Daily Archives: April 5, 2017

Filters

Author:
Category:
Analysis, Exploring, Research

Environment – Artist Reference 1 – Carlos Spottorno

1 Comment

Carlos Spottorno

Having confirmed a plan in producing photographic responses to my travels throughout the Mediterranean, I wanted to investigate some methods in making this kind of photography more original unique. As discovered in my previous blog post, the genre of Travel Photography is now very crowded due to its accessibility and ease of involvement. There is little originality in documenting the landscapes and atmospheres of foreign locations as it can essentially be done by anyone. Consequently, I may have to indulge in some peculiar methods in order to make my work more personal and distinctive. With this plan in mind, I began looking at the work of Carlos Spottorno. Carlos Spottorno is a Spanish documentary and Travel photographer with an artistic background who has focused his main personal projects on subjects related to power shifts, economy, and social issues that shape the real world. Born in Budapest in 1971, Spottorno has travelled all across the globe, generating editorial, commercial and personal projects that possess some fork of message or deeper meaning.

One of his projects called “The PIGS” bears some visual resemblance to the work I am producing due the synonymous European environments explored. For this project, Spottorno intended to capture Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain through the eyes of the economists. PIGS is a term coined by the business and financial press as a way to refer to Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain during their current financial plight. These countries are all united in facing vast loss in historical prominence and are hence grouped together under this banner. What started as a pejorative label used by neoconservatives, mainly from English speaking countries, was eventually taken up for some time without any qualms by the media. Excessively high levels of public and private debt, government deficits, a property bubble and very disappointing political and economic policies, have put the PIGS in the crosshairs. It is alleged that the PIGS won’t be able to bear the pressure of sharing a common currency with their stronger European brethren. Spottorno states:

“I have often asked myself how, after so many centuries of splendor, could these countries have come to their current destitute state. What happened to Greece, the cradle of Western Civilization? What became of Italy, heir to the Roman Empire and endowed with one of the richest artistic heritages in the world? What went wrong with Portugal, the first global naval power in history? At what point did Spain and its empire, on which the sun never set, see the onset of their decline? I believe the root-cause of our countries’ current sorry state of affairs is to be found in the distant past. Issues that for many centuries piled up on our doorsteps are now rearing their heads and plain to see.”

Spottorno continues, arguing that the PIGS view themselves, rightly, as the architects, and as the stem cells from which the idea of Europe developed. Southern Europe resists admitting its loss of political stature in the global political arena, seeing itself as the wellspring of Western Civilization. Spottorno sees The PIGS as old, cynical and individualistic countries. I think this is a really interesting concept, and I something that I have frequently thought about in the past. Its quite staggering how these countries were formerly, some of the most powerful and dominant forces on the planet and now are simple, weak shadows of these former identities. I think that Spottorno had an excellent lead for a photographic project here, due to the passion he had behind the project. He attempts to illustrate the stereotypes brought up by the term PIGS. In other words, what we would see if we were to translate into images the articles we read in the financial press. He intends to present how he imagines economists perceiving these countries. The result is a collection of clichés, some true and incomplete. The same way a travel guide carefully avoids anything seemingly unattractive, this book shows much of what we find embarrassing, oftentimes rightly, and at times unfairly.  What stands out the most is the glaring absence in these images of all that is positive, beautiful and promising in these countries.

