Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was an American photographer best known for her black and white photography of New York City architecture. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923,when Man Ray hired her as a darkroom assistant.

Abbott's subjects were people in the artistic and literary world and others just passing through the city. She started her New York project in 1929 and worked on the project independently for six years.

These photographs are street sense of New York city at that time. They are very strong images I think. There are people, buildings of he city where they live and their daily activities which showing you an urban life. They are street photographs as well as documentaries. The sense in the photographs are very clear and still. I like her style. 

These two photographs are windows, very interesting composition, Curved the lines and straight lines in perspective. The second one,the shutters on the windows are like the letters on the posters. 

Building in contrast. I especially like there is a man walking and a car passing by. 

This one brought the gun to a very close viewpoint, pointing to the building. I don's know what Abbott wanted to say. To me, I think the photograph brought the eye right in front of the viewer's eye. You see it is form, you see the power and the danger of it. 

Bird eye view, very interesting, especially the second one, the city view is from a nice shape of metal frame. 

Looking up viewpoint, 

I really like this one, such a good viewpoint, it is so beautiful. 

Really like this one too. the building, the bus and people came together and became one.

Information I found on Wikipedia says "Changing New York" was primarily a sociological study within modern aesthetic practices. It suggests a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city, the place they live, work and play, their daily activities. It was intended to make people realize that  their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior ( and vice versa). Abbott chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject or destabilized it. 

Abbott also did portraits. Here are a few examples. I found the first one is very interesting. It is two people. I am guessing it was created by using long shutter speed in the dark. I have try it. 

Abbott also did science photography for many year.  I only looked through them in the morning. Now when i am reading the titles, I suddenly feel they are so amazing. I liked the artistic abstract form when I saw them. But now they are make sense. It is so amazing what photography can do in this field.  They are showing people the dry theory in this beautiful art format and make everything so meaningful. 

Soap Bubbles 1945-6

Light through Prism 1958-61

Bouncing Ball Time Exposure 1958-61

Strobe Photography of a Bouncing Ball 1958-61

Time Exposure of a Bouncing Ball 1958-61

 

Falling Balls f Unequal Mass 1958-61

Autumn- clear and blur

I wanted to take some photos of autumn leaves weeks ago. So I was looking at the colours every time I was outside. I went Wilton Park on a weekend. The color was beautiful. I always have the same problem, I took too many and have to spend time to do deleting. I only did very little adjustments on computer. Quite happy with the improvement of using camera.

Because of the exposure setting, the colour I got from the camera is brighter than the real colour. So it is true, the camera can lie. It is by the end not human's eyes. What the camera can see is different from what you can see. So how you use the camera will depend on what you want from the camera. 

These two images were taken at night. There was one night, the moon looked so beautiful. I thought I would take a photo when I got home. But when I got home, I lost the perfect location, the clouds moved, the surroundings blocked my view. I had to take the leaves in. The result was interesting. The moon did not look very clear as I wanted, guess my camera or my lens is not for this purpose. But I got the leaves at this beautiful colour in the dark. I was happy with this. I could not take good photos at night before. 

I managed to cropped the leaves out. 

After doing research on Penelope Umbrico, I had been thinking to do something like that. Today, I brought the autumn leaves ones onto photoshop to see what change I can make. Tried filter but nothing I liked. Then tried blur. I started to blur the image until every clear form was taken away, only had the colour left. I was happy with the result. So I blurred more images and printed them out. I wanted to see what they look like together. I like the result I think. I am taking away the clear image, but leaving the colours, and these yellow, orange sort of colour are what I see everyday this autumn. When I search "autumn" on google and flickr, there are so many beautiful clear images. There is no need for another one or two more. But now I blurred the beauty, only leave the colour to say something. I put all these blurred images together, took away individuality. I think i am simplifying the feelings. 

Photography Experiments-ink and paint

I poured ink into water, let it flow in the water . Here are what I got. They appeared not as clear as I expected.

Then, I used coloured ink and paint. Paint did not work very well, ink was better. 

I saw the reflections of the the light in the ink and it was so clear. So I took some photos of the reflections.

I brought a silky feeling dress, wanted to get some photographs of soft fabric. I wanted wind blow onto it but the air of the heated was not strong enough. I tied it around the light and got some interesting images. 

I also brought a colour light bulb. When I was doing research, Wolfgang Tillmans used photo paper, chemical and lights in the dark room and he created lots of beautiful subtract images. I wanted to see if the colour light can do the same. Because the light was not light enough, it was very difficult to take photos in that light condition. I got some but it did not work as I expected. 

These were from the whole day work in the studio, I was a bit disappointed when I seen them on computer, I took so many and it took me a long time choosing and deleting. I started to think why I take these photos, what I want to say. I only know I want colours, i want some beautiful images. But what the point is this I can not answer.