Alexander Mourant is a London based photographer who was born in 1994 in Jersey in the Channel Islands.  He has

Mourant’s project Aurelian was based off a recent trip to Africa called Cairo to Cape Town: Africa’s Plastic Footprint which was documenting the shifting cultural and geographical landscape of Africa.  Aurelian which is the study of the passing of time and slippery nature of memory is linked to this trip in Africa where change was being documented.  This is because Mourant wanted to explore after this trip not just his memory of it, but how it has affected him.  Therefore this project is dedicated to envoking the experience of this trip to Africa as over time his memories and emotions clashed as an intense longing for the tropical landscape he had left behind and his past relationship with this developed.  In environments that reflected the experience of Mourant’s recent trip to Africa, it was in the atmospheric environment of the butterfly house that Mourant found his subject.  He was interested in the symbolism of the flight of the butterfly through across science, literature and art.  “These hot, artificial environments are used through the work to probe the nature of experience, such as an assembly point, or an artist’s studio, as an envisioned idea where time is not absolute but continuously contained and all-encompassing”.  In doing this he chose to experiment with a slower-paced, more conceptual approach that explores the metaphysical qualities of photography.

In my project I am very interested in exploring the concept of originally evolution is how we got here, and creationism is why we are here.  Therefore I am becoming increasingly interested in exploring the metaphysical within the physical and I believe the theory of evolution vs the theory of creationism acts as a strong backdrop for this.  Including in this, I am interested in recording a story of why the world was created and in doing that, explore the freedom found in nature in the ever continuous series of miracles that occur as change in nature.  Therefore Alexander Mourant is useful as a strong artist reference as I believe as his images are not only capturing his experience, but also these surrealsist images help reflect Mourant’s vision of the world.  This is not in terms of vision in terms of sight, but Mourant’s ability to capture nature in a way that connects spiritually with him. I similarly want to explore the way I see change and freedom in nature as something that has a purpose, and something that is based on my experience as a Christian in the ways in which I see the freedom given to plants, animals etc in terms of survival and change.  Therefore this project I believe is starting to head in a direction that explores spirituality in the continuous process of change found in nature, but also heavily links to previous project of faith in the family and environment.

I chose this image as I really like the strong atmospheric tones which I believe encapsulate the idea of capturing experience in a photograph.  I personally believe the blue filter is effective at connoting trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.  These connotes I believe reflect Mourant’s relationship with his memory and experience because this is suggesting that his memory, his relationship with past experience is a power and force that is not only spiritual but also he has a living connection with it.  This is similar to my work that I want to explore in that creationism explores the notion that we are here for a reason and in order to achieve this, I believe I will have to capture the experience of my own beliefs to explore and explain why change is so frequent in nature an in doing this this explores the notion of freedom.  As I will be looking at why I believe life forms have a purpose, I want to explore the physical vs the metaphysical (in other words otherworldly) show the connection that has been lost with nature by humans.  I believe Mourant has achieved this successfully through the blue filter.  Aside from the symbolism that the filter itself was a piece of church glass window, I like how Mourant has captured atmospheric tones that reflect for me how the elements of this world are not just elements, but they were designed by a creater in an original, naturalistic viewpoint.  For example I like how the bird, is sitting on top of the trees and debris, this but also as well how everything appears connected and part of the same body.  Furthermore the composition of the image fascinates me because I like how their is a border like feauture to the bottom third of the image.  This in a sense gives the image a strong grounding, as we go from harder elements to more delicate and softer ones as we move up the image.  Aside from the blue showing how everything is connected, contrastingly by having such a range of elements in this structured order, it is easy to get the impression that  objects are still unique.  Both these factors link to my interest in exploring the Theory of Creationism in how everything in nature is connected but also how it is unique from each life form.

