Haley Stipes Photographer Style

The first photographer I looked at was Jeannette Montgomery Barron. She is known mostly for her portraits, but her book Photographs & Poems was comprised entirely of her still life photography. All of her photographs are square and in black and white. She uses a relatively small depth of field, and all of her images are taken very close up to the subject. Seemingly in almost every image, she will have something reflective/glass, a plant, or interesting play with shadows. I find only a few exceptions to these parameters in the entire book. In all of her images, it is pretty obvious she set up these still lifes instead of stumbling upon them. The majority of them are in front of blank walls, and they all appear to be taken indoors. Some of them have natural light, especially the ones by the windows, but the ones with intense shadows I think have an artificial source of light in order to make the contrast so intense. A lot of her images have 2 main elements to look at, where one of these elements is halfway out of the image while the other more dominant element is usually completely in the image.

The second photographer I found was Sergio da Silva. For his work in the book Water, Mirror of the World, he was working for the United Nations in order to create awareness for the lack of clean water for much of the world population. He wanted to focus on the beauty of water in order to show it is alive and worth preserving. His images seem to be more rectangular in size and vary from being vertical or horizontal. His images are in color, and usually this color is quite striking or vibrant. His subject matter always has to do with water, but unlike Barron his work has less of a formula to it. His images aren’t as apparently similar to each other. For example, he can take a very playful image of pool water and vibrant beach umbrellas and the next image will be a more muted image of people in a storm. Additionally, some of his images will have people in them while others will not. Despite the seemingly large subject matter, he does have some trends he loosely follows. He will often show motion in the water, resulting in a blurry abstract image. Another trend is that he will work creatively with reflections made with water. Most of the time, whether or not there is an actual person in the image, there will be something man-made either in the background, to the side, or reflected in the water, and these man-made things come from all around the world. I think it is showing how humanity ultimately is united by Earth’s water.

The third photographer I thought was interesting was Chema Madoz. He is a Spanish photographer and his book was simply called Chema Madoz. It is his style that I have decided to recreate. His images are all in black and white and they all are different sizes, unlike the previous two photographers who kept their image sizes fairly consistent. He uses a relatively large depth of field most of the time except for a select few images. His images do however seem flatter than the previous two since shadows aren’t emphasized as much and the backgrounds are very plain and blank for the most part. This means we have a main subject to look at and nothing to distract the viewer. His style is instantly recognizable because he takes seemingly unrelated objects (usually two) and combines them in a visually witty way. The physical objects that he uses vary greatly, but some objects he uses on multiple occasions include burnt match sticks, metal can lids, and books. He tends not to use people in his photography, but when he does he uses them like objects and they don’t really interact with the camera and they aren’t the main focus either. He will usually only use one body part such as a hand, hair, or arm. His subject matter is always centered within the image with as little distraction to it as possible.