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.

Biography

Stephen Shore was something of a prodigy as a photographer. Born in New York City in 1947, he learned about and practiced photography from the age of six. In 1958, Shore was given a copy of Walker Evans’ book American Photographs. This book had a profound effect on him, introducing him to a descriptive visual language of place. At the age of fourteen, his work was bought by Edward Steichen for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1965 through 1967, Shore worked in Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, a formative experience that allowed him to experiment with combining documentary and conceptual modes in the laconic style characteristic of his later images. In 1971, at the age of twenty-four, Shore had a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first accorded a living American photographer.
Shore emerged in the 1970s as one of the major exponents of color photography, shooting bleak yet lyrical scenes of the North American landscape. Documenting everyday settings and objects, from hotel swimming pools and televisions to parking lots, gas stations, and deserted roads, Shore exhibited an ability to transform commonplace surroundings into compelling works of art, working with a subject matter similar to Walker Evans.

His photos and work

Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21 , 1975, de la série Uncommon Places, 1973-1986 © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers

Image Analysis

• Foreground vs background | Dominant features
• The formal elements : line, shape, form, texture, pattern, tone
• Composition | low horizon line | Square format
• Perspective and detail / cluttering
• Wide depth of field | Large Format Camera
• Colour | impact and relevance
• Nationalism vs mobility vs isolation
• Social commentary | The American Dream ?

New Topographics

New topographic 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.

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.

What is 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.

Historical context:

• 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

Common Themes and Concepts of New Topographics

Their photographs depicted the built environment, suburban sprawl, industrial structures, and the mundane aspects of daily life, that were taking place in the American landscape of the post- War 2, with a sense of objectivity and an almost scientific detachment.

A landscape is part of Earth’s surface that can be viewed at one time from one place. It consists of the geographic features that mark, or are characteristic of, a particular area. The term comes from the Dutch word landschap, the name given to paintings of the countryside. A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.

History of landscapes

Artists have been painting the landscape since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans created wall paintings of landscapes and gardenscapes. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tradition of depicting pure landscapes declined, and the landscape was seen only as a setting for religious and figural scenes. This tradition continued until the 16th century when artists began to view the landscape as a subject in its own right. The artistic shift seems to have corresponded to a growing interest in the natural world sparked by the Renaissance. The term “landscape” actually derives from the Dutch word landschap, which originally meant “region, tract of land” but acquired the artistic connotation, “a picture depicting scenery on land” in the early 1500s (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000). The development of the term in the Netherlands at this time was logical because the Netherlands was one of the first places that landscape had become a popular subject for painting. At this time, the rising Protestant middle class sought secular art for their homes, creating the need for new subjects to meet their tastes; landscapes helped fill this need.

Exposure Bracketing

Exposure bracketing is when you bracket your shots you take exactly the same picture of your subject at several different exposures. This technique gives you a range of options to choose from when you’re editing. As a result, it’s much less likely that you’ll end up with a badly underexposed or overexposed photo.

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. It offers a more natural and realistic picture output even with a widened range of contrast.

I took the top three images using the technique called exposure bracketing I stood my camera up on a bench to get these photos and i changes the exposure from a high exposure to a low exposure and then a photo with the standard exposure 0.

This is a photo i took over the weekend. I haven’t edited this photo at all yet but i pressed the HDR button on Lightroom and this is what it gave me.

It has slightly changed my photo.

Who is Ansel Adams?

Ansel Easton 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. Adams was a key advisor in the founding and establishment of the photography department at the museum of modern art  in New York, an important landmark in securing photography’s institutional legitimacy. He helped to stage that department’s first photography exhibition, helped found the photography magazine aperture, and co-founded the centre for creative photography at the university of Arizona.

What is group F/64?

Group f/64 or f.64 was a group founded by seven American 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint

Ansel’s famous quotes

“Life is your art”. “An open, aware heart is your camera”. “A oneness with your world is your film”. “Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum”.-A.A

Image analysis

This image is called The moon and the half dome.

The type of lighting used in this photo is natural daylight but Ansel Adams has edited it into black and white and there is a contrast between the shadows and highlights in this image. Ansel Adams made this image at 4:14 the afternoon of December 28, 1960 with a Hasselblad camera and 250mm Zeiss Sonnar lens. This photo catches peoples attention due to its clear and clean shot , you can see all the textures in the tall cliff and the patterns are almost highlighted. The quality and definition of the cracks and crevasses are what makes this image so unique.