Aomori is a project done by Alexander Mourant following his Aurelian project.  This links to the previous project because Aurelian used atmospheric conditions to create a metaphor for elsewhere that he has a connection with.  However “Aomori, meaning ‘blue forest’ in Japanese, is a synthesis of two existential ideas – the forest and the nature of blue,”.  By exploring this relationship, I like how for Mourant it is him demonstrating how he translates his experience into his photographs.  The color blue and the environment is effective because it encourages how we perceive and connect with nature and the Forest is the vocational emphasis of the study of the progression of how nature changes and evolves.  “For me, the immensity found in the colour blue, encourages a deeper reflection on our past, present and future. In the same way, the presence of the forest and the density of its nature, arrests for us, the relentless progression of time.”  This links to my project of exploring creationism and the process of elements and change in nature because likewise with my project, Mourant is shooting the images that is led by his spirit.  I believe this inspires me in order to achieve images that explore the qualities found from the Theory of Creationism in the elements in terms of how the world was created, but also why the world was created.  Susan Bright commented on the religious symbolism of Mourant’s work,: ‘the spiritual history of the process seeps through into the image, to a time when the land was a place of worship,’.  This strikes me heavily, obviously being religious and this having a direct link to my previous project Faith but for me nature is something beautiful and I firmly believe that many Westerners have lost touch their connection with the nature and by with that the world.  Therefore in my project one significant aim of mine is to reignite that connection by highlighting how and why I believe their is something more to the elements thatn just their physical composition and how these charestics breeds new life and change into the world that is very beautiful.  “As temporal dimensions crumble, objectivity leaves us. We are found in a still, oneiric state, contemplating our own accumulation of experience.”

I like this image because it signifies continuous change and growth but also the rate of growth that is experienced and found in nature.   This image I believe is symbolic that nature and the change in nature isn’t random but purposeful and planned as opposed to an accident that happens randomly.  This image is also a strong metaphor for how the world was created as something which we are not necessarily sure where it came from, where we are going but we know we are going there and I like how Mourant has referenced the process of change over time.  Because the flow of the river arguably is random, then it could be mentioned that creation is random.  This links to the idea of freedom in that creationism gives freedom to evolve, linking both theories together.  What particularly strikes me about this image is how Mourant has focused on capturing smooth tones of water.  I like how effective this technique is at emphasizing furthermore how the metaphor for change isn’t so much focused on the individual element but how all the elements are reacting together and moving as one.  The image above I have selected because this emphasis of all of nature being in perfect harmony, being created as it was meant to be; I feel is important to note as constant change in nature is a freedom in its own right.  For example, not just the water emphasizes this but I believe by Mourant including the rocks and the banks, I believe this successfully shows the change and therefore freedom in these forms of elements over the years as their relationship with the river has changed.  In my image, I want to explore the freedom in change as a gift of creationism, and I believe this image is a strong reference to this aim.

The definition for creationism is: “the religious belief that the Universe and life originated from “specific acts of divine intervention” as opposed to the scientific conclusion that they come through  about natural processes”.

https://www.google.je/search?q=alexander+mourant&safe=active&rlz=1C1GGRV_en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz7_Kb09fZAhVqI8AKHWImDs4Q_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=949&surl=1#imgrc=RYBChTDwUEpmvM:

The main points of creationism are these:

Creationism takes the belief that all life was created by the actions of God.  Some Creationists say God did this in a single creative event whereas  other Creationists don’t limit creation to one event, but a constantly changing and adapting event.  Therefore organisms created by God can’t produce new forms of organism – only God can do this.  This links to survival because it shows that animals dont survive through chance, but they they have a specific purpose in life that they were created for to achieve.  Christian belief is that everything was created by God for his pleasure and glory.  “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created” (Revelation 4:11).  This theory therefore is composed of the idea that as the elderly passes away in nature and is replaced with the new, it is not so much because they don’t have the survival traits but the change found in nature is living evidence of God working in the world and re-enforces that creation is always happening and didn’t just happen once.   This explores the freedom of what life is as opposed to death because where evolution argues essentially life among beings is an accident, creationism sees life as having a particuler purpose in that we are meant to explore the limits of freedom in our lives which ultimatley passes down onto the generation below.

Big bang vs 7 day creation.  Baby, cells – microscopic cells

On the opposite hand, the Intelligent Design theory claims that some sort of supernatural designer was involved in the creation of life on Earth. It differs from Creationism because it divorces Creationist ideas from their roots in Scripture that a specific God had a purpose for everything he created.  Life on Earth – and also the universe- shows so much order, purpose and design that there must have been a designer.  Some living things contain certain types of complexity that are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause.  Some aspects of the universe show positive evidence of having been designed by some form of intelligence.   “We do not know how God created, what processes He used, for God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as Special Creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by God.” (1)

All this is argumentative of a common point that counters evolution in that animals were created by God or someone rather than animals being a product of a common ancestor.  Interestingly where Creationsim argues where we came from, Evolution argues how we got here.  Therefore each argument is contrary to the other in that Creationism explains the reasons why life has existed and survived whereas  Evolution explains how life has survived.  This difference is significant to my project of exploring the freedoms and limitations of life and death, old and new because from a creationist viewpoint of change found in nature is part of God’s ongoing creation.

