PRACTICAL WORK: This term you have 6 weeks to complete all work, including essay and photobook or film. This include all relevant blog posts demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of: RESEARCH > ANALYSIS > PLANNING > RECORDING, EXPERIMENTATION > PRESENTATION > EVALUATION.
DEADLINE: MUST complete final photo-shoots/ moving image recordings by end of January 2021.
ESSAY: We will continue to spend 1 lesson a week every Wednesdays on CONTEXTUAL STUDIES where you will be learning about critical theory, photo history and contemporary practice as well as developing academic study skills to help you writing your essay. However, it is essential that you are organising your time effectively and setting aside time outside of lessons to read, study and write.
DEADLINE: Essay MUST be handed in Fri 29 Jan 2021
PHOTOBOOK / FILM: Returning after Christmas we will be spending the whole month of January developing, designing and printing the photobook which will include your essay and somewhere between 40-60 images sequenced to tell a story. For those making a film you will spend January editing moving images and sound in Premiere.
MOCK EXAM: 5 – 11 Feb 2021. 3 days controlled test (15 hours) Groups:
FINAL DEADLINE: Completion of photobook/ film with final essay Thurs 11 Feb 2021 .
EXAM (ESA): Exam Paper and preparation begins Fri 12 Feb 2021.
EXAM (ESA): Controlled Conditions 4 – 5 – 6 May and 12 – 13 – 14 May 2021.
Week 16: 4 – 10 Jan Essay writing: Academic study skills Contextual Study: Decoding Photography
MON: Academic Sources
Research and identify 3-5 literary sources from a variety of media such as books, journal/magazines, internet, Youtube/video that relates to your personal study and artists references .
Begin to read essay, texts and interviews with your chosen artists as well as commentary from critics, historians and others.
It’s important that you show evidence of reading and draw upon different pints of view – not only your own.
Take notes when you’re reading…key words, concepts, passages
Write down page number, author, year, title, publisher, place of publication so you can list source in a bibliography
Bibliography
List all the sources that you have identified above as literary sources. Where there are two or more works by one author in the same year distinguish them as 1988a, 1988b etc. Arrange literature in alphabetical order by author, or where no author is named, by the name of the museum or other organisation which produced the text. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources in alphabetical order e.g. websites/online sources, Youtube/ DVD/TV.
Quotation and Referencing:
Why should you reference?
To add academic support for your work
To support or disprove your argument
To show evidence of reading
To help readers locate your sources
To show respect for other people’s work
To avoid plagiarism
To achieve higher marks
What should you reference?
Anything that is based on a piece of information or idea that is not entirely your own.
That includes, direct quotes, paraphrasing or summarising of an idea, theory or concept, definitions, images, tables, graphs, maps or anything else obtained from a source
How should you reference?
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
https://vimeo.com/223710862
Here is an full guide on how to use Harvard System of Referencing including online sources, such as websites etc.
TUE: Essay Question
Think of a hypothesis and list possible essay questions
Below is a list of possible essay questions that may help you to formulate your own.
WED 6 JAN: CONTEXTUAL STUDIES Decoding Photography • Select one of the questions listed • Read text in detail, make notes and identify 3 quotes • Select one image from examples mentioned in text and apply your own interpretation of the photograph by applying theory and critical thinking • Incorporate the 3 quotes above into your interpretation of the image and make sure you comment on the quotes.
THUR: Essay Plan Make a plan that lists what you are going to write about in each paragraph – essay structure
Essay question:
Opening quote
Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?
Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography and visual culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian.
Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced
Bibliography: List all relevant sources used
FRI: EssayIntroduction In this lesson you will write a 45 mins draft essay introduction following these steps:
Open a new Word document > SAVE AS: Essay draft
Copy essay question into Essay title: Hypothesis > if you don’t have one yet, make one!
Copy your essay introduction (from Essay Plan) which will give you a framework to build upon and also copy your Statement of Intent.
Identify 2 quotes from sources identified in an earlier task using Harvard System of Referencing.
Use one quote as an opening quote:Choose a quote from either one of your photographers or critics. It has to be something that relates to your investigation.
Begin to write a paragraph (250-500 words) answering the following questions below.
You got 45 mins to write and upload to the blog!
Think about an opening that will draw your reader in e.g. you can use an opening quote that sets the scene. Or think more philosophically about the nature of photography and and feeble relationship with reality.
You should include in your introduction an outline of your intention of your study e.g.
What are you going to investigate.
How does this area/ work interest you?
What are you trying to prove/challenge, argument/ counter-argument?
Whose work (artists/photographers) are you analysing and why?
What historical or theoretical context is the work situated within. Include 1 or 2 quotes for or against.
What links are there with your previous studies?
What have you explored so far in your Coursework or what are you going to photograph?
How did or will your work develop.
What camera skills, techniques or digital processes in Photoshop have or are you going to experiment with?
Use 500 words blog post you produced before Christmas in relation to Art Movement and Isms as a basis for this paragraph
Select at least two qoutes from your literary sources (see list below) that you can incorporate into your paragraph.
Your paragraph must include visual examples of artists making work within that art movement that is relevant to your Personal Study.
Complete Paragraph 1 and upload to the blog at the end of lesson
Paragraph 1 Structure (500 words): Use subheading. This paragraph covers the first thing you said in your introduction that you would address.The first sentence introduces the main idea of the paragraph. Other sentences develop the subject of the paragraph.
Content: you could look at the following…exemplify your hypothesis within a historical and theoretical context. Write about how your area of study and own work is linked to a specific art movement/ ism. Research and read key text and articles from critics, historians and artists associated with the movement/ism. Use quotes from sources to make a point, back it up with evidence or an example (a photograph), explain how the image supports the point made or how your interpretation of the work may disapprove. How does the photograph compare or contrast with others made by the same photographer, or to other images made in the same period or of the same genre by other artists. How does the photograph relate to visual representation in general, and in particularly to the history and theory of photography, arts and culture.
Include relevant examples, illustrations, details, quotations, and references showing evidence of reading, knowledge and understanding of history, theory and context!
RECORDING: Bring images from new photo-shoots to lessons and follow these instructions
EDITING:
Save shoots in folder and import into Lightroom
Organisation: Create a new Collection from each new shoot inside Collection Set: PHOTOBOOK
Editing: select 8-12 images from each shoot.
Experimenting: Adjust images in Develop, both as Colour and B&W images appropriate to your intentions
Export images as JPGS (1000 pixels) and save in a folder: BLOG
Create a Blogpost with edited images and an evaluation; explaining what you focused on in each shoot and how you intend to develop your next photoshoot.
Make references to artists references, previous work, experiments, inspiration etc.
Prep for photobook design: 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.
EXPERIMENTING:
Export same set of images from Lightroom as TIFF (4000 pixels)
Experimentation: demonstrate further creativity using Photoshop to make composite/ montage/ typology/ grids/ diptych/triptych, text/ typology etc appropriate to your intentions
Design: Begin to explore different layout options using InDesign and make some page spreads for our newspaper (format: 280.5 (h) x 420 mm (w)
Alternatively design a photo-zine. Set up new document as A5 page sizes. This is trying out ideas before you begin designing photobook.
Make sure you annotate process and techniques used and evaluate each experiment
EVALUATING: Upon completion of photoshoot and experimentation, make sure you evaluate and reflect on your next step of development. 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?
FILM: (Lesson time (Mon, Tue, Thurs & Fri)
RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic response to your Personal Study and bring footage from video/ audio recordings to lessons:
EDITING: • Save media in folder on local V:Data Drive • Organisation: Create a new project in Premiere • Editing: begin editing video/ audio clips on the timeline • Adjusting: recordings in Colour / B&W appropriate to your intentions.
EXPERIMENTING: • Video: experimenting with 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.
EVALUATING: 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?
THURS/FRI: 14 – 15 Jan PRESENTATION – Work-in-Progress
PRESENTING: Prepare a 3-5 mins presentation on something that you are working on right now in your project. For example:
An idea An image A photo-shoot An experiment An inspiration New research New development
Use blog posts to present in class. As a class we will give constructive feedback on how each student can develop their work and projec
It is important that you try and be as productive as possible over the Christmas break. This is particularly important as we may have an extended period of non-contact time due to Covid-19 restrictions. It may be that you need to adapt or change your original plan for your project to suit your current situation of isolation or lock down. A really good and meaning full project can be reconfigured to suit current circumstances. As always if you need help and support get in touch via email and tune into TEAMS lessons.
Our deadlines are fixed and coursework still have to be completed as per below.
PRACTICAL WORK: You have 2 weeks over Christmas and a further 6 weeks on your return in January to complete all work, including essay and photobook or film. This include all relevant blog posts demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of: RESEARCH > ANALYSIS > PLANNING > RECORDING, EXPERIMENTATION > PRESENTATION > EVALUATION.
DEADLINE: MUST complete 3-4 new photo-shoots/ moving image recordings this term that must be published on the blog by Mon 4 Jan 2020.
ESSAY: We will be spending minimum 1 lesson a week on CONTEXTUAL STUDIES where you will be learning about critical theory, photo history and contemporary practice as well as developing academic study skills to help you writing your essay. However, it is essential that you are organising your time effectively and setting aside time outside of lessons to read, study and write.
DEADLINE: Essay MUST be handed in Fri 29 Jan 2021
PHOTOBOOK / FILM: Returning after Christmas we will be spending the whole month of January designing / editing your photobook / film.
MOCK EXAM: 5 – 11 Feb 2021. 3 days controlled test (15 hours) Groups:
FINAL DEADLINE: Completion of photobook/ film with final essay Thurs 11 Feb 2021 .
EXAM (ESA): Exam Paper and preparation begins Fri 12 Feb 2021.
EXAM (ESA): Controlled Conditions 4 – 5 – 6 May and 12 – 13 – 14 May 2021.
XMAS BREAK: 19 Dec – 4 Jan Essay: Reading & Writing Photography: Photo-shoots & Experimentation
Objective: Criteria from the Syllabus
Show evidence for an on-going critical and analytical review of your investigation – both your written essay and own practical work in response to research and analysis.
ESSAY
Academic Sources
Research and identify 3-5 literary sources from a variety of media such as books, journal/magazines, internet, Youtube/video that relates to your personal study and artists references .
Begin to read essay, texts and interviews with your chosen artists as well as commentary from critics, historians and others.
It’s important that you show evidence of reading and draw upon different pints of view – not only your own.
Take notes when you’re reading…key words, concepts, passages
Write down page number, author, year, title, publisher, place of publication so you can list source in a bibliography
Bibliography
List all the sources that you have identified above as literary sources. Where there are two or more works by one author in the same year distinguish them as 1988a, 1988b etc. Arrange literature in alphabetical order by author, or where no author is named, by the name of the museum or other organisation which produced the text. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources in alphabetical order e.g. websites/online sources, Youtube/ DVD/TV.
Quotation and Referencing:
Use quotes to support or disprove your argument
Use quotes to show evidence of reading
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
Essay Question
Think of a hypothesis and list possible essay questions
Essay Plan Make a plan that lists what you are going to write about in each paragraph – essay structure
Essay question:
Opening quote
Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?
Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography and visual culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian.
Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced
Bibliography: List all relevant sources used
EssayIntroduction Draft an essay introduction following these steps:
Open a new Word document > SAVE AS: Essay draft
Copy essay question into Essay title: Hypothesis > if you don’t have one yet, make one!
Copy your essay introduction (from Essay Plan) which will give you a framework to build upon and also copy your Statement of Intent.
Identify 2 quotes from sources identified in an earlier task using Harvard System of Referencing.
Use one quote as an opening quote:Choose a quote from either one of your photographers or critics. It has to be something that relates to your investigation.
Begin to write a paragraph (250-500 words) answering the following questions:
Think about an opening that will draw your reader in e.g. you can use an opening quote that sets the scene. Or think more philosophically about the nature of photography and and feeble relationship with reality.
You should include in your introduction an outline of your intention of your study e.g.
What are you going to investigate.
How does this area/ work interest you?
What are you trying to prove/challenge, argument/ counter-argument?
Whose work (artists/photographers) are you analysing and why?
What historical or theoretical context is the work situated within. Include 1 or 2 quotes for or against.
What links are there with your previous studies?
What have you explored so far in your Coursework or what are you going to photograph?
How did or will your work develop.
What camera skills, techniques or digital processes in Photoshop have or are you going to experiment with?
PHOTOBOOK
PLAN > SHOOT > EXPERIMENT > EVALUATE
PLANNING: Produce a detailed plan of at least 3-4 photoshoots that you intend on doing in the next 3-4 weeks.
RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic responses to your Personal Study
EDITING: Download InDesign at home and import images from each shoot.
• Create a new Collection from each new shoot inside Collection Set: LOVE & REBELLION. • Select 8-12 images from each shoot. • Experimenting: Adjust images in Develop, both as Colour and B&W images appropriate to your intentions • Export images as JPGS (1000 pixels) and save in a folder: BLOG • Create a Blogpost with edited images and an evaluation; explaining what you focused on in each shoot and how you intend to develop your next shoot. • Make references to artists references, previous shoots, experiments etc.
EXPERIMENTING:
• Export same set of images from Lightroom as JPEG (4000 pixels) • Experimentation: demonstrate further creativity using Photoshop to make composite/ montage/ typology/ grids/ diptych/triptych, text/ typology etc appropriate to your intentions • Design: Begin to explore different layout options using InDesign and make a new zine/book. Set up new document as A5 page sizes. This is trying out ideas before we begin designing photobook in January. • Make sure you annotate process and techniques used
EVALUATION: Upon completion of photoshoot and experimentation, make sure you evaluate and reflect on your next step of development. 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?
FILM
PLAN > SHOOT > EXPERIMENT > EVALUATE
STORYBOARDING: Based on your specification and narrative produce a storyboard with 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.
PLANNING: Produce a detailed plan of at least 3-4 video/audio recordings that you intend on doing in the next 3-4 weeks, incl Christmas break
RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic response to your Personal Study and bring footage from video/ audio recordings to lessons:
• Save media in folder on local V:Data Drive • Organisation: Create a new project in Premiere • Editing: begin editing video/ audio clips on the timeline • Adjusting: recordings in Colour / B&W appropriate to your intentions.
EXPERIMENTING: • Video: experimenting with 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.
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?
ESSAY: In the Spring term will be spending 1 lesson a week every Wednesday on writing and developing your essay. However, you will need to be working it independently outside of lesson time.
Objective:Criteria from the Syllabus
Be aware of some of the methods employed by critics and historians within the history of art and photography.
Demonstrate a sound understanding of your chosen area of study with appropriate use of critical vocabulary. – use for image analysis
Investigate a wide range of work and sources
Develop a personal and critical inquiry.
Academic Sources:
Research and identify 3-5 literary sources from a variety of media such as books, journal/magazines, internet, Youtube/video .
Begin to read essay, texts and interviews with your chosen artists as well as commentary from critics, historians and others.
It’s important that you show evidence of reading and draw upon different pints of view – not only your own.
