Inspiration Αρχεία - Vassilis Tangoulis

The amazing world of Akira

26/11/2022

I will start today showcasing the work of some favorite photographers of mine. Photographers i find their work inspiring and mind-puzzling. I don’t intend to share in my blog many interviews. My only motivation is to give you something different from the standard view in the field of Fine Art Photography. One of my favorite photographers out there is Dr. Akira Takaue and i came across his work around 2011 when i saw his amazing seascapes in FotoBlur. From that moment i followed him in every other social media and witnessed his transition to Architecture Fine Art Photography. Hope you enjoy it. I would like to thank you Akira for this interview and i start by telling you that i totally love your architecture work because it has so many conceptual elements and brings a different (extra) dimension to the classical Fine Art Architecture Photography. But first lets talk about your title. You are a Dr. that means you have a PhD..what is your field and what is your actual work? Tell us some things about your life. My main field is structural engineer/ consulting engineer, providing engineering of high-rise building and long-span bridges such as mega-structure mainly in the Asia nations.I started this field since 1996, firstly I was designing bridge structures mainly in Japan. And then After receiving Dr. of Engineering and qualifications of Architect/ Professional Engineer Japan, I’ve been in the field of international structural engineering from Italian long-span bridge project in 2004. Naturally daily job is “fortunately” so busy, have not enough time to stay in Japan with my family calmly, but I’m satisfied since it allows me to travel a lot. Does your profession influences your photographic vision and if yes in what way? Can you define your artistic vision in more detail if there is such thing of course…? Yes, that extremely influences my photography.I would like to produce conceptual urban scape including the fields of Aesthetic Design and Structural Mechanics including material engineering. And also I would like to direct a spotlight to not only famous structures but also “Common Structures” usually seen in a town. The photogenic subjects regarding structures may not be limited in famous and popular structures. Even if they are nameless and common shape structures they were designed and planned carefully, calculated in depth and constructed precisely, which must be the crystallization of engineering. I would like to produce artistic images of such structures based on the logic of Landscape Architecture Design and structural properties of the building. There is a common saying that a good photographer can find his masterpiece in the backyard…is this possible with the architecture photography? Of course Yes. The field of architecture category in photography consists of a lot of elements, such as close-view, middle-distance-view, long-distance view, BW, Color, abstract, Flat-Shot-Image that is my field such as “Interruption” you can see here. Buildings and Bridges are not constructed automatically, but they are planned, analyzed and designed by Engineers based on aesthetic design, landscape architecture design, City planning, Structural Mechanics and material engineering. Therefore, I believe that I can find out and discover some different and characteristic points of views of a structure including surrounding conditions. What i really like in your work is the color or selective color. Every photo can be black and white or color in Fine Art photography? What are your thoughts about this? The choice whether BW, Color or spot color is applied to may depend on the concept I determined during taking and post processing. For example, this shot with warmhearted colors, beautiful lady with colorful bags, “Joyfull Day in Urban Matrix“. Already I received a lot of opinions about this image, but I determined that the concept of this image should keep warmhearted color and not strong BW tones. I like BW images working by only contrast, shape and light condition, but sometimes that may not efficiently work.The choice of color or not completely depends on the major concept including motif and story of the image.Therefore, I believe that photographers should make their own concept, story and motif in their images. In some great photos of yours i have seen some conceptual extensions..Remember that one with a woman’s silhouette in a skyscraper. Can you tell us more about this kind of processing? What are your thoughts about manipulation in general..I have heard many people saying that hate to change the sky from a photo and add a more dramatic from another one and others saying that the most important in a fine art photograph is the final result and how close it is to the artist’s vision. My photography is now under development. The mentioned photo of a woman’s silhouette in a skyscraper was produced in my challenging term in 2010. This is just a concept of digital Manipulation, not an architecture image. I challenged this concept 2 years ago but I thought that such the concept with digital manipulation might not become my main category, so I stopped to produce them. Therefore, from that time since 2012, I’m trying to take shots without drastic changes by photoshop and i am focused in taking architecture shots with ND filters. I do not disagree with such the concept of digital manipulation but I would like to take real urban scape photography based on structural mechanics and landscape architecture design. Do you want to become a professional photographer? As of today, No, I don’t. I’m a architect and bridge engineer, which may be my one-way road in my life. Therefore, if I quit my main job as international structural engineer, my architectural images would not be worked remarkably and technically well. What is your photographic gear and how much time do you spend for post-processing? NIKON D700 and NIKON V1. And for post processing, I spend total 2 or 3 hours by Photoshop element and Nikon Capture NX2. Are there special places for a Architecture photographer? I mean for me as a landscape photographer Iceland is paradise..Any paradise for you Akira? As I mentioned in the second question, I would like

