Yesterday, on 11/07/17, Croatian photographer Tanja Deman came into the school to hold a workshop with us. It was centered around looking at the shots we captured form out shoot at Grosnez and L’Etacq a few weeks ago – she wanted us to reflect on what we caught and start thinking about ideas for creating photo montages and photo collages like hers.
She also set a task before her workshop yesterday for us to gather some out favourite images from the shoot, and link them to our artist references to then begin gathering thoughts about what we could o with out images and I began creating some edits. These are on the blog.
The workshop consisted of Tanja getting us to open up Adobe Bridge on out computers and to begin organizing our folders so she can come round to our work areas and look at what we have produced – this was what the opening part of the lesson was made up of. From working with Tanja before in the photographic academy which took place in the Easter holidays, I was aware that she was very reliant of using Bridge to arrange her image and she essentially is an advocate of the software program to use as a tool for seeing all your images together and she encouraged all of us to use it regularly in future work. She briefly went through the essential tools within the program to help us.
Katrin Koenning
I like that in the image above, Koenning has, as it seems, attempted to contrast the effect of land and sea. The left image being land and some sort of bush or tree being the subject contrasted against a black background so that it absorbs the light and makes the red of the tree stand out. The right image being sea and a fish being the subject. I love the contrast between content and colors of the photo – that the right one is almost over exposed and looks as though a flash has been used but I really like this effect and I find the cold blue very enticing. I thought about contrasts in my images when editing in post production. I chose to use the method of overlaying images and creating a collage of just two images to contrast subjects. I like the effect of layering images because it can hide features of the background image and the new image can replace what is missing and create a new outlook and a new narrative.
In the above image I crated, I wanted to show the effect of contrasting two images. I really like using a black and white image that is heavily contrasted so that there are deep blacks against faded out whites and neutral greys and then a more vibrant, smaller image on top. I wanted to contrast the vast and wide landscape in the background that is very empty against the more close-up macro of the yellow plant and greenery surrounding it. I love the juxtaposition of feeling micro and feeling mega! There is also more evident detail in the macro which contrasts to the vaster landscape where you cannot pick up detail as much and to add to this, I also blurred the image in the background using the motion blur tool on Photoshop.
By the timer she had come round to my work station, I had organised all my folders so that she could have a look and give some advice on what I can do next to progress. I really enjoyed seeing Tanja again because it is helpful that she already knows my style and has seen my photography work before so knows that I nave a particular way of photographing and editing images. I think this was evident from my sets of edits I presented her ans I believe she enjoyed looking at them. I did show her my images that I collected from the archive in advance to the workshop but I have no intention of using them because I don’t feel like they would relate to what I want to produce, however, the other artist references, including Superstudio, Luigi Ghirri and Katrin Koenning will be influential to be further edits. In particular, Katrin Koenning’s images – I hope to take into account her work when planning another shoot so I can capture images that reflect her very aesthetically pleasing style and technique of paring two images together – almost like half-frame photography.
Katrin KoenningMy image inspired by Luigi Ghirri’s warm and retro colours and environments
Once Tanja had had a look through my edits and given me her thoughts on them, it had given me some sudden inspiration and there were thoughts going through my head about her I could improve and move forward with ideas she told me she liked. She especially liked the pool images where I had played about with overlaying and re-sizing images to create more of a collage where proportions are a bit confused but had a nice effect on the audience. She told me to progress with this style and play about more and more with overlaying and re-sizing on Photoshop and to just go crazy with it until I have some works that look very muddled but effective. The images of myself in a pool in France on a holiday last summer with the use of an image of L’Etacq are my favorite as well and once again used contrasts to juxtapose man-made swimming areas – being the pool and natural constructions of beach and eroded rock over time to create a seascape.
Tanja then finally showed us some of her work on Photoshop using hr own laptop where she gave us a very quick masterclass on how to make the most of the tools on Photoshop to create a good collage. She demonstrated her skills and told us what she does to create what she does.
I really liked the underwater images that Tanja captured on the coast in Jersey. I decided to use them as inspiration while editing some of the images I got from Grosnez. The black and white faded effect was what I wanted to create with my edits.
I remembered a photographer that I liked called Idiris Khan, and I wanted to combine his ideas and Deman’s to achieve my edits. Here is the main image by Khan that I wanted to use as inspiration.
