Born on February 20, 1902, Ansel grew up in a house situated on the dunes west of San Francisco. In his early life he proved to be a ambitious musician. However, once he received his first camera in 1916, he slowly transitions from a musician to a photographer. He created his first visualized photograph in 1927,  Monolith, the Face of Half Dome. This photo shows the mountain rising from an ink-black sky, its face illuminated by a dazzling midday sun just out of frame. Though Ansel initially made an exposure using a yellow filter, he immediately swapped that for a dark red filter, which darkened the sky and produced the deep shadows and bright light we recognize in the final image. He met many photographers that influenced his work, and changed his style away from the ‘pictorial’ (photos that look like paintings) and more towards the ‘straight photography’. And by 1935, he was famous in the photographic community.

He was apart of the sierra club and eventually because the sierra clubs official photographer – the worlds oldest environmental preservation societies. He proposed improving parts and wilderness areas, becoming known for both an artist and a representative of Yosemite national park. In his time, he managed to prevent the building of a dam in the national park (kings canyon), by convicting congress to preserve the natural environment. He was considered on the Americas most influential conservationists and received a presidential medal.

Ansel Adams and the “group f/64” rebelled against the pictorialism photography. Ansel Adams states below what the mission of “group f/64” was, and how revolutionary it was: “It was devotion to the straight print, paper surfaces without textures that would conflict with the image texture. It was a belief in sharpness throughout the photograph. Good craft, in other words. F/64 is a small stop on the camera that gives great depth of field and sharpness.

He’s now considered to be the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century. His popularly has only increased after his death, as it shows the countries remaining fragments of uninhabited wilderness(especially national parks), which is only becoming more rare as time moves on.

monochromatic photography:

Monochromatic photography is a style of photography that relies on the use of one colour, in one or more shades, to create an image. Ansel Adams used monochromatic images in Black and white to bring out depth and high contrast in his images. Using one colour allowed Adams to focus on light and shadows, as well as lines and shapes. This can create an image that is highly stylized and that has a unique and memorable look.

Visualisation:

Ansel Adam began visualising his whole photo after he starting taking photography seriously. The idea behind this concept was to visualize in your minds eye the end result that you were trying to achieve prior to actually taking the photograph. An example may be finding the best camera angle, or the sort of light that will bring the best out of the scene, Or for professionals, Envisioning the whole image, creating an imaginary image in your head of the whole composition, colour, leading lines, and more. Of course, Some areas of the photograph may not look like how you envisioned it, so Ansel Adams might of changed the lens, colour filter, burning (increases exposure) and dodging (decreases exposure in areas).

The zone system:

The 11 zones were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle grey, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail). 

When Ansel Adams spitted his image into different zones, He was able to visualise how the scene in front of him can be translated into black and white film. By doing this you wont leave out any detail as there would be less pure black and white in his images.

Photograph analysis – The Grand Tetons And The Snake River

Taken in 1942, in the Grand Teton National Park, It strikes the viewer with a sense of power created by nature.

This 1942 photograph was originally conceived as part of The Mural Project for the US Department of the Interior, which Adams worked through one trip during the fall of 1941 and another in May and June of 1942. The project was initially planned to celebrate the US’s National Parks system in a suite of large-scale mural-sized prints, that would have lined the walls of the Department of the Interior building, separate from, but in concert with, the pre-existing painted WPA murals already installed.

Adams offers a masterclass in compositional balance, The bright shimmering river that swerve from the bottom right on the image, all the way to the centre, which acts as leading lines towards the mountains. This is juxtapositioning with the craggy and dramatic peaks of the Tetons, Topped with brooding storm clouds, giving drama in the image. The storm could break within seconds of Adams taking this photo, or it could pass, giving the viewer a sense of tension when seeing the image.

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. For most of the Western world, it was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval over the classical.

