Photography Set II
Angie McMonigal
Shape, Value, Repetition, Lines, Tone.
Angie McMonigal is a fine art and commercial architecture photographer in Chicago. She brings a detailed, thoughtful1 perspective to her work. She focuses more frequently on bold architectural details rather than sweeping cityscapes. Her photographs celebrate those unexpectedly iconic elements hiding in plain sight. She distills the essential lines and textures that frame the city from landmark buildings, with elements such as repetition, lines, simple colors, and amplifying details. Most of her pictures were black and white and don’t contain complicated values. There were a variety of different lines, such as horizontal, vertical, curved, or diagonal, most shapes are also based on architecture.
The values created by colors in McMonigal’s work are from natural lights, whereas the slightly brighter parts are lit by the sun, and vice versa. However, we can only predict limited overall objects, instead, the photographer captures very detailed and zoom-in areas of the main object. Although making most of them are black and white, McMonigal’s photos are made with contrasting colors, such as the sky and the building, the tree and the sky, so there won’t be any similar or unclear objects. Lines are also one of the important elements in the style of McMonigal’s photography style. Some of the windows are zoomed in and taken at specific angles, the bottom left one also had a reflection of the sky. McMonigal captures the abstract of partial scenes, usually, under the field of repetition, each set of repetitions also contains other elements such as shapes and lines. However, since the colors in McMonigal’s work are very simple, the gradation and contrast of colors here are created with a variety of arrangments: natural lighting, afterward editing, focus bright, shadows, etc. Having the effect of colors and patterns, Angie’s work involves a calm and peaceful tone, which gives the audience a lot of space to imagine and feel.
Angie once said: “My photographs celebrate those unexpectedly iconic elements hiding in plain sight.” McMonigal also had previous experience in designing and creating, where she interacts with Moving from the broader context to a detailed circumstance, I am now focusing on the architecture field of my original vision—the beauty of odds. I am seeking to research and take photos of parts of architecture and will be zoomed in to express the abstract feeling.
Angie McMonigal explores and takes photos based on bold architectures with patterns on its design. Her goal is to create images that draw out the organic interplay between design, structure, environment, and society. This really fits and corroborates with modern people’s aesthetics, in which simplicity can create a different type of feeling, a special resonance.
Uncommon in most of McMonigal’s photographs, this picture had a character in it: a person standing right in the middle of two sides of the building. And having the effect of the sunlight, the two sides also has different colors, which I think signifies the controversial individuality of a human. And how sometimes making major choices between any two is very important.
In my opinion, this picture is balanced in the use of shapes and lines, based on the design of the architecture. For example, the lines are continuing toward the top, which creates a feeling that they will intercept, and more than one line crosses over each other. The person and its reflection in the middle also create some sort of bold line there. The shapes in this photo are also contradictory, for example, the diamond shapes on top are from the photographer’s perspective, but if you stand in a different angle, it will look like squares or rectangles. The half-circle and whole “boat shape” windows also have a sense of contrast from clear angles to rounded shapes.
This photographer seeks to take pictures of architecture with repetitions which is one of the elements of the abstract photo, she also evaluates them with black and white filters, which brings us to a calm tone, stead of being distracted by the colors instead of the patterns and abstract style. Especially that the black and white create a strong contrast, which further indicates that everything has two sides.
I really liked how this photographer didn’t shoot photos of the whole view, where she only takes the details and main parts of the whole scene. And also speaking about the picture above, the lines meeting together on the top makes me feel tension, but then the half circle and slightly brighter color at the bottom make me relax, so there are more than one feeling and message in this photo.
Angie McMonigal inspired me by having a lot of repetitions in her photographs, which I will also be focusing on later. Her contrast of colors also influenced me in editing photos after taking them, even though her photos are simple, with no live colors, and only architecture, the technique she uses makes her photos look more vivid.
Blue photos:
Blues contact sheet link: file:///Users/sharon.wu/Desktop/set%202%20blues.pdf
Green photos:
Greens contact sheet link: file:///Users/sharon.wu/Desktop/set%202%20greens.pdf
My green photos included elements of my vision and have more similarities to my photographer’s work than the blue ones. Which then further develops the characteristics of my vision. With the inspiration from Angie McMonical, I seek to find significant areas around and out of the school, for architecture and make them abstract. In my green photos, the colors were edited into black and white, in that we can focus on the elements and abstraction of the photos. For my vision, there involves clear lines, shapes, and repetitions which are more rational than emotional. I also tried to take pictures that are fairly different from one another in which some are simple and some contain more elements.
Red photos:
With the inspiration photos from Angie McMonigal, I attempted to take photos that also draw out the organic interplay between design, structure, environment, and society. With the perspective of abstraction, I tend to zoom in on my camera to shoot the details of architecture. Through this process, I specialize in urban, abstract, reflection, architecture, street, and concert photography. Editing the photos into black and white also takes me to a brand new world from seeing natural colors in my life, but not being attracted by the design of architecture. According to Angie’s work, I tried to avoid fancy and complicated shapes in my photos, which responded to Angie Mcmonigal’s work. On my own, I also used editing apps to lean more toward Angie McMonigal’s photo characteristics.
The main message I am trying to convey in my red photos is how there’s nothing that is absolutely the same, every mind has a different thought, and thought will lead to a different design, and lastly, even the simplest shape can be developed into a superior level. Although I had successfully connected parts to my vision, the main flaw was that the photos are not as clear, and sometimes shooting higher buildings also increases the difficulty. Now I am just turning my pictures into black and white, next time, I can try to adjust different lighting according to the arrangement of the objects in my photos. For example, contrasting objects can be perfected into two colors, black and white, and not just all black or all white, lighter parts can be more light, darker parts can also be darker, this way it is easier to identify the subject and the message. To correspond to my photographer’s work, I can also focus on one type of element in the future, for example curving lines, straight lines, rectangles, or triangles. To dig deeper into my photography, I can also research his/her background such as their motivation for taking this specific type of photo. Moreover, using a more precise focus is definitely what I need to add for the future. For next time, I am looking forward to adding very simple colors, but also not destroying the tone of the picture, and maybe building objects to shoot photos on my own.