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Documentary Photography

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Throughout summer I have been looking into our next topic, documentary photography. For this I wanted to find a way to bring in my own style and ideas without completely ignoring the original concept of documentary photography. To me documentary photography is simply taking photographs of a person’s everyday life, following them around and taking various action shots of all the elements of that person’s day. Documentation is an extremely popular media and I believe it to be something that we as humans have done for millions of years, even from the beginning when cave men made drawings on the stone walls, the carvings made by Egyptians to the stained-glass windows in churches. Documentation almost comes naturally to us. I believe that there is no perfect way to document something, however I do believe that documenting something visually is so much better than simply writing it down. I love watching videos diaries that people create and show the world from their perspective and those who document their day and what they have done. One YouTuber in particular that I really love is Jack Harries who has created a series of short documentary films as he travels the world and discovers new people and new places.

Jack Harries
YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/user/JacksGap
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackharries
Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackharries/?hl=en

My favourite videos of his
The Rickshaw Run series:

24 hours in series:

The reason I love watching this style of film documentary is because it’s so real and exciting. I like seeing different cultures and people and being able to discover new places even if I am sat watching it over the internet and not actually being physically there. The way these videos are filmed are excellent as Harries created his own Steadicam from a first person perspective. He used a bike helmet, put two weights on the back and his Canon 6D on the front with a view finder too right in front of his face to create the most real reactions possible while seeing the world from his perspective. I really enjoy discovering different cultures and seeing different streets of the world without even having to spend any money at all. Visual documentary is a great thing and, I think, the best way to lock in mementos of our modern world for the future generations to come.

Alex Webb
Alex Webb’s Portfolio: http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53Y_H
Alex Webb’s website: http://www.webbnorriswebb.co

Below are some of Alex Webb’s images

I find Webb’s images interesting as they are somewhat staged but also documentary. His images lean more towards the tableau side of photography as when he goes into a situation he gets real people and repositions them to make for a more interesting photograph.

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At first I struggled to come up with, what I thought was, an interesting idea. I thought that it would be challenging to come up with a concept and a meaning behind each photograph but then I realised that the whole concept behind this style of photography is not to have some amazingly moving concept or meaning, it is simply a way of remembering. A way to hold on to memories for longer than our minds could ever hold onto. I began to question how interesting ordinary people’s lives were, mainly my own. I thought that my life was very mundane and not worth the documentation but then I realised that we are all different and all unique and it would be very interesting to see how every ordinary person lives their private life. What actually makes us ‘ordinary’? I want to find something different, someone who stands out from the norm. This is when I realised that we are all very different the way we handle and approach things and I think that this alone could be a really excellent exploration of documentary photography. I want to follow ordinary people throughout their day and see how each one of those people do things differently.

I believe that there is a set of ethics that photographers must follow from a humanitarian perspective. Each other their images must be true to its surroundings and not suggest something that is completely false. I think that photography can be very honest as photographers are able to express themselves through their work as well as in documentary photography, getting a true and real message across for the rest of the world to view. Photographers are able to manipulate events by only allowing the spectator to see what they want them to see. This can simply be zooming more into the environment only just allowing what the photographer wants their spectator to see. There has been debates between staged photography and the photojournalists methods of only bare witness. I like both methods and think that as long as the situation isn’t completely fabricated and manipulated to make a person, town or country look bad then I think it is fine to ask your found subjects to stand in certain places in order for the photographer to make the best photo possible. sometimes I think it all depends on what is actually in the image itself, a lot of documentary/photojournalism photography do not focus on composition at all as what is actually going on in the image is the most important thing which is the message that the photographer is trying to get across.
Nowadays photographers have blogs and can share their images all across the internet as well as explaining the situation as background information on their individual blog. I think this is a very honest process and allows photojournalists to tell their side of the story and what was actually going on outside of the image that they took. This makes it easier to avoid backlash and inquiries into why the photographer took the photo instead of helping out in the situation.

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I think that nowadays we all think that only celebrities are worth looking at and that watching them living their ‘perfect’ lives will somehow make up for our very much mundane ones but here is where I think we as humans fail. We shouldn’t be continuously watching the lives of celebrities but we should focus on our own lives and living them the way we want to.  I think that there is no such thing as the perfect life and no one on this earth is living it because obviously we all have our ups and downs. I will be exploring different versions of documentary photography including tableaux/staged photographs.

