Camera Obscura:

The “Camera Obscura” is a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side and it is used to project an image onto a wall, like a modern day projector. This method was called “Pinhole photography”, which has been used since the 1550’s and it was used mostly for drawing and painting, this concept was later developed into the Camera.

Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where the scene is reproduced, inverted and reversed, but with colour and perspective preserved. The Camera Obscura was actually made to study solar eclipses without damaging your eyes from looking at the sun.

Nicéphore Niépce:

Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor who is the Inventor of Photography. In 1826, he invented the technique “Heliography”, the precursor to the Daguerreotype. He used the technique to take the first photograph ever called “View from the Window at Le Gras”:

Louis Daguerre:

Louis Daguerre was a French artist and photographer who invented the “Daguerreotype” in 1939 and developed the Diorama theatre.

The “Daguerreotype” was a tool used to help print images in physical form, the method was to polish a metal sheet of silver-plated copper and treat it with fumes to make the sheet light sensitive and exposing it to a latent image for usually a few seconds for bright photos and longer for darker photos, once the photo comes out you then fume it with mercury vapour. The dark parts of the image would turn out silver, making the bright parts stand out by the contrast.

The photos would turn out looking something like this, these are called positives:

Henry Fox-Talbot:

Fox Talbot was an English member of parliament, scientist, inventor and another pioneer of photography. He wanted to develop the three primary elements of photography: developing, fixing, and printing.

Accidentally, he found out that there was an image after the short exposure. To view it in bright light, he used a different chemical to remove the silver film. This could be done by using his invention called the “Calotype”:

Robert Cornelius:

Robert Cornelius was an American photographer and pioneer in the history of Photography, he took the first photograph in the US by using a photographic plate he made in 1839. The photo was an image of himself, making it the first self portrait in the US too:

He wanted to improve on the daguerreotype, so he made his own plate and took this portrait outside his family store and it required him to sit still for 15 minutes for it to produce.

Julia Margaret Cameron:

Julia Cameron was a well known British Photographer. She did lots of soft-focus close up pictures and portraits of Victorian men, women and children and is deemed “One of the most important portraitists of the 19th century” and is one of the early Photographers in lighting.

Her photos had many connections to Pictorialism and the Pre-Raphaelites movement.

Here are some of her photos:

Pictorialism was an approach to Photography that emphasizes the beauty of subject matter, tonality and composition rather than the documentation of reality. Began in the 1860’s, it viewed the camera as a tool for making an artistic statement, similar to a paintbrush.

Henry Mullins:

Henry Mullins was a photographer who set up a studio called “The Royal Saloon” in Jersey 1848. His speciality was “cartes de visite” photos which was a type of small photograph. He would use these to take portraits of families and officers:

Bibliography:

Camera Obscura: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura

Nicéphore Niépce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce

Louis Daguerre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Daguerre

Henry Fox-Talbot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Daguerre

Robert Cornelius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cornelius

Julia Margaret Cameron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Margaret_Cameron

Henry Mullins: https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Henry_Mullins

Contact Sheet

Image Selection

Image Editing

This image makes me feel intimidated as the mans pose displays him as powerful and the use of light positioning to create shadows on his face portrays him as cruel and spiteful making the audience feel uneasy. The dim lighting also creates an eerie and dark feeling to the image with the writing on the pillars implying that there are some unknown stories and secrets hidden within this image.

In the background we can see what looks like a train and rails making me question what sort of role he had in a place like this and following further research I found out that the man was a German industrialist that was a convicted war criminal. Alfred Krupp’s business was using almost 100,000 slave labourers from concentration camps to manufacture arms for the Nazis under terrible working conditions. This caused many deaths from exhaustion, hunger, neglect and malnourishment. Krupp was surprisingly interested by the work of Arnold Newman, a Jew, despite his obvious hateful views. This lead the New York based magazine Newsweek to commission Newman to take Krupp’s portrait. He originally refused on a moral basis however he changed his mind when he realised he could create an image that would represent the evil that he harboured and the pain and misery that Krupp was responsible for.

This context explains the use of a downwards camera angle, which contrasts the power we originally sensed. This is to present how Arnold was looking down on Krupp, positioning the viewer to be higher up then him potentially symbolising the fact that now that Krupp has no power and authority over the Jewish people and Arnold Newman is taking back that power.

Arnold Newman

” – my work is an expression of myself. It reflects me, my fascination with people, the physical world around us, and the exciting medium in which I work.”

