Plans for my photoshoots

2 photoshoots before the Christmas holiday:

• I will be taking images of my family here in Jersey at our home. I want to focus specifically on my Aunt and Uncle who are the ones who offered me a place to stay when I moved over to Jersey, and I want to be able to try and portray how my relationship with them has changed since September 2018, which is when I first moved over to Jersey. I’d like to try and take images with Polaroids to try and capture the authentic effect it gives the image. Polaroids tend not to change any of the details and cannot be edited by editing programs such as Photoshop, so it captures the moment as it is, and that’s the type of effect i’d like to add to my work. If using Polaroids doesn’t turn out the way i’d like it to then i’ll switch to a normal digital camera.
• The second photo shoot I plan to take if of the family as a whole who live in my house. I currently live with my aunt and uncle and my aunt’s parents, so i’d like to photograph them all together, mainly at dinner or when sitting in the living room, as this is when we are all usually together and talking.

2 photoshoots during the Christmas holiday:

• Since all of my family is coming over and spending Christmas in Jersey, I have the opportunity to take pictures of both my family in London and my family in Jersey together in one room. I will be planning to take images during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when everyone will be eating and spending time together. This will also capture the close relationship my family has despite living in different places. I will also try and take these images in Polaroids however if it doesn’t end up working out then I will switch to a normal digital camera.
• I will be going to London the weekend before Christmas so I have a chance to photograph my family and their lives in London to compare to my family in Jersey. I want to mainly focus on my mother and younger brothers who I lived in a house with until I moved over to Jersey at 16, and I want to photograph their life in London since I have left. I also want to focus on my Grandparents, who are also a huge influence in my life. Like my other photoshoots I plan to use Polaroids, however I will switch to a digital camera if need be.

Aims for 1st Shoot:

Equipment: 50mm, 24-105mm, Tripod, Remote camera trigger, Flash trigger, Various lighting

• Studio shoot
• Self-portraiture (Tripod, Remote trigger, etc)
• Close-ups
• Slow Shutter Speed
• Multiple Exposures
• Mimicking old family photos
• Different lighting techniques
• Low-key lighting – Using shadows to create atmosphere
• High-key lighting – overexpose for clinical aesthetic

Other Ideas:

• Multiple exposure – Cover face with hands? possibly too cliche…
• pulling on parts of face – Cheeks? mouth?
• pulling hair in front of face?
• Tears on face?
• eyes closed to open – SS or ME
• play with idea of being on phone? social media scrolling slow shutter?
• use laptop and phone as light sources?
• Extreme close up on eyes? SS quick eye movements?

Aims for 2nd Shoot:

Equipment: 24-105mm, 100-400mm, Tripod, Remote camera trigger, (Torch?)

• On site shoot – Bunkers? Nature? Forrest/trees?
• Response to Leif Sandberg
• Walking around – concept of ghosts?
• similar brief to Shoot 1

Other Ideas:

• Use torch
• Play around with lighting outside of studio environment
• Use unnatural shadows with artificial light
• Obscure face

Aims for 3rd Shoot:

Equipment: 24-105mm, 50mm, Tripod, Remote camera trigger, Flash gun

• Family – Ideas of alienation
• isolation in crowd
• slow shutter
• people moving around – life moving around someone who is stuck in place
• draw together themes of mental health and family

Aims for 4th Shoot:

Equipment: 24-105mm, 50mm, Tripod, Top down tripod, Flash trigger, Photography table

• Studio Shoot – Objects
• Notes and reports
• Empty pill packets
• Messy
• Multiple point lighting
• Use photography table
• Top down photography for documents

Planning

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 Dirty Scenes, 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.

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