I also like that a lot of documentary photography is in black and white. This is done to make the images more shocking to the spectator and to really maintain focus on the people in the photograph as well as what kind of background the spectator might assume that they come from. I will use this method in  a lot of my photographs as a lot of my ideas will look a whole lot better if produced in black and white, however I do have one big[ish] idea that I want to make in colour as I think it will be more interesting as well as keeping a record of the colours and fashions of the modern world.

Below are some images that I have looked at for inspiration –

Documentary Photographers:
Corey Arnold – http://www.coreyfishes.com/#
Lauren Greenfield – http://www.laurengreenfield.com
Martin Parr – http://www.martinparr.com
Walker Evans – http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm
Ed Kashi – http://edkashi.com/event/everydayclimatechange
Abbas – http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53B_Y
Eugene Atget – http://www.nga.gov/feature/atget/
Robert Frank – http://www.danzigergallery.com/artists/robert-frank
Mary Ellen Mark – http://www.maryellenmark.com
Alex Webb – http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53Y_H

Tableaux Photography

There are different elements of documentary photography including  tableaux photography. This comes from the documentary style but is more commonly known as staged photography. This is were the photographer may find the subjects in an area and re-position them to make for an interesting photograph or they could be completely staged and prepared to bring across a message to the spectator as well as documenting more serious issues of the modern world, for example feminism.
Tableau came from a French phrase meaning ‘living picture’. Here the subject will dress up, possibly using props, using appropriate backgrounds and poses in an attempt to re-stage past/original events. This style of art was going on long before photography came around as was done in paintings many years before. The 1970s saw the rise of a now famous photographer, Cindy Sherman who began to voice her own thoughts as women were now beginning to express themselves more freely in the public eye. I like this style of documentary photography as I am able to stage some interesting images as well as get across important morals that I believe in and I think this style of photography is a great way to make hard hitting images to start people talking and to open up people’s minds on subjects they may have never thought about in the past.

Tableaux Photographers: 
Cindy Sherman – http://www.cindysherman.com
David Hilliard – http://www.davidhilliard.com

Evaluation, Mr T instruction

Performance Photography: Self Evaluation

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Overall, I don’t think that I have produced enough work which is why I am going to carry on working on this project for a while over summer. I just don’t think that I have done enough of my own work other than the day trip to St Malo, a few experimentation’s inspired by other photographers and one of my own shoots. This week I am going to carry on working on my Invisibility Cloak project to try and produce some more good work as I like the idea behind it and think that there is plenty of room for a lot more development. I want to develop this over the summer as well as get started on some research and planning [and shoots] for the next term of documentary photography which I think will be very interesting. I’m not sure how well I will do on this but I will obviously try my best and get to work over the summer period.

I don’t yet have a favourite final outcome from my individual shoot of Invisibility Cloak as I have quite a few and I still want to create more during summer. I have decided on some final outcomes but I don’t actually prefer any over the other as I think they are all basically on the same level and get my message across. I do however like the stranger ones as it makes the spectator think and wonder what is actually going on in the photograph. Below are four of the images taken from my Invisibility Cloak shoot.

Over the summer I will be working on a new location at the beach and I think I want to develop some experiments on John Baldessari with beach shots, having a load of people on the beach but everyone of them being anonymous with the different coloured dots in front of their faces as well as it being in black and white.

Evaluation, Mr T instruction

Group Analysis 10.07.15

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On Friday 10th July Tom and Gareth came into school and for most of the day we created and presented our ideas and final outcomes to them. We got ourselves into groups and I went with Robyn, Tania, Sophie and Jamie. We were happy to go up and present first during the second hour of the day, which we think went quite well and it wasn’t as bad as we had thought it would be. Our presentation was in two halves, one being the artists and the concept of performance photography and the other being our experimentation and final outcomes. We were able to exhibit a variety of our work and it was very interesting to see them next to one another and be able to compare and contrast the different perspectives we each got on the St. Malo day.