The images below are my edits of the images that I took at Grosnez usings Deman’s and Khan’s ideas.
I wanted to try an edit just using Khan’s idea. His edits look very blurry because he layers the same image over and over again. I decided to use the motion blur tool on Photoshop to achieve the same effect.
Is fear is a good thing? / What are your opinions on fear? / Have you ever experienced fear during your photography?
On the 2nd of July we had an hour long workshop with Jonny Briggs. During this session the main topic was based around fear and fear of making mistakes and how it can impact our work. The questions above are a few of the initial questions that Jonny faced with us, he went around the group asking everyone what there personal opinions on whether fear is a good thing or not. Listening to everyone’s ideas was really interesting and definitely stretched my thoughts on it and made me consider that fear can be a good thing and especially fear of mistakes because it means you care about something and don’t want to wreck the work you may be creating. Other concepts which came up in discussion which i found interesting was that mistakes can often improve our work and make it more individual and different because mistakes can lead to work differing from the social norms.
Jonny then got us to do a task about making mistakes and getting us to try new things which we may have felt fearful off. We all had a pen and piece of paper and had to close our eyes and draw a face with as much detail as possible. The outcomes were discussed and many people agreed that the outcomes were more interesting than normal faces because they were more distorted and every image was different and people seemed to have a style to their drawings when we compared the first drawing we did to the second drawing.
Here are some more edits, continued on from my primary experiments using the pen tool on Photoshop to digitally draw on top of the images. I decided to explore the concept of photo collage and montage more so in preparation for Tanja visit on Tuesday 11th June. I felt like this would be necessary and would open up my mind to the style of art more to allow to me decipher whether I wish to explore it in more detail for A2 course or not – or whether I just want to use it as a starting point and experimentation tool – which I think is most likely because I don’t feel like collaging is something I can strive at but is useful for developing my skills and advancing my understanding of the very popular style.
I tried to use the work of my artist references more in these edits and just explore different way of editing to get me back into the habit of editing constantly. I started overlaying images and I was particularly drawn to the idea of placing one image on top of another – most of the time contrasting black and white and colour and I opted for the lighter and more delicate way of editing. Towards the latter stages however, I explored the tools more so and came up with a piece plays about with proportions and colours.
Over the weekend, I visited my neighbour who is the owner of Claude Cahun’s old property In the parish of Saint Brelade. Diane Martland is a lady in her seventies who has lived in the property since 1965; eleven years after Claude Cahun died. Her father purchased the house addressed “Bedford House” for £15,000 and I couldn’t hazard a guess to as how much the property is worth now considering the location, condition of the house/ land and due to the discovery of Claude Cahun’s work and how this coincides with the property. Of paramount importance, Jersey Heritage recently ‘listed’ the building meaning it cannot be knocked down and it will be forever protected.
I questioned Lady Di to what her favourite image(s) were of Claude Cahun’s collection to which she picked the following:
Diane picked these two images as she felt a connection on a personal level as the pictures were taken in the garden she owns. She commented on how she enjoyed the absurdity of the images, especially the photograph of the cat on a leash on the beach/garden wall. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s photographic montage is another Diane enjoys as its quirky nature combined with the breathtaking scenery of the South-West coast creates a sublime image.
Following this discussion, I asked Diane whether she’d be comfortable posing to replicate some similar images to that which Cahun took and she jumped at the opportunity… she was doing costume changes as she’d arranged different sets of clothing which she felt were similar to that of the image and also asked me to fetch my dog because we didn’t quite have a cat.
Whose Archive is it Anyway? Throughout History, individuals and social organisations have shaped and preserved information about their personal activities day to day. Archivists are people who recognize and preserve these documents of significant, lasting value. These records and the places in which they are stored are known as archives. Keen Archivists and historians see archives as records that have naturally accumulated over time. They have been generated as a product of legal, commercial or social activities. Some people define archives as “the secretions of an organism.” Overall, archives consist of records that have been thoroughly selected for permanent preservation based on their cultural, historical or penitentiary value. Unlike books or magazines, for which lots of identical copies exist, archival records are normally unpublished and unique. Personally, I believe Archives are there to preserve memories, and events of significant importance; however the significant events throughout people lives vary from individual to individual. For example, something that is exceptionally imperative to one person may not be important to another person. In my perspective, there are two types of archives, and they should be kept distinctively separate. The two types are personal archives compared to public archives. There are many different types of public archives, including Historical societies, Museums, Religious archived and Government archives. Personal Archives are known as Special Collections. These are archives containing materials from individuals and families.
