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Focusing on movement sequences – Shoot 1
Monthly Archives: April 2019
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SHOOT 3 – CLOUDSCAPES
The 3rd category of my nature study is cloudscapes. From previously researching Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivelents and John Day’s photographs for inspiration, I have taken my own photos in response to the artists. In response to Stieglitz, I have captured heavy cloudscapes in times of bad / stormy weather in order to emphasize the dramatic sky like he focused on in Equivalents. John Day approaches cloudsacapes in a complete opposite visual style, with heavy saturation and colour enhancement in order to present the rich and varying colours of the sky above.
PRIMARY SOURCE:
Gallery visit – Research
CCA Gallery – Behind the Lens
Behind the lens was an expedition that focused on 1960s-70s Britain. This included pop culture, counter pop culture, sexual revolution and rock documentary. The expedition was by Mike McCartney, Rupert Truman and Carinthia West. The main focus of the gallery was on street photography style images were the subject didn’t know the image was going to be taken. The images captured the raw moments of music artists such as Paul McCartney working in there natural environment. The gallery also had images which were going to used as album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd.
Public and private – Pop Icons
Exhibiting artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Peter Blake, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, Eduardo Paolozzi, Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones. The gallery focused on British and American Pop artists showing there work. Emerging in the mid 1950’s in Britain and late 1950’s in America, Pop Art reached its peak in the 1960’s and went on to become the most recognisable art form of the 20th century. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be.
Public and private – Being Human
The final exhibition we visited focused on female artwork. Being Human is an all-female art exhibition. The gallery holding the exhibition thought an all-female showcase needed to happen locally when they read the “Tate appears to have a 30% cap on the collection of female artists, with its allocation of annual budget is even worse, with as little as 13% spent on works by female artists in recent years.”
Blake was commissioned by Dodo Designs to produce an enamel plaque that was issued in an edition of 10,000 and sold for £1. Due to a fault in the enameling process the work was eventually screen printed onto tin. Babe Rainbow was a fictional lady wrestler, the reverse of the work featured her biography. This was favorite artwork from all three exhibitions as I thought it best depicted its chosen art style which in this case was pop art. The artwork reminds me somewhat of a poster the way there is central figure in the image and the bold text writing.
Gallery Visits
CCA Gallery – Hill St
The CCA had an exhibition on musical links to photography, for example to top two images here are Biffy Clyro album covers. I really liked the bottom left image, it goes well with my circles topic but also it is very eye catching and well constructed.
Private Public Gallery
This was my first time to the Private Public gallery and I noticed that the work seemed more contemporary than the CCA’s. It was mostly art rather than photography but there were photographs around, whether they be manipulated physically or digitally. One image that interested me was the bottom left about Lily Langtree. Lily was a model/actress in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s from Jersey. She had a global fan base and this image was supposed to be the draft print for a postcard but it was so good that hey kept it. The artist has blown it up and digitally manipulated it slightly and printed it. The image on the top right was pop art and is of a woman who was a boxer or wrestler (something like that) and was able to easily beat men at their own game. The image is aimed to represent women as strong and able to be better than men at things women are stereotyped not to be able to do.
Final two weeks before EXAM!
Work to be done by Tue 7 May (First day of Exam)
PHOTO-SHOOTS: If you still need to produce more images that you must complete your shoots ASAP to allow time for further post-production and editing.
EDITING: Make a rough edit of shoots (you can come into school and work on classroom computers or alternatively download a 30 day free trial of Lightroom/ Photoshop from Adobe. Click here for more details.
EVALUATE: What went well? how can you improve/ develop work from here? Describe visual/contextual links with research, artists references, exam theme. Analyse your best two images following method: TECHNICAL – VISUAL – CONTEXTUAL – CONCEPTUAL
FINAL OUTCOMES: Consider what your final outcomes will be and how to present them ie. single images or a series of images, diptych, or triptychs, grids etc.
PHOTOBOOKS: For those who wants to make a photobook – begin to make a selection of images – think about narrative and sequencing (what is the story you want to communicate and how you are going to do it in a series of images).
RESEARCH: Support book design with research and analysis of at least one other photobook by other photographers. Follow these steps here in your understanding of design, concept and narrative.
