Here is a simplified check list of what we expect to see posted on the blog from each individual student.
Research 1: – 1-2 blogposts Mind-map & moodboards based on exam themes
Research 2: Artists References – 1 blog post per artist.
See here for more details and guidelines on how to produce a A-grade artists references. Follow instructions and make sure you include contextual analysis and references to literary sources/ hyperlinks.
Statement of intent – 1 blog post Description of main idea including how you interpret chosen theme and how you intend to explore it. Use illustrations.
Planning – 1 blog post Evidence of planning photoshoots and how you responded to artists references.
Recording – 1 -2 blog posts per photo-shoot From each shoot select 8-12 images for further experimentation. Produce quality work from each shoot and analyse and evaluate your photos through annotation showing understanding of visual language using specialist terminology. Follow process of EDITING > EXPERIMENTING > EVALUATING
Final outcomes – 1 – 3 blog posts – Final prints: show evidence of how you intend to present and display your final prints – make mock up in Photoshop – for example. a single image or diptych, triptych, predella, size A5, A4 or A3, typology-style grid, collage etc. Use images of a white gallery wall and superimpose your final images using Photoshop
– Photobook: If you have made a photobook – write a book specification and describe in detail what your book is about in terms of narrative, concept and design. Produce a seperate blog post with screen prints of design and layout for further annotation, commenting on pages/ spreads/ narrative/ sequencing/ juxtaposition etc. Make a hyperlink to book browser in Blurb. Follow instructions here:
– Film: Show evidence of storyboarding and produce screen as you progress for further annotation, commenting on editing and sequencing video and sound etc. Upload film via Youtune/ Microsoft Streaming. Follow instructions here:
Evaluation – 1 blog post Write an overall final evaluation (250-500 words) that explain in some detail the following:
how successfully you fulfilled the EXAM brief and realised your intentions as set out in your statement of intent. Reflect on any changes, moderations or refinements.
links and inspiration between your final outcome and exam theme including artists references.
analysis of final prints/ photobook/ film.
Check all Coursework is completed including print folder and previous modules including Personal Study. See Check list below.
Equipment: If you have borrowed any photographic equipment, cameras, lenses, batteries, tripod, and card readers please bring it no later on the last day of the exam!
To achieve a top marks we need to see a coherent progression of quality work from start to finish following these steps:
Your final blog post should be an online link to you BLURB book with an evaluation. If you have already written an evaluation as part of another blog post on your book design then add the online link to that blog post and change the date to make sure it sits at the top.
Log into your blurb account and click on Sell my book
Click on Privacy & Sharing
Copy link circled in red above.
Make a new blog post: MY PHOTOBOOK and copy in link from Blurb into the title of your book using Link button above.
Our exhibition; LOVE & REBELLION is happening soon and we need your help to make it happen! It is vital that you submit the work we need, as follows
PRINTS: Check that you have made a folder in your name with your prints and included the mock layout of how the images needs to be displayed. Once complete put folder in box on the table
IF you are missing prints, please submit images for final printing again here, making sure you have formatted each image to the correct size, ie. A2, A3, A4, A5 either in format landscape or portrait. If confused see your teacher!
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\PRINTING\Final Prints – Exhibition
FILMS: We need your original MP4 file that you exported from Premiere from your film projects, both the film on Rebellion that you made in small group and any other films you made as an individual student. If you can’t find your MP4 file, then open up your film project in Premiere again and re-export. Follow these instructions here:
In Premier: Click on Sequence > Render IN/OUT
File > Export > Media
Export Settings: Format H.264
Output Name: use title of your film and save to V:Data drive
Click Export at bottom
Save your MP4 file here with tittle of film and who made as follows: title_your name.mp4
BOOKS: We need to exhibit your books so if you haven’t ordered it or handed in yet for final assessment, you MUST DO SO ASAP!
ZINE: We would also like to exhibit your zines that you made in the beginning of the academic year based on a LOVE STORY. Check the box on the table that you printed, folded and stapled a copy. If not, complete zine now and put in the box!
STATEMENTS: We need a 100 word statement from you about the work that you are exhibiting as prints and films. You should have written one when you submitted work for the Guernsey Photography Festival competition earlier. If not, you need to re-write: See example below for how to format it below
Thomas Le Maistre, XY My photobook ‘XY’ is a brief delve into the life of a close-knit group of young adults, exploring the way in which boys become men, changing physically and mentally during this strange yet energetic period of adolescence. Inspired by the works on male photography and the maze gaze by Robert Mapplethorpe and Karlheinz Weinberger, my similar style of images aims to capture the lives of us as young adults during what could be considered the most important period of our lives.
Save your statement here: M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\LOVE & REBELLION\Statements
LOVE & REBELLION Exhibition dates: 24 May – 13 June Berni Gallery. Jersey Arts Centre Official opening Mon 24 May 5:30 – 7:00 by the Bailiff of Jersey Make sure you attend opening and invite family friends – will check how many people are allowed to gather first.
HANGING EXHIBITION: We need assistance with students who wish to help installing the exhibition on Sun 23 May 10:00 am
PUBLICITY – MEDIA: We need 3-4 students who are willing to speak with local media about their work and the exhibition. Normally this involves live interview on radio with BBC Radio Jersey, Channel 103FM and ITV Channel TV.
PROMOTION – SOCIAL MEDIA. We need a small team of 2-3 students who would like to promote the exhibition on our Hautlieu Creative Twitter and Instagram feed. We need to come up with a good hashtag eg. #love&rebellion #hautlieuphotography
Each week you are required to make a photographic response (still-images and/or moving image) that relates to the research and work that you explored in that week. Sustained investigations means taking a lot of time and effort to produce the best you can possibly do – reviewing, modifying and refining your idea and taking more pictures to build up a strong body of work with a clear sense of purpose and direction
AO1 – Develop your ideas through sustained and focused investigations informed by contextual and other sources, demonstrating analytical and critical understanding.
To achieve an A or A*-grade you must demonstrate an Exceptional ability (Level 6) through sustained and focused investigations achieving 16-18 marks out of 18.
Get yourself familiar with the assessment grid here:
To develop your ideas further from initial research using mind-maps and mood-boards based on the themes FREEDOM AND/OR LIMITATIONS you need to be looking at the work of others (artists, photographers, filmmakers, writers, theoreticians, historians etc) and write a statement of intent with 2-3 unique ideas that you want to explore further.
STARTING POINTS – EXAM PAPER
In the EXAM PAPER go to pages 24-27 and read all four STARTING POINTS. Select one that inspires you and that may help you develop your project. You can work alone or in a small group of 2-3.
Task 1: ARTIST REFERENCES From your chosen starting point answer the following 3 questions:
What are the connections with the exam theme(s) – provide example, such as a key image, body of work, book, exhibitions.
Does the work remind you of others? – provide contextual references, eg. other artists, movement/ism, political, social and cultural.
Plan a photographic response – technical, visual, conceptual , eg. a process, an idea, a presentation
Make a 3-5 mins presentation – share ideas!
Task 2: ARTIST REFERENCES Find inspiration from other sections
Select a STARTING POINT from any of the other titles, FINE ART, GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION, TEXTILE DESIGN, THREE-DIMENSIONAL DESIGN
Describe how this ARTIST REFERENCE connect with the exam theme(s), other artists work you have already looked at and other contextual references.
Make the blog post as exciting as possible using a combination of images, texts and hyperlinks to online sources
Task 3: ARTISTS REFERENCES Develop your research and contextual analysis of the work of at least 2-3 (or more) photographers/ artists in depth.
Produce at least 2-3 blog posts for each artist reference that illustrate your thinking and understanding using pictures and annotation and make a photographic response to your research into the work of others.
Follow these steps to success!
Produce a mood board with a selection of images.
Provide analysis of their work and explain why you have chosen them and how it relates to your idea and the exam themes of TRANSITION and/or FREEDOM and/or LIMITATIONS
Select at least 2 key images and analyse in depth, TECHNICAL (lighting, camera), VISUAL (composition, visual elements) (interpretation, subject-matter, what is the photographer trying to communicate), CONTEXTUAL (art historical, political, social, personal), CONCEPTUAL (ideas, meaning, theory of art/ photography/ visual culture, link to other’s work/ideas/concept)
Incorporate quotes and comments from artist themselves or others (art critics, art historians, curators, writers, journalists etc) using a variety of sources such as Youtube, online articles, reviews, text, books etc.
Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post
Plan at least 2-3 shoots as a response to the above where you explore your ideas in-depth.
Edit shoots and show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop
Reflect and evaluate each shoot afterwards with thoughts on how to refine and modify your ideas i.e. experiment with images in Lightroom/Photoshop, re-visit idea, produce a new shoot, what are you going to do differently next time? How are you going to develop your ideas?
For more help and guidance on image analysis go to Photo Literacy
Photography Agencies and Collectives World Press Photo – the best news photography and photojournalism Magnum Photos – photo agency, picture stories from all over the world. Panos Picture – photo agency Agency VU – photo agency INSTITUTE – photo agency Sputnik Photos – photo collective made of Polish and East European photographers A Fine Beginning – photo collective in Wales Document Scotland – photo collective in Scotland NOOR – a collective uniting a select group of highly accomplished photojournalists and documentary storytellers focusing on contemporary global issues.
Sea Change explores tidal changes around coastal Britain. These transitions provide an ever changing environment that is integral to Island Britain’s history and sea-going way of life.
Tanja Deman
Much of Tanja Deman‘s work comments on humanity’s movement away from nature and towards constructed states. This transition is damaging, but we still feel a connection and a sense of nostalgia even with the natural environment. Deman creates intricate composite images that juxtapose often incongruous and unexpected images taken by gaining access to areas that are off-limits and even classified.
Edward Burtynsky
Burtynsky is concerned with The Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
Peter Mitchell got to know Leeds as a struggling artist, working as truck driver at times…and constantly re-visiting places that he saw were changing over time. Whole communities gave way to development, new industry and transport networks. “A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission” was published 40 years after conception…and now Leeds has changed beyond recognition. Mitchell’s photography have a painterly quality to them ; a sombre palette and considered compositions, but juxtapose the old and the new as well as the empty spaces created by change.
Robin Friend
In The Bastard Countryside Robin Friend presents evidence of a broken planet, over-consumption, waste and a lack of love and respect for the environment on our doorstep…
Thom and Beth Atkinson
Marking 75 years since the outbreak of the Blitz, Thom and Beth Atkinson’s first photobook, Missing Buildings, seeks to preserve the physical and psychological landscapes of the Second World War in London.
Over a million of London’s buildings were destroyed or damaged by bombing between 1940 and 1945. From the mysterious gap in a suburban terrace, to the incongruous post-war inner city estate, Missing Buildings reveals London as a vast archeological site, bearing the visible scars of its violent wartime past. But this book is more than a simple record of bombsites; to the artists’ generation, the war is the distant story of an epic battle, passed down to them through books, images and grandparents’ memories.
Blurring fact and fiction, Missing Buildings searches for this mythology, revealing strange apparitions of the past as they resurface in the architecture of the modern-day city. Missing Buildings asks us to contemplate the effects of war upon the British psyche and suggests that the power wrought on our imaginations by the Blitz is a legacy as profound as the physical damage it caused.
Eugene Atget and Gentrification
Working in and around Paris for some 35 years, in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Eugène Atget created an encyclopedic, idiosyncratic lived portrait of that city on the cusp of the modern era. Around 1900, Atget’s focus shifted. The city’s urban landscape had been recently reshaped by the modernization campaign known as Haussmannization—a necessarily destructive process led by (and named after) Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann that saw Paris’s medieval neighborhoods razed and transformed into wide avenues and public parks. Those changes, in turn, kindled a broad interest in vieux Paris (“old Paris”), the capital in its pre-Revolutionary, 18th-century form. Atget’s documentary vision proved highly influential, first on the Surrealists, in the 1920s, who found his pictures of deserted streets and stairways, street life, and shop windows beguiling and richly suggestive
Joel Meyerowitz and New York 9/11: Aftermath
Comparison of images in New York; Joel Meyerowitz
Immediately after the harrowing events of September 11, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was designated an active crime scene and closed off to reporters and photojournalists. Sensing the magnitude of the historical record about to be lost, internationally-acclaimed landscape photographer Joel Meyerowitz fought for access to the site.
Meyerowitz became the only photographer allowed to document the painful transformation of the World Trade Center site over time. For nine months he photographed “the Pile,” as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the courageous rescue personnel, police officers, firefighters, and construction workers leading the recovery efforts inside it.
Using both a large-format view camera and a 35-milimeter Leica, Meyerowitz made over 8,000 images around the sixteen-acre site where the Twin Towers once stood. His images show the mangled metal, shards of broken glass, and cascades of files and papers in the still-smoldering piles of debris; the riot of patriotic color seen in spontaneous memorials; and the elegiac silence of the dust that seemed to cover every surface in Lower Manhattan. Eventually, as his weeks in “the Pile” wore on, his subject shifted from the panoramic sweep of complete devastation to the intimate moments of mourning, strength, determination, and resilience in the faces and figures of the people on hand.
Vanitas
Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death.
The term originally comes from the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’
Vanitas are closely related to memento mori still lifes which are artworks that remind the viewer of the shortness and fragility of life (memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember you must die’) and include symbols such as skulls and extinguished candles. However vanitas still-lifes also include other symbols such as musical instruments, wine and books to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods.
Paulette Tavormina
Inspired by the works of 17th century Old Master still life painters such as Giovanna Garzoni and Maria Sibylla Merian, American photographer Paulette Tavormina creates stunningly lit imagery of fruits and vegetables immersed in dark atmosphere
Mat Collishaw
A perfect example of the old technique getting combined with modern-age ideas is Mat Collishaw’s Last Meal on Death Row series of works. Although they appear as meticulously arranged staged photography still lifes of food, each image is actually based on death row inmates’ last meals before they are executed. Apart from the eerie subject, the pictures deliver a strong drammatic effect through an excellent use of chiaroscuro.
Krista van der Niet
On a much more lighter, even pastel note, we have Dutch photographer Krista van der Niet, whose compositions often include fruits and vegetables mixed with mundane objects such as socks, cloths and aluminum foil, giving it all a contemporary feel. Her photos often carry a dose of satire as well, which references consumerism and popular culture through a clever employment of objects within a carefully composed scenery.
Laura Letinsky
Olivia Parker
Experimenting with the endless possibilities of light, self taught photographer Olivia Parker makes ephemeral constructions. She started off as a painter, but soon turned to photography and quickly mastered the way to incorporate an extensive knowledge of art history and literature and reference the conflicts and celebrations of contemporary life in her work. Over the many years of her artistic career, her style remained fluid, yet consistent
Richard Kuiper
Think paintings by Pieter Claesz or Adriaen Coorte, only in plastic. That’s how one could describe the photographs of Richard Kuiper, whose objects are all made of this everlasting, widely used material, including water bottles, floral arrangements, even the feathers. The artist tries to draw our attention towards the excessive use of plastic in our everyday lives, with the hope we will be able to decrease it before it takes over completely.
More Landscape
Light is the key element of photography. Photographers and filmmakers often capture both gradual and sudden transitions of light. Shadows from clouds pass across the landscape in pictures such as No Man’s Land by Fay Godwin. Other photographers show transitions of light over longer periods, such as Fong Qi Wei and Dan Marker-Moore, who record the change from day to night in film and photographs. Stephen Wilkes’ large scale night and day panoramas of urban vistas have the epic quality of paintings by the 16th century artist Brueghel.
FAY GODWIN, MARKERSTONE ON THE OLD ROAD FROM LONDON TO HARLECH, 1976
Fong Qi Wei
Dan Marker-Moore
Stephen Wilkes
Robert Rauschenberg
During times of stress and economic upheaval, the language of art can change reflecting a transition in the way individuals see themselves. This shift in perspective can even apply to a whole country. Robert Rauschenberg made politically charged collages in the 1960s that at first sight seemed to be chaotic assemblages of images and marks. However, these collages showed great compositional skill in directing the viewer’s attention and created memorable images that reflected the upheavals of the era. Rauschenberg had been influenced by the earlier collagist Kurt Schwitters and he, in turn, influenced other artists such as Sigmar Polke, David Salle and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Robert Rauschenberg Buffalo II (1964) screenprint
Political Transition – communism – capitalism – consumerism – individualism
USSR – Russia
West Germany v East Germany
China
North Korea
Alice Weilinga
North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and Reality (2013 – 2015)
Alice Weilinga works in places like Pakistan and North Korea ; countries that have experienced radical changes in their traditional way of life but still cling to the dreams of their ancestors. Political decisions have shaped the communities and their struggles, whilst the propaganda machines depict a progressive future. Weilinga explores this tension and questions it’s validity by way of intricate composite imagery that draws on often-romanticised imagery that belies forced and slave labour, amongst other issues.