In this photograph, we see a young gipsy holding his horse after cleaning it. In some parts of Portugal, like in other european countries it is still possible to see working horses in urban context. Nomad gipsies settlements are in the middle of town, generating sometimes troubles between them and the other people living in the areas. They are accused of being dirty and chaotic, besides dealing with drugs and crime. This is a clear highlight of the plight endured by Portugal and he transformation experienced through history. I like this photograph a lot, a powerful composition evoking a lot of emotion. The boy and the horse are stood central dominating the frame and drawing the attention of the viewer. Nevertheless, in the background, we see the urban landscape, a  white blocky building providing the context and message. The building features an interesting lighting setup as certain faces are shrouded in complete shadows and others in complete light. A nice contrast is created that doesn’t distract from the subject and his horse but ensures our eyes naturally meet this component.
Carboneras, Almería: hotel “El Algarrobico” was built in a protected Natural Park with the complicity of local authorities. Popular activism and the pressure made by Greenpeace stopped the project, although after a decade of legal activity it has not yet been demolished. Nevertheless, It’s interesting, though, that many locals would like the hotel to start operating, and revitalize the poor local economy. This photograph is really interesting as we see a lot of opposition and clashing of certain messages. Typically we associate tourism with lush landscapes, clean architecture  and bright, vivid colours. However, within this photograph this idea of tourism which is ushered in by the family sat upon the beach, is conflicted by the surrounding landscape. This abandoned hotel that still remains to be demolished is just sitting there, whilst the dingy colours of the surrounding environment produces quite a depressing tone. We truly see the repercussions of this failing economy and stereotypes surrounding Spain have been challenged.

The photographs within the PIGS project represent, visually, my initial intentions for this study. The photographs concentrate primarily on the landscape and significance of the local environment which is what I wished to do as well. They occasionally feature a subject within the foreground who can provide context and intrigue surrounding the narrative. Nevertheless, my travels around the Mediterranean do not possess the same kind of depth and meaning that Spottorno has here. The reason why the PIGS project is so successful is due to the direct, concentrated proposition organised by Spottorno. He has discovered something that he is passionate about and ensured absolute focus upon this for his photographs. On the other hand, this kind of depth or internal meaning is absence from my work, meaning minimal focus would be achieved on my shoots. This is why I would like to find something more unusual for my work, and fortunately Spottorno has another project that I would like to reference.

LA GRIETA / THE CRACK

In December 2013 reporter Guillermo Abril and Spottorno received from the assignment of preparing a series of stories about the European Union’s external borders. THE CRACK is Spottorno’s field journal as he followed the border from Africa to the Arctic with the aim of identifying the causes and consequences of Europe’s identity crisis. Halfway between a photobook book and a graphic novel, in as much as it uses narrative elements of the latter, the end result is not a story based on actual events: these are actual events. At the time the media’s coverage was focused on the migration flows in Melilla and the Southern Mediterranean. The great migrant exodus in the Balkans, and the attacks in Paris and Nice were still a long ways in the future. The war in Ukraine seemed to have stabilized, and the United Kingdom hadn’t yet voted to leave European Union. These and many other events would take place over the course of time it took them to cover their assignment, which took them all the way from Melilla to the Arctic. After three years working on the story, several covers, dozens of pages in magazines, and a World Press Photo, the authors set out to convey, with the 25,000 photographs and 15 notebooks they had compiled, the story of what is happening on the European Union’s borders, making use of an innovative narrative form.

This project is a perfect example of how to present Travel Photography in an innovative and original way in order to separate it from the crowded genre and boring photographs. Spottorno has borrowed the aesthetic of comic-book art presenting his images upon paneled pages with a typical comic-book filter employed onto the images. The pages feature speech bubbles and narration boxes, just like a comic book would, enabling a narrative to be told. The idea is very imaginative and a good representative of the originality I intend to capture for my travel photography. By presenting the images in this way, Spottorno is provided his travels around the globe with a story and sense of progression. The portfolio becomes more than just images, and Spottorno has created a professional and sophisticated final product. This is something that I would like to replicate for my Environmental project, essentially utilizing the travel photograph as a backdrop for something greater and more creative. Whilst the visuals of the PIGS project can still be echoed, I would like to incorporate an individual style through the editing stage, perhaps taking advantage of my artistic abilities as I have done in the past. The next stage is to try and think of an concept i  manipulating my shoots that is original and individually relevant. 

