Victor Schrager is a New York artist known for his photographs featuring books. He was interested in the colors of old book covers and would photograph books with selective focus so they appeared to vaporize. His images purposefully go out of focus to eliminate details on the books. The document discusses someone attempting to recreate Victor Schrager's style by taking photos of arranged books with adjustments to focus, exposure, and saturation in Photoshop to match Schrager's aesthetic of blurred, floating books.

1. Victor Schrager
Josh Sampson

2. His Work
Victor Schrager is a New york artist who artist who worked as a director of New York’s
Light Gallery for three and half years, until he eventually embarked on a career
dedicated to the genre of books. He’s interest in books were used in backdrops for
most of his photographs and has been recalled o say, “I was always taken with the
evocative colours of old hardback covers”.
While taking photographs, Victor experimented with his camera’s selective focus to
physically engage the elements of the picture and soon became hooked on watching
solid books just vaporise before his eyes.
The image on the left shows the angled geometrics and
planes of colour which Schrager uses to depict old
hardback books. he has purposefully sent the photograph
out of focus so that the books seem to dissipate and
float free, therefore details on the books are eliminated.

3. My Photographs
With Victor’s work in mind, I attempted to recreate a couple of his photographs. I
used different coloured and sized books to the ones used by himself, however I did
use hardback books and placed them as accurately as possible to where his were
placed. When taking the photo, I manually adjusted the focus so that I could place the
whole image out of focus and had my camera on f-stop 3.5 and a shutter speed of
1/30 as well as an ISO of 4000. Once I had chosen the best photograph from my
camera, I placed it into Photoshop and increased the exposure levels to lighten up
the background and changed the saturation levels to alter the colour schemes of the
books involved. I also cropped the image so that the books were the focal point of the
image and casted the image even more out of focus by using filter called ‘Gaussian
Blur’. (This is shown on the next slide with a screenshot from Photoshop and the
original and finished images).

4. Victor’s
Photograph
My photograph
A screenshot
from
Photoshop

5. My Second Image
Once again I used the
‘Gaussian Blur’ to reduce
the overall focus of my
image to try and recreate
Victor Schrager’s image
as accurately as possible.
My image
Victor’s
original
Image