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A Swedish photographer who has used her project, Rågsved, to recover and come to terms with her troubled past. ANGELICA ELLIOTT moved to Rågsved after her boyfriend ended his life. The photobook was an ongoing project and started as soon as she moved there, almost as a way to feel free and became a way of therapy for ELLIOTT. Although she has no formal education in photography, ELLIOTTs’ images are well thought out and capture something truly beautiful, just life. ELLIOTT did assist two photographers, JH Engström and Margot Wallard, in Paris and knew from then on photography was what she needed to be doing. At the age of 18/19 she started shooting analogue and shared a small dark room, where she developed her images. At this time photography was a hobby. As she started collecting her images she realised that a book could be created. Every image within the book is personal.

“I learned a lot about myself during this time. In a way, to be myself. I learned to respect my work and believe in myself as an artist. I also realised that, ‘F*ck it, I can still do this without a proper art school education, and that I will continue doing what I do in my own way’. That is freedom to me. Nothing and no one can take my photography away from me. It is something I will never lose. That makes me feel strong and independent.”

– ANGELICA ELLIOTT

This black and white image, has strong contrasts and a large tonal range. In this image there are lots of different shapes, which add texture and interest to the image. The windows have created interesting patterns in the image. There isn’t any real composition elements in the image, however the strong contrasts draw the viewers eye to the image. After researching the project by ANGELICA ELLIOTT, I think this is a picture of the city of Rågsved. Is this an image of where ANGELICA has recovered from her traumatic past? For this image to be placed in her book, it must be very important to her and hold some significance.

I am using this project to express myself and to discuss what limits me and makes me feel free. Similarly to ANGELICA ELLIOTT I feel this project could essentially be very healing and therapeutic to complete.

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Favourite images from these shoots

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For my first photoshoot I decided just to go on a walk through a nearby valley and see what caught my eye and inspired me from my natural surroundings, collecting a large variation of images in whatever styles suits the particular subject best and then later on working out which to keep and use in my photobook. This resulted in several hundred images of different plants. trees, birds, flowers and general landscape scenes which I narrowed down in Adobe Lightroom.

Firstly, I went through with the colour labels and either chose red or yellow for whether I wanted to discard the image immediately or move on to the next selection process. This ended up with me having roughly 70 images to work with.

Then I went through and either flagged them as “keep” or “discard” depending on whether there were other similar images which worked better, or if they were duplicates form a slightly different angle, or if they just overall didn’t work as well with the other images as I had hoped. This left me with 37 images. I then edited the final group of images a little, just making any corrections to the exposure or when the colour balance was off slightly, before exporting them out of Lightroom.

Once they were in my files I was able to analyse them against each other, physically putting them next to other images and comparing them in a range of different combinations, before separating them into two folders: “yes” and “no”. I decided against deleting any of the images in the “no” folder, as I could change my mind or my vision of the project could change slightly and they would be necessary again. I was also aware of the fact that I could end up using even less of these images, depending on how the other photoshoots go, so this selection is in no way final, but with some I already have an idea of how to use them effectively in the book.

At the end of all this I ended up with 28 images that I chose to keep and move on with into the next stage of my photobook.

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(POSSIBLE LAYOUT)

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For my future photoshoots I know I am going to focus more on landscapes and scenes rather than individual plants, flowers and trees, and I also am planning to produce a series of portraits to use alongside these other images, possibly posed in similar positions. For example, the images below almost look like two heads looking at each other and two people of different heights standing next to each other, so I am going to make images with a similar form using people to mirror them.

As I said before I know I’m not going to end up using all of these images, but I do quite like some of them and I’m trying to think of interesting ways I can incorporate them into my photobook to best represent my idea of spring as a period of transition.

NARRATIVE-

in three words: winter, spring, summer

in a sentence: the slow but gradual transformation from cold, harsh winter to soft, warm summer, adding in some comparisons to how people change/age over time.

