Toledano is a English photographer born in 1968 in London, to a French Moroccan mother and an American father. He grew up in London and Casablanca. He received a BA in English literature from Tufts University in Boston. Toledano considers himself a conceptual artist: Everything starts with an idea, and the idea determines the execution. Consequently, his work varies in medium, ranging from photography to installation, sculpture, painting and video.

His project ‘When I was Six ‘, focuses on the short life of his younger sister Claudia  who passed away in a car accident when he was six, and then again was never spoke of again and subsequently because the elephant in the room between him and his mother and father, who found the situation too painful to speak about. After his both of his parents had passed away he found a box of all her her things neatly packed away by his mother. He used this project to get to know his sister who he a very little time with, the project also help him to understand how his parents dealt with the trauma of losing a child. 

‘This work was a way of getting to know Claudia. But it was also a way of getting to know my parents and their relationship with her. It gave me a glimpse into the pain and courage it took to stay together as husband and wife, as mother and father, to give me the beautiful life they gave me. I have no memories of my life after my sister’s death for a few years, other than an obsession with space, planets, and distant universes. Perhaps it was a way of being somewhere else, distant. Half of the images in the book are of the imagined landscapes that saved me, when I was a child that needed saving. The other half, of things that belonged to my sister. Things that explain who she was, how she loved my parents, and what happened after her death.’

Interracial marriage is a form of marriage outside a specific social group  involving spouses who belong to different socially-defined races or radicalized ethnicities. In the past it has been illegal the United States of America and in South Africa as miscegenation. It became legal in the entire United States in 1967 when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case Loving v. Virginia that race-based restrictions on marriages violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Interracial relationships have never been illegal in England or Europe, but they might have been frowned upon in society .

One of the most important and significance interracial relationships was between seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, In June 1947, at a dance at Nutford House organised by the London Missionary Society, her sister introduced her to  Prince Seretse Khama. He was the son of the paramount chief Sekgoma II of the Bamangwato people.Their plans to marry caused controversy both with the tribal elders in Bechuanaland and the government of South Africa, which had recently instituted the system of racial segregation known as apartheid.The British government intervened in an attempt to stop the marriage. The Bishop of London, William Wand, said he would permit a church wedding only if the government agreed.The couple married at Kensington register office in September 1948. Julius Nyerere, then a student teacher and later President of Tanzania, said it was “one of the great love stories of the world”. A movie of their story was made in 2017 titled’ A United Kingdom’

One of the most high profile interracial marriages of modern day society is the marriage of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, however there has been backlash from different parts of the black community and the marriage in turn has become very political, as many say they we shouldn’t forget the history of what the British Monarchy/Harry’s family, did to many different countries around the world and this should have been in the forefront of Megan’s when decided to marry him.

As I am mixed race have parents of different races, my father is black, who lives in Leeds the city in which he grew up in, his parents come from the island of St Kitts. My mother is white, and lives in Jersey with me, my mum and was born on island and came back to the island to have me. Her Fathers family lived in jersey, but her mother and her family organically came Guernsey. The met each other in Skyros which is a small island in Greece which is why they decided t call me Sky. They separated why I was two, however they have tried hard to keep in contact with each other as friends. Looking back now that decision was the best thing that they could have done, as I have no memories of their ever being arguments or them having any hate towards each other.

Saint Kitts, also known as Saint Christopher Island, after Christopher Columbus is an island in the West Indies/Caribbean. The west side of the island borders the Caribbean Sea, and the eastern coast faces the Atlantic Ocean. Saint Kitts and the neighboring island of Nevis constitute one country,  the islands are separated by a shallow 3-kilometer channel known as “The Narrows”

Saint Kitts has a population of around 40,000, the majority of people who are native to the island are of African descent. The primary language is English, the people who live there have coined the name Kittitians, such as Jersey people call themselves Jersey Beans.

Saint Kitts became the first  Caribbean island in which the British and French set up  colonies in the mid 1620s. Along with the island nation of Nevis, Saint Kitts was a member of the British West Indies until gaining independence on September 19, 1983.

