Eadweard Muybridge was important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.
Producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He was a bridge between still photography and recorded movement.
Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment when a horse is trotting, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. After awhile he used a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results. By 1878 he was photographing horses in motion using batteries of cameras, their shutters triggered by the horse’s movement over trip wires. The results were a technical and conceptual breakthrough. In their published form, they laid out the span of time captured by the cameras as a sequence of stop-motion images unlike anything that had been seen before.
Seeking a means of sharing his groundbreaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.
This work reminds me of the artist Andy Warhol’s early work where he uses repetition as a device to alter our perception of a different type of society portrait, creating different variations of the same image.
In the early 1960s, he began a series of portraits of stars. He used photographic silkscreen printing to create his celebrity portraits. This meant he could directly reproduce images already in the public eye, such as publicity shots or tabloid photographs
To respond to this work I could also photograph something moving with a fast shutter speed to create a series of images of the same object. Similarly, I could take the same photo and create different variations in colour and appearance and display them together like Andy Warhol.
Bernhard “Bernd” Becher and Hilla Becher were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America. To create these works, the artists traveled to large mines and steel mills, and systematically photographed the major structures.
Bernd Becher’s first experiments in photography were in 1957 after studying painting and lithography , at which point he was already interested in functional buildings of industry and started documenting those that he had seen around his hometown of Siegen. Hilla studied photography in Germany and worked as an aerial photographer briefly. The couple met there that year, began collaborating, and married in 1961.
Water Towers 1931-2007,
Gas Tanks 1931-2007
Their black-and-white images served as visual case studies or typologies for industrial structures including water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories. Their work had a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white. Their photographs never included people.
They exhibited their work in sets or typologies, grouping of several photographs of the same type of structure. The are well known for presenting their images in grid formations.
They overlooked beauty and the relationship between form and function. Both subjects addressed the effect of industry on economy and the environment. “I became aware that these buildings [blast furnaces] were a kind of nomadic architecture which had a comparatively short life—maybe 100 years, often less, then they disappear,” the artists said of their work. “It seemed important to keep them in some way and photography seemed the most appropriate way to do that.”
Blast Furnaces Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher 1931-2007
Blast Furnaces 1969−95 comprises twenty-four gelatin silver print photographs taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher over a period of almost thirty years and printed in 2013 under the supervision of Hilla Becher. The prints are arranged in three rows of eight. The photographs were taken across a number of years andin different locations across Europe and the United States.
In addition to blast furnaces, the Bechers created a number of similar ‘typologies’ of industrial architecture, including Gas Tanks 1965–2009 (Tate P81237), Water Towers 1972–2009 (Tate P81238) and Winding Towers (Britain) 1966–97 (Tate P81239). Each of these typologies gathers work from across a number of decades, reflecting the consistency with which the Bechers worked from the start of their collaboration in 1959.
To achieve the ‘perfect chain’ described by the Bechers, each photograph was produced following exactly the same setup, using a large-format camera positioned to capture the form from one of three distinct perspectives (as a detail, in the context of its surroundings, or in its entirety) so as to take up the whole frame of the picture. The flat, neutral quality of the prints was achieved by working in shadowless lighting conditions. Working within these parameters allowed the artists to make consistent groups of ‘types’ irrespective of when the images were taken. In the 1950s and early 1960s the Bechers’ unmediated, dispassionate approach and taxonomical mode of presentation stood in stark contrast to the pictorialist aesthetic dominant in photography at the time, instead drawing on the attitudes of the interwar avant-garde movement Neue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity) and its photographic practitioners such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt.
In 1989 they described their attitude to photography as follows:
The particular strength of photography lies in an absolutely realistic recording of the world. This sets it apart from all other image media; photography can do this better than anything else. And the more precisely it depicts objects the stronger its magical effect on the observer. (Quoted in Lange 2007, p.189.)