The main public Archive in Jersey is Société Jersiaise. It was formed in 1873. Collecting photographs is a priority throughout the society because they are a significant part of the society’s museum and library. There are plenty of aspects that photography is used in throughout the Jersey Archive’s. These include recording research, as documentary and scientific records and as an independent art form. The images are actively maintained by the society members. The establishment has lasted for over 140 years and has resulted in the collection of a huge photographic archive, with over 80,000 images dating from the mid-1840’s to the present day.
Archives are sometimes referred to as society’s collective memory. They transfer information from era to era, and therefore are sustaining memory from generation to generation. They transfer documentation, education, enrichment, and research to help sustain cultural traditions and values. It is argued that material objects, artifacts, and documents—including those contained in archival collections—play a special role in human communication. Their durability defines them as communicational resources that can be used to transmit information beyond the bounds of interpersonal contact.
Photographs have their place within most archives, public or private, educational or personal, however they have not addressed the question of what roles are assigned to these photographic records in the actual process of forming an archive. Both photograph and film have been prominent in archives ever since the first set of documents were gathered in ancient times. Photographs profoundly changed the way archives are produced and accumulated in our contemporary world – an impact that only more recently was relativized by the appearance of electronic documents. As ways of recording action and information, images contain a resource for expression that distinguishes them from other, verbal-based records found within documents gathered over the centuries. Photos also allow us to gain an understanding of different cultures throughout the world. The use of verbal documents would be very limiting because of the language barrio from county to country; however visual documents allow us to bridge this gap.
Using the book called Archives, Networks and Narratives by David Bate, I got a better understanding of what Archives really are and how they can be used in so many ways. He also talks about how Archives have expanded since the invention of the internet. Throughout Bate’s book he writes about the British museum, which was established as a state collection in 1753. According to Bate, a man called Roger Fenton was the museum’s first official photographer, who was employed in 1854 to document its artifacts. Fenton uses his photos to create an impression of what it would have been like to see the artifacts in the Victorian era. Bate describes the images of having “a ‘pastness’, which shows the effect a photograph itself can have on how we see the things in it.” This proves that photos aren’t just used to document peoples lives and activities throughout history, but they can also be used to document the objects passed down through generations. This is important because although the artifacts themselves may not last, the images still create an ‘atmospheric space, with a kind of silence around the artifacts.’
Looking through archival material would help enrich my personal study because I want to investigate the differences between personal and public archives. An example of archival images that I will be using within my personal study, are images that my great uncle took. He was a very famous local photographer. He took lots of images of Jersey, and traveled around the world taking images as well. I decided to incorporate these images into my personal study because they are images that have been passed down through our family, so they are therefore our personal archive.
Looking at archives has been very interesting because it has helped widen my knowledge about the importance of photographs. I’ve learned that photos are a prominent part of archives, and that they help form links between generation and generation so cultures and important information about people’s lives are not lost. I’ve also learnt that photographs can be a powerful tool, used to bridge the gap between language barrios across countries. From reading David Bate’s book, I learnt that photos are used to document peoples lives, as well as the artifacts that they use. This is important because it allows people to remember important cultural aspects that have been around for centuries.
According to wikipedia, Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.
Documentary photography follows a topic or story over time, whereas photojournalists who cover real-time events such as breaking news. Documentary photography further deepens our understanding and emotional connection between unjust acts throughout the world. It can capture and sustain the public’s attention and mobilize people who are interested in important social issues such as human rights.
According toGeoff Harris, “a picture is worth a thousand words” The image below is from the Open Society Foundation. The person who took the image is called Christian Holst, who is a documentary photographer. He writes about the image in great detail, talking about who the man is, and a bit about his life.
“A novice monk puts on a clean robe in a monastery in Rangoon. Novices like this young man will study for 10 to 13 years before they are able to pass required tests and be ordained as monks….”
Christian Holst’s In the Quite Land: Life Under the Military Regime of Burma
Documentary Photography is very important because it has the power to highlight stories that aren’t gaining attraction. They create a diverse range of perspectives. Photography has the influence to inspire people, and tackle issues such as corruption and discrimination. Documentary photography does this.
Here are some more examples of Documentary photography.