Romanticism came after the age of enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason). which was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. People who where with this art movement believed in science and facts, which likely helped lead to the very quick change in parts of the world caused by the industrial revolution. The romantics directly opposed these views.

The industrial revolution was the biggest influence in sparking the popularity of this art movement. Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more “authentic” European past with a highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanisation, brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy, awe, wonder, and terror, in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to the “beautiful” and the “sublime”. Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices.

Many Romantic paintings had colours that tended to be soft and warm, with a focus on pink, red, and pastel shades. Techniques like blending, layering, and brush strokes can create a dreamy, romantic effect, as well as expressive compositions, vivid colours, and dramatic contrasts of light and dark. This created a focus on individualism, an emphasis on nature, emotion over reason, freedom of form, and an exploration of the Gothic and unknown.

John Constable

John Constable (born June 11, 1776, East Bergholt, Suffolk, England—died March 31, 1837, London) one of the first artists of the Romantic movement to create landscape paintings drawn directly from nature rather than the idealised and dramatic depictions favoured by other artists of the period (the age of enlightenment). Constable moved away from the highly idealized landscapes that were the expected norm of the period and instead favoured realistic depictions of the natural world created through close observation. 

In this oil painting Constable has constructed the painting so that the viewer stands on the near bank of the river and the size of the image (it was another six-footer) in conjunction with the carefully rendered fall of light enables the viewer to feel that they could enter the scene. The image highlights the glory of nature without resorting to artifice or exaggeration and reflects Constable’s determination to paint the truth of what he saw.

The image here is really pleasing to the eyes, with its leading lines from the river, the wide open space of green, brown and yellow meadows that run of the frame, the blue sky that reflects a nice tint on the river, and more. The image gives a feeling of safety , making the views want to actually be there, instead of the grimy, melancholy towns and cities.

Niagara USA – Thomas Cole

The American painter Thomas Cole makes his name as a painter of sublime scenes, vast landscape of the American interior showing nature at its most dignified and impressive.

This painting shows the vast Niagara falls with very small native Americans in the foreground. He does this to show a diminished presence in scale and reinforces the false idea of the “vanishing Indian” and is meant to signal impending transformation rather than acknowledge their stolen sovereignty. The people here look almost lost and puny in the vastness of there environment. To be a romantic is to find relief from the pressures of modern industrial life through nature, which this painting displays very well.

The Sublime

The Sublime definition is of very great excellence or beauty. However, in Romantic art it means something slightly different – Sublime Art is Edmund Burke’s 18th-century theory that defines art as that which alludes to an immeasurable greatness beyond comprehension.

In “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757) it noted that there were certain experiences which supply a kind of thrill or shudder of perverse pleasure, mixing fear and delight. He shifted the emphasis in discussions of the sublime towards experiences provoked by aspects of nature which due to their vastness or obscurity could not be considered beautiful, and indeed were likely to fill us with a degree of horror.

We are observing something that is potentially dangerous, but we can gain pleasure knowing that we are observing it from a place of safety – meaning shows the sublime. There is an initial feeling of fear or distress, followed by pleasure, once the subject realises that the object that is posing these feelings is not a real threat. Burke claims that the most powerful passion is that of fear because it comes from an apprehension of pain.

Roger Fenton

 (28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) was a British photographer, noted as one of the first war photographers.

The most compelling of his views of the English, Welsh, and Scottish countryside call to mind the paintings of Constable and Turner as well as Romantic poems by William Wordsworth that celebrate man’s ties to nature. Fenton possessed a particular sensitivity for the play of light and atmosphere in the natural world, a subject he explored throughout the decade of his career with as much determination and success as he did architecture.

What is a landscape?

The term comes from the Dutch word landschap, the name given to paintings of the countryside. all the visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.

History of the landscape genre

Like most genres, Landscape as a genre first appeared in art. It was very niche and unpopular at first but slowly grew into one of the biggest genres.

It first became the subject of artists paintings in the 16th century in the neverlands but was not very popular compared to the art from Italy and France.

