A sentence: I want to reflect how a personal identity is often conflicted with standards set by myself.
A paragraph: Body image and self worth is an ever growing problem throughout our generation with a collective obsessiveness as to the way we look and how we should be presented. This creates a comparison anxiety between ourselves and others, however it’s not all doom and gloom. I want to use this project as a self growth tool to reflect upon how far I’ve come and celebrate my personal small achievements.
How you want your book to look and feel: I want my books to all have a very handmade and personal feel so that the reader can understand my thoughts and emotions.
Format, size and orientation: My three small books will all be different sizes, my main book ‘Erasure’ is just off being A5, then ‘uncomfortable Skin’ and my essay are 0.5 cm smaller than each other. This cascading series offers the reader a structure to follow and show hoe problems are slowly getting smaller.
Binding and cover: The covers will be card with linen spines and all Japanese stab bound.
Titles: ‘Erasure’ is my main book of the trilogy that shows a narrative of contrasting childhood archival imagery vs. current images however all images are disturbed by my current thoughts. ‘Uncomfortable Skin’ is a book filled with close up and detailed self portraits that are raw and exposing of myself. Some have also been hand edited to again show disruption within the structure.
Design and layout: For every image in the book there will be a poem on the opposite page. Each image will be stuck onto parchment paper then stuck into the book, this gives the images a border and a purpose.
“The anthropologist, the journalist, and (apparently) the travel writer seek, and if they are lucky find, explanations and solutions. But the artist may discover that every avenue of inquiry leads to another mystery, more complex and more interesting than the original question.” Francine Prose on the photography of George Georgiou, Aperture Fall 2012
Originally he was thinking about London as a city of migration, the last stop not only for immigrants but also for people from across the UK. A city of dreams and possibilities; but as we all know, these dreams are not so easily realized. As the project evolved, he became more interested in trying to express the experience of the city, how we move through it, share it, coexist as a diverse group of peoples and cultures. The hardest part was what he considered the little soap operas we see everyday in public space, those encounters we witness and perceive as fictions – are they secret lovers or a married couple? etc. It’s a little like when we drive pass an accident on the highway: we glimpse the crashed car and imagine the rest. How we perceive became an important element in the work.
“The design of the book was by far the hardest part of the whole project as it holds together the whole concept of the work and relates to the actual experience of moving through a city.” g.georgiou – interview with Fotoroom
The essence of the project is that you might take the same route everyday but what you see, the ebb and flow on the street takes on a random nature. To capture this flow, the concertina allows the feel of a bus trip, but more importantly it gives the viewer the opportunity to create their own journeys by spreading the book out and combining different images together. This moves the book away from an author-led linear narrative to one of multiple possibilities.He struggled with the design and selection for a long time but felt that he had to take responsibility for the whole project. It was the same with self-publishing and doing a crowd-funding campaign. Because of the expenses of making a concertina book and with all the hand work that it involves, he didn’t want a third party cutting on the production values because of costs. He was lucky that he found a great printing house in Istanbul, MAS matbaa, that worked very closely with him on the technical aspects and helped make the book financially viable.
Early Examples of Street Photography
“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”Walker Evans, ca. 1960 from Afterword in Many Are Called
No better advice has ever been given to street photographers than that offered by Walker Evans, one the greatest American documentary photographers of the mid-twentieth century. Best known for his work depicting unsentimental pictures of poverty stricken sharecroppers in America’s deep south during the 1930s Depression, Evans would never have described himself as a ‘street photographer’ although he did roam the streets of New York. However, these instructions reveal the essence of what is now known as street photography: the impulse to take candid pictures in the stream of everyday life.
Walker Evans, American (1913-2009)
Street photography is an unbroken tradition stretching back to the invention of photography itself. It revels in the poetic possibilities that an inquisitive mind and a camera can conjure out of everyday life. Most street photographers get their best shots in crowded and populated urban areas such as shopping malls, high streets, parks, markets, cafes/bars, museums, subways, train stations or seaside promenades. In their spontaneous and often subconscious reaction to the fecundity of public life, street photographers elevate the commonplace and familiar into something mythical and even heroic. They thrive on the unexpected, seeing the street as a theatre of endless possibilities, the cast list never fixed until the shutter is pressed. They stare, they pry, they listen and they eavesdrop, and in doing so they hold up a mirror to the kind of societies we are making for ourselves.
