Deconstructing Environmental Photographers

Rutt Blees-Luxemburg

Presenting a hauntingly beautiful impression of some of London’s most familiar landmarks. 

‘the 5 x 4 camera is the opposite of what the street photographer would use. It requires slowness and concentration and the exposures are long. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. So it’s another kind of street photography. Or maybe ‘street’ isn’t even important. ‘Public’ photography is better.’

Her photographs are of streets or contain streets. In 'Liebeslied' photographs show kind of very private form of communication. 

Her ealy works were about great heights and the monumentality of the build city. 

Recent work are more intimity. There is an attention to another experience of the public, the small theatrical spaces and gestures.

Difference between Bless-Luxemburg and Wentworht and Lutter is that her photographs are almost the opposite of street photography which we associate with bright daylight, people, grabbed chance instants and rapidity. Her images shows emptiness...

Richard Wentworth

(Sculptor and photographer, urban explorer, walker and talker)

All Wentworth pictures are basically snapshots taken on the streets. Pictures of urban life where the things change or the things that never do. 

Shotckholm: Bottle cap as an ashtray, sparing the green tablecloth. Is this action inspired by the presence of the bottle cap, the manners of the smoker, or a completely unthinking gesture? Wentworth pointed out the sexual connotations of the red hot cigarette tip plunged into the open bottle cap, complicating things further. Wentworth is drawn to the poetry as much as the prosaic reality of his images.

Vera Lutter

Vera Lutters photography is inspired by the city’s presence, light, and architecture.
Her art works (silver gelatin prints) are negatives made by transforming room into a camera obscura. Because of ethereal platinum tones her photographs looks quite melancholic. 
Using just simple photosensitive paper she had changed popular landscapes, such the Manhattan, for abstract spaces never seen before.

In her works, she focused on industrial sites that pertain to transportation and fabrication.

‘333 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL’, 2001

The Museum of Contemporary Photography commissioned Lutter in 2001 to turn rooms in Chicago office buildings into camera obscuras and photograph Chicago’s downtown. Chicago’s buildings have long been photographed – this vertical city on the prairie, with its blocks of abstract grids, has held great attractions for the camera – and Lutter’s pictures, with their sweeping verticals and repeated rectangles, play up these aspects. The Chicago photographs show the presence of old and new buildings, compressed into a grid of overlapping planes.

Lutter uses the camera obscura to render in massive form images that serve as faithful transcriptions of immense architectural spaces.

Similarity is that all three photographers show the city from other point of view. Unseen or just lost in the same second as seen or just ignored. But all of them have different message to tell, intimacy, or kind of poetry, or evolution of the city.

There are three different techniques, such as camera obscura or 5x4 camera. Three different concepts which are talking about the city in many different ways. 

the City

Researching... Researching... Researching...

Going through my research I was looking at photographers whom photographs I find really interesting. Personally I think that pictures of a buildings in the city doesn’t describe city at all, they are more like a postcards for me.

City as an architecture.

I started my research from Andreas Gursky who represents city as a massive line production. By his photograph he gives a critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalism on life.

His photographs are just pushing to go to the city and find something more than just a building...

Later on I just asked myself ‘isn’t street photography kind of city pictures?’ I look around my room and I’ve found book which I bought in a charity shop. I though why not to look inside. And then my brain stork come over.

Buildings makes a city.

People makes the city.

Book called ‘a global snapshot for the digital age’ is organized way much better than the Internet, where you sometimes struggling to find something interesting.  

In this book I found tones of super random images taken by people around the world. There different themes, such a family or New York.  Basically I was more interested in the cities.  In the part with snapshots from London I had really weird feeling. Some of this images I knew, I could recognized the place, even I could say 

that I spent there a lot of time, but I have never seen this place from that angle.

Matt Stuart

"I had been waiting on this corner where there was a good cross light. So the sun was coming from the left across the street I was facing.  I was waiting for people to be lit by the sun whilst leaving the background in shadow. I had been waiting for an hour or so and was feeling very aware of everything happening around me when I saw these three men walking across the pavement and all touching their faces. I cut across the man in the foreground taking one frame which is the one you see. They were gone. I think it is one of the most spontaneous photographs I have ever taken.”

Stuart is fascinated about people and the way they live their lives. But what is really interesting is that Matt shots photos from perspectives which create an illusion of objects and situations that don’t exist in reality. 

