After doing some research into the the Disposable Camera Project, I decided that I wanted to take on this idea for myself. Because I know when using a film camera the quality and style of image can change dramatically and create variation. What I did like about using the disposable camera was that there is only one setting so I didn’t have to worry about the camera, so I could focus on what I was taking images of. However because you are not able to look back you can end up take photos of the same things twice, which is a problem because you have a limit of 30 shots before the camera runs out.

What I found when I got back the camera was that many of the images that I had taken were out of focus and not any good really, and overall the quality of the images from this shoot are nowhere close to what you would achieve on a regular digital camera. And shooting on film camera is very expensive the camera cost me about six pounds and then to get the images developed cost my about seven pounds so for how much the process cost I don’t think that it is worth it.

Below are the 14 images that I got back from the camera that could be useful for the project, the rest of the images in the project where to out of focus and not up to the standard of anything that I would want to use. I wanted to do this project to see the variation and difference that using a a film camera would crete over a regular camera. But looking back at these images now due to the quality and the lack of control there is when taking the images I not think that I will use any type of film camera in this project.

William Eggleston born in Memphis in 1939 and is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium.  Since the early 1960s, William Eggleston used color photographs to describe the cultural transformations in Tennessee and the rural South. He registers these changes in scenes of everyday life, such as portraits of family and friends, as well as gasoline stations, cars, things that wee see everyday but never top to apreacte the beauty in these things. Switching from black and white to color in 1956 which then colour transparency became his dominant medium.

The book ‘William Eggleston At Zenith’ was created in 2013. He describes his book as“my childhood and adulthood escapes unexpectedly met each other.” 

In an interview by Shahrzad Kamel from ASX magazine William Eggleston describes the book in a lot of detail and goes into the meaning behind it. Within the interview he talks about how he use to lie on the grass as a child and stare up at the sky while forgetting everything. He describes how he watched them move for hours while raising his hands to the sky. He says, “I wished I could touch them, I would dream of riding away on one; imaginary transportation to another universe.” The book contains abstract images of the sky and moving clouds. Although the concept is relatively simple, the meaning and spiritual connotations behind the idea is very powerful. Eggleston wanted his images to be artistic, and to resemble paintings and well as photographic images.

At first I didn’t like this project as I thought that the concept was very simple and the images would be very similar to each other and therefore boring. But I actually really like the simplicity of the images. The contrasting with the white is very eye catching for the viewer, which is something that I want to focus on doing throughout my project. The images are abstract but yet anybody even if they aren’t used to abstract work in photography they will be able to understand and appreciate the images. When he presented this project the environment was plain white which made the images stand out a lot more as the blue is contrasting to the white.

My response to ‘William Eggleston At Zenith’

I took these images whilst I was doing a separate shoot, as I wasn’t focusing that much on getting these image, this is why I don’t really like these images. What I don’t like about the images is that all are very similar to each other, I took these image at mid day so I think that if I took them sunrise or sunset, I think that this would some colour and variety in the images. Or if I took images f the clouds throughout the day there would be more variety in the pattern of the clouds this would make the images more interesting

The Disposable Camera Project was created in 2014 by the Colour Box Studio .Which is a Melbourne based pop up art space and online creative hub. The director, Amie Batalibasi, decided to do a project in which she gave nine participants a disposable camera and where asked to fill up the camera in the space of 24 hours. The project had been going on for 3 years. Each of the participants have their unique style and perceptions. What they view as a good image all varies. The project achieved a vast difference in style of images and subject. A book was created containing all the images called “The Disposable Camera Project.”

What this project does that can’t really be achieved with the use of digital cameras, is the sense of freedom but at the same time develops the photographic process to be thoughtful. As with a film camera you have a limited amount of images before the film runs out. But unlike digital cameras you are not able to look back and view the image, so there is one take to get the time right so each shot is thought through a lot more.But with this project id gives freedom with photography for people who might not be used to using a camera and to be able to capture scenarios and landscapes in a pure and simple way.

http://rinkokawauchi.com/en/

“Just when it seems that everything has been photographed, in every possible way, along comes a photographer whose work is so original that the medium is renewed. Such a photographer is Rinko Kawauchi, who makes simple, lyrical pictures, so fresh and unusual that they are difficult to describe or classify. Her images document everyday things, yet could not be described as documentary. They are generally light in tone, yet somehow dark in mood. They are almost hallucinatory, yet seem to capture something fundamental about the psychological mood of modern life.”
Garry Badger on Rinko Kawauchi’s book “Utatane” (Siesta)

Rinko Kawauchi was born in Japan in 1972. Kawauchi became interested in photography while studying graphic design and photography at Seian University of Art and Design where she graduated in 1993. She first worked in commercial photography and advertising for several years before embarking on a career as a fine art photographer. In Japan Rinko Kawauchi has become one of the most celebrated photographers of her generation. After appearing in several museum exhibitions and festivals in Europe (among others “Rencontres de la Photographie”, Arles; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam: Photographers’ Gallery, London) the Metopolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo is preparing a major exhibition about the artist for May 2012.

In 2001 three of her photo books were published: Hanako (a Japanese girl’s name), Utatane (a Japanese word that defines a state between wakefulness and sleep ), and Hanabi (“fireworks”). In the following years she won prizes for two of the books in Japan.In 2004 Kawauchi published Aila; in 2010, Murmuration, and in 2011 Illuminance; in 2009. In the ‘Utatane’ series. Rinko demonstrates a concentrated intentness on what she calls “the little voices that have been whispering to her since childhood”. These are the source upon which she draws, the intimate origin of a world described here according to a highly personal aesthetic: Utatane re-creates a fragmentary and fleeting world in which every detail relates to notions of birth, life, death and the passage of time.