Walker Evans was introduced to the work of Eugene Atget through his friend Berenice Abbott and he was immediately influenced by Atget’s dispassionate style and the way Atget grouped his pictures together in themes such as shop fronts, signs, interiors, architecture, portraits etc.
Walker Evans, New York Shop Front
Eugene Atget, Paris shop front
Many Are Called. In 1938, Walker Evans began surreptitiously photographing people on the New York City subway. With his camera hidden in his coat – the lens peeking through a buttonhole – he captured the faces of riders hurtling through the dark tunnels, wrapped in their own private thoughts.
This in contrast to George Georgiou’s work within ‘Last Stop’ is somewhat similar to the fact that they are both concealing the camera as much as possible to get as real of an image as possible. Within Georgiou’s work he is photographing from above street level on a double-decker bus giving more of a separation from the photographer’s reality, and the people photographed’s reality. Evans aimed to capture people within their own thoughts ; Georgiou aimed to capture people in the middle of acting through their daily routine.
In both of these images, two people have been photographed waiting for either a bus or a train. However, within Evans’ image the pedestrian’s are looking directly at him creating an awareness of their actions being captured. Illustrated in Georgiou’s image, these people are oblivious to the fact that they are being recorded in real time, this creates a sense of there being to separate narrative’s; the journey behind how these people are living out their daily routine, and the motivation behind the photographer. Both images are successful in how they capture strangers but both have very different stories to reflect. This narrative is achieved in the majority of mages included in ‘last Stop’, the sense of an outsider interpreting others’ life story and imagining what happens after the moment of connection is gone.
This photo shoot was inspired by the narrative positive to negative and turning a negative film into a positive image and the photographer Francesca Woodman. I wanted to have more full length images due to most of my work being portraits and not incorporating the human form. I wanted to explore this idea of body image due to my relationship with my own not being the most healthy. Baggy clothes hid lumps and curves; I didn’t want to give people the opportunity to judge my figure, only for my critique. Alongside a lack of self respect baggy clothes became my comfort zone and a way to hide the troubles no one knew of. A realisation of these habits is when it came to events in which I would wear a dress. I would list everything wrong I see which was usually anything in sight head to toe. An improvement then began and started breaking comfortable habits and turned to new ones. Not just clothing but self respect building, still in the process, just learning to accept that no matter what I’m stuck with this vessel whether I like it or not. I am the person I spend the most tine with so if I don’t like myself, how are others supposed to enjoy their time with me. This project is an aid and insight into how my identity functions and how easily someone can return back to bad habits.
Inspired by Francesca Woodman, who produced universally commanding and profound images from the age of thirteen. Born into a family of artists, ‘art’ was her first language. She experienced early exposure to a plethora of exemplary creative people along with countless potential historical, literary, and theoretical influences. Woodman worked with traditional photographic techniques but was consistently performative and experimental in her practice. Many of her works are multi-media, including drawings, selected objects, and sculptures within her photographs. Settings may vary from confined interiors to the expansive outdoors, but Woodman herself is always there. Typically the sole subject, and often naked, she can be found caught entwined within a landscape or edging out of the photographic frame. Interested in the limits of representation, the artist’s body is habitually cropped, endlessly concealed, and never wholly captured. Woodman was acutely aware of the evanescent nature of life and of living close to death. She positions the self as too limitless to be contained, and thus reveals singular identity as an elusive and fragmentary notion.
Side by Side
My interpretation of her hair pulling image above is more of a close up portrait due to me wanting to focus more on my features i dislike the most: large nose and cankle neck.
My interpretation of the image above was more focused on the idea of me being in dress; i never really express my feminine side so when I do I like to celebrate it. I don’t know why I don’t like the more femme things in life but it’s me breaking out of my girly controlled fashion in my childhood, and breaking into my own sense of self and style.
