In the project Love and Rebellion we decided to make newspaper spreads to display our images, either from our phonebooks or films. I did a film for my final project which was more focused on rebellion to do with the fight against reality and dreams. I decided to keep the frame of the film for the majority of the spreads as I thought it captured more of what was going on composition wise. My film, Wake Up, was mainly based on being a horror and being an abstract/dream-like film as towards the end I tried to make the viewer feel as uncomfortable as possible with a mixture of imagery and sounds. Shannon O’Donnell uses the technique of selecting key frames from the timeline in Premier and presenting them as still-images. I will also print my spreads as final outcomes for mounting. I may use a different layout for mounting compared to my newspaper spread due to have more room to experiment with and being able to show a full layout of the filmed shot.

Inspirations:

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Duane Michals (b. 1932, USA) is one of the great photographic innovators of the last century, widely known for his work with series, multiple exposures, and text. 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. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’s singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once. Things Are Queer, 1973/ Nine gelatine silver prints with hand-applied text/3 3/8 x 5 inches 

Sequence (grid)

I experimented with how to layout my sequences of photos. The 3×3 layout was my favourite layout because wherever you look across the three photos, whether its a row or a column or diagonally, they all make sense as a sequence. I put mostly portraiture shots within the sequence as most of film consisted of my portraiture shots are part from 4/5 of them. I chose top put the earrings as the odd picture out of the rest in the middle as a focusing piece of the sequence. The photos all relate to rebellion some way our another, I also found that as a viewer they seem to be quite ominous as each shot has some looming darkness surround the photo or emerging from the backdrop of the photograph.

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Montage

When editing the montage I chose to make the outcome as nightmarish as possible and edit the photograph the way I would’ve intended my film to look like if I had more time to edit it and learn the skills I would need to make it as ominous and creepy as possible. I liked the montage before and after I cropped the image but I thought the final image should be cropped as it had more of a focus on where I had edited the image in order to have the full effect of surrealism and making the viewer feel uncomfortable. By using the blending and smudging tool to create the demonic smile and make it look as realistic as possible. As for the eyes a selected the pipette tool and used the lightest shad that was on the eye already and then coloured the two eyes in, similarly to what I did in my film but instead of editing the footage I just wore contacts to make the process easier. I also duplicated the cut outs of the face using copy and paste and then change the opacity to make a ghost like effect. I also copy and paste a another image I had created and hid it within the photo to add an even more disturbing attribute to thew image.

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Juxtaposition

I found it fairly difficult to find a juxtaposition within my film and when I did find one it was difficult to lay it out on the newspaper as the film was landscape and I wanted to have images portrait in order to fill the pages. I used the two images from my school shots. One of them it a photo of me and my friends sitting in our art class and the other is me sitting by myself in the same room in pretty much then same position. I think these two images are opposites of each other as I purposely tried to show that within the film when I was shooting it. One by myself and one with everyone surrounding me; they’re linked but they are also different. These two shots represent thew little changes shown throughout the film which was a way of showing progression without changing too much.

Full Bleed

I chose this photo as the full bleed as it was one of the best executed shots through my film. I liked where the light hit the face of the subjects as it it represented and foreshadowed the ending of the film where the nightmarish dream will take over what you are used to seeing and change the normal daily lifestyle that the viewer and subject was used to. I also liked the highlights and shadowing within this shots as the shadows almost seemed to be consuming the surroundings pot the subject with a little bit of the light shining through before the ending ion the film where the nightmare took over the subject. I also like the actual shadow being shown on the wall coming from the subject as it is also another representative of the future; the subject being overwhelmed and being consumed by the dream in which she was stuck in. It almost seems like the shadow is lurking wherever she goes and is always lurking in a metaphorical sense.

How is reality represented within surrealism and dreams? 

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” 
― David Lynch

Dreams are something that make our minds wonder, leaving us on the edge of our seats; whether it’s because we want to know what was about to happen next or whether it’s because we want to know the meaning of what they dreamt of. Our life within reality which influences what we dream about is what interests me; how do we know what’s reality and what is just a dream? When we are dreaming, we’re not usually aware of it because it seems so real which leads me to think, maybe the line between dreams and reality isn’t so clear. “We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” David Lynch, a film director who revolves his work around surrealism and abstract forms of reality, is known to be “the first popular Surrealist” and has developed his own unique was of creating cinematic masterpieces by trying to expand the audience’s imagination to have their own understanding of what they are seeing within his film, his style has been dubbed as “Lynchian”; characterised as meticulous sound design and dream-like imagery. He tries to make his films as surreal as possible and the way they are interpreted differs from each viewer as they have their own perception of realism. One of his films called Lost Highway inflicts a lot of intriguing questions about reality, “I like to remember things my own way…How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened” Fred, Lost Highway (1997). Throughout the film the protagonist finds himself to be in unrealistic situations but with a pattern – Renee/Alice creating a sense of normality, therefore showing reality with a dream or vice versa. Inception was the other film that is a good example of dreams being represented within reality, “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” Cobb, the protagonist from the film Inception, said this which Christopher Nolan deliberately wrote in the script to make the audience think about the truth of the statement. This links into my hypothesis very well as to why we may not know how to separate reality from dreams as sometimes reality can be surreal at times. Although the film Inception is quite complex as it goes into detail about dreams within a dream and going into limbo; apparent lack of limitations, limbo is described as a dimension that can allow a dreamer to manifest their deepest desires, but also unwittingly trap themselves in a world where they lose their awareness that the world created is not reality. Therefore, suggesting that you can get trapped within your thoughts and some have described the film to be similar to how a coma would be; an ongoing dream that feels like reality. In an attempt to answer the question, “How is reality represented within surrealism and dreams?” I will be delving into the history of surrealism, realism, dadaism and how the film producers David Lynch and Chris Nolan express dreams as a different reality. 