Rinko Kawauchi’s work focuses on ordinary things and everyday situations. Her photographs attain their specific quality through her use of cropping and choice of perspective as well as the subtle use of natural light in combination with often virtually transparent colours. Rinko Kawauchi works in series, which, in the form of open narratives, combine poetry and emotion with representations of mortality and occasional melancholy.

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 photographs are mostly in 6×6 format.However, upon being invited to the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010, Kawauchi first photographed digitally and began taking photos that were not square. Kawauchi also composes haiku poems.

Mine

Laura El Tanawy

Blanca Vinas born in Barcelona in 1978, graduated in Building Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. He has taken an advertising graphic at the Massana School of Barcelona. As a result of his interest in architecture, his photographic work is very focused on urban environments. He currently designs album covers, makes promotional photographs for music groups and is part of the Anodyina Zines collective. His work has been exhibited in different individual and collective shows, and is one of the artists represented by the Atelier Gallery.

Blanca images have a sense of fantasy/dream feel to them, in most of the images they have been taken on a disposable camera, which then allows him to manipulate them once they have been developed. However to create some of the images he tampers with the actually camera so he has no control over what the images will end up looking like, which I think is a brave and different way at looking at photography, and is something that I want to experiment with in my project. One of the way that he does the image is by soaking the images in baking soda which allows the chemicals to run. He then uses double exposure in editing and merges the images together.

I took this shoot in my back garden one morning before going to school, as when I woke up the sunrise had created beautiful sunrise. So I thought that I would be able to use this sky in the background of some of the images. I feel that this shoot was successful as i did created some images that I really like. But as I was rushed for time as I was trying to leave for school on time, I didn’t have time to think and plan out some shots and I hadn’t really thought about what I had wanted to photograph previously . So I want to do another shoot in the same location, but to really take my time focusing on the small details that I could photograph.

Edits 

When editing these images I used Laura El- Tantawy for inspiration, as in her work there is an overriding theme of using pastel colours and having a fantasy/dream feel to them. I wanted my images to look obscure but still natural at the same time. For the editing of these photos the main technique that I used was double exposure as it is manipulating the images.

Feelings of terror, awe, infinity, and minuteness swirl and course through an experience of the sublime in nature, and for centuries, artists from Donatello to Bill Viola have attempted to recreate that experience in their paintings, sculptures, and video projections. Theorized as early as the 1^st century, the sublime has captivated writers, philosophers, and artists alike. Through its various definitions and interpretations, at its base, the sublime is a feeling rooted in humans’ relationships to the world, to nature, and what lies beyond that help us to formulate an understanding of ourselves.

The sublime has long been understood to mean a quality of greatness or grandeur that inspires awe and wonder. From the seventeenth century onwards the concept and the emotions it inspires have been a source of inspiration for artists and writers, particularly in relation to the natural landscape.

The theory of sublime art was put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. He wrote ‘whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime’.

Private Gallery

The images in the CCA Gallery were and exhibition by Mike McCartney, Rupert Truman, and Carinthia West. In the images in the exhibition was very diverse some of the images gave an insight to the lives of the stars of the 60’s such as Mick Jagger and David Bowie, as the photographer Carinthia West was involved in this world she was able to photograph the stars as regular people, which normalised them in a sense which is something that I really liked.

CCA Gallery

The images in the private gallery greatly contrasted what was being exhibited in the CCA Gallery. The style of the images in the Private Gallery focused on the art and culture of the pop art movement. In the gallery the works were more paintesing than they were photographs. The work consisted of bright colours, abstract shapes and abstract painting. The gallery was titled ‘Pop icons on the 20th century, Britain and American pop art’. The pop art movement was around in the 1950’s and peaked in the 60’s but is still widely recognised and practiced today

Laura El-Tantawy is an Egyptian photojournalist and artist based in London, England. She was born in Worcestershire, England, in 1980 and grew up between Saudi Arabia and Cairo, Egypt. Given her multicultural background, she has found solace in photography not just as an artistic form of expression, but also as an inner voice to reflect upon her own identity and how it relates to the world around her.

Laura  El-Tantawy recently did a project called Beyond here is nothing at all. She described the project as ‘Beyond Here Is Nothing’ is a photographic meditation on the notion of home. ‘To be home is to feel a strong connection to a land and a grounding to its roots’. The image below is taken from this project, many of the images in this project have a sense of dream like and fantasy to them.

El-Tantawy studied journalism and political science at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. In 2009, she received a research fellowship from the University of Oxford, where she researched the impact that Internet blogging and independent newspapers were having on pushing the boundaries of free speech in Egyptian media.

“My photographic interest in a project typically stems from having some personal connection with the subject matter,” she said. “Having lived between East and West much of my life, I have often felt lost between the traditional ideologies instilled in my upbringing and the extremely liberal practices of the West. I had to find a defining balance for myself as an individual, and my work as a documentary photographer has helped me do that. Dealing with who I am as a person and my position on the critical social issues facing the world today—particularly those pertaining to my background—is at the heart of all the themes I take on in my work.”

In 2002, El-Tantawy started her career as a newspaper photographer with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Sarasota Herald-Tribune. In 2006, she became a freelancer so she could focus on pursuing personal projects. Her work has been published and exhibited in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. She lives between the U.K,  her country of birth, and Egypt, with which she associates most of her childhood memories.

Laura recently produced a project entitled ‘ The Veil’. The images in this project has been made to be ‘bad’ on purpose, she was trying to capture the movement and the hustle and bustle of the city that she lives in, the project was focusing on how most women wear veils to  cover up as part of their religion and how this might clashing in the 21th century.