Monthly Archives: January 2020

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Understanding Photobook Design

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War Sand – Donald Weber

Image result for war sand book
  • Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper. – The texture of the paperboard cover feels rough, and the book is slightly heavy.
  • Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both. – The majority of the images are in colour. However, a few images are black and white. A range of paper is used in the book including smooth, glossy paper, coloured paper (Colours specific to the book include: Green, yellow, pink, and black). Different quality paper is also used, including standard office/printing 80-100 gsm, Quite thick 160-170 gsm
  • Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/ square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages. – The majority of the book features large landscape images with white borders. Occasionally, full bleed images are included. The book is A4 and has 371 Pages.
  • Binding, soft/hard cover. image wrap/dust jacket. saddle stitch/swiss binding/ Japanese stab-binding/ leperello – Paperborad soft cover. “Perfect bound” book.
  • Cover: linen/ card. graphic/ printed image. embossed/ debossed. letterpress/ silkscreen/hot-stamping. – The paperboard cover is debossed with little pictures
  • Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing. the title is literal as the book focuses on D-day and the remnants left behind either on a large scale, or mocroscopic level.
  • Narrative: what is the story/ subject-matter. How is it told? The book has many sections.
  • Structure and architecture: how design/ repeating motifs/ or specific features develops a concept or construct a narrative.
  • Design and layout: image size on pages/ single page, double-spread/ images/ grid, fold- outs/ inserts. Many of the images are double page spreads.
  • Editing and sequencing: selection of images/ juxtaposition of photographs/ editing process. The book is separated into different sections. These include: the images of the beaches in Normandy, the microscopic images of the sand collected from the beaches, still life images containing figurines in second world war settings, and also a section containing movie stills from war films.
  • Images and text: are they linked? Introduction/ essay/ statement by artists or others.  Use of captions (if any.) the images and text are linked as they both focus around the D-Day landings.
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Man Ray-Paragraph 3

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Man Ray was one of the most earliest surrealist photographers, he was born in 1890 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a Jewish immigrant from Russia. Much like Cahun he also changed his name from Emmanuel Radnitzky to Man Ray. In 1912 this family changed their last name in order to fit into American society. The famous quote from surrealist Francis Picabia ‘only useless things are indispensable’ links to how both photographers changed their names. Names are pointless, they are simply a way of others identifying you through association of your face with your name. In the world of surrealism, a name is essential to who you are, names tell stories about your heritage and they put you a bracket. This emphasis of ‘useless’ items being ‘indispensable’ is seen throughout Man Ray’s collection of Rayographs. These were known as camera-less photographs, he placed objects such as thumbtacks and coils of wire on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposed it to light. These images were the binary opposites of the trends in photography at the time. Movements like pictorialism involved no manipulation, believing that adaptations and uniqueness would be a disruption to the artistic integrity of the medium. 

Untitled Rayograph- Man Ray, 1922. 

This image is part of his 1922 ‘Spiral Series’, composed of a spiral object and other shapes, from cubes to glass goblets. They mimicked dream-like landscapes, inspired by Giorgio De Chirico, the intent was to create a nonsensical concept, so that it was up to the readers imagination to take meaning from it or not. It was the whole idea that photography didn’t need to be literal, it could be metaphorical and creative. The coils of wire represent the lengths of your unconscious mind and how there is endless visions and emotions, some we don’t know about yet and ones we will never know about. The possibilities are endless in the unconscious which also can be translated into the world of photography, there aren’t patterns or trends to follow, you make your work your own. In the background there are clouds, giving the impression of different levels of space and slow movement. “You can never step in the same river twice” is the famous saying from philosopher Heraclitus. A river is constantly moving, as soon as you step into a river it will have changed within milliseconds, like surrealism, there is no consistency, artists are all different, there are no two photos the same. It is a fluid concept. Similarly, clouds are constantly changing shape, yet in this image the cloud is frozen in time. 

AO3 Record Ideas, Component 1 Personal Investigation

Photo-shoot 3: Final Images

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This image (along with the 2 below), is meant to represent a liberation from the tight restriction of female gender stereotypes. Here, makeup and feminine products are seen to be destroyed, broken and smashed, showing a rebellion against the norm, and presenting examples of freeing individual expression, and breaking stereotypical gender roles in order to express ones self freely.
This image is a more overt example of the issues and problems caused by adhering to gender expression that doesn’t fit the needs and desires of the individual. Here, the subject is distressed by their need to adhere to the beauty standards of society, and therefore can be seen crying while applying makeup.
Here, I have made use of monotone in order to emphasize the contrast of te colours and shapes of the jewelry and hands. I kept a single colour in order to draw attention to the jewelry on the hand, and overall I feel like this image is the strongest from the photo-shoot, with it having a double meaning of identity liberation, and also feeling trapped and restrained by society’s standards and judgement.

