Statistically, the Portuguese are the 3rd most hard working nation on average working nine hours per day.
A study was carried out by the University of Southampton showed that the Portuguese immigrants in Jersey who first began as farm workers are more able to become successful business-owners without learning very much of the language.
According to the States statistics unit there were 5,500 people in Jersey last year who were either born in Portugal or Madeira.
On average one Portuguese worker works about 1,852 hours per year.
Portugal was also among the five biggest foreign working communities in Britain.
Establish coherent and sustainable links between your own practical work with that of historical and contemporary reference.
Show evidence for an on-going critical and analytical review of your investigation – both your written essay and own practical work in response to research and analysis.
Hypothesis: Possible questions to investigate
Within my personal study, there is evidence of various techniques. These include: Portraiture, Documentation, Landscape, Abstraction and Reflections on Photography (themes of Aesthetics, Codes, Truth, Seeing, Looking)
Questions to consider concluding my overall hypothesis:
Portraiture
Does a portrait tell us more about the person portrayed or the photographer?
Here is a link to an interesting article by Canon, who released a project directed to the relationship between the camera and the person.
After reading this article, I strongly believe that a portrait can be re-represented in any way. The photographer is the pivitol force within a photo-shoot. Emphasis to strong stereotyping and styles are reflected throughout the article, but with persuasion photographers perceive an image in a different way, therefore reflecting the photographer more.
Can personality and identity be expressed in a portrait?
Visual Arts –
Portraits contain clues about the people pictured in them that can tell us things about the subjects’ cultures, identities, traditions, and roles in society.
Portraits can express how people think about themselves and their world.
Portraits can include symbols that reference interesting aspects of the people in them.
When creating a portrait, an artist makes many artistic choices that affect how we understand the image.
Artists make choices about media, style, background, and embellishments to visually describe themselves or others
What are the differences/ similarities in a formal or informal approach to portrait photography?
What makes an iconic Photograph?
What are the Influences of the Old Masters and other painters on modern photographic portraiture?
What are the key elements if Portraiture and Intimacy?
How Can Photography reflect inner emotions such as fear and isolation?
Documentary and Street photography:
Is it possible for photography to capture moments in time objectively and truthfully?
Examining the documentary aesthetics: A photograph should not be manipulated, so that its authenticity, veracity and sense of realism can be maintained?
What is the relationship between photography and realism?
How can photography bear witness to the ways of life and events of the world?
What is the relationship between Henri Cartier-Bresson’s theory of the ‘decisive moment’ and subjectivity?
What are the intentions of Voyeurism and the nature of observation and intervention in documentary photography?
Landscape photography
Issues in Landscape Photography: Romantic or idyllic representation of nature vs culture and the man-made world.
What is beauty in landscape photography?
How does people control, interact and construct the environment in which they live?
In what way has the work of Ansel Adams influenced Joe Cornish?
To what extent could the work of Ansel Adams be considered spiritual?
What is the Meaning behind William Eggleston?
How Is William Eggleston At War With The Obvious?
What was so different about the ‘New Topography’ exhibition in 1975?
Two Photographers, One Aim: Preserving nature. Looking at the different approaches to landscape photography between Ansel Adams and Robert Adams.
Abstraction:
Two photographers, one aim: Looking at the different approaches to abstract photography between Eliot Porter and Aaron Siskind.
In what way can abstraction make visible what is invisible in the natural and urban landscape?
Reflections on Photography; Aesthetics, Codes, Truth, Seeing, Looking
Examining the documentary aesthetics: A photograph should not be manipulated, so that its authenticity, veracity and sense of realism can be maintained?
Photography: A Critical Introduction Third Edition Edited by Liz Wells
In 1939 a Documentary photographer called Dorothea Lange, was working on a government run project called Farm Security Administration. Dorothea had stopped on the road to investigate a group of people who were employed to pick peas. Within less than 15 minutes she had photographs of the ‘migrant mother’ and her children. This photograph went on to become the most reproduced photograph in history, it was reproduced on stamps to represent the ear of 1930’s and used for cartoons.
One of the main principles of this photograph was that it should remain untouched free of photo shop even any minor changes so that the photograph could maintain it’s accuracy and genuineness.
What the photograph shows/ represents?
