Dexter Navy is a filmmaker and photographer. Across both lens based mediums his aim is to produce work that is ”psychedelic, cinematic and at all times holds an authentic feeling.” Dexter’s career began when he was 18 years old as i-D Magazine stumbled across his photographs which he used to post on Tumblr, and then they asked him to start shooting for them. From there his creative career has massively grown, he now has a very respected portfolio of work which is prominent in modern fashion and music culture. From working on video production for big name artists in the music industry to producing magazine covers and advertising campaigns for world renowned fashion brands.
Just to name a few of the artists and brands who Dexter has worked with: Dior, A$AP Rocky, Kendall Jenner, Louis Vuitton, Playboy Carti, Converse, Kanye West, MAINS, topman, Alexander Wang and many many more…
I believe that aesthetically Dexter Navy is a very relevant creator to look at in terms of how I intend to go about this project, this is because his chaotic and psychedelic visual tendencies are something which I will take inspiration from and use as a reference when producing my work.
Below are just a few links to music videos produced by Dexter Navy…
My concept for the beginning of this shoot was first to show a type of beauty within my personal daily life, I wanted this to be a reflection of the everyday and seeing beauty within the normal. I wanted to show both a combination of femininity but also a focus on how I could express this not only through a softer tonal scheme but a more vibrant colour. I wanted to show variations of both nature elements, and also more detailed areas that are looked over for being seen as beautiful. I not only wanted to from beautiful imagery but I too wanted to how a more abstract and interesting composition to my work.
In my coursework I looked at how photographer Lewis Bush had put together an article explaining how breaking the rules of photography can be a great way of working as a photographer. The article covers how breaking the rules of photography can be a way of finding new ideas and exploring areas of the creative subject which you would not otherwise, if you stuck to the rules. He goes on to talk about how the best ideas aren’t clearly visible and in order to find these new and innovative creative ideas, photographers must break the rules and take things to the next level. The article covers 8 rules within photography that can be broken in order to achieve this, these 8 rules are the rules of: Objectivity, Audience, Manipulation, Reality, Technicality, Ownership, Camera and The rule of rule breaking. Of these 8 rules I have decided that I will like to explore the rule of manipulation.
Within the rule of manipulation sub-section of the article Bush looks into the photographer Alice Wielinga who breaks this rule within her work, and relates well to my initial ideas of this exam project. I took a particular interest in her work after seeing it for the first time as I found that the aesthetics of it were very individual and intriguing. Here are some examples of her work, the first of which has some context attached by caption…
From series: North Korea – A Life between Propaganda and Reality. It is April 2013. While the Western media follows Kim Jong-Un’s steps during his missile test launches, I travel 2,500 kilometres through the North Korean interior. Once arrived, the images I know from my advance research correspond with the scenes my guides proudly show me during their propaganda tour. But seeing these scenes with my own eyes, I gradually discover that behind everything they present to me, a different reality is hidden. While I listen to my guides talking about what invaluable contributions the greatly admired leaders made to their country, I drive through a landscape that looks haggard and desolate. During my journey I collect propaganda material and take photographs of the reality I encounter. This material is the basis for my multimedia project ‘North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and Reality’. With the found propaganda images and my own photographs I compose a story that deconstructs the North Korean propaganda.
As Bush’s article talks about, this specific series of Wielinga’s work is executed using a combination of photographs from her visit to North Korea and North Korean propaganda. The combination of these two visual matters creates a brilliant juxtaposition which is very effective at putting across her political points.
Here is a section of Lewis Bush’s article, covering how Wielinga produced this project, including a couple of quotes from the photographer herself…
‘ When Dutch photographer Wielinga traveled to North Korea, she found her ability to photograph in the secretive state severely curtailed. “I felt that, with mere documenting, I wasn’t able to tell the story as I was experiencing it,” she says of the stage-managed excursions to which journalist-visitors are subjected. Her response was to digitally merge her photographs of official North Korea propaganda with her own images of workers and decaying factories. “I see propaganda and reality as two sides of the same coin,” she says. “Propaganda is an essential part of everyday life in North Korea, and because of that a reality in itself.” ‘
Aside of the work that was looked at in Bush’s article, Wielinga has produced many photo-montages which I think are a lot more experimental and chaotic, relating to my initial ideas for this project. Here are some of those photo-montages which I am referencing…
Each painting within the Haystack series is different however they all share common qualities too. They were painted in the farmlands of Normandy, north of Parish. Each picture shows a field with hills and trees in the distance. In the foreground Monet painted haystacks – which lead to the title of the group of paintings. Sometimes there is one stack, sometimes two or three. The haystacks themselves are put together by binding a large base of hay and then adding a cone shaped layer of hay on top. Each stack is close to 20 feet tall and weighs an enormous amount, withstanding the harsh weather until it is time to harvest them.
Impressionist artists like Monet were interested in seeing the world in a new way. In doing so, they wanted to show that viewing their surroundings could be much more beautiful and complex than what is on the surface. Through painting subjects that were common images, not heroic stories or sublime natural beauty, Monet shows that importance can be found in everything. His Haystacks elevate the status of common bales of hay, highlighting the importance hay plays in agriculture and sustaining life. Impressionism, and Monet specifically, often give importance to working class elements of life, like farming, by painting them.