The artistic movement known as Surrealism helped to allow artists to express their imaginative thoughts more thoroughly. Surrealism as an artistic movement began as early as 1917, heavily inspired by the captivating paintings of Giorgio de Chirico for having such a hallucinatory quality to them such as The Song of Love. Closely following behind Chirico was the Dadaist writer André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist manifesto, just as the Dada movement ended in 1923, “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” is how he observed the new movement as, creating the most obscure imaginary things into something in the physical world. For the poets and artists of the surrealist movement, dreams stood for all aspects of the world repressed by rationalism and convention. The ‘revolution of the mind’ sought by surrealism drew upon the uncensored creative impulses of the unconscious.  This ensured that it never became a style as everyone’s view on surrealism was different. The movement of Surrealism created new opportunities for unique and unappreciated artists to emerge and make their mark on attitudes towards the abstract world. For the first time people had the chance to show how they look at life and express their feelings through unrealistic and obscure paintings and photographs, to turn the world into a different reality in order to open up people’s minds to the unimaginable. “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” Salvador Dali once said this to convey his thoughts on what he believed to be the true meaning of Surrealism; an art allowing us to do limitless stretches of the imagination in order to proceed forward in the artist world. One Dali’s famous artworks is “The Persistence of Memory” from 1931, inspiring a lot of other Surrealist artists around the globe. The artwork consists of melting clocks which seem to be in a dry desert like landscape. A lot of paintings were famous in the surrealist movement before many photographs because at the time many photographs were discarded as just a copy of the real world and it wasn’t considered a talent of any type of artist, whereas paintings and drawings were seen as well thought out art as well as individual to each artist. This movement helped to create other movements that have more abstract qualities to them. 

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“Black has depth.. you can go into it.. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.” 

― David Lynch,

The first relation to the question, “How is reality represented within surrealism and dreams?” is the famous film maker David Lynch. He first was first enrolled at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as he initially wanted to become a painter but then he later moved on to studying at the Pennsylvania Acadamy of Fine Arts from 1965 to 1969. This is where the 60 second film called Six Men Getting Sick in 1967, which was his first animated film. He eventually carried on in film making and created his first film Eraserhead, in 1977, at American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies where his strange and obscure way of looking at reality and dreams stood out, baffling anyone who watched the film. Other famous films that Lynch is well known for are, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart, Elephant Man and the Series Twin Peaks, many of which he Has been nominated for best director for his outrageously weird and creative way of viewing the surrealistic world. By allowing his films to be portrayed as strange and to make the audience watch something they’ve never seen before it forces the viewer to think about what the film could possibly be about and how it could possibly relate to the real world as well as what the message is behind the film. David Lynch believes that not everything in the world has to have a clear explanation or meaning, “I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.” although there have been many thoughts and investigations on the meanings of his films, he prefers for people to have their own interpretation, to not just be told what to think and believe what you believe to be the true meaning. The way I see it is, why only believe everything you see in reality when realistically a lot of the imaginative thoughts and dreams people have can be put into the real world? 

Lost Highway, made in 1997, is one of the films that I have watched that has a very strange meaning behind it when it comes to my own view on the film. In the film there are two main characters Fred Maddison/Pete Dayton and Renee/Alice. The film starts off with Fred and Renee receiving video tapes of what seems like a stalker watching them outside their house. Eventually Fred bumps into this ghost-like man at a party, the man came across as freakish and creates an unsettling feeling for Fred and the viewer as he claims to have already met Fred before. Later on, the couple get another video tape of Fred murdering Renee when originally when the tape was filmed the couple would’ve been alive, but this is made to confuse the viewer to think whether what they saw before the tape was real or just an illusion or vice versa. Fred is shown to be having a mental breakdown in prison and then turns into Pete Dayton, who is then released as he isn’t seen to be the same person that they put into prison for committing murder. Dazed and confused, Pete goes home to find a girl who looks exactly same as Renee but is called Alice, who now has blonde hair. This creates and unsettling and ominous feeling as us as viewers know that she is dead which can only mean she is part of the reason why all the madness is occurring. Pete ends up having an affair with Alice to find out that she is meant to be dating a wealthy and powerful man that Pete knows as somewhat a father figure. Alice and him plan to runaway together, leading to Pete finding Alice in another man’s house who he ends up accidently killing and finding a photo of Alice and Renee in the same photo together, making the audience baffled that they are twins. Towards the end Pete turns back into Fred and meets the ghost-like man again who is filming him and interrogating him. An odd turn of events eventually leads to Fred and him killing the wealthy man who was meant to be with Alice. The story line leads me to think that Fred possibly had a personality disorder such as schizophrenia, he may be transitioning from one alter ego to another, and the ghost-like man is his devilish sub conscious persuading him to do unimaginable things such as murder which he doesn’t remember due to his illness. I think Lynch was trying to put across that Fred imagined the world differently to others and that he didn’t want to see reality and physically seeing things as the only possibility, “I like to remember things my own way…How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened” this quote again demonstrates the meaning he is trying to put across which was mention during the beginning of the film – foreshadowing the future events. Other viewers may see it as all a nightmarish dream as it leads back to the house at the beginning leading back to the main question of, “How is reality represented within surrealism and dreams?” this starts to make me think that David Lynch wanted to represent reality as something that isn’t set in place; something that can be tarnished and manoeuvred to be whatever you want it to be.  

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“I’d written Inception as sort of a clever-clever heist movie. And heist movies tend to be deliberately superficial and glamorous. I needed him to bring the thing together, open it up to the audience and make it a human story, and he’s done that extraordinarily well.” – Chris Nolan (Director)

Christopher Nolan is the other relation to the question, “How is reality represented within surrealism and dreams?” with his film Inception made in 2010. The film Inception is about creating another world where everything feels like reality but it’s actually a dream. The goal is to plant an idea into someone’s head by heading into the depth of each dream without going into limbo where the character will not know the difference between a dream and reality which leads to fatality within the storyline. The protagonist played by Leonardo Dicaprio ends up getting stuck in limbo in his past before his next mission and him and his wife eventually manage to get out, but his wife thinks they’re still in a dream so commits suicide to “get out of the dream”. Surrealistic events occur throughout the entire film but the characters that demonstrate that they are limbo are completely unaware of this which links into my question nicely. Reality is represented as something that is desired within the film for the people who have already seen incredible and dream-like scenarios but for the people who are stuck and have no way to extend possibilities dreams and surrealism are desired greatly. This can represent the real world and how the audience members may feel whilst watching the film; a way to escape reality due to their emotions and feelings being so intertwined with the characters and the motions of the film. Most people in life wish to achieve their wildest dreams but, of course, within reality – in the real world. How much can people achieve with a closed mindset? Christopher Nolan has tried to open people’s mind to the most abstract possibilities, we all know that a film is just a prolonged moving image, but the film can be inspiring; encouraging the viewers to make their life more spontaneous and unbelievable. In other words, reality seems to be represented as a word that discourages people to push the limits of their dreams and not make the thoughts of the unconscious mind into a reality. Making the movement of surrealism occur with our reality rather than just being an art form is possible depending on how much people limit what we can do within reality and how fine the line is between the real world and our imagination. In the film inception Ariadne (played by Elliot Page) is told to join the mission to plant something into someone’s mind, as she was an architect student who seemed to have a view of the world that seemed endless; moved buildings, mirror the world that they stood on to appear above the etc. This demonstrated the endless possibilities that someone could achieve by having a different mindset and being open minded, which was the reason Cobb chose her (Leonardo Dicaprio). Nolan said what his intentions were when creating the film, “I’d written Inception as sort of a clever-clever heist movie. And heist movies tend to be deliberately superficial and glamorous. I needed him to bring the thing together, open it up to the audience and make it a human story, and he’s done that extraordinarily well.” in my mind I think when he says, “make it a human story” that is implying that he wanted the audience to feel like it wasn’t all just completely outrageous with what they were viewing; something that could actually be created. The was the dreams were created could be created one day if we gathered enough intelligence is what I think he means but maybe even the storyline behind it of how much Cobb compresses his emotions due to going too far with his imagination to the point where the real world wasn’t enough. Overall, I think that Christopher Nolan was trying to make the film an emotionally raw but thrilling at the same time; inspiring but as well as showing the limitations of dreams and reality. 