Experimentation-and-Finals research-photog-presentation

When we received our feedback forms we got a lot of positive response and we did fairly well even though we didn’t add everything that we have actually done. This was fun to do and interesting to find out what other people thought of our work as a group. We got a lot of good feedback saying that our ideas and work was well developed which was good for us to see as well as being able to see what we can improve on and change. I did think that maybe this way of testing could have been more effective in the way it was done as we have each done our own individual work and not completely worked together for the entire thing, especially when it came to doing the research. I liked this task and thought that everyone worked really well and all the presentations were well laid out and presented.

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slides from group project
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slides from group project
Evaluation, Mr T instruction

My Manifesto

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For my final ideas I have decided to stick with the movement of Surrealism for this I want to create images with no boundaries. To me surrealism is the creation of a new world, a new form of reality that is why I chose to focus on it. I really like the idea of having no limitations within my work and being able to come up with the craziest ideas imaginable and see how well they work out for me and whether some of the weird ideas from the depths of my brain come across well in the photographs. I think that this applies a lot to challenge as it is something very different to anything that I have ever done before in this photography course, it is a new style of performance.  I find it challenging for the model in my images as a lot of the time the ideas in my head stay in my head and I simply direct them and position them without them really knowing whats going on or what is going to be produced, I do explain all my ideas and progress my ideas. It is also challenging in the editing process as I need to layer the images and find new ways to develop my creations in order to make them look good and to come across how i imagine them inside my head.
frtfrblogThrough my work I plan to communicate a wider message than just a non sense surrealist image, which is what I think a lot of surrealist work has, a concept behind it. For my shoots I am going to name my project Invisibility Cloak, I decided on this name because it makes me think the most and I feel like a spectator would see this title and wonder what it meant and would make them want to read on. I have already done one of the shoots for my project and one of the images that I made reminds me of the Harry Potter films and when Harry receives the cloak of invisibility. Here I got an idea of what the message behind my project was. I think that we live in a world where everyone judges you on your appearance, the first time you meet someone it doesn’t really matter how hard you try to impress them because they’ve already made a judgement on you based upon the clothes you wear, how you’ve done your hair, how your makeup looks etc. Now I imagined what if we lived in a world were you can’t see any of that? And instead of hiding behind our clothes to cover ourselves up we use them as a way to be known to the world for people to see that we are living. I thought this would be a good concept and although it is quite cheesy I like the message behind it and I think it will make for some good images at the end of it all.

I’m taking a chance with this project because I think that a lot of people might not get it and might just think its strange, which is the risk element of this project but I like it and I haven’t seen anything EXACTLY like this before so it will be a good chance for me to show my skills and try and create some really good work. I have looked through many surrealist photographers and in the end I found two that I really like as I think their work is different and imaginative. The first one, my absolute favourite, is a photographer named Christopher Mckenney who specializes in horror surrealist photography, to me this is very interesting and is a huge risk to take because for a lot of people it can be too much. For example, I showed my parents one of his images [man holding gun to head] and they did not like it at all. My mum didn’t really get it and wasn’t keen on it and my dad just hated it because he thought that it was going too far and too much for an image. I explained to them what I thought the image represented [see earlier post] and told them the whole concept behind it. The next photographer who I really like is Brian Oldham as his work is very unique and I think has a deeper message behind it. He sticks to surrealist photography and has work which won’t make people as uncomfortable and Mckenney’s might for some.

Work from Christopher Mckenney
'Spec'
Work from Brian Oldham

My Manifesto RULES:

I’m not really keen on having set rules for my shoots as I think that anything can happen and a lot of the time things that are unplanned and unprepared can turn out looking better than those that I have planned weeks in advance. If I had to give myself rules and limitations this is what they would be:
1. Keep track of time, don’t shoot when dark [creates more of a horror mood, which I do not want]
2. Allow models to have their own say and don’t restrict them to following the exact directions that I give to them
3. Remember to take a photo of the bare background before starting to shoot with model to make editing simple
4. bring all props and allow time for  preparation before shooting
5. don’t go crazy and make hard images to edit and change
6. stay in woods for first shoot and don’t mix locations [unless it looks good]
7. allow space for spectator to generate their own meaning behind the photographs, don’t make it obvious
8. no black and white images for this shoot [doesn’t allow for enough detail in photographs]
9. remember it’s PERFORMANCE photography so stick to telling some sort of story, performance doesn’t necessarily have to have a live public audience waiting, the spectator can see and image it for themselves when looking through images]
10. there are no limitations in surrealism or performance photography so keep strong ideas and allow them to be expanded

