iJourneys

John Gough Photography

Why I Love Leiter

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Some years ago I went to a Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern, I sat in front of one of his paintings, which one I don’t know, but it was like many of his works made up of abstract rectangles of colour. I sat there, and tears appeared in my eyes. It was an emotional response to this amazing art. Why? There is no reason except that I suppose there had to be some connection at an unconscious level.  

It happened again recently at a Saul Leiter exhibition in Milton Keynes. (On until the 2cd June 2024 at the Milton Keynes Gallery). I cried again. It may be me. Perhaps I am oversensitive but imagine the power of a photograph that can bring tears to your eyes.

Leiter’s work is sublime, it lifts street photography into an art form, it captures fragments of life. We know they are fleeting moments because people are captured by Leiter through condensation soaked shop windows, from the restrictions of a car window, between railings or buildings, or in reflections in shop windows. They are glimpses of time.

The colours are beautifully muted using early Kodachrome film, which adds to the ethereal feel. They are more often portrait than landscape. Again, this gives the images a look of being caught between one event and another. People are seen in private moments. They are captured doing nothing in particular, just the ordinary actions of everyday life, walking, talking standing and sitting.

Coming back to Rothko, Leiter’s work has elements of abstraction. Pictures within pictures, distortions from rain soaked windows, figures out of focus, blurred foreground, a tantalising view, seen through a crack in an advertising hoarding. Every day life in New York captured by a shard of light in the lens of his camera. The beauty of the ordinary created by a genius.

(I have collated some of Leiter’s work here. Also, Rothko for reference. There are numerous films on YouTube including the one above, and lovely books on Amazon where you can luxuriate in his photography.)

Exploring the Artistry of Wolfgang Tillmans

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Wolfgang Tillmans

I was looking through the medals and acceptances awarded at this year’s London Salon. The majority of awarded images were brilliantly creative. It is clear that to win photography distinctions today it is not enough to point your camera at a fabulous sunset, anyone with a smartphone can do that. To make waves now requires real creative input from the photographer.

Making waves brings me to the world of Wolfgang Tillmans, a photographer who is renowned for his innovative approach and his ability to creatively capture the essence of life. Tillmans’s work crosses conventional boundaries, blurring the lines between photography, abstraction, and conceptual art. I love his later work and I have curated some of his abstract images here. There are also videos about Tillmans here

Abstract and Conceptual Explorations

Tillmans’ career started with traditional photography, but later he started to explore abstraction and conceptual art. He experimented with the photographic process itself, manipulating light, colour, and exposure to create mesmerizing abstract compositions. These works often evoke emotions, making viewers revaluate their own interpretation of the images.

Recognition and Influence

Wolfgang Tillmans is the only photographer to have won the prestigious Turner Prize which he achieved in 2000. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, solidifying his place as one of the most influential artists of our time.

Wolfgang Tillmans Exhibitions

Tillmans curates his photographs in unique and thought-provoking ways. These often immersive installations allow visitors to experience his art interactively, blurring the line between the observer and the observed. He rejects the conventions of photographic presentation, developing connections between his pictures and the social space of the exhibition. Unframed prints are taped to the walls or clipped and pinned. Framed photographs appear alongside magazine pages. Images are grouped on walls and tabletops as photocopies, colour or black-and-white photographs, and video projections.

“I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment,” Tillmans has said. “They’re also always a world that I want to live in.”

“The viewer…should enter my work through their own eyes, and their own lives”

Wolfgang Tillmans

His exhibition To Look without Fear, is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 9 November 2023 – 3 March 2024 

Photo London Review 2022

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Photo London Review 2022

If your inspiration is flagging I suggest a visit to Photo London. The event which is held over four days at Somerset House in London, is back after a break of two years due to Covid.

Visiting Photo London you get the chance to visit around one hundred exhibitors. These are commercial galleries worldwide that specialise in the sale of photographic art. As you walk from one gallery exhibit to the next, you are blown away by the imagination and craft created by some of the world’s top creative professional photographers.

My interest this year was nature and abstract art. Here is some of the photographic work that caught my attention.