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When comparing these film director’s films with my own film I think there some clear similarities as well as some differences in order to really define how I think reality is represented within surrealism and dreams. The snap shots from my film below is partly showing how I was trying to represent the world we live and how easily it can be represented as something else with metaphorical meaning. I edited on of the photos as a montage as it was much easier to edit a photo rather than a whole clip the way I wanted to. In the first row of photos, I was representing reality as modifiable and adjustable to the way we want to see them, whether that’s hallucinatory or us physically editing reality through a screen. By making the film more horrific I thought it represent how people fear what they aren’t used to seeing in the real world. I also thought the part of the body you could see on the left side of the shot was ominous looking as in both examples you can be sure if the girl is looking at what she truly looks like or if it’s what the mirror has changed her to appear as. I also added a lot of faces with the opacity a lot lower so they’re barely visible just to add some more unsettling factors to the image without being completely noticeable until pointed out. As for the other row of photos, this was me showing the transition from reality to the dream/film the girl at the start was watching from the beginning. The idea of this was to make the viewer aware that they were watching a film within a film again as they were probably so submerged within the film that they forgot and then this is meant to replicate the viewer themselves being the viewer already shown in the film. The transition from the colour to black and white was meant to represent the girl coming back into the real world. In this sense this relates the film inception when Cobb is stuck in limbo and doesn’t realise that he’s in a dream. Dreams can be so realistic that it is very rare that we’ll realise that we’re dreaming whilst we’re in the dream; this is what I wanted to portray in my film whilst linking it nicely to inception. As for the disturbing factor in my film, David Lynch’s film link to this as his films are wildly abstract as well as this, I wanted my audience to interpret the film in their own way just like Lynch does. I wanted to display the ‘revolution of the mind’ sought by surrealism drew upon the uncensored creative impulses of the unconscious as well to link it to the history of the art form. 

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Overall, I think the answer to my hypothesis isn’t simple, as the definition of what it could mean is different to every individual person. In my eyes I see reality the simple and basic life everyone sees but within dreams I think it’s much more complex; reality is something that tangible and it can be desired as well as unwanted. With surrealism in the mix, I think that reality is merely a blank canvas to be destroyed, build upon or modified. The movement of surrealism allowed reality to be morphed within people’s imagination as well as in front of their very eyes. I think David Lynch helped to make the surrealism movement move on further especially in the film industry and develop people’s minds to explore their imagination more. As for Inception I think Nolan widened the minds of the viewers of what is possible in the cinematic universe and possibly in the real world also. Reality is just preventing people from exploring their imagination and exploring creative thinking from my point of view.

bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch , https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13043.David_Lynch, https://www.history.com/topics/art-history/surrealism-history, http://www.surrealismart.org/quotes.html, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/surrealism/tapping-the-subconscious-automatism-and-dreams/ , https://www.britannica.com/biography/Christopher-Nolan-British-director, https://issuu.com/museothyssenmad/docs/surrealism-and-dream, https://www.museothyssen.org/en/exhibitions/surrealism-and-dream, https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Lynch-American-director-and-screenwriter, https://theoverlook.blog/2017/07/27/lost-highway-suppression-of-reality-in-lynch-angeles-the-city-of-dreams/

Final Film: https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/5159dcd1-518b-4934-8bc4-56fc8612120e?list=studio – description – A short film about surrealism and dreams – showing a false sense of reality and delving into dissociation, nihilism and nightmares.

Photographic Responses/storyboard

When going through my film I decided to take picture of certain points where I thought the composition and the lighting was good and what I thought would be seen as a good photograph. Of course after I edited these photos individually and cropped them they would most likely look even better. Due to the film never usually having still shots I found it difficult to take a photo where I wasn’t moving in order for the photo to be in complete focus. I will most likely use a lot of these in my newspaper spreads after editing them and cropping them to look less like screenshots. I will definitely have to sharpen the image a lot more and possibly take some more photos of when I had the film in colour rather than in black in white as some of the shots looked a lot better in colour but due to the storyline fitting the black and white theme better I decided to change it from colour to black and white.

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Depicting which photos looked better in colour compared to black and white. I found that when the lighting was hitting certain points of why face due to it being the golden hour and the lighting coming from the window sometimes the photo seemed to look better in colour as it was easier to see that the light was sunlight and was purposely done to highlight portions of my face. On the other hand, when the photo was put back into black and white the eyes seemed to look more disturbing and lifeless which contributes a lot to the kind of them of dreams/horror in my story.

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Film Makers and Photographers Inspiration

I was mostly inspired by Chris Nolan’s film Inception and David Lynch’s film Lost Highway but I was also inspired by some photographers.

Kevin Corrado – his photography walks the line between lyricism and surrealism, never straying too far from either. He usually uses himself as the subject in his figurative works. His compositions are simple and elegant and the imagery could best be described as quiet and peaceful; at times seeming to transcend the boundaries of the image. Hid most known works consists of woodland photoshoots where humans appear from mysterious picture frames as if they were coming from another world. His work clearly revolves around the idea of dreams and how the world works. He has made this illusion buy using photoshop or another editing software where he has removed the rest of the persons body and made it look as if the person is floating .