Instructions, Research

Power of the Sea

Leave a comment

Power of the Sea

The sea is an incredibly powerful force. It is often taken for granted that we can co-exist safely with it but this is far from the case. I have already looked at the mysteries and mythology that people think of when it comes to the sea but now I am going to look at the true destructive power of the sea. The sea is one of the most powerful forces on earth, it takes life like it is nothing. Countless lives have been lost to the sea over the years, even with masses of technological advancements in recent years we still cannot protect ourselves from its awesome power sometimes. Although dated one of the best example of this is the Titanic, supposed to be unsinkable the massive loss of life from the tragedy proved that the sea is and always will be king.

Final Farewell

This painting was created after the sinking to commemorate the loss of life. Titled “Final Farewell” is gives a very melancholy notion of the ship sailing off into the sunset, towards better things that would not come, and that in the end the Titanic’s journey would end with 1,503 people perishing on its maiden voyage.  There are not any artistic, photographic works based on the Titanic due to the final resting place of the ship being 3.8km under the water but there are plenty of paintings. Many do not focus on the sea but instead the humanity and the loss of life, as well a fear. Fear is something that I could definitely tap into with my project being based around water.

Another element that ties in with this fear is the sense of randomness of the sea. On the land things can generally be anticipated much better, roads do not usually just breakdown, buildings will not suddenly collapse and for the most part even some of the worst weather can be hidden and protected from. most of the deaths due to bad weather on land are based around water too, floods and tsunamis caused by natural disasters kill more than the rest of the natural disaster itself usually. On the open water this does not apply, the randomness of waves and the sea conditions makes it an incredibly difficult thing to predict. The image above shows some of this, although over dramaticized the different direction of the waves really lend to the notion of randomness and chaos that is going on. The splashes of white from the cresting waves contrasting with the deep, dark water of the troughs makes the painting a very interesting one to look at. This kind of thing can also be captured in photography, a much smaller example of this can be seen in my work from my first shoot.

Today we have the advantage of satellite mapping and forecasts to inform us of the dangers of the sea and what there is lying ahead of us but this is not always enough and cannot always capture and be aware of everything. The photograph above is of a “rogue wave” that crashed over the MS Stolt Surf on  the 4th October 1977. Estimated to have reached a height of at least 22m before crashing over the ship and subsequently causing a mass of damage to the ship that left one of the sailors hospitalised. furniture, port holes, electric cables and lights were damaged with the boat beginning to flood. The ship’s engines were at risk from being broken, but thankfully they managed to keep them running, if not then they would have ended up lateral to the waves and if this had happened then the ship could have easily been split in two and it is unlikely that the crew would have survived. These rogue waves were originally considered mythical n nature but recently have managed to be properly studied, this had confirmed that they do exist, occurring in open water, usually at very substantial depths there is no way to predict when these waves will occur because we have no other knowledge about them. Often linked to disappearances of many ships with unknown reasons for disappearance they are terrifying, for many reasons but mainly for the reason that they are truly random.

Even on land people cannot always be safe from the awesome power of the sea Tsunamis are a real danger to many people who live in these disaster prone areas. One of the countries that is often hit by Tsunamis is Japan, in 2011 the country was it by a Tsunami that caused massive destruction to the county’s coastline. Destroying homes, causing the leak of radioactive material from a nuclear power reactor and killing almost 20,000 people this disaster made headlines around the world for a long time. Again being incredibly difficult to predict there was little warning and because of the devastation caused people did not know how to react. The photographer Paolo Pellegrin was one of the first on site to record the devastation and destruction.