Katherin Linkersdorff

Katherin has developed a process which robs flowers of their pigment. She treats the flowers for several months and then photographs them. She’s inspired by the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, the acceptance of transience and imperfection. It creates a beautiful ethereal effect.

Explore her work here and on her website.

Santeri Tuori

A Finnish fine art photographer who photographs skies, and nature. What caught my eye were his images of water lilies.

There is a lovely selection of his work on the Purdy Hicks website

Eeva Karhu

Eeva’s work is abstract, often the amalgamation of many images captured while she walks often down the same path outside her door in her native Helsinki.

There is a selection of her work on the Purdy Hicks website

This video explains the process behind her photography

Edouard Taufebach and Bastien Pourtout

These photographers create a panorama of repeated patterns.

The recurrence of the similar shapes and elements with the minimalistic colour leads the viewers to gauge the incongruity within an appearance of a congruent field of the photograph. The dissimilarity creates a subtle flow of rhythm synonymous with the circuits of movement in nature. These are the images constructed by the France-based photographer-duo Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout, as they like to say, “In the exchange and confrontation of two points of view. This creates a multiple and subjective image of reality.”

The photomontage The Blue of the Sky, for which the duo won the Swiss Life 4 Hands 2020 Prize, represents the sky dotted with the swallows.

This is a video in which Edouard Taufebach explains their three year project to create a collage of Marlene Dietrich images.

Learn more about their work on their website

Jennifer Latour

I apologise in advance but this is an idea I have to borrow from Vancouver based photographer Jennifer Latour. Bound Species is a portfolio of work which splices different plant species together.

In the series, her plant creations transport us to the vibrant technicolor of a warm spring day. “It was brought together from my love for design, my work in effects, and my photography,” she explains to IGNANT. “I splice different plants and flora together to create their own unique breed of species”. Combined with frosted natural scenes, peculiar cemetery trees, and anonymous portraits drenched in sunshine, Latour’s poetic and tender imagery elicits feelings of positivity and calm. Despite referencing a common object in art history, Latour’s spliced creations are surprising in their balance of color, minimalism, and innocence, transmitting visual pleasure and contentment in the viewer.

IGNANT

I have collected some of her work here and there is more work for sale on Artsy

New Artists

Photo London is so worth visiting because it introduced me to these new artists. This is photography I have never seen before and probably would never see.

These are not the sort of images that appear every week in Amateur Photographer.

Christine Ellger Flower Photography

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I am constantly looking for inspirational flower photography, and recently I have been loving the work of Christine Ellger.

BIOGRAPHY
Christine Ellger was born in Germany in 1948. Her interest in photography was heightened with the advent of digital photography and the infinite possibilities it offers in terms of processing. Since she retired in 2010, Christine Ellger has been continually photographing the world she has been discovering on her travels. She collects photographs and subsequently retouches them, conferring a magical aspect to them stemming directly from her imagination. The originality of her work is thus based on its fantastical and hyperrealist rendering. At first glance, the spectator cannot make out the photographic technique used. Hyperrealist style is the identical reproduction of a photograph as a painting. This painting is often so realistic that the spectator comes to question the very nature of the work. This well and truly applies to Christine Ellger’s bewitching world. 

Christine Ellger is known mainly for her fantastical composites but she has a considerable catalogue of flower photography. I have collated her beautiful flower photography here. Like her composites, they have a dreamy ethereal quality.

The learning for my own flower photography is:

  • Usually single flowers and pairs
  • The flowers are close up and fill the frame. On some only part of the flower is shown
  • The square format usually works well
  • Dark backgrounds and use of texture and light. The backgrounds include several dark colours.
  • Plain background and textured flowers rather than textured backgrounds and plain flowers.

Brilliant

Hyper Collage Photography

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Ysabel Le May Hyper Collage Photography

Hyper collage photography has developed out of collage, which has long been a technique used in both art and photography. Man Ray was an early exponent of photography collage in the 1930s. Jump forward, and we are all aware of the images created using Photoshop layers to build composites. Often to create fantasy effects. Andrea Hargreaves is one of my favourite artists using this technique.

