Altmanshofer Photography Style
Eugène Atget
Eugène Atget began his photography career after he had served his time in the Sixty-third Infantry Division in France, and dropped out of school where he studied drama. After trying to make a career in painting, Atget decided he would become a photographer of art. His camera of choice was a 18x24 cm view camera, placed on a tripod. The plates used in the camera were gelatin-silver negative plates that were 1.5mm thick. The pictures were either oriented vertically or horizontally, and adjusted with a tilt-shift, so a soft vignetting is present on all his pictures.
Atget photographed Paris because to him it was so beautiful and picturesque. His images were so tasteful for the time, his images were bought by libraries, historical societies, and even artists and sculptors. They looked at his work with admiration. Atget with a camera, was creating the art he wanted to make that he might not have been able to as a painter himself.
Atget would often get up before dawn to take pictures; carrying almost forty pounds of equipment through the streets of Paris and even into the countryside. The photographer of art had transitioned into a street photographer, capturing the architecture and streets of old Paris. It is argued that Atget was just a depressed painter/artist who was ashamed of the medium he was using; that the resulting pictures he took were mistakes, or he didn’t see what he was doing. In his own way, “not only did Atget document a city, he also captured its essence” (Oden).
Serge Clèment
Serge Clèment’s photographs drawn an intimate experience between the viewer and the image. Creating a sense of surrealness in a timeless, distorted reality. Clèment’s collection of images in Dépaysé play off of the idea that each image is in relation to the next; with the use of smoke, fog, rivers, streams, streets going across the image, and reflections.On the other hand, Clèment’s work also tries to capture reality, but still adding his own flair to make the viewer feel as if they are viewing the familiar sight with a perspective different from their own.
There is no clear distinction as to what Clèment’s photography style is; if his images are for research, questioning of something, or created just for creation’s sake. Clèment is an urban photographer, playing with the notions of using transparency to capture reality.
Clèment photographed with viewcamera(s) that could make 50x60 cm, 67x100cm, and 100x150cm silver gelatin negatives, that was mostlikely mounted on a tripod. The collected works in Dépaysé are all in black and white, and have been considered a palimpsest; something that is reused or altered that still bears traces of its original form. Thus also playing more into the transparent images idea.
Tseng Kwong Chi
Tseng Kwong Chi was a photographer from Hong Kong whose works were a compilation of self portraits in front of tourist destinations and national landmarks. “A cross between Ansel Adams and Cindy Sherman,” his work explores tourist photography in a playful juxtaposition of truth, fiction, and identity, while also paying homage to landmarks and the grandeur and mystery of nature” (Chi). Kwong Chi’s work explores the ideas of truth, fiction, and identity as a Chinese immigrant. Kwong Chi would photograph himself in front of these places to explore what Americans considered was their identity. And he would do this for every country that he visited, a Chinese immigrant exploring the world, and exploring the identity of the cultures around him.
In the beginning of his photography career, Kwong Chi would photograph himself, with the landmarks behind him looming over his figure. To give off the sense of scale and beauty. Through his career he would transition from photographing like this, to showing the landscape to his scale. And in the later years of his self portraits, Kwong Chi would finally transition to showing the grandeur of the landscapes before him. A very stirking example of this being his image of the Grand Canyon. He is faced away from the camera, looking out into the vastness of the national park
Kwong Chi is seen holding a long cord with a camera shutter button to his viewcamera. It’s unclear what exact size of plates he used, but they were gelatin-silver print negatvies.
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