THOMAS STRUTH

Struth trained at the Dusseldorf Academy from 1973-1980. His early works consisted of huge black and white shots os streets in Japan, Europe and America. Through photographs he attempts to show the relationship between people and their modern day environment

In the mid-1980s Struth added a new dimension to his work when he started to produce family portraits. This was after a meeting with psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann. These works attempt to show the underlying social dynamics within a seemingly still photograph. His photos are usually praised for their clinical objectivity. He said that a photograph "has a clear language, one that speaks openly not only about its subjects ... but also very much about the attitude of the photographer toward these things. In this regard, a photograph is always objective."

Trained as a painter he even seems to imply that the best photography aspires to the condition of painting. Critics usually contrast these scenes of geometric serenity with the passionate cinematic photographs of Andreas Gursky. Unlike Struth, Gursky clearly believes that photography has surpassed and displaced painting

Like Atget his pictures are without people. Atget populated his pictures with the cities character in the form of objects and compositions. Struth's pictures, with their balance and perfection captures the essence of the city in a different way. The Crosby Street, New York (SoHo) (1978) and Sommerstrasse, Düsseldorf (1980) make these two very different cities look identical.

This is why, in Struth's museum photographs, the figures in the paintings seem uncannily more real than the actual, living people looking at them. In a photograph of people standing before a Seurat painting the painting itself is active, not the people staring at it. We recall that Seurat based his paintings on photographic principles. His famous photograph of The Chicago Art Institute has a balance that makes the frame almost become like a window on the wall, and the woman viewing an active member of the painting.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans

Despite rejecting the claim of “fine artist” like his French counterpart Eugene Atget, Walker Evans is widely viewed as the pioneer of the photographic art in America. With his seminal work “Ameriacn photographs” he became the first Photographer to have a standalone show in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. He is renowned for his documentary almost anti Photographic Style which is summed up by his mentor and friend Lincoln Kirstein when he says “Photography in itself almost probably does not interest him”

Evans always dreamed of being a writer and was heavily influenced by the work of T.S Elliot and Ernst Hemmingway which is evident in the dramatic anti-romantic nature of his work. Coming from a wealthy background, being the son of an Advertising Executive allowed Evans

to travel to Paris in his early 20’s where he learned from the photography of Eugene Atget. Returning to America after a year in Paris, armed with a new found French intellectualism and in the words of Kirstein began photographing “the contemporary civilisation of Eastern America and its dependencies as Atget gave gave us in Paris before the war” with shots of clear, hideous and beautiful detail.

American Photographs although lacking obvious continuity and physically existing as separate prints can be read as a series or collection of statements deriving from and presenting a consistent attitude. The opening picture of a photo-booth proclaims "Photos" and points us in ironically in the direction of what’s to follow. The photographs are almost always shot front on, with a rigorous directness. His eye is open and visible. There is no need to dramatize the material. It is already intensely dramatic.

The relationship of man and machinery in industrial America is a theme that is consistent throughout. Evans is obsessed with mans reliance on the machine and the obvious scarring of the landscape that results. He is concerned with the psychology of the people who use them. He shoots Architecture with a view to looking at the people behind it, those who use the building or those who built them. In the barbers shop picture he does the opposite simply shooting two empty chairs suggesting instead an absence of people.

Evans pictures to my mind have a humorous aspect to them. He sarcastically questions “good taste” architecture of the time, mimicking post revolutionary New England and colonial architecture moulded with stucco instead of being sculpted from stone. Symbolic fragments like that of the cracked iron cast moulding or pressed tin Corinthian capitals demonstrate this.

SPACE FRAMED: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE HUMAN HABITAT

Project Proposal

Michael Hayes

My proposal is to make a project concerned with contemporary patterns of habitation in the Irish landscape i.e. The housing estate.

During the course of this seminar I've found myself naturally drawn to the documentary style of Walker Evans and the survey-like work of Robert Adams. While it remains to be seen whether their approach to photography is appropriate to this project, I think it's a suitable starting point.

For me the housing estate is a subject that encompasses many of the topics we've already discussed such as the observation of the ordinary, the comparison of typologies, and man'scolonisation of the landscape. However, at this point, I'm probably most interested in capturing human occupancy at a smaller scale; how individuals' attempt to live within the boundaries handed to them, whether its just leaving a pair of shoes outside the front door or sitting on a garden wall having a chat.

In terms of presentation, I feel that a book/catalogue represents too unified an object given the subject matter. Therefore I propose (for now at least) that the final images will be presented as individual postcards on a typical, revolving newsagent's stand. There idea here would be that each image, though repeated many times, becomes an object itself which may transfer ownership from exhibition to audience and thereby leading to further fragmentation and decontextualisation.

Below are a series of preparatory images (taken from our studio project in cahir) that just show a number of different approaches to the subject and which might give a better idea of what I'm thinking of...

"The landscape is the place we live... we cannot therefore scan it without scanning ourselves."
- John Swarovski, introduction to The New West

Robert Adams work is focused on how the western landscapes of North America have been shaped by human influence. His photography takes a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgement of the subject matter.

Adams' was a professor of English at the University of Colorado before taking up photography. This background is clear in the way he addressed the destruction of the western landscape and discussed some of the attitudinal shifts that would be necessary for its future preservation,"if we call places by names that are accurate, we may ultimately find it easier to live in them". In a similar fashion Adams photographs offer a lesson in the value of candor. His picture make fresh what we think we have seen and know. He rediscovers the known landscape and returns it to a state similar to that found in survey photographs: strange, unknown and unnamed.
Unlike typical survey publications though, Adams' pictures are not accompanied by diagrams or maps. However the minimal amount of text serves to underline the scientific and informational purity of the pictures themselves. Their seemingly prosaic, unpictorial character gives them the semblance of images made for the purpose of date alone.
Meanwhile, Adams skillfully and subtly plays with the would-be objective and seemingly non-selective character of survey photography and uses it to his own subjective ends. For example, the separation of title from image, and the image's consequent isolation allows for a symbolical representation of a much larger idea of the West rather than a limited geographical area. For Adams, space is a stage without a centre, and his lack of a singular, clearly established subject corresponds to the apparent infinity of western expansion.