BLOG POSTS: Go through all your blog posts and make sure that you have completed them all to your best ability, e.g. good use of images/ illustrations, annotation of processes/ techniques used, analysis/ evaluation of images and experimentation. Remember to MAKE YOUR BLOG POST VISUAL andinclude relevant, links, podcasts, videos where possible.
To achieve a top marks we need to see a coherent progression of quality work from start to finish following these steps:
RESEARCH > ANALYSIS > PLANNING > RECORDING > DEVELOPING > EXPERIMENTING > PRESENTING > EVALUATING
CLOUDSCAPES
Cloudscape photography is photography of clouds or sky. An early cloudscape photographer, Belgian photographer Léonard Misonne (1870–1943), was noted for his black and white photographs of heavy skies and dark clouds. In the early to middle 20th century, American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) created a series of photographs of clouds, called “equivalents” (1925–1931). According to an essay on the series at the Phillips Collection website, “A symbolist aesthetic underlies these images, which became increasingly abstract equivalents of his own experiences, thoughts, and emotions”. More recently, photographers such as Ralph Steiner, Robert Davies and Tzeli Hadjidimitriou have been noted for producing such images.
Equivalents
In the summer of 1922, Alfred Stieglitz began to take photographs of clouds, tilting his hand camera towards the sky to produce dizzying and abstract images of their ethereal forms. In an article the following year, Stieglitz maintained that these works were a culmination of everything he had learned about photography in the previous forty years:
“THROUGH CLOUDS I WANTED TO PUT DOWN MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE—TO SHOW THAT MY PHOTOGRAPHS WERE NOT DUE TO SUBJECT MATTER—NOT TO SPECIAL TREES, OR FACES, OR INTERIORS, TO SPECIAL PRIVILEGES, CLOUDS WERE THERE FOR EVERYONE—NO TAX AS YET ON THEM—FREE.”
Over the next eight years, he made some 350 cloud studies, largely produced as contact prints on gelatin silver postcard stock. Stieglitz called these photographs Equivalents. More than describing the visible surfaces of things, the works could express pure emotion, paralleling the artist’s own inner state. Stieglitz, along with many of the artists of his circle, argued that visual art could assume the same nonrepresentational, emotionally evocative qualities as music. Indeed, music was an inspiration for the Equivalents, and this is reflected in the early titles he gave them: Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs (1922) and Songs of the Sky (1923). Stieglitz did not limit himself to clouds, or allusions to music, in these photographs: one notable work, Spiritual America, shows a close-up of the nether regions of a harnessed gelding (a castrated male horse), the image serving as a metaphor for the artist’s impression of a diminished American culture in the same way that his depictions of clouds represented his emotions. Stieglitz often presented the Equivalents in series or sets, recombining different groupings of prints for exhibition.
The Cloudman
The “Cloudman“, Dr. John A. Day, is a professor emeritis from Linfield College, in Oregon, USA, who taught meteorology for over forty years and who has a great passion for sharing the wonder of clouds. Now in his nineties, he continues to write, teach, and inspire people of all ages, around the world. His photography and writings are found in international publications and museums, and are used by artists, musicians, teachers, and many other cloud lovers. In 1962 he was granted a Faculty Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to study Cloud Physics at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, England. In 1971 he returned to England, this time on sabbatical leave, for intensive study of the History of Cloud Classification, focusing on the work of Luke Howard, England’s first meteorologist. Day’s interest in clouds was first of a technical nature, learning to forecast their appearance and development. Studies of clouds in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s were directed toward gaining a fuller understanding of the physical causes that led to the formation of particular cloud types. In this period he started photographing clouds which led to an extensive collection of photographs. In later years his focus of interest has shifted form technical to artistic, and through the medium of photography, he attempts day by day to capture the beauty and majesty seen in the cloud forms that grace the sky. His photographs are rich in colour and greatly differ from the works of Alfred Stieglitz’.
MANY SKIES ARE SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL TO BEHOLD. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO SAY IT. SHEER BEAUTY! THE COMBINATION OF FORM, POSITION, GRADATIONS OF LIGHT AND SHADOW, AND EVEN COLOR IN THE LATE EVENING AND EARLY MORNING HOURS IS PLEASING TO THE EYE, AND STIRS AN INNER SENSE THAT CAUSES ONE TO BREATHE AN INAUDIBLE, “AHH, THE GREAT ARTIST AT WORK!”