….but what is collage? The Museum of Modern Art defines a collage as: a “technique and resulting work of art in which fragments of paper and other materials are arranged and glued to a supporting surface”.

Hyper collage photography is a technique that combines multiple images that are manipulated using Photoshop. For example, Jim Kazanjian uses the technique to combine photographs of different architectural features to create fantastical buildings and landscapes.

However, what has grabbed my attention. Are photographers that are using natural phenomena to create fine art hyper collage images.

Fine Art Hyper Collage Photography

Ysabel Le May

I first came across Ysabel le May at the Saatchi Art. Where her work sells for upwards of $4000.

She is based in Texas and her art has been exhibited all over the world.

Ysabel Le May can be summed up simply: W.O.W. It stands for ‘Wonderful Other Worlds’, which she creates through the process of hypercollage. 

Saatchi Art

She photographs the natural world and uses collage to piece the images together to create a fantastical depiction of nature. She calls her images baroque tableaux.

The video above demonstrates the process she uses.

Lisa Frank

Lisa Frank is an American artist who describes her work as looking to communicate those momentary flashes of connectedness with nature.

She creates tapestries and still life composites using natural materials.

It is my purpose to draw the viewer into a local world as it hasn’t been seen before.

Lisa Frank

You can follow her process here.

Cas Slagboon

Cas Slagboom is a Dutch artist. Again he uses natural objects but often combined with human figures to create a fantasy feel.

For me, photography is more than capturing the perfect moment. Every time I try to capture my astonishment with a single photo, I am disappointed. This was not what I want to see and feel. It is larger, more complex, more diffuse. I have to bring all those fragments together. In compositions in which they together tell a story that transcends my understanding. So, that every time I look at it, I can be surprised again.

Cas Slagboon

All the photographic technology we have to capture our world in images may give us idea that we really see it. ………I use modern technology to find a language that exceeds the photographic moment, so there is sufficient room for the complexity of what we call reality.

Cas Slagboon

Summary

I included the two quotes from Cas Slagboon because they sum up my own feelings. That it is difficult to capture the reality of the moment with just one photograph. I have been experimenting with the Pep Ventosa style of photography and mixing abstract and reality to capture what we really see and feel.

Hyper collage photography is just one more technique on that journey.

Pete Souza: The Way I See It

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The Way I See It, is a documentary about former Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza. Recording his personal journey as an image maker, with top secret clearance and total access to President Obama.

As a photographer, the film is interesting because it shows the way Pete Souza worked. It is accompanied by hundreds of examples of his work, which are wonderfully clear and compassionate.

Shade

On another level, the documentary is a comparison of the Obama presidency with that of his successor Donald Trump. Souza was apolitical and photographed four presidents including both the Reagans and the Obamas. What changed was what he saw as Trump’s total disregard for the Office of President.

His book Shade documents why he considered Trump unfit for office.

Pete Souza Photography

It is his however his photography that I find spellbinding. The photographs are more than just a record of the Presidency. OK, the Obama’s are undoubtedly photogenic, but the intimacy he has been allowed to capture shows a trusting and valued relationship between President and photographer.

His range is impressive, from formal group portraits with a medium format camera and studio lights. To press photography with flash and long and wide lenses. To intimate portraits indoors using just available light.

You can view his work in his book, Obama an Intimate Portrait, which contains over 300 pages of his Obama photographs

Precious historical documents . . . vividly human and often funny . . . these images tell the true story of a presidency that words have failed’ Jonathan Jones, Guardian

The Way I See It: Video

Watch, The Way I see It on Prime Video either rent for £1.99 or buy.

Bailey Portraits

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It is strange isn’t it that you have views on everything but you know nothing. My view of the photographer David Bailey was that he was a famous fashion photographer of the ’60s, who went on to shoot some portraits of celebrities. For example the famous photograph of Michael Caine with a cigarette.

What I had not understood was the depth of his work and his astonishing output over the years since the 1960’s.

At Christmas I was lucky enough to receive Baileys Stardust, the book that accompanied a major exhibition of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2014.