Koyaniqaatsi
Drawing its title from the Hopi word meaning “life out of balance,” this renowned documentary reveals how humanity has grown apart from nature. Featuring extensive footage of natural landscapes and elemental forces, the film gives way to many scenes of modern civilization and technology
GPF 2021
Here are a set of video interviews with photographers discussing their work, background and specific projects that will be exhibited at the next Guernsey Photography Festival in September 2021. Some if these photographers and projects are relevant to the theme of TRANSITION and deal with issues such as, climate change, anthropocene.
10 questions with Anastasia Samoylova Anastasia answers questions and discusses her project, Floodzone.
Anastasia Samoylova moves between studio practice, observational photography, installation and public art projects. Although her work takes many forms, a central concern is the place images occupy in our understanding and misunderstanding of the world. The epic project FloodZone, photographed in the Southern United States, reworks our expectations of coastal paradise into a psychological portrait of communities faced with rising sea levels.
10 questions with Hannah Modigh Hannah answers questions and discusses her project, Hurricane Season.
Hannah Modigh is recognised as one of Sweden’s leading photographers. Her sensitive, poetic projects and photobooks, often centred on crisis-ridden areas in the USA, such as small towns plagued by drugs in the Appalachian Mountains (Hillbilly Heroin, Honey) and impoverished areas of Louisiana (Hurricane Season), as well as portraits of Swedish youths in search of their identity (Milky Way), have attracted significant international attention.
10 questions with Elisa Lavergo Elisa answers questions and discusses her project, Chicanes.
Elisa Larvego was born Geneva in 1984. Studied at Ecole d’arts appliqués (Vevey), then at school of art and design in Geneva. In 2010 she won le Prix d’Art de la Nationale Suisse. Her work has been exhibited nationally (Musée de l’Elysée, Musée Helmhaus, Photoforum PasquArt), and internationally such at festival PhotoEspaña, le Centro Nacional de las artes in Mexico and les Rencontres d’Arles (France), Her approach is both anthropologic et poetic. She developed an interest for the link between individuals and their territory.
10 questions with Tara Fallaux Tara answers questions and discusses her project, The Perfect Pearl.
Photographer and director Tara Fallaux studied Film and Photography at various art schools in The Netherlands and the US. Once graduating from Carnegie Mellon University School of Fine Arts in Pittsburgh, Tara kicked off her career as a portrait and documentary photographer for magazines in New York and later Amsterdam. Tara has since worked as a freelance photographer combining personal photography and film projects with commercial work. THE PERFECT PEARL is a work in progress. It is an associative and poetic narrative about love and the concept of love in China. In China, a girl who is still unmarried after the age of 25 is called a ‘faded pearl’.
10 questions with Chloé Jafé Chloé answers questions and discusses her project, I give you my life.
Chloé Jaffé lives in Tokyo and is sufficiently integrated to have worked in a hostess club and met a boss who agreed that she document the women associated with – they cannot be part of – the Yazuka organised crime syndicates. They were typically keen that Jaffé photograph their ‘irezumi’ tattoos, made painfully over years by hand with a wooden handle and a needle: they are a source of pride, still associated with outsider status, not fashion, in Japan. As such, they represent a strong commitment to their gangster partners.
10 questions with Anaïs López Anaïs answers questions and discusses her project, The Migrant.
Anaïs López’s practice as photographer is characterised by looking for new ways to tell her stories. For each project she consciously steps outside the well-known paths of presentation formats traditionally suitable for photography. The Migrant is realised as a web documentary, and published on the website of the Dutch newspaper Trouw. Next to this online publication, a photobook in an edition of three has been produced; one of these copies is used by López to tell the story in a theatrical performance. Another copy travels around the world, and may be borrowed by individuals who would like to read the story and share it amongst friends.
10 questions with Pierfrancesco Celada Pierfrancesco answers questions and discusses his project, When I feel down I take the train to the Happy Valley
After completing a PhD in Biomechanics, Pierfrancesco is now concentrating his attention on his personal photographic projects. He recently won the Guernsey Photography Festival International Competition. He is currently working on his long-term project about solitude in modern Megalopolis. He is based in Hong-Kong.
FREEDOM / LIMITATIONS
Below are more inspirations and artists references exploring the themes of FREEDOM and/or LIMITATIONS.
Definition in dictionary (noun):
The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.
The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.
SYNONYMS: liberty, liberation, release, emancipation, deliverance, delivery, discharge, non-confinement, extrication amnesty, pardoning independence, self-government, self-determination, self-legislation, self rule, home rule, sovereignty, autonomy, autarky, democracy self-sufficiency, individualism, separation, non-alignment emancipation, enfranchisement exemption, immunity, dispensation, exception, exclusion, release, relief, reprieve, absolution, exoneration impunity, informal letting off, a let-off right to, entitlement to privilege, prerogative, due scope, latitude, leeway, margin, flexibility, facility, space, breathing space, room, elbow room licence, leave, free rein, a free hand carte blanche naturalness, openness, lack of inhibition, lack of reserve, casualness, informality, lack of ceremony, spontaneity, ingenuousnes impudence familiarity, overfamiliarity, presumption, forwardness
Binary opposition
The exam themes of FREEDOM AND/OR LIMITATIONS are a binary opposite – a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.
Binary opposites in relation to exam themes:
Freedom vs limitations Liberty vs captivity Independence vs dependence Exemption vs liability Scope vs restriction
Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory in Linquistics (scientific study of language) According to Ferdinand de Saussure, binary opposition is the system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Using binary opposites can often be very helpful in generating ideas for a photographic project as it provides a framework – a set of boundaries to work within. You can make work about freedom by exploring limitations and vice versa.
Lets thinks about the concept of freedom in 4 ways:
Political Freedom Religious Freedom Sexual Freedom Artistic Freedom
Political freedom
Political freedom is a central concept in Western history and political thought, and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action, and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.
Throughout history artists has made work that questions political
A strong relationship between the arts and politics, particularly between various kinds of art and power has occurs across historical epochs and cultures. Artists respond to political events uses different mediums from panting, photography, film, performance and graphic design to produce as a way of actively calling for social change.
With the upcoming election in Jersey you have a chance to respond to political events, issues and causes that you care about.
Photography and Propaganda Photography has been used as Propaganda for as long time. One of the most iconic images made during the Economic Depression in the 1930s America is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. It was used by the federal agency FSA (Farm Security Administration) to raise money and awareness has been reproduced for decades on stamps, posters etc. The controversy surrounding the image is an interesting study where the account from Lange and the woman photographed, Florence Thompson differ significantly.
Dorothea Lange ‘Migrant Mother’
Before migrant mother was made photography was entrenched in producing propaganda material for the Russian Revolution and socialist uprising. See the work of El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich. These artists and many more were part of the new European avant-garde movements such as Russian Constructivism, Dadaism and later Surrealism. See also the work by some of the pioneers of photo-montages such as John Heartfield, Raoul Hausman, Hannah Hoch.
El LissitzkyJohn HeartfieldRaoul HausmannHannah Hoch
See my PPT on an extensive overview of development of photomontage here:
Peter Kennard is one Britians most productive artists using photo montage to producing propaganda style images with highly political comments and satire. All forms of advertising is a form of propaganda with material used to promote and sell a particular item, merchandise or lifestyle.
Peter KennardPeter Kennard
Most protest groups such as Occupy London (like to website) or even the evil ideology of ISIS uses propaganda disseminated through new media and social media in order to reach a wide audience.
Occupy-London-democracyIsis propaganda poster
For those of you who studying Media, you should be able to link this with your module on We Media. Make links both to historical and contemporary means of propaganda, visual material produced and forms of communication and dissemination of images/ messages/ ideology/ mechandise etc.
During the Vietnam War, conceptual artist, Marta Rosler made a series of photo montages that were a critique of America’s involvement. in 1981 she wrote one of the key essay on documentary photography and its fraught relationship with its inherent truth, ethics and the politics of representation, In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography.) Read it here.
Martha Rosler collage from the war in VietnamMartha Rosler Photo-op from War in Iraq 2004
The Russian avant-garde reached its creative and popular height in the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and 1932, at which point the ideas of the avant-garde clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.
Exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) Covering the period of artistic innovation between 1912 and 1935, A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde traces the arc of the pioneering avant-garde forms after Socialist Realism was decreed the sole sanctioned style of art. The exhibition examines key developments and new modes of abstraction, including Suprematism and Constructivism, as well as avant-garde poetry, film, and photomontage.
Alexander RodchenkoVarvara Stepanova, The Results of the First Five-Year Plan, 1932 (State Museum of Contemporary Russian History, Moscow)El Lissitssky
Soviet Cinema
Sergei Eisenstein, Potemkin, 1925 Eisenstein used the events of the 1905 rebellion against czarist troops in the port of Odessa to give meaning to the Russian Revolution of 1917. One of the most memorable shots, comprising the Odessa steps sequence, for example, captures the horror of the massacre in a close-up of a woman screaming after she has been wounded by the advancing soldiers. His brilliantly percussive editing, detailed shots, repetitions, contrasts, compressions and expansions of time, and collisions of images ran counter to the trend toward a seamless illusion of reality found in other national cinemas of the 1920s. After the Revolution, young film directors searched for a cinematic style that, by destroying tradition, would help to bring about a new society. In films on revolutionary subjects, they abandoned conventional structure, experimented with new techniques, and used montage. Eisenstein, in particular, believed that juxtapositions of images would shock viewers into becoming active cinematic agents.
Dziga Vertov:Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 Part documentary and part cinematic art, this film follows a city in the 1920s Soviet Union throughout the day, from morning to night. Directed by Dziga Vertov, with a variety of complex and innovative camera shots, the film depicts scenes of ordinary daily life in Russia. Vertov celebrates the modernity of the city, with its vast buildings, dense population and bustling industries. While there are no titles or narration, Vertov still naturally conveys the marvels of the modern city.
For contemporary responses to communist legacy of Russian communism and Soviet empirealism see new work by Polish photographer Rafal Milach
In REFUSAL Rafal Milach’s ongoing artistic practice focuses on applied sociotechnical systems of governmental control and ideological manipulations of belief and consciousness. Focusing on post-Soviet countries such as Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Poland, Milach traces the mechanisms of propaganda and their visual representation in architecture, urban projects and objects.
Refusal brings together different material and visual layers that ultimately represent these systems of control. Among other things, Refusal showcases photographs of handmade objects found in governmental centres and chess schools that produce optical illusions and whose innocent disposition is fundamentally changed here as they exemplify how the human mind can be influenced and controlled. Furthermore Soviet television programmes about social experiments or various state-run competitions exemplify the process of formatting and shifting meanings to serve a concrete vision of government.
See Milach’s latest photobook, The March of the First Gentlemen
The First March of Gentlemen is a fictitious narration composed of authentic stories. Historical events related to the town of Września came to be the starting point for reflection on the protest and disciplinary mechanisms. In the series of collages, the reality of the 1950s Poland ruled by the communists blends with the memory of the Września children strike from the beginning of the 20th century. This shift in time is not just a coincidence, as the problems which the project touches upon are universal, and may be seen as a metaphor for the contemporary social tensions. The project includes archive photos by Września photographer Ryszard Szczepaniak. This project was made within Kolekcja Wrzesińska residency.Read review here in the BJP
Rafal Milach is also a founding member of Sputnik Photos and Polich photography collective who have been working on a large project, Lost Territories Archive about former soviet republics
Matthei Asselin: Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation Asselin’s project is conceived as a cautionary tale putting the spotlight on the consequences of corporate impunity, both for people and the environment. Designed by fellow countryman Ricardo Báez, a designer, curator and photobook collector who has notably worked with the Venezuelan master Paolo Gasparini, Monsanto® submerges the reader into an exposé of the corporation’s practices, whether by showing contaminated sites and the health and ecological damage they cause, the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, or the pressure on farmers to use patented GMO seeds.
Read article here in American Suburb X (ASX) and listen to interview below
Alice Wielinga: North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and RealityAs a photographer, how do you make insightful work about a place where media is as heavily controlled as it is in North Korea, ‘a big black hole on the world map’ where government propaganda is ubiquitous and stage managed photo opportunities are the norm? For Alice Wielinga the solution was to take that propaganda and imposed control and turn it back on itself, by creating detailed composite images that blend familiar North Korean propaganda paintings with her own photographs of the secretive state. The resulting series North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and Reality, has been on display at the Les Rencontres d’Arles festival following Wielinga’s win in the portfolio review prize at the previous year’s festival. Wielinga’s composites, which each take weeks to produce, are richly detailed vistas which could easily be dismissed at first glance as conventional propaganda. Closer inspection however reveals incongruities between the painted elements and the new photographic ones. Alongside the stylised faces of smiling workers and bold soldiers, she inserts the tired people and emaciated landscapes she photographed …
Alice WielingaAlice Wielinga
Watch Youtube clip where Alice talks about her work from North Korea
Actions. The image of the world can be different
A new exhibition at Kettle Yard’s in Cambridge featuring work by 38 artists that seeks to reassert the potential of art as a poetic, social and political force in the world.
Artists in Actions: Basel Abbas + Ruanne Abou-Rahme. John Akomfrah, Rana Begum, Joseph Beuys, Anna Brownsted, Candoco Dance Company + Laila Diallo, Alice Channer, Nathan Coley, Edmund de Waal, Jeremy Deller, eL Seed, Jamie Fobert, Helen Frankenthaler, Naum Gabo, Regina José Galindo, Anya Gallaccio, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Barbara Hepworth, Callum Innes, Mary Kelly, Idris Khan, Issam Kourbaj, Linder, Richard Long, Melanie Manchot, Julie Mehretu, Gustav Metzger, Oscar Murillo, Ben Nicholson, Harold Offeh, Cornelia Parker, Vicken Parsons, Katie Paterson, Zoran Popović, Khadija Saye, Emma Smith, Caroline Walker, Kate Whitley
Jeremy Deller
Money rather than yachts are parked in the island tax haven of Jersey and another muralshows the capital, St Helier, going up in smoke. The conflagration is predicted for 2017, but the banners egging on the rioters have already been designed by Ed Hall, a specialist in campaign banners. The mask-like faces are based on a tax avoidance diagram and a deliberately opaque financial scheme known as the “Jersey Cashbox”.
Read more here about Jeremy Deller‘s show at the Venice Bienale and watch video
Here is a video clip from Deller re-enactment of The Battle of Orgreaves
John Akomfrah is a hugely respected artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explores the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. Their first film, Handsworth Songs (1986) explored the events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a charged combination of archive footage, still photos and newsreel.
His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his “extended definition of art” and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by open public debates on a very wide range of subjects including political, environmental, social and long term cultural trends. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Joseph Beuys was a German-born artist active in Europe and the United States from the 1950s through the early 1980s, who came to be loosely associated with that era’s international, proto-Conceptual art movement, Fluxus. Beuys’s diverse body of work ranges from traditional media of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to process-oriented, or time-based “action” art, the performance of which suggested how art may exercise a healing effect (on both the artist and the audience) when it takes up psychological, social, and/or political subjects. Beuys is especially famous for works incorporating animal fat and felt, two common materials – one organic, the other fabricated, or industrial – that had profound personal meaning to the artist. They were also recurring motifs in works suggesting that art, common materials, and one’s “everyday life” were ultimately inseparable.
Lewis Bush: Archisle Photographer-in-Residence 2018 is a Photographer, Writer, Curator and Educator based in London. After studying History and working as a researcher for the United Nations Taskforce on HIV/AIDS he completed a MA in Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication in 2012. Since then he has developed a multifaceted practice encompassing photography, writing and curation to explore ideas about the way power is created and exercised in the world. In The Memory of History (2012) he travelled through ten European countries documenting the way the past was being manipulated in the context of the economic crisis and recession. This project was widely published and was exhibited at the European Union’s permanent representation in London in 2014. More recent works include Metropole (2015) which critiques the architectural transformation of London and the city’s growing inequality by subverting the imagery of London’s luxury and corporate developments. Bush’s new book Shadows of the State (2018) uses open source research to reveal numbers stations, cold war intelligence communications which remain in use today. Bush is a Lecturer on the MA and BA(hons) Documentary Photography Programmes at London College of Communication.
British documentary photograph projects in response to political times, for example 1980s Thatcher era
Chris Killip: In Flagrante Poetic, penetrating, and often heartbreaking, Chris Killip’s In Flagrante remains the most important photobook to document the devastating impact of deindustrialization on working-class communities in northern England in the 1970s and 1980s.
