Artist Research

Tom Hunter

I was told about this photographer during one of the feedback sessions, I was told that my initial videos looked similar to that of hunters work. This was purely an aesthetical link.

I like how he chooses the deep dark colour, he chooses to take a lot of care lighting his works in a clever way. 

"Hunter photographs the people and places of his immediate community. Woman Reading Possession Order, is part of a series of work he made of a group of squatters living in Hackney. In this photo, Hunter borrows his composition and colours from Vermeer’s A Girl Reading At An Open Window. Like Vermeer, Hunter portrays quiet, everyday scenes which give his ‘outsider’ subjects a visible presence and quiet nobility."- Saatchi Gallery.

The above overview of his work gives a brief insight into his style and reasons behind what he photographs. One thing that I can pull from his work is the connection between himself and the area that he lives in and photographs. This is similar to what I am doing in my video, photographing a local community or in fact my local community.
Below are some of Hunters most well known photographs, along with a few of my photographs by him and also which all of them have the things that I looked at with the lighting in.

August Sander

August Sander, a german photographer most well known for the catalogue of german people which helped to archive "Citizens of the Twentieth Century". With citizens of the twentieth century, Sander wanted to create a ranked order of portraits of the german people, from farmers to members of parliament, he set out to photograph every "type" of person. Sadly, he died before he could finish his idea in the early 1960's.

The thing that I like most about Sanders work is the link to some of the subjects that he had in his photographs. By this I mean that, he was originally a labourer (more specifically a miner). I think that from this, he already had that initial emotional connection to the farmers and other manual labour ways of life. This connection brings me to talk about my reasons for choosing to photograph the forge, I have worked in this industry for years and have a first hand account of the decline of this particular industry, similar yet different to that of August Sander.

It was said that "The theme for the project grew out of the portraits he made of Westerwald farmers, in whom he saw the archetypal contemporary man."- Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

One thing that I like about Sanders style is the way that he chooses to isolate the subject with a dead pan feel but how he is able to give some indication of who the person is, be this subtle or obvious. In some of his photographs he chooses to show a lot of the background of the sitter while in other photographs he choose to be more subtle and only tell us about the person through their clothing or fashion. Either way, he gives the viewer information about each person which helps to set the scene and create an interesting image. His photographs are truly beautiful. Below are some examples of some of my favourite works from Sander.

My personal favourite and one of his most well known photographs is 'The Three Farmers'. 

"This black and white photograph is a group portrait of three young men portrayed outdoors on a path in a natural setting. They stand behind each other in single file, their bodies facing in the same forward direction perpendicular to the picture plane, their heads looking to their right straight at the camera. All three of them wear suits and hats and gaze with some self-assurance directly at the photographer. The young man on the left has unkempt hair peeking out from his tilted hat, a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from his lips, and holds a wooden cane at an angle to the ground. The central figure is holding a cigarette in his left hand and clasps a cane in the other, while the man on the right and at the front of the group seems rooted to the spot, his cane held straight to the ground echoing his upright posture." - Christian Weikop (The University Of Edinburgh) March 2013 for Tate.

I read up on this iconic image in a book I recently acquired, 50 Photo Icons- Hans- Michael Koetzel. It was in this book that I learnt about Sanders passed and what influenced this photograph. I quote " Sander, who had came from a simple background himself, had a great understanding and appreciation for the area and undoubtedly stuck up a sympathetic relationship with the farmers who lived there." He chose to use only available light (like myself) and also made the sitter feel comfortable.

Jasper White

Jasper White was one of my aesthetic influences, the set of photographs that he produced called "sheds" was about many Australian working mens sheds or man caves as they are also known. There is also a subtle link to the forge within these photographs, in both scenes there is a busy look about them, as soon as you step into the forge your eyes are open with things to look at.

Below are some images from Whites set of photographs.

http://www.jasperwhite.co.uk/


Dusseldorf School

"A group of artists, including Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Stuth and Thomas Ruff, who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Art Academy) in the 1970s and rose to prominence in the 1980s. Responding in part to the concerns of the new topographics, these artists’ works are characterized by a sober, documentary quality, “straight on” (and often expansive) "topographic" views of landscapes, a focus on cityscapes or interior environments, and the minimisation of the human figure. Since the 1990s, aided by new technical capabilities in digital photography and printing, a hallmark of the group’s photographs has been a combination of dizzying detail and monumental size, giving the works an immersive quality and contributing to a blurring of the boundaries between photography and painting."- Artsy.net

The Dusseldorf School has turned out some of my favourite photographers including Bernd and Hilla Becher. A couple who are most well known for their typologies of industrial buildings and structures such as water towers and pit heads. The thing that really stands out for me is the fact that they photographed all of these magnificent structures before many of them were torn down, they documented something similar to of that I am currently doing, part of the industrial world. The standard and strategic layout of photographs, with 3x3 set of images gives an almost political/ governmental feel to the sets of photographs.

Below are some examples of their works. 

Thomas Ruff

"Arguably the most versatile artist of the Dsseldorf School, Thomas Ruff reinvents himself as an artist, both conceptually and aesthetically, with each new body of work. From architectural photography to portraits, from aerial views and cityscapes to color abstractions and internet-derived nudes, Ruff constantly challenges the given meanings of photography. This book presents for the first time his most recent body of work, the so-called "Machine" pictures. In this series, Ruff borrows from the picture archive of a Dsseldorf machine factory, where he discovered glass negatives that had been used for commercial brochures. The artist scanned the negatives and then proceeded to digitally alter their color and size. By freeing these images from their original context and re-processing them, Ruff grants them a pictorial autonomy. Thus, with theMachines series, Ruff not only investigates the history of photography, but also ponders such fundamental questions as how something can appear in a picture, how we perceive pictures, and what role our assumptions about media play."- Caroline Flosdorff and Michael Stübe. Although he was always just questioning the authenticity of a photograph, his subject matters i.e. the machines and lathes that he photographs (or uses from archives) are relavant to my studies at present. Below are some examples of his works.