His photographs are a very real look at what happened to the country in the wake of this disaster. His shots are all composed the same way, using a wide angle panoramic style the images show an incredible amount of detail due to a very high contrast. This incredibly high contrast further emphasises the destruction of the area by giving the viewer lots of information to take in, this causes them to look for longer and notice even more details. The apocalyptic levels of destruction being caused by a simple wave is immense, the sea is not something to become complacent of. It has the ability to create the kind of destruction that is seen in these photos, at random and without warning. One of the most powerful elements of these images for me is the boats being beached so far inland, these are boats weighing hundreds of tonnes and they have been ripped from moorings and anchors designed to hold them against everything that nature can throw at them and they have simply been plucked with the ease of plucking a hair and dragged inland by the storm surge. Pellegrin’s images lend themselves to this idea of randomness that the water produces, items are strewn everywhere with no order or care. And yet these people called this place their home, it was their environment and now it is a completely different environment that people can no longer live in.

 

Analysis, Research

Artists referance-Francesca Woodman

Leave a comment

Francesca Woodman was an American photographer who created black and white images often using herself or other young, female models as the subjects.  During her life time her art was not well-known and it was only after her death (she committed suicide at 22) that her work received attention.  She is considered to be a progressive feminine voice in photography and her work explores themes of isolation and self-displacement. Woodman explained to her parents (who were also artists) that she used herself as a model as a matter of “convenience” because she was always available and knew exactly the effect she wanted to produce with an image. The main subject of her work was broadly an exploration of her own body in relation to space.  Her photographs test the boundaries of the body but she rarely revealed her whole body with her face often blurred or masked and parts of her body are hidden behind elements of the environment. This creates an interesting relationship between observation, self-display and mystery. Some critics have interpreted this as an attempt to resist the male gaze with the tendency to camouflage herself. In some images Woodman also most becomes one with her surroundings by blending into the wallpaper or floor so that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the two. By fragmenting her body in this way, hiding behind furniture or using reflective surfaces such as mirrors to conceal herself she dissects the human figure and emphasises isolated body parts. This creates the idea that she is simultaneously there whilst also absent and relates to the idea of disappearance.

Woodman often used long exposure techniques to capture movement within her images and create surrealist compositions . The concealed figures have a mysterious, ghost-like quality . There are also no modern buildings in her work which the critic Elizabeth Gumport describes in this article as crumbling ruins “whose disintegrating forms evoke the wrecks admired by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic revivalists often cited as [some of Woodman’s] major influences”. Woodman often photographed herself nude or wearing old-fashioned clothes  such as white petticoats and is typically sited in empty dilapidated rooms containing old furniture. Her photographs look as though they belong in a much earlier time with her choice of costume meaning it is impossible to date the images and the use of old buildings and absence of modern objects create a Gothic appearance.  Woodman was apparently an avid reader of Victorian Gothic fiction such as novels by the Brontes which could be said to be reflected in her work with the idea of spectral female figures, confined to attics. The soft focus and black and white nature of her images is also similar to the style of earlier generations of photography which further emphasises the timelessness of her work. The soft greys that shade her images add to the mysterious tone and show her eye for light, shadow and form.

Critics have disagreed about the meaning and purpose of her art with some comparing her to surrealist photographers (with her use of Surrealist motifs such as mirrors, gloves, birds, and bowls) and others hail her as a feminist hero.  Her images are also very personal, lending them an autobiographical quality and therefore interpretation of her work is often based on psychoanalysis in light of her suicide. However her images are also often subtly amusing and contain playful visual jokes such as the example below with her arms covered in bark and mimicking the form of the trees. Family and friends have argued that while many think her work was about death and disappearance, Woodman’s light-heated sense of humour and energy is also apparent in her work. They say that  “Her life wasn’t a series of miseries” and she was fun to be with.

I have researched the work of  Francesca Woodman because her art has inspired many contemporary photographers within the area of performance and self-portraiture. In my own work I am also going to be considering the relationship between myself and different environments and I am going to experiment with a surrealist approach, using long-shutter speeds. I am also intrigued by Woodman’s use of props such as mirrors and this is something I am going to use, potentially within the context of old buildings.

