I took around 160 photos during this photoshoot, however, lots were blurry and the lighting on the day was very dim so this affected the brightness. I had to experiment a lot with the ISO as it was gradually becoming darker whilst I was outside. Also, it depended a lot on what I was photographing; for example, when photographing the drains on the wall the lighting was not as bright as the landscape photos of the sea, therefore I had to turn up the ISO.
contact sheet:
The outcome of the images I chose to edit in Lightroom:
Laurie Frankel collects a variety of different rubbish and turns them into vanitas style still life images. She takes something that we usually would find gross and turns it into a fascinating piece of art.
“I wanted to be inspired by something that was not inspiring,” Frankel says. “I decided to take something of no value, something that’s just so ordinary, and add something beautiful to it.”
Analysis:
In this image, for example, Frankel has used a range of dirty rubbish from the large Tropicana bottle, to the chopped carrots on the foreground of the image. The Tropicana bottle is the focal point of the image; this is because it’s the biggest and item, therefore it captures the viewers eye. The bright colours of yellow and orange coming from the plastic bag and the carrots contrasts the dark background colours of the soil, and the brown paper bag. Frankel has used a black background and some sort of black sheet where the rubbish is sitting on. She has done this to accentuate the colours and shapes of the items.
My Response:
Taking inspiration from Laurie Frankel and Thriza Schaap, I aim to photograph still life plastics and rubbish, I will take these photos in the studio and experiment with different lights, backgrounds and angles.
Daniel Beltrá captures the profound beauty and vulnerability of the natural world in his photographs of natural landscapes and wildlife. Primarily a landscape photographer, Beltrá combines painterly abstraction with the haunting details of an earthly paradise in peril. His sweeping aerial images invite us to soar over majestic fields of ice, water and earth, to experience the natural wonders of our planet, and to bear witness to the scars, and shocking scale, of environmental degradation.
Beltras oil spill work
Daniel Beltra takes an abstract approach when photographing the oil spills from a high up POV. The bright colors of the oil massively contrasts against the deep dark tones of the ocean; this catches the viewers eye.
His images always have lots of texture due to the swirling of the oil, he makes these natural disasters look pretty.
Spill- Daniel Beltra (2011)
It was the world’s worst offshore oil spill: 5m barrels spewing from the BP-run Deepwater Horizon rig into the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people, marine life and devastating hundreds of miles of coastline. From a Cessna float plane 3000 foot above the Louisiana coastline, photographer Daniel Beltrá captured the carnage. It was only from this height, he said, that the magnitude of the spill – and the futility of the clean-up operation – became apparent. “It was like trying to clean an Olympic pool full of oil while sitting on the side using Q-tips.”
My respone:
I aim to photograph signs of oil in our seas, inspired by the work of Beltra. i want to take an abstract approach to my work by photographing the multi-colors of the oil in the sea. I will find this mainly in the harbors, as oil spills from the boats. To compliment this, i might also take photos of boats in the harbor as they are the cause of the oil spills.
Juha Tanhua
In this collection of cosmic photographs, comets, nebulas, and galaxies stretch before the human eye, showering the sky in glittering scenes that ought to be from a telescope. But instead of looking upward into the night, Finnish photographer Juha Tanhua points his camera to the ground. He documents his “oil paintings” in broad daylight, shooting gasoline and oil spills usually found in car parks. “I don’t look up, but down,” he tells Colossal. “It’s not space above us; it’s space under our feet. You can find subjects to photograph even in dull places like parking lots. Expect nothing, get everything.”
The photographer first got his idea for the gasoline puddles when noticing an oil spill next to his car. “It looked a little bit like the northern lights,” he says.
My response:
As well as capturing the oil spills in the sea, i can also focus on where oil also spills from, cars. Using this idea, i aim to approach it in the same abstract way as the oil spills in the sea, capturing the colors of the oil on the ground. Inspired by Juha Tanhua.
Thirza Schaap is a photographer exploring new art forms through her Plastic Ocean project. She lives and works in Amsterdam and Cape Town, South Africa.
“Plastic Ocean is an art project, which I started to create awareness around pollution to try and prevent (or at least reduce) the use of plastic.”
