I explored the environment and area of where I lived to stat the project. This also links in to a depiction of my own environment that i am surrounded by. As I discussed in my specification, I was looking out for land and areas that showed the conflict between man made changes and the natural landscape. I picked a late time of day where the lighting was soft and natural, I didn’t use flash at all to keep the lighting as natural as possible, but with the overcast weather it made the images more flat. For my next shoot I will pick a time where the weather is sunny to evoke a brighter more intense lighting. Above is a contact sheet of the photographs. I tried a variation of landscape and portrait photographs.
In the above photographs, they were all taken in the same area, you can really get the sense of human presence in these photographs but with an eerie absence of people. I wanted to focus on roads and paths that have eroded thru ought the soil but still featuring the rich green grass growing on the sides, showing the regrowth nature creates. The overcast lighting makes the pictures appear very straight forward, leaving the viewer to focus on the physical features of the image, similar to that of a documentary image, the flat lighting stripped the photographs of any creative narrative, they work well as a series, but do not leave any mystery or sense of poetic ambiance. The photogrpah top right reminds me of the photograph by Richard Misrach ‘Abandoned Trailer’ which depicts a selection of rubbish and abandoned debris surrounding a lake. Similar to Misrach’s photograph, my photographs portrays the dramatic effects on the land caused by society. I brought the highlight levels down to bring out the texture in the sky as well as evoke a more eerie ambiance similar to that in the work of Richard Misrach.
Abandoned Trailer, Mississippi River, Near Dow Chemical Plant, Plaquemine, Louisiana, 1998, by Richard Misrach
In the above photographs I wanted to look at the harsh difference between the smooth road and the rural landscape. The above photographs work well as a series as well as evoke a narrative of travel, where the viewer follows the photographer’s journey.
The above photographs all share a romantic influence such as with the use of flowers in the last two photographs and the focus on vast landscapes. Similar to the first few photographs, there isn’t really a narrative evoked in these photographs, the photos focus on the more obvious features as opposed to a deeper narrative and meaning.
I tried a selection of very straightforward compositions that allowed for lost of information and captures the whole landscape. I used the rule of thirds such as in the first photograph above, the electricity box if focused in the third section of the photograph. I have also placed the horizon in the centre, making the photograph more straightforward similar to the genre of new topographic, which is often described to have a very formal or banal aesthetic.
The photos above show a slightly romantic influence with the use of flowers. I like the influence of people in these photographs, the tractor marks in the mud and the boxes reflects the agricultural side, the flowers add a very poetic influence. These are my favourite photographs of this shoot for the juxtaposition and connotations between the mud, which shares negative connotations of dirtiness and unpleasantness and flowers which share positive connotations such as passion and beauty.
Rather than physical space, the theme of Environment can also be considered within a psychological context where artists construct or imagine an environment that they respond to in creative ways using photography, performance and film.
Using binary opposites we can think of these environments as;
exterior/ interior private/ public masculin/ feminine
physical/ psychological
Currently visiting Jersey as part of the Archisle international artist-in-residence programme is Clare Rae from Melbourne, Australia. Clare will be researching the Claude Cahun archive, shooting new photography and film in Jersey and contributing to the educational programme. Clare Rae produces photographs and moving image works that interrogate representations of the female body via an exploration of the physical environment.
from the series Magdalen. These images engage with the site of the Magdalen Asylum, where girls and women were housed at the Abbotsford Convent, whilst working in the laundries downstairs. The asylum was in operation for approximately 100 years until it was decommissioned in the 1970’s. These rooms are laden with history, and provided a dense and loaded environment within which to make artwork. Using this history as a starting point, I attempted to activate these spaces using my body, gently testing the physical environment.Stages is a collaborative project by Clare Rae and Simone Hine. Both artists follow in the tradition of feminist art practices, using their own body to examine broader ideas related to the conditions of feminine representation. Stages takes the Rosina Auditorium at the Abbotsford Convent as a catalyst for the production of new work. Both artists will bring their own aesthetic and line of questioning to this very particular space. Together, Rae and Hine present works that are defined by the space, whilst also contributing to a redefinition of the space.Untitled (NGV). 2013 This project engages with the public and private spaces of the National Gallery of Victoria (International), in particular the photography and print store rooms.Monash Commission 2016. The series of 10 photographs investigate institutional spaces around the Monash University Clayton Campus, mostly engaging with buildings within the Science faculty, but also including iconic modernist architecture such as Robert Blackwood Hall, the Law Library and the former site of the Monash University Museum of Art.
Clare will give an artist talk contextualising her practice, covering recent projects that have engaged with notions of architecture and the body, and the role of performative photography in her work. Clare will discuss her research on these areas, specifically her interest in artists such as Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman and Australian performance artist Jill Orr. Clare will also discuss her photographic methodologies and practices, giving an analysis of her image making techniques, and final outcomes.
All students MUST attend her public lecture on Wed 22 March at Jersey Museum 5:30-7:00 pm. Here is a link to her Talk
Saturday 18 March Clare also ran an Archisle workshop on Body & Architecture in Photography. The workshop consisted of a talk by Clare, providing insight into her photographic practice focusing on recent projects that have engaged with the body and performance.
Homework: Here is the task that she asked participants to respond to. All students must complete this task within one lesson and upload 3 images with an evaluation by Mon 27 March.
1. Produce a self-portrait, in any style you like. Consider the history of self-portraiture, and try to create an image that alludes to, (or evades?) your identity.
2. Produce a performative photograph, considering the ideas presented on liveness, performance documentation and Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. ‘Captured’ vs. pre-meditated?
3. Produce a photograph that engages the body with the physical environment. Think of architecture, light, texture, and composition to create your image.
For further context lets consider some of these artists’ influences on Clare’s practice.
Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob was a French photographer, sculptor, and writer. She is best known for her self-portraits in which she assumes a variety of personas, including dandy, weight lifter, aviator, and doll.
In this image, Cahun has shaved her head and is dressed in men’s clothing. She once explained: “Under this mask, another mask; I will never finish removing all these faces.”1 (Claude Cahun, Disavowals, London 2007, p.183)
Cahun was friends with many Surrealist artists and writers; André Breton once called her “one of the most curious spirits of our time.”2(See Guardian article below by Gavin James Bower, “Claude Cahun: Finding a Lost Great,)
While many male Surrealists depicted women as objects of male desire, Cahun staged images of herself that challenge the idea of the politics of gender. Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today. She was exploring her identity, not defining it. Her self-portraits often interrogates space, such as domestic interiors and Jersey landscapes using rock crevasses and granite gate posts.
I Extend My Arms 1931 or 1932 Claude Cahun 1894-1954 Purchased 2007 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P79319
The Jersey Heritage Trust collection represents the largest repository of the artistic work of Cahun who moved to the Jersey in 1937 with her stepsister and lover Marcel Moore. She was imprisoned and sentenced to death in 1944 for activities in the resistance during the Occupation. However, Cahun survived and she was almost forgotten until the late 1980s, and much of her and Moore’s work was destroyed by the Nazis, who requisitioned their home. CaHun died in 1954 of ill health (some contribute this to her time in German captivity) and Moore killed herself in 1972. They are both buried together in St Brelade’s churchyard.
For further feminist theory and context read the following essay:
Amelia Jones: The “Eternal Return”: Self-Portrait Photography as Technology of Embodiment – pdf Jones_Eternal Return
Currently the National Portrait Gallery in London brings the work of Claude Cahun and Gillian Wearing together for the first time. Slipping between genders and personae in their photographic self-images, Wearing and Cahun become others while inventing themselves. “We were born in different times, we have different concerns, and we come from different backgrounds. She didn’t know me, yet I know her,” Wearing says, paying homage to Cahun and acknowledging her presence. The bigger question the exhibition might ask is less how we construct identities for ourselves than what is this thing called presence?
Behind a mask, Wearing is being Cahun. Previously she has re-enacted photographs of Andy Warhol in drag, the young Diane Arbus with a camera, Robert Mapplethorpe with a skull-topped cane, hard-bitten New York crime photographer Weegee wreathed in cigar-smoke. Among these doubles, you know Wearing is in the frame somewhere, under the silicon mask and the prosthetics, the wigs and makeup and the lighting. Going through her own family albums, she has become her own mother and her father. It is a surprise she has never got lost in this hall of time-slipping mirrors, among her own self-images and the faces she has adopted. Wearing has got others to play her game, too – substituting their own adult voices with those of a child, putting on disguises while confessing their secrets on video.
Cahun has been described as a Cindy Sherman before her time. Wearing’s art undoubtedly owes something to Sherman – just as Sherman herself is indebted to artist Suzy Lake. Looking back at Cahun, Wearing is both tracing artistic influence, and paying homage to it, teasing out threads in a web of relationships crossing generations.
Cindy Sherman, A selection of images from her film stills
Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. To create her images, she assumes the multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, and stylist. Whether portraying a career girl, a blond bombshell, a fashion victim, a clown, or a society lady of a certain age, for over thirty-five years this relentlessly adventurous artist has created an eloquent and provocative body of work that resonates deeply in our visual culture.