The portraits in this book were personally selected by Bailey from his work over fifty years. These include actors, writers, musicians, politicians, film-makers, models, and artists. As well as the people he encountered on his travels to Australia, India, Sudan and Papua New Guinea.

It is uncanny how he can bring something fresh to faces that we are all familiar with. Creating something extraordinary.

As Bailey said:

“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary”

Resources

I have attached a documentary about the irascible but brilliant Bailey, and collated some of his portraits here

The book, Bailey’s Stardust may be about to go out of print. This version is in Spanish, but get it while you can. It is the photographs that you will want to savour.

Glenys Garnett

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I have long been a fan of Glenys Garnett, her creative flower photography and landscape work are an inspiration.

RPS Virtual Events

I mention this because the RPS is hosting a virtual event where Glenys will be talking about creative landscapes. It will cover:

In this 60 minute presentation Glenys Garnett will give you some overview and insight into her approach to capturing and creating landscape imagery. She will share her influences and the techniques she uses both in-camera and in Photoshop to show how she goes about creating her composite landscapes.
Glenys will also explain the tools you need to make a start in developing your own creative images.

The RPS is also running an online workshop where Glenys will be talking about Making Creative Landscape Images. It is restricted to six people only, but I have written to the RPS to try and make the recordings available.

Links to the Work of Glenys Garnett

Meantime if you want to follow Glenys and sample her wonderful creative images, find her Twitter feed. There are new wonderful photographs almost every day.

To see her work I have created a Pinterest board, but it is just a sample of her vast output.

Glenys is also very generous in sharing her techniques and knowledge. You can subscribe to her YouTube feed here.

One of the things I been practising during the lockdown is to imagine a scene and then to attempt to create it. This has been more relevant during these times because our freedom of movement has been curtailed. Choosing a location, turning up and hoping an opportunity will present itself is no longer so accessible. This has made me look inward more and create with what is available.

With this in mind, as we come out of lockdown. I am going to take time to study these tutorials on YouTube and the RPS, in the hope that I can share in some of the Glenys Garnett creative magic.

Joshua K Jackson

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Joshua K. Jackson is a British photographer based in London, Working in colour, photographing everyday life in the capital. His work has been published worldwide and exhibited in the UK, USA and Europe.

Check out this series of videos about street photography and the work of Joshua K Jackson, promoted by Adobe.



Camera Wrist Strap

I have avoided dropping my camera so many times using a simple inexpensive wrist strap like this one. Cameras and expensive lenses do not bounce!

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Bruce Davidson

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Show me a grainy black and white photograph from the 1960s and I am sold. Which is welcome, because the work of Bruce Davidson is now on sale at Huxley-Parlour in London

I love the documentary photography of that time. Especially the work of Tony Ray-Jones, Marketa Luskacova, David Hurn, and Don McCullin.

Bruce Davidson [Magnum Photos] came to the UK from the States in the 1960s. On an assignment from Queen magazine to go and photograph the British.

Bruce Davidson Shoots the British

Driving around the country in a Hillman Minx for two months. He was able to capture the country as it transformed from pre-war to post-war. Gritty in many industrial areas that had not changed since the 1930s. A country still riven by class but changing rapidly.

“They gave me carte blanche because Cornell Capa told them, ‘If you want to get a beautiful set of pictures, let him take off. You will be surprised.’ And that’s what I did,” Davidson says.

His pictures were first published as Seeing Ourselves as an American Sees Us: A Picture Essay on Britain on April 12, 1961. “I was free to encounter life,” Davidson says. “I was open and didn’t have any agenda. There was a certain sense of sky and fog, of another place. That’s why those pictures are delicate – and I was delicate too. “

I have curated some of his photographs from that trip here.

Exhibition

You can visit the Bruce Davidson exhibition A United Britain. At Huxley-Parlour in Swallow St, between the 17th Jan and the 14th March.



Camera Wrist Strap

I have avoided dropping my camera so many times using a simple inexpensive wrist strap like this one. Cameras and expensive lenses do not bounce!

UK

USA