Styles / Staged & conceptual
Düsseldorf School of Photography
- Left flash: a large soft source, 90 cm, 1.3 m from the face, about 35° to the camera’s left, 7 cm above the eyes.
- Right flash: a large soft source, 90 cm, 1.3 m from the face, about 35° to the camera’s right, 7 cm above the eyes.
- Background: a small soft source, 40 cm, 92 cm from the face, behind, at the camera’s left, 53 cm below the eyes.
- Background: a small soft source, 40 cm, 92 cm from the face, behind, at the camera’s right, 53 cm below the eyes.
To scale, from the render’s scene file. One way to get this light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Rendered with this plan. Two matched flash softboxes either side of the lens and two more on a pale backdrop, flat and even, the head square-on.
Render: a synthetic clay head made with MakeHuman, not a person, in Blender Cycles, 85 mm, f/5.6.
The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.
Colour photographs of buildings, museum halls, libraries, crowds, landscapes and faces, taken square-on from a distance with a view camera and printed huge, often face-mounted to acrylic, so the wall-sized print shows more detail than the eye. The light is flat and even, the people small or expressionless, the viewpoint often raised. The Bechers' deadpan typology turned into colour 'pictures' the size of paintings, sometimes digitally assembled.
How the look is made
- Stand square-on and well back, raise the camera if you must, and keep every vertical upright.
- Use flat, even light and keep everything sharp from front to back.
- Show no emotion: subjects face the lens or are too small to read; let the structure of the place speak.
- Work in series: the same kind of room, building or face photographed the same way again and again.
- Print in colour and very large, so detail and scale become the experience of the picture.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.
- Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
- Highlights
- Even the brightest parts (clouds, white cloth, snow) keep texture and detail.
How the style is lit
- Flat overcast daylight with no fill and no flash.
- The available light of an empty interior, with an exposure long enough to blur anyone who moves.
- Even studio flash on a pale plain backdrop for frontal head-and-shoulder portraits.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. The set-up at the top of the page is the one we rendered, to scale. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- The style’s f/27 on 5 × 7 in gives about the depth of field of f/5.3 on full frame.
- Then
- 24–60 mm · f/16–f/45 · 1/125 s–1 min · ISO 25–100 on 5 × 7 in, inferred from the gear and the look. Normal or slightly wide lenses and f/16–f/45 are inferred.
- White balance
- Daylight colour negative in flat daylight, printed and later scanned to neutral greys; lamps in interiors and city lights at night keep their own warmth (inferred).
- Focus
- Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
- Rendering
- Verticals kept vertical with camera movements or correction.
- Angle
- Looking down on the subject.
- Distance
- Standing well back; people are small.
- Balance
- The subject faces the lens; planes run parallel to the picture. The subject in the middle, the frame balanced around it.
- Crop & fill
- Detail runs to every edge with no single centre.
- Duration
- An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.
Direct
Portrait sitters face the lens square-on, head and shoulders, shoulders level, eyes straight into the lens, mouth closed and unsmiling, no gesture, held still like a passport photograph. Elsewhere people are small visitors, workers or crowds seen from far off, walking, looking at things or turned away, never directed into a story.
- Turn to the camera
- Shoulders and hips face the lens straight on: direct, symmetrical, sometimes confrontational.
- Head & gaze
- Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye.
- Expression
- Unsmiling, composed and blank: the face gives nothing away.
- Without a pose
- No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
- With the sitter
- Neutral, unemotional and distant.
- The set-up
- The same kind of subject, photographed the same way, many times.
Style the set
Places are shown as found, with nothing dressed or moved for the camera. Portrait sitters come in their own everyday clothes, with no make-up and their hair as it is, against a pale, plain backdrop; the order in the picture comes from the place or the series, not from props.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Colour
- Colour held back towards grey. White balanced to the light, so whites stay white and skin, food and products keep their real colour, with no overall cast.
- Film
- A view camera on a tripod: great detail, slow and deliberate. Printed colour negatives: soft, forgiving colour.
- Texture
- Every surface resolved, more than the eye would see. Smooth tones with no visible grain.
- Shown as
- Pictures made and shown as a set.
- Shown in
- Large prints on the wall, like paintings.
Stay away from shallow depth of field, soft focus & diffusion, tilted angle, snapshot, direct on-camera flash, visible grain, intimate & diaristic, glamour & aspiration, smiling, laughing, theatrical & acted and black shadows.
