MindMap

Notes on my MindMap

For my personal study, from the word "liberation" I want to focus on attatchment which leads onto bond. Through attatchment and bond I associate people and places. Certain people I associate with certain memories and places and certain places I associate with certain moments in time and the people I was with. 

The people in my life who I have an attatchment to is my family. I come from a large family, I have three sisters and my mums side of the family is particularly large (They're also from the north of England, Buxton in particular). 

I am close with my mums family, however I am not very close and attatched to my fathers side of the family. I still care for them as they are part of my family however there is a lack of bond between us as theyre have been certain aspects of my fathers childhood which lead to his detatchment and my detatchment from them. However, as time continues, some family members from my fathers side have realised that time runs quickly and relationships are being rekindled. I want to capture both strong and weak family bonds, dsiplaying that families are complicated, however time can heal.

I also want to focus on the friends that play a large parto of my life. I have unique bonds with each individual and specific attatchments to memories associated with them. 

I also want to explore how friendships can become romantic, for example, my boyfriend was first a good friend of mine and over time we became romantically involved. Both mine and my boyfriends parents have very healthy relationships which I believe has an influence on my relatiopnship as we see aspects that make a relationship happy and apply it to ours. 

Art Movements & Isms

PICTORIALISM

Time period : 1880s-1920s

Key characteristics/ conventions 

From the 1880s and onwards photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resembled paintings e.g. manipulating images in the darkroom, scratching and marking their prints to imitate the texture of canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery based on allegorical and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes. 

Pictorialism reacted against mechanization and industrialisation. They abhorred the snapshot and were also dismayed at the increasing industrial exploitation of photography and practices that pandered to a commercial and professional establishment. The Pictorialists championed evocative photographs and individual expression and they constructed their images looking for harmony of matter, mind and spirit; the first was addressed through objective technique and process, the second in a considered application of the principles of composition and design, and the last by the development of a subjective and spiritual motive.

Artists associated

Julia Margaret Cameron (one of the first socially accepted photographers during this period)

Peter Henry Emerson ‘naturalistic photography’ – book he wrote on the romanticism of photography with rural landscapes and figures within landscapes 

The Vienna camera club (Austria)

The brotherhood of the linked ring (London)

Photo secession (New York)

Key works

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1979)

Julia Margaret Cameron was a photographer in the Victorian era. The bulk of Cameron’s photographs fit into two categories – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks and limp poses and soft lighting. Cameron’s photographs were unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus.

Peter Henry Emerson

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.

REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Time period: 1920s

Key characteristics/ conventions 

Went back to photography origins, with detail and purpose not recreating paintings. (closely associated with ‘straight photography’) photography grew up with claims of having a special relationship to reality, and its premise, that the camera’s ability to record objectively the actual world as it appears in front of the lens was unquestioned. This supposed veracity of the photographic image has been challenged by critics as the photographer’s subjectivity (how he or she sees the world and chooses to photograph it) and the implosion of digital technology challenges this notion opening up many new possibilities for both interpretation and manipulation. A belief in the trustworthiness of the photograph is also fostered by the news media who rely on photographs to show the truth of what took place.

Artists associated

Paul Strand

Walker Evans

Key works

Dorothea Lange

Lewis W Hine

We have chosen to look at the Book published by David Campany called “So present, so invisible.” From his brief introduction, he clearly states that photography itself is evolving everyday, how now we have images produced digitally. Photographs aren’t a problem to capture anymore because we all have cameras on our phones. The topic of photography turns into a very conversational aspect as their is so much to talk about within one image than not. In his book, he has had various conversations with lots of other photographers the one photographer I have chosen to explore is Latoya Ruby Frazier.

“I look for narrative or context that will amplify the voices of the marginalised who have so many important stories to tell about America, capitalism, working class life and the current issues we face..”

“I believe in the value of documentary photography especially at this moment, as we watch the mass media manipulate the issues around gentrification ,poverty, police brutatltiy and corporative violent against our ecosystems.”

“Kracacuer felt that photographs obscured the truth and fought contemplation. Benjamin was concerned that photographic world masked the complexity of the human world.”

“Andrea Holding Her Daughter Nephartti”

The image above comes from one of her famous publications called “the notion of family.” In this exploration of her work she was trying to tell her story. Frazier was an African- American along with all her family. She wanted to emphasise the struggle her family had to go through and come to terms with oppression of Braddock, a small suburb, and the terrible physical and psychological torture they endured for years. Her work captures a balance between family and society, our body enduring pain but also be somewhat hopeful aswell.

