Zemni Images

Photography, moving image, design and illustration of Linda Mayoux

Lake District photographers

Category: Theory and Concepts

  • Lake District photographers

    Photographers found from a Google Search on Lake District Photography.

    Brian Kerr

    These ones are my favourites from the search. Particularly the misty lakes and sunsets are beautiful. Colours have been altered but not over contrasty or just standard use of warm up filters. The images are very sharp. Subjects are often placed centrally using wide angle lens, instead of conventionally on rule of thirds. Probably done with a medium or large format camera?

    Matthew Priestley

    A photographer from Manchester who goes out fell walking with colleagues a few times a year. He uses a digital compact because of its portability and processes in Photoshop and Lightroom. He produces images focusing particularly on plays of light. Some of the views are very appealing, but the images are less sharp and sometimes over-contrasty. Possibly because of the use of a compact camera.

    Dave Lawrence

    These are picturesque postcard images, rather than beautiful.   Slow shutter speed waterfalls. Zig zag compositions of walls on dale hillsides with sheep. Blue lilac colours, and free use of warm up filters. Pretty touristy and unnatural colours.

    He is really strong on marketing with dowloadable screensavers. Photobox Pro Galleries. Zazzle for other merchandise eg mugs. Greetings Cards. Red Bubble for calendars etc.

    Heart of the lakes photography holidays website has a lot of rather standard sunny, but rather washed out panoramas of Castlerigg and well-known vantage points.

  • Documentary photographers today

    Task

    Do your own research into the work and techniques of the Magnum agency photographers and include your findings in your learning log or blog.

    The list below represents a range of styles and approaches and has been selected to support your development and give  a feeling of the industry today.
    Look briefly at the website of each of the photographers to get an overall feel for the range of work that’s out there. Pick out five or six photographers whose work appeals to you (more if you have time) and analyse their approach:

    • What is the main strength of their practice?
    • What makes them different to other photographers working in a similar genre?
    • Where do your chosen photographers fall in the social documentary–photojournalism spectrum? Does this matter?

    Richard Billingham
    Briony Campbell
    Luc Delahaye
    Melanie Dornier
    David Gillanders
    Nadav Kandar
    Steve McCurry
    Mimi Mollica
    Zanele Muholi
    Nicholas Nixon
    Ingrid Pollard
    Brent Stirton
    Medford Taylor
    Ed Thomson
    Albrecht Tübke
    Donovan Wylie

  • The Decisive Moment

    The idea of the decisive moment is underpinned by the notion that this is something that emerges from the scene, i.e. it happens independently of the viewer. Magnum stressed the ‘moment’ as being crucial to the interpretation and communication of the image.

    Henri Cartier Bresson

    It could be argued, though, that the decisive moment is effectively created by the observer who decides that it is in some way ‘decisive’. Moments only become ‘decisive’ through the act of observing and analysing.

    What is ‘decisive’ depends on interpretation and meaning. Different moments of coincidence and contrast have different meanings.

    There are also generally a continuum of decisive moments, corresponding to a multitude of observers. Different observers will produce different decisive moments.

    The concept of the ‘moment’ raises questions about the photographer’s motivation and integrity.

    • Is it acceptable to engineer this moment or should a photographer wait to capture it in its honesty and purity?

    Sources:

    Simon Bainbridge 2011 Hereford Photography Festival

    Graham Clarke, The Photograph (pp.145–87). Discussion of how Cartier-Bresson, Werner Bischof, Robert Capa and others put their personal style into an image, for example in Capa’s war photography. ’the moment’ and social class as a motivating issue for the documentary photographer.

    Importance of technology

    Getting the moment is still a challenge for modern photographers but current practice is based on portability, with a return to the smaller but very high-quality digital camera. Much of Magnum’s style and the numerous ‘moments’ they captured were delivered through a technology breakthrough – the Leica 35mm rangefinder camera. The Leica gave flexibility and the ability to be inconspicuous, unlike the full- and half-plate cameras that had been used before and which involved setting up a tripod and a wood or metal 5×4 camera. Quick and instant, the Leica was made to capture the moment. The camera itself changed the photographers’ practice and delivered an ability to move quickly and get in close. (Capa later used Contax and Rollei cameras, but not until after the Spanish Civil War.)

