Associated with the idea of advancing new aesthetic values.
To be modern in this period was to be identified with a new subject matter and new ways of seeing.
Modernism believed that science can save the world, which is different to previous movements and art styles which had huge references to religion and rejected the idea of science.
The invention of photography contributed to the creation of modernism, since it is considered to be the modern way of image making compared to fine art which was previously the main way scenes could be captured in an image.
Critic Norbert Wolf says ” Not even the scholarly disciplines concerned with romanticism have been able to do more than arrive at an approximate definition,” (Wolf 2007)
For one of our photography trips we visited the Jersey Arts Center to take a look at the exhibition taking place showing the lives of migrant farmers in Jersey.
Invisible hands is an art exhibition which is a project between Alicja Rogalska and the Morning Boat to portray the lives of migrant workers in Jersey. This exhibition was created to bring light to these workers and the poor conditions they are forced to deal with despite all the hard work they put into their daily lives. These people and their work have been a huge part of the Island’s agriculture for over 150 years, yet this is still failed to be mentioned as much as it should.
Winning clay potato cast in bronze :: Jersey art center :: Invisible Hands
As part of the exhibition, artists were asked to create the most average potato out of clay, with the winning one being cast in bronze and displayed at the exhibition. There were also some runner ups displayed on a shelf near by.
Modernsim was a movement in art, literature and architecture that reacted to the intense changes in technology, society and culture at the time. It rejected the dominance of older movements such as Naturalism and was in favour of new experimental ways of producing art.
Paul Strand
Paul Strand was an American photographer who helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His pictorial studies followed by coolly seductive machine photographs helped define early American modernism.
Post-Modernism:
Postmodernism was created through the dismantling of the modernism movement. Modernism was generally based on idealism and a Utopian version of human life and society and a belief in progress, whereas Postmodernism was born of skepticism and suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Most art which can be included in this movement refers to things outside of the art world such as social and cultural issues, and looks at the importance of context behind a picture. A photographer which can be related to this movement is Cindy Sherman.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer best known for her socially critical photography and feminist artwork. She uses makeup, costumes and stage scenery to create tableaus of situations to challenge modern concepts, mainly about the roles of women within society. A lot of her work can be considered postmodernism as the context behind her images are just as important as the work itself.
For my newspaper spreads I had to create three double pages for each of the subjects which we covered – Landscape, portrait and objects which relate to the occupation :
Portrait page
For my page for portraits I chose the occupation survivor who came and visited my class – Bob Le Suer . I decided I wanted to choose one with colour and one in black and white to have that contrast.
Landscape page
For my landscape page I decided to do a full bleed double page of an image I took at Noirmont. This is a close up of the bunker at Noirmont and catches the beautiful scenery of the island behind it. This could be seen as ironic as a structure with such a bad history and was created for immoral reasons was built in a place which portrays the real beauty of the island.
Object page
For my objects page I also decided to go with a full bleed image. Based off of the artist Rafal Milach, this is an image of a world war helmet placed on a colour background of yellow and purple, with images of people from archive images cropped out and placed in the scene.
Rafal Milach was born in Gliwice, Poland in 1978. He is a photographer, visual artist, and author of multiple photo books.
His works have been exhibited in Poland and worldwide, and can be found in the collections of the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the ING Polish Art Foundation, Kiyasato, the Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan, and the Brandts in Odense in Denmark.
In his photo book, The First March Of Gentlemen, he focuses on using bright backgrounds with objects and cut outs of archive images. He takes two sheets of coloured paper, one for the floor and one for the wall, and places them on a table against a wall. He then chooses an object and places it on the coloured paper, and takes images of it. During editing, he chooses archive images which feature people in black and white, cuts them out, and chooses places to put them around the objects to make the people look like they’re interacting with the objects.
Visual :
In this image you are immediately drawn to the colours which have been chosen for this image. A dark green against a pinkish-purple with emerald green pyramids placed in the middle. There are cut-outs of people from images which seem to be from the archives, of two young boys and four soldiers. The boys seem to be possible hiding from the soliders from behind the pyramids.
I took some of my images which I took in the studio and some which are from the archives and made photo montages by mixing these. I was primarily taking the people from the archive images and putting them into my object images to replicate the style of photographer Rafal Milach, who took images of objects with colourful backgrounds and photo shopped people into them to create an interesting aspect.
What I did :
I first took an image which I liked and which I felt can be used for this type of photo montage.
I then took an archive image with people in it which I could use with the object photo I chose.
For this photo montage, I wanted to make it look like the soldiers are looking for something or someone, so I chose one who looked like he could be peering around the corner. I cut him out and put him at the side of the helmet, and then went and cleaned up the edged with the eraser to give it more of a neat and natural look.
From that same archive image I took another soldier and did the same – cut him out and put him on the side of the helmet.