This photobook will be a study on how the weather, environment and general mood changes as the weather warms up and the seasons change from winter to summer. The season of spring has always been represented as a period of transition, and often also as a period of rebirth- not only in a religious sense but also environmentally. I want to have the images seem natural and as if they are seen through your own eyes, and I’m planning to do this by not over-editing the images and carefully using angles to my advantage. I also want to do some portrait work as well and add that alongside, to represent how humans age over time and the transition of youth to adulthood and old age.

DESIGN-

• portrait orientation
• colour
• some text throughout the book (quotes?)
• most images in pairs, some as individuals
• fairly simple editing to keep the natural theme
• title along the side of the book as well as on the front

I don’t have plans for a name yet, but I want it to be short and something to do with the spring, or the changing of seasons.

DE BLAUWER’S IMAGES-

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IMAGE ANALYSIS-

https://www.katriendeblauwer.com/?nspl

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I’ve chosen the theme of freedom as the ideas I had in mind about souls, spirits, ghosts and possibly the angel and the devil links in quite nicely. I think that the freedom to push limits and have the freedom to do things that reality prevents you from doing usually whether it’s physically or having too many responsibilities in the real world to be able to do the things we wish to do. The theme of freedom is extremely similar to the theme of limitations which is why I decided to do both. I think photographers like Duane Michals are very inspiring when it comes to the idea I want to present in the film I’m going to make. I think that being inspired by his work and recreating it to come to life will be very interesting. When looking at what I want to do for my own film I think Daune Michals’ work will link in nicely:

To explore the freedoms and limitations of the mind within reality and within our own abstract thoughts. In my film I would like to venture to the captivity of our own minds and the limitations it causes and then explore the freedoms of having no commitments or responsibilities in another reality. I want to express the freedom a lost soul may have compared to a living soul and I will show this by showing the same person in two different worlds; one in the real world with commitments and limitations of what we are able to do and another world where the person has the freedom to do what they want. Within the spiritual world I’m going to use a red ball to show guidance to represent that freedom can also have its down sides of feeling lost or not knowing what to do with the space around you. The ball will lead the ghost to where their human self would like to go if they ever got the chance and then they’ll be able to enjoy and see the beauty in the different parts of the world around them that they wouldn’t get to do if they had the chains of responsibility and guilt holding them down. The girl in the real world is somewhat meant to represent the devil as the limitations and the girl in the spiritual world where she has the freedom to go wherever she wants is meant to represent the angel. So there is a good and a bad part to the story. At the end the devil and the angel both realise that in life there are freedoms but as well limitations. They visuals will also include: A girl wearing a black dress to represent many things but mainly limitations and transition into another scene where the same girl is wearing a white dress to mainly represent freedom. The girl in the black dress will just show scenes of having a dull life and have a lack of enjoyment shown but longing for adventure and to see the more exciting parts of life e.g. the beach, nature, traffic lights and the urban parts of the island etc. The ending will show the girl in the white dress going into the room of the girl in the black dress and opening a book of sketches of the places the girl is black wanted to top to and then both of them merging into thew same person to represent the good parts of life and the bad parts and then to add a horror factor to the film I’ll make the eyes of the girl change colour and the candle going out that was lit at the start.

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Duane Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. I like the way that Michals presents his work as dark and ominous as that’s the way I like to go about presenting my work also. I like the theme of black white where shadow and light appears to be a lot more dramatic than it would be if the photograph or film was in colour. Whether the spirit/ghost is visible in the photo or if there is a feeling of the supernatural lurking around the photo, I think Michals work represents the unsettling feeling of uncertainty. His work links to my theme of Freedoms and Limitations as there’s the idea that the angel/devil near the bed had the freedom to do what they want without consequences but as had the limitations of not having a normal human life.

“The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at . . .. We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong . . .. That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring–just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience–grief, loneliness–how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.” – Duane Michals