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Exploring Fine Art Photography

The origin When i try to describe my vision is like i draw incoherent lines, shapes in a white paper without any real meaning and sense mostly because everything is driven by emotion and, for me at least, is very difficult to “tame” it and restrict it in regular shapes and rules. I am surprised when i read about the visions of other photographers so well defined and described. It is like you can control your emotions or leave them out of the whole creativity process. Anyway lately i was featured in a new photomagazine and was asked to give my ideas about the terms Clarity and Confusion and how these terms define my work. It was that time i realized that these terms could describe quite well my whole perception about my Fine Art Photography. I will try to elaborate this but firstly i will show two of my latest artworks from my collection “Borders”. It is the best way to describe the way i work and understand Fine Art. My “real” world is unreal “Borders” collection © Vassilis Tangoulis| Fine Art Photography These latest artworks show clearly that I am motivated by a vision to transform the “real world” out there into a dreamy place possibly in another timeframe and outside the ordinary description of shapes, lines and figures. In order to succeed this I am using the Long exposure technique allowing me to play with large time exposures and my post processing skills. The truth is that beyond every photographic technique and any post processing skill i have to visualize these unearthly scenes, i have to “see” these rock formations and the trees balancing in the borders of a calm sea and a dynamic sky. As i have said I am drawn to Long exposure photography because it allows me to add a fourth dimension– i.e. time– to a three dimensional object. My photography is a 4D object leaving its footprint, its “trace,” in a 2D layer. When this happens for a 3D object, it is easy for a mind to visualize its 3D morphology. In order to envision a 4D object, however, one needs the power of Fine Art photography. In other words I use Fine Art Photography to reveal secret aspects of common subjects like these rocks and trees. “Borders” collection © Vassilis Tangoulis| Fine Art Photography I experiment with light, time, and spatial coordinates– and then through my post processing, my “common” subject is finally framed in a transformed world in which its dimensions can be easily described and visualized. As you can see my intension is to question everything reality considers as prerequisite, to alter the way nature is photographed and finally to confuse the eyes of the viewer. Someone could say that this can be done easily if you use subjects like trees and rocks so i will give some more examples. I always find as an interesting challenge to visit well photographed places like Meteora i visited lately. You can see my interpretation in one om my photos from my collection “Middle of the sky“. Emphasizing the tones of the misty backgound, playing with the tonal gradients, using dodging processing for the foreground rock formations and paying special attention to the light treatment managed to give a mystic atmosphere quite suitable , i think, to this special place. For a moment i manage to confuse the eye of the viewer about the reality of this landscape although all the elements of the frame seem to be quite real and if someone happens to be familiar with Meteora can raise easily the question if this photo was taken there. “Middle of the sky” collection © Vassilis Tangoulis| Fine Art Photography Finding…”Confusion” I believe everything started unconsciously when I was trying to find my identity as a photographer many years ago. I never felt comfortable with street photography and landscape photography (when I was trying to capture the real picture of a scape). Then I discovered the neutral density filters and a whole new world was suddenly revealed. A world with blurred movements, skies with dramatic tones where the clouds have unreal shapes, the seas are frozen and everything there is blurred giving the notion of movement in a static medium. “Waterland” collection © Vassilis Tangoulis|Fine Art Photography The figures of people are abstract and in one picture there is a whole history of movements while colors, when the photograph is in color, have such a great mixture of tones already outside the classical pallet of colors nature uses to treat its miracles. I felt in love with this technique and the transformed world I could capture with my lens and by the same time this was my very first step to create confusion (not to me of course) but to all my viewers and to make them asking questions like (is this from a place in earth? Am I living in this place because I haven’t seen something like this before). Elaborating Confusion through Clarity Through the years i tried to elaborate my “Confusion” concept. I wanted to keep my photos simple. There is a misunderstanding here that simple means easy. “Messolonghi” collection © Vassilis Tangoulis|Fine Art Photography Actually it is quite the opposite. Having a photo with a boat or a tree or an abandoned house “resting” in a large negative space is so challenging for me since I have to intrigue the eyes and the mind of the viewer and at the same time to make him/her wonder about the clarity of this work. In other words to confuse him/her about something so ordinary and simple. A large portion of my work is minimal having this kind of vision.I wanted to make this confusion more challenging and I think this next step was the decisive one since I managed to give my personal signature to this peculiar and at the same time so interesting perception of my “reality”. My intention was to produce photos with a “Clarity” character and this means that a viewer instantly and clearly understands my subject but at the same time a