Gotta hand it to you...
I mainly observed a few common themes in Stieglitz's artistic photographic work: human hands, city landscapes and intimate portraits, of mainly women. This is how I came to search for a similar photographer and chose to narrow the search down to one photographer whose focus was on hands as many of Stieglitz's photos.I find hands fascinating as well and can understand how interesting and intimate both of these photographers would have found this subject.
The photographer I think has a similar subject in his images is Richard Seah. Richard, like Stieglitz, is an artistic photographer who shoots images of hands. Richard Seah is quoted as saying “To me, the key to taking brilliant photographs is having the eye – and the mind – to see possibilities. I am drawn to alternative viewpoints – as evidenced in my interest in natural health and alternative medicine. This inclination shows up in my photography. I have little interest in popular subjects like landscapes or glamour.” Richard and Stieglitz never went into detail about why they took photos of hands but if you look at their work you can see it’s a very strong theme in their work. Was Richard inspired by Stieglitz's photography, I don’t know, but it’s possible that Richard and Stieglitz were inspired by the same elements of the human form and were impacted enough to use it in their images. They both used close up stances when shooting their images, and there seems to be no image manipulation or tweaking post-shot by either photographer, but one thing seems to stands apart in Richard’s work is that his images seem to be un-staged and more earthy, soft and natural while Stieglitz is more ‘choreographed’, rigid and sharp. Yet both have captured part of the beauty and exquisiteness of the hand in action. Richard touches on his inspiration of his new book of photos including the hand pictures saying: “My best pictures are related to prayer,” Richard Seah adds. “And I focus a lot on the hands (and sometimes the feet too). Asian Photography magazine featured my work in its April 2006 edition with a headline that I felt was appropriate: Spiritual Photographer.” Below are some of Richard Seah’s works. You take a look and see if you see some similarities to Stieglitz’
Stieglitz's
photography spanned fifty years, beginning in the mid 1880's Kodak’s “new”
camera presented Alfred Stieglitz with a tool that gave him more liberty to shoot
images of everyday street scenes. Some
of Stieglitz's images were parallel in style to “soft focus pictorialism”, yet
he seldom interfered with or tweaked his negatives or print to achieve his end
product. Stieglitz's change his
photographic approach to a more straightforward style, where he believed that “the
creativity of the image was best achieved by being true to the capabilities of
the camera”(urban-photography-art.com/alfred-stieglitz) Stieglitz's achieved this
result by photographing in less than perfect lighting which gave comparable makings
to his pictures only accomplished by other photographers by photo manipulation.
Alfred Stieglitz
In an article written by Urban Photography the
writer comments “His early work was very much in the vogue of his
contemporaries, being pictures that told a story; in a similar way paintings of
the time did also. In fact his work was often mistaken for representations of
paintings.” (Urban-photography-art.com/alfred-stieglitz) Stieglitz's photographic career supported and
helped to propel the medium of photography as an art form. Here are some of Stieglitz's photos of hands
that he did. They are remarkably powerful in that there seems to be something
very vulnerable and yet strong about them.
I mainly observed a few common themes in Stieglitz's artistic photographic work: human hands, city landscapes and intimate portraits, of mainly women. This is how I came to search for a similar photographer and chose to narrow the search down to one photographer whose focus was on hands as many of Stieglitz's photos.I find hands fascinating as well and can understand how interesting and intimate both of these photographers would have found this subject.
The photographer I think has a similar subject in his images is Richard Seah. Richard, like Stieglitz, is an artistic photographer who shoots images of hands. Richard Seah is quoted as saying “To me, the key to taking brilliant photographs is having the eye – and the mind – to see possibilities. I am drawn to alternative viewpoints – as evidenced in my interest in natural health and alternative medicine. This inclination shows up in my photography. I have little interest in popular subjects like landscapes or glamour.” Richard and Stieglitz never went into detail about why they took photos of hands but if you look at their work you can see it’s a very strong theme in their work. Was Richard inspired by Stieglitz's photography, I don’t know, but it’s possible that Richard and Stieglitz were inspired by the same elements of the human form and were impacted enough to use it in their images. They both used close up stances when shooting their images, and there seems to be no image manipulation or tweaking post-shot by either photographer, but one thing seems to stands apart in Richard’s work is that his images seem to be un-staged and more earthy, soft and natural while Stieglitz is more ‘choreographed’, rigid and sharp. Yet both have captured part of the beauty and exquisiteness of the hand in action. Richard touches on his inspiration of his new book of photos including the hand pictures saying: “My best pictures are related to prayer,” Richard Seah adds. “And I focus a lot on the hands (and sometimes the feet too). Asian Photography magazine featured my work in its April 2006 edition with a headline that I felt was appropriate: Spiritual Photographer.” Below are some of Richard Seah’s works. You take a look and see if you see some similarities to Stieglitz’
Richard Seah
Sources for info and photos provided by
http://www.urban-photography-art.com/alfred-stieglitz.html
http://yourstrulyjms.blogspot.com/2011/01/alfred-stieglitz.html
http://www.art-photograph-gallery.com/richard-seah.html
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