The moon and the half dome is a testament to the artistic refinement and confidence that comes with age. Here, it shows his outlook on photography in its finest and purest light, where only the elements he wished to highlight are visible – just the moon, the rock face, and the artist’s intent.  Likewise, it is a testament to the energy and artistic vigor that Ansel was capable of in his later years – and to the enduring, timeless quality of Yosemite National Park’s natural beauty. This image remains an iconic reminder of Ansel’s gift to all who love nature, and to the art of photography. Ansel Adams uses the black and white process in such a way, that makes him able to make an appealing contrast between light and dark and highlights and shadows. This picture illustrates the beauty of the Half Dome under the moonlight. There are three aspects that make this picture stand out; the clear skies, the moonlight and the silhouette of the setting sun The clear skies help define the beautiful formation of the dome. It accentuates the sharp edges and curve of the cliff that give life to the picture. In addition, the shadow of the sun that starts to cover the precipitous cliff appears that it’s concealing the dome from the coldness of the night, while the gleaming moon starts to shed light. The black and white contrast gives softness and smooth comparison between the two.

Zone system

The Zone System created by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer over 80 years ago, is a technique that offers photographers a way to control exposure and capture the entire tonal scale in their photographs.

some of his photos

Femininity: Femininity (also called womanliness) is a set of attributes, behaviours, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as socially constructed and there is also some evidence that some behaviours considered feminine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors. To what extent femininity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate. It is conceptually distinct from both the female biological sex and from womanhood, as all humans can exhibit feminine and masculine traits, regardless of sex and gender.

What does it mean to be feminine? Traits such as nurturance, sensitivity, sweetness, supportiveness, gentleness, warmth, passivity, cooperativeness, expressiveness, modesty, humility, empathy, affection, tenderness, and being emotional, kind, helpful, devoted, and understanding have been cited as stereotypically feminine.

What are negative feminine traits? Typical negatively feminine traits, referred to as unmitigated communion or unmitigated expressiveness within the literature, are those of being overly submissive, passive, anxious, excessively worried, dependent, fearful and also overly concerned with the welfare of others to the detriment of one’s own well-being.

Masculinity :Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviours and roles associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as socially constructed and there is also evidence that some behaviours considered masculine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors. To what extent masculinity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate. It is distinct from the definition of the biological male sex as anyone can exhibit masculine traits. Standards of masculinity vary across different cultures and historical periods. In Western cultures, its meaning is traditionally drawn from being contrasted with femininity.

What does it mean to be masculine?In the socialization of masculinity, boys and men are encouraged to reject or avoid anything stereotypically feminine, to be tough and aggressive, suppress emotions (other than anger), distance themselves emotionally and physically from other men, and strive toward competition, success and power.

What are negative masculine traits? of toxic or unhealthy masculinity can include: Unconditional physical toughness. Physical aggression, fear of emotions. Discrimination against people that aren’t heterosexual. Hyper independence.

My images.

I took 220 images in total and did 2 photo shoots I have decided to only use my photos from the first shoot and I took 140 photos in that shoot.

Those are the images from my first shoot and these are my photos from my second shoot which I am not using.

These are my selected/flagged images from my first shoot.

I have edited some of these photos.

I edited all the photos of Amelie in this lighting by increasing the highlights and I made them more pink but changing the colour grading shadows and highlights to a pinker tint. I also changed the colour temperature to blue so that the pink and blue would stand out against each other. This is a before and after of 2 of the edited photo’s.

I edited these photos of Maks the same as he is also in the more feminine lighting.

 

 I took my favourite images of mine and went into power point to make them into a table with all 4 photos lined up. Amelie was my representation of femininity, I asked her to pose how women stereotypically pose for photos this is what we came up with. I used honeycomb lighting with a pink film to create a pink background behind her and then used colour gels to put over a light to create the blue on her face. I used pink and blue as they are stereotypical boy and girl colours.

