PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT: AFTERMATH OF STORM CIARAN
TASK ONE: PHOTO-SHOOTS
Produce at least 3 photo-shoots over H-TERM in response to recent Storm Ciarán. The storm affected many islanders and their families, homes, communities, neighbourhoods and areas of destruction in Jersey’s landscape, both in the countryside and urban areas, such as parks and green spaces. You could document both the destruction left behind by the storm in its aftermath and the rebuilding/ repairing. Begin to edit images at home using Lightroom (you can download Adobe software using your school account) and produce blog posts for each shoot. Alternatively, bring images to class after half-term.
This photographic study is the starting point for our landscape studies, both natural and man-made > see link to blog posts here
Landscape : romanticism to new topographics | 2024 Photography Blog (hautlieucreative.co.uk)
TASK TWO: CONTEXTUAL STUDIES
- RESEARCH AND EXPLORE: The New Topographics and how photographers have responded to man’s impact on the land, and how they found a sense of beauty in the banal ugliness of functional land use…
- Create a blog post that defines and explains The New Topographics and the key features and artists of the movement.
- ANSWER: What was the New Topographics a reaction to?
- EXTENSION: Research and explore TYPOLOGY – the study and interpretation of types that became associated with photography through the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher
See resources below for more information and inspiration for your studies…
JERSEY and Storm Ciarán
Read more here in the JEP or BBC Jersey about Storm Ciarán in Jersey.
You can also use generative AI either in Photoshop or DreamStudio. See this fake Tornado video that received over 400K views on TikTok
You could focus on trees in Jersey that has been uprooted, damaged and cut down and photograph them as a series of Typology studies. (make link to Yr 12 blog post) These images could be compared with archive photos of the Great Storm in 1987. Read and see more here about weather in Jersey through the ages on Jerripedia.
The Government of Jersey and other environmental agencies and groups, such as the National Trust for Jersey and Jersey Trees for Life are calling for a Tree Council to be formed that will oversee the planting of hundreds of new trees. You could document this process and record those involved in the replanting effort, such as tree surgeons, arboriculturists and volunteers.
Particular areas that were hit hard where many trees were felled by the storm, include ‘The bendy Tree’ on the Five Mile Road, trees in the ground of the Atlantic Hotel, along the Railway Walk and Grande Route de St Ouen (near St Ouen’s Manor).
Explore these options…
- St Helier
- Residential areas
- Housing estates
- Retail Parks and shopping areas
- Industrial Areas
- Car Parks (underground and multi-storey too)
- Leisure Centres
- Building sites
- Demolition sites
- Built up areas
- Underpass / overpass
- The Waterfont
- Harbours
- Airport
- Finance District (IFC buildings)
Pay attention to the light…strength, warmth, direction, shadows
Use the weather conditions to your advantage…fog, mist, wind, storms, rain, sleet, snow, bursts of sunshine, frost, ice, condensation
FALLEN TREES
a responce to Storm Ciarán in Jersey
Explore more her in the pdf: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\YR 12 LANDSCAPE PROJECT 2024
INSPIRATIONS: URBAN AND INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES
New Topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (that included Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore and Germans, Bernd and Hilla Becher ,) whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape…
Many of the photographers associated with new topographics including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Bernd and Hiller Becher, were inspired by the man-made, selecting subject matter that was matter-of-fact. Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. An exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York featuring these photographers also revealed the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development.
The New Topographics were to have a decisive influence on later photographers including those artists who became known as the Düsseldorf School of Photography.
What was the new topographics a reaction to?
The stark, beautifully printed images of the mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental…
Post-war America struggled with
- Inflation and labor unrest. The country’s main economic concern in the immediate post-war years was inflation. …
- The baby boom and suburbia. Making up for lost time, millions of returning veterans soon married and started families…
- Isolation and splitting of the family unit, pharmaceuticals and mental health problems
- Vast distances, road networks and mobility
You should look at photographers such as…
- Joel Sternfeld
- Gabriel Basilico
- Andreas Gursky
- Edward Burtynsky
- Richard Misrach
- Sze Tsung-Leong
- Thomas Struth
- Peter Mitchell
- Paul Graham
- Donovan Wylie
- Ed Ruscha
- Rut Blees Luxemburg
New Topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape…
The beginning of the death of “The American Dream”
TYPOLOGIES and the landscape
TYPOLOGY means the study and interpretation of types and became associated with photography through the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs taken over the course of 50 years of industrial structures; water towers, grain elevators, blast furnaces etc can be considered conceptual art. They were interested in the basic forms of these architectural structures and referred to them as ‘Anonyme Skulpturen’ (Anonymous Sculptures.) Each industrial structure was photographed from eight different angles on an overcast day with light grey sky mimicking the detached white background in a photographic studio. Their aim was to capture a record of a landscape they saw changing and disappearing before their eyes so once again, Typologies not only recorded a moment in time, they prompted the viewer to consider the subject’s place in the world.
Read this useful introduction to the Becher’s work from American Photo magazine which describes their interest in the ‘Grid’ and their influence on future generations of photographers, members of the Düsseldorf School.
Stoic and detached, each photograph was taken from the same angle, at approximately the same distance from the buildings. Their aim was to capture a record of a landscape they saw changing and disappearing before their eyes so once again, Typologies not only recorded a moment in time, they prompted the viewer to consider the subject’s place in the world.
The Becher’s were influenced by the work of earlier German photographers linked to the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s such as August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt and Albert-Renger-Patzsch.
See also the work by Americans, William Christenberry and Ed Ruscha’s photographic works on types e.g. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1964). Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Or Idris Khan‘s appropriation of Bechers’ images.