Take notes when you’re reading…key words, concepts, passages
Write down page number, author, year, title, publisher, place of publication so you can list source in a bibliography
Quotation and Referencing:
Why should you reference?
To add academic support for your work
To support or disprove your argument
To show evidence of reading
To help readers locate your sources
To show respect for other people’s work
To avoid plagiarism
To achieve higher marks
What should you reference?
Anything that is based on a piece of information or idea that is not entirely your own.
That includes, direct quotes, paraphrasing or summarising of an idea, theory or concept, definitions, images, tables, graphs, maps or anything else obtained from a source
How should you reference?
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
https://vimeo.com/223710862
Here is an full guide on how to use Harvard System of Referencing including online sources, such as websites etc.
TUE: Essay Question
Think of a hypothesis and list possible essay questions
Below is a list of possible essay questions that may help you to formulate your own.
Make a plan that lists what you are going to write about in each paragraph – essay structure.
Essay question:
Opening quote
Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?
Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography, visual and popular culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian.
Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced
Bibliography: List all relevant sources used
Essay question: Hypothesis
Think of a hypothesis and list possible essay questions
Introduction (250-500 words). Think about an opening that will draw your reader in e.g. you can use an opening quote that sets the scene. You should include in your introduction an outline of your intention of your study e.g. what and who are you going to investigate. How does this area/ work interest you? What are you trying to prove/challenge, argument/ counter-argument? What historical or theoretical context is the work situated within. Include 1 or 2 quotes for or against. What links are there with your previous studies? What have you explored so far in your Coursework or what are you going to photograph? How did or will your work develop. What camera skills, techniques or digital processes in Photoshop have or are you going to experiment with?
Paragraph 1 Structure (500 words): Use subheading. This paragraph covers the first thing you said in your introduction that you would address.The first sentence introduces the main idea of the paragraph. Other sentences develop the subject of the paragraph.
Content: you could look at the following…exemplify your hypothesis within a historical and theoretical context. Write about how your area of study and own work is linked to a specific art movement/ ism. Research and read key text and articles from critics, historians and artists associated with the movement/ism. Use quotes from sources to make a point, back it up with evidence or an example (a photograph), explain how the image supports the point made or how your interpretation of the work may disapprove. How does the photograph compare or contrast with others made by the same photographer, or to other images made in the same period or of the same genre by other artists. How does the photograph relate to visual representation in general, and in particularly to the history and theory of photography, arts and culture.
Include relevant examples, illustrations, details, quotations, and references showing evidence of reading, knowledge and understanding of history, theory and context!
See link to powerpoints: Pictorialism vs Realism and Modernism vs Postmodernism here
Paragraph 2 Structure (500 words): Use subheading. In the first sentence or opening sentences, link the paragraph to the previous paragraph, then introduce the main idea of the new paragraph. Other sentences develop the paragraphs subject (use relevant examples, quotations, visuals to illustrate your analysis, thoughts etc)
Content: you could look at the following...Introduce your first photographer. Select key images, ideas or concepts and analyse in-depth using specific model of analysis (describe, interpret and evaluate) – refer to your hypothesis. Contextualise…what was going on in the world at the time; artistically, politically, socially, culturally. Other influences…artists, teachers, mentors etc. Personal situations or circumstances…describe key events in the artist’s life that may have influenced the work. Include examples of your own photographs, experiments or early responses and analyse, relate and link to the above. Set the scene for next paragraph.
Include relevant examples, illustrations, details, quotations, and references showing evidence of reading, knowledge and understanding of history, theory and context!
Paragraph 3 Structure (500 words): Use subheading. In the first sentence or opening sentences, link the paragraph to the previous paragraph, then introduce the main idea of the new paragraph. Other sentences develop the paragraphs subject (use relevant examples, quotations, visuals to illustrate your analysis, thoughts etc)
Content: you could look at the following…Introduce key works, ideas or concepts from your second photographer and analyse in-depth – refer to your hypothesis…Use questions in Pg 2 or add…What information has been selected by the photographer and what do you find interesting in the photograph? What do we know about the photograph’s subject? Does the photograph have an emotional or physical impact? What did the photographer intend? How has the image been used? What are the links or connections to the other photographer in Pg 2? Include examples of your own photographs and experiments as your work develop in response to the above and analyse, compare, contrast etc. Set the scene for next paragraph.
Include relevant examples, illustrations, details, quotations, and references showing evidence of reading, knowledge and understanding of history, theory and context!
Conclusion (500 words): Write a conclusion of your essay that also includes an evaluation of your final photographic responses and experiments.
List the key points from your investigation and analysis of the photographer(s) work – refer to your hypothesis. Can you prove or Disprove your theory – include final quote(s). Has anything been left unanswered? Do not make it a tribute! Do not introduce new material! Summarise what you have learned. How have you been influenced? Show how you have selected your final outcomes including an evaluation and how your work changed and developed alongside your investigation.
Bibliography: List all the sources that you used and only those that you have cited in your text. Where there are two or more works by one author in the same year distinguish them as 1988a, 1988b etc. Arrange literature in alphabetical order by author, or where no author is named, by the name of the museum or other organisation which produced the text. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources in alphabetical order e.g. websites, exhibitions, Youtube/TV/ Videos / DVD/ Music etc.
The A-level coursework consist of two modules, Personal Investigation (worth 72 marks) and Personal Study (essay worth 18 marks) which are interlinked and informed by each other.
All the work that you produced (both coursework and exam) in Yr 12 also contributes towards A-Level coursework and overall equate to 60% of the total marks. The Personal Study essay account for 12%. The last week before H-Term 8-10 Feb is a Mock Exam and will count as final DEADLINE.
On Thursday 11 Feb we will handout Exam paper and begin work on the final component, Externally Set Assignment (Exam) that accounts for the remaining 40% of the combined A-level Photography marks
What is a Personal Study?
The aim of this unit is to critically investigate, question and challenge a particular style, area or work by artists/ photographer(s) which will inform and develop your own emerging practice as a student of photography. The unit is designed to be an extension of your practical work in your Personal Investigation module where the practical informs and develops the theoretical elements and vice versa of your ongoing project.
Your Personal Study is a written and illustrated dissertation, including a written essay (2000 words) and a lens-based body of work (either stills photography or moving image) with a number of final outcomes produced from your Personal Investigation unit.
This year you have a choice to make either a film (3-5mins) or a photo book, either online using Blurb or by hand using traditional book binding techniques, which you design to include both your essay and a final selection and sequence of your photographs produced as a response to your chosen theme(s) of LOVE & REBELLION.
In addition, you are expecting to produce an appropriate amount of blogposts that demonstrates your ability to research, analysis, plan, record, experiment, present and evaluate.
What it says in the syllabus (Edexcel)
Essential that students build on their prior knowledge and experience developed during the course.
Select artists work, methods and art movements appropriate to your previous coursework work as a suitable basis for your study.
Investigate a wide range of work and sources.
Develop your written dissertation in the light of your chosen focus from the practical part of previous coursework and projects.
Establish coherent and sustainable links between your own practical work with that of historical and contemporary reference.
Be aware of some of the methods employed by critics and historians within the history of art and photography.
Demonstrate a sound understanding of your chosen area of study with appropriate use of critical vocabulary.
Show evidence for an ongoing critical and analytical review of your investigation – both your written essay and own practical work in response to research and analysis.
Develop a personal and critical enquiry.
Culminate in an illustrated written presentation.
How to get started: Link your chosen area of study to your previous work, knowledge and understanding based upon your chosen theme(s) of LOVE & REBELLION
Up until now you have explored both themes in class and produced two different outcomes; a photo-zine and a film. Both are exploring narrative in different ways and it up to you know to decide which theme and medium you enjoy most and feel will give you the best chance at producing a quality final outcome.
The choice is between making a photobook; exploring a subject and theme in depth using photography as a tool for visual storytelling, either through observation (documentary) or staging (tableaux) a series of photoshoots. Making a film might be more in line with your creative skills set and offer other elements to storytelling, such as moving image and sound. Either option offers its own unique set of challenges and opportunities for you to express yourself creatively as A-Level Photography student.
Its also important to point out that your work will presented and exhibited to a large audience in May next year through a collective newspaper and two exhibitions in the Channels Islands, Berni Gallery at the Jersey Arts Centre (21 May – 14 June 2021) and Guernsey Photography Festival (23 Sept – 24 Oct 2021
In this module we will re-visit how different narrative structures can be used to tell stories in pictures from looking at photobooks as well as cinema. We will consider narrative within a documentary approach where observation is key in representing reality, albeit we will look at both visual styles within traditional photojournalism as well as contemporary photography which employs a more poetic visual language that straddles the borders between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fiction.
Some of the subjects you wish to explore within the themes may relate to issues already discussed and interpreted in your work so far, for example race, gender, equality and climate change. It may be useful for you to revisit some of the parts we have already covered so far here in our coursework.
PRACTICAL WORK: You have 6 weeks in lesson time and over 2 weeks at Christmas to complete principal shoots and make new images. This include all relevant blog posts demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of: RESEARCH > ANALYSIS > PLANNING > RECORDING, EXPERIMENTATION > PRESENTATION > EVALUATION.
DEADLINE: MUST complete 3-4 new photo-shoots/ moving image recordings this term that must be published on the blog by Mon 4 Jan 2020.
ESSAY: We will be spending minimum 1 lesson a week on CONTEXTUAL STUDIES where you will be learning about critical theory, photo history and contemporary practice as well as developing academic study skills to help you writing your essay. However, it is essential that you are organising your time effectively and setting aside time outside of lessons to read, study and write.
DEADLINE: Essay MUST be handed in Fri 29 Jan 2021
PHOTOBOOK / FILM: Returning after Christmas we will be spending the whole month of January developing, designing and printing the photobook which will include your essay and somewhere between 40-60 images sequenced to tell a story.
MOCK EXAM: 5 – 11 Feb 2021. 3 days controlled test (15 hours) Groups:
FINAL DEADLINE: Completion of photobook/ film with final essay Thurs 11 Feb 2021 .
EXAM (ESA): Exam Paper and preparation begins Fri 12 Feb 2021.
EXAM (ESA): Controlled Conditions 4 – 5 – 6 May and 12 – 13 – 14 May 2021.
Week 12: 23 – 29 Nov Introduction to Personal Study Review and Reflect
Lesson task MON:Inspirations Choose one Personal Study from past students, either from blog post below or photobooks in class. Look through sequence of images carefully and read the essay. Present the study in class and comment on the book’s, concept, design and narrative. Review the essay and comment on its use of critical/ contextual/ historical references, use of direct quotes to form an argument and specialist vocabulary relating to art and photography. Make an assessment using the mark sheet and calculate a grade.
Essential that students build on their prior knowledge and experience developed during the course.
From your Personal Investigation based on LOVE & REBELLION write an overview of what you learned and how you intend to develop your Personal Study.
1. Describe which themes, medium (photography, film), approaches (documentary, tableaux, conceptual), artists, skills and photographic processes/ techniques inspired you the most and why.
2. Include examples of current experiments to illustrate your thinking.
3. Produce a new mind-map and mood-board based around how you interpret the theme of LOVE & REBELLION now using new inspirations etc.
4. Write a statement of intent that clearly contexualises how you wish to develop your project further, including theme(s), subject-matter, artists and final outcome you aim to make; photobook or film.
5. Plan your first photo-shoot as a response to initial ideas. Must be published on the blog by Wed 2 Dec.
Week 13: 30 Nov – 6 Dec Theory & Practice: Artists References Contextual Studies: Conversations on Photography
THEORY > ANALYSIS
Objective:Criteria from the Syllabus
Select artists work, methods, theories and art movements appropriate to your previous coursework work as a suitable basis for your Personal Study.
Investigate a wide range of work and sources
ARTISTS REFERENCES: Select 2-3 artists/photographers that have inspired your work already and that you would like to research in depth as a basis for your Personal Study. Compare and contrast their practice and work following these steps:
Produce a mood board with a selection of images and write an overview of their work, methods, style, approach and subject matter.
Select at least one image from each photographer and analyse in depth using methodology of TECHNICAL > VISUAL > CONTEXTUAL > CONCEPTUAL.
MEANING & METHODS: Identify meaning and methods behind selected artists/photographers work and research at least 3 different literary sources (online articles, books, Youtube clips) that will provide you with different critical perspective and views other than your own.
The literary sources will also provide you with something to read for further contextual understanding and critical thinking in preparation for writing your essay. Make sure you save hyperlinks photocopies etc in a new folder: Academic References.
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, books
Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post.
PRACTICE > RESPONSES
PLANNING: Plan a shoot in response to researching and interpreting artists work above. Make sure it relates to your ideas on how you intend to develop your project. Follow these instructions: what, why, how, when, where?
RECORDING: Complete planned photo-shoot and bring images in to class. Begin to edit and show experimentation with images using Lightroom / Photoshops/ Premiere as appropriate to your intentions. Make sure you annotate processes and techniques used.
EVALUATION: Upon completion of photoshoot and experimentation, make sure you evaluate and reflect on your next step of development. 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?
PHOTOGRAPHERS / ARTISTS
You can find other alternative inspirations and artists references here:
Raymond Meeks (Halfstory, Halflife), Theo Gosselin (Sans Limites), Jen Davis (Eleven Years), Diana Markosian (Inventing my Father, Santa Barbara), Doug Dubois (My Last Day at Seventeen), Alessandra Sanguinetti (The Illusion of an everlasting Summer), Justine Kurland (Girl Picture), Jim Goldberg (Raised by Wolves) Sophie Calle (Suite Vénitienne), Nick Waplington (Living Room), Nan Goldin (The Ballad of Sexual Dependency), Corinne Day, (Dairy), Martin Parr (Signs of the Time, Common Sense, The Cost of Living), Chris Killip (Isle of Man: A book about the Manx), Lauren Greenfield (Fast Forward, Girl Culture), Nicholas Nixon (the Brown Sisters), Robert Clayton (Estate), Valerio Spada (Gomorrah Girl), Martin Gregg (Midlands), Alain Laboile, (At the Edge of the World, Sian Davey (Looking for Alice, Martha), Laia Abril (The Epilogue), Rita Puig-Serra Costa (Where Mimosa Bloom), Carole Benitah, (Photo Souvenirs), Richard Billingham (Ray’s a Laugh), Larry Sultan (Pictures from Home), Matt Eich: I Love You, I’m leaving, Yoshikatsu Fujii: Red Strings, Junpei Ueda: Pictures of My life, Sam Harris (The Middle of Somewhere), Dana Lixenberg (Imperial Courts), Philip Toledano (Days with my Father, When I was Six), Mariela Sancari (Moises is not Dead), Yury Toroptsov (Deleted Scene, The House of Baba Yaga), Amak Mahmoodian (Shenasnameh), Colin Pantall, (All Quite on the Homefront), Mitch Epstein (Family Business), Jason Wilde (Vear & John, Silly Arse Broke It), LaToya Ruby Frazier (The Notion of Family),
Doug DuBois: My Last Days of Seventeen The title, “My last day at Seventeen,” was first uttered by Eirn while I was taking her photograph in her parents’ back garden on the eve of her 18th birthday. Although Eirn argues her remark was more properly phrased, “ it’s my last day as seventeen” the sentiment is the same: there is a time in everyone’s life where the freedom and promise of childhood are lost to the coming of age and experience. The process can be gradual or abrupt; it can begin at age 18, 12 or 40.