Taken in the late 1970s and early 80s, Chris Killip‘s photographs are a study of the communities that bore the brunt of industrial decline in the North East. They evoke both the social tensions and the economic upheaval that defined the era. “You didn’t have to be a genius to realise how important it was to get in and photograph it before it all fell apart,” he says. “The strange thing is, I didn’t realise how quickly it would go.”
Paul Graham: Beyond Caring Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring published in 1986 is now considered one of the key works from Britain’s wave of “New Color” photography that was gaining momentum in the 1980s. While commissioned to present his view of “Britain in 1984,” Graham turned his attention towards the waiting rooms, queues and poor conditions of overburdened Social Security and Unemployment offices across the United Kingdom.
Read essay here on Graham and Beyond Caring by critic David Chandler
Martin Parr: The Cost of Living
Austerity vs capitalism
Jim Goldberg: Rich and Poor The photographs in this book constitute a shocking and gripping portrait of contemporary America. Jim Goldberg’s photographs of rich and poor people, with the subjects’ own handwritten comments about themselves on the prints, give us an inside look at the American dream at both ends of the social scale.His pictures reveal his subjects’ innermost fears and aspirations, their perceptions and illusions about themselves, with a frankness that makes the portraits as engrossing as they are disturbing.
Linda Benko, 1979.USA. San Francisco, California. 1982. “I keep thinking where we went wrong. We have no one to talk to now, however, I will not allow this loneliness to destroy me – I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS. I would like an elegant home, a loving husband and the wealth I am used to.”
Often considered Goldberg’s seminal project, Raised by Wolves combines ten years of original photographs, text, and other illustrative elements (home movie stills, snapshots, drawings, diary entries, and images of discarded belongings) to document the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The book quickly became a classic in the photobook canon and, thus, the original is essentially unavailable.
Shooting the rich – an article in the BJP Carlos Sporttono: Wealth Management Dougie Wallace: Harrodsburg Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti:The Heavens Jim Mortram: Small Town Inertia Jim Mortram lives near Dereham, a small town in Norfolk. Dereham is no different from thousands of other communities throughout Britain, where increasing numbers of people struggle to survive at a time of welfare cuts and failing health services.
For the last seven years, Jim has been photographing the lives of people in his community who, through physical and mental problems and a failing social security system, face isolation and loneliness in their daily lives. His work covers difficult subjects such as disability, addiction and self-harm, but is always with hope and dignity, focusing upon the strength and resilience of the people he photographs.
Karen Knorr: Belgravia The Belgravia series, images and texts describe class and power amongst the international and wealthy during the beginning of Thatcherism in London during 1979. Belgravia is still a cosmopolitan and rich neighbourhood in London near Harrods in Knightsbridge with many non-domiciled residents. My parents lived in Belgravia and the first image of the series is a photograph of my mother and grandmother in the front room of our “maisonette” on Lowndes Square. Yet the photographs are not about individuals but about a group of people and their ideas during a particular time in history. They are “non-potrtraits” in that they do not aim to flatter or to show the “truth” of these people. People are not named and remain anonymous.
Politics and elections
Mark Duffy: Vote No 1 Across the world, we are experiencing a severe disillusionment with our nations’ political class. This series takes a humorous, if dark, look at this issue by focusing on the unintended disfigurements that electoral candidates’ faces suffer when advertising themselves to the public.
The Irish landscape was littered with electoral campaign advertising during the recent European, local and national by-elections. ‘Vote No. 1′ documents this and examines the culture of election advertising in Ireland. The series focuses on the accidental, and often gruesome, disfigurements the electoral candidates’ faces suffer – an unintended consequence of their posters’ erection.Mark Duffy 80 Lilford rd. se5 9hr Tel:07794111878 markduffyphotographer@gmail.com
Christopher Anderson: STUMP Stump collects his color and black-and-white photographs from recent campaign trails-particularly from the 2012 Obama/Romney contest-that scrutinize the highly rehearsed rhetorical masks of, among others, Barack and Michelle Obama, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton and others (including audience members at rallies). Removed from the context of reportage and sequenced here, these images accumulate a mesmerizing quality that is both frightening and hilarious.
Read review here on Joerg Colberg blog Conscentious
Identity and citizenship
Shirin Neshat Ahmed Mammoud – Shanamanesh Sam Irwin
Use of Archive and Found images Right now in contemporary photography and in particularly in photographers making photo books the use of archival material is dominating ways that photographers tell stories. We have discussed this earlier during Personal Study and many of you incorporated family archives and photo albums into the narrative and making of your photo book. There is no reason why you can’t explore archives again, both public (Photographic Archive Society Jersiaise, Archive of Modern Conflict) and private (mobile phones, social media, family albums etc.)
Here is a selection of photographers using archives in making new work: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (Divine Violence/Holy Bible, War Primer 2, People in Trouble, Spirit is a Bone etc) Christian Patterson (Redhead Peckerwood, Bottom of the Lake), Tommasi Tanini (H. said he loved us), David Fahti (Anecdotal, Wolfgang), Dragana Jurisic (YU: The Lost Country), Anouk Kruithof,Ed Templeton (Adventures in the nearby far way), John Stezaker
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Divine Violence/Holy BibleChristian Patterson Redhead PeckerwoodDavid Fathi ‘Wolfgang’Dragon JurisicAnouk KruithofEd TempletonJohn Stezaker
Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen, Doug Rickard, Daniel Mayrit all use found images from the internet, Google earth and other satellites images as a way to ask questions and raise awareness about our environment, state operated security facilities, social and urban neighbour hoods, prostitution, and London’s business leaders of major international financial institutions.
Mishka Henner, Levelland Oil Field- Texas
US oil fields photographed by satellites orbiting Earth.
Mishka Henner Dutch Landscapes
Mishka Henner: I’m not the only one, 2015 Single channel video, 4:34 minsPhotographer Trevor Paglen has long made the advanced technology of global surveillance and military weaponry his subject. This year he has been nominated for the prestigious The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize which aims to reward a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year. The Prize showcases new talents and highlights the best of international photography practice. It is one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of photography. Read more here
Trevor Paglen
Doug Rickard is a north American artist / photographer. He uses technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographs on his monitor, to create series of work that have been published in books, exhibited in galleries.
Months after the London Riots in 2008 (at the beginning of the economical crash) the Metropolitan Police handed out leaflets depicting youngsters that presumably took part in riots. Images of very low quality, almost amateur, were embedded with unquestioned authority due both to the device used for taking the photographs and to the institution distributing those images. But in reality, what do we actually know about these people? We have no context or explanation of the facts, but we almost inadvertently assume their guilt because they have been ‘caught on CCTV’.
In his awarding book: You Haven’s Seen the Faces..Daniel Mayrit appropriated the characteristics of surveillance technology using Facebook and Google to collect images of the 100 most powerful people in the City of London (according to the annual report by Square Mile magazine in 2013). The people here featured represent a sector which is arguably regarded in the collective perception as highly responsible for the current economic situation, but nevertheless still live in a comfortable anonymity, away from public scrutiny.
See also this book Looters by Tiane Doan Na Champassak
Religios Freedom
Khadija Saye who had been invited to contribute to the exhibition before her death in the Grenfell Tower fire. Read article here in the Guardian.
Dwelling: in this space we breathe is a series of wet plate collodion tintypes that explores the migration of traditional Gambian spiritual practices and the deep rooted urge to find solace within a higher power. This series of tintypes were produced with artist, Almudena Romero.
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins At a time of significant national and global uncertainty, the season in 2018 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London explore how artists respond to, reflect and potentially effect change in the social and political landscape.
Reflecting a diverse, complex and authentic view of the world, the exhibition touches on themes of countercultures, subcultures and minorities of all kinds, the show features the work of 20 photographers from the 1950s to the present day. Diane Arbus, Casa Susanna, Philippe Chancel, Larry Clark, Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Paz Errázuriz, Jim Goldberg, Katy Grannan, Pieter Hugo, Seiji Kurata, Danny Lyon, Teresa Margolles, Boris Mikhailov, Daido Moriyama, Igor Palmin, Walter Pfeiffer, Dayanita Singh Alec Soth and Chris Steele-Perkins
Paz Errázuriz The beautifully arresting series of photographs, Adam’s Apple (1982-87), by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz are of a community of transgender sex-workers working in an underground brothel in Chile in the 1980s. Taken during the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet when gender non-conforming people were regularly subjected to curfews, persecutions and police brutality, the photographs are a collaborative and defiant act of political resistance.
Read review here in Dazed and Confused and a gallery page in the Guardian
Alec Soth:Broken Manual In Alec Soth’s Broken Manual (2006–10) he documents men living off the grid. His atmospheric images, both colour and black and white, are of monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways who all have in common the need to disappear in America.
Yto Barrada: AgadirFor her first major London commission, artist Yto Barrada weaves together personal narratives and political ideals to create a complex portrait of a city and its people in a state of transition.
Set in an apocalyptic post-industrial landscape of Southern Russia, on a site of an archaeological expedition, the little known work of Russian photographer Igor Palmin, The Enchanted Wanderer (1977) and TheDisquiet (1977), features Soviet Hippies in their bell-bottoms and flower power hair bands, playing guitars in opium filled trailers or standing alone on desolate lands.
Dayanita Singh formed a deeply profound and meaningful friendship over 30 years with Mona Ahmed, a eunuch from New Delhi who was both feared and revered, an outcast amongst outcasts, living much of her life in a cemetery. As well as the groundbreaking photo book, with profoundly honest and frank words by Mona, the exhibition includes a poignant film, shot in one take, of a very still Mona listening to her favourite song Rasik Balma from the 1956 romantic comedy Chori Chori.
Driven by motivations both personal and political, many of the photographers in Another Kind of Life sought to provide an authentic representation of disenfranchised communities often conspiring with them to construct their own identity through the camera lens.
Sexual freedom
Rights and women and is a current
Sufragette movement and Femen
For those interested in exploring identities, stereotypes, gender, alter-egos through self-portraiture using varies techniques such slow shutters-speeds, use of dressing up, make-up, props, masks, locations (mine-en-scene) Often these images are questioning ideas around truth, fantasy or fiction.
Francesco Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, Yasumasa Morimura, Gillian Wearing, Sean Lee (Shauna) Juno Calypso
Rather than physical space, the theme of Environment can also be considered within a psychological context where artists construct or imagine an environment that they respond to in creative ways using photography, performance and film.
Using binary opposites we can think of freedom as;
exterior/ interior private/ public masculin/ feminine physical/ psychological
Clare Rae from Melbourne, Australia visited Jersey as part of the Archisle international artist-in-residence programme last year. Clare has been researching the Claude Cahun archive, shooting new photography and film in Jersey and contributing to the educational programme. Clare Rae produces photographs and moving image works that interrogate representations of the female body via an exploration of the physical environment.
from the series Magdalen. These images engage with the site of the Magdalen Asylum, where girls and women were housed at the Abbotsford Convent, whilst working in the laundries downstairs. The asylum was in operation for approximately 100 years until it was decommissioned in the 1970’s. These rooms are laden with history, and provided a dense and loaded environment within which to make artwork. Using this history as a starting point, I attempted to activate these spaces using my body, gently testing the physical environment.Stages is a collaborative project by Clare Rae and Simone Hine. Both artists follow in the tradition of feminist art practices, using their own body to examine broader ideas related to the conditions of feminine representation. Stages takes the Rosina Auditorium at the Abbotsford Convent as a catalyst for the production of new work. Both artists will bring their own aesthetic and line of questioning to this very particular space. Together, Rae and Hine present works that are defined by the space, whilst also contributing to a redefinition of the space.Untitled (NGV). 2013 This project engages with the public and private spaces of the National Gallery of Victoria (International), in particular the photography and print store rooms.Monash Commission 2016. The series of 10 photographs investigate institutional spaces around the Monash University Clayton Campus, mostly engaging with buildings within the Science faculty, but also including iconic modernist architecture such as Robert Blackwood Hall, the Law Library and the former site of the Monash University Museum of Art.
Clare gave a artist talk contextualising her practice, covering recent projects that have engaged with notions of architecture and the body, and the role of performative photography in her work. Clare will discuss her research on these areas, specifically her interest in artists such as Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman and Australian performance artist Jill Orr. Clare will also discuss her photographic methodologies and practices, giving an analysis of her image making techniques, and final outcomes.
Homework: Here is the task that she asked participants to respond to in a workshop. This could be a good starting point to for photographic exploration.
1. Produce a self-portrait, in any style you like. Consider the history of self-portraiture, and try to create an image that alludes to, (or evades?) your identity.
2. Produce a performative photograph, considering the ideas presented on liveness, performance documentation and Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. ‘Captured’ vs. pre-meditated?
3. Produce a photograph that engages the body with the physical environment. Think of architecture, light, texture, and composition to create your image.
For further context lets consider some of these artists’ influences on Clare’s practice.
Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob was a French photographer, sculptor, and writer. She is best known for her self-portraits in which she assumes a variety of personas, including dandy, weight lifter, aviator, and doll.
In this image, Cahun has shaved her head and is dressed in men’s clothing. She once explained: “Under this mask, another mask; I will never finish removing all these faces.”1 (Claude Cahun, Disavowals, London 2007, p.183)
Cahun was friends with many Surrealist artists and writers; André Breton once called her “one of the most curious spirits of our time.”2(See Guardian article below by Gavin James Bower, “Claude Cahun: Finding a Lost Great,)
While many male Surrealists depicted women as objects of male desire, Cahun staged images of herself that challenge the idea of the politics of gender. Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today. She was exploring her identity, not defining it. Her self-portraits often interrogates space, such as domestic interiors and Jersey landscapes using rock crevasses and granite gate posts.
I Extend My Arms 1931 or 1932 Claude Cahun 1894-1954 Purchased 2007 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P79319
The Jersey Heritage Trust collection represents the largest repository of the artistic work of Cahun who moved to the Jersey in 1937 with her stepsister and lover Marcel Moore. She was imprisoned and sentenced to death in 1944 for activities in the resistance during the Occupation. However, Cahun survived and she was almost forgotten until the late 1980s, and much of her and Moore’s work was destroyed by the Nazis, who requisitioned their home. CaHun died in 1954 of ill health (some contribute this to her time in German captivity) and Moore killed herself in 1972. They are both buried together in St Brelade’s churchyard.
For further feminist theory and context read the following essay:
Amelia Jones: The “Eternal Return”: Self-Portrait Photography as Technology of Embodiment – pdf Jones_Eternal Return
Last year the National Portrait Gallery in London brings the work of Claude Cahun and Gillian Wearing together for the first time. Slipping between genders and personae in their photographic self-images, Wearing and Cahun become others while inventing themselves. “We were born in different times, we have different concerns, and we come from different backgrounds. She didn’t know me, yet I know her,” Wearing says, paying homage to Cahun and acknowledging her presence. The bigger question the exhibition might ask is less how we construct identities for ourselves than what is this thing called presence?
Behind a mask, Wearing is being Cahun. Previously she has re-enacted photographs of Andy Warhol in drag, the young Diane Arbus with a camera, Robert Mapplethorpe with a skull-topped cane, hard-bitten New York crime photographer Weegee wreathed in cigar-smoke. Among these doubles, you know Wearing is in the frame somewhere, under the silicon mask and the prosthetics, the wigs and makeup and the lighting. Going through her own family albums, she has become her own mother and her father. It is a surprise she has never got lost in this hall of time-slipping mirrors, among her own self-images and the faces she has adopted. Wearing has got others to play her game, too – substituting their own adult voices with those of a child, putting on disguises while confessing their secrets on video.
Cindy Sherman, A selection of images from her film stills
Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. To create her images, she assumes the multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, and stylist. Whether portraying a career girl, a blond bombshell, a fashion victim, a clown, or a society lady of a certain age, for over thirty-five years this relentlessly adventurous artist has created an eloquent and provocative body of work that resonates deeply in our visual culture.
For an overview of Sherman’s incredible oeuvre see Museum Of Modern Art’s dedicated site made at a major survey exhibition of her work in 2012.
This exhibition surveys Sherman’s career, from her early experiments as a student in Buffalo in the mid-1970s to a recent large-scale photographic mural, presented here for the first time in the United States. Included are some of the artist’s groundbreaking works—the complete “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80) and centerfolds (1981), plus the celebrated history portraits (1988–90)—and examples from her most important series, from her fashion work of the early 1980s to the break-through sex pictures of 1992 to her monumental 2008 society portraits.
Some of her latest images using digital montages
Sherman works in series, and each of her bodies of work is self-contained and internally coherent; yet there are themes that have recurred throughout her career. The exhibition showcases the artist’s individual series and also presents works grouped thematically around such common threads as cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tales; and gender and class identity.
