Ametsuchi (heaven and earth) is a theme that Kawauchi has been contemplating as she searches for the origins of civilisation and culture. By capturing the 1,000-year-old ritual of Mount Also, she contemplates time honoured traditions of humanity. In the series, she includes photographs from three more sites — including: The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the view from a planetarium, and the Shiromi Shrine dance ritual in Miyazaki —and by mixing these images together, she turns her attention to ancient ceremonies here on Earth as a connection to the heavens. Although Heaven and Earth could be looked at prom a perspective of biblical enforcement, I do not believe this is the use of her work. The elements of religion I do not want represent in my work, as it creates connotations of my work forcing or demanding to be held above other work, or the work is too politically demanding of religious ideas to be considered by everyone to be beautiful.  I found this book which I believe directly reinforces the themes of amestushi wants to show throughout their work: In this think, you are able to see how the photos brings together images of distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of a traditional style of controlled-burn farming (yakihata) in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations. Punctuating the series are images of Buddhist rituals and other religious ceremonies—a suggestion of other means by which humankind has traditionally attempted to transcend time and memory. Other works form this artist are visible though is work experimenting within the luminance of pieces and the effect that lighting has on a piece of work.

Where “haiku” is a minimalist form of poetry, of meditation on facts that happen in everyday life and its visual counterpart is a subtractive operation of the elements within a frame. A haiku is a Japanese poem describing a mood, an ambiance, often linked to Nature and the passing of seasons, with a specific metric: 3 lines with a 5/7/5 feet rules explored the emotional power of the intimate images that each one of us keeps with us as amulets. This is an approach one photographer takes towards the haiku “When I photograph, I start out with an open mind. If I start out with a precise idea of what I want to photograph, I might miss an interesting event or object. So, I begin with an open mind and try to photograph all kinds of objects.Haiku: the art of emptiness,True haiku is a celebration of unclutteredness, emptiness, fleetingness, vastness, littleness, nothingness, change”. Emptiness finds its way from silence towords, often in parataxis. An example of parataxis from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:Parataxis is the lack of conjunctions. We must fill in the empty spaces. Beckett, Pinter, modern masters of breath, of pause, of emptiness. It has been happening for centuries with haiku. True haiku catapults us into infinity; creating an aperture which not only suggests infinity – it actually allows us through, into the Void. Haiku is a portal to emptiness. The emptiness itself is not to illustrate a lack of beauty or belonging for objects of cluttered spaces, it is just a meditative effect in order to emphasis the importance and beauty within the little things, and the cleansing of ourself to become pure and part of this experience. It is seeking the value of less being more, and focusing on the things we might normally take for granted. Haiku create silences, arise from silence, return to silence. How? Haiku shuts out the noise of the world in concentrating on pure phenomena – even when such phenomena themselves contain sound. It becomes a silenced sound, a return to the beginning of sound, the first quack of a duck, or the cry of a pheasant that has just swallowed a whole field, the silence before and after that cry. Within photography haiku is almost a speechless narrative transcript laying all of the most important value moments being within a location or person not a thing itself. These photos are meant to capture a purity of true bliss. Linking also to that of being opulent and visceral.

Looking at this website , I found countless amounts of images and inspirations that are not only a clear influence from both beauty and the conceptual ideas of haiku, but also some really innovative images and edits, It shows the world, with such beauty that we never get a chance to see with our normal daily lives. I want all of my images this have this unique combination of seeing the wold in such beautiful unique pattens and ways. I believe due to me being influenced by these images I will conceptually annotate them, and explain the processes as why I believe they are successful. Above is a small development of a more normal consideration of natural beauty within the emptiness of space.

conceptually I chose this image as it’s qualities are clearly echoed from the terms of abstraction, and additionally the clear influence of fine art. You can not only see the elements of nature, and the development of abstraction, but there are clear echoes of heaven due to the light forming in a triangular manner and yet contrasting with the circular trees centered in the middle. It is a clear disposition of that of land and sky. Despite this image being edited their is still a sense of purity and agency to it, The rich detail of the tops of the branches creates an interest which we would not normally be inclined to see. There is a power within the pieces formality, and I belive if I was to produces a set of images edited in this manner it would not only work well with my starting off development of fine art, but it would too develop the conceptual idea as what can be seen as beautiful in nature, and what is heaven and earth a representation of.