I chose Bernd and Hilla Becher as research as I think their work links directly with the project variation and similarity. By creating different variations of the same objects they are highlighting the structures similarities as well as their differences. Also by displaying their work in a grid format allows for the audience to identify the differences more clearly which is an aspect I will take inspiration from. I also like how the same composition is used for each of the variations which is also something i will take inspiration from as I think it creates structured appearance. To respond to their work i plan to take photos of the same objects in different variations and display them together so they can be compared to one another. Although, I won’t be photographing industrial structures in my images but natural objects as variation in nature is a direction I would like to experiment with in my project.
I first wanted to explore the idea of repetition by creating a gif in Photoshop to generate ideas for my project. I chose the subject keys for my gif as everyone has them but with different variations in appearance i.e key shape, key chains. I thought by creating a gif showing different types of keys people have is a good way to represent the same object but in different variations.
To create the gif in Photoshop I chose >File>Load Files into a Stack> and chose all the images of the keys i had taken. I then selected all the layers and chose the speed i wanted the images to change.
GIF
Stands for “Graphics Interchange Format.” GIF is an image file format commonly used for images on the internet for sending images, especially moving images
I think that the limitations of creating is that you cannot see the movement in the image and only still objects if the timing of the images is slow, like the one I created above. Creating stop motion animations, if the timings were fast enough would create the appearance of movement which is something I could explore in my project. Another limitation when creating gifs is that it’s hard to create the same lighting in all the images which could make the gif look disorderly. I could also display gifs of different objects with more images than the one i may above to create more variation with a faster changes.
Early Works of Repetition
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol has redeployed repetition as a device to alter our perception of a different type of society portrait – a portrait of celebrity. Warhol used an assembly line of silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe as a metaphor for the loss of ‘self’ in the vicarious world of celebrity. Using silk-screening meant he could directly reproduce images already in the public eye, such as publicity shots or tabloid photographs. The technique also allowed him to easily produce multiple versions and variations of the prints.
He is known for his bright, colourful paintings and prints of subjects ranging from celebrities, to everyday products such as cans of soup. Marilyn Monroe 1962 is perhaps one of Warhol’s most iconic works. The work is made up of two canvases, each featuring 25 Marilyns printed in a grid pattern. The rows of repetitive heads suggest postage stamps, billboard posters or, perhaps more fittingly, film strips.
Warhol’s life and work simultaneously satirized and celebrated materiality and celebrity. On the one hand, his paintings of distorted brand images and celebrity faces could be read as a critique of what he viewed as a culture obsessed with money and celebrity. On the other hand, Warhol’s focus on consumer goods and pop-culture icons, as well as his own taste for money and fame, suggest a life in celebration of the very aspects of American culture that his work criticized.
My Interpretation of his Work
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Hiroshi Sugimoto
In 1980, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon. From the English Channel to the Arctic Ocean, from the Norwegian Sea to the Black Sea, Tokyo-born artist has travelled the world to capture marine landscapes and create abstract canvas. Each black and white photograph is of the same size and cut directly through the center by the horizon line.
“Every time I see the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.” says Sugimoto who describes his vision of sky and water as a form of time travel.
Sugimoto refers to his signature photographic style as “time exposure” experiments – playing with shutter speeds other photographers could never master. His goal through these “experiments” is to capture time through his images – creating time capsules that will last for eternity. Eternity is a constant focus of Sugimoto, who also worked on series that dealt with the issues of life and death – intrigued by the transience of human life.
Sugimoto has said that he draws much of his inspiration from sculpture artist Marcel Duchamp – famous for his sculpture of a urinal in the 1950s. Duchamp’s art dealt heavily with the Dadist movement of art. Sugimoto’s works are a unique combination of the Dadist movement as well as the Surrealist movement.
William Christenberry
William Christenberry was an American photographer and artist who was known for simple, richly coloured photographs of decaying buildings in Alabama’s rural Hale county. Christenberry was considered a pioneer of fine colour photography, and his work carries a strong sense of both place and the passage of time.
