Daidō Moriyama - Train images.

Diadō Moriyama is a Japanese photographer who primarily works in black and white shooting fairly grainy images. His work is often shot from odd angles and shows people in the urban areas of Japan. He has taken a lot of photographs of people waiting for, boarding and riding trains and i think these are interesting, you cant always tell every part of the image but the overall idea is clear, its obvious what the image is about and it makes you look more than if everything was brightly lit. The images give a gritty feel to the urban areas of china, he works with a high contrast which also adds to the dark feel of a china that is still recovering from war. I think i would like to take an image like this, i think it would be interesting to use the trains aspect as the lighting in train stations often comes from harsh florescent lighting which would give interesting lighting for this type of photograph. The odd angle in the photograph above gives the impression that the photographer is also stood waiting for a train, i like this angle as it is interesting and gives a different perspective to the photograph that would not normally be had from a set up photograph. It is more of a photograph that is taken during movement and i think this would be a good way to take mine, it is evident that the subjects in the photograph are unsure what the photographer is doing and i think that this style of photography would be interesting to try myself. 

William Eggleston - Colour.

This set of photographs by William Eggleston is called "Colour" A group of seemingly unconnected photographs in terms of location and subject, taken across america. These photographs are connected through the colours used. Every photograph has bright and vibrant, colours in almost every aspect. Eggleston was one of the first photographers to use colour seriously, he took colour as a way to make the image stand out and reach people. The pieces always have a sky that stands out and often has a nice tonal range. I would like my sky to work like this, i think in the top image the way the sky goes from a pinky colour up into a blue gives a really nice set of colours to the image. In nearly all of the images from the colours series natural light is the only thing used. He often used evening light with the setting sun to add to the warm tones within the images. He used to specialist type of printing called "dye-transfer printing" along with a kodachrome film to allow him to get rich saturated tones whilst printing. I think with my piece i would use a digital camera and create these tones using saturation and vibrance digitally, i would still like the image to hold the same colour range and have a vibrant blue sky. To create a homage for this image the subject does not really matter as long as the colours are similar, these colours could be adjusted using photoshop if needs be but i think it would be good to try get them as right as possible in camera as this is what Eggleston would have had to do in his work. 

Edward Weston - Frank Sheridan, 1933

This photograph taken by Edward Weston in 1933, is in a way a portrait of a man shown just by his hand smoking a cigarette. Weston worked with a soft focus pictorialist style for a large portion of his career but later decided against this and became a member of the F/64 group. The F/64 group worked with very sharp focused images that had a carefully considered composition. The piece is in black and white and would have been shot on a 8x10 camera. The photograph appears to use natural light from the room, this can be seen because the background is not fully black or fully grey, the grey seems to enter at the top where the light is coming from. The piece is interesting as it shows the subject holding the very last bit of his cigarette, this would probably have been because it took Weston quite a long time to set up his camera. For my photograph i think i would work with digital as i do not have access to an 8x10 camera and if i did i would not be confident using it. I could possibly use a 5x4 camera but that would meant he photograph had to be taken in the studio and i would only have the image on a colour positive which i would not be able to blow up to an A4 size. I think it might be interesting to try and modernise this photograph, using the same content i could take the image using a digital camera. Still only using natural light and keeping the image in black and white, i could try the image with a roll up cigarette but i also think it would be interesting to try and modernise the image more by using an e-cigarette. A large amount of people smoke these now and it would give a more modern feel to this piece rather than it being a direct copy. 

August Sander - "Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts"

Sanders main work was a set of photographs which categorised people into various categories depending on their jobs in general, the set of photographs, taken over around twenty years attempted to document each level of society from bankers to homeless people. The pieces were taken as portraits and usually showed people in the clothing they wore to work in or for the homeless the clothing they wore on the street. He worked for a long time documenting as many people as he could with the aim of creating a body of work that documented people from every walk of life in Germany. The pieces are interesting as they show everyone in the background of where they worked or spent most of their time. This makes for an interesting set of images. 

This image of a baker is interesting it shows him looking proud of his profession, in the uniform he would wear to work and in the background of a kitchen. The lighting in this image seems to come exclusively from the light that is in the room, it would be difficult at the time of taking the images (early 1900's) to take a lighting kit with him to the shoot. The images were all shot using a large format camera which gives a large amount of clarity even in the black and white images. I think for my image i would also like to use a photograph of someone in a uniform that they use to go to work in, i think it would be difficult to take the photograph within someones workplace but it could be looked into, i am unsure weather i would try modernise the image by using a digital camera and flash or studio lighting. I think it would be interesting to use a large format camera for this piece but it would also be very difficult as i have only had a couple of sessions using one. 

Surrealism - Brassai

Brassai's work shows the various generalisations that were associated with the surrealism movement. The photographs are all in black and white and often depict nude women in various environments. These nude women were used to represent sex and the sexual part of the brain that Freud often talked about. In this image on the right you can see a nude woman almost being examined by a doctor, this is to depict how people view the nude woman, people were often psychoanalysed by doctors like Freud on how they felt subconsciously about sex and the naked form and this image depicts that. Surrealist photography often tried to depict the unconscious and the body against the mind. People and image that people saw in dreams were often shown in these surrealist images and this was a key theme of this style of photography. 

 

Surrealists were using the camera for its two dimensional image qualities, they are interested in getting the unconscious down into a physical thing. In her book Photography a cultural history she says  “The surrealists advocated the transformation of human perception.” (Marien:2010:253) Surrealism as a movement was heavily influenced by the work of Freud and his theory’s, they wanted to reveal peoples inner thoughts through photographs and worked towards this. Photographers used the camera to juxtaposition real life events and create something new from them, they used the camera to capture lifes chaotic moments and turn them into photographs that tried to make sense of dreams and peoples inner thoughts.