Objects help us identify what happened in our world’s history and happenings alongside stories of previous owners. Pictures show progression in how far we’ve come with politics/ fashion/trends/architecture/transport/culture/communities, all reflecting past times that could benefit future times. Old magazines and newspapers help us understand how minor events connected with major events. Personal trinkets tell stories how someone once lived their life reflecting what hobbies they liked alongside their occupations. History always benefits the future. We take all of our ideas from the past and either improve them or retain them so that we can evolve using these ideas. A way a building was built 50 years ago isn’t remotely the same as a building nowadays however those buildings helped us to adapt the ideas that work and use them again. 

Snooper’s Paradise

When first visiting Brighton, I was introduced to a shop in North Lane called ‘Snooper’s Paradise’. This shop has 3 floors of brick a brac history, from car number plates, to 300 year old books, cassette tapes, to stamps, this store has every part of history inside. This shop introduced me to my love of dated objects. I have purchased many old vinyls, cassette tapes, old magazines, photographs, sunglasses, crazy fashion and original 1935 glass bottles to use around the house. My love for old things is eternal, this is due to these objects reflecting simpler times where music was soulful, people where vibrant and fashion was outrageous. My favourite era is the 70’s, because people were encouraged to let go and feel free; hippies and naturists ruled the world. This free spirit helped people to speak up about any problems and political issues without hesitation making equality and race prime topics. 

On my most recent visit there, I purchased some items which I thought held the most history that I could capture in frames. I purchased: stamps, a competition rosette, a 1975 Playboy magazine, a photograph of an architect, a Vaseline container, train tickets and a cassette.

Photoshoot Idea

 My main photoshoot idea is to utilize the style of archival photography so that the only central focus within the composition is the object.

 The only examples I could find were only stock photos due to the fact that I want a specific look: object main focus, plain background.

For lighting, I would use 3 separate light sources: one that cancels out any shadows from behind, one light source coming from the left then another from the right. This surround lighting would create a complete white wash so that there is no shadows overcasting the objects or there surroundings.

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his Black And White images of the American West. Adams helped found the anti-pictorialist Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography that favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.

Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite national park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the U.S Department of the interior to make photographs of U.S. National Parks; his work and his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system.

Adams went to to these national parks and then used his camera with a colour filter to make the picture look more dramatic than it actually was. He knew that one day the national parks would become tampered with and impure so he wanted to preserve the memory that he had, and what he saw at the time.

Here are some of his images:

He used his camera to place himself in areas where there is a large amount of action in the scene, he also had very little open sky showing in them and this meant that all the focus was on the trees, the mountains and the lakes.

He believed alot in the style of strait photography, this is that he used a very high f stop. The reason that he did this is because he believes that having a low f stop isn’t the way that we see the world and that having a low f stop is hiding the true reality. As I said earlier he was part of a group called f/64 they were a group of people who believed in taking photos with a high aperture.

Brief Biography:

Dan is an American photographer and cinematographer. He specializes in landscapes, mainly cityscapes as he grew up in Chicago and then moved the New York.  Before he’s a photographer, he’s a motion graphics and animation artist by profession. The photos of his I am going to be focusing on are time slice photographs.  “A time slice is more than a photograph. A time slice takes a series of photographs and combines them into one single image. It takes slices of the same photograph offset in time from several seconds up to a few minutes.” Dan says he takes around 30,000 photos to complete his time slice work. He takes his photo’s over time in order to capture the environment at different times.

Analysis:

This photo of Dan’s is of Los Angeles at night. The famous skyscrapers of American city life in which he grew up around are at the foreground of this photo and the bright lights reflecting off the water. The emphasis in contrast between the dark sky and the vibrant buildings exaggerate the idea that cities never sleep. It suggests that city people never get breaks, they are constantly moving, light are always on, cars beeping, people running to work, it’s constant pandemonium. There is a clear rule of thirds in this photo, in the middle is the city, the top is the sky and the bottom is the water. This mirrors the repetitiveness of city life and how its extremely structured, everyone gets up early goes to work then finishes work, commutes back home and then its repeated the next day .This symbolizes the difference between us and nature, we create the noise and pollution and the environment just has to deal with it. In comparison to the stillness of the sky and the water, even over time it remains the same, quiet and calm but the city is the opposite. It has a very cold tone, creating and eerie mood almost horror like, the water is so still and not much movement of clouds is occurring. He would have used a wide angle lens and put his camera on a tripod, which would have been kept in the exact same position in order to be able to create an accurate time slice of the city.

