Who is August Sander:

August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer, he was well known for his work on photographing German Citizens during the 1920’s and is said to be “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century”.

Career:

Sander is well known for his work on landscape, nature, architecture and street photography. But above all, he is best known for his Portraits. He published an album containing some of his work on portraits and named it “People of the 20th Century”.

People of the 20th Century:

This book was published in 1929 and had 60 environmental portraits within. The physical copies of the photos were destroyed in 1936 by the Germans during World War Two.

MASTER MASON, 1926:

This is one of the photos from the album and I will analyse it.

In this, you see a Brickmason standing next to a pile of bricks looking at the camera. The bricks create a pattern of lines going straight down and across. His white overalls create contrast with the rest of the darker surroundings and is the first thing that you are most likely to get drawn to, you can see that the light shining on him is coming from the right as the left of his body is darker than the rest and he is casting a shadow on the brick pile to the left. It is unclear where he is as there is no background, so it can only be assumed he is inside a factory or working on a house. His face gives neutral vibes, he doesn’t appear happy or sad and instead looks more focused on getting his work done and over with. Behind him you can see some sort of furnace or machine, perhaps used to make the bricks for him to use, along with a bucket at his feet that could be used for the mortar to hold the bricks together.

Altogether, the photo feels very neutral, in both the Man’s emotion and feeling the photo creates. It definitely catches the environmental portraiture side as it shows a man in his working environment.

I went around the school with Jude and we took photos of each other in many different areas I enhanced them in Lightroom.

An environmental portrait is a photographed portrait that captures subjects in their natural surroundings and workplace instead of in a studio or other artificial setup.

mood board:

The photo has been taken centre on, looking directly at the main subject (the man). There are two light sources, the natural light at the back which helps create the depth and intensity of the photo, the other light source is the artificial light behind the camera which is being used to amplify and enlighten the sides of his face while his nose and eyes are left dark, adding to the intimidating effect.

In the foreground there is a very intimidating man that appears to be in his 60s, dressed in a smart suit while looking directly into the camera. His hands are resting under his chin, adding to his striking pose. In the background, there seems to be one of the subjects industrial factories that he owned. I assume that it is a train factory as we can see multiple different tracks and trains. There are windows that line the ceiling and large pillars that surround the man.

In 1963, Newsweek magazine commissioned Jewish man, Arnold Newman to photograph industrialist Alfred Krupp, a convicted but later pardoned Nazi. Newman wanted Krupp to appear as the sinister-looking man that he was. Krupp came from a prominent 400-year-old industrial German dynasty worth around £1.33 billion.

“As a Jew, it’s my own little moment of revenge. It was my impression of a Nazi who managed to survive yet killed millions of people”

– Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman was an American photographer, who specialized in portraits of well-known people posed in settings associated with their work. This approach, known as “environmental portraiture,” greatly influenced portrait photography in the 20th century. He was born on March 3rd, 1918 in New York City.  He was raised and attended schools in Atlantic City, N.J. and Miami Beach, FL. He studied art under a scholarship at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL from 1936 to 1938. He died in New York City on June 6th, 2006. 

Mr. Newman argued that he was not interested in the details of his subject’s surroundings, but the symbols he could create with them. Uninspired by a plain back drop, he decided to tell a story with every portrait through their background/ environment.

I took photographs of Jude while we were together at Ikey’s, a café we frequently visit in town on Bath Street. I did this to test out different ways of taking portrait images, and the way light works with various facial expressions and poses. It was only a 5 minute shoot that wasn’t supposed to amount to much, but I liked the way of few of these images turned out and wanted to edit them.

In the last 4 photos, I took of a man who noticed us messing around with my camera and questioned us about photography and why we’re doing it. He asked us to take some photographs of him and send them to him later on his email, also asking me to take photos for an event which I wasn’t able to go to due to illness.

These photos of Jude could just be considered regular headshots, as the background has little to no focus throughout each of these images, but I really like the way the colours work in the images to create warmth. I also gained experience with using the flash button, as I’ve always been a bit hesitant to use it because of issues like red eyes and overexposures.

My editing with these images also improved, as I experimented with masking layers to blur out the backgrounds and make the subjects more prominent without making it too obvious in the final image.

This photo is the closest thing I got to actual environmental portraiture in this shoot, as I’m planning to take more images of people around the island. I still think the final result turned out really well, and I like the way the colours in the image compliment each other.

We went round school taking photos of each other to get an idea of how to work with natural lighting and the lighting you have in unfamiliar places i like the outcome of some of my photos but not all of them, these are the outcomes i like and have edited them.

An environmental portrait is a photographed portrait that captures subjects in their natural surroundings instead of in a studio or other artificial setup.

what is meant by the word portrait? a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses.

Environmental mood board

artist research

Alec Soth. Alec Soth is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth makes “large-scale American projects” featuring the midwestern United States. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a “photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers” and photographs “loners and dreamers”

Celebrated as one of the most important US photographers working today, Alec Soth merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. His first photographic series, Sleeping by the Mississippi, evolved from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River made between 1999 and 2002.

Soths images tells a story they are intriguing to look at because of the information and life story you can see of the person in a singular photo and how the people who see the image go on journey to interpret their own story on how they see the image.

An environmental portrait is a photographed portrait that captures subjects in their natural surroundings instead of in a studio or other artificial setup.

Alec Soth

Alec Soth is a photographer born in American in 1969  is a photographer who is best known for photographing the Midwestern United States. He lives in Minneapolis, MN, which is also the city of his birth, although he relocated to Bronxville, NY, for his studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman was born in March 3rd 1918 and died on June 6th 2006, Arnold Newman was an American photographer, noted for his “environmental portraits” of artists and politicians He was also known for his carefully composed abstract still life images.

comparing Alec Soth with Arnold Newman

Alec Soth photo are more modern than Arnold Newman this is because when Arnold Newman was taking his photos they where taken on a black and white camera and Alec soth. also with Soth the person in the photo is the main subject.