The technique of constructing landscapes is one that has been used in many instances and for different reasons. Whether for practical or artistic reasons, the artists have been exploiting their medium for many years.

The first example of this that we see is the work of Gustave Le Gray, taken near Montpellier, France in 1857, titled The Great Wave. This image’s origin was in Le Gray’s struggles to create an image that was equally representative of the darker regions of the scene and also able to capture the wild movement of the sea without it becoming entirely blurred. This led him to choose to use two different exposures in two different images – one of the sky and one of the sea. He then of course had to merge the two together to form the landscape we see in the final photo. Owing to its period, this process would have been lengthy and complicated; involving manipulating the actual negatives to fit together and look seamless. This was therefore a pioneering image for Le Gray and as the first of its kind, it has inspired artists through time.

One example of an artist inspired by Le Gray’s image could be Dafna Talmor, whose series of Constructed Landscapes II employs the same physical cutting process in a darkroom. Her images are made up of other images taken in different locations (still on film despite their recency) before being cut up and spliced together to form these collages.

This technique does inspire the question of a new possibility to photography – can we use photography to create a new medium of art through both physical and digital (examples seen in the work of Andreas Gursky) manipulation?

Gursky, born 15th January 1955 in East Germany, is a visual artist focused on presenting deadpan and hyper focused images with no favour to either foreground or background.

Beginning his studies under Bernd and Hilla Becher in the early 1980s at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, Gursky was influenced heavily by their work. He was also influenced by the New Topographics movement happening in America around this time. His recent works are of the digitally manipulated kind – with multiple images being taken and repeated across the canvas to create a whole image.

His work has been exhibited in many collections across the world, most notable being the MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He also holds the record for the highest price paid at auction for a single photographic work.

Anthropocene is the name for the current geological era, spanning from the first significant human impact on earth to the present day. The word has garnered attention as being a buzzword for the climate action movement, as the amount of change (most famously in temperature) that the earth has seen over this period (due to human impact) is considerable.

Therefore, I think that there are a wide range of options for me to build the basis of a project upon, however, being in Jersey, these are basically limited to a degree.

Typology is the recording of many things that are of the same ‘type’, and in photography, there are many different interpretations of this definition.

Typology can be found in all three of Portraiture, Landscape and Still Life studies.

To create my response, I took photos in Central London, picking out a few different subjects as and when I saw that they occurred quite frequently. I collected images of bikes, telephone boxes, lamp posts, numbers on buildings and views that seem to reach into the distance through the foreground (for want of a better word).

Whilst I regret that there are perhaps not as many images as I would have liked, I obviously cannot take more in this location and so from here I will create final images.

I think that lots of my images have similarities with the work of Nicholas Nixon, Robert Adams and Stephen Shore. Here are some examples.

When I took my images for this topic, I used the flash for some of them. In these images you can see the raindrops are lit up and frozen in motion in front of the camera. The reason that you can see this only in these photos is firstly because when the flash is engaged, the camera automatically makes the shutter speed as short as possible. This is to avoid the camera from taking in too much light from the flash and overexposing the image. This makes it possible to see the raindrops as individual shapes as opposed to blurred entities because a faster shutter speed eliminates motion blurs. Secondly, the light obviously illuminates the raindrops before the camera.

Below is a comparison between one image taken with flash and the same image taken without it. These were taken seconds apart and so this demonstrates the effect of the flash on the appearance of the light.

I like these images because I think they all respond well to the brief of New Topographics, as they all have a very muted and desolate tone. I also think that there is a lot of alignment between my images and those of the most famous artists of the movement.

Here are the outcomes from my New Topographics photoshoot. I decided to go to the Les Landes racecourse to take these images because I thought that it would have the right kind of empty/abandoned feeling. I think that this was achieved in my photographs.

Additionally, the weather at the time was a heavy sheet of rain covered by a thick cloud shelf which created a colourful and dramatic sunset, which I think really added to my photos.

As it was getting dark towards the end of my shoot I decided to start using my flash to take some photos with a more accentuated effect of eeriness and abandonment and I really like these. I often like to use my flash and I think I have taken some of my favourite photos with the flash equipped, so I think this shows a little more of my own style in these images.