For this shoot i wanted to create a series of images inspired by Maten’s sea change project. I will looks at the moving tide in Jersey which would be significant since we have the 3rd quickest moving tide in the world. To start with I researched the tide times and located a week where it best suited my needs. I needed the high and low water to be within a time in the day where there was light. Thus ensuring that there is a consistent theme so the contrast between the low water and high water images look the best.
With this information I just needed to figure out certain locations to shoot at, obviously the initial ideas being on the coast where the sea is. I pin pointed a variety where the change in sea height is easily distinguished by rock formations ect. I came up with the locations, St ouens bay at L’roco tower, corbiere lighthouse, St Aubins bay, Beauport beach, Portlet beach and Plemont bay. For this shoot i decided to go with Plemont bay . I will first shoot the locations at low tide and mark the exact spots in which i took the photo’s using colored tape. I will also write down the particular settings and focal lengths used. This will mean that when i go back at high tide i can get the exact same shot just with a change in water height.
He was born in London, started taking photographs as a teenager, and has been involved with photography ever since. In 1979 he set up Science Photo Library, a picture agency specializing in science and medicine. In 2003 he started a new career as a landscape photographer, with a focus on exploring natural change in the world around us. Sea Change, a series taken over 10 years, compares identical views at high and low tide around the coast of Britain. Sea Change won the LensCulture portfolio grand prize in 2011 and has been exhibited in Britain, Italy, Denmark, and the United States.
From 2003 to 2012 Michael Marten traveled to different parts of the British coast to photograph identical views at high and low tide, six or eighteen hours apart. His beautiful and surprising photographs reveal how the twice daily rhythm of ebb and flood can dramatically transform the landscape. This links to my previous studies of the depiction of light and how this can transform a familiar landscape. I have also focused on the sea within this and therefore looking at the sea in another way and the way in which it changes a landscape really appeals to me and connects perfectly for my project.
“I am interested in showing how landscape changes over time through natural processes and cycles. The camera that observes low and high tide side by side enables us to observe simultaneously two moments in time, two states of nature”.
Recent landscape photography often focuses on human shaping of the environment – urbanization, globalization, pollution. Even when critical and committed, this approach can emphasize and glamorize humankind’s power over nature. “I’m interested in rediscovering nature’s own powers: the elemental forces and processes that underlie and shape the planet. The tides are one of these great natural cycles. I hope these photographs will stimulate people’s awareness of natural change, of landscape as dynamic process rather than static image. Attending to earth’s rhythms can help us to reconnect with the fundamentals of our planet, which we ignore at our peril.” — Michael Marten
“… a sense of threat as well as one of miracle attends Marten’s images. The people who fill his beaches at low tide seem often still to be there at high tide, invisibly in their fixed positions, fatally swallowed by metres of sea.” – Robert Macfarlane
With one of the fastest moving tides in Jersey I think taking inspiration from Marten’s sea change project will be a very interesting subject matter. It will be especially appealing for local residents to see the dramatic change that they often overlook everyday when driving past. The difference between low and high tide creates a completely different mood similar to lighting which i have previously looked at. With this focus on how a place feels, the mood and atmosphere, as appose to the detail of a certain subject matter I am going down a different route to the stereotypical type of photography.
Over the course of my project I have been collecting images that reflect inspiration taken from my original artist reference Hiroshi Sugimoto. It was much easier to collect a variety of lighting over a long time period therefore every-time I went on a shoot I would snap a couple of Images in the style that can be seen below. This allowed me to collect a wider range of weather conditions and lighting than if I were to go out on specific shoots for this. I think this process has worked very well in allowing me to collect a variety of seascape images with a sense of changing lighting and weather conditions.
Edits
For this shoot i wanted to take a different approach to the typical photos that have influenced my interest in the ocean by Hiroshi Sugimoto. His photos usually portray a moody atmosphere through the choice of B&W formatting. Despite his project all containing B&W images there is still a clear focus on the depiction of light. However i wanted to try and emphasize this focus on changing light and how it shapes the landscape as appose to the traditional landscape images from the romantic genre. I feel as if I have successfully achieved this aim with a wide variety of weather conditions and lighting on the same landscape.
Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was generally based on idealism and a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or truths such as those formulated by religion or science could be used to understand or explain reality. Modernist artists experimented with form, technique and processes rather than focusing on subjects, believing they could find a way of purely reflecting the modern world. It is generally very simple and non decorative. Modern art rejected tradition so it looked very different to anything anyone had seen before.
While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of scepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodern art drew on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century, and advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning. Cultural identity was a big part of postmodernism, with people realizing that modernism was dominated by straight white men. Within post modern art, it is popular to include quotes or words on their art since it fits with the idea of questioning things. There are no rules about what postmodern art is but there tends to be a lot of contrasting and questioning. The works of post modernism are often abstract and somewhat strange. There is an objective to display that everyone has different reality and there is such thing as human nature instead of nurture.
The modernist approach links to my previous studies of Sugimoto and Monet’s Hay Stacks that focus on mainly the depiction of light and how it shapes the environment. Rather than focusing on subjects these artists use lighting and textures as a way of reflecting the modern world.
Modern Art
Time Period – From 1450 – 1960
Gender Spread – Most of the artists in the modern times were male
Mindset – Go with the ideas in every way
Influence – Political and society pressure
Postmodern Art
Time Period – From 1960 to present
Gender Spread – Mixture of both
Mindset – Question the changes and movinf towards new ones quickly
Influence – Free of any pressures
In the Modern work, whatever the meaning was given by the writer was considered to be the only meaning but in postmodern times, people tend to make their own mind and deduce the idea according to their will. In modern era people tended to enjoy the modernism but in the postmodern era, people are questioning the changes and moving towards new ones quickly. Arts in the modern times was influenced by political and society pressure while the postmodern art is free from all those factors.
For this shoot I wanted to capture the repetition of the view that is shared by everyone all around the world should they come to the edge of their country/island. Thus view being the ocean. I wanted to travel around the island I live on capturing the repetitiveness of the view experienced when i reached the edge of the land. I think through this particular shoot I want to create a sense that, regardless of where we are, we could all go to a large body of water and see the same thing. The fact that we would share the same visual experience regardless of if we did that now, in the past or in the future. Our internal experience stimulated by the view will be more individual and vary from person to person.
Contact Sheet
Edits
Overall, I am very happy with how this shoot went and even more so with the edits. Through the editing process, which I undertook in Adobe Lightroom I have increased the saturation of the blues and made the images pop by increasing highlights, whites, clarity and contrast. Also, I cropped each image to ensure that the horizon splits the image in half directly through the center like Sugimoto has done within his project. I took this series of images across a whole day which allowed for a change in weather and lighting, altering the aesthetics of the images slightly. This links to my previous study of Sugimoto and Monet’s hay stacks paintings in the way they focus on the depiction of light.
Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray was a French photographer who lived 1820 – 1884. He has been called “the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century” because of his technical innovations, his instruction of other noted photographers, and “the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making. His most well known images are seascapes, the first to ever have an exposure that was able to depict the detail in both the sky and sea at the same time.
Technical innovations
His technical innovations included:
Improvements on paper negatives, specifically waxing them before exposure “making the paper more receptive to fine detail”.
A collodion process published in 1850 but which was “theoretical at best”. The invention of the wet collodion method to produce a negative on a glass plate is now credited to Frederick Scott who published his process in 1851.
Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky
Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky at a time where it was impossible to have at the same time the sky and the sea on a picture due to the too extreme luminosity range. Combination printing was an early experiment of HDR photography where you expose for bright and dark areas of a landscape scene.
In October 1999, Sotheby’s sold a Le Gray albumen print “Beech Tree, Fontainebleau” for £419,500, which was a world record for the most expensive single photograph ever sold at auction, to an anonymous buyer. At the same auction, an albumen print of “The Great Wave, Sète” by Le Gray was sold for a new world record price of £507,500 or $840,370 to “the same anonymous buyer” who was later revealed.
