Assignment 1: Contrasts
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"The basic principle underlying Itten's approach to design was his "general contrast theory," whereby factors of shape, value, color, and texture were classified as pairs of opposing characteristics, such as large-small, straight-curved, rough-smooth, and transparent-opaque."
Clark V. Poling, review of "Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later " by Johannes Itten, Art Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer, 1977), pp. 368+370 Accessed: 12/02/2013 12:57 |
In the same blog post, Freeman also explains how there are different kinds of contrast:
- One is to do with image quality, and includes brightness, colour, focus, and the representation of movement (e.g. motion blur)
- Another sort of contrast relates to "the ‘surface’ qualities of the subject" (such as the texture, or whether an object is hard or soft, for instance),
- Finally, contrast can also be a more abstract concept, and relate, for instance, to the emotions expressed by a human subject.
MethodFor this assignment, I looked through my photos and tagged them according to which of the adjectives in the list they exemplified. Some photos were tagged with more than one adjective (e.g. liquid, continuous and much), and some contrasting pairs were also exemplified within the same photo (e.g. straight/curved). I ended up with a total long-list of 72 photos in the initial selection. I then printed them as contact sheets (shown on the right), and narrowed down the selection further, putting them into contrasting pairs. I then started the process of selecting the final pairs. First I looked back at the assessment criteria. Then I made further selections based on the following criteria:- making sure my selection covered eight different contrasting pairs of adjectives (so if there were two pairs of photos for any of the categories, I selected just one)- ensuring that within each pair, the two photos made sense together (thematically, compositionally... ). I also tried to get variety in terms of of:
I also think that my final selection of contrasting pairs might be a little too literal at times, an deals mostly with contrast in terms of image quality, or surface’ quality, rather than being contrasting from a more conceptual, abstract point of view. The exercise has given me lots of ideas, though, and I would like to try going out to take photos setting out to capture contrasting images, rather than doing the selection retrospectively, as I've done here. |
The long-listThe final selectionAccompanying notes on the Contrasts assignment. |