My Plan for my shoots and my edits are as follows:
I am going to take 3 photoshoots so that I can use three different locations as I want to create my own landscapes by filtering 3 photos. The first location I am going to take photos at is the woods behind Longueville Manor known as Swiss Valley so I can catch twigs and branches in the top areas of my photos. The second location will be Le Mare beach so I can get a rocky area with some flat parts to provide a stable base for my edits. For the third location I want something modern to be a part of my edits so the natural things like trees look like they are growing in this place, so I will be going to Pier Road Car Park for the blocky effect I want in my edits.
For my edits I will be doing images that comprise of 3 filtered images that have been colour balanced to a reddish yellow, using shadows, midtones, and highlights, and by adjusting the opacity accordingly and increasing contrast and brightness, so that all 3 images can be seen clearly.
I will then be putting variating coloured circles over the faces that are in my photos using the app Sketchbook.
After that I will use the app XstereO Player to do my stereographs in landscapes and portraits, red and blue, and green and magenta. so I have many variations of colours and combinations.
Once I’ve done that I will start cutting my stereographed edits into tear like parts using the magic wand tool, so I can move them across to a black landscape base and create a collage like piece.
And finally after all that I will be using images from my shoots to turn into very contrast and brightness black and white images, to then overlay them on top of the cut images to add even more detail.
Here is my photo-shoot in which I planned to record the 171 postcards which I bought with the intention of using in this project (Plan on previous post) I believe that this shoot was successful as I closely followed my photo-shoot plan and was lucky enough to have a good source of natural sunlight on the day which I did the shoot. These postcards show the connections between Jersey as the rest of the world which I intend to explore with this project and therefore I thought they were very appropriate to use in photo montages and collages. The dated aesthetic running through the majority of these postcards is firstly something which I believe successfully shows the history of development due to modern systems around the world. And secondly I believe these visual qualities will make for an unusual and interesting outcome.
To start my project I intend to explore ideas of sublime and beauty within nature, focusing on emphasising light and fragility within the natural world. I want to be able to express an emotion through my photos, whether that be using shapes, shadows, reflections and light.
The photographer Rinko Kawauchi is an artists who interested me, inspired by Japanese art and her ethnic religion, looking at portraying nature in a feminine light. This is where I will explore ideologies like beauty and the sublime and styles of Japanese art, as well as form and shape related to femininity. When I do a shoot in this concept I will emphasise the light, similar to Kawauchi.
I also want to explore uses of colour and texture and the opposing shapes and forms that are associated with the ideas of masculinity and femininity. For example to explore stereotypical views on masculinity i could photograph geometric bold structures in the urban environment, I could juxtapose these images to natural ones to represent stereotyped femininity. I will focus on soft shapes in comparison to angular ones and create a contrast between the two, perhaps looking for similar shapes within the images to connect them. I am also inspired by the artist Meghann Riepenhoff who produces seascape without a camera looking at the tidal patterns made by ocean waves creating more abstract images. She describes her photos as a 'series of camera-less cyanotype'. I am interested in exploring her work and interpreting it as for my political landscape project I explored ideas of light sensitive paper and cynotypes and tried to recreate them. Exploring that in this project will follow on from my previous work and gives me a better understanding. The work of Meghann Riepenhoff also links to the work of Susan Derges which is another photographer I will take inspiration from in my project. She also specialises in cameraless photographic processes, most often working with natural landscapes. Exploring the movement of water and the texture it creates is an concept i want to explore in my project.To interpret their work I will try to create cynotypes myself. I want to do this as I think it creates an interesting aspect to my project where they are photos that aren't taken by a camera, creating an effect that wouldn't be produced with a digital images.
Example Meghann Riepenhoff Work:
Example of Susan Derges:
As I continue through my project I will develop it further by evaluating what I have done successfully and work from that. I will start by exploring shapes and forms within nature that soft and rounded linking the ideas of beauty from a feminine point of view in my first shoot. I then plan to explore the movement of water/ocean in my second shoot and will continue by researching cyantypes by Susan Derges and Meghann Riepenhoff to do an interpretation in my third shoot. I then want to focus on abstract shapes looking at light and shadows within a landscape in my forth shoot. I am particularly interested in exploring nature and beauty as I consider it something that influences me as an individual.