Visually, what we can see from this image is 2 ladies, one being the mother and the other the daughter. They’re positioned in the centre of the image which immediately draws our attention to them as the models straight away.

After having done some contextual research on the image, Frazier has captured this moment because of what was going on at the time. The image is called “Andrea Holding her daughter Nephratti.” She’s holding her daughter because of the living conditions at the time in Flint. A crisis began in 2014 when officials switched to a cheaper water source. The new water source caused old lead pipes to corrode. The lead became toxic which meant all civilians would have to switch to bottled water for ordinary everyday tasks. Frazier spent 5 months with three generations of woman from Flint as they attempted to live their normal lives. She described that those woman often lent on one another and relied on each other to be able to live day in day out. This explains the positioning of the mother and daughter in the image above as you can see one of them is resting her head on the other. The positioning of them is important as it mirrors the reliance on each other at this particular time.

Symbolically, as they are wearing white it could also be inferred as a sign of peace due to the cultural differences that Frazier was experiencing as an African- American in Flint at this time. The colour white is often associated with peace and coming together, something which only happened in Flint after they changed the water supplies The reliance they had on one another to complete day to day tasks that now became a challenge. The tone and emotion coming from the image is rather ominous in the sense that neither of them are smiling but neither of them look angry. Frazier could have kept them almost emotionless to portray what was happening to her community not only racial abuse but physical abuse as well.

PERSONAL STUDY

For my personal study I am going to show the narrative of my childhood and the events that have happened in it. The main event that I am going to focus on is my parents divorce and how that affected me and my little brother. I am going to incorporate other family members that similarly took the role of parenting during the time of the divorce. I have decided to do this for my personal study because its personal story that made me the individual I am today. I have learnt a lot through seeing what the effects of divorce can have on an adult but also a child being me. I now live with my mum so most of my personal study is going to focus on her and how she has had to understand and adapt to the rules of also being a dad. I do occasionally see my dad so I will also use pictures of him throughout my personal study.

The people I have chosen to photograph are my family members. I have decided to use old photos from albums

WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?

SHOOTS

• For my first shoot I have been to the studio and decided I am going to take a photo of my family members. I took small passport photos that I had found and using the lighting set up in the studio photographed images that may have been a bit tampered with due to it being so old. I have examples below of the images I have taken:

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These are images of my parents.

For my next shoot I am going to continue to look at archival images but include other family memebers like my aunty and uncle. I am including this because I used to stay there all the time and they took on the roles of looking after me when my parents were busy so I have always looked at them both as being my second parents.

As my study goes on I am going to incorporate old pictures and new pictures of my parents and aunties and uncles. Therefore I am going to take images of my family members singly again , make them look like passport photos. On an app I have on my phone I am going to experiment with different colours and making small boarder around the images. I am going to look at different photographers and take some examples of their work and try and incorporate it into my photographs. As I take art A- Level I am going to try and bring in some drawn elements onto my images.

I would also like within some of the image I take to create a distorted like image. I want to do this because I want it to reflect with the narrative that I am going for and reflect how I saw the time of their divorce. An example of an image I would like to say influenced my style is below:

For my personal study under the topic OCCUPATION VS LIBERATION I have chosen to photograph a range of things covering objects, portraits and some landscape work. During the past few months we have covered a range of tools and skills including using Lightroom and InDesign when creating our final outcomes for the Zines. When having gone and done a photo shoot we have been told to go through a selection process on Lightroom which would have included staring them out of 1-5, flagging them, color coding them and then most people would have narrowed down to about 10 images. From those 10 images we would then have to experiment with them. This could be changing the lighting settings, to changing the color of the image to sometimes just cropping the images. We have learned how to use the studio lighting and how to set them up to make our images look professional. Additionally, we have also learned how to photograph in different types of light, for instance the bunkers had low lighting so we had to adjust so that our images didn’t look blurry or too dark.

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This is what the selection process would have looked like.

The areas I have enjoyed personally going out to photograph have been portraits because i think a lot can be interpreted from a single image. The people I have chosen to photograph have been people close to me weather that be friends or family. The topic in this module that lead me to wanting to continue with portraits was ‘Home Sweet Home.’ Some photographers i have looked at are Sian Davey and Masahisa fukase. These two photographers drew my attention to the most due to them photographing their family members. I liked their work also because it showed a real connection to their families. Each image has a different story with either really vibrant colors or really dull colors. The lighting in the images as well have an effect on the way we interrupt them, for instance with more light could indicate a happier story, an image full of darkness would probably have a more gloomy interpretation. I like the way portraits look and when having had a couple go’s at photographing for instance Joan I could tell that she wasn’t just some ordinary person she had a story to tell.

