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What are typologies –

The term ‘Typology’ was first used to describe a style of photography when Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959. The couple described their subjects as ‘buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style’.

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Dictionary definition –

– A system used for putting things into groups according to how they are similar.

Case study – Bechers –

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Quote –

Quote – “Our camera does not produce pretty pictures, but exact duplications that, through our renunciation of photographic effects, turn out to be relatively objective.”

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Questions in relation to the Bechers and their concept of Typology –

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1. How did they first meet? – As students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957, Bernd and Hilla Becher first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959. The Ruhr Valley, where Becher’s family had worked in the steel and mining industries, was their initial focus.

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2. What inspired them to begin to record images of Germany’s industrial landscape? – The first area they went to was the first abandoned place in Germany that was going to be demolished so they wanted to preserve the architecture that was slowly disappearing at the time.

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3. How did the Bechers explain the concept of Typology? – She explained how while she was in this abandoned area she saw similarities between things like cooling towers and water towers, she said while they look similar they all had small differences which was easy to see in a format like a typology, like a flipbook. They needed to wait for clouds or a darker day to ensure that the object in the image was separated from the background. She said the best images for typologies are geometric objects.

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4. Which artists/ photographers inspired them to produce typology images? – German photographers like Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander, and Albert Renger-Patzsch.

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5. What is the legacy of the Bechers and their work? – changed the course of late twentieth-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fuelled the modern era.

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notes –

– They used a large format camera, means you have to take time with taking images as it takes time and money just for one shot.

– They photographed every single structure in the abandoned area from 8 different angles.

– opposed other movements like romanticism and stuck to realism as closely as possible.

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Image analysis –

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As you can see in the image above the image has been presented in the typographic style with all very similar looking buildings with small differences lay out in a grid pattern. Each of the images had been taken on a large format camera with a 400 mm lens, which isn’t typical for this type of photography but was used to give the subject of the image more of a flat look. Each image is taken in black and white in sharp focus on a cloudy day which in this black and white format allows the subject of the image to stand out better than it would against a blue sky. Each subject in the image is a geometric shape which is what is usually seen in typology’s. The idea behind these images was from the creators of the typology style who wanted to capture the architecture that was slowly disappearing at the time and help to solidify it as an image.

Contact sheet

selection process

as you can see above I used P and X to flag my images to filter out the bad ones from the ok and good ones, next I rated these images 4 or 5 stars as 4 being ok ones and 5 being good ones, finally I gave them the colour yellow or green, green being the best and yellow being good. I will now edit these images that I selected and present them bellow along with the raw images.

final images

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Evaluation

As you can see in the 6 images above they have been lay out in a grid pattern and they all have very similar features while being slightly different, this is all typical of the typology genre, these images where all taken on a housing estate which I explored and when I noticed the pattern consisting of the bushes, wall and bollards I photographed them with a similar deadpan frame and edited them to be monochrome images to remove and colour differences in the images, this meant that when I lay them out in this grid pattern they would be similar and different at the same time much like the Bechers did with there images.

Case study – lewis baltz

Who was he –

Lewis “Duke” Baltz was an American visual artist, photographer, and educator. He was an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. His best known work was monochrome photography of suburban landscapes and industrial parks which highlighted his commentary of void within the “American Dream”.

Technical –

– well lit, outside, natural lighting / outside

– shot on a lightweight leica camera

– sharp image overall in black and white

Visual –

– geometric simple shapes used as subjects which is typical of the new topographic genre

– basic image with different colours and textures

– looks almost 2D

Contextual –

– Artist in movement inspired by the man-made side of the world.

– The new topographics were a reaction to the realized change from nature to urban landscapes and reflecting juxtaposition between them

Conceptual –

– reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them.

Quote –

” I never had any profound loyalty to the idea of photography as a medium but simply as the most efficient way of making or recording an image. “ – Lewis Baltz

Contact sheet

selection process

as you can see above I used P and X to flag my images to filter out the bad ones from the ok and good ones, next I rated these images 4 or 5 stars as 4 being ok ones and 5 being good ones, finally I gave them the colour yellow or green, green being the best and yellow being good. I will now edit these images that I selected and present them bellow along with the raw images.

editing process

Original image

Next I used the auto setting to make my image inline.

