Victor Schrager

Victor SchragerStephen Heywood

Victor Schrager

Victor Schrager is a New York artist and first came to still-life photography when he was a student at Harvard. Schrager works in a studio, carefully using a large-format plate camera and lightening that imbues his work with a painterly aesthetic. He chooses books according to scale, shape and colour to create an abstract sense to his images. “Everything is surrendered to the visual. Elements are placed where they are most urgently needed,” he says. Schrager purposefully throws the focus so that their faces and spines seem dissipate, float free and dematerialized.

This image was edited on Photoshop by increasing the exposure, brightness, contrast and gamma correction to make the books darker in colour but slightly more defined. I then layered the same image on top of each other to create a blurry effect. I did this instead of using the blur filter as I still wanted the words and images on the books to be vaguely recognisable.

Original Photograph Edited Photograph

I positioned the books in such a way to try to imitate Schrager’s work. I created the foreground sharp and the background blurry, just as Victor Schrager did.

I cropped and zoomed in on the image to focus on the section I felt was the most important. I edited the image in Photoshop. I adjusted the saturation, contrast, exposure and gamma correction to make the image more like Schrage's work. I layered the image to add the blurry effect.