Here is link to Shannon’s blog showing all her research, analysis, recordings, experimentation and evaluations
Watch her film below about feminism, her mother and her role in the family. This film was the starting point for her photographs above by re-staging herself as a domisticated female
Another site of influence to Clare Rae is Francesca Woodman. At the age of thirteen Francesca Woodman took her first self-portrait. From then, up until her untimely death in 1981, aged just 22, she produced an extraordinary body of work. Comprising some 800 photographs, Woodman’s oeuvre is acclaimed for its singularity of style and range of innovative techniques. From the beginning, her body was both the subject and object in her work.
The very first photograph taken by Woodman, Self-portrait at Thirteen, 1972, shows the artist sitting at the end of a sofa in an un-indentified space, wearing an oversized jumper and jeans, arm loosely hanging on the armrest, her face obscured by a curtain of hair and the foreground blurred by sudden movement, one hand holding a cable linked to the camera. In this first image the main characteristics at the core of Woodman’s short career are clearly visible, her focus on the relationship with her body as both the object of the gaze and the acting subject behind the camera.
Woodman tested the boundaries of bodily experience in her work and her work often suggests a sense of self-displacement. Often nude except for individual body parts covered with props, sometimes wearing vintage clothing, the artist is typically sited in empty or sparsely furnished, dilapidated rooms, characterised by rough surfaces, shattered mirrors and old furniture. In some images Woodman quite literally becomes one with her surroundings, with the contours of her form blurred by movement, or blending into the background, wallpaper or floor, revealing the lack of distinction of both – between figure and ground, self and world. In others she uses her physical body literally as a framework in which to create and alter her material identity. For instance, holding a sheet of glass against her flesh, squeezing her body parts against the glass and smashing her face, breasts, hips, buttocks and stomach onto the surface from various angles, Woodman distorts her physical features making them appear grotesque.
Through fragmenting her body by hiding behind furniture, using reflective surfaces such as mirrors to conceal herself, or by simply cropping the image, she dissects the human figure emphasising isolated body parts. In her photographs Woodman reveals the body simultaneously as insistently there, yet somehow absent. This game of presence and absence argues for a kind of work that values disappearance as its very condition.
Since 1986, Woodman’s work has been exhibited widely and has been the subject of extensive critical study in the United States and Europe. Woodman is often situated alongside her contemporaries of the late 1970s such as Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke, yet her work also foreshadows artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Nan Goldin and Karen Finley in their subsequent dialogues with the self and reinterpretations of the female body.
For those interested in exploring identities, stereotypes, gender, alter-egos through self-portraiture using varies techniques such slow shutters-speeds, use of dressing up, make-up, props, masks, locations (mine-en-scene) Often these images are questioning ideas around truth, fantasy or fiction an involve artists making images in both interior and exterior environments
Juno Calypso won the recent BJP International Award 2016 and is currently exhibiting in London at TJ Boulting Gallery. It was an old picture of a lurid pink bathroom that inspired London-born photographer Juno Calypso to spend a week honeymooning solo at a Pennsylvania love hotel. “My first thought was that I’d be out of my mind to go all that way to take some pictures, but after failing to find anything similar in Europe I knew I’d be even crazier not to go,” Calypso says.
Surrounded by heart-shaped tubs, sparkling mirror lights and her signature anachronistic beauty devices, the Penn Hills Resort became the setting of The Honeymoon,Calypso’s new series of photographs exploring the absurdities of female identity and sexuality.
Read article here and also this article on artists exploring their alter-egos and inner selves in photography.
Anne Hardy’s photographs picture depopulated rooms that suggest surreal fictions. Working in her studio, Hardy builds each of her sets entirely from scratch; a labour-intensive process of constructing an empty room, then developing its interior down to the most minute detail. Using the transient nature of photography, Hardy’s images withhold the actual experience of her environments, allowing our relationship with them to be in our imagination.
Hardy’s work transforms sculpture into photographic ‘paintings’. Though her scenes are built in actuality, their compositions are developed to be viewed from one vantage point only and it’s only their 2 dimensional images that are shown. Hardy uses the devices inherent within photography to heighten her work’s painterly illusion. In Cipher, aspects such as the hazy aura around the fluorescent lights, faux grotto walls, and the spatial defiance of the hanging ropes, give allusion to gesture and drawn lines.The construction of an environment taking place in her studio
Tableaux Photography and Staged environments. Tableaux photography always have an element of performing for the camera. See artists such as, Tom Hunter, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Duane Michaels, Sam Taylor Johnson (former Sam Taylor-Wood), Hannah Starkey, Tracy Moffatt, Vibeke Tandberg
Jeff WallGregory CrewdsonSam Taylor-JohnsonTracy MoffatUntitled – May 1997 1997 Hannah Starkey born 1971 Purchased 1999 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78246Vibeke Tandberg
Performance and Photography For those of you who would like to explore Performance and Photography further here is a link to a project we did in 2015 when Tom Pope, was in Jersey as the Archisle Artist-in-Residence.
Study the blog posts below when we were exploring Pope’s practice and the themes of Chance, Change and Challenge . You should be able to find some starting points here.
Here are some of the key concepts that underpin Pope’s work and practice:
Performance, Photography, Chance, Humour/Fun, Repetition, Play Psychogeography, dérive(drifting), Situationism (link to a ppt: Situationism), Dadaism, Public/Private, Challenging authority, Failure, DIY/Ad-hoc approach, Collaboration, Audience participation
For example, write a manifesto with a set of rules (6-10) that provide a framework for your performance related project. Describe in detail how you are planning on developing your work and ideas. Think about what you want to achieve, what you want to communicate, how your ideas relate to the themes of FREEDOM and/or LIMITATIONS and how you are going to approach this task in terms of form, technique and subject-matter.
A list of art movements that you may use as contextual research. Many of them also produced Manifestos:
Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Situationism, Neo-dadaism, Land/Environmental art, Performance art/Live art, Conceptualism, Experimental filmmaking/ Avant-garde cinema (those studying Media make links with your unit on Experimental film)
Here are a list of artists/ photographers that may inspire you:
Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Yves Klein, Bas Jan Ader, Erwin Wurm, Chris Arnatt, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Francis Alÿs, , Sophie Calle , Nikki S Lee, Claude Cahun, Dennis Oppenheim, Bruce Nauman, Allan Kaprow, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Marcel Duchamp and the Readymade, Andy Warhol’s film work, Steve McQueen, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Marina Abramovic, Pipilotti Rist, Luis Bunuel/ Salvatore Dali: , Le Chien Andalou, Dziga Vertov: The Man with a Movie Camera.
Photography and sculpture Photographic installations which are site specific and 3-dimensional is very in vogue right now. In the exam paper starting point 4 is about artists exploring the material nature of a photographic image and the idea that photographs can be sculptural. Here are a few artists to explore
Felicity Hammond is an emerging artist who works across photography and installation. Fascinated by political contradictions within the urban landscape her work explores construction sites and obsolete built environments.
The Space Between @ ART ROTTERDAM 2017The Space Between @ ART ROTTERDAM 2017
In specific works Hammond photographs digitally manipulated images from property developers’ billboards and brochures and prints them directly onto acrylic sheets which are then manipulated into unique sculptural objects. http://www.felicityhammond.com/
Lorenzo Venturi: Dalston Anatomy
Lorenzo Vitturi’s vibrant still lifes capture the threatened spirit of Dalston’s Ridley Road Market. Vitturi – who lives locally – feels compelled to capture its distinctive nature before it is gentrified beyond recognition. Vitturi arranges found objects and photographs them against backdrops of discarded market materials, in dynamic compositions. These are combined with street scenes and portraits of local characters to create a unique portrait of a soon to be extinct way of life.
His installation at the Gallery draws on the temporary structures of the market using raw materials, sculptural forms and photographs to explore ideas about creation, consumption and preservation.
Watch our exclusive interview with Lorenzo.
Boyd Webb (born 1947) is a New Zealand-born visual artist who works in the United Kingdom, mainly using the medium of photography although he has also produced sculpture and film. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1988. He has had solo shows at venues including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Boyd Webb Abyssogramme, 1983
Initially he worked as a sculptor, making life casts of people in fibreglass and arranging them into scenes. He eventually turned to photography and his early work played with ideas of the real and the imagined. Through mysterious and elaborate compositions created using actors and complex sets built by the artist in his studio. In later years his focus shifted to a cool observational style, his work less theatrical and technique less elaborate.
James Casebere pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. For the last thirty years, Casebere has devised increasingly complex models that are subsequently photographed in his studio. Based on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Casebere’s abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative and oftentimes suggestive of prior events, encouraging the viewer to reconstitute a narrative or symbolic reading of his work.
Caspar David FriedrichJames Casebere
While earlier bodies of work focused on American mythologies such as the genre of the western and suburban home, in the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to institutional buildings. In more recent years, his subject matter focused on various institutional spaces and the relationship between social control, social structure and the mythologies that surround particular institutions, as well as the broader implications of dominant systems such as commerce, labor, religion and law.
Thomas Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes he finds in images taken from various media sources. Once he has photographed his re-created environments—always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity—Demand destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates.
Christian Boltanski (born 1944) is a French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker, most well known for his photography installations and contemporary French Conceptual style. Boltanski’s subject matters are history and life duration. Vulnerability is his strength, and reflecting upon absence is his way to express his passion for what is real. And so Boltanski builds his own archives, moves shadows around the gallery space, or brings forgotten memories back to the surface through the eyes and faces of strangers that emerge from found photographs; he synchronizes the sound of the human heartbeat to the rhythm of history; he creates settings with old clothing so that individual stories may not be dispersed; he investigates fate and challenges, through irony, the transience of things to propose the art of time.
The Reserve of Dead Swiss 1990 Christian Boltanski born 1944 Presented by the Fondation Cartier 1992 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T06605
To get you started on a creative journey we are going to have some fun at playing games with photography. The themes of TRANSITIONS / FREEDOM / LIMITATIONS lend themselves well to explore the concepts of ACTION > PLAY > CHANCE in the image making process. Often a photograph is made with ‘a bit of luck’ in capturing a moment or ray of light allowing for chance to enter the frame. An element of performance is also aligned with photography, the act of making a photograph is a performance in itself, a person in front of a camera may act out a character, persona or pose.
Resurgence in interest around photography’s relationship to performance has increased the awareness of the photograph both as documentation and as a performative work in itself. Recent international exhibitions have explored photography’s relationship to ‘performance’ and the differing ways that artists have used the camera in this arena. Performing photographs looks at how the performative is located within the photograph itself, and in the relationship of the image to the viewer, as well as photography’s relationship to the written and spoken word.
Probably one of the worst things to happen to photography is that cameras have viewfinders. — John Baldessari
John Baldessari is often referred to as the father of conceptual art. Central to his practice is language, both verbal and pictorial. In his photo-based work of the early 1970s, he embraced chance, accident, and game-playing, as in the series Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Carrots (1971) (also featuring versions with green beans and rhubarb). He would ask a participant to select three individual vegetables from a selection of the same type (e.g. carrots). S/he would then select one by pointing to it, a photograph documenting the choice. The other vegetables would then be discarded and replaced by two more. The selection process would begin again and further photographs would be taken to record the choosing. The work was finished when the vegetables ran out.
Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Carrots (1971)
Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That are the Same (By Sight – Side View), 1972-73
John Baldessari ’Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) 1973
In the piece Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That are the Same (By Sight – Side View), 1972-73 and other works of the period like the artist’s book Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) the artist is playing with the ideas of repetition and failure (an essential feature of games). He makes ten attempts to create a puff of smoke from his cigar that exactly matches the shape of a cloud in a photograph stuck to the studio wall.
Watch this video about John Baldessari narrated by Tom Waits as an inspiration first.
TASKS: To begin we will perform a few collective photo games. In the end you will design and perform your own game.
PHOTO-GAME 1:What to photograph?
Each student think of an instruction, an object, place, or scenario to be photographed.
Participants: Whole class. Aim: Every student have to make one image of each instruction Method: All the instructions will be collated and given to all students in the class. Location: Outside/ Inside Evidence: Produce blog post with a selection of edited images and an evaluation Deadline: One week > 22 March
Upload all images in a folder and print a set of small prints (9x13cm = 4 per A4 sheet). Lay all images in a huge grid on the tables so that vertically you can see every students response to the same instruction, while horizontally you will be able to discern each student’s approach or style. As an example, here is a list of instructions, as an example:
A red ball A tree and a dog An ugly photograph A political argument A kiss A shallow focus image of a bar of soap a random photograph An unambiguous photograph Grass and concrete An old-fashioned photograph A futuristic photograph a blue car and a white car Nigeria Timeless beauty Flowing water
PHOTO-GAME 2: Photo-dice (Zen for Photography)
An artwork which consists of 5 dice, each describing a decision leading to a photograph.
Participants: Whole class, each student roll the dice once. Aim: Roll the five dices and write down instructions Method: Produce a set of 10 images using the instructions Location: Outside/ Inside Evidence: Produce blog post with a selection of edited images and an evaluation Deadline: One week > 22 March
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PHOTO-GAME 3: Boxing Match
Participants: Pair up with a fellow student Aim: Capture your opponents portrait while he/she avoids being photographed. Method: Use your camera instead of throwing punches Location: Outside Evidence: Produce blog post with a selection of edited images and an evaluation Deadline: One week > 29 March Technical: Camera settings
Select S-mode (shutter speed priority) and Auto ISO on camera.
Begin with fast shutter speed 1/250 and reduce by 1 stop > 1/125 another stop > 1/60 and another >1/30
Frame each shot using a standard lens with a focal lenght of 50 mm.
PHOTO-GAME 4: Throwing a Ball
PHOTO-GAME 5: The12 PARISH CHALLENGE
Join the Jersey Climate Conversation and take part in their active challenge. You need to find the 12 QR codes that are placed in each parish of the island. When you find the code, scan it and you’ll learn something about the area and the environment. Use your camera and explore the area that is described. You could choose to visit a few places to visit each day, or you could try and visit them all during the week. Minimum is to explore at least one parish – even if tis the one that you live in. You can drive to each location, park the car and walk around exploring the area. Alternatively consider cycling.
Lighting: Think about quality of light. Sunny = bright colours/ dark shadows. Overcast: clouds produce soft diffused light Timing: Different time of the day produces different light. For example early morning or late afternoon the light is softer and warmer. After rain light is reflected on wet surfaces. Avoid midday white light which harsh and has no character. Technical: Camera settings
Choose Manuel mode or Aperture priority and choose a mid aperture of f/8.
Check that your shutter speed does not get slower than 1/60 sec otherwise use a tripod for slower shutter speeds, or increase ISO. Be creative with the way you photograph an area using different ways to frame a landscape, view or structure.
Look for details too, get up close and make abstract images.
If you encounter people on your walk stop them ask if you can make a portrait of them.
PHOTO-GAME 6: GOOGLE EARTH
With travel restrictions in place it is almost impossible to go abroad or visit exotic destinations. What would it be like to visit a location on Google Maps made famous by a particular photographer and, using Street View, attempt to make pictures like them? Here are some examples from staff and students at Thomas Tallis School who run Photo Pedagogy. Follow them on Instagram too!
Here’s my first attempt at doing this. I visited Greenwood, Mississippi and tried to look through William Eggleston’s viewfinder. Thanks to @artpedagogy for the prompt. Where next? New York as Roy DeCarava? Paris as Brassai? Reggio Emilia as Luigi Ghirri? Marseille as Germaine Krull? Where would you go and as whom?
Inspired by artists like Michael Wolf and Doug Richard, why not take a virtual field trip using Google Street View? I decided to visit Auckland, New Zealand this afternoon and took a few snaps while I was there. I spotted a severed arm, a building on fire and a high risk crash site complete with red light cameras. It was an action packed adventure! Where would you choose to go on your virtual school trip?
Year 13 photographers visited Moscow (as promised) this morning on their virtual school trip and used William Klein as inspiration who famously documented his experience of the city in the early 60s. Looking at some if his images from the book ‘Moscow/Mockba’ they explored the streets and returned with their own William Klein style pictures.
PHOTO-GAME 7: Photography Genre Treasure Hunt
Another one from the team at Photo Pedagogy. This task explores the following genres: travel, nature, self-portrait, landscape, still life, fine art, portrait, fashion, architecture. But which is which?
Participants: Individual task Aim: Capture the ball in mid-air and three balls in a line Method: Use your camera try and frame the ball Location: Outside Evidence: Produce blog post with a selection of edited images and an evaluation Deadline: One week > 29 March Technical: Camera settings
Select S-mode (shutter speed priority) and Auto ISO on camera.
