Thinking about ways to display my photographs has lead me to the little experimentation below. As Hammond’s work was all about conveying the tactile nature of photographs by making them into sculptures i wanted to experiment with other ways to make my photographs tactile. Therefore i decided to sew into them. My photographs are all about the materials used to build the dens and building dens is a tactile experience. I therefore decided to create some images which revolved around a tactile experience. I photographed some plain white sheets and then decided to sew into them adding loads of bright colours. The whole point of the dens is also the bright and vibrant colours which causes them to clash with their surroundings and so i wanted to add colour to the white sheets. I think this also links quite well with my idea which came directly from Hammond’s work, the projecting of my images onto white sheets. Here instead of projecting the images i am sewing patterns and colours into the work. Overall i quite liked it as a little experimentation of creating tactile photographs. 

Now that i have all my photographs taken i am starting to think about how i want to display them as i final piece. Something which i thought was really interesting was how much my photographs were about process which i explored with organic architecture and photographing the adding of each element. As this became the whole point of my photographs, the photographs becoming more and more simply a recording of the dens existence i wanted to consider ways of displaying my work which revolved around keeping this tactile nature to my photographs. I therefore decided to look at an emerging photographer called Felicity Hammond who displays her work in a really interesting way.

Hammond creates her photographs as sculptures which she displays within a space. Her work explores construction sites and places of ruin and destruction.

“I spend around a year photographing the same site and documenting its development over that time. There is a Baroque feel to the landscapes I choose, and they become shrouded with tarpaulin that looks incredibly sculptural – just like dressed objects in classical paintings. There’s theatre in these building sites, especially when they are lit at night.”

Her photographs once taken can then be printed onto acrylic sheets which can be manipulated into sculptural objects. She uses advanced photographic technologies such as CGI to print her photographs. The first time Hammond experimented with printing directly onto acrylic was in her project “You Will Enter An Oasis”. Previous to this she did  a residency at Bow Arts where she made cyanotypes, which are really early print processes of making photographs. UV light is used to expose an image.This project really led her into realizing her love for the changing nature of a place into destruction and her love for blue prints and exploring the process of change. This is also where the inspiration for so much of the blue used in her work comes from, Hammond remembering as a child being obsessed with her father’s engineering manuals and drawings. She likes the idea of her work revolving around the concept ‘restore to factory settings’. I think i want to mainly take inspiration from her work in considering how it creates a more immersive viewing of the photographs to be surrounded by the images. I want to try and re-create the experience of being surrounded by the dens and therefore evoke more of the childlike wonder of the experience. I want the experiences of the photographs to go beyond the photographs as in to have more of a connection with the process of building dens.

“This was my first material investigation into working with printing directly to acrylic. I wanted to allow the imagery used on rendered images to manifest itself into the physical world.”

Considering her work has given me an idea of how i am going to display my images in another form of presentation other than a book. I am considering now also making an instillation of a den inside a studio. The whole idea being to create a mass of material which hangs from the ceiling in a den like shape and to then project the photographs of my different dens onto this generic mass of a den. The sheets to create this den will be white to allow the details of the photographs to be as clear as possible and i will light the room to be very dark with only the den with the photographs projecting onto it illuminated. I can then photograph this process to create another set of images which show the process of creating a more tactile way of viewing my images. I think the whole concept behind this comes back again to how all the dens merge into one long childhood game. How each game played in each den leads onto the other and in building each den as children we learn tips and tricks which we carry on into our next den. The instillation will show this by having all these different dens printed onto the same generic shape of a den.  This is similar to Hammond’s work as the photographs are printed onto a material which is then sculpted into a different shape but i am simply projecting the images rather then having it literally printed onto the material. 

I wanted to experiment as well with creating some abstract movement photographs. I really liked how the over exposure of the woodland photographs worked and therefore i wanted to play more with creating slightly over exposed which had movement within them. After taking my more formal photographs of my friends as wild children and considering the work of Charles Fregar, i wanted to add an element of eeriness and almost suggestions of how the dens could be considered more sinister. I therefore decided to do the below photo shoot to juxtapose against my other images which involved making a fire and then movemnt around a fire. The idea od people dancing around a bonfire to me has strong connotations of witchcraft and paganism and therefore i was hoping this shoot might add these impression of something more sinter to my shoot.

I deliberately decided to plan this shoot down the beach as i wanted the images to be on the verge of being over exposed and i though the white light of the sand would help to create this impression. I however didn’t want the images to be too overexposed and so i did the shoot as the sun was setting so the light wasn’t intensely bright. Overall the outcome i think worked really well as the images give exactly the impression that i wanted them to. Another reason i choose to make a fire within this movement shoot is that a fire was a consistent element of every den we made as children. We would always make a fire to go with the den to “keep us warm” and to “cook food on.” I therefore was think again about presenting the cross over between the reality of the game and the real reality.

Most of the photographs i took i only focused on the legs and feet of my subjects. This is because i didn’t want the images to be about the people and personalities of the people but more so the concept of people being present. I created these images to create the abstract concept of people being present without obviously stating it and therefore i thought the inclusion of faces and whole bodies might be quite suggestive of this. The above and below images i composed so that the fire was in the right hand side of the frame and then the subjects are to the left surrounding the fire. The main source of light is coming from the left hand side of the frame towards the outside of the image and then spills into the rest of the frame. The images are fairly exposed as the smoke from the fire is also drifting into the frame from the fire and causing a haze in front of the figures. I remembered from my last photo shoot the speed in which i got my subject to move and i asked my subjects to replicate this. Therefore in these images you can see the movement of the subjects clearly but you can also still distinguish that they are human figures. I quite like the very pale and bright tones of the images, the bright light from the sun and the fire has meant the image is fairly washed out of colour which means the odd hint of colours stands out even more. 

The above and below images worked really really well. These images rather then showing feet show the movement of a figure reaching. This works really well as the figure is solid as their legs are stillish and then the top half of their body and arms as they reach for more wood for the fire are blurred. I really like how in these images the movement has created a curved blur which is different from the other types of movement. The photographs are composed similarly with the fire in the right hand corner and the blur of the people to the left. 

I quite like the above photograph for being really abstract as the impression of the smoke from the fire creates an interesting dynamic to the feet walking away. 

The last image below was taken with the least amount of light as the sun was almost completely set. I quite like the composition of this image as it is different to the others. There is one subject walking in the very foreground of the frame and another in the center of the frame in the background. Even though the entire of this subject is in the frame you can not see there face and there body as it is blurred becomes all about the movement of bending over to pick up stuff for the fire. In this image the fire isn’t the center feature which draws you into the frame. You can see a bit of it to the right of the image but its not the main focus. In this image the fire and the sky in the background compliment each other, each bringing out the colour of the other.