Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012

I visited the National Portrait Gallery recently to see the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait prize.  The standard was excellent once again with some outstanding entries.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012 offers a unique opportunity to see sixty portraits by some of the most exciting contemporary photographers from around the world.

The images are drawn from editorial, advertising and fine art.  They explore a range of themes, styles and approaches to the contemporary photographic portrait, from formal commissioned portraits of famous faces to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family.

The competition is open to amateurs, students and established professionals.

A selection of the photographs are shown below:

"Mark Rylance" by Spencer Murphy

This portrait is of Mark Rylance, an actor.  Actors make good subjects for portraiture as there is no awkwardness or discomfort in front of the camera.  The purple background in this portrait contrasts well with the subject's green eyes.

"Margarita Teichroeb" by Jordi Ruiz Cirera

The subject of this portrait, Margarita is a Mennonite from a colony in Bolivia.  Photography is forbidden for Mennonites, which explains her awkward expression.  The light from the window provides excellent illumination of the subject.

"Lynne, Brighton" by Jennifer Pattison

The subject of this portrait is a friend of the photographer.  The green background contrasts well with the reddish colouring of the subject.  This is an excellent portrait that captures the subject in a straightforward pose, bare and undaunted, looking straight down the lens and beyond.  The fact that the subject is not wearing any clothes is almost incidental.  The thing that really stands out is the chipped mug.  It catches your eye like the punctum in a photograph described by Roland Barthes.

"The Nine Lives of Ai Weiwei" by Matthew Niederhauser

This portrait is in a way a contextual portrait as the artist is posing outside his studio with one of the many cats that live there.  The blue of Weiwei's shirt blends well with the doors of his studio, with the ginger cat's fur providing a good contrast from the opposite side of the colour wheel.  The portrait was taken while Ai Weiwei was held under virtual house arrest and forbidden to leave China.  The cat has a symbolic presence due to its reputed nine lives echoing Ai Weiwei's many scrapes with the state in China.

Bronze Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts

I recently visited the Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  The exhibition was an exploration of bronze sculpture's achievements over more than five thousand years and its richness and diversity - historical, geographical and also stylistic.

Bronze is an alloy consisting mainly of copper with lesser amounts of tin.  Unalloyed copper is difficult to cast but the tin content reduces its hardness as well as affecting its colour.  From as early as 3000 BCE copper was also alloyed with lead to facilitate casting by making the molten metal more fluid.  Many brass artworks commonly described as bronze are in fact copper-zinc alloys.

Bronze is uniquely suited to the rendering of varied textures and finishes and to capturing the fall of light.  The material's strength and ductility also permit extraordinary compositional boldness.

The human figure, in action or at rest, nude or draped, is probably the single most popular subject for bronze sculpture, whether monumental statuary or small-scale statuettes.  Examples of small-scale statuary are shown below:

"Buddha Shakyamuni in Abhaya-Mudra", India, Late 6th-century. 68.6cm tall.

"St John the Baptist Preaching to a Levite and a Pharasee" by Giovani Francesco Rustici, 1506-11. 262cm tall.

"Portrait of King Seuthes III" Thracian, 4th-century BCE. 39cm tall.

"Danaide" by Constantin Brancusi, 1918. 28 cm tall.

Man's relationship with the animal kingdom has been a theme for bronze sculpture since ancient times, such as the fantastical stylisation of the Chimaera of Arezzo, shown below.

"Chimaera of Arezzo", Etruscan, c. 400 BCE. 129 cm long.

Animal forms in bronze appear not only as statues in their own right but also as decorative elements such as the menacing insects of Louise Bourgeois.  An example is Spider IV below:

"Spider IV" by Louise Bourgeois, 1996. 203.2 cm across.

Ancient groups of castings such as the Chariot of the Sun, dating from 14th-century BCE and created from bronze and gold leaf demonstrate the sophisticated casting technologies available to early cultures.

"Chariot of the Sun", Trundholm, Seeland, 14th-century BCE. 60 cm long.

Richard Hamilton "The Late Works" at The National Gallery

I recently visited The National Gallery to see an exhibition of Richard Hamilton's paintings and photographs.  The exhibition was entitled "The Late Works".

Richard Hamilton was a leading British artist with a major international following.  He was among the most conceptually rigorous and technically sophisticated of modern painters.

The exhibition looked at works produced primarily in the last decade of his life.  Certain master themes recur.  They include depictions of interiors, often of enormous visual complexity, and the use of linear perspective in their construction; the female nude; allusions to Old Master painting; and Hamilton's ongoing meditation on the art of Marcel Duchamp.  His technical innovations with computer programming inform many of the works.

My favourite images from the exhibition are shown below:

"The Saensbury Wing" (1999-2000) by Richard Hamilton

The picture was painted in 2000 for the exhibition Encounters: New Art from Old.  In a variation on a painting of a church interior by the Dutch 17th-century master Pieter Saenredam, he depicted a female nude wandering alone through the Sainsbury Wing of The National Gallery.

"The Passage of the Angel to the Virgin" (2007) by Richard Hamilton

This is a modern day Annunciation evoking a Renaissance painting Hamilton had copied at The National Gallery more than 60 years before.

Among artists, Hamilton was an early and influential exponent of computers and digital printers.  The mastery that sophisticated digital programs gave Hamilton in the mathematically precise rendering of coherent space and an increasingly subtle and controlled application of colour opened up new possibilities for aesthetic experimentation.  He worked with computer technicians to enter information into a 3D-modelling program.