Tommy Ingberg – a self-taught photographer and visual artist, born 1980 in Sweden. He works with photography and digital image editing, creating minimalistic and self-reflecting surreal photo montages dealing with human nature, feelings and thoughts. Tommy leaves the interpretation of his work up to the viewer but says:

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“For me, surrealism is about trying to explain something abstract like a feeling or a thought, expressing the subconscious with a picture. The Reality Rearranged series is my first try at describing reality trough surrealism. During the two and a half years I have worked on the series I have used my own inner life, thoughts and feelings as seeds to my pictures. In that sense the work is very personal, almost like a visual diary. Despite this subjectiveness in the process I hope that the work can engage the viewer in her or his own terms. I want the viewers to produce their own questions and answers when looking at the pictures, my own interpretations are really irrelevant in this context.”

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David Lynch – Gripping the audiences imagination is one of Lynch’s true talents when it comes to the film industry. Although he started off as an artist, his artistic skills contribute to his films and they start to make more sense when you remember where he started. Most of his film have very little dialogue and if they do it’s because its used more as poetry and each line has a purpose and specific meaning. Similar to how he frames each scene; each one is framed a certain way and creates a particular feeling with the viewers and often it leaves them mildly disturbed. Being one the biggest contributors to surrealist film industry, you would think that Lynch’s work would be fairly mainstream although it is quite the opposite. Although he is mostly a film maker now he felt as if he wanted to be known more as an artist, who typically won’t be as well known as a film maker. His most famous film (his debut film), Eraserhead, still stands as a benchmark in surrealist horror, and Lynch would go on to define surrealism in film through his later works Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. But what gives Lynch’s strange masterworks their strange ominous feeling upon his fans and longevity is his keen artistic eye; his fascination with the light and dark of American life, and his brilliant command of unique character and melodrama. It’s a powerful and heady combination of strange and amazing; a combination that has earned David Lynch a legion of devoted fans and earned him a place as one of the greatest filmmakers in history.

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” 

Chris Nolan – Inception – This Sci-Fi/Action film has inspired me along with photographers due to my idea being about surrealism, dreams and nihilism. The film itself is an interesting concept and has many plot twists that leave the audience shocked and wanting to know more. My own film consists of a similar concept of a dream within reality and my goal is to ensure that the viewer is so emerged within the film that they forget that they are watching the protagonists dream and not their real life. The plot twists are what makes a good film in my opinion hence why I picked inception as the movie that I want to base my project on with influences from other things also. Mental health also links into the film as Dom (the protagonist)is dealing with his own mental issues which impacts on the main plot of the movie and can cause a huge disaster of going into limbo. His poor mental health is caused by his late wife passing away due to the unbearable thought of not knowing what’s real life and what is just a dream, her death take a dramatic toll on his mental well-being as well as her being nihilistic which links into my film and the fact that my film is about what is real and what is just in our imagination.

The way the film was played out also helped me to realise that I needed to have a beginning, middle and end:

The Beginning:  Cobb is dragged to a table with Saito and Saito says something along the lines of “are you here to kill me? I know what this is. I’ve seen one before, many years ago. It belonged to a man from a half remembered dream.” (I think talking about his totem). The Middle: Dominic Cobb is the foremost practitioner of the artistic science of extraction, inserting himself into a subject’s dreams to obtain hidden information without the subject knowing, a concept taught to him by his professor father-in-law, Dr. Stephen Miles. Dom’s associates are Miles’ former students, who Dom requires as he has given up being the dream architect for reasons he won’t disclose. Dom’s primary associate, Arthur, believes it has something to do with Dom’s deceased wife, Mal, who often figures prominently and violently in those dreams, or Dom’s want to “go home” (get back to his own reality, which includes two young children). Dom’s work is generally in corporate espionage. As the subjects don’t want the information to get into the wrong hands, the clients have zero tolerance for failure. Dom is also a wanted man, as many of his past subjects have learned what Dom has done to them. One of those subjects, Mr. Saito, offers Dom a job he can’t refuse: to take the concept one step further into inception, namely planting thoughts into the subject’s dreams without them knowing. Inception can fundamentally alter that person as a being. Saito’s target is Robert Michael Fischer, the heir to an energy business empire, which has the potential to rule the world if continued on the current trajectory. Beyond the complex logistics of the dream architecture of the case and some unknowns concerning Fischer, the biggest obstacles in success for the team become worrying about one aspect of inception which Cobb fails to disclose to the other team members prior to the job, and Cobb’s newest associate Ariadne’s belief that Cobb’s own subconscious, especially as it relates to Mal, may be taking over what happens in the dreams. The End: Saito and Cobb sitting together at the table again. Same kind of setup, but this time Saito says, “have you come to kill me? I’m waiting for someone..” and Cobb finishes his sentence by saying “someone from a half remembered dream.” Cobb essentially tells him they’re in limbo and they presumably kill themselves to wake up to reality. Although the ending leaves the viewer wondering if Cobb is back in reality or if he is still trapped in a dream, he can tell due his totem. Dom Cobb’s totem is a spinning tractricoid top that originally belonged to Mal (his wife). Should he spin the top and it topples over, he is awake; if it continues to spin, then he is still dreaming.

Editing The Clips

Whilst editing the colour of the footage I decided to make the majority of the film in black and white. Due to the clips being in mostly different lighting every time a shot I had to turn down the saturation, tint and temperatures to the lowest possible setting in order for most of the clips to look similar when it came to shadows and highlights. I also made sure to change the curve to make sure the clips looked exactly how I wanted them to look. I also had to individually edit each and every clip so it took a lot longer than I anticipated due to there being over 200 snippets. After editing so many of the individual clips I had to render the film many times to make sure it ran smoothly and didn’t glitch. By going to transitions I found that I could dip to black which I used in some parts if my film; mostly at the ending and the beginning and when I was showing the progression to the next day.

When I was cutting up the footage I made sure to use the razor clip mostly everything and then the shortening tool for big amounts of footage. Between the glitching parts of my film I put in graphics from a tv with static to show damage and change. I also matched the audio of Alan Watts speaking to the glitching to have the full effect of disruption. I would cut up the same scene with different camera angles to intrigue the viewers and make the film more complexed. Matching the two different camera angles was difficult because I would have to match up the movements I made exactly for the transitions to look smooth. I would cut up and copy and paste the same clip to make the glitching more dramatic especially towards the ending to really freak out the observer.

