WALKER EVANS

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’ work from the FSA period uses the large format, 8×10-inch view camera. Born in St. Louis, United stated on the 3rd of November 1903 and died April 10th 1975 in Yale New Haven hospital, United states. Evans studied at Williams College and the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1955, Walker Evans created his first portfolio, Beauties of the Common Tool, which included commonplace items. These are the photos he would take of tools:

DARREN HARVEY-REGAN

Darren Harvey-Regan is a 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, London. In 1955, Fortune magazine published, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, a portfolio by Walker Evans featuring pictures of ordinary hand-made tools, such as a ratchet wrench and a pair of scissors.

Harvey-Regan first constructed a montage of Evans’s images to make new forms. He then sourced matching tools, cut them in half and re-joined various halves together, with the resulting physical objects being photographed to create his final work. The montaged tools become both beautiful and bizarre objects, in which a ratchet wrench is combined with a pair of pliers and a Mason’s trowel joined with a pair of scissors. These are two of his photo art:

Regarding the selection of objects, composition, lighting, and exposure levels, both artists Darren Harvey-Regan and Wlker evans paid close attention to detail. There are certain distinctions between these two painters in addition to their obvious similarities. For instance, Darren Harvey-Regan takes photos of everyday objects while Walker Evans does not change their appearance.

Nostalgia

William Eggleston

Since the early 1960s, William Eggleston used color photographs to describe the cultural transformations in Tennessee and the rural South. He registers these changes in scenes of everyday life, such as portraits of family and friends, as well as gasoline stations, cars, and shop interiors. Eggleston looks at the world with the eyes of a documentarian rather than a curator: He shoots from unexpected angles or when the subjects are looking away. This creates the impression that the photographer isn’t there, and makes the images all the more intimate. He calls attention to familiar places, the people, and the objects that inhabit it. Here he has created a picture of an everyday scene. Shooting from an unusual angle, the mundane subject matter and cropped composition combines to produce what is considered a snapshot.

This is one of William Eggleston’s works. I have chosen this artist because his work may seem random but makes it seem alive with the vivid colours in the images. His photos show me that anyone can make any boring picture into looking more joyful. The lighting, texture and tone look beautiful and it doesn’t even look edited, it looks soft and natural.

These pictures represent the road trips I would always have as a child. The first picture is the original and the others are edited. I changed lightings as much as i could so most them of could see more bright.

I decided to take pictures of the park since that’s one of the places I would be most as a child. My favorite photo out of all of these park pictures is the second one. Just love how it’s set.

My final piece is the photo above because I like the brightness of the picture. Also love how it is set and it makes it look alive. 

Still life photography is a genre of photography used for the depiction of inanimate subject matter, typically a small group of objects. Similar to still life painting, it is the application of photography to the still life artistic style. Still-life photography’s origins reside in the early 20th century. Art photographers emerged such as Baron Adolf de Meyer. Most still lifes can be placed into one of four categories: flowers, banquet or breakfast, animal(s), and symbolic.

First still life painting:

The painting generally considered to be the first still life is a work by the Italian painter Jacopo de’Barbari painted 1504. The “golden age” of still-life painting occurred in the Lowlands during the 17th century.

Most famous still life artists:

• Paul Cézanne, 1895
• Caravaggio
• Georges Braque, 1910
• Henri Matisse, 1910
• Paul Cézanne, 1898
• Jean Siméon Chardin, 1728
• Vincent van Gogh
• Adriaen van der Spelt, 1658
• Francisco de Zurbarán, 1633

Most famous artists these days:

sara tasker

Yukiko Masuda

What is vanitas?

Vanitas is a still life painting of a 17th-century Dutch genre containing symbols of death or change as a reminder of their inevitability. Vanitas is also a still life artwork which includes various symbolic objects designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the worthlessness of worldly goods and pleasures.

What is Memento Mori?

Memento mori is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards. Memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember you must die’. A basic memento mori painting would be a portrait with a skull but other symbols commonly found are hour glasses or clocks, extinguished or guttering candles, fruit, and flowers.

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

Writing with light

2) What year was the first photograph made on camera?

1826 (Joseph Nicéphore Niépce) 

3) When did the first photograph of a human appear?

1838 (Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre)

4) Who made the first ‘selfie’ ?

Robert Cornelius (1839)

5) When did the first colour photograph appear?

1861 (James Clerk Maxwell)

6) What do we mean by the word genre? 

A style or category of art.

7) What do we mean by the genre of still-life? 

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

8) What was the main purpose of the Pictorialist movement? 

To capture moving objects.

9) How do we describe the term documentary photography? 

Capture images that truthfully portray people, places and events.

10) What is exposure in photography? 

The amount of light that reaches your camera’s sensor.

11) What controls exposure on your camera? 

Aperture, shutter speed, ISO. 

12) What control on our camera records moving objects? 

Shutter.

13) How do we explain depth of field? 

A view across a field. 

14) What factors affect Depth of Field? 

Lens aperture, distance from camera to subject, and lens focal length. 

15) What is composition in photography? 

The arrangement of visual elements within the frame.

16) What is your understanding of aesthetics in art? 

Concerned with the nature of beauty and taste. 

17) What are contextual studies in photography? 

Consider factors outside of the image, as well as inside the frame. 

18) How many images are captured on average every day worldwide? 

4.7 billion.

19) Which portrait is the most reproduced in the world? 

The Queen (Elizabeth II)

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