I will be taking pictures of Fort Henry, a coastal defense built before the German occupation which was repurposed into a German defense, and the two spotlight observation bunkers situated to the north and south of the fort. I will be using a tripod for my outcomes in order to capture the subjects as deadpan as a response to the Bechers with their typologies. I will edit a few of my outcomes to create a manipulated landscape as a response to Andreas Gursky.
Photoshoot
Selection & Edits
Evaluation
I believe the photoshoot went well as the weather was clear and sunny, which provided good lighting for recording my subjects. I also was able to produce deadpan images in response to the Becher’s typologies, I believe these outcomes were successful as the images were even and flat. I believe I wasn’t as successful when editing my response to Gursky as the borders of two of the images I was splicing together didn’t blend well, resulting in a large section of terrain being lighter.
Katrien de Blauwer was born in the small provincial town of Ronse (Belgium). After a troubled childhood, She moved to Ghent at a young age to study painting. Later she attended the Royal Academy in Antwerp to study fashion. A study she abandoned. It was at that time she made her first collage books, actually studies and moodbooks for fashion collections. At a later age she began collecting, cutting and recycling images as therapeutic self investigation.
Her images consist of mostly feminine figures which in turn makes her work somewhat of a feminist movement. As she created collages made up of found photographs and magazine cut outs, she took things that weren't her own, and for me and from my view of her work mirrors the early start of the Feminist movement; when women started to fight for their rights and take back what was rightfully theres from the patriarchy.
DIRTY SCENES
In DirtyScenes, pages are often overlaid with paint and crayon, disrupting the intimacy of the images. Although unspoken, the narrative seems to draw from the artist’s own life – her body, femininity and sexuality, as well as alluding to absent male figure and various other unknown female characters, creating a sense of unknown which viewers often perplexed and questioning.
Anonymity is a central theme in de Blauwer’s work, she describes it as “an important part of the language”. “In Dirty Scenes, anonymity is prominent because this series deals with hidden anonymous encounters,” she says. By working this way, de Blauwer hopes that both herself – the artist – and the audience can appreciate the story and experience it in unison. “The viewers can identify with the intimate image or narrative due to becoming anonymous themselves, and eventually the story belongs to everyone. I’m acting as a neutral intermediary between the story of others and my own, I did not make these images, but I gave them a new life and meaning; I bring satires from others into my inner world and vice versa.”
Katrien De Blauwer calls herself a "photographer without a camera". She collects and recycles pictures and photos from old magazines and papers. Her work is, at the same time, intimate, directly corresponding with our unconscious, and anonymous thanks to the use of found images and body parts that have been cut away. This way, her personal history becomes the history of everyone. The collage effects a kind of universalisation, emphasizing the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognize oneself in the story. The artist becomes a neutral intermediary: without being the author of the photographs, she appropriates and integrates them into her own interior world, a world she’s revealing in third person.
Dirty Scenes is an enhancement to Why I Hate Cars – a story where the male figure is focal yet not present. Here, contrastingly, the female subjects are in center, yet their appearances are deterred from view. As observed through the dream of a small girl, the subjects are situated such that hinders all feeling of character – maybe symbolizing naivety, an absence of comprehension, or a need to overlook the situations occurring.
Either way, it’s widely known that art and creative techniques can act as a successful means of psychotherapy. De Blauwer compares her collage work to “visiting a therapist” – “I talk through my work.”
“As I age, my work is growing with me as I mature, and everything my work is trying to tell me is becoming clearer,” she says. “It’s a healing process; it’s a quest, and one that often confronts me with myself.”
MY OWN WORK AND RESPONSE
Below are three of my responses to Katrien de Blauwers series of photographs 'Intimate Abstract' which focuses on close up shots of female figures. It seems to be a common occurrence nowadays that males mostly dominate the world of such confidential female details in the art world, and so I found De Blauwers movement of work quite liberating in terms of exposing ourselves as women on our own, without men jeopardising our dignity for the sake of themselves.
Us, as women, can choose wether we expose ourselves and our venerability or not. Men have no choice anymore. We have taken charge.
In search of lost parts of his childhood he tries to think outside the reality he was socialized into and create new ones with his parents and self. Through these he uses photography to explore the relationship with deception, the constructed reality of the family, and question the boundaries between parents , between child/adult, self/other, nature/culture, real/fake in attempt to revive his unconditioned self, beyond the family bubble. Although easily assumed to be photo shopped or faked, upon closer inspection the images are often realized to be more real than first expected. Involving staged installations, the cartoonist and the performative, he looks back at a younger self and attempt to re-capture childhood nature through assuming adult eyes.
“Maybe, but it’s more complicated: maybe for him the endless encounters with what can be infinitely reduced occurrences, the tireless recording of them, often without looking through the viewfinder, maybe that process got to the point it did because he was in a state of recognition that “occurrences” themselves are a single sort of thing – brief concentrations of human or animal energy forming erratically through often in structured spaces, and in the presence of a recording device.”
‘it seems that Winogrand was flirting with the side that the photographic act will always and inevitably transform things into a picture and that “composition” is entirely secondary to this phenomenon.”
“The “weak” claim reflects or expresses a certain ambivalence about art that was characteristic of the avant-garde, or the avant-garde period. But things have moved from there and ow there’s less reason to want to undermine art, especially “Art”, and more reason now to want to preserve it as a possibility since it is to an unprecedented extent threatened with a kind of dissolution into a mass culture of a global culture.”
