3 words: identity, belonging, separation.

A sentence: It’s about my inner conflict towards my role in the family after my parents divorce.

A paragraph: My photobook explores my emotions during a time of change, in which I felt everyone was going forward but I was stuck in the present, when everything was how I liked it. Through surrealistic and documentary photography it express a period in my life that was confusing, yet also exciting, new people, new places, a whole new life.

How you want your book to look and feel: I want my book to look minimal and feel smooth on the outside but on the inside it will feel chaotic.

Format, size and orientation: It will be a landscape book, A5 or A4.

Binding and cover: The cover will be hard and glossy with standard binding.

Title: ‘Life In A River.’ The idea behind my title is from the saying ‘you cannot step in the same river twice’. This connects with my book in the sense that I can never go back to before the divorce, before I moved house, life is constantly changing, it’s whether you let the river swallow you or you swim with it.

Design and layout: None of the images will cover a full page, I want it to feel like a scrap book/ family photo album that appears messy yet, the story is meaningful. I want there to be a lot of negative space surrounding the photos to symbolize isolation.

Editing and sequencing: I will start with a few documentary photos from a decade ago then move onto some surrealists images. Throughout there will be a mixture of documentary and surrealist to create a sense of uncertainty and confusion.

Images and text: My text will be on opposite page to the picture and will be quotes from my interviews of just sayings or sentence I think are significant to the image. The text will be small and black with a simplistic font because words aren’t as important as actions.

In this shoot I took self portraits of my birthmarks, to add a sense of self and identity to my photobook. My birthmarks have significance to my identity, as they are a part of me.

I took my mirror out into my garden and set it up against trees and walls. I ensured that my reflection wasn’t seen in the mirror to continue the theme of lack of identity.

YU The Lost Country- Dragana Jurisie

Initial thoughts: From reading the title I assumed it was a documentary photo book about an unknown country. The image on the front page and the colours give a gloomy impression.

Dragana Jurisie: She was born in Slavonski Brod, Croatia which was then known as Yugoslavia. Now she lives in Dublin as a photographer. In 1991 her family home burnt down, this is when she said her journey as a photographer began, the day that thousands of prints and negatives her father made were destroyed. Jurisie realised that day the power photography has over memory, after the fire her father never took a photograph other then a snapshot to record the damage for the insurance company. In the 1990 census she was denied the right to be a Yugoslav despite her Croatian father and Siberian mother. The reason for her exile was because “Yugoslavia does not exist. It is a heterogeneous conglomerate that you cobbled together in Paris.”

The Book: is A5 size and is portrait. It has a linen material stuck over the hard cover, which has an image printed on it in blue and white, the material gives it a pixelated filter.

The title of the book can be seen on the spine alongside the authors name. On the front cover it can be seen in the bottom right hand corner. The title ‘YU’ stands for Yugoslavia, ‘the lost country’ is situated in the middle of the ‘YU’, giving initial connotations that Yugoslavia is currently unknown, I personally had never heard of it.The title is fairly literal because Yugoslavia I now know was a state formed in 1918 that composed to six socialist republics before breaking off into five countries.

The story behind the book is about the extinction of Yugoslavia, Jurisie uses documentary photography to create this narrative, by travelling to the current countries that used to made up ‘the lost country’. The first page of the book is of another book which is all about Yugoslavia, she uses this book as a navigation for her travels.

The majority of the book follows an image on the right and text on the left but there is an odd double page spread of image on the left and text on the right. Some pages have quotes were from Rebecca West the British writer, who was in a similar situation to Jurisie, so they hold a sentimental value and hold a similar opinion to herself. None of the images fill a full page, which gives is a scrap book feel like a traveler would make of their holidays. Under the text for each page their is a note of what city in what country the image was taken.

The juxtaposition between the old maps and the new images of Yugoslavia it adds a sense of time and how much things can change. Places that used to be meaningful to you are now unknown and foreign. In literal meaning it is contrasting the past and present, for Jurisie it creates nostalgia but for me its a new story.

The text and the images create anchorage, the two elements together make the narrative, without the text the images could have any meaning and be in any country. This concept of text and images works for me as a reader, it adds structure to the chain of images especially with the name of the country, its as if I am on the journey with her. The minimalist design works in harmony with the age of Yugoslavia and how at the time the majority of photography was influenced by realism which is the pinnacle of simplicity and lack of hidden meaning.

This photobook links in many ways to my concept as its all about identity. After her exile she felt lost and unwanted so she went on a journey to reignite that feeling of comfort and belonging, but instead she felt confused as her once foreign home of Ireland was now more familiar than her real home. She used photography as a way to feel closer to her father and her home but realised like the photos she lost in the fire that she also lost her memories of her homeland. Her absence from physically being in Yugoslavia caused her to forget her time there, much like her forgetting the times in the photos that were burnt. Without being and seeing, the memory ceases to exist.

