CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Photographs of Surfaces
Close photographs of walls, rock, water, bark and pavement that fill the frame with texture until the subject turns into pattern.
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About
Move a camera close enough and depth disappears: a wall, a rock face or a patch of ground becomes an image almost without a subject. The close-up surface came into its own with modernism. In the 1920s Albert Renger-Patzsch isolated plants, materials and machine parts in crisp detail, and Brassaï, from the 1930s, recorded faces and signs scratched into the plaster walls of Paris.
After the war, Aaron Siskind photographed weathered signs and walls as flat fields of marks, close in spirit to the abstract painting of his friends, and Minor White found landscapes of the mind in frost, rock strata and eroded stone. Contemporary photographers extend the idea with aerial views of fields, salt pans and water, and with macro lenses. The strongest pictures hold a double reading: first a pattern, then the grit, rust, paint or skin it really is.
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