THE DREAMY, LONG-EXPOSURE
PHOTOGRAPHY OF VASSILIS TANGOULIS
By Victor Gavenda
The evocative long-exposure
photography of Vassilis Tangoulis maintains a magical balance between stasis
and volatility, at once commonplace and strange. He prefers to work in monochrome,
inviting comparisons with the images of Ansel Adams. But rather than conveying
the majesty of the natural world in realistic detail like Adams, Tangoulis
conjures a surreal, minimalist realm that hovers on the edge of our dreams,
serene yet disquieting.
A chemistry professor by
profession, Tangoulis was born in a small town in the mountains of Greece and
now lives in the seaside city of Patras. He draws inspiration from his
homeland’s unique countryside, but he rebels against the practice of cranking
out tourist postcard views of Greece. Instead, he chooses unglamorous subject
matter (fishermen, decaying freighters, lonely trees) and uses long-exposure
photography to add the sense of the passage of time. He calls it the
“projection of a four-dimensional scene onto a 2D surface.”
Tangoulis realized early on that
he wasn’t out to capture “the real thing.” Since that first epiphany, he says,
“My landscapes turned out to be dreamlands separate from the reality we
experience and inhabit.” Tangoulis says he dreams in black and white, and those
dreams always consist of simple figures, objects, or artifacts placed in large
negative spaces.
He finds that black and white
gives him the power to focus the viewer’s interest on his subject—whether a
tree, a seascape, or a small house on a hill—without the distraction of color.
This helps to free viewers to create their own dream-story as they wander
between negative space and his main subject.
Tangoulis takes great inspiration
from Greece, which offers plenty of the water scenes and abandoned artifacts he
is so fond of depicting. “I love to capture Greek landscapes using my personal
viewpoint and thus present a unique view of Greece.” An unexpected feature of
the Greek landscape plays a surprising role in his photography: “In some parts
of Greece, snow is the main problem in winter.”
Capturing a static photograph of
a landscape or object is not the end of Tangoulis’s process. He employs a
number of techniques—some in-camera, some in-computer—to transform a raw scene
into a representation of the dreamland he has envisioned.
One aspect of the experience of
dreams is that time often doesn’t flow in a linear manner. Time may stand
still, or we may feel we are witnessing an event at multiple points in time
simultaneously. Tangoulis found that he can bring this time-out-of-joint
feeling to his dreamscapes by using long exposures, sometimes as long as four
or five minutes. Anything in motion in the scene, whether an object or a fluid,
becomes blurred and indistinct (Tangoulis uses neutral-density filters to
reduce the amount of light entering the lens so the image isn’t completely
over-exposed).
Tangoulis explains that, while a
photograph is inherently a 2D representation of a 3D scene, it’s possible to
add a component of the fourth dimension—time—as well. “The power and magic of a
long-exposure photograph comes from the fact that the dimension of time, as an
extra dimension above and beyond the spatial coordinates of the scene, can be
monitored and captured.”
Adobe Photoshop CC plays a major
role in enhancing Tangoulis’s images. “The first photograph I capture in the
camera is only about 30 percent of the final image,” says Tangoulis. “The rest
of it is the result of the processing in Photoshop combined with my
previsualized scenery, which is driven by my artistic vision.” Indeed, because
so much of the character and emotional content of Tangoulis’s images comes from
his post-processing, he eschews the term “photos” for his creations and prefers
to call them “artworks.”
Tangoulis first decides which
portions of the image he wants to draw the viewer’s attention to. In Photoshop,
he creates and saves selections for those areas, and then adjusts the tonality
and contrast of those areas. The portions of the image he wants to recede into
the background receive minor applications of the Gaussian Blur filter and
little to no contrast adjustment. He says that adjusting light conditions in
parts of the image can also add to the feeling of depth.
Photoshop is also indispensable
for his compositing work. Sometimes his imaginary dreamscapes can be realized
only by the combination of multiple images. He begins by processing each image
in Adobe Camera Raw for basic exposure and distortion corrections, noise
reduction, and conversion to 16-bit and 300 dpi. He saves the results in TIFF
format. In Photoshop, the TIFFs then undergo a basic conversion to black-and-white.
He also adjusts the luminance of key parts of the image using luminosity masks.
For the compositing, Tangoulis
loads the images as individual Photoshop layers and uses layer masks to hide
parts of each layer. Next, he uses gradient masks to add light to some areas or
to enhance the dark areas. (He spends a lot of time dodging and burning.)
Because these are local rather than global adjustments, he sets up layer groups
to save the various selections required.
Other Photoshop features come in
handy, too, such as the Patch tool and Gaussian Blur (useful for taking care of
color banding that may result from the processing). He also uses blend modes
when combining layers, especially Screen and Darker Color. As a final touch, he
adjusts the contrast of the composited image.
Although Tangoulis concentrates
on unpopulated landscapes, a subset of his work does incorporate people. He
confesses that “adding the human element has been a challenge for me,”
precisely because of his love of long exposures. The human figure ends up
blurred, which he says “gives an abstract feeling to the human element.”
In the course of producing his
collection The Gathering, Tangoulis tried a new technique: He composited an
unblurred figure of a human into a long-exposure image. He admits that he was
surprised by the success of these images. Tangoulis now feels that he has
overcome the challenge by finding the harmony between his minimal, silent
landscapes and the shape of the human body. Implementing this solution involved
finding a way to process the image so the human doesn’t draw too much of the
viewer’s attention, so that it becomes “a part of the landscape in harmony with
all the elements of nature.”
Tangoulis doesn’t produce black
and white images exclusively. Color plays a role in about 20 percent of his
portfolio. “I am always pretty sure from the beginning if a photo is going to
be in black and white or color,” he says. The choice is driven by the feeling
he’s trying to capture.