Christenberry showed Walker Evans some of his photographs, taken with a Brownie camera that Christenberry had been given when he was a child. He used the photographs at the time as guides for his paintings and sculptures, but Evans told him that the photographs were worthy of consideration as art.
Christenberry explores the effects of time on his boyhood home by choosing subjects such as buildings, signs, and found objects. Christenberry believes that all objects leave their individual mark on the landscape as time passes, even when the object is destroyed in reality.
Typology- Bernd and Hilla Becher
The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began working together in 1959 and married in 1961, are best known for their “typologies”—grids of black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure. The seemingly objective and scientific character of their project was in part a polemical return to the ‘straight’ aesthetics and social themes of the 1920s and 1930s in response to the sentimental subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early post-war period. They overlooked beauty and the relationship between form and function. Both subjects addressed the effect of industry on economy and the environment.
“I became aware that these buildings [blast furnaces] were a kind of nomadic architecture which had a comparatively short life—maybe 100 years, often less, then they disappear,” the artists said of their work. “It seemed important to keep them in some way and photography seemed the most appropriate way to do that.”
I think that Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work links to making gifs as they created series of images of the same objects in different areas. When making a gif I used different variation of the same obejct ‘keys’ aswell. Instead of displaying my work in a grid format though, i created a gif to only show image for a set amount of time.
During the first 11 years of her career, Ono moved among New York, Tokyo, and London, serving a pioneering role in the international development of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art. Her earliest works were often based on instructions that Ono communicated to viewers in verbal or written form. Though easily overlooked, the work radically questioned the division between art and the everyday by asking viewers to participate in its completion.
In the above video Cut Piece, Ono confronted issues of gender, class, and cultural identity by asking viewers to cut away pieces of her clothing as she sat quietly on stage.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon collaborated on a number of works, often in response to global politics and conflict. At the end of the decade, Ono’s collaborations with John Lennon, including Bed-In (1969) and the WAR IS OVER! if you want it (1969–) campaign, boldly communicated her commitment to promoting world peace.
“I think that conceptual art – it works in many ways. What I think it does the most is when it opens up things within people’s mind. And they will follow it and do something that is conceptual – but it would create reality in their life.”
Bruce Naumann: early video works
https://youtu.be/D6LppuVHlus
Bruce Nauman was one of the most prominent, influential, and versatile American artists to emerge in the 1960s. For more than 50 years Naumann has worked in every conceivable artistic medium, dissolving established genres and inventing new ones in the process. “I’ve always had overlapping ways of going about my work,” Bruce Nauman once remarked. “I’ve never been able to stick to one thing.”His expanded notion of sculpture admits wax casts and neon signs, bodily contortions and immersive video environments. Using his body to explore the limits of everday situations, Nauman explored video as a theatrical stage and a surveillance device within an installation context, blending ideas from conceptualism, minimalism, performance art, and video art.
Some of Nauman’s earliest work was shaped by ideas that arose in the wake of Minimalism in the late 1960s. In particular, the way he treated the body – often his own, shown on video completing repetitive tasks – and the way he related the body to surrounding objects show the impact of Minimalism’s new ideas about the relationship between the viewer and the sculptural object. Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s ideas about language have been an important influence on his work, shaping his interest in the way words succeed or fail in referring to objects in the world.
Much of Nauman’s work reflects the disappearance of the old modernist belief in the ability of the artist to express his ideas clearly and powerfully. Art, for him, is a haphazard system of codes and signs, just like any other form of communication. Aside from informing his use of words, it has also encouraged him to use “readymade” objects – objects that, unlike paintings or traditional sculptures, already carry meanings and associations from their use in the world – and to make casts of objects ranging from the space underneath chairs to human body parts.
Andy Warhol
In 1963 he acquired his first motion picture camera, a hand held 16mm Bolex, and shortly after he claimed an ‘abandoning’ of painting. Disingenuous this claim might have been but his expansion into filmmaking was no passing jaunt. Between 1964 and 1968 the artist was particularly prolific, producing literally hundreds of films of varying length and style. Nearly 650 films were produced, including hundreds of silent Screen Tests, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.”