For an overview of Sherman’s incredible oeuvre see Museum Of Modern Art’s dedicated site made at a major survey exhibition of her work in 2012.
This exhibition surveys Sherman’s career, from her early experiments as a student in Buffalo in the mid-1970s to a recent large-scale photographic mural, presented here for the first time in the United States. Included are some of the artist’s groundbreaking works—the complete “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80) and centerfolds (1981), plus the celebrated history portraits (1988–90)—and examples from her most important series, from her fashion work of the early 1980s to the break-through sex pictures of 1992 to her monumental 2008 society portraits.
Some of her latest images using digital montages
Sherman works in series, and each of her bodies of work is self-contained and internally coherent; yet there are themes that have recurred throughout her career. The exhibition showcases the artist’s individual series and also presents works grouped thematically around such common threads as cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tales; and gender and class identity.
Clare Rae sites other influences in her practice, particularly artists living and working in Australia such as Jill Orr and Julia Rrap.
Jill Orr is a contemporary artist based in Melbourne. She is best known for her works in performance, photography, video and installation works that often explore the body, and its positioning within social, political and environmental contexts. While Orr’s works are predominantly site-specific, the recording of her works are regarded as equally significant aspects of her working practice.
Jill Orr, Trilogy, performance & videos for Performance, Presence, Video Time, curated by Anne Marsh, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide. 2015Jill Orr: Antipodean Epic, 2015
BLEEDING TREES 1979
BETWEEN SOMEWHERE AND NOWHERE, 2011
Jill Orr’s work centres on issues of the psycho- social and environmental where she draws on land and identities as they are shaped in, on and with the environment be it country or urban locales.
Julie Rrap’s involvement with body art and performance in the mid-70s in Australia continued to influence her practice as it expanded into photography, painting, sculpture and video in an on-going project concerned with representations of the body.
Another site of influence to Clare Rae is Francesca Woodman. At the age of thirteen Francesca Woodman took her first self-portrait. From then, up until her untimely death in 1981, aged just 22, she produced an extraordinary body of work. Comprising some 800 photographs, Woodman’s oeuvre is acclaimed for its singularity of style and range of innovative techniques. From the beginning, her body was both the subject and object in her work.
The very first photograph taken by Woodman, Self-portrait at Thirteen, 1972, shows the artist sitting at the end of a sofa in an un-indentified space, wearing an oversized jumper and jeans, arm loosely hanging on the armrest, her face obscured by a curtain of hair and the foreground blurred by sudden movement, one hand holding a cable linked to the camera. In this first image the main characteristics at the core of Woodman’s short career are clearly visible, her focus on the relationship with her body as both the object of the gaze and the acting subject behind the camera.
Woodman tested the boundaries of bodily experience in her work and her work often suggests a sense of self-displacement. Often nude except for individual body parts covered with props, sometimes wearing vintage clothing, the artist is typically sited in empty or sparsely furnished, dilapidated rooms, characterised by rough surfaces, shattered mirrors and old furniture. In some images Woodman quite literally becomes one with her surroundings, with the contours of her form blurred by movement, or blending into the background, wallpaper or floor, revealing the lack of distinction of both – between figure and ground, self and world. In others she uses her physical body literally as a framework in which to create and alter her material identity. For instance, holding a sheet of glass against her flesh, squeezing her body parts against the glass and smashing her face, breasts, hips, buttocks and stomach onto the surface from various angles, Woodman distorts her physical features making them appear grotesque.
Through fragmenting her body by hiding behind furniture, using reflective surfaces such as mirrors to conceal herself, or by simply cropping the image, she dissects the human figure emphasising isolated body parts. In her photographs Woodman reveals the body simultaneously as insistently there, yet somehow absent. This game of presence and absence argues for a kind of work that values disappearance as its very condition.
Since 1986, Woodman’s work has been exhibited widely and has been the subject of extensive critical study in the United States and Europe. Woodman is often situated alongside her contemporaries of the late 1970s such as Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke, yet her work also foreshadows artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Nan Goldin and Karen Finley in their subsequent dialogues with the self and reinterpretations of the female body.
For those interested in exploring identities, stereotypes, gender, alter-egos through self-portraiture using varies techniques such slow shutters-speeds, use of dressing up, make-up, props, masks, locations (mine-en-scene) Often these images are questioning ideas around truth, fantasy or fiction an involve artists making images in both interior and exterior environments
Juno Calypso won the recent BJP International Award 2016 and is currently exhibiting in London at TJ Boulting Gallery. It was an old picture of a lurid pink bathroom that inspired London-born photographer Juno Calypso to spend a week honeymooning solo at a Pennsylvania love hotel. “My first thought was that I’d be out of my mind to go all that way to take some pictures, but after failing to find anything similar in Europe I knew I’d be even crazier not to go,” Calypso says.
Surrounded by heart-shaped tubs, sparkling mirror lights and her signature anachronistic beauty devices, the Penn Hills Resort became the setting of The Honeymoon,Calypso’s new series of photographs exploring the absurdities of female identity and sexuality.
Read article here and also this article on artists exploring their alter-egos and inner selves in photography.
Anne Hardy’s photographs picture depopulated rooms that suggest surreal fictions. Working in her studio, Hardy builds each of her sets entirely from scratch; a labour-intensive process of constructing an empty room, then developing its interior down to the most minute detail. Using the transient nature of photography, Hardy’s images withhold the actual experience of her environments, allowing our relationship with them to be in our imagination.
Hardy’s work transforms sculpture into photographic ‘paintings’. Though her scenes are built in actuality, their compositions are developed to be viewed from one vantage point only and it’s only their 2 dimensional images that are shown. Hardy uses the devices inherent within photography to heighten her work’s painterly illusion. In Cipher, aspects such as the hazy aura around the fluorescent lights, faux grotto walls, and the spatial defiance of the hanging ropes, give allusion to gesture and drawn lines.
The construction of an environment taking place in her studio
Tableaux Photography and Staged environments. Tableaux photography always have an element of performing for the camera. See artists such as, Tom Hunter, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Duane Michaels, Sam Taylor Johnson (former Sam Taylor-Wood), Hannah Starkey, Tracy Moffatt, Vibeke Tandberg
Jeff WallGregory CrewdsonSam Taylor-JohnsonTracy MoffatUntitled – May 1997 1997 Hannah Starkey born 1971 Purchased 1999 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78246Vibeke Tandberg
Performance and Photography
For those of you who would like to explore Performance and Photography further here is a link to a project we did in 2015 when Tom Pope, was in Jersey as the Archisle Artist-in-Residence.
Study the blog posts below when we were exploring Pope’s practice and the themes of Chance, Change and Challenge . You should be able to find some starting pointshere.
For example, write a manifesto with a set of rules (6-10) that provide a framework for your performance related project. Describe in detail how you are planning on developing your work and ideas. Think about what you want to achieve, what you want to communicate, how your ideas relate to the theme ENVIRONMENT and how you are going to approach this task in terms of form, technique and subject-matter.
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
After researching the concept of ‘Environmental art’ as a movement I have decided to analyse the work of one specific artist associated with it-Andy Goldsworthy. He is a British sculptor and photographer who was inspired by Robert Smithson and other artists from the 1960s and 1970s.
“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.”-Andy Goldsworthy
Goldsworthy crafts his artwork out of natural materials such as rocks, ice, or branches. Aware that the landscape will change he documents the resulting interventions with the land and exhibits them through his photographic prints. His art is not constructed with longevity in mind, “It’s not about art, It’s just about life and the need to understand that a lot of things in life do not last”. This shows how crucial a role photography plays in his art as it freezes the moment in time when his art is most alive“Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image”. His photographs have an indexical relationship to the sculptures that they record and Goldsworthy prefers to use maximum depth of field in his images to focus on the surrounding environments and not always the artworks themselves. He also brackets his exposures, shooting a number of different exposures sequentially as well as normally taking a close-up shot, in which the work is centrally framed, and a shot showing the work in its immediate context.
His work has been criticised by some as being ‘Childish’ and ‘Naive’ and originally he didn’t like his work being labelled this way but since having children himself he says that he has seen ‘how intensely a child looks at things, you really can’t describe that looking as naive. My work is childlike in the sense that I am never satisfied to look at something and say that is just a pond or a tree or whatever. I want to touch it, get under the skin of it somehow, try and work out exactly what it is’.
In his early life Goldsworhty worked on farms as a labourer and he has compared the repetitive quality of farm tasks to the routine of making sculptures and methodically photographing them. He has also said that is is the land around his home that is the most important to him and it’s that landscape that he keeps returning to because it’s the place where he can learn the most about the landscape and his relationship to it.
Goldsworthy’s outdoor,ephemeral artworks are mostly made in private or remote circumstances but they are made ‘public’ through his photographs which are framed for exhibition or published in books. The public’s ability to access and experience Goldsworthy’s sculptures is influenced by the artist’s decision as to which works are printed or published, and by limits of the still photograph in determining how those works are ‘viewed.’
