For one of my photo shoots I took images of my family members and friends, from both London and Jersey, over the course of a few days. It was conducted over the Christmas holiday in Jersey while my family gathered to celebrate Christmas. These photo shoots were based off of the photographers Walker Evans and Latoya Ruby Frazier, who both took images of families for their series. For my photos I aimed to take images of as many of my family members as possible when they visited Jersey for the Christmas holidays.

A few images from my photoshoots :

Chosen images :

Final edits :

Analysis image :

In this black and white image you can see a boy, my brother, being shown something on a phone by someone out of the picture. Since the background around him has been blurred slightly, you are able to easily focus on his face without being distracted by the environment around him.

This image was taken when my family from London came over to Jersey for the Christmas holiday. The boy in the image is my brother and this was when my family and I went out for dinner the night before they left to go back to London. This image is a response to one of the photographers I will be looking at in my essay, Latoya Ruby Frazier, who is a photographer who took images of her family within their home when there was an economic crisis happening in their town of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

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. 

Planning

For my third photoshoot I intend on experimenting with nighttime photography by taking images of Fort Henry and the observation bunkers. For the photo shoot to succeed, I will need a tripod to reduce image shakiness and blurring as the camera aperture will be lower resulting in a longer exposure time. I intend to edit some of my images to use as a response to Eva Nielsen to portray the bunkers as ghostly and dramatic by changing the colour of the images to black and white.

Shoot

Selection & Edits

Evaluation

I believe the outcomes from the photoshoot are successful as the images do not look blurry. I also believe the edited images are successful in portraying the German defences in a ghostly manner. Overall, I will be using most of the edited outcomes from the photoshoot in my photobook.

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.

How does Cristina de Middel use tableaux photography in tandem with archival images to represent previous narratives?

In what way does Crisitina de Middel construct a narrative using a variety of photographic images such as tableaux and archives.

“Ms. Middel shows how the medium promotes both fact and fiction”

The work that I will be focusing on is Cristina de Middel’s book called ‘Afronauts’. The book is based around a Zambian science teacher named Edwuard Makuka, who in 1964 decided to train the first African crew to travel to the moon. His plan was to use an aluminium rocket to put a woman, two cats and a missionary into Space. First the moon, then Mars, using a catapult system. He founded the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Astronomical Research to start training his Afronauts in his headquarters located only 20 miles from Lusaka. The plan was not well thought out as neither Zambia or any of the surrounding countries had the resources, finances or expertise to follow this programme through to completion.  The book was a finalist in the Paris Photo Fair Aperture First book award. The style of photography that she uses is halfway between documentary photography and tableaux, because she uses real stories but then re-enacts them out using models and actors. Middel also uses a set of archival images of Zambian villages of the time to also show how ridiculous the idea of a space program to compete with the US and Russia was. The book is opened to a letter from one Zambian minister to another saying that according to Makuka America and Russia may lose the race to the moon.

Historical Context:

The first emergence of postmodernism in photography was in the late 20th century. It is characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.

One of the founding post-modernist photographers was Mark Klett in his superimposing work. One project that is an example of this is his Yosemite in time, in which he photographed large wide landscaped then later in photoshop superimposed images over the top lining them up with the landmarks that are still there. The images that he would use are those of the ‘greats’ who photographed the area in the early 1900’s like Ansel Adams and his photos were taken closer to 2000 so they were taken to show the impact and changes on the landscapes over the century. He would take the large images with wide lenses and often from further back than the original images. He often went to spots where were multiple images taken from the area so he can fit 2 or more images within his.

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.

These images are from a photoshoot I did, trying to collect some images I thought would work with my personal study whilst also juxtaposing them. The purpose of these images and the feeling I wanted to get from them was purely aesthetic while trying to envoke an emotional response that isn’t constructed.

I was trying to decide here between a more saturated and vivid effect, bringing out the neons and making the colours and lights the focus of the image, or have the image less saturated, with the colours still being the most obvious feature but also focusing on the scene captured itself.

Again, in these sets of images, I was trying to decide whether I wanted the colours to stand out the most or if I wanted a sort of muted look. In all the images I liked the reflections and wanted to name them to stand out which I think I achieved in images 1 and 3. Looking back, I would’ve cropped them to frame them better.