  • Dorothea Lange

    Lange was finishing a month’s trip photographing migrant farmhands for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

    “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
    (From Popular Photography, Feb. 1960, quoted in Wells, p.42)

    The six images in the series were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4×5” film. This type of camera needs and demands careful composition and is one sheet of film for one exposure. There were other children and a husband in the family but Lange moved these out of the image
    in an effort to construct the connotations she wanted. For example, the image may have recalled the traditional iconography of the Madonna and child in the mind of some

    pp.39–49 of your course reader. This is an in-depth look at the cultural impact of Lange’s Migrant Mother and the FSA project, examining the image in context from the original through to the Black Panther version of the sixties. This is essential reading and expands on what has been introduced here.

    Getty Museum film about Dorothea Lange’s documentary work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQPS3KI5-yM

  • Early Social Documentary

    To Do

    What moved or motivated the photographer to get hold of his or her camera and get involved?
    Where did it start? What was its purpose?

    Many of the early practitioners of documentary photography remain quite famous today within visual culture for the way that they contributed to the development of film and cinema.

    Early Social Documentary

    Note was not ‘objective’ – long shutter speeds meant was empty. Often moved objects for better effects.

    United States

    Alfred Steiglitz

    Roger Fenton

    Matthew Brady

    Jacob Riis

    Lewis Hine

    The FSA project

    In 1935 the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project was set up to document the experiences of peasant farmers and sharecroppers and rural poverty in the Mid West of America. Led by Roy Stryker and funded by the US government, the project’s team of 17 photographers produced some 80,000 images from 1935–44. Some of these images were made available via newspapers and magazines to a target audience of middle-class city dwellers to help justify the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, an economic programme designed to transform America’s economy in the wake of the Great Depression.

    The FSA project saw the social documentary genre, with its enquiring insight, recording for posterity and mission to elicit change, begin to cross over into photojournalism or editorial photography. The paid commissioned photographer began to emerge, as opposed to the independent and individually motivated social documentarist. The emerging genre photographer may have had an altruistic motivation but needed the pay to make it happen.

    Prominent amongst the FSA project’s image-makers were Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, the first black American photographer to work for Life magazine.

    UK

    Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79)

    Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853–1941)

     Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901)

    Modernism

    Henri Cartier Bresson

    Magnum Photos

  • Lewis Hine

    Source: Wikipedia

    Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940)  was an American sociologist and photographer. After his father died in an accident, he began working and saved his money for a college education. Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University.

    Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform.Both Riis and Hine made their social reforming images more widely available through magic lantern shows, arguably the YouTube of the time, with the aim of reaching a middle-class audience with some political influence. Whereas Riis presented the urban poor as helpless victims, Hine was committed to social change. Hine was more than sympathetic to the cause and used the setting of the people in his images in a way that endorsed the points he and the committee were making. He wanted to see labour law reform and felt that he could help achieve this by shedding some light on the plight and daily struggle of previously ‘invisible’ people like immigrants and child workers.

    He became a full-time photographer when he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee in 1908 to travel around America for four years documenting and providing evidence of the working and social conditions of children. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labour laws in the United States.

    Hine was also aware of the dangerous nature of the high rise race – the pace that buildings were going up in New York and the number of fatalities that were involved. The industry guideline at the time was that there should be no more than one death per floor – the Empire State Building has 102 floors. Whilst his images have an almost relaxed feel, the stark background and the drop below reveal the danger that these workers were exposed to.

    During the Great Depression, he again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was also a member of the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

    The Library of Congress holds more than five thousand Hine photographs, including examples of his child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images. Other large institutional collections include nearly ten thousand of Hine’s photographs and negatives held at the George Eastman House and almost five thousand NCLC photographs at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

    In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was never completed. The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles due to loss of government and corporate patronage. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died at age 66 on November 3, 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation.

    After Lewis Hine’s death his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was dismantled in 1951. The Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures but did not accept them; but the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York did.

     Notable photographs

    •  Child Labor: Girls in Factory (1908)
    • Breaker Boys (1910)
    • Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills (1910)
    • Steam Fitter (1920)
    • Workers, Empire State Building (1931)
    • Two Boys Working on a
    • Loom in Massachusetts
    • The Spinning Room at Carver Mill.

    Documentary film about Lewis Hine’s involvement with the child labour reform movement

    Lewis Hine pdf

    Google Images

  • Jacob Riis

    Danish-born Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a pioneer in social documentary photography which included identifiable people and was one of the first photographers to use the new technology of magnesium flash. Riis photographed the flop houses where people were stacked at night
    on every available horizontal space. Again these were usually immigrants and Riis showed the squalor they inhabited in his book How the Other Half Lives (1890) which featured the infamous Mulberry tenements in New York.