The images show a clash between worlds, offering minimal and aesthetically pleasing compositions which, on closer inspection, in-still a sense of ecological grief. Plastic Ocean questions consumption, idolatry and what it is we value in our lives today. The effect is a quirky, playful and pop art paradox.
At a first glance, the debris do not disgust us. On the contrary. Their dainty look almost seems to gloss over the ugliness of all the plastic pollution on our beaches. But only for an instant. Our initial attraction, soon fades.
Plastic Ocean provides a kind of Vanitas for the 21st century. Traditional icons of mortality, ephemerality and wealth have been traded out for bottles, baskets and bowls: single-use items which are used and discarded, now only existing as empty vessels of destruction.
Our beaches are covered in plastic confetti and there really is nothing to celebrate.
In my response:
In one of my photo shoots, i aim to create a still- life, vanitas inspired shoot. Using objects such a plastic, nets, bottles, bottle lids, wrappers and anything that pollutes our oceans. I set up a photo shoot at home, and use the studio at school; i aim to experiment with different background, lighting, and angles.
Gustave Le Gray was the central figure in French photography of the 1850s—an artist of the first order, a teacher, and the author of several widely distributed instructional manuals. He is known as the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century because of his technical innovations in the still new medium of photography, his role as the teacher of other noted photographers, and the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making.
His real contributions—artistically and technically—however, came in the realm of paper photography, in which he first experimented in 1848. The first of his four treatises, published in 1850, boldly—and correctly—asserted that “the entire future of photography is on paper.”
Image analysis:
Dafna Talmor
In Constructed Landscapes, Dafna Talmor conjures imaginary places through a process of collaging and montaging colour negatives.
comparison
Gustave Le Gray- The Great WaveDafna Talmor
Both could be described as landscape pictures. What kinds of landscapes do they describe?
‘The Great Wave’ describes an idyllic and romanticised landscape. Gustave describes a stormy day. The thick and dark clouds creates an intense environment, and the choppy waves on the bottom half compliment this.
Talmor’s image describes a more abstract image. Her original images were most likely the same as Gustave Le Grayes in the sense of being a romanticized straight up seascape. However, her technique of collaging different images together allows the viewer to see all the different angles of the landscape.
What similarities do you notice about these two pictures?
The content in both images is similar, they are both the sea. Both images have dark tonal colours. Both images have a burnt feature to them; the image on the left has rustic colours within the black and white, undertones of yellow. The image on the right is a collage, its been made by cutting up images and putting them together, however, on the edges of where it looks like its been cut up, there’s colours of orange a slightly red, again looking burnt.
What differences do you notice?
The image on the right is a collage, its abstract and not just a straightforward landscape of the sea. The image on the left is black and white with very yellow undertones, it seems more old and vintage. Also, in the image on the left, the sea is choppy and rough, smashing up against the rocks and the sea on the right is more calm and flat.
What words/phrases best describe each of these landscapes?
Gustave le gray- grainy, dark, gloomy, tonal, vintage, vivid
Dafna Talmor- abstract, Delineated, sectioned, cubic in a way
In which of these landscapes would you prefer to live?
The image on the right. It appears more peaceful; yet very interesting as there’s different parts to the image, its still dark and tonal but has a less gloomy and threatening feel to it.
Mandy Barker is a British photographer. She is mostly known for work with marine plastic debris. Barker has worked alongside scientists in hopes of bringing awareness to the mass amount of plastic that is floating around in our oceans
What inspired Barker?
“nature inspires me a lot; like the things I find along the seashore, the way objects get washed up, the patterns in nature. They all influence shapes in my work.”
Mandy Barker states: “The aim of my work is to engage with and stimulate an emotional response in the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction along with the subsequent message of awareness. The research process is a vital part of my development as the images I make are based on scientific fact, essential to the integrity of my work. The impact of marine plastic is an area I have documented for more than 10 years and am committed to pursuing through visual interpretation, and in collaboration with science I hope it will ultimately lead to positive action in tackling this increasing environmental problem, which is currently of global concern”.