Warhol’s films have been highly regarded for their radical explorations beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema. One such film, Empire 1964, his eight-hour, static-shot of New York’s most recognisable skyscraper, is included in the exhibition at Tate Liverpool.
Warhol began to take an interest in the avant-garde film in 1963 when it was at the height of the mythic stage. He quickly made himself familiar with the latest works of Brakhage, Markopoulos, Anger, and especially Jack Smith, who had a direct influence on him. On one level at least Warhol turned his genius for parody and reduction against the American avant-garde film itself.
The first film that he seriously engaged himself in was a monumental inversion of the dream tradition within the avant-garde film. His Sleep (1962) was no trance film or mythic dream but six hours of a man sleeping.
Planning Response
I plan on taking inspiration from these videos by producing my own video recordings of the same task everyday. I will then edit these recoding together so the video dress the theme repetition. I think by doing this I will develop more ideas for my project and will inspire me to produce more video responses. By recoding a task I do everyday will produce the same shot in different variations i.e. different lighting, compositions.
Dictionary of Water Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) is a series of fifteen large photo-lithographs of water, printed on white paper. Each of the images focuses on a small area of the surface of the river Thames. The colour and texture of these watery surfaces varies dramatically between images: colours range from black to blue and from dark green to khaki-yellow, and in each case the water’s texture is differently augmented by tidal movement and the play of light.
“The Thames has this incredible moodiness, and that’s what the camera picks up. [I]t has these vertical changes and it moves very quickly. It’s actually a very dangerous river and you sense that just by looking at it … [E]very photograph is wildly different – even though you could be photographing the same thing from one minute to the next. It’s almost got the complexity of a portrait.” (Quoted in ‘Roni Horn Interview: Water’)
Horn’s work, which has an emotional and psychological dimension, can be seen an engagement with post-Minimalist forms as containers for affective perception. She talks about her work being ‘moody’ and ‘site-dependent’. Her attention to the specific qualities of certain materials spans all mediums, from the textured pigment drawings, to the use solid gold or cast glass, and rubber.
Sigfried Hansen: Hold the Line
Street photography exploring colour, shapes, geometry
Siegfried Hansen traces visual compositions from graphics and colours and creates street photography the main point of which is not body’s or faces, but graphic connections and formal relations. It shows the aesthetics of coincidence in a public area, which is full of surprises.
Siegfried Hansen’s Hold the Line is a playful examination of the city as a graphic playground of color, line, and form. Filled with bold geometric images and brightly colored pages. The book’s key design elements echo the graphic content of the images and give it rhythmic presence. Color pages are interspersed throughout, accentuating the bold colors that dot the city and contrasting the city’s monochromatic stone.
While people are present, this work is not entirely about the dynamism of the street and its inhabitants in a way that typifies classic street photography. Instead, it is about the city as a graphic force and how it not only shapes the way we move, but also frames what we see.
I chose this photographer to look at to generate ideas as his work reminds me of the photos I produced in the ‘Future of St Helier’ project where i focused on bold lines and bright colours. Looking at this photographer in this project could develop the style of work I was producing then, looking at industrial structures and the shapes they make to address the theme of variation and similarity in buildings.
Li Hui
Li Hui is a young Chinese photographer based in the city of Hangzhou, capital of the province of Zhejiang, China. Since 2009 she has used photography to see a different world and get the courage to “explore things her own way.” Her images are a blissful mix of sensuality and purity that disclose a unique artistic sensibility. She expresses her feelings through her sensitive personality. Mostly influenced by cinema, music, nature and human body, this photographer keeps learning by experimenting the ideas that cross her mind.
The “leit-motif” in your work seems to be sensuality (through light, details and feminine lines). What motivates you to capture this subject and what do you want to say through it?