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The images above are the sort of images I am going to incorporate into my personal study. I will look at photographic archive images from when my parents were younger and include images of their growing up process. I am doing this because our living conditions were very different as my parents are from a rural area in Madeira. My parents got divorced when i was 11 but the actual process took over 4 years. In my personal study i am going to show the development of their divorce and show what effect it had on the people around them, myself included. I will mainly use portrait based images but might include a couple of valued objects that they gave to each other during the time of their marriage.

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These are some of the screenshots from my final zine.

After I have printed out my zine for the last page and for the page that features Joan, I am going to print onto tracing paper a quote from the day of liberation in 1945, I am also going to write a quote that features something Joan had said to us on the day we photographed her.

My narrative throughout my zine is pretty simple, I have included pictures of objects I also photographed which link to liberation and occupation as these are objects from that time. I have include couple pictures of guns and ammunition I took at the Jersey War tunnels as it also links in to the theme of occupation. Some images I have used as a double page spread

“There is a lot of casual chat about it, just as there is a lot of casual photography”

3 quotes taken from interview with Rut Blees Luxemburg:

“It’ another kind of street photography. Or maybe “street” isn’t even important. “Public” photography is better.”

I agree with this quote because street photography can be done by anybody, therefore it should be called public. It also signifies that people can sometimes judge what can happen in the image if we called it street photography, but if we do it in public, people would be more aware of what is happening.

“It’s a fascination with the possibilities of the large format camera and the long exposure which allows me to let chance enter the work.”

“I edit before I shoot, which means I take a very deliberate number of photographs.”

I believe that this is true because you make sure that you have everything you need before doing the photo shoot, but also as photographers we edit the setting of the camera before we take an image therefore we dont have to do it after.

Image analysis:

Visual:

In the image you can see a set of steps going in to a river – you can also see the water edge. The light is hitting the stairs on the centre but the main light focus is on the right side of the image. In the image there is a few details that you can focus on, you can see the brick outline on the wall,

Technical:

The image has been taken in an abstract form only focusing on the steps and the water, you can notice as well that the light is mainly on the right side of the image

Contextual/Conceptual:

Rut Blees mostly photographed at night and focused on urban surrounding. The image is called In Deeper, and this was taken by the river Thames. The Footprints in the mud on the steps signify the absent of human presence.

ABOUT:

Irving Penn was born on the 16th July 1917 and died on the 7th October 2009 and was an American photographer and was best known for his fashion photography, portraits and still life. Penn was well known and worked with a wide variety of famous companies for example Vogue Magazine and went on to take a more independent approach to advertising approach for specific clients like Issey Miyake and Clinique. Penn’s work has been exhibited all around the work including international sites and continues to inform the art of photography as well as still being a dramatic influential character and photographer.

TECHNICAL: From just looking at the image it is evident the lighting being produced in artificial and most likely took place in a photography studio using a jet black background to help contrast with the white skull which helps make the definitions of the skull stand out. Overall there is a good exposure level supported by the manipulation of the editing done of the skull, the images shows no signs of reflection however due to the brightness of the skull illuminating against the jet black background it is possible that flash was used to help aid this point even more and create an even stronger contrast. The focal point of the image is clearly the front face of the skull and in great focus with no blurred aspects which further provides evidence the camera lens type and size. The image also has low sensitivity due through the lack of grain seen in the image with fine and specific textures of the skull adding more realistic view for the audience. The image only presents a black and white image so therefore is slightly harder to determine the temperature of the image however due to the contextual factors (the image being a skull) to me it presents a more colder temperature to the images also supported by the conceptual evidence.

VISUAL: From the photograph we can clearly see that there are only black and white colours used which adds a more dramatic feel, due to the jet black background which extensively contrasts with the fresh white skull, this visual aspects supports the point that the main focal point is the skull. Additionally, the overall tone presented is a light tone due the the bright white skull standing out and can be seen through the formation of the skulls- one facing forward, one facing to the side and one facing down all transformed to merge all together, this point also brings up the idea of symmetry which is some way can be seen but not crystal clear however showing a 3D representation of the skull.

CONCEPTUAL: Overall the image does not give much of a story which i believe helps make the audience really think deeper about the true meaning about the photograph and why it has been edited in that certain way. To me, after analysing the visual and technique points of the image i believe the image could be seen as a reflection on human life or even the idea of the beauty of the human body with the brain being the most essential part of the body to be able to function the rest of the body. so therefore the presentation of the image, the illuminated white skull being contrasted against the jet black background showing the main significance and main focal point of the image therefore making the view concentrate on the skull itself and look deeper into the distortions of the skull.