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
This impressionism technique was a quick way of working and was necessary for Monet to accomplish the real goal of his painting. Monet was looking at objects, haystacks, and at the “atmosphere that colors it differently at different times of the day/times of the year.” He had to work quickly to capture the changing light and how it colored his surroundings. Often we have an image in our head, but Monet was showing that that image should differ throughout time. A haystack covered in snow might appear white in our minds, but depending on the light, it would appear blue, yellow, or pink at sunset. Focusing on a single subject twenty-plus times gave Monet the ability to show the effects of changing light. It took his art from being focused on objects as subject, to being about light, or lumière, as subject. This idea about focusing on lighting/textures as appose to a subject matter links to the artist research I have done on Hiroshi Sugimoto and his project Seascapes.
As I start to develop my ideas for the variation and similarity project I will experiment with some quick ideas that might help give me inspiration or starting points for my own idea. On the theme of repetition I will be researching and creating own GIFs.
A GIF is a file format which supports both still images and animations, it is a condensed file taking up less space than a video but working in a similar way. GIFs have been used for year in advertising but in 2015 Facebook begum to support them on their site and they grew in popularity on social media and creative outlets. They generally show cartoons, graphic designs or stop animations from photographs.
To create my own GIFs I started by choosing a topic or theme, I then took a variety of pictures of the shoes. I made sure to line up each shoe in the centre of the frame to make the GIF as smooth as possible. I then dragged each image into photoshop and onto a timeline where I set the duration to 0.1 seconds so it flicked through the images relatively fast. Using the same background with slightly different subjects it shows the variations and similarities between each photo.
A GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a bitmap image format developed in 1987. It is a widely used format on the internet as it is widely supported. The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image and supports animation. The use of GIF’s in the context of photography can be extremely useful to display a range of photographs in a unique and interesting way. In this instance I have shown different shoes in order to allow the viewer to compare the different shoes shown to see the different shapes and styles even though they are all only shoes. Creating a GIF is a relatively easy and straightforward photograph – to create the GIF shown in this post I uploaded all of the photographs into photoshop and then loading all of the different files into a stack. I then created a frame animation and made frames from the layers. I then chose the time that each frame will be shown to be 0.2 seconds and so resulting in a fast moving GIF.
This use of GIF’s is extremely relevant to the topic ‘Variation and Similarities’ as it is an easily displayable way to demonstrate both variation and similarities between subjects. I plan on experimenting with GIF’s and working them into my exam as I believe that it is a very effective way of displaying typologies of subjects, such as different high rise buildings/office blocks and the contents of peoples’ bags. As I further develop my work on typologies I will explore photographing more styles of building and putting these into a GIF format in order to effectively show the similarities and differences between the buildings as I aim to do. Below I have demonstrated an example of the type of work I could produce whilst incorporating GIF’s into my experiments – I will focus on building a wider portfolio of similar photographs in order to create a variety of GIF’s.
The graphics interchange format (GIF) is a bitmap image forma that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by an American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on June 15 1987. It has since come to widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and potability. Giffs are less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with color gradients, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.
A GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe on June 15, 1987. Since then it has been a commonly used image format, usually as an animated loop, on the internet due to its support and portability. This is an appropriate way of creating imagery for this variation and similarity project, as it is a way of displaying typologies (similar objects/frames)
In the early 1970s, John Baldessari made a promise “I will not make any more boring art”. The lithograph image demonstrates his thinking at the time as his interest in Conceptual art developed. The work was created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in conjunction with an unconventional exhibition. Baldessari was not present at the “exhibition,” nor at the workshop where the print was made. He simply sent a handwritten page to the students to be reproduced and made a videotape of himself writing the sentence. Prior to the creation of this work, Baldessari, together with friends and students from University of California at San Diego, gathered paintings he had made as a young artist and drove them to a crematorium where they were burnt.
His participation in the conceptual movement lead him to create ‘Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)’ in 1973. The images represent Baldessari’s interest in language and games as structures following both mandatory and arbitrary rules. He attempts to fulfill a simple yet arbitrary goal, following rules in a similar manner to a game as structured by the title of his book. There are thirty-six documented attempts in the book–the typical number of exposures on a roll of 35mm film. The resultant images are documentation of Baldessari’s game, but they also border on abstract imagery and bear a resemblance to his later works.
In other works, Baldessari takes archival images, using colourful price stickers to obstruct the viewer from seeing the faces of the people in the image. The viewer is encouraged to analyse other aspects of the image, that would otherwise not catch their attention, such as the clothing of the figures, wealth, era, etc.
“I just got so tired of looking at these faces” – John Baldessari
Responses:
In response to ‘Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)’, we took 1 larger ball and 3 tennis balls and took turns throwing them in the air to get a straight line. This was harder than it seemed. The balls were coloured bright yellow or green in order to stand out against the white/grey sky. I found that it was difficult to maintain that the moving items were in focus.
Another experiment we carried out involved dodging the camera. In many of the outcomes, the face of the subject is not clearly seen, reflecting the same ideas of Baldessari.
All images from both experiments were taken with varying shutter speeds of 1/100s to 1/200s to capture the movement of the subjects in different motions.
In a third experiment, we experimented with the use of archival imagery. We used a coin toss to determine where the circles should be cut out on the image.
In Photoshop, I edited circles of colour over the already cut out circles. I also painted lines of colour over certain areas where there was negative space.
In one image, I used the colours of the Jersey Flag, Red, White and Yellow, as the image depicts Jersey soldiers.