In 2001, Rinko Kawauchi launched her career with the simultaneous publication of three astonishing photo-books—Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako—firmly establishing herself as one of the most innovative newcomers to contemporary photography, not just in Japan, but across the globe. In the years that followed, she published other notable monographs, including Aila (2004), The Eyes, the Ears, (2005), and Semear (2007). And now, ten years after her precipitous entry onto the international stage, Aperture has published Illuminance, the latest volume of Kawauchi’s work and the first to be published outside of Japan. Kawauchi’s work has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. In Illuminance, Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns. Gorgeously produced as a clothbound volume with Japanese binding, this impressive compilation of mostly previously unpublished images is proof of Kawauchi’s unparalleled, unique sensibility and her ongoing appeal to the lovers of photography In her photos we see an iridescent diamond; a radiant blue sky; an elderly woman making onigiri; an infant suckling on a mother’s breast. At first glance, her photographs seem simple. But her talent lies in the way she is able to evoke the primal in all of us: a depth of raw human emotion. “It’s not enough that [the photograph] is beautiful,” says Kawauchi. “If it doesn’t move my heart, it won’t move anyone else’s heart.” A distinctive trait of her work lies both in the sequence and the juxtaposition of her images. This editing, she says, “differentiates between a photograph and an artwork. Seeing two images next to each other opens up the imagination and gives birth to something else. Flipping through the pages of the book, it can arouse feelings of excitement, sadness, or happiness—things that are hard [for me] to do with words.” her “Illuminance” series, which are on display in large-scale proportions. Square photographs appeal to the artist because, she has said, the images don’t “pull” in any direction: they are neither vertical nor horizontal. This creates quite a different composition to the standard landscape or portraits, which usually rely on a rule of thirds for the aesthetic appeal. The square format is inherently calm, but in the hands of Kawauchi, it is never boring.
why I chose this artist: Kawauchi is a master of finding stillness and purity in everyday life. I chose this artist because through this work I personally can see the whole beauty and opulence within the light and abstract thoughts coming from each of the objects or places themself. The images themselves are not about being directly taken in a perfect manner, but done in such a way to evoke a feeling. The work itself too has a clear narrative throughout which I can truly appreciate, this is too what I want to show within my work. Her ability to capture poetic beauty enforcers a need to be meditative, her work is made of peoples emotions, within a peaceful positive manner, and I believe she does capture this successfully.
image anaylsis:
I chose this image as it really inspired me. I belive the way the richness of the diamond itself is not the valued part of the images itself, but the refraction of the light and the chose of rainbow light creating new compositions and formations of shape and colours is. It brings a brightness to a very dark room, I Like how from the composition it is implied that the crystal is on a table and then surrounded by a wall, however the space surrounding itself is represented to be infinite. The echoes of beauty within this photo are beyond evident, and the true exploration of what it means to be visceral. There also seems to be such an energy and expansion of happiness coming from one object, their is a personality from this, it is not just a thing as it forms new life and new beauty from within. conceptually I believe this image spoke personal to the photographer, and she just saw such a purpose of exceptional beauty from within. The effect, achieved without any post-production tricks, transforms a mundane scene into a sight resembling a divine passage to heaven. An artist who chooses her subjects as a child would, focusing on small but fascinating details that are free of heavy symbolism and are reminders of the wonderful world around us. More often than not, she captures these in a limited spectrum of cool, pale blues that have become her signature colours.
Aim for my photoshoot: I too am planning on buying small objects which I see and can value a beauty within.This agin is a personal response of my own emotions and narrative. A look into what I value most, and see beauty in. I want to use different object, mediums and photography items such as living plants in scenarios which they would not usually be found, so I can control the conditions and the factors of light which they will be surrounded by. She describes her wok as “It’s not enough that the photograph is beautiful. If it doesn’t move my heart, it wont move anyone else’s heart.”, so to capture her work I must find scenarios and lighting which is both organic and produced in order to influence and create these themes of beauty.
I Am planning on photographing 171 postcards which I have bought with the intention of using in this project. I believe that these postcards show the connections between Jersey as the rest of the world which I intend to explore with this project and therefore I thought they were very appropriate to use in photo montages and collages. The dated aesthetic running through the majority of these postcards is firstly something which I believe will successfully show the history of development due to modern systems around the world. And secondly I believe these visual qualities will make for an unusual and interesting outcome.
Here is how I am going to approach the photo shoot…
Brief: photograph sourced postcards with the intention of use in chaotic photomontage/collages
Subjects: 171 vintage sources postcards
Location: Home, dark room or outdoors depending on the weather
Light source: Lightbox and camera flash if the weather is bad, Natural outdoor lighting on a white canvas if the weather is good
Exposure: Slightly over-exposed, so that when edited together with other imagery light tones can be emphasized and edited with easily
After exploring my initial ideas for this exam project I have come to the decision that I will produce photographs surrounding the theme of chaotic imagery. I plan to do this by creating photo-montages, collages and edits in response to the artists and photographers which I have and will research. I am going to relate this work to the issues of overpopulation and capitalism which have and still continue to play a big part in the overpowered development of the world. I will photograph all kinds of things relating to this theme as rather than limiting myself to one specific subject matter this will not allow me to produce pieces with chaos as the main part.
These issues of overpopulation and capitalism are something which closely links Jersey with the rest of the world, through trade, immigration, politics and culture. I plan to explore this link and how it has developed over time, looking at the past and how it has become the present. And then how the future may look in terms of these issues. This will be executed by the use of archival and found imagery mixed with my own purposed photographs through means of collage and montage.
