Formalism is the study of art based on analysis of its form, the way it is made and what it looks like. Formalism photography is where the design, composition and lighting are dominant over the subject matter, and concentrates on the desired subject while eliminating everything else, to make the subject the main focus. Paying attention to the formal elements will help you emphasise the most critical aspects of the shot.
The seven formal elements are commonly known as: – Line – Shape & Form – Pattern – Tone – Colour – Texture – Space
Walker Evans:
Walker Evans is a self-taught, American photographer who is best known for his black and white images. Black and white photography removes any distraction of colour and helps the viewer focus on other aspects of the photo, such as the subject, the textures, shapes and patterns. Therefore, as Walker Evans aimed to capture daily life events and objects, this makes the photographs have more feeling to them due to the lack of colour. This is an example of Walker Evan’s photography where he took photos of tools from everyday life.
Darren Harvey-Regan:
Darren Harvey-Regan, born in 1974, is a British photographer and graduate of the Royal College of Art. His work has appeared in exhibitions and publications internationally, and is part of the permanent photography collection at the V & A Museum in London. Darren’s photographs are focused towards natural objects, sculptural forms and geometrical shapes. He is well known for his sculptural images, but as we can see here, he also uses tools as they are interesting to photograph because they’re simple but creates a main focus on the image as there is no other distraction and the photo.
I used colours to label and categorise the photos I used green for the images I really liked and definitely wanted to use and then yellow was for the ones I thought were ok and possibly would use and red for the ones that I definitely wouldn’t use.
this is the original photo before editing
for this image I did some basic editing so I cropped the image slightly and when changed the temperature of the image slightly because I thought the originally was a little bit too warm. Then I changed exposure and contrast. I also dulled down some of the highlights because they looked too bright making the image look really overly bright.
Overall I do really like the image I think the gold objects really stand out because of the colour contrast as everything in the image is black and white so the gold and even the read on the ashtray really stands out in the image.
When looking at the image I really like how I have the old fashioned camera in focus and then everything else like the photo and the vintage lighter not in focus. It makes the camera really stand out which I wanted to do originally but you can still see the other objects which corelate to the camera.
I think the contrast between the black and white works really well compared to the gold objects but also it matches quite well with the vintage camera. I think I maybe could have arranged my objects better I think they look kind of awkward in the way they are positioned at the moment.
here I went to the studio and too some photos inspired by walker Evans, I have already taken some similar photoshoots that involved more items, and different objects however I made this photoshoot more personally aimed towards still life photography and Walker Evans. I really like hoe some of my photos turned out however most of them had become very blurry and vivid, making it hard to work with and edit them, while others looked not centred enough or had a piece of the background in the photo. This made it difficult to chose a photo to edit. However I found a few and made sure that they were cropped to the right size.
Here I played around with the settings to try and see what looked best, I felt that my photos looked better with a warmer tone then a cold tone as the tools themselves were quite cold they wouldn’t have blended in well together. I made sure that the highlights were quite low as there were already shadows involved in the photo, therefore the tool already has a darkened background adding a white tone to it would make it look unrealistic and fake. I also added the blacks to over 50% because as the background was added to a warm tone, it helped me visualise and focus on the object more.
Photo Analysis:
Overall I am really happy with how this photo has turned out as the photo looks really clear. However the artist I was inspired by, Walker Evans, his photos were quite coldly toned and didn’t show much warmth, so I personally believed that the warmer tone made my photos look more advanced and original to me, although I was trying to copy walkers Evans work I did want to interpret my own ideas into the photo to make it more original to me. If I were to redo this photoshoot I would have liked to try and make them cold toned to see what difference it would have added. Or I would have liked to have used more tools maybe a knife and fork or even a spoon to mix it up a little bit as I had only used 2 different tools it didn’t help me explore and advance my ideas.
