To present I wanted to show the film and push the fact that I was using film. I could have done this by printing the images and then saying that they were taken on film but using the slides also gives a certain aesthetic with the fact that the colours are inverted on the negative slides.
The way that I framed the negatives is by cutting a hollow rectangle out of some hard card and then sticking the negative to this in the order that they were taken, I then numbered the frames so that they could be easily kept in order. Finally, I made a small box from foam to contain the 6 sides that are not on the light box.
At the beginning of the Journeys and Pathways exam I wasn’t sure which subject/topic to focus my time on. Therefore I started mind-mapping and creating a mood-board of my ideas. Initially I was thinking about urban landscape and street photography, which I did end up doing for a part of my project. Later in the project I wanted to move on to a more art related topic such as street art and how it has evolved. I also initially wanted to do some work on Alice Wielinga and make some comparative photo-montages of expectation vs reality of Jersey, however I didn’t end up making a response to that as I wanted to focus more on the art side of things and reworking photos as that’s what I am more passionate about and enjoy more.
My first photo-shoot was for developing the archive photos into something more. I went into the same places that the photo had been taken in 40 years earlier. I planned to print out the two versions of the 3 different photos and then to take some acetate and cut them to size so that they would fit over the modern photos. Next I took a fine tipped white ink pen and drew over the outlines of everything in the modern photo this was inspired by my case study on Gosia Wlodarzak. Once I had finished this I displayed it over the top of the archive photo, however just off at an angle so it could show how much the same place has changed overtime. The pieces of acetate didn’t exactly match the photos which is what I predicted would happen, however I still really like the way it has turned out.
After this, I moved on to looking at art on the streets (or the lack of it) in Jersey. At first I wanted to go out and try to picture local murals/graffiti around in town. Unfortunately I couldn’t really find any and most of the ones I did find were discoloured and old. So I came up with the idea of just taking photos of some streets and whatever else I thought was interesting and drawing over the top of it. As a part of my response to the Journeys and Pathways title I wanted to explore topics such as street art and how it has evolved over the years. I also wanted to experiment further with editing my photos by hand and using different mediums such as paint, coloured pencils and cutting/ re sticking things together, this was in order to show what usual everyday streets in Jersey could potentially look like if more street art was incorporated. Therefore, when I was searching for artists and photographers to make case studies on and develop from I saw some of Heath Ledger’s art and photography work in amongst these. I have always really loved his acting work as he was very talented but until recently I wasn’t aware that he was also a keen artist. Overall, I did really like how my set of images turned out, I think I researched into Ledger enough and acknowledge the methods and mediums that he used to create these, but also added in my own personal touches, drawings etc. of what I wanted as well.
I have decided that I will first back my images with foam board and present them on a piece of black card in 3 different configurations. This will leave 2 images that I liked however didn’t fit with the image sets.
I chose the images to group together based on color palette, composition as well as the tonal balance of the images.
I chose not to include this image in the 3 compositions since I found it too dissimilar from the other images. I also didn’t want to change the orientation of the piece as I thought it would take away from the strong shapes in the image.
I found this image too similar to one of my A3 prints to include in the compositions. It also wouldn’t fit on the black card in my original compositions. This was another image in which i didn’t want to change the orientation.
For my final images, I wanted to play around with a few styles of photo montage, so I edited a photo around two times until I got the final image.
Final Selection:
Edits that didn’t make it:
These are some edits of photos that could of potentially made it, but I preferred the other photos more. I have also included the editing process of these images.
Editing Process:
I placed the beach photo on top of studio photo Then I used the polygon lasso tool to cut out this shape into the beach photoI then used the eraser tool to clean up the sidesI then used the paint tool to give it some more shadow and depthI then duplicated the layer and placed it on the other eyeFinal Outcome
I do like this photo, but I think it is too simple and I prefer the other one more.
During the Image selection process I decided to cut the amount of selected images down to 10. This was to remove images that looked too similar to each other as well as helping the images to flow as a set.
In the first couple of days of the project I struggled to generate clear ideas of where I wanted to take my project, initially in the begining the first ideas that were coming to my mind surrounded looking at buildings from new ones to old ones and also portraits of aging and photographing that journey of aging in both people and buildings howver after I had done some brainstorming and thinking I came across the idea of looking into the idea of the journey of adverts throughout the past couple of hundred years, (the final time span being from 1939-2016) specifically looking at women in adverts, this interested me as I thought it was different and is something that I enjoyed the sound of that I thought could be quite fun.
