André Kertész and Bill Brandt produced images which distorted form. They explored the use of close-ups, unusual angles, light and shadow, and optical effects to create abstract images, using a variety of subject matter. Look at appropriate examples and produce your own work on this theme.
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André Kertész
Born in Budapest in 1894, Kertész made his first photographs in 1912. In 1925 he moved to Paris where he established himself as an artist-photographer and his signature style evolved. In 1936, at the age of 42, he emigrated to the United States and settled in New York, where for more than 20 years he created picture essays for various popular magazines. Kertész retired from commercial work in 1962 and turned his camera once again to the commonplace objects and situations that had always been his favorite subjects.
In 1933 Kertész was asked by the publisher Querelle to contribute nude photographs to the men's magazine Le Sourire (The Smile). Since the war he had been interested in the optical distortions created by water or the chromium-plate housings of auto lamps. For this project he used three mirrors and a camera designed to expose 9-by-12-centimeter negatives fitted with an early zoom lens. "Sometimes, just by a half-a-step left or right, all the shapes and forms have changed. I viewed the changes and stopped whenever I liked the combination of distorted body shapes," Kertész recalled. |
Bill Brandt
"As a consequence of this radical manipulation of the figure, these photographs seem at times more like studies of sculptural form than depictions of the human body: They remind us of certain aspects of the sculpture of Brancusi and Arp and Henry Moore, as well as the paintings of Yves Tanguy. Yet in fact they resemble nothing but themselves, and once the viewer has adjusted to Brandt’s formal vocabulary, the pictures come to have a poetic quality that’s irresistible. Knees, arms, even fingers and toes acquire a shocking aesthetic interest. Moreover, Brandt’s graphic genius brought to black-and-white photography some of the blackest blacks to be seen anywhere in the history of the medium. "Admirers of Brandt’s earlier documentary photographs can be forgiven if they do find The Nudes somewhat shocking, for the latter certainly violate without apology the ethic as well as the aesthetic of documentary photography. For this viewer, no apology is required: I count The Nudes, all of which date from the late 1940’s to the late 1950’s, to be Bill Brandt’s greatest work." Hilton Kramer, 2005 |
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Ansen Seale
Excerpted from an article by Diana Lyn Roberts which appeared in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, 2006
..."For all the technical discussion, Seale is mostly interested in capturing a compelling image. He likens his slit-scan technique to a finish line camera at a racetrack. “The camera is continuously ‘on’ and trained only at the finish line. The first horse to stick its nose through the plane of the finish line is captured. What I’m interested in is what happens to the rest of the horse.” A kinship exists here to Edweard Muybridge’s famous 19th century series Animal Locomotion, except that instead of stopping the action and differentiating each image in series, Seale’s camera puts them together in a seamless stream of continuous motion. Since time is “flattened”, we don’t see the motion in dimensional space. Movement is typically understood as a change in gesture through time. Changing the time element alters the perception of movement. It’s a sort of still animation; since time is imaged in flow instead of taken in sequence, the movements appear all at once. This is perhaps most apparent in the series of nude figure studies. These works are a bit like Cubist paintings, in which the human form is viewed from different perspectives in the same picture plane. Our brain can accommodate the painting, but somehow when it’s a photograph, our perception is challenged. Seale comments, “Half your brain says ‘this is real’ but the other half of your brain is saying ‘something is very wrong here.’ Somehow the figure works bring home the idea of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle: that we can know only one thing about a particle, either its location or momentum, but not both.” In Strive, a female form floats mysteriously in the left half of the picture. The figure is distorted, distended, and attenuated in disturbing ways. Something about the implied motion here arouses a sixth sense somewhere in the viewer’s psyche and puts one on guard. It’s not unlike seeing something out of the corner of one’s eye, when the type of motion signals something fearful—the difference between a leaf blowing past and the slithering of a snake, or the scampering of a rat. The female form in Strive isn’t an ephemeral angelic presence, but a ghostly distortion of human spirit. The isolated studio background provides another level of alienation, much like the characters milling aimlessly about in The Wanderers. It’s an irrational space with no bearings, no sense of orientation. Like many things in life, it isn’t necessarily frightening, just disorienting. |