Artist Research- Matt Black
Matt Black is an American documentary photographer whose work has focused on issues of poverty, migration and the environment. He is from Californias Central Valley, a rural agricultural area in the heart of the state; His background leading him to use his skills to highlight issues surrounding geography, inequality and the overall environment in the rustic parts of the United States.
A project of his which I have chosen to focus on is ‘The Central Valley’. He begun this project back in 1955, photographing his home region. He seeked to capture the marginalisation and fortitude of communities throughout this area of California. The images in this series portray the hardships faced by many Valley residents as they worked to live in one of the greatest agricultural regions of the world; Responsible for billions of dollars in output, but whose communities are marked by poverty, unemployment and lack of health and education. This is presented in Black’s images.
Matt Black. (n.d.). The Valley. [online] Available at: https://www.mattblack.com/the-valley.
Matt Black Shoot Plan
Because of the subject matter around Matt Black’s work, my plan is to carry out an on-location shoot at a farm, or at least another sort of agricultural area, so animals (and maybe even farmers (with their consent)) could be featured in my images- like this photographer has done. Because Black’s images are photos which I would consider quite high-contrast, my aim to to take these pictures on a day when the sun is out (making my work more similar to his as he took them in sunny California). This would make it easier for me to capture harder shadows and brighter highlights as I will definitely be using the in-camera black & white filter in real time while I’m shooting. I feel this would help me to draw my focus more on tone, instead of colour, which would also make post processing easier as well.
Week 3 Reflection:
During the third week of FMP I…
- Found a photographer who shoots in black and white (Matt Black), researched him and his work and planned out a shoot related to him
During week 3, I was successful in finding a black & white photographer but didn’t manage to start my project proposal. This is because I feel I haven’t done enough practical experimentations to know exactly what my long term plans are for this project. The Matt Black shoot which I have planned may have to be carried out either during or after the half-term, depending on the opening times of the farm that I intend to visit. I will plan and carry out a number of exploratory shoots during the half-term so I can start my project proposal in week 4.
Matt Black Shoot
To prepare my camera for this shoot, I went to its image effects settings to select monochrome. Thinking ahead, I made the decision to use a telephoto lens with my camera as I knew there would be some animals I wouldn’t be able to get too close to. I visited Meanwood Valley Urban Farm in Leeds on a sunny day as planned, so I was able to capture hard shadows and bright highlights; The high contrast images as I intended. Even though it was a bright day, I still chose to use a high ISO setting of 800 to achieve the same sharp, grainy effect I noticed in Matt Black’s photos. I spent about two hours exploring the farm and found many scenes that were great for the look I was going for. I managed to photograph some people (consensually) as well as a range of animals including cows, sheep, donkeys, alpacas, goats and chickens.
Editing
I took a large amount of really good photos throughout this shoot so my pictures only needed minimal editing. I noticed that the images Matt Black takes are so high contrast that many of them have a lot of solid black and solid white areas. Because of this I increased the contrast to maximum (100) for most of my photos, before experimenting with various presentation formats.
Some of my favourite photos from this shoot are the photos of the sheep. I had the idea to position the pictures of it in a strip to show the frame progressively getting ‘smaller’ and the viewer getting ‘closer’ to the animal. I started off with a plain white background and when I finished positioning all of the photos, I realised the final result resembles a strip of photos on film. This led to me putting the images on a black background instead. A way I could take this design further would be to maybe scan a strip of empty film to overlay over the 4 images for a more ‘vintage’ effect. This could potentially make the photos look more nostalgic, slightly linking them to my theme of memories.
On another note- not specifically related to my theme- I really like how in the first photo, there isn’t really any barbed wire crossing the image and as they progress, the shadow of the barbed wire is seen on the sheep’s face. This makes the animal look free to begin with before informing the viewer that it actually isn’t.
I decided to position some selected photos in a grid, featuring some people at the farm as well. I tried to somewhat balance dark and light on the grid, by trying to create a sort of imaginary diagonal line going through the whole arrangement- with mainly black on top and mainly white on the bottom. For both of these presentation formats, I like the ones with the black background the best, as when comparing the two, I feel the white boarders around the photos take the viewers attention away from the actual images themselves.
This shoot was definitely more successful than I thought it would be as I was not expecting these black and white photos to look as great as they did. I in fact think a lot of them look better than many types of photos which are in colour so black & white photography is certainly something I intend to come back to.