These images, are my final outcomes of my ‘New Topographics’. Inspired by Photographers of the topic, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Frank Gohlke. Inspired by their modern approach to Landscape photography, their Photoshoots can be shown to leave heavy influence on my work and that of many other photographers who choose to capture the aesthetic of urban landscapes.
(Influence – Robert Adams: His image shown below of a large stretch of land, urbanised due to a change an increased need of homes, can be seen similarly in my images above, Rapid projects of destruction and construction of mass amounts of homes shares the conceptual basis Roberts drives behind his pictures).
(Influence – Lewis Baltz: Inspired by these images in particular, their use of large open space and stark bold lines with the bland rooftops, designed purely for functionalism, show how its remarkableness is intentional, with the soul focus based within its walls).
(Influence – Frank Gohlke: Inspired by this image, Gohlkes’s use of a long line of stretched road balanced with a large industrial structure to the left, was available for me to try and replicate myself in which I have done well).
Final presentation of mobile edits:
produced using a camera, but edited on a mobile device with the app Snapseed, their use of filters and variety of adjustment tools, produced to what I believe are some good images, influenced by Adams, Baltz and Gohlke.
I started off with 113 photos of different places around Jersey these places were: Gorey, St Catherines, Archirondel.
Flagged photos:
I then flagged the images I thought looked best and there were 49 remaining.
After I flagged the photos I went through them and chose my favourite of each setting and scenery. Lots of the Landscape photos I chose looked similar so I went through each one and chose my favourite.
Landscape 1:
For this image I turned the vibrance up and the temp a bit to make the colours brighter. I turned up the texture and dehaze as the original looked a bit unclear and this made sure the nature in this image was clearly visible.
Landscape 2:
For this image I didn’t like the original way it looked as I thought it looked dull. To change this is turned up the vibrance and made the colours in the image really bold and stand out.
Landscape 3:
For this image I changed it to black and white because I think it looks good with the dark hills and the foliage. I turned up the texture and clarity to show all the rocks and patterns in the waves.
Landscape 4:
For this photo I turned up the vibrancy to make the sky bright blue as I think it looks really pretty with the brightness of the sea. The castle looks really nice with the natural scenery which is opposite to the theme of the new Typographics
Landscape 5:
This image of St Catherines Pier was originally in colour I turned it to black and white. The lampposts was a main part of my reason to turn it to black and white as they gave off this vintage, olden day look which is why I think it suits the black and white. I turned up the contrast, texture, clarity and dehaze to make everything look more clear and less mixed together. Another thing I like about this image is the clouds, they look like they are being pulled away making this photo look very dark.
For this image it is much darker than any of the other ones. I added blue mid-tones to the image to make it look a lot moodier. I love how this turned out because you can see the darkness is the clouds and the see, this made the image look a lot more dramatic and it gives off a scary vibe which I think looks really good with the theme. The original looked very grey and less vibrant which to me looked boring and dull, by turning up the contrast, highlights and whites this made it more bright, then by turning the mid-tones a dark blue gave this photo a lot more contrast to the final image.
This image is much more vibrant where the yellow and blue tones of the path and the sea are really bright, I turned up the contrast to make this look better. I also turned up the vibrance and saturation to make the image look brighter and stand out.
Photoshoot 2
For my second landscape photoshoot I chose to take pictures around town.
For this image I went to the top of highlands hill and took a picture of the view from there. I changed the image to black and white as I think it suited the image better than from when it was in colour. For the overall tone I turned everything down as I like the dark look at the front and as the buildings go further back it gets lighter.
For this imagine I also took it on highlands hill. In the image you can see lots of buildings with foliage on the right side of the picture. The thing that stands out in this image is a person. I gave the image a blue tint as I think the blue makes the picture look cold which I like and I think it matches the vibe well. I turned the texture up for more detail. I turned down the exposure as the lighting looked weird with the blue tint.
This image was taken near Harve Des Par. I gave the picture a yellow tint to give the image a yellowish retro look. I think the features in the image suit this look because of its suburban look. I turned up the exposure, contrast and highlights so yellow tint didn’t make the image look too dark.
Anthropocene is a proposed geological era dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth until now
The history of earth is split into a hierarchical series of smaller sections of time, often referred as ‘the geologic time scale’. These divisions, in descending length of time, are called eons, periods, eras, ages and epochs.
Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time. it is used to outline the most latest period in Earth’s history where human activity started and where it began to have a major impression on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. The word Anthropocene is obtained from the Greek wordsanthropo, which stands for “man,” andcene which stands for “new,”. This was coined and made by the popular biologist Eugene Stormer and chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000.
There is a known theory that states that all of this began at the beginning of the industrial revolution of the 1800s, where the humans activity had significant impact on carbon and methane in the earths atmosphere.