– Arnold Newman, A Life in Photography

He was coined as the ‘Father of Environmental Portraiture’, due to his carving out of a niche in images of popular figures in their working/living environments. This work was certainly the root of Newman’s bountiful success in his medium and the inherent professionalism and vision in his images mean he is still widely regarded as one of the grand masters of 20th and 21st century modern art. His portrait of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky from 1946 (pictured below) was arguably the one that really kickstarted his career in high prestige portrait photography.

Newman’s extensive experience has earned him award upon award from multiple photographic institutions including The Lucie Awards, The Royal Photographic Society Centenary Award and The International Center of Photography, and his work has been displayed globally in a range of exhibitions in highly regarded museums and galleries.

My in-depth analysis of one of his images, the famed portrait of Alfred Krupp, can be found on this post.

Mary Ellen Mark

“I think photography is closest to writing, not painting. It’s closest to writing because you are using this machine to convey an idea. The image shouldn’t need a caption; it should already convey an idea.”

– Mary Ellen Mark

Amanda and her Cousin Amy – Mary Ellen Mark

She claimed to photograph those who were “away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes”. Her work has been displayed globally and in highly regarded publications such as LIFE, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. She has published 20 books and also acted as the associate producer of the major motion picture, AMERICAN HEART (1992). Her advertising campaigns have included work for major companies including British Levi’s, Coach Bags, Heineken, Nissan, and Patek Philippe.

Here is a simple analysis of her image of Federico Fellini on the Set of Fellini-Satyricon, Rome, Italy, 1969.

Paul Strand

“It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.”

 – Paul Strand

Such was his fervour in wanting to take images of a truly candid nature, Strand equipped a false lens on his camera to distract attention away from himself, allowing him to capture his subjects completely without their knowledge. However his most famous images are of a more posed and direct nature, with the subject staring into the lens, as in the picture below.

Paul Strand, Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France, 1951

Strand was mentored by a renowned artist of his generation, Alfred Stieglitz, who taught him the ways of abstract photographers and influenced much of his architectural work throughout his career.

Strand spent some of his early career photographing in Mexico, where he was Chief of Photography and Cinematography for the Government’s Department of Fine Arts from 1932 until 1934. He captured images in all three branches of photography, as was his style, during this period; documenting and illustrating people and places.

In 1920, he co-directed a short film Manhatta with Charles Sheeler and in the 1930s he became involved in documentary film, ending his career from the 1940s onwards by focusing on creating high quality photobooks.

My analysis of ‘The family, Luzzara, Emilia, Italy (Lusetti family)‘, 1953

Michelle Sank

‘I am always searching for that subtle tension where the portrait and environment interact with one another to create a strong narrative.’

– Michelle Sank

She became fascinated with creating imagery that surrounded issues concerning sociocultural diversity in the world of low-level poverty that presented itself to her in 1990s/2000s Cornwall, and, later on, the rest of the UK. With the majority of her work being focused on the exploration into what it means to be a young person in today’s age of oversexualisation and multitude of pressures on body image, she has become one of the most highly regarded and influential artists in her field of photographic venture.

Her work has been exhibited in many locations including the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. She has also been published in a number of books including her own monographs The Water’s Edge; Becoming and The Submerged.

Below I analysed Sank’s image of ‘Britney and Ross‘ from her 2020 photographic series ‘Breathe’, which focused on the subject of isolation and quarantining in her local neighbourhood during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Bert Teunissen

‘Anything can catch my eye – it’s just the joy of looking and the joy of taking pictures.’

– Bert Teunissen

The story behind his ‘Domestic Landscapes‘ series is rooted in the idea of chasing the light he found in his childhood home in East Holland. He felt that the light in this home was so mesmerising in its quality that he felt it necessary, when his old home was destroyed to be modernised, to go out and capture the similarly atmospheric light in other pre-war homes across Europe. It was important that these homes be pre-war as it means that they were designed with the function of being entirely lit without the use of electricity. This means that the window system would have been made to allow all the available natural light to enter the home.

Additionally, Teunissen said that ‘The title Domestic Landscapes also refers to the idea that the homes that I photographed form a landscape of the life of the people that live in it. These homes have changed just as slowly through the years as the landscapes in which I found them. The people in the photos have aged with their habitats and have become part of it.‘

Above is my analysis of an image from the France section of the series.

 

This photoshoot was taken during the lesson so we didn’t have much time to take the images, especially since we had to walk around the school finding where we wanted to take our images. We ended up with 45 images total but I didn’t like them all.

After flagging the images I liked or that weren’t blurred I only had 13.