Misunderstood brief but still inspired

It turns out that I, along with everyone else in the class had misunderstood part of our brief. We thought we had to find a photographer who does work relating to one of the current themes at our chosen festival. I won't go into it much because obviously it's not what we were supposed to do but I did some research and found plenty of photographers who's work I thought fit the theme of 'Field of Vision'.

Firstly I looked at the photographer and his series that the CONTACT festival is incorporating this year. Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian photographer who specialises in social documentary photography and photojournalism. His series of work called 'Genesis' depicts the lives of both humans and animals and how they correspond with the earthly surroundings. We get a chance to look into the lives of something else, giving us a new field of vision.

I think Salgado's images are beautiful, they really do capture the relationship and lives between nature and human. The tones and lighting create crisp detail and the black and white allows for our eyes to smoothly drift around each image. It's an amazingly inspirational body of work.

I went on to research more photographers and artists who's work depicts 'Field of Vision' well enough to be included into our festival. I looked at the work of English painter Robert Barker who's paintings were described as panoramic.







I also researched Andreas Gursky who is a German visual artist who specialises in large format architecture and landscape colour photography. I've studied Gursky's work before in college when I was doing a project on patterns, I found it interesting and still do, how his work is so detailed and recognizable yet taken from such a far distance.

John Davies is another photographer that I found to portray field of vision in his work. He's an English industrial landscape photographer. He uses black and white for a subtle ad analytic style. His work takes two points of view, the positive and negative sides of the rapid growth of development and industry, it's up the viewer to take the image how they want.

I also started looking at distorted landscapes and made the link between M.C Escher's drawings and photos taken with a fish-eye lens. I thought it was interesting how his distorted drawings could be re-created in the from of a photograph!

The images above are Escher's drawings and the one below is a photo taken with a fish-eye lens.