Victor Schrager

Josh Sampson

His WorkVictor Schrager is a New york artist who artist who worked as a director of New York’s Light Gallery for three and half years, until he eventually embarked on a career dedicated to the genre of books. He’s interest in books were used in backdrops for most of his photographs and has been recalled o say, “I was always taken with the evocative colours of old hardback covers”.While taking photographs, Victor experimented with his camera’s selective focus to physically engage the elements of the picture and soon became hooked on watching solid books just vaporise before his eyes.

The image on the left shows the angled geometrics and planes of colour which Schrager uses to depict old hardback books. he has purposefully sent the photograph out of focus so that the books seem to dissipate and float free, therefore details on the books are eliminated.

My PhotographsWith Victor’s work in mind, I attempted to recreate a couple of his photographs. I used different coloured and sized books to the ones used by himself, however I did use hardback books and placed them as accurately as possible to where his were placed. When taking the photo, I manually adjusted the focus so that I could place the whole image out of focus and had my camera on f-stop 3.5 and a shutter speed of 1/30 as well as an ISO of 4000. Once I had chosen the best photograph from my camera, I placed it into Photoshop and increased the exposure levels to lighten up the background and changed the saturation levels to alter the colour schemes of the books involved. I also cropped the image so that the books were the focal point of the image and casted the image even more out of focus by using filter called ‘Gaussian Blur’. (This is shown on the next slide with a screenshot from Photoshop and the original and finished images).

Victor’s Photograph

My photograph

A screenshot

from Photoshop

My Second Image

Once again I used the ‘Gaussian Blur’

to reduce the overall focus of my image to

try and recreate Victor Schrager’s

image as accurately as possible.

My image

Victor’s original Image