My project up to this point has been more of an exploration of beauty, my own emotional views on the subject and then learning and evolving into the meaning of topics such as haiku and the emotional subjectivity to the pain of beauty and finding the beautiful within daily life. However, when planning and discussing this topic with various people, it become evident that the topic of beauty was either subject to too much personal opinions and subjectivity, or however, was too vague to create a Narrative book upon. However, I was able to discuss the main elements I have achieved so far within shoots, and what in my project to my mind was the most important currently. From this I was able to see that the main exploration of my project was the ability to see the evolution of life, and almost a family tree, or tree of life scenario. The growth of peoples attitudes and emotions accompanied with why or how they feel this way. This then led me to discuss the values of what was previously beauty and chaos to more directional opposites, such as light and ark. At the beginning of life is darkness and then light, life begins and then the more you experience life, it gets darker and then too comes to an end. This is the evolution of life. Not only does this still allow a personal experience but it creates a beginning resolution and end narrative to my story as a whole. It has a clear emotional impact and posses a successful narrative.

From this idea, I wanted to expand and create a more specific narrative concept. I started to think what is something which has personally effected my life, yet still is a clear representative of the creation and end of life. I began to relate the effect of religion to my project. God is the creator of earth and has the power to control the beginning of life and death, he is the cause and effect of light and dark and the family tree and evolution of love and family. From a young age me and my family have gone to a catholic church, I was then an alter server for 7 years, however soon dropped out of my conformation, leaving the church altogether. This close connection and bond within the church then came to an end, however the effect of religion upon my family is still strong. My narrative, could be about the power of religion to cause the effect of light and dark and have the power to show the evolution of life, but within my personal experience I could too highlight the darkness as the leaving of the church, and not just death itself.

I started to think of the viewpoints that the world was originally said to be founded on, and from roman Catholicism, the belief is that the world was created by god over 7 days. Each day forming and creating a different elements, being water, earth, plants, animals and people. I could gradually expand throughout he aspect of light and birth, these key beginning . elements. The story itself says:  ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

Because of this new theme, there are still connections obviously within my work as it was about beauty and chaos, two key contributes to gods creation and the act of the people, but additionally, it too posses the ability to further the aim of my shoots over half term. Not only will I still look into illuminance and beauty created by god and the stages he created the world, but too going to the church itself, and taking images which symbolise the birth of christ and decay.

The narrative itself of life to my mind, could be broken into the following: Darkness light birth growth decay death. This 3ill be the key narrative to my book, showing this evolution of life experience, forming elements of haiku and illuminance throughout he birth and growth of life, and presenting chaos towards the ending, in order to show my demise and leaving from the church itself. Creationist from Catholic Church. This still allows my narrative to have a personal connection with myself, without removing all concepts of beauty and positivity but still showing a more interesting event in real time. Because of this now my aims are: Water  – reflections in water bubble hand in water me in front of water, Natural landscapes, Golden hour , Underwater ,Light ,Stairs , Baby old people close ups skin , harbour ,flower, forest, light abstraction, darkness, town, farm, rain, zoo, birds, pain and myself. I believe with allowing myself to photograph all of these concepts my book will really have a clear and successful narrative message which is too personal. Additionally I believe the title such as ascension would be successful for the development of a book.

All Zones Off Peak

Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak is the collection of a fifteen year photographic journey around Liverpool. The book features pictures resulting from spending eighteen years riding the buses of Liverpool during his 1978 to 1996 ‘bus odyssey’, the images were selected from 100,000 negatives. These works form a portrait of Liverpool and its people taken from the various bus routes that criss-cross the city. Wood spent 20 years travelling the buses during off-peak hours. In this time he shot 3,000 rolls of film, painstakingly refining his view of the city. The work has been published in two books: All Zones Off Peak (1998) and Bus Odyssey (2001). Described as ‘an epic of the everyday’, the photographs are dramatic and powerful documents of a city in motion. The book is composed of images where Wood photographs the world beyond the window as well as fellow travelers on the bus and waiting outside.

This image is taken from Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak, at first glance the images read like studies of the disenfranchised of the Northern inner cities. Wood’s bus journeys visually connect the regenerated areas of the city with more neglected, peripheral spaces: the declining high streets, areas of wasteland, cleared slums and abandoned houses of the inner-ring suburbs. These photographs are not about capturing specific moments but the endlessly repeated routines and minimal, wordless communities produced by bus journeys.

For the layout of ‘All zones off peak’ Wood uses a classic format for most the pages, using the same template of landscape pictures with a white border on all four sides, none of the images seem to be cropped and if they have been they have been cropped into the same landscape proportions as all the other images.