“I have a great interest in simply observing, I can be very quiet just looking at the sky, the water, a plant, or an animal for hours. I would like to motivate myself more to shoot this themes because they are just all around me. ” I am mostly inspired by my natural surroundings, such as the patterns of a flower, the shape of the trees after a strong wind, thick clouds in the sky before a storm, the rain hitting the ground, the sun and the way its rays shine on my hand and the palm of my hand becomes transparent. I am touched by these subtle things. “- Li Hui
“I think watching films is a way to improve the overall aesthetic of my work. But music can also evoke images that float around in my head. Different types of music have different associations.”
She doesn’t show her models faces in her photos as she wants the viewer to find their own feelings and experiences in them. She says it’s ‘interesting to hear different opinions and what different people take away from the pictures’, leaving the story up to the viewers imagination. What people take away from an image depends on their personality and their own background.
I particularly liked this photographer when I came across her work as I liked how she focused on beauty in landscape and her use of movement and light. If I were to take inspiration from her in my project I would focus on producing images that looked at light and delicate shapes that expressed a specific emotion.
Rinko Kawauchi
Rinko Kawauchi’s 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.
Her attention to small gestures and coincidental details enables her to cast a gaze of enchantment upon her daily surroundings that is always fresh and new. With her camera, she captures elementary and casual moments, all with the same passionate concentration. Rinko Diary is a visual diary that includes photographs of everything from sandwiches and Patti Smith to the poignant butterfly/flower/leaf set against a concrete pavement.
I like this photographer and think I will take inspiration from her in my project as I like how she portrays casual moments with a lot of meaning. I also like how she views nature in her photos, emphasising the sunlight and beauty. She ‘creates compelling portraits of everyday life, rendering the mundane as sublime through her lens’ (ignant.com) which is an aspect I would like to interpret. Her works radiates a sense of fragility and emotion.
Texture photography stands out from different types of this medium as the focus of photographers is put on the textural aspect of it. The quality of each photo is measured by its impact, and this type of photography can be defined as imagery which impact depends on the texture of the represented subject.
Texture can stand for surface irregularities or small forms on a surface that are sometimes rendered visible through the optical enlargement of details. While the aim of each photo is to attract the attention of the viewers, this could be achieved through the emphasis of different elements such as color, leading lines, dramatic scenery, or in this case texture.
Three sub-types of texture photography can be defined through the use of terms detail, information, and drama. In the first, interesting details on the surface of an object are of primary concern for the photographer, drama relies on the dramatic effects, as the term itself suggests, and for information it is important to select what info is communicated through the photo and to make a compositional decision that would best bring it out.
Patterns and Shadows
Filling the frame with a repetitive pattern can give the impression of size and large numbers. The key to this is to attempt to zoom in close enough to the pattern that it fills the frame. Patterns can be found virtually anywhere, although some of the easiest ones to identify occur in nature. Architectural design offers a great source of patterns, especially in mirrored high-rise buildings. Compositional considerations such as the Rule of Thirds, leading lines, balance, and framing usually don’t apply when shooting patterns.
The other common use of repetition in photography is to capture the interruption of the flow of a pattern. Broken repetition might include adding a contrasting object (color, shape, texture) or removing one of the repeating objects.
Body and Patterns
The human body is central to how we understand facets of identity such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. People alter their bodies, hair, and clothing to align with or rebel against social conventions and to express messages to others around them. Many artists explore gender through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process. Portraying body and pattern could challenge the notion that the female in art is an”object,” rather than its, subject, viewer, or creator.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of social upheavals in the United States and Europe, significant among them the fight for equality for women with regards to sexuality, reproductive rights, the family, and the workplace. Around this time, the body took on another important role as a medium with which artists created their work. In performance art, a term coined in the early 1960s as the genre was starting to take hold, the actions an artist performs are central to the work of art. For many artists, using their bodies in performances became a way to both claim control over their own bodies and to question issues of gender.
Dictionary of Water
