For my first shoot, I will be looking through family photos and albums to look at the three generations of my family; my grandparents, my parents and me. Through the years of taking photos, it has been highly developed from photos being printed and placed into albums which was mainly what my grandparents and parents did, up until now where phones have been developed to where you can now save the images on your phone, so their has been a decline in physical album making and the use of disposable cameras. Not only has the way of storing photos changed, but the context of the images have changed as well. During my grandparents years, photos were a privileged thing to have and wasn’t a common thing along with photos being staged and directed, however photos are more now candid and capturing the moment as it is, which tends to be a common trend within baby pictures due to the lack of communication between baby and parents, but as the child begins to age and are able to communicate photos become more staged between parents and baby’s, which is a trend through my family photos.
During this shoot I mainly focused on photos that my grandparents and parents took, which allowed me to see how times had developed as photos my parents had taken where in colour and more in focus compared to the photos from my grandparents which where more out of focus and in black and white.
Fairies is a legend and stories that inhibits all of the Channel Islands, looking specifically into Jersey’s history with mythical fairies I have found that it to be one of the favoured and known legends of the islands being habited by fairies. The islands fairies are strongly associated with prehistoric sights, MacCulloch, art historian and academic, notes it was best believed that the fairies inhibited the island before the people who are here now and ‘that the cromlechs were erected by them for dwelling places’.
It has been said that people who interfered with the ancient monuments would be punished by the fairies, it was considered extremely unlucky to meddle with the ancient stones because of the ‘wrath of the spirits’ who inhabited these places. It has been known that in areas of the parish of St Johns fairies have blinded people who have disturbed the lands around them.
Mr Hocart who once broke up the ancient stones of La Roque Qui Sonne at L’Ancresse for building material was said to have been cursed. As soon as his house was complete a fire broke out killing the servants. Parts of the stone were sent to Britain for sale and the ships which carried them sunk. The story of Hocart is noted in 19th century guide books, with various gruesome misfortunes befalling him.
For this photoshoot I plan to use a tableaux effect, placing people in costume that similar to representing that of a fairy and creating the illusion of these torments: taunting and blinding, to suggest the stories and the myths, as well as having some tableaux photographs of just the fairies in the woods and in and amongst the island for effect and to add to the ideas of the occupation it has on the island.
I will be taking images of my family here in Jersey at our home. I want to focus specifically on my Aunt and Uncle who are the ones who offered me a place to stay when I moved over to Jersey, and I want to be able to try and portray how my relationship with them has changed since September 2018, which is when I first moved over to Jersey. I’d like to try and take images with Polaroids to try and capture the authentic effect it gives the image. Polaroids tend not to change any of the details and cannot be edited by editing programs such as Photoshop, so it captures the moment as it is, and that’s the type of effect i’d like to add to my work. If using Polaroids doesn’t turn out the way i’d like it to then i’ll switch to a normal digital camera.
The second photo shoot I plan to take if of the family as a whole who live in my house. I currently live with my aunt and uncle and my aunt’s parents, so i’d like to photograph them all together, mainly at dinner or when sitting in the living room, as this is when we are all usually together and talking.
2 photoshoots during the Christmas holiday:
Since all of my family is coming over and spending Christmas in Jersey, I have the opportunity to take pictures of both my family in London and my family in Jersey together in one room. I will be planning to take images during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when everyone will be eating and spending time together. This will also capture the close relationship my family has despite living in different places. I will also try and take these images in Polaroids however if it doesn’t end up working out then I will switch to a normal digital camera.
I will be going to London the weekend before Christmas so I have a chance to photograph my family and their lives in London to compare to my family in Jersey. I want to mainly focus on my mother and younger brothers who I lived in a house with until I moved over to Jersey at 16, and I want to photograph their life in London since I have left. I also want to focus on my Grandparents, who are also a huge influence in my life. Like my other photoshoots I plan to use Polaroids, however I will switch to a digital camera if need be.
I will be taking pictures of Fort Henry, a coastal defense built before the German occupation which was repurposed into a German defense, and the two spotlight observation bunkers situated to the north and south of the fort. I will be using a tripod for my outcomes in order to capture the subjects as deadpan as a response to the Bechers with their typologies. I will edit a few of my outcomes to create a manipulated landscape as a response to Andreas Gursky.
Photoshoot
Selection & Edits
Evaluation
I believe the photoshoot went well as the weather was clear and sunny, which provided good lighting for recording my subjects. I also was able to produce deadpan images in response to the Becher’s typologies, I believe these outcomes were successful as the images were even and flat. I believe I wasn’t as successful when editing my response to Gursky as the borders of two of the images I was splicing together didn’t blend well, resulting in a large section of terrain being lighter.
