First Photoshoot

• I want to go back to La Motte and take landscape photographs whilst looking at the archival images I’ve collected.
• I could take inspiration from the archival images or take the images in the same place to show the effects of time on the area.
• This is taking inspiration from Chrystel Lebas in her series ‘Field Studies’ where she goes back to the same areas Edward Salisbury visited and takes photographs in the same way to show how the environment has changed.

Second Photoshoot

• I will revisit La Motte and collects more objects I find around the area
• I will then photographs these images in a studio to develop from my previous photoshoot and work on improving the images I take.

Some images from previous studio photoshoot:

• I will experiment by using different lighting techniques and different arrangement of the objects.
• As well as experimenting with the editing of the images in the style of Chrystel Lebas like in my previous shoot or in other ways that I haven’t tried.

Third Photoshoot

• I will focus on going to La Motte in different weather conditions so my images vary.
• This will make the atmospheres in the images different from one another.
• I will also focus on taking more close up images as well as landscape images of the area to create variety in the way the images are taken in my photobook.
• This is taking inspiration from Edward Salisbury where he photographed some close up images looking at texture when he visited an area.

Images from photo archive:

Archaeological excavations carried out between 1911 and 1914 showed that the islet had been occupied over a long period of time. Despite being quite small the site is unusual because it had several both ritual and domestic elements, as well as providing important environmental evidence relating to changes in sea level. The remains of a series of prehistoric rubbish heaps, dating between 1,500-300 BC, containing fragments of pottery, animal bones, stone tools and shells were found.

Group of 18 cists which were excavated  were dated from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Two cists can be found at La Houge Bie.

Cist: An ancient coffin or burial chamber made from stone or a hollowed tree

La Motte is a tidal island, and listed archaeological site, also known as Green Island, located in the Vingtaine de Samarès in the parish of St Clement on the south-east coast of Jersey, Channel Islands.

The island has a grassy surface and is predominantly clay surrounded by rocks. In recent times efforts have been made to reduce erosion of the island by the construction of walls.

Some archaeological evidence has been found here. Remains of a cemetery on La Motte are believed to be from later settlers. There are Neolithic elements including a cairn and a number of middens, dating from 1500 BC to 300 BC, on La Motte.

http://photographic-archive.societe-jersiaise.org/Details/archive/110003728

To the east of Grève d’Azette beach lies Le Croc du Hurté. In the medieval period this small promentory actually extended out to what we now know as Green Island or to give it its old name, La Motte – the mound. Richard Popinjay from Portsmouth drew a map of Jersey for Queen Elizabeth I in 1563 which shows La Motte still part of the main island. At some stage in the 17th century a severe storm must have caused the waves to smash and wash away the thin strip of land connecting it to Le Croc du Hurté.

In September 1858 some children found a skeleton buried on the islet. The mystery was cleared up at the coroner’s inquest by 82-year old James Le Templier who said that he had discovered the body sewn in a hammock washed up on the islet about 50 years earlier. As there had been a naval engagement between a Royal Navy vessel and a French Navy brig a few days before, the Constable of St Clement declared the body to be that of a French sailor and ordered the soldiers from the Roqueberg battery to bury it on La Motte.

https://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/2009/10/23/witch-trials-in-jersey-fact-or-fiction/

https://jerseyeveningpost.com/features/2015/05/03/coast-gallery-spotlight-on-green-island/

The slipway, La Montée de la Sordonnière, was built about 1870 and takes its name from the beach – sordonnière means a sea slug.

At the far end of the beach is Rocqueberg. A guardhouse with an associated magazine was built here in 1691 from which the men of the St Clement’s militia kept a look-out in times of emergency. In the late 18th century two 24-pounder cannon were positioned here on a wooden platform behind an earth wall or boulevard.

In 1797 an accidental explosion destroyed the original guardhouse and because of financial constraints it was not replaced until 1802. By then a small detachment of the regular army was based here and it was these men who were tasked with burying the French sailor on Green Island.