Exploring, Inspiration

Water – Mystery and Mythology

Leave a comment

Water – Mystery & Mythology

Since the beginning of human civilization we  have always had an innate sense of fear surrounding the sea and what it contains. 71% of the earth’s surface is covered in water and so it is has the potential to home so much life, much of which we still do not know about. With a maximum depth of 11km finding all of the different species that call it home is not something that is possible, even with today’s technology we cannot catalogue all of the different species as we would like to. There are species that exist in the oceans that we will likely never come into contact with, there is simply so much space that we would never be able to see it all. If this is true today it understandable why our ancestors had tales of the Kraken taking down ships and giant sharks swallowing people whole.

This sense of mystery and the unknown really lends itself to the subject of environment because even with this fear of the unknown people still made the sea and water their environments. Fishermen and women as well as merchants and explorers use the water to travel around and made a living out of traveling on the water. This often leads to stories about the disappearance of ships under relatively regular circumstances being labelled as mysterious or linked to higher powers or mythical creatures. Even from the days of the Ancient Roman Empire through to more recent times these stories have existed, and have only been exaggerated by sightings of giant squid and unexplained disappearances. These kind of disappearances capture the imagination of the public and artists alike.

Often artists will try and show these events and the mystery and fear that surrounds them, found on old maps these images are not very descriptive but still give a sense of mystery that these creatures can just appear out of nowhere and will attack ships. The water and the sea are their environment and we are intruders in their homes and they do not like it. This sense of the unknown is something that I could look into for my project, I have always been fascinated by mysterious disappearances of ships and people at sea. One of my favourite stories as a child was that of the Mary Celeste, possibly the most famous example of disappearances at sea. It captured my imagination and started my love and fear of disappearances at sea (although I love the sea one of my greatest fears is being stranded at sea out of the sight of land).

The main story can be read about the ship here but as it is an insanely well known story only some of the details may be new. The fact that the ship disappeared along with its crew in the first place is not that remarkable in the first place, although unexpected it was not an impossibility, but what is so confusing is that the ship was found intact without a soul aboard, looking as if the crew and Captain’s family had just got up one morning and had all just jumped overboard leaving everything behind aside from a single lifeboat. Many different theories exist as to what happened to cause this but no one will ever truly know so theories will stay as just that, theories.

“Without a shadow of warning we found ourselves in the water.”

This hasn’t stopped people from creating art based on what they think could have happened. The sketch above shows one of these theories, it is based on a theory that all of the people on board the ship were on a part of the deck that then collapsed (this website talks about this particular event). There is no real evidence to support this theory but it was popular at the time, the image captures the suddenness and fear with which the crew must have left the ship. Ether through an accident like what the image above depicts but alternatively if they voluntarily left the ship through their own devices but without physically being forced.

Click on this image to go to the artist’s page

This idea of it being a ghost ship is a romantic notion that has gained a lot of association with the ship. The modern painting above really associate this with the ship. The ship is seen just as a silhouette on the water, non-solid it seems to shift in front of your eyes making this seem like a real, ghostly apparition.

Ultimately all of these different pieces of artwork (not just about the Mary Celeste) are driven by a fear of death. Humans are built and coded to survive. The header image shows this very well, the chaos of this attack shows the human resolve to survive that drives us all every day. The man lifting his axe to this creature really shows the heroism of these people and ultimately that the people who work on the sea are often the ones who will have to work the hardest just to stay alive when things go wrong. Out at sea there is no help other than yourself or if you’re lucky enough your fleet, this has even transferred over to the modern day. In the middle of a long ocean voyage for members of the merchant navy on cargo container ships there are often only very basic medical facilities. this can mean that in a major medical emergency like heart attack or ruptured spleen there is often nothing that can be done. The isolation of the sea like this is not something that I could easily represent but I could try. Without being in one of these environments I could not truly represent this kind of mystery of isolation but I could look at doing something surrounding unexplained sea creatures and other mythological creatures and experiences.

In the end it may be scary to imagine what still lies out there in the oceans, undiscovered and undisturbed. But even the creatures that we know about can be pretty terrifying too.