Smith made his photography debut with ‘Artist Rifles’ a series of photos of fake war scenarios created by his own experience in the army.
‘Artist Rifles was to become the first chapter in Paul’s interrogation of the many-headed beast that is masculinity, of what it means to be a man. The most immediate subject of this enquiry was naturally to confront his own reasoning for joining the army.’
The cloning of the protagonist creates a appropriate metaphor for the army’s effect on an individuals identity and creating group identities (Brothers in Arms) This duplication of himself is a very effective method to emphasize the struggles of male identity, fitting in and belonging to a group / community.
Smith has used this technique multiple times after his Artist Rifles project with himself and others. for example his advertising campaign with Robin Williams or his second self protrait project ‘Make My Night’
‘Make My Night’ follows a group of lads on a night out consisting of good laughs, pranks, fights, drinking and, inevitably, the rough morning after. ‘ As before, he becomes the anonymous everyman but this time is more overtly the narrator as well as the protagonist of a frequently observed ritual.’
WHAT: Take some images of his garage where he kept his mini highlighting details and his tools. Also the spare room where there are trophies and stuff he won. I want to capture the details around the house where he lived, and his my Nan who still lives there.
WHERE/WHEN: In my Nan’s house and in her garage. During the day so I can use natural light in the house to take the photos.
EQUIPMENT: I am going to use my Sony A73 with my 35mm lens to get the wider interior shots of the house and of my Nan. For the details I will use either the 50mm or the 70-200mm zoom lens to really isolate the the details I am capturing. I want to use window light for most the interior shots of the house and not use the ceiling lights as they are a different colour and make the photos look really dingy and colour contrast with the cool window light. For areas where more light is needed and definately in the garage I will set up my SL60W light with a softbox. I will put it off to the side of the work bench and point it down onto the desk as this will cause some nice shadows.
Initial Shoot – Test
I took these initial images as I was already visiting my Nan’s house. I wanted to see what the lighting is like just from the ceiling lights. I wanted the chance to edit these images first and see whether I need to bring a light when I do the proper shoot. I am happy with these imaged but I think they are lacking contrast which I can get from using an artificial light.
Edited Images
I am happy with the outcomes of these images, I didn’t want to completely change the images but rather enhance the old look and make them look aged.
Edit Process
Using Lightroom I first adjusted all the basic corrections to get the image to a good starting point and correct things like exposure, shadows, highlights and white balance. I desaturated the image slightly to make it look older. I raised the shadows and decreased the highlights to try and increase the dynamic range.
I used the an S curve on the tone curve graph to add a bit of contrast. I then raised the blacks slightly to make the image look more filmic
I added blue to the shadows to make the image feel colder. I did this to for documentary effect as no one is using the garage anymore so there is not life in it. I then added orange into the highlights to try and balance out the cold.
Because I had added in a lot of blue into shadows I needed to compensate by lowering thee saturation of the aqua and blues. I also tweaked the other sliders to make the image look more realistic.
Late 19th and early 20th Century (1880’s – 1920’s)
Key characteristics/ conventions:
Trying to make photography a handmade proccess. The idea was to make the photos look like art or painting. ‘Fixing an Image’.
Artists associated:
Peter Henry Emerson, Heinrich Kuhn, Hans Watcek, Hugo Henneberg,(Vienna Camera Club) Joseph Gale.
Key works:
Methods/ techniques/ processes: Vaseline on the lenses to make the image soft so it looks less like a photograph, scratching the negatives to look like brushstrokes.
REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
Time period:
‘1910’s – 1940’s’
Key characteristics/ conventions:
Go back to the qualities of photography as it recreates accurate and sharp images. They wanted to take photos of what they actually saw. They took things the way they were and not manipulated in the darkroom. Trying to emphasise and focus on shape. The art came from the skill of the photographer
Artists associated:
Paul Strand transitioned into and pioneered straight photography. Walker Evans, Ansel Adams. Group f.64 – A group that were interested in capturing the amazing natural landscapes.