The above images focus on the struggles and issues with trying to navigate gender identity in a society that doesn’t accept you. I have used both positive and negative examples, with some images reflecting the breaking, smashing and ruining of items that represent female beauty standards, therefore allowing the individual to be liberated from the pressures and strains of beauty standards. Alternatively, I have also made reference to more negative consequences of beauty standards, with one of the images depicting a female subject applying lipstick while crying, representing the affects of the pressure on women to adhere to society’s standards of beauty. The final image depicts male hands covered in jewelry, and although this can be used to represent the liberation of gender identity and expression (with the subject able to express their like of jewelry regardless of their gender), the way in which the jewelry is placed can also represent a chain/ties, used to restrict the hands.

Overall, I feel like this photo-shoot has been a success. I have developed one of my favorite images from the project (black and white hands), and will be using these images in my final book, as I feel like they successfully represent the struggles and triumphs of adhering to (and rebelling against) beauty standards and stereotypes.

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Photobook specification

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3 Words: Generations, Legacy, Family

Sentence: A book about the relationship between myself and my grandfather, inspired by the physical resemblance between myself and my Grandfather

Paragraph: Throughout my life, Whenever my family have looked at personal family photographs of my Grandfather as a young man, My family have constantly remarked upon the strong resemblance between myself and my grandfather and this is the inspiration behind this photo book, exploring my grandfathers young life and recreating original images myself whilst depicting this resemblance.

Book Design

I would like to produce a hardback saddle stitch bound book on semi gloss paper. Ideally I would like my book to be a square, roughly 30x30cm with a portrait orientation of images set as squares in the centre of the page with a white border. I would like to incorporate written text by my grandfather and myself and include these alongside the photographs and photographed objects throughout my project. I would have an image of my grandfather on the front cover and the same image replicated by myself on the rear cover of the book. I would like a simple title which I am still considering in terms of what to name the book. I would incorporate a full bleed image on the middle page of a landscape and I will either have one half of the book as photographs of my grandfather, and the other half will consist of images of myself recreating the photographs myself.

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COMPLETE ALL CW FOR MOCK EXAM

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DEADLINE: MOCK EXAM!
Mon-WED 10-12 Feb Class 13C & 13E
WED-FRI 12-14 Feb Class 13B

Interim deadline: Essay Draft MON 3 FEB

DEADLINE for Final Prints WED 5 FEB

INTERIM DEADLINE: FRI 7 FEB
DRAFT PHOTOBOOK LAYOUT

IN PREPARATION FOR MOCK EXAM MAKE SURE THE FOLLOWING IS READY BY THE END OF NEXT WEEK:

  1. A draft layout of your photobook before your Mock Exam day (that time is used to fine tune design with teacher)
  2. Complete and proof read essay by Mon 10 FEB so it is ready to be incorporated into book design. 
  3. Select final prints (5-6) from book project and put into into shared PRINTING folder here M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\A2 PRINTING.
    DEADLINE for submission: WED 5 FEB
  4. Make sure you monitor and track your progress by Fri 31 Jan using planner and tracking sheet below and publish on blog.

PLANNER – Download and save in your folder. Make sure you monitor and track your progress. 2 weeks remaining – including MOCK EXAM!

Personal-Study-Planner-Tracker-2020-Spring-Term-3Download

AT THE END OF YOUR FINAL MOCK EXAM DAY – ALL COURSEWORK MUST BE COMPLETE:

Structure your 3 day mock exam as follows:

Day 1: Complete essay, incl illustrations, referencing and bibliography + publish on blog (essay also needs to be added and presented at the end of your photobook)

Day 2: Complete photobook + blogpost showing design process and final evaluation. Use a combination of print screens + annotation

Day 3: Mount final prints + blogpost showing presentation of your final outcomes + evaluation. Finish and publish any missing blog posts as per planner and tracking sheet.

ESSAY
Include essay in the back of your book. Layout in text columns and make sure to include illustrations of your own images and that of artists, as well as a bibliography. Also publish essay as a separate blogpost

PHOTOBOOK
Final book design checked and signed off by teacher. make sure you have a made a blog post that charts your design decisions, including prints screens of final layout and write an evaluation.

BLURB – ORDER BOOK
Upload book design to BLURB, log onto your account on their website, pay and order the book.

Consider spending a few extra pounds on choosing better paper, such as Premium Lustre in check-out, change colour on end paper or choose different cloth/ linen

BLOGPOST
All blog posts in relation to the above must be published, including any other posts missing from previous work modules since the beginning of A2 academic year ie. Bunker, portraits and objects work, including zines which must be printed and bound ready for assessment and exhibition.