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Then I selected the preset B&W 12 and changed the amount to 87%

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I then cropped the image

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I then edited the image to my liking

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final images

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Evaluation

These images are inspired by the photographer Lewis Baltz, although this image may be objective to opinion, I believe that the moss built up on top of the old garage reflects the natural landscape trying to take back over, I believe that the moss being such a small feature to the majority urban environment actually strengthens this idea that the image is part of The New Topographic genre as the man-made garage is still the main focus of the image representing the juxtaposition between urban and natural landscapes. The image has a deadpan aesthetic with centre framing which is typical of this genre of images. The image reflects a man altered landscape with the building taking up much of the image and the natural environment on the right juxtaposing it, representing the integration of the urban world into natural landscapes. The deadpan and banal theme of this image helps to reflect this genre perfectly, almost as some sort of protest against urban landscapes, the monochrome aesthetic of this image further backs up this idea removing all colour and leaving just shape and form.

What are The New Topographics?

New topographics was a term created 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 and could sometimes be used to show the contrast between nature and the urban landscape.

Key features of the new topographics

photographs depicted the built-up environment, suburban areas, industrial structures and the mundane aspects of daily life, that were taking place in the American landscape.

Key artists of the new topographics

Many of the photographers associated with new topographics including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Bernd and Hiller Becher who were inspired by the man-made side of the world.

What was the new topographics a reaction to?

The new topographics were a reaction to the realized change from nature to urban landscapes and reflecting juxtaposition between them, they were shown as mundane but oddly fascinating images and was a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them.

Case study – Stephan Shore

Who was he –

Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.

Image analysis –

Technical –

– well lit, outside, natural lighting / outside

– shot on large format field camera

– sharp image overall while moving objects like cars are blurry

Visual –

– pavement used as line leading up to natural environment (mountains)

– Chevron signs pointing and leading to mountains

– colours shown in signs photographed represent America / American flag

– lots of different shapes, geometric

– space used with the sky taking up the majority of the image

Contextual –

– Artist in movement reflecting how new of a country is compared to old European ones

– Post world-war 2

– Taken in LA in 1975

Conceptual –

– Contrast between built up area and mountains in the background shows change in movements

Quote –

“I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness.” – Stephan Shore

Mood-board

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Artist Reference – David Hockney 

Who is he –

David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Image analysis –

Hockney took hundreds of photos at a crossroads in the USA, using individual images from all around the wide environment and putting them together to create something that looks much different than the original scenery. The image is well lit and outside and saturated, using a fast shutter speed to create sharp images using a low ISO (most likely 100) due to the well lit environment creating a warm image with lots of contrasting colours due to the style of photo created. The road in the middle of the image is used as a line leading to the blue sky, mountains in the distance and the wide open space. I believe that the road signs in the image have been used to make you feel like the passenger in a car driving down a long road in out of civilization where really, where the image was taken the area looked nothing like this description.

Where image was taken –

Quote –

“You must plan to be spontaneous.” – David Hockney 

Contact sheet

selection process

as you can see above I used P and X to flag my images to filter out the bad ones from the ok and good ones, next I rated these images 4 or 5 stars as 4 being ok ones and 5 being good ones, finally I gave them the colour yellow or green, green being the best and yellow being good. I will now edit these images that I selected and present them bellow along with the raw images.

final images

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Evaluation

These images above have been taken and edited into panoramas and joiner images, doing this helps to expand on the image and almost explore an entire different story than what it would have been, instead of just a snippet of the landscape you get the entire thing which has helped to show contrast between the built up man made landscapes and creates a juxtaposition between the dramatic sky and the man-altered reclaimed landscape creates tension in the environment as you can’t enjoy the natural view without seeing the urban landscape around you. Although the focus in this image is the natural landscape the buildings draw your gaze away from it. The ISO on these images is likely low as it is in a well lit environment in daylight.

Panoramic Landscapes

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What is a panoramic landscape?

Panoramic photos are composed of a series of two or more photos merged together to capture a scene that is larger than is possible to capture in one single photo.

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how were they created?