Young Earth Creationists believe that God created the Earth within the last 10,000 years literally as according to the way the Bible described this process.  Most Young Earth Creationists believe the Universe is around as old as the Earth is.

Old Earth Creationists believe that the physical Universe was created by God, but the event of creationism described in the Book Of Genesis is to be taken metaphorially and figuratively.

Gap Creationism argues that life was created on a pre-existing Earth, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Original act of creation.)”And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”  Therefore Gap Creationists can agree with the theory of evolution and with the ago of the Earth to an extent while holding a belief of Biblical Creationism as well.  However

Day Age Creationism believes that because the Bible doesn’t specify how long a day is, but in the Bible it could be millions or billions of years.  This view could also agree with scientific view regarding the

The Creation of the World – Genesis 

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ² The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

³ And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

⁶ And God said, “Let there be an expanse^[a] in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” ⁷ And God made^[b] the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. ⁸ And God called the expanse Heaven.^[c] And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

⁹ And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. ¹⁰ God called the dry land Earth,^[d] and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

¹¹ And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants^[e] yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. ¹² The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ¹³ And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

¹⁴ And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons,^[f] and for days and years, ¹⁵ and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so.¹⁶ And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. ¹⁷ And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, ¹⁸ to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹ And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

²⁰ And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds^[g] fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.”²¹ So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.²² And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” ²³ And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

²⁴ And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. ²⁵ And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man^[h] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

²⁸ And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” ²⁹ And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. ³⁰ And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. ³¹ And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

(1) Gish, Evolution? The Fossils Say No!, 1979

http://rinkokawauchi.com/en/publications/384/

http://rinkokawauchi.com/en/works/253/

AILA

Here is another series that I really like by Rinko Kawauchi. All of her images have a very similer atmosphere that goes with her idea and concept of the world. Her style is very spiritual and pure. This puplication by Rinko was done in 2005. This is how she describes the series in her own words, “A chick, horse, dog, turtle and human beings…Some creatures are to die soon after the birth; some creatures are born only to be eaten by the others to sustain their lives. All the living creatures are accepting their fate in the life no matter what it is. The mysterious and precious moments of the birth of various creatures. The blessings of being living. The babbles, vividness, beauty, joy, and the ephemeral existence of the lives in nature.” Within the series she is interpreting every day situations through the images that she creates.

I love the pure, softness that Rinko has created through her use of editing. She has managed to collect a wide variation of themes, frames and subjects within this series. She has captures portraits, landscapes, abstract images and lot of images of nature.  Every images within the series tells its won story and has its own unique theme. When she combines all the images into a series they all have this flow because of the style she has created.

http://rinkokawauchi.com/en/works/194/

Illuminance

The series Iluminance was done in 2011. Kawauchi’s work has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. In Illuminance, Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns.

Assessment Objectives A2 Photography: (Edexcel)

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 using mind-maps and mood-boards based on the themes FREEDOM AND/OR LIMITATIONS 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

1. Produce a mood board with a selection of images.
2. Provide analysis of their work and explain why you have chosen them and how it relates to your idea and the exam themes of FREEDOM AND/OR LIMITATIONS
3. 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)
4. 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.
5. Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post
6. Plan at least 2-3 shoots as a response to the above where you explore your ideas in-depth.
7. Edit shoots and show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop
8. 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 2018 Exam Paper A2 on pages 24-27 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.

Exam Planner PLANNER for A2 EXAMINATIONS 2018

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.

USEFUL WEBSITES
Lensculture – great source for new contemporary photography from all over the world
British Journal of Photography (BJP) – Journal on Contemporary Photography
Photographic Museum Humanity
Landscape Stories

Blogs and podcasts for writing and talking about contemporary photographic practice:
1000 WORDS
MAGIC HOUR
A SMALL VOICE
SAINT LUCY
Conscientious Photography Magazine
COLIN PANTALL BLOG

Photography Agencies and Collectives
World Press Photo – the best news photography and photojournalism
Magnum Photos – photo agency, picture stories from all over the world.
Panos Picture – photo agency
Agency VU – photo agency
INSTITUTE – photo agency
Sputnik Photos – photo collective made of Polish and East European photographers
A Fine Beginning – photo collective in Wales
Document Scotland – photo collective in Scotland
NOOR – a collective uniting a select group of highly accomplished photojournalists and documentary storytellers focusing on contemporary global issues.