Last stop

Rules of interaction and proximity are changing. It is this space that fascinates George Georgiou, this migration of people around this very open and public arena, but also a migration that has reached a target, the holy grail of the imagined Western urban dream.  It is this new highly fragmented sense of community that his work investigates.  London’s double decker buses are the perfect “vehicle or vessel” to explore and transverse a complex and vast city, to frame it.  It has the advantage of allowing him two perspectives or levels of observation, the lower and upper decks.  From this vantage point he can capture the complex phenomenon of urban stratification, how different people use the city through the day, how new layers of architecture, signage and street furniture add to what was already there. How different social, economic and ethnic groups appropriate, shape and adapt to the city. With buses he does not have full control, the random nature of where the bus stops and his position to what is in front of him is not to dissimilar to the encounters we have as we move through the city.  He becomes, as the people he observes, part of the city system where thousands of individual paths cross randomly.  A community of invisibility and but also voyeurism. But not only is the passer-by invisible, but he, as the photographer becomes a voyeur, become invisible to the outside, like the CCTV cameras in London that follow our every moves.  Nonetheless his photography is not detached; he tries to capture and understand the emotional content of London’s everyday migrations, rhythms and rituals. Because he is part of this rhythm and community, it is also his distance and attachment, it is his community, his security, his home.

Originally the project began as Georgiou was thinking about London as a city of migration, the ‘last stop’ not only for immigrants but also for people from across the UK. A city of dreams and possibilities; but as we all know, these dreams are not so easily realized. As the project evolved, he became more interested in trying to express the experience of the city, how we move through it, share it, coexist as a diverse group of peoples and cultures. The part that seems the most considered is the little soap operas we see everyday in public space, those encounters we witness and perceive as fictions. It’s a little like when we drive pass an accident on the highway: we glimpse the crashed car and imagine the rest. How we perceive is important element in the work. The design of the book is what holds together the whole concept of the work and relates to the actual experience of moving through a city. The essence of the project is that you might take the same route everyday but what you see, the ebb and flow on the street takes on a random nature. To capture this flow, the concertina layout of the book allows the feel of a bus trip, but more importantly it gives the viewer the opportunity to create their own journeys by spreading the book out and combining different images together. This moves the book away from an author-led linear narrative to one of multiple possibilities.

Sarker Protick

This story has two primary characters, a river that represents nature and a community representing the humankind. Here, all these different people have a same voice, the same state. The narrative evolves between men and river and their relationship. It’s intimate and it’s ruthless. We find dependency and destruction at the same time. It’s a contradictory affair. The river gives so much to its people and at times it takes away everything. Riverbank erosion generally creates much more suffering than other natural hazards like flooding; as while flooding routinely destroys crops and damages property, erosion results in loss of farm and homestead land. In the winter of 2011, I travelled to the villages near Ishurdi district. Padma, the largest waterway of Bangladesh flows right beside. At first the place seems abandoned. Drowned and broken houses, floating trees are all that remains. These are traces of life that was once here. Slowly I discover life in the villages. People who are still living here, many as refugee in others land. They have lost their house, farmlands almost everything. Some has left the places as they ran out of all the options.While a global warming, climate change is still being questioned, here, like many other places is facing consequences. Over the years the river changed it’s course. While doing it, it has taken so many. When the monsoon arrives and the river runs fast. The lands get washed away and disappear. Places I have photographed do not exist any more. River erosion continues with dire consequences for this land and community.

Protick’s works are grounded around the ideas of time and space. Hovering between corporeal and meta-physical, his use of light as protagonist creates a truth that is more emotional than factual. It is document only to a suspended reality, where time is perpetually slowed; and we are not just looking, but seeing. Whether working with family, environment or history, Protick’s work consistently deals with Time and how it transforms matter and life. Much of his current work, even including the book I am specifically looking at , is an exploration of him living scenarios and the people seen around himself and his life. Although having a similar narrative construct to the second photographer, he is choosing to take his photos with the aim of showing a more heavenly lighting, showing people with a clear representation of their scenario: “This isn’t something new or something connected to a particular part of the country,” says Sarker Protick, speaking about his recent work, Of River and Lost Lands, which deals with the contemporary relationship between people and nature in Bangladesh, in the context of the devastating damage and loss of land caused each year during monsoon season.