Begin with fast shutter speed 1/250 and reduce by 1 stop > 1/125 another stop > 1/60
Frame each shot using a standard lens with a focal lenght of 50 mm.
Here are three quick responses to the Genre Treasure Hunt from someone’s at home, at work and in someone living in New Zealand. Such interesting differences that foreground the creative decision-making process.
EXTENSION 1: Make a multi-genre single image.
EXTENSION 2: Make a sequence of images
Sometimes constraints can help us break out of habitual behaviours. How might you explore photographic genres whilst observing self-imposed rules? For example, choose a genre of photography. Create a sequence of images observing the following rules:
1. You must be sitting down when you make the photograph 2. The photograph must be black and white 3. You can only photograph another photograph 4. Your photograph must be square.
The first few pictures here are still life photographs of Josef Sudek’s glass studies from an Internet search.
Source image@ Josef Sudek
The second set are travel photographs of virtual journeys to visit prisons in Greenwich. What other rules might generate unusual images? Suggestions on a postcard please…
PHOTO-GAME 8: PHOTOGRAPH EVERY IMAGE YOU ENCOUNTER IN ONE DAY
What types of image will you encounter today? Why are they there? Who put them before you? What do they mean to you (or others)? How might they influence your thoughts, emotions, opinions and actions?AND THEN… how will you photograph these encounters – e.g. formally, objectively; with a documentary or snapshot aesthetic; with attention to surface, light, pixels – and why? You can look specifically at photography but you could easily explore imagery of art and design that you encounter in one day. This photo game is mostly, trying to instigate activities with a focus on the ‘active’ – getting students away from screens and thinking, noticing, questioning, creating.
PHOTO-GAME 9: IMPROVISATION – HOW TO CONSTRUCT A NARRATIVE
FINAL TASK: DEVELOP YOUR OWN PHOTOGAME
The greatest freedom is to have no choice. Make a set of parameters within which you will work. This could be a geographic parameter (one city block for instance), or a psychological, thematic, or technical one. The point is to create a method of working where you make some very strict and precise choices about how you will not work. The stricter the better.
Here is a project based on developing your own Photo Game devised by PhotoPedagogy with have some helpful guides you can download.
In 2015 Tom Pope came to Jersey for a 6 month residency with Archisle in the Photographic Archive of the Société Jersiaise and produced an exhibition and installation I Am Not Tom Pope, You Are All Tom Pope featuring a number of diverse and new work incorporating elements of photography, performance, video and sculpture. As part of this exhibition Tom made The Last Portage where he in collaboration with friend and the public dragged a boat across Jersey from Gorey Harbour to St Ouen’s. Go to his website to see full version of the film and many other examples of his unique work. Here are some of the key concepts that underpin’s his work and practice:
Here is a clip where Tom is talking about his work Over the Edge
Here is a link to Tom Pope’s website where you can see a number of different works exploring the relationship between Performance and Photography using both video and stills photography to records his public performances and events.
Another link to a video teaser about his work which was a solo-exhibition So It Goes at London Gallery George and Jorgen
BLOG
You are expected to show evidence of the following three EEEs on the blog for each PHOTO-GAME you complete.
EDITING: For each shoot select and adjust your best set of images (as per instructions in game) using either Lightroom / Photoshop using basic tools such as cropping, exposure, contrast, tonality, colour balance, monochrome etc.
EXPERIMENTING: Make sure you demonstrate creativity and produce at least 3 different variations of the same image, eg. colour/ monochrome, montage/ grid, juxtaposition/ sequence etc.
EVALUATING: Compare your images and photographic experiments and provide some analysis of artists references that has inspired your ideas and shoots. Use the Photo-Literacy matrix below.
INSPIRATIONS
The exam project is about exploring an idea and provide evidence of experimentation, imagination and making creative connections with the work of others through an intelligent and informed discourse (debate). Here are further inspirations and lines of enquiries that you can follow on from having a go at some of the photogames. The suggested activities below are borrowed from Photo Pedagogy – see more here
Looking at how performance artists use photography and how photography is in itself a performance.
Performing for (and with) the Camera
The notion of performance in photography is tricky. Students might wonder about the relationship between photography and what they might think of as the antics of conceptual artists. Asking students to design and execute performances as a prelude to documentation with the camera might initiate a threshold experience for some, pushing them well outside their comfort zones. Whilst inducing a stressful experience isn’t the point of this set of exercises, it is designed to encourage students to really question their relationship to photography, reminding them that it is a “hybrid kind of picture making, democratic and diverse.” Photographs perform a range of functions in our lives and making art is only one of them. Linked to this is photography’s relationship to time. We primarily take photos to remember, to stop time, to capture the ephemeral, to fix a live event. As a consequence, all photographs “remind us of things lost“.
Performance and live art is all the rage, largely due to the opening of Tate’s new Switch House extension, a space designed to showcase art made since the 1960s. New galleries, like the Tanks, and existing spaces, like the Turbine Hall, enable audiences to engage with art that would otherwise feel restricted in conventional galleries. Nevertheless, Tate has also explored the relationship between performance art, live art, happenings etc. and lens based documentation in a recent exhibition entitled ‘Performing for the Camera‘. Photography has been used to capture performances since its invention – from the stars of the Victorian stage to the art happenings of the 1960s, right up to today’s trend for selfies. This exhibition explores the relationship between the two forms, looking at how performance artists use photography and how photography is in itself a performance.I was lucky enough to attend Tate’s Summer School this year. I’ve written a blog post about this experience and some of the lessons I took away from it. Chief among these was the determination to use some of the strategies employed by artists Anna Lucas and Alex Schady and to encourage my students to engage with the relationship between performance and lens based image making.
What follows, therefore, are some playful ideas and experiments that we have explored so far this term.
Yves Klein with Harry Shunk & János Kender ’Leap into the Void’ 1960
Bruce Nauman ’Self-Portrait as a Fountain’ 1966-7
Douglas Huebler ’Duration Piece #4′ 1969
John Baldessari ’Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) 1973
Keith Arnatt ’Self-Burial (Television Interference Project)’ 1969
Masahisa Fukase ‘From Window’ 1974
Masahisa Fukase ‘From Window’ 1974
Amalia Ulman ’Excellences & Perfections’ 2014-15
Some initial questions:
Why are light and lens based media often used to document performances and live events?
Why might some performance artists not want their work to be documented?
Is it possible to document a performance in such a way as to capture its spirit/atmosphere and, therefore, do it justice?
Which artists have considered the lens based document to be integral to their performance based practice?
In what sense is making a photograph or film a kind of performance in itself?
How has social media and the use of smartphones influenced the way we perform for the camera?
Some research
This article by Liz Jobey is a great place to start. She quotes Allan Kaprow, inventor of the ‘Happening’, on the subject of artists’ relationship with everyday life:
Artists must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street… we should utilise the specific substances of sound, movements, people, odours, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists… Young artists of today need no longer say, “I am a painter” or “a poet” or “a dancer”. They are simply artists. All of life will be open to them. — Allan Kaprow
Writing in The Guardian about the Tate exhibition, critic Adrian Searle comments on the contemporary relationship between camera, photographer and viewer:
Photographic space becomes a theatre. Sometimes the photographer is witness, sometimes collaborator, sometimes the one in front as well as behind the camera. When we are photographed – mugshot, passport photo, press shot, selfie – we are all performing, for ourselves and for other people, if not for the camera. Nowadays we do it on YouTube and Instagram and Twitter, too, and any other platform you can think of. Which of my avatars shall I show you today? — Adrian Searle
Photography is a great tool for noticing, for paying attention to the miraculous in the everyday. Everything from brushing ones teeth to playing a Beethoven sonata might be considered a kind of performance and lens based media which, in the form of mobile devices, can be used to document (and create) both a mundane and a remarkable performance.
The Tate exhibition presents different kinds of relationships between camera and performance:
This film about the pioneering work of Joan Jonas contains some wonderful footage of her work ‘Song Delay’ which is currently on display in the Switch House at Tate Modern. Simon Baker, Tate’s photography curator,gives us an introduction to the exhibition ‘Performing for the Camera’ in this short video. And here is Romain Maider, one of the artists included in the Tate show, discussing his practice.
And here is Romain Maider, one of the artists included in the Tate show, discussing his practice.
Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera exhibition explores the relationship between photography and performance through works by Ai Weiwei, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Yves Klein and Francesca Woodman. Curator and art critic Morgan Quaintance takes a look.
Serious Play
Chance is an important theme in art and photography. The first systematic investigations of chance were begun by the Dadaists and Surrealists in the 1920s. Marcel Duchamp and Jean (Hans) Arp created works of art according to the laws of chance. The Surrealists, taking their cue from Dada, embraced chance as a new principle.
I am trying to make my photography automatic, to use my camera as I would a typewriter. — Man Ray
The word the Surrealists used to describe the operations of chance was ‘automatism‘. André Breton used the word in his definition of Surrealism in the 1924 manifesto:
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
Influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and his experiences of soldiers suffering from mental illness during the First World War, Breton conceived of artists (poets first and then visual artists) as discoverers of a hidden reality, a sur-reality, beyond the superficial facts of existence. By embracing chance through ‘psychic automatism’ he proposed to reconfigure our relationship to the world and ourselves. For the Surrealists, chance provided a series of creative strategies that offered to liberate the unconscious and create “convulsive beauty“.
The real importance of automatism lay in the fact that it led to a different relation between the artist and the creative act […] the surrealists conceived themselves as explorers and researchers rather than ‘artist’ in the traditional sense and it was discovery rather than invention that became crucial for them. — Michael Richardson
This kind of utopian energy and revolutionary fervour can seem hopelessly naive to us now. But imagine a world recovering from the death and destruction of the ‘great’ war, a time of fantastic new discoveries in science and industry that would alter mankind’s relationship to time and space – the motor car, air travel, the wireless, the theory of relativity – not to mention photography, still in its relative infancy as an art form. Western culture prior to 1914 had prized logic and the rational and yet this had led to the horror of trench warfare. Automatism was therefore an antidote to logic – a deliberate attempt to seek a new kind of sense, one based on chance associations.
gallery of images:
3 Standard Stoppages’ by Marcel Duchamp is an exploration of the role that chance can play in the creation of a new kind of art. Duchamp rejected painting in order to experiment with new forms. He chose existing objects, calling them Readymades, and displayed them in art contexts, thus changing their meaning. His use of chance processes was another way to question the conventional methods of making works of art. Duchamp dropped three metre–long pieces of thread onto a canvas, then cut wood the shape of their silhouettes to suggest the idea of indeterminacy. Even standard length pieces of thread, he suggests, when allowed can re-arrange themselves into different shapes thus bringing into question the notion of standardisation. This idea may relate to the theory of Pataphysics invented by the French writer Alfred Jarry to describe the ‘science of imaginary solutions’, and explicitly designed to ‘examine the laws governing exceptions, and … explain the universe parallel to this one’.
3 Standard Stoppages’ by Marcel Duchamp
RULES OF THE GAME
Suggested Activities:
Students devise a game of choice that requires photographic documentation. Consider the most appropriate way to compose and display the set of imagesStudents may wish to explore the many ways in which artists and photographers use titles to challenge, confuse and intrigue viewers. For example, Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe has two titles, one written on the canvas ‘This is not a pipe’ (in French) and an additional title drawing attention to the game untrustworthiness of pictures The Treason of Images.
Students explore the relationship between words and images, either the titling of individual pictures or whole collections, so that the viewer is required to puzzle over the connection between the visual and textual information. Students may wish to investigate the theory of semiotics and notions of the connotative and denotative meanings in photographic images.
Chance and indeterminacy are important ideas in the aleatory music of John Cage. He employed a range of devices including the I Ching so that he was not totally in control of the resulting music. Challenge students to create their own system for creating aleatory photographs.
George Brecht’s 1957 essay on Chance Imagery details a variety of techniques used by artists to introduce indeterminacy into their work including coins, dice, numbered wheels, cards, bowl drawing, automatism and random numbers.
Students could explore other artists whose practice embraces collaboration. For example, Sophie Calle and Vito Acconci have both explored collaboration with strangers. Students devise a photographic activity that requires the collaboration of a stranger to complete it.
In 1953, artist Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by fellow artist Willem de Kooning, thus calling into question the very nature of the work of art. Ask students to devise an activity with a fellow photography student inspired by this experiment.
Challenging the conventions of art making was an important strategy of the Dadaists and Surrealists. Ask students to make a list of the ‘rules’ associated with making a successful photograph E.g. image in focus, framing of subject, rule of thirds, no obstructions etc. Now ask students to create a set of images which deliberately break one or more of these conventions.
Encourage students to practice Blind Photography. This involves covering the viewfinder and/or viewing screen of the camera so that it is not possible to see a preview of the image before clicking the shutter. The idea is to photograph by instinct, giving up as much control as possible to the camera. This can be further developed by blindfolding the photographer. A classmate acts as the photographer’s guide, helping them navigate a particular space safely, whilst the blindfolded photographer makes a set of images.
Explore the work of contemporary artists for whom instructions and play are important ideas. For example, Sol Le Witt’s photographs were often not taken by the artist himself. Erwin Wurm draws instructions for his collaborators to create One Minute Sculptures. Conceived by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, do it is an exhibition of artists’ instructions, that began in Paris in 1993. It has become the longest-running and most far-reaching exhibition ever.
THE END OF YOUR FINAL MOCK EXAM DAY – ALL COURSEWORK MUST BE COMPLETE:
Structure your 3 day mock exam as follows:
Day 1: Complete essay, incl illustrations, referencing and bibliography + publish on blog (essay also needs to be added and presented at the end of your photobook)
Day 2: Complete photobook design/ edit film + produce blogpost showing design process and final evaluation. Use a combination of print screens + annotation
Day 3: Select final prints and review all work, including essay, photobook, film + produce blogposts showing virtual presentation of your final prints + evaluation. Finish and publish any missing blog posts as per planner and tracking sheet.
ESSAY Publish essay as a separate blog post with illustrations of key works by artists and your own images analysed in your text, as well as a bibliography listing all literary sources used. Also include essay in the back of your book using layout in text columns and include illustrations and bibliography.
PHOTOBOOK Final book design checked and signed off by teacher. Make sure you have a made a blog post that charts your design decisions, including prints screens of final layout with annotation and write an evaluation.
For more help and guidance editing, process and evaluation go to blog post below.
BLURB – ORDER BOOK Inside Lightroom upload book design to BLURB, log onto your account on their website, pay and order the book.
Consider spending a few extra pounds on choosing better paper, such as Premium Lustre in check-out, change colour on end paper or choose different cloth/ linen if needed.
FILM Final film checked and signed off by teacher. Make sure you have a made a blog post that charts your editing process, including prints screens with annotation and write an evaluation.
For more help and guidance on editing, process and evaluation go to blog post below.
Export final film as mp4 file and upload to Youtube / Microsoft Streams and embed on Blog. Follow these steps:
In Premier: Click on Sequence > Render IN/OUT
File > Export > Media
Export Settings: Format H.264
Output Name: use title of your film and save to V:Data drive
Click Export at bottom
Using Microsoft Stream: Open up Office 365
Go to All Apps and select Stream
Create > Upload Video
Browse to upload your exported film from V:Data drive
Write a short description, choose thumbnail and publish
My Content > Videos > embed film into Blog post with evaluation.
In Youtube: Set up an account at home (www.youtube.com)
Click Create (top right corner) > Upload video
Select file > your exported film from V:Data drive
Write a short description and choose thumbnail
Once uploaded, embed film into Blog post with evaluation.
BLOGPOSTS All blog posts in relation to the above must be published, including any other posts missing from previous work modules since the beginning of A2 academic year, including zines which must be printed and bound ready for assessment and exhibition.
See previous student, Stanley Lucas as a guide on blogposts that needs to be done and published before you the end of your Mock Exam
Each student should submit film from project on Rebellion or Personal Study or both. You can submit more than one piece of work, eg. film, photobook as pdf and/or 6 images.
Create GPF folder in your M:drive and follow the instructions below.
Submit film: Copy URL address from your film from YouTube (Microsoft Stream will not work) + wrote 100 words statement in Word doc + include up to 6 still images as jpgs and create a Zip folder in your name.
Submit Photobook: create pdf from Lightroom + write 100 words statement in a Word document + include up to 6 images as jpgs and create a Zip folder in your name.