Mother and child – maternal symbolism
Poverty during the depression
Lack of presence in the mothers expression
Absence of the farther
The human condition at the time
Social and historical evidence
Resistance against the depression
Gender roles – femininity
Dorothea Lange – The Assignment I Will Never Forget
Essay to go with the photograph of Migrant Mother
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, she was thirty-two. “She and her children had been living on frozen vegetables from the field and wild birds the children caught. The pea crop had frozen; there was no work. Yet they could not move on, for she had just sold the tires from the car to buy food. There she sat in that lean in tent with her children huddled around her, seemed to know that my pictures might help her, so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
Ways in which the photograph can be analysed:
Relation to politics and ideology
Process and technique
Class, race and gender
Psychoanalysis
Aesthetics and traditions in art
Context
Essay to go with it
In 1978, they were able to track Migrant Mother, they found her living in a trailer in Modesto California, however they said that she was an ordinary dull woman who was no longer able to be the icon of the depression. In an interview with ‘Migrant Mother’ Florence Thompson held by the United Press 50 years after the photographs were taken Florence said that she was proud to be the subject of the photography however she didn’t make any money out of it and so it had done her no good.
Throughout history women faced unequal standards of living and were expected to live happily without suffrage. This began to change in the early 1900s as women started to stand up against this and have a mind of their own.
In 1903 a woman in Britain founded a new organisation, her name was Emmeline Pankhurst, this was the Women’s Social and Political Union. Pankhurst knew that the movement would have to become more radical and militant if they were ever to be noticed and effective. They were given the name Suffragettes by an article in The Daily Mail. These women were often silenced and little media coverage was to be allowed on their movement as many people in politics wanted them to be silenced and not to allow them to gain any sort of following. These women did many protests against the norms that their faced in their society. They simply wanted the right to vote. Throughout campaigns these women were hit down, shamed and also sent to prison. Those who made it home were shamed in the street they lived in by police and their husbands were humiliated. Those who went to prison would often go on hunger strike but were force fed through tubes going down their noses. Women were treated so poorly all because they wanted the right to a simple vote. The suffragettes went through so much and many became martyrs to the cause. Without these women we would not be where we are today with feminism.
“this was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known in England, or for that matter in any other country…..we interrupted a great many meetings……and we were violently thrown out and insulted. Often we were painfully bruised and hurt.” – Emmeline Pankhurst
Suffragette protests
Suffragette protests
Suffragette protests
What they did
The Suffragette women were willing to do whatever it took to get noticed by Parliament and demanded the right to vote through violent means of protest. They would throw stones in shop windows, shout down the streets with signs. These women faced police hitting them down and being thrown to the ground all because they had a difference in their views and supposedly these women were breaching the peace. To think of everything that these women had to go through just for the simple right to vote baffles me as it seems to be something that we all have now and that many people ignore and don’t actively use their right to vote. These women faced imprisonment instead of accepting fines as it would have defeated the whole purpose of their movement, they would never give in. When in prison women would go on hunger strike and would refuse to take any sort of food at all. These women were force fed, they were held down against their will and a tube would be shoved up their nose where they would be forcibly given milk and other liquidised foods. The movie Suffragette shows this in a lot of depth and really gives audiences a sense of what it would have been like just as one Suffragette in Britain back in the early 1900s. Suffragettes also faced police brutality being thrown to the ground and hit in attempts to stop them protesting. Somehow this has seeped through history and not a lot of people know about the Suffragette and the fight that women had to go through and are still going through just for the right to vote. Feminism now branches further into issues of equal pay, equality of life and equality of social standards as well as a more equal political state. This fight is nowhere near over and women are still fighting for their rights in 2016. Many Suffragettes died during protests and have since become martyrs to the cause.
Suffragette protests
Suffragette protests
Suffragette protests
What I think | Overview
It is so important that the Suffragettes fought for their rights back in the early 1900s because they gave women of the future a better chance and better opportunities. This was just the start of ridding of our suppression that has been bestowed upon us by men. These women actually lost their lives because they felt so passionately and believed that it was their right to have a simple vote. I am so pleased to live in a time where I don’t have to fight for my right to vote and to be seen as more of a human being rather than a robot that stays at home doing all of the cooking, cleaning and caring for the children. I do think that the movement of the Suffragettes is one of Britain’s untold histories, not many people know what these women went through. We aren’t taught this in school, almost as if it wasn’t real. I feel that many people are ashamed that this actually happened, that women had to fight hard to get the right to vote and that many died in the process. I also think that the brutality of the police really emulates what women went through and how far they would go to suppress these women. Without this movement and without these women I wouldn’t be in school today, I wouldn’t have an education and I probably wouldn’t have any where near as many rights as I do have now. I am so glad that these women saw that something was wrong and stood up for what they believed in as I find nowadays it is so easy to just ignore your feelings and not voice your own opinion in fear of being shamed or laughed at but these women did not care, they simply fought. This was the first step of feminism and now in the third wave of feminism we still haven’t got too much further, there is still so much change that needs to happen and many more fights to be fought and won but without the movement of the Suffragettes we as women wouldn’t be able to voice our opinions. We have so far to go in feminism and it is now becoming a whole lot more accepted in countries like America and Britain but other European countries are still fighting for their rights and some are still fighting for the right to vote.