This image I interpreted as trying to break free from yourself but you’re limited to your own skin and energy.
Francesca Woodman was an American photographer known for her black-and-white self-portraits. Despite her short career, which ended with her suicide at the age of 22, Woodman produced over 800 untitled prints. Influenced by Surrealism and Conceptual Art, her work often featured recurring symbolic motifs such as birds, mirrors, and skulls. The artist’s exploration of sexuality and the body is often compared to both Hans Bellmer and Man Ray. Woodman’s work is also characterized by her use of long shutter speed and double exposure, the blurred image creating a sense of movement and urgency, “Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner …?” Woodman once stated. Born on April 3, 1958 in Boulder, CO to the artists George and Betty Woodman, she went on to attend the Rhode Island School of Design and traveled to Rome as part of its honors program in 1977. While in Rome, she made some of her most poetic and provocative works. Moving to New York in 1979 to pursue a career in photography, the next two years proved to be troubled for the artist. A lackluster response to her photography and a failed relationship pushed her into a deep depression. The artist jumped to her death from a loft window on January 19, 1981 in New York, NY.
So far within my project I have achieved two shoots/experiments involving portraits and personal archival imagery. Over the next couple weeks I will expand on these ideas and create more complex montages inspired by Kensuke Koike and continue mt theme of destruction and erasure of identity. I also intent to do more full length shots so that I have a variety of images but they all correlate to the idea of personal identity.
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.
For this photo shoot, I firstly attempted to take formal portraits in which I had my camera on a tripod with a timer and flash. This set up however wasn’t working in my favour and the images weren’t conveying any emotions. So, I removed the camera from the tripod and took flash selfies on close up mode. This method aided me in expressing emotions and having physical control over the camera creating movement within my images too. I’m happy overall with my final images due to the fact that they are full of signals and hints as to how i’m feeling making it easier post shoot, with almost no editing. My successful images are my uncomfortably close up portraits due to the simplicity of them and almost no editing due to a simple expression conveying my message. I also followed my shoot with beginning experimentation with montages following along with my theme of destruction and erasure of identity.
Kensuke Koike is a surrealist artist aiming to challenge the possibility of Image Making by bringing new meaning to archive found photography. Born in Japan and now residing in Italy, the artist spends his days buying old photographs at fleamarkets and distorting them in his studio to bring us often incomprehensible work that is exhibited around the world.
Reviving vintage photographs is an obsession for many collage artists, but none quite live up to the standard of notorious analogue collage image maker Kensuke Koike. Each piece by the artist brings us revelations about culture, and truth in image making. For many in the field, a collage comprised of one photograph (or single image processing as Koike calls it) could be a restrictive nightmare, but for the artist such a restriction has profound results.
“Daguerre’s technique gave a unique image : it can only be copied by being re-photographed – something that already suggests photography’s complicated relationship with reality.”( Bright and Van Erp. 2019:17 )
“If manipulation is the first thing something thinks of in connection with photography, what does that say about the value of the photograph as a reflection of reality?” ( Bright and Van Erp. 2019:17 )
“And what does a ‘real photograph’ look like: Is it something you can hold? Is it something you can see on a screen and alter?” ( Bright and Van Erp. 2019:17 )
“The daguerreotype didn’t make up what was in front of the camera, as a mirror doesn’t lie.” ( Bright and Van Erp. 2019:17)
“The process of manipulation starts as soon as we frame a person, a landscape, an object or a scene with our cameras.” (Bright and Van Erp. 2019:18)
“From Daguerre’s age to ours, photography has undergone a transformation, not only technologically but conceptually.”(Bright and Van Erp. 2019:18)
Bibliography: Bright, S. and Van Erp, H.(2019), Photography Decoded. London: Octopus Publishing House
When discussing my idea of belonging, I wanted to explore the internal feeling that’s hidden on a daily base. These are images I took just under a year ago but through developing this personal study I thought it was more relevant and conveyed the correct message. It also reflects my progression since then meaning i’m going to follow this shoot up with a recent state of mind in where I am now.