Submit 6 images: Image size: no longer than 1000 pixels. Label the files with your name and numeration (firstname_lastname_1.jpg) + write 100 words statement in a Word document and create a Zip folder in your name
How to create a Zip folder: right click inside your GPF folder > send to > compressed (zipped) folder
NEWSPAPER SPREADS: In anticipation of the possibility of producing a newspaper based on the themes of LOVE & REBELLION design 3-4 versions of a newspaper spreads based on images from your photobook.
You must design the following spreads:
FULL-BLEED: Select one movie still as a full-bleed spread.
JUXTAPOSITION: Select 2 movie stills and juxtapose images opposite eahc others or layer them to create new meaning.
SEQUENCE: Select a series of movie stills (between 5 – 12) and produce a sequence from your film either as a grid, story-board, contact-sheet or typology.
MONTAGE: Select an appropriate set of movie stills and create a montage of layered images. You may to choose to work in Photoshop for more creativity and import into InDesign as one image (new document in Photoshop 420mm(h) x 280.5mm(w) in 300 dpi)
Follow these instructions:
Create new document in InDesign with these dimensions: 420mm(h) x 280.5mm(w), 10 pages, Orientation: Portrait, 2 columns, Column gutter 5mm, Margins: 10mm, Bleed: 3mm
Only use in high-res TIFF/JPEG files (4000 pixels)
Use design ideas and layouts from your zine/ newspaper research as well as taking inspiration from artists listed here as a starting points for your spreads.
Incorporate texts and typography where appropriate.
Once you have completed pagespreads, double check:
All images are high-res file
Check links in InDesign (if Red Question mark appears re-point to image in your folder)
Package your layout and save in your name into this shared folder: M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\LOVE & REBELLION\Newspaper
INSPIRATIONS
SEQUENCE
Shannon O’Donnell:That’s Not The Way The River Flows (2019) is a photographic series that playfully explores masculinity and femininity through self-portraits. The work comes from stills taken from moving image of the photographer performing scenes in front of the camera. This project aims to show the inner conflicts that the photographer has with identity and the gendered experience. It reveals the pressures, stereotypes and difficulties faced with growing up in a heavily, yet subtly, gendered society and how that has impacted the acceptance and exploration of the self.
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 gelatin silver prints with hand-applied text 3 3/8 x 5 inches The Spirit Leaves the Body, 1968 Seven gelatin silver prints with hand-applied text 3 3/8 x 5 inches (each image)Death Comes to the Old Lady, 1969 Five gelatin silver prints with hand-applied text 3 3/8 x 5 inches (each image)Tracy Moffatt: Something More, 1989
Tracy Moffatt: The nine images in Something More tell an ambiguous tale of a young woman’s longing for ‘something more’, a quest which brings dashed hopes and the loss of innocence. With its staged theatricality and storyboard framing, the series has been described by critic Ingrid Perez as ‘a collection of scenes from a film that was never made’. While the film may never have been made, we recognise its components from a shared cultural memory of B-grade cinema and pulp fiction, from which Moffatt has drawn this melodrama. The ‘scenes’ can be displayed in any order – in pairs, rows or as a grid – and so their storyline is not fixed, although we piece together the arc from naïve country girl to fallen woman abandoned on the roadside in whatever arrangement they take. Moffatt capitalises on the cinematic device of montage, mixing together continuous narrative, flashbacks, cutaways, close-ups and memory or dream sequences, to structure the series, and relies on our knowledge of these devices to make sense and meaning out of the assemblage.
Philip Toledano: Day with my father, 2010
Philip Toledano: DAYS WITH MY FATHER is a son’s photo journal of his aging father’s last years. Following the death of his mother, photographer Phillip Toledano was shocked to learn of the extent of his father’s severe memory loss.
Sophie Calle’s practice is characterised by performances using rule-based scenarios, which she then documents. Venetian Suite consists of black and white photographs, texts and maps that document a journey the artist made to Venice in order to follow a man, referred to only as Henri B., whom she had previously briefly met in Paris. Although Calle undertook the journey in 1979, the texts describe the actions as taking place in 1980. Venetian Suite records Calle’s attempts to track her subject over the course of his thirteen-day stay in Venice. She investigates and stalks him, enlisting the help of friends and acquaintances she makes in the city. Eventually Henri B. recognises Calle, and they share a silent walk. Even after this encounter Calle continues her project, shadowing Henri B. from a distance until his arrival back in Paris.
The work was initially produced in book form in 1983; the same year Calle also presented the work as a sound installation in a confessional booth. In 1996 she configured Venetian Suite as a gallery-based work, the appearance of which deliberately recalls a detective casebook, with texts written in a style that mimics and deconstructs the narrative tension typical of detective novels or film noir. The text begins as follows:
For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them. At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him. (Calle and Baudrillard 1988, p.2.)
Walkers Evans and Labour Anonymous
Walker Evans: One of the founding fathers of Documentary Photography Walker Evans used cropping as part of his work. Another pioneer of the photo-essay, W. Eugene Smith also experimented with cropping is his picture-stories
Hans-Peter Feldmann, Sonntagsbilder (Sunday Pictures). 1976 The complete set of 21 offset lithographs, on thin wove paper, with full margins, all I. various sizes
Hans-Peter Feldmann: (b. 1941 Duesseldorf). The photographic work of Hans-Peter Feldmann began with his own publications in small print-runs between 1968 and 1975. Often using reproductions of photographs from magazines or private snapshots, which he mixed with his own photographs, Feldmann, like Ed Ruscha, undermined the aura of the unique, “authentic” work of art. With his laconic imagery he seeks to break down conventional notions of art.
MONTAGE
Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image.
Mask XIV 2006
John Stezaker: Is a British artist who is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.
His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention
Thomas Sauvin and Kensuke Koike: ‘No More, No Less’ In 2015, French artist Thomas Sauvin acquired an album produced in the early 1980s by an unknown Shanghai University photography student. This volume was given a second life through the expert hands of Kensuke Koike, a Japanese artist based in Venice whose practice combines collage and found photography. The series, “No More, No Less”, born from the encounter between Koike and Sauvin, includes new silver prints made from the album’s original negatives. These prints were then submitted to Koike’s sharp imagination, who, with a simple blade and adhesive tape, deconstructs and reinvents the images. However, these purely manual interventions all respect one single formal rule: nothing is removed, nothing is added, “No More, No Less”. In such a context that blends freedom and constraint, Koike and Sauvin meticulously explore the possibilities of an image only made up of itself.
Veronica GesickaTraces presents a selection of photomontages created by Weronika Gęsicka on the basis of American stock photographs from the 1950s and 1960s. Family scenes, holiday memories, everyday life – all of that suspended somewhere between truth and fiction. The images, modified by Gęsicka in various ways, are wrapped in a new context: our memories of the people and situations are transformed and blur gradually. Humorous as they may seem, Gęsicka’s works are a comment on such fundamental matters as identity, self-consciousness, relationships, imperfection.
JUXTAPOSTION
Juxtaposition is placing two things together to show contrast or similarities.Look at the newspapers: LIBERATION / OCCUPATION and FUTURE OF ST HELIER produced by past students and the publication GLOBAL MARKET on the table by ECAL students for inspiration.
Spreads from Global MarketW. Eugene Smith. Jazz Loft ProjectCOLOUR – SHAPESSHAPES – GEOMETRYRepetitionOBJECT – PORTRAIT
FULL-BLEED: Image goes across two pages to the edge
Page-spread from FUTURE OF ST HELIERPage-spread from LIBERATION / OCCUPATION
AO1 Develop ideas through sustained and focused investigations informed by contextual and other sources, demonstrating analytical and critical understanding AO2 Explore and select appropriate resources, media, materials, techniques and processes, reviewing and refining ideas as work develops AO3 Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions, reflecting critically on work and progress AO4 Present a personal and meaningful response that realises intentions and, where appropriate, makes connections between visual and other elements.
Definition in dictionary:
TRANSITION
noun
1. the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another.”students in transition from one programme to another”
verb
2. undergo or cause to undergo a process or period of transition.”he transitioned into filmmaking easily”
FREEDOMS
noun
1. the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.”we do have some freedom of choice”
2. the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.”the shark thrashed its way to freedom”
LIMITATIONS
1. a limiting rule or circumstance; a restriction.”severe limitations on water use”
2. (LAW) a legally specified period beyond which an action may be defeated or a property right does not continue.
How to start – TASKS FOR H-TERM
Read both the Exam Papers and Exam Planner thoroughly, especially pages pages 3-5 and page 24-27 which details specific starting points and approaches to the exam theme – make notes! Look up the word in the dictionary, synonyms and etymology (the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.)
Brainstorm your idea and research artists listed – look also at starting points in other disciplines e.g. Fine Art and Graphic Communication etc.
Begin to gather information, collect images, make a mood-board and mind-map,
Make plans for photoshoots and write a specification.
Produce at least ONE PHOTO-SHOOT over H-Term as a response to tasks listed below and initial research and ideas.
You must show evidence of the above on your blog– complete at least 4-5 blog posts.
2018 presentation with examples of Artists References from page 5 of exam booklet – showing evolution of artistic freedom
Each week you are required to make a photographic response (still-images and/or moving image) that relates to the research and work that you explored in that week. Sustained investigations means taking a lot of time and effort to produce the best you can possibly do – reviewing, modifying and refining your idea and taking more pictures to build up a strong body of work with a clear sense of purpose and direction
Prior to the timed examination you must produce and submit preparatory supporting studies which show why and how the supervised and timed work takes the form it does. You must produce a number of blog posts 25-40 that charts the development of your final piece from conception to completion and must show evidence of:
Research and exploration of your ideas
Recorded your experiences and observations
Analysis and interpretation of things seen, imagined or remembered
Experimentation with materials, processes and techniques
Select, evaluate and develop ideas further through sustained investigation
Show connections between your work and that of other artists/ photographers
Controlled Exam 15 hrs over three days: (Final Outcome)
This time is for you to fine tune and adjust your final images for print using creative tools in Lightroom/Photoshop and/or complete a final edit of your photobook, film or video in Premiere. Your final outcome(s) must be presented in a thoughtful, careful and professional manner demonstrating skills in presenting work in either window mounts, picture frames, foam-board, and/ or submit pdf of photobook, or embed (from Youtube upload) moving image and video based production to the blog.
Week 24: 8 – 14 March: EXPLORE THEMES > RESEARCH > ANALYSE > PLAN > RECORD > EXPERIMENT > PRESENT
Lesson 1 (Mon): Seminar Read both exam papers and discuss in class.
Homework: Photo-game1 What to Photograph? Deadline: One week > 15 March Produce blog post with a selection of edited images and an evaluation
Each student think of an instruction, an object, place, or scenario to be photographed. All the instructions will be collated and given to all students in the class. Every student have to make one image of each instruction. As an example, here is a list of instructions (don’t copy!)
A red ball A tree and a dog An ugly photograph A political argument A kiss A shallow focus image of a bar of soap a random photograph An unambiguous photograph Grass and concrete An old-fashioned photograph A futuristic photograph a blue car and a white car Nigeria Timeless beauty Flowing water
Lesson 2 (Tue): Group work Research 1: Analyse and interpret chosen theme(s) and produce mindmap & moodboard. Publish on blog.
Lesson 3: (Wed): Group work Present your research and interpretation of exam theme(s). 3 mins.
Lesson 4: (Thurs) Individual work Statement of Intent: Based on you mindmap and moodboard begin to formulate a specification with details of 2-3 ideas that you wish to explore: How, who, when, where and why? Plan a photo shoot and/or photographic response to one of your initial ideas.
Lesson 5: (Fri) Individual work Research 2: Begin to support your initial ideas by looking at the work of others and find inspiration from photographers listed on pages 24-27 in the Exam papers. Look also for specific starting points in other disciplines, such as Fine Art, Graphic Communication and Textile Design.
Analyse the work of at least two or more photographers/ artists with references to texts/ sources/ quotes and explain why you have chosen them and how it relates to your idea and the exam theme.
Produce quality blog posts for each artist reference that illustrate your thinking and understanding using pictures and annotation.
Plan a photo shoot and/or photographic response. Deadline: One week > Fri 19 March Produce blog post with a selection of edited images and an evaluation.
Week 25: 15– 22 March: EXPLORE THEMES > RESEARCH > ANALYSE > PLAN > RECORD > EXPERIMENT > PRESENT
Lesson 1: (Mon 15 March) Photogame 1: What to Photograph?
Upload all images in a folder and print a set of small prints (9x13cm = 4 per A4 sheet). Lay all images in a huge grid on the tables so that vertically you can see every students response to the same instruction, while horizontally you will be able to discern each student’s approach or style.
An artwork which consists of 5 dice, each describing a decision leading to a photograph.
Participants: Whole class, each student roll the dice once. Aim: Roll the five dices and write down instructions Method: Produce a set of 10 images using the instructions Location: Outside/ Inside Evidence: Produce blog post with a selection of edited images and an evaluation Deadline: One week > 22 March
Here is a link to a new blog post with more Photogames – use it as an inspiration for generating ideas and make images. It has instructions about how to develop your own Photogame.
Produce blog post from the above photogame with a selection of images, experimentation and analysis. Make contextual links with John Baldessari work where appropriate.
Week 26-27: 22 March – 1 April + EASTER: EXPLORE THEMES > RESEARCH > ANALYSE > PLAN > RECORD > EXPERIMENT > PRESENT
Statement of Intent Based on you mindmap and moodboard begin to formulate a specification with details of 2-3 ideas that you wish to explore: How, who, when, where and why? Plan a photo shoot and/or photographic response to one of your initial ideas. Research 2: ARTISTS REFERENCES Begin to support your initial ideas by looking at the work of others and find inspiration from photographers listed on pages 24-27 in the Exam papers. Look also for specific starting points in other disciplines, such as Fine Art, Graphic Communication and Textile Design.
Planning: PHOTOSHOOT Plan at least 4-5 photoshoot you can complete by the time you return from Easter. They need to have a sense of purpose and include what, where, when, who and explain how they explore the theme. Make sure you produce at least one shoot before Easter to test out ideas and discuss with your teacher.
EASTER >Recording: PHOTOSHOOOTS Make sure you complete most of your planned shoots over Easter break. From each shoot select 8-12 images for further experimentation. Produce quality blog posts from each shoot and analyse and evaluate your photos through annotation showing understanding of visual language using specialist terminology. Follow process below of three EEEs.
Before you break off for Easter to must have completed all the above with relevant blog posts charting your thinking and creative progress. Make sure you produce quality blog posts that illustrate your thinking and understanding using pictures and annotation.
You are expected to show evidence of the following three EEEs on the blog.
EDITING: For each shoot you have made select and adjust your best set of images using either Lightroom / Photoshop using basic tools such as cropping, exposure, contrast, tonality, colour balance, monochrome etc.
EXPERIMENTING: Make sure you demonstrate creativity and produce at least 3 different variations of the same image, eg. colour/ monochrome, montage/ grid, juxtaposition/ sequence etc.
EVALUATING: Compare your images and photographic experiments and provide some analysis of artists references that has inspired your ideas and shoots. Use the Photo-Literacy matrix below. Consider what you need to do next to develop your project? What’s your next step!
REVIEW > REFLECT > REFINE
Produce another shoot
Revisit idea/ concept
Refine experimentation
FINAL OUTCOME
Begin to consider how you wish to present your work:
A set of final prints – single, diptych, triptych, multiple images mounted on foamboard, mountboard A photobook – design in Lightroom using Blurb A film – editing in Premiere
UNDERSTANDING FILM EDITING: NARRATIVE, CINEMATOGRAPHY, SOUND, MISE-EN-SCENE, EDITING
Earlier in the academic year we looked at narrative in photography, literature and cinema. Let’s refresh our memory and revisit some of the theories around visual storytelling.
Blog: Produce a number of posts that show evidence of the following:
1. Research a film and describe its story – including subject-matter, genre and style etc.
2. Who is the film director? Why did he/she make it? (intentions/ reasons) Who is it for? (audience) How was it received? (any press, awards, legacy etc.)
3. Deconstruct the film’s narrative, editing and sound, such as; scenes, action, shot sizes, camera angles and mise-en-scene (the arrangement of the scenery in front of the camera) from location, props, people, lighting, sound etc.
CASE-STUDIES: Look below for examples of films and theory on editing and sound used in understanding cinema and language of moving images.
THEORY
For more details see Dr McKinlay’s blog on Narrative in Cinema and The Language of Moving Image which look more specifically at some of the recognised conventions and key terminology associated with moving image (film, TV, adverts, animations, installations and other moving image products) which will help to create your own moving image product. Remember the key is to know what the rules are before trying to break them.
The following recognised conventions should help students to deconstruct key moving image media texts and will also help students to create their own moving image products, working within or against these conventions. Remember the key is to know what the rules are before trying to break them.