Since I want to make him look like he’s looking around the side of the helmet, I needed to erase some of the image away to make him look like he’s on the other side of the helmet. To do this I erased his legs but kept his arm on the side.
I moved the layer the cut out was on to be underneath the first guy I cut out to make it seem that he is in front of him, and so they don’t over lap and seem unnatural.
I found another archive image which I thought I would be able to use in my object image.
After cutting the soldier out I placed him on the top of the helmet to make it look like he’s looking for something or someone from a higher angle, since he looks like he’s holding some sort of device, such as binoculars or a camera. Like the other two, i cleaned up the edges to give it more of a natural and neat look.
I chose one more archive image and cut out the guy at the front in the suit.
I decided to place him on the other side of the helmet to make it seem that he is the guy the soldiers are looking for, and since he is holding something in his hand it looks like that he might have something which the soldiers want and that’s the reason they are looking for him.
We managed to get some objects from the war from the Jersey Archive. This included stuff such as a war helmet, tins of bandages, a red cross package, a bar of soap, coupons and much more. We decided to take still life images of these in the studio with two types of lighting – Continuous lighting and flash lighting.
Continuous lighting is what it’s name suggests – lighting which doesn’t change. With this lighting we paired it with an infinity board to make the objects look secluded and in an area bigger than it actually is.
Flash lighting is when the lighting flashes as the image is taken. This is done by putting a sensor on the camera so it can time when to turn the lights on. This type of lighting was more used with a birds eye view angle – the camera was put on a special stand which positions it looking down at the subject from above.
Light room work :
Original pictures
Originally I had taken 60 still life images in total of the objects, and from there i uploaded them onto light room and sorted through them, flagging the ones I wanted to use.
After I had flagged the images I wanted.
After flagging my wanted images I was left with 15 images to choose from. I went and colour coded each image. Yellow means that there’s a chance I might use the image, green means that I will defiantly be using the image for my blog.
Images which have been colour coded yellow
Images which I have been colour coded green
Chosen images:
Red cross package with tins of bandages and an emergency tin.
Two tins with bandages with an emergency tins.
Two tins of bandages
Red cross package with two tins of bandages and an emergency tin.
Red cross box with a crystal radio box and a war helmet.
In a lot of these images I was going for a warm tone. In the images of the coupons and newspaper, this warm tone brought out the yellowing of the aging paper. I also tried getting the objects to stand out against the background, to be bright and focused so it’s the only thing that the viewer can concentrate on. I also liked the look of the reflections on the floor, caused by the infinity board. It makes it look like the objects are in fact on something and aren’t floating in space, but it also doesn’t take much attention away from the object itself.
For the continuous light, my settings on my camera were:
Camera setting: Manual Mode ISO: 100 White Balance: Daylight Aperture: F/16 Shutter: 0.5 sec to 0.8 sec
For the flashing light, my setting on my camera were :
Camera setting: Manual Mode ISO: 100 White Balance: Daylight Aperture: F/16 Shutter: 1/125-1/200 Flash heads set to power output: 2.0
Still life is the painting or drawing of an arrangement of objects, typically including fruit or flowers.
History of still life in art:
Still-life as an art form first originated from Ancient Egyptian highly codified mortuary rituals. Egyptians at the time believed that objects represented on the walls of a tomb or inside a sarcophagus would accompany the dead in the afterlife. They would often include Funerary paintings, embellishment elements which are added to the resting place of the dead, to the walls of the tomb. These paintings included objects such as crops, meat and fish, all of which they believed would travel with the individual into the afterlife.
Greek and Romans later realised similar types of paintings though they did not associate any religious symbolism to it. However, unlike Egyptianfrescoes which were not using any perspective or shading, Greek and Roman started to develop a somewhat sophisticated form of still-life art, more realistic and detailed.
Still life art uncovered from Pompeii
Many mosaics and paint works survived in Pompeii under the ashes that covered the town when Mount Vesuvius volcano exploded in 79AD. The scenes and objects depicted by the Roman mosaics and paintings show the importance that the Romans put on hospitality, commonly the still-life artworks that have been unearthed in Pompeii and Herculaneum, show offering of food and water made by the hosts to the guests.
Jumping to the 19th century, still life began to fall from favor due to the rise of European Academies. Academies taught the “Hierarchy of genres”, which held that a painting’s artistic merit was based mainly on the subject in the work. After neoclassicism went into decline in the 1830’s, genre and portrait painting became the main focus for the Romantic and Realist revolutions. The still-life paintings of Gustave Courbet, Eugene Delacroix and Francisco Goya portray strong emotional currents, and are less concerned about accuracy and more interested in mood.
Vincent Van Gogh, Sunflowers
Vincent Van Gogh has become one of the most famous painters in history, and his still-life work of sunflowers, done during the 19th century, is well known by many. He uses mostly yellow tones and light shadowing to bring the flowers to life.
