I Am planning on photographing 171 postcards which I have bought with the intention of using in this project. I believe that these postcards show the connections between Jersey as the rest of the world which I intend to explore with this project and therefore I thought they were very appropriate to use in photo montages and collages. The dated aesthetic running through the majority of these postcards is firstly something which I believe will successfully show the history of development due to modern systems around the world. And secondly I believe these visual qualities will make for an unusual and interesting outcome.
Here is how I am going to approach the photo shoot…
Brief: photograph sourced postcards with the intention of use in chaotic photomontage/collages
Subjects: 171 vintage sources postcards
Location: Home, dark room or outdoors depending on the weather
Light source: Lightbox and camera flash if the weather is bad, Natural outdoor lighting on a white canvas if the weather is good
Exposure: Slightly over-exposed, so that when edited together with other imagery light tones can be emphasized and edited with easily
After exploring my initial ideas for this exam project I have come to the decision that I will produce photographs surrounding the theme of chaotic imagery. I plan to do this by creating photo-montages, collages and edits in response to the artists and photographers which I have and will research. I am going to relate this work to the issues of overpopulation and capitalism which have and still continue to play a big part in the overpowered development of the world. I will photograph all kinds of things relating to this theme as rather than limiting myself to one specific subject matter this will not allow me to produce pieces with chaos as the main part.
These issues of overpopulation and capitalism are something which closely links Jersey with the rest of the world, through trade, immigration, politics and culture. I plan to explore this link and how it has developed over time, looking at the past and how it has become the present. And then how the future may look in terms of these issues. This will be executed by the use of archival and found imagery mixed with my own purposed photographs through means of collage and montage.
John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He attended San Diego State University and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA from 1970 – 1988 and the University of California at Los Angeles from 1996 – 2007. Baldessari’s artwork has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions and in over 1000 group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards and public works. His awards and honors include the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award, an award from the International Print Center New York in 2016, memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the BACA International 2008, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by La Biennale di Venezia and the City of Goslar Kaiserring in 2012. Baldessari is known for his quote speaking of ” I will not make anymore bring art”, throughout his work he wanted to break free from the artistic conventions at the time of what was expected of art, and show that anything can form and turn into art. A series of his work was called ‘ throwing three balls in the air to get a striaght line’ This is interesting especially at the time, his work is based so much off chance and effects of time. His work is dependent on nothing, he wants to form art and create new ideas from aspects which he and no one else can control, and I personally believe this is what is most interesting about his work. This work took around thirty-six attempts for himself to achieve.
The images above are form a moving image video piece of his, in which he points at different aspects of his body repeatedly saying’ this is art’. His clear denotations of wanting to break free of conventional fine art is transparent. His unique body movement and the development of black and white, is another aspect of his work I believe would be interesting to look into. It is although his work is a fighting and creation of new art yet using the most basic concepts of how to photograph himself. Much of his images too create connotations of typologies. He has said “I guess a lot of it’s just lashing out, because I didn’t know how to be an artist, and all this time spent alone in the dark in these studios and importing my culture and constant questions. I’d say, ‘Well, why is this art? Why isn’t that art?'” his changing of conventional art had an enormous dynamic on what it is to create art. His basic mediums of placing colours over someones face, or capturing a specific moment of time. Baldessari has always been conscious of the power of choice in artistic practice – like choosing to paint something red rather than blue, for example. Here, he carefully associates the choice of arm movements with the artistic choices that a painter or sculptor may make, concluding that choice is a form of art in itself. But he also confronts one of the fascinating problems that unpinned the work of many early Conceptual artists: how much can art be reduced and simplified before it stops being art at all? Baldessari offers no definitive answer, but he suggests that the gap between art and the ordinary, between art and life, may be imperceptible.
his artistic influences prompt links to very popular, public means of communication functioned, and it could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with coloured dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating. The aim of what I want to capture from his work is the aspect f unpredictability, and how it doesn’t matter with photography what your outcomes are, as much as you should always experiment within how to find new creative methods.
For these responses I will be using this photo as reference and I’ll be using these images for the edits.
For these edits, I changed all the photos to black and white and played with the colours effected by the tool so that the images weren’t tonally flat. I then used the colour balance tool and used the midtone colours to get the effect I wanted.
“Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was generally based on idealism and a Utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or truths such as those formulated by religion or science could be used to understand or explain reality. Modernist artists experimented with form, technique and processes rather than focusing on subjects, believing they could find a way of purely reflecting the modern world.”
Steve Patterson
Modernism:
“While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of skepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodern art drew on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century, and advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning.”
Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer Her work is characterized by a serene, poetic style, depicting the ordinary moments in life. Kawauchi’s art is rooted in Shinto, the ethnic religion of the people of Japan. According to Shinto, all things on earth have a spirit, hence no subject is too small or mundane for Kawauchi’s work; she also photographs “small events glimpsed in passing, conveying a sense of the transient. Kawauchi sees her images as parts of series that allow the viewer to juxtapose images in the imagination, thereby making the photograph a work of art[ and allowing a whole to emerge at the end; she likes working in photo books because they allow the viewer to engage intimately with her images
Kawauchi’s photographs have been described as ‘visual haikus’. Like haikus, they take note of a simple beauty in an uncluttered, non-metaphorical manner. It makes sense, therefore, that she composes haikus to accompany many of her photographs. Haiku is a very short form of Japanese poetry in three phrases.
Whatever her mood, Rinko Kawauchi says that taking pictures is as natural to her as drinking tea: she seizes upon anything that strikes her; insects, children, animals, scraps of ordinary life, tiny scraps of life that embody – more often than not – the ephemeral (lasting for a very short time). Inexhaustibly, her work constructs a new kind of inventory, the unacknowledged purpose of which is to emphasize the connections between human beings and the natural or animal world.
Illuminance
She simultaneously released a series of three photographic books – UTATANE, HANABI, HANAKO from Little More publisher, which created an overnight sensation in the photography world in Japan. According to Shinto, all things on earth have a spirit, hence no subject is too small or mundane for Kawauchi’s work.
“The mindful awareness of what is special in simple things—which Rinko Kawauchi dedicates herself to in her photographs—must be contemplated on the background of the aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi. This philosophy postulates reduction, modesty and a symbiotic relationship with nature and is applied to many areas of life, whether architecture, dance, tea ceremonies or haiku poetry. Wabi-sabi allows room for “mistakes.” Applied to photography, the goal is not the “perfect photograph;” rather, expressivity and depth make a picture meaningful—and therein lies its beauty.”—LensCulture
AILA
The subject of Rinko Kawauchi’s work “Aila” (which means “family” in Turkish) is the depiction of the essence of life: animals, plants and people are shown in a sequence assembled by free association, which also includes both birth and death. Rinko Kawauchi’s fascination in fleeting beauty, the subjects of creation and destruction, and life and death are communicated in her images.
” Kawauchi’s subject matter is intimate, personal and almost sentimental, but her photographs are not trite. She seems to take pictures from the perspective of a girl who spent too much time gazing out of the window at school, studying bugs on leaves or watching dandelions disperse in the wind. “- Frieze, review.
Seen in the opposition of light versus shadows and life versus death, Rinko believes the fleeting nature of these dualities is what ultimately determines our fragile existence. Her ‘Light and Shadow’ Project (2011) explores this theme with a poignant series of images focused on one black and one white pigeon. All proceeds from the sale of the publication went to disaster relief funds for northeast Japan
Her images document everyday things, yet could not be described as documentary. They are generally light in tone, yet somehow dark in mood. They are almost hallucinatory, yet seem to capture something fundamental about the psychological mood of modern life.” – (Garry Badger on Rinko Kawauchi’s book “Utahan”)
I decided to explore the work of Rinko Kawauchi and to take inspiration from her in my project as i specifically like how she emphasises the light and soft colours in nature and beauty. I like how she photographs things that are ‘ephemeral’, that won’t last for long, addressing concepts like life and death in her work. I also like how photographs everyday situations and objects and emphasises the beauty that most people would.t notice, which is something i would like to do in my project as well.
Stephen Shore was born in 1947 in New York. He was an only child and lived a privileged existence. With annual trips around Europe, exposing him to new cultures and art. At the age of six, his uncle gifted him a darkroom set. He would use this to develop his families snapshots taken on a inexpensive Kodak Brownie. He had little skills with a real camera until the age of nine, when his mother bought him a 35mm camera.
Shore was using a large format camera (8-by-10 camera, that’s on a tripod, and it produces a negative that’s eight inches by ten inches. ) to ensure maximum exposure and detail.
This photograph of an intersection in Oklahoma is among the image sequence known as American Surfaces, taken on Shore’s first drive across the United States. At the center of the image is the point where two roads intersect, marked by a set of traffic lights and a vertical sign marking the Texaco station visible behind two cars on the right side of the image. The image has been taken late in the day and the lights are bright against the faded blue and orange sky, the dark green of the nature strips and the grey of the road and the foreground parking lot in which crumpled newspapers lie discarded. American Surfaces is intended to be seen as a sequence, in which the minor details of life on the road, including food on tables, beds and televisions in motels and gas stations such as this, build to communicate a sense of the North American interior as an anonymous monotony.
Another task we performed on our out of classroom day was experimenting with archival images. In our pairs we were given two images between us, we then flipped a coin onto said image and cut around the coin with a Stanley knife. We then changed the outcome of the images by overlapping them in different formations. We also kept the off cuts to add to the images we had experimented with. Below are some different variations of the images we experimented with in my pair.