The panorama was invented in 1787 by the Scottish painter Robert Barker, is a large circular work exhibited in a rotunda so that the viewer can view it from a platform erected in the center of the building, immersing the viewer in the surrounding image.

Early panoramas were made by placing two or more daguerreotype plates side-by-side. Daguerreotypes, the first commercially available photographic process, used silver- coated copper plates to produce highly detailed images.

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Joiner photos

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What is a joiner photo?

Joiner photography is a fairly new technique of photography. A joiner, designed by Hockney, or panograph, is when the artist assembles an image from several overlapping photographs. David Hockney is the most notable artist that uses this technique, hence the common referral of joiners as “Hockney’s”.

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how were they created?

David Hockney created joiner collages as a way to make an image from many photos. I think Hockney has produced interesting pieces of art which are very different to conventional photography and have a surreal quality. Traditionally photography captures a single moment in time.

What is exposure bracketing?

A photographic technique where multiple shots of the same scene are taken at different exposure settings to capture the full tonal range and merge them during post-processing.

What is HDR

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to a technique that expresses details in content in both very bright and very dark scenes.

Response to Ansel Adams – image analysis

Same image analysis used in my Ansel Adams blog post

Contact sheet

selection process

as you can see above I used P and X to flag my images to filter out the bad ones from the ok and good ones, next I rated these images 4 or 5 stars as 4 being ok ones and 5 being good ones, finally I gave them the colour yellow or green, green being the best and yellow being good. I will now edit these images that I selected and present them bellow along with the raw images.

final images

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Evaluation

As you can see in the images above they all have one common them, that being the fact they all have a high dynamic range, this helps in some ways and particularly with this set of images to romanticize them, directly linking to Ansel Adams and his beliefs in photography. These images were likely taken with a high ISO as they are taken outside during the day in a well lit environment. HDR and exposure bracketing used in the image can help to almost expand the image in a metaphorical sense and adding things that you couldn’t see before.

Who was he?

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph…even creating a Zonal System to ensure that all tonal values are represented in the images. Ansel Adams was an advocate of environmental protection, national parks and creating an enduring legacy of responses to the power of nature and sublime conditions…Other members in Group f/64 included Edward Weston, but also Imogen Cunningham among other female photographers who have often been overlooked in the history of photography.

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams

Some of his famous work –

As you can see in the two example images above, Ansel Adams uses both the zone system and visualization in his work which is explained below.

Brief explanation –

visualisation – Visualisation is a skill that can be learned. It involves the photographer learning to create a mental image of the final photograph before shooting. It must be done in as much vivid detail and composition as possible. This creates a template for the work before it starts.

Zone system – The Zone System assigns numbers from 0 through 10 to different brightness values, with 0 representing black, 5 middle grey, and 10 pure white; these values are known as zones.

Who were f/64

During the Great Depression, the citizens of America looked towards the West and the opportunities it offered, particularly through massive public works projects. This is why it was important for individuals like Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Henry Swift, John Paul Edwards, Brett Weston, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, and Preston Holder, who were the original f64 group members, to present it to the rest of the country in the most realistic, revealing way.^[1] The first attempt in spreading their visual ideas was the 1932 exhibition of eighty of their photographs held at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco which lasted six weeks and introduced stark, comprehensive imagery in a variety of topics. This is why, in fact, the group’s name derives from a small aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures great depth of field and renders a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background.

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Image analysis

Story behind the image –

On the spring morning of April 10th, 1927, Ansel Adams set out along Yosemite’s LeConte Gully to capture an image of face of Half Dome, one of Yosemite National Park’s most iconic natural features. His fiancée Virginia Best and three close friends, including fellow wilderness photographer Cedric Wright picked carefully along the steep gully in the icy shadow of nearby Grizzly Peak.

