Zemni Photography Blog

Tag: black and white

  • Hiroshi Sugimoto

    website Google images from Wikipedia: Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death. Sugimoto is also deeply influenced by the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole. He has also expressed a great deal of interest in late 20th century modern architecture. His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures have given Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work. Exerpts from his description of selected works from his website: Joe:  Like a work of architecture, this sculpture has to be experienced by walking around and through it… Joe is different according to the time of the day, the season, and the viewer’s position. It is in the visitor’s memory that the sculpture “takes shape” in the most complete way…Using a photographic technique involving areas of extremely soft light and blurred darkness, he sculpted views that seem like aspects of visual memory: the arts of photography and sculpture overlap and memories of the two-and the three-dimensional mix. Revolution: For a long time it was my job to stand on cliffs and gaze at the sea, the horizon where it touches the sky. The horizon is not a straight line, but a segment of a great arc. One day, standing atop a lone island peak in a remote sea, the horizon encompassing my entire field of vision, for a moment I was floating in the centre of a vast basin. But then, as I viewed the horizon encircle me, I had a distinct sensation of the earth as a watery globe, a clear vision of the horizon not as an endless expanse but the edge of an oceanic sphere…There remains… a great divide between comprehending (i.e.explaining) the world and being able to explain what we ourselves are. And even then, what we can explain of the world is far less than what we cannot ― though people tend be more attracted by the unexplained. In all this, I somehow feel we are nearing an era when religion and art will once again cast doubts upon science, or else an era when things better seen through to a scientific conclusion will bow to religious judgement. Seascapes:  Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence…Let’s just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing. Lightning sheets: The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes. Architecture: I decided to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture. Pushing my old large-format camera’s focal length out to twice-infinity―with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur―I discovered that superlative architecture survives, however dissolved, the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process. Chamber of Horrors: People in olden times were apparently less fearful and grievous of death than we are today. To some it was even an honor to be chosen by the gods as a sacrificial victim, a liberation from the sufferings and strife of this life…Must we moderns be so sheltered from death? —————————————
    A sensitive and comprehensive portrait made with Sugimoto that discusses his life, vision and focuses particularly on his recent works on ‘Lightning Fields’ and electricity, sculpted and photographed forms from mathematical formulae, reviving ancient Japanese traditions from Shinto and theatre and a gallery to communicate his vision to next generations.

    Hiroshi Sugimoto is a contemporary Japanese photographer, born in 1948 and dividing his time between Japan and New York. His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures have given Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death. A lot of his work also relates to scientific concepts – electricity and origins of life and visual forms from mathematical formulae. His work has been a key inspiration for by black and white photography in:

    • 2.2.1 Bridge where in my treatment of the bridge shapes I am inspired by the dramatic black white contrasts of his Conceptual Forms and Joe, and his work on the branching forms of electricity has influenced my working of the algae and other textures.
    • 2.2.2 Shutterscapes: Lake District my series on cloudscapes and mountains has been influenced by Seascapes.

    Sugimoto’s vision

    Sugimoto’s website

    [Photography is] a kind of contrivance to externalize my internal vision. The world exists and so do I. But does the world exist as I see it? It may be that each individual is seeing the world differently. And all share the same fantasy of how this world should look like.

    Thousands of years of history are in me.

    We see what must be seen. Then disappear into the sea.

    ‘Capitalism won’t stop until we have depleted all resources….my work hopefully gives us an opportunity to think before destroying ourselves’

    He works in series projects. The images that have been most influential on my own work are those that are highly abstract, dealing with light, dark and time as a way of making us think about life and our place in a fragile world in an immediate and haunting way.

    Discussion by Sugimoto of the evolution of his photographic approach and concept, particularly towards his seascapes and more minimalist works. The underpinnings are not just meditative awe at the beauty of minimalist landscapes and a wish to reflect on what is timeless – we have been changing the land, but seascapes are what our earliest ancestors saw. He links this to our responsibility for our future ‘Capitalism won’t stop until we have depleted all resources….my work hopefully gives us an opportunity to think before destroying ourselves’
    A catalogue of some of Sugimoto’s best known work by Ted Forbes, explaining his aims and techniques: Movie Theatres, Seascapes, Chamber of Horrors, Architecture, In Praise of Shadows – a series of abstract images of candles burning down and picures of wax works.