He often only uses found tools or his bare hands for creating the art which relates to the idea of working directly within the land and the tools vary depending on where he is. For example he talks about how he likes using dry slate to draw on other pieces of slate so that it’s not just drawn on but drawn out of the slate.
As well as the deeper meanings of Goldsworthy’s work his art is also visually appealing with his use of colour, shapes and patterns. For example the two images above stood out to me as impressive because they are both similar in appearance but are produced from different materials found in different environments. Similarly both are round in shape with a hole in the middle. This could relate to the idea of the ‘circle of life’ and decay that occurs in nature. The black hole in the centre acts as a focal point and breaks up the appearance of a solid structure. The black hole is a recurring form in his work and to me this has a slightly mysterious quality and creates links to the form and shape of an eye with a dark pupil looking at the viewer. Goldsworthy has said that he began using this after he had been digging in a sand dune and the ceiling collapsed in. When he crawled out it left a small hole in the sand which he thought of as a window into the ground and the material.
The use of colour in the structures above have been created out of different shades of the same material. This process of finding the right stones and leaves as well as separating out the colours would have been time consuming and shows the work and time he has spent on creating these pieces which won’t physically last for very long. The lighter colours in the centres contrast with the dark circles in the middle and progress to the darker border which seem to frame the structures. One of the reasons I was drawn to Goldsworthy’s work in particular was that unlike some Earth artists he doesn’t always interfere hugely with the land using machinery such as diggers to move vast amounts of material for creating wide scale interventions with the land. In the case of these two images he has used materials that are naturally found on the ground and has only created order out of the usual randomness in which they would be placed. This is pleasing to see because of the human desire to see patterns in things and create order to make sense of the world. They challenge the viewer’s perception about the natural and the unnatural.
I haven’t yet decided the exact direction that my project is going to take or how I will combine my ideas. However I am interested in Earth art because it’s a more unusual approach to exploring environments and focusing on the smaller details that make up landscapes. I also like the idea of using techniques that reflect primitive art which could be interesting to explore with the idea of reconnecting to the land etc. I am also intrigued by the unique relationship of photography for recording ephemeral art designs and it also links to the idea of sculpture which is something I haven’t looked at before. I may be able to incorporate these ideas into my wider project but perhaps not too heavily as it could be difficult and time consuming to get good results.
Environmental art as a movement includes a range of artistic practices such as historical approaches to nature as well as new politically motivated works which explore the deeper relationships to environmental systems and social concerns. The physical environment has always inspired art, for example it could be said that it began with Palaeolithic cave paintings which represented aspects of nature such as animals and humans interacting with them.
Environmental art is an umbrella term which encompasses many different art styles , techniques and objectives. The artists associated with it often share similar beliefs about human interconnectedness to the natural world-socially, economically or spiritually. Environmental art contains a variety of sub movements including romanticism in the way that it seeks to celebrate the beauty and greatness of nature and the people connected to it as well as Eco-realism and Gaga art.
The growth of environmental art as a specific movement began around the late 1960’s and early on it was associated predominantly with sculpture and land art. It partly arose out of criticisms that sculpture was out of harmony with the environment. In 1968 Robert Smithson organised an exhibition in New York titled “Earthworks” which challenged conventional ideas to do with exhibitions because his artwork was too large to be collected. They were represented by photographs which emphasised the resistance to acquisition .
Earth art uses the natural landscape to create structures, forms and sculptures and it grew from ideas associated with conceptualism and minimalism. These were popular during the 1960’s when artists began to abandon traditional approaches and new ways of engaging with the world through art. There was a change from representing nature in art to utilising it as a material which has connections to primitive artists who used the natural materials available to them. Although some artists such as Smithson used mechanical earth-moving equipment to make their artworks, other artists made minimal and temporary interventions in the landscape such as Richard Long who simply walked up and down until he had made a mark in the earth.
The system of presenting art went through radical change as the Book ‘The representation of nature in art’ explains, artists reject the “traditional workshop-museum-gallery circuit”. It goes on to say that Land artists are grouped together by their desire to “work on the spot so that they can leave their mark, in one way or other, on whatever scale, and for however long, without deciding in advance how their works are to be accessed. They use photographs, film, maps and drawings to describe their work, which usually remains inaccessible… these artists use nature, not to reveal its beauty and evoke emotions but rather to dig, mark, plot, and transform. In this way the sculptural dimension emerges”. It is explained that Land art is “more the result of different intellectual, sociological and artistic paths than an aesthetic manifesto. The only thing the paths have in common is their medium: nature.”
By using the most basic materials Earth artists aim to get as close to the essence of their work as possible. The often ephemeral nature of their work means that they accept the inevitability of their work disappearing which means the role of photography in recording it is very important. I find this connection between art, sculpture and photography interesting as well as the way that it is reflective of very primitive methods of creating art but utilises new technologies to record it.
Ibris Khan is a London based artist who focuses on an array of techniques and mediums from photography, painting to sculpture and film. He takes photographs from other sources as well as entire books and overlays them to create these compelling and abstract black and white images. His work evokes a very intense form of energy. The huge amount of layers creates a very provocative sense of texture. His photographs also reflect something spiritual with their use of movement and ambiguity.
Stephanie Jung
Stephanie Jung is a photographer based in German who as a passion for experimental photography using overlay and montage techniques. She takes her own photographs of places shes traveled and overlays them together. She picks places that stand out to her where she is really compelled by the ambiance and environment. Her work is a reflection of lost moments that cant be taken back as well as capturing the energy of somewhere such as a bustling city or eerie country road. Her work really emphasizes a sense of energy created by city environments which is also emphasized by the vivid colours used. Similar to Khan’s work, her use of overlay techniques gives a new sense of life to the image evoked by the intense textures that run through the image.
“My work is a lot about everyday scenes from a city, I take the images during a walk through the cities. I do not plan to take images from a special motive, it happens very spontaneously, I find beauty both in calm and busy moments, as I think both represent life at its best.” – The Phoblographer interview
Another view of Paris
I was really drawn to the photograph above by Jung which features a view overlooking the city in Paris. For this photograph she took various photographs moments apart, which evokes the movement of the cars as they drive up and down the road. The photographs features a very artistic colour scheme with its intriguing grey and yellow sky line contrasted with the blue buildings and vivid streak of red from the lights.
This was taken in 2009 on top of the Arche de Triomphe, watching Paris at night with my friends. The view was amazing, the La Defense district at the back, and the road in front with all the cars rushing from one place to another. It’s my favorite image because of the warm lighting and the coloured lights of the cars. –COOPH interview (2014)
Both artists use this technique to add energy into their work. The strong use of texture give both artists work a very crowded effect. Jung’s work evokes the atmosphere of her environment with its use of scenery and vivid colour and bold use of colour scheme, her work also reflects a romantic influence with the use scenery and colour, which evokes beauty. Khans work on the other hand is a lot more conceptual, the often indistinguishable shapes evoke something eerie or ghostly, his work is a lot more subtly compared to Jung’s chaotic landscapes. I like Jung’s use of rich colours and textures to make her work evoke a sense of energy and an exaggerated ambiance into scenery of her photographs which is something I plan on incorporating into my own work.
This was just a simple mood board that I have created looking at environmental portraits. I have looked at a classical example, in the form of August Sander as well as more contemporary studies from Jonathan Bielaski and Anthony Kurtz. The main concept of environmental portraits is to photograph a person in their natural environment, this has the effect of giving a whole volume of information to the viewer other than just the subject and their clothes. You get to build up a much more in-depth relationship with the subject, getting to understand a little more about what makes them who they are. You can often see a relationship between the subject and their environment, there are things in the environment that are represented in the subject and vise versa. This works very well for the keyword of this project, with more structure than simple portraits or landscapes it allows the environment to be studied and linked to a subject.
Sander’s work is the real starting point for this type of environmental portraiture, there were similar works to this but this the classic example and where the movement came from. His images are always composed well, he has the subject look directly at the camera and stand in a pose that shows off who they are. Their outfits are an essential part of the images. The Soldier shows the youthfulness of this man who is ready to experience war. Taken in a winter hamlet this is clearly not his home, he shows no connection to the location, he is simply posted there for what ever reason. His other images are in a very high contrast, this gives an amazing amount of detail to the faces, clothes and surrounding of the subjects. The detail gives a fantastic perspective of the subject, you really feel like they are standing right in front of you, staring into your eyes. There is a connection made to these people who are all likely dead now, this is what his photography was excellent at doing, making you feel a connection to these people who you will never meet, and likely will never know the names of.
Bielaski’s work is a more modern take on Sander’s. He travels to locations with his subjects and set up photos using lights and his camera almost as if it was in a studio. He uses a camera that can capture 100MP in a single photograph, this incredible detail has the same effect as Sander’s high contrast. You get to see the details in a subject’s face and clothes making it seem like you are simply looking through a window at them. Bielaski also seems to have used HDR for his images, further increasing the detail and information available to the viewer in the photograph. Almost looking like animations his images are highly manipulated, and although it makes the images look very impressive it draws away from the subject a little, the viewer does not focus on the content as much because they are dazzled with these fantastic colours.