Here is a folder EXAM 2018 with a lot of PPTs about various genres and approaches to photography: USE IT !!
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Resources\EXAM 2018

Here are some thoughts from me on the Exam and different artists whose work makes link and references to the theme of FREEDOM AND/OR LIMITATIONS.

Definition in dictionary (noun):

1. The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.
   
2. The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.

SYNONYMS:
liberty, liberation, release, emancipation, deliverance, delivery, discharge, non-confinement, extrication
amnesty, pardoning
independence, self-government, self-determination, self-legislation, self rule, home rule, sovereignty, autonomy, autarky, democracy
self-sufficiency, individualism, separation, non-alignment
emancipation, enfranchisement
exemption, immunity, dispensation, exception, exclusion, release, relief, reprieve, absolution, exoneration
impunity, informal letting off, a let-off
right to, entitlement to
privilege, prerogative, due
scope, latitude, leeway, margin, flexibility, facility, space, breathing space, room, elbow room
licence, leave, free rein, a free hand
carte blanche
naturalness, openness, lack of inhibition, lack of reserve, casualness, informality, lack of ceremony, spontaneity, ingenuousnes
 impudence
familiarity, overfamiliarity, presumption, forwardness

Binary opposition

The exam themes of FREEDOM AND/OR LIMITATIONS are a binary opposite – a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.

Binary opposites in relation to exam themes:

Freedom vs limitations
Liberty vs captivity
Independence vs dependence
Exemption vs liability
Scope vs restriction

Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory in Linquistics (scientific study of language) According to Ferdinand de Saussure, binary opposition is the system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Using binary opposites can often be very helpful in generating ideas for a photographic project as it provides a framework – a set of boundaries to work within. You can make work about freedom by exploring limitations and vice versa.

Lets thinks about the concept of freedom in 4 ways:

Political Freedom
Religious Freedom
Sexual Freedom
Artistic Freedom

Political freedom

Political freedom is a central concept in Western history and political thought, and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action, and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.

Throughout history artists has made work that questions political

A strong relationship between the arts and politics, particularly between various kinds of art and power has occurs across historical epochs and cultures. Artists respond to political events uses different mediums from panting, photography, film, performance and graphic design to produce as a way of actively calling for social change.

With the upcoming election in Jersey you have a chance to respond to political events, issues and causes that you care about.

Photography and Propaganda
Photography has been used as Propaganda for as long time. One of the most iconic images made during the Economic Depression in the 1930s America is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. It was used by the federal agency FSA (Farm Security Administration) to raise money and awareness has been reproduced for decades on stamps, posters etc. The controversy surrounding the image is an interesting study where the account from Lange and the woman photographed, Florence Thompson  differ significantly.

Before migrant mother was made photography was entrenched in producing propaganda material for the Russian Revolution and socialist uprising. See the work of El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich. These artists and many more were part of the new European avant-garde movements such as Russian Constructivism, Dadaism and later Surrealism. See also the work by some of the pioneers of photo-montages such as  John Heartfield, Raoul Hausman, Hannah Hoch.

See my PPT on an extensive overview of development of photomontage here: 

Peter Kennard is one Britians most productive artists using photo montage to producing propaganda style images with highly political comments and satire. All forms of advertising is a form of propaganda with material used to promote and sell a particular item, merchandise or lifestyle.

Most protest groups such as Occupy London (like to website) or even the evil ideology of ISIS uses propaganda disseminated through new media and social media in order to reach a wide audience.

For those of you who studying Media, you should be able to link this with your module on We Media. Make links both to historical and contemporary means of propaganda, visual material produced and forms of communication and dissemination of images/ messages/ ideology/ mechandise etc.

During the Vietnam War, conceptual artist, Marta Rosler made a series of photo montages that were a critique of America’s involvement. in 1981 she wrote one of the key essay on documentary photography and its fraught relationship with its inherent truth, ethics and the politics of representation, In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography.) Read it here.

The Russian avant-garde
A large, influential wave of avant-gardemodern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate, but inextricably related, art movements that flourished at the time; namely Suprematism, Constructivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Zaum and Neo-primitivism. Given that many avant-garde artists involved were born or grew up in what is present day Belarus and Ukraine (including Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Ekster, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky, David Burliuk, Alexander Archipenko), some sources also talk about Ukrainian avant-garde, etc.

