simple, minimalistic composition flat light, therefore low contrast consistency no emotion detachment scale The origins of the word “Deadpan” can be traced to 1927 when Vanity Fair Magazine compounded the words dead and pan, a slang word for a face, and used it as a noun. The following year, the New York Times used it as an adjective to describe the works of Buster Keaton. It’s hard to trace when deadpan photography became a widespread understanding of this particular style of photography, but it was used deliberately to describe the works of photographers such as Thomas Ruff, Alec Soth and Edward Ruscha throughout their careers....

By the late 1970s, there was a “rush to colour” which Sally Eauclaire summarised in her curation of “The New Color Photography” (1981) at the International Center of Photography. She also published a book of the same name. The New Colour photography of the 1970s developed primarily in the United States as part of a photography boom. It grew from three sources: black and white photography traditions (from the fine print to street photography), the everyday amateur snapshot, and the colour saturated visual culture (television, cinema, picture magazines) of recent decades....

The 1930s was the decade when the autochrome and all other screen processes on glass became obsolete as various tricolour printing processes were finally commercialised for those who could afford to use these services. Tricolour negatives could be routinely, if expensively, sent to the lab for reliable processing and printing, rather than be painstakingly tackled at home by the photographer. Black and white had long been the medium associated with both art photography and serious photojournalism, “black and white are the colours of photography” Robert Frank famously declared....

Mohammed Alim Khan (1880-1944), Emir of Bukhara, taken in 1911. This is an early colour photograph taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire. Three black-and-white photographs were taken through red, green and blue filters. The three resulting images were projected through similar filters. Combined on the projection screen, they created a full-colour image. When photographs were seen for the very first time, they were greeted with a sense of wonder....

Landscape photography has long been associated with romanticized depictions of pristine nature and picturesque scenes. Most famously from the 1920s Ansel Adams cultivated an approach to landscape photography that posited nature as separate from human presence. Consistent with earlier American landscape painting, Adams photographed scenery in a manner intended to provoke feelings of awe and pleasure in the viewer, using vantage points that emphasized the towering scale of mountain peaks. With Group f/64 he advocated “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and embraced a wide tonal range from black to white to record texture and dramatic effects of light and weather....