Mary Ellen Bartley is an American artist well known for her photographs that explore the tactile and formal qualities of the printed book and its potential for abstraction. Her work has been widely exhibited across the world for example at the yancey Richardson Gallery in New York and The Drawing Room and Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York. Bartley’s work has also been featured in several exhibitions exploring themes of the book and objects caught in transition from the analog to the digital realm.
During the period of lockdown due to COVID Mary decided to make a project where she took a picture of the same objects every day for a month. These objects consist of a book, sponge, mug, milk bottle, a glass cube and a small dish, everyday she manage to take a different picture with a different meaning, for example she would change the lighting and the order of the objects with only using natural light t6he whole time. She did this project to help show the beauty in everyday objects that would usually be ignored or abandoned.
A photomontage is a collage constructed from photographs.
Historically, the technique has been used to make political statements and gained popularity in the early 20th century (World War 1-World War 2)
Artists such as Raoul Haussman , Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield employed cut-n-paste techniques as a form of propaganda…as did Soviet artists like Aleksander Rodchenko and El Lissitsky
Photomontage has its roots in Dadaism…which is closely related to Surrrealism
I made these still life edits using Lightroom classic by enhancing the temp of the images and illuminating the oldness of some of the objects. Overall I enjoyed this process of taking the images and experimenting on lightroom
Formalism describes the critical position that the most important aspect of a work of art is its form. the way it is made and its purely visual aspects – rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world.
Peter Fraser
Peter Fraser created this image in 2002
Fraser travelled to many countries in the world in the early 1990s photographing different machines in scientific research establishments. In 2002 Fraser brought multiple different images made from the department of Applied Physics at Strathclyde University. He did this with other photographers making sureall images of dirt and litter, to propose a democratic notion of the importance of all material and to minimise waste which he demonstrates across all of his work,
‘everything might be worthy of the utmost attention’.
Line & Shape: There are number of repetitive circles within this piece which are complemented by the different curves of the main object which is the main vocal point Space: The space in the image appears quite shallow and constrained. There is a mainly black background which what looks like metal as well. Texture: The objects in the image appear smooth and almost wet as you can see the glaze from the light reflecting off of it. Value/Tone: The image contains a range of tones from very dark to very light. There are deep shadows but also some mid tones.
What to look at when describing images
Light: Which areas of the photograph are brightest? Are there any shadows? Does the photograph allow you to guess the time of day? Is the light natural or artificial? Harsh or soft? Reflected or direct? How does light fall across the objects in the photograph?
Repetition/Shape: Are there any objects, shapes or lines which repeat and create a rhythm or pattern? Do you see echoes or reflections within the image?
Space: Is there depth to the photograph or does it seem shallow? What creates this appearance? What is placed in the foreground, middle ground and background? Are there important negative (empty) spaces in addition to positive (solid) spaces?
Texture/ value tones: If you could touch the surface of the photograph how would it feel? How do the objects in the picture look like they would feel?
Colour: What kind of colours can you see e.g. saturated, muted, complementary, primary? Is there a dominant colour? How would this image be different if it was in black and white? Does the use of colour help us understand the subject or does it work independently?
Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist well known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, documenting the effects of the Great Depression where he spent two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Much of Evans work from the FSA included photographing using a less developed camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that he took “literate, authoritative, transcendent”. Many of his works are still in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the George Eastman Museum.
In Evans later life he was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time. Shortly afterward, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for graphic design at the Yale University School of Art. In one of his last photographic projects, Evan completed a black and white portfolio of the Brown Brothers Harriman for publication in “Partners in Banking”. This was published in 1968 to celebrate the private bank’s 150th anniversary. In 1973 Evans used the new Polaroid instant camera for his last piece of work, the company provided him with an unlimited supply of film, and the camera’s simple design made it much easier for the aged photographer to get the hang of it.
Darren Harvey-Regan
Darren is a famous English photographer who’s work has appeared in exhibitions and publications internationally and is part of the permanent photography collection at the V & A Museum in London. Darren experimented with Blurring the boundaries between photography and sculpture. Armed with an MA from the Royal College of Art, and fascinated by the work of heavyweights such as Cy Twombly, John Baldessari and Bill Watterson, the sensitive and mature curation of his exhibitions is fundamental to the meaning of his work.
Albert Renger-Patzsch,
Renger-Patzsch was born in Würzburg Germany and began making photographs at age twelve. After military service in the First World War he studied chemistry at the in Dresden. In the early 1920s he worked as a press photographer for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a freelancer, in 1925 he published a book called the Das Chorgestühl von Kappenberg (The Choir Stalls of Cappenberg). And then soon later he had his first museum exhibition in Lübeck in 1927. His second book followed in 1928, This is his best known book and it is a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations. During the 1930s Renger-Patzsch made photographs for industry and advertising. His archives were destroyed during the Second World War. Later In 1944 he moved to Wamel, Möhnesee, where he lived the rest of his life
Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer and sculptor. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, He was inspired, by nature and the ways in which plants grow. He believed that “the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure.” Among his contacts at the Berlin Arts and Crafts School was Heinz Warneke. From 1923, he was professor at the United State Schools for Fine and Applied Art in Berlin.
The word Photography literally means ‘drawing with light’, which derives from the Greek photo, meaning light and graph. the purpose of photography is to communicate and document moments in time. When you take a photograph and share it with others, you’re showing a moment that was frozen through a picture.