I was influenced by Joanna Piotrowska for this image and her staged family portraits. This is meant to mimic a child looking under their bed for monsters before they go to sleep. As a child I did this and some of my brothers still do.

The bucket is significant as it continues my theme of lack of identity.

Joanna is a polish photographer born in 1985 in Warsaw, now based in London. In 2013, she gained a Master Of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art in London. Not long after in 2014 she created ‘Frowst’ as her first debut, which is a series of staged family portraits in a large black and white format, this collection went on to win the first book Award the same year.

‘FROWST which means stuffy or stiffly, captures the paradoxical nature of a home. Warm and cozy, a frowsty space can also feel airless and uncomfortable. The space of intimacy is often suffocating, but its comfortable security might trap us inside longer than we wish. It allows us to manifest our vulnerabilities and weaknesses under the safe roof of domestic convenience.’

The book is comprised of twenty-five photographs, arranged in a minimalist way, usually a photo per spread. I take inspiration from this as I want to have a few blank pages to create tension between images. Her images are tableaux as as she sets them up deliberately, creating mise-en-scene. At first sight they are simple, casual pictures but soon reveal the surgical precision of the staged situation.

http://joannapiotrowska.com/ReflectsonFrowst.html

Her images first striked me as uncomfortable, the way a fully grown woman was sitting on an older mans lap. The theme throughout the book is consistent as she recreates relations within a household. She uses domestic settings such as a kitchen or bedroom as the background for these unsettling images. The black and white adds to the sense of reminiscing and remembering a time in which we were young and certain situations weren’t awkward or weird at the time. I am going to use black and white for the majority of my images as they represent memories from my past. The book highlights the carelessness of being a child, the lack of social consciousness we had at this early stage of life. I am going to use her concept to recreate memories from my childhood for images in my photo book. Her theme of family fits perfectly into my book which surrounds the theme of divorce. In her book she creates forts out of cushions and chairs as you did as a child and places the subject underneath them. These images create a sense of playfulness and reminiscing, but there is more depth to their meaning. “The shelter is like a fortress for our bodies, an extension of our selves. It is about how we choose to live, what we’ve surrounded ourselves with,” she says. “It’s also a little absurd that an adult is building this temporary, fragile structure. It isn’t really giving us any protection because it’s so ad hoc.” Joanna is taking a childhood past time and relating it to our behaviour as adults and how anything we do has a effect on us. The forts we once made weren’t just for fun, they were security we build for ourselves.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/07/we-need-to-defend-ourselves-joanna-piotrowska-family-photographs-tate-britain

To what extent does Surrealism create an unconscious representation of ones inner conflicts of identity and belonging?

In 1917 surrealism was first seen in the form of art through the work of Giorgio de Chirico, who illustrated average streets but through a hallucination perspective. His paintings were moving away from realism, instead of just capturing physically what was there he also created subjective meanings within his art. Andre Baton was the original inventor of surrealist concepts in 1924 through his written surrealist manifesto, where the he describes the movement as ‘the pure psychic automatism expressed in the real functionality of a person.’ (History.com editors 2017:1). Breton was saying that a surrealist artist must bypass any thoughts of rationality in order to gain automatism which is an act or idea achieved through the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud may have not been an artist but his development and exploration into how the mind works was a large influence. This Little Hans study into dream analysis and phobias opened doors into the world of unconscious thoughts and desires, he uncovered areas in psychology and philosophy that hadn’t ever been discovered before due to the idea that is wasn’t ‘scientific’ research. Similarly, in surrealist work can be seen as ‘unscientific’ because it doesn’t follow a strict structure like realism once did, rather it used the unconscious mind as the force behind the influence.  

Dadaism was an early stage of surrealism that commenced during World War I, its purpose was to ridicule the meaningless of the modern world. The whole concept was formed to deconstruct the definition of art by experimenting with different techniques, materials and mediums. Photo montage became popular through Dadaists such as Raoul Hausmann and his piece ‘The Art Critic’. The montage was used as a means of expressing political dissent. Other techniques were invented such as collage which is widely known today as assembling different elements to create a whole, Max Ernst famously created ‘ The Hat Makes the Man’. Cubomania is a form of collage where an image is cut into squares and reassembled randomly. This technique was invented by Romanian Surrealist artist Gherasim Luca. Surrealism began to emerge into photography through artists such as Maurice Tabard and Man Ray who explored automatic writing using techniques such as combination printing and double exposure. In the early 1920s, technology was developing rapidly and became of great interest to avant-garde artists due to its association with technology. Photography was beginning to become a chance for artists paradigms of vision and representation. The evolution of the camera worked in harmony with the movement from realism to surrealism, as technology modernized so did ideologies. 

