First Chosen Photographer.
Task One, two, + three planning.

William Klein.

''I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn't interest me... there were things you could do with a camera that you couldn't do with any other medium... grain, contrast, blur, cock-eyed framing, eliminating or exaggerating grey tones and so on. I thought it would be good to show what's possible, to say that this is as valid of a way of using the camera as conventional approaches.'' - William Klein

Le ballet La La La Human Steps dans le métro, 1991

Couloir du metro avant les obsèques de De Gaulle, 1970

I Picked William Klein's work because I loved how he took such a different approach to photography, to him it didn't matter if the photograph was grainy, out of focus, over exposed or any other of the things that photographers seem to try their best to avoid in their usual work. So I loved how he took these things, normally seen as bad points, in the work and made them work for his photographs. Klein has been praised for his different take on photography techniques, he was ranked 25th on the professional photographer's top 100 most influential photographers. His photobooks were very popular also, and searching his name on popular art and photography sites he seems to have influenced many artists and photographers in their own work. I picked these two photos because I think they captured the idea of documentary photography very well, I really love the out of focus first picture and also the chaotic busy picture of the people in the second picture, I also love how his work is in black and white, this appealed to me alot. William Klein tried to create photographs that showed people what it felt like to be in a city and see it from an outsiders point of view, his work often shocked photographers because of his lack of attention to traditional photography. He used wide angled lenses and motion blur alot in his photography. Klein mostly took pictures in the street at first, producing photobooks from different places that he'd visited, then he became a very famous photographer for vouge fashion. Most of the images he took for his photobooks and in the street I think just look like snap shots, since they're of crowds and people in the street they weren't posed photos. I think the motion blur in his photos really go well with the city theme of his photos like the idea that the whole busy world is just bluring on past you if you just sit and watch, like in the top photo I think it looks sort of like double vision. I also think the second photograph works well for this outsiders view because all the people in the photograph are staring at the camera, like they're staring at you because you're different or you don't fit in with the norm in the place that this has been photographed. The harsh contrast of grey scale in the photograph make the place look daunting and scary, how the place would seem to an outsider. This is repressented well in the first photograph on how the group of alternative looking people are all in a group together, but with added motion blur it could represent that they're a little different looking compared to the rest of the lines of people. Comparing the two photographs, the first one is showing different people slightly blured, and different, but the second photo shows lines of mundane looking people on their daily routine to work ect. it looks like the second photograph was taken by someone looking down the stairs into an underground or tube station, I like how it looks like there's an army of people emerging from the underground, and it really gives a good representation of how busy and over crowded tube stations can be. The amount of people in the photograph, makes you look at it from a whole, not being drawn to individual people, showing how in the city you can just feel like a number, lost in a place with so many otheres like you. Your eye is guided from the bottom of the photo by the flow of people to the top of the photo, this shows how there are endless lines of people and looks like the line could just go on forever. I think the grainy effects on the photograph also looks really effective too, it's such an attractive style to me because it doesn't follow the normal rules of photography like you must get a clear image. For my own interpretation of Klein's style, I have decided to take pictures of a crowd of people somewhere, and copy the same style, then for my other photographs take a photo of someone dressed differenty and add motion blur, both in black and white.

Second Chosen Photographer.

August Sander.
''I never made a person look bad. They do that themselves. The portrait is your mirror. It’s you.'' - August Sander

Men on the street.

Young Soldier, Westerwald, 1945

I picked August Sander as my second photographer as I loved how in all of his photographs the people had blank expressions. He strived to take photographic portraits that were perfect how they were taken, and that they didn't need editing and that they were clear and crisp images.

Sander wanted to document German life and society during the Weimar Republic. Sander was described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century."

