Walker Evans

Walker Evans was a Photographer and Journalist who was best known for his work documenting the Great Depression. He was born in 1903 and unfortunately passed in 1975. His photographs generally captured the everyday struggles and lives of people which has made a lasting impact to documentary photography. Walker Evan’s work is recognised to this day for its cultural and historical significance and influences many other photographers, such as Diane Arbus. Walker Evans also produced a series of photographs named ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’. This is a series of still life photos featuring tools in black and white.

Beauties of the Common Tool

This series was posted in Fortune Magazine in 1955, spread across 5 pages. It captures a variety of tools, shot from above with the same lighting that appears to give them depth and emphasise their small details. These images could be an example of typologies as they clearly have the use of the same lighting, angles and they have the same purpose, which is to highlight the elegance of the tools. Additionally, Walker Evans intentionally made these images boring and not interesting so that the viewers will focus on the tools.

Darren Harvey-Regan

Darren Harvey Regan is an English Photographer, born in 1974, who’s work is highly inspired by literature and the forming of words to convey ideas. He personally believes that most of his work is a sculptural in the process and photographic in the end result. In 2010, he graduated the Royal College of Art and since has had many exhibitions and features in Museums, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Some of Darren Harvey-Regan’s Work

Darren Harvey-Regan typically makes sculptures out of plaster and photographs them, however, he also produced a series of photographs in which he digitally montaged Walker Evans’ photographs by snipping and rejoining them to make them into something more enticing and unique. These photographs were printed out 87 x 69cm and are rephrased versions of Evans’ work.

Darren Harvey-Regan Interpretations of Walker Evans’ work

Work Comparison

Technically, both pieces of work are originally by Walker Evans, however, Darren Harvey-Regan used Evans’ photos to make them into something more. Regan’s montages appear much more interesting and, by first glance, may be quite confusing to some viewers as they no longer appear as ‘common’ tools. The contrast between the tools and background in both artworks draw your focus towards the tools and in Darren Harvey-Regan’s montages the tools appear to have been made darker with a lighter background. This makes the images appear more clear and pristine.

Formalism is a critical and creative position which holds that an artwork’s value lies in the relationships it establishes between different compositional elements such as colour, line, and texture, which ought to be considered apart from all notions of subject-matter or context. Photographers focus on more than one thing in formal and visual elements such as line, shape, repetition, rhyme, balance etc but their main ones are flatness, frame, time and focus. These are some photos examples of formalism of that were took from photographers.

The key components of formalism are:

Line

Shape

Form

Texture

Colour

Size

Depth

Emphasizing elements such as line, colour, shape, texture, and other aspects rather than the subject matter, the work of the photographers Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan are examples of formalism within photography.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was an American photographer born 3rd November, 1903 and died 10th April, 1975. He was one of the leading photographers in in the history of American documentary photography. Evans had a great influence towards the evolution of ambitious photography during the second half of the 20th century. He began taking photographs in the late 1920s on a European trip, and published his first images in 1920 upon returning to New York.

The portfolio ‘Beauties of the Common Tool” by Walker Evans was published in 1955, where Evans appreciated the common tool and displayed them on their own. These photographs were taken of the common tools suspended behind a plain backgrounds. These photographs were taken in greyscale, eliminating the distractions that the colour on the tool may bring, and fully focusing on these objects for what they are.

Many photographs by Walker Evans were taken on a 8×10 inch view camera. The years 1935-36 were ones of highly productivity and accomplishment for Evans, as this is where he documented the effects of The Great Depression whilst working a a photojournalist, best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration. He has described his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.

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Darren Harvey-Regan

Darren Harvey-Regan is a photographer born in 1974 in the United Kingdom. He is interested in the concept that photographs exist not only to show things, but also to become physical objects themselves. As shown in the photograph above, he cut matching ordinary tools in half and then joined these halves together, creating a unique and bizarre object.

Darren Harvey-Regan graduated from the Royal College of art. His work has been displayed internationally in exhibitions and publications, and also is part of the permanent photography collection at the V&A Museum in London. Through his photographs, he aims to work in the liminal space where flat representation ends, and three-dimensional object begins.

Walker Evans’ work hugely influenced Darren Harvey-Regan, and both artists had great attention to detail to their choosing of objects, composition, lighting and exposure values. However, despite the clear similarities between these two artists, there are a few differences also. For example, Walker Evans photographs common objects without altering their appearance, whilst Darren Harvey-Regan does.

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Formalism photoshoot – contact sheets

Contact sheets with edits:

My photos before and after editing:

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Final Images

I edited my photos in greyscale, with inspiration from Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan. Whilst editing, I focused on the main elements of formalism and emphasized those aspects of the photographs.

What is formalism?

Formalism is how aspects of the composition of a photograph which make it appealing. these aspects are line, shape, form, texture, colour, size and depth.

Line

Definition: A straight or curved geometric element that is generated by a moving point and that has extension only along the path of the point.

There are many different types of lines. straight lines tend to be manmade, whereas curved lines are more often seen in nature. lines can also be seen at different angles; the picture below is an example of this.

