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Analysis, Artists References, Creative Pathway, Personal Investigation, Photobook Design, Practical Task, Preparation

Luce Family Crest

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On my return to Societe Jersiaise after the Christmas break, I re-started my studies from where I left off before Christmas immediately but instead of looking at old Jersey postcards, I began something a little different and hopefully more beneficial to my studies at school for my photography project – the tasks completed on Monday morning of this week has already proved much more beneficial to me than my previous tasks at the SJ. So even though, different to before Christmas, I still got straight back into the swing of things as I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve in my first session back before I attended the SJ. I didn’t want to continue with my study into the old postcards of Jersey because they were not providing me with what I wanted from my time at SJ. I wanted to find representations of Jersey as an old honeymoon destination but this was not being achieved and I felt my time wasn’t being used efficiently and it was getting a little repetitive so I suggested for me to move on form this and begin something new. I suggested my idea to Karen and she backed this up and gave me the all clear to go ahead with my intentions; my idea was to look through relevant information regarding my family history in the library at SJ. This task was really interesting and I will explain it more later in this post as well as what the create below actually is as it links with my studies from Monday 8th Jan.

When I was at Societe Jeriaise on 8th January, I was introduced to the library they have within the building. I was also introduced to the librarian and very knowledgeable, Ana. Myself and Karen went down to the library and told her what I wanted to research and observe relating to my family history. I wanted to look at my family tree and so Ana lead us straight to a draw full of family trees of the families of traditional Jersey names. She pulled out a large transparent envelope which included the family tree of the Luce family. I begin to look through this, and, as it was my first time looking at this family tree in such detail, I become a bit loots and overwhelmed by all the information provided about ancestors and potential long lost relatives which I was unaware of.

Ana then told both myself and Karen that earlier that week she discovered that the mother of the British comedian, Miranda Hart had the maiden name of Luce. This was also news to me and when I was left alone to delve deeper into my family history, I began researching this and discovered that great grandfather’s and uncle’s of Miranda Hart, were in fact Luce’s and they worked in the several wars of the world as surgeons and medical assistants. Although this was interesting, it did not have a relation to my project and I quickly moved on before I became knee deep in irrelevant content.

Next, Ana pulled out a very large hardback book; it was almost like an encyclopedia, but covered information of traditional Jersey surnames and their origins as well as including the crest of each family name. This book was called an armorial book. An armorial is defined as ‘relating to heraldry or heraldic devices.’ And heraldry as defined as ‘the system by which coats of arms and other armorial bearings are devised, described, and regulated.’ All information relating to the surnames of Jersey-born families is carefully collated and and detailed in this book and it included the origins of the Luce name which was a great. Although a very small segment of the book outlined the Luce name, it had the crest of our family within and it was amazing to see. I immediately had the idea to include this in some way or another within my photo book to give some sense of historical but personal meaning to my book.

Below is the crest if the Luce family taken from the online version of the armorial book. It is evidently very detailed and beautiful in it’s intricacy and symbolic representations and I was eager to create a replicate of this by tracing part of the crest, in particular, the coat of arms in the middle and there was no way I would be able to re-create a quality drawing of the full crest. Therefore i decided to begin my recreation of the coat if arms in the center which included a range of different symbols within this and I would use this creation once digitized on Adobe Photoshop as a personal and historical representation to include in my photo book.

Crest of ‘Luce’ family name

I would love to infer as to what the different symbols within the coat of arms actually mean and I think I would be able to find this information out from the librarian, Ana. For now, however, the image below is a JPEG of my recreation of the crest and it was a first draft experiment that may change slightly through alterations over thg next few weeks leading up to the creation of my photo book. However, I was really pleased with the final outcome because of the drastic change that occurred between the first stage of tracing the crest and the uploading an image of this to Photoshop to then improve in terms of final tweaks including the increase in black point and decrease in white point to make the black lines stand out and I also added the grey background as well as drop shadows to some of the symbols, as shown in the original crest above as I wanted it look as authentic as I could whilst still  holding elements of it being handmade/drawn.

My digitized recreation of the ‘Luce’ coat of arms

 

Creative Pathway, Independent Study, Personal Investigation, Personal Study, Preparation, Reading, Research and analysis, Written Task

Divorce Parties

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This blog post covers work discovered through attending my work placement at Societe Jersiaise as well as this relating to my work for my personal investigation and I will be using this information mainly as research to work in conjunction with my project regarding my parent’s divorce and how this has since shaped my own life living two different experiences, one with my mum and the other with my dad. I encounter this notion of divorce parties when at Societe Jersiaise as the database lacks any information on divorces in Jersey and instead has over 100 images relating to marriages and weddings but this interesting discovery of divorce parties intrigued me and I thought that the information found would work well in conjunction with what I produce, even I do not produce anything [images] relating to the celebration of divorce – but on a deeper level – this whole project is a celebration of divorce as I am documenting this as it happened in the past and I am also showing it now and what has come of it – a celebration in its own right because the vent has in-turn affected me and made me a different prosper to who I would have been if they stayed together – one I am proud to be. My project looks at the fragility of relationships and the intimacy that comes with all relationships in a lifetime – to me intimacy is what makes a relationship strong because knowing a person inside and out, something I feel I possess with my relationship with my mum, my girlfriend and my sister, is crucial to feeling like you have a place within this world – this fast-moving world where often you can feel very isolated and this project looks to challenge that while supporting this realism through underlying moods and tones shown through my images – as much as it about finding a balance between two oppositions, it is good for these conflict at times; for example, loneliness and acceptance or cohesion and destructiveness of familial bonds.