FINAL PRINTS
Select your final prints from book project and make a blog post showing ideas about how to present them.

Extra prints
Save each image in your name as a high-res image (4000 pixels) into shared PRINTING folder here M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\PRINTING

MOUNTING
Complete all mounting of final prints from photobook and all other previous CW projects.

FOLDER
Make sure each print is labelled with your name and candidate number and put in a BLACK folder together with all your other CW produced at AS.

See previous student, Stanley Lucas as a guide on blogposts that needs to be done and published before you the end of your Mock Exam

https://hautlieucreative.co.uk/photo19al/author/slucas08

Component 1 Personal Investigation

Essay Draft

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How has stories and literature influenced the work of Anna Gaksell?

Traditionally, throughout the 20th century photography was centered around capturing the decisive moment, however, we have come to explore the notion of creating this ‘decisive moment’ artificially, constructing scenes made for only the purpose of photography. Tableaux photographs have been made from the beginning of the medium, although Staged photography emerged as its own known genre in the 1980’s; both ideas involve composing a scene much like a painting, creating elements of Pictorialism. Anna Gaskell creates ominous photographs of women, taking themes from literature and stories, generating a dream-like narrative in her work. I chose to look at Gaskell due to her staged and tableaux approaches and how she uses her influences to warp them into her own narratives and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. I am going to review the extent to which stories and literature has influenced her work using her imagery for Wonder (1996-97) influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Hide(1998) influenced by Brother’s Grimm tale The Magic Donkey. In my own work I intent to explore the stories of the myths and folklore based in my home of Jersey. Using Gaskell as my influence to explore the notions of the boundaries of a narrative from a literacy influence in the visual work and representations. I plan to explore these notions with the narrative of the legends, through tableaux and landscape the reality of these stories and their occupation of the island. 

Historical Context:

The movement that took the medium of photography and reinvented it into an art form is known to be Pictorialism. Pictorialists wanted to make the photographs look like painting and drawings to penetrate the art work, this eventually would happen and go on to juxtapose the original purpose of photographs.  In 1839 photography was first used in order to objectively present subjects scientifically, images were highly scientific, fixing the point on objects, and was not considered an art form; that is until pictorialism was presented.  The shift from photography being used to produce purely scientific and representational images happened from the 1850s when advocates such as the English painter Willian John Newton suggested that photography could also be artistic.  Although it can be traced back to these early ideas, the Pictorialist movement was most active during the 1880s and 1915, during its peak it had an international reach with centers in England, France and the USA.  Pictorialists were the first to begin to try and class photography as an art form, by doing so they spoke about the artistic value of photography as well as a debate surrounding the manipulation of photographs and the social role that eventually holds.  Pictorialist photographers used a range of darkroom techniques that allow the photographers to express themselves creatively using it as a medium to tell stories.

Anna Gaskell:

Anna Gaskell is a contemporary American artist known for creating contemporary work exploring themes from literature and stories. Gaskell creates ominous images of women that nod to familiar or historic narratives, she explains her process of an attempt “to combine fiction, fact, and my own personal mishmash of life into something new is how I make my work.”, Gaskell is creating imagery by merging together reality, fiction and her own personal touches of the two warping and blurring the lines between the known stories and her own twist on them. Creating photographs that depict narratives from literature that may not be the original people know, Gaskell takes her influences and warps them into her own, stretching the boundaries of the narrative of the stories and literature that has influenced her work. Gaskell’s work dips into the notion of Pictorialism, using tableaux methods to generate her photographs. Gaskell’s photo series “Wonder” is influenced off Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the work is produced off the back of the idea of isolating dramatic moments from the larger plots. The photographs are staged and planned in the style of ‘narrative photography’, the scenes are artificial, produced and only exist to be photographed.

I have chosen to look closer at Untitled #47 from Anna Gaskell’s series Wonder, the photograph depicts two young girls both dressed identically interacting with each other with a sense of urgency, one towering over the other holding their neck and nose.  Although interacting with each other they do not represent individuals, but instead, act out the contradictions and desires of a single psyche, Gaskell’s use of twins for the representation of Alice builds a connection and visual link of identicalness for in which we know they are being represented together rather than individually, while their unity is represented by their identical clothing and looks.  Gaskell has staged the photographs to create her own striking visual reinterpretation of Wonderland through the moments of Alice’s physical transformation, the mysterious and often cruel rituals they act out upon each other may be metaphors for disorientation and mental illness.  Gaskell’s work has no clear beginning or end containing ambiguous narratives, adding to the emphasis of the unknown and disorientation.  This idea is striking in comparison to Alice in Wonderland as the narrative can be originally taken as Alice’s own dreams taken from stories, the character collectively evoked is Alice, perhaps lost in the Wonderland of her own mind, unable to determine whether the bizarre things happening to her are real or the result of her imagination. Gaskell has created a alternative narrative one in which the audience is familiar with, generating a post-modern effect of a simulacra to entice her audience.  