  

He is one of the best examples for being in the good time in the good place. His photographs are taken in well-known places but they capture image which you see and forget in the same second.  

I’ve found this interview so cool. I used ‘cool’ because I couldn’t find any other word describing it. I really refreshing, taking so far away about strict thinking about the city, something extraordinary.

Matt Stuart

Born in 1974, Matt Stuart was raised in the leafy suburbs of Harrow, North West London. He admits to a less than distinguished school career, but was called upon aged 11 to play a trumpet solo in front of the Queen Mother. Her Majesty’s reaction is not recorded. A little later, in 1986, Matt discovered skateboarding after watching the film “Back to the Future”. Skating occupied his every waking moment until 1994, when he looked up from the half-pipe and noticed that girls had got a lot more interesting. He also indulged in a brief, ill-advised affair with Kung Fu. Matt’s father, keenly aware that his son would never be the next Bruce Lee, introduced him to photography, handing over books by Robert Frank & Henri Cartier-Bresson. Ever since then, photography has been Matt’s overriding passion, although he’s still quite interested in skateboards and girls. (But thankfully not Kung Fu).

What have you got planned this week?

This week I am arranging an exhibition to be held at the KK Gallery from the 4th – 26th February. I have been getting prints made and buying frames and have frantically been trying to think of a name for the show… which I have now managed. It is going to be called “Look Both Ways”.

What do your parents think your doing?

Shopping, they asked me to pop out and get some milk, in 1998

Who do you look like?

I am a mixture of Quentin Tarantino (on a bad day) and Rupert Everett (on a very good day)

What’s your favourite sense?

Sight would be too obvious so I’m going to go with touch.

Tell us something people don’t know about you…

I’m left handed, have a double jointed finger and almost lost my thumb when I was younger. I resent the fact that cameras are not made for lefties.

Did your education count?

My traditional education didn’t count for much, but I grew up skateboarding and I learnt more about people and life doing that than any school could have taught me.

What word can’t you spell?

Dyslexic

Tell us a good fact

The London Underground logo represents the circle line and the central line.

What’s Next?

A mediocre UK based fashion outlet.

What’’s your ‘Plan B’?

I’m already on Plan D, I would have to put on my pads and try skateboarding again if photography fails… 

Weegee (Arthur Fellig)

He was following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death.

‘He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful.’

In his pictures he include city but people of the city were more important.

Deconstructing Environmental Photographers

Edward Steichen, 'The Flatiron, New York', 1905

Steichen began experimenting with colour photography in 1904 and was one of the first people in the United States to use the Lumiere Autochrome process.

The Autochrome Lumière is an early color photography process. Patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907, it was the principal color photography process in use before the advent of subtractive color film in the mid-1930s.

Steichen was a leader in the Pictorialist movement, which asserted that photography was an art form in which the creativity of the artist was most evident in the way that a picture was printed, not so much in composition.

Although he used only one negative to create all three photographs, the variable coloring enabled him to create three significantly different images that convey the chromatic 

progression of twilight.

Picture was taken in the evening, where there was some light fog and drizzle. Wet road, fuzzy lighthouses, the hackney –these elements build a slightly mysterious mood.

Camera position: on the street, looking straight on the street. Because of the fact that The Flatiron Building was considered a very modern building and a lot of people vigourously disliked it; photographer choosen to show it as a part of the city.

Alfred Stieglitz, 'The Flatiron', 1903

Alfred Stieglitz:

'the Flatiron Building ‘appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster steamer–a picture of a new America still in the making.’

Stieglitz subscribed to a theory that the principal subject of a photo should be in sharp focus while secondary elements should be left out of focus.

Photograph is contrasted with the natural shape of the tree in the snow and evening light, the building is an element of quiet beauty in a photograph of soft tones and simple shapes.

Tiny figure on the park bench - in New York, buildings do the job of making people seem tiny.

Alvin Langdon Coburn, ‘The Flatiron Building’, 1911

Looking at this photograph for the first time seems to be out of focus. Later on viewr can see some details (such a windows) of the Flatiron Building.

This photograph shows the modern city, with anonimus businessmen. Camera position show us that photographer is one of the passers-by.

Those three photographs have quite similar composition and camera position. There is a presence of trees. All photographs include kind of street view and human figures.

Also all photographs are taken in the evening.

