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Work to do by Mon 18 March

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Produce an appropriate number of blog posts with good use of images, hyperlinks and written analysis or evaluation of the following:

1. Photo-Assignment: PLAY
- Historical/ contextual references to Marcel Duchamp, origins of conceptualism, John Baldessari, Tom Pope and others mentioned as artists references and creative starting points
 
- Responses/ experimentation: Upload images from last Wednesday photo-games with a ball and coin toss and produce a number of photographic experiments eg. grids, diptychs/triptychs, stop animation (GIF), montages etc.

2. SPECIFICATION: Write a specification with 2-3 ideas about what you are planning to do; how, who, when, where and why? Use images to illustrate your ideas

3. RESEARCH AND ANALYSE: ARTISTS REFERENCES Research and analyse the work of at least 2-3 (or more) photographers/ artists. Produce at least 2-3 blog posts for each artist reference that illustrate your thinking and understanding using pictures and annotation and make a photographic response to your research into the work of others

- Produce a mood board with a selection of images.
Provide analysis of their work and explain why you have chosen them and how it relates to your idea and the exam themes of VARIATION and/or SIMILARITY.
- Select at least 2 key images and analyse in depth, TECHNICAL (lighting, camera), VISUAL (composition, visual elements) (interpretation, subject-matter, what is the photographer trying to communicate), CONTEXTUAL (art historical, political, social, personal), CONCEPTUAL (ideas, meaning, theory of art/ photography/ visual culture, link to other’s work/ideas/concept)
- Incorporate quotes and comments from artist themselves or others (art critics, art historians, curators, writers, journalists etc) using a variety of sources such as Youtube, online articles, reviews, text, books etc.
- Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post

4. PLAN AND SHOOT: Plan at least 2-3 shoots as a response to artists references where you explore your ideas in-depth.
- Edit shoots and show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop

5. REVIEW AND REFLECT: Evaluate each shoot afterwards with thoughts on how to refine and modify your ideas i.e.  experiment with images in Lightroom/Photoshop, re-visit idea, produce a new shoot, what are you going to do differently next time? How are you going to develop your ideas? Plan a second or third shoot. Explore different photographic techniques and processes. Research and analyse new artists references/ inspirations etc.

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ARTIST REFERENCES – GROUP WORK

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Mike Disfarmer

(1884–1959) Portrait photographer from Arkansas in America, he captures harsh realism is rural parts of the country for 40 year. He lived a reclusive lifestyle only making human contact when taking hid photos. After leaving his family farm and changing his name to Disfarm as a form of rebellion he taught him self how to take and develop photos even building his own studio. He would charge 25-50 cent for a penny portrait which people from the community would buy as tokens to give to family and friends. He photographs, individuals sometimes groups generally with a natural expression not posing or overly smiling. The overall collection creates a sense of identity for the time, rural location and people who occupied it.

Stuart Pearson Wright

Wright plans a move away from portraiture, yet his projected subjects remain bound up with the enigma of his own identity and origins.

“People say I make my subjects look sad or old. I suppose I do instinctively either bring out of them, or project on to them, something rather melancholy.”

Wright explores identity of other people out of his own isolation. His obsession with portraiture formed out of never meeting his father, he was born as the result of artificial insemination.

  • Pearson Wright, Stuart; Adam Cooper; National Portrait Gallery, London; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/adam-cooper-157526
  • Pearson Wright, Stuart; Prince Philip (b.1921), HRH the Duke of Edinburgh; Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/prince-philip-b-1921-hrh-the-duke-of-edinburgh-218533

Seydou Keita

https://www.all-about-photo.com/photographers/photographer/125/seydou-keita

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/seydou-keita

‘Serving elite and middle-class patrons, his images often highlight the idealized or imagined socio-economic status of his sitters through the inclusion of props: cosmopolitan clothing and accessories, radios, telephones, bicycles, and sometimes his own car. To formalize the outdoor setting, Keïta regularly employed richly patterned backdrops that add movement and visual energy to his images and used a low vantage point and angular composition to highlight his clients’ confident facial expressions and relaxed postures. ‘

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Experimenting with GIFs

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Whilst in Bristol I saw an opportunity to continue to experimentation with GIF’s, along most streets, outside each house were a collection of recycling boxes. The pavements seemed to be covered in these boxes, presumably because it was collection day however it did ruin the overall look of the area. There were a mix of green and black boxes containing various packagings to be recycled, for example Glass, plastic bottles and cardboard. I decided to take pictures of these boxes from a birds eye angle framing the rectangle shape in the centre. I was interested in the variety of thing in the bins and how they differed from house to house and how they reflected the lifestyle of the people living in each house. I cropped all these photos to the same size and orientation so that they all followed the same shape conventions. I then proceeded to bring them into photoshop and turn them into a GIF, each frame lasting 0.1 of a second. The final GIF flicks through the photos showing the variation and similarity between each recycling bin.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Gbins.gif
Analysis, Contextual Studies, Developing, Research

Artist Research – Bernd and Hilla Becher

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Sources:

Planning

Photoshoot 1- Planning

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For my first photoshoot I wanted explore repetition in nature, looking at the soft shapes that plants and natural objects create and to emphasise the fragility and beauty in the shapes using light. I am taking some inspiration from the photographer Rinko Kawauchi as i like how she focuses on everyday situations and objects, emphasising their beauty, especially in nature.

I want to go to a natural area to take photos and I think that a woods would be a good place to explore as there many different things i can take images of and would be easy to find repetition. I plan to take pictures including water i.e. the shapes of waves/ripples, reflections of trees and plants on water, things you can see through the water underneath. I also want to take photos of patterns on trees, plants and in the landscape, hopefully helping me generate more ideas for my project. The lighting in the photos i take will depend on the weather that day.