Kurtz’s work in the mood board is kind of a mix between Sander’s and Bielaski’s. He still has high contrast to the images but they are not over the top with excessively vibrant colours, the bright colours that are seen in some of the images are a result of the subject being powder paint which in its self it very vibrant. His images are a mixture of having the subjects look at the camera and not having them look at the camera, this works well depending on the different photographs. The one of the group of people works well despite there being no specific single subject, the mass of people lends itself well to the chaos in this scene. His depictions of his subjects work well because they do not seem forced or over bearing, you see the subject and plenty of the background to give context to the subject.
AO1 – Develop your ideas through sustained and focused investigations informed by contextual and other sources, demonstrating analytical and critical understanding.
To achieve an A or A*-grade you must demonstrate an Exceptional ability (Level 6) through sustained and focused investigations achieving 16-18 marks out of 18.
Get yourself familiar with the assessment grid here:
To develop your ideas further from initial research of mind-maps and mood-boards on the themes ENVIRONMENT you need to be looking at the work of others (artists, photographers, filmmakers, writers, theoreticians, historians etc) and write a specification with 2-3 unique ideas that you want to explore further.
Follow these steps to success!
Research and analyse the work of at least 2-3 (or more) photographers/ artists. Produce at least 2-3 blog posts for each artist reference that illustrate your thinking and understanding using pictures and annotation and make a photographic response to your research into the work of others
Produce a mood board with a selection of images.
Provide analysis of their work and explain why you have chosen them and how it relates to your idea and the exam theme of ENVIRONMENT
Select at least 2 key images and analyse in depth, FORM (composition, use of light etc), MEANING (interpretation, subject-matter, what is the photographer trying to communicate), JUDGEMENT (evaluation, how good is it?), CONTEXT (history and theory of art/ photography/ visual culture,link to other’s work/ideas/concept)
Incorporate quotes and comments from artist themselves or others (art critics, art historians, curators, writers, journalists etc) using a variety of sources such as Youtube, online articles, reviews, text, books etc.
Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post
Plan at least 2-3 shoots as a response to the above where you explore your ideas in-depth.
Edit shoots and show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop
Reflect and evaluate each shoot afterwards with thoughts on how to refine and modify your ideas i.e. experiment with images in Lightroom/Photoshop, re-visit idea, produce a new shoot, what are you going to do differently next time? How are you going to develop your ideas?
To help you get started look at the starting points in the Exam paper on pages 22-25 under Photography. Look also at other disciplines such as, Fine Art, Graphic Communication, Textile Design, Three-dimensional design – often you will find some interesting ideas here.
However don’t just rely on these pages and starting points in the exam paper. Often those students that achieve the highest marks are those that think outside the box and find their own unique starting points.
Here is a folder EXAM 2017 with a lot of PPTs about varioues genres and approaches to photography: USE IT !!
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Resources\EXAM 2017
Here are some thoughts from me on different artists whose work makes link and references to the theme of ENVIRONMENT.
Chris Jordan: Midway Message from the Gyre
Definition in dictionary (noun):
1. the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.
2. the natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity.
synonyms:
the natural world, nature, the living world, the world, the earth, the ecosystem, the biosphere, Mother Nature, Gaia;
wildlife, flora and fauna, the countryside, the landscape
This broad definition encompass almost everything and the obvious approach to thinking about the environment is a place. However the concept of an environment can be interpreted in different ways.
Physical – observed and recorded environment Psychological – constructed and imagined environment
Using binary opposites we can divide these environment into;
nature/ culture light/ darkness east/ west
exterior/ interior private/ public masculin/ feminine
During AS Landscape project we explored exactly this is we began by looking at Romanticism in landscape photography as exemplified by Ansel Adams and his contemporaries in Group f/64 and ended up with questioning this overtly idealised monochrome aesthetics with the advent of New Topographics in the mind 1970s – a group of photographers questioning the prevailing monochrome and romanticised aesthetic of depicting nature at it most sublime and beautiful by making images of the urban man-made world.
As A2 students we want you to develop the binary concepts of natural vs man-altered environments and combine this with what you have learned during A2 in terms of documentary and narrative and incorporate your understanding of storytelling and use of archives to enrich your photographic study.
Sea / Coast / Marine Environment In the Photographic Archive at the Society Jersiaise there are significant works by early Jersey landscape and architectural photographers such as Thomas Sutton
Remains of ruined coastal defence tower, Tour du Sud, La Carrière, St Ouen’s Bay, Jersey. Plate from Souvenir de Jersey, published 1854.
Other photographesr in the Photo-Archive who explored Jersey landscapes, topographical views, town, countryside, build-environments etc . Samuel Poulton, Ernest Baudoux, Albert Smith , Edwin Dale, AK Lawson, Paul Martin, Godfray, Frith (put in surnames first for searching online catalogue here.
Baudoux, Ernest. View of Victoria College, St Saviour, with boys standing informally outside
Gustave Le Gray (French 1820 –1884) was an early pioneer of seascapes.
Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky at a time where it was impossible to have at the same time the sky and the sea on a picture due to the too extreme luminosity range. Combination printing was an early experiment of HDR photography where you expose for bright and dark areas of a landscape scene.
Contemporary approaches to views of horizons between sky and sea, see inspiration from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto whose monochrome images are minimalist and spiritual in their expression.
If you intend to explore sea landscapes you must do contextual research in relation to the art movement of Romanticism – see below. Technically you must make images exploring diverse quality of light, expansive views and weather patterns at different times of the day. Make sure to use a tripod, cable release and apply exposure bracketing and experiment with HDR techniques in post-production. Other techniques such as panoramic images and Hockney ‘joiners’ and Typology studies are also appropriate.
Jersey west coast has unique identity and geography. For many it is place of refuse from work, school and where they go for relaxation, leisure, beach, surfing, walking. If we think about Jersey and an island surrounded by water and with a one of the fastest tidal moments in the world you can look at photographers who has explored the notion of sea or water in interesting ways.
Michael Marten: Sea Change Excellent use of diptych and triptych and exploring low vs high tides to see how it changes a landscape scene
Mark Power: The Shipping Forecats Intangible and mysterious, familiar yet obscure, the shipping forecast is broadcast four times daily on BBC Radio 4. For those at, or about to put to sea, the forecast may mean the difference between life and death. InThe Shipping Forecast, Mark Power documents the 31 sea areas covered by the forecast,
Subject of water – both studies done on the Thames River in London
Roni Horn: Dictionary of Water
Water is a series of photographs of the surface of the Thames. It is ever-changing: now swirling, now scrunched like black tin foil, now in Turneresque lemon and flame colours, now plucked up into dune shapes. Each is annotated with tiny numbers, which refer to footnotes. The footnotes, hundreds in total, worry away in small type under the images – they happen, in other words, under the surface, and concern what the water suggests and conceals. (“Black water is sexy. / What is water? / What do you know about water? Only that it’s everywhere differently. / Disappearance: that’s why suicides are attracted to it. / You can’t talk about water without talking about oneself. / Down at the river I shot my baby.”)
[no title] 1999 Roni Horn born 1955Mark Dion:Archeaology
Archaeological excavations aren’t limited to ancient Egypt or Stone Age villages. In 1999 during the Tate Thames Dig artist Mark Dion and volunteers collected found objects from the river bed and displayed in the cabinets.
Tate Thames Dig 1999 Mark Dion born 1961 Purchased with assistance from private benefactors 2000 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T07669
Nature as Environment: In their most recent collection of work, The Meadow, photographers Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley explore the connections and relationships formed between humans and the natural world. Over the course of a decade, the two have taken numerous photographs of an area of land in Carlisle, Massachusetts. Combined with Kelley’s writing, the collaborative project resulted in this uniquely-crafted work. The land they have chosen serves as an ideal subject, composed of paths and abandoned farmland reclaimed by the vibrant foliage.
The Meadow Barbara Bosworth
Embodying a diaristic style, the final product has the feeling of a handcrafted scrapbook recollected from someone’s bookshelf. Tucked as if by accident between the pages are small booklets bearing the photographers’ experiences, and the occasional fold-out triptych which embellishes the arts-and-crafts vibe. A detailed appendix documents the numerous foliage, fungi, and pebbles found during the exploration of the meadow. They even transcribe the logs of the previous property owner, who chronicled day-to-day the teeming life he discovered on a series of wooden doors.
Finn Larsen, Tracks
Walking 50 km of a train track from one end to another over a 5 year period in different seasons and light recorded the landscape along a track that you ordinary only would see in fleeting glimpses travelling at high speed.
Other who has explored nature vs man-made environments within a confined parameters albeit on a much larger scale is Richard Misrach who for decades have photographed the border and desert like terrain between the USA and Mexico. See books Violent Legacies and his latest installment Border Cantos – a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it in a unique collaboration with composer and performer Guillermo Galindo.
The Wall, Jacumba, California an image Misrach captured in 2009.
Galindo fashions instruments to be performed as unique sound-generating devices. He also imagines graphic musical scores, many of which also use Misrach’s photographs as points of departure. A unique melding of the artist as documentarian and interpreter, the book will include several suites of photographs drawn from a number of distinct series, or Cantos―some made with a large-format camera as well as an iPhone.
