Contrast
“the state of being strikingly different from something else in juxtaposition or close association”
Photographers
Boyle Family
The Boyle Family is a collaborative group of artists- at a beginning, group was started by husband and wife- Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, later on, their children and even friends and neighbours were working with them. Boyle Family is well known for “Earth studies” which were black and white 3D casts of the earth.
Alexander Rodchenko
Alexander Rodchenko was a Russian artist, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of Russian constructivism movement, Alexander was designing everything, from book covers to advertisements, his work was often abstract. Rodchenko later in his life started to take a pictures, which is what he became famous for, he was specialising in both- taking photos and photomontages. His work had a massive impact on photography and art in 1920s.
Harry Callahan
Harry Callahan was born in Detroit. His story with photography has began in 1938, right after he finished Engineering degree on University. However he took it seriously in 1941, when he joined local camera club. Callahan has been specialising in a lot of different genres and won different rare awards for high quality photography, like Photographer and Educator Award or ICP’s Master of Photography Infinity Award. Callaham is popular and respected in the photography community for “open mind and experimental attitude”.
Lewis Baltz
Lewis Baltz was born in Californiain 1945, he was a visual artist and photographer. Main focus of his work is searching for beauty in destruction and desolation, his work is showing development of technology and all the things designed by humans like offices or factories, it’s the reflection of power and control. His work has been used in a lot different, popular books as well as in museums and art galleries, for example Museum of Modern Art in Paris or in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Ernst Haas
Erns Haas (Born in March 2, 1922,- died in September 12, 1986) was a famous photographer well known for his innovations in development of colour photography and use of abstract light. In 1958 Popular Photography magazine considered Ernst Haas as a one of the top ten photographers in the world. Haas has published a lot of famous photo-books, for example: The Creation, Little Big Man or Elements. Moreover, Haas won a lot of popular awards for his skills in photography and also for ‘out of focus’ photographs.
Photoshoots
Final Outcomes
Evaluation
My first A Level Photography project was called Contrast, I focused myself on details of pattern and textures because I think that it’s the simplest form of contrast which is all around us, so I wanted to show its details at it’s best. Personally, the most interesting part of the project was taking pictures and experimenting with them because I found it interesting to look for different forms of contrast all around the area, and also I enjoyed looking for good perspectives and camera settings to take a high quality picture. Furthermore, experimenting with my pictures in different ways, such as photo-montaging and setting different levels of colours or saturation was a very interesting and enjoyable experience; I could enhance the photo to show details of contrast even better and, most importantly, I have gained some new experience and learned new things, which for sure will be useful in my future projects.
Good example of new technique which I have used is lighting effects and curves of darkness; this allowed me to experiment with the intensity of light and also, the direction it comes from. Moreover, I used filter of grain effect (which I really doubted before) in one of my experiments, and surprisingly, it worked really well; I could make the texture even sharper because of it, and also show clear contrast. After this experiment, I’m convinced, that in future I’d like to try to develop further experimenting with different types of filters, I think that this is very underrated option.
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As part of my project I had to find out and research some of the photographers who are related to Contrast, those were Kurt Schwitters, Boyle Family, Harry Callahan, Alexander Rodchenko, Ernst Haas and Lewis Baltz. All of them were/still are professional artists who achieved a lot of rare rewards for their pictures which are popular all over the world. This research was extremely helpful and had influence on my photographs because it gave me idea of what I should look out for and how I need to edit my pictures to increase the quality of what I want to show. I really enjoyed using the technique which most of researched photographers used- it was experimenting with tones of black and white, I liked it because I think that changing the colours and tones is allowing to modify the mood of the photo, from positive and happy to negative and sad.
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The most successful part of my project was definitely coming up by accident with two really good (in my opinion) experiments, mainly because I didn’t do it on purpose. One of them was taking photo of random note on the floor with the word ‘nope’ written on it, a few minutes of editing and came up with comic picture which was still related to my project.