In comparison to her series Wonderit is clear Gaskell has been influenced by other stories and pieces of literature which is clear to see in her later series Hide based off Brothers’ Grimm tale The Magic Donkey, this series has been suggested to be her most radical and abstract to date, the title of the series can be linked in reference to the children’s game ‘hide and seek’.  In this series Gaskell has again cast young girls as her forefront protagonists, placing them in photographs that emit a sense of nightmarish foreboding and thinly veiled violence.  Gaskell’s reference to the Brother’s Grimm story is brought out in the sense of anxiety that she creates with the dramatic lighting and camera angles.  

WORD COUNT:  1,035

Bibliography

Readings:

Quotes:

Component 1 Personal Investigation

Conclusion – draft

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Both photographers include family – in Walker Evans’ image you can clearly see the family of five standing together on the porch, and in Latoya Ruby’s image you can see a grandmother and her granddaughter. When it comes to the contexts of their images, they are similar in the way in which they both look at the effect of economic downfall on families. Evans was exploring the effect of the Great Depression on families within small communities, while Ruby was looking at her own family in the time of racism and economic downfall in her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. They also show the importance of family in dire situations, with each of them photographing families which seem to have strong relationships in times which were socially and financially difficult for them. However it is different in the way which while Evans was looking at multiple families and how they were effected by a country-wide event, Ruby was only looking at the effects of economic downfall in her small hometown, and her own family. As Latoya Ruby was looking at her own family, she had more of a connection with those who she was photographing and knew them well, so she could shape her photographs to suit their personalities, lives, ect, whereas Walker Evans didn’t know the families personally and did not have that connection, so he may not have been able to take images which truly reflect who these people are. When it comes to each of them as individuals, there are differences between the two which could effect the way they take their images and look at the events which they are documenting, such as the fact that Frazier is a woman and Evans is a man, so they would each look at the events in different ways – through a man’s point of view and a woman’s point of view. By investigating these two artists they have inspired and influenced my work greatly by showing me ways of approaching my chosen theme of family, such as taking candid images of them within their own homes or out socialising. Latoya Ruby Frazier was able to portray the importance of family through the use of exploring her own family members and taking images of them during a time of financial downfall and racism within her community, and Walker Evans was able to show this by taking images of three families who were just pulling through during the Great Depression.

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book specification

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Narrative: What is your story?
Describe in:

  • 3 words: My twin sisters.
  • A sentence: An insight into the life and bond of my twin sisters.
  • A paragraph: My twin sisters are identical, however, as they grow older they become less and less identical. People often class them as a collective rather than two individual girls. Twins have a bond that is incredibly strong and people often believe is ethereal or telekinetic. In my project, I want to display that although they do have a strong bond and are similar in many aspects; they are also different individuals. I will explore their interactions, the way they dress, items they own and what they like to do in their free time. They are twins but I like to think of them as doppelgangers; they may look alike both they are both different individuals.

Design: Consider the following

  • How you want your book to look and feel: I want
  • Paper and ink: Matte paper
  • Format, size and orientation: I want the book to be a portrait book and to be A4 size.
  • Binding and cover
  • Title: doppelgänger 
  • Structure and architecture
  • Design and layout
  • Editing and sequencing
  • Images and text
AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, Uncategorized

PICTORIANISM VS REALISM-Straight photography

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Julia Margaret Cameron was a photographer in the Victorian era. And she was special because she was one of the only female photographers back in her time and everyone was interested in her, she used her family and sibling for her photography .Her photographs focused on both religious and literally work.

Peter Henry Emerson was famous for his book that he wrote and his photographs that had a lot of realism in them and color.

A lot of groups of photographers arised in that time for example The Vienna Camera Club which was mostly on female nudes which raised a lot of concerns and questioned because now a days sexism is not much of a thing any more and females have more rights because the world became more modern, while in the old days specially examples like The Vienna Camera Club you can see how the females bodies where objectivide and that was a normal thing

the pictorialist where a group of photographers around the world which created photographs which had a lot of symbolism in them which where objects in a photograph that meant another thing most of the time about religious or literal stuff

Walker Evans was a documentary photographer that rejected Pictoralisim by photographing farmers or low class people and families and there houses to deliver a message to the people