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.
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.
For my third photo shoot I plan to explore the fragility linking the relationship between human and nature, and ideologies of beauty. Doing this will allow me to develop my previous ideas further. I want to take inspiration from the photographer Andrew S. Gray who is inspired by paintings of the old English masters who through camera techniques and post processing have developed painterly impressionist images of both recognizable and abstract scenes. I started experimenting with this in my second photo shoot by adjusting the shutter speed when taking photographs of the reflection of a tree in moving water. Doing this made interesting shapes and lines that were blurred and that I think were effective. I want to develop this further in my third photo shoot exploring photographing landscapes and moving the camera, as well as photographing moving water and reflection. Doing this expresses spirituality in nature and the fragility through the soft blurred lines.
By trying to interpret the work of Andrew S. Gray I will be exploring abstract photographing in a different way to how I am looking at the artist Kandinsky’s work. This is because in this shoot I will focus more on landscape and emphasising the colours, rather than the shapes and details in the lines. In my fourth photo shoot I want to focus on the details of plants and water. I still want to pay attention to the textures of the branches and trees, but will focus on emphasising the fragility and the delicacy in the landscape. I also want to experiment in this photo shoot by photographing at different times of day as I want to see how photographing at dusk would be different from photographs taken early in the morning. This will allow me to create a variety of images with different levels of light.
Photoshoot 4
For my fourth photo shoot I plan to interpret the style of the artist Wassily Kandinsky who was a pioneer of abstract art, similar to my work in my first photoshoot, but developed. I want to focus on the shape and textures of plants and branches, whether that be in water or not. I want to focus on how Kandinsky argues that the impact of colour on the viewer could be two-fold; both physical and spiritual, ‘Colour is a power which directly influences the soul’. So in this photoshoot I will focus on the colour and experiment with editing them to make them resemble abstract art more. I think that emphasising the spirituality in nature in my photos will add another aspect to my project, focusing on that as well as the relationship between the self and nature.
Photoshoot 5
For one of my photo shoots I want to explore the work of Susan Derges who specialises in camera-less photographic processes, most often working with natural landscapes. Her work revolves around the creation of visual metaphors exploring the relationship between the observer and the observed; the self and nature or the imagined and the ‘real’.
To interpret her work I want to photograph waves and ripples in water. I also want to experiment by using light sensitive paper, like she does, if I can find the materials as I think that this work help me understand how shes works. From researching photo grams of the movement of water I have found out that the process if very difficult. This may make it hard to produce work that I can use as a final outcome to my project, but I think that doing it will help with my experimentation. If i am unable to do this technique then I plan to take images of water and edit them to interpret the appearance of a photo gram.
Using an image I took in my Lilia Luganskaia shoot, I increased the saturation of the blue in the eyes as well as brightening their exposure. This helps to make them stand out as features on the face, in contrast with the dark hair elsewhere in the image. This also fits with the statement that “eyes are the windows to the soul”.
Next, I used the frequency separation technique to smooth out the textures in the skin, I did not want this to be too extreme as this would create a false perception making the person seem unrecognizable.
The technique involves creating multiple layers of an image, before healing and blurring areas of the skin that you do not want to appear.
In order to develop my exploring of ‘Variance and Similarity’ further I have further shoots that I plan on producing so that I can add to the material that I have to work with as well as adding to possible experiments that I can do with my work.
My first shoot idea is to focus on steel, specifically its texture. In my previous shoots and experiments I have looked at contrasting man-made building faces with natural granite rock faces. This has led to me thinking, as I was focusing on the material of granite, it may be interesting to contrast man-made structures with eachother by focusing on how the materials used to make houses have changed overtime. Traditionally granite has been used in Jersey but as office blocks, such as the international finance centre, have been developed there has been an increase in more ‘modern’ looking materials, such as steel. I will plan on capturing different textures of steel and then using these as a backdrop as I have done with the granite photographs that I have produced.
My second shoot idea is a follow up to the previous photographs that I have been producing of building faces. Previously I have photographed buildings in the area of St. Peters and in St. Helier, which has resulted in the photographs demonstrating vernacular architecture as the buildings in the geographic areas will have certain styles of architecture to them, especially if they are part of an estate. Next I will visit St. Johns and produce a shoot of a range of houses/buildings in the area in order to increase the range of material that I have to work with.
In this post I am showing the outcomes of manipulating both my shoots of building faces and granite faces. Previously I have experimented with removing parts of the building face to reveal other buildings behind it in order to create contrast between the two and to show the similarities and differences between buildings. This experiment draws inspiration from that as I found that it can be quite effective when I remove the natural frames from the photographs to give an insight into the background photograph. I have used this approach when experimenting with integrating the building and granite photographs together – I photoshopped out all windows of the building face in the foreground to reveal the texture and natural colours of the granite in the background. I experimented with presenting the granite photographs in black and white but I found that the outcome was too boring, whereas when the granite photographs were in colour it would bring the photograph to life by contrasting with the high-contrast black and white building face, which would further bring out the colours of the rock. The idea behind these experiments comes from the fact that a lot of houses have granite lying under the decoration and so this represents peeling back the layers of plaster and paint to reveal the base structure.
