For the St Malo day I worked with Tania Ferreira and together we decided to work with the idea of Tom Pope’s Weak Anarchy set of images. I really like the idea of challenging what we as a society see as right. Weak Anarchy isn’t the idea of doing something against the law but instead a movement that challenges the way people think. It isn’t necessarily against the law but it also isn’t see as very good in the public eye. I want to challenge the way the public think and see if spectators will actually interact in the performance. http://www.tompope.co.uk/weakanarchy.html
In St Malo we went round in groups of about 10 people where we could split off into our little creative groups. There were three different locations with three different teachers; McKinley, Toft and Pope. Our first group was with Mr Toft and we headed around near and on the beach. Some photographs below are just images of documentation of where we went.
For the next hour we went up to the wall in St Malo and tried to get inspired. This for me was the most challenging part of the trip as there weren’t many objects we could take and create something different and unique with. The whole performance was a lot harder to do and create on this location. Here we were working with Mr McKinley. I managed to reflect a lot more on the movement behind performance photography and the theory of it in this hour rather than producing something great as a practical. Here are some photos of the journey on the wall [not performance pieces].
The third and final location we went to was around the streets of St Malo. Here we worked with Tom Pope which was interesting to see him as a photographer exploring the streets. This was my favorite shoot as we did work as a collective large group. All of these photographs are documents of our surroundings and where we went on the day. I am going to be making a short video of the performances which Tania and I did as well as some other performances which we watched throughout the day.
Here are some images from the day we spent down at the Jersey Archive. We went outside down to an open space and Tom Pope gave us some activities to do in pairs and small groups. This was a fun way to show us what performance photography is all about.
Selfie Challenge Explanation
Selfie Challenge Example
Selfie Fights
Selfie Fights
Selfie Challenge
Selfie Challenge
Group Work
Group Work
Group Work
Group Work
Tom Pope Group Work
Orange Challenge
Orange Aftermath
Orange Challenge
I really enjoyed this day, messing around with a different style of photography but I don’t think that I got many artistic or creative photos out of it so I am going to do my own individual shoots by myself to express the art of performance photography.
Tom Pope lives and works in London. For Tom’s photographs he uses a film camera and develops the images in a light room. When we went to the Jersey Archisle for a workshop with Tom he explained that his photography has an element of chance, he believes that a studio is too isolated to work in and he uses the theory of psycho-geography, whereby he gets inspired by the location he is in to take the photographs. To take Tom’s photographs he uses no post production or does not plan to shoot his photographs as he believes it makes for a more “truthful document”. Tom’s work involves “drifting around and seeing where the city guides you” i think this is an interesting idea of exploring the terrain.
Tom Pope studied photography at the Swansea Metropolitan University and the Royal Collage of Art and he is a champion Archer. Tom is also interested in Philosophy.
Fountain bikeI think we Both Want Something Quite DifferentFlight of FancyFountainCatchA moment
Tom Pope sees his photography as him ‘recording a performance’ as the film is made until the video is over. For example Tom Pope’s video of him shaking a tree and the performance is over when the petals have covered the camera lens. In a performance there may be no record if the performance is trying to hit the shutter. Tom believes that photography and film is intertwined and that it is ‘lens based media’.
In addition Tom Pope says that he ‘subverts the meaning and lines of objects I see’ and he ‘subverts social situations’. I think by this he means that by going to different places and going to different situations then he can subvert how we would usually see people act in those places and shock the people around us. I think that in Tom Pope’s images this is shown by when he makes his videos the audience’s reaction in the back of the videos.
I have an idea to shock the public just like Tom Pope does in his photography to try and get the audience to get involved. I want to achieve this by walking through the streets of St. Malo and just threw powder paint into the air, I want to record it as a video and get some images from them to ensure I had some members of the public in them and their reactions. I won’t throw a vast amount of powder because I don’t want to disrespect/damage French property, just enough to make it visible and able to wash away with the rain. The powder paint is like releasing some sort of physical energy into the air but by creating a beautiful cloud of pink. It’s like expressing some emotion to people that I don’t know me and don’t speak the same language as me and who live in different environments to me. This interests me as some reactions will understand that it is creative but some will think I am just disturbing people and creating mess.
Flowers
As a kind gesture, I plan to buy a bunch of roses and give out a rose to random people walking in the street to see what their reactions are. This idea is more to get a positive reaction from the public rather than a more negative will likely happen when I shoot some of my other ideas which may cause some aggravation to some members of the public.
I would like my videos to be spontaneous as well, because I find it easier to walk around, see something then come up with an idea of what I can do. These types of videos are in the heat of the moment which can either go good or bad which is always helpful for experimentation.
A collection of Pope’s images captured between 2005-2011
The results regarding the ‘Chancing Orange’ Shoot with Tom Pope – Societe Jersiaise June 2015
With regard to Tom Pope, our development of the key themes came down to various statements: repeating an action over and over again to benefit the chances of capturing the performance which becomes influenced / held within the margins of challenge and how you can change the chance by altering the subjects performance.
Tom’s influence comes down purely by walking through a threshold of chance and change. His approach to walking through a public arena or audience gives sense of a performance but not of that being successful, its always down to chance regardless of environmental, physical or social factors. I fell when approaching this challenge, this ideal of chance stayed in my mind. I questioned myself on how to make this shoot more successful, and doing so I changed the way I angled my camera and positioned myself in a more beneficial and approachable position. The more I did this with more control, the more effective the photograph turned out to be.
In this image above, Molly was positioned around 5 meters from where i was standing. She threw the orange towards my camera and I did vise versa. This photo was among the most successful, as using a manual blur helped contribute towards the main focus of the image, in this case, the orange. This also helped as during the editing processes in Photoshop, we were able to not insert a Gaussian Blur or any artificial focusing tools because this feature was so effective.
