Linking photographs

I can’t be alone in finding it difficult to adequately display photographs on a website.  Apart from the fact that I’m still in the toddler stage of photography, I fall on my bum quite a bit but still keep going, I also struggle with my lack of website building knowledge and the limitations that imposes.

I’d love to say that in all my blogs and assignments I am displaying my images exactly how I want them to be seen but I have neither developed my personal style or skills enough yet to do this.

However, following comments from my tutor I have looked into how others use layout to make a cohesive whole out of a group of sometimes seemingly unrelated photographs to see if I can apply it to my own images. 

One photographer I came across was Leanne James who has a style of photography not too dissimilar to my own.  Her series ‘Megalith Still’ is linked by their subject matter, in this case horses. However, her series ‘Days of Home’ has less obvious connections between the images.  There is one of tree trunks in a sea of deep green and one of a man in silhouette standing beneath a church window.  She has overcome this separateness by assigning the series with a name.  Days of Home, it attaches an emotion to each and every image in the series and helps to provide an anchor for them. Once we have been instructed in how to view them, we can make the connections. Text is important.

A photographer whom my tutor recommended looking at was Nina Berman. There are a number of ways in which she ties her photographs together:

Visual reference 

A man in his chair surrounded by his dogs, a little girl with flower hair clip sitting on a bright pink mat watching army helicopters, a small boy holding a gun. What links these?  The military connection is easier to see in the last two images but when you look more closely at the man with his dogs, you notice he is wearing a flak jacket.

Click on captions and you get more information on the photographs; ‘Human Target Practice All America Day’ for the boy, ‘Helicopter Flyby, All America Day’ for the girl and for the man, ‘Glen Spencer, Citizen Border Watch, Arizona/Mexican border’.

Together they portray US nationalism and jingoism

Colour intensity or lack thereof

eg Hedge and 9/11 Afterglow

‘Hedge’ is a group of photographs are linked by the saturated nature of their colours and an air of chaos. ‘9/11 Afterglow’ is also chaotic but all colour has been drained from the world, which feels very apt for what the images show.

Physically joining photographs 

eg 9/11 Afterglow

Apart from the black and white theme, these images have also been visually spliced together as diptychs forcing us to connect them.

Subject 

eg Purple Hearts

These photographs are linked by the subject of loss, whether it is the loss of a person, body part, identity or ideals.

Place 

eg Obama Train

Nina Berman took a series of photographs through the windows of Obama’s election campaign train.  All though they feature different locations they are all taken from the same ‘place’.