Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy)
This picture shows action. A cowboy immediately grabs our attention- he dominates the composition, as he is the only red object in an overwhelmingly blue photo. He is riding out of the picture - maybe away from something, maybe towards something. This is shown by the amount of negative space behind the cowboy, whereas there is very little in front. The picture has a very low horizon, and our attention is therefore drawn more towards the sky and the cowboy than the landscape itself, which hangs loosely to the bottom of the photograph. This picture is not about a landscape, but rather an action in its time and place. This photograph is an example of appropriation. Richard Prince cropped images from newspaper advertisements, showing the clichéd, idealised images of the media. He in this explores the collective fantasies of society, which represents the ideals of the society which created the images. All media is a representation of people's - and society's - ideals and ideas, and therefore speak about the society which created them. It is a heavily romanticised photograph, focusing on the liberty and adventure of the Cowboy, and the American Frontier. The image is designed to conjure up an idealised view of the American West, which remains a powerful image to many Americans even now. The image is deeply imbued with visions of the American Dream, and individual liberty and boldness. The photo can therefore be seen as a depiction not of a Cowboy, but of the hopes and dreams of American society. |
Roger Fenton, the Valley of the Shadow of Death
The thing which dominates this photo is the foreground. A river of cannonballs flows downstream through a desolate valley. The high horizon only accentuates this, making the foreground take up most of the photo. The impact of this is to draw our attention to the spheres - cannonballs, a remainder of the brutal fighting of the Crimean war. The overall impression is of desolation and despair, the bleak landscape dotted with grim mementos of human suffering. The lack of any people in the photograph only adds to the sense of desolation - it is quite literally lifeless. The picture itself is mired in controversy. Many allege that Roger Fenton in fact moved the cannonballs to increase their significance and impact in the composition. It raises the question of how much we can trust the indexicality of a photograph. How can we trust a photo to be a representation of a real scene when even the scene itself can be altered. The photograph comes from a highly important time for photography. The Crimean War, fought on the battlefields of modern-day Ukraine, was the first war which was extensively photographed, offering readers of newspapers a new perspective on the events of the war. Photojournalism revolutionised people's views of foreign events - people could see them as they looked in real life. The realism of a photo creates a false sense of indexicallity- the idea a photo represents a moment in time and space that actually happened. Over time, photographers would use this to manipulate viewers, as propaganda and tools of misinformation. This is where it all began. |
One artist we looked at was Croatian-born artist Tanja Deman. She uses collages to create surreal images, often juxtaposing the built and the natural environment to create impactful works, which communicate a powerful message about socio-political issues.
Her work involves digitally 'stitching' images together, incorporating continuous lighting to create a sense of continuity between the images. She takes digital pictures, coverts them into monochrome and then stitches them together. This then leads to these pictures, which juxtapose the artificial and natural landscape. The pictures have environmental and socio-political themes, focusing on the often violent interaction between man and nature. The natural scenery overtakes the buildings, in stark contrast to the ecological destruction happening across the world. |
|
|
Drafts from Dionne Lee on Vimeo.
Andreas GurskyAndreas Gursky is a German photographer living and working in Dusseldorf, Germany. His work is made of large, colour photographs, often made of multiple smaller images stitched together. His work has an immense scale, which alienates and humbles the viewer, which is accomplished through enormous, high resolution prints. His work is taken using a large format camera, which is then moved between shots. This creates a picture that is far higher resolution than a conventional image. The pictures are taken using a narrow aperture, creating an immense depth of field, ensuring details are in focus across the entire photo. He then prints these pictures at a massive scale, often covering an entire wall.
The effect of the photographs can be quite unsettling: the immense scale of the image and the dispassionate, objective composition has an alienating effect, as the size of the photographs turns the people within them into mere specks, physically distancing the viewer from the people within. Gursky's work is emblematic of the objective style of the other photographers of the Dusseldorf School, a German photographic movement emphasising objectivity and a descriptive, view of subject matter. |
Bernd und Hilla BecherWorking together as a couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher were two of the most influential photographers to come from Germany (aside from me of course).
Their work consisted of highly regular, structured pictures of industrial architecture focusing on the German Ruhrgebiet in the countries west, along the border with France. There, the Bechers documented the forms of industrial architecture, which were symbolic of the former industries practiced there. The Ruhr, historically the heart of Germany's steel, coal and mining industry, which resulted in mass-scale industrialisation across the region. However, by the 1950s, Germany's traditional industries began to decline and the economy underwent restructuring. The Bechers therefore began to photograph the distinctive forms of industrial architecture in the region, which were at risk of vanishing, taking monochrome pictures of blast furnaces, coal bunkers and winding towers. They used for their photography a large format view camera, allowing for maximum detail, and control of perspective distortion, allowing for the most precise, detailed photos possible. Their work is known for its unsentimental, geometric compositions, which portray the photo without social commentary or emotional involvement. They would then create typologies out of these photographs, displaying multiple photographs of the same type of building, composed in the same fashion together. The contrasting aspects of individuality and similarity emphasise the features of industrial architecture. The geometric qualities of the photographs illustrate the sculptural nature of the industrial architecture, regarding the buildings as 'anonymous sculptures', which was the title of their 1970 photobook. Their work can be regarded as conceptual, and they left a lasting impact on German photography, through the Dusseldorf School, which inpired photographers such as Gurksy, Hoefer, Struth and Ruff. |