I have decided to create my first structure within my garden as it is my most accessible environment. I thought it would be a really good place to start to get back into den making as i could take my time building the structure and not have anyone staring at me in some random environment. It also means that i don’t have to transport my materials anywhere to build the den and so can consider exactly what materials would work best within the environment and the space.

I have decided to build the den in the same area that the dens within my garden were commonly built. I think this is because i know from experience that this area has  three tree structures which work well to begin my structure from. The area has actually changed significantly in the last 5 ish years since i was making dens as it is a bit more over grown because my sister and I don’t play in that space anymore. The massive tree we always used to use as a part of our den was also cut down. I still however think it is the best space in my garden for a couple of reasons. Firstly as we haven’t played there loads the overgrown nature of the area would work really well in the photographs to convey a wild jungle like feel. The den will look hidden with in the environment which could be a really interesting photograph to create. Secondly while i do want the environment to convey it is a garden i want to avoid having really man made object obvious within the frame. This particular area can be photographed from angles which show the fence and houses in the background but doesn’t include cars. Depending on how well this shoot goes i might then consider another den in my garden which revolves around a more man made environement.

I have decided for this shoot that i want to choose a day which is sunny so as to experiment with the blankets becoming see-through in the light. I think in my garden is the best place to work out whether the idea of the light through the material is going to work and i can also experiment with using different materials. I also want it to be slightly windy so i can have some movement to my structure. The area i am photographing however has no cover to it and so if its too windy this may become problematic as the structure wont stay up.

The next thing to consider is exactly which materials i am going to use. I need at least two very large blankets as these are to make up the roof and the back wall. The rest can be of varying sizes and i can patch work them together. Below are the photographs of the materials i’m planning to use. I think 5 blankets is about average for what i used to use to create when i was younger. I’m thinking about the fact that i need to have 4 walls and then a roof. I decided to choose blankets which blended into the environment to an extent. I choose blankets in colours of green and blacks but then also choose a vivid yellow blanket to incorporate. I think having this one really brightly coloured blanket might be quite interesting as wherever it is is going to stand out more vividly. The yellows will also bring out the yellows and oranges from the environment which are still left over from autumn. As well as choosing colours which match the environment the colours also compliment each other. I think this will be my first experimental shoot where i can see whether my ideas really work and come together. I might later do a shoot in which i use all clashing colours of blankets but as the area I’m photographing is overgrown and the den is going to appear like its hiding within the environment i wanted it to blend in.

I have also photographed some rope from in the shed and some pegs to hang the washing. Whenever we would create our dens in the garden we would use whatever we could get our hands on in order to  create our dens. I therefore simply looked around the garden to consider what was available to hand which i could use to build my dens.

I think this shoot is going to be a lot of experimenting to get back into how to build dens and whether my ideas are going to translate into a good photograph. I think i might end up changing a few elements after this initial shoot but i will need to consider this later.

 

I have decided to also consider Andy Goldsworthy in my artists research because while he also doesn’t build dens/homes in the environment he uses his natural surroundings to create structures and patterns. He uses an extreme variety of materials to create his structures from snow to petals to clay.  Goldsworthy is considered part of the Environmental Art movement as both a sculptor and a photographer. His work become instillation’s within the environment as they are created for the space in which they are made from elements of the space. Because they are created in such unpredictable locations his work is deliberately ephemeral. I like the concept that he leaves his designs within the environment and allows nature to naturally make them disappear. With many of the dens we made as children out of branches we left them as they were, sometimes even coming back to them a week later as they were natural and therefore would just disappear back into their surroundings. This is the whole point of many of Goldsworthy’s designs that they are fleeting and are only around for a shot period of time. I guess this also links to how with den building you become so absorbed with the process but then you always have to leave them behind in the environment they are in or at least partially dismantle them, taking back all the blankets.

“I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and “found” tools–a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I take the opportunities each day offers: if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn. “

The main idea behind why Goldsworthy creates his pieces are that he wants to understand nature better by participating with it. He feels closer to nature and as if he can understand it by manipulating it. Goldsworthy talks about how to him the process is as important as the final result which is what i am also considering within my project by photographing the process of the den building. He talks about how he considers the material as important as the final piece as each action of creating his structures are not independent of each other. When he picks up a material to place it somewhere else he is not just considering what he can create with the material itself but the space and influence he creates on the place the material has been moved from. Goldsworthy then finds it significant of how when he makes a change to the environment and then leaves, changes continue to happen because of the first change that he initially made, that nature always carries on. He therefore considers movement to be a key part of his pieces as the piece will change as time moves forward. I think this is really interesting to consider with my natural dens and has given me another idea in photographing them. I could photograph the process of building the den and everything i was previously going to do but then i could keep coming back to the den over a couple of weeks and photographing how it falls apart and once again becomes reverted back to being a part of nature.

“Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.”

“Failure is really, really important, but failures have to hurt. … And if I start making this work with the intention of it collapsing, then I’ve lost that intensity of the will for it to succeed, which makes the failure that much more poignant and significant. So there’s a really odd sort of state of mind that I guess I get into when I’m making these works, that is necessary for me to extract the finished piece [and] extract the right kind of feeling for the work as I’m making it. … To achieve what I want, to achieve the works that I make, I have to be fully committed to them succeeding. I couldn’t make them otherwise. And you cannot feel that commitment without feeling or having a deep sense of loss when they do collapse or fail, and that’s inevitable.”

“When I make something, in a field or street, it may vanish but it’s part of the history of those places,” he says in another interview. “In the early days my work was about collapse and decay. Now some of the changes that occur are too beautiful to be described as simply decay. At Folkestone I got up early one morning ahead of an incoming tide and covered a boulder in poppy petals. It was calm and the sea slowly and gently washed away the petals, stripping the boulder and creating splashes of red in the sea. The harbour from which many troops left for war was in the background.”

Above are the most den like structures that Goldsworthy has created that i could find, But after really considering his work the concept of all his pieces really does fit in with the process of den building and even the end product. To summarize all the similarities;

-Firstly they are both created from the materials on hand at the time in the specific location. Goldsworthy will use elements of the environment around him to create his work like when building a den you will use  down the beach rocks but then in a wood you would use branches. This then influences the environment you are building in as you are moving things around and creating new things.

-Next the structures are then left behind within the environment and become once more apart of the land. The den structures decay slowly and become once again part of the surroundings much like the work of Goldsworthy in which he creates the structures and then leaves them.

-Both are also all about the process of creation and can be in need of constant repair which makes the whole point of the den being the process and not the final product. When creating dens they constantly fall apart and some of Goldsworthy’s work is never completed as it cant be.

-Another point is that you use the surroundings around you to create the structures, as in with den building there is no official plan or structure which you know you are going to make you consider what you have and what can be achieved with it.

I think by considering Goldsworthy’s work it has made me consider den building in a more in depth way then before. I didn’t realize when i set out to research Goldsworthy’s work that all the concepts for his designs match up so well with den building. I will therefore have to consider them when i create my den.

IMAGE ANALYSIS

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Below is one of my favourite of Goldsworthy’s photographs. I think it will be significant to consider how he photographs his work just as i did with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. His structures are on a lot smaller scale then any of Christo’s work and i am going to be working on a scale in between both artists so it will be good to consider both to find a middle ground. Goldsworthy seems to take photographs of his structures in a very formal and straight photographic manner. I think this is because for him the main element of the photograph is to act as a documentation of the act, as my photographs are going to do. Goldsworthy’s therefore must be considering through out the process of creation where he is creating the piece in the environment and how it would look photographed. The photograph for him however is definitely a secondary element and it is the act of creation which is the point of his work.

The structure below is small which we can tell from the surroundings and the angle of the photograph looking down. I think it is an interesting design in which Goldsworthy has taken sticks which are straight and created a circular structure. It is very reminiscent of tipi’s and seems to rely on the same structural principle that all the sticks weight is placed at the center of the design and by all leaning together they counter balance each other. What makes this structure so interesting is the identical nature of all the sticks. I’m not quite sure what kind of tree or even whether the sticks naturally look as they do in the picture but i would assume they do in reference to Goldsworthy’s concepts. Therefore it has taken Goldsworthy time and skill to find sticks in which the gradient of dark wood to light wood all match up to create a structure with a dark circle in the center. Colour wise the photograph works really well in having the light brown of the sticks bringing out the light brown from the leaves in the surroundings. The lightest point of the photograph is the background of the frame and also the flecks of light colours of leaves scattered across the moss. The darkest point is then the dark ends of the sticks which ties in with the darkness of the moss in places. All the colours with in the photographs are natural and therefore compliment each other . None of the colours in this particular pieces are bold and bright to stand out, they all work together and give the piece an overall appearance. The photograph has been composed so the structure is in the dead center of the frame.

I think it is quite important to consider how the structure has been photographed from the side and not above. By taking the photograph from above the scale of the piece would have been harder to identify and also the texture of the sticks placed together may also have been lost. Also you can consider that the structure may not be a perfect circle, from this angle you can not tell but from above yo would be able to notice tiny details which are slightly out.