    The series that have been most influential on my own work are those that are highly abstract, dealing with light and time as a way of making us think about life and our place in a fragile world.

    Seascapes  

    The seascapes are a series of very large black and white prints all have the same middle horizon line. These images have inspired my reworking of:

    So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence…Let’s just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.

    This beautiful series of very large black and white prints all have the same middle horizon line. When presented here as an on-line presentation the different light and weather conditions around the same horizon line merge into each other in a really haunting way.

    Their minimalist abstraction and meditative impact has been compared to that of Rothko’s paintings – but strangely the painting appear more ‘realistic’ than the photographs.

    A discussion of a Pace exhibition in London and catalogue comparing the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Mark Rothko in terms of compositions.

    Revolution

    In this series he is at his most minimalist: ‘horizontality’, verticality and diagonals of Angst. With dramatic, eerie splashes of light.

    For a long time it was my job to stand on cliffs and gaze at the sea, the horizon where it touches the sky. The horizon is not a straight line, but a segment of a great arc. One day, standing atop a lone island peak in a remote sea, the horizon encompassing my entire field of vision, for a moment I was floating in the centre of a vast basin. But then, as I viewed the horizon encircle me, I had a distinct sensation of the earth as a watery globe, a clear vision of the horizon not as an endless expanse but the edge of an oceanic sphere…There remains… a great divide between comprehending (i.e. explaining) the world and being able to explain what we ourselves are. And even then, what we can explain of the world is far less than what we cannot ― though people tend be more attracted by the unexplained. In all this, I somehow feel we are nearing an era when religion and art will once again cast doubts upon science, or else an era when things better seen through to a scientific conclusion will bow to religious judgement.

    This French video discusses Sugimoto’s approach to time and abstraction. In this series he is at his most minimalist: ‘horizontality’, verticality and diagonals of Angst. With splashes of light.

    Joe and Conceptual Forms

    Like a work of architecture, this sculpture has to be experienced by walking around and through it… Joe is different according to the time of the day, the season, and the viewer’s position. It is in the visitor’s memory that the sculpture “takes shape” in the most complete way…Using a photographic technique involving areas of extremely soft light and blurred darkness, he sculpted views that seem like aspects of visual memory: the arts of photography and sculpture overlap and memories of the two-and the three-dimensional mix.

    See: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/joe-1 and https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-24

    Drive-in Theatre

    Its eerie light and blank picture on nothingness.

    https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/drivein-theatre

    Lightning Fields

    The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes. His process is discussed in detail in

    See: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-28

    Further ideas I want to explore

    Architecture

     I decided to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture. Pushing my old large-format camera’s focal length out to twice-infinity―with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur―I discovered that superlative architecture survives, however dissolved, the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.

    See: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-5

    Chamber of Horrors

    People in olden times were apparently less fearful and grievous of death than we are today. To some it was even an honour to be chosen by the gods as a sacrificial victim, a liberation from the sufferings and strife of this life…Must we moderns be so sheltered from death?

  • Peter Henry Emerson

    As I stood admiring just before sunrise, the reed-tops bending under their beautiful crystal heads, rooks came flying from a wood near by, and a vast flock of peewits darkened the sky. As the yellow sun arose in frosty splendour mists began to rise on the river, and there followed a brief spell of magic beauty ere the thickening mists began to bury everything as they blew in fitful gusts from the river. in On English Lagoons (1893)

    Do not put off doing a coveted picture until another year, for next year the scene will look very different. You will never be able twice to get exactly the same thing.  1889

     

     Blackshore, River Blythe, Suffolkfrom Emerson’s illustrated book ‘Pictures of East Anglian Life’, 1888

     

     

     

    “At Plough, The End of the Furrow”, from Emerson’s photographic album ‘Pictures From Life in Field And Fen,’, 1887

     

     

     

     

    Confessions from Emerson’s book ‘Pictures From Life in Field And Fen’, 1887

     

     

     

    Peter Henry Emerson (13 May 1856 – 12 May 1936) was a British writer and photographer. Emerson was intelligent, well-educated and wealthy with a facility for clearly articulating his many strongly held opinions. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.