The Russian avant-garde reached its creative and popular height in the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and 1932, at which point the ideas of the avant-garde clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.

Exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
Covering the period of artistic innovation between 1912 and 1935, A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde traces the arc of the pioneering avant-garde forms  after Socialist Realism was decreed the sole sanctioned style of art.  The exhibition examines key developments and new modes of abstraction, including Suprematism and Constructivism, as well as avant-garde poetry, film, and photomontage.

Read article here in the New York Times

Russian avant-garde and photomontage

Soviet Cinema

Sergei Eisenstein, Potemkin, 1925
Eisenstein used the events of the 1905 rebellion against czarist troops in the port of Odessa to give meaning to the Russian Revolution of 1917. One of the most memorable shots, comprising the Odessa steps sequence, for example, captures the horror of the massacre in a close-up of a woman screaming after she has been wounded by the advancing soldiers. His brilliantly percussive editing, detailed shots, repetitions, contrasts, compressions and expansions of time, and collisions of images ran counter to the trend toward a seamless illusion of reality found in other national cinemas of the 1920s. After the Revolution, young film directors searched for a cinematic style that, by destroying tradition, would help to bring about a new society. In films on revolutionary subjects, they abandoned conventional structure, experimented with new techniques, and used montage. Eisenstein, in particular, believed that juxtapositions of images would shock viewers into becoming active cinematic agents.

Dziga Vertov:Man with a Movie Camera, 1929
Part documentary and part cinematic art, this film follows a city in the 1920s Soviet Union throughout the day, from morning to night. Directed by Dziga Vertov, with a variety of complex and innovative camera shots, the film depicts scenes of ordinary daily life in Russia. Vertov celebrates the modernity of the city, with its vast buildings, dense population and bustling industries. While there are no titles or narration, Vertov still naturally conveys the marvels of the modern city.

For contemporary responses to communist legacy of Russian communism and Soviet empirealism see new work by Polish photographer Rafal Milach

His exhibition Refusal which has been nominated fro the prestigious the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

In REFUSAL Rafal Milach’s ongoing artistic practice focuses on applied sociotechnical systems of governmental control and ideological manipulations of belief and consciousness. Focusing on post-Soviet countries such as Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Poland, Milach traces the mechanisms of propaganda and their visual representation in architecture, urban projects and objects.

Refusal brings together different material and visual layers that ultimately represent these systems of control. Among other things, Refusal showcases photographs of handmade objects found in governmental centres and chess schools that produce optical illusions and whose innocent disposition is fundamentally changed here as they exemplify how the human mind can be influenced and controlled. Furthermore Soviet television programmes about social experiments or various state-run competitions exemplify the process of formatting and shifting meanings to serve a concrete vision of government.

Read interview with Rafal Milach in GUP magazine

See Milach’s latest photobook, The March of the First Gentlemen

The First March of Gentlemen  is a fictitious narration composed of authentic stories. Historical events related to the town of Września came to be the starting point for reflection on the protest and disciplinary mechanisms. In the series of collages, the reality of the 1950s Poland ruled by the communists blends with the memory of the Września children strike from the beginning of the 20th century. This shift in time is not just a coincidence, as the problems which the project touches upon are universal, and may be seen as a metaphor for the contemporary social tensions. The project includes archive photos by Września photographer Ryszard Szczepaniak. This project was made within Kolekcja Wrzesińska residency.

Watch Youtube clip where Alice talks about her work from North Korea

A new exhibition at Kettle Yard’s in Cambridge featuring work by 38 artists that seeks to reassert the potential of art as a poetic, social and political force in the world.

Read article here in the Guardian

Artists in Actions: Basel Abbas + Ruanne Abou-Rahme. John Akomfrah, Rana Begum, Joseph Beuys, Anna Brownsted, Candoco Dance Company + Laila Diallo, Alice Channer, Nathan Coley, Edmund de Waal, Jeremy Deller, eL Seed, Jamie Fobert, Helen Frankenthaler, Naum Gabo, Regina José Galindo, Anya Gallaccio, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Barbara Hepworth, Callum Innes, Mary Kelly, Idris Khan, Issam Kourbaj, Linder, Richard Long, Melanie Manchot, Julie Mehretu, Gustav Metzger, Oscar Murillo, Ben Nicholson, Harold Offeh, Cornelia Parker, Vicken Parsons, Katie Paterson, Zoran Popović, Khadija Saye, Emma Smith, Caroline Walker, Kate Whitley

Money rather than yachts are parked in the island tax haven of Jersey and another mural shows the capital, St Helier, going up in smoke. The conflagration is predicted for 2017, but the banners egging on the rioters have already been designed by Ed Hall, a specialist in campaign banners. The mask-like faces are based on a tax avoidance diagram and a deliberately opaque financial scheme known as the “Jersey Cashbox”.

