Responding to Sophie Calle (Suite Venitienne) and Arnau Blanch

Sophie Calle’s project Suite Venitienne focused on following a man around the streets of Venice. This was when she met a man, at a party who said he was moving to Venice, so she moved to Venice and there, she began to follow him. Calle documented her attempts at following the man. She phoned hundreds of hotels, even visited the police station, to find out where it was that he was staying, and persuaded a woman who lived opposite to let her photograph him from her window. As I am doing a project on surveillance I thought that her work was relevant to look into as it shows surveillance in a literal sense of how she was closely observing the man and documenting his movements. 

Arnau Blanch is another photographer that I have found an interest in once coming across. He is a Spanish photographer who’s work primarily consists of stark black-and-white images. The way in which his photos are take with harsh lighting is something which i believe gives a very haunting aesthetic like that of a discomforting dream or even a nightmare.  The way in which he portrays human figures within these photographs is something which i believe is very striking as you are immediately drawn to the whole figure.

After looking into the work of both Calle and Blanch I wanted to produce a set of images that showed influence from the styles of both of their work, whilst clearly exploring the theme of surveillance. Here are some of the outcomes which I ended up producing…

Then experimenting with colour…

 

Developing the layout of my photo-book

I decided to create my book I would not use indesign and blurb itself, but I would create my own book from scratch using book wright, also enabling myself to work on the development as much as I am able. I want to record the processes to which It has taken me in order to create my book. I originally started with creating a folder of all of my images from every single one of my shoot, the ones from the sublime and previously. This led me to choose from around 12 shoots. However I know my concept now is inspired from emotions from the dependency of water with a surreal aspect of being represented and a sublime influence. Because of this I narrowed down my shoot collection to around 7. I not only want only conceptually interesting images, but also a similarity in colour scheme to create a bettering narrative story.

I want to create an almost surreal type of book with my imagery, most of which I want to correlate with the colour. Many of my images I purposely edited in such a way that they would have a blue effect in order to have a clear connotation to that of water. Because of this I belive it creates another aspect which need to be thought out when sequencing my images. I have started off by experimenting within 5 different ways in which I can experiment within the lay out of the images, these being the following: a double page spread, 3/4 of a page, a singular image between two pages cropped or overflowing the page, two images beside each-other sequenced in the middle of the book and finally a long image next to a squared image to create an unsequenced essence of variation.

Three issues I am having to experiment with is the amount of images and pages I should include within the book itself, This is also down to the amount of photos I should have over the two pages and how many images I belive should be included within the book itself. Secondly is the issue of having images which are too similar in the book or too close to each-other. I have decided My best shoots are my 3-4 most recent ones using water, because of this a lot of the images could be considered similar. I do not want to show an element of repetition within my images as I belive this would be considered as boring. Because of this I am unsure weather I should expand and add previous less sublime images, or use the best water images and just creating a smaller book. Lastly I do not know what I am doing with the text yet. I have prepared and left spaces for poems and stories if I believe it would be the best way for me to enhance my work, however I am still unsure what the written work would be. I am planning to do a physical print off and examination of all my photos in order to see what is best and the most appropriate, however I thought it would still be beneficial to start with the development.