Analysis of still-life image:
Cookmaid with still-life of vegetables and fruit by Sir Nathaniel Bacon
Although Sir Nathaniel Bacon did not paint professionally, he was a skilled amateur artist. This type of art and subject matter, a cookmaid surrounded by fruits and vegetables, are more associated with Dutch and Flemish art. It is unusual in England for that period in time, however Bacon may have been influenced by pictures of this type during his travels in the low country, and therefore bought the style back with him. Every item in the image is known to have grown in England, and reflects a part of Bacon’s life as he was a keen gardener and successfully grew melons on his Suffolk estate.
In this image, the first thing you see is the woman in the middle. She stands out against the rest of the image, being the only living thing surrounded by fruit and vegetables. You can see all types of fruit and vegetables, such as melons, parsnips, horse radish, lettuce and apples. The amount of fruit and vegetables in the image portrays the wealth of the owner, which was Sir Nathaniel Bacon. You can also see the singular flower wreath to the top left of the image, next to the maid’s head. The image seems to follow the rule of three. The background is split into three, with the left wall, the gap where you can see the outside of the building, and the right wall. There are also three large lettuces on the right side of the image, three large pumpkins/melons at the bottom, and three small lemons on the left side, on the table. The tone of the image seems quite cold and dark, there’s no sunlight and the clouds in the distance are grey and gloomy.
Bob Le Sueur is a 99 year old man who is a survivor of the war, and is well known among the island for his involvement in assisting escaped Russian prisoners, in Jersey, during the second world war.
Bob Le Sueur was 19 when the island was occupied by the Germans, and 24 when they were finally liberated. Throughout the time Jersey was taken over, Bob got to work and helped to shelter 8 different Russian escapees from the Nazis who were hunting them down. One of these Russians was Feodor, also known as Bill, who had before been harbored by a woman named Louisa Gold. Bob knew Lousia through the company which he worked for, and found out that she had taken in the Russian after her son Edward was killed in action, telling Bob that, “she had to do something for another mother’s son.”
However a few years later she and her brother Harold were both arrested by the Germans and sent to separate camps to be murdered. From that point on, Bob made it his responsibility to hide Bill. At first he kept him in a filing room at his offices, told him not to go near any of the windows and took him food regularly. He later moved him between various addresses before settling in a flat occupied by two conscientious objectors sent over from the mainland.
Later Bob was able to shelter other Russians in the many remote houses he knew.
Bob’s stories
He told our class a story of when his friend Bill got so drunk off of strong apple brandy that he crossed his arms, started kicking his legs and sang very loudly a song from Russia, loud enough to hear out in the streets. Ofcourse, at that exact moment of time a German troop was making their way down the street right next to the house where Bill was singing loudly. But thankfully the German soldiers were singing themselves too, so before they could notice the Russian singing Bob and his friends manage to quiet Bill by shoving a washcloth in his mouth.
Bob also mentioned that they were able to get his Russian friend, Bill, an illegal registration card. When I asked him how one could get an illegal registration card back then, he explained that if you lost a registration card, you could easily go down to the registration office and come up with some excuse about loosing it, and they would give you a new one. Once you had the duplicate card, the extremely skilled would have been able to carefully remove the image and replace it with a picture of the person who would want to use it illegally. There was a purple stamp which was placed half on the card, half on the image, so it would have been hard to replicate. However, Bob said that there was this one girl in particular, who couldn’t have been too older than myself, was skilled when it came to copying the stamp, so she would sketch in the other half of the stamp on the picture so it looked like the real thing.
He recalled the time when two German Bomber planes flew over Jersey and released two cylinders attached to parachutes. At first he thought they were bombs, but later found out that they were messages to the commander chief of Jersey. However, the Commander had already left the island with his family, so the messages were delivered to the Bailiff so he could do something about it. The Germans threatened that if Jersey did not surrender within 24 hours they would carpet-bomb the island, which is when they bomb one area intensively. This would have been devastating for the tiny island, and no doubt would have left numerous casualties. This is one of the factors which lead to the island being surrendered.
Cutting to Liberation Day, Bob was telling the story of when he and his friends were on their way to get a good spot to watch what was happening. They were cycling on their bikes with their makeshift tires made of tightly pulled garden hose, when suddenly one of Bob’s tires snapped. It made a sound similar to a pistol shot, sending everyone in the surrounding areas to panic. There were two people who dropped to the ground, and two German solders, both who held rifles, turns towards him with guns pointed. He mentioned remembering thinking to himself ‘ It’s Liberation day and these are the last seconds of my life.’ At that moment it would have been terrifying, but Bob was laughing when he was telling us this story.
He did say that we had wished he had shook the hand of one of the German soldiers on that day, one which was obviously starving, young and about to be taken as a prisoner of war. He even asked our class if he should’ve done it, just out of courtesy, however it would’ve been too early to be seen with the enemy, so he didn’t. He said that he always felt a bit of regret for not showing that boy some compassion, even if he was fighting for the Nazis.