Analysis
In this composition, natural day lighting was used. Due to the nature of the house face, the natural light only brought out so many shadows and shapes within it meaning that there is only a simple face to it, which contrasts to the rock face in the background which has all sorts of shapes, tones and shadows brought out from the natural lighting. I used a 300mm lens to capture the photograph of the rock to ensure that I could zoom in enough to create the abstract composition as I intended to. I used a deep depth of field as well in order to ensure that everything was sharp and in focus to ensure that the resulting photograph was as of high a quality as possible. I used an ISO of 800, an aperture of f/8.0 and a shutter speed of 1/500 when taking the rock photographs. The ISO of 800 is fairly high but ensures that the photograph is correctly exposed along with the quick shutter speed of 1/500 that allows the photograph to be sharp and focused when the camera is zoomed in to such an extent. The depth of field ensures that the photograph is fully in focus and is clear. For capturing the building face I only used a shutter speed of 1/100 and an ISO of 100. These camera settings have allowed me to create contrast between the two photographs incorporated into the composition.
The photograph of the house face has been kept in black and white whereas the rock photograph in the background has been kept in colour to create a contrast between the two photographs and to emphasise the natural colours and tones within the rock face. There is also a wide tonal range within the composition due to the editing to create high contrast and to bring out the shadows in both photographs. There is a strong sense of texture within the composition due to the sharp angles and shapes within the rock face, this adds to the aesthetic qualities of the composition. There is also a sense of 3D in the composition for the same reasons – the jagged rock face contrasts with the flat face of the house in the foreground. The unpredictable structure of the rock shapes also contrasts greatly with the house face structure which has been carefully designed and built to meet form and function requirements.
The idea behind these experiments comes from the fact that a lot of houses have granite lying under the decoration and so this represents peeling back the layers of plaster and paint to reveal the base structure. The house face was originally photographed as part of a shoot to show the variance and similarities between houses within a certain geographic area, but I have realised that I can achieve the aim of that shoot whilst being able to add another element of contrast through contrasting the man-made building structures with the natural granite structures.
My 4th photographic shoot has been based around ‘water’. I categorized nature into 4 sections I would focus on photographing, water being one of them. Before my shoot, I have looked at photographers who incorporate water photography into their work, including Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Rinko Kawauchi. Hiroshi specializes in ‘seascapes’, an area of work focusing on the distinct horizon between sea and sky. On the other hand, Rinko looks at the sublime, including photographs of the water in her large collection of work. She uses the element of light to her advantage, something I have taken inspiration of in my photograph pictured below. I have captured the light hitting the water and glistening in the reflection. I photographed and video-captured this to show the movement of light and include motion in my imagery. I believe these primary sources represent the beauty of how light and water come together to explore the sublime.
2.
For the second part of my photographic study on water, I have looked at the source of habitat it provides in the environment to wildlife. As I am looking at variation of nature for my project, I thought it would be an interesting angle to look at the various ways in which water can be photographed; one way being as an element, another as a habitat and another as a form of patterns and abstraction.
3.
My final area of study is based around the patterns, form and abstract nature of water. The variety of images I have taken of water in the sea and reservoirs, show the interesting patterns, and shapes within the water. I have edited the photos into black and white to show resembelance to Sugimoto’s work, as well as highlighting the varying shades and tonal contrasts as a result of different white balance and lighting.
Using one of my photographs, I have created an edit in response to the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s. Like Hiroshi does with his photographs, I have separated the horizon from the sea with a distinct landscape line. Using Photoshop CC, I have filled in the top half of the photo with a pale grey colour to contrast with the black and white water.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is an example of an alternative landscape photographer. Sugimoto, born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory. His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures means Sugimoto has gained a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work. Sugimoto has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1994), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1995), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2003) and the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris (2004). His most recent exhibition, “Lost Human Genetic Archive”, is showing at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum from Sept. 3 – Nov. 13, 2016, incorporating selected images from Seascapes among others.
Seascapes
In 1980 he began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon, Seascapes, in locations all over the world, using an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of varying duration (up to three hours). The locations range from the English Channel and the Cliffs of Moher to the Arctic Ocean, from Positano, Italy, to the Tasman Sea and from the Norwegian Sea at Vesterålen to the Black Sea at Ozuluce in Turkey. The black-and-white pictures are all exactly the same size, split exactly in half by the horizon line. Sugimoto describes his vision of sky and water as a form of time travel.
“THE SEASCAPES ARE BEFORE HUMAN BEINGS AND AFTER HUMAN BEINGS.”
Tyrrhenian Sea Priano, 1994
Image analysis:
Hiroshi uses prolonged exposure times in order to produce flat and clean images in which the ocean has creases rather than ripples and waves. He freezes time, stills movement, and makes the seascape into an unrecognizable abyss. His use of contrasting light and dark explores the haunting concept of battle between life and death. His black and white photographs stand out from the works of other photographers in its use of natural light. Hiroshi’s work embraces shadows and forms. His photographs are left open to interpretation and make viewers question the notion of his work. As a photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto has a reputation for having some of the most impressive technical abilities.
“Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let’s just say that t here happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”
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.
The above image was a collection of over 50 images taken in portrait covering 360 degrees. I like how smooth this planet came to be and I think this is a very successful attempt at a Tiny Planet as an experiment. I plan to carry on a do a few more. This one in particular was at Les Landes in the fields of St Ouen, this captures the calm and peaceful environment of life in the West. My only dislike is the distortion in the middle however I do not thing there is anything I can do about that.
Grosnez
Again, the above image was a collection of over 50 images taken in portrait covering 360 degrees just like the Les Landes planet. This one was taken on the cliffs at Grosnez where you can see the castle. I would not really call this one particularly successful. Yes it is a tiny planet and it did what I wanted it to do however, due to the nature of the location and subject matter, the planet comes across as being very squished and distorted and makes the subject difficult to recognize and the planet looks very strange and I do not believe it captures the nature of the area.
In conclusion, I think the Les Landes planet was much better than the Grosnez one because I think being on cliffs/by the sea on the Grosnez planet stops the planet being smooth and more circular and makes the image look a bit messy and too distorted for my liking.