katrin koenning

Melbourne-based photographer Katrin Koenning (Germany) and Dhaka- based photographer Sarker Protick (Bangladesh) live thousands of miles apart. Yet, in Astres Noirs, a collaborative work that comprises their debut photobook, their photographs are interwoven to create a visual dialogue across distances. The images of both artists were taken with mobile phone cameras, of everyday objects and scenes, though were then transformed visually, stripping colour and amping up the contrast, to form symbolic, poetic ephemera. Printed with a lightly glistening silver ink onto matte black paper, the photographs emerge like celestial phenomena from the page. Mysterious and contemplative, the images give evidence to the artists’ passionate exploration of the world around, and, perhaps more significantly, their desire to exchange their findings with another.The photographer’s project idea is driven by anger at policies that elevate short-term profit above the need to make sustainable decisions and safeguard the world for future generations. Katrin Koenning is interested in counter-narratives and and positive ecological imaginaries to highlight our current state of collective urgency. Thus, Swell will not be centralised around a single environmental issue but rather, with the Greenpeace Photo Award, Koenning will create a still and moving image work focused on a number of mini-ecologies across Australia. The work will focus on what is at stake while avoiding expected tropes of disaster-imagery. It will create a space in which things are connected, rather than apart. With a style characterised by hybridity Koenning seeks to expand the limits of the documentary. She introduces visual elements into a dialog to provide context for the topic under discussion. The project becomes a personal narrative about the current state of the world and, at the same time, about nature hanging in the balance.

From personally researching her work further You are visually able to see the huge influence she has from so many different aspect of the world around her. She is, to my mind, so good at finding the light and passion within even the most desperate and desolate scenarios. Her works’ beauty is transdecent within every project of her work, however I chose her piece above, as it has the strongest relation to the book I am looking into. Much of her work really focuses on photographing light withthe intention to construct a story. Her work has more of a magic quality than religious, but it almost makes us question our lives and the passion we should see and feel for life. Her works are clearly edited a-lot and to her mind it is clearly a pivotal part of the final outcomes of her world as a whole. The piece above creates an expatiation of fear yet the outcome of peace, the floating creates a wholesome new outlook on the fatality of death, And instead of showing death as something to be feared, it is seen as something to be accepted.

Astres Noirs

What I decided what I loved about this book itself, is the hugely prominent highlights of silver within every image. It is so different to everything I have see previously within photography books. There is a clear presentation of beauty within every image, there is a sense of magic and power within the compositions. The book too shows a combination of landscape, objects and people which is an area I too am interested within showing. I believe with the clear influence of this book personally upon my work, I will be able to finalise my idea, and form a finalised narrative concept. Between each image their is a religious aspect highlighting a power of god, within the power of his creation. This approach pf almost bringing black and white into the modern century is so interesting, it’s a twist on what a photobook should be as captivating as a fine piece of music—a triumph of form, theme, movement, instrumental coloration, and, of course, the passion of the playing.

Astres noirs is the debut book for both Katrin Koenning and Sarker Protick, artists who live thousands of miles apart whose peculiar photographic wanderings create a hauntingly beautiful dialogue. This book presents photographs taken on mobile phone cameras, devices used to capture their everyday in an impulsive and almost obsessional way, documenting life from their doorsteps to far afield. Their photographs capture the commonplace such as water stains on asphalt, dust clouds and rays of light, and transform these into mesmerising frames – elusive fragments that evoke an imaginary creature, a milky way, a phosphorescent silhouette… presented together, their combined voices lead us on a journey into unexplored territory, somewhere between the everyday and paranormal, between night and day. Amongst enveloping darkness, lightness is revealed, dazzling and miraculously caught by discerning eyes. For their part, Koenning and Protick had been shooting on their smartphones (presumably in colour or, shots then drained of colour), Koenning from Australia, Protick from Bangladesh. Many of their photos are of commonplace things, a puddle, a horse, a bird. Some are more mysterious, more telling: a soft ball of light, a floating body, specks through an airplane window, faces nearly lost to the shiny blur.

My inspiration of black and silver: to my mind this book has been my most influential artists for myself and my project so far. Not only does it allow a concentration on the debate of light and dark, but shows a series of abstract images, displaying the fundamentals of life, and a clear narrative concept. The images are too filled with purpose and stories. I belive If I were to start editing my images in this way, and printed off my book on black paper, this could really benefit my project as a whole, and access a whole new level of photography, different to anything I had previously done or accomplished previously. Both of the artists add in a political theme to their work as well as showing the narrative of light throughout the light and dark. Because of this I believe me assigning the political narrative of not just life, but religion seen within death resurrection and the beginning of life, is a successful narrative construct. I will now start some experimentation of how I can form the similar edits, and colour tones.