Before you shoot it
The school's members are living artists with signature works: never prompt by their names or recreate a specific picture such as Rhein II or 99 Cent; describe the choices instead.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- Galleria dell'Accademia 1, Venice , Thomas Struth, 1992. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Köln, Zoobrücke (Cologne, Zoobrücke) , Andreas Gursky, 1988. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Porträt (I. Graw) , Thomas Ruff, 1989. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- The Rhine II (Rhein II) , Andreas Gursky, 1999. Tate.
With other styles
Pairs with New Topographics. Share the level, distant, unemotional view of built places; take the series and flat light from it and add colour and wall-sized prints.
Pairs with New Objectivity photography. Borrow its sharp, frontal description of things for detail shots that sit beside the large views in a series.
The opposite: Diaristic snapshot photography. Its close, flash-lit intimacy is the opposite pole: use the comparison to keep distance, stillness and even light in every frame.
The opposite: Staged tableau photography. Both make gallery-scale colour pictures, but tableau directs a story; keep the Düsseldorf picture undirected and let the place, not an actor, carry it.
Sources
- Düsseldorf School of Photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_School_of_Photography (Becher professorship 1976–1996, student list, 1988 Johnen & Schöttle show, Städel 2017 survey, Neue Sachlichkeit lineage, Bechers in New Topographics)
- Düsseldorfer Photoschule, Wikipedia (de): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorfer_Photoschule (professorship dates, wider student list, 'objectifying view from a certain distance', Sander, Blossfeldt and Renger-Patzsch as forerunners)
- Dusseldorf School of Photography, Tate art term: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/dusseldorf-school-photography (Gursky, Höfer, Hütte, Ruff, Struth; New Objectivity tradition; documentary method with new technical possibilities)
- Andreas Gursky, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gursky (studied with Becher 1981–87, high vantage points, digital editing since the 1990s, prints up to six by ten feet)
- Thomas Ruff, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ruff (studied 1977–85; Porträts 1981–85 on 9 × 12 cm negatives with flash, even light, neutral expressions; printed up to 210 × 165 cm from 1986; Häuser digitally edited)
- Candida Höfer, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_Höfer (empty public interiors, frontal or diagonal, elevated position; colour from 1979)
- Rhein II, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhein_II (1999; dog walkers and a factory removed digitally; Tate and MoMA prints)
- SFMOMA collection records for Gursky's Köln, Zoobrücke (90.264) and 99 Cent (FC.714), Struth's Galleria dell'Accademia 1, Venice (94.312) and Ruff's Porträt (I. Graw) (2003.204): https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/94.312/ (media: chromogenic prints, several face-mounted to acrylic; dates; sizes)
- Andreas Gursky in Conversation with Jeff Wall, in Andreas Gursky (Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2018), PDF at andreasgursky.com: https://www.andreasgursky.com/en/downloads/2018/conversation-wall-and-gursky ('The Plaubel cameras ... were used by the Becher Class [including Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth] up until the 2000s'; 'I created many of my early landscapes with my father's cumbersome old Linhof'; the Bechers' 'very precisely exposed 13x18 centimetre black-and-white negative, photographed from a slightly elevated perspective')
- Andreas Gursky: Images, Tate Liverpool, 1 July – 28 August 1995: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/andreas-gursky-images ('This gives him a 4 x 5 inch negative from which he produces his crisply detailed colour prints')
- Seeing Is Believing, Newsweek, 18 March 2001: https://www.newsweek.com/seeing-believing-148639 (Gursky: 'I always work with five-by-seven-inch-plate camera')
- Long Shot Close Up: Andreas Gursky, Pars Media film page: https://www.parsmedia.com/films/long-shot-close-up-andreas-gursky ('Gursky uses 100 ASA Fuji film in two large format Linhof cameras that are positioned side by side, one with a slight wide angle lens, one with a standard lens', photographing Arirang in Pyongyang)
- Thomas Ruff, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ruff (Porträts of 1981–85 'taken with a 9 × 12 cm negative and, because of the use of a flash, without any motion blur')
- Candida Höfer photographer profile, Wallpaper*: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/candida-hofer-photographer-profile (since the 1970s 'with one assistant, a large-format camera, and nothing more – not even lighting equipment', using the existing light)
- Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wikipedia, citing Jeff L. Rosenheim, Bernd & Hilla Becher (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernd_and_Hilla_Becher (Plaubel Peco 13×18 cm monorail camera; lenses from 90 to 600 mm; 25 ASA sheet film from about 1970; exposures 'from 10 seconds to a minute')