http://www.alexandrawaespi.com

Alexandra’s work pushes the photographic print further through experimentation with chemical reactions, manipulation of the film’s emulsion, and alternative darkroom and digital processes. She develops color film at home, often with a rough development process, bending negatives in the reel and varying the temperatures and times. In the darkroom she prints on found old paper and applies the developer with a paintbrush.

With the printed image, new layers are added by hand. Her scanner manipulations were first developed in her attempt to archive her work digitally. She believes the manipulations transform her images into an alternate reality, which fuses analogue and handcrafted techniques with digital glitches. After these stages she is left with a tangible object rather than individual photographs.

Her inspiration comes from early 20^th century colour photography; particularly the techniques used in hand colouring and toned black and white prints. She is also influenced by the toned prints from Boris Mikhalov and intuitive style of Miroslav Tichy.  

botanical studies

This project was created as a collaboration between the Graphic designer and Photographer Alexandra Waespi, they wanted to make a poster representing the month of July last year. July in 2018 was one of the hottest Julys on record for England so they wanted to convey the sense of how hot it really was in the images

To kickstart ideas on their collaborative project, Alexandra and Alexa began by listing words that they instantly associate with July. Alexandra chose descriptive ones, “sun-drenched”, “thirst quench” and “warm nights” for instance, while Alexa opted for “sticky”, “hazy” and “fuzzy”. Alexandra then merged the words into combinations “that could be translated visually.

Alexandra introduced the concept of potentially adding image manipulation techniques, to create a melting, photographic effect. For Alexa’s typographic element, the designer wanted the graphics to also reflect this hazy, sunny feeling, suggesting it may “be nice to combine this bleached Polaroid effect with sun prints,”. Sun-prints, is a technique where the paper is overlaid and then left out in the sun until it exposes, leaving a bleaching effect, was an apt way to create typography that happened naturally. I am going to try and attempt to rectre this technique when I do my own version of this photoshoot, but due to the weather recent being overcast and raining in not too sure if this will be possible.

Experiments for Alexandra continued, posting options and options of different flowers and levels of exposure for the pair to discuss on the thread. While Alexandra was photographing, Alexa was reading Maggie Nelson’s mix of poetry and prose, Bluets.Coincidentally, the photographer’s experiments reminded her of the writer’s use of words, but also the duo’s initial lengthy list. First, Alexa decided to experiment with typography digitally before using cyanotype to create the sun-prints as “the texture of those should play really well with these polaroids,” Alexa explains on the thread.

Digitally, Alexa produced numerous examples of how type could interact with Alexandra’s photographs. However rather than poetic sentences, the designer remained drawn to the bolder typography, particularly the word ‘melt’ to describe the project. Being able to watch Alexa work in this way was a treat for the photographer explaining that she “loved seeing Alexa use an analogue technique to put the text down, experimenting with the sun printing”. “To see those chemical stains felt like a real harmony between the ‘stains and dust’ on my images and to have that down in her work as well.” It was also during this period that Alexa felt the poster came together, particular once the pair had decided to “choose a one colour palette for the two elements,” allowing the poster “to come into itself”.

The final poster in Alexandra’s words is a mix of styles and creative disciplines in “a bold blended harmony,” she says. For Alexa she sees more of a message that the poster conveys, believing it “has a bit of mystery to it,” she explains. “Alexandra’s raw images of the flowers on black are striking and a little haunting, that feeling is present in this final outcome.”

EDITS:

For the editing of the images i edited them all on Lightroom changing the settings to give the desired effects. I then went through a second selection process selecting the images which worked best after editing but then also editing images in green to create a gif.

Final Selection:

Overall the photoshoot worked well as a response to commercialism as i wanted to created these big stand alone graphics projected onto the area. The photoshoot is meant to question our usage of brands and how in our everyday lives they are everywhere and we have ended up consuming brands more then we consume our natural landscape and spend time outside. If I was to redo the shoot I would select several other outdoor areas or a city area. This shoot required lots of planning so i want to find an easier way to project without requiring lots of equipment.

