Artist research ~ Ruth Bernhard ~ Everday Geometry.

Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard was born in Germany, 1905—2006.

She began her career in commercial photography and during her lifetime, Ruth Bernhard shot almost exclusively in black-and-white.

I find Ruth Bernhard’s work extremely compelling, evoking a lot of interest and attention due to the shadows. She works with the human body and objects. Something that I have been looking at is her work with shadows, coming up with ideas that other people haven’t, by using everyday objects to create strong shadows, which adds something different and something I wanted to experiment with in everyday geometry.

For my work based upon Ruth Bernhard’s work, I used controlled lighting and fruit. I thought that fruit has a lot of interesting shapes and it appeals to many. I decided to experiment with where to put my fruit, placing them in different ways with different angles, and different parts of the shadows. I decided to use carrots and plums to use for shadows as they both have different colours I wanted to experiment with, the plums being darker and the carrots being brighter.

I found that the plums brought out better shadows due to the shape, whereas the carrots were a little harder to work with, getting the lighting right especially but I am happy with my results.

I wanted to use colour in my work which is different to this photographers work due to them purely working in black and white, but I thought that the colours in the fruit were interesting and striking and I wanted to work in colour for my Everyday Geometry as a whole.