The information to follow covers divorce parties and what they are and what the subject of divorce parties are supposed to take from it. However, I do believe that it would be interesting to perhaps get in contact with a wedding planner on Jersey to inquire as to whether the have weer actually organised a divorce party for a local and go from there with regards to including it in my project.

Once I discovered this idea of divorce parties, I did some research into it in order to see if it could get me anywhere and if it intrigued me. I found an article on The Guardian Online which covered the celebration and in particular interviewing a specialist in divorce party planning and a lady who has made a living out of it. You can read the full article above in the hyperlink but for now, I am going to list the notes made from reading into divorce parties from several sources. I also got some information from the planner’s website dedicated to booking a divorce party.

Divorce Parties 
  • Attempts to allow subject to get past pain of being divorced
  • there are divorce party planners who make a living out of it
  • Idea of rituals and ingrained traditions of celebrating birth, marriage, death bit not divorce…
  • Throw a divorce party to forget and vent anger of a cheating partner
  • If you want to become the person you used to be when single – to feel more independent and free
  • It is often women who want to throw a divorce party to forget their cheating male partner
  • It is a riddance of bad memories – revenge
  • E.G. one woman burnt cheating husband’s trophy on bonfire at the party
  • E.G. another woman threw wedding ring into sea and some burn their wedding veil or wedding photos
  • “There has been a couple guys but men don’t seem to need the display of support like women do”
  • There is a divorce party handbook which outlines etiquette at parties and what the evening would consist of etc.
  • It reiterates the importance to maintain relationships with people around you – however, detachment can lead to attachment onto other things to forget what once was happy times
Creative Pathway

Beginning my Work Placement at Societe Jersiaise / Day 1 & 2

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In order to better my experience during my second year at Hautlieu doing Photography A Level, and to also benefit myself as an artist for personal satisfaction and understanding of the industry, I have begun an enrichment scheme at Societe Jersiase which has been running for several years now. I am working closely with both Karen Biddlecombe and Gareth Syvret and the scheme was set up with the function for the student to visit once a week for a couple of hours i order to help them with any tasks at the Societe as well as the staff at the Societe to guide and direct the student in the right direction for their own personal investigation.

Image result for societe jersiaise jersey

I began last Monday (27.11.17) and had my second day today (04.12.17). I am there each Monday from 10am -12pm.

Tasks which I have begun include looking through and becoming comfortable using the archival database in which all the archives are stored. Last week I was looking through all images relating to ‘weddings’ in Jersey. To find these, I simply do a search for a key word, in this case ‘weddings’ and the relating images appear. There are over 100 images of old wedding imagery but no images relating to ‘divorce’. The images I discovered were mainly taken by prominent photographer of nineteenth century, Percival Dunham who was employed by The Morning News – newspaper in Jersey at the time and the images were mainly very stiff, set-up and formal images of groups of people – the traditional wedding photography method at the time due to the lack of advanced technology in which long exposures were required capture a crisp image. Becoming comfortable using the database in the archive was very useful as I know I will be using it throughout my time at the SJ to retrieve important information I may wish to include in my project at school. Once completed a search for an image, you are given other details about the image such as the date taken, published, the subjects within to the image, where it was taken and whether it was published in a newspaper. As well, there are key words which you can use to direct you to other searches relating to that word.

As well, during my first day at the SJ, I started looking through an encyclopedia of photography in the twentieth century and within this, there was a short section on wedding photography and in particular, how this used to be and look like in comparison to what it has developed into due to better and more advanced camera techniques etc. I read this section in the encyclopedia and found it very interesting as I was able to relate it to the image in front of me that I was looking through on the archive. It mentioned how wedding photography used to be very formal and often in groups where the images were staged to the the best outcomes – I noticed this in the image on the database – there were very few images where it was taken in the moment because if people were constantly moving, the photographer would not be able to capture this due to the long exposures required using the old box format cameras.

Image result for twentieth century photography encyclopedia

I also begun reading, as it related to my project at school relating to relationships and my parents divorce about the concept if divorce parties which has only recently become a very popular market for a niche audience who wish to vent any anger over their divorced partner, in particular, if it was a painful break-up.

(Here is the online article published by The Guardian on divorce parties)

This introduction of divorce parties as a method t forget and vent your anger on your forgotten former partner present the idea of rituals and traditions in that there is a celebration/get-together for birth, marriage and death but not divorce… When in attendance at a divorce party where you are the center point, you are essentially becoming the person you used to be when you were single, where you feel more free and interdependent and we celebrate this – that we don’t need anybody else and we can enjoy life solo yet we also moan when single and wish we had a partner. At a divorce you experience the riddance of bad memories by burning possessions of the other half that they may have left at the house. I intend to write a blog post outlining divorce parties, their purpose and their popularity.

Moving onto my second day the SJ, I carried out some other tasks for the duration of my time there on 04.12.17. These included being shown the store room where all the archival images are kept. Karen took me to the top floor in which the store room is located and in here, the room temperature has to be a certain number of degrees and the images have to be sorted very neatly and orderly in acid paper in order preserve their quality as they are very delicate and important to the history of Jersey as everything that relates to the history of Jersey is sent through to SJ for them to keep and sort from the accessions they receive. This was a very interesting activity and allowed me to realise the extent of the images SJ owns. There were monochrome prints as well as colour prints and collections of aerial views from wartime as well as collections of images taken by a range of photographers the island used to home, including Percy Dunham.

Finally, during my two hours, I began to sort through and look at the recent collection of old Jersey postcards that SJ has acquired. They have over 50,000 old postcards and some present Jersey as a honeymoon destination for couples – as it once was and this was a great activity for me to see the old representation of Jersey which is still circulating around  the island currently. I was also trained on how to scan the postcards into the system using the specialist technology which was useful.