The photographs were made over a five year period in the town of Cobh, County Cork in Ireland. I came to Cobh at the invitation of the Sirius Arts Centre in the summer of 2009. Ireland had just begun its sharp decline from the boom years of the Celtic Tiger. I spent my days trying to ingratiate myself with contractors to gain access to building sites that lay abandoned throughout the Irish countryside. I got nowhere.
Raymond Meeks: Every summer, since as long as anyone in the area can remember, groups of teenage boys and girls have been congregating by a single-lane bridge that spans the tributaries of Bowery and Catskill Creeks in the Catskill Mountain region of New York. Just below it, in the wilderness, a waterfall drops sixty feet above a pond. Those daring enough to take the leap usually take a small run-up before flinging themselves off the precipice. Within the act of the jump and its timeless ritual lingers the last fleeting moments of youth, of endless summer days and reckless abandon. Beyond that, the unknown.
Known for his slow-burning chronicles of rural America, Raymond Meeks turns his attention to Furlong and its intrepid summer dwellers in his most recent book Halfstory Halflife. Sketching out his local area with a sensitive lyricism, Meeks observed its energy and atmosphere over the course of three years; the spectacle of the wait, the anticipation of the climb and the final leap into darkness, where time comes to a standstill as bodies are frozen in motion. These everyday experiences and rituals, simple and carefree in their nature, gain a weight and significance through the lens, as the bodies fall somewhere beyond the threshold of youth and into adulthood.
Theo Gosselin ( Sans Limites): The much anticipated follow up to his highly successful debut book Avec Le Coeur, Sans Limites by Théo Gosselin presents a glimpse of a life beyond boundaries – unrestricted by limitations of geography and social conventions. The result of the photographer´s most recent road trips across the US, Spain, Scotland and native France,
At times, Gosselin´s work approaches something akin to poésie bucolique; his photographs representing modern day pastoral landscapes that resemble 21st century equivalents of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, Manet’s Déjeuner sur L’herbe or Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses. At other times, his images capture moments more resonant of Bacchanalian scenes. Deliberately cinematic, Gosselin’s photography reveals friends in the act of escaping from their regular lives into newly enticing and perilous modes of existence, ever in search of the persistent though elusive idea of freedom.
Jim Goldberg: Raised By Wolves. The personal story behind the making and the legacy of Goldberg’s seminal work about marginalized youth, which occupies the liminal space between documentary and narrative fiction
Jen Davis has spent eleven years working on a series of self-portrait ’s dealing with issues regarding beauty, identity, and body image. Her poignant and beautifully articulated photographs have recently been published Kehrer Verlag in a monograph titled, Eleven Years.For over a decade Jen has bravely turned the camera on herself revealing a journey of self analysis and self awareness that while very personal, it incredibly universal. Her work reflected a mastery of light and color.
Haley Morris-Cafiero: Wait Watchers For my series, Wait Watchers, I set up a camera in a public area and photograph the scene as I perform mundane tasks while strangers pass by me. I then examine the images to see if any of the passersby had a critical or questioning element in their face or body language. I consider my photographs a social experiment and I reverse the gaze back on to the stranger and place the viewer in the position of being a witness to a moment in time. The project is a performative form of street photography.
I place the camera on a tripod and take hundreds of photographs. The resulting images capture the gazer in a microsecond moment where the shutter, the scene, my actions and their body language align and are frozen on the frame. I do not know what the people in my photographs are looking at or reacting to. I present the images to the world to start a conversation about the gaze and how we use it communicate our thoughts of others.
For most of my life, my father was nothing more than a cut out in our family album.
An empty hole.
A reminder of what wasn’t there.
I have few childhood memories of him.
In one, we are dancing together in our tiny apartment in Moscow. In another, he is leaving.
My father would disappear for months at a time. Then, unexpectedly, he would come home.
Until, one day, it was our turn to leave.
The year was 1996.
My mother woke me up and told me to pack my belongings. She said we were going on a trip, and the next morning we arrived in our new home, in California.
We never said goodbye to my father.
For my mom, the solution to forget him was simple. She cut his image out of every photograph. But those holes made it harder for me to forget him.
I often wondered what it would have been like to have a father.
When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.
Inspired by the 1980s American soap opera Santa Barbara, my mother enrolled with an agency in Russia that posted listings in American newspapers and catalogs for so-called mail-order brides. She was 35. We arrived to the coastal town of Santa Barbara, and were met by an older man who would soon become her husband, and take the place of my own father. And this is where the story begins. The idea of touching something that felt untouchable.
I returned to Russia to visit the scattered remnants of my father’s memory. In fact, I hardly know anything about him. He died before I turned two. I have no personal memories of him. Almost nothing that could have recalled its existence has survived. There was just his camera. When I was nine, I found it in the closet where my mother had kept it safe for years. I took it apart to the last screw as if I was looking for something hidden inside. With my own unconscious hands, I destroyed the last object that bound us to my father.
There are still his photos, which he had taken and drawn himself. My father was an amateur photographer. In one of these photos, I am a five month old baby lying face down on my parents’ bed. My eyes are fixed on him, the photographer. My father, who has only thirteen months to live.
His untimely death made him an abstract character, a shadow at the gates of nothingness. He was almost forgotten. No one spoke of him anymore. His grave has been abandoned. All I knew about him was from a few stories that people who knew him told me. Despite everything, these stories told and repeated with more or less precision depending on the witness maintained a semblance of memory. Just as folklore is passed on, repeated and revised from generation to generation.
LaToya Ruby Frazier (The Notion of Family); In this, her first book, LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982) offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s hometown. The work also considers the impact of that decline on the community and on her family, creating a statement both personal and truly political
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.)
Matt Eich:I Love You, I’m leaving Love You, I’m Leaving is my meditation on familial bonds, longing, and memory. The series borrows from personal experience and the visual language of the everyday in order to create a fictional account that mirrors my reality. Made during a time of personal domestic unease, I photographed as my parents separated, and my family moved to a new city.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/102344549
Yoshikatsu Fujii:Red Strings 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.
If you are interested in exploring the themes of LOVE & REBELLION within the notion of family have a look at different approaches within documentary and tableaux photography here
Family can be interpreted in different ways, one is to consider it in relation to the concept of HOME – which can be interpreted as both family or community. Home is also more than just the four walls of your house where you live with your family. Jersey, the island where you perhaps are born or where you grew up can be considered a home too. Home can be interpreted as a community. If you are away from home you often think about your home with a sense of nostalgia. Home can be associated with memories, feelings, hopes, fears etc.
Or Laura El-Tantawy and her project the uprising and protests in her homeland of Egypt , In The Shadow of Pyramids
GUERNSEY PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL (GPF): The theme for 2021 will be Acts of Love and Rebellion. Below is a list of photographers who will be exhibiting at the next festival with work relating to the two themes of LOVE and REBELLION. If we manage to produce a newspaper it will be exhibited at the festival in Guernsey in Sept 23 – 24 Oct 2021.
Week 14: 7 – 13 Dec Theory & Practice: Art Movements & Isms
THEORY > Art Movements & Isms
The syllabus states clearly that you have to be aware of some of the methods employed by critics and historians within the history of art and photography.
To demonstrate your knowledge and understanding you will have to write a paragraph in your essay providing historical context about your chosen artists/ photographers and how their their work and practice is linked to a specific art movement, ism or theory.
For this task you need to select an art movement and ism that is relevant to your Personal Study and make a 2-3 minutes presentation in class. You can choose to work alone or pair up with a fellow student:
Pictorialism
Realism / Straight Photography
Modernism
Post-modernism
Follow these instructions:
Start by watching the films below, study PPT presentations and read articles here which will provide you with an overview.
Select two literary sources from above and identify relevant quotes (at least two) that you can incorporate into your paragraph.
Your paragraph must include visual examples of artists making work within that art movement that is relevant to your Personal Study.
PRACTICE>Photographic responses
Respond to the art movement/ ism that you have researched and make an image or a set of images that represent the methods/ techniques/ processes/ approach/ styles / aesthetics used by artists working within that is ism or movement.
Make it relevant to your own project.
Produce a blog post and publish by – Wed 15 Dec
Week 15 + XMAS: 14 Dec – 4 Jan Practical work: PHOTOBOOK / FILM Photo-shoots & Experimentation
Objective: Criteria from the Syllabus
Show evidence for an on-going critical and analytical review of your investigation – both your written essay and own practical work in response to research and analysis.
PHOTOBOOK
PLANNING
STORY: What is your story? Describe in:
3 words
A sentence
A paragraph
NARRATIVE: How will you tell your story?
Images > new photographic responses, photo-shoots
Archives > old photos from family albums, iPhone
Texts > letters, documents, poems, text messages
PRACTICAL WORK
PLANNING: Produce a detailed plan of at least 3-4 photoshoots that you intend on doing in the next 3-4 weeks – including Christmas break. Follow these instructions: what, why, how, when, where?
RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic response to your Personal Study and bring images from new photo-shoots to lessons:
• Save shoots in folder on Media Drive: and import into Lightroom • Organisation: Create a new Collection from each new shoot inside Collection Set: LOVE & REBELLION • Editing: select 8-12 images from each shoot. • Experimenting: Adjust images in Develop, both as Colour and B&W images appropriate to your intentions • Export images as JPGS (1000 pixels) and save in a folder: BLOG • Create a Blogpost with edited images and an evaluation; explaining what you focused on in each shoot and how you intend to develop your next shoot. • Make references to artists references, previous shoots, experiments etc.
EXPERIMENTING:
• Export same set of images from Lightroom as JPEG (4000 pixels) • Experimentation: demonstrate further creativity using Photoshop to make composite/ montage/ typology/ grids/ diptych/triptych, text/ typology etc appropriate to your intentions • Design: Begin to explore different layout options using InDesign and make a new zine/book. Set up new document as A5 page sizes. This is trying out ideas before we begin designing photobook in January. • Make sure you annotate process and techniques used
EVALUATION: Upon completion of photoshoot and experimentation, make sure you evaluate and reflect on your next step of development. 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?
WED 16 Dec: CONTEXTUAL STUDIES Conversations on Photography: As a case study read one interview, identity 3 quotes and apply theory to a analysis of one image
Visuals > new photographic responses, photo-shoots
Sound > ambient, sound fx, voice-over, interview, music
Archives > found imagery, footage, audio
PRACTICAL WORK
STORYBOARDING: Based on your specification and narrative produce a storyboard with 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.
PLANNING: Produce a detailed plan of at least 3-4 video/audio recordings that you intend on doing in the next 3-4 weeks – incl Christmas break
RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic response to your Personal Study and bring footage from video/ audio recordings to lessons:
• Save media in folder on local V:Data Drive • Organisation: Create a new project in Premiere • Editing: begin editing video/ audio clips on the timeline • Adjusting: recordings in Colour / B&W appropriate to your intentions.
EXPERIMENTING: • Video: experimenting with 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.
EVALUATING: 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?
Week 16: 4 – 10 Jan Essay writing: Academic study skills Contextual Study: Decoding Photography
MON: Academic Sources
Research and identify 3-5 literary sources from a variety of media such as books, journal/magazines, internet, Youtube/video that relates to your personal study and artists references .
Begin to read essay, texts and interviews with your chosen artists as well as commentary from critics, historians and others.
It’s important that you show evidence of reading and draw upon different pints of view – not only your own.
Take notes when you’re reading…key words, concepts, passages
Write down page number, author, year, title, publisher, place of publication so you can list source in a bibliography
Bibliography
List all the sources that you have identified above as literary sources. Where there are two or more works by one author in the same year distinguish them as 1988a, 1988b etc. Arrange literature in alphabetical order by author, or where no author is named, by the name of the museum or other organisation which produced the text. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources in alphabetical order e.g. websites/online sources, Youtube/ DVD/TV.
Quotation and Referencing:
Use quotes to support or disprove your argument
Use quotes to show evidence of reading
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
TUE: Essay Question
Think of a hypothesis and list possible essay questions
WED 6 JAN: CONTEXTUAL STUDIES Decoding Photography • Select one of the questions listed • Read text in detail, make notes and identify 3 quotes • Select one image from examples mentioned in text and apply your own interpretation of the photograph by applying theory and critical thinking • Incorporate the 3 quotes above into your interpretation of the image and make sure you comment on the quotes.
THUR: Essay Plan Make a plan that lists what you are going to write about in each paragraph – essay structure
Essay question:
Opening quote
Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?
Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography and visual culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian. Link to powerpoints and resources above about art movements and isms.
Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced
Bibliography: List all relevant sources used
FRI: EssayIntroduction In this lesson you will write a 45 mins draft essay introduction following these steps:
Open a new Word document > SAVE AS: Essay draft
Copy essay question into Essay title: Hypothesis > if you don’t have one yet, make one!
Copy your essay introduction (from Essay Plan) which will give you a framework to build upon and also copy your Statement of Intent.
Identify 2 quotes from sources identified in an earlier task using Harvard System of Referencing.
Use one quote as an opening quote:Choose a quote from either one of your photographers or critics. It has to be something that relates to your investigation.
Begin to write a paragraph (250-500 words) answering the following questions below.
You got 45 mins to write and upload to the blog!
Think about an opening that will draw your reader in e.g. you can use an opening quote that sets the scene. Or think more philosophically about the nature of photography and and feeble relationship with reality.
You should include in your introduction an outline of your intention of your study e.g.
What are you going to investigate.
How does this area/ work interest you?
What are you trying to prove/challenge, argument/ counter-argument?
Whose work (artists/photographers) are you analysing and why?
What historical or theoretical context is the work situated within. Include 1 or 2 quotes for or against.
What links are there with your previous studies?
What have you explored so far in your Coursework or what are you going to photograph?
How did or will your work develop.
What camera skills, techniques or digital processes in Photoshop have or are you going to experiment with?
Week 17: 11 – 10 Jan PRESENTATION – Work-in-Progress
Prepare a 3-5 mins presentation on something that you are working on right now in your project. For example:
An idea An image A photo-shoot An experiment An inspiration New research New development
Use blog posts to present in class. As a class we will give constructive feedback on how each student can develop their work and project.
We are living in times of real change to our environment (climate change), politics (identity), economy and health (global downturn due to Covid-19). As young people you are the next generation whose future will feel the impact of what is happening around the world today. For this task we want you to make a 90 SEC FILM based on the theme of REBELLION which will give you an opportunity to make a creative response that is engaging with politics, whether that is based on art, identity or culture. The film is a platform for you to express how you feel about the current state of affairs and give you a voice that represents your views on issues that are important to you and your generation.