The images below are a collection of images from my iphone that I have taken throughout the course my project, that have caught my eye for the its uniqueness/beauty. I don’t always have my camera with me so sometimes I have to use my phone to capture what I see going on around me. Depending on the type of image that I am taking I sometimes actually prefer my phones camera to the Canon camera that I normally use. My phone is an Iphone XS which is noted for the quality of it camera. Rather than exporting these images onto photoshop, as I find that this can dramatically decrease the quality of the image. I edited the images on an app on my phone called ‘VSCO’, what I really like about this set of image is that the vibrancy of the colours was already very high and I didn’t need to do that much editing to it, which is one of the reason I prefer using my phone. Most of these image were taken during the period of ‘golden hour’ this is when the sun is setting and the sun creates this golden light looks really good when taking photos. Overall I really like this collection of images and might end up using some of them in the final outcomes of the project.

Produce a detailed plan of 3 shoots for each idea in your specification that you are intending to do;  how, who, when, where and why in the next 3 weeks?

Photo shoot one – For my first photo shoot I am planning to further develop my previous mirror shoot by doing a similar photo shoot be in a different location to add to this idea. For the location, I am planning to go to a beach/ rocky beach location. I am also going to try to use different size and shaped mirrors also using a model to hold the mirror. To complete the shoot I will use a tripod to make sure the photos are taken from exactly the same place each time.

Photo shoot two – The next photo shoot will consist of taking a photo of the landscape, digitally manipulating it in some way, printing it out and then somehow rephotograph it in the landscape. This could be achieved by either going a model to hold the image in their hands or holding up the image myself behind the camera. The show differentiation in the images which will be printed out I plan to take them at a different weather condition or a different time of day which will change the lighting and shadows.

Photo shoot Three – My third photo shoot will be similar to my second but instead of using images I have taken and rephotographing them back into the landscape, I will used archival images from public archive and rephotographing them back into the landscape. I could incorporate these images back into the landscape as previously stated in my second shoot. The idea behind these images is to show what changes have occurred in between the time when the two images have been taken.

Possible Photo Shoot Four – Another photo shoot I could conduct is taking paintings in frames and rephotographing them back into the landscape. The paintings could be cheaply purchased from a second shop. The idea of this shoot is too show the contrast between the painting and the surrounding landscape. The artworks would juxtapose the landscape (e.g. An smokey industrial painting in an idyllic country-side background)

For my first shoot I wanted to experiment with movement and performance by taking a series of photos of a movement. I did my first shoot in the studio so I could have access to a neutral background so my subjects became the only focus in each photograph. This photo shoot was for the purpose of experimenting and practicing the creation process of moving imagery. I asked my friends to perform simple movements while I put my camera into the burst setting so I could take pictures quickly and gain a number of photos for each movement they performed. I then divided each group of photos for different movements into different folders in Lightroom so I could easily find each set of images. When editing a set of images I used the sync setting so each of the photos were edited identically the same, in terms of cropping and adjusting colour and shade corrections. I then exported each set of photos in separate folders and then uploaded every photo for each set into photoshop by loading the files into stacks. This meant that each photo was uploaded into one document but into individual layers for each set. I then made frames from each layer to create a frame animation. This means that each photo for a set is displayed in one file as a gif which demonstrates each movement in each photo and set.

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.

My project up to this point has been more of an exploration of beauty, my own emotional views on the subject and then learning and evolving into the meaning of topics such as haiku and the emotional subjectivity to the pain of beauty and finding the beautiful within daily life. However, when planning and discussing this topic with various people, it become evident that the topic of beauty was either subject to too much personal opinions and subjectivity, or however, was too vague to create a Narrative book upon. However, I was able to discuss the main elements I have achieved so far within shoots, and what in my project to my mind was the most important currently. From this I was able to see that the main exploration of my project was the ability to see the evolution of life, and almost a family tree, or tree of life scenario. The growth of peoples attitudes and emotions accompanied with why or how they feel this way. This then led me to discuss the values of what was previously beauty and chaos to more directional opposites, such as light and ark. At the beginning of life is darkness and then light, life begins and then the more you experience life, it gets darker and then too comes to an end. This is the evolution of life. Not only does this still allow a personal experience but it creates a beginning resolution and end narrative to my story as a whole. It has a clear emotional impact and posses a successful narrative.