“So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost.” – Andre Breton [1924]

Mr T instruction

Tom Pope; Call for participants

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Read Tom Pope’s new blogspot about his planned epic film:
Pushing the Boat Out

The film will see Tom, with the help of the Jersey community, push a 13.7ft boat across the island and out to the Atlantic ocean.

Here is what Tom has to say:

‘On July the 16th, starting from Gorey harbour i will set off with the boat heading West to St Ouen’s Bay. The underlying principle of the film is centred on how it’s an impossible task for me to complete alone. As a photographer and performer it will not be viable to record the process of pushing the boat across Jersey while actually doing it. I will require assistance from the public if i want to succeed in moving the boat and recording the performance. The resulting video footage will be used to create a 20-25minute film.’

Read and find out more here;

http://www.archisle.org.je/category/tom-pope-blog/

Photo by: Albert Smith 1924-34. Societe Jersiaise

 

Mr T instruction, Research

Dadaism: Complete Nonsense

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The actual word ‘dadaism’ is a nonsense word which was made up with no real meaning. The creators wanted to use a word that meant nothing as a sign of protest against the First World War. This new idea was adapted in 1916. This movement can be seen as shocking, surprising and scandalous to most people, although it isn’t as crazy as people make it out to be. Dadaism was created by Hugo Ball in Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. This is the total rejection of rules and came from utter disgust after the brutality of WWI. Here Ball wanted an audience reaction to try and test their tolerance and to test them and their take on this new art form.
This can be associated with photo montage, this is the layering of different types of images cutting them out and putting them back together in a different way to create an entirely new image. Here many propaganda posters were created as a new movement and to influence citizens. This really interests me as I am able to explore how different countries and different leaders perceived themselves and what message they wanted to bring across to the world.

I like the idea of dadaism and photo montage. I think I am going to experiment with copies of old family photographs and create my own photo montage as well as maybe creating a few more realistic propaganda posters for past and present leaders. This will be interesting for me and I think that I will be able to explore a load of different aspects of this movement. For me I will be taking a chance to see how controversial a lot of what I am going to create will be, as well as it changing and challenging the way society thinks and perceives a certain influential person or period in time.

There weren’t many women involved with the dadaism movement but there was one popular woman called Hannah Hoch. Hoch was a German Dada artist, born in 1889. The reason not many women were a part of this movement because around the time this came about women were seen as secondary to men, that they should stay at home and nurture the children and were unworthy of work. Hoch was actually one of the originators of photomontage. She was the loan woman amount the Dada group as women were seen as lesser than men back then.

Mr T instruction, Research

Cubism: The Beginning of Modern Art

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Cubism became one of the most influential visual art styles of the early Twentieth Century. This starts in 1907 when Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of five prostitutes. However it wasn’t who he had painted as this was common for artists to hire prostitutes to paint as it was seen as disrespectful to paint a nude image of your wife or of someone else’s wife. It was the way in which he had painted them which really got people talking, starting the era of cubism and the gateway to modern art.

avignonI fiind this painting very interesting because the way it has been done is as if these women aren’t human but also in a way to protect their identity so that no one can see who these women actually are. I do think Picasso did this just as an experiment, to test the way the spectator thinks, which came to be very successful as now any one of his paintings will be sold for millions of dollars as each is unique and there is only one copy of it. I find this painting visually interesting because it doesn’t show too much attention to detail. It gives the basic shape and outline of each woman’s figure unlike biblical painting that people are used to seeing on top of church ceilings [from 1500s]. I like that this painting doesn’t objective these women as many other painters have done so many times in the past. To me this painting is embracing the human form and physique yet somehow it managed to deface the women in the painting too. I’m unsure whether or not distorting these women’s faces was an experimentation of different shapes or rather a means to say that these women’s faces don’t matter and only their bodies do. I have mixed feelings about this painting as you can see it from many different perspectives and can take from it both positively and negatively.