The photo above shows the debris of balloons after being popped in the air and left to float in the sea, polluting our oceans washing up on the shore and putting animals in danger as they think its food This is an effective image, due to the harsh contrast between the black background and the bright vibrant colors of the balloons. This creates the effect of of the plastic moving or even sinking. From the top of the image, the rubbish is larger and towards the center and bottom of the image, the rubbish is smaller. Creating the effect of the rubbish floating further away, Mandy Barker does this to emphasis the concern that rubbish pollutes all of our oceans for miles.
In this project Mandy posted on social media for people to collect footballs to create a collage and to project how impactful plastics are to the environment. in total 992 marine debris balls were recovered from the world’s oceans in just 4 months. 769 footballs and pieces of, with 223 other types of balls were collected from 41 different countries and islands and from 144 different beaches, by 89 members of the public.
The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems
How and why are photographers exploring this concept?
Humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere. Photographers can use their skills to capture this concept and publish/ display it for people to reflect on. I think its a very impactful genre of photography.
Examples of Anthropocene:
Plastic and waste
Plastic pollution is a global problem. Approximately 7 billion of the 9.2 billion tonnes of plastic produced from 1950-2017 became plastic waste, ending up in landfills or dumped. Poor waste management contributes to climate change and air pollution, and directly affects many ecosystems and species. Landfills, considered the last resort in the waste hierarchy, release methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas linked to climate change.
Habitat Loss
Habitat loss occurs when natural habitats are converted to human uses such as cropland, urban areas, and infrastructure developmentHabitat loss has significant, consistently negative effects on biodiversity. Habitat loss negatively influences biodiversity directly through its impact on species abundance, genetic diversity, species richness, species distribution, and also indirectly.
Ocean Pollution
Every minute, the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic is dumped into our ocean.
Some of the debris ends up on our beaches, washed in with the waves and tides. Some debris sinks, some is eaten by marine animals that mistake it for food, and some accumulates in ocean gyres.
Climate Change
Warmer temperatures over time are changing weather patterns and disrupting the usual balance of nature. This poses many risks to human beings and all other forms of life on Earth. Changing climatic conditions and dramatic increases in carbon dioxide will put our ecosystems to the test, threatening supplies of fresh water, clean air, fuel and energy resources, food, medicine and other matters we depend upon not just for our lifestyles but for our survival.
Air Pollution
Air pollution refers to the release of pollutants into the air—pollutants which are detrimental to human health and the planet as a whole.
Most air pollution comes from energy use and production, burning fossil fuels releases gases and chemicals into the air.
Oil Pollution
-One quart of motor oil can pollute 250,000 gallons of water, and one gallon of gasoline can pollute 750,000 gallons of water! Oil that leaks from our cars onto roads and driveways is washed into storm drains, and then usually flows directly into a lake or stream.
-Depending on the circumstances, oil spills can be very harmful to marine birds, sea turtles and mammals, and also can harm fish and shellfish. Oil destroys the insulating ability of fur-bearing mammals, such as sea otters, and the water-repelling abilities of a bird’s feathers, exposing them to the harsh elements.
Typology is typically a body of work that holds consistency throughout the work, usually in the environment, subjects and presentation.
Bernd and Hilla Becher
The term ‘Typology’ was first 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’.
Stoic and detached, each photograph was taken from the same angle, at approximately the same distance from the buildings. Their aim was to capture a record of a landscape they saw changing and disappearing before their eyes so once again, Typologies not only recorded a moment in time, they prompted the viewer to consider the subject’s place in the world.
Black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure. The rigorous frontality of the individual images gives them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness.
Pitheads 1974 Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher
research who influenced the Bechers’… from three German photographers in the 1920s, Karl Blosfeldt (plant studies), August Sander (portraits of citizens of Cologne) and Albert Renger-Patz (he photographed industrial landscapes)
The Bechers’ were inspired by Karl Blossfeldts plant studies, they were inspired by the way he presented his work.
Kevin Bauman
100 Abandoned Houses:
The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. He actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of his home town. Bauman had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.
100 Abandoned houses is my favourite project of Kevin Bauman. Each abandoned house contrasts one another yet they fit perfectly when put together next to eachother. Every house is different in its own way, however, as the pictures are taken roughly from the same distance, they belong.