Culture as Environments
Within the history of landscape photography the wild west hold a particular fascination in the minds of early explorers, settlers, scientist and artists. Early landscape photographers include Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton E. Watkins and William Henry Jackson whose work was a major influence on people like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White
Timothy Taylor
In American cinema the advent of the genre, Westerns where frontiers people battle native American indians against a backdrop of sublime Grand Canyon. Another more serene rendition of the American West can be seen in the road movie Paris, Texas by filmmaker Wim Wenders – who also uses photography for location shoots and photographic books.
Wim Wenders
Others who has explored the unique landscape of the wild west or America’s deep South is John Divola, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Richard Misrach, Ron Jude, William Eggleston
We looked at Alec Soth during the Documentary module as a poetic lyrical story-teller who combines landscapes, portraits, still-lives and other visual material in his photo books.
By way of a follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi (reveals the unique characters and landscapes Soth encountered during a series of road trips along the Mississippi River) Alec Soth turns his eye to another iconic body of water, Niagara Falls. And as with his photographs of the Mississippi, these images are less about natural wonder than human desire. “I went to Niagara for the same reason as the honeymooners and suicide jumpers,” says Soth, “the relentless thunder of the Falls just calls for big passion.”
Alec Soth: Niagara
Alec Soth Niagara
Using a large-format 8×10 camera like Ansel Adams Soth worked over the course of two years on both the American and Canadian sides of the Falls. He depicts newlyweds and naked lovers, motel parking lots, pawnshop wedding rings and love letters from the subjects he photographed. We read about teenage crushes, workplace affairs, heartbreak and suicide.
Theo Gosselin goes on roadtrip with his friends and make a set of images evoking a cinematic quality
Theo Goselin Sans Limites
Ron Jude: Lick Creek Line
Lick Creek Line extends and amplifies Ron Jude’s ongoing fascination with the vagaries of photographic empiricism, and the gray area between documentation and fiction. In a sequential narrative punctuated by contrasting moments of violence and
beauty, Jude follows the rambling journey of a fur trapper, methodically checking his trap line in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States. Through converging pictures of
landscapes, architecture, an encroaching resort community, and the solitary, secretiveprocess of trapping pine marten for their pelts, Lick Creek Line underscores the murky and culturally arbitrary nature of moral critique.
Ron Jude
Typology means the study and interpretation of types and became associated with photography through the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs taken over the course of 50 years of industrial structures; water towers, grain elevators, blast furnaces etc can be considered conceptual art. They were interested in the basic forms of these architectural structures and referred to them as ‘Anonyme Skulpturen’ (Anonymous Sculptures.)
The Becher’s were influenced by the work of earlier German photographers linked to the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s such as August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt and Albert-Renger-Patzsch.
August SanderKarl BlosfeldtAlbert-Renger-Patzsch
See also the work by Americans, William Christenberry and Ed Ruscha’s photographic works on types e.g. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1964). Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Or Idris Khan‘s appropriation of Bechers’ images.
Ed Ruscha, 26 Gasoline Stations
William ChristenberryIdris Khan
See previous blog post for more guidelines and a photo-assignment.
Not least of the Bechers’ legacy is their lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists who use the photographic medium today, most notably the students taught by Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy between 1976 and 1996. Among his most renowned students are Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth.
Andreas GurkstThomas Struth born 1954 Ferdinand-von-Schill-Strasse, Dessau 1991 1991Thomas RuffCandia Hofer
From Germany, apart form the legacy of the Dusseldorf Kunst Akademie headed by the Becher’s another school of photography, the Werkstatt für Fotografie (Workshop for Photography) was founded in Berlin by Michael Schmidt who invited several leading American photographers, including William Eggleston and John Gossage, to teach there.
Michael Schmidt Waffenrufe
Responding to the wall between East and West in Berlin Schmidt produced a seminal work, Waffenrufe. Another body of work Berlin Nach 45 show empty streets of East Berlin made in the early hours as a quite testament to post war German architecture and urban city planning
Conceptual approaches to natural/ man-made environments
Tanja Deman is a Croation artists who will be Archisle’s International Photographer-in-Residence in 2017.
Her art is inspired by her interest in the perception of space, physical and emotional connection to a place and her relationship to nature. Her works, incorporating photography, collage, video and public art, are evocative meditations on urban space and landscape. Observing recently built legacy or natural sites her work investigates the sociology of space and reflects dynamics hidden under the surface of both the built and natural environment.
Tanja Deman Fernweh
Fernweh series explores the concept of a modernist city through its extreme relations to the landscape. The images are placed on a blurred line between a past which reminds us of a future and a future which looks like a past. Scenes are referring to the modernist ideas and aspiration of a man conquering the natural wild land and subordinating it to the rational order, and the consequences of those aspirations, which switched into the longing for an escape from urban environments.
Tanja Deman Collected Narratives
Collective Narratives is a series staging a moment of contemplation of nature and built environment. Natural spectacles, framed in theatrical space are contemplated by an audience. These constructed images consolidate: geological formations; a projection of an urban environment; an arena; a deep chasm; a theatre and a crumbling slag-heap through a very active kind of watching.
While making the series ‘Collective Narratives’ I was interested in different types of spectatorship and architectural settings in which they are taking place. Moreover, the notion of a ritual in which a large group of people gathers and participates in order to experience something together by observing, intrigued me. I see these spaces for cultural and sports spectacles, as zones of pure potential, where the world must be rebuilt or re-imagined every time they are in use. Having liberated them from their utilitarian, commercial restrains, and the environments in which they were created, I allow them to cross the boundary of reality.
Together these scenes examine time and the strange modes of spectatorship attached to the inanimate world. A collective witnessing of phenomena that are usually experienced in private atmospheres.
Staged / Constructed Environments Land art is art that is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials such as rocks or twigs
Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty
Land art was part of the wider conceptual art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous land art work is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty of 1970, an earthwork built out into the Great Salt Lake in the USA. Though some artists such as Smithson used mechanical earth-moving equipment to make their artworks, other artists made minimal and temporary interventions in the landscape such as Richard Long who simply walked up and down until he had made a mark in the earth.
A Line in the Himalayas 1975, printed 2004 Richard Long born 1945 Presented by the artist (Building the Tate Collection) 2005 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T12035
Land art, which is also known as earth art, was usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artist could exhibit in a gallery. Land artists also made land art in the gallery by bringing in material from the landscape and using it to create installations.
Parallel Stress 1970 Dennis Oppenheim
As well as Richard Long and Robert Smithson, key land artists include Hamish Fulton, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheimand Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Hamish Fulton(born 1946) is a British walking artist. Since 1972 he has only made works based on the experience of walks.
Wind through the Pines 1985, 1991 Hamish Fulton born 1946
William Christenberry making typological studies of vernacular architecture traditional to the deep American South.
Christenberry also made little sculptures or 3D models of some of the buildings he had photographed
Photography and sculpture
Photographic installations which are site specific and 3-dimensional is very in vogue right now. In the exam paper starting point 4 is about artists exploring the material nature of a photographic image and the idea that photographs can be sculptural. Here are a few artists to explore
Felicity Hammond is an emerging artist who works across photography and installation. Fascinated by political contradictions within the urban landscape her work explores construction sites and obsolete built environments.
The Space Between @ ART ROTTERDAM 2017
The Space Between @ ART ROTTERDAM 2017
In specific works Hammond photographs digitally manipulated images from property developers’ billboards and brochures and prints them directly onto acrylic sheets which are then manipulated into unique sculptural objects. http://www.felicityhammond.com/
Lorenzo Venturi: Dalston Anatomy
Lorenzo Vitturi’s vibrant still lifes capture the threatened spirit of Dalston’s Ridley Road Market. Vitturi – who lives locally – feels compelled to capture its distinctive nature before it is gentrified beyond recognition. Vitturi arranges found objects and photographs them against backdrops of discarded market materials, in dynamic compositions. These are combined with street scenes and portraits of local characters to create a unique portrait of a soon to be extinct way of life.
His installation at the Gallery draws on the temporary structures of the market using raw materials, sculptural forms and photographs to explore ideas about creation, consumption and preservation.
Watch our exclusive interview with Lorenzo.
Boyd Webb (born 1947) is a New Zealand-born visual artist who works in the United Kingdom, mainly using the medium of photography although he has also produced sculpture and film. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1988. He has had solo shows at venues including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Boyd Webb Abyssogramme, 1983
Initially he worked as a sculptor, making life casts of people in fibreglass and arranging them into scenes. He eventually turned to photography and his early work played with ideas of the real and the imagined. Through mysterious and elaborate compositions created using actors and complex sets built by the artist in his studio. In later years his focus shifted to a cool observational style, his work less theatrical and technique less elaborate.
James Casebere pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. For the last thirty years, Casebere has devised increasingly complex models that are subsequently photographed in his studio. Based on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Casebere’s abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative and oftentimes suggestive of prior events, encouraging the viewer to reconstitute a narrative or symbolic reading of his work.