    Life

    Emerson was born on La Palma Estate, a sugar plantation near Encrucijada, Cuba[1] belonging to his American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson and British mother, Jane, née Harris Billing. He was a distant relative of Samuel Morseand Ralph Waldo Emerson. He spent his early years in Cuba on his father’s estate.

    During the American Civil War he spent some time at Wilmington, Delaware, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father.

    He was schooled at Cranleigh School where he was a noted scholar and athlete. He subsequently attended King’s College London, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge in 1879 where he earned his medical degree in 1885.

    In 1881 he married Miss Edith Amy Ainsworth and wrote his first book while on his honeymoon.The couple eventually had five children.

    He bought his first camera in 1881 or 1882 to be used as a tool on bird-watching trips with his friend, the ornithologist A. T. Evans. In 1885 he was involved in the formation of the Camera Club of London, and the following year he was elected to the Council of the Photographic Society and abandoned his career as a surgeon to become a photographer and writer. As well as his particular attraction to nature he was also interested in billiards, rowing and meteorology.

    After the publication of Marsh Leaves in 1895, generally considered to be his best work, Emerson published no further photographs, though he continued writing and publishing books, both works of fiction and on such varied subjects as genealogy and billiards. In 1924, he started writing a history of artistic photography and completed the manuscript just before his death in Falmouth, Cornwall on 12 May 1936.

    In 1979 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.

    Photography as art

    Emerson’s passionate belief was that photography was an art and not a mechanical reproduction. In 1889 he published a controversial and influential book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, in which he explained his philosophy of art and straightforward photography. The book was described by one writer as “the bombshell dropped at the tea party” because of the case it made that truthful and realistic photographs would replace contrived photography. This was a direct attack on the popular tradition of combining many photographs to produce one image that had been pioneered by O. G. Reijlander and Henry Peach Robinson in the 1850s. Emerson denounced this technique as false and claimed that photography should be seen as a genre of its own, not one that seeks to imitate other art forms. All Emerson’s own pictures were taken in a single shot and without retouching, which was another form of manipulation that he strongly disagreed with, calling it “the process by which a good, bad, or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting”.

    Emerson also believed that the photograph should be a true representation of that which the eye saw. He vehemently pursued this argument about the nature of seeing and its representation in photography, to the discomfort of the photographic establishment.

    Initially influenced by naturalistic French painting, he argued for similarly “naturalistic” photography and took photographs in sharp focus to record country life as clearly as possible. His first album of photographs, published in 1886, was entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, and it consisted of 40 platinum prints that were informed by these ideas. See You Tube video of the photos

    Before long, however, he became dissatisfied with rendering everything in sharp focus, considering that the undiscriminating emphasis it gave to all objects was unlike the way the human eye saw the world. He then experimented with soft focus. Following contemporary optical theories, he produced photographs with one area of sharp focus while the remainder was unsharp. But he was unhappy with the results that this gave too, experiencing difficulty with accurately recreating the depth and atmosphere which he saw as necessary to capture nature with precision.

    Despite his misgivings, he took many photographs of landscapes and rural life in the East Anglian fenlands and published seven further books of his photography through the next ten years. In the last two of these volumes, On English Lagoons (1893) and Marsh Leaves (1895), Emerson printed the photographs himself using photogravure, after having bad experiences with commercial printers.