From this idea, I wanted to expand and create a more specific narrative concept. I started to think what is something which has personally effected my life, yet still is a clear representative of the creation and end of life. I began to relate the effect of religion to my project. God is the creator of earth and has the power to control the beginning of life and death, he is the cause and effect of light and dark and the family tree and evolution of love and family. From a young age me and my family have gone to a catholic church, I was then an alter server for 7 years, however soon dropped out of my conformation, leaving the church altogether. This close connection and bond within the church then came to an end, however the effect of religion upon my family is still strong. My narrative, could be about the power of religion to cause the effect of light and dark and have the power to show the evolution of life, but within my personal experience I could too highlight the darkness as the leaving of the church, and not just death itself.

I started to think of the viewpoints that the world was originally said to be founded on, and from roman Catholicism, the belief is that the world was created by god over 7 days. Each day forming and creating a different elements, being water, earth, plants, animals and people. I could gradually expand throughout he aspect of light and birth, these key beginning . elements. The story itself says:  ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

Literal	Fundamental Christians	Genesis story is an accurate account of creation
Non-Literal	Catholic Church	The Biblical accounts are to be understood alongside reason and science

Because of this new theme, there are still connections obviously within my work as it was about beauty and chaos, two key contributes to gods creation and the act of the people, but additionally, it too posses the ability to further the aim of my shoots over half term. Not only will I still look into illuminance and beauty created by god and the stages he created the world, but too going to the church itself, and taking images which symbolise the birth of christ and decay.

The narrative itself of life to my mind, could be broken into the following: Darkness light birth growth decay death. This 3ill be the key narrative to my book, showing this evolution of life experience, forming elements of haiku and illuminance throughout he birth and growth of life, and presenting chaos towards the ending, in order to show my demise and leaving from the church itself. Creationist from Catholic Church. This still allows my narrative to have a personal connection with myself, without removing all concepts of beauty and positivity but still showing a more interesting event in real time. Because of this now my aims are: Water  – reflections in water bubble hand in water me in front of water, Natural landscapes, Golden hour , Underwater ,Light ,Stairs , Baby old people close ups skin , harbour ,flower, forest, light abstraction, darkness, town, farm, rain, zoo, birds, pain and myself. I believe with allowing myself to photograph all of these concepts my book will really have a clear and successful narrative message which is too personal. Additionally I believe the title such as ascension would be successful for the development of a book.

All Zones Off Peak

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Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak is the collection of a fifteen year photographic journey around Liverpool. The book features pictures resulting from spending eighteen years riding the buses of Liverpool during his 1978 to 1996 ‘bus odyssey’, the images were selected from 100,000 negatives. These works form a portrait of Liverpool and its people taken from the various bus routes that criss-cross the city. Wood spent 20 years travelling the buses during off-peak hours. In this time he shot 3,000 rolls of film, painstakingly refining his view of the city. The work has been published in two books: All Zones Off Peak (1998) and Bus Odyssey (2001). Described as ‘an epic of the everyday’, the photographs are dramatic and powerful documents of a city in motion. The book is composed of images where Wood photographs the world beyond the window as well as fellow travelers on the bus and waiting outside.

This image is taken from Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak, at first glance the images read like studies of the disenfranchised of the Northern inner cities. Wood’s bus journeys visually connect the regenerated areas of the city with more neglected, peripheral spaces: the declining high streets, areas of wasteland, cleared slums and abandoned houses of the inner-ring suburbs. These photographs are not about capturing specific moments but the endlessly repeated routines and minimal, wordless communities produced by bus journeys.

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For the layout of ‘All zones off peak’ Wood uses a classic format for most the pages, using the same template of landscape pictures with a white border on all four sides, none of the images seem to be cropped and if they have been they have been cropped into the same landscape proportions as all the other images.