Garry Winogrand

Garry is born in 1928 in New York city and died in 1984 in Mexico. He made his first rentable appearance in 1963 at an exhibition at the museum of Modern art in New York . He was influenced by Walker Evans and Robert Frank and theirs respective publications. American photographs and the American . His first book is the Animal in 1969 which is a collection of pictures where he observes the connection between Animal and human. These photographs capture the evolution of the 20th and 21th century phenomenon . He photographed incessantly , mostly on the street and publishing journalistic images in numerous magazines. The main subject in this book The man in the crowd in 1998 is the relationship between people each other and the town. For Garry the street is as an enigma, a theater where everything is possible and he photographed the men , women, unknowns people. Most people who walk through in a city ignore it but he said the absolute opposite and spent most of his walking like hunting down and fellow citizens watching , looking and photographing. The famous picture of Winogrand shows women on the bench where we can see different groups and affinity on the same bench . He recording here so spontaneous , complexity as the banality of the city life. Through his book he shows some people alone or not and at the end of the book he submits a work on the crowd. In the crowd , the affective life made legible in faces and bodies in motion. In this part of the book , we often see violent and political scenes. The variation in the crowd picture are, in fact, so strenuous, the poses of bodies in motion so dissimilar.

CANDIDA HÖFER

 

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Candida Höfer (*1944) is a german photographer.

From 1973 to 1982 she studied at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf.
First she was studying film and from 1976 photography under Bernd Becher.
Along with Thomas Ruff, also from the Becher-Class, she was one of the first of Bechers students who took color-photographs and showed her works as slide-projections.

In the beginning Candida Höfer photographed the Turkish Immigrant Workers in Germany at different places like shops, cafés and parks.

Later the people disappeared completely from her photographs.
Höfer began to take color-photographs of interiors of public buildings. First there were rooms like offices, banks or waiting rooms. Later she specialized in large format photographs of "empty" interiors and social spaces.

She has been really interested in representing public spaces such as museums, libraries, national archives of opera houses - devoid of all human presence. 
The presence of human beings has become ever more keenly manifest in her "empty" rooms, attested to by the absence of those for whom the interiors or exteriors were actually built.
Höfers photographs of public spaces are sober and ascetic in feel.
The atmosphere is disturbed by neither visitors nor users. There is a great silence in the pictures.Also the colors attract more attention.

Often the photographs present the significant work of famous architects but this seems to be not really important.

If you look to Höfers photographs maybe you can imagine a world without people. Maybe you can just see these "empty" rooms in another way and forget everything what actually happens in these rooms.

BERND & HILLA BECHER

Bernd Becher (*1931; +2007) and Hilla Becher (*1934) are an photographer couple from Germany.

They are really famous for their black&white photographs of framework houses and industrial buildings like watertowers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, winding towers etcetera.
Both oft them studied at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf from 1957 to 1961.
There they get to know each other and began to work together.

Bernd and Hilla Becher are two of the most influential visual artists of our time.
Since the beginning of the 1960s together they have documented industrial buildings all over the world  with unparalleled systematicness. This passion has resulted photographs that are documents of cultural and technological history from a vanishing industrial era.

The most interesting thing for the Bechers is the fact, that the architecture of these industrial buildings is totally dictated by the function.  
Once Hilla Becher said it is like "sacred architecture of technique".

For the Bechers it is also very interesting, how different the buildings are in different countries.
The buildings have got many small details and that is what the Bechers want to show with  their also very detailed and precise photographs.

Their famous work should not have any social critic, only the documentary work is important for them.

It's all about the different basic forms of these industrial buildings.
That is also the reason, why the Bechers decided to take only black&white photos.
Something like for example a blue sky would only distract.
The best conditions for there photographs were diffused light, as little shadow as possible an no bright sun.

To describe the great work of the Bechers maybe these words of Paul Klee would be right ones: "Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes visible".

Joel Sternfeld

1. Wet n' Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida, September 1980

2. After A Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California 1979

3. McLean, Virginia, December 1978

4. The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, March 1979

Joel Sternfeld is born in 1944 in New York city. he is a fine art color photographer noted for his large format documentary pictures of the United States.

He has influenced a generation of color photographers including Andreas Grusky who borrows many of his techniques. Indeed , for his pictures he used a 8*10 view camera to render detail and the distance also allows Sternfeld to put more information in this pictures.

He write some books , the first is American prospects in 1987 which he explores the irony of human altered landscape in the united states , to make this books he photographed ordinary things , including unsuccessful towns, landscape and people. By the title he might be referring both the America's future with the relationship between the human and industrial, agricultural landscape. We can see , with some example that the work of light and color is an important element of his photographs. Color is for Joel never arbitrary and it's to connect elements and resonate emotions. For him colors add another level of complexity and he always maintains a balance between shade of colors and loaded details. To make this work he choose the time of the day and the quality of light. Many of this photographs are taken in the suburb , rail , road , river way, factories , gas station, motels and old buildings appear in these pictures. It's interesting because all of his photographs have a title , sometimes some text.

The other of this book is On the site, landscape in memorial , which is about the violence in America where is photographed sites of recent tragedies. He studied and photographed also the social class and stereotypes in America.

This primary tools are : distance, color, disjunction and humor !