Before I start my Personal Study, I want to do some simple research into all of the photographers I am going to write about within my essay.
The New Topographic Photographers:
“With shots of disused warehouses and eerily empty streets, the New Topographics photographers trained their cameras on the creeping urbanisation and industry of 1970s America.” – The Guardian
“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was an exhibition curated by William Jenkins in which he selected eight young american photographers; Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. Each photographer was represented through ten pages in the exhibition, all except for Stephen Shore worked in Black and White. Jenkins chose these photographers because their images all had a similar ‘banal’ aesthetic, but were formal images.
“The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.”
Of The New Topographics, I have chosen to look at Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, as their work is very strong and well know for being part of the new topographic movement.
Robert Adams
Adams is an American Photographer who was part of the New Topographic’s movement. “His work is largely concerned with moments of regional transition: the suburbanization of Denver, a changing Los Angeles of the 1970s and 1980s, and the clear-cutting in Oregon in the 1990s.”
His work demonstrates the vastness and the beauty of america and whilst have the banal aesthetic that made Jenkins chose him for the exhibition, his images are very interesting and of good quality.
Lewis Baltz
Baltz is a photographer I first studied last year when looking at Landscape photography, and although at the time i had very little interest in his work, I have come to appreciate it and enjoy his images much more now.
Photographers who influenced the Bechers:
Albert Renger-Patzsch
In 1925 Renger-Patzsch was a German photographer, who began to pursue photography as a full-time career in 1925. He rejected both Pictorialism, an imitation of painting, and the experimentation of photographers who relied on startling techniques. His photographs record the exact detail of objets. In his book Die Welt ist schön (“The world is beautiful”), his images showed both nature and industry in his style of photography, which was very clear and transparent. These images were closely related to painting of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“The New Objectivity”) movement.
August Sander
During military service, August Sander was an assistant in a photographic studio in Trier and By 1904 he had opened his own studio in Linz. When he moved to a suburb of Cologne in 1909 he began to photograph the rural farmers who lived nearby. Around three years later Sander left his urban studio so he could continue photographing in the field, finding subjects along the roads he traveled by bicycle.
Karl Blossfeldt
Blossfeldt is a very clear influence for the Bechers, and you can see the similarities in the way they both photographed. Blossfeldt was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist.He made most of his images with a homemade camera which was able to magnify the subject u to 30x its size, which he mainly used to photograph plants. This camera revealed lots of detail about the plants natural structure.
Photographers who the Bechers have since influenced:
Bernd and Hilla Becher have influenced a large number of photographers, who are mainly German, including Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, and Roswitha Ronkholz, who joined the first year of the new photography class run by the Bechers in 1976.
Thomas Struth
Struth is a German Photographer known for his images of urban scenes, jungles, and portraits.
“Much of his early works are black and white photographs of urban scenes, particularly industrial spaces and deserted streets, which reflect the changing conditions of contemporary society in his observations of architecture and urban development.”
This kind of edge to his work is what shows the influence of the Bechers work and teaching.
Andreas Gursky
“Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints. ” – http://whitecube.com/artists/andreas_gursky/
His current work is known for its scale and colour, with his images looking at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.
Candida Hofer
Hofer i a german photographer, best known for her large format images on architectural interiors. Her images greatly show the influence that the Bechers had, with her images all being taken in the same way, like the typologies that the Bechers produced.
This is basically my current thought process of what I want to include in my essay and to see what is relevant to my findings. I want to develop further in my essay the work of activist groups and organisations as well as incorporating the work of Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman. I find this the most interesting and want to find out more about a lot of it. I also want to add in some media theorists like Laura Mulvey who talks about the male gaze and what audiences and spectators will expect to see in film, photography and art. I am still unsure as to what question I want to ask as there is so much to talk about. I think that I will need to pinpoint one specific part of the whole topic and focus on that and give an in-depth understanding of this rather than giving a more generalised essay about the entire movement of feminism as it is such a huge and broad topic.