Read more here about Jeremy Deller‘s show at the Venice Bienale  and watch video

Here is a video clip from Deller re-enactment of The Battle of Orgreaves

John Akomfrah is a hugely respected artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explores the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. Their first film, Handsworth Songs (1986) explored the events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a charged combination of archive footage, still photos and newsreel.

Joseph Beuys: 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue.

His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his “extended definition of art” and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by open public debates on a very wide range of subjects including political, environmental, social and long term cultural trends. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.

Joseph Beuys was a German-born artist active in Europe and the United States from the 1950s through the early 1980s, who came to be loosely associated with that era’s international, proto-Conceptual art movement, Fluxus. Beuys’s diverse body of work ranges from traditional media of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to process-oriented, or time-based “action” art, the performance of which suggested how art may exercise a healing effect (on both the artist and the audience) when it takes up psychological, social, and/or political subjects. Beuys is especially famous for works incorporating animal fat and felt, two common materials – one organic, the other fabricated, or industrial – that had profound personal meaning to the artist. They were also recurring motifs in works suggesting that art, common materials, and one’s “everyday life” were ultimately inseparable.

Lewis Bush: Archisle Photographer-in-Residence 2018 is  a Photographer, Writer, Curator and Educator based in London. After studying History and working as a researcher for the United Nations Taskforce on HIV/AIDS he completed a MA in Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication in 2012. Since then he has developed a multifaceted practice encompassing photography, writing and curation to explore ideas about the way power is created and exercised in the world. In The Memory of History (2012) he travelled through ten European countries documenting the way the past was being manipulated in the context of the economic crisis and recession. This project was widely published and was exhibited at the European Union’s permanent representation in London in 2014. More recent works include Metropole (2015) which critiques the architectural transformation of London and the city’s growing inequality by subverting the imagery of London’s luxury and corporate developments. Bush’s new book Shadows of the State (2018) uses open source research to reveal numbers stations, cold war intelligence communications which remain in use today. Bush is a Lecturer on the MA and BA(hons) Documentary Photography Programmes at London College of Communication.

Read Lewis Bush blog Disphotic here

British documentary photograph projects in response to political times, for example 1980s Thatcher era

Chris Killip: In Flagrante
Poetic, penetrating, and often heartbreaking, Chris Killip’s In Flagrante remains the most important photobook to document the devastating impact of deindustrialization on working-class communities in northern England in the 1970s and 1980s.

Taken in the late 1970s and early 80s, Chris Killip‘s photographs are a study of the communities that bore the brunt of industrial decline in the North East. They evoke both the social tensions and the economic upheaval that defined the era. “You didn’t have to be a genius to realise how important it was to get in and photograph it before it all fell apart,” he says. “The strange thing is, I didn’t realise how quickly it would go.”

Read article here by Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian

Paul Graham: Beyond Caring
Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring published in 1986 is now considered one of the key works from Britain’s wave of “New Color” photography that was gaining momentum in the 1980s. While commissioned to present his view of “Britain in 1984,” Graham turned his attention towards the waiting rooms, queues and poor conditions of overburdened Social Security and Unemployment offices across the United Kingdom.

Read essay here on Graham and Beyond Caring by critic David Chandler

Martin Parr: The Cost of Living

Austerity  vs capitalism

Jim Goldberg: Rich and Poor
The photographs in this book constitute a shocking and gripping portrait of contemporary America. Jim Goldberg’s photographs of rich and poor people, with the subjects’ own handwritten comments about themselves on the prints, give us an inside look at the American dream at both ends of the social scale.His pictures reveal his subjects’ innermost fears and aspirations, their perceptions and illusions about themselves, with a frankness that makes the portraits as engrossing as they are disturbing.

Often considered Goldberg’s seminal project, Raised by Wolves combines ten years of original photographs, text, and other illustrative elements (home movie stills, snapshots, drawings, diary entries, and images of discarded belongings) to document the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The book quickly became a classic in the photobook canon and, thus, the original is essentially unavailable.

