Concept: To capture subjects casually in a social setting, inspired by Paul Graham’s “End of an Age” project.
Lighting: Two portable LED floodlights giving out artificial light to show the subject from different angles. I may choose to use only one when creating shadows on the face.
Props: I will cover the portable lights with blue colour gels, using tape to stick them down, in order to create blue light. In future shoots, I will experiment with other colour gels including red and green
Location: Social occasion at friend’s house
Camera Settings: Raised exposure for low-light situations, Small aperture to allow in more light, I will experiment with shutter speed to produce moving images and still images
In End of an Age, British photographer Paul Graham captures the threshold moments that mark the ending of adolescence, the small slice of time between youthful indulgence and the emerging awareness of adult responsibilities. His photographs resonate between these two poles: between full-on consciousness and escape; between seeing the world with shocking clarity and the desire to hide oneself from that reality. It is a situation that each of knows and remembers all too well, a traumatic time. And it is often the threshold of a profound psychological transformation.
“It is a time when things are deeply felt, when you appear to see things very clearly, sometimes with brilliant intensity, and you believe passionately in what you can achieve, but then you also have to escape from that, to let go, to unburden yourself…The visual duality of the work reflects that duality in life – between the power of stone-cold reality and the need to escape that: get drunk, turn away, close your eyes, get stoned.” – In an interview with the author of ‘Paul Graham’ published by steidlMACK
The photographs alternate between ultra-sharp direct flash images where every detail is minutely recorded, and the opposite extreme, with loose available-light photographs, saturated with colour, blurred and sometimes poorly focused. These compelling colour images are portraits in the fullest sense – images that seek to reflect on the inner self through our material presence.
When he made the pictures for End of An Age Graham was between 39 and 42 years old, whereas the young people in his pictures were around 17 to 27. His work looks back at the pleasures and discomforts of youth now consigned to the past. Although some appear to be photographed in social situations (the lighting often suggests clubs and bars), the exact locations, individually and collectively, are deliberately withheld.
“I think it’s better that I withhold the location. Anyone can see that these are young, white, First-World westerners, but beyond that, it’s best to keep it non-specific and more universal. The minute I say that these pictures were taken in Stockholm or wherever, everyone will say “Oh, so this is how young Swedes are today,” or “It’s a portrait of young Sweden,” and that’s not the point. I want them to go far beyond any national identity. It’s not Stockholm and it’s not a documentary about young Swedes. It could be anywhere from Germany to Ireland, to the UK, to Spain, to parts of the US.” – in ‘I Blame Elvis’, an interview with Jenefer Winters.
Surprisingly, Graham did not use colour filters for the pictures: “the colour casts come from the available lighting…red or ultra-violet, yellow or green, just whatever light is there, uncorrected.” Subjects also appear to move through a gradual 360-degree turn, a dance-like spin or pirouette. This hints at the question of what is being hidden, the pressures of coming to adulthood and the feelings associated with change itself.
Image Analysis
This image depicts a young woman with her face angled, as if looking off into the distance. It is unclear if the photo is staged, or candid, yet the emotion on her face still comes through. Graham composes this image to feature negative space across the right side, this suggests the nightlife environment as she is surrounded in colour. The left side of her face becomes blurred into the background, as her youth becomes associated with this atmosphere.
The colour is not overwhelming as it is not highly saturated nor highly contrasted. This allows the viewer to recognise and relate with the subject’s facial cues.
End of an age evolved from an idea Graham had in 1995 based around a common photographic ‘mistake’, the red-eye reflection so familiar from amateur snapshots. His book opens and closes with images that embrace these ‘errors’: extreme close-ups of young peoples faces with glowing red orbs floating against rough-grained skin tones. He achieves this grain in his images by using highly sensitive ISO’s.
In a way, Graham is using a documentary approach to showcase the lifestyles of the youth, yet he does this in a more minimalistic style, choosing not to present the environment, leaving the emotional strain of growing up to be shown through the facial distinctions on his subjects faces. The relationship he has with these subjects is interesting due to the age gap, signifying the strong difference between the life of the youth and the older generations.
