Thomas Kellner is a German fine-art photographer, lecturer and curator of photographic exhibition projects. He became known above all for his large-format photographs of famous architectural monuments, which, through many individual images and a shifted camera perspective, look like "photo mosaics". His numerous pinhole camera projects, including portraits, demonstrate that an image cannot be planned. Each portrait is unique and reveals a new side of photography to its viewer. Documentary photography however, not only mirrors a changing culture and society, but also bears witness to an evolving fine art photography. Kellner's architectural photography opens up a view of the polarity of a building. |
St. James' Church |
Everyman Cinema |
The original St. James' church building was consecrated in 1842 and 5 years later, the church was extended. The building has a stone foundation that was laid in 1900 and the completed church was consecrated by the Bishop of London in 1902.
The building was destroyed by World War II bombing, and the restored church was rededicated in 1952. The Church spire was completed in 1910, the spire stands 300 ft above sea level-this is how the church got the name "Church on the Hill" The tower is 21 feet square and 80 feet high. On top if this the spire rises to another 82 feet and the total height to the top is 170 feet. |
The Odeon Theatre was one of the original cinemas in the Oscar Deutsch owned Odeon Theatres Ltd. chain. It opened on 9th September 1936. Seating was originally provided for 1,827, with 1,217 in the stalls and 610 in the circle.
The Odeon’s rather small facade is covered with white faience tiles in the central section, with two bays either side that are covered in black faience tiles. On either side are a parade of shops on the ground floor with flats above, which hide the bulk of the auditorium section of the building. Inside the building, the decorative Art Deco styling is considered a prime example of 1930’s cinema styling and even created a style to itself, thanks due in this case to architect George Coles, it became known as the ‘Odeon style’. |
My favourite final response |
Evaluation |
I have chosen this as my favourite piece because it was the final one I produced after experimenting with the others. This meant that I was able to get a hand of the editing technique used and also look at Nicholas Kennedy Sitton's work. In some of his work he uses quite a vibrant colour palette so I decided to edit my photo to enhance that colour giving the final piece a more interesting look. I also looked more in depth at how far apart each circle was and experimented with that as well as how big the initial circle is. I believe that these elements is what made this final piece stand out from the rest. To improve, I could've attempted to make a more even circle so that the white lines wouldn't appear, however I think they give it more of a spiralling effect because they mark out the circles more. The church created the best effect for the twirling due to its shape and the tall spire, however I enjoy the colours of the everyman cinema with the vibrant blue and red which add interest to the image and make it less dull looking.
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For this strand, I went around trying to find buildings that showed signs of decay or that were deconstructed in any way. I was in Wood Green when I found one of the main buildings that I used. I liked this building because of the decay of the white paint that was once used on top and the deconstruction of the brickwork. Furthermore, I like that it wasn't just the wall but it had the coloured doors that also had their blue and red paint stripped slightly. The second place that I enjoyed photographing was the bridge tunnel. I liked the dim lighting and almost eeriness of it. The tunnel walls showed the most sign of decay which surrounds you completely. I liked the contrast in terms of deconstruction and decay for both locations as the first one is more the disintegration of the buildings structure itself, however the second one was more over time moss forming and rotting. To make the photos resemble Nadav's work more, I edited the images slightly so they weren't as vibrant and more subtle and neutral to give it that sense of disaster and tranquility combined. I did this by lowering the saturation and contrast of the images. I would've liked to be able to find examples of deconstruction and decay inside buildings to get more of a variety so if I were to improve and develop this task I would try and find buildings that are run down and maybe have more interesting elements inside like furniture or different materials other than bricks like glass. |
"Citizens of the 20th Century" - August Sander |
The theme of structure can be explored through series of images of the same or similar people or objects. This strategy is called typological study- a classification of subjects according to type. This approach first came about when the German photographer August Sander produced a project called 'Citizens of the 20th Century' where he took a series of portraits entitled 'The Face of Our Time' and categorised the portraits according to their profession and social class. Although the Nazis confiscated the first publication of Sander's work, and the majority of his negatives were later destroyed by fire, approximately 1,800 portrait negatives for People of the Twentieth Century survived, as well as Sander's notes and plans. Together with the existing vintage prints, they have provided the basis for the current reconstruction of Sander's ambitious project in book and exhibition form.
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Hilla Becher was a German artist born in 1931 in Siegen, Germany. She was one half of a photography duo with her husband Bernd Becher. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture including water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories around Europe and North America. They exhibited their work in sets or typologies, grouping of several photographs of the same type of structure. The are well known for presenting their images in grid formations. "By placing several cooling towers side by side something happened, something like tonal music; you don’t see what makes the objects different until you bring them together, so subtle are their differences." - Bernd and Hilla Becher. |
My inspirationBen Weeks
He returned from a trip to Lake Garda with a poster made up of 36 individual photos of various picturesque doors. I really like the variation of types of doors, materials, structures and designs of all the different doors. I find it really interesting the stark contrast between the doors found in Lake Garda and the doors found in London. I think the doors in Lake Garda are really fascinating to look at and explore so I would like to try and capture some of the doors in London in a more visually pleasing way. |
Herman Kolgen
Herman Kolgen’s series Dust Restriction is inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s collaboration "Elevage de Poussiere" where Man Ray photographed Duchamp’s iconic work The Large Glass (1915-1923) after it had collected one year’s worth of dust while Duchamp was in New York. In Dust, Kolgen references both aesthetic and process underlying Duchamp’s - and by extension Man Ray’s - work. Dust Restriction is derived from a larger body of work titled Dust which includes performances and installations featuring dust accumulations - allowing the viewer to perceive and hear dust on immense scale. |
I also decided to look at Eadweard Muybridge who is best known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. Muybridge began experimenting in photographing motion in 1872, when the railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved his point to Stanford. Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887. These consisted of photographs of various activities of human figures, clothed and naked, which were to form a visual compendium of human movements for the use of artists and scientists. I really like his work and how the images of motion are clear and you can almost see the movement happening. |
Pippin was a photographer in the 80s and worked with converted or improvised photographic equipment and kinetic sculptures. Frequently the resulting photographs are distorted or otherwise compromised by the manner of their construction, but the imperfections are seen as an important characteristic of the image, giving a link back to the object which was used as a camera.
In 1998, he was continuing his experiments in a San Francisco laundromat when it occurred to him to shoot a series of images of a person walking along the line of washing machines – an homage to Muybridge, the Englishman who emigrated to San Francisco and who there, in 1878, arranged twelve photographic cameras in line to analyse the movement of a galloping horse. |
I edited the GIF on photoshop by choosing the images that align with one another and layering all of them onto a blank page and creating a frame animation. After I did this, I used the elliptical marquee tool and added a mask layer to each layer of the animation. This gave the image a much cleaner cut circle and eliminated all of the black and unnecessary background
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