Title/opening quotation:
title ideas – ???
– possible opening quote – “some people have told me that they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.” – Cindy Sherman
– possibly use a quotation from my mother when interviewing her
– find a quote from a feminist activist
Introduction plans | What’s in it?
– brief synopsis of what I want to find
– artist references (Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun)
– possibly mention the Pussy Riots and Femen (add own opinion)
– what are my goals for the whole project
(make sure to have a clear argument or opinion that remains strong throughout)
– focus in on one or two specific areas of feminism [housewives and fashion]
Paragraphing | What to focus on
– make individual paragraphs about Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman as well as cross referencing and comparing the two to one another
– mention modern day (present) movements within feminism especially in Russia and Ukraine with Femen and Pussy Riot – talk about the controversy within these movements and with other feminists
– talk about my own work and how I have responded to all of this [shoot of my mum and then re-staging those images myself to parody them in a sense and the work of gender equality within the fashion industry]
– link in my own work and its relevance to the movement of feminism
– mention the movement of feminism and how it all started with the Suffragette movement and now into the third/fourth wave of feminism
– has my work been influenced by my chosen artists or does it contradict/go against their work
Conclusion | Creating a final judgement
– come to a final judgement about everything and refer to the question and hypothesis
– give a final judgement similar to what I was trying to say in the introduction
– talk about if my initial thoughts and judgement are the same now as they were before. Have I proved the point I wanted to make or disproved it?
Lynn Gumpet has been director of NYU’s Grey Art Gallery since 1997 and she has developed and overseen exhibitions, educational activities and collections. Previously Gumpert had served as a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City from 1980 t0 1988, she was also a senior curator there in 1984. Since Gumpert has worked as an independent curator and consultant organising a variety of shows in museums in Paris and Tokyo. Gumpert has a fast knowledge of art history and has industry experience in the arts.
About | Lucy R. Lippard
Lucy R. Lippard
Lucy Lippard is an American activist, feminist, art critic and curator noted for her works and books on contemporary art. Lippard earned degrees from Smith College (BA) and New York University (MA) before she began her career as an art critic in 1962. She began contributing to publications such as Art International and Artforum. Lippard set the standard for post minimalism, or antiform art, when she organised an exhibition entitled ‘Eccentric Abstraction’. This exhibition was hugely successful and this was to do with the quality of its sculptures, including works from Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. Lippard is a well known art critic and is noted for her contributions through exhibitions.
Jonas Mekas
About | Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas is a Lithuania philosopher, born during the war and taken to a forced labour camp by Nazis in Elmshorn, Germany. After the war ended he went to the University of Mainz where he studied philosophy. He was later moved to New York City where he lived with his brother. Shortly after this move Mekas bought his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon got deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954 Mekas and his brother started Film Culture magazine soon to become the most important film publication in the United States. Mekas continued to write poetry and make films, and has published more than 20 books on poetry and prose translated into over a dozen languages.
About | Ted Mooney
Ted Mooney
Ted Mooney is an American author, born in Dallas, Texas and grew up in Washington D.C. In 1973 Mooney moved over to New York and still lives there today. He has pursued two parallel careers in the literary and art worlds. Mooney’s first novel won the Sue Kauffman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters entitled ‘Easy Travel to Other Planets’ in 1981. He was also a full-time Senior Editor at Art in America magazine which he held from 1977 to 2008.
About | Shelley Rice
Shelley Rice
Shelley Rice is a critic and historian who has lectured on photography and multi-media art in the USA, Europe, South America, Asia, Australia and Africa. She is a co-author of numerous catalogues and books including Landmarks [1984], The Art of the Everyday [1997] and many more. Rice has also been an American Consultant for, and a contributor to, Michel Frizot’s La Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie [Paris, 1995 and in the USA in 1999]. Rice is also a photography and arts critic with many essays published in Art in America, Art Journal, Ms. Magazine, Etudes Photographiques, The New Republic, Bookforum, Aperture and more. Rice is currently working for an online magazine of the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. Here she served as the Invited Blogger in 2012 and where she has been since 2014 as the host of the radiophonic talk show, The Meeting Point.
About | Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Abigail Solomon-Godeau was a freelance critic, curator and photographic critic and now working as an art historian. She has produced many books including; Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices which was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1991. Other books include; Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation; The Face of Difference: Gender, Race and the Politics of Self-Representation. Solomon’s work and essays have appeared in such journals as Art in America, Artforum, The Art Journal, Screen, Afterimage and more. These essays have been widely translated into various languages. Currently she is working on a book entitled Genre, Gender and the Nude in French Art.
