Keld Helmer-Petersen: Black Light
Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who was inspired by Albert Renger-Patszch, the experiments at The Bauhaus in Germany and by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Art Institute of Chicago. He achieved fame for his colour photographs but he also published several books of black and white images that explore dramatic contrasts of tone. In some, we are only presented with images that are black and white. All mid tones have been removed. He created and found these images, using both cameras and flat bed scanners to achieve the effects he was looking for. These books are beautifully designed and encourage us to consider the space around the image and the accompanying text as integral to the meaning of the work.
My black light photos
In this set of photos I chose to edit most of them to be more shifted to the white side of the scale, bar a few. Doing this made it quite clear to the viewer what each image was of and they didn't come out looking as abstract as other black light images I have seen. However the effect of making them black and white and removing all grey areas gave some photos I'd already taken a new and interesting quality. I especially liked experimenting with parallel lines and trying to make apparent the grid format of many photos. For example in photographs of building sites or scaffolding the are always patterns of lines running parallel along side each other and by using this effect you can make it much more prominent and clear, creating some great results. The same goes with buildings, which many of this set of photos were of, much of the architecture in the city is buildings made up of very straight clear squares and rectangle, with not many curves. Putting the two tone effect on images of these buildings create quite 'cubist' looking outcomes.