IDENTITY POLITICS is a term that describes a political approach wherein people of a particular religion, race, social background, class or other identifying factor form exclusive socio-political alliances, moving away from broad-based, coalitional politics to support and follow political movements that share a particular identifying quality with them. Its aim is to support and center the concerns, agendas, and projects of particular groups, in accord with specific social and political changes.
The term was coined by the Combahee River Collective in 1977. It took on widespread usage in the early 1980s, and in the ensuing decades has been employed in myriad cases with radically different connotations dependent upon the term’s context. It has gained currency with the emergence of social activism, manifesting in various dialogues within the feminist, American civil rights, and LGBT movements, disabled groups, as well as multiple nationalist and postcolonial organizations, for example: Black Lives Matter movement.
CI Pride 2019 in St Helier
CULTURE WARS are cultural conflicts between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices. It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values is seen.
Grayson Perry’s: Big American Road Trip. Artist and social commentator Grayson Perry crosses the US, exploring its biggest fault lines, from race to class and identity, making art as he goes along. Click here to watch Episode 3 where he travels to the Midwest and finds folk bitterly divided over identity politics and hot issues like abortion and vaccination. What causes such ‘culture wars’ and how can they be overcome?
Grayson Perry. The American Dream. 2019
This map of the US reflects a battle-torn landscape where nuance, compromise and empathy are casualties in the culture war
DISCUSS: Make a blog post and write 300-500 words expressing your view on identity politics and culture wars . How does it impact society? Describe some of the positive aspects of groups harnessing their shared identity and political views as well some of the dangers of tribalism dividing communities. Provide examples both for and against, reference sources used and include images. Try and frame the debate both within a global and local perspective.
Read article here in the Financial Times, that uses the recent debate around the removal of Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square as an example of wider discussion on Britain’s colonial past and the current government’s handling of racial inequality.
The issues above should also be viewed within a much broader historical frame work on racism and colonialism. Make connections with what we explored before the summer as part of our project
‘We women are roused. Now that we are roused, we will never be quiet again’ Emmeline Pankhurst
SUFFRAGETTES: A suffragette was a member of an activist women’s organisations in the early 20th century who, under the banner “Votes for Women”, fought for the right to vote in public elections, known as women’s suffrage. The term refers in particular to members of the British Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a women-only movement founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, which engaged in direct action and civil disobedience.In 1906, a reporter writing in the Daily Mail coined the term suffragette for the WSPU, from suffragist, to belittle the women advocating women’s suffrage. The militants embraced the new name, even adopting it for use as the title of the newspaper published by the WSPU.
Bringing together the voices of women who fought for equal rights and representation – from aristocrats and actresses to mill workers and trade unionists – these speeches, pamphlets, letters and articles form an inspiring testament to the power of a movement.
Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters (left to right) Christabel and Sylvia manhandled by police (c1914)
Dame Millicent Fawcett addressing a meeting in Hyde Park as president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (c1913)
“Militant suffragettes in Jersey – the Misses L Forsyth and Agnes Buckton who are at present visiting the Island” was the caption to this photograph published in the Jersey Morning News edition of 28/08/1914. The photograph is by Jersey’s first Photo Journalist: Percival Dunham.On 6 February 1918 the coalition government enfranchised women with the Representation of the People Act. However, the vote was restricted to those over 30, property owners and graduates from British universities. Ten years later, in June 1928, the government extended the franchise to include all women over the age of 21. A year later in 1919 women in Jersey were also given the right to vote.Photograph from the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive
Women’s groups today and female activism: FEMEN is a feminist activist group intended to protect women’s rights. The organization became internationally known for organizing controversial topless protests against sex tourism, religious institutions, sexism, homophobia, and other social, national, and international topics.
The #MeToo movement, with variations of related local or international names, is a movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment where people publicize allegations of sex crimes committed by powerful and/or prominent men.
DADAISM: Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. It arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. Influenced by other avant-garde movements – Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism – its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. Dada’s aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York, and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups. The movement dissipated with the establishment of Surrealism, but the ideas it gave rise to have become the cornerstones of various categories of modern and contemporary art.
Hannah Höch
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
The Art Critic 1919-20 Raoul Hausmann
Explore more here on The Art Story about Dada, key concepts, artists and their art. Here are some of their main players and some of their work. Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Emma Hennings, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, Marcel Janco, Sophie-Tauber-Arp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, Hans Richter, John Heartfield
Read an article here in the New Your Times celebrating its 100 year birthday.
At Cabaret Voltaire (the birthplace of Dada) in Zurich Hugo Ball recited one of his poems, Karawane in 1916.
Ball described his poetry as an effort to “return to the innermost alchemy of the word” to invent a new language outside of the conventional one. Of the phonetic verses that he created, which he called “Lautgedichte” (“sound poems”), he wrote:, “I don’t want words that other people have invented… I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words that are seven yards long.”
The Dada Manifesto is a short text that was written on July 14, 1916 by Hugo Ball and read the same day at the Waag Hall in Zurich, for the first public Dada party. In this manifesto, Hugo Ball expresses his opposition to Dada becoming an artistic movement. His proclamation upset Tristan Tzara a Romanian artists who in 1918 published another Dada manifesto, which you can read here.
READY-MADES: Marcel Duchamp was a pioneer of Dada. In the years immediately preceding World War I, Duchamp found success as a painter in Paris. But he soon gave up painting almost entirely, explaining, “I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products.”
Seeking an alternative to representing objects in paint, Duchamp began presenting objects themselves as art. He selected mass-produced, commercially available, often utilitarian objects, designating them as art and giving them titles. “Readymades,” as he called them, disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Instead, Duchamp argued, “An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”
“In 1913,” recalled Marcel Duchamp, “I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.”1 The result, Bicycle Wheel, is the first of Duchamp’s Readymades
Dada, the direct antecedent to the Conceptual Art movement, is now considered a watershed moment in 20th-century art. Postmodernism as we know it would not exist without Dada. Almost every underlying postmodern theory in visual and written art as well as in music and drama was invented or at least utilized by Dada artists: art as performance, the overlapping of art with everyday life, the use of popular culture, audience participation, the interest in non-Western forms of art, the embrace of the absurd, and the use of chance.
A large number of artistic movements since Dada can trace their influence to the anti-establishment group. Other than the obvious examples of Surrealism, Neo-Dada, and Conceptual art, these would include Pop art, Fluxus, the Situationist International, Performance art, Feminist art, and Minimalism. Dada also had a profound influence on graphic design and the field of advertising with their use of collage and experimenting with typography, as well as fashion and music from Jazz and Punk. Read more here.
INSPIRATIONS > INFLUENCES
ARTISTS REFERENCES: You could consider the theme of REBELLION as an act of expressing your identity and protecting your freedom as a citizen, whether that is political, religious or sexual freedom. See link to A2 Exam in 2018 below for more ideas, artists references etc.
Below are a number of artists and ideas exploring the theme of REBELLION in relation to 3 associated subjects: GENDER, AUTHORITY AND PROPAGANDA.
GENDER
CASE STUDY: 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. 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.
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.”
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.
READ articles here in The Guardian and the BBC to learn more and use these texts for your essay. Link to Jersey Heritage which houses the largest collection of her work.
In 2017 the National Portrait Gallery in London staged a major exhibition Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask showing their work 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?
In Behind The 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. Read articles here in Aperture and The Guardian in relation to the exhibition.
Cahun has been described as a Cindy Sherman before her time. Wearing’s art undoubtedly owes something to Sherman – just as Sherman herself is indebted to artist Suzy Lake. Looking back at Cahun, Wearing is both tracing artistic influence, and paying homage to it, teasing out threads in a web of relationships crossing generations.
Cindy Sherman, A selection of images from her film stills
Cindy Sherman works play with female stereotypes. 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 on a dedicated site at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York that hosted 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.
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.
Here is link to Shannon’s blog showing all her research, analysis, recordings, experimentation and evaluations
Since her A-level studies Shannon has continued her passion for photography and has recently completed her BA (Hons) degree in Documentary Photography at University of South Wales. During her 3-year degree she developed a number of projects based around gender identities and constructions. Shannon will deliver a presentation about her practice on Wed 14 Oct, but beforehand you need to do some research about her work so you can engage with her talk and ask some relevant questions. You will need to have an in-depth knowledge of her work as you are are required to write a comparetive essay between Claude Cahun and Shannon O’donnell.
Here is a link to her website, a short biography below and examples of key works:
I am an artist born in Jersey, Channel Islands. Currently based in Cardiff, Wales my practice explores themes around the gendered experience with a focus on femininity and masculinity as gendered traits. Through deep research and a sociological approach my work explores the self and identity.
My fascination lies with questioning society and challenging traditional views of gender through my work. My work is informed by my personal experience and through interviewing specific demographics to help gage a sociological understanding of how gender is viewed or challenged within mainstream society.
That’s Not The Way The River Flows Gender is being re-conceptualised. Our experience of gender is changing, transforming from being solely male and female, opening to a multitude of subcategories including; gender queer, non-binary, transgender and gender fluid. As we unpick the complicated narrative of gender and the generalisations that it encapsulates, we are forced to re-imagine what it is that makes us who we are and what we want or can identify as. The beginning of change starts with the self.
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.
A Short Film: That’s Not The Way The River Flows A visual poem with word by me surrounding the claustrophobia of gender identity, while visuals poke fun at ideas of masculinity and femininity (2019).
Here They Stood “Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.” – Christabel Pankhurst
The Cat And Mouse Act, formally known as the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, 1913 was formed in British Law specifically aimed at militant Suffragettes who went on hunger strike while imprisoned. The Act, passed on 25th April 1913, afforded prison guards to temporarily discharge individuals whose health was at major risk. Once in better health prisoners were informed to report back to carry out the rest of their sentence, many of whom did not conform.
The Cat And The Mice (2018) project, name derived from the Act of 1913, follows the path of Suffragettes and Suffragists alike around Cardiff in the early 1900s. It encapsulates historically significant places, now forgotten in modern city life. The project also aims to show how the efforts of those Welsh women within the Suffrage movement have allowed for contemporary women of Cardiff, specifically Riverside, the freedom to have a voice, to set up local peaceful organisations for change in the community, as well as a leading example to contemporary activists of today.
Susan’s Sleep (2018) is a short film that, when creating, became a form of therapy for me. It helped me to understand that I had a lot of unresolved trauma and for that reason and for my family I will not release the full short film but instead leave you with a trailer.
This body of work explores the traumatic experience that my family and I went through beginning on the 25th December 2016 and well into the new year. My mother was ill and on Christmas day was taken in an ambulance to the hospital as she could no longer breathe for herself. On the 27th December she was put into a medically induced coma after fighting with the NIV (Non Invasive Ventilation System). Here we spent our days by my mothers bedside in an isolated room on ICU (Intensive Care Unit). This short film is about that time in limbo, waiting each day for bad news, or any news.
By Your Bedside (2018) is a series of images that I created to compliment my short film, Susan’s Sleep. The images are quite, to reflect my own experience during the time my mother was in a coma. I went mute during this time, isolated myself and kept my emotions inside. The only time that I felt able to express myself was when I was sat by my mother’s bedside. These images convey the surreal movie-like experience I felt while waiting for my mum to wake up.
Casa Susanna: A series of polaroid portraits found at a jumble sale about 20 years after the images were originally taken in the 1960s. This was a place where men who enjoyed female dress and transgender women were able to fully be themselves without judgement. It was a kind of holiday place but with an extremely strong community that cared for one another surrounding it.
Lissa Rivera – Beautiful Boy (a chaptered series)Photographer makes images of her effeminate male partner, they have an interesting story on how he had felt so free during his time in college to dress and act as he felt confident but in the greater outside world he has reverted to sticking to the status quo and blending in as felt that he wouldn’t be accepted otherwise. Walter Pfeiffer – Carlo Joh. A collaboration between photographer and the subject where the subject brought in their own props and was involved in the creative process of how they wanted to be represented..
Clare Rae, an artist from Melbourne, Australia who produces photographs and moving image works that interrogate representations of the female body via an exploration of the physical environment. Rae visited Jersey as part of the Archisle international artist-in-residence programme in 2017. She was researching the Claude Cahun archive, shooting new photography and film in Jersey, as well as running workshops.
In her series, Never standing on two feet, Rae considers Cahun’s engagement with the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey, an aspect of her work that has received little analysis to date. Rae writes:
Like Cahun’s, my photographs depict my body in relation to place; in these instances sites of coastal geography and Jersey’s Neolithic ritual monuments. I enact a visual dialogue between the body and these environments, and test how their photographic histories impact upon contemporary engagements. Cahun used self-portraiture to subvert the dominance of the male gaze in photographic depictions of the female body in the landscape. My practice is invested in the feminist act of self-representation and I draw parallels between my performances of an expanding vocabulary of gesture and Cahun’s overtly performative images of the body expressing a multiplicity of identity. In this series, I tease out the interpretations inherent in landscape photography. I utilise gesture and the performing body to contrast and unsettle traditional representations of the female figure in the landscape.
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT: Here is the task that Clare asked participants to respond to in a workshop she delivered while in Jersey. This could be a good starting point for your 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.
While in Jersey Clare gave an 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.
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.
Francesca 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.
MASCULINITIES: LIBERATION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY Through the medium of film and photography, this major exhibition considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity from behind the lens, the exhibition brings together over 300 works by over 50 pioneering international artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Catherine Opie to show how photography and film have been central to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture. The show also highlightslesser-known and younger artists – some of whom have never exhibited in the UK – including Cassils, Sam Contis, George Dureau, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas, Karlheinz Weinberger and Marianne Wex amongst many others. Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is part of the Barbican’s 2020 season, Inside Out, which explores the relationship between our inner lives and creativity.
Catherine Opie
Peter Hujar
Rineke Dijkstra
Karen Knorr
Hal Fisher
Karlheinz Weinberger
Rotimi Fani-Kayode
Masahisa Fukase
Sam Contis
Thomas Dworzak
Adi Nes
In the wake of #MeToo the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, female perceptions of men, hypermasculine stereotypes, tenderness and the family, the exhibition shows how central photography and film have been to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture.
Here is a downloadable teaching resource that includes information, activities and tasks that will help you develop ideas.
Key Focus Areas and questions in relation to the exhibition and the concept: MASCULINITIES
1. What does it mean to be male?
2. What overarching themes do you associate with the words masculine, masculinities or male? What would you classify as hegemonic (ruling) masculine values or traits, particularly historically – e.g. power, leadership, strength, dominance?
3. What would you say are the assumed norms of masculinity today? Think of examples of what breaks or subverts these norms and find examples in the exhibition.
4. Compare expectations and perceptions of masculinity through time, society and place – where are we now and where have we come from? Look at the variety of masculine identities encompassed, often complex or even contradictory, shaped by culture and society. In addition, you could consider the word femininities in just the same way and compare commonalities or differences.
5. How much are we conditioned by the society or culture in which we live, in terms of our gender identities? Consider gender expectations from birth onwards – what messages do we receive about who we are or are supposed to be and accompanying notions of equality? Do you feel there is still pressure put on young boys to be a certain way or to conform to some perceived gender norm?
