Thomas Ruff's most famous body of work "Portraits" features what you might expect... portraits. However, his interpretation of this is very different and unique from everyday portraits. The style of this particular body of work is very formal and simple. While working as the art director for the Dusseldorf post-punk band EKG, he used the band members as models for his photography. This genre of photography was not really studied at the Dusseldorf Academy but, you can see in the work it is highly influenced by the way they teach the subject by the symmetrical and flat images.

He first began his research into framing and the composition of historical portraiture and decided from this to use a style that is very plain and simple. The reason for this was to express his feelings that “a photograph is only able to express the superficial’ (http://www.tate.org.uk) and not convey deep emotions or a personnel insight into a persons life. Ruff believes that a photograph is only just a cover up or surface of someone or an object and there is no real meaning behind a photograph. With this as the drive of his project he took portrait shots of his friends wearing normal clothes using a medium format camera with emotionless expressions. These portraits were blown up to a very large size when displayed in galleries first in 1986.

An interview by Philip Pocock uncovers the reasons behind Ruff’s work:

“Philip Pocock: Unlike the Neue Sachlichkeit of Sander or Renger-Patzsch, there is a clear crisis of belief in the objectivity of your medium in your work. True or false?

Thomas Ruff: It's both. It's true and false. They also used the camera as an instrument to take pictures. The difference between them and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost bit by bit the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality.” (http://www.jca-online.com/)

Ruff’s answer suggests that he believes that photography does not capture reality and only what is placed in front of it.

For my homage of Thomas Ruff’s work I decided to go out onto the streets of Leeds and take portraits of people without them knowing and try and capture their true emotions. In the modern age we live in once people see a camera they tend to pose or try and appear how they want to be seen. People want to look their best in almost every photograph and can put on a face or create a surface to hide behind. By photographing random people in Leeds without them knowing I was able to escape the false surfaces and capture their real expressions.

http://www.jca-online.com/ruff.html

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/thomas-ruff-2602

Homage to Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko's photography is all about extreame unique angles that portray objects in a way that has never been see before and create a unique prespective on everday buildings and people. He believed that "The most interesting viewpoints of today are the from the top down and from the bottom up" (www.telegraph.co.uk). He experiments around with perspectives by placing himself in unusual angles such as laying down and photographing up at the large apartment buildings to distort them or from high above to make people appear smaller or object become abstract. Most of his images were taken on the streets of Moscow where he used his trademark style of tilting his lens at unusual angles which made trams to appear as if they were about to derail or people walking on angles. His work however, was not seen as compositionally brilliant but unnessersary distortions that are not true and make people appear as freaks.
“In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations. New objects should be depicted from different sides in order to provide a complete impression of the object.” – Alexander Rodchenko 

My homage to his work has focused on the use of unusual angles to create unreal perspectives. I went to the top of an eight story parking lot in order to photograph down at people walking the streets. I spent a couple of hours photographing groups of people just waiting for the right composition of figures and statues. From such a height people appear as moving chest pieces moving around the stoned pavements like a chessboard trying to avoid each other and this is what I tried to capture in my image.

(http://juan314.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/en-el-pavimento-on-the-pavement-by-alexander-rodchenko-1930/)

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3671028/Alexander-Rodchenko-A-man-who-took-life-lying-down.html)

Homage to Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall's photography makes deliberate references to past images in particuarly from the Canon of Western history painting. The canon of western history paintings are considered, along side with music, to have the largest influence on western culture and have shaped it. Wall does not simply try and copy or recreate these paintings but pulls the core and context from within the painting. The image "The Destroyed Room" 1978 is inspired by the painting "The Death of Sardanapalus" by Delacroix which features a king with a mental illness who intends to out live his possessions. The painting features horses, possessions and his wives bing destroyed. The feelings and emotions are expressed through the use of violent reds and the painting appears to be collapsing from the top downwards.

Wall creates a parallel context but with a contemporary style trying to re-create the rage fore told in the painting making it look like the scene of a burglary or crime. He uses the same red and similar objects such as a bed and common possessions. The work is very traditional yet contempory creating a vision of how the painting may have been expressed in the future. The work was created as an installation inside a studio which can be seen in the work, which is deliberately left visible by Wall to show he has setup, the scene intentionally to look exactly how it is.

 As homage to Jeff Wall's work I am going to focus on a space that suggests a person has no possessions and almost the opposite to the painting by Delacroix. I have discovered a location that was or possibly still is the sleeping place of a homeless person who has very little possessions. He is not filled with rage but, instead little hope. The location has been boarded up similar to the windows and doors in Walls work. Instead of bright red colours darker greys are used to represent a different sense of emotions.

Homage to Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams is best known for his use of the large format camera which allowed him to capture stunning landscape and nature images. Every photography is at the highest detail and showcase a full range of black and white tones. Adams specificically used a view camera which required him to control every step of the photograph he took. Controlling the tonal range was very crucial to his work along with the zone system he created. Large negatives were used in order to make prints that show even the tiny details. The use of this camera allows the artist to choose exactly which parts of the photograph are to be in focus and this whole process is very different to using a camera with auto focus and exposure settings. The equipment needed to take each shot was very heavy which put many photographers off taking images using the 10X8 large format cameras on rural landscapes. Because Adams was exposing just one sheet of film at a time he was able to apply the zone system he created to previsualize each image before he even took it and develop it specifically for that shot. This zone system is what makes his work so unique as many other photographers were unable to achieve the density range of whites and blacks likes Adams. With several other artists such as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Willard VanDyke created the group f/64 to show their dedication to the genre of photography. The name f/64 comes from the aprture setting on the camera which is the smallest hole for the light to pass through the lens. This required a long shutter speed but was rewarded with a very large and vast depth of field able to capture the whole of a landscape in focus. For my homage to Ansel Adams work I found a rural landscape with a range of blacks, greys and whites and photographed it using a DSLR camera using the highest f stop number on my camera at f/22. This allowed me to capture a large depth of field and large range of tones. I also thought about the composition and use of shapes to flow the eye around the image like in Adams work.