Walter Gropius, ‘The Flatiron Building, New York’, 1928

In this photograph Gropius found the Flatiron Building profile irresistibly exciting, despite the building's old-fashioned decoration.

The way how the photograph is framed and cropped brings very original and modern look of the building.

Unlike the three first photographs, there is no street view. The Flatiron Building is shown here as a great, modern architecture with little taste of surrealism.  

Walker Evans, ‘Flatiron Building seen from below, New York City’, 1928

In this photograph, photographer relies on the cameras ability to capture every single detail in sharp focus. As photograph title says picture is taken from below, by this camera position photographer show majesty of the building.

But because of the presence of the lantern and kind of shed, likewise the way how picture is cropped, the Flatiron Building is closed in defined space.

Composition of the photograph; where strong lines of architecture around, leaad viewers eyes into the main subject.

Berenice Abbott, ‘The Flatiron Building’, 1938

"Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see."

Berenice Abbott was a documentary photographer; in her photographs she captured two words, such a real and now.

Photograph of the Flatiron Building is a documental representation of the American architecture.

In conclusion Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn represented the icon (The Flatiron Building) through tradiction artistic way. Where they include the city life.

Walter Gropius, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott used documentary style. They showed the bulidng as an icon of modernization of the city.

Interm Review: Object

Lost and Found Still-life

In my project, I focused on the issue which is bothering millions of people but obviously it is those millions people fault – pollution.

People throwing away things which are still useful and not broken. It happens because of that we are living in post consumption generation, where we are not paying much attention to objects. If it is something broken we just throw it away and buy new one instead of trying to repair it somehow. In some situations we can call it laziness.

My research started from Todd McLellan who specializes in automotive, commercial and conceptual work. 

'Disassembled' is his latest series of photographs of object from the past (vintage gadgets) which are in dismantled form. There are items such as a typewriter (which I like the most),  Pentax camera and alarm clock, the collection shows the craft of these mechanical objects.  Every single piece is positioned in an almost obsessive arrangement - by type, 

size and function - resulting in a clear portrait of an era that we've left behind.

Then I went through Christian Vogt gallery where I found series called ‘In Camera: Eight-two Images by Fifty-Two women’ which I found really interesting because of the usage the wooden box.

There are pictures of women, but in every single portrait was this box.

Sometimes viewer can think that the box is more important than a model in the picture. But I think that that’s the thing which makes these pictures more interesting. For this reason, pictures got another value, they become more interesting; sometimes a bit funny.

I found something very interesting in Edward Westons photographs of peppers. They are quite sexual but at the same time really soft and so normal because it's just a vegetable..,

I love the way how the light and shape of the object are working together. Basically shape is doing its work and I guess pepper from the picture 'Pepper No.30' is not just a random vegetable bought in the market place. 

"It is classic, completely satisfying – a pepper – but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter." 

This photograph made me think how to present object in other way...

Also I looked at Chris Jordan’s series called 'Running the Numebrs: An American Self-Portrait' where I found perfect responding to my project. 

This series is based on massive pollution, but his photographs – which are breathtaking – are not at all what I was looking for...

Pictures production

All objects in my picture are founded objects. Not in the charity shop or even in the bin, just on the street. It may sound ridiculous, but it’s true. Some people don’t pay attention on what and where they are throwing away things, they just want to get rid of them.

I’ve chosen the smallest objects which I’ve found in the past. I found them very useful and by my picture I would like to show that they are still ready to use.

Large Format Camera

When Johnathan started to talk about large format camera I was just terrified. I’m using my 35mm camera all the time, so obviously I know what film camera means and how to use it. But this one… So big with lots of new things...

I found 5x4 camera workshops really helpful for practice and develop ideas for this unit. During the workshops I was practicing with objects which I knew that I’m going to use for my final image.

 I was quite confused about composition of the image, because pollution is on the top of world’s issues. I wanted to compose it in more modern version; taking inspiration from Todd McLellan.

But then I decided to use a kind of modern idea with more still-life composition.

It was really hard to print my final image. I thought that I knew how colors are going to work, because I was printing my test shoots, with same objects before. But because I used cream color background it became more difficult and complicated.

I spent long hours in the darkroom to print my image in proper colors.

When at least I’ve found proper colors I could not hide my happiness about. Basically I’m not fully satisfied about this picture. I’m not sure that it show my concept at all.

But on the other hand I’m happy that I took that picture because it show random objects which are not making sense at all which I can link with pollution.