The seascapes were, and are still, Le Gray’s greatest public, commercial and aesthetic success. He took them in France – a first set taken in Normandy in the summer of 1856 and a second set from the Mediterranean coast in spring 1857. At the horizon, the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates the join between two separate negatives. The combination of two negatives allowed Le Gray to achieve tonal balance between sea and sky on the final print. It gives a more truthful sense of how the eye sees the landscape, rather than how the camera perceives nature. When first shown, the luminous, shimmering effects, Le Gray’s otherwise dark seascapes were often mistaken for moonlight. It is easy to see why this misconception arose in these monochrome images where darkness encroaches towards the edges of the scene.
This shoot was as a response to John Baldessari and the way in which he tries to make his art fun and “not boring”. As a class we were set a variety of photography games resulting in a fun activity which then led to some interesting photos. The first game was ‘photography boxing’ where the allocated model has to try and dodge the camera and the cameraman has to try and photograph them whilst they’re dodging. The second game was a simple one where your partner through a ball and you had to try and photograph it in mid air. Following on from this, we then had to try and capture a line of three tennis balls in the air inspired by a shoot that Baldessari had completed.
My Edits
I like the abstract nature of the images with the balls and the obscure nature that they create. Although tennis balls and bouncy balls are not that uncommon, it is rather uncommon for them to be photographed in isolation. Thus creating a new but interesting subject matter for the audience. I was much more satisfied with how the ‘dodging’ game resulted in unique portraits than the ball ones. When editing, i chose to put all of the images in black and white as I believe it was somewhat distracting. Also, with the white wall, this effect complimented it. It is often hard to get a model to pose for you within a portrait shoot, however this game made it significantly easier to achieve successful portraits in my opinion. This is because there is no awkwardness within the model as they were more focused on the dodging than posing for the camera.
John Baldessari: “I will not make anymore boring art”
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)
John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice in California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography.
In 1970, Baldessari and some friends burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. The ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies resulting in an art installation consisting of a bronze plaque with the destroyed paintings’ birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies. Through this project, Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. This project highlights as he quotes ‘no more boring art’ which i believe is very interesting. I like the way in which he incorporates a social event in the creation of this art which appears to have been fun and exciting. This comes under the theme of ‘play’ in the way they’re playing with the existing art to create a new piece. He has many other ‘playful’ projects however this one stood out to me because of the extent he went to and also the meaning it has being it too.
In this video, Baldessari makes many arm movements, reciting the phrase, “I am making art,” after each gesture. Baldessari has always been conscious of the power of choice in artistic practice. Here, he carefully associates the choice of arm movements with the artistic choices that an artist may make, concluding that choice is a form of art in itself. Another way in which this piece can be interpreted is a reaction to artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s that explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium.
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The impressionist artists were not trying to paint a realistic picture, but an impression of what the person, object or landscape looked like to them. This how the name of the movement came about – impressionists. They wanted to capture the movement and life of what they saw and show it to us as if it is happening before our eyes.
The sudden change in the look of these paintings was brought about by a change in methodology: applying paint in small touches of pure colour rather than broader strokes, and painting outdoors scenes to catch a particular fleeting impression of colour and light. The result was to emphasise the artist’s perception of the subject matter as much as the subject itself.
Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. Usually when you imagine a scene you view this the same all the time, however it should differ as time goes on because the lighting is always changing. Impressionists paint their pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant with the absence of detail but with bold colors. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir. Monet was interested in subtle changes in the atmosphere which I have taken a particular interest in shown through my previous shoots.
Impressionist covers much of the art of this time, there were smaller movements within it, such as Pointillism, Art Nouveau and Fauvism. Pointilism was developed from Impressionism and involved the use of many small dots of colour to give a painting a greater sense of vibrancy when seen from a distance.
Before impressionism, landscapes in art were often imaginary and painted perfectly from a studio. The impressionists changed all that. They painted outdoors and on the spot. As they were outside, they looked at how light and colour changed the scenes and painted what lay in front of them. The technique of impressionism allowed the artists to quickly paint what was in front of them resulting in what some people argued to be ‘messy’. Lots of people didn’t like impressionism as they thought it was a bit messy and that the paintings looked unfinished. They thought art should be neater and that subjects in art should be more important than just everyday scenes. I argue against this point and believe that it is an interesting technique that allows an appreciation for the depiction of light which is often overlooked when looking at an art piece.
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