21st March

Four Photographers:

1. Love Saul Leiter's work. Worked in the 50s and 60s, producing "urban pastorals" of Manhattan. His photographs are like little snips of poetry, fleeting, abstract, soft.  He often shoots through a rain-misted window or shows his subject via its reflection, so there's a dreamy quality. I like these:

They almost look like paintings; I love how he plays with light and perspective. Sort of what I was trying to do on the beach, photographing through the stream and filming through the sun and rain.

Art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2005: “Mr. Leiter was a photographer less of people than of perception itself. His painter's instincts served him well in his emphasis on surface, spatial ambiguity and a lush, carefully calibrated palette. But the abstract allure of his work doesn't rely on soft focus, a persistent, often irritating photographic ploy, or the stark isolation of details, in the manner of Aaron Siskind or early Harry Callahan. Instead, Mr. Leiter captured the passing illusions of everyday life with a precision that might almost seem scientific, if it weren't so poetically resonant and visually layered.” 
Have just found his abstract paintings:

Beautiful colours in these - wish I could see them closer up.

   2.  Thomas Graics is also a painter as well as a photographer. He pilots planes over Iceland, and takes abstract aerial photographs, vivid in colour and light. He is mostly concerned with aesthetics, rather than just documentation.

"The absence of a horizon, of spatial depth, produces the focus on forms and colours. It is as if the photographs were abstract paintings, for they are enlivened by formal contrasts, or dominated by the harmonious interplay of colours and forms." Christian Schoen, Abstraction of Nature.

See sketchbook for photographs.

  3.  Andy Hughes photographs trash on the beach, but zooms in closely to blur the boundaries and make his objects beautiful and abstract. He focuses attention on what would normally be passed by and disregarded. Unlike my photographs, his have an environmental message to give out, but otherwise very similar compositions. andrewhughesphoto.blogspot.com/

I like how he uses the setting to create a mood, and uses light to give a magical quality to his images. Mostly it is by zooming in close that he transforms the object from the mundane to something almost beautiful. Like my photos! However, I'm starting to wonder how much I need the beach setting for my stills.

  4.  Henry Horenstein does surreal images of sea-life in its underwater setting. Black and white images, soft focus and mysterious. They seem to concentrate on form , and often zoom in extreme close-up giving an abstract quality. They are taken through glass and have a diffuse appearance. V. moody and mysterious.

www.henryhorenstein.com/