In the 17th century the classical landscape was born. These landscapes were influenced by classical antiquity and sought to illustrate an ideal landscape recalling Arcadia, a legendary place in ancient Greece known for its quiet pastoral beauty. Many people described it as being pastoral simplicity and was the place to go for many landscape artists.

In the Late 18th century, landscape art finally became accepted in the academy because of the artist French Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. In 1800 he published a groundbreaking book on landscape painting, Eléments de perspective practique. The book emphasized the aesthetic ideal of the “historic landscape,” which must be based on the study of real nature. The success of the book pushed the Academy to create a prize for “historic landscape” in 1817.

Landscape kept gaining popularity through the 19th century, This is likely due to many people moving into less rural areas, caused by the industrial revolution. This made many people miss there old life in the country side, so they would turn to art to remember the old life.  Barbizon painters such as Théodore Rousseau and Charles Daubigny became less concerned with idealised, classical landscapes and focused more on painting out-of-doors directly from nature—a practice known as plein air painting. The 19th century also saw the birth of landscape photography, which would greatly influence the landscape painters’ compositional choices. Gustave Courbet (an  Impressionists) pushed the boundaries of landscape painting even further.

In the early 20th century, painters continued to embrace the landscape. As photography gained acceptance as an art form, artists used the medium to create interpretations of the land through pictorialist effects. Ansel Adams captured the country’s attention with his breath-taking views of the wild beauty of the American West.

I decided to lay out my favourite final images in a virtual gallery here:

Evaluation:

Overall, I think this montage of images does a good job of presenting classic masculine ideas. With the colour grading and high contrast, It makes each image stand out. However to improve on this next time I will need to organise this montage better (e.g. diamond cameo) And I feel like the top middle photo does not match any other photo so I will need to take more specific body part photos. I had a little bit of inspiration from Claude Cahun (with the camera work and editing), but I feel like I should of stepped more into her style of bold, outgoing photos.

I think this image links very closely to Duane Michal’s work, by showing the insecurities of a person with there identity. It shows how modern masculine expectations can make a person insecure in themselves. I feel like the foreground model isn’t in frame enough to make it obvious to the viewer that there are 2 different photos.

I think this image links fairly closely to Cindy Shermans work linking to the male gaze. However, I edited my photos to have a rosy red colour grading to them, breaking the norms of gender identity with a feminine colour. The bright, glossy lips of the subject take the viewers attention away from the ‘manly’ body in a strong looking pose. By taking the viewers attention towards the lips you are making more ‘feminine’ traits a focus in the photo, conflict the binary opposites of masculinity vs femininity.

Photoshoot 1

For editing I decided to use other photos from photoshoot one, This Image below I tried to capture Cindy Sherman idea of the “male gaze”, but complete flip it so I’m capturing images of men instead.

The characters in Sherman’s photos are often an exaggeration of widely represented female identities. Since this exaggeration and masquerade is visible through heavy make-up or distinctive clothing, the works appear to reveal the artificial construction of what is supposed to make a person female, such as wearing clothes typical for a housewife or the extensive use of eyeliner:

So for this image I made a very traditionally “masculine photo” with my model where he has no t-shirt, and holding a breath case with a strong intimidating pose. I have cropped this image to keep the eye area away from the rule of thirds to make the body the dominating feature of this image. Keeping the eye area and the posing (of the breath case) high, which further increases the intimidation that this model creates for the viewer as he is looking down to the camera so to the viewer. :

To confuse the viewer I have edited this photo with some colour grading often associated with feminine traits like rosy red, to remove the line between masculinity and femininity. This take away a lot of the intimidation that I talked about above:

After this, I noticed that the background, not being completely black, could distract the viewers eyes from the subject and a easy way of mitigating that is by using a vignette. A lot of old photos also have naturally occurring vignettes due to incorrect camera equipment (e.g. lenses with large apertures or barrels) But adding it digitally can make your images pop and guide the viewers eyes to the subject:

I repeated this process with other photos:

Here I tried re-arranged the first photos I took to make it look more clean:

Photoshoot 2

For this image I didn’t want to overdo it in editing so I kept it simple and just merged 2 images together. One being confident and the mirror one being more insecure. It almost looks as if the foreground image is going to punch him inside the mirror, suggesting he’s insecure about himself.

