Breaking The Rules / Alice Wielinga
Photographer Lewis Bush has put together an article explaining how breaking the rules of photography can be a great way of working as a photographer. The article covers how breaking the rules of photography can be a way of finding new ideas and exploring areas of the creative subject which you would not otherwise, if you stuck to the rules. He goes on to talk about how the best ideas aren’t clearly visible and in order to find these new and innovative creative ideas, photographers must break the rules and take things to the next level. The article covers 8 rules within photography that can be broken in order to achieve this, these 8 rules are the rules of: Objectivity, Audience, Manipulation, Reality, Technicality, Ownership, Camera and The rule of rule breaking. Of these 8 rules I have decided that I will like to explore the rule of manipulation.
Here is a link to the article from Lewis Bush…
http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/eight-photography-rules-worth-breaking/
Within the rule of manipulation sub-section of the article Bush looks into the photographer Alice Wielinga who breaks this rule within her work. I took a particular interest in her work after seeing it for the first time as I found that the aesthetics of it were very individual and intriguing. Here are some examples of her work, the first of which has some context attached by caption…
It is April 2013. While the Western media follows Kim Jong-Un’s steps during his missile test launches, I travel 2,500 kilometres through the North Korean interior. Once arrived, the images I know from my advance research correspond with the scenes my guides proudly show me during their propaganda tour. But seeing these scenes with my own eyes, I gradually discover that behind everything they present to me, a different reality is hidden. While I listen to my guides talking about what invaluable contributions the greatly admired leaders made to their country, I drive through a landscape that looks haggard and desolate. During my journey I collect propaganda material and take photographs of the reality I encounter. This material is the basis for my multimedia project ‘North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and Reality’. With the found propaganda images and my own photographs I compose a story that deconstructs the North Korean propaganda.
As Bush’s article talks about, this specific series of Wielinga’s work is executed using a combination of photographs from her visit to North Korea and North Korean propaganda. The combination of these two visual matters creates a brilliant juxtaposition which is very effective at putting across her political points.
Here is a section of Lewis Bush’s article, covering how Wielinga produced this project, including a couple of quotes from the photographer herself…
‘ When Dutch photographer Wielinga traveled to North Korea, she found her ability to photograph in the secretive state severely curtailed. “I felt that, with mere documenting, I wasn’t able to tell the story as I was experiencing it,” she says of the stage-managed excursions to which journalist-visitors are subjected. Her response was to digitally merge her photographs of official North Korea propaganda with her own images of workers and decaying factories. “I see propaganda and reality as two sides of the same coin,” she says. “Propaganda is an essential part of everyday life in North Korea, and because of that a reality in itself.” ‘