The island of Saint Kitts is home to the Warner Park Cricket Stadium, which was used to host 2007 Cricket World Cup matches. This made St. Kitts and Nevis the smallest nation to ever host a World Cup event.

Similar to Jersey, the island is divided into nine parishes:

• Christ Church Nichola Town
• Saint Anne Sandy Point
• Saint George Basseterre
• Saint John Capisterre
• Saint Mary Cayon
• Saint Paul Capisterre
• Saint Peter Basseterre
• Saint Thomas Middle Island
• Trinity Palmetto Point

Both of my grandparents on my dads side of the family are native to the island, they both came to England sepretaly as part of the ‘Wind-rush’ generation, but met in England and the decided to settle down and start and family.

The Windrush generation refers to the collection of immigrants who were invited to come to England to start and new life and work. The British crown called on its empire, to come and work in England to help boots the economy and rebuild England after the war. The immigrants that came from the Caribbean/West Indies, are called ‘Windrush’ as the first boat to sail to England was called MV Empire Windrush, which on June 22, 1948, docked in Tilbury, Essex, bringing nearly 500 people from the Caribbean to the UK.

I have only visited the island once, which was when I was around two years old so I have no memories of visiting the island. But I am planning to visit some of the family that we still have there sometime soon.

MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, is a publication which is committed to establishing, representing and promoting a collective of woman photographers of an African descent.

MFON’ was founded just over a year ago, by Lalah Amatullah Barrayn and Adama Delphine Fawunda. The book is dedicated  solely to 118 woman photographers of African descent. The title ‘MFON’ takes its name from Mmekutmfon ‘Mfon’ Essien, the Nigerian born American photographer who died ages 34 form breast cancer,  the day before her series “The Amazon’s New Clothes” was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as part of the critically acclaimed exhibition “Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers.”

The first edition of the book features over 100 woman from across the Diaspora. The book  features a collection of  essays written by women scholars, journalists and artists. The main of the book is too;

1. Promote an international representative voice of women photographers of African descent.
2. Fill a void while creating a space for intellectual discourse around issues represented by women photographers of African descent.
3. Create a powerful collective of women photographers, journalists, and scholars to build their practices through solid representation of their voices within the field of photography.

Diaspora – A diaspora is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. In particular, diaspora has come to refer to involuntary mass dispersion of a population from its indigenous homeland. An example of a diaspora is the 6th century exile of Jews from outside Israel to Babylon.

The book has been featured in numerous publications, Vogue, The New York Times and the BBC. They first attempted to publish the book in 2006, in which they where unsuccessful, as the publishing houses saw to relevant market for the book. But now with the rise of black culter coming more widely  accepted the the main stream market.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2018/march/women-photographers-african-diaspora/

Previous essay Questions 

• How does the work of Phillip Toledano and Yoshikatsu Fujii show childhood and family breakups?
• How does Diana Markosian and Rita Puig-Serra Costa, express the notion of family history and relationships in their work
• How have concepts of family, separation and memory  been explored in the photo books of Sarello Casanova a

Possible Essay Questions 

• How has the breakdown of family relationships effected photographic nature of  Phillip Toledano and Yoshikatsu Fujii
• How can a person’s identity be shown through their possessions and the condition of these possessions
• an you show a person experience though life in photographs ?
• In what way does Carole Bénitah explore childhood memories through her work as a method of understanding identity and self expression?

Straight Photography Movement and Pictorial Photography Movement 

The Pictorial Movement 

Pictorialism, an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality, they  tried to make their they made images look similar to romanticism painted which tended to be very fantasy/ dream like. To create this effect pictorial photographers would often smear Vaseline around the lens of the camera to make the image distorted, the height of pictorialism was around the 1800s – 1910.