“I was in this city on and off for two years and some of these people became good friends of mine who I know very well and remain in contact with. These people I photographed many times over, whereas others are complete strangers who happened to be standing by me, and I took a picture, and I’ve simply no idea who they are.”
Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud believed that people could be cured by making conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations, thus gaining insight. The aim of psychoanalysis therapy is to release repressed emotions and experiences, i.e., make the unconscious conscious. It is only having a cathartic (i.e., healing) experience can the person be helped and “cured.”
Psychoanalysis Assumptions
Psychoanalytic psychologists see psychological problems as rooted in the unconscious mind.
Manifest symptoms are caused by latent (hidden) disturbances.
Typical causes include unresolved issues during development or repressed trauma.
Treatment focuses on bringing the repressed conflict to consciousness, where the client can deal with it.
How can we understand the unconscious mind?
Psychoanalysis is commonly used to treat depression and anxiety disorders. In psychoanalysis (therapy) Freud would have a patient lie on a couch to relax, and he would sit behind them taking notes while they told him about their dreams and childhood memories. Due to the nature of defence mechanisms and the inaccessibility of the deterministic forces operating in the unconscious, psychoanalysis in its classic form is a lengthy process often involving 2 to 5 sessions per week for several years.
This approach assumes that the reduction of symptoms alone is relatively inconsequential as if the underlying conflict is not resolved, more neurotic symptoms will simply be substituted. The analyst typically is a ‘blank screen,’ disclosing very little about themselves in order that the client can use the space in the relationship to work on their unconscious without interference from outside.
Images from my visit to the Freud Museum in London, including Sigmund Freud’s famous “Psychoanalytic Couch”
Psychoanalysts use various techniques to develop insight into their clients behaviour and the meanings of symptoms, including ink blots, parapraxes, free association, interpretation (including dream analysis), resistance analysis and transference analysis.
– Rorschach ink blots:
The ink blot itself doesn’t mean anything, it’s ambiguous (i.e., unclear). It is what you read into it that is important. Different people will see different things depending on what unconscious connections they make. The ink blot is known as a projective test as the patient ‘projects’ information from their unconscious mind to interpret the ink blot.
– Freudian Slip:
Unconscious thoughts and feelings can transfer to the conscious mind in the form of parapraxes, popularly known as Freudian slips or slips of the tongue. We reveal what is really on our mind by saying something we didn’t mean to. An example of this is where a person may call a friend’s new partner by the name of a previous one, whom they liked better.
Freud believed that slips of the tongue provided an insight into the unconscious mind and that there were no accidents, every behavior (including slips of the tongue) was significant (i.e., all behavior is determined).
– Free Association:
A simple technique of psychodynamic therapy, is free association, in which a patient talks of whatever comes into their mind. This technique involves a therapist reading a list of words (e.g.. mother, childhood, etc.) and the patient immediately responds with the first word that comes to mind. It is hoped that fragments of repressed memories will emerge in the course of free association.
Freud reported that his free associating patients occasionally experienced such an emotionally intense and vivid memory that they almost relived the experience. This is like a “flashback” from a war or a rape experience. Such a stressful memory, so real it feels like it is happening again, is called an abreaction. If such a disturbing memory occurred in therapy or with a supportive friend and one felt better–relieved or cleansed–later, it would be called a catharsis.
– Dream Analysis:
According to Freud the analysis of dreams is “the royal road to the unconscious.” He argued that the conscious mind is like a censor, but it is less vigilant when we are asleep. As a result, repressed ideas come to the surface – though what we remember may well have been altered during the dream process.
As a result, we need to distinguish between the manifest content and the latent content of a dream. The former is what we actually remember. The latter is what it really means. Freud believed that very often the real meaning of a dream had a sexual significance and in his theory of sexual symbolism he speculates on the underlying meaning of common dream themes.