My film was being based off of mental health and how it rebells against your love for others. The main focus would be anxiety and how this mental illness can cause people to dissociate themselves from life itself. Dissociation being a big part of the narrative, I am looking to create a film/zine where a lifestyle in reality can turn into something quite dream-like and somehow showing a glimpse of what it may be like for someone who has anxiety or a disorder where it causes them to dissociate or even become nihilistic. The way I’m going to shoot this project will be in first person and having self portraiture intertwined within my film/zine. I am planning on representing these dream-like scenarios by cutting out parts of the world and scenery are myself and possibly cutting out the people around me as well to act as the dissociation. I’ve done a lot of research as to why dissociation happens and what mental illnesses can cause this; illnesses such as; anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar, schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. I chose to base my project off of anxiety as I have experienced a lot of anxiety throughout my life as many people have and I feel like I can portray the feelings towards life from someone who has experienced anxiety better than any of the other illnesses listed. I moved it more towards dreams and surrealism because I thought it fitted better with the films IO was linking it to. The way I linked this to the film was by editing the film and the way I wanted it to be perceived was heavily inspired by David Lynch’s film “Lost Highway” and Chris Nolan’s film “Inception”. Both have dream-like concepts and are made to leave the viewer on the edge of their seat, wanting to know more as well as disturbed by the ending. The idea of being inside a different reality is a key point of my film and the other two films and mu ending of showing me sitting in my lounge again is meant to make the viewer feel somewhat dissociated by making them forget that they were watching a film within a film just like Christopher Nolan’s film Inception having dreams within dreams and not knowing what reality is and David Lynch’s film Lost Highway making you unsure what the real story is, sure to the protagonist being show in so many different story lines.

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STEP BY STEP:

The Reality: 

• Filming me sitting on the sofa
• Filming the tv and putting on creepy 50’s tv shows on the tv 
• Flipping back and forth from the shots
• Show glitching on the tv and start to add UP music to the scene to transition into the first day.

First Day: 

• My Room – Filming waking up from two different angles and flip between them making sure to get good lighting – around Golden hour. 
  • Film daily routine of getting dressed, doing make up and brushing teeth.
  • Leaving the house – filmed from different angles, and then walking into school with a friend.
  • School- looking in the mirror and washing hands and sitting with friends also filmed from different angles. 
  • Going home- walking out of school with a friend and then walking back to my house.

Second Day:

• My Room – Filming waking up from two different angles and flip between them making sure to get good lighting – around Golden hour. 
• Film daily routine of getting dressed, doing make up but taking out brushing teeth to make the day slightly shorter but overall showing the same thing but a different day.
• Leaving the house – filmed from different angles, and then walking into school with a friend BUT starting to show a sense of there being something wrong by adding glitching graphics and filming me walking by myself then editing the two scene together to make it look as if my friend is disappearing.
• School- looking in the mirror and washing hands and sitting with friends also filmed from different angles but do the same glitching as last time as well as myself disappearing to make a pattern of something going wrong. As well as making thew audio glitch to have the full effect.
• Going home- walking out of school with a friend with the glitching again and cutting out walking home to shorten the day. 

Third Day:

• My Room – Filming waking up from two different angles and flip between them making sure to get good lighting – around Golden hour.
• Film daily routine of getting dressed, doing make up but taking out brushing teeth to make the day slightly shorter but overall showing the same thing but a different day. As well as starting add glitches within my house and cutting out scenes to make the day shorter.
• Leaving the house – filmed from different angles, and then walking into school with a friend and adding glitching graphics and filming me walking by myself then editing the two scene together to make it look as if my friend is disappearing again but again making the day shorter.
• School- looking in the mirror and washing hands and sitting with friends also filmed from different angles but do the same glitching as last time as well as myself disappearing to make a pattern of something going wrong. As well as making thew audio glitch to have the full effect.
• Going home- walking out of school with a friend and then walking back to my house but filming from different angles and standing in different places to edit me glitching into different places.

Final Part:

• My Room – Filming waking up from two different angles and flip between them making sure to get good lighting – around Golden hour but adding glitches right from the start to show that nothings right.
• Starting my daily routine but adding glitching and other shots of me wearing white contacts and looking possessed and staring to add colour to the black and white movie to show reality come back into place. As well as adding demonic sounds to make the viewer feel more disturbed.
• Adding the shot of me having white eyes with a lighter and then glitching back into reality.

Back to The Reality:

• Transitioning out of the glitching screen
• Filming me sitting on the sofa and then fading into the title screen – WAKE UP

Editing The Audio

I used many different audios in my film to make the viewer feel as comfortable as possible. By making the audio glitch at the same time as the footage I thought it would make the glitching more dramatic. I had to cut up snippets of the audio and copy and paste them lots of times to make it sound like it was glitching. I also faded in and out audios and music to either cha the scenes or make room for other audios as I ran out of audio slots. When it came to editing the “plot twist” of the film I overlapped many different audios and made them gradually get louder to build suspense. I made sure to make the heart beat a main sound that the viewer could hear so that the scene would become more intense and hopefully make their heart race in the process. I made it one of the last sounds you could hear to make the film be suspenseful even until the end when the title screen comes on. I also had to cut ups a lot of repeated audio to use for the glitching parts if the film and had to make sure they were all at the same volume and I did this by making sure they were all on the same track and turning the whole track up instead of putting upon the individual bars on the audio.

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“I’d written Inception as sort of a clever-clever heist movie. And heist movies tend to be deliberately superficial and glamorous. I needed him to bring the thing together, open it up to the audience and make it a human story, and he’s done that extraordinarily well.” – Chris Nolan (Director)

Research and Narrative: This Sci-Fi/Action film has inspired me along with photographers due to my idea being about surrealism, dreams and nihilism. The film itself is an interesting concept and has many plot twists that leave the audience shocked and wanting to know more. My own film consists of a similar concept of a dream within reality and my goal is to ensure that the viewer is so emerged within the film that they forget that they are watching the protagonists dream and not their real life. The plot twists are what makes a good film in my opinion hence why I picked inception as the movie that I want to base my project on with influences from other things also. Mental health also links into the film as Dom (the protagonist)is dealing with his own mental issues which impacts on the main plot of the movie and can cause a huge disaster of going into limbo. His poor mental health is caused by his late wife passing away due to the unbearable thought of not knowing what’s real life and what is just a dream, her death take a dramatic toll on his mental well-being as well as her being nihilistic which links into my film and the fact that my film is about what is real and what is just in our imagination. When breaking down the beginning middle and end of this film it start a little bit like this…

More Specifically:

The Beginning:  Cobb is dragged to a table with Saito and Saito says something along the lines of “are you here to kill me? I know what this is. I’ve seen one before, many years ago. It belonged to a man from a half remembered dream.” (I think talking about his totem).