Caspar David FriedrichJames Casebere
While earlier bodies of work focused on American mythologies such as the genre of the western and suburban home, in the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to institutional buildings. In more recent years, his subject matter focused on various institutional spaces and the relationship between social control, social structure and the mythologies that surround particular institutions, as well as the broader implications of dominant systems such as commerce, labor, religion and law.
Thomas Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes he finds in images taken from various media sources. Once he has photographed his re-created environments—always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity—Demand destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates.
Christian Boltanski(born 1944) is a French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker, most well known for his photography installations and contemporary French Conceptual style. Boltanski’s subject matters are history and life duration. Vulnerability is his strength, and reflecting upon absence is his way to express his passion for what is real. And so Boltanski builds his own archives, moves shadows around the gallery space, or brings forgotten memories back to the surface through the eyes and faces of strangers that emerge from found photographs; he synchronizes the sound of the human heartbeat to the rhythm of history; he creates settings with old clothing so that individual stories may not be dispersed; he investigates fate and challenges, through irony, the transience of things to propose the art of time.
The Reserve of Dead Swiss 1990 Christian Boltanski born 1944 Presented by the Fondation Cartier 1992 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T06605
Anette Messenger
Letha Wilson Marlo Pascual
Environment and Street Photography
Classical approaches between the flaneur (Cartier-Bresson) and confrontational (William Klein) see – previous blog post and ppt here.
Within the context of environment lets look at: Eamon Doyle – Dublin Trilogy Richard Wentworth vs Eugene Agtet Michael Wolf Peter Bialobrzeski: Cairo Diaries Kyler Zeleny: Out West John MaClean: Two and Two, Hometown, New Colour Guide Lee Friedlander: America by Car Antonio Olmos: The Landscape of Murder Jason Larkin: Waiting
Christopher Anderson: Capitolio Capitolio is New York documentary photographer Christopher Anderson’s cinematic journey through the upheavals of contemporary Caracas, Venezuela, in the tradition of such earlier projects as William Klein’s New York (1954-55) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958). It presents a poetic and politicized vision, by one of today’s finest documentary photographers, of a city and a country that is ripping apart at the seams under the stress of popular unrest, and whose turmoil remains largely unreported by Western media.
Abstraction with a city environment: Saul Leiter Ernst Haas Nagoya Hatakoeyama: River Series Stephen Gill: Talking to Ants, other projects Siegfried Hansen: Hold the Line Antonio M. Xoubanova: A Small Universe
A Small Universe is my imagining of the universe in 2.5 seconds and 10 linear metres of street.” “The project is a 2.5-second-long feature film comprised of images and sequences which reference the beginning of things – technology, religion, the universe, the street, love, matter and its different forms, the basics of the human condition, contemporaneity, advertising and the end of existence.” “The images in the book represent a space according to their size; they are containers of time. An image captured at 1/40 second shutter speed is physically 10 times larger than another shot at 1/400 second. The size of each image is determined by the amount of time it contains. The book is therefore an attempt to materialize something as minimal, abstract and complex as 2.5 seconds of existence – a fragment of matter, or a small space.” “If the universe is defined as the total sum of all matter, time and space, this book of “street photography” is the attempt to address a controlled universe and the elements it contains, which in the end reveal themselves to be complex and uncontrollable.”
Focusing on people, faces and private space Satoshi Fujiwara: Code Unknown
City or nature at twilight/ night
Awoiska van der Molen: Sequester Christen Lebas: Blue Hour Todd Hido Rut Blees Luzembourg Bill Henson Maciej Dakowicz: Cardiff After Night Richard Renaldi: Tales of a City Ken Schles: Night Walk Chris Shaw: Life as a Night Porter (link to Sophie Calle) Oscar Monzón: Karma – takes a voyeuristic look through the car window.
Case-study: Environment as one site
Anders Petersen: Cafe Lehmitz Krass Clement: DRUM Klaus Pichler: Golden Days before they End Andrew Miksys: Disko Ciaran Og Arnold: I went to the worst of bars…
Environment as a Personal or Psychological space
Cindy Sherman: film-stills
– image hanging of door – girl who committed suicide Claude Cahun Elina Brothers Patrick Willocq
Anne Hardy Robert Frank – recent work such as his trilogy: You Would, Park/Sleep and Ta UF, Tal AB
staged environments (tableaux)
Tom Hunter, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Duane Michaels, Sam Taylor Johnson (former Sam Taylor-Wood), Hannah Starkey, Tracy Moffatt, Vibeke Tandberg
Environments for animals:
Raymond Meeks: Animal Shelter Nico Baumgarten: How the Other half lives Christopher Nunn: Ukranian Street Dogs Gary Winograd: The Animals
Documentary vs Staged Photography
If we examine documentary truth (camera as witness) versus a staged photograph (tableaux photography) all sorts of questions arise that are pertinent to consider as an image maker. Remember our discussion we had at the beginning of September when we began module of Documentary and Narrative. We discussed a set of images submitted at the World Press Photo competition on 2015.
Tableaux Photography and the Staged photograph
Tableaux photography is a style of photography in which a pictorial narrative is conveyed through a single image as opposed to a series of images which tell a story such as in photojournalism and documentary photography. This style is sometimes also referred to as ‘staged’ or ‘constructed photography’ and tableaux photographs makes references to fables, fairy tales, myths and unreal and real events from a variety of sources such as paintings, film, theatre, literature and the media. Tableaux photographs offer a much more ambiguous and open-ended description of something that are subjective to interpretation by the viewer. Tableaux photographs are mainly exhibited in fine art galleries and museums where they are considered alongside other works of art.
Tom Hunter, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Duane Michaels, Sam Taylor Johnson (former Sam Taylor-Wood), Hannah Starkey, Tracy Moffatt, Vibeke Tandberg, William Wegman.
Tom Hunter, Eviction order after VermeerJeff Wall Invisible ManGregory Crewdson Twilight
Watch video behind the scenes of Gregory Crewdson shoot
See my PPT om Tableaux Photography for more details
Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen, Doug Rickard, Daniel Mayrit all use found images from the internet, Google earth and other satellites images as a way to ask questions and raise awareness about our environment, state operated security facilities, social and urban neighbour hoods, prostitution, and London’s business leaders of major international financial institutions.
Mishka Henner, Levelland Oil Field- Texas
US oil fields photographed by satellites orbiting Earth.
Mishka Henner Dutch Landscapes
Mishka Henner: I’m not the only one, 2015
Single channel video, 4:34 mins
Photographer Trevor Paglen has long made the advanced technology of global surveillance and military weaponry his subject. This year he has been nominated for the prestigious The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize which aims to reward a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year. The Prize showcases new talents and highlights the best of international photography practice. It is one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of photography. Read more here
Trevor Paglen
Doug Rickard is a north American artist / photographer. He uses technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographs on his monitor, to create series of work that have been published in books, exhibited in galleries.
Months after the London Riots in 2008 (at the beginning of the economical crash) the Metropolitan Police handed out leaflets depicting youngsters that presumably took part in riots. Images of very low quality, almost amateur, were embedded with unquestioned authority due both to the device used for taking the photographs and to the institution distributing those images. But in reality, what do we actually know about these people? We have no context or explanation of the facts, but we almost inadvertently assume their guilt because they have been ‘caught on CCTV’.
In his awarding book: You Haven’s Seen the Faces.. Daniel Mayrit appropriated the characteristics of surveillance technology using Facebook and Google to collect images of the 100 most powerful people in the City of London (according to the annual report by Square Mile magazine in 2013). The people here featured represent a sector which is arguably regarded in the collective perception as highly responsible for the current economic situation, but nevertheless still live in a comfortable anonymity, away from public scrutiny.
See also this book Looters by Tiane Doan Na Champassak
Photography and Performance
Tableaux photography always have an element of performing for the camera and the exam themes lend themselves really well to revisit Performance in Photography and explore fantasy, fiction, parody, alter-ego, identity etc. Read my blog post from last Summer when we were exploring Tom Pope’s practice in Photography and Performance and the themes of Chance, Change and Challenge . You should be able to find some starting points here
For example, write a manifesto with a set of rules (6-10) that provide a framework for your performance related project. Describe in detail how you are planning on developing your work and ideas. Think about what you want to achieve, what you want to communicate, how your ideas relate to the themes of Truth, Fantasy or Fiction and how you are going to approach this task in terms of form, technique and subject-matter.
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
images
Photography and Sculpture:
Images produced through transformation of materials and making things to be photographed. See work by: Lorenzo Vitturi (Dalton Anatomy), Thomas Demand, James Casebere (see Emily Reynolds work), Vik Muniz, Chris Jordan (Midway Atoll), Stephen Gill.
For those interested in exploring identities, stereotypes, gender, alter-egos through self-portraiture using varies techniques such slow shutters-speeds, use of dressing up, make-up, props, masks, locations (mine-en-scene) Often these images are questioning ideas around truth, fantasy or fiction.
