Who Am I Now Course – Week 3

This week I took the students understanding of abstract photography a step further and expanded their appreciation of using photographs to illustrate how they feel.

After a general introduction that discussed the use of elements of visual design (space, form, colour, line, pattern, texture and space) to influence how a photo makes the viewer feel. I illustrated how our cultural interpretations evoke particular ideas and feelings, for example the colour red represents danger, fire, war, power etc.

In addition to this we discussed how an element of visual design can produce a personal resonance, evoking specific memories particular to the photographer. This relationship between the view/scene and the photographer’s emotional experience when viewing the scene is fundamental to the production of great photography.

Stieglitz and White

To explore this territory we visited the work of Alfred Stieglitz (Equivalents) and Minor White, who was heavily influenced by Stieglitz’s work and produced a famous response – Equivalence: The Perennial Trend.

Both photographers explored this territory. Stieglitz was the first to demonstrate how other objects could represent human emotions with his photographs of clouds. This was his response to the critic Waldo Frank who maintained that his portrait photographs were only great because of the power of the subjects.

Minor White took this further, into the realm of the personal response to a scene, particularly one in nature. He liked to photograph scenes and objects that he felt a deep resonance with.

After examples and discussion and the students were encouraged to produce their own ‘Equivalents’, photos that represented how they felt and a particular time and place. They were then asked to select one to share and discuss with the group, explaining what the photo meant to them and how it made them feel. Here they are.