    His main photography books are:

    In the end Emerson found that his defence of photography as art failed, and he had to allow that photography was probably a form of mechanical reproduction. The pictures the Robinson school produced may have been “mechanical”, but Emerson’s may still be considered artistic, since they were not faithful reproductions of a scene but rather having depth as a result of his one-plane-sharp theory. When he lost the argument over the artistic nature of photography, Emerson did not publicise his photographic work but still continued to take photographs.

  • Eugene Atget

    The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that
    was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from
    1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm
    wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply
    about the small traders, street musicians, actors, artists, ribbon sellers, etc., who were being
    squeezed out of their livings by modernisation. He also cared for the architecture of the republic,
    much of which was crumbling and in a state of squalor, just waiting to be demolished. Atget
    was motivated more by the need to re-create, preserve and document the old city’s existence
    than by a desire to create imagery for sale.
    It’s not difficult to imagine these
    works as paintings. (Compare Atget’s
    Bitumiers with Gustave Caillebotte’s The
    Floor Scrapers, for example.) You’ll find
    more Atget images in the Bridgeman
    Art Library. Follow the link on the OCA
    student website. Some of Atget’s work
    showed surrealist elements. Look at his
    famous ‘corset shop’ photograph, for
    example.
    Project Photography as art
    Water Lilies Eugène Atget. Not Paris this time, but recognisably
    in a fine art tradition i.e. Monet.
    Bitumiers

  • Jacob Aue Sobol

    Jacob is a member of Magnum Photos. Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, Rita Castelotte Gallery in Madrid and RTR Gallery in Paris also represent him.

    Jacob was born in Denmark, in 1976 and grew up in Brøndby Strand in the suburbs south of Copenhagen. He lived as an exchange student in Strathroy, Canada from 1994-95 and as a hunter and fisherman in Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland from 2000-2002. In Spring 2006 he moved to Tokyo, staying there 18 months before returning to Denmark in August 2008. He now lives and works in Copenhagen.

    After studying at the European Film College, Jacob was admitted to Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography in 1998. There he developed a unique, expressive style of black-and-white photography, which he has since refined and further developed.

    Sabine: In the autumn of 1999 he went to live in the settlement Tiniteqilaaq on the East Coast of Greenland. Over the next three years he lived mainly in this township with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter but also photographing. The resultant book Sabine was published in 2004 and the work was nominated for the 2005 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

    Gomez-Brito family: In the summer of 2005 Jacob travelled with a film crew to Guatemala to make a documentary about a young Mayan girl’s first journey to the ocean. The following year he returned by himself to the mountains of Guatemala where he met the indigenous family Gomez-Brito. He stayed with them for a month to tell the story of their everyday life. The series won the First Prize Award, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo 2006.

    I, Tokyo: In 2006 he moved to Tokyo and during the next two years he created the images from his resent book I, Tokyo. The book was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award 2008 and published by Actes Sud (France), Apeiron (Greece), Dewi Lewis Publishing (Great Britain), Edition Braus (Germany), Lunwerg Editores (Spain), Peliti Associati (Italy) and Mets & Schilt (The Netherlands)

    Bangkok Encounter:2008

    2009 Home, Copenhagen.

    Arrivals and Departures – a journey from Moscow to Beijing – in co-operation with Leica Camera.

  • Harandani Dikko Notes

    Mali website a bit claustrophobic

    La moustiquaire  beautiful black and white images through mosquito nets. Can’t download any of the text. Has facebook page.

  • Emeka Okerere Rough Notes

    Nigeria  website

    Much more voyeuristic and less engaged than eg Michael Tsegaye. Performance photography,

    Artist’s statement

    Emeka Okereke born in 1980 is a Nigerian photographer who lives and works between Africa and Europe, moving from one to the other on a frequent basis. He came in contact with photography in 2001. He is a member of Depth of Field (DOF) collective, a group made up of six Nigerian photographers.

    Presently, his works oscillate between diverse mediums. He uses photography, poetry, video and collaborative projects to address issues pertinent to his convictions. His works deal mainly with the questions of co-existence (beyond the limitations of predefined spaces), otherness and self-discovery. Often times they are subtle references to the socio-political issues of our times.