John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He attended San Diego State University and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA from 1970 – 1988 and the University of California at Los Angeles from 1996 – 2007. Baldessari’s artwork has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions and in over 1000 group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards and public works. His awards and honors include the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award, an award from the International Print Center New York in 2016, memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the BACA International 2008, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by La Biennale di Venezia and the City of Goslar Kaiserring in 2012. Baldessari is known for his quote speaking of ” I will not make anymore bring art”, throughout his work he wanted to break free from the artistic conventions at the time of what was expected of art, and show that anything can form and turn into art. A series of his work was called ‘ throwing three balls in the air to get a striaght line’ This is interesting especially at the time, his work is based so much off chance and effects of time. His work is dependent on nothing, he wants to form art and create new ideas from aspects which he and no one else can control, and I personally believe this is what is most interesting about his work. This work took around thirty-six attempts for himself to achieve.
The images above are form a moving image video piece of his, in which he points at different aspects of his body repeatedly saying’ this is art’. His clear denotations of wanting to break free of conventional fine art is transparent. His unique body movement and the development of black and white, is another aspect of his work I believe would be interesting to look into. It is although his work is a fighting and creation of new art yet using the most basic concepts of how to photograph himself. Much of his images too create connotations of typologies. He has said “I guess a lot of it’s just lashing out, because I didn’t know how to be an artist, and all this time spent alone in the dark in these studios and importing my culture and constant questions. I’d say, ‘Well, why is this art? Why isn’t that art?'” his changing of conventional art had an enormous dynamic on what it is to create art. His basic mediums of placing colours over someones face, or capturing a specific moment of time. Baldessari has always been conscious of the power of choice in artistic practice – like choosing to paint something red rather than blue, for example. Here, he carefully associates the choice of arm movements with the artistic choices that a painter or sculptor may make, concluding that choice is a form of art in itself. But he also confronts one of the fascinating problems that unpinned the work of many early Conceptual artists: how much can art be reduced and simplified before it stops being art at all? Baldessari offers no definitive answer, but he suggests that the gap between art and the ordinary, between art and life, may be imperceptible.
his artistic influences prompt links to very popular, public means of communication functioned, and it could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with coloured dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating. The aim of what I want to capture from his work is the aspect f unpredictability, and how it doesn’t matter with photography what your outcomes are, as much as you should always experiment within how to find new creative methods.
For these responses I will be using this photo as reference and I’ll be using these images for the edits.
For these edits, I changed all the photos to black and white and played with the colours effected by the tool so that the images weren’t tonally flat. I then used the colour balance tool and used the midtone colours to get the effect I wanted.
“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.”
Steve Patterson
Modernism:
“While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of skepticism 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.”
Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer Her work is characterized by a serene, poetic style, depicting the ordinary moments in life. 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
Kawauchi’s photographs have been described as ‘visual haikus’. Like haikus, they take note of a simple beauty in an uncluttered, non-metaphorical manner. It makes sense, therefore, that she composes haikus to accompany many of her photographs. Haiku is a very short form of Japanese poetry in three phrases.
Whatever her mood, Rinko Kawauchi says that taking pictures is as natural to her as drinking tea: she seizes upon anything that strikes her; insects, children, animals, scraps of ordinary life, tiny scraps of life that embody – more often than not – the ephemeral (lasting for a very short time). Inexhaustibly, her work constructs a new kind of inventory, the unacknowledged purpose of which is to emphasize the connections between human beings and the natural or animal world.
Illuminance
She simultaneously released a series of three photographic books – UTATANE, HANABI, HANAKO from Little More publisher, which created an overnight sensation in the photography world in Japan. According to Shinto, all things on earth have a spirit, hence no subject is too small or mundane for Kawauchi’s work.
“The mindful awareness of what is special in simple things—which Rinko Kawauchi dedicates herself to in her photographs—must be contemplated on the background of the aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi. This philosophy postulates reduction, modesty and a symbiotic relationship with nature and is applied to many areas of life, whether architecture, dance, tea ceremonies or haiku poetry. Wabi-sabi allows room for “mistakes.” Applied to photography, the goal is not the “perfect photograph;” rather, expressivity and depth make a picture meaningful—and therein lies its beauty.”—LensCulture
AILA
The subject of Rinko Kawauchi’s work “Aila” (which means “family” in Turkish) is the depiction of the essence of life: animals, plants and people are shown in a sequence assembled by free association, which also includes both birth and death. Rinko Kawauchi’s fascination in fleeting beauty, the subjects of creation and destruction, and life and death are communicated in her images.
” Kawauchi’s subject matter is intimate, personal and almost sentimental, but her photographs are not trite. She seems to take pictures from the perspective of a girl who spent too much time gazing out of the window at school, studying bugs on leaves or watching dandelions disperse in the wind. “- Frieze, review.
Seen in the opposition of light versus shadows and life versus death, Rinko believes the fleeting nature of these dualities is what ultimately determines our fragile existence. Her ‘Light and Shadow’ Project (2011) explores this theme with a poignant series of images focused on one black and one white pigeon. All proceeds from the sale of the publication went to disaster relief funds for northeast Japan
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 “Utahan”)
I decided to explore the work of Rinko Kawauchi and to take inspiration from her in my project as i specifically like how she emphasises the light and soft colours in nature and beauty. I like how she photographs things that are ‘ephemeral’, that won’t last for long, addressing concepts like life and death in her work. I also like how photographs everyday situations and objects and emphasises the beauty that most people would.t notice, which is something i would like to do in my project as well.