 Maks was my representation of masculinity I told him to do these poses as this how i think stereotypically men would pose. For these photos i switched the colours around and had the blue in the honeycomb lighting but the pink colour gel wasn’t appearing as apparent as I wanted so I switched to red which is a more masculine colour according to stereotypes so it worked.

 

I then switched the roles and got Maks in the feminine lighting and got him to do the feminine poses and Amelie in the masculine lighting to do the masculine photos.

I then added words to the images to show stereotypes of both femininity and masculinity.

This was for femininity, I used a dark pink and smaller writing to show the positive stereotypes of women and the black large words are the negatives ones that associate with women.

This was for masculinity, I used white and smaller text for the positive words that associate with men and a light grey and larger text for the negative words.

This is my idea of trying to break the stereotypes as I have a man in the feminine lighting doing typical female poses and I have a women in the more masculine lighting doing man like poses. Amelie is presenting as strong and brave although those words associate with men and she is a female so therefore she is proving the stereotypes for women wrong. Maks is acting more feminine as he is presenting to be quite friendly looking and kind although those words are associated with women not men so he showing that men can be kind as well as females. My idea behind this was to show that by being masculine you don’t have to act like the stereotypes and to be feminine doesn’t mean you are weak.

These are my mood boards for femininity and masculinity my aim was to make the ‘masculine’ mood board very feminine and the feminine mood board very masculine.

 

 

Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954 is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. She is well known for testing the stereotypes of each gender.

Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collection untitled film stalls, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially art house films and popular movies.

Cindy Sherman is famous for her use of make-up, costumes, props and prosthetics to create complex and ambiguous photographic images. She invents fictitious characters and photographs herself in imaginary situations. Her work #cindysherman will continue to inspire artists around the world for many years to come.

For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humour and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art. She was a key figure of the conceptual art movement.

Cindy Sherman has always been adamant that her photographs are not self-portraits, even though the photos are of her. In a interview when asked about this she replied with this  ‘I guess technically they’re pictures of me, but not, because I’m doing all these weird things to my face so it doesn’t look anything like me.’ ‘I always want my photographs to be a little off, whether it’s the background not quite fitting in or, in the old work, you’d see the shutter cord, or be able to tell that I’m using fake tits or a fake nose. Everybody knows it’s not real anyway.’

Image analysis: Cindy Sherman is trying to represent a house wife in the kitchen in this photo and in black and white to show that this could be trying to show how it was in older years. Cindy is not looking into the camera which could mean she is maybe looking around for someone or some thing

What is identity? Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, and/or expressions that characterize a person or a group. Identity emerges during childhood as children start to comprehend their self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout different stages of life.

MINDMAP/ MOODBOARD: Add a mind-map and mood-board of ideas and associated visual stimulus. This is very important for this project, because it will steer your individual photoshoots…. E.g:

Femininity: Femininity (also called womanliness) is a set of attributes, behaviours, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as socially constructed and there is also some evidence that some behaviours considered feminine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors. To what extent femininity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate. It is conceptually distinct from both the female biological sex and from womanhood, as all humans can exhibit feminine and masculine traits, regardless of sex and gender.

Masculinity: Masculinity involves displaying attitudes and behaviours that signify and validate maleness, and involves being recognised in particular ways by other men and women. Traits traditionally viewed as masculine in Western society include strength, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness.

Identity in photography explores how we see ourselves as a person but also how we see ourselves in relation to others. The photograph or image is the physical manifestation of an individual experiencing the indexical world. Portraits or self-portraits can reveal aspects of a person’s identity and ways in which it is influenced by family, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, or nationality.

Biography: Claude was born on 25th of October in 1894 in Nantes in France. She died on the 8th of December in1954 in Jersey channel islands.

Claude Cahun worked with and was dating her step sister Marcel Moore.

Cahun was sentenced to death as a punishment in 1954 for undermining the German forces and then her lover/step sister killed herself in 1972.

Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today.  She was exploring her identity, not defining it. 

Claude Cahun mostly referred to herself with grammatically feminine words, but she also said that her actual gender was fluid. For example, in disavowals, Claude Cahun writes: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” Claude Cahun is most well known for her androgynous appearance, which challenged the strict gender roles of her time.

Claude showed her gender through her photographs, these are some examples of that.

Claude used her photography skills to show of and share her sexuality and gender. Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today.  She was exploring her identity, not defining it.