    For a New York Times (2008) article on Riis visit:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/opinion/12tue4.html?th&emc=th

    Watch a 10-minute film clip about Riis and his use of the new magnesium flash:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACoIbokOcc

  • Shirley Baker

    Images on Mary  Evans Picture Library

    Google Images

    Shirley Baker, (1932-2014), was one of the rare female photographers who chronicled life in the north of England from the 1950s onwards. Her street photography was in the ‘flaneuse’ tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, whom she named as influences. Unposed snapshots of people going about their business were juxtaposed with telling graffiti. She had a great eye for composition that has been under-appreciated next to her compassionate documentation and concern for social injustice, with a particular focus on women and children.

    From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art and would always carry her camera modestly stowed in her handbag. In free periods, she began a body of work, spanning 15 years, of the social housing in the area that was being demolished as people lived in semi-derelict slums. Shirley’s work in Salford and Manchester (shot mainly between 1960 and 1973) captured a time of rapid social and economic change in the lives of working class people in Manchester and Salford.”It was a time of much change: people were turfed out of their homes and some squatted in old buildings, trying to hang on to the traditional life they knew.”

    Slum clearances, started in the 1930s, resumed in earnest in the 1950s, and in the twenty years between 1955 and 1975, around 1.3 million homes were demolished nationwide. When Shirley Baker began photographing the streets of her native Salford, it seemed that no-one was interested in recording the human story of these soon-to-be demolished communities. Old ladies sitting on doorsteps in a row of condemned houses, men with handcarts searching for refuse to be recycled, children playing inventively among rubble and abandoned cars. That she chose to preserve these moments on film, now seems like the only perceptive response to a vanishing environment. It was not until 1989 that her first book, Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford, was published and Baker began to be more widely appreciated.

    In addition to her work in Manchester and Salford, she spent a considerable amount of time capturing Camden Market at the height of punk. Her work was often humorous and she added over the years to collections such as owners who look like their dogs and people falling asleep in public.

    Remembering the work of Shirley Baker Phil Coomes  BBC

    Life

    (from Guardian Obituary)

    Born in Salford, to Alec, a furniture maker, and Josephine, a housewife, Shirley had an identical twin, Barbara, who would also become an artist. They both went as boarders to Penrhos College, in Colwyn Bay, from where during the second world war they were evacuated to Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire. Their parents were unfazed by their daughters pursuing the arts professionally after they left school.

    Baker married Tony Levy, a GP, in 1957, and the couple eventually settled in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where their daughter, Nan, was born in 1963. Baker never displayed any of her photographs around their home, although she did like to take pictures of the family. This perhaps summed up the private, almost secretive, nature of her work.

    When Baker studied  photography at Manchester College of Technology, there was only one other woman on the course. On finishing, Baker’s plan was to work in-house at a company, recording processes and producing promotional images. She started at Courtaulds fabric manufacturers before freelancing for other businesses and doing some journalism, including for the Guardian. Baker encountered difficulties getting a press card, so was unable to pursue photojournalism seriously, and believed she was only given the assignments deemed unsuitable for men. From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art.

    Baker kept photographing in later life and completed an MA in critical history and the theory of photography at the University of Derby in 1995. She joined the Mary Evans Picture Library in 2008, and in 2012 had solo shows in Oldham and Salford, with another planned for 2015 at the Photoraphers’ Gallery in London. She was always pleased when people who featured in her work came along to exhibitions. At the opening of the Lowry Gallery in 2000, the Queen not only viewed Baker’s photographs but met some of Baker’s subjects, too.

     

     

  • Documentary typologies for Eugenics

    Documentary typologies for Eugenics

    There was widespread interest in eugenics in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Eugenics is based on the idea that some characteristics are ‘better’ than others and that you can improve the human gene pool by encouraging reproduction between people with desirable genetic traits and discouraging reproduction amongst those with less desirable traits. Clearly the belief that some groups were inherently genetically inferior could be used as a justification for all kinds of behaviour, from colonial rule to modern day racism.

    Scientific Racism: The Eugenics of Social Darwinism.  one-hour BBC4 documentary

    Implicit in eugenics was the idea of classification or objective measuring – pigeon-holing people into particular groups according to their genetic characteristics and treating them accordingly. The Victorians, for example, believed that you could identify criminal ‘types’ through their facial characteristics.