Under the strict nazi regime his photography work was limited, he moved to a rural area and saved most of his negatives then in the 1944 bombings his studio was destroyed. I enjoy how clean and crisp his images are, and how controlled they seem. I picked these two photos of his because for the first one, I love how empty the streets are and how sturn and smart the guy looks in the suit, and for the second one because of how clear and clean the photo looks and how perfect it is. You can tell he took great pride in making sure that his photos were crisp and perfect in his eyes. In his life he was a photographers assistant, then started working in a photography studio, he did start a book full of documents from his travels but unfortunately it wasn't completed. He then published a book of about 50 portraits, he did lots of different types of photography in his life, but he was mostly remembered for his portraits. I think the images effectively show how strict German life and society was at that time, both men in the photos look very smart and controlled and under order. On the first photo I like how much the person in the photograph stands out, and how faded the background is, like whitened out then how dark the figure looks, because of this he looks really strong and like a bold personality and in power. This represents german life at the time because there were many strict rules that people had to follow day by day and I think the man looks in power and really serious. I like how on the second photo, even though the man is all dressed up looking smart and under command he looks secretly pleased with himself. In both the photographs, both of the men in the photo are hardly showing any emotion towards the photographer, it looks posed, but could easily reflect how both men were feeling at the time of the photographs, as some horrible things at the time were going on. The portrait format obviously suits the photographs because they are off a portrait, but I love how he has got all of the mans body in in the first photo, then for the second one, only his shoulders maybe because he is sat down. To reproduce a photo in Sanders style I plan to take a portrait of someone looking straight at the camera, facing straight towards it in black and white looking like they're in command or power of something. Then I will edit the background of the photograph so that it is slightly brighter than the figure like the first photograph and colour burn and darken the man's coat to make him stand out alot.

Third Chosen Photographr.
WeeGee Crime photography (Arthur Fellig)
'Murder is my business' - weegee

Arthur Fellig, most known as weegee was a crime seen photographer, he was a self taught photographer, he worked mostly at nightclubs listening to broadcasts about what was going on in the city, if a crime/murder was commited weegee was often beat the police to the scene of the crime to take his photographs. In his photographs weegee used flash which gave the graphic crime scene pictures a harsh and contrasted effect. He took the majority of his photographs at night. His images caught my eye because I think how harsh and blunt they come across. All of his images are in black and white some of his images have been displayed in the museum of modern art. His photographs were published in local news papers.
All of his photographs were taken with taken with very basic photographic equipment and he had not been trained professionally to be a photographer. He also did the stills for stanley kubricks film 'dr strange love'. I love how clinical and stark the flash in the photos makes everything look, it really adds to the eery feel to the crime seen being photographed. I chose this photographer for that reason, I also loved the fact that his photographs had such a story to them. I like how in the first one there's so much blank space and then the gun, when you first stare at the photograph, I think you're drawn to the man, but then you start to explore the photo and realise that there is a gun and he's been shot. I love the symmetry in the second photograph and how the benches in the photo really draw your eye to the middle of the photograph. With the photos I think that the fact that the scene of the photograph is a dark and horrible topic of terror, but the fact that he used harsh flash for the photos makes it seem like he's revealed what's happened with the bright flash, and that the horror of the situation is just there for everyone to see and that everything that happened in the dark is now revealed. For my reproducing of his work I plan to take a photo with someone holding a hat and try and get a really symmetrical photograph in black and white. Then add a vignette effect to them in photoshop and a film grain. Also I would like to try and reproduce his picture of the man who's been shot on the floor, again using black and white, then adding a film grain, and messing about with the contrast levels.

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Bill Brandt.

But I did not always know just what it was I wanted to photograph. I believe it is important for a photographer to discover this, for unless he finds what it is that excites him, what it is that calls forth at once an emotional response, he is unlikely to achieve his best work. - Bill Brandt

Portrait of Artist Francis Bacon.

Peter Sellers, 1963

Although I cannot use Bill Brandt as one of my documentary photographers, I did do a little reaserch about him because I really liked how he documented a persons personality in a photography. he once took pictures to reflect how british society was at the time when he was around and also the effects on people of the bitz, so I am using this cause he documented british society, also because I found his images beautiful. I loved his portrait of Francis Bacon, I think he's really 'documented' and captured his personality in the image, for example the way we can't see what he's looking at in the photograph, making him seem like a bit different and like that he sees things in a different way, and if you look at his art you'll see that he definitely does. I think the second photo represents the whole stereotypical man reading the news paper all done up for his job. Bill Brandt in his life contributed alot of his photographs to various magerzines, he's considered by many people to be one of the most important british photographers of the 20th century.

Task three pictures :)
Here I had to reproduce a set of images for each of my chosen photographers.

William Klein
In response to william kleins photos, I decided to take images like the first photograph I chose of his. His first picture is of a group of alternative looking people, the photograph has motion blur and is in black and white, to reproduce this image I took some images of my friends, then edited them into black and white, then added motion blur via photoshop.