Francesco Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, Yasumasa Morimura, Gillian Wearing, Sean Lee (Shauna) Juno Calypso
Stranger than Fiction: Should documentary photographers add fiction to reality?
Documentary photography belongs to the realm of truth, yet some photographers are testing the boundaries between reality and fiction in a bid to reach a public that is accustomed to these narrative forms in the literary and cinematic worlds. In contemporary photography today your have what some people call Fictional Documentary (similar to TV genre such as doc-drama) where you interpret real or historical events through fiction. This is often expressed through a personal and artistic vision which are operating somewhere between fiction and fantasy with some elements of truth or historical data that has been re-imagined.
See the work of: Cristina de Middel (Afronauts, Sharkification, This is What Hatred Did), Max Pinckers (Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty), Vasantha Yogananthan (A Myth of Two Souls), Ron Jude (Lick Creek Line), Eamonn Doyle ( i ) Paul Graham (Does Yellow Run Forever), Yury Toroptsov (Fairyland, House of Baba Yaga, Divine Retribution), Gareth McConnell (Close Your Eyes), Joan Fontcuberta
Cristina de Middel AfronautsMax_Pinckers_from_the_series_Will_They_Sing_Like_Raindrops_or_Leave_Me_ThirstyVasantha Yogananthan ‘A Myth of Two Souls’Ron Jude Lick Creek LinePaul Graham Does Yellow Run ForeverYury Toroptsov House of Baba Yaga
Gregg Segal is a well-known photographer famous for bringing light to ugly and controversial subjects. Since a very young age, Segal has taken interest in photography, capturing mundane moments as works of art and documentation. At the age of 16, he attended the ‘Interlochen Arts Academy’ and soon after went on to do a BFA at the ‘California Institute of the Arts’. His passions and skill for storytelling through visual arts was helped by his interest in film and his ‘dramatic writing’ masters degree from ‘New York University’. Since then Segal has used the photographic medium to explore culture: our beliefs, our values, and our histories. As well as identity and the roles we play: super-heroes, CEO’s, inventors, gamblers, factory workers, and those just making up their identity as they go. His work has been recognised by huge organisations such as ‘American Photography’, ‘PDN’, ‘Investigative Reporters and Editors’ and ‘The New York Press Club’. Whilst his portraiture and photo essays have been featured in major magazines like ‘Time’, ‘Newsweek’, ‘The Independent’, and ‘National Geographic Adventure’. The reason I have chosen him for inspiration on how to portray environmental issues is down to his beautifully executed series he has named ‘7 Days of Garbage’.
The amount of rubbish that gets thrown away on a daily basis usually goes unnoticed. However, in this project aptly named ‘7 Days of Garbage’, Gregg Segal shows bizarrely artistic photos of families and individuals laying in a 7 days-worth pool of their own rubbish, escalating the inconvenient truth about one of the deepest environmental issues of today. As his work is very diverse Segal tries to avoid categorization, creating his own blend of editorial, fine art and documentary photography. All of these subjects, brave enough to show to the world their trash in the most vulnerable of ways, were Segal’s neighbours, friends, and other acquaintances. “Subjects are photographed surrounded by their trash in a setting that is part nest, part archaeological record,”he explains. “We’ve made our bed and in it we lie”. Below is a quote from Segal explaining the results that this project has had on himself and his subjects…
“By asking us to look at ourselves, I’ve found that many are considering the issue more deeply. Many have said the process of saving their garbage and laying in it reconciled them to a need for change. Others feel powerless. It isn’t their fault that the products they buy are disposable and come with excessive packaging. Our economic model and its necessity for growth fuels the waste epidemic – and makes conservation seem untenable.”
Here I have presented two of my favourite images from the ‘7 Days of Garbage’ series to compare and evaluate. By looking at these two pieces together you can really start to understand the growing problem of consumerism in younger generations. Both of these images depict a straight forward full body portrait image of a person lying on top of a week’s worth of their own rubbish. The meaning behind these creations is quite well explained by the photographer in a powerful statement; “We’ve made our bed and in it we lie”. This explains his intentions that, using his own blend of editorial, fine art and documentary photography, Segal has portrayed one of most problematic pollution issues to the environment in today’s society. I like the age diversity that he has included in this project as it is a really powerful statement that no-one is safe from this problem and everyone unintentionally contributes. I also love the compositions and structure of these images as the strong and obvious symbolism (created by strategically placed rubbish) emphasises the dramatic impact we are having on the world around us. These staged photographs are, in my opinion, essential for documenting our society’s problems today.
* Specified Task – Key Image Evaluation: Lastly is my favourite image from this collection depicting a typical 1st world family of four, surrounded by a weeks worth of their house-hold rubbish. I love the overhead perspective of this image as it adds to the staged photography style and overall dramatic tone. This way we are able to view the whole scene from a ‘new perspective’ and really clearly see the layout of the family and their waste. Because of the cloths and ethnicity of these people we can assume it is based currently in the western world. This emphasises this growing problem as a critical issue in first world countries that’s happening right now and will only get worse. The photographer names this family in order from left to right as Alfie, Kirsten, Miles, and Elly. By informing us of each of their names he has really made the project personal and allowed us to relate and connect to the subjects on deeper level. The meaning behind these images is very obviously a statement towards pollution and what we leave behind. Gregg Segal describes his goals and aspiration for the project; “bypersonalising the problem of waste – by starting with myself and working outwards from there, I’ve found that some are taking small steps to mitigate the crisis. Reflecting on the pictures I’ve made, I see 7 Days of Garbage as instant archaeology, a record not only of our waste but of our values – values that may be evolving a little”. This quote tells us that the meaning of these images is to inform the public of this common travesty as well as to inspire change. The many discarded food wrappers and massive amounts of waste paper symbolise how we can unintentionally, and without regard, waste these every day objects because of consumerism. Overall I love the fine art nature of this image as it still portrays a very clear meaning whilst balancing on the line between staged and documentary photography. The real scale of the rubbish against the size of the family really puts this problem into perspective. Without this use of staged photography, these issues would never come to light and be encouraged to change.
Steven Hirsch is a brilliant photographer and teacher that was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Now based in New York’s East Village, his photographs have been seen in many major news publications such as ‘The New York Times’, ‘The Huffington Post’ and ‘Time’. Apart from this, he has also been awarded two of the ‘New York Foundation for the Arts’ grants and his work has been widely exhibited and collected by many prestigious museums. Hirsch’s photography has covered a diverse subject matter, including his project ‘Courthouse Confessions’, a visual chronicling of the defendants who passed through the Manhattan Criminal Court Building. Yet despite all of his achievements the reason I have chosen him to be my first inspiration for my project is because of one of his more controversial collections names ‘Gowanus’.
“Gowanus: Off The Water’s Surface” is a series of photographs portraying the horribly polluted waters in the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, New York. The toxic liquid that fills the Gowanus Canal today is not commonly referred to as alluring, celestial, beautiful. Yet through Hirsch’s eye’s, we see sludge, chemicals, and waste products become vibrant and moving images of colour. When Hirsch began shooting for this project in 2014, he took photographs in the Spring. “Because of the time of year, there was a runoff,” he says. “There was a lot of surface pollution because of that, which made it very interesting”. These depictions reveal a deep rich world of abstract shapes and explosive colour, the photographs are painterly in style, with Impressionistic hints of hue and texture. Within the pollution, surreal worlds are depicted and visions of figures, faces and bodies, and natural forms like waterfalls, landscapes, glaciers, or galaxies arise. These images were first featured in 2010 on ABC News online and more recently in The New York Times and the Daily Mail, despite being met with bitter controversy. I think this series makes an amazing start to my ‘environment’ project because they show a very abstracted and beautiful version of the truth. These images will be admired whether the viewer cares about the canals pollution levels or not. I love the way he has taken something so horrible and turned it into something beautiful, thus subtly informing the public of their society’s environmental problems. Below I have chosen five pieces from this series and evaluated each one.
– beautiful abstract photographs of polluted water by Steven Hirsch. – ‘Gowanus’ 2014.The first photographs that caught my eye from this series are the two abstract ‘painting like’ pieces above. The photograph on the left shows a dark and beautiful mixture of blue canal water, black shadows, multicoloured oil and gold reflections. This piece is entitled ‘Epiales’, which in Greek mythology is the name of the spirit and personification of nightmares. Because of this mythical context, we can assume it is more about the colours, shapes and beautiful symbolism; then the recording societies effect on the canal. However, I believe that because of the nature of this represented character being the ‘personification of nightmares’, this image takes on a much deeper meaning. Human culture naturally and ‘accidentally’ creates these beautifully sickening masterpieces on the water’s surface, so traumatic to the environment it can be compared with nightmares. The photograph on the right comes at this theme from a different viewpoint. Entitled ‘Chloris’, the goddess of flowers, it seems as if it would have a much happier theme. This, however, is not possible with the vibrant, unnatural and toxic colours swirling together mimicking and possibly one day replacing the natural colours found in beautiful untouched flowers.These next two astral looking images really express the representation of this project well for me. On the left is a piece entitled ‘Phorcys’, in greek mythology, meaning the ancient sea-god of the hidden dangers. Although this piece looks like a galaxy to me, with its bright colours and deep black background, the title has completely changed its context. Now knowing that this image relates to the dangers of the sea it is a clear representation of constant man-made disasters, like oil spills, that pollute our oceans. I love the beauty he has captured of the oil shimmering on the water’s surface and the ripples that really emphasises its dark and daunting meaning. The next photograph on the left is a bit more straight-forward as it is indeed meant to appear as a constellation of stars. The title of this image, ‘Pleiades’, is named after the seven mountain-nymph sisters who were banished to live amongst the stars. In astronomy ‘Pleiades’ is an open star cluster dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. This astral depiction of all of these dead inhabitable stars (showed with canal pollution) for me, represents the bigger picture of the universe and our underappreciation of Earth as a source of life.