The history of the camera
The history of the camera can be taken all the way back to the ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese. Even though these civilisations used a very simple version of the device, called a camera obscura, which was used to project real-life scenes on a surface or wall. Despite its very basic design. During the Renaissance, artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci used its light projections to sketch added depth to their ‘3D’ art. Although the early cameras were massively popular with artists and tourists, there was no way of ‘freezing’ an image in a photograph until the 19th century.
The first photograph was taken During the 1800s, Britain and France were almost in a sort of race to get early photographic technology off the ground. The French where the first ones to come through when Nicéphore Niépce took the first ever photo in 1827. Eleven years later, Again the French took another ‘first’ photograph when Louis Daguerre took the first snap of a human being in his pic ‘Boulevard du Temple’. Around the same time British inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, developed the calotype process and with it, the first ever photo on paper.
George Eastman
Mass photography started In 1884, When an American inventor called George Eastman came up with an idea that revolutionised the photography industry. This invention was called the photographic roll – one of the first ever to be used in a camera. The easy to develop photographic process helped his company, Kodak, create the first mass-produced cameras ever sold. The portable camera was a huge hit and sold millions while continuing to be popular until the 60’s.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a Romantic painter and printmaker who was most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects.
daguerreotype
The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process in the history of photography. He was named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate. Daguerreotypes always come in protective cases, they are often made of leather and lined with silk or velvet. Depending on the angle at which you view them, they can look like a negative, a positive or a mirror.
Henry Fox
Henry Fox Talbot is best known for his development of the calotype, an early photographic process that was an improvement over the daguerreotype of the French inventor Louis Daguerre. he was an English scientist, inventor, and photographer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries.
Richard Maddox
In 1871 Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician, he suggested suspending silver bromide in a gelatine emulsion this was an idea that led in 1878 to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates coated with gelatine containing silver salts.
Leap into the void
Leap into the Void is a picture which is a demonstration of freedom and liberty. It seems a blunt act of disobedience against the laws of physics and human nature. Klein leaps from a rooftop freely into an open space, looking unconcerned and unmoved to the immanency of his fall. There was originally 2 pictures where one shows the tarp underneath which was there to break his fall, and another of the bare street. Klein merged the images together to create the illusion that he was falling into nothing.
To start off I have flagged the pictures that I would like to use and crossed off the ones that I don’t like as much.
Secondly I pressed the flagged button on the dropdown box so the pictures that I didn’t need are not visible and I can only see the ones that I would like to work with.
Then i pressed the X and Y button to compare two images, you can also zoom into details by using the magnifying glass which helps you to compare the details. and see what one has better focus or better lighting.
then I started editing the pictures, e.g. changing that saturation and the texture and just generally playing around with the settings to see which was more appealing to me.
I then exported the photo into my folder twice once at 2000 pixels and once at 4000 pixels. I did this so I have two pictures at different sizes
Then picked out the different neutral tones that where in the picture by using the colour picker
Aperture is the feature which controls the amount of light that comes into the camera. To do this you would shrink or enlarge it.
Aperture also affects the depth of field. By changing how the image is focused. For example, the image could be focused on one isolated object in the middle of the image whilst blurring out the background. or it could be focused on the whole image.
The higher the focus is than the smaller the amplitude will be. You can also adjust the aperture settings on your camera by turning the dial to the ‘A’ button and then spin the wheel at the front of the camera.
My aperture experiments
We tested the aperture by taking pictures of different things we collected from the beach such as, Shells, Rocks, Flip Flops and seaweed by Using two types of set ups, The first one we used was the infinity table which gives the illusion of a infinite white background in the image. To change the colours We used different coloured gel sheets covering the lights which eventually changed the colour of the images. Our second set up was using more natural light, with a white backdrop.
Our second set up was using more natural light, with a white backdrop.
The picture below was taken with a big Aperture
and the picture below was taken with a smell Aperture
You can see the difference as the first image is focusing on only the centre point of the picture when the second one shows the image as a whole with no CenterPoint.
still life is a painting or drawing of an arrangement of objects, typically including fruit and flowers and objects contrasting with these in texture, such as bowls and glassware.
There are multiple different types of still life which are: Flowers which symbolises life and growth, Banquet or Fruit which can symbolise religion e.g. Adam and Eve, Animals or skulls which symbolises mortality and other symbolic items
Still life started in the 17th century when paintings of objects developed a great popularity in Europe. The momentum for this term came as artists created compositions with greater complexity, whilst bringing together a wider variety of objects to communicate symbolic meanings.
Vanitas is A still life artwork which includes various symbolic objects designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the worthlessness of worldly goods and pleasures.
The term “vanitas” originally comes from the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’
Vanitas are closely related to still life which is artworks that remind the viewer of the shortness and fragility of life and include symbols such as skulls and extinguished candles. However vanitas still life’s also include other symbols such as musical instruments, wine and books to remind us explicitly of the worldly pleasures and goods.
(memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember you must die’)
Memento mori is Latin for ‘remember that you must die’. This is an artistic symbol and has appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards.
The most common motif of this is a skull, often accompanied by multiple bones, coffins, an hourglass and flowers to symbolise the impermanence of human life.