However, others think that the actual beginning of Anthropocene was in 1945. This era was when humans tested the first ever atomic bomb and then proceeded to drop atomic bombs in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, japan. This dangerous act, resulted in radioactive particles that were detected in soil samples, globally!
How and why are photographers exploring this concept?
Many photographer explore Anthropocene because its almost like a meeting point. It makes photographer stop, rethink and overcome the separation between the environment and humanity. It reflects this climate urgency which produced awareness to the environment and responsibility towards the planet that holds us and that we inhabit.
What are the 4 causes of the Anthropocene?
Agriculture: encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, fisheries, and forestry for food and non-food products.
Urbanisation: the process of making an area more urban.
Deforestation :the purposeful clearing of forested land.
pollution: the introduction of harmful materials into the environment
Consequences of the Anthropocene:
habitat loss
global warming
animal extinctions
changes in the chemical compositions of the atmosphere, oceans and soil.
A typology is a single image that generally involves one aspect of any size which fills the whole image. The image above focussed on taking an industrial approach which works well with some of my own photos such as the jersey incinerator below. These images are typically in black and white and the time and weather in the day is also a factor typology photographers have to large take into account. as the industrial building itself is a darker colour, that makes the shade dark once its in black and white. this means that you cannot produced these images with the same affect if the sky is blue and clear as this will make it a darker shade. therefore, making sure this is taken on a cloudy day will create contrast with the building that is being photographed and make it further stand out so it does not blend into the dark shade of the sky and get lost.
Bernd and Hilla Becher
“The question ‘is this a work of art or not?’ is not very interesting for us.”
– quote byBernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher are a photography duo who are husband and wife who started photographing together in1959. For close to fifty years, they documented architectural forms they collectively referred to as “anonymous sculpture.” They produced photos that only included singular buildings which were usually in the centre of the image to make it the main focus. the buildings they photographed included water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, framework houses of mine workers, and other vernacular industrial architecture.
they would generally take these photos using black and white instead of colour. They would then group these images together in a grid, they produced what they called “typologies,” which grouped buildings by function creating a simple but unique idea of photography
In this photo, it is displaying the same structure but in many different forms and locations. each photo has been taken front facing and made sure to get the structure exactly in the middle. this works well because if the photos were not directly in the centre then it would look off when put onto a grid with other similar photos. This photo documents industrial structures which all look fairly old and well used and so I like how they haven’t used colour for their images.
I think the black and white works as it further brings across the industrial feel to the image whereas colour would probably make it too bright and each image one the grid wouldn’t be able to match each other. the distance of zoom on the camera also works well with each image to make sure they all take up the same amount of space on the image and match sizes. I also like how each image does well to not involve background. almost each image is basically empty which works well to make the main structure the dominant focus within the image.
Typology Practical response
One disadvantage of this shoot was that the sky was generally more blue, however the many clouds in the sky still managed to create that contrast with the building but just not as much as I would have liked.
I think this image works well as typology as the building is centred in the middle and is clearly the main focus of the image.
Images by Lewis Baltz – Inspiration for photoshoot
Photoshoot Plan
For this photoshoot, I am going to go to for a walk around St Brelade, mainly the area near the old Les Quennevais School, and try to find similar scenes to the ones featured in Baltz’s photographs. I am then going to make these images monochrome and edit them as little as possible in order to keep them natural and present the landscapes truthfully.
Contact Sheet
Image Selection
My Images in B&W
I edited these images in Lightroom Classic by making them B&W then increasing the contrast. For most of these images I also slightly cropped and rotated them.
Virtual Gallery/Evaluation
I believe that my images share some similarities but also have differences towards Lewis Baltz’s work. For example, they are similar as they display many straight edges and man-made structures such as doorways and walls. Some of these photos also depict man-made structures with plants and natural elements, alike Lewis Baltz. On the other hand, I think my photographs are different to Lewis Baltz’s in terms of locations as it wasn’t very easy for me to find many warehouses or buildings like what he depicts as Jersey is quite different to America.
George Marazakis, born in 1976 in Creta Island, Greece, studied Mechanical Engineering and currently works for the Greek Ministry of Justice. However, he photographs the Anthropocene scene in rural, vacant areas that have been abandoned by society in his ‘A Cure for Anthropocene’ project. These areas are lost and forgotten about and become consumed, because of society extremely quickly progressing through time, that the area is not needed, although it still leaves a mark and impact on the environment around it, restricting growth and areas for ecosystems to thrive in.
His photographs show the pace at which the environment is damaged and how much damage is actually happening. He portrays the side of nature which is not right in from of us like pollution which is everywhere, his photos are in more excluded areas showing the degradation of our planet.