Key works:
Methods/ techniques/ processes:
Photographers interested in the genre of straight photography would use a very small aperture to get everything in focus. A group was formed called group f.64. This represents the smallest aperture a large format camera can go to on the lens. This became a trademark and a common feature of photographers like Paul Strand and Ansel Adams
New set of aesthetics to re-associate photography with art – Allegory style, dream world and spiritual ideas, with romantic ideals
Artists associated:
Abelardo Morell– modern contemporary. Uses old keyhole method to project outside scenes into rooms, no other interference so the light projects the image upside down. lengthy process
The Vienna Camera Club (Austria)
Photo-succession group – founded by Alfred Stieglitz
The brotherhood of the linked ring.
Key works:
Alfred Stieglitz – New York in 1890 promoted idea that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture, created photo succession group (important group in solidifying the pictorialist movement) Alfred used compositional choices and use of natural elements like rain, snow, and steam to unify components of a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole.
Julia Michael Cameron – pre-Raphaelite style, fairy light, unfocused. Creates angelic scenes with woman, white clothing and soft finish to present innocence.
Emerson’s Naturalistic Photography – promoted photography as art rather than science, natural and aesthetic depictions of (famously) wheat workers workers
Methods/ techniques/ processes: Vaseline on lenses to have foggy smudged affect, and chemicals or scratches on developing negatives. Made the images look like paintings, with depth and sketchiness through human interaction, not just the mechanical use of the camera .
REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
Time period: 1915
Key characteristics/ conventions : sharp shapes, realistic and clear view of reality, play with shadows. art made in initial framing not in post. Edward Western, Walker Evans.
Artists associated: paul strand creator. Edward Western, Walker Evans – wall street crash 1929 economic depression of workers.
Pictorialism was strongest between 1885 to 1915. It emerged as a response to the growth of amateur photography and the commercialism of photography due to the rise of Kodak’s more affordable handheld cameras. It criticised the wider use of the “point-and-shoot” method that rose as a result, believing it to undermine the more traditional craftsman-like role of the photographer.
KEY CHARACTERISTICS-
Its main purpose was to classify photography as an art form and separate it from the type of photography used for scientific or documentary purposes. It focused on “the beauty of subject matter and the perfection of composition rather than the documentation of the world as it is.” Often the results are dreamlike, romaticised, idyllic, and make references to classical paintings.
KEY WORKS-
Julia Margaret Cameron
Hal Morey
Fred Holland Day
Clarence H White
ARTISTS ASSOCIATED-
Henry Peach Robinson: gave pictorialism its name in his book “Pictorial Effect in Photography” (1869)
Alfred Stieglitz: American artist who gathered a group of artists to promote photography as an art-form, called the “Photo-Secession” group
Clarence H White: teacher and leading pictorialist, created elegant and natural portraits of his friends and family, established the Clarence H White school of photography in 1914- the first educational institution to teach photography as an art-form
Alvin Langdon Coburn: experimentalist photographer, inspired by Japanese ink paintings, the first photographer to take completely abstract images
Julia Margaret Cameron: mid-19th century photographer, possibly one of the first to use photography as a fine art, overall a very important contributor to early pictorialism
MORE KEY WORKS-
Alfred Stieglitz
Elias Goldensky
Robert Demachy
Alvin Langdon Coburn
METHODS/TECHNIQUES/PROCESSES-
In the dark room development stage the images were often tampered with to imitate other, more accepted work of art, like paintings, using different solutions or pigments to mimic brushstrokes, or leaving them to over-develop or under-develop for a chiaroscuro effect. Pictorialists also often experimented with different paper types and chemical processes to create different effects, a few of which are described below:
cyanotype: resulted in deep blue tones and made by covering the photographic paper with light-sensitive iron salts
gum bichromate: made by coating the paper in gum arabic, potassium bichromate, and one of the artist’s chosen pigments, then leaving it to develop in the light; this was one of pictorialists’ favourite techniques
platinum print: a two step process, this starts by exposing paper sensitized with iron salts to a negative, then chemically developing it and replacing the iron salts with platinum, allowing for a wide range of tones
carbon print: made by coating tissue paper with potassium bichromate, carbon black pigment, and gelatin; provides great detail and so became one of the most commercially-available development methods
First appearing in 1927, the term ‘deadpan’ was coined by the New York Times magazine to describe the work of Buster Keaton, an American actor, comedian, film director, producer, screenwriter, and stunt performer.