Sir Edward James Salisbury (16 April 1886 – 10 November 1978) was an English botanist and ecologist. He was born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire and graduated in botany from University College London in 1905. Salisbury used photography simply as a tool to record species. He had a purely instrumental approach and was using a fairly primitive form of camera, which had its limitations. Before photography, botanists had to be very talented illustrators or collaborate with good ones. Photography was to provide a more accessible way to get things recorded. However, the medium had its limits, not least because Salisbury was working with black and white photography, missing all the information a colour image would record. It is surprising how atmospheric and artisan his photographs appear from a contemporary perspective. Perhaps this is in part due to a surge of contemporary artists’ use of older cameras and techniques for artistic effect. Lebas uses technically advanced cameras and in her work we see much clearer and sharper images which provide a lot more information than Salisbury’s original, often out-of-focus, images.

His passion for plants began at an early age. During family outings into the surrounding countryside, he would collect flowers to grow on his own patch in the garden at home. He attached a label to each one giving its Latin name. He went on to study botany at University College, and on graduation became a research student. Before long, he was helping to lay the foundations of a brand-new branch of botany called plant ecology. Instead of studying plants in isolation, scientists began investigating their relationship with their environment.

When the British Ecological Society was founded in 1913, Salisbury became a founder member. By now he was working on an even greater project involving the oak-hornbeam woodlands of Hertfordshire. The botanist recorded the light intensity in woods at different seasons of the year, and studied its effect on the flora beneath the trees. This classic study was the first if its kind in the country. When his research was published in 1916 it revolutionised the understanding of woodland ecology.

Interview with Chrystel Lebas:

Focussing on Salisbury’s landscape images to begin with, how do these photographs speak of nature in a historical sense? How do you think Salisbury regarded nature, visually and conceptually?

Chrystel Lebas: This is an interesting question about the act of looking for scientific purposes: what are we looking at? Is it of any importance? How does looking inform research? I concluded, during my research, that Salisbury photographed mainly for scientific purposes; he used his photographs as a document to illustrate his writings and records his experiments. The notebooks and papers archived at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Library Art & Archives (after he died someone donated them all to Kew) didn’t reveal anything from his photographic past and how he came to use the medium. I know that he was from a wealthy family of 9 children, and they all studied or worked in the Arts, Science or Architecture. I presume they had a darkroom in the house (in Harpenden), so I guess they must have picked up on the beginning of photography together, and Salisbury then carried on using it for his own research.

Previously used Hypotheses:

• In what way do the photographers_______ and ________ reflect the concept of _________?
• In what way does______ explore ______ through her work as a method of understanding______?
• Can the work of ______ show how the relationship between ________ has developed and changed over time?
• How do the photographers _____ and _____ portray the environment and the effects of time?
• How can photographers ______ and _____ bear witness to the ways of life and events of the world?

Own Hypotheses:

How do the photographers Stephen Gill and Mandy Barker relate photography to scientific investigations?

How do the photographers Mandy Barker in her series ‘Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals’ and  Chrystel Lebas in her series ‘Field Studies’ show the effects of mankind on environment over time?

How do the photographers Mandy Barker in her series ‘Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals’ and  Chrystel Lebas in her series ‘Field Studies’ address issues of environment?

How do the photo books ‘The Meadow’ by Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley and ‘Field Studies’ by Chrystel Lebas represent the environment?

Death of a Loyalist Soldier

‘Death of a Loyalist Soldier’ is a photo taken by war photographer and photojournalist  Robert Capa and is claimed to have been taken on September 5, 1936. It depicts the exact moment of death when a republican soldier in the was shot in Battle of Cerro Muriano in the Spanish Civil War. Picture Post, a pioneering photojournalism magazine published in the United Kingdom, had once described then twenty-five year old Capa as “the greatest war photographer in the world” and his ‘falling solider’ photo is said to be the most iconic image of the Spanish Civil War.

