Artist Style Paragraphs Shaffer

               The artist I chose to imitate is Bernhard Fuchs. He was born in 1971, in upper Austria and has studied under both Timm Rautert and Bernd Becher from 1993-1999. The pictures in this book are of the areas around his home land of Helfenberg and were taken between 2004 and 2007. Fuchs said “What I feel in front of this landscape eludes direct representation because it belongs totally to my inner experience.”  These photos serve to show his return to home and help establish that his memories of home are what drive his passion for his other works of photography along with his present life. He uses these photos to show how humans have intruded upon nature, but they also show that they almost seem as though they have always belonged there. The way Fuchs photographs these roads and pathways creates a balance between the colors of the roads/pathways and the nature surrounding it. He not only chooses places that are very saturated in color, but he sticks to taking pictures in either the morning or late afternoon, to make it seem like the light is coming from the landscapes themselves, rather than the sun above. The photos are not rushed, they are thoroughly thought through and they were made to capture the essence of existence. They don’t capture just one specific thing, but rather a feeling of confidence and comfort, along with the before mentioned existence. In order to replicate the style, I decided to take the photos with a tripod, as his photos look like they were taken at a height that would require one. I also decided to dedicate a whole weekend to these photos to make sure I would be able to make them feel as unrushed as the photos belonging to Fuchs. Another way I tried to replicate his style was going home to places that have meaning to me, just as he did with his photos. When I picked up the book to look at it, all the photographs in the book reminded me of home which is why I worked to make sure my photographs could capture the same feeling.

               Henry Wessel lived from 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey, to 2018 in Point Richmond, California. In his lifetime, he studied at The Pennsylvania State University and did not decide to really photograph until 1967. In 1971 he received the Guggenheim grant to photograph landscapes along the United States highways. He wanted to show how the terrain was transformed by human presence. Wessel was a part of those who did not want to focus on the untouched nature, but rather the nature that has been warped, combined and marked by humans. He ended up moving to San Francisco because of the light of California. He used a Leica camera, with a 28-milimeter lens and used color and black-and-white, Tri-X film. For the photographs in the book Odd Photos he stuck to black-and-white film. When he photographed, he observed rather than actively looked for what he wanted to photograph, and then took time to decide how he wanted to capture the scene in a photograph. He wanted his images to be balanced and for everything in them to connect to each other. He called the photos in Odd Photos “little gifts from the world, hidden in its chaos, hidden in a piece of time” in the beginning of the book, before you see any photos. The photos in this book all seem to have one thing that stands out from the rest, but at the same time, still blends in. At first, I didn’t catch this in the photos, but I ended up having to look back at the first few to look for those out of place objects. If I were to recreate these photos, I would do as Wessel did, I would wander around and observe, rather than seek out something to photograph. Once I found what I wanted to create an image with, I would then spend time deciding how to capture the image while keeping it balanced, but at the same time having the one object stand out to really capture his style.

               Harry Callahan was born in Detroit in 1912. He went Michigan State University to study engineering and worked at Chrysler after he dropped out of college. In 1938 he took up photography as a hobby and did not consider it as a profession until he went to an Ansel Adams workshop. He then worked at General Motors Photographic Laboritories, as the chairman of photography at the New Bauhaus and then he became the head of the photography department at the Rhode Island school of design. As a photographer he was successful and even won many awards that include the Photographer and Educator Award in 1976 and 20 years later the National Medal of Arts in 1996. After meeting with Alfred Stieglitz and seeing the works he made of his wife, Callahan began to also photograph his wife, creating many intimate photos of her that were very successful. He would even include his daughter, Barbara, in some of the photos. His process often consisted of wandering around the city, sometimes with his wife and daughter, stopping to take photos of them, either together or just his wife. Most of his works were created with black-and-white film. Some of those were composed of multiple exposures to create a layered effect that can be achieved with photoshop today. Callahan dabbled in colored film as well, but most of his works are in black-and-white. If I were to imitate his style, I would have to find a willing participant that I had a deep connection with, just to capture the intimacy that he captures in his photos. If I were to recreate the multiple exposed images, I would layer them in photoshop, changing their transparencies to create the same effect that he was able to with his multiple exposed films. With today’s technology it would probably be easier to create the photos that Callahan created.