Pablo Picasso was inspired by Etienne-Jules Marey [1830 – 1904] and Eadweard May Bridge. These two also created a new style of art called montage. This came from Russia as well as the theory of an active audience when watching films. Here the Russians believed that an audience watching a film want to get involved and think actively and take from a film what they want whereas the old American belief was that all audiences’ were passive and were just fed something and they took it all in and did what the advertisement or film told them to do.

Mr T instruction

Starting points – Final Ideas

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Objective: Contextual studies and developing final ideas

There is now 3 weeks left of this module and it is time for you to begin to develop  ideas for final outcomes.

From the Planner Summer 2015 it states that you MUST Produce a number of posts that show evidence of the following:

1. Research: Look at a number of different starting points for developing your own ideas. In particular other artists within performance, photography and video for example see ppt: Performance and Photography, Photomontage and resources from below. Choose at least two artists references.

2. Analysis: Select key works for further analysis. Describe techniques used, interpret meaning, evaluate aesthetic quality. Make links to art history e.g. concept of Dadaism, Photomontage, Futurism, Surrealism, Experimental filmmaking/ Avant-garde cinema, Situationism,  Psychogeography, Performance art/Live art, Neo-dadaism, Conceptualism etc.

3. Planning: Write a manifesto with a set of rules (6-10) that provide a framework for your final project. Describe in detail how you are planning on developing your work and ideas in the next two weeks. Think about what you want to achieve, what you want to communicate, how your ideas relate to the themes of Chance, Change and Challenge and how you are going to approach this task in terms of form, technique and subject-matter. Illustrate your ideas with examples, mindmaps, moodboards etc. You can work individually or in groups.

4. Friday 3rd July Group crit: Critical reflection and presentation of your work/ ideas

5. Upload and process images/video using Lightroom/ Photoshop/ Premiere.

6. Final outcome: Edit, experiment and evaluate with a number of different creative outcomes using still images or video. Produce a number of posts that illustrate your working and thinking process, using screen-graps, images and annotation.

7. Create a title for your work and write an artists statement.
Review, reflect and  describe the ideas, influences and meaning behind your final outcome. Reflect also on what you have learned during this module on Performance and Photography and evaluate how successful you were in realising your ideas and how it relates to themes of Chance, Change & Challenge.

8. DEADLINE Friday 10th July: Feedback and creative input. from Tom Pope and Gareth Syvret.  Make sure you have work ready for presentation!

HELP & SUPPORT:

A list of art movements that you may use as contextual research. Many of them also produced Manifestos:

Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism,  Situationism, Neo-dadaism, Land/Environmental art, Performance art/Live art, Conceptualism, Experimental filmmaking/ Avant-garde cinema (those studying Media make links with your unit on Experimental film)

Here are a list of artists/ photographers that may inspire you:

Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Yves Klein, Bas Jan Ader, Erwin Wurm, Chris Arnatt, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Francis Alÿs, , Sophie Calle , Nikki S Lee, Claude Cahun, Dennis Oppenheim, Bruce Nauman, Allan Kaprow, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Marcel Duchamp and the Readymade, Andy Warhol’s film work, Steve McQueen, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Marina Abramovic, Pipilotti Rist, Luis Bunuel/ Salvatore Dali: , Le Chien Andalou, Dziga Vertov: The Man with a Movie Camera

A few Youtube clips (view at home or in class on teacher’s computer)

John Baldessari: I will not make any more boring art

Vito Acconci

Bruce Nauman: Art Make-Up

Yoko Ono: Cut Piece

Martha Rosler: Semiotics of the Kitchen

Gillian Wearing: Dancing in Peckham

 

Mark Wallinger: Hymn

Chris Burden: Shoot, 1971

Joseph Beyus: , I Like America and America Likes Me

Luis Bunuel/ Salvatore Dali: Un Chien Andalou

Dziga Vertov: The Man with a Movie Camera

Marcel Duchamp On the Readymade

 

Experimentation, Mr T instruction, Research

St Malo Day: Photographs

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Weak Anarchy

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.

Mr T instruction

Archisle Day 9.06.15

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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.

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.