For this project I'll be looking at the style of work produced by three photographers, Eliot Porter, John Szarkowski and Edward Weston.
ELIOT PORTER.
Eliot Porter was at the head of the revolution of Colour Photography in the late 1930's, while other photographs stayed faithful to black and white imagery he wanted to explore new ways of showing the natural world to the public. By mastering Dye Transfer Printing he was able to produce brilliant full colour prints in a darkroom, he would use this technique to produce better shots of birds then anyone else was capable of at the time and then move on to show landscapes all over the world in their full glory. His strong interests in science and the environment naturally lead to much of his work begin used to argue the case of nature conservation while also his work has been described as "bridging the gap between nature photography and fine art.
JOHN SZARKOWSKI.
Szarkowski's was a great documentary photographer who worked mainly in the medium of black and white focusing on the changing face of parts of America. His two best known books The Idea Of Louis Sullivan (where he looked at the people and changing landscape of Chicago and the American Midwest) and The Face of Minnesota (this time just focusing on the state and it's inhabitant's) show his skill best as capturing the mood and stile of the time. He also liked to capture the changing of the seasons within the landscape but most of all he liked to highlight the way that in America they were losing the traditional ways of farming and rural life.
EDWARD WESTON.
Regarded as one of the true masters of the 20th century Weston used large format cameras and only the available light to create images that can be best described as breath taking. What he liked to show was the forms and patterns that naturally accrued within a landscape be it in the clouds in the sky or in the rocks on the ground. One thing he has in common with Porter and Szarkowski is that they were all experts when it came to printing there work in the darkroom (a skill you could say we are slowly losing today)