6. Consider too, the word liberation in the context of the title – how and if photography is a liberating force for the subjects of the camera’s gaze
7. Do you think photography such as that seen in the exhibition can help to pave the way for new attitudes and choices? Discuss using examples you find in the exhibition.
In 2018 the Barbican staged another ground breaking exhibition; ANOTHER KIND OF LIFE: PHOTOGRAPHY ON THE MARGINS. Touching on themes of countercultures, subcultures and minorities of all kinds, the show featured 20 photographers from the 1950s to present day, reflecting a more diverse complex view of the world.
Another Kind of Life followed the lives of individuals & communities on the fringes of society from America to India, Chile to Nigeria. Driven by personal and political motivations, many of the photographers sought to provide an authentic representation of the disenfranchised communities with whom they spent months, years or even decades with, often conspiring with them to construct their own identity through the camera lens.
Featuring communities of sexual experimenters, romantic rebels, outlaws, survivalists, the economically dispossessed and those who openly flout social convention, the works present the outsider as an agent of change. From street photography to portraiture, vernacular albums to documentary reportage, the show includes the Casa Susanna Collection, Paz Errazuriz, Pieter Hugo, Mary Ellen Mark, Dayanita Singh, Teresa Margolles, Katy Grannan, Phillipe Chancel, Daido Moriyama, Seiji Kurata, Igor Palmin and many others.
Daido Moriyama
Phillipe Chancel
Paz Errazuriz
Walter Pfeiffer
Katy Grannan
Pieter Hugo
Mary Ellen Mark
Igor Palmin
Seiji Kurata
Casa Susanna
Dayanita Singh
AUTHORITY
Rebellion could also question authority; parents (home), teachers (school), government (society) etc. Within art history there are many examples of artists being rebellious and making provocative work that reflects on their own role as an artists and as a citizen. Here are some examples of film and video works.
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.
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
Here are a list of other artists/ photographers that has influenced Tom Pope’s work and that may inspire you too.
Mark Wallinger: Hymn
Bas Jan Ader: I’m Too Sad to Tell You
Martha Rosler: Kitchen Semiotics, 1975 In this performance Rosler takes on the role of an apron-clad housewife and parodies the television cooking demonstrations popularized by Julia Child in the 1960s. Standing in a kitchen, surrounded by refrigerator, table, and stove, she moves through the alphabet from A to Z, assigning a letter to the various tools found in this domestic space. Wielding knives, a nutcracker, and a rolling pin, she warms to her task, her gestures sharply punctuating the rage and frustration of oppressive women’s roles. Rosler has said of this work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”
Andy Warhol: The early experimental films Andy Warhol made in the 1960s are among the most significant works in the career of this prolific and mercurial American artist. In the short span of five years, from 1963 through 1968, Warhol produced nearly 650 films, including hundreds of silent Screen Tests, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.” Warhol’s films have been highly regarded for their radical explorations beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema. With works such as Empire (1964), his notorious eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, My Hustler (1965), a social comedy about gay life on Fire Island, and the double-screen The Chelsea Girls (1966), the first avant-garde film to achieve extensive commercial exhibition, Warhol redefined the film-going experience for a wide range of audiences and attracted serious critical attention as well as much publicity. In 1970, the artist withdrew his films from distribution; for the next twenty years, most critics and scholars could only reconstruct these works from reviews and other verbal accounts.
Yoko Ono: Since emerging onto the international art scene in the early 1960s, Yoko Ono has made profound contributions to visual art, performance, filmmaking, and experimental music. Born in Tokyo in 1933, she moved with her family to New York in the mid-1950s and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College. Over the next decade she lived in New York, Tokyo, and London, greatly influencing the international development of Fluxus and Conceptual art.
Ono’s earliest works were often based on instructions that she communicated to the public in verbal or written form. Painting to Be Stepped On (1960–61), for example, invited people to tread upon a piece of canvas placed directly on the floor, either physically or in their minds. Though easily overlooked, the work radically questioned the division between art and the everyday. In 1964, she compiled more than 150 of her instructions in her groundbreaking artist’s book, Grapefruit. The instructions range from feasible to improbable, often relying upon the reader’s imagination to complete the work. At turns poetic, humorous, unsettling, and idealistic, Ono’s early instruction pieces anticipated her later work, such as Cut Piece (1964), a performance in which people were invited to cut away portions of her clothing; Sky Machine (1966), a sculpture that speaks to her environmental concerns; and To See the Sky (2015), a spiral staircase installed beneath a skylight that visitors were invited to ascend in order to contemplate the sky.
Gillian Wearing: Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992-93)
Gillian Wearing: Dancing in Peckham. 1994
Duane Michaels: A self-taught photographer, Duane Michals broke away from established traditions of the medium during the 1960s. His messages and poems inscribed on the photographs, and his visual stories created through multiple images that he named Sequences defied the principles of the reigning practitioners of the form. Indeed, Michals considers himself as much a storyteller as a photographer.
Duane Michaels. Things Are Queer, 1973. Nine gelatin silver prints with hand-applied text. 3 3/8 x 5 inches
Some artists also presents political dissent enacted with the photograph in mind. Ai Weiwei took pictures of his hand, middle finger extended, in gestures of disrespect toward national monuments typically photographed by tourists
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.
In the work of Joseph Beuys dubbed ‘I Like America and America Likes Me‘, the artist is on a mission to illustrate that it is possible for human beings to coexist with nature. In this project of 1974, the artist is inspired by the belief that the union between men and nature must be restored. To put together the video for ‘I Like America and America Likes Me’, Beuys purposed that he would not set his foot down on American soil and his eyes would see nothing other than the coyote that was inside the gallery. By the time the three days were over, the coyote having built up its level of tolerance for the artist allows him a hug. He later added though that the coyote symbolizes the Native Americans and their relationship with nature. For the natives, the coyote is sacred, even representing a god to some, standing for power and transformation. In the eyes of the “white man,” the coyote stands for something very different: A dirty and untamable animal.
Dennis Oppenheim, Parallel Stress 1970
Dennis Oppenheim (September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim’s early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the nature of art, the making of art and the definition of art: a meta-art that arose when strategies of the Minimalists were expanded to focus on site and context. As well as an aesthetic agenda, the work progressed from perceptions of the physical properties of the gallery to the social and political context, largely taking the form of permanent public sculpture in the last two decades of a highly prolific career, whose diversity could exasperate his critics.
Dennis Oppenheim, Tooth and nail. 1970-74
Bruce Nauman (American b.1941) Using an array of media including video installation, performance, sculpture, printmaking and photography, Bruce Nauman is known for conceptual works that explore space, language, and the body. Nauman infuses his pieces with irony and humor, creating verbal and visual puns to often-unsettling effect, challenging viewers and making them aware of their own physicality. Read more here in an interview in New York Times.
Bruce Nauman discusses his video work “Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear” (1994). The artist filmed himself poking his face and then slowed the footage down, forcing viewers to pay attention to the formal qualities of each frame. Nauman reflects on how fellow artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Andy Warhol also reconsidered time and duration.
Bruce Nauman’s No, No, New Museum forms part of a series of four videos called “Clown Torture”. In it, Nauman performs absurd scenarios dressed as a clown. The video elicits unease and disturbs the viewer despite including nothing shocking. The clown, associated with the circus and parties but also horror films such as “It”, repeats the word ‘no’ countless times.This monotonous complaint ‘no, no, no’ fixes itself in our minds like a torture. The video plays on a loop, so it restarts automatically when it ends, giving the impression that this act continues eternally.
Pioneer of performance art, Vito Acconci talks about three ground-breaking actions he staged at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York in January 1972.
In ‘Seedbed’ Acconci positioned himself in the confined space under a specially constructed ramp and repeatedly masturbated, using the sound of visitors walking above him to fuel his sexual fantasies. ‘Transference Zone’ took place in a small room containing photographs of seven people who had an important place in the artist’s life, along with some of their possessions. If a visitor knocked on the door, he would invite them in and respond to them as if he or she were that person. For ‘Supply Room’, Acconci stood blindfolded in a corner screened off by netting, while his companion Kathy Dillon sat in the opposite corner. Her voice was audible on a pre-recorded monologue, inviting women entering the space to kidnap Acconci and take him prisoner. The three performances reflect Acconci’s interest in the interplay between the psychological and the social, and the overlapping boundaries of interior and exterior.
Chris Burden, Shoot. 1971
Chris Burden was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot, where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. From his action-based works of the 1970s to the jaw-dropping technical feats of his later sculptures, Chris Burden (1946–2015) consistently challenged his mental and physical limitations, reflecting on the surreal and precarious realities of contemporary life. Burden was a radical and uncompromising figure with a fierce political consciousness.
Gilbert & George: Gilbert & George have been creating art for almost fifty years. Describing their relationship in life and work, they have said, “It’s not a collaboration. . . . We are two people, but one artist.” George, born in Devon, England, in 1942, and Gilbert, born in the Dolomites, Italy, in 1943, met while studying sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, in 1967. One day while taking photos of each other holding their small-scale sculptures, and then without, the artists realized that they could dispense with them altogether. What was most interesting was not the objects themselves, but their presence as “living sculptures” within the images. They summed up their newly conceived position as artists succinctly: “Art and life became one, and we were the messengers of a new vision. At that moment that we decided we are art and life, every conversation with people became art, and still is.
Gilbert & George performed Singing Sculpture over a number of years and was their first success. For this performance they painted themselves in bronze and dressed in suits to sing and dance to a 1930s song titled Underneath the Arches
Marina Abramovich: Working in a wide range of media, Marina Abramović is best known for her provocative performance works, employing her own body as both subject and medium. In an early performance entitled Rhythm 10, Abramović repeatedly stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a series of knives, effectively testing the relationship between the mental and physical, and reinterpreting the concept of rhythm. Between 1976 and 1988, Abramović collaborated with German photographer and performance artist Ulay to create performance works that explore such binaries as male and female, active and passive, through the execution of repetitive, exhausting, and often painful actions. Abramović has continued to work independently since then, staging performative works that increasingly demand viewer involvement, such as her MoMA retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” in which museum visitors could sit down across from Abramović at a table and engage in a silent exchange with the artist.
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 Lissitzky
Raoul Haussman
John Heratfield
Hannah Höch
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 KennardOccupy-London-democracy
Isis 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
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
https://vimeo.com/231261685
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 Wielinga
Watch Youtube clip where Alice talks about her work from North Korea
This unit requires you to produce an appropriate number of blog posts which charts you project from start to finish including research, planning, analysis, recording, experimentation, evaluation, and presentation of creative outcomes.
Week 7: 12 – 18 Oct INSPIRATIONS & INFLUENCES Complete the following blog posts
RESEARCH > ANALYSIS
THEORY & CONTEXT: Write 300-500 words expressing your view on identity politics and culture wars. How does it impact society? Describe some of the positive aspects on groups harnessing their shared identity and political views as well some of the dangers of tribalism dividing communities. Provide examples both for and against, reference sources used and include images. Try and frame the debate both within a global and local perspective.
PROTESTS & MOVEMENTS: Research political activism of the Suffragettes as well as the artistic movement of Dadaism. Describe each of their political ideologies and analyse what role photography played and how it was used as a propaganda tool. Make references to contemporary activism and movements, such as FEMEN, #meToo, BLM etc.
ARTISTS REFERENCES: A comparative study between Claude Cahun and a contemporary photographer. Analyse, describe and discuss similarities and/or differences between key examples of their work on political activism and gender identities. Follow these steps:
1.Produce a mood board with a selection of images and write an overview of their work, style and approach to self-portraiture.
2.Select at least one image and/or video from each artists and analyse in depth using methodology of TECHNICAL>VISUAL>CONTEXTUAL>CONCEPTUAL
3.Incorporate quotes and comments from the artists themselves or others (art critics, art historians, curators, writers, journalists etc) using a variety of sources such as Youtube, online articles, reviews, text, books.
4.Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post.
5.Plan a photographic response that links with your 90 SEC FILM ASSIGNMENT
Week 8: 19 – 25 Oct PLANNING & SPECIFICATION Complete the following blog posts
PLANNING > PITCHING: 90 SEC FILM: A moving-image response in relation to the theme of REBELLION engaging with politics that are based on art, identity or culture.
• In groups of 2/3 students present idea and concept for your 90 sec film as a poster and manifesto.
• You have 30 mins to put together your poster and will have 30 seconds to present and pitch your idea to the class. Use Photoshop to design your poster and publish on the blog as a JPEG.
• Photo-game: You must use 3 words from ‘throwing the dice’ and incorporate into your manifesto and use those concepts as creative starting points for making your film.
INTENTIONS: including 3 dice words from photo-game
VISUALS: how the film will look – incl. inspirations from artists, film makers, movements etc
SOUND: consider audio, such as interviews, ambient sound, sound effects, music
TITLE: possible titles of film
ROLES: producer, photographer, editor
How to write a manifesto? Read more here A manifesto is a statement where you can share your… – Intentions (what you intend to do) – Opinions (what you believe, your stance on a particular topic) – Vision (the type of world that you dream about and wish to create.
STORYBOARD: Develop the above manifesto into a storyboard that provides you with a clear plan ahead of how you wish to make your 90 sec film, incl. individual scenes, shot sizes and mise-en-scene (the arrangement of the scenery in front of the camera) from location, props, people, lighting, sound etc.
Week 9-10: 26 Oct – 13 Nov (incl H-TERM) RECORDING > EDITING Complete the following blog posts
RECORDING > H-TERM: Plan and complete principal shoot following your storyboard during h-term. Make sure you take a few images behind the scenes of the production and are using the right equipment; camera, sound recorder, tripod etc.
EDITING > FILM PRODUCTION Still-images: Edit and adjust using Lightroom and export as high-res jpgs ready for import into Premiere
Moving-images & Sound: Upload clips into Premier and edit on the timeline. Show experimentation with cuts/ transitions/ duration 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.
Export film as mp4 file and uploads to Youtube account 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.
Job done!
EVALUATING > SCREENING: Write an evaluation on the blog that reflects on you artistic intentions, film-editing process and collaborating as a group. Include screen-prints from Premiere and a few ‘behind the scenes’ images of the shooting/ production.
DEADLINE: Fri 13 Nov SCREENING: Mon 16 Nov (with popcorn) Prepare a short presentation of your film with Q&A.
ESSAY > WRITING
Claude Cahun was a prolific writer and she famously wrote, ‘Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces’
Essay Question: In what way can the work of Claude Cahun and Shannon O’Donnell be considered political? • Put in context of identity politics and both historical activism and contemporary movements.
• As exemplar, choose one key image of Cahun and O’Donnell for comparison.
READ: To write a good essay you need to have contextual knowledge of the subjects discussed in this blog posts, such as identity, culture, gender, authority and propaganda. In addition to resources already studied, below are some key texts on gender identity / feminism/ self portraiture that you must reference in your essay by incorporating relevant quotes to articulate a critical view. You MUST READ at least 2 of the texts below.
