Unit 31 - LO1: What Makes a Good Photograph?

Unit 31 - LO1: Photographic Genres and Their Purpose

Photographic Genres and Their Purpose

There are many different types of genres in photography. Each has a different purpose or different style, sometimes both, that sets them apart from each genre and makes them stand out. Examples of this would be:

Landscape Photography

This genre of photography focuses on the environment around us, the places within our world. These can be natural places, such as mountains and rivers, or can be man made, such as skyscrapers or bridges. Landscape photography is often done because of emotional memories or past experiences that are tied with certain places, but they can also be done to capture the beauty of a surrounding area or a vast feeling of the world. The photographs tend to show a vast open area, or the beauty of nature and its surroundings.

Landscape photography has a wide range of uses in media, two examples of when landscape photography would be used would be in advertising for tourists, as it portrays the place in a good light and shows its beauty. The other example could be that it would be common practice for artists to use landscape photographs as a reference for their paintings.

Some photographers that are well known in landscape photography would be:

Ansel Adams

A famous American landscape and nature photographer, he ha won several awards in a 5 decade long career as a photographer.

Galen Rowell 

A Wilderness photographer and a mountain climber, he traveled and climbed mountains all over the world.

Henry Jackson

Jackson was a painter and geological survey photographer and took many iconic photographs of Western America.

Eliot Porter

A famous American nature photographer, he is considered to be one of the first photographers to capture nature and landscape in colour.

Monochrome Photography

Defined as a style of photography where the image has been captured in only one hue of colour, as opposed to the colours of the object that was photographed.