Concept: To produce Sherry-esque images in photoshop using landscape and portrait images
Procedure: I have learnt that there are a variety of techniques in producing the strong sense of colour in images. In this response, I will experiment with using overlays over existing images, using colours that relate to the image as well as colours that contrast. To do this, I must:
Step 1: Convert image to greyscale by going Image>Mode>Greyscale.
Step 2: Go to Image>Mode>Duotone
Step 3: In Duotone, choose “monotone” under the dropdown menu.
Step 4: Click the colour swatch for the colour I want to use
David Benjamin Sherry is an American photographer and avid darkroom printer who is challenging and reinvigorating the American Western landscape tradition among other classic genres of photography. His work revolves around interests in the analog film process, environmentalism, color, mysticism, abstraction, human connectedness in the digital age, minimalism and queer politics, and he ultimately aims to reexamine the history of photography. He’s best known for his iconic monochromatic darkroom printed landscapes, a project born from his love of the outdoors and the protected natural landscapes of North America. Eventually these interests developed into new projects, raising deeper concerns for the rapidly changing environment, while continuing to sustain his queer sensibility in the hetero-male dominated canon of photography. Part-archeologist and part-futurist, Sherry uses a large format 8×10 film camera in order to reflect and contemplate our place within the contemporary American landscape.
Muley Point I, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah, Monuments, 2018
The revivification and radicalization of the colonial, heteronormative history of American landscape photography—which, ironically, is gorgeous and irresistibly romantic—is David Benjamin Sherry’s modus operandi in Monuments, eight photographs that feature scenes from the National Monuments threatened by the Trump administration. By celebrating and honoring the environmental ethic, kinship with wilderness, and formal mastery of pre-digital, film-based, darkroom photography popularized by Edward Weston, Minor White, Ansel Adams, and Robert Adams, Sherry keeps this heroic tradition alive by communing with far-flung forests and deserts to locate compositions that he transforms into sublime images. But his relationship to the forefathers stops there; his practice conceptually centers itself in education and rejection of perpetuating the corrupt political history of the American West, whose legends of freedom are fabricated from stolen lands which have been “consistently raped, abused, and destroyed,” as Sherry says.
The politics in this exhibition cannot be denied. This series features images of the Trump administration’s final list of National Monuments whose protected status will be illegally violated and “scaled down” to be sold in interest of coal, uranium mining, and oil drilling. While some photographs depict areas slated for imminent development (Muley Point I, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah, 2018), some portray areas that may not be immediately at risk (Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, New Mexico, 2018). In selecting this suite of images, Sherry preferred to openly commemorate the experience of visiting these remote, sacred, ecologically significant places, by choosing to “embody the whole monument” and embracing awareness of, “what’s safe today may not be safe tomorrow.” Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou, Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Nevada’s Gold Butte—one gets lost in each image and can physically feel space, vertigo, silence, geological force, weather conditions, and time of day. This is due, in part, to large-format printing and a large-format camera – an 8×10 whose generous negatives can pack more information than high-resolution digital images. But it’s also the result of Sherry’s reverence to place: revisiting his favorite cottonwood tree five times over various seasons or returning to the Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument over the course of ten years. Adoration and awe are media as much as photography itself for Sherry, who started his photographic exploration of National Parks in 2007 after the death of a close friend to seek the “eternal life around us,” his best photos strike a “quiet equation… that record light over landscape to define form and to find beauty.”
The monochrome printing process Sherry has developed is very much his own — he developed this after mastering “natural or straight” color printing. This process was achieved through the study of color theory and understanding the powerful effect color can have on a viewer. After spending years devoted to black and white photography, Sherry created the monochrome color in his work, as a parallel to the black and white process while even incorporating the zone system. Sherry creates a monochrome hue by using varying degrees on the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow dials on his enlarger, he pushes the color without losing image quality, to achieve the hue that he has actually “pre-visualized” at the moment the photo was taken. Sherry has amassed an archive of color test strips as a kind of reference guide for the system he’s developed for conveying an emotional response, a mood and a tone. For Sherry, monochrome color and black-and-white photography are siblings, because of their “abstraction from reality by highlighting form, light and composition.”