Listent to MoMa curator, Roxana Marcoci’s reading of Cahun’s self-portrait Untitled
Claude Cahun: Freedom Fighter, an article about Cahun’s activism and resistance against the German occupiers of Jersey, written by Louise Downey, curator at Jersey Heritage, 9 May 2017.
Masquerade, Susan Bright, curator and writer from her book, Auto-focus: The Self-portrait in Contemporary Photography. 2010 – link to pdf at school.
Read Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie We Should All be Feminists Now which she delivered as TED talk in 2013. Watch her speech below or read an excerpt here.
DEADLINE: Mon 30 Nov. This is an independent study/ Homework task!
Week 11: 16 – 22 Nov Design newspaper spreads
Lesson TUE-FRI: In anticipation of the possibility of producing a newspaper based on the themes of LOVE & REBELLION we will this week focus on designing 4 versions of a newspaper spreads based on using movie stills from your film. Shannon O’Donnell uses 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
PRINTING: From Indesign export spreads as JPEG into shared folder below and choose size A3 or A4.
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\PRINTING\A2 Coursework Prints Autumn 2020
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 / OCCUPATIONLewis Bush, from Metropole (2018)
Typology means the study and interpretation of types and became associated with photography through the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs taken over the course of 50 years of industrial structures; water towers, grain elevators, blast furnaces etc can be considered conceptual art. They were interested in the basic forms of these architectural structures and referred to them as ‘Anonyme Skulpturen’ (Anonymous Sculptures.)
The Becher’s were influenced by the work of earlier German photographers linked to the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s such as August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt and Albert-Renger-Patzsch.
August SanderKarl Blosfeldt
See also the work by Americans, William Christenberry and Ed Ruscha’s photographic works on types e.g. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1964). Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Or Idris Khan‘s appropriation of Bechers’ images.
Ed Ruscha, 26 Gasoline StationsIdris Khan, Every…Bernd And Hilla Becher Gable Sided Houses. 2004 Photographic print 208 x 160 cm
Since 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing industrial structures that exemplify modernist engineering, such as gas reservoirs and water towers. Their photographs are often presented in groups of similar design; their repeated images make these everyday buildings seem strangely imposing and alien. Idris Khan’s Every… Bernd And Hilla Becher… series appropriates the Bechers’ imagery and compiles their collections into single super-images. In this piece, multiple images of American-style gabled houses are digitally layered and super-imposed giving the effect of an impressionistic drawing or blurred film still.
Idris Khan, Every…Bernd And Hilla Becher Gas . 2004
A well rehearsed phrase that we are all familiar with, invoking childhood memories of fairytales, grandparents recounting old days or stories around the campfire. American novelist Kurt Vonnegut argued that the quality that defined good storytellers was simply that they themselves loved stories.
In this module we will study how different narrative structures can be used to tell stories in pictures from looking at photography, cinema and literature in photo-essays, film and books. We will consider narrative within a documentary approach where observation is key in representing reality, albeit we will look at both visual styles within traditional photojournalism as well as contemporary photography which employs a more poetic visual language that straddles the borders between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fiction.
In order to understand how photography as a medium can be applied to tell a story we need to understand the differences between narrative and story and how editing, sequencing and design is intrinsic to this process.
THEORY
Often people tend to think of narrative and story as the same thing. In photography that is no exception. Jörg M. Colberg, a photographer, teacher and editor of Conscientious Photo Magazine (online blog dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography) has written extensively about narrative in photography. For you to gain a better understanding of the differences between narrative and story when we think about it in relation to making a photobook (which is your main outcome in your Personal Study later in the academic year) or in your current task of making a photo-zine you NEED TO READ his two blog posts; Photography and Narrative (part 1) and Photography and Narrative (part 2).
a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious
a book, literary work, etc., containing such a story, or
the art, technique, or process of narrating, or of telling a story.”
In Colberg’s view;
‘Those three options really aren’t the same at all. A photobook’s story is not the same as the book itself…. What I tend to find is that many photographers use the term narrative in the sense of it being the same as story (option 1), but what they mean is that it is the way the story is told (Option 3).’
He continues:
‘This is because it will contain a set of photographs that are being presented in a very specific way: there is an edit, a sequence, and very specific decisions about design and production were (hopefully) being made. As I’m trying to explain in the following, the edit and sequence (and to a lesser extent design and production) form a specific narrative that, in turn, might or might not produce or allude to a story. How to approach this then?’
When Colin Pantall made his book, All Quiet on the Homefront about his daughter growing up and becoming a father he wrote about the process of making it on his Blog here: Identifying the Story: Sequencing isn’t narrative
In Pantall’s experience narrative isn’t just sequencing a set images that flows together nicely. He says:
‘In photobooks there are so many elements used in editing, sequencing and creating a narrative. It’s really difficult. For All Quiet on the Home Front, we went through the lot of them. Sequencing by chronology, geography, family, resemblance, art history, season, colour, form, tone, flora, expression, dress, climate, mood, symbolism, material, and so on. The sequencing was a gradual process that was embedded into the editing with voice, mode, person, text, the basic best picture edit and much more besides.’
In his view identifying the story first and being able to communicate it in three words is essential.
‘You can sequence in a multitude of ways in other words. But none of that made a narrative. What made the narrative was actually identifying what the story was about. Do that and then you can create all the structures through which the story can flow – and that, structures plus story, creates the narrative.’
For photographer, writer and lecturer, Lewis Bush;‘narrative are things that exists within stories.’ In his article, Storytelling: A Poverty of Theory, Bush gives different reasons why photography as a medium does not have an established theory on narrative like cinema or literature. He also wonders why photographers often refer to themselves as storytellers but have little understanding of the differences between story and narrative when applied to photography.
‘One story can spawn many narratives, a fact that, in contrast to photography, is well understood in literature and cinema….when I say ‘I’m going to tell you a story’ I actually tell you a narrative of that story.’
Bush cites an example in cinema, Akira Kurosawa’sRashomon where multiple narratives are presented on screen of a murder, that may or may not have happened.
In photography today Bush reminds us;
‘it is well understand that single images are not reality, they are a representation of it.’ Similarly, a series of images put together in a fragmentary and incomplete order is ‘a record of something [that] are always a narrative of a story or event, never a full reflection of the thing itself’.
In a follow article: ‘Photographic Narrative: Between Cinema and Novel‘ Lewis Bush cites different examples from both cinema, literature and photography and identity each mediums different strengths and weaknesses.
In Bush’s view, photography’s narrative strength is;
‘It’s sheer power of description.’ A single photograph can depict a scene with a verisimilitude which pages of written account would still fail to capture. It is this quality which led photography to be first employed for practices like crime scene photography, in place of the unreliable memory and incomplete notes that had previously been relied upon.
Conversely photography also has many weaknesses, such as explaining things. Bush cites German theatre parctitioner and playwright Bertol Brecht who wrote, a photograph of a factory tells us what a factory looks like, but it tells us very little about the relationships that underlie it.
Bush also references Roland Barthes , whose seminal book, Camera Lucida,(1980) is a bedrock of photographic theory, especially, the relationship between photography and memory, photograph and death. He describes reading a sentences where Barthes, ‘characterised photographs as things which were somewhere “between cinema and novel”.
Bush then outlines traits and similarities for storytelling between photography and cinema, photography and literature and provides a number of examples which we will have a closer look at below.
CINEMA
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. Let’s look at some narrative structures and film editing techniques that are used in cinema.
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.
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 conventions and key terminology associated with moving image (film, TV, adverts, animations, installations and other moving image products.)
PHOTOGRAPHY
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.
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
Rita Puig Serra Costa: Where Mimosa Bloom
https://vimeo.com/124694405
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.
Yoshikatsu Fujii:Red Strings
https://vimeo.com/102344549
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.
NARRATIVE – a summary
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.
An analogy: if you witnessed a road accident and the police arrived to take statements from witnesses. Your version of events would be different to that of other witnesses or bystanders. They are both ‘true’ to what you saw and they both tell a different narrative depending on where you were in relation to the event, your point of view and how you remembered the event as it happened.
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, write the following:
PLANNING: Write a specification that provide an interpretation and plan of how you intend to explore A Love Story. This must include at least 3 photoshoots you will be doing in the next 2-3 weeks (these could include photo-assignments). How do you want your images to look and feel like? Include visual references to artists/photographers in terms of style, approach, intentions, aesthetics concept and outcome. Remember the final outcome is a 16 page photo-zine so you will need to edit a final series of 12-16 images that sequenced together as a set forms a narrative that visualises your love story.
STORY: What is your love story? Describe in:
3 words
A sentence
A paragraph
NARRATIVE: How will you tell your story?
Images > new photographic responses, photo-shoots
Archives > old photos from family albums, iPhone
Texts > letters, documents, poems, text messages
AUDIENCE: Who is it for?
Most image makers tend to overlook the experience of the viewer. Considering who your audience is and how they may engage with your photo-zine is important factor when you are designing/ making it.
Reflect and comment on this in your specification (age group, demographic, social/ cultural background etc.)
PHOTOBOOKS
A few photo book 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.
Mayumi Suzuki:The Restoration Will
My parents, who a owned photo studio, went missing after the 2011 tsunami. Our house was destroyed. It was a place for working, but also for living. I grew up there. After the disaster, I found my father’s lens, portfolio, and our family album buried in the mud and the rubble.
One day, I tried to take a landscape photo with my father’s muddy lens. The image came out dark and blurry, like a view of the deceased. Through taking it, I felt I could connect this world with that world. I felt like I could have a conversation with my parents, though in fact that is impossible.
The family snapshots I found were washed white, the images disappearing. The portraits taken by my father were stained, discolored. These scars are similar to the damage seen in my town, similar to my memories which I am slowly losing.
I hope to retain my memory and my family history through this book. By arranging these photos, I have attempted to reproduce it.
Dragana Jurisic’s YU:The Lost Country
Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991. With the disappearance of the country, at least one million five hundred thousand Yugoslavs vanished, like the citizens of Atlantis, into the realm of imaginary places and people. Today, in the countries that came into being after Yugoslavia’s disintegration, there is a total denial of the Yugoslav identity.
“There proceeds steadily from that place a stream of events which are a source of danger to me,” wrote the Anglo-Irish writer, Rebecca West in 1937. “That place” was Yugoslavia, the country in which I was born. Realizing that to know nothing of an area “which threatened her safety” was “a calamity”, she embarked on a journey through Yugoslavia. The result was Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Initially intended as “a snap book” it spiraled into half a million words, a portrait not just of Yugoslavia, but also of Europe on the brink of the Second World War, and widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
At Easter 2011, I started retracing Westʼs journey and re-interpreting her masterpiece by using photography and text, in attempt to re-live my experience of Yugoslavia and to re-examine the conflicting emotions and memories of the country that was.
In 1999, Jacob Aue Sobol went to live in the settlement of Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland, where he lived the life of a fisherman and hunter with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family. Taken over three years Sobol’s book records, in photographs and narratives, his encounter with Sabine and their life on the east coast.
Photographer Jacob Aue Sobol reflects on the three years he spent in Greenland and the traveling he did there. While his first trip was focused on documenting the culture, his second trip revolved around his girlfriend Sabine, who later became the subject of a series of photographs.
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
AUDIENCE: Most image makers tend to overlook the experience of the viewer. Considering who your audience is and how they may engage with your photo-zine is important factor when you are designing/ making it.
Students past responses to the theme of love, friendship, family etc.
Niah Da Costa: Espera For my photo book, the main theme was intimacy and young love. I wanted to explore my relationship with my boyfriend and show a series of different styles of images. I called this photo book “Espera” which means to wait in Portuguese, as this word (besides love) is a word that both Jack and I use frequently. Read more on her BLOG here.
Amy Low:Nothing can get between us A photo-book which is based on specific people in my life and what makes them an individual, I want this to also center around the theme of youth culture. Each picture/section of my book is about one person and their features/interests and things that make them who they are. I also plan to have pictures which break theme in the book to act as a barrier between each portrait. Read more on her BLOG here.
Jude Luce: All My Love My plan for my photo book is to produce a detailed and insightful exploration into my family life, with me centered within the middle. This is the running theme throughout and I hope to show it through poetic, still images of landscapes or objects which may have no direct meaning at its face value but has a deeper meaning once inferred. As well, the portraits in my project are intended to be collaborative and intimate to show the relationships I hold with the people in my life but the portraits are intended to show the emotion of each being as well. I have contrasted yet shown the similarities of my mum and dad’s relationship when they were together to that of my relationship with Lucy now and the overall look I hope to achieve is that of a fun, vibrant, light-hearted but quite solemn and sombre image-based diary about how I am still developing through the events if life and the attachments I have built from the event which shaped my life – my mum and dad’s divorce. I want their to be an obvious existence of the theme of attachment but also an underlying theme of detachment. Although these themes are the main focus for my book, they are underlying themes which are subtly hinted at every now and then by a sequence which develops upon the understanding of love. Memory is fragile and I use this notion as a driving force for my project made up of diaristic photographs, which, when come together, create an album of moments in time which in-turn lend themselves to never be forgotten. I have attempted not to avoid the subject of my mum and dad’s divorce but felt it easier to express this and my feelings towards it through other subject matter, being my relationship with my girlfriend and the other people in my life, such as my individual relationships with my mum and dad and how I view them in solitary opposition to one another.
Cerian Mason:Untitled I produce a large amount of documentary style images revolving around the more shadowed teenage social life. This involves being in a lot of places we shouldn’t be, drinking too much and probably a little more nudity that this blog is ready for. Below is a selection of my project work over the last few weeks presenting a range of locations – from abandoned hotels to out of hours nightclubs – featuring my friends being strange and causing trouble. There are some clear trends in the image I create such as the selective palettes and tight range of colours and the positioning of characters – these images were not directed at all though the figures were of course aware I was photographing them. This photobook was made using bookwright software and will be printed as a portrait A4 project. Many of the design ideas for this projects are inspired from artists and graphic designers I have studied over the last two years such as Lotta Nieminen. Studying the graphic designer’s personal projects. I took particular notice of the image layouts and use of overlapping text. There is a carefully controlled colour palette and minimalistic design which aids the presentation of images in such a publication. Benjamin Koh’s project work again has a strong graphic theme which uses a muted colour palette to emphasize the continued sense of photographic narrative. His pages tend to be uncluttered and minimal which draws attention to the graphic images in each of the carefully constructed double-page spreads. These elements were crucial to my own work, ensuring that images would be easily visible and clearly presented.
Gio Rios: Home Sweet Home? In terms of my title, I called my book ‘home sweet home?’. This is of course a common household saying, that I have added a question mark to. Due to the fact that my home life is fairly broken and has been on and off my entire life, which makes it far from ‘sweet’. On the first page within my book I write the quote ‘family means no one gets left behind or forgotten’. This is controversial from the start, as my farther had done exactly this from my birth, which is ultimately what stems my thoughts and feelings towards a lot of my family life and the reasons for the decisions made within this book.
Here I feature a stand alone image of an ultrasound of me. This is used to imply that I am the center of this book and that this is my own representation. The inclusion of juxtaposing images, put alongside one another, help to emphasise my emotions towards certain characters within my book.
