CASE STUDY: Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, chromogenic colour print

technical:

square image, natural lighting, rule of thirds, maybe slight saturation, non grainy image, white balance = normal

wide depth of field due to large format camera

visual:

cars, signs, petrol station, mountains, lamp posts, pavement

road pointing to the mountain, nature is still there being masked by man made things, leading lines, chevron pointing out to the mountains and out of ‘hell hole’

red, white and blue mentioned a lot in the image, national pride, national colours as part of their branding, reminders of pop art

peace, serenity

concept:

nationalism, branding, pride

driving, needing to go to petrol station to drive, many petrol stations so cars can fuel and keep driving

contextual:

the environment, petrol not as popular due to the fumes, encapsulates the fact america needs cars to get around

taken at down level, sense of order and organise with a bit of clutter, juxtaposition

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, chromogenic colour print:

Technical:

The photo has been taken with a large dynamic range.

The colours are really bright and pop out, the exposure would have been high.

Has captured various shadows.

Visual:

There are signs in it.

A petrol station, cars, petrol pumps, open sky, mountains…

Leading line towards the mountain.

The “Chevron” sign is pointing down and other signs are pointing in different directions.

loads of blue, red and white.

Multiple cars which everyone used at the time due o fuel being cheap and it being shown as the way to get to everywhere.

Contextual:

By having the town appear cluttered and showing so much infrastructure within the photo, it makes the town out to be a hellhole.

We can tell which it is a old photo due to the cars being vintage and that the town heavily relies on petrol/fuel due to everyone in the photo driving and so many petrol stations cluttered in the town and the photo, we also know that in this time fuel was dirt cheap and no one knew the environmental damages it caused and there were also no electric cars.

Conceptual:

loads of blue red and white which are national American colours.

The signs are pointing in different directions out of the photo which makes it seem like there pointing to ways out of the hellhole.

The road has a leading line towards the mountains showing that if we keep on driving down it we can escape the hellhole and enter the opposite which is the mountains/wilderness that aren’t man made and have no infrastructure and are open and not cluttered.

1. How did they first meet?

They began collaborating together in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf school in 1957. Bernd originally studied painting and then typography, whereas Hilla had trained as a commercial photographer. After two years collaborating together, they married.

2. What inspired them to begin to record images of Germany’s industrial landscape?

The first area they went to was a spot in Germany was a area where thee was abandoned architecture that was going to get demolished so they wanted to preserve it by capturing it in photos, they were using a large format camera which means they weren’t able to take loads of images fast as they have to take one photo at a time meaning the whole process was slow and more carefully thought out.

3. How did the Bechers explain the concept of Typology?

Hilla Becher came up with it, she was looking at psychology and biology books, one of the people she looked at in biology was Karl Blossfeldt who published a famous book in 1928, they need to wait for the right light so a cloudy/white sky so they can clearly have the sky come out a clear white on the photo, they also photographed every drawing because they were conceptual photographers, they opposed creating images that used romanticism and wanted everything to look as real as possible, it was therefore the opposite of romanticism and was realism.

4. Which artists/ photographers inspired them to produce typology images?

The Bechers were inspired by:

1. August Sander – He took photos of people in different jobs, which influenced the Bechers’ way of organizing their photos.
2. Eugène Atget – He photographed buildings in Paris, which inspired the Bechers’ focus on architecture.
3. Walker Evans – He took clear, straightforward photos of buildings, which influenced the Bechers’ style.
4. Alfred Stieglitz – He treated photography as an art, which influenced how the Bechers approached their work.
5. New Objectivity – A movement that focused on clear, direct photography, which the Bechers followed.

Basically, these photographers and artists influenced the Bechers’ organized and detailed way of photographing buildings.

5. What is the legacy of the Bechers and their work?

The Bechers influenced artists such as Ed Ruscha and sculptor Carl Andre, perhaps their most pronounced legacy was among their students, who include Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth— now known as the “Becher School.”

Here are some of there photos:

On this walk, we went around Havre Des Pas beach to take some landscapes.

Contact sheet

These are all the photos I took at the beach and I have flagged all of the images that I like and plan on editing.

before and after editing

These before and after images, shows what they looked like before and after i edited them, I decided to make them look a bit darker and gloomy to give more effect and details to the images.

Who are they?

Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla Becher (1934–2015) are considered the most influential German photographers of the post-war period. Over the past 50 years, the couple and artist duo captured the aesthetic of disappearing industrial facilities, often making the overlooked structures visible to viewers for the first time. Their strict adherence to particular formal principles and their typological approach gave rise to the idea of photography as conceptual art. The Bechers taught at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and shaped the work of an entire generation of photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth. Sprüth Magers represents the artist couple’s Estate.

Hilla Becher was a German artist born in 1931 in Siegen, Germany. She was one half of a photography duo with her husband Bernd Becher. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America.

They won the Erasmus Prize in 2002 and Hasselblad Award in 2004 for their work and roles as photography professors at the art academy Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

What did they photograph?

Industrial structures including water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories. Their work had a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white. Their photographs never included people.

They exhibited their work in sets or typologies, grouping of several photographs of the same type of structure. The are well known for presenting their images in grid formations. 

