TYpologies
august sander
One of the first photographic typological studies was by the German photographer August Sander, whose epic project 'People of the 20th Century' (40,000 negatives were destroyed during WWII and in a fire) produced volume of portraits entitled 'The Face of Our Time' in 1929. Sander categorised his portraits according to their profession and social class.
response:
ed ruscha
Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
Ed Ruscha is an American artist who combines an interest in photography and painting. His matter-of-fact images are often presented in book form:
"Ruscha's book projects of the sixties and seventies have come to be recognized as central to photography's development, encouraging both conceptual approaches and interest in analyzing the built landscape. Less well known is his continuing commitment to capturing the various thoroughfares of his adopted home city. At present, the Streets of Los Angeles project numbers more than forty separate shoots and well over a million exposures [...] Photography has always been central to his artistic practice, most notably for the slender, pocket-sized volumes that he began publishing in 1963 and his extensive documentation of Los Angeles streets, beginning with Sunset Boulevard in 1965." - The J. Paul Getty Museum
"Ruscha's book projects of the sixties and seventies have come to be recognized as central to photography's development, encouraging both conceptual approaches and interest in analyzing the built landscape. Less well known is his continuing commitment to capturing the various thoroughfares of his adopted home city. At present, the Streets of Los Angeles project numbers more than forty separate shoots and well over a million exposures [...] Photography has always been central to his artistic practice, most notably for the slender, pocket-sized volumes that he began publishing in 1963 and his extensive documentation of Los Angeles streets, beginning with Sunset Boulevard in 1965." - The J. Paul Getty Museum
michael wolf
Informal Arrangements
For over twenty years Michael Wolf has captured the hyper-density of the city of Hong Kong through his large-scale photographs of its high rise architecture. In a new solo exhibition Informal Arrangements at Flowers Gallery, Wolf juxtaposes an abstracted view of Hong Kong’s seemingly endless industrial facades with an intimate perspective from within its hidden network of back alleys, in a series of photographic typologies and vernacular sculptures.
Bernd and hilla becher
industrial architecture
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The images that they decided to take were based on heavy industry they chose buildings thats were clearly built for a purpose these buildings/objects followed a historical thread. They shrank the buildings into images when photographing them. They felt that architecture was behind many elements of the industrial economy. They also realised they will disappear, and that lead them both to feel they were just as important as any historical building.
They originally took a lot of shots of each building - from various angles ect. They were first taken out of fascination. Once they taken the various images they felt they had to order them. They then classified the images once they were familiar with them. They began looking at their basic forms, which lead them to realise they came into subspecies. This caused them to then create a typology classified by groups based on form. This order created a kind of harmony and sense of satisfaction/ ease when viewing the images as each object corresponds to another. The first and last images still show a significant resemblance although they are the most different. An example which was given was the simple structure of a water tower as there are different kinds - some are simply elevated barrels and some more intricate. Regardless of their complexity and design they all have same function and each evokes an age or way of thinking. When taking the images they used a telephoto lens, up to 600mm sometimes on two tripods to avoid distortion. They were particular about each image, as well as the conditions they were taken in and they didn't tampur with them. They used a long exposure time - 20seconds - and small apature - to get an accurate image. Did work on cloudy days so there was not much light. |
Experimenting with typologies
For this typology i took pictures of room numbers of different colours. I decided to order the images in number order because in doing that the images automatically went into some sort of colour order. When ordering the photographs i also thought they looked more ordered and rigid if all cropped into a square with a border of the same sort of size. When devising typologies again i'd need to really focus on the angle the image is taken at and ensure that the all the angles are the same - this could be classed as controlling variables. For the example above the only variables changing are the room number and colour. Doing this creates a neat and clear idea of pattern which is aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Another thing i would need to control is the distance the picture is taken from the object (e.g. room number).
veiw from benches.
google street veiw -
3-21 Ōsakajō, Chūō-ku, Ōsaka-shi, Ōsaka-fu 540-0002, Japan
i chose to take images in Japan because their culture is so unknown to me and as a result of this i find many things they do fascinating. When looking around osaka i noticed many people with medical masks on which i thought obscure. As i looked through the city i noticed more and more people on bicycles; i also noticed few bus stops and of those few bus stops very few people standing at them. I was shocked by this due to the contrast it brings to the way we travel in London. As a result of this i chose to focus on capturing modes of transport and movement.
FONDAMENTA ORMESINI, 2737, 30121 VENEZIA, ITALY
Unlike japan, i have been to venice. I don't think there's anywhere in the world like it and thought it was more than worth capturing. I originally began looking at obscure angles and spaced for example i took some image of the underneath of some of venires many bridges. I then started to look for obscurities such as distorted people. I then looked at things that stood out and made me feel something such as the bottom left image which i found rather amusing. I found the graffiti captivating and that lead me to look closely at walls and imperfect walls such as cracked paint, which i don't think takes away from venices' beauty in the slightest.