My granddad is someone who has consistently been in and out of my life, throughout my upbringing. Therefore I feature him alongside a set of spiraling stairs to imply that he has spiraled out of my life.
Rochelle Merhet: Ryan The first step I took to my project inspired by the work of the artists I have studied and discussed was look at my own archived family photographs. I have a huge selection taken by my parents featuring me and my brother, many appeared very informal depicting me and my brother playing and laughing at each other, which gave the ability to see the relationship between me and my brother and how it has developed. Much like any family album, these photographs share a very personal importance to me. I wanted to use photographs that depicted who I was as well as my brother in my book as a way of a candid reflection of what my childhood was like and how I felt about it. Similar to the work of Carolle Benitah I wanted to make physical alterations to the photographs to further explore the notion of nostalgia, memories and the relationships between family members, in particular between me and my brother. I wanted use their project as a way to further understand myself through the use of memories and photographs to build and develop and understanding of who me and my brother are today and in particular our differences which are created from the notion of ‘nature and nurture’.
Matthew Knapman: Is that My Blue Butterfly? The research of both these artists informed and influenced my personal project, which focused on the life of my mother who is currently diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. She was originally diagnosed with breast cancer in Easter 2014, but when the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, it is called metastatic cancer. The liver, lungs, lymph nodes, and bones are common areas of spread of metastasis. Using art and physical materials, I wanted to draw into and edit the photographs I take in order to illustrate my emotions and what my mother is going through. The physical art would be a visual guide to the audience, telling a story regarding the illness. This is something that I was excited to do, given my passion and abilities in art and design. I can draw, scratch or edit the photograph using chemicals and other kinds of destructive methods. This can demonstrate some kind of investigation into the relationship between traditional art and Photography as mediums. This is something that I touched upon for my AS project.
Max Le Feuvre: Untitled My photo-book is based around my Grandfather. He died 30 years ago and so I never got the chance to meet him. I wanted therefore to find out more about him and develop an understanding of what he may have been like if I had got to know him. This project was therefore very much about exploring and investigating the theme of absence, a story based around someone who is no directly part of it. I photographed off and on for 9 months to create this project, re-tracing my Grandfather’s steps and using photography to express my findings. Archival resources in particular have played a huge part in my project, especially through the access I have had from the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archives, and the resources I have found play as much a part in this story as does my own responses. I wanted to make my images and narrative feel as simplistic and personal as possible and so I constructed my photo-book by hand, I style I believe gives my work a quirky, old-fashioned feel.
Shannon O’Donnell: Shrinking Violet Shrinking Violet stemmed from a short film that I created as part of my project of my mother. I made a film based around an interview that I did with my mum and made it up of archival images as well as documenting her everyday life. Part of the interview sparked my interest when she said ‘I’m not one of those shrinking violets in the work place’. This caught my attention as I see her role as simply doing what is expected of her, something that I want to challenge through my photographic work. This brought on the idea for creating a parody shoot where I dress as a persona, similar to my mum, and pose around the house mimicking the role I see my mum portray. I wanted this photo book to embody the traditional role of women our society perceives and for spectators to view the images I have created to recognise themselves, their mothers, their sisters and their wives. Gender defines everyone and, at times, can be limiting. It makes us feel that we need to belong and conform to the expectations placed on us at birth solely on whether we were born male or female.
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
“Good friends make you face the truth about yourself and you do the same for them, as painful, or as pleasurable, as the truth may be.” – Corinne Day
An autobiography is an account of the life of a person written by that person. In other words, it is the story that a person wrote about themselves. My inspiration for this study came from memories that are forgotten, and the ‘things’ that re-jog our brains to remember them. These could be objects from a childhood collection box or a set of images from a blurry holiday. For this piece of work I attempted to join two ways of memory revival into a book as well as a layout presenting some of my final images.
Sian Cumming: The ButlerAs a photographer, it is important for me to express details about my life to almost create a biography through photographs. I chose to use my dad for my project as his job has impacted my life since day 1. My dad is the Butler for the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey and has enabled me to have an insight into the life of royalty. My dad’s responsibilities are; ensuring the house events run smoothly, he also manages the house staff and liaises with his Excellency and Lady Mc Cole for all their requirements. I have lived in the grounds of Government House all my life and have truly honoured living here. Our tight community has really impacted my life and the way I am, as I also work as a waitress for Government House functions, I have been taught the type of service required for the Governor and his guests by my Dad himself. It was an honour to follow the footsteps of my dad and what he does at work and for the Governor to allow me take photographs of him off duty was a privilege in itself. To me, family is the most important aspect in life, it’s the root to our personality. Family is the single most important influence in a child’s life. From your first moments of life, you depend on parents and family to protect and provide for your needs. They form your first relationships with other people and are your role models throughout life. Researching into the way different photographs express the notion of home was truly inspiring and made me want to produce something that shows how my life has been
Your task is to produce a 16-page zine based around A Love Story.
Your love story may be real, for example it could be based around a love story in your family, such as grandparents, parents, siblings or other relatives (uncles, aunties, cousins) whose stories about love (both finding it and loosing it) that you may have been told around dinner tables or family gatherings. Stories that might be true or false, or based on facts that over time has been fictionalised and become family lore or myth.
Love can also be found among friends or take inspiration from personal experiences of teenage love. A love story could also be about unrequited love, or falling out of love with someone. However, a love story does not have to include romance. People love each other without physically desiring one another. It could be felt beyond the physical to include a spiritual connection. Some people talk about having found a soul mate. What does this actually mean? How could you translate this into a visual narrative and begin to make photographic responses?
A love story could also be about someone ‘loving’ one particular thing or aspects of their life, such as a love for an animal, hobby, sport or nature.
This Autumn term we will be continuing to explore the themes of LOVE & REBELLION with a focus on narrative as the second year of your A-Level photography studies is based around visual storytelling. In the first half of the term everyone will explore a set of collective tasks that will act as triggers and creative starting points in the second half where you will be choosing which theme you wish to explore more in-depth as part of your Personal Study unit which will lead you towards your final major outcome making a photobook, or film and writing an essay.
However before that you will learn about different ways you can be a visual storyteller experimenting with making photo-zines in InDesign and a short film using Premier. Other new software that you will be learning is Lightroom which is a workflow programme where you upload, adjust and edit images from your photoshoots.
A selection of zines from last year when students were exploring Jersey Occupation history
Archives can be a rich source for finding starting points on your creative journey. This will strengthen your research and lead towards discoveries about the past that will inform the way you interpret the present and anticipate the future. During this term we had planned for us to visit two public archives, first the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive which contains over 100,000 items dating from the mid-1840s to the present day and is the principal Jersey collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century photography. The second was Jersey Archive that has collected over 300,000 archival records and is the island’s national repository holding archival material from public institutions as well as private businesses and individuals, including important photographic collections such as Jersey Evening Post and many of the iconic images of Surrealist artist and activist, Claude Cahun, who we will be studying in depth as part of the theme REBELLION. However, due to current restrictions on school trips we will instead explore their archives and resources online and postpone visiting the institutions.
SJ Photo-Archive
JEP Collection
Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun
OVERVIEW
In the first four weeks we will be exploring the theme of LOVE and your task is to produce a 16 page photo-zine based on A LOVE STORY. What and whose love story you wish to tell in a series of images is entirely up to you. It could be based around a love story in your family. For example, your grandparents, parents, siblings or other relatives, such as distant uncles, aunties, cousins whose stories about love (both finding it and loosing it) that you may have been told around dinner tables or family gatherings. Stories that might be true or false, or based on facts that over time has been fictionalised and become family lore or myth.
Love can also be found among friends or take inspiration from personal experiences of teenage love. A love story could also be about unrequited love, or falling out of love with someone. However, a love story does not have to include romance. People love each other without desiring. It could be felt beyond the physical to include a spiritual connection. Some people talk about having found a soul mate. What does this actually mean? How could you translate this into a visual narrative and begin to make photographic responses?
A love story could also be about someone ‘loving’ one particular thing or aspects of their life, such as a love for an animal, hobby, sport or nature.
In this module we will study how different narrative structures can be used to tell stories in pictures from looking at photography, cinema and literature in photo-essays, film and books. We will consider narrative within a documentary approach where observation is key in representing reality, albeit we will look at both visual styles within traditional photojournalism as well as contemporary photography which employs a more poetic visual language that straddles the borders between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fiction.
When we begin to make work in response to REBELLION in the second half of this autumn term we will be experimenting with a different way to construct narrative using a staged approach to photography within the tradition of tableaux, as well as creating a series of self-portraits.
CONTEXT: For further understanding and context of the historical, conceptual and aesthetic differences between documentary practice and tableaux photography click on the links below and read the following chapters.
All texts from Bate, David (2016), Art Photography. London: Tate Publishing
For each introduction to the themes of LOVE & REBELLION there will be two photo-assignments for you to complete independently in your own time outside of lessons. This is partly to train your eye, improve camera skills and to encourage you to make images and photographic responses on a weekly basis. This is vital in your development as a photography student and essential for your final year of A-Level Photography which will require you to work on projects over a much longer period. The programme of study is designed with specific tasks to be completed in lessons as well outside of the classroom. The expectations of a A-level student at Hautlieu School is 5 hours of independent study at home per subject each week.
We will encourage you to achieve the highest possible marks, but this will entail a sense of discipline and effort on your part. We want you to produce original work of high quality and maturity that can be awarded top grades. Historically, photography students at Hautlieu School have acquired a reputation for making work beyond the confines of Edexcel syllabus and their work have been recognised both locally and internationally through exhibitions, competitions and publications. For example, in the last couple of years we have produced two separate newspaper supplements, FUTURE OF ST HELIER and LIBERATION & OCCUPATION both published and distributed in the Jersey Evening Post. If funding can be found it is our hope that we would be able to produce yet another newspaper and successfully complete a trilogy.
Hoarding display at Trenton Square on the Esplanade with students work from the Future of St Helier newspaper.
PLANNER
Download LOVE & REBELLION PLANNER and use it weekly to help you with monitoring and tracking your own progress
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT 1: A portrait of someone you love Environmental Portrait Candid portrait
DEADLINE: Mon 14 Sept
ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAIT: A formal portrait with emphasis on environment and setting of the model that may suggest the person’s social, economic, cultural background.
Larry Sultan: Pictures from Home
Alec Soth from I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT 2: Photograph a couple This could be a documentary approach where you follow and observe two people who are together, or turn the camera on yourself if you are in a relationship and stage scenarios. Images here could extend beyond portraiture to include locations where you live, meet and socialise – both inside and outside Specific objects and detail may also be relevant. Your final edit will be 12-16 images that sequenced together form a narrative based on a love story that will be the visual content of your 16-page photo-zine.
DEADLINE: Fri 25 Sept
In the photo-assignments you will be assessed on effort, camera skills, creativity and overall aesthetic quality of your photographs. You are required to make a self-assessment of each of your shoots using mark sheet at the end of the post.
GUIDELINES Consider the following before and during shooting
LOCATION: at home in the living room, kitchen or bedroom, consider natural light (window light) and backdrop. Location can also be outside of the house during daylight
MODEL: family members, parents, brother, sister, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends.
POSING: ask model to try out different poses and control how you set up the people you are photographing choosing appropriate location and backdrop.
FRAMING: full-body, half-body and head-shots, experiment with different angles and use appropriate focal lenght (ie. wide-angle lens 18-35mm, standard lens 50mm, telephoto lens 70-300mm).
LIGHTING: consider source and direction of lighting
INSIDE: use natural light through window as side light
OUTSIDE: Avoid direct sunlight or dull grey overcast light in the middle of the day. Choose softer light, early morning/ late afternoon, sunlight diffused by clouds etc.
EVIDENCE From each assignment complete the following and publish on the blog on a weekly basis: Use Planner above to help with monitoring and tracking progress
PLANNING: Who, What. When, Where? How do you want your images to look and feel like? Include visual references to artists/photographers in terms of style, approach, intentions, aesthetics concept and outcome. Use inspirations listed here or find your own.
RECORDING: Consider guidelines provided for each assignment such as source and direction of lighting, composition and framing, backdrop and location. Use tripod where appropriate and take your time shooting and connecting with your subject.
EDITING: Upload and process images from each photo-shoot. Make a rough edit of 8–10 images and evaluate.
EXPERIMENTING: Show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop appropriate to intentions.
ANALYSIS: Select at least 1 key images and analyse in depth using this methodology: TECHNICAL > VISUAL > CONTEXTUAL > CONCEPTUAL. Compare with examples of artists references where appropriate.
EVALUATION: Evaluate each assignment and make a self assessment based on the criteria, EFFORT, SKILL, CREATIVITY and AESTHETIC using this mark sheet and post on the blog.
This unit requires you to produce an appropriate number of blog posts which charts you project from start to finish including research, planning, analysis, recording, experimentation, evaluation, and presentation of creative outcomes.
Week 1-2: 3 – 13 Sept INSPIRATIONS
Complete the following blog posts
INDEPENDENT STUDY: HOMEWORK
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT 1: A portrait of someone you love Environmental Portrait Candid portrait
MINDMAP > MOODBOARD: Produce a mindmap and moodboard based around the theme of LOVE.
RESEARCH > ANALYSIS: For inspiration select at least two artists references, one historical portrait photographer from SJ Photo-Archive and one contemporary photographer from the Archisle programme,or GPF 2020. Explore discuss, describe and explain key examples from their work on portraiture done in Jersey. Compare and contrast their approaches , outcomes and follow these steps:
1. Produce a mood board with a selection of images and write an overview of their work, style and approach to portraiture.
2. Select at least one image from each photographer and analyse in depth using methodology of TECHNICAL>VISUAL>CONTEXTUAL>CONCEPTUAL
3. 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.
4. Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post.
5. Plan a photographic response that links with Photo-Assignment 1: A portrait of someone you love
GUERNSEY PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL (GPF): The theme for 2021 will be Acts of Love and Rebellion. Below is a list of photographers who will be exhibiting at the next festival with work relating to the two themes of LOVE and REBELLION.
David Fathi, THE DEAD GOVERN THE LIVING Site-specific installation
Week 3: 14 – 20 Sept NARRATIVE
Complete the following blog posts
INDEPENDENT STUDY: HOMEWORK
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT 2: Photograph a couple This could be a documentary approach where you follow and observe two people who are together, or turn the camera on yourself if you are in a relationship and stage scenarios. Images here could extend beyond portraiture to include locations where you live, meet and socialise – both inside and outside Specific objects and detail may also be relevant. Your final edit will be 12-16 images that sequenced together form a narrative based on a love story that will be the visual content of your 16-page photo-zine.
PLANNING: Write a specification that provide an interpretation and plan of how you intend to explore A Love Story. This must include at least 3 photoshoots you will be doing in the next 2-3 weeks (these could include photo-assignments). How do you want your images to look and feel like? Include visual references to artists/photographers in terms of style, approach, intentions, aesthetics concept and outcome. Remember the final outcome is a 16 page photo-zine so you will need to edit a final series of 12-16 images that sequenced together as a set forms a narrative that visualises your love story.
