The Civil war stereography was also a key influence in my work as the 3D anaglyph effect has provided my work with colours that were not originally there.
The 3D effect that were on the original civil war photos were added in reference to the distances they wanted the different parts of the photos to look as if it were looking through the human eye, as if they were there.
The effect I wanted to create was merely to move parts of my images in to different parts of the photos to create an extra detail, but also so that they were visually interesting to look at, which is the same reason that the civil war stereographs were made as well.
An obvious difference between my work and the civil war stereographs, is the fact that my work is in colour and theirs is in black and white, although they used plate cameras, this created small spots of extra natural detail to the photos, unlike my photos in which I had to manually create them through the app I used to create my stereographs.
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 1st 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’.
Zen Buddhism is a mixture of Indian Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. It began in China, spread to Korea and Japan, and became very popular in the West from the mid 20th century. The essence of Zen is attempting to understand the meaning of life directly, without being misled by logical thought or language. Zen techniques are compatible with other faiths and are often used, for example, by Christians seeking a mystical understanding of their faith. Zen requires an intense discipline which, when practiced properly, results in total spontaneity and ultimate freedom.
‘Zen’ is the way the Chinese word Ch’an is pronounced in Japan. ‘Ch’an’ is the Chinese pronunciation of the Sanskrit word Dhyana, which means meditation.
Christmas Humphreys, one of the leading pioneers in the history of Buddhism in Britain, stated that “Zen is a subject extremely easy to misunderstand.” Zen Buddhism is a practice that needs to be experienced, not a concept that you can intellectualize or understand with your brain. Zen does not depend on words – it has to be experienced in order to ‘understand’.
Zen sends us looking inside us for enlightenment. There’s no need to search outside ourselves for the answers; we can find the answers in the same place that we found the questions. The first step is to control our minds through meditation and other techniques that involve mind and body; to give up logical thinking.
Clues to the meaning of Zen (From BBC Website)
Because Zen is so hard to explain here are some quotations that may help you get an idea of it:
The essence of Zen Buddhism is achieving enlightenment by seeing one’s original mind (or original nature) directly; without the intervention of the intellect.
Zen is big on intuitive understanding, on just ‘getting it’, and not so hot on philosophising.
Zen is concerned with what actually is rather than what we think or feel about what is.
Zen is concerned with things as they are, without trying to interpret them.
Zen points to something before thinking, before all your ideas.
The key to Buddhahood in Zen is simply self-knowledge.
To be a human being is to be a Buddha. Buddha nature is just another name for human nature – true human nature.
Zen is simply to be completely alive.
Zen is short for Zen Buddhism. It is sometimes called a religion and sometimes called a philosophy. Choose whichever term you prefer; it simply doesn’t matter.
Zen is not a philosophy or a religion.
Zen tries to free the mind from the slavery of words and the constriction of logic.
Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.
Zen is meditation.
My photographic Ideas from this
My initial ideas for the exploration of Zen Buddhism was as a result of a previous artist study i have completed on Hiroshi Sugimoto. He is a japanese artist where zen buddhism plays a significant role in his culture. Through his work there is this sense of spirituality, by seeing beauty in everything and the ideas of Zen Buddhism is also portrayed through his work. After having explored it more, i want to try and free the mind from the logical way of thinking about a landscape through my images. I want to try and convey a sense of beauty and importance in every aspect of what I am photographing. This links to the study of Monets Hay Stacks which show the importance of Hay Stacks in agriculture despite usually people being unconcerned with some Hay Stacks. Despite the absence of any real definition of Zen Buddhism i feel as if i can contribute to the explanation of it through my photographic responses that will have a focus on freedom, beauty and importance in everything that will help to relax and disconnect the mind from any logical thinking.
This is my third photo shoot I conducted to experiment working with mirrors. To complete this shoot I used a tripod to mount my camera on, I then used a model to hold mirror up in the landscape. I took a photo of the landscape before the model stepped into frame and then took a photo with them in the frame. I used the cutting tool to cut and the middle of the mirror so the layer was clear there. I then put the image of the plain landscape behind this image to create the affect that the frame was clear but it also hid whatever was behind it (Like an invisibility cloak.)
To get the landscape (behind the mirror) in the image to look exactly the same and unaltered I made sure it was the right size and positioned in the right place.
These are my best final outcomes from shooting and experimenting in this style. The images are in a surrealist style which is something I could further explore. (This also links to the idea of the sublime which I could also explore.) The weather on this day also helped to add to the idea of the sublime as it was very foggy with golden light from the sun creating a mysterious atmosphere.
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.
This image is taken from the project ‘Beyond here there is nothing’ in this project Laira is exploring the meaning of home and the connection to home. As Laura is living in a different country to where she is originally from this image might be a reelection of how she is dreaming of what her home is like. The tree in the bottom right is a palm tree which are typically found in warm countries, not in England. To create this image Laura has used the technique of double exposure and layering to the sense of all the images being together as one. So this is something that I want to experiment with in this project.
