I chose to take images of Ryan Hervé, a professional board maker and owner of Hervé Surfboards, in his workshop. There were multiple rooms available for me to photograph in and I found that there was luckily really interesting lighting used in every room, especially in the shaping room. I was very interested in photographing in the shaping room as the lighting was designed with the function of providing the best possible view of the boards’ angles, and this created some really atmospheric images in my opinion.
There was also a lot of dust in this room, created through the process of filing and shaping the fiberglass, and I feel that this almost created a sort of muted feel to the images.
Additionally, the photos from the painting room also used the lighting in an interesting way and I am happy with these.
We took these images around the school and although there are a few strong ones, I think that the majority of them are not worth editing. They are either blurred due to incorrect aperture or not posed in the way that I would have wanted.
I have edited a few and these have been included below.
” – 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
Arnold Newman is a prestigious American photographer who was born on the 3rd of March 1918 and died on the 6th June 2006 in Manhattan, New York. His most notable work is made up of many celebrated personalities including Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Audrey Hepburn and Ronald Reagan, to name a few.
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
Mary Ellen Mark was born on the 20th of March 1940 in Pennsylvania and died on the 25th of May 2015 in Manhattan, New York. Mark’s work branches into many different areas of photography including documentary, photojournalism and advertising. Her most famous pieces however are definitely those that make up her exploration into the portrait genre, taken during her extensive travels on the search for imagery that “reflects a high degree of humanism”.
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.
“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
Born on the 16th of October 1890 in Brooklyn, New York, and deceased on the 31st of March 1976 in Orgeval, France, Paul Strand was named as the ‘creator of modern American photography‘ due to his pioneering a new style in photography.
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.
‘I am always searching for that subtle tension where the portrait and environment interact with one another to create a strong narrative.’
– Michelle Sank
Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1953, Michelle Sank has lived in Exeter, Devon since 1987.
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; BecomingandThe 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
Bert Teunissen, most famous for his ‘Domestic Landscape’ images, was born in the Netherlands in 1959.
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.
Alfried Krupp, industrialist. Essen, Germany, 1963. By Arnold Newman.
How does this image make me feel?
Upon first inspection, and without any context at all, I would certainly say that this image evokes the feeling that the subject is perhaps an evil or powerful figure, all thanks to the combination of lighting placement and intensity, the industrial colour palette and the body language that he is demonstrating.
How was this image taken technically?
This image appears to be a film image taken with a fairly wide-view lens, which is indicated by the narrowing perspective and upfront placement of the man in the image. Arnold Newman used 35mm film and usually was equipped with a tripod. I can imagine that the exposure would have been rather difficult to control with the light source behind the subject possibly threatening to overpower the image. However we can see that the photographer has decided to use two light sources either side of the man to create an interesting pattern of shadows which certainly contribute to the overall feeling of dread evoked by the photograph.
What can I see in the image?
The photo appears to be taken in an industrial trainyard of some sort with maintenance equipment and tools stacking up behind the subject, who takes centre-stage in the foreground. We can see multiple train carriages on the platform in the background, and running down the top-centre of the picture is a series of glass panes letting in small amounts of natural light. Framing the subject, whose hands are clasped in a menacing fashion beneath his chin, are two pillars caked in a thick, smog-induced dust which further suggests the industrial purpose of the setting. Finally, taking together both the subject’s powerful body language, with his hands creating a pyramid-like shape under his chin (pyramids/triangular shapes are very strong in their structure) and the effect of his face being very minimally lit and largely in shadow so that we cannot see his features in the traditional way all contribute to the overall evil atmosphere within the composition.
Why was the photo taken like this?
It is obvious that the photographer’s intentions were to present the subject in this cruel and plotting portrayal and the use of all of the above techniques definitely demonstrate this intention.
What is the story behind this image?
Shown in the image is the German industrialist figure and convicted (and later pardoned) war criminal, Alfried Krupp, whose family business was responsible for using almost 100,000 slave labourers from the concentration camp system to manufacture arms for the Nazis under terrible working conditions, which caused many deaths of exhaustion, hunger or other results of neglect and malnourishment. Interestingly, Krupp was personally intrigued by the work of Arnold Newman, a Jew, despite his obvious views on the Jewish people. The New York based magazine Newsweek commissioned Newman to take Krupp’s portrait. After originally refusing on a moral basis, he agreed to do so, with the view of creating an image that would represent and depict, in the simplest essence, the evil that Newman knew Krupp was responsible for in his war crimes.
