September 18, 2014

Is it minimal?

That was really hard work: reading Michael Fried's "Why photography matters as art as never before". But the most interesting part to me were the photos that he selected to make his point about "theatricality". The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto features quite prominently in Fried's book with two appearances:
  1. Sugimoto's interior shots of film theaters only illuminated by the film projected on the screen - with the added twist that the exposure ran through the entire length of the film.
  2. Sugimoto's "Seascapes" showing black & white shots of the sea with the horizon dividing the image in halve.
The latter images immediately appealed to me in that they are really pretty abstract in their total reduction of color and form. Those images inspired me to see what I can get with a similar setup. I chose some place at the North Sea and used the same lens, same focal length, same position but shot at different times. With the ever changing weather and light being the only variables - and the wind creating more or less waves.

Here's one of the most minimalistic shots I've (ever) captured with the morning mist obscuring the horizon, so even the line that normally defines the horizon is missing from this shot: It's only different shades of gray and some random wave patterns.

After Sugimoto 1 70039

If you 'd like to see all shots from this series, head over here. And don't fret: all of them are less minimalistic than the image above ;-)

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