The Middle: Dominic Cobb is the foremost practitioner of the artistic science of extraction, inserting himself into a subject’s dreams to obtain hidden information without the subject knowing, a concept taught to him by his professor father-in-law, Dr. Stephen Miles. Dom’s associates are Miles’ former students, who Dom requires as he has given up being the dream architect for reasons he won’t disclose. Dom’s primary associate, Arthur, believes it has something to do with Dom’s deceased wife, Mal, who often figures prominently and violently in those dreams, or Dom’s want to “go home” (get back to his own reality, which includes two young children). Dom’s work is generally in corporate espionage. As the subjects don’t want the information to get into the wrong hands, the clients have zero tolerance for failure. Dom is also a wanted man, as many of his past subjects have learned what Dom has done to them. One of those subjects, Mr. Saito, offers Dom a job he can’t refuse: to take the concept one step further into inception, namely planting thoughts into the subject’s dreams without them knowing. Inception can fundamentally alter that person as a being. Saito’s target is Robert Michael Fischer, the heir to an energy business empire, which has the potential to rule the world if continued on the current trajectory. Beyond the complex logistics of the dream architecture of the case and some unknowns concerning Fischer, the biggest obstacles in success for the team become worrying about one aspect of inception which Cobb fails to disclose to the other team members prior to the job, and Cobb’s newest associate Ariadne’s belief that Cobb’s own subconscious, especially as it relates to Mal, may be taking over what happens in the dreams.

The End: Saito and Cobb sitting together at the table again. Same kind of setup, but this time Saito says, “have you come to kill me? I’m waiting for someone..” and Cobb finishes his sentence by saying “someone from a half remembered dream.” Cobb essentially tells him they’re in limbo and they presumably kill themselves to wake up to reality. Although the ending leaves the viewer wondering if Cobb is back in reality or if he is still trapped in a dream, he can tell due his totem. Dom Cobb’s totem is a spinning tractricoid top that originally belonged to Mal (his wife). Should he spin the top and it topples over, he is awake; if it continues to spin, then he is still dreaming.

Theory of Narratives in Films

When looking at moving image products, it is therefore possible to look for patterns, codes, conventions that share a common features. In other words, narrative theories look at recognisable and familiar structures, that help us to understand both how narratives are constructed and what they might mean. For example, it is clear that narratives are a combination of many individual elements (sound, image, text etc) which are edited (connected) together. Narratives are organised around a particular theme and space and are based in an idea of time. So for example, many narratives (Film, TV, Radio) are usually linear and sequential, in that they start at ’00:00′ and run for a set length. This means that they normally have a beginning, middle and end. “

“A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end” – Aristotle Poetics.

However, as with all creative work, it is possible to break, alter or subvert these rules and are subject to other conventions, rules and codes. For example, narrative media structures (ie film, TV drama, music video, advertising etc as opposed to theatre, drama, live events etc) do not generally play in real time. As such, they employ elision or ellipsis in that some elements are missing. Similarly, time often moves backwards (flashbacks) or forwards (flash forwards) at moments which break the linear sequence. Time can also run simultaneously, in that it is possible to play-out different narratives at the same time:  simultaneous or parallel narratives. Narrative strands are even able to be flagged up as something that needs to known (or will be fully developed) later, known as foreshadowing. This raises the concept that the audience are then given some information, feelings, ideas or logic that the on-screen actors do not have access to, which is called dramatic irony. An example of dramatic irony in this movie is the t the protagonists wife still thinks she is in a dream when she is in reality so therefore she jumps ion a balcony to get back to the “real world” and leaves the main character devastated and the audience in shock and dibelief.

Narrative theory can be applied to moving image texts but in many ways, narrative theory transcends a specific media form, such as, film and television and is able to take on a much greater significance in terms of how we organise our lives, our days, our weeks, our years, how we interact with each other, how we organise our memories, our ideas, aspirations and dreams.

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The First Famous Surrealist – Pauline Kael

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” 

― David Lynch

Gripping the audiences imagination is one of Lynch’s true talents when it comes to the film industry. Although he started off as an artist, his artistic skills contribute to his films and they start to make more sense when you remember where he started. Most of his film have very little dialogue and if they do it’s because its used more as poetry and each line has a purpose and specific meaning. Similar to how he frames each scene; each one is framed a certain way and creates a particular feeling with the viewers and often it leaves them mildly disturbed. Being one the biggest contributors to surrealist film industry, you would think that Lynch’s work would be fairly mainstream although it is quite the opposite. Although he is mostly a film maker now he felt as if he wanted to be known more as an artist, who typically won’t be as well known as a film maker. His most famous film (his debut film), Eraserhead, still stands as a benchmark in surrealist horror, and Lynch would go on to define surrealism in film through his later works Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. But what gives Lynch’s strange masterworks their strange ominous feeling upon his fans and longevity is his keen artistic eye; his fascination with the light and dark of American life, and his brilliant command of unique character and melodrama. It’s a powerful and heady combination of strange and amazing; a combination that has earned David Lynch a legion of devoted fans and earned him a place as one of the greatest filmmakers in history.

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Inspiration: Francis Bacon

At the beginning of David Lynch’s Career he found inspiration through the famous and wealthy, Francis Bacon was an Irish figurative painter, who was influenced in his earlier years by Picasso and surrealism. His most expensive painting was a staggering $142 million! His unique expressionist and deeply disturbing style of painting, which emerged during the 1950s, featured pictures of people screaming or in pain and often portrayed inside bathrooms or cages. Arguably this painter of the twentieth century, was also for forty years the most controversial. Bacon’s art often appears deliberately disturbing. His subject was the human form. Bacon reinterpreted the physical construction of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. To him it was something to be taken apart by the artist’s penetrating gaze and then put back together again on canvas. He forces us to see, perhaps for the first time, the separate shapes and stresses hidden in the familiar human figure. The way Bacon painted his faces could be especially challenging. In his portraits, generally of people the artist knew well, the subjects are sometimes shown screaming. Due to his paintings, he was often called an Expressionist or even a Surrealist, Bacon himself strongly rejected both labels. He insisted that in its own way his work was close to the world we see every day, remaining true to what he called “the brutality of fact.”

