Assignment 4 - Style

David Hilliard

Growing up, Hilliard was dissatisfied with single framed photographs because he felt they couldn’t portray the extent of the story he was trying to tell. He studied and experimented with film but didn’t like the constant running narrative of film so looked for a hybrid between film and photographs. Eventually he settled on what is now his iconic style: photographing multiple frames into a segmented panoramic. His work reflects characters, relationships, and stories from his past, working with rich/vibrant colors that help intensify his photos. The main focus of his photographs are usually centered around objects and figures that help tell his story or recreate memories that blend with some of his fantasies. In combination with lush colors and multiple perspectives over several frames, Hilliard commonly plays with shifts between sharp and soft focus on his subjects in his scenes. The use of the differences in sharp/soft focus helps guide the viewer's attention to specifically targeted objects or subjects. An overarching theme throughout his photos is masculine identity, but still occasionally includes women in his photographs. The majority of his work are re-creations of memories but occasionally he likes to photograph scenes that convey longing or fantasies for things he wants but doesn’t have.

Andreas Gefeller

Gefeller’s work is most recognizable for its birds eye view captures, giving the viewer a new perspective for seemingly familiar places. His photographs capture natural scenes (meaning he captures them as they are) but at the same time they have a creative structure to them, as if they were pre-planned. A lot of his photographs seem to be taken from impossible angles, such as the interior of a room from the perspective of someone looking down through the roof, which give the viewer a feeling of a fictional space. To capture his shots, Gefeller mounts his camera on boom stick that is suspended by a tripod, pointed completely perpendicular to the ground. For a lot of his bigger pieces of work or more intricate photographs, Gefeller has to take multiple photos then stitch them together using a computer program to give the photograph the illusion of a single shot. Some of his biggest photographs are made up of hundreds of individual images that have been arranged into one. He often photographs unpopulated social landscapes, but that still show signs of recent activity. Gefeller prefers to capture his images with flat light, giving the landscape the appearance of an unnatural or fictional space. The combination of lighting, top-down view, and collaboration of multiple images, gives Gefeller’s photographs the feeling of a fictional reality.

Thomas Wrede

Unlike the last two photographers, Thomas Wrede doesn’t have one specific style or theme across all of his work. Thomas Wrede focuses on landscape photos but tends to capture them in different ways. Sometimes, Wrede goes big, capturing large landscapes with a single lone object as the focus. But sometimes he goes small, using toy models to replicate small towns or vehicles in a miniature setup to give the illusion of a large landscape. For his larger landscape photographs, Wrede usually has a lone object such as a tank, boat, or truck, as the focus point. He uses techniques such as tilt shift and blur to give the object the illusion of being smaller than it really is (compared to the large landscape surrounding it). On the flip side, Wrede will place model homes and cars in a scene and photograph from a half a meter to a meter off the ground to give the illusion of an aerial perspective. This ultimately gives the small props the illusion of being full scale objects surrounded by a large landscape. The combination of the “aerial view” and artistic strategy, creates overwhelming photographs that can be hard to interpret by the viewer. His photographs create a bit of a paradox, initially making the viewer think, “yes, that is a real truck”, but after some observation creates a bit of uncertainty because of the tilt shift or aerial view.

Andreas Gefeller