I took some archival images from photo albums, during times where I was too young to understand the complex nature of having divorce. I painted my finger tips with black ink and transferred it onto white paper, then I roughly cut them out. I placed my fingerprints on top of the faces in each image and took a photo. I wanted to include old photos as well as keeping my theme of lack of identity. I used the fingerprints to not only cover up the face but a metaphor for family. This concept is similar to my earlier blood photoshoot and how our family share genetics. In our modern day you can make a name for yourself, but it hasn’t always been like that. You weren’t judged based on your own image, you were judged based on your family, whether they were rich or poor.

I took images of oak trees as they fit well with the aesthetic of my photobook. They add a sense of eeriness and darkness about my book. I made them black and white to create high contrast between the grey sky and the brown branches, to exaggerate the trees silhouette.

For this shoot I was inspired by the Shakespeare play, Macbeth. In Act 5, Scene 1 where Lady Macbeth is relentlessly scrubbing her hands because she is having a hallucination of the King’s blood. This scene is a representation of her subconscious guilt and how the murder is haunting her on the inside. ‘Out damned spot, out I say!’, this is what she said when she was violently washing her hands, even though there was nothing on it. Lady Macbeth goes on to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and eventually kills herself because of these visions and remorse.

This links to my personal study because blood runs in the family. You can runaway, get adopted, your parents can die but you will always be connected to your family via DNA. Lady Macbeth was trying to get rid of the imaginary blood, but she can’t because the murder is now permanently en-scripted in her memory. Likewise no matter how much you try to distant yourself from your family, they will forever be running through your blood, in your genetics.

The hands are my own, I set my camera to about neck height to get a viewpoint of my head looking down at them. I used red food colouring as ‘blood’ and kept reapply to make is look as ‘fresh’ as possible. I used Manual setting and autofocus so I could adjust myself to whether I wanted a dark feel or not. Some of the images featuring the sink I used flash as it is generally dark in that corner of the bathroom.

Rae is based in Australia, Melbourne, but came to my knowledge through her exhibition at CCA Galleries alongside Claude Cahun’s work. Her work is influenced by feminist theories and the female body, she uses her body as the focal point of many of her images. The iamge below is taken from her series ‘Never standing on two feet‘, which consider’s Cahun’s engagment with the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey The photographs Cahun produced in Jersey are intimate. They explore an idea of self within the immediate environment and were produced in collaboration with her lover, Marcel Moore. Many threads of inquiry emerged for me while viewing the archive: Cahun’s performative photographic gestures; the nature of photographic performance for a lover; and the repercussions of imaging a woman’s body aging over time, to name a few.

This photo is powerful through it’s use of naturalistic imagery with the combination of a portraits. There is high contrast between the two genres, yet they work in harmony in this image if hers. Feminist ideologies can be seen via her clothing choice of a skirt, which is connotated as a stereotypical feminine item. The posture is ‘un-lady like’, how her legs are open and she is slouching backwards over the rock as if she is at home and not in public. She uses black and white, which is influenced by the work of Claude Cahun at a time when colour photography was fairly new and expensive.The black and white symbolizes the out-dated patriarchal society Cahun once lived in, where there were certain gender roles written into everyday life, that belittle women as the inferior sex. Rae is challenging dominant modes of representation around female identity. This image is a self-portrait, which she is set up and captured on a timer, a main interest of her work is experimenting with performance documentation and how the camera is part of the image, it isn’t just a witness, it’s a performer as well. Although her positioning and posture is awkward and uncomfortable, it doesn’t overpower the image, it blends with the romanticism of the surroundings. Rae’s use of femininity also creates a sense of delicacy, she may be wearing a skirt which has connotations of sexual confidence, but it is mid-length which adds a sense of modesty. She doesn’t want to drown out the background with over-sexualising and objectivity her body. The way she is laying vulnerably over the rock, suggests lack of control over her gender. Many women face sexism and have their life planned out by society, some don’t get an education, some will only ever be a stay at home mum, who cooks and cleans for the duration of her life. Her work relates to my photobook as it displays ideas of conflict with gender/sexual identification. This links to my work as I am exploring personal identity and how it fluctuated and confused me at the time of my parents separation. Her fusion of nature and identity I am going to use in some of my shoots. I feel that nature connects to the idea of genetics and family, which relates to the fact you are born into a certain bloodline whether you like it or not, you have no free-will in the matter.