This was not Ansel’s first journey to photograph Half Dome. In fact, nearly a decade earlier, a 14-year-old Ansel had visited this very spot on a family trip to Yosemite. Eager to experiment with his brand-new Kodak Brownie camera, young Ansel snapped several pictures of Half Dome, including one upside-down image, his favourite, taken accidentally as he fell off a stump.

analysis –

In the technical aspects of this images we can see the image is taken in natural daylight where the light is shining down on the left side of the cliff face. Like all of Ansel’s images, it is taken in black and white, we also know that he used a dark red filter with his Korona camera which creates the dark shadows and contrasting bright white light, this helps the photograph to follow Ansel’s zone system rule that he uses throughout his work. The definition of the image is very sharp and has a wide depth of field that helps to focus on all areas of the image and represent the true size of the cliff face. I imagine the shutter speed of this image was quite fast as it is in sharp detail. The visual elements of this image include both texture and space which help to give the cliff face a more impressive look. Looking deeper into the images meaning I believe it represents Adams love for nature and his romanticized style he uses throughout his images do, doing this through the large scale cliff face squeezed into frame and the contrasting black an white colours which help to represent the untouched landscape.

 My personal response / opinions to rural landscapes / romanticism

In my opinion rural landscapes often help convey romanticism through themselves being more prominent depending on many factors like weather, time of day and time of year. All of these factors help to create this familiar nostalgic mood we all feel when we view work created in the romanticized genre.

Contact sheet

selection process

as you can see above I used P and X to flag my images to filter out the bad ones from the ok and good ones, next I rated these images 4 or 5 stars as 4 being ok ones and 5 being good ones, finally I gave them the colour yellow or green, green being the best and yellow being good. I will now edit these images that I selected and present them bellow along with the raw images.

final images

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Evaluation

One common theme in all of these images is that they all are romanticised, these sunset type images with beams of light breaking through the clouds helps to create a romanticised effect to the landscape, this links back to my personal response to rural landscapes and romanticism that is landscapes often help convey romanticism through themselves being more prominent depending on many factors like weather, time of day and time of year. These images where taken on a low ISO as even though there was cloud cover it was a bright day meaning using a high ISO would result in a grainy image. The stark contrast in colour between the foreground and the background leads your gaze towards the rural natural landscape.

Early Landscape Art (Pre-Renaissance to 16th Century) –

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Renaissance and Early Modern Art –

The Renaissance (14th-17th century) brought a shift in perspective in terms of landscapes, Artists began to focus on nature a lot more in a more realistic way, however, these landscapes were most commonly second to human subjects in art works, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Virgin of the Rocks” (1483), where the landscape serves as a setting for the religious narrative but is not the primary focus.

Baroque and the Rise of Dramatic Landscapes (17th Century) –

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Dramatic Landscape Painting –

The Baroque period (17th century) was used to evoke deep emotions and convey a sense of awe in art, artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael used it within his work to show a vast, expansive sky that dominates the scene. The use of atmospheric effects such as light and weather brings the landscape to life, giving it a grandeur that transcends mere setting. Especially in his work “View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds” (1670).

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The Sublime –

Philosophers like Edmund Burke introduced the idea of the sublime, which the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. Claude Lorrain’s “Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba” (1648) reflects this sublime quality, with vast skies and dramatic lighting that evoke feelings of awe and reverence.

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Symbolism in Baroque Landscapes –

Many Baroque landscapes were not realistic depictions but messages often holding religious meaning. In Nicolas Poussin’s “Landscape with Saint John on Patmos” (1640), the landscape becomes more than just scenery—it conveys a deeper meaning, portraying nature as a place of divine reflection or contemplation.

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Romanticism (Late 18th – Early 19th Century) –

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The Embrace of the Sublime –

Romanticism, emerging in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, fully embraced the sublime and took it to new emotional and spiritual heights. One artist who embraced sublime in this era was Joseph Mallord William Turner who created the painting (1775-1851) A Ship against the Mewstone.

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Birth of landscape photography –

When photography was invented in 1839 landscapes were among the first subjects, an example of these early artists is Carleton Watkins who captured the vast American west, his work helped inspire the creation of national parks. An example of one of his images is A 19th-century view of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, east-central California, U.S.; photograph by Carleton E. Watkins, c. 1866.

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20th century –

Early 20th century, modernism –

– Ansel Adams used sharp detailed realism in his work, almost sublime, with work such as The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942 Photograph.

– Others experimented with abstraction and surrealism.

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Modern day –

– Traditional sublime landscapes

– Climate change and environmental crisis

– Conceptual landscape

– Digital manipulation

– Social media impact