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.
For the project I want to do more research into the spiritual aspects of photography, and how to photograph a world that isn’t really there. And small details of everyday life can be seen as a thing of beauty. Rather than photographing whole frames of landscape images, I plan to capture my images with a more abstract view. Many of the images in the mood board have been taken on film cameras, as this is something I have always had an interest in this aspect of photography but never really experiment that far into it so this will be a challenge for me. I also love the colours tint that film camera give to the images. But the main aim of the project is for me to take a different approach on the way that I see the island.
As a key artist reference to my work, Dafna Talmor’s Constructed Landscape project has a been a massive influence to my final images and work in general. The way Talmor cuts up her images is a more manual way from what I did. She refers to her technique as slicing, splicing and merging. The way I created my images was through the use of the magic wand tool in photoshop, I made sure that I didn’t create straight line cuts and made very rough tear like cuts to replicate the process that Talmor did.
Also something I picked up from Talmor’s work, was the natural side to her work, in her actual images she’s taken photos in woods and on beaches. But to contrast her work slightly, I went to an urban landscape (carpark) and took photos for my images there too.
Another contrast to her work is that her work uses natural colours that fit in with her natural photos, and I used really vibrant colours to represent the combination of urban and landscape.
In this post I have done some further experimentation on ways to compare and merge the photographs that I have taken. The main idea behind this editing is to take away parts of a photograph layered on top of another photograph to reveal a photograph in the background – this will allow the differences and similarities between the faces of the two buildings to be shown clearly. The idea for introducing shapes into the photograph to show contrast came from John Baldessari’s work with brightly coloured dots in which he covered the face of his subjects with dots that contrasted with the background; I felt that the introduction of more shapes brought another element to the photograph. Below is my first example of experimentation with cutting shapes into a photograph then layering; I cut around a coin with a stanley knife to reveal the features of the photograph below and show to create abstract effects within the composition.
In the first set of edits below I have used both circles and oblongs to create a range of contrasts within the photograph. I believe that this method may appear too confusing and removes the aesthetically pleasing aspects from the photographs but it does show contrast between structures.
In the below set of edited photographs I have used photoshop to remove the windows from the photograph on the top layer and so opening up a viewing into the background layer. This method could be used well with a double exposure method potentially, as I have done with the photograph on the left. This method helps to show similarities as even though parts of the composition have been completely removed it does not look completely abnormal.
In the below left edit I had first cut out the shapes within the windows and felt that this did not create a strong enough composition so then I continued to alter the opacity of the photograph to create more of a double exposure effect in which you can see both photographs when you look at it in a different perspective. In the photograph on the right I have cropped out circles within the photograph similarly to my first experiment with cutting out shapes. I feel that the circles do not sit well against the blocky natural shapes of a building face and so creates an abstract but not an aesthetically pleasing compositon.
From my previous research and photo shoots I am leaning towards the focus of depiction of light and external factors that shape our environment. Essentially i will be focusing on elements of a photograph that people tend to not look at. Usually people will try and capture a certain object or subject as the main focal point of a photograph however I want to defy these conventions and look at the depiction of light, textures and other things that form and change our landscape. These initial ideas came from my artist reference on Hiroshi Sugimoto who photographs the ocean without a direct focus on the ocean itself but how the atmosphere shapes it. Leading on from this I looked into Monets Hay Stacks paintings which link to this idea of the environment being formed by external elements such as the light and atmosphere. He captures the changing light and how it colored his surroundings by painting a landscape at different times of the day.
Having explored the light i wanted to look into another factor that shapes the environment thus being tidal movement. I have researched one artist Micheal Martens who looks at how the tide forms the landscape at different times of the day. I have responded to this in one shoot however plan to look further into this in a scientific way, exploring how this occurs and why. As well as this i will also complete some more shoots simply exploring how the low tide vs high tide changes a familiar landscape into something quite different. Furthermore, as well as this scientific exploration I will also look into the spiritual culture as a whole and how this is demonstrated in photography. Through this i will look into Japanese culture and zen Buddhism inspired by the spirituality that is conveyed through Sugimoto.
My current ideas for an end product is a photo book and possible cinematic video that will be inspired by Koyaanisqatsi. Through the photo book there will be a sense of spirituality looking at the beauty within things that aren’t usually seen as beautiful. I will include aspects of the way in which the landscape is transformed by elements such as light and tidal movement. With intentions of creating a video, it would consist of cinematic sequences of the environment throughout a day to show how the landscape is transformed through a day and how light effects it. Also, there would be clear reference to the ocean since this plays a significant role in transforming the landscape from something familiar to a place vastly different.