Last stop

Rules of interaction and proximity are changing. It is this space that fascinates George Georgiou, this migration of people around this very open and public arena, but also a migration that has reached a target, the holy grail of the imagined Western urban dream.  It is this new highly fragmented sense of community that his work investigates.  London’s double decker buses are the perfect “vehicle or vessel” to explore and transverse a complex and vast city, to frame it.  It has the advantage of allowing him two perspectives or levels of observation, the lower and upper decks.  From this vantage point he can capture the complex phenomenon of urban stratification, how different people use the city through the day, how new layers of architecture, signage and street furniture add to what was already there. How different social, economic and ethnic groups appropriate, shape and adapt to the city. With buses he does not have full control, the random nature of where the bus stops and his position to what is in front of him is not to dissimilar to the encounters we have as we move through the city.  He becomes, as the people he observes, part of the city system where thousands of individual paths cross randomly.  A community of invisibility and but also voyeurism. But not only is the passer-by invisible, but he, as the photographer becomes a voyeur, become invisible to the outside, like the CCTV cameras in London that follow our every moves.  Nonetheless his photography is not detached; he tries to capture and understand the emotional content of London’s everyday migrations, rhythms and rituals. Because he is part of this rhythm and community, it is also his distance and attachment, it is his community, his security, his home.

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Originally the project began as Georgiou was thinking about London as a city of migration, the ‘last stop’ not only for immigrants but also for people from across the UK. A city of dreams and possibilities; but as we all know, these dreams are not so easily realized. As the project evolved, he became more interested in trying to express the experience of the city, how we move through it, share it, coexist as a diverse group of peoples and cultures. The part that seems the most considered is the little soap operas we see everyday in public space, those encounters we witness and perceive as fictions. It’s a little like when we drive pass an accident on the highway: we glimpse the crashed car and imagine the rest. How we perceive is important element in the work. The design of the book is what holds together the whole concept of the work and relates to the actual experience of moving through a city. The essence of the project is that you might take the same route everyday but what you see, the ebb and flow on the street takes on a random nature. To capture this flow, the concertina layout of the book allows the feel of a bus trip, but more importantly it gives the viewer the opportunity to create their own journeys by spreading the book out and combining different images together. This moves the book away from an author-led linear narrative to one of multiple possibilities.

Sarker Protick

This story has two primary characters, a river that represents nature and a community representing the humankind. Here, all these different people have a same voice, the same state. The narrative evolves between men and river and their relationship. It’s intimate and it’s ruthless. We find dependency and destruction at the same time. It’s a contradictory affair. The river gives so much to its people and at times it takes away everything. Riverbank erosion generally creates much more suffering than other natural hazards like flooding; as while flooding routinely destroys crops and damages property, erosion results in loss of farm and homestead land. In the winter of 2011, I travelled to the villages near Ishurdi district. Padma, the largest waterway of Bangladesh flows right beside. At first the place seems abandoned. Drowned and broken houses, floating trees are all that remains. These are traces of life that was once here. Slowly I discover life in the villages. People who are still living here, many as refugee in others land. They have lost their house, farmlands almost everything. Some has left the places as they ran out of all the options.While a global warming, climate change is still being questioned, here, like many other places is facing consequences. Over the years the river changed it’s course. While doing it, it has taken so many. When the monsoon arrives and the river runs fast. The lands get washed away and disappear. Places I have photographed do not exist any more. River erosion continues with dire consequences for this land and community.

Protick’s works are grounded around the ideas of time and space. Hovering between corporeal and meta-physical, his use of light as protagonist creates a truth that is more emotional than factual. It is document only to a suspended reality, where time is perpetually slowed; and we are not just looking, but seeing. Whether working with family, environment or history, Protick’s work consistently deals with Time and how it transforms matter and life. Much of his current work, even including the book I am specifically looking at , is an exploration of him living scenarios and the people seen around himself and his life. Although having a similar narrative construct to the second photographer, he is choosing to take his photos with the aim of showing a more heavenly lighting, showing people with a clear representation of their scenario: “This isn’t something new or something connected to a particular part of the country,” says Sarker Protick, speaking about his recent work, Of River and Lost Lands, which deals with the contemporary relationship between people and nature in Bangladesh, in the context of the devastating damage and loss of land caused each year during monsoon season.