In recent years traditional designations of media like "oil on canvas" disappeared from his vocabulary to be replaced by such terms as "oil on Fuji/Oce LightJet on canvas".  Nonetheless, Hamilton always referred to his practice as painting.

"Hotel du Rhone" (2005) by Richard Hamilton

Hotel du Rhone shows a lobby being cleaned by a (naked) chambermaid.  Hanging on the wall behind her is one of his earlier paintings, "Lobby".  Hamilton was fascinated with how Renaissance artists of the 15th-century used the laws of one-point linear perspective to construct the illusion of three-dimensional space on two-dimensional canvases.

"Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) by Marcel Duchamp

The presence of Marcel Duchamp is often apparent in Hamilton's late paintings as in "Descending Nude" below, which evokes Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) above.  Duchamp's painting portrays continuous movement through a chain of overlapping cubistic figures.

"Descending Nude" (2006) by Richard Hamilton

Photography 1: P & P, Proj 23: Selective Processing & Prominence

Project 23: Selective processing and prominence

In this project I took an image that I had used in project 19.  The image is of a small figure in a red coat set against dramatic sea cliffs.  The figure is just visible in the photograph.

In this project I processed the original image into two new images.  In the first image I sought to make the figure lest prominent so that it recedes into the setting.  In the second the objective was to do the opposite and make the figure stand out more.

The original image and the two new versions are shown below:

Original image.

Figure less prominent.

In order to make the figure less prominent in this image, I selected the red parts and the face of the figure and desaturated them.  The lack of colour in these parts of the figure has resulted in it receding into the setting.

Figure more prominent.

In order to make the figure stand out more in this image, I selected everything except for the figure.  I then desaturate the selected area.  This left the figure as the only coloured part of the photograph.  This technique is a form of "colour popping", which is sometimes used to create impact in a photograph, (although to be really effective the coloured area would need to be alot larger in relationship to the setting).

Photography 1: P & P, Proj 22: Adjusting the Balance Between Person & Space

Project 22: Adjusting the balance between person and space.


In this project I drew on my photography so far in the course and on the techniques learned, to vary the balance in any one picture situation.  I created two images, using the same general viewpoint and composition, varying the balance of attention between the person and the setting they were in.

The images created are shown below:

3053

3054

These two images were taken from almost the same position.  The first image gives the person more prominence compared to the building.  The second image in contrast gives more prominence to the building.  In each of the photographs the person is facing away from the camera.  This has altered the relationship between the person and the rest of the image.

Balancing the attention between figure and setting involves deciding on both relative size and placement.

In the first image the person has greater visual weight and commands more attention in the frame than the building.  In the second image the stress is laid on the building.

Photography 1: P & P, Proj 21: Making Figures Anonymous

Project 21: Making figures anonymous

In this project the intention was to discover ways of including a person or people in a photograph of a place, while deliberately making them unrecognisable and as a result less prominent.  A successful image will be one that is primarily about the place, but in which one or more figures play a subsidiary role to show scale and give life and to show that it is in use.

Among the common ways of achieving this while shooting are the following:

• Small and many - A crowd of people naturally have a certain dominance because of their numbers, but individually they command less attention.
• Facing away - The human face is such a powerful visual attractant that simply by photographing someone from behind or with their head turned away from the camera alters their relationship to the rest of the image.
• In silhouette - Shooting from darkness towards a bright background communicates "person" but rarely "personality".
• Partly obscured - Figures and faces even partly hidden behind some other object are automatically reduced in visual importance.
• Motion blur - Useful if slightly mannered technique when you have a tripod and the light is sufficiently dim to use a slow exposure.  Needs experience to judge the effect of length of exposure on the appearance of a moving figure.  Light figure against dark background is always more noticeable than dark figure against light background.
• Small human against a dominant location - Extreme size relationship is key.  Figure must have sufficient contrast against the setting to be noticed.  Typically, contrast is in the form of colour difference or tonal difference, (dark against light or vice verse).  Abandon identity.  More likely to give a general description based on clothes and action, e.g. a farmer among fields, a worker in a large factory space, or a climber and mountainside.

 The images produced for this project are shown below:

124809; "Small human against a dominant location".

12848; "Facing away".

3044; "Motion blur".

163043; "Small and many".

When the place is the principal subject, but when it will look better inhabited, it is often useful to find ways of reducing the visual attention that a person or a face tends to command.  There are a number of useful visual techniques that allow the photographer to achieve this objective.

Photography 1: P & P, Proj 20: Busy Traffic

Project 20: Busy Traffic

For this project I chose a busy location, The National Gallery in London on a Friday afternoon.  I was lucky enough to get a seat opposite this popular painting - "The Toilet of Venus" by Diego Velazquez.  I spent a long time watching the ebb and flow of the crowd around this painting.  Sometimes there were few people and at other times there were many.  The crowd seemed to move in waves.  There always seemed to be some people who were stationary, looking at the painting and others who were hurrying on to see other works.  I had in mind the work of Thomas Struth when carrying out this project, especially his work in the public art galleries.

My aim was to show the busyness of the location.  I kept the exposure relatively slow to create some blur.

The resulting photograph is shown below:

3050

The problem with shooting people in a gallery such as The National Gallery is that photography is not normally allowed, as an official gently reminded me.

The essential things to bear in mind when attempting to show busyness are:

• Choose a busy location and find a viewpoint that will give you a satisfying composition as well as a good sense of the nature and function of the space.
• Spend some time watching how the flow of people works - the patterns they make, any surges or lulls in movement and numbers and how this can contribute to the composition of the shot.
• The inclusion of some blur can add to the feeling of business of the location.