The composition of this image makes it look like the moment was unanticipated because of how the horizon isn’t straight and how the soldier feet are touching the bottom of the image. If the moment was anticipated than Capa would have set up a better composition in the photo, but because it was unexpected he didn’t have time. This is also indicated through the blurriness in some parts of the image where Capa had to take the photo quickly. The photo is black and white because it was taken in 1936 making the image more formal and leads the audiences eye to the soldier straight away. The foreground of the image shows the soldier being shot and falling back towards the ground and the background displays mountains out of focus, showing how the image was unanticipated.

Doubts have been raised since 1975 in relation to the authenticity of the image. In José Manuel Susperregui’s 2009 book “Shadows of Photography”, he concludes that the photograph was not taken at Cerro Muriano, but at another location about 30 miles away. He said this meant that the Falling Soldier photograph ‘was staged, as were all the others in the same series, supposedly taken on the front.

This position the solider is in makes the image seem authentic as his arm holding the gun has been thrown backwards like he’s just been shot. But the likelihood of catching the exact moment a soldier was shot is very unlikely making the claims against Robert Capa more believable, but still isn’t evidence. But the environment surrounding the soldier doesn’t look like it was taken in the ‘heat of the battle’ said Mr. Hartshorn making the image looked like it’s staged.

This photo above is of another man from the same sequence as “The Falling Soldier.” A researcher has used the mountains to identify what he says is the picture’s correct location. Cynthia Young, curator of the Robert Capa Archive at the I.C.P “very possibly didn’t remember” where he took the picture, probably leaving his agents and editors back in Paris to make a guess when they developed his film, defending the authenticity.

Capa described how he took the photograph in a 1947 radio interview:

I was there in the trench with about twenty milicianos … I just kind of put my camera above my head and even [sic] didn’t look and clicked the picture, when they moved over the trench. And that was all. … [T]hat camera which I hold [sic] above my head just caught a man at the moment when he was shot. That was probably the best picture I ever took. I never saw the picture in the frame because the camera was far above my head

Richard Whelan, in This Is War! Robert Capa at Work, states, ‘It is neither a photograph of a man pretending to have been shot, nor an image made during what we would normally consider the heat of battle.’

Although Capa’s image could have been staged, the exposure he gave to the public about war by portraying a soldier the moment he was shot was effective and displays the turmoil that’s experienced in war.

“Which ever way you view the authenticity of his work and the identity he created, the impact that Capa has had cannot be denied. Every photograph taken represents a metaphor that will eternally last in the viewer’s mind, depicting a time riven with devastation that is still felt today. It is these timeless reverberations his photography has created that made him ‘the greatest war photographer in the world’.” (Andrew Kingsford-Smith)

In his July 1998 article, Phillip Knightley deniedthe importance of Brotóns’s discovery and stated “The famous photograph is almost certainly a fake—Capa posed it.” He went on to argue, “Federico could have posed for the photograph before he was killed.” Richard Whelan sought the advice of a forensic expert, Captain Robert L.Franks, the chief homicide detective of the Memphis Police Department. to my request. In his analysis, he said that the first thing that struck him as odd about The Falling Soldier was that the man in the photograph “had been standing flat footed when he was shot. He clearly was not in stride when he was shot.”  He went on to write, “Was this picture posed? I think not, based on the human reflex response. You will notice that the soldier’s left hand, which is partially showing under his left leg, is in a semi-closed position. If the fall was, in fact, staged, the hand would be open to catch his fall.  The deduction that the man had been carrying his rifle in a was suggesting that he did not expect to use it soon led Richard Whelan  to reconsider the story.

 “They were fooling around,” [Capa] said. “We all were fooling around. We felt good. There was no shooting. They came running down the slope. I ran too and knipsed.”                             “Did you tell them to stage an attack?” asked Mieth.
“Hell no. We were all happy. A little crazy,
maybe.”
“And then?”
“Then, suddenly it was the real thing. I didn’t
hear the firing—not at first.”
“Where were you?”
“Out there, a little ahead and to the side of
them.”

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283315