As alluded to, when looking at moving image products, it is useful to make a link to NARRATIVE THEORY as most often the key ideas, codes and conventions that are put to use for moving image products, are usually put together to serve ideas around NARRATIVE. For example, character, theme, motivation, empathy, ideology and so on.
Here are a few things to consider when working with Moving Image. (These are extracts from Dr McKinlay’s blog posts above)
THE CAMERA: Here are some of the key features of the camera in terms of creating a moving image product.
Focus and Depth of Field: The focus is used to direct and prioritise elements in a shot and therefore prioritise certain information. For example, it will determine who the audience should look at (even if we are not listening to them). It may switch our focus (known technically as a pull focus / rack focus / follow focus) between one element and another. Remember that the elements may not be people, but could be objects, spaces, shapes or colours, which may represent an idea, theme, belief etc (see the post on Semiotics)
Tracking / Panning / Craning / Tilting / Hand held / Steadicam
Establishing Shot / Long Shot / Medium Shot / Close-up / Big Close-Up / Extreme Close Up (students often struggle with the first and the last again issues with SCALE, SIZE & SPACE, so practice is really important)
Insert Shot
THE EDIT: Moving image products (like other media products: print, radio, on-line) are clearly constructed around the concept of putting one thing next to another. This is editing.
Editing is the process of manipulating separate images into a continuous piece of moving image which develops characters, themes, spaces and ideas through a series of events, interactions and occurrences. As such, it is (usually) LINEAR and SEQUENTIAL, although, it must be remembered that moving image products often parachute the audience into a particular moment and usually leave them at an equally unresolved moment. As such BACK STORY,FORESHADOWING, REPETITION, ELLIPSIS, DEVELOPMENT, ENIGMA, DRAMATIC IRONY and other concepts are really important to always bear in mind. Again NARRATIVE THEORY is really important to an understanding of moving image products.
Moving from Camera to Edit, would be to look at the way camera can frame and position characters and thereby the audience by creating ‘subjectivity‘ and empathy in the way they are constructed. This can be used to deliberately ‘stitch‘ the audience into the text in a deliberate and particular way.
This idea of sewing / stitching the audience into the text was developed by theoreticians of the “Screen theory” approach — Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey, so follow this link to find out a little bit more.
SHOT SEQUENCING 1: Shot / Reverse Shot
The Shot / Reverse Shot a really good starting point for students to both think about and produce moving image products. The basic sequence runs from a wide angle master shot that is at a 90′ angle to (usually) two characters. This sets up the visual space and allows the film-maker to to then shoot separate close-ups, that if connected through an eye-line match are able to give the impression that they are opposite each other talking. The shots are usually over the shoulder. Firstly, they include both characters – which are called EXTERNAL REVERSES. As the drama increases, the framing of each shot then excludes the back of the head of the other character and moves in to a much closer over the shoulder shot – which are called INTERNAL REVERSES. Remember that these shots are not creating a direct look to camera. To look directly at the camera creates a very different relationship between the characters and the audience and is a technique that is only used for specific techniques / genres / film-makers.
The basic edit: cut/fade/dissolve
SHOT SEQUENCING 2: Shot progression
Shot progression usually involves the following shots (although not always in the same order). The use of these shots allow the audience to understand SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS between locations, people, movements etc. The length of shot will determine the drama, empathy, theme etc. The choice of how to sequence each shot will determine the AESTHETIC QUALITY of the product. The next sequence will then follow a similar pattern, which again allows the audience to understand concepts such as SPACE, TIME, DISTANCE, MOVEMENT, MOTIVATION, PLOT, THEME etc.
establishing shot / ES, moving to
wide shot / WS,
to medium shot / MS,
to close up / CU,
to big close up / BCU;
and then back out again
The use of sequential editing (editing one clip to another) allows for a number of key concepts to be produced:
parallel editing: two events editing together – so that they may be happening at the same time, or not?
flashback / flash-forward – allowing time to shift
montage – a series of independent and perhaps unconnected shots to be edited together
CONTINUITY EDITING
Continuity editing can be seen as the opposite of montage editing as the main aim is to create a sense of realism or ‘believability’ known as verisimilitude and has it’s own structure of rules where shots are edited together at particular times or on particular shots. For example:
match on action
eye-line match
graphic match
sound bridge
30′ rule
180′ rule
Editing is the process of putting one element / idea next to another. It is known as the Kuleshov effect, in that adding one element / idea to another actually produces a third idea / element, which if constructed well can produce in the audience an idea that isn’t actually present! If this sounds confusing, the basic rule in editing is you don’t show everything literally, you need to use just enough information to provide ideas and suggestions for your audience to develop EMPATHY and INVOLVEMENT with characters, themes, setting, plot. As such, what you leave out known as ELLIPSIS is just as important as what you put in. Again the ideas of SPACE, SIZE & SCALE are really important, because you need to frame your shots with appropriate SIZE AND SCALE and trim your shots so that they are not too long ie creating the appropriate SPACE for ideas, characters, themes, the plot etc to develop.
The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. Through this phenomenon we can suggest meaning and manipulate space, as well as time.
The Kuleshov Effect
Kuleshov edited a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine was alternated with various other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was “looking at” the bowl of soup, the girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief, or desire, respectively. The footage of Mosjoukine was actually the same shot each time.
Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings. Kuleshov believed this, along with montage, had to be the basis of cinema as an independent art form.
Chris Marker: La Jétte
Chris Marker, La Jettee, (1962)
Chris Marker, (1921-2012) was a French filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor and multi-media artist who has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Marker’s La Jetée is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel. What makes the film interesting for the purposes of this discussion, is that while in editing terms it uses the language of cinema to construct its narrative effect, it is composed entirely of still images showing imagesfrom the featureless dark of the underground caverns of future Paris, to the intensely detailed views across the ruined city, and the juxtaposition of destroyed buildings with the spire of the Eiffel Tower. You can read more here about the meaning of the film and it is available on Vimeo here in its entirety (29 mins)
Mark Cousins:Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise
A narrative can also be made constructed entirely of archive footage as in Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise, a film that shows impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times – protest marches, Cold War sabre-rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima – but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how x-rays and MRI scans have improved human lives. The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too. Made by director and film critic, Mark Cousins and featuring original music score by Mogwai, it was first broadcast on BBC4 as part of Storyville documentary. Your can read a Q&A with Cousins’ here where he discusses the making of the film.
Christopher Nolan: Memento
Memento is a 2000 American neo-noirpsychological thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Guy Pearce stars as a man who, as a result of an injury, has anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories) and has short-term memory loss approximately every fifteen minutes. He is searching for the people who attacked him and killed his wife, using an intricate system of Polaroid photographs and tattoos to track information he cannot remember.
The film is presented as two different sequences of scenes interspersed during the film: a series in black-and-white that is shown chronologically, and a series of color sequences shown in reverse order (simulating for the audience the mental state of the protagonist). The two sequences meet at the end of the film, producing one complete and cohesive narrative
Telling a story in reverse can be an interesting way to construct a narrative. Both cinema and literature are good at jumping between different time modes, past, present and future. Moving image and sound can enhance these different temporal shifts and written language is good and transporting your imagination from one time zone to another. Photography is mute but different strategies can be employed such as changing from colour to monochrome suggesting a different time or a different set of images. Using old photographs from archives, or found imagery can add complexity too, and including words can support a sequence of images, or add tension between the visual and the textual adding other elements to a photographic narrative.
Memento: Narrative and Postmodernism is also being looked at in Media Studies and if you are studying this subject make sure you include knowledge and understanding learned. Adopting a inter-disciplinary approach to your work is advantageous and being able to use theory and/ or context from other subjects will add value to your overall quality of your work and potentially achieve higher marks.
Theorists like Sergei Eisenstein, D.W Griffiths, Lev Kuleshov, Jean Epstein, John Grierson (also the coiner of the term ‘documentary’), Dziga Vertov, Andre Bazin, and Siegfried Kracauer went into sometimes painful detail to articulate theories about how various film and editing combinations created different forms of meaning. Many of these ideas remain surprisingly robust and useful a century later, and remain the bedrock of much of the theory taught to film students.
MISE EN SCENE
Mise en scene plays a huge role in communicating the tone of a story — but what is mise en scene? In classical terms, mise en scene is the arrangement of scenery and stage properties in a play or film. Today, mise en scene is regarded as all of the elements that go into any single shot of a production. Click below to learn more about mise-en-scene
Four of the most important aspects of mise en scene are: sets, props, costume/hair/makeup, and lighting. Here are examples from filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson on how to apply color to these four aspects.
VIDEO ART are not following moving image conventions as described above. Instead they are more fragmented in structure and often don’t follow a narrative in a linear sense. Often they are concerned with other elements, such as repetition, parody, chance, play or staging something for the camera. For more help and guidance – see my a previous blog posts here from 2017
Tom Pope, Art and Protests, Jersey Live film stuff
You may explore different approaches to image-making across different genres such as performance, photography, video,multi-media, installation, land/ environmental art, experimental film-making and avant-garde cinema.
See more examples here of video art and experimental films in the blog post from our 90 sec film project on ART & ACTIVISM.
Moving image depends on sound for much of its’ meaning. It is impossible to overstate how important a role audio plays in the film viewing experience. While it’s perfectly natural to be drawn to the visual side of film making, those striking visuals don’t hold the same weight without strong cinematic sound design to back them up. Whereas a painting is purely visual and a song can be purely aural, cinema combines sight and sound for a unified experience where one bolsters and elevates the other. Click on link below and learn about the role of the sound designer and other sound design jobs, the fundamentals of sound design, and to check out some examples from the movies with the best sound design.
Sound design is how filmmakers flesh out the aural world of a film to enhance the mood, atmosphere, and/or tone. Sound design components include sound effects or SFX sound design, mixing, Foley sound design, dialogue, and music. Sound design is the final and most important element needed to create an immersive experience for the audience.
Examples of sound design in practice:
A sound designer working in the sci-fi, horror, or fantasy genres will likely be tasked with conceiving original sounds for unique sources. What does an alien ship sound like? How do you approach horror creature sound design? All of these are questions a sound designer will devise answers for.
Let’s take a look at District 9‘ssound design as an example. In this scene, the sounds of the mech suit, alien weapons, computerized UI, the spaceship, and the creature vocalizations all required immense creativity in District 9’s sound design.
This is sound design from Neill Blomkamp’s District 9
The Coen Brothers have a keen ear for cinematic sound design. Their filmography is jam-packed with excellent examples of sound design, including some of the best sound design in films. Their work showcases the variety of different directions a sound designer can take the material.
This can range from stylized near-cartoon sound design in something like Raising Arizona to something more psychologically-driven like Barton Fink’ssound design. John Goodman’s ferocious roars, hysterical dialogue, the rush of fire, and the long decay of his shotgun blast, are all sound design examples culminating in one cohesive moment.
Barton Fink sound design in action
In addition to individual sound effects, sound designers also create what are known as soundscapes. You can think of a soundscape as a bed of audio that music, SFX, and dialogue rest on top of. Creative soundscapes are a great way to enhance a film’s sense of atmosphere or style.
Many of the most memorable soundscapes find themselves at home in the horror genre. An eerie soundscape can be a great way to double down on the creepiness of on-screen visuals. The films of David Lynch almost always feature incredibly inventive soundscapes that he often crafts himself.
In this example from Eraserhead, notice how much atmosphere and dread are generated through the powerful and oppressive soundscape. The droning, surreal tones are layered with industrial noises that magnify the bleak nature of the environment surrounding our protagonist and the end effect is staggeringly effective.
Sound editing vs sound mixing
To continue familiarizing yourself with audio post-production and to get a good handle on the distinction between sound editing and sound mixing, read article on the nuances that distinguish them here.
What you hear on a movie’s soundtrack is multilayered. Dialogue, ADR, sound effects, Foley, music — it’s all part of the overall sound design. Putting it all together is a massive job and it’s handled by multiple teams with different taks. So, that brings us to the question of the hour: what is the difference between sound editing vs sound mixing?
Catch a few scenes from iconic movies that delineate between editing and mixing, below.
Sound editing is the creation, recording, or re-recording of sounds.
When you’re on set, capturing quality sound is critical. But the majority of the sounds you hear in the movies are rarely ever captured this way. Often, the main focus on set, is the blocking and staging of the actors, and perfecting the execution of their lines.
Many of the sounds are added in later. The collection and creation of these sounds is sound editing. We’ll get more into the ways artists collect these sounds soon. Once these sounds are added in, then sound mixing can begin. The main goal in mixing is to make sure that all of the sounds, including recorded dialogue, are as seamless as possible.
Let’s dive a little deeper into both sound editing and mixing.
Week: 19-20 -21: 25 Jan– 11 Feb MOCK EXAM 3 days (15 hrs) Mon 5 – Thurs 11 Feb Finish Editing Film & Complete Essay
In the next three week focus on beginning to edit and collect all your images, archival material and texts, including finishing writing your essay needed to complete your photobook.
ESSAY: Lesson time (Fri): Complete conclusion, bibliography, proof read and hand in draft essay no later than Mon 1 FEB.
You want to aim for a draft layout and hand in draft version of your essay before your Mock Exam day, then use that day to fine tune design and complete essay
FILM: Lesson time (Mon, Tue, Thurs & Fri) Produce a number of blogposts that show evidence of the following:
STORYBOARDING: Re-evaluate your own film’s narrative and storyboard including details of individual scenes, action, shot sizes, camera angles and mise-en-scene (the arrangement of the scenery in front of the camera) from location, props, people, lighting, sound etc.
Narrative:What is your story? Describe in:
3 words
A sentence
A paragraph
2. RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic response to your Personal Study and bring footage from video/ audio recordings to lessons:
• Save footage in folder on local V:Data Drive • Organisation: Create a new project in Premiere
3. EDITING: • Begin editing video/ audio clips on the timeline • Adjust recordings in Colour / B&W appropriate to your intentions. • Video: experimenting with editing and sequencing using relevant transitions and effects • Sound: consider how audio can add depth to your film, such as ambient sound, sound fx, voice-over, interview, musical score etc. • Title and credits: Consider typography/ graphics/ styles etc. For more creative possibilities make title page in Photoshop (format: 1280 x 720 pixels) and import as a Psd file into your project folder on the V-Data drive.
Produce screen prints of layout ideas as you progress and add to Blog for further annotation, commenting on editing and sequencing video and sound etc.
4. EVALUATION: Write an evaluation on the blog that reflects on your artistic intentions, film-editing process and collaboration. Include screen-prints from Premiere and a few ‘behind the scenes’ images of the shooting/ production for further annotation. Comment on the following:
How successful was your photoshoot and experimentation?
What references did you make to artists references? – comment on technical, visual, contextual, conceptual?
How are you going to develop your project from here? – comment on research, planning, recording, experimenting.
What are you going to do next? – what, why, how, when, where?
5. BLOG POSTS: Make sure all blog posts are finished including, research, analysis, experimentation, annotation and an evaluation of final outcomes.
6. FINAL PRINTS: Select a set of 5-6 photographs as final outcomes and evaluate – explaining in some detail how well you realised your intentions and reflect on what you have learned in LOVE & REBELLION project.
Save final prints in our shared PRINT folder (no later than 15:00 end of your Mock exam day) in a high-resolution (4000 pixels on the long edge.) Save each images in your name i.e. first name_surname_title_1, and 2, 3 and so on.
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\PRINTING\A2 Coursework Prints Spring 2021
7. NEWSPAPER SPREADS
In anticipation of the possibility of producing a newspaper based on the themes of LOVE & REBELLION design 4 versions of a newspaper spreads based on using movie stills from your film. Use the technique of selecting key frames from the timeline in Premier and presenting them as still-images. We will also print your spreads as final outcome for mounting.
You must design the following spreads:
SEQUENCE: Select a series of movie stills (between 5 – 12) and produce a sequence from your film either as a grid, story-board, contact-sheet or typology.
MONTAGE: Select an appropriate set of movie stills and create a montage of layered images. You may to choose to work in Photoshop for more creativity and import into InDesign as one image (new document in Photoshop 420mm(h) x 280.5mm(w) in 300 dpi)
JUXTAPOSITION: Select 2 movie stills and juxtapose images opposite eahc others or layer them to create new meaning.
FULL-BLEED: Select one movie still as a full-bleed spread.
Follow these instructions:
Create new document in InDesign with these dimensions: 420mm(h) x 280.5mm(w), 10 pages, Orientation: Portrait, 2 columns, Column gutter 5mm, Margins: 10mm, Bleed: 3mm
Only use in high-res TIFF/JPEG files (4000 pixels)
Use design ideas and layouts from your zine/ newspaper research as well as taking inspiration from artists listed here as a starting points for your spreads.