 

 

London-based artist Idris Khan was born in the UK in 1978. Since completing his Master’s Degree with a Distinction in Research at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, he has received international acclaim for his minimal, yet emotionally charged photographs, videos and sculptures.

Drawing on diverse cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion, Khan has developed a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration and speaks to the themes of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments.

Whilst Khan’s mindset is more painterly than photographic, he often employs the tools of photomechanical reproduction to create his work. Photographing or scanning from secondary source material–sheet music, pages from the Qur’an, reproductions of late Caravaggio paintings–he then builds up the layers of scans digitally, which allows him to meticulously control minute variances in contrast, brightness and opacity. The resultant images are often large-scale C-prints with surfaces that have a remarkable optical intensity.

Khan’s oeuvre has expanded to include sculpture and painting. For sculptural works, using materials such as steel plates, cubes and horizontal stone slabs, Khan sandblasts the surface with templates of musical scores or prayers, continuing his investigation into the ways in which cultural, visual, cinematic and temporal memories coalesce into a dense, synesthetic whole.

Examples of Khan’s work;

Here one can see that Khan has built up the layers of his photographs digitally, with use of exposures and contrasts, therefore making his original photograph have similarities to chalk drawings, as the lines don’t have sharp ends.

Again, one can see a tree with lots of layers done digitally, it is interesting to look at in this photograph as it feels like there is a lot of movement in the image. As if no matter what is going on around the tree it will stay strong and won’t fall, I feel like this because the tree is the darkest aspect of the photograph so it feels like it has the most layers, therefore being the strongest. This could be metaphorical as one can see street lights in the background which are quite faded and then comparing to the tree which is quite dark it shows that no matter what nature will always beat man made objects. Therefore simply by the use of layering one can realize that it completely changes the way one see’s the object which the photograph has chosen to shoot, as before editing this would simply just be a tree, where as it’s looked at with a different frame of mind when edited in this particular way.

My interpretation;

For my first two photographs I decided to interpret in the way of Idris Khan, I tried to use his technique exactly by using a black&white filter, by contrasting and playing with exposures and layering a lot. Therefore it gave a very similar feel to what Khan has produced. The reason I chose the photograph below to edit, is because I felt like Khan’s images always have a lot of movement, and this photograph was already an action shot, so i feel like it represents the movement with just layering the still image.

I enjoyed editing this photograph as I now prefer the layered image to the original edit. This is due to the layering of the tree’s, as now it looks as if there is a large forest in the background, this is from the layering of trees and use of exposure hiding the buildings which are in the original. The use of the tree’s being layered makes the environment look more remote and peaceful, which is what I wanted the photograph to represent.

In the two photographs below I’ve used the same editing format as Khan, however I’ve only allowed the layers to be seen on the model, and not the background. I’ve also kept the color format and not changed it to black&white which Khan typically does.

I like the use of this technique on the photograph below as it shows the movement of the models hair. Therefore showing the weather conditions on this day, very windy, and representing the models attitude towards life, as he has a carefree attitude.

In this essay I will be analyzing how fashion photography has changed from the 1920s to our current decade, with reference to the book ‘FASHION CULTURES, Theories, Explorations and Analysis’ Chapter 9 written by Elliot Smedley and edited by Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson.

‘Fashion photography emerged within and grew to dominate the commercial arena during the 1920’s and 1930’s’ page 144

the reason behind fashion photography emerging and growing to dominate the commercial arena was because the cultural movement of Surrealism had a profound impact on fashion magazines in the 1920s and ’30s. For example, paintings by Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico featured in Vogue alongside avant-garde photographs by Man Ray. Some fashion photographers adopted their revolutionary principles, attempting to give visual expression to the unconscious mind. New techniques and unexpected juxtapositions were used to challenge perceptions of reality, to amuse and to disturb. Another example of fashion photograph being influence by Surrealism was the chief photographer of French Vogue, and later of Harper’s Bazaar, Baron George Hoyningen-Huene who inspired a generation. His own work reflected a painterly fascination with light, shade and classical forms. His protégé Horst P. Horst produced similarly inventive images, fusing surreal and classical motifs.

Photography by George Hoyningen-Huene for Vogue US in 1929. 

One can see in the above image it has been influenced by the surrealism period as the below ladder has been painted on and the men aren’t actually climbing up, giving it a surrealistic effect.