For this Image below I really tried to replicate Duane Michals images with mirrors. I got my subject to hold a mirror looking into it, I also increase the lighting to create a hazy look:

ANOTHER ONE G

COMBINED:

For this one I used Images I took a while ago and was inspired by Cindy Sherman’s latest exhibition, here are some examples:

They are all very ‘ugly’ looking, giving a almost humorous effect on the viewer.

The exhibition showcases the artist’s individual series and also presents works grouped thematically around such common threads as cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tales; and gender and class identity.

I was inspired for this photoshoot by some of Cindy Sherman’s mirror images, especially Untitled Film Still #2 by Cindy Sherman . She almost seems insecure about herself and the qualities that men have expected upon her. I will replicate this but for men instead with my images. Another artist I got inspiration from was Duane Michals. Her magic mirror of uncertainty shows a woman looking into a skewed mirror. This constant change of position in the mirror represents her uncertainty. It almost represents self consciousness which I will try to replicate in my work, where the uncertainty of masculinity is at its peak right now.

These B&W sequence of images, all with different image skewed, could show a story of self consciousness, and how her appearance is always changing. The last photo she looks directly into the camera almost like she has given up on trying to match the feminine look that people have put upon her.

Here I told my model to stand in different poses while I kept the camera at the same location. This is so I can montage them together and create interesting photos when editing. Here are A few that I liked:

The Idea for this photoshoot was to focus the image on the reflected subject from the mirror, showing the true reflection of the subject. I will need to edit them so the real subject is different from the virtual subject, since I kept the tripod the same Hight and length away it should be easy. The camera settings used are; f/4.5 (creates blurred foreground keeping the focus on the virtual subject), exposure time of 1/360 as I used 3 flash lights with a box diffuser on to light up the subject, ISO of 100 to reduce noise, and a focal length of 18mm.

This is the first photoshoot with different body parts taken and different “masculine” objects. Most of the photos had: f-11, 1/160 shutter speed, ISO-100. A low ISO was used to give higher quality photos and since we where using a flash with a box light we didn’t need to worry about having the photo being too dark or light enough but blurry as we did not use a tripod. I chose 3 images from the body parts and the items to match with each other, they needed to be good quality, have an interesting aesthetic (e.g. captured from a weird angle). Large contrast in lighting and more.

I’m trying to capture the juxtaposition between masculine features of the body and masculine objects. I will achieve this by making the photos incredibly ‘masculine’ with stereotypes like muscles, strong fragrance smell, and wires as they are usually associated with a traditional ‘mans job’. This is done to make it seem unreasonable to follow these traditions and how humans can chose there own path in life.

I was inspired a little by Claude Cajun to make the images B&W and w she composes the image (high contrast inni)

3 photos and editing process:

I chose these 3 as they are all unique and show only the body of this very attractive model. I then added a B&W filter with these settings:

I bumped the contrast a lot some of the flatter images to show more veins and muscles increasing the “masculine” look.

Now here are the object photos:

Here I put them all in photoshop to invasion all of them next to each other. Here I’m trying to communicate different masculine ideas all together, overwhelming the viewer with these social constructs.

For these photos:

I edited each one with blue colour grading for the shadows and mid tones with yellow colour grading for the highlights as its often associated with a “mans” colour, further adding to this unreasonably masculine image collection:

some photo inspiration I found online, I looked for photos that where unique and presented my views on masculinity and how the line between masculinity and femininity doesn’t really exist.