“It turned out to be one of my best photographs, It was my impression of a Nazi who managed to survive yet killed millions of people”
Here is a collection of some typical images of the genre.
Environmental Portraits are images of individuals which show them in a setting which represents who they are and what they do in either their home life or professional life. This genre can produce images that give a truly interesting insight into the subjects and their stories. I really enjoy some of the most significant images from this style as they are extremely cinematic in their raw and direct nature.
Some influential artists that I will be studying include;
Here are my images displayed as I planned to. I am happy with this layout but it is unfortunate that I could not mount them all together on one piece of black card as I wanted to. There was regrettably not a big enough piece of card to fit all three photos in this layout. However I think that this is a good outcome for my project and I am happy with this.
In my opinion, I personally think that the first two diptychs are far stronger than the third, which I regrettably do not particularly like.
However I don’t think this is because of both images, but just because of this one;
I think the reason that this image does not really compliment my others is because it is just a little more cluttered than them – the composition is just less simplistically successful which has unfortunately resulted in a less professional looking image. I also think that it doesn’t at all relate to any of my artist studies.
This being said, I do think that my other images are all really strong and I am happy with my editing choices. I think that all of the images that I put together do compliment and contrast each other in a productive manner.
It was quite frustrating to not have been able to take as many strong and varied images as I would have liked; and I think maybe a more clear framework in my head would have perhaps made this a little easier. Knowing exactly what I wanted before I went out to take photos might have made this simpler. However, I do still feel that the weather was quite difficult during the week and this did invalidate a lot of my images that I actually took for the project.
I think I did use the camera to the best of my abilities, but there is definitely more I could learn and utilise within the settings to take more interesting images.
Altogether, I would like to have put more thought into creating images that really did resemble the work of my artists, specifically Andreas Gursky. I feel that this was not completely taken into account when I went out to take photos, but more importantly in my planning. By not choosing subjects that would suit his style, I was limiting my chances of replicating his photos. I am happy with my outcomes for Fay Godwin however, and I think this might be due to my personal preference toward her style and her photos over those of Gursky.
Gursky’s digital manipulation of his work is something that I feel I was not educated on enough to fully understand and be able to replicate. I was not fully aware of the amount of manipulation that actually went into his images, and I would most likely have not had time to do this to my own.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this project. Taking the time to research the different aspects of Anthropocene and its effects was really interesting and I feel that I have learnt a lot through doing so. I am proud of my outcomes, despite feeling that my idea was not as strong as it could have been, and I am aware that there is room for improvement in all areas of this kind of task for my future reference.
When I first began thinking of ideas for this project, I felt that there was a slight lack of accessibility to any ideas that I could choose with complete passion behind them. This due to our general limited resources in Jersey, but also due to personal limitations. By this I mean not having much time outside of school to take images, limits put in place by the weather and any kind of fear felt when it comes to choosing a slightly more unorthodox idea. If I had had the courage, time and subjects to do so, I would have liked to have done a portrait project, as this is my favourite genre and I generally feel more proud after producing a portraiture based project. Unfortunately I felt rather limited on this front due to time restraints and so I looked to landscape, being my second favourite genre. Having just done a landscape project, I had a lot of images available to me as well as the fortunate position of living in St Ouen. I was very interested in the idea of enhancing imagery of Jersey’s natural areas as I personally enjoy these places often in my own time. I think I must have wanted to raise awareness of these places of beauty as it is pretty fair to say that not many people who are residents in Jersey really take the time to appreciate the amazing sights we have on our island, and to me this is quite unfortunate.
How did I plan?
My house is surrounded by the effects of agriculture, yet the area also has some of the most naturally beautiful scenery on the island. The locations of Greve de Lecq woodland, Val de la Mare Reservoir, L’Etacq and Les Mielles nature reserve are all within a very short distance of my house and so this made them easy choices of sites for me to photograph. This is clear in the fact that I was not able to actually get to La Collette (due to its location) in the end and so I did not get any images of the recycling centre. I also regrettably did not make it to Les Mielles just due to general timing restraints as I only had after school to take these images and it would not have been possible to get there before darkness. Luckily, the weather in the week that I had to take images actually offered all the weather that I wanted to capture. Earlier in the week there were stormy days but this was contrasted by the clear sunshine at the end of the week.