Characteristic of the Pictorialism 

• Pictures that look similar to paintings in  the same era
• Many images featuring the female body as the many subject matter
• The use of shadows and darkness to obscure some of the frame
• Out of focus images
• Blurry and fuzzy images

Pictorial Photographers 

Emerson’s Naturalistic Photography – In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) expounded his theory of Naturalistic Photography which the Pictorialist used to promote photography as an art rather than science. Their handcrafted prints were in visual opposition to the sharp b/w contrast of the commercial print

Examples of Pictorial photography 

Straight Photography 

Pure photography or straight photography is a photography movement which began in reaction to the Pictorial photography movement. Straight photography emphasizes and engages with the camera’s own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus and rich in detail. The term generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes, but sharply depict the scene or subject as the camera sees it. The movement began around the same time that pictoralism began to die out, so around 1910.

Straight Photographers 

Paul Strand – born 1890 New York City.The iconic photographer Strand redifined the medium through his portraits, city scenes, and abstract compositions that helped define modernist photography in the twentieth century.

Ansel Adams –  His signature style was characterized by a sharp, high-resolution focus and stark contrasts of light and shadow. Adams co-founded Group f/64, a collective of Western-American photographers.

László Moholy-Nagy. He was influential in promoting the Bauhaus’s multi- and mixed-media approaches to art, advocating for the integration of technological and industrial design elements.

Examples of straight Photography 

Joachim Schmid was born in 1955 in Balingen; he lives and works in Berlin. His works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including at Lieu d’Art et Action contemporaine de Dunkerque (2015), the Museum Folkwang in Essen (2014). He has published over one hundred artist books. His works can be found in prestigious public collections, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul.

Using other people’s (often mundane) photographs, he creates artwork that is alluring, intriguing, and captivating. He revels in photographs that other people lose or throw away in public, especially if they seem to have been discarded with some animosity or intense feeling. His project ‘Pictures from the Street’ 1982-2012, features countless images of authoress photographs and remnants of images that have been left thrown of discarded, that he has encountered by chance by walking through the streets of public spaces through out the world. The collection has more than 900 images, if he finds an image that has been ripped or towrn apart he will try his best to reassemble the image and then disply the imag on arhival paper.Displaying the images inchronological order noting the date and place where each image was  found.

A project that has become one of Schmid most notable works is that he created an ‘institute’ that offered to safely recycle or re-use dangerous film and photos. The Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs became publicized worldwide, by chance, and Schmid was inundated with parcels of photos and negatives that people wanted to dispose of, safely. One of the parcels that was sent to the ‘institute’ was a parcel of over a decade of negative images from a professional photo studio, how ever the original company that sent the parcel had sliced the images in half to try and destroy their value, but what Schmidt discovered that he was able to put two half’s of separate images together to create weird and bizarre compositions.

Joachim Schmid created this image after he sent out a request to be sent images that people wanted to be disposed of in a safe and confidential manner, from a photograph company he received  a box  in which all of the images had been sliced in half to try and destroy the value of  the images. What Joachim did was found that he was able to combine two separate images to make an entirely different image. On first glance of this image, it looks like the young girl on the left hand side is an archival images of the grown woman of the left, so that the photograph has decades between them. The only detail that we can see of the woman face is the eyes which can be seen to have a wrinkles beginning to appear .The image looks as if it was taken in a very professional environment, such as a photograph studio, it looks as if artificial lighting was used to take both images.

For this project, I am going to be researching and exploring into my mixed heritage, of English and Caribbean blood. And the way that growing up in a western and predominantly white island, has effected my identity, and how Caribbean effect my identity as a seventeen year old. I am also to look at the difference between my families and the lives that they have left and the way that they ended up together.

For the project I am going to use a mixture of mediums, but the main method that I am going to use will be archival images that I will find in family archives. I am also going to analyse images of when I was young and oblivious to how my race separate me out from the rest of my friends and how people would and will continue to see me as difference. And that how I have become aware of the say that my race will impact the rest of my life.

In what way can the work of Lewis Bush and Clare Rae both be considered political?