Adeadpan photograph is often described as being ‘devoid of emotion’, which is prevalent in the Keaton’s work. A deadpan image is considered to be seemingly empty, existing merely as a subject and photograph. There is a clear lack of joy, sorrow or any other emotion on the subject’s face and the deadpan is often considered a mood of its own. The aesthetic of deadpan is that the photographer is entirely detached from the subject being photographed, the subject is indifferent and the image produced is objective.
Buster Keaton’s self-portraiture
The visual language of the deadpan aesthetics is mainly built on the absence of a photographer’s emotional input.
THEORETICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THE DEADPAN AESTHETICS Peter Lančarič
Modern deadpan photography can be seen in the works of photographers such as Rineke Dijkstra and Alec sloth, whose images are highly engaging yet seemingly disengaged with the subjects.
Rineke Dijkstra
Soth’s photography consists of a mix of still lifes, portraits and landscapes, presenting the world in a completely unbiased way. His images have “a sense of distance is so tangible you can almost feel it” according to a New York Film Academy article in 2014. The portraits Soth produces show, in full, real people who have real stories and hobbies and so forth, yet his images are completely objective and present them no further as a body and a face. What you see is what you get; his subjects are not posed or dressed for the shoot and are presented as honestly and as accurately as possible. They are presented as though this is how they would appear if you were to walk up to them in real life.
Alec Soth
The detached and unemotional style of deadpan photography is rooted in the development of the ‘New Objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement of the 1920s. This style was pushed forward in the 1970s by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed large water tanks and other industrial landscape features in a formal manner and producing high quality objective images and typologies.
As the 2000s emerged, the aesthetic of deadpan has become more prevalent in photographic portraiture.
Images from Thomas Ruff, for example, reflect a modern understanding of the photographic presentation of a subject and the ability to capture and highlight identity issues.
Thomas Ruff
Ruff is a German photographer who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy). He is renowned for his production of 60 passport-like portraits. The images were all taken in the same manner and are a perfect depiction of the deadpan aesthetic. The subjects were framed as in a passport photo, typically shown with emotionless expressions, in front of a plain background and with the upper edge of the photographs situated just above the hair. The colours are de-saturated and muted, as many deadpan images are.
All of Ruff’s subjects were of German ethnicity and between 25 to 35 years old. The images are objective, display no information and do not grant any insight into the person pictured. Yet, all these psychologically blank portraits portray the prominent character of his generation- the first to be born after World War II.
He captures perfectly the identity issues that his generation may have faced following WWII. Despite having no direct involvement or responsibility for the carnage of the war, the topic is still conflicting for each of the subjects- Should they, or should they not, feel guilty for the war crimes committed by their country?
Incorporating this into my project:
For the portrait sections of my photo-book, I’m aiming to incorporate the deadpan aesthetic into my images. These photos will introduce all of my subjects objectively, with no insight into their personality, character flaws or narratives within their lives. The portraits will be juxtaposed by still life images of objects that are often considered taboo. This will create a strong contrast between the ordinary and regular nature of the portraits and the negative connotations surrounding the objects, which could not have been achieved if the portraits presented the use of these objects or showed the emotions of my subjects. Placing these two types of images together also begins to create a narrative of it’s own, making the viewer question why each object is significant to the subject beside.
I’m also considering photographing the body parts of my subjects and juxtaposing this with the still-life shots. Photgraphing scars, tattoos and other distinguishing features ads depth to the narrative and gives an insight into the types of people presented throughout the book.