Incorporate texts and typography where appropriate.
Once you have completed 3 pagespreads, double check:
All images are high-res file
Check links in InDesign (if Red Question mark appears re-point to image in your folder)
Package your layout and save in your name into this shared folder: M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\LOVE & REBELLION\Newspaper
PHOTOBOOK: Produce a number of blogposts that show evidence of the following:
1. Research a photo-book and describe the story it is communicating with reference to subject-matter, genre and approach to image-making.
2. Who is the photographer? Why did he/she make it? (intentions/ reasons) Who is it for? (audience) How was it received? (any press, reviews, awards, legacy etc.)
3. Deconstruct the narrative, concept and design of the book and apply theory above when considering:
Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper.
Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both.
Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/ square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages.
Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing.
Narrative: what is the story/ subject-matter. How is it told?
Structure and architecture: how design/ repeating motifs/ or specific features develops a concept or construct a narrative.
Design and layout: image size on pages/ single page, double-spread/ images/ grid, fold- outs/ inserts.
Editing and sequencing: selection of images/ juxtaposition of photographs/ editing process.
Images and text: are they linked? Introduction/ essay/ statement by artists or others. Use of captions (if any.)
UNDERSTANDING PHOTOBOOKS: NARRATIVE, EDITING, SEQUENCING, DESIGN, FORM, FUNCTION
Earlier in the academic year we looked at narrative in photography. Let’s refresh our memory and revisit some of the theories around visual storytelling.
Narrative is essentially the way a story is told. For example you can tell different narratives of the same story. It is a very subjective process and there is no right or wrong. Whether or not your photographic story is any good is another matter.
Narrative is constructed when you begin to create relationships between images (and/or text) and present more than two images together. Your selection of images (editing) and the order of how these images appear on the pages (sequencing) contributes significantly to the construction of the narrative. So too, does the structure and design of the photo-zine or photobook.
However, it is essential that you identity what your story is first before considering how you wish to tell it. Planning and research are also essential to understanding your subject and there are steps you can take in order to make it successful. Once you have considered the points made between the differences in narrative and story complete the following:
CASE-STUDIES: Let’s explore some examples of images used in photo-essays and photobooks and see if we can identify the story as well as examine how narrative is constructed through careful editing, sequencing and design.
PHOTO-ESSAY: The life of a country doctor in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains
“A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes – just sometimes – one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought”
W. Eugne Smith
W. Eugene Smith compared his mode of working to that of a playwright; the powerful narrative structures of his photo essays set a new benchmark for the genre. His series, The Country Doctor, shot on assignment for Life Magazine in 1948, documents the everyday life of Dr Ernest Guy Ceriani, a GP tasked with providing 24-hour medical care to over 2,000 people in the small town of Kremmling, in the Rocky Mountains. The story was important at the time for drawing attention to the national shortage of country doctors and the impact of this on remote communities. Today the photoessay is widely regarded as representing a definitive moment in the history of photojournalism.
Here is a Powerpoint with more information about how to construct a Traditional Picture Story that includes individual images such as:
Person at Work
Relationship Shot
Establishing Shot
Detail shot
Environmental Portrait
Formal Portrait
Observed Portrait
Here is a link to an entry for Percival Dunham considered Jersey first photojournalist for a very brief period in 1913 and 1914, when he worked for Jersey Illustrated Weekly and then the Morning News, the main competitor for many years for the Evening Post (now the Jersey Evening Post and the island’s only daily newspaper for over half a century). Try and identity individual images as above from a selection of prints from the Societe Jersiaise Photographic Archive that holds over 1000 images by Percival Dunham in their collection.
Select somewhere between 12-15 images from the set and edit and sequence them to construct a specific narrative.
Record an image of your sequence and produce a blogpost where you describe the above process.
PHOTOBOOKS: In October of 1958, French publisher Robert Delpire released Les Américains in Paris. The following year Grove Press published The Americans in New York with an introduction by American writer, Jack Kerouac (the book was released in January 1960).
Like Frank’s earlier books, the sequence of 83 pictures in The Americans is non-narrative and nonlinear; instead it uses thematic, formal, conceptual and linguistic devices to link the photographs. The Americans displays a deliberate structure, an emphatic narrator, and what Frank called a ‘distinct and intense order’ that amplified and tempered the individual pictures.
Although not immediately evident, The Americans is constructed in four sections. Each begins with a picture of an American flag and proceeds with a rhythm based on the interplay between motion and stasis, the presence and absence of people, observers and those being observed. The book as a whole explores the American people—black and white, military and civilian, urban and rural, poor and middle class—as they gather in drugstores and diners, meet on city streets, mourn at funerals, and congregate in and around cars. With piercing vision, poetic insight, and distinct photographic style, Frank reveals the politics, alienation, power, and injustice at play just beneath the surface of his adopted country.
Since its original publication, The Americans has appeared in numerous editions and has been translated into several languages. The cropping of images has varied slightly over the years, but their order has remained intact, as have the titles and Kerouac’s introductory text. The book, fiercely debated in the first years following its release, has made an indelible mark on American culture and changed the course of 20th-century photography. Read article by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian
MORE PHOTOBOOKS: A few photobooks dealing with memory, loss and love
Yury Toroptsov:Deleted Scene
On a mission to photograph the invisible, with Deleted Scene photographer Yury Toroptsov takes us to Eastern Siberia in a unique story of pursuit along intermingling lines that form a complex labyrinth. His introspective journey in search of a father gone too soon crosses that of Akira Kurosawa who, in 1974, came to visit and film that same place where lived the hunter Dersu Uzala.
Yury Toroptsov is not indifferent to the parallels between hunting and photography, which the common vocabulary makes clear. Archival documents, old photographs, views of the timeless taiga or of contemporary Siberia, fragments or deleted scenes are arranged here as elements of a narrative. They come as clues or pebbles dropped on the edge of an invisible path where the viewer is invited to lose himself and the hunter is encouraged to continue his relentless pursuit.
Dealing with the grief that the photographer suffered following the death of her mother, Where Mimosa Bloom by Rita Puig Serra Costatakes the form of an extended farewell letter; with photography skillfully used to present a visual eulogy or panegyric. This grief memoir about the loss of her mother is part meditative photo essay, part family biography and part personal message to her mother. These elements combine to form a fascinating and intriguing discourse on love, loss and sorrow.
“Where Mimosa Bloom” is the result of over two years work spent collecting and curating materials and taking photographs of places, objects and people that played a significant role in her relationship to her mother. Rita Puig Serra Costa skillfully avoids the dangerous lure of grief’s self-pity, isolationism, world-scorn and vanity. The resonance of “Where Mimosa Bloom” comes from all it doesn’t say, as well as all that it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief. Despite E.M.Forster’s words – “One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another” – Rita Puig Serra Costa proves that some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated.
I received a text message. “Today, our divorce was finalized.” The message from my mother was written simply, even though she usually sends me messages with many pictures and symbols. I remember that I didn’t feel any particular emotion, except that the time had come. Because my parents continued to live apart in the same house for a long time, their relationship gently came to an end over the years. It was no wonder that a draft blowing between the two could completely break the family at any time.
In Japan, legend has it that a man and woman who are predestined to meet have been tied at the little finger by an invisible red string since the time they were born. Unfortunately, the red string tying my parents undone, broke, or perhaps was never even tied to begin with. But if the two had never met, I would never have been born into this world. If anything, you might say that there is an unbreakable red string of fate between parent and child.
Before long, I found myself thinking about the relationship between my parents and . How many days could I see my parents living far away? What if I couldn’t see them anymore? Since I couldn’t help feeling extremely anxious about it, I was driven to visit my parents’ house many times. Every day I engage in awkward conversation with my parents, as if in a scene in their daily lives. I adapt myself to them, and they shift their attitude toward me. We do not give way entirely to the other side, but rather meet halfway. Indeed family problems remain unresolved, although sometimes we tell allegorical stories and share feelings. It means a lot to us that our perspectives have changed with communication.
My family will probably never be all together again. But I feel without a doubt that there is proof inside of each of us that we once lived together. To ensure that the red string that ties my family together does not come undone, I want to reel it in and tie it tight.
Laia Abril: The Epilogue’
‘The Epilogue’ is the book about the story of the Robinson family – and the aftermath suffered in losing their 26 year old daughter to bulimia. Working closely with the family Laia Abril reconstructs Cammy’s life telling her story through flashbacks – memories, testimonies, objects, letters, places and images. The Epilogue gives voice to the suffering of the family, the indirect victims of ‘eating disorders’, the unwilling eyewitnesses of a very painful degeneration. Laia Abril shows us the dilemmas and struggles confronted by many young girls; the problems families face in dealing with guilt and the grieving process; the frustration of close friends and the dark ghosts of this deadliest of illnesses; all blended together in the bittersweet act of remembering a loved one. Read more here on Laia Abril’s website
Week: 19-20 -21: 25 Jan– 11 Feb MOCK EXAM 3 days (15 hrs) Mon 5 – Thurs 11 Feb Design your Photobook & Complete Essay
In the next three week focus on beginning to edit and collect all your images, archival material and texts, including finishing writing your essay needed to complete your photobook.
ESSAY: Lesson time (Fri) • Complete conclusion, bibliography, proof read and hand in draft essay no later than Mon 1 FEB.
INTERIM DEADLINE: FRI 5 FEB DRAFT PHOTOBOOK LAYOUT
You want to aim for a draft layout and hand in draft version of your essay before your Mock Exam day, then use that day to fine tune design and complete essay.
1. Write a book specification and describe in detail what your book will be about in terms of narrative, concept and design with reference to the same elements of bookmaking as above.
Narrative:What is your story? Describe in:
3 words
A sentence
A paragraph
Design: Consider the following
How you want your book to look and feel
Paper and ink
Format, size and orientation
Binding and cover
Title
Structure and architecture
Design and layout
Editing and sequencing
Images and text
2. Produce a mood-board of design ideas for inspiration. Look atBLURB online book making website, photo books from photographers or see previous books produced by Hautlieu students on the table in class.
3. Create a BLURB account using your school email address. With Blurb you have different options on how you design your book:
a) Using Lightroom to design your book which is integrated with BLURB. Only for use on school computers, unless you have LR at home on your own laptop.
b) Download Bookwright via Blurb onto your own laptop and work offline at home and you can work indecently of school. Here you have full control of layout/ design features. Once completed, you upload photo book design to Blurb
c) Choose online option if you want to work directly online. Very limited layout/design options (not recommended!)
For those who wish to make their own hand-made photobook using Indesign follow the same steps as below in terms of documenting and annotating your design process. or if you want to customize your Blurb book see me for more details on how to do it.
4. Using Lightroom make a rough selection of your 40-50 best pictures from all shoots. Make sure you have adjusted and standardised all the pictures in terms of exposure, colour balance/ B&W, contrast/brightness etc.
5. Print a set of small work prints (4 to one A4 page) on the Laserjet, cut them up in guillotine and lay them out on the big white table for editing.
6. Decide on format (landscape, portrait) size and style of your photo-book. Begin to design your photo book, considering carefully, narrative, editing, sequencing, page spreads, juxtaposition, image size, text pages, empty pages, use of archival material etc.
7. Add your illustrated essay at the end of your photo book, including title, any captions (if needed), bibliography, illustrations of artists work (incl data) and images of your own responses. Think carefully about font type, size and weighting.
8. Produce screen prints of layout ideas as you progress and add to Blog for further annotation, commenting on page layout/ narrative/ sequencing/ juxtaposition of pictures.
9. Make sure all blog posts are finished including, research, analysis, experimentation, annotation and an evaluation of final outcomes.
9. Final prints: Select a set of 5-6 photographs as final outcomes and evaluate – explaining in some detail how well you realised your intentions and reflect on what you have learned in LOVE & REBELLION project.
10. Save final prints in our shared PRINT folder (no later than 15:00 end of your Mock exam day) in a high-resolution (4000 pixels on the long edge.) Save each images in your name i.e. first name_surname_title_1, and 2, 3 and so on.
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\PRINTING\A2 Coursework Prints Spring 2021
11. NEWSPAPER SPREADS: In anticipation of the possibility of producing a newspaper based on the themes of LOVE & REBELLION design 3-4 versions of a newspaper spreads based on images from your photobook.
You must design the following spreads:
SEQUENCE: Select a series of movie stills (between 5 – 12) and produce a sequence from your film either as a grid, story-board, contact-sheet or typology.
MONTAGE: Select an appropriate set of movie stills and create a montage of layered images. You may to choose to work in Photoshop for more creativity and import into InDesign as one image (new document in Photoshop 420mm(h) x 280.5mm(w) in 300 dpi)
JUXTAPOSITION: Select 2 movie stills and juxtapose images opposite eahc others or layer them to create new meaning.
FULL-BLEED: Select one movie still as a full-bleed spread.
Follow these instructions:
Create new document in InDesign with these dimensions: 420mm(h) x 280.5mm(w), 10 pages, Orientation: Portrait, 2 columns, Column gutter 5mm, Margins: 10mm, Bleed: 3mm
Only use in high-res TIFF/JPEG files (4000 pixels)
Use design ideas and layouts from your zine/ newspaper research as well as taking inspiration from artists listed here as a starting points for your spreads.
Incorporate texts and typography where appropriate.
Once you have completed pagespreads, double check:
All images are high-res file
Check links in InDesign (if Red Question mark appears re-point to image in your folder)
Package your layout and save in your name into this shared folder: M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\LOVE & REBELLION\Newspaper
PRINTING: From Indesign export spreads as JPEGs into shared folder above and choose size A3.
In this folder here you can find texts to read in relation to a number of subjects and themes below. Some of these files are too large to upload to the blog here so go to the folder below.
Bate, David (2016) ‘The Art of the Document’ in Art Photography. London: Tate Gallerie How documentary photography now is considered within a fine-art context
Max Pinckers Interview: On Speculative Documentary How fact and fiction today in documentary photography is blurred
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail (1994), ‘Inside/ Out’ in Photography At The Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press
Judith Butler is an academic and writer who is an authority on feminism and gender studies, incl queer theory. Her seminal book is: Gender Trouble which we do have a copy of in the Library LRC and in Media. Here is a good overview of her work – make sure you read it all and watch video as well.
Rudd, N. (2021), The Self-Portrait. London: Thames & Hudson. – too large a file to be uploaded to blog – find text here: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\NOSTALGIA\Contextual Studies\READING
Have a look at Shannon’s O’Donnells work here and when she was an A-level student?
Francesca Woodman
Townsend, C. (2006) Francesca Woodman: Scattered in Space and Time. London: Phaidon Press Limited. – too large a file to be uploaded to blog – find text here: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\NOSTALGIA\Contextual Studies\READING
Frames of Mind: Photography, Memory and Identity by Anwandter, Patricia Marcella In Frames of Mind, I have sought to explore the themes concerning the dynamic construction of memory. What do we choose to remember and how do we reinforce it? Who are we in relationship to who we were? Working with a collection of over five hundred images accumulated throughout my life, I have reinvestigated the images and their interrelationship with one another
Overview of Barthes book Camera Lucida in Photo Pedagogy The first half of this article talks about Barthes theory of a studium and punctum. The latter part about a photograph of his dead mother which allows him to think about memory. Commentary on Barthes book
Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes Article by Brian Dillon in the Guardian, 26 March 2011 Grieving for his mother, Roland Barthes looked for her in old photos – and wrote a curious, moving book that became one of the most influential studies of photography
DEATH IN THE PHOTOGRAPH – critical article in response to Roland Barthes seminal book ‘Camera Lucida’ reflecting on photography.
Howarth, S. (2016) ‘Is My Family Normal?’ in Family Photography Now. London: Thames & Hudson.
McLaren, S. (2016), ‘Thanks for Sharing!’, in Family Photography Now. London: Thames & Hudson
Williams, V. (2013). ‘Who’s Looking at the Family, Now’ in Family Politics, Issue 20. Brighton: Photoworks.
All three texts above are too large a file to be uploaded to blog – find text here: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\NOSTALGIA\Contextual Studies\READING
Landscape in Motion: Muybridge and the Origins of Chronophotography Author(s): Dimitrios Latsis Source: Film History , Vol. 27, No. 3 (2015), pp. 1-40 Published by: Indiana University Press
Frizot, M (1998), A New History of Photography. Cologne: Könemann. Read Ch 14: Speed of Photography
Warner Marien, M. (2002) Photography: A Cultural History. London: Lawrence King. Read chapter Science and Photography: The photography and Movement (pg 212-217)
Politics and elections
Read 