In this essay I will be responding to the work of Lewis Bush and Clare Ray, looking  at the differences and similarity in their work, and the way in which their work can be considered to be political. Both of the photographers in question have been recently involved in the jersey Archisle ‘Photographer in Radiance’ programmed in which they produced a body of work in reaction to the island and the history and connotation that goes along with the island.

Trading Zones

This was the first exhibition that I visited, this was the work produced by Lewis bush, as a result of living on the island for six months and a documentary response to the finance industry in this exhibition there was a wide variety of mediums; Blue prints, photographs, response slips from members of the public, some of the images were abstract and required a deep understanding of the link between the work and the theme of the exhibition.  What I liked about this exhibition, was that it was open for a person’s own interpretation, of how they view that finance industry, and that they were able to give their own opinion of the finance industry which would become apart of the exhibition itself. Lewis handed out pieces of card to ,members of the public with has the words’ Fiance is …..’ he then asked the public to write, draw or any other way that they wanted to express their feelings and opinion of the finance industry. He wasn’t saying whether the finance industry was good or bad but was showing the way that it has affected the island and the impact that it has had. Another part of the exhibition that I thought was highly effective was when Lewis had overlay many images of males and females who work in finance corporations. I believe that this made the viewer look at themselves and think would they be making a differences if they when into this industry or if they would just be the same as every other person working their and become another number working for a corporation.

Clare Rae

Clare Rae’s worked that she produced is entitled ‘ Entre Nous’, in which she has looked at the work of Claude Cahun, who was a female, queer artist and activist, who came to jersey during the second world war to escape from the Nazi as she was Jewish.To produce the work Clare visited many places around the island as she wanted to recreate the works of Claude Cahun, she set up a timer and then posed in the images, in many of the images she has confined her body to small and inclosed spaces, so her body becomes apart of the landscape. Her self portraits Clare’s who comes under the theme of surrealism and self expression.Clare also used a film camera which allowed her to put more thought into her work as it restricted her to a certain number of images per film, which shows that each one of her images where careful panned and throughout and to a high standard. A feature of Clares images focused on the idea of the male gaze, which is one of the reason that she has included her own body in the images, to symbolize the way in which females bodies have become incredibly sexualized, also so by doing this she is in control the female body in a piece of art, as historically in art male artist have sexualized the female body .

To compare both of the bodies of work Bush’s approach is to document the finance industry in a very open way as he is an is coming to jerseys and viewing it from the outside and showing the look on the industry. But what he is doing fro members of the public who come to view the exhibition is laying down  the effect of the industry down right in front of people’s faces so they are able to struce their own view of the impact that it having on Jersey. Whereas Clare Read work has more of a personal touch to it as she includes her own body in images so it becomes a part of the landscape, so her work shows her own opinion of who she would fit into the island, and how she respond from the island by reflecting on the work of Claude Cahun. 

In this shoot I will be responding too the rule of manipulation and taking inspiration from, in which he used double exposure to create a 3D effect look. For this shoot I needed to only take very simple and plain images as I knew that most of the work for the images would  have to be done in editing.  I took theses images on the park near my house, I wanted to photograph the tops of the trees and I wanted to create a contrast i within the images as I wanted some of them to me more plain and the others to be more detailed, and as I knew that I was going to edit my images and use the technique of double exposure and if there are a lot of different components to the which when edited the image can look too busy

Edits 

Compare and contrast

I don’t think that the two images when placed next to each other look that similar, this may be due to the process in which I took this image. I took this image on a DSLR, as I didn’t have access to a film camera which is the style of camera that Blanca Vinas uses. I think that his image had more of a fantasy look to it, as many of the colours in the image are either pastel and light and airy. I edited this image on Photoshop I used the same image three times and increased the hie on all of the images dramatically, as I wanted to created an image that look that it had been heavily edited and manipulated . Both of the images have trees as the main focus, but the photographers image only has the silhouette of the tress which I think is a more effective style, so when I edit theses images again I will try to re-create this style.