Surrealism was a movement in literature and art, that now links in to photography and film making, which was popular between the First and Second World Wars. It was founded by the poet André Breton and the movement emphasised the importance of unconscious thought as a starting-point for creativity, inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud. Surrealist artworks are signified by their juxtaposition of incongruous imagery and figurative, typically photo-realistic style.

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MODERNISM

Time period: 18th century – 1950s

Key characteristics/ conventions : Modernism was a broad movement encompassing all the avant-garde isms of the first half of the 20th century. Although different modern-isms were often incompatible (and occasionally antagonistic) they all rejected the dominance of older movements such as Classicism, Naturalism, and Academicism in favour of new experimental ways of producing art. Early modernity is characterised intellectually by a belief that science could save the world and that, through reason, a foundation of universal truths could be established. The common trend was to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of art and human experience. Modernity imbue all aspects of society and are apparent in its cultural forms including fiction, architecture, painting, popular culture, photography. the age of enlightenment late 18th century, moving away from religious beliefs and god and moving into the more scientific aspects of things. This included a range of ideas centred on the sovereignty of reason and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state. the perfectibility of human nature. by the 19th century the enlightenment was reaffirmed by artists . to examine the impediments that were holing humanity back. free humanity from historical baggage. Modernism makes references to things inside the art work itself e.g. form, composition, medium, material, skills, techniques, process. When looking into the aspects if art, modernism holds a belief in the individual genius of the artist, a desire for originality, a thirst fro the new, and reverence for the precious and a unique art object. Modernism is concerned with object rather than subject and form rather than content, creator rather than spectator.

Artists associated:

Alberto Giacometti

Of all the artists working in Paris in the 20th century, Giacometti was the great enthusiast of plaster. He worked away at it with his knife, often subjecting it to so much pressure that it finally crumbled away, forming the rubbish observed by Genet. When he was happy with it, he painted it. The original Women of Venice exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1956 were plaster figures with black and brown lines etched on to their faces and bodies, making them resemble the women in his paintings.

Now the Giacometti Foundation in Paris has found new methods of restoring his plaster sculptures, many of which were damaged by being broken apart and covered in orange shellac to be cast in bronze. The Women of Venice, whose painted surfaces have been revealed, can once again be exhibited as they were at the Biennale, rather than as bronzes. And they will make their first appearance at a major retrospective opening at Tate Modern in London next month. This will be Giacometti’s first Tate show since a retrospective in 1965, when the sculptor worked away in a basement, perfecting the works that he was never quite prepared to declare finished. It will be his first major exhibition in London for a decade.

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El Lissitzky

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Jackson Pollock

In 1947 Jackson Pollock arrived at a new mode of working that brought him to his fame. His method consisted of flinging and dripping thinned enamel paint onto an unstretched canvas laid on the floor of his studio. This direct, physical engagement with his materials welcomed gravity, velocity, and improvisation into the artistic process, and allowed line and color to stand alone, functioning entirely independently of form. His works, which came to be known as “drip paintings,” present less a picture than a record of the fluid properties of paint itself. 

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POST-MODERNISM

This movement was a reaction from ww2 and pop art started to emerge by taking inspiration from mass media.Postmodernism makes references to things outside theart work…e.g. political, cultural, social, historical,psychological issues. It favours the context of a work including examining subject and the reception of the work by its audience. Work from this time period are aware of and make reference to the previously hidden agendas of the art market and its relation to art museums, dealers and critics. Postmodern work often uses different approaches in theconstruction of the work such as…eclecticism,intertextuality, collaboration, pastiche, parody, recycling, reconfiguration, bricolage

Pop Art

Andy Warhol

People’s opinions are torn over whether Pop Art is genius and a creative new idea for the postmodern age, or whether it is a load of rubbish. Others believe that pop art is worth way more that it is worth to look at. Pop art is post modern as it has created a new version of art which is original and new, as well as combining both high art with low art. Andy Warhol’s art work is post modern as it uses bricolage to combine both images and writing within artwork.

Andy Warhol’s most famous pieces are Marilyn Monroe screenprints, deteriating throughout the continueing images in many rows of the piece, as many of Warhol’s work is collages of layers of images. This shows the destruction and breakdown of Marilyn Monroe as her fame and publicity increased. Andy Warhol’s work concentrates on the idea and concept behind his work, rather than the realism which had been dominant in years before Warhol’s work became famous. Where art work is only considered as ‘good art’ when based on a realistic scene. As Warhol was one of the first pop artists to occure, people were shocked yet intrigued at this new upcoming style of art. Andy Warhol blurs the lines between high art and popular culture, as his pop art has both the combination of images and writing, which was new and original at the time. Another key piece within his portfolio is his ‘Campbell’s tin soups as shown below.

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Tableaux

“Tableaux is used to describe a painting or photograph in which characters are arranged for picturesque or dramatic effect and appear absorbed and completely unaware of the existence of the viewer. ” – Sarah Jones

Tableaux vivant is French and stands for ‘living picture’, and is a story telling scene containing one or more actors or models. Tableaux photographs are a style of staged photography in which a pictorial narrative is conveyed through a single image or a series of images that makes references to fables, fairytales, myths, unreal and real events from a variety of sources such as paintings, film, theatre, literature and popular media. The models in the photographs are usually told to be: stationary and silent, usually in costume, posing in a certain way, with props and scenery, the setting may also be lit in a certain way in order to make the photo and scene look more dramatic. In order to take good tableaux photography it works well to combine both theatre and the visual arts.French philosopher, Denis Diderot was the first to use ‘Tableau Vivant’ in the eighteenth century to describe paintings with a certain type of composition. Tableau paintings had the effect of walling off the observer from the drama taking place, as well as that they were natural and realistic. In his desire to make paintings that were realistic rather than idealised, Édouard Manet, a French modernist painter, decisively rejected the idea of tableau as suggested by Diderot in the 1860s, but the concept of tableau reached a crisis due to this. He painted his characters facing the viewer with a new vehemence that challenged the beholder. In the 1970s, a group of aspiring young artists such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky began to make large format photographs that resembled paintings, that were designed to hang on a wall. As a result these photographers were obliged to take on the very same issues revealing the continued importance of tableau in contemporary art.