This photo contains straight lines.

Shape

Definition: The visible makeup characteristic of a particular item or kind of item.

Shapes are two-dimensional. They can be measured by overall height and width. Shapes can be the outline of an object. different shapes can combine to create new shapes. shapes can be organic or manmade and can be complicated or simple. the purist shape is a silhouette.

form

the shape and structure of something as distinguished from its material

Form is three-dimensional. Form has overall height, width, and depth.  there are two basic types of form—geometric (or regular) and organic.

texture

The visual or tactile surface characteristics and appearance of something

Texture in the photograph is similar to form in that it is revealed by variations in tonality and presented in two dimensions.

colour

A phenomenon of light (such as red, brown, pink, or gray) or visual perception that enables one to differentiate otherwise identical objects.

the aspect of the appearance of objects and light sources that may be described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation for objects and hue, brightness, and saturation for light.

size

 Physical magnitude, extent, or bulk: relative or proportionate dimensions

In photography, the space is already rendered before the camera, so we look at how both size and depth are reproduced, created, and recognized in the photograph.

Size in a photograph is relative and can be an illusion.

When a familiar object appears in the frame of a photograph (car, basketball, streetlamp, etc.) we immediately get a feel for the scope of the entire scene. Without a familiar object in the image, we struggle to determine the scale shown in the photograph.

depth

The direct linear measurement from front to back

A photograph is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene. Even is a simple snapshot we are given a sense of depth due to various visual cues, to which we rarely give much thought or analysis.

Q1: What is the etymology (origin & history) of the word photography?

The word photography is derived from the Greek word “photos,” meaning light, and “graphos,” drawing. Modern photography traces its roots back to the camera obscura, a drawing aid artists and scientists used to record images as early as the eleventh century.

Q2: What year was the first photograph made in camera?

Hundreds of years of advancements in chemistry and optics led to the invention of the camera obscura, which enabled the first photograph to be taken. That photograph was taken in 1826 by French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, at his family’s country home, Le Gras.

Q3: When did the first photograph of a human appear?

Taken in 1838, Louis Daguerre’s photograph of a Paris street scene shows a man standing along the Boulevard du Temple getting his shoes shined. It is widely believed to be the earliest extant photograph of human figures.

Q4: Who made the first ‘selfie’

Robert Cornelius, an American photographer, took a daguerreotype of himself in 1839. Taken two years after the invention of the daguerreotype but just months after Daguerre shared his invention with the world, the image is thought to be both the first selfie and one of the first photographs of a person.

Q5: When did the first colour photograph appear?

The foundation of all practical colour processes, the three-color method was first suggested in an 1855 paper by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, with the first colour photograph produced by Thomas Sutton for a Maxwell lecture in 1861.

Q6: What do we mean by the word genre?

a style or category of art, music, or literature.

Q7: What do we mean by the genre of still-life?

An image that shows inanimate objects from the natural or man-made world.

Q8: What was the main purpose of the Pictorialist movement?

To affirm photography as an art form.

Q9: How do we describe the term documentary photography?

Documentary photography describes any photos that attempt to record the world as it is. From wide-angle photographs of war to close-up snapshots of people on the street, these images can inform an audience about the hidden corners of contemporary life and even become part of the historical record.

Q10: What is exposure in photography?

In photography, exposure is the amount of light per unit area reaching a frame of photographic film or the surface of an electronic image sensor. It is determined by shutter speed, lens F-number, and scene luminance. To capture bright light.

Q11: What controls exposure on your camera?

The three elements of camera exposure settings.

• Shutter speed — How fast the shutter opens and closes. Faster shutter speeds allow less light to reach the sensor but can reduce blur in your pictures.
• Aperture — How much light is allowed into the lens
• ISO — Your camera’s sensitivity to light.

Q12: What control on our camera records moving objects?

Shutter. The shutter is a curtain in front of the camera sensor that remains closed until you start shooting. Once you click the button to take a photo, the shutter opens and lets in light that passes through the lens, exposing the sensor to it.

Q13: How do we explain depth of field?

How much of your image is in focus. Depth of field is the portion of that distance or ‘depth’ that is ‘in-focus’. A higher depth of field would see the whole image from foreground to background sharp and in focus, a lower depth would result in blurry backgrounds and blurred elements in the foreground too.

Q14: What factors affect Depth of Field?

You can affect the depth of field by changing the following factors: aperture, the focal length and the distance from the subject.

Q15: What is composition in photography?

Composition in photography is the equivalent of the skeleton in the human body. It keeps everything together, supports the weights of various visual elements, and makes the frame look dynamic. The arrangement of visual elements within the frame.

Q16: What is your understanding of aesthetics in art?

Philosophical study of beauty and taste. Aesthetic qualities refer to the way and artwork looks and feels. This understanding can influence how students see beauty and the way they appreciate and understand art. 

Q17: What are contextual studies in photography?

Simply put, meaning is derived from context, whilst context is the information that surrounds something (which in most cases here refers to a photograph). We form our understanding of a photograph not just from what is in it, but what we know about it. To provide historical, cultural and theoretical understanding of images.