This sequence of photographs, showing pitheads from British mining and quarrying sites, were taken from 1965 to 1974 and is representative of the way the Bechers chose to display their work through their career, arranging images in groups according to type. Pitheads, known as such in the United Kingdom and as winding towers elsewhere, were positioned at the top of coal shafts and served as mechanisms for hoisting gear into and out of mines. These nine images, arranged in rows of three, all show the pithead from the same distance and perspective, centering the structure in the frame and tightly cropping the surrounding buildings. In each case, the horizon is low and the backdrop cloudy; the pitheads themselves rise up as triangles, with circular rigs positioned at top of the structure, where a vertical base intersects with a metal diagonal leading into the mine itself.

best raw photos –

edits and experimentation –

final typologies photos –

second photoshoot ( The New Topographies) –

best raw photos –

edits / experimentation –

final edits –

within these images iv chose them as my final images because of the receptiveness of the images but with different edits to create a cool effect

“Typology is the study of types, and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner; to be fully understood, the images must be viewed as a complete series.”

artist reference –

Bernd & Hilla Becher

The husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing together in 1959. For close to fifty years, they documented architectural forms they collectively referred to as “anonymous sculpture.” Their extensive series of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, framework houses of mine workers, and other vernacular industrial architecture—often technologies on the verge of obsolescence—comprise an in-depth study of the intricate relationship between form and function. The Bechers produced impeccable black and white photographs, using a large-format camera carefully positioned under overcast skies to record shadowless front and side elevation views of their subjects. Arranging these matched photographs in a grid, the Bechers produced what they called “typologies,” which grouped buildings by function, underscoring the similarities and differences between structures.

examples –

photo analysis –

technical- within the image there is a sharp focus which could mean that it was taken with a medium or large format camera for high detail, which is common in typological photography. The light is soft and diffused, which is probably due to overcast natural lighting, which helps avoid harsh shadows, plus gives equal prominence to all parts of the structure. the centred and frontal composition, shot straight on at eye level, from thus natural, objective framing it eliminates distraction and creates a catalogue like feel.

visual- within this image you can see there is a possible old wooden cooling tower or industrial ventilation structure, which is tall, cylindrical, which weathered textures plus some visible wear + decay. there is a string use of vertical + horizontal lines, which is symmetrical and this emphasizes the composition. the range of greys that you can see in thus image highlights the surface textures and structural forms over colour, leading the image a timeless, archival quality.

conceptual- the tower could speak to themes of industrial decay, memory + time, how once functional structures became relics.

A description first used by curator William Jenkins in 1975 to characterize the photographs he included in the exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape“, which focused on artists who depicted the built, or human-made, environment with a sense of detachment.

 a ground-breaking exhibition of contemporary landscape photography held at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography

Urban landscapes

An urban landscape refers to the environment shaped by human habitation and activities within cities, impacting plant species, biodiversity, and ecosystems. “Urban landscapes” and “cityscapes” are often used interchangeably, and both are popular and contemporary art genres. However, there are subtle differences between the two. Urban landscapes typically depict a city’s natural and built environment, including parks, rivers, and buildings.

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, chromogenic colour print

In the foreground there is a petrol station and it has bright vibrant colours, in the middle ground there is a lot of promotion going on and information boards. and lastly in the background there is hills where the light goes from being really cold to colder

This photo uses natural lighting. The petrol station has national colours to attract peoples attention. because back in 1975 when this photo was taken it was a time of distress. the background has a sunset

there is many colours in this photo that stand out in this photo are the yellow and orange car, it has no clouds and it has a blue sky that fades into a lighter colour

A panoramic image shows a wide perspective. They capture a large amount of scenery, more specifically, natural landscapes. Very few cameras have an automatic button to press to create a panoramic image, so you have to do it manually. You do this by setting the camera up (either with a tripod or by hand) and you move the frame along, but you leave a bit of an overlap to connect them in photoshop.

David Hockney

David Hockney is a British artist who became well known for his creative work in photography during the 1970s and 1980s. He made photo collages called “Joiners”. These collages showed different views and moments at the same time, instead of just one fixed image like normal photos. Hockney wanted to show how people really see the world. He also used tools like photocopiers to make pictures in new ways, and later did the same with iPhones.

David Hockney’s Joiner Photos

David Hockney’s Joiner Photos are picture collages he created in the 1980s by combining many small photos. He used Polaroid and 35mm photos to create a larger image, similar to putting together a puzzle. These photos don’t show just one single view, instead, they show different angles and moments all at the same time, by taking lots of images in different positions of the same area. Hockney wanted to show how people actually see the world (piece by piece) as our eyes move around a scene.

My panoramic Images

I decided to recreate Hockney’s panoramic images by taking an image and slighting moving the camera to create a longer version of the image. I uploaded these images to photoshop and placed them side by side using the tools that photoshop provides in order to do this. However, at the end I had to crop these images as they were uneven and some areas would be shorter than others.

I prefer the first image to the second, as I feel like it presents the landscape in a better way, with no distractions or anything blocking it. Unlike the first image, the second one’s lighting is dimmer, and the building on the far right distracts the viewer from focusing on the main part of the image.