Plan for shoot: the plan for my shoot, is going to consist of many different locations, and many different outcomes and goals for each location I go to. These will consist of: going to the zoo, a waterfall, a beach, St Ouens bay, caves, in to the sea, forest, and will too try an capture different aspects of light, animals, sunsets and refractions of movement. I believe I will try and achieve this shoot in either one day or through the combination of two days, and use the whole day, through sunrise to sunset to go to all locations and capture all different elements purposing the theme of haiku, it is only if the lighting or elements are not quite as successful or do not portray the Elements of heaven and earth in the way I wanted I will redo the shoot. After looking more into ways I could enhance these shoots and these images, I wanted to try and develop How I could photoshop without taking away the natural beauty of the origins of the photo. Much of this photoshoot I believe will be enhancement of the light. This effect of movement echoed throughout the image creates a natural way to create a more abstract effect of imagery, perhaps I could do a whole development of trying to find natural ways to distort and create a new meaning behind a once plain image. So Far I have taken around four shoots, all differing from focuses on themes of mediated chaos, surrealism, fine art and finding the beauty in everyday. I believe doing this large shoot and being able to develop all of these images in order to also be bought into a successful narrative within my book. Putting both of these experimentations of haiku into terms, I belive I can find a good balance of images which are a pure depiction and unedited which forms acts of heaven and earth, and too creates more abstract edited pieces which combine to work with my past shoots, these will really help my project focusing on beauty grow and be able to flourish into a successful narrative piece.

Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray was a French photographer who lived 1820 – 1884. He has been called “the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century” because of his technical innovations, his instruction of other noted photographers, and “the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making. His most well known images are seascapes, the first to ever have an exposure that was able to depict the detail in both the sky and sea at the same time.

Technical innovations

His technical innovations included:

• Improvements on paper negatives, specifically waxing them before exposure “making the paper more receptive to fine detail”.
• A collodion process published in 1850 but which was “theoretical at best”. The invention of the wet collodion method to produce a negative on a glass plate is now credited to Frederick Scott who published his process in 1851.
• Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky

Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky at a time where it was impossible to have at the same time the sky and the sea on a picture due to the too extreme luminosity range. Combination printing was an early experiment of HDR photography where you expose for bright and dark areas of a landscape scene.

In October 1999, Sotheby’s sold a Le Gray albumen print “Beech Tree, Fontainebleau” for £419,500, which was a world record for the most expensive single photograph ever sold at auction, to an anonymous buyer. At the same auction, an albumen print of “The Great Wave, Sète” by Le Gray was sold for a new world record price of £507,500 or $840,370 to “the same anonymous buyer” who was later revealed.

The seascapes were, and are still, Le Gray’s greatest public, commercial and aesthetic success. He took them in France – a first set taken in Normandy in the summer of 1856 and a second set from the Mediterranean coast in spring 1857. At the horizon, the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates the join between two separate negatives. The combination of two negatives allowed Le Gray to achieve tonal balance between sea and sky on the final print. It gives a more truthful sense of how the eye sees the landscape, rather than how the camera perceives nature. When first shown, the luminous, shimmering effects, Le Gray’s otherwise dark seascapes were often mistaken for moonlight. It is easy to see why this misconception arose in these monochrome images where darkness encroaches towards the edges of the scene.

For my first photoshoot I went to the woods behind Longueville Manor and took a variety of shots that I could work with later, some with the subject standing still, and some with him moving around which created interesting poses such as leaping or running.

Luigi Ghirri, born 5 January 1943, was an Italian artist and photographer who gained a far-reaching reputation as a pioneer and master of contemporary photography, with particular reference to its relationship between fiction and reality.

He started his career in the 1970s. Influenced by conceptual art, he created his first two series, Atlante (1973) and Kodachrome (1978), where his cropped images of the landscape were presented with a deadpan, often ironic wit and a continuous anthropological engagement with his surroundings. The compositions and hues of his photographs suggested subtle emotional tones and a meticulously rich way of viewing the world, as well as the role of images within it.