    Photography was adopted as a useful tool to facilitate classification.It was manipulated and used by racists and propagandists  to endorse a ‘science’ to the public.  Such photography effectively dehumanised its subjects and turned them into research objects although its creators might have argued that it was simply documentary – showing what was there. It also served a journalistic function, publicising and legitimising racist organisations and ‘celebrities’ like Margaret Sanger.

    In America the eugenics movement was well funded and they produced plenty of indicative material.

    Francis Galton photographed immigrants as they arrived in America, often at Ellis Island. He identified 46 different races through measurement and through facial characteristics on photographs.  Charts were compiled to show what to expect visually of the Negroid Insane Criminal and the Negroid Criminal.  Margaret Sanger’s ‘Negro Project’ sought to restrict the black population, and thus improve the American population, through ‘planned parenthood’ masquerading as health care and family planning.

    For more on Malthusian eugenics and the Harlem Project,
    visit:

    The Nazis took this to the extreme by exterminating groups who failed to match the Aryan ideal – Jews, black people, homosexuals, Roma, people with learning disability – and eugenics fell into disfavour after World War II as a result.

    The Baldwin lecture and a perspective on post genome race:

    http://www.princeton.edu/president/speeches/20100309/

  • Colour Photography

    Wikipedia to be properly edited with links
    Main article: Color photography

    Color photography was possible long before Kodachrome, as this 1903 portrait by Sarah Angelina Aclanddemonstrates, but in its earliest years the need for special equipment, long exposures and complicated printing processes made it extremely rare.

    A photographic darkroom withsafelight

    Color photography was explored beginning in the mid-19th century. Early experiments in color required extremely long exposures (hours or days for camera images) and could not “fix” the photograph to prevent the color from quickly fading when exposed to white light.

    The first permanent color photograph was taken in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle first published by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. Maxwell’s idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green and blue filters. This provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image.

    Transparent prints of the images could be projected through similar color filters and superimposed on the projection screen, an additive method of color reproduction. A color print on paper could be produced by superimposing carbon prints of the three images made in their complementary colors, a subtractive method of color reproduction pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauronin the late 1860s.

    Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made extensive use of this color separation technique, employing a special camera which successively exposed the three color-filtered images on different parts of an oblong plate. Because his exposures were not simultaneous, unsteady subjects exhibited color “fringes” or, if rapidly moving through the scene, appeared as brightly colored ghosts in the resulting projected or printed images.

    Implementation of color photography was hindered by the limited sensitivity of early photographic materials, which were mostly sensitive to blue, only slightly sensitive to green, and virtually insensitive to red. The discovery of dye sensitization by photochemist Hermann Vogel in 1873 suddenly made it possible to add sensitivity to green, yellow and even red. Improved color sensitizers and ongoing improvements in the overall sensitivity of emulsions steadily reduced the once-prohibitive long exposure times required for color, bringing it ever closer to commercial viability.

    Autochrome, the first commercially successful color process, was introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Autochrome plates incorporated a mosaic color filter layer made of dyed grains of potato starch, which allowed the three color components to be recorded as adjacent microscopic image fragments. After an Autochrome plate was reversal processed to produce a positive transparency, the starch grains served to illuminate each fragment with the correct color and the tiny colored points blended together in the eye, synthesizing the color of the subject by the additive method. Autochrome plates were one of several varieties of additive color screen plates and films marketed between the 1890s and the 1950s.

    Kodachrome, the first modern “integral tripack” (or “monopack”) color film, was introduced by Kodak in 1935. It captured the three color components in a multilayer emulsion. One layer was sensitized to record the red-dominated part of the spectrum, another layer recorded only the green part and a third recorded only the blue. Without special film processing, the result would simply be three superimposed black-and-white images, but complementary cyan, magenta, and yellow dye images were created in those layers by adding color couplers during a complex processing procedure.

    Agfa’s similarly structured Agfacolor Neu was introduced in 1936. Unlike Kodachrome, the color couplers in Agfacolor Neu were incorporated into the emulsion layers during manufacture, which greatly simplified the processing. Currently available color films still employ a multilayer emulsion and the same principles, most closely resembling Agfa’s product.

    Instant color film, used in a special camera which yielded a unique finished color print only a minute or two after the exposure, was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.

    Color photography may form images as positive transparencies, which can be used in a slide projector, or as color negatives intended for use in creating positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography owing to the introduction of automated photo printing equipment.