The photoshoots I’ve decided:

different body parts mixed with traditional “male” items, I will montage them next to each other and have some in B&W – DONE

use reflections (i.e. a broken mirror), the reflection is self-conscious but the real life person is happy. – use the photo below as reference for the sad photo that will be in the mirror.

Cindy Sherman – Focused on Femininity

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York NY. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades.

“I am trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me.” —Cindy Sherman

At the heart of Sherman’s work is the multitude of identity stereotypes (like femininity) that have arisen throughout both the history of art and the history of advertising, cinema, and media. Sherman reveals and dismantles these stereotypes as well as the mechanics of their production in creating series after series of photographs that focus on particular image-making procedures.

The “male gaze” in her work of gender identity

The feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey writes in her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” about the subconscious way we see women and how they are depicted in Hollywood movies from the 1930s to the 1950s.

She argues that a lot of these movies objectify women and the female body for men’s pleasure. The black-and-white photographs of Cindy Sherman’s series Untitled Film Stills are reminiscent of movies from the 1930s to the 1950s and depict Sherman as she portrays women in different roles with the help of costumes, make-up, and wigs. They can be interpreted as challenging the male gaze mentioned by Mulvey.

This image makes the subject seem almost vulnerable, giving an eerie and creepy effect. This is because it leads to the viewer becoming an inappropriate spectator. The picture makes the audience part of a threatening situation they do not necessarily want to be a part of. It even indicates that the viewer who is only able to see the woman’s back is the one who poses a threat. Become confronted with the negative implications of the way the media – especially movies – depicts women. The male gaze is often present in Cindy Sherman’s artworks but she subtly changes the perspectives, expressions, and circumstances. The luggage to the left of her further increases her vulnerability it can be nicked inni.

Claude Cahun – freedom fighter

Defying conventional ideals of beauty and femininity with her shaven head and male attire, Claude Cahun is a perfect example of someone who pushed the boundaries of gender roles in a stereotypical society. Cahun staged images of herself that challenge the idea of the politics of gender. Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today.”Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me”. Cahun made photomontages with their partner Marcel Moore (aka Suzanne Malherbe), to illustrate Cahun’s autobiographical essay Disavowed Confessions (Aveux non Avenus). The photomontages feature self-portraits in masculine and feminine guises to show the artist’s identity in flux. 

This image is a perfect example of a female breaking the stereotypes placed on them as she shaved her head and wore male clothing. “Under this mask, another mask; I will never finish removing all these faces.”.

“I am in training don’t kiss me”

This is a series of photographs she took in 1927. Cahun adopts the paradoxical representation of a feminized strongman and performs various poses. Here is one of her photos from the series:

Here, Cahun breaks through gender boundaries and represents oneself simply as an active human rather than as a woman or man defined by their sex. Cahun presents an obviously constructed identity using props, highly stylized clothing, and make-up. In this photo you can see many masculine mixed wih feminine features like how she holds charmingly painted weights, psuedo-nipples are sewn onto the flat costume shirt, and even the traditional weight-lifter handlebar mustache has been displaced onto the curls of cropped hair.

Masculinity vs femininity has been a heated topic since the dawn of time. This is an example of binary opposites, which is where two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Using binary opposites can often be very helpful in generating ideas for a photographic project as it provides a framework. other examples include:

• good vs evil
• black vs white
• man vs nature
• young vs old
• Ignorance vs wisdom

femininity means qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of women or girls. By tackling the ideals of the female beauty, feminist photography tried to change general consciousness on the objectification of women, their role within domestic life, their own views of self.

photos that I think represent qualities of femininity:

Masculinity means qualities or traits regarded as characteristic of men or boys. Traits traditionally viewed as masculine in Western society include strength, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness. Many photographers try to combat these views as many men don’t feel like they match these traits.

photos that I think represent the qualities of masculinity :

Mood board

These photos are how I seen the concept of masculinity, I will try and portray my view of masculinity in my photos and how it can be troubling to specify people in only 2 groups.