I started out by looking into Cindy Sherman and how she works and what ideas and photographs she produces as she is an artist who generates images questioning the representations and ideas of women and ideals, I feel for me Sherman was a very useful artist to have looked into as it helped me to generate ideas easily. From looking in depth at Cindy Sherman I decided to start recreating images some more famous than others from adverts across a 100 year time span, the first couple of shoots worked well and gradually throughout the project I developed more and came to a collection of 8. While developing these photo-shoots I also researched into feminist movements such as Feminist Art and the Guerrilla Girls as well as Kourtney Roy and again Cindy Sherman, from researching these I found the wide in-depth thoughts that go into challenging feminism and looking at how it had developed. This made me want to produce two very different ads from the same era (1993 and 1994) this allowed me to show not only a difference of the journey across decades but also across a 1 year time span which seemed interesting to me the drastically different way that they were being represented.
Overall I am happy with the way that my final images developed and finished not only as individual prints but as well on the mount and foam board, I feel I have been able to explore on a bit of a different take on the title of journeys and pathways and have explored something I enjoy. I think my final outcomes have been successful and work together well in the series, I think that I have been able to show my ideas well and continually expressed my thoughts at various times and reinforced my ideas around why I was generating the images and recreations that I was. I would have like to generate another outcome with my unused image had I had more time to develop the extra image needed however I still think that it was a useful experiment and recreation at the begining of the project to be able to start myself off into my ideas. I am happy with the way that this project allowed me to develop more of my editing skills which I feel have got better as I have been able to develop them, however I don’t feel I was able to develop my camera skills as much as generally across the project I was working in the studio with artificial lights which stayed roughly the same throughout all of my photo-shoots.
Overall I am happy with the final images that I was able to produce and how I came to my final images during the project as a whole and I feel it was quite successful.
I plan on using these images along with the ones I have found of my parents, grandparents and even great grandparents during their youth to create a chronological collage. I have images of my father in the army when he was 16, 17 and 18. I have my grand mother where she was 16 and I have my great grandfather at my age posing for a phone in a chair but also images of all of them, my mother, father, grandparents and great grandparents, later in life.
The overall course of action during this project I feel was very good. I started the unit not knowing the sort of path I wanted to go down in terms of the type of photos I should be capturing and creating. In the past we had explored both minimalism and portraiture but I had yet to do anything regarding landscape photography so therefore I was keen to explore this theme this unit. A major aspect of landscape photography is the theme of landscape romanticism, the depiction of landscapes in art – natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view – with its elements arranged into a coherent and sublime composition. As art is one of my areas of interest also, I decided to experiment with this theme.
The first few photo shoot I did were quite all over the place as I did not exactly know how to Tackle the subject. I chose locations which were very well know for their natural beauty yet the final outcomes of each photo shoot were underwhelming and far from what I wanted. About half way through the project I came across a photographer called Cody William Smith on the internet. Some time ago he did a series using mirrors and landscapes, reflecting various aspects of the environment within the mirrors, with very impressive and interesting outcomes.
I decided to attempt a very similar concept as this, so I went out and purchased a large rectangular mirror, Smith used a circular one in his own photography. I did not completely want to copy his concept therefore the theme which I wanted to tackle was the urbanization of landscape. This was something which I realized during my previous photo shoots at Sorel point and Corbier. Each location was effected differently with human impact. At Corbier, the rocky shoreline was home to Corbier lighthouse, and Sorel point had physically been impacted by the quarry which was set up there some time ago, digging away at the cliff and eroding it away.
The first photo shoot which I did for this concept was quite minimal as I was not quite sure yet in what I wanted to have reflected in the mirror. To my surprise, this very experimental photo shoot turned out to be one of my most successful, I was able to capture some of the most beautiful imagery I had ever before in photography since the start of the course. I was so pleased with the outcomes in fact that I decided to take the most successful images from that shoot and automatically make them my final pieces. The images although very minimal and subtle, captured perfectly what I wanted them to.
Eager to make the them of landscape urbanization more apparent in my work, I revisited Sorel point to directly capture the impact of the granite quarry. I took along with me a model, who was able to bridge the gap between nature and human impact with the presence of her hands. This again turned out to be a very successful photo shoot, with some very impressive final outcomes.
The editing process of all my final outcomes was very minimal, simply cropping, adjusting the brightness, contrast and saturation of the images. Coming up with the idea for my display box was also quite easy as I expressed the symbolism of some of the aspects in the images in a physical form. The final display boxes were also everything I hoped they would be. The only minor inconvenience I experienced whilst making them was that I expected my final prints to fill the entirety of the page instead of a small slither, yet I soon realized this was my own mistake as I cropped some of the images so much that they were now in a panoramic format instead of filling up an entire page.
Below are my mounted and displayed final pieces for the theme “Journey’s and Pathway’s”. I am very happy with how these displays turned out and I was able to capture exactly what I wanted to present.
Final Display 1 Final Display 2Final Display 3
Gallery Display:
Below is what my photos would look like displayed in a gallery –
Overall I am very happy with how the displays turned out because they look very effective and well made.