Ghirri’s work quickly attracted international attention. In 1975 Time-Life included him in its list of the “Discoveries” of its annual Photography Year publication, and he showed at the Photography as Art, Art as Photography exhibition in Kassel. In 1982 he was invited to the photokina in Cologne, where he was acclaimed as one of the twenty most significant photographers of the 20th century for his series Topographie-Iconographie.

Image Analysis:

I haven chosen this photograph of Luigi Ghirri’s because it has all the aspects of what I want to include within my own photographs, for example, a wide natural background and the inclusion of models. I like this photograph of Ghirri’s because of the use of colour and contrast, the swimming costumes the models are wearing are different shades of blues that match the blues in the water but also contrast at the same time, also the contrast between the white sand and blue water progressing to an even darker blue is interesting, linked with the almost orange models wearing vibrant blue costumes, the photograph is very simple and candid but the colouring makes it far more interesting and engaging. In conclusion this photograph is simple but engaging and is a very similar style to what I hope to photograph myself for my project.

Produce an appropriate number of blog posts with good use of images, hyperlinks and written analysis or evaluation of the following:

1. Photo-Assignment: PLAY
- Historical/ contextual references to Marcel Duchamp, origins of conceptualism, John Baldessari, Tom Pope and others mentioned as artists references and creative starting points
 
- Responses/ experimentation: Upload images from last Wednesday photo-games with a ball and coin toss and produce a number of photographic experiments eg. grids, diptychs/triptychs, stop animation (GIF), montages etc.

2. SPECIFICATION: Write a specification with 2-3 ideas about what you are planning to do; how, who, when, where and why? Use images to illustrate your ideas

3. RESEARCH AND ANALYSE: ARTISTS REFERENCES 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

- Produce a mood board with a selection of images.
Provide analysis of their work and explain why you have chosen them and how it relates to your idea and the exam themes of VARIATION and/or SIMILARITY.
- Select at least 2 key images and analyse in depth, TECHNICAL (lighting, camera), VISUAL (composition, visual elements) (interpretation, subject-matter, what is the photographer trying to communicate), CONTEXTUAL (art historical, political, social, personal), CONCEPTUAL (ideas, meaning, theory of art/ photography/ visual culture, link to other’s work/ideas/concept)
- 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.
- Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post

4. PLAN AND SHOOT: Plan at least 2-3 shoots as a response to artists references where you explore your ideas in-depth.
- Edit shoots and show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop

5. REVIEW AND REFLECT: 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? Plan a second or third shoot. Explore different photographic techniques and processes. Research and analyse new artists references/ inspirations etc.  


 

Mike Disfarmer

(1884–1959) Portrait photographer from Arkansas in America, he captures harsh realism is rural parts of the country for 40 year. He lived a reclusive lifestyle only making human contact when taking hid photos. After leaving his family farm and changing his name to Disfarm as a form of rebellion he taught him self how to take and develop photos even building his own studio. He would charge 25-50 cent for a penny portrait which people from the community would buy as tokens to give to family and friends. He photographs, individuals sometimes groups generally with a natural expression not posing or overly smiling. The overall collection creates a sense of identity for the time, rural location and people who occupied it.

Stuart Pearson Wright

Wright plans a move away from portraiture, yet his projected subjects remain bound up with the enigma of his own identity and origins.

“People say I make my subjects look sad or old. I suppose I do instinctively either bring out of them, or project on to them, something rather melancholy.”

Wright explores identity of other people out of his own isolation. His obsession with portraiture formed out of never meeting his father, he was born as the result of artificial insemination.

Seydou Keita

https://www.all-about-photo.com/photographers/photographer/125/seydou-keita

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/seydou-keita

‘Serving elite and middle-class patrons, his images often highlight the idealized or imagined socio-economic status of his sitters through the inclusion of props: cosmopolitan clothing and accessories, radios, telephones, bicycles, and sometimes his own car. To formalize the outdoor setting, Keïta regularly employed richly patterned backdrops that add movement and visual energy to his images and used a low vantage point and angular composition to highlight his clients’ confident facial expressions and relaxed postures. ‘