Bitter Harvest, the media is the message

In the picture of the woman with the two children, the media chosen, black and white, serves to strongly support the feeling of desolation and hopelessness captured in the image. The empty dish, the lack of a father figure and the makeshift tent are also a great help in demonstrating the hard times these people are going through. Also, the angle that the photographer decided to use seems to be the one of a person looking with pity at the suffering and pain that his subjects are living.

In the second picture, the color media brings an impression of hope and life to the image. Even though the sky is really dark and cloudy, the sun still shines and the man and the woman seem to be looking ahead, into the future, into better times. They stand together with a confident look, like they are saying "these are hard times , but we will get through them". By shooting the picture at this angle, the photographer makes us looks at his subjects like they are on a podium, like they are heroes. But the same picture taken with black and white film would have not had the same hopeful impact.

Joyce Tenneson vs the Pictorialists

Do I see a relationship between the work of Joyce Tenneson and the pictorialists photographers?

Yes I do. Joyce's pictures have that "soft glow" quality that is found in the pictorialists work. Her usage of sepia tones, soft focus and just the overall look of her works certainly remind me of Gertrude Kasebier's work. The feeling of the pictures is also very similar, the calm and beauty of woman resting, the certain look of peace and quiet that emanates from them is also another reminder of the pictorialism work that I have seen.

Gertrude and the dots : a critique on pictorialism

This is a portrait of a young woman done by the photographer Gertrude Kasebier. The technique used here is pictorialism. The image has a sepia tone and the subject is sitting on a big chair, looking softly at the photographer, holding a little creamer.

I believe that the photographer used the pictorialism technique in this picture so that the image would resemble a painting and therefore, could be looked at more as a piece of art than as a picture alone. The beautiful softness of the image is also due to the technique used in the creation of the portrait. When I look at this image I can really embrace the beauty of the woman, the softness of the image also adds a lot to the feeling of the picture, of the emotion that comes from her eyes.

I am amazed at how sharp the woman appears. All the little details on her dress and hair, are just really beautiful. The way the photographer interacted with the subject probably had lots to do in the resulting image. If the photographer wanted to create a vision of happiness, calm and motherly love, then I can say that he was successful without any second thoughts.

Big Ideas, Large Format

Ah! the large format! This assignment was one I was waiting to do since the beginning of the year. I had used a large format camera in the past, my step dad owns a even larger one, a 8x10 I think, and I always wanted to learn more about them and mostly, take more pictures using the technology.

My and my partner for the assignment tried different types of picture. We tried to a city scape and for that we even played with the controls on the side of the cameras to make the "accordeon" part change from a straight angle to a slightly curved one. The results did not really show that the angle had been changed, and the pictures were overexposed so I did not decide to post any of those images.

The ones I am showing here are by far my favorite. In the first image I wanted to show the moving traffic on each side of me while I was standing still. Since it was a bright sunny day , the moving cars did not leave much of a mark on the images, but still, the result is quite nice, if you look carefully you can even see the ghostly prints left by the moving cars. The other picture I have here, "Matte with a stick", really amazed me when I first saw it in the dark room. I had wanted to create a ghost portrait of myself, which is kind of going with a theme I have been digging into in my personal work, and the results are just better than I expected. What I did was quite simple. We took a long exposure with a very small aperture and I left the frame for a third of the exposure time, right in the middle. The results are beyond what I had planned for. I am really happy with it.