PICTORIALISM 1880s -1920s

Key characteristics/ conventions : Pictorialism as a movement thrived from about 1885 to 1915, although it was still being promoted by some as late as the 1940s. It began in response to claims that a photograph was nothing more than a simple record of reality, and transformed into an international movement to advance the status of all photography as a true art form. For more than three decades painters, photographers and art critics debated opposing artistic philosophies, ultimately culminating in the acquisition of photographs by several major art museums. Photographers wanted to be noticed as artists rather than photographers as many people at the time didn’t see photography as an art form, they saw it more as controlling a machine by simply pushing a button. The pictorialists smeared vaseline on the lens of the camera and stretched photographs made to look like art, meant to have darkness and sketchiness.

Key works: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, allegorical paintings, paolo veronese 1558

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Sally Mann

Drawing upon her personal experiences as inspiration, Sally Mann creates a haunting series of  photographs that speaks about the one subject that affects us all, the loss of life. Dark, beautiful and revelatory, What Remains, created in 2004 is a five-part meditation on mortality, explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, spirit and earth. This body of work consist of landscape, pictures of decomposing bodies and portraits of her children.

“And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.”

Sally Turner Munger on May 1, 1951 in Lexington, VA, she received her BA and later her MA from Hollins College in Virginia before working as an architectural photographer for Washington and Lee University during the mid-1970s.Throughout the following decade, the artist’s career grew as she began producing books of photography, including At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), which captures developing identities of 12-year-old-girls from her hometown and includes her notable work, Candy Cigarette (1989). From 1999 until his death in 2011, Mann photographed Cy Twombly’s studio in her hometown of Lexington, VA. Using large-format cameras to capture fine details, Mann’s images appear antique due to her interest in early photographic technology, as well as revisiting the 19th-century process of wet collodion. Her work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mann currently lives and works in Lexington, VA.

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Julia Margret Cameron (1815-1879)

Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. Cameron’s photographs were unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. Cameron is also known for known today for her moving and sensitive portraits of eminent Victorians. A paramount example is her 1867 photograph of Sir John F. W. Herschel, in which the scientist, mathematician, and photographic experimenter looks directly at the camera, emerging from the shadows with the tousled hair and deep facial lines of a man devoted to the intellectual life. Her soft-focus style, ridiculed by many critics and photographers of the period who were devoted to sharp precision in photography, gives Herschel a timeless quality and emphasizes the essence of the man instead of transitory details. About such sittings, Cameron wrote, “When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.”

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Methods/ techniques/ processes:

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: this is a two step process where the photographer starts by exposing paper sensitised with iron salts to a negative, then chemically developing it and replacing the iron salts with platinum, allowing for a wide range of tones

Cyanotype: had outcomes where deep blue tones, they did this by covering the photographic paper with light-sensitive iron salts.

Carbon Print: this is made by coating tissue paper with potassium bichromate, carbon black pigment, and gelatine; provides great detail and so became one of the most commercially-available development methods.

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REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Pure photography or straight photography refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation. The West Coast Photographic Movement is best known for the use of this style. Straight Photographers were photographers who believed in the intrinsic qualities of the photographic medium and its ability to provide accurate and descriptive records of the visual world. These photographers strove to make pictures that were ‘photographic’ rather than ‘painterly’, they did not want to treat photography as a kind of monochrome painting. They abhorred handwork and soft focus and championed crisp focus with a wide depth-of-field. Realism within photography (closely associated with ‘straight photography’) this style grew up with claims of having a special relationship to reality, and its premise, that the camera’s ability to record objectively the actual world as it appears in front of the lens was unquestioned. This supposed veracity of the photographic image has been challenged by critics as the photographer’s subjectivity (how he or she sees the world and chooses to photograph it) and the implosion of digital technology challenges this notion opening up many new possibilities for both interpretation and manipulation. A belief in the trustworthiness of the photograph is also fostered by the news media who rely on photographs to show the truth of what took place.

The rural poor or the urban environment were not subjects for Pictorial photographers. But when A Danish immigrant , Jacob Riis published his book, How the Other Half Lives’ about the slums of Manhattan a new kind of realism was born with a socialist dimension. A number of photographer’s such as Lewis W Hine and Dorothea Lange began to document the effects of industrialization and urbanization on working-class Americans. Their work brought the need for housing and labour reform to the attention of legislators and the public and became the origins of what we now call photojournalism.

Paul Strand

n 1907 Stieglitz took this picture, The Steerage and thereby rejected Pictorialism’s aesthetics and became in favour of what Paul Strand called ‘absolute unqualified objectivity’ and ‘straight photographic means’. Stieglitz and Strand was also influenced by European avant-garde art movements such as Cubism and Fauvism and some of their pictures emphasised underlying abstract geometric forms and structure of their subjects.  

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Walker Evans

Often considered to the leading American documentary photographer of the 20^th century. He rejected Pictorialism and wanted to establish a new photographic art based on a detached and disinterested look. He most celebrated work is his pictures of three Sharecropper families in the American South during the 1930s Depression.

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Methods/ techniques/ processes: don’t manipulate the photo and have it as it. Emphasis of the frame. abhorred handwork and soft focus and championed crisp focus with a wide depth of field. photographic not painting-like.

Tommy Inberg

Tommy Ingberg is a self-taught photographer and visual artist, born 1980 in Sweden. He works with photography and digital image editing, creating minimalistic and self-reflecting surreal photo montages dealing with human nature, feelings and thoughts.

Tommy leaves the interpretation of his work up to the viewer but says, “For me, surrealism is about trying to explain something abstract like a feeling or a thought, expressing the subconscious with a picture. The Reality Rearranged series is my first try at describing reality trough surrealism. During the two and a half years I have worked on the series I have used my own inner life, thoughts and feelings as seeds to my pictures. In that sense the work is very personal, almost like a visual diary. Despite this subjectiveness in the process I hope that the work can engage the viewer in her or his own terms. I want the viewers to produce their own questions and answers when looking at the pictures, my own interpretations are really irrelevant in this context.”

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Kevin Corrado

Kevin Corrado’s photography walks the line between lyricism and surrealism, never straying too far from either. He usually uses himself as the subject in his figurative works. His compositions are simple and elegant and the imagery could best be described as quiet and peaceful; at times seeming to transcend the boundaries of the image. Hid most known works consists of woodland photoshoots where humans appear from mysterious picture frames as if they were coming from another world. His work clearly revolves around the idea of dreams and how the world works. He has made this illusion buy using photoshop or another editing software where he has removed the rest of the persons body and made it look as if the person is floating .

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