“If human civilization is in fact a disease, then it can also be the cure. But if the cure to the planet’s disease isn’t self-restriction, it will result in self-extermination. After all, the salvation of the planet is a different concept than the salvation of humanity.” – Marazakis
Chris Jordan is an American artist, photographer and film producer. He has won many awards for his photography including the Ansel Adams Award for Excellence in Conservation Photography and the 2007 Green Leaf Award from the Natural World Museum and United Nations. He is famous for his photographs capturing litter and mass consumption. A lot of his photos show the disturbing truth of how the populations littering has an effect on nature. He does this by capturing images of the rubbish including plastic packages and toys inside the stomachs of dead birds. His photographs focus on the negative part of how humans live, rather than taking photos of beauty, he includes the unpleasantness.
More of Chris Jordan’s similar work is:
Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2003–2006) – A series of photographs portraying the magnitude of America’s waste and consumption.
In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster (2005) – A series of photographs taken in 2005 showing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Running The Numbers I: An American Self Portrait (2006–2009) – A series of photographic mosaics depicting visualisations of statistics related to America’s consumerism, social problems, and addictions.
Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture
In this photoshoot I looked at the sandy dunes specifically and how it can intertwine and show inspiration from Ansel Adams’s work. I looked after different pictures from many different perspectives and from different heights to get different views. Despite the heights of the hills not being as high as Ansel Adams’ I was still able to get a nice range of different photographs from a different stance.
In my photoshoot I took them in daylight so the textures are able to be seen, if I were to taken them in a darker setting the outlines and different gradients of the photograph would not been able to be seen, especially if I were to edit them in a black and where monochromatic scale then the features would not show up clearly as I want them too. Despite the dunes not presenting themselves as high as they appear in person rather than on camera, I believe they look interesting and dramatic due to the different patterns and appearance of the grass, greenery, sand and rock.
I think that in the photographs above I have tried to display my ideas of natural landscapes. I believe it was a good locations where the combination of the dunes of sand and the different textures of grass and the land especially with the different heights put into perspective. I took photographs from many perspectives eg. up close, from below, from above, across the horizon, zoomed into a specific area highlighted etc.
I believe that the photographs produced and presented on the page look interesting and how the different textures are shown looks appealing as it not just a flat structure and flat organisation of subjects. I believe that the black and white contrast to the colour looks even more dramatic with the shadowed and darker shades presented the difference between the light and dark shadows looks.
In the photographs above I show the difference between the light and the quality. The white and dark tonalities look more prominent in the black and white photograph therefore looking similar to the photographic work of Ansel Adams where his “Zone System” comes into play where the level the darker tones range at 0-4 mostly in that specific photograph and the brighter ones from 7-10.
In the photographs above I believe that the landscapes looks interesting as the different patterns of the paths looks almost as if the continuous patch of greenery is almost cut and disassociated, it almost looks as if it’s separating from it.
The combination of the sand and different coloured/shaded grass looks almost like a swirl patter as the landscape presented is not in a straight pattern (almost looks like a maze or a map where there is many paths and journeys).
Especially in the first photograph below the previous writing the “map/maze” ideas comes into terms as it shows the landscape below in a bigger perspective whereas the second photograph the landscape below is cut off in half but the landscapes and feature closer to the lens which is a complex of textures of sand especially and rock at a slant.
The third photograph looks directly downwards onto the landscapes in a lower down perspective. The photograph includes the ocean and the element of the coast so not only is the greenery included the contrast between that also appears.
The integration of natural vs man-made is evident here where the subtle element of man made structures is presented here.
The term ‘anthropocene’ derives from “anthropo”, meaning “human” with “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geologic time. Anthropocene is the period where human impact has dramatically changed the natural land and its environment. This includes things such as:
Global Warming/climate change
Emission of carbon dioxide
Extinction
Ocean acidification
Habitat destruction
Widescale natural resource extraction
An increase in extremeness and frequency of severe weather conditions e.g. earthquakes, tornados and storms
Photographers are exploring this concept to bring attention and awareness to the situation. By them doing this, it shows people the truth about what is really happening in the world and highlighting the severity of these things and that we need immediate change.
The photographs that come from this issue are both beautiful and ugly/jarring. This is because the way that some images are captured, they are appealing because they might show a large area of land which has patterns or colours that draw your attention. However, there are also images that do capture, in raw, the intensity of these situations and a lot of these types of photos are very unattractive and unpleasing to look at. There are also photos which appear beautiful but the meaning or background behind them is horrible therefore changing your perspective on it. All of these images bring light on the environment and what is happening to it.
Although these photographers are helping, it isn’t necessarily solving problem. Rather it is spreading the conversation, provoking thoughts that will hopefully provoke change.