    Another aspect of his practise lies in project organising which artistic interventions to promote exchanges cutting across indigenous and international platforms.

    To this effect he organized the first ever photographic exchange projects between a school in France and one in Nigeria involving the Fine Art School of Paris and Yaba College of Arts and Technology Lagos. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of “Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project” an annual photographic project which assembles up to ten artists from Africa towards a roadtrip across Africa. There has been three editions of the project since 2009. Through Emeka Okereke Photography & Projects, he co-ordinates projects based on exchanges. The most recent of these projects include: Crossing Compasses, Lagos-Berlin Photo Exchange (May – June 2012) and Converging Visions: Nigeria – Netherlands Photo Exchange (June – September 2012)

    In 2003, he won the Best Young Photographer award from the AFAA “Afrique en Création” in the 5thedition of the Bamako Photo Festival of photography. He has a Bachelors/Masters degree from the National Fine Art School of Paris and has exhibited in biennales and art festivals in different cities of the world, notably Lagos, Bamako, Cape Town, London, Berlin, Bayreuth, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, Brussels, Johannesburg, New York, Washington, Barcelona, Seville, Madrid, Paris, etc. He has also won several awards both in Nigeria and Internationally.

    Invisible borders: Trans-African Photography Project

    In 2009, I founded a project which every year unites up to ten African artists – photographers, writers, film makers and art historians on a road trip across Africa in a bid to reflect on exchanges across geographical borders. The core concept of this project is deeply rooted in the philosophy of movement and the ardent need to transcend inflicted limitations, by creating a crossbreed of realities which in turn offers the possibility of an extension of oneself beyond predefinitions.

    There has been four editions of the road trip project with journeys to Mali, Senegal, Ethiopia and Gabon – always departing from Lagos Nigeria.  I have taken part and coordinated all  four editions, travelling across over 15 countries in the process.

    During the trips, my works consisted of images, writings and films which looks at the intricate interactions between people and their spaces as experienced in the Africa of today – that friction between people and space in the quest for existence and co-existence. Furthermore, these works testify to an Africa at the brink of a turning point, that point where the new is struggling its way out of the old…and we are the signs as well as symptoms.

    Sao Tome

    It is a small Island with only 180,000 inhabitants. Everything man-made seems to be engulfed by the freshness of nature. There are more trees and forests than people and due to this, the people have a unique relationship with nature. Food is abundant because the land and plants are far from barren. All year round the trees produce all kinds of fruits. It is an Island of immense greens. Where only the thought of the concept of selling “bio” foods at acutely exorbitant prices becomes immediately ridiculous.

    In the way of material acquisition, we do not see much. The cityscape is plagued with old dilapidated building of obviously Portuguese architecture. One could tell that much has not been done in terms of an independent advancement since its independence from Portugal in 1975.

    The buildings are chipping away with every passage of time, with no scheme towards preservation talk more of restoration – they just stand there obtrusively like phantoms of a colonial past, creating a picture of people meandering through “beautiful” shacks and rubbles. But all of this is perfectly cocooned every inch of the way, by the freshness and liveliness of the many plants.

    Rituals Lagos 2001-2003

    This project was one of the first body of works produced at the earlier stages of my carrer. It explores the relationship between body and light. These works won the Afrique en Creation Price at the 2003 Bamako festival of Photography.

     

  • Michael Tsegaye Rough Notes

    Michael Tsegaye, Ethiopia,  portfolio website

    Born in 1975, Michael Tsegaye lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He received his diploma in painting from Addis Ababa University’s School of Fine Arts and Design in 2002, but soon gave up painting after he developed an allergy to oil paint. He subsequently found his real passion in photography and has made of it not only a profession, but a way of expressing a very particular voice.

    “As a photographer I try as much as possible to escape being pigeonholed. I place myself among my peers (photographers and painters) across the world. While the spirit of my culture — its traditions in music, poetry and literature — informs my photography, my goal is that of any artist: to understand my life and standpoint in the 21st century, and express these through art.”