Read article here in the Guardian and a thorough insight here on Magnum Photos. For more Theory and Practice, read here 

Shooting the rich – an article in the BJP
Carlos Sporttono: Wealth Management
Dougie Wallace: Harrodsburg
Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti: The Heavens

Jim Mortram: Small Town Inertia
Jim Mortram lives near Dereham, a small town in Norfolk. Dereham is no different from thousands of other communities throughout Britain, where increasing numbers of people struggle to survive at a time of welfare cuts and failing health services.

For the last seven years, Jim has been photographing the lives of people in his community who, through physical and mental problems and a failing social security system, face isolation and loneliness in their daily lives. His work covers difficult subjects such as disability, addiction and self-harm, but is always with hope and dignity, focusing upon the strength and resilience of the people he photographs.

Read interview here with Jim Mortram in the BJP

Karen Knorr: Belgravia
The Belgravia series, images and texts describe class and power amongst the international and wealthy during the beginning of Thatcherism in London during 1979. Belgravia is still a cosmopolitan and rich neighbourhood in London near Harrods in Knightsbridge with many non-domiciled residents. My parents lived in Belgravia and the first image of the series is a photograph of my mother and grandmother in the front room of our “maisonette” on Lowndes Square. Yet the photographs are not about individuals but about a group of people and their ideas during a particular time in history. They are “non-potrtraits” in that they do not aim to flatter or to show the “truth” of these people. People are not named and remain anonymous.

Politics and elections

Mark Duffy: Vote No 1
Across the world, we are experiencing a severe disillusionment with our nations’ political class. This series takes a humorous, if dark, look at this issue by focusing on the unintended disfigurements that electoral candidates’ faces suffer when advertising themselves to the public.

Christopher Anderson: STUMP
Stump collects his color and black-and-white photographs from recent campaign trails-particularly from the 2012 Obama/Romney contest-that scrutinize the highly rehearsed rhetorical masks of, among others, Barack and Michelle Obama, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton and others (including audience members at rallies). Removed from the context of reportage and sequenced here, these images accumulate a mesmerizing quality that is both frightening and hilarious.

Read review here on Joerg Colberg blog Conscentious

Identity and citizenship

Shirin Neshat
Ahmed Mammoud – Shanamanesh
Sam Irwin

Use of Archive and Found images
Right now in contemporary photography and in particularly in photographers making photo books the use of archival material is dominating ways that photographers tell stories. We have discussed this earlier during Personal Study and many of you incorporated family archives and photo albums into the narrative and making of your photo book. There is no reason why you can’t explore archives again, both public (Photographic Archive Society Jersiaise, Archive of Modern Conflict) and private (mobile phones, social media, family albums etc.)

Here is a selection of photographers using archives in making new work: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (Divine Violence/Holy Bible, War Primer 2, People in Trouble, Spirit is a Bone etc) Christian Patterson (Redhead Peckerwood, Bottom of the Lake), Tommasi Tanini (H. said he loved us), David Fahti (Anecdotal, Wolfgang), Dragana Jurisic (YU: The Lost Country), Anouk Kruithof, Ed Templeton (Adventures in the nearby far way), John Stezaker

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.

US oil fields photographed by satellites orbiting Earth.

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

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.

Read article here in the BJP on Shooting the Rich

Read and see more here on his website and the publisher, RIOT Books 

See also this book Looters by Tiane Doan Na Champassak

Religios Freedom

Khadija Saye who had been invited to contribute to the exhibition before her death in the Grenfell Tower fire. Read article here in the Guardian.

Dwelling: in this space we breathe is a series of wet plate collodion tintypes that explores the migration of traditional Gambian spiritual practices and the deep rooted urge to find solace within a higher power. This series of tintypes were produced with artist, Almudena Romero.

Read an obituary here in the British Journal of Photography

Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins
At a time of significant national and global uncertainty, the season in 2018 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London explore how artists respond to, reflect and potentially effect change in the social and political landscape.

Reflecting a diverse, complex and authentic view of the world, the exhibition touches on themes of countercultures, subcultures and minorities of all kinds, the show features the work of 20 photographers from the 1950s to the present day. Diane Arbus, Casa Susanna, Philippe Chancel, Larry Clark, Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Paz Errázuriz, Jim Goldberg, Katy Grannan, Pieter Hugo, Seiji Kurata, Danny Lyon, Teresa Margolles, Boris Mikhailov, Daido Moriyama, Igor Palmin, Walter Pfeiffer, Dayanita Singh Alec Soth and Chris Steele-Perkins

Read Press Release here

Paz Errázuriz The beautifully arresting series of photographs, Adam’s Apple (1982-87), by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz are of a community of transgender sex-workers working in an underground brothel in Chile in the 1980s. Taken during the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet when gender non-conforming people were regularly subjected to curfews, persecutions and police brutality, the photographs are a collaborative and defiant act of political resistance.