Taking inspiration from Rinko Kawauchi where she looks at 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.  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. 

Beauty and Nature

The beauty of nature can have a profound effect upon our senses, those gateways from the outer world to the inner, whether it results in disbelief in its very existence as Emerson notes, or feelings such as awe, wonder, or amazement.  

Emerson offers is that “the simple perception of natural forms is a delight.”  When we think of beauty in nature, we might most immediately think of things that dazzle the senses – the prominence of a mountain, the expanse of the sea, the unfolding of the life of a flower.  Often it is merely the perception of these things itself which gives us pleasure, and this emotional or affective response on our part seems to be crucial to our experience of beauty. Nature is beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive.  In nature we observe growth and development in living things, contrasted with the static or deteriorating state of the vast majority of that which is man-made.

(Harvard University- Beauty in Nature)

I want to try and emphasise these concepts within my photography and throughout my project. I think that this is an interesting concept and is something I have yet to explore in my other photography projects. I will also look more into ideologies of beauty and picturesque in my project. For this shoot i plan to start generic images that i can develop from in my next photoshoots. I also want to photograph relations in water as I think it’s an interesting way to look at an objects from another perspective, epically in nature.

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First Photoshoot

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The final outcomes of this project are going to have two overlapping images of the same location, in contrasting weather to create an image which is similar but greatly different at the same.

Image result for hsbc airport adverts
This is similar to what I want the final outcomes of this project to look similar too.

For this shoot I went to four different locations around the island, for this shoot I need to take two sets of images, essential a before and after set of images. The first set of images are going to be of icon jersey landscapes on a day where the weather isn’t the nicest, so cloudy and windy. The next set of image are going to be taken during the summer time, when the weather is nicer. I will then get these two images and create images similar to the one above. Overall I think that the shoot went really well, from the shoot I got a range of different types of images, some of them the weather is very dark and cloudy whereas in others the landscape is very dramatic and almost looks like and image from the Romanticism period.

These images are only first experiments, to figure out which designs/patterns look the best, I have overlapped some of the designs with other images from the shoot to have an idea of what the final outcomes of the project are going to look like.

I think that this is the best image that I have produced from this experiment as I think that it is the most effective and precise technically. I think that pattern is the design that I want to carry on with throughout the project, as it looks the most effective, even if it is slightly harder to do. For this image I went down to Coriber lighthouse, this was towards the end of the shoot. I knew that I wanted to come to this location last as I knew that this was the time where the water would be at its highest and the sun would be setting so the image would have lost of different elements to it, as I think that the images that I have taken so far in this project have been very basic and and not very interesting visually so I think that this image has added another dynamic to the images.
In this image I have overlapped two different images in the attempt to recreate my own version of the HSBC advert, which can be seen above. I think that this image is good but could be improved massively. I think that I will go back to take more images, as the two images are very similar in the colour pallets so it makes the athletically less pleasing. The other issue with this images is that the waves in the images don’t line up perfectly which then throws off the whole of the image, This is a result of rushing during the editing process so I will have to take more care when editing these images.
I have mixed feelings about this image I really like like pattern on this image, as it is simple but yet effective as it draws the on lookers eye to the center of the image. This design works well with this image, as the image has a center focus, and the rest of the image is very dramatic and has a lot going on. but if I used this pattern on another image I’m not sure hoe it would look as the design is very basic and plain.
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A2 Photography Exam – Action Plan

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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.

Analysis, Contextual Studies, Research

Bernd and Hilla Becher

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Mood-board of typologies created by Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their series of photographic images, (or typologies,) of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids. They influenced many documentary photographers and artists.

Bernd Becher was born in Siegen. He studied painting in Germany from 1953-1956, then typography (the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed) from 1959-1961. Hilla Becher was born in Potsdam. After Hilla’s time studying photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1958-1961, she had completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in her place of birth. They both began working as freelance photographers (self-employed) for the Troost Advertising Agency in Düsseldorf, concentrating on product photography (advertising or commercial photography). The couple married in 1961. Bernd and Hilla Becher first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959. The Ruhr Valley, (where Becher’s family had worked in the steel and mining industries,) was their main focus. They were fascinated by the similar shapes in which the buildings were designed. After capturing thousands of pictures of individual structures, they noticed that the various large buildings, (of cooling towers, gas tanks and coal bunkers, for instance,) shared many distinctive formal qualities. In addition to this, they were intrigued by the fact that so many of these industrial buildings seemed to have been built with a great deal of attention towards its design. Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from a straightforward “objective” point of view. They only did their shoots on overcast days, (to avoid shadows,) and early in the morning during spring and autumn. Objects included barns, water towers, coal tipples, cooling towers, grain elevators, coal bunkers, coke ovens, oil refineries, blast furnaces, gas tanks, storage silos, and warehouses.

Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher Framework Houses 1959-73

This typology created by the Becher’s shows their objectives of conceptual art. They wanted to create a series of images where every object showed similar characteristics. These images were taken in Germany, as their images were based around the German industrial architectures. Each image is similar to the other, because of the repeated lines of wood that are used as part of each houses construction. This repetition effect is something that intrigues me towards these series of images. I like how each house has a triangular rooftop – the houses are a classic shape and although they seem like original shaped houses, they all have their own speciality that differentiates them from each other. For example, on the bottom row, second image from the right, this house appears to have 5 rectangular windows with a variance in how the panels for the window are displayed. The white panels all determine how many small squares there are inside of the window – some windows have 6 small squares, some only have 2 squares and 2 long rectangles. This same house has 1 door that has 2 slight windows either side of the door. This house is very different to the houses around it on the grid format, that the Becher’s used to create their typology. However, they all have similar shapes and objects that create the houses.