* Specified Task – Key Image Evaluation: Lastly is my favourite image from this collection depicting the water’s surface lined with reflective oil that is distorted by ripples. I love the perspective the ripples give water and the composition of the many recurring rings inside the frame. Its populated location, current time period and abstract view can tell us a lot about the context and tone of this image. This piece is named after ‘Hephaestus’ the Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, metals and fire. This is a very obvious connection between the metallic shine of the oil and the ‘Greek god of metal’. Because of the titles of each of these pieces being related to Greek mythology, we can assume there is a greater meaning behind the beauty of each image. However, since researching further into this series I have found that for Hirsch, it’s the composition that fascinates him. In an interview about his work, he explains that “a lot of people see an environmental disaster. I just want the pictures to look beautiful”. This quote tells us that the meaning of these images is up to the viewer, some may choose to see the tragedy and others simply the beauty. For me, I believe the meaning of this image is very strongly orientated towards this environmental issue. This oily subject matter and its array of man-made colours is directly linked to the pollution we face in current times paired with the result of sustaining populated cities. I believe that the recurring ringlets in this photograph can symbolise humanity’s devastating and repetitive actions against nature and the beautiful colours shows our distraction and ignorance towards the subject. Overall I love the abstract nature of this image as it contains lots of intense reflective light creating brilliantly contrasted tones. These shadows in the water create a great perspective for this photograph and give us a strong clue for understanding the subject matter. My favourite factor in this image is, of course, the brilliant and vibrant colours that flow from, and contrast,each other.
In order to start this exam project and complete the tasks to the best of my ability, it is important to understand the areas that have been highlighted as personal strengths. Working on a variety of coursework and exam projects over AS and A2, documentary and narrative work has taken a central focus strengthening my work and creating the majority of my final image prints. Portraits are another strength and in particular with female figures, I have made a range of intimate images reflecting wider contextual themes. Below is a selection of my work which has had the best response – both in terms of personal happiness and academic grading.
Reflecting on this, it could be seen as logical to follow a similar route to my past projects and work on a new documentary piece reflecting the exam theme, ‘environment’. Having a relatively strong portfolio of work in this area however, I am keen to explore something new and perhaps strengthen another part of my photographic skill set. Below are some of my personal selection from my A2 coursework section on documentary and narrative.
My strongest images are from social events rather than planned shoots which I think is visible in my final image selection. Although I am confident in this area, I would like to investigate other styles of photographer rather than staying in this genre and take a few risks. Whilst this is maybe a bit nuts given i’m in the middle of A Levels, I like to think that the pressure might make me learn fast.
Here I have presented two of my favourite images from the ‘7 Days of Garbage’ series to compare and evaluate. By looking at these two pieces together you can really start to understand the growing problem of consumerism in younger generations. Both of these images depict a straight forward full body portrait image of a person lying on top of a week’s worth of their own rubbish. The meaning behind these creations is quite well explained by the photographer in a powerful statement; “We’ve made our bed and in it we lie”. This explains his intentions that, using his own blend of editorial, fine art and documentary photography, Segal has portrayed one of most problematic pollution issues to the environment in today’s society. I like the age diversity that he has included in this project as it is a really powerful statement that no-one is safe from this problem and everyone unintentionally contributes. I also love the compositions and structure of these images as the strong and obvious symbolism (created by strategically placed rubbish) emphasises the dramatic impact we are having on the world around us. These staged photographs are, in my opinion, essential for documenting our society’s problems today.
Lastly is my favourite image from this collection depicting a typical 1st world family of four, surrounded by a weeks worth of their house-hold rubbish. I love the overhead perspective of this image as it adds to the staged photography style and overall dramatic tone. This way we are able to view the whole scene from a ‘new perspective’ and really clearly see the layout of the family and their waste. Because of the cloths and ethnicity of these people we can assume it is based currently in the western world. This emphasises this growing problem as a critical issue in first world countries that’s happening right now and will only get worse. The photographer names this family in order from left to right as Alfie, Kirsten, Miles, and Elly. By informing us of each of their names he has really made the project personal and allowed us to relate and connect to the subjects on deeper level. The meaning behind these images is very obviously a statement towards pollution and what we leave behind. Gregg Segal describes his goals and aspiration for the project; “by personalising the problem of waste – by starting with myself and working outwards from there, I’ve found that some are taking small steps to mitigate the crisis. Reflecting on the pictures I’ve made, I see 7 Days of Garbage as instant archaeology, a record not only of our waste but of our values – values that may be evolving a little”. This quote tells us that the meaning of these images is to inform the public of this common travesty as well as to inspire change. The many discarded food wrappers and massive amounts of waste paper symbolise how we can unintentionally, and without regard, waste these every day objects because of consumerism. Overall I love the fine art nature of this image as it still portrays a very clear meaning whilst balancing on the line between staged and documentary photography. The real scale of the rubbish against the size of the family really puts this problem into perspective. Without this use of staged photography, these issues would never come to light and be encouraged to change.
The first photographs that caught my eye from this series are the two abstract ‘painting like’ pieces above. The photograph on the left shows a dark and beautiful mixture of blue canal water, black shadows, multicoloured oil and gold reflections. This piece is entitled ‘Epiales’, which in Greek mythology is the name of the spirit and personification of nightmares. Because of this mythical context, we can assume it is more about the colours, shapes and beautiful symbolism; then the recording societies effect on the canal. However, I believe that because of the nature of this represented character being the ‘personification of nightmares’, this image takes on a much deeper meaning. Human culture naturally and ‘accidentally’ creates these beautifully sickening masterpieces on the water’s surface, so traumatic to the environment it can be compared with nightmares. The photograph on the right comes at this theme from a different viewpoint. Entitled ‘Chloris’, the goddess of flowers, it seems as if it would have a much happier theme. This, however, is not possible with the vibrant, unnatural and toxic colours swirling together mimicking and possibly one day replacing the natural colours found in beautiful untouched flowers.
These next two astral looking images really express the representation of this project well for me. On the left is a piece entitled ‘Phorcys’, in greek mythology, meaning the ancient sea-god of the hidden dangers. Although this piece looks like a galaxy to me, with its bright colours and deep black background, the title has completely changed its context. Now knowing that this image relates to the dangers of the sea it is a clear representation of constant man-made disasters, like oil spills, that pollute our oceans. I love the beauty he has captured of the oil shimmering on the water’s surface and the ripples that really emphasises its dark and daunting meaning. The next photograph on the left is a bit more straight-forward as it is indeed meant to appear as a constellation of stars. The title of this image, ‘Pleiades’, is named after the seven mountain-nymph sisters who were banished to live amongst the stars. In astronomy ‘Pleiades’ is an open star cluster dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. This astral depiction of all of these dead inhabitable stars (showed with canal pollution) for me, represents the bigger picture of the universe and our underappreciation of Earth as a source of life.
Lastly is my favourite image from this collection depicting the water’s surface lined with reflective oil that is distorted by ripples. I love the perspective the ripples give water and the composition of the many recurring rings inside the frame. Its populated location, current time period and abstract view can tell us a lot about the context and tone of this image. This piece is named after ‘Hephaestus’ the Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, metals and fire. This is a very obvious connection between the metallic shine of the oil and the ‘Greek god of metal’. Because of the titles of each of these pieces being related to Greek mythology, we can assume there is a greater meaning behind the beauty of each image. However, since researching further into this series I have found that for Hirsch, it’s the composition that fascinates him. In an interview about his work, he explains that “a lot of people see an environmental disaster. I just want the pictures to look beautiful”. This quote tells us that the meaning of these images is up to the viewer, some may choose to see the tragedy and others simply the beauty. For me, I believe the meaning of this image is very strongly orientated towards this environmental issue. This oily subject matter and its array of man-made colours is directly linked to the pollution we face in current times paired with the result of sustaining populated cities. I believe that the recurring ringlets in this photograph can symbolise humanity’s devastating and repetitive actions against nature and the beautiful colours shows our distraction and ignorance towards the subject. Overall I love the abstract nature of this image as it contains lots of intense reflective light creating brilliantly contrasted tones. These shadows in the water create a great perspective for this photograph and give us a strong clue for understanding the subject matter. My favourite factor in this image is, of course, the brilliant and vibrant colours that flow from, and contrast,each other.