Read review here in Dazed and Confused and a gallery page in the Guardian

Dayanita Singh on making photobooks as mobile museums
Her blog:  DAYANITA SINGH , RANDOM THOUGHTS ON PHOTOGRAPHY, ART AND BEING A SOLOIST

Alec Both: Broken Manual
In Alec Soth’s Broken Manual (2006–10) he documents men living off the grid. His atmospheric images, both colour and black and white, are of monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways who all have in common the need to disappear in America.

Read article here in the Guardian

Yto Barrada: AgadirFor her first major London commission, artist Yto Barrada weaves together personal narratives and political ideals to create a complex portrait of a city and its people in a state of transition.

Klaus Pichler: This will change your life Forever

Read interview here in GUP magazine

Liz Hingley
Jonas Bendisken

Set in an apocalyptic post-industrial landscape of Southern Russia, on a site of an archaeological expedition, the little known work of Russian photographer Igor Palmin, The Enchanted Wanderer (1977) and TheDisquiet (1977), features Soviet Hippies in their bell-bottoms and flower power hair bands, playing guitars in opium filled trailers or standing alone on desolate lands.

Dayanita Singh formed a deeply profound and meaningful friendship over 30 years with Mona Ahmed, a eunuch from New Delhi who was both feared and revered, an outcast amongst outcasts, living much of her life in a cemetery. As well as the groundbreaking photo book, with profoundly honest and frank words by Mona, the exhibition includes a poignant film, shot in one take, of a very still Mona listening to her favourite song Rasik Balma from the 1956 romantic comedy Chori Chori.

Driven by motivations both personal and political, many of the photographers in Another Kind of Life sought to provide an authentic representation of disenfranchised communities often conspiring with them to construct their own identity through the camera lens.

Sexual freedom

Rights and women and is a current

Sufragette movement and Femen

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

INSPIRATIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE AND THE BODY

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 freedom as;

exterior/ interior
private/ public
masculin/ feminine
physical/ psychological

Clare Rae from Melbourne, Australia visited Jersey as part of the Archisle international artist-in-residence programme last year. Clare  has been 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.

Clare gave a 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.

Homework: Here is the task that she asked participants to respond to in a workshop. This could be a good starting point to for photographic exploration.

Untitled Actions: exploring performative photography

Outcomes for participants:

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.

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.

A few articles to read:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/14/claude-cahun-finding-great

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160629-claude-cahun-the-trans-artist-years-ahead-of-her-time

Link to Jersey Heritage: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/collection-items/claude-cahun

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

Last year 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?

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 9 March-29 May

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.

Read articles in relation to exhibition here:

http://aperture.org/blog/feminism-gillian-wearing-claude-cahun/

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/08/gillian-wearing-claude-cahun-mask-national-portrait-gallery

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.

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.

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.

Further reading and context:
Krauss_Rosalind_E_Bachelors
Johanna Burton (ed) Cindy Sherman, October Files, MIT Press From

A few articles/ reviews
Hal Foster https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n09/hal-foster/at-moma
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/03/cindy-sherman-interview-retrospective-motivation

See how students in the past have responded to Cindy Sherman

Shannon O’Donnell and her book: Shrinking Violet

Here is link to Shannon’s blog showing all her research, analysis, recordings, experimentation and evaluations

Watch her film below about feminism, her mother and her role in the family. This film was the starting point for her photographs above by re-staging herself as a domisticated female

link to her photo book: Shrinking Violet

Chrissy Knight portraits of Women of Yesterday

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.

Here is an article in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman

British Journal of Photography http://www.bjp-online.com/2016/01/on-being-an-angel-francesca-woodman-foam-amsterdam/

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.

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

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 points here.

Here are some of the key concepts that underpin Pope’s work and practice:

Performance, Photography, Chance, Humour/Fun, Repetition, Play
Psychogeography, dérive (drifting), Situationism (link to a ppt: Situationism), Dadaism, Public/Private, Challenging authority, Failure, DIY/Ad-hoc approach, Collaboration, Audience participation

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 FREEDOM and/or LIMITATIONS 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.