Monthly Archives: November 2015

The Photograph as Document #5 – Constructed Images

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“Use digital software such as Photoshop to create a composite image which visually appears to be a documentary photograph but which could never actually be. To make a composite image you need to consider your idea and make the required amount of images to join together. Upload the images and decide which image you’ll use as your main image and background. Use the magic wand to select sections of image from the others you wish to move into your background image. Copy via layer and drag into the background. Do this repeatedly until you have all the pieces of your puzzle in place. In order to make it more convincing, use the erase tool on each layer to keep the edges soft and to create a better illusion. Be aware of perspective and light and shadows for the most effective results.”

– C&N Coursebook

London – No Sé

I was first confronted (and given the sheer scale of the print, confronted is definitely the word) by Andreas Gursky’s picture Sao Paulo – Sé (2002)  at the Barbican Exhibition, Constructing Worlds (reviewed here as part of my log for TAoP).  I immediately liked it and the other Gursky, the 1992 constructed image – Paris Montparnasse – on show at the exhibition. Continue reading →

the photograph as document # 3 – street photography/reportage

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Regent Street; September 2015

“Find a street that particularly interests you – it may be local or further afield. Shoot 30 colour images and 30 black and white images in a street photography style. In your learning log, comment on the differences between the two formats. What difference does colour make? Which set do you prefer and why?” – C&N Coursebook

I’m never that sure about “Street Photography”: as a genre it seems to span so wide a variety of photographers and their ways of working as to be meaningless as a description; I don’t really know what the pictures are “for”; and I don’t enjoy taking “street” pictures, finding the whole thing grimly stressful. And this is before I even start thinking about the number of different ways the practice of street photography is codified by the policemen of both photography and of the internet. Is street black and white or colour? Can you crop the images? Should you involve the objects before your lens in the picture-making or just hit and run? Must there be people? Does inside count as “street” if it is a public inside?  Continue reading →

Henri Cartier Bresson at the Fine Art Society – London

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This was a  rather good, big exhibition (50 prints dating from 1932 to 1999) held in the Fine Art Society’s hall, looping round ground floor entrance area and then making a run up the stairs to the first floor. You had to slip behind reception desks at some points to look more closely, and at one point the flow was broken by a canvas studded with arrows and a staircase heading down into the basement, but the viewing conditions were generally good and the pictures lit well. Continue reading →