Katrien de Blauwer was born in the small provincial town of Ronse (Belgium). After a troubled childhood, She moved to Ghent at a young age to study painting. Later she attended the Royal Academy in Antwerp to study fashion. A study she abandoned. It was at that time she made her first collage books, actually studies and moodbooks for fashion collections. At a later age she began collecting, cutting and recycling images as therapeutic self investigation.
Her images consist of mostly feminine figures which in turn makes her work somewhat of a feminist movement. As she created collages made up of found photographs and magazine cut outs, she took things that weren't her own, and for me and from my view of her work mirrors the early start of the Feminist movement; when women started to fight for their rights and take back what was rightfully theres from the patriarchy.
DIRTY SCENES
In DirtyScenes, pages are often overlaid with paint and crayon, disrupting the intimacy of the images. Although unspoken, the narrative seems to draw from the artist’s own life – her body, femininity and sexuality, as well as alluding to absent male figure and various other unknown female characters, creating a sense of unknown which viewers often perplexed and questioning.
Anonymity is a central theme in de Blauwer’s work, she describes it as “an important part of the language”. “In Dirty Scenes, anonymity is prominent because this series deals with hidden anonymous encounters,” she says. By working this way, de Blauwer hopes that both herself – the artist – and the audience can appreciate the story and experience it in unison. “The viewers can identify with the intimate image or narrative due to becoming anonymous themselves, and eventually the story belongs to everyone. I’m acting as a neutral intermediary between the story of others and my own, I did not make these images, but I gave them a new life and meaning; I bring satires from others into my inner world and vice versa.”
Katrien De Blauwer calls herself a "photographer without a camera". She collects and recycles pictures and photos from old magazines and papers. Her work is, at the same time, intimate, directly corresponding with our unconscious, and anonymous thanks to the use of found images and body parts that have been cut away. This way, her personal history becomes the history of everyone. The collage effects a kind of universalisation, emphasizing the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognize oneself in the story. The artist becomes a neutral intermediary: without being the author of the photographs, she appropriates and integrates them into her own interior world, a world she’s revealing in third person.
Dirty Scenes is an enhancement to Why I Hate Cars – a story where the male figure is focal yet not present. Here, contrastingly, the female subjects are in center, yet their appearances are deterred from view. As observed through the dream of a small girl, the subjects are situated such that hinders all feeling of character – maybe symbolizing naivety, an absence of comprehension, or a need to overlook the situations occurring.
Either way, it’s widely known that art and creative techniques can act as a successful means of psychotherapy. De Blauwer compares her collage work to “visiting a therapist” – “I talk through my work.”
“As I age, my work is growing with me as I mature, and everything my work is trying to tell me is becoming clearer,” she says. “It’s a healing process; it’s a quest, and one that often confronts me with myself.”
MY OWN WORK AND RESPONSE
Below are three of my responses to Katrien de Blauwers series of photographs 'Intimate Abstract' which focuses on close up shots of female figures. It seems to be a common occurrence nowadays that males mostly dominate the world of such confidential female details in the art world, and so I found De Blauwers movement of work quite liberating in terms of exposing ourselves as women on our own, without men jeopardising our dignity for the sake of themselves.
Us, as women, can choose wether we expose ourselves and our venerability or not. Men have no choice anymore. We have taken charge.
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.
“Maybe, but it’s more complicated: maybe for him the endless encounters with what can be infinitely reduced occurrences, the tireless recording of them, often without looking through the viewfinder, maybe that process got to the point it did because he was in a state of recognition that “occurrences” themselves are a single sort of thing – brief concentrations of human or animal energy forming erratically through often in structured spaces, and in the presence of a recording device.”
‘it seems that Winogrand was flirting with the side that the photographic act will always and inevitably transform things into a picture and that “composition” is entirely secondary to this phenomenon.”
“The “weak” claim reflects or expresses a certain ambivalence about art that was characteristic of the avant-garde, or the avant-garde period. But things have moved from there and ow there’s less reason to want to undermine art, especially “Art”, and more reason now to want to preserve it as a possibility since it is to an unprecedented extent threatened with a kind of dissolution into a mass culture of a global culture.”
For my first photo shoot I am going to be taking photos of my boyfriend and me in front of a white wall doing a different variety of poses such as, hugging, looking at the camera and many others. I want to portray an ameliorative side of the relationship
For my second photo shoot I am going to again take photos of me and my boyfriend and I, but I will be portraying a pejorative view of a relationship instead to show a contrast.
For my third photo shoot I will be taking photos of my friends relationship and showing a ameliorative view of their relationship.
For my fourth photo shoot I will be taking photos of my friends relationship and showing a pejorative view of their relationship.
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.
