Assesment Environment

8/3/2019 Assesment Environment

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Assesment

Johanna Rosenlew

The Environment I

For the first task for the Environment unit I have chosen to deconstruct RobertAdams photograph 'On Signal Hill, Overlooking Long Beach, California', taken1983.

I failed to find two trees, so in order to produce the best replica I used one smalltree overlooking the Medway River and parts of Chatham. I photographed it justbefore the sunset, when the fog had appeared over the river. I used an aperture of

16, to try to copy the depth-of-field.

For my own conceptual approach for the environment unit I have chosen to portraythe polluted sea.I got the idea by watching the tidal in the Medway River. Because we don’t haveany tidal in Finland, I have always found the phenomena as very interesting. But Iwas really chocked when I saw what the sinking water revealed in the grey mud-waste. It looked like people had used the sea as a garbage bin. I have always seenthe sea as the most pure form of nature, as a never-ending blue escape from man-

maid environment. For this unit I wanted to portray it as ugly, dirty and destroyed.

I have always loved Edward Weston’s way of representing the natures naturalforms, so that is why I used his photographs as my visual reference for this unit. Istudied his photographs taken of sand dunes. I wanted to copy the feeling of thesand (mud for me) and I also put a lot of thought I the composition of the picture.



My initial idea was to use a big aperture as Weston used, but because Iphotographed early in the morning and didn’t want to risk getting blurry images Iused a medium sized aperture to be able to use a shorter shutterspeed.

The hardest thing for me has been the time management. I wanted to put more

time and effort into this project, but failed. Considering that, I am still very happywith my final prints. I have never before intentionally used a visual reference whilephotographing and it made me concentrate more while working. I learned that it’snot only about releasing the shutter; there is a lot of work behind every picture Ihave taken this unit.





The Environment II

For my second pastiche I decided to replicate Brassaïs photograph, Paris after dark no 27, taken in 1933. I took my image in Soho in London on a rainy night. Itwas hard to get the exposure right, so to get the best possible replica I set up mycamera exactly how I wanted it and took multiple images with different shutter speeds.

For the urban environment Unit, my photographs reflect upon how much I miss myhome town.

I come from Helsinki, the small capital of Finland. I live in the centre of the town

surrounded by history and the sea. When I first came to Rochester, I must admitthat I had a small "cultural-chock". Everything was grey and brown and the never-ending brick houses all looked the same; boring and unfriendly.

As this was a project that we got almost free hand to do whatever we wanted, Idecided to do something different and experiment with double exposures. I first gotinspired to do this project by looking at Dan Mountfords double exposures. I



discussed his images with Colin and Riikka, and they told me that they wheredouble exposed in the darkroom.

From his pictures, I got the idea to show how much I miss my hometown by firsttaking a photograph of the environment, and then of myself. With that, I wanted tocreate an image that shows how my home environment always is inside of me, inmy thoughts, and how I always have images of my hometown in my head.

Because of the lack of space in the darkrooms and too little time, I figured out that Iwouldn’t be able to double expose in the darkroom and instead did it directly on the



film. I think my result is good, but it would have been even better if I could havedone the double exposure in the darkroom. Time management was critical for mefor this project. Because I wanted to photograph during the winter holidays inFinland, I had to make sure that I would have enough time to print my images whenI returned. Instead of photographing myself, I used my mother to represent me,because it would have been too hard or impossible to photograph myself without ashutter releaser.

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Assesment Environment