Although humans are absent in these photos, queer narrativity is built into both the process and product via Sherry’s own queer subjectivity. With this environmental work, Sherry aims to disrupt prevailing, institutionally-entrenched understandings of nature and sexuality. Sherry aligns his views with eco-feminism and believes that the destruction of our planet stems from the oppressive forces of the white male hegemony, and that those forces have acted violently against Mother Earth and will continue to do so unless we begin to think differently about our relationship to the Earth and to women and all “others.” Hetero-cis-white male forces, who have controlled our land for centuries, have knowingly forced the ghettoization of these minorities in urban areas, while they control and violate the natural world at will.
Additionally, Sherry considers travel for these pictures to be a tool in understanding the queer experience in mainstream society, as he navigates solo through rural spaces and communities not traditionally considered “safe” for queer people, and is faced with his “otherness” everywhere he goes. “The photo is a vehicle for talking about identity,” says Sherry. By co-opting the formal language and traditional practices of his forefathers while imbuing his finished product with his queer aesthetic and agenda, Sherry presents us with a radical new perspective of the West.
So, while these photographs grapple with grim and angering political circumstance, they paradoxically exude an adventurous, near-psychedelic joie de vivre through his use of color and form: they represent liberation, independence, resistance, and self-determination; American qualities that we supposedly hold dear, but which are constantly imperiled as the land itself. Interconnectedness between identity and the earth becomes Sherry’s poetic call for liberation from the patriarchal power structure that has controlled and abused our public lands for millenia. “With the continued destruction of our planet, we as a society are losing grasp of our deep co-dependence with the earth, and as that connection disintegrates, the key to our survival as a species has also begun to fall apart. Unless we all take action, we are only hastening our own demise.”
Rio Grande Gorge, Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, New Mexico, Monuments, 2018
Extensions and Dimensions, Point Lobos, California (for Edward Weston), Climate Vortex Sutra, 2014 Traditional Color Darkroom Photograph, 90 × 70 inches
3 Suns Rose Before Me, Birth in Futureverse, Traditional Color Photograph, 30 x 40 inchesSpectral Green Star Machine, Birth in Futureverse Traditional Color Photograph, 30 x 40 inchesStand With Your Lover On The Ending Earth, Birth in Futureverse, Traditional Color Photograph, 72 x 91.5 inches
Image Analysis:
All Matterings of Mind Equal One Violet, Birth in Futureverse, Traditional Color Photograph, 30 x 40 inches
David Benjamin Sherry captures a seascape in natural daylight, he uses a deep depth of field to capture it entirely in clarity. However, there is a subtle blur due to the sea spray, this covers the land as it disappears into the distance. The purple colour comes in the printing process, where Sherry achieves a range of tones by exposing different areas at different levels. Because of this, the image appears to reach out with a 3D effect in areas where the purple colour is stronger.
Sherry reflects the use of colour in the title of the series, ‘Birth in Futureverse’, obviously believing the World is colourful and that colour represents the differences between us.
Concept: To capture mushrooms in the style of Alexander Mourant’s ‘Aurelian’. Mushrooms often symbolise fertility due to their phallus-like shape, they represent growth because of their fungal properties.
Lighting: Artificial lighting as I will capture the mushrooms when it is dark. I will wait till after it has rained as the environment will be damp, giving a humid effect. Organisms living in the environment will also reveal themselves due to the moisture of the rain.
Flash needed when experimenting with the gels.
Camera Settings: I will experiment by using the gels over the flash to change the colour of the lighting, as well as placing the gels over the lens.
Props: Pink, Yellow and Green gels. The pink and yellow gels are more subtle giving the image a soft blur. I will also use a green gel as the colour is commonly associated with nature.
Alexander Mourant was born in Jersey, Channel Islands in 1994. Having studied at Bryanston School he progressed to BA (Hons) Photography at Falmouth University, graduating in July 2017. Alexander has exhibited a variety of work, most notably with CCA Galleries, Mall Galleries and in a duo show with Andy Hughes RCA held at the Royal Geographical Society in London, May – June 2017. His practice revolves around the continuous nature of experience, largely in a response to his time spent in Africa and Japan.