    Future memories chronicles the urbanization of various neighborhoods in Addis Ababa.

    Chasms of the soul  images are of gravestones in Ethiopia. When a person dies, his or her relatives place a photograph onto the tombstone and also inscribe a short history of the deceased. Thinking about the family’s photographs, and the idea of memorials and loss, I am struck by the personal sense of damage that these images—and the air that falls about them—evoke. As a result of time, those buried continue to experience a second death: the gradual deterioration of their entombed identity.

    Ethiopia at work 10 years ago it was said that it took a full day for the average farmer to walk to the closest road. This prevented farmers from communicating with neighbours or engaging in independent small-scale market activity with each other. But in the Wollo region of Ethiopia, I came across a new market that was created by the building of a road that was still under construction. (2008)

    Working Girls ll Commercial sex workers who live in Sebategna, a busy neighborhood in Addis Abeba close to the central bus station and Merkato (the largest open-air market in Africa). (2009) Black and White chiaroscuro.

    North Road  Impressions of northern Ethiopia along the road that leads from Addis Abeba to Wello, Tigrai, Gonder, and Gojjam. (2008) Full saturated colour.

    Ankober (2007) Misty atmospheric Black and White

    Arenguade (2011) Semi-abstract patchwork images of Ethiopian fields taken from a plane. Colour.

    Afar (2011) Erta Ale active volcano in Eastern Ethiopia Danakil depression. Black and white textures and rock formations.

  • An My-Le

    http://www.anmyle.com

     

  • Willie Doherty

    Willie Doherty (born 1959) is an artist from Northern Ireland, who has mainly worked in photography and video.

    His website images

    Doherty was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and from 1978 to 1981 studied at Ulster Polytechnic in Belfast. Many of his works deal with The Troubles. As a child he witnessed Bloody Sunday in Derry, and much of his work stems from the knowledge that many photos of the incident did not tell the whole truth. Some of his pieces take images from the media and adapt them to his own ends.

    His works explore the multiple meanings that a single image can have. Some of Doherty’s earliest works are of maps and similar images accompanied by texts in a manner similar to the land art of Richard Long, except that here the text sometimes seems to contradict the image.

    Doherty’s video pieces are often projected in a confined space, giving a sense of claustrophobia. The videos themselves sometimes create a mood that has been compared to film noir.

    Doherty has acknowledged the importance of the Orchard Gallery in Derry as a venue where he could see modern art in his formative years. Doherty was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994 and 2003, and has represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1993, Great Britain at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 2003 and Northern Ireland at the 2007 Venice Biennale. He was a participant in dOCUMENTA

     

  • The Zone System

    to be further elaborated

    Human vision is far superior to any camera in terms of the range of tones it can encompass within a single field of vision.

    Early photographic emulsions were considerably more sensitive to blue light than to other colours on the spectrum of visible light. This meant that landscape photographs, particularly those made on clear days, had completely blown-out skies as the negatives were much denser in the skies than the foreground, resulting in loss of detail in the (positive) print.

    Edward Muybridge made a library of clouds and skies that would be layered with a negative where the sky detail was absent in order to make photographs that were nearer to human perception.

    The Zone System by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer (1889-1963) is a way to visualise how the tones visible in a scene can most effectively be rendered onto the photographic negative.

    Adams (1981, 60) described the zone scale and its relationship to typical scene elements:

    Zone Description
    0 Pure black
    I Near black, with slight tonality but no texture
    II Textured black; the darkest part of the image in which slight detail is recorded
    III Average dark materials and low values showing adequate texture
    IV Average dark foliage, dark stone, or landscape shadows
    V Middle gray: clear north sky; dark skin, average weathered wood
    VI Average Caucasian skin; light stone; shadows on snow in sunlit landscapes
    VII Very light skin; shadows in snow with acute side lighting
    VIII Lightest tone with texture: textured snow
    IX Slight tone without texture; glaring snow
    X Pure white: light sources and specular reflections

     

    Adams (1981, 52) distinguished among three different exposure scales for the negative:

    • The full range from black to white, represented by Zone 0 through Zone X.
    • The dynamic range comprising Zone I through Zone IX, which Adams considered to represent the darkest and lightest “useful” negative densities.
    • The textural range comprising Zone II through Zone VIII. This range of zones conveys a sense of texture and the recognition of substance.