katrin koenning

Melbourne-based photographer Katrin Koenning (Germany) and Dhaka- based photographer Sarker Protick (Bangladesh) live thousands of miles apart. Yet, in Astres Noirs, a collaborative work that comprises their debut photobook, their photographs are interwoven to create a visual dialogue across distances. The images of both artists were taken with mobile phone cameras, of everyday objects and scenes, though were then transformed visually, stripping colour and amping up the contrast, to form symbolic, poetic ephemera. Printed with a lightly glistening silver ink onto matte black paper, the photographs emerge like celestial phenomena from the page. Mysterious and contemplative, the images give evidence to the artists’ passionate exploration of the world around, and, perhaps more significantly, their desire to exchange their findings with another.The photographer’s project idea is driven by anger at policies that elevate short-term profit above the need to make sustainable decisions and safeguard the world for future generations. Katrin Koenning is interested in counter-narratives and and positive ecological imaginaries to highlight our current state of collective urgency. Thus, Swell will not be centralised around a single environmental issue but rather, with the Greenpeace Photo Award, Koenning will create a still and moving image work focused on a number of mini-ecologies across Australia. The work will focus on what is at stake while avoiding expected tropes of disaster-imagery. It will create a space in which things are connected, rather than apart. With a style characterised by hybridity Koenning seeks to expand the limits of the documentary. She introduces visual elements into a dialog to provide context for the topic under discussion. The project becomes a personal narrative about the current state of the world and, at the same time, about nature hanging in the balance.

From personally researching her work further You are visually able to see the huge influence she has from so many different aspect of the world around her. She is, to my mind, so good at finding the light and passion within even the most desperate and desolate scenarios. Her works’ beauty is transdecent within every project of her work, however I chose her piece above, as it has the strongest relation to the book I am looking into. Much of her work really focuses on photographing light withthe intention to construct a story. Her work has more of a magic quality than religious, but it almost makes us question our lives and the passion we should see and feel for life. Her works are clearly edited a-lot and to her mind it is clearly a pivotal part of the final outcomes of her world as a whole. The piece above creates an expatiation of fear yet the outcome of peace, the floating creates a wholesome new outlook on the fatality of death, And instead of showing death as something to be feared, it is seen as something to be accepted.

Astres Noirs

What I decided what I loved about this book itself, is the hugely prominent highlights of silver within every image. It is so different to everything I have see previously within photography books. There is a clear presentation of beauty within every image, there is a sense of magic and power within the compositions. The book too shows a combination of landscape, objects and people which is an area I too am interested within showing. I believe with the clear influence of this book personally upon my work, I will be able to finalise my idea, and form a finalised narrative concept. Between each image their is a religious aspect highlighting a power of god, within the power of his creation. This approach pf almost bringing black and white into the modern century is so interesting, it’s a twist on what a photobook should be as captivating as a fine piece of music—a triumph of form, theme, movement, instrumental coloration, and, of course, the passion of the playing.

Astres noirs is the debut book for both Katrin Koenning and Sarker Protick, artists who live thousands of miles apart whose peculiar photographic wanderings create a hauntingly beautiful dialogue. This book presents photographs taken on mobile phone cameras, devices used to capture their everyday in an impulsive and almost obsessional way, documenting life from their doorsteps to far afield. Their photographs capture the commonplace such as water stains on asphalt, dust clouds and rays of light, and transform these into mesmerising frames – elusive fragments that evoke an imaginary creature, a milky way, a phosphorescent silhouette… presented together, their combined voices lead us on a journey into unexplored territory, somewhere between the everyday and paranormal, between night and day. Amongst enveloping darkness, lightness is revealed, dazzling and miraculously caught by discerning eyes. For their part, Koenning and Protick had been shooting on their smartphones (presumably in colour or, shots then drained of colour), Koenning from Australia, Protick from Bangladesh. Many of their photos are of commonplace things, a puddle, a horse, a bird. Some are more mysterious, more telling: a soft ball of light, a floating body, specks through an airplane window, faces nearly lost to the shiny blur.

My inspiration of black and silver: to my mind this book has been my most influential artists for myself and my project so far. Not only does it allow a concentration on the debate of light and dark, but shows a series of abstract images, displaying the fundamentals of life, and a clear narrative concept. The images are too filled with purpose and stories. I belive If I were to start editing my images in this way, and printed off my book on black paper, this could really benefit my project as a whole, and access a whole new level of photography, different to anything I had previously done or accomplished previously. Both of the artists add in a political theme to their work as well as showing the narrative of light throughout the light and dark. Because of this I believe me assigning the political narrative of not just life, but religion seen within death resurrection and the beginning of life, is a successful narrative construct. I will now start some experimentation of how I can form the similar edits, and colour tones.