“The world is blue at its edges and its depths.” – Rebecca Solnit
Aomori, 2017
In Aomori, Alexander Mourant consistently uses the colour blue, inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s words in The Blue of Distance. For Solnit, the blue world embodies distances we can never quite arrive in. The colour blue — formed through fluctuating atmospheric conditions — creates for her, and many others, a great immaterial and metaphorical plane.
In Japan, where the series was captured, followers of Shinto – an ancient and sacred religion – place a strong belief in Kami. Kami are essentially spirits. Through diligently conducted religious and spiritual ceremonies, present day Japan connects through the Kami to their ancient past. The Japanese believe that Kami pervade every aspect of life. They live in the fabric of reality; rocks, trees, plants, waterfalls, even mountains contain Kami. Kodama are the spirits found in the forest, living in certain species of trees. They are the very being of the forest. Upon researching this extensive spiritual belief, Mourant realised that Japan had strong metaphysical potential and was an ideal site for his work.
The colour in his images comes from sourced blue glass from a church window, which was then cut to size to fit the filter holder of his camera. Mourant’s aim was to introduce this colour into the process, by exposing film directly to the blue world. With this, the photographs are given a body, a soul almost, in which we could experience from the image itself, bringing Solnit’s blue of distance near, into the world of the forest; they are by process, forever blue.
Aurelian, 2016 – 2017
Alexander’s family has lived and farmed in Jersey for generations, so a relationship to landscape, space and experience is embedded in his psychology. This rural upbringing influenced his photographic sensibility.
‘Aurelian’ explores the interior space of British butterfly houses. These artificial environments are used throughout the work to probe the nature of experience, as an envisioned idea where time is not absolute, but continuously contained and all encompassing. By employing cultural objects and contemporary abstraction, the work holds a dynamic tension — questioning one’s spatial sense — stimulated through colour, form and materiality. In hindsight, Aurelian was a body of work necessary to incubate further creative ideas and, most importantly, it triggered a deeper understanding of the intricacies of photography.
The work draws from a variety of personal sources, but most importantly, Alexander’s four month sojourn through the heart of Africa.
Image Analysis
Waterfall I, 2017
Alexander captures the movement of a waterfall through a slow shutter speed, the softness of the water metaphorically represents the spiritual history of Japan. Before travelling to Japan, he conducted digital tests with the blue glass in order to find the ideal exposure time. However, it didn’t tell of how the process would translate to film.
Mourant acknowledged that shooting with the blue glass is almost like shooting in black and white, where he required bright natural sunlight in order to still capture the details of the trees and rocky face. The image is composed to look up at the waterfall, indicating the importance of this spiritual relationship that Japan has with nature. Alexander leaves negative space at the top of the image, where the forest joins with the heavens.
“the spiritual history of the process seeps through into the image, to a time when the land was a place of worship”.
The immensity found in the colour blue, encourages a deeper reflection on the past, present and future. In the same way, the presence of the forest and the density of its nature arrests the relentless progression of time, where the canopy of the trees shelter those below from gently falling light.
Artistically, Alexander’s influence is varied, but his process finds its roots in the 1960s land art movement being that he is interested in the material and psychological effects of organics, climate and geography. A key idea that resonates in both Aomori and Aurelian is “The Art of Pilgrimage” as described by writer Michael Kimmelman. To visit is to invest months of planning, submit applications and await approval, followed by long car journeys into the remote desert or jungle. This idea of a pilgrimage to a site becomes very relevant as each project attempts to depict a place between imagination and reality with metaphor.
After further research, I have realised the strong connection between psychology and colour and therefore will associate psychological theories and therapies to my work.
In particular, Freud’s psychoanalysis theory which deals with curing people of their traumatic experiences and anxieties by making conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations.
This also links to the particular treatments that Freud used including the famous Rorschach test and dream analysis.