Why?

I chose Dan as my case study because I liked his idea of time being explored in just one place. Also I liked the modern feel to Dan’s work and how he focused on the light of the night, as I feel like day photography is more common than night photography. As it shows a journey without moving, emphasizing the fact that you don’t have to travel far to experience change. As well as I thought it suited Jersey because it is very small and you run out of place to go to, I wanted to capture the true beauty of Jersey, as I feel like our generation are very unappreciative of Jersey in winter. My aim is to capture an afternoon at the beach to go against the idea that most of my generation has that everywhere is same old, same old.

Luigi Ghirri is an Italian born artist and photographer. Ghirri has achieved a far reaching reputation as a pioneer of contemporary photography due to his very systematic approach to photography. His picture often feature very baron backgrounds with a strongly contrasting subject. His photography often features very strong lines and structures, often photographing man-made objects or natural objects featuring very strong geometric shapes.

The lighting in the image is very flat and soft. This image is naturally lit however it seems as though it may have been overcast due to the lack of harsh shadows. It appears as thought the image was taken around mid-day as any shadows appear directly beneath the slide. The image appears to have been taken using a high F stop since the whole image is mostly in focus and there appears to be very little vignetting. There appears to be a considerable amount of grain and Gaussian blur in the image which suggests it is either taken on film (also suggested by slight discoloration on the right) or an old digital camera. The image looks rather cold.

The image features very flat tones across the background which is broken up by the strong contrast created by the bright red slide in the foreground. There is some texture created by the small ripples throughout the sand in the foreground. The piece features very strong lines  with a strong emphasis on triangles created by the slide and the small stream of water across the sound. The ripples in the sand create a repeating pattern until they slowly go out of focus as they reach the background.

The image creates an uncomfortable feeling due to the lack of human activity in an area that is supposed to be full of life. It creates an uncanny scene as something just appears to be out of place, perhaps the strong contrast created by the slide.

The rest of this collection strongly stuck to the same look however most of them had stronger contrast and saturation then the image I analysed.

Luigi also has some interesting work which has been painted back in to which helps to emphasize the strong lines in the image.

I believe Luigi will influence my project as i like the subjects which he chooses to photograph and his strong use of contrasting colors. I find the idea of using flat tones to be interesting as well as it challenges you to use contrasting colors  instead of contrasting tones.

Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits.

She is best known for “Complete Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white photographs which were meant to subvert the stereotypes of women in media (namely arthouse films and popular b-movies).  In the 1980s, Sherman used color film and large prints, and focused more on lighting and facial expression.

She is a key figure of the “Pictures Generation”, a loose circle of American artists who came to artistic maturity and critical recognition during the early 1980s, a period notable for the rapid and widespread proliferation of mass media imagery.  Sherman turned towards photography at the end of the 1970s in order to explore a wide range of common female social roles, or personas.  Sherman sought to call into question the seductive and often oppressive influences of mass-media.  Turning to self-portraits she extended role playing in fantasy Hollywood, fashion, mass advertising, an “girl-next-door” roles and poses.   She called her audiences attention to the powerful machinery and make-up that lay behind the countless images circulating in an incessantly public, “plugged in” culture.

• Sherman’s photographic portraiture is both intensely grounded in the present while it extends long traditions in art that force the audience to reconsider common stereotypes and cultural assumptions, among the latter political satire, caricature, the graphic novel, pulp fiction, stand-up comedy (some of her characters are indeed uncomfortably “funny”), and other socially critical disciplines.  Sherman’s many variations on the methods of self-portraiture share a single, notable feature: in the vast majority of her portraits she directly confronts the viewer’s gaze.

