Appraisal

Critical Appraisal: Landscape

For this Environment project we had to produce a collection of three landscape images. I started by looking at development in London and started researching how buildings had developed and been re built since the war. I was informed however that is idea would be better suited to the second half of this project which is based on the city.

  

War Photo

 

I then changed my idea and started looking at how we don't always appreciate landscape. This lead me to look at Elina Broterus, Michael Wolf and Aliki Braine. Elina Brotherus has done a large number of self portraits however locates many of then in traditional landscape settings. This lead me to look at traditional landscapes and I then looked at Wolf's work which blocks out much of the landscape. This gave me the idea to photograph traditional scapes but block then in some way to show ignorance to them. Aliki Braine really re enforced this idea as she physically hole punches away the landscape so that it is not visible.

Elina Broterus

  Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf

Aliki Braine

 

  Contact sheet

Above is the contact sheet from my first attempt at this shoot. I chose three of the negatives from this selection to damage in some way. I decided to damage them in three different ways and therefore burnt, scratched and draw on them. We decided at my review to just use this as a test shoot as they were more of an experiment than a well thought out set of images.

 Image 1

 Image 2

 Image 3

 I have not yet managed to scan in my contact sheet from this shoot but have got the negative scans below. I started the shoot with the intention of carrying on with the same idea as before but with better landscape images but then took inspiration from the way that Michael Wolf uses focal point blur out the background.

 By using the idea of using focal point to make the landscape unclear I have managed to still show landscape as unseen and unappreciated . In each image I have plantation in the foreground that I have focused on to contrast with the lack of visibility of the landscape. I feel that my concept is quite evident and my only main concern about the collection of images is that the third image is alot darker than the other two. It has been photographed in the same way but I think it stands out from the other two as the bold colouring helps represent the beauty that is being missed.