Key characteristics/ conventions : Pictorialism strived to be art by trying to make pictures that resembled paintings ie. 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 allegoric and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes.
A number of different photographic groups and associations emerged that promoted pictorialism such as: The Vienna Camera Club (Austria).
Artist Associated:
Henrich Kuhn
Hugo Hunneberg
Hans Watcek
Julia Margaret Cameron
George Davidson
Peter Henry Emerson
Key works:
Methods/ techniques/ processes: Experimenting with chemicals in the dark room and they also placed Vaseline on the lens to create this sinister blur in the images.
REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
Time period: 1920’s
Key characteristics/ conventions : Went back on photography origins because photographers believed in the intrinsic qualities of the photographic medium and its ability to provide accurate images. They wanted to produce images that were more photographic than painterly. REALISM
Artists associated:
Paul Strand
Jacob Riis
Dorathea Lange
Walker Evans
Alfred Stieglitz
Key works:
Methods/ techniques/ processes: Straight photography uses a sharp focus allowing key details to shine through and draw our attention. Realism photography is used to show and capture what the world is really like. Each image reflects the life and a story for each individual .
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.
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:
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.
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.
Example of portrait photography
Joan – One final outcome
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.
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
This was the 2 spreads I made for the objects although only one of the actual page spreads will be used. I also made one for people as we had completed a project called “Home Sweet Home” which included taking candid portraits. Then finally the one above that was part of our bunker project which is what we completed towards the beginning of the A2 course. I chose to make 2 of the page spreads as I thought the image with the guns and the bullets was quite strong and wanted to have it full page instead of having the negative space around it like the ones below it.
From the 3 spreads that are labelled under people, objects and bunkers one image we took will be selected and then published inside the JEP
After uploading all my images onto Lightroom I selected the ones I was going to experiment with and cut down to have at least a final selection of 5 images.
The images above are from a famous photographer called Walker Evans. Walker Evans was born in Missouri in 1903-1975. He is best known for his 1930’s and 1940’s documentary photographs of the United States. He spent an early part of his career experimentally photographing the streets of New York. From 1935, he worked for the Farm Security Administration and travelled through the mid-west and southern states of America creating his most important and significant work. Evans was the first photographer that the museum of Modern Art in New York honoured with a solo exhibition called Walker Evans, American photographers
Picked fruit and cut flowers, artefact of glass, plastic, wood and metal objects are just some of the things gathered and put in front of a camera to photograph. In the 1820’s ad 30’s photographers could simply not resist in gathering these ornaments to capture not only a photograph but also a story. The still life was ideal for a world of accelerated manufacture and exchange, mobilising desires and expressing tastes.
MITCH EPSTEIN
Another contemporary photographer that focuses on still life is Mitch Epstein.