    Adams and Archer sought to refine and better manage some if the many variables that affected exposure, such as developer formulae and development times, so that the photographer could more strictly control the contrast and range of tones rendered.

    In reality both film and digital sensors can render many more ‘zones’ than just eleven. But reminds us that when you point a light meter at an object it reads it as mid grey (zone 5). Therefore the photographer has to decide where in the scene they wish Zone V to be in order to control exposure properly.

    In colour photography this also needs to be adjusted to allow for the fact that different colours correspond to different tones – yellows are better slightly over-exposed while reds and blues under-exposed.

    Exercise 1.8 The Zone System in Practice

    ——————————————
    TASK Demonstrate your awareness of the principles of the zone system and your ability to take accurate light readings by producing 3 photographs taken in relatively high dynamic range. The exposure should render as much detail as possible in the brightest and darkest areas of the photograph. Collate these and any reflections.

    My reflections on the zone system:

    The system sounds simple but in practice is quite complicated because much depends not only on the extreme white and black points where detail needs to be preserved, but the overall balance of dark and light tones that affect perception of clipping and also the desired key of the image for aesthetic reasons. This means that quite a lot of experimentation is needed to select the metering point that will give the desired result.

    In digital photography, the important point is the preservation of detail in the image that will be available for post-processing rather than any ‘correct exposure’ in the unreliable LCD screen. It is therefore best to have the highlight clipping warning turned on, and also to review the histograms as one works.

    In practice with images of the type of dynamic range I found on the sunniest day in winter, I could adjust both highlights in images exposed for the shadows and shadows in images exposed for the highlights equally easily to regain detail where I wanted them.

    The zone system is certainly a useful guide, but will require a lot of practice to gain real confidence. Alternative methods are auto-bracketing, or using the camera’s matrix metering system together with the highlight clipping warning and exposure compensation where necessary. These two are arguably quicker unless I get really confident.

    The Images

    These images were taken along the river Cam on a sunny day. All the images had both slight black and slight white clipping and were just outside the Dynamic Range of my camera. I used Spot metering and experimented with different metering points to try and reflect the image I had in mind.
    Image 1: Graffiti

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    In Graffiti my interest was in maintaining detail in the sunlight on the silver graffiti rather than the dark bridge.

    Graffiti 1

    My first attempt took as mid grey the bright grass at the back assuming this was a mid-tone. But this image was much lighter than I wanted with too much clipping on the graffiti and very washed-out. Although the grass was mid-tone for the image as a whole, it was not mid-tone for the image I wanted.

    Graffiti 2My second attempt took the lighter path as the mid-tone. This then pushed all the other tones darker, giving me more detail on the graffiti.

    In post-processing in Lightroom I found though that there was not much difference in what I could do with the image – adjusting the highlights, shadows, exposure and contrast I could achieve pretty much the same effect with either image.

    Image 2: Bridge

    In this image I wanted to highlight the dot of the duck and I was also interested in the white detail and reflections of the V shapes. Again I was not so interested in the shadows except as background contrast.

    Bridge

    This second image was also just outside the dynamic range of my camera with both slight black and white clipping. But because the very white area takes up less of the image, choosing the grass as mid grey worked better because the smaller area of highlight clipping is less noticeable. I took further shots using the water, but that lightened the image too much. Metering from the lighter sky at the back became too dark.

    Image 3: Wier

    In this third image the dynamic range was not as great as it first appeared except for some bright sparkles on the water. The blacks were just within range. The image on the left was spot metered on the water, pushing everything too dark – the spot metre picked up the very tiny bright sparkles rather than the larger grey areas between. The second image I metered on the white water bottom left giving a wider tonal range.

    weit 1 weir 2