Mulvey’s main theory was entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and she made great political use of the theory Freudian psychoanalytic theory:
– in a patriarchal [society dominated by men] society ‘pleasure in looking’ has been split between active male and passive female. In other words the females are there to be looked at while the males are the ones doing the looking.
Mulvey believes that Hollywood not only traditionally focuses on a male protagonist but also assumes a male spectator. They expect that males are the only ones in the cinemas actually watching these films and that women would have no desire to be a lead role such as James Bond. Mulvey coined the term ‘the male gaze’ presenting ‘woman as image’ [or ‘spectacle’] and man as ‘bearer of the look’. This basically means that women are there to be looked at and visually enjoyed by men who are there to objectify and watch the women. In film women should be shown as sexy and more of a love interest or to be sexualised rather than a character with a proper background and personality, she is only there to be looked at and so doesn’t need to have a name or personal story or background.
– the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ is given to both men and women. For example, the man will identify with the lead protagonist who is a strong and independent male that uses women and is cool, his comes across as the most masculine. The females will identify with the pretty love interest and happily watch her and see themselves in the position of the beautiful woman.
– men identify with the man who is using the woman as a fetishistic [the focus of an obsession] object.
– women gain pleasure from identifying with the beautiful woman in the film.
David Gauntlett | Born 1971
David Gauntlett
Gauntlett’s is a sociologist and media theorist who’s work expresses that creativity stems from self-identity and self-expression. He was a media professor at Bournemouth University and in 2006 he joined the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster as Professor of Media and Communications. Gauntlett uses the depictions of masculinity, femininity and sexuality in a variety of media such as men’s and women’s magazines, television, film, popular music and self-help books. This is in attempts to explore how these representations impacts women’s and men’s self-identities in both the UK and the USA. Gauntlett presented debates on the power of the media providing an overview of past and contemporary representations of gender and sexuality in the means of media coverage; advertising, magazines, television and film.
A David Gauntlett essay:
Anthony Giddens | Born 1938
Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens is a British theorist. He grew up in a lower middle-class family in London. Giddens completed a Bachelor’s degree in sociology and psychology at the University of Hull in 1959 and completed a Master’s degree at the London School of Economics and he got a Ph.D at the University of Cambridge. Giddens came up with the theory of structuration exploring the connection between individuals and social systems. He is a prominent contributor in the field of sociology and has 34 published books that have been translated in at least 29 languages. From 1998 to 2003 Giddens was the Director of the London School of Economics and still remains there as a professor. Giddens suggests the theory of structuration, a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems. This is based in the analysis of both structure and agents. Meaning that peoples social lives are more than just random individual acts and that there is in fact a social structure. This is in the traditions, institutions, moral codes and have established ways of doing things but it also means that these social standards can be changed when people start to ignore them, replace them or reproduce them in different ways.
Butler is a professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is well known as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity. Butler came up with the “Queer Theory”, this grew out of feminism and gender studies in the 1990s. Her work combats negative representations of gay sexuality in the media and challenges the idea that gender is a fixed, immovable part of the essential life, as male or female. She suggests that male and female gender or sexual preference does not control all aspects of our identity, or how we perceive other peoples identity. Someones sexuality shouldn’t be/isn’t the most important aspect of a person and should not define what kind of person they are.
I agree with this theory as I think that stereotypes tend to scare people and make them think in a narrow-minded way. This theory develops stereotypes and simply states that this side of a person doesn’t define them and that audience’s shouldn’t judge someone just because of their sexual preference, this isn’t a definitive aspect of a persons personality, nor should it be.
Michel Foucault | Born 1926
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was a French historian and philosopher and is associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. Foucault has had strong influence not only in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines. Foucault was a major figure in two successive waves of the 20th century. The structuralist wave in the 1960s and then the poststructuralist wave. His work can generally be characterised as philosophically oriented historical research. Towards the end of his life he insisted that all his work was part of a single project of historically investigating the production of truth. Foucault tried to find a way of understanding the ideas that shape our present not only in terms of the historical function but also by tracing changes in their function throughout history.
Hofer i a german photographer, best known for her large format images on architectural interiors. Her images greatly show the influence that the Bechers had, with her images all being taken in the same way, like the typologies that the Bechers produced.
