Camera & Photo: Homage to Malevich and the Suprematists with the Fuji X-T1

In 1918 the avant garde Russian artist and founder of the Suprematist art movement, Kasimir Malevich, painted his purely abstract compostion, "White on White" -- a skewed white square painted onto a square canvas also painted white. As manifestations of the Suprematist art manifesto with its basis in pure artistic feeling, this painting, along with "Black Square" painted in 1915 revolutionized the art world and finalized its departure from a reliance on real-world subjects, introducing instead completely non-objective, abstract geometric compositions. They seem tame by today's standards, but were quite shocking for their time.

Kasimir Malevich Suprematist compositions, "White on White", 1918, and "Black Square", 1915.

Every now and then I give myself a photographic exercise based on a theme. This weekend I decided to pay homage to Malevich by limiting my palette to purely abstract compositions in black and white. While Malevich used paint, photographers use light and shadow to create fluctuations in tones.

I set my X-T1 camera to square format and black & white and used two lenses, the 60mm macro and the 56mm f/1.2 with a Nikon 6T close-up lens on it. In both cases I set the camera to manual focus because I was shooting wide open and wanted to place the focus point in very specific locations. I usually shoot the Fuji X cameras in RAW plus jpg. Most of these images were from the original jpg compositions with a bit of post-processing added contrast.