Q18: How many images are captured on average every day worldwide?

4.7 billion.

Q19: Which portrait is the most reproduced in the world?

For it is John Hedgecoe who took what is now thought to be the most reproduced photo in history — the sideways portrait of The Queen that was used on Royal Mail postage stamps.

Camera settings:

First Edits:

(Before and afters of some of my edits to show my inspiration of Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan) –

Edits –

I believe these images came out well as, too me they are the most similar to Harvey-Regan’s work in terms of lack of shadow and good exposure on the tools, by having a high contrast and clarity I was able to create this effect as the edit is more focused on the object.

These images could be better in terms of lighting – With less brightness to remove the shine on the cutlery. Despite that these to me looked similar to Walker Evans work, By adding a higher clarity it makes seeing the details easier to find.

These images, in my opinion could possibly be better, as they don’t seem bright enough, however I am pleased with their outcome. I decided to make a personal attempt by using a warm brown colour by adjusting the temperature and playing around with the highlights.

I like how these images came out, I feel like these look quite similar to Walker Evans in terms of the use of a grainy background and cold colourless aesthetic that both photographer’s use.

Overall I am pleased with how these Pictures came out, In this photoshoot I decided to take influence from both Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan.

This photoshoot was inspired by Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan who are known for their images taken of tools. I tried to recreate their images closely by using a white background as seen in their images, helping to draw the focus onto the tool only. I used a stool in order to capture the tools from a birds eye view as seen in the photographer’s work. I used a variety of different tools in my photoshoot and experimented with using tape to prop up the tools and no tape to see the difference it made on the shadows cast by the tools.

I first put all my images into Lightroom and then began to narrow them down until I had my best set of images that I wanted to edit and use in my blog. I did this by first either putting a white flag or black flag to the image depending if I liked it or not. I then rated all of the images with a white flag out of five. Finally, I assigned each of the images a colour (green, yellow or red). I then used the filter option in order to get my best images.

Before and after images:

For the first tool I decided to photograph, I chose a hammer. I experimented with setting up the hammer in different ways as seen in my images in order to make it look more interesting rather than laying it flat down on the table. I then used Lightroom in order to change the exposure and clarity of the picture. Additionally, I decided that I would make the background more of a warmer tone like the wood seen on the handle. This made my image look more cosy and inviting despite the object having opposite connotations.

For these images, I decided to closely recreate the work of Walker Evans by using a white, negatively spaced background and taking the photographs of the tools from a bird’s eye view. I used a variety of different objects in my photoshoot and tried taking some pictures of just one tool and then taking pictures of a group of tools together.

I then used Lightroom to enhance my white background so my objects would stand more out and used the colour setting to brighten up any small bits of colours seen on the objects.

Overall, I like how this photoshoot came out as I feel it closely resembles the work of Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan, which is what I was trying to aim for. However, if I were to further this photoshoot in the future, I would try and merge two objects together as seen in Darren Harvey-Regan’s work as I feel it creates a unique, creative final outcome.

For these photographs, I took a picture of multiple tools rather than just one singular one. I like these photographs as I feel they are more interesting to look at due to the viewer having multiple things to focus on rather than just one object which could become boring.

I decided to experiment on photoshop with this image. I first selected the image I wanted to use and then duplicated it. Next, I turned out of the images black and white and put it as my bottom layer. I then went onto the top, coloured layer and selected the quick selection tool. I then proceeded to outline the left and right tool. Once I had all the necessary parts outlined, I then right clicked and pressed layer via cut, exposing the black and white layer behind it. However, I kept the middle tool coloured which makes it stand out compared to the rest of the tools.

Finally, I tried to recreate Darren Harvey-Regan’s original image of two tools merged together using my own images I took in the studio. I first opened up a plain white page which was then used as my background. Next, I opened up one of my images of my tools and used the quick selection tool to go over half of the tool. I then right click on it and pressed layer via copy, making sure to get rid of the full image of the tool as I no longer needed it anymore. Some of my edges on my cut out were a bit raggedy and so I used the eraser tool to smooth it out more. I then chose another tool and completed the same process. Overall, I think this attempt was successful as it looks similar to Darren Harvey-Regan’s original image and furthered my photoshop abilities.

These images are from my Objects photoshoot, apart of my Nostalgia Project.

4 – 5 star rated photos:

(These are also white flagged – meaning they consist of clearly taken photos).

These images, I believe best take inspiration from the works of Walker Evans and Darren Harvey-Regan.

3 – 2 star rated photos:

(These are also white flagged – meaning they consist of mostly clearly taken photos).

These images are good but I feel as if they could’ve been better, some fit my standard but lack in terms of visuals ( E.G. exposure and space).

2 – 1 star rated photos:

(These are black flagged meaning they do not appeal to what I was aiming for during the nostalgia photoshoot).

These images were either poorly done, or not what I wanted for them to come out as.

Camera settings and lighting –

For my photo shoot I used a Canon EOS 4000D, using the manual focus and the features below:

and some on: