August Sander

I have chosen to write about August Sander because his work intrigued me. I think all of Sander’s photographs create a huge feeling of time as they are in black-and-white and are taken of people in the 20th century.

August Sander was a famous German photographer who lived a long life, 1876-1964. Sander’s photography career began when he was a teenager. Acquiring his first camera in 1892, he took up photography as a hobby and, after military service, pursued it professionally, working in a series of photographic firms and studios in Germany. After photographing local farmers, Sander was inspired to produce a series of portraits of German people from all classes of society. In the mid-1920s, Sander began his decades-long project ‘People of the Twentieth Century‘, but in the 1930s his work fell into disfavor and was banned by the Nazis. Although his project couldn’t have been completed, it includes over 600 photographs divided into seven volumes and nearly 50 portfolios. The photographs from this project are all mostly black-and-white portraits documenting Germans from various social and economic backgrounds in the 20th century.

Emotional:

• Intimidating
• Uneasy
• Creepy
• I like the photo because it makes me think about the backstory and meaning behind it.

Visual:

• Looks like a train factory
• Dull
• Dark lighting, lots of shadows
• Looks a bit abandoned and dirty/rusty
• Artificial lighting
• Shallow depth of field
• Old white man-main focus point, subject of the image-staring into the camera, makes viewer feel uncomfortable
• Dark surroundings
• Symmetry

Technical:

• Balanced composition from the 2 pillars either side making the main subject centered
• Line of symmetry
• Losing focus and detail the further back you go behind the subject so the main subject is focused and the rest is blurry
• Lighting is from either side of his face so the middle of his face is dark shadowy.

Conceptual

Taken from Los Angeles Times:

“In 1963 Jewish photographer Arnold Newman was commissioned by Newsweek to take a portrait of Alfred Krupp, a convicted Nazi war criminal. At first, Newman declined the offer. The Jewish American photographer saw the convicted war criminal as the devil and wanted to put a knife in his back. But Newman did proceed with the job. A sinister-looking man, Krupp was seated on a platform with his factory in the background. Newman asked him to lean forward. Krupp clasped his hands together under his chin. “My hair stood on end,” Newman would later say. It was considered one of the most important photos by the man who became known as the father of the environmental portrait.”https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-arnold-newman-photographer-20190613-story.html

Contextual

• 1963

Examples of Arnold Newman’s photography:

What is environmental portraits?

Environmental portraits are typically images that show a subject in their workplace, usually undertaking their profession. They don’t always have to be in a workplace, they can also be images where the subject is linked to the background and shows the subject’s life and surroundings. The environment behind the subject helps tell the story about who they are, what they do, or what their passion is. Photographers like taking environmental images because they are visual storytellers and they like to tell stories with out the use of words. These images reveal the story behind a stranger, and makes the viewer feel closer to them in a way.

Mood board:

This style of photography makes me feel inspired because I can learn about different work environments and how they have changed over the years. I also like how each photo has a different feeling to it from the subject’s body language and their facial expression.

What is typology?:

Typology in photography is a single photograph or a body of photographic work, that shares a high level of consistency usually of similar objects.

As we can see here, there are 9 photographs all including trees of similarity. This is called typology because it is a suite of images in relation to the same subject. In this case, the tree is the main subject of the image.

In this virtual gallery, I used my favourite ‘still life images’. I like this layout because the smooth and textured photos contrast really well together. I like the way that the two photos that are opposite to each other include similar objects but are photographed with two different tones, cool and warm. Both of these images have a smooth textured background, and the photo that is centred has a rough textured background which creates a contrast between all of these photographs.

Edit 1:

Before

After

Edit 2:

Before

After

Formalism:

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

For my artist response, I chose to use the artist Walker Evans as inspiration for my photographs because I found his work really interesting as he uses tools to take single object photographs.

Importing photos

I used Lightroom Classic to edit and organise my photographs. Using this, I have learnt the skills of importing images from the computer files into Lightroom Classic, I can also rate my images from 1-5 stars depending on the quality and pick my best images from the photoshoot.

Flag colour representation:

• RED: Images that could’ve been improved
• YELLOW: Good images that I could potentially use
• GREEN: My best images

Single object photoshoot:

Single Object editing:

Edit 1:

Before editing:

After editing:

In the unedited photo above, I found that the image seemed too dull, with no colour. I decided to edit the image so that the hammer had more texture to it and stood out so the viewer’s focus was only on the tool. I also increased the saturation, this made the background colour brighter and a heavier pink tone.

Edit 2:

Edit 3:

Edit 4:

I chose these images as my ‘best’ ones because the quality of the photography is high and, in most of the images, I like the way the texture of the background contrasts with the smoothness of the objects. In the other ones, I like how the background looks so smooth so the focus is mainly on the objects.

Single:

I like these images because they all have a similar warm tone which gives off a feeling of nostalgia and could be categorised as ‘vintage’, as if these images were taken a long time ago.

Comparison:

before vs after

I chose to edit this image because out of all of my still life images, this was the best one and also my favourite. I edited this image using Adobe Lightroom Classic. I found that increasing the colours made a huge impact on the detail of the photograph. I decreased the whites to make the background seem a bit darker than it was. I also increased the vibrancy and saturation so the light shining on the objects came across as a warmer tone.

Experimentation on presentation:

Triptych:

A triptych is when you present a group of three images. So finally, I decided to use triptych as a way to present these images because I like the layout and it is therefore easier to compare them. I chose to use these 3 photos because I found that they stood out to me the most, as they all are higher quality and are similar in a way as they all represent a warm tone.

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.

Before Vs After editing

In all of these images I increased the texture and clarity to sharpen the objects and background, so the objects are more in focus and the detail is precise.

These particular images are all unedited but I really like how in the warmer tone images the background looks really glossy rather than textured, so we can therefore see the reflection of the objects. But as we can see on the left hand side, in the cooler toned photos, the cloth which is used as a backdrop is textured to show the objects in a clearer perspective to focus on them.

In this photo we can see that the objects in the background is blurry, this is because the aperture is low meaning the depth of field is shallow. This makes the main subject of the photo (i.e. the plane) a lot sharper and easier to focus on. The faster the shutter speed, the faster the photo takes which means that the motion of the plane has been frozen as it is spinning.

Whereas, in this photo there is a wide depth of field because the aperture is higher than the first photo. This means everything is in focus, including the background and the objects that are further away. Using a slower shutter speed means that any moving object will be blurred, which is shown here.