ARTIST RESEARCH | oksphotography

Eliot Dudik

Eliot Dudik is a photographer well known for his photos on culture, landscape and politics. His work has been displayed in exhibitions in many galleries and universities across the United States and Canada including the Columbia Museum of Art and Welch Gallery at Georgia State University. He taught photography at the University of South Carolina for a few years before founding his own photography programme named and gallery in Virginia where he is still teaching and directing today.

Dudik's landscapes are quite calm. He photographs many trees and they are quite often quite stark of life, with bare trees and dead leaves, which makes the photos feel haunted from the time of year they are taken (Winter/Autumn). The colours used are very gentle and often quite contrasted between dark shadows and light skies or fields.

I find this work interesting because of its simplicity. The photos are not jaw dropping or astonishing, but they contain depth and are insightful to the world around us. My favourite photograph of Dudik's is the one of two bridges joining land as it captures not only the natural world but human's interaction with it.

Another element of Dudik's work that I liked was the borders he puts on his landscapes. I like these because they make the work easily recognisable as his. I think the work could be improved by adding other elements of nature such as weather conditions (rain, thunder or lightning) or flowers, contrasting his work of dead nature with new life.

My artist research for Harewood House consists of two artists called Eliot Dudik and Richard Misrach. They are both photographers with a specific focus on landscapes. I wanted to research and practice shooting landscapes before my trip to Harewood House as stately homes are very popular for landscapes and I wanted to heighten my potential as much as possible before I went.

In my interpretation of Kernan's work I included a range of different content such as architecture and nature. As a key element of Dudik's work is how he captures seasons and weather when it is rather bleak and bare, I chose to do the opposite and include lots of greenery and colour.

I cropped all my photos and added borders similar to that of Dudik's to show how parts of my work could be seen to resemble Dudik's. This also emphasised what a great effect the cropping and borders of Dudik's photos have on his work as they became much more like his when this was added, even though my content was completely different from Dudik's. I found that cropping my images greatly simplified them as it got rid of background objects such as trees or paths which did not add to the quality of the photograph, but made it busier and harder to focus on.

So I could compare the different images and view the effects editing had on them, I went back to my photoshoot and edited the original images so they matched those of Dudik's, which are not very colourful or bright. This made my photographs look very similar to Dudik's, showing what a massive effect simple editing can have on a photograph. For the second versions of my images, I made very simple slight changes such as decreasing the saturation, warmth and exposure and increasing the shadows and contrast. This made the images quite gloomy and miserable, which was the impression I got from Dudik's work.

Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach is an American photographer born in 1949. He is well known for the introduction of colour to 'fine art' photography and is widely recognized as one of the most internationally acclaimed photographers of the century. Throughout his career he has photographed change in the environment caused by various manmade factors such as tourism, industrialism, floods and fires.

His first major photography project was completed in 1974 showing homeless residents in Berkeley. It was displayed in the International Centre of Photography and published as a book that won the Western Book Award in 1975. Misrach, frustrated at the book's minimal impact, retreated to deserts in places such as South Carolina and Baja where he took photographs containing no human life whatsoever.

Recently, Misrach has been taking photos of well known landscapes such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Border Cantos. He has also been focusing on raising awareness for events such as Hurricane Katrine and the Berkeley Fire.

Richard Misrach is my favourite artist I have studied this year as his work is very simplistic due to his use of faded colours and bare landscapes. I think his work looks very sophisticated as it is not busy or dramatic. The weather conditions in some of his photographs really alter the mood of the image. For example, clouds and fog put quite a dull sad mood on the photos whereas sunsets or a bright sky make them seem happy and peaceful. Personally, the photographs make me feel lonely. Many of them are plain landscapes, quite stark and empty, making me feel very small in comparison to the world around me.

Luckily for this photoshoot, I was able to take photos of the snow! I think this was a great opportunity as the crisp white of the snow left me with little colour to work with and a very bare open landscape, very similar to Misrach's photographs. I worked with a variety of different weather conditions to complete my interpretation of his photographs such as the sun, snow and rain. I also planned the time of day I took the photos as to when I would be able to capture fog or sunset.

I edited the first three photos by blurring them and increasing the clarity. I really liked these images because their colour was very simple yet dramatic and although the photo were blurred they contained strong leading lines and contrast between the dark outline of objects and blue colour of the sky. On the other three images, I mainly just increased the sharpness as I wanted to do the opposite of the first three. I do not think the sunset photograph fits well in this shoot because it does not contain the same main colours of the other images (blue and white), and I increased the saturation to make the sunset stand out, making it not as subtle and plain as the other images.

HAREWOOD

Artist Research: Eliot Dudik and Richard Misrach