August Sander.
For my second interpretation of my second photographers work, I decided to copy August Sanders first photograph with the man stood staring at the camera. To copy these photos I took the three pictures, then in photoshop edited them into black and white, I lightened out the background and colour burned the guys suits so make them really dark. I messed about with the contrast and brightness of the picture too, so that the man in the picture was the main focus and everything else just seemed faded out. I got the models to just stare at the camera, and show no emotions, like August Sanders photo. I had to edit out one of the models lip rings, because I wanted the photo to look old and they didn't have those sorts of then, so I used the spot heal tool for this.

Weegee
Here I had a go at reproducing both of weegees photographs that I showed above, for the ones with my model laying down I used a flash, but since this didn't give the same harsh effect that weegees photos had, I edited it further in photoshop, bringing up the contrast and brightest in the photo, then adding a film grain in picasa. For the hat photo I also changed the contrast and brightness settings to give a harsh effect, I then added a vingette effect using photoshop.

Task Four.
William Klein
William klein is noted for his extensive use of unsual photographic techniques, he was ranked 25th in the top one hundred most influential photographers, he achieved fame as a fashion photographer for vouge, and despite having no training as a photograher, he won an award in 1957 for his first book of photographs. his extensive use of wide angle and telephoto lenses, natural lighting and motion blur. His first book was called 'New york' and featured loads of pictures of his home town. I had a look in a good called 'How to read a photograph' by Ian Jeffrey, I looked up Kleins name in the index of the book and was led to a page about a photographer called Nakahira Takuma. Although this article didn't tell me anything about Kleins work, it showed where Takuma had used Kleins influence to create his own photographs.

August Sander.
Looking further into the work of August Sander, I read more about his book 'Face of our time'
which was published in 1929. It was a collection of 60 portrait photographs, it depicted the life of the german people from 1905 to 1928. Instead of focusing on what Germany was trying to portray in the war, of the perfect race, he instead set out on actually documenting what was really a genuine representation of German life.People found this absolutely fascinating because Germany was trying to portray an aryan race, but Sanders when completely agaisnt this and showed what it was really like, what people didn't want you to see. I looked up Sander in the book 'How to read a photograph' by Ian Jeffrey. Here it told me about the photography project called 'People of the twentieth century' that Sander never managed to complete. It also showed another one of his photographs called 'farmer from the westerwald' this portrait was like the style of the other photographs of his that I chose, with the person staring back at the camera and a high contrast photograph.

Weegee
Weegee was mostly known for his stark black and white street photography, starting as a press photographer, in the 1930s, he followed the cities emergency services and documented their activities. Most of his work depicted realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury an death. In 1945 'naked city' was his fist book of photographs. It formed the basis of a film made in 1948 called the naked city. In the early 60s, he experimented with 16mm films with panoramic photos, photo distortion and photography through prisms. He is well known for the famous well known maralin monroe photograph taken through a plastic lens, in which her face is distaughted but still recognisable. I had a look in my book 'How to read a photograph' by Ian Jerrery, it took me to a page on a photographer called 'Ed Van Der Elsken', I read into about this photographer and it told me that weegees book 'naked city' had inspired this photographers work.

Since all of my photographers were from a few years ago, I strugled to find exhibition reviews of any of them, so I looked more into the books that they had been put into, since this was what most of the pictures had been placed into.
here is a list of books that each of the photographers have had their photographs put into

William Klein;
'Paris + Klein' by William R. Klein (Hardcover - 31 Dec 2002)

'William Klein; Rome' by William Klein (Hardcover - 26 Oct 2009)

William Klein: Life is Good & Good for You in New York' by Max Kozloff (Hardcover - Feb 2010)
'William Klein; Contacts' by William Klein and Robert Delpire (Paperback - 3 Nov 2008)
'William Klein : Rétrospective Exhibition' by William Klein, Quentin Bajac, Alain Sayag and Bruno Racine (Paperback - 1 Nov 2005)
'New York 1954- 1955' by William R. Klein (Hardcover - 11 Jan 1995)
'William Klein' by William Klein and Christian Caujolle (Paperback - 1 Oct 2008)'Close up' by William R. Klein (Hardcover - 30 Oct 1989)

'William Klein: Photographs (An Aperture monograph)' by John Heilpern (Hardcover - 11 Jun 1981)