Then elitist fashion imagery, which owed much to illustration, was superseded by more commercial picture. This was due to Hollywood being a large  impact on the movement of fashion photography, because films began to be produced and it got extremely popular, therefore changing the way of fashion photography;

‘Films threw up the new role models, images of a consumer society,  visually based fantasies and narratives, and new codes of representation’ (Craik 1994: 101) … most notably how they become ‘blemish free’.’ Page 145

When fashion photography was influenced by Hollywood, it was also a period of time when magazines didn’t want to show excess as it was during World War 2. In this time period Man Ray was also a key photographer as most of her photographs were social documentary as a recording of fashion, showing women in wartime Britain in every situations.

This realistic aesthetic emerged across sea’s and influenced the Americans.  Alexandra Liberman, the art director a Vogue, realised that ‘the intimacy of the unopposed news photograph could be grafted onto fashion photographs to give them a wider appeal, greater realism’ (Harrison 1991: 42). This was shown when;

‘In the 1950’s, Liberman commissioned photographers who used the techniques of social documentary, specifically Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, whose images contained contrived spontaneity.’  page 145

Storytelling is a strong element in Richard Avedon photographs in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Here Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall in an evening dress by Griffe (Moulin Rouge, Paris 1957).

The reason for their work to be influenced by social documentary photographs is because they began to take their cameras outside the studio. This therefore made the images feel more realistic to the audience, however they were idealized moments that enabled;

‘women to imagine what they would look like, to men, in this situation or outfit, without having to commit themselves in any way to that situation or that outfit’  (Barnard 1996:120)

Then, in the 1960’s, there were 3 new photographs who changed the style of fashion photography;

‘The emphasis on sexuality in fashion photography was promoted by the self-styled ‘Terrible Three’ – David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy’ Page 146

These photographs were working-class Londoners with an irrelevant attitude to the world of fashion and the pretensions of its protagonists. Their work was a dominant theme that represented women’s independence, yet at the same time also placed value on beauty, sexuality and success.

David Bailey’s photograph: an East End woman in the 1960s London.

One can see the way Bailey has placed value on beauty, sexuality and success in the above image. This is shown by the comparison of a faux girl in the background and a working class citizen in the foreground. It makes the viewer compare the women, in all of these aspects.

In  the 1970’s these themes continued by photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. These photographers could barely be seen as documentary, as they were very explicit photographs. Therefore, these photographers had to suffer consequences;

‘They therefore encountered charges of misogyny and sexism; the photographers were accused of being exploitative and regressive. Here, fashion photography encountered critical discourse – and entered the public consciousness – through feminist debate.’ Page 146

Guy Bourdin, photograph of Burlesque. 

Helmut Newton Saddle I, aus der Serie: Sleepless Nights, Paris 1976. 

As shown above one can understand why women would be offended by Bourdins and Newtons images, as their photographs are trying to make it socially acceptable to make women be sexual objects.

In 1980 there was another new style in fashion photography which is known as ‘straight up’. This style is featuring people spotted on the streets rather than using professional models. It was classed as fashion photography because there would be credits stating where the subject had bought their clothes. The style of this decade was known as ‘punk’ and ‘grunge’. Photographers such as Steve Johnston and James Palmer photographed in a ‘straight up’ style and of people dressed in the punk outfits.

Examples of work by Steve Johnston. 

Example of work by James Palmer.

Then in the 1990s it became the decade of ‘Harsh Reality’ in fashion photography. The main four photographers of this genre were Corinne Day, David Sims, Juergen Teller and Nigel Shafran. They all shared a similar aesthetic based around notions of realism;

“There style had its roots in the insecure political climate of post-Thatcherism and global recession; there was a perceived platform for change.” page 148

Corinne Day ecompassed the mood of the new decade with a seemingly ‘unprofessional’ technique, represented by her series of photographs of Kate Moss which wasn’t currently a ‘supermodel’ at this period of time in her life. The set of photographs appeared in The Face in 1990.

The Face in 1990, Kate Moss, taken by Corinne Day. 

Due to the way the model, Kate Moss, responded in front of the camera, these photographs link to Twiggy in the 1960’s.  Both models came across as ordinary people in the photographs, due to the way they smile and have squinty eyes etc. making them not look as superficial as other models, and more relatable to everyday people. The difference was Twiggys photos were taken by a man, therefore the males sexual desires were placed onto the model.

Model Twiggy from the 1960s.

‘Behaving like ‘human beings’ and documenting ‘realistic’ activities became a prominent feature of contemporary fashion photography in the early 1990’s, and dominated the decade.’ escaping to reality, Elliot Smedley. page 143

In conclusion, one can see visually, there are always themes that continue to appear from past decades into contemporary work. This is due to being inspired by past photographers, and creating new themes by combining past ones. The main theme which stands out to me throughout the decades in fashion photography is trying to make the viewer feel relatable to the models in the images, and therefore they can therefore image themselves in this costume.