Analysis (Below Image)

Contextual:  Sherman was generating this image in a time where she was maturing in the 1970s among the discovering of the American Womens’ Movement, later known as the rise of Feminism.  Sherman and her generation learned to see through mass media cliches and appropriate them in an ironic manner that made viewers self conscious about how artificial and highly constructed “female portraiture” could prove on close inspection.

Conceptual:  For this image Sherman is employing herself in the image to suggest the central character in the 1960s’ “coming of age” romance, the young female intellectual on the verge of discovering her “true womanhood”, or the prototypical virgin.

Technical:  The lighting in the image is coming from the top right of the photograph and is looking down on Sherman.  The light coming from that angle could be artificial light being used to create effect and light her well as to see everything in frame and still create shadows and tones.  The lens has it’s focus on Cindy herself we can see around the edges of the image that it is slightly blurred creating a sharp focus on her herself.

Visual:  Sherman stands on the right side of the photograph which fits well with the idea of the rule of thirds as she doesn’t stand directly in the centre.  As she leans and reaches upwards it creates a leading line for our eyes to travel all the way across her in a smooth way.  There is a lot of pattern and repetition with the books creating repeating lines in a manner that is pleasing to the eye.  The image being in black and white shows the range of tone in the photograph, her face is well lit creating lighter tones around her face, skin and hair and then we have some darker tones coming in around the book shelf where shadows would start to develop and the light may not be reaching.

Damian Chrobak

“Born in Jastrzebie Zdroj (Poland), Damian studied at the Academy of Photography in Warsaw. After his first year he decided to set off on a different path and began his search for a photography he could truly call his own. Born in 1977 in Jastrzebie Zdroj (Poland), Damian Chrobak has been a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers since 2010 and is the founder of the Un-Posed street photography collective. After studying at the Academy of Photography in Warsaw, Poland, Damian moved to London in 2004, where he completed a Black & White Photography Course at the University of Arts in London. Since then he has been documenting the city’s street life. His work has been published in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States of America, New Zealand, Poland and other European countries. He has also produced photographs for book and recording covers. He is currently based in London and working on documentary and street photography projects. Street photography is characterised by a high degree of sensitivity to aesthetic, psychological and sociological insight. The photographer plucks out from his surroundings seemingly random moments and reveals their significance. What is important for him in a photograph is a deeply humane reflection on the nature of the individual and society as a whole. The ordinary moments in everyday life often have a hidden meaning and can be interesting, humorous, bizarre or remarkable. Strolling through the streets of a twenty-first-century city, photographer tries to capture something timeless on film, an eternal truth about man, one which hasn’t changed for millennia.” http://un-posed.com/photographers/damian-chrobak

Examples of his work:

Image Analysis:

I will analysing this photo from Chrobak’s project “Everywhere I look, I’m Being Looked At”.

Conceptual:

I think this photo focuses on the idea of consumption and its impact on changing and shaping our daily routine. This photograph depicts ordinary situations, combining it with advertisements and people. This picture gives the meaning of how we are constantly surrounded by visual media and how it shapes our thinking and routine. It is as if in every corner of town we have eyes wanting to catch every passerby with a penetrating gaze giving its message to every passer-by. This photograph speaks of urban life filled with flow of information, recording our habits, interests and weaknesses.

Visual:

This photo is in black and white which gives it a very retro and old feel to it, it also has a dark tone. I can see that he has used a little of texture such as noise, which gives a grainy texture to the photo. The viewpoint of this photo is on the the advertisement because it is staring right at you whilst the people are looking ahead of them. This creates a sense of a personal feel, as if the photo is staring right at you.

Technical:

The lighting for this photo appear to be natural lighting. The ISO is probably set high because the subway looks quite dark, the shutter speed is low because the people in the photo are motion blurred and distorted. The photo has quite a high contrast and is at the right exposure. The aperture is quite low as mostly everything is focused.

Contextual:

This photo was taken in the busy streets and metro stations of London. This conveys what city life is like in London. It also gives another perception that London is very crowded place, and people are always on the move. The eyes can also shows the deeper meaning that they are literally peering back at you, as if to remind us that we are always being watched.