For the Anthropocene project I have decided to focus on air pollution created by humans.
What I am going to photograph:
The type of images I want to create are going to be focused around the smoke and emissions coming from these sources.
Definition – how human activity has a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
Mind map:
Mood board:
Here is my attempt to create a typology focused on lamps I found around my house:
A photographic typology is a single photograph or more, that shares a high level of consistency. This consistency is usually found within the subjects, environment, photographic process, and presentation or direction of the subject.
The term ‘Typology’ was used to describe a style of photography when Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959. The couple described their subjects as ‘buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style’.
THE BECHER’S – Typologies of industrial architecture
Hilla Becher was a German conceptual photographer. Becher was well known for her industrial photographs, or typologies, with her collaborator and husband, Bernd Becher. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America and then won the Erasmus Prize in 2002 and Hasselblad Award in 2004.
They focus on photographing industrial structures such as water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories and never included people. Their work was in a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white.
They exhibited their work in typologies, grouping of several photographs of the same type of structures. They’re also well known for presenting their images in grid formations.
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha is an artist known for his paintings and prints but is also recognised for his photographic books on typologies.
Jeff Brouws
Twentynine Palms – is a photographic book by Jeff Brouws is a photo book that contains a selection of images of vintage roadside signs advertising fortune tellers and palm readers.
Night photography is used to express the world in a different light. images taken after dark of landscapes, cityscapes, or the night sky have greater depth, emotional quality, and sense of emptiness or abandonment that daytime photographs of the same location might lack.
Below is my attempt at some night time photography:
Using a selection of different images from my landscape shoots, I compiled some montages from my favourite outcomes:
We went on a walk from harve des pas to la Collette and I took lots of images inspired by the new topographics movement on the way, here are some of the images before editing:
On lightroom i looked through the images and selected the best outcomes:
These are the edited outcomes:
All of these images were edited and adapted on Lightroom to follow the style of the New Topographics movement.
Robert Adams was a photographer who documented the extent of the damage to the American West. His refined black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West revealed the impact of human activity on nature. His images often lack human subjects however manage to capture the physical traces of human life. An underlying tension in Adams’s work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly adapted or scarred by human presence, through buildings and industrialisation, and the beauty of the natural land captured in the camera. The complex photographs express sombre indignation by exposing the darkness of the nineteenth-century and shows how humans view the West as an unlimited natural resource for human consumption despite the destruction being caused. However, his work also conveys hope that things can change.
His goal
“is to face facts but to find a basis for hope. To try for alchemy.”
The image Colorado springs displays a melancholy and sombre scene of the silhouette of a woman stood in a suburban house. It was taken in a time of great change as many peoples life’s were abandoned and they moved to the new suburbs created to ensure there was enough housing after all the soldiers came back from war and started families. However, this meant many people had to move to these new suburbs leaving everything they knew before behind for this desolate and lonely land. Robert Adams photographed around these suburban towns and encapsulated the atmosphere and emotions of the residents through his images, such as the one above, to capture the damage and transformations happening to natural landscapes. His images are strategically taken to portray this meaning using the repetition of rectangular shapes surrounding the figure zoom in the viewers attention onto the woman to leave her as the main subject as she represents the loneliness and isolation many people were facing in this situation. The black and white filter further develops the melancholy feeling to the image as all colour is stripped portraying the way peoples life’s have been changed and the dark tones portray the sadness. The image is quiet with minimal eye catching elements to represent the feeling of seclusion and lack of joy present in these new suburban towns making the viewer wonder if the woman is perhaps reminiscing her life before being moved to the desolate suburbs. The natural lighting continues the sense of ‘realness’ showing the scene as he found it to accurately display the events. From what I can tell Adam’s used a fast shutter speed as I believe the image isn’t set up so the woman would have most likely been moving which means he must of had a quick shutter speed to ensure she wasn’t blurred from the motion. I believe the image was also taken with natural lighting as he is outside and not in a studio further displaying the ‘real’ insight into the situation as the scene has not been set up in a studio it is how he found it. Overall, I think Robert Adams created this image to show an accurate representation of how the residents of the town were feeling at the time and showing their loneliness and isolation and almost giving them a voice, through his images, in a time where they had been sent away leaving them silenced.
New topographics was described as ‘a ground breaking exhibition of contemporary landscape photography’.
William Jenkins selected eight young American photographers:
Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. He also invited the German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher.
The exhibition was recreated in various locations: such as Bristol, Tucson, Rochester, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Nederland’s and Spain.
Although the eight photographers included in the original exhibition make up the core of the New Topographics school, photographers such as Laurie Brown have been tied to the school.
The purpose
New topographics was a reaction to the ongoing expansion and growth of suburban areas due to the soldiers returning from war and therefore there was a need for more space for them and their growing families. This meant people were moved to these new suburbs that were located in the middle of know where which were very isolating and lonely as many people left their friends and families. The movement showed a more realistic demonstration of American landscapes by showing the industrialised and suburbanised landscapes rather than just the ethereal nature landscapes.