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. However, it is essential that you identity what your story is first before considering how you wish to tell it.
In order for you to understand better how narrative works in photography let’s consider the differences between narrative and story when making a photobook, or in your case a photo-zine. Click below and go to blog post: NARRATIVE AND PHOTOGRAPHY where we will also study how different narrative structures can be used to tell stories from looking at the origin of photo essays in photojournalism to contemporary photography as well as cinema and literature. Once you have considered the points made between the differences in narrative and story, write the following:
Most image makers tend to overlook the experience of the viewer. Considering who your audience is and how they may engage with your photo-zine is important factor when you are designing/ making it.
Reflect and comment on this in your specification (age group, demographic, social/ cultural background etc.
RECORDING: Practice making portraits of two people and experiment with different lighting setups in the photographic studio.
Lighting: Different lighting set-ups
Recording: Headshots, half-body, full-body,
Moods: Explore different moods, expressions, angles, framing.
EDITING > SEQUENCING: Upload and process images from both studio photo-shoots and your own shoots in relation to PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT: A Love Story using Lightroom. Make a rough edit of 8–10 images, both colour and b&w and annotate from each shoot and publish on the blog as work progresses.
We will go through Lightroom in class and make sure you follow instructions below.
Produce a blog post where you evaluate your first sequence of images, reflect on what story you are trying to communicate and how you can improve and develop your narrative.
Edit 20-30 images down to an ordered series of 10-15 images.
Think about start, middle and end images.
Think about your theme or story.
Think about visual relationship between images and their juxtaposition e.g colour, shapes, subject, repetition, landscape, portrait, object etc.
What happens or changes over the series of images?
Are you using your best images?
COLOUR – SHAPES
SHAPES – GEOMETRYREPETITIONOBJECT – PORTRAIT
Week 4-5: 21 Sept – 6 Oct DESIGN
Complete the following blog posts
RESEARCH > ANALYSIS: Research zines and newspaper design made by artists and photographer that will provide visual stimulus for your page design. Produce a mood board and consider the following in your analysis:
Café Royal Books is a small independent publisher of photography photobooks or zines, and sometimes drawing, solely run by Craig Atkinson and based in Southport, England. Café Royal Books produces small-run publications predominantly documenting social, historical and architectural change, often in Britain, using both new work and photographs from archives. It has been operating since 2005 and by mid 2014 had published about 200 books and zines and they are held in major public collections
Editions Bessard is a paris-based independent publishing house created by pierre bessard in 2011. Focusing on working with artists, writers and curators to realise intellectually challenging projects in book form.
The new imprint Éditions Emile is named in honour of Emile F. Guiton, the founding father of the The Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive. The first set of publications is a series of small photo-zines comprising of 48 pages with an average of 30-40 images and a short text providing further context. With plans to publish three editions annually, each issue of ED.EM. will take a fresh look at a specific collection within the archive, by pairing it with either another collection or contemporary work, in order to re-contextualise the images, keeping the collections active and relevant for new audiences both in the island and beyond.
EXPERIMENTING > DESIGNING: Create 2-3 examples of alternative layouts for your photo-zine using Adobe InDesign and complete a visual blog post that clearly shows your decision making and design process using screen-prints. Make sure you annotate!
See examples of previous students blog charting his zine design process, here.
PRESENTATION > EVALUATION: Print, fold and bind final photo-zine and hand in for assessment. Write an evaluation on the blog that reflects on your design process, intentions and includes screen-prints of each page-spread of final design.
During the summer it is important that you keep training your eye and practice making images. Below are two tasks, ICONIC IMAGE and FAMILY ARCHIVE that you can work on during the break which will prepare you for the next academic year in September.
Publish all your work on the blog before returning to school on Thurs 3 September where we will be discussing your response to making an iconic image as well as research into your family archives and history. Best of luck!
ICONIC IMAGE: The first task is a photographic response to the essay: What makes and iconic images. Try and make an image either in camera as observed reality or a staged approach, or using a combination of digital manipulation in post production that in your view creates and iconic image. Write a short evaluation that explains your intentions and thought processes.
Alberto Korda
Nick ut
Kevin Carter
FAMILY ARCHIVES: Explore your own private archives such as photo-albums, home movies, diaries, letters, birth-certificates, boxes, objects, mobile devices, online/ social media platforms and make a blog post with a selection of material that can be used for further development and experimentation using a variety of re-staging or montage techniques .
Archives can be a rich source for finding starting points on your creative journey. This will strengthen your research and lead towards discoveries about the past that will inform the way you interpret the present and anticipate the future. See more Public/ Private Archives
For example, you can focus on the life on one parent, grand-parent, family relative, or your own childhood and upbringing. Ask other family members (parents, grand-parents, aunties, uncles) if you can look through their photo-albums too etc.
Family photo-albumsDigital images stored on mobile phones, uploaded on social media etc.
TASKS STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE:
Either scan or re-photograph archival material so that it is digitised and ready for use on the blog and further experimentation.
Plan at least one photo-shoot and make a set of images that respond to your archival research. This can be re-staging old photos or make a similar set of images, eg. portraits of family members and how they have changed over the years, or snapshots of social and family gatherings.
Choose one of your images which relates to the theme of family (e.g. archive, family album, or new image you have made) and destroy the same image in 5 different ways using both analogue and digital method techniques. Eg. Reprint old and new photos and combine using scissors/ tearing and glue/ tape. In Photoshop use a variety of creative tools to cut and paste fragments of images to create composites.
Extension: Choose a second image and destroy it in 5 new or other ways.
cof
Under Oath, 2017
Jonny Briggs: In search of lost parts of my childhood I try to think outside the reality I was socialised into and create new ones with my parents and self. Through these I use photography to explore my relationship with deception, the constructed reality of the family, and question the boundaries between my parents and I, between child/adult, self/other, nature/culture, real/fake in attempt to revive my unconditioned self, beyond the family bubble. Although easily assumed to be photoshopped or faked, upon closer inspection the images are often realised to be more real than first expected. Involving staged installations, the cartoonesque and the performative, I look back to my younger self and attempt to re-capture childhood nature through my assuming adult eyes.
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.
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
There are different ways artists and photographers have explored their own, or other families in their work as visual storytellers. Some explore family using a documentary approach to storytelling, others construct or stage images that may reflect on their childhood, memories, or significant events drawing inspiration from family archives/ photo albums and often incorporating vernacular images into the narrative and presenting the work as a photobook.
Rita Puig-Serra Costa (Where Mimosa Bloom) vs Laia Abril (The Epilogue)> artists exploring personal issues > vernacular vs archival > inside vs outside
Rita Puig-Serra Coasta, Where Mimosa BloomLaia Abril, The Epiloque
Carole Benitah (Photo Souvenirs) vs Diane Markosian (Inventing My Father) > family > identity > memory > absence > trauma
Carole Benitah, Photo-SouvenirsThis is the closet thing I had to an image of my father. A cut out of him in my mother’s photo album.
Ugne Henriko (Mother and Daughter) vs Irina Werning or Chino Otsuka > re-staging images > re-enacting memories
‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’ — Martin Luther King Jr
“I Have a Dream” is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States.
In the new academic year beginning in September we will be exploring the themes of LOVE & REBELLION in an exciting programme of study that will be centred around visual storytelling and include a variety of outcomes such as designing photo-zines, photobook, write an essay and produce a film. The main shift in your photographic studies from Yr 12 to Yr 13 is to begin to consider images in series that are part of a much larger visual investigation and photographic narrative, rather than just make one good picture!
Initially we had something else planned for the next few weeks until summer break linked to our recent experience of COVID-19 and the subsequent island lockdown. However in recent weeks it was an event in Minneapolis that has caused the largest reaction worldwide. The death of George Floyd has the potential to be a catalyst for change and as image-makers it is our moral obligation to respond to this new reality.
https://vimeo.com/425981516
Let’s pause for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and reflect.
Global Context: Racism
Black Lives Matter Describe racism. How does it manifest itself? What is institutional racism?
Racism takes many forms and can happen in many places. It includes prejudice, discrimination or hatred directed at someone because of their colour, ethnicity or national origin. People often associate racism with acts of abuse or harassment. However, it doesn’t need to involve violent or intimidating behaviour. Take racial name-calling and jokes. Or consider situations when people may be excluded from groups or activities because of where they come from.
Racism can be revealed through people’s actions as well as their attitudes. It can also be reflected in systems and institutions. But sometimes it may not be revealed at all. Not all racism is obvious. For example, someone may look through a list of job applicants and decide not to interview people with certain surnames. Racism is more than just words, beliefs and actions. It includes all the barriers that prevent people from enjoying dignity and equality because of their race.
Read article in The Guardian on police brutality in Britain and a view from the lawyer that represented Stephen Lawrence, a black youth who was killed in a racially motivated attack by a groupof whites while waiting for a bus with a friend in Eltham, South London on 22 April 1993. Read Labour MP David Lammy’s response to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s latest decision to set up a Racial Equality Review in response to recent public unrest.
Watch George the Poet discussing Black Lives Matter movement in the UK on Newsnight.
Racism in Jersey: Watch a 3-part series of television programmes Special Report: Race, Racism and the Channel Islands by Gary Burgess a reporter for ITV Channel TV that is being broadcast this week (Wed 17, Thurs 18, Fri 19 June). It features personal views and experiences of BAME islanders and also includes an interview with me about Jerseymen and slave ownerships.
Credit: ITV Channel TV
Colonialism: Slave trade
Colonialism – what is it? How did the transatlantic slave trade embody and empower colonialism and imperialism? What are the distinctions between the concepts of colonialism and imperialism?
Colonialism is the practice of establishing territorial dominion over a colony by an outside political power characterized by exploitation, expansion, and maintenance of that territory. The indigenous populations suffered in the hands of the coloniser where they were subjected to confiscation of ancestral land, incarceration, hard labor and restriction in trading. To understand where racism came from we have to know about our colonial history, and in particularly enslaving Africans by forcibly removing them from their homeland and transporting them in ships across the Atlantic to the Americas to work on plantations in the new colonies occupied by European settlers. From the time Portuguese mariners began to ferry African slaves from 1500s onwards until the abolition of slavery by the British in 1833 somewhere close to 12 – 15 million black people had been trafficked. The kidnapping of Africans occurred mainly in the region that now stretches from Senegal to Angola. However, in the 19th century some enslaved Africans were also transported across the Atlantic from parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa. All the major European powers were involved in this enterprise, but by the early 18th century, Britain became the world’s leading slave trading nation. It’s estimated that British ships were responsible for the forced transportation of at least 2-3 million Africans in that century.
Here is a useful website for postcolonial studies and USI (Understanding Slave Initiative) which have many resources to help you understand the full legacy of slavery, incl some audio recordings of firsthand accounts. Listen to Equiano’s testimony of being kidnapped from his village and later sold at a slave market
For those of you who are really keen to learn more about Postcolonialism, please visit Dr McKinlay’s (Head of Media Studies) website here which includes proper academic references to some of the key thinkers and scholars on the subject, such as Edward Said, Louis Althusser, Chinua Achebe, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and many others, as well as video and motion graphics that further illuminates issues at hand
On 25 March 1807, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act entered the statute books. Nevertheless, although the Act made it illegal to engage in the slave trade throughout the British colonies, trafficking between the Caribbean islands continued, regardless, until 1811. The emancipation of slaves also happened at different pace in different colonies. For example, in British Honduras it wasn’t enforced until 1st Aug 1834 and some of the last places was Brazil (1888) – although not British dominion, but a Portuguese colony. In the USA, following the Union victory in the Civil War, slavery was made illegal upon the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
By 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act was enacted formally freeing 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain’s slave owners. The University College of London recently established ‘The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ which includes a searchable database showing just how vast the extent of slave ownership was in Britain and how central it was to the economy at the time. In order to abolish slavery it was agreed that the slave owners would be compensated for their financial loss seeing 46,000 slave owners come forward to get their compensation. Until 2009 it represented the biggest bailout in British history with the UK government setting aside £20m in 1834, a sum that represented 40% of total government expenditure and the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn today.
Modern day slavery. Today, although difficult to accurately determine, the Global Slavery Index estimates that there could be as many as 40 million slaves globally. With the overthrow of Gaddafi, of which Britain was complicit in, Libya has become an open market for the sale of African migrants and refugees in town squares and car parks. It has also become a major gateway for gangs profiting from the trafficking of refugees and migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe.
Local context: Jersey
What is Jersey’s role in all this? How are islanders acknowledging issues of racism and its own colonial history?
Reviewing the UCL database there is a total estimate of around £72,000 in compensation connected to Jersey at the time, which today — using the Bank of England inflation calculator — would roughly equate to £7,546,000. Read full article ‘Jersey’s Links to Slavery’ written by Ollie Taylor from 9×5 Media.
Another article, ‘A Respectable Trade or Against Human Dignity’ written by local maritime historian, Doug Ford provides further details of Jersey mariners involved in transatlantic slave trade. They include:
Josué Mauger from St John, Jersey, who built his fortune in the West Indian slave trade. Mauger had a fishing station, rum distillery and a large warehouse in the Halifax area in Nova Scotia, Canada and he opened a store in the town. He established a series of trading posts in Mi’kmaq territory (indigenous people of the Atlantic province of Quebec), and had a contract as a supplier to the Royal Navy. He was the largest shipowner in Halifax between 1749 and 1760, owning either wholly or in part 27 vessels. He also had a lucrative smuggling business with the French at Louisbourg, and when the Seven Years War broke out in 1756 he financed a number of privateering ventures. Evidence of Mauger’s involvement in the slave trade is an advert placed in the newspaper, the Halifax Gazette on 15th May 1752
“Just imported, and to be sold by Joshua Mauger, at Major Lockman’s store in Halifax, several Negro slaves, as follows: A woman aged thirty-five, two boys aged twelve and thirteen repectively, two of eighteen and a man aged thirty”. Further research needs to be carried out in Nova Scotia to ascertain exactle the scale of Mauger’s involvement before he returned to England in 1760. In 1768, he was elected to Parliament for Poole, a seat he retained with only a brief interruption until 1780. When he died, he left his money to his favourite great nephew, Philippe Winter Nicolle, who went on to set up his own merchant business in Jersey and build a new family home – No. 9 Pier Road, now part of Jersey Museum and known as Merchant House
Josué Mauger
Merchant House, 9 Pier Road
Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 18th century
Links between slavery and modern wealth in the UK are well established. Read article in the New Statesman here. The legacy of colonialism is wealth creation and the birth of capitalism. Stock markets were started when countries in the New World began trading with each other. While many pioneer merchants wanted to start huge businesses, this required substantial amounts of capital that no single merchant could raise alone. As a result, groups of investors pooled their savings and became business partners and co-owners with individual shares in their businesses to form joint-stock companies. Originated by the Dutch, joint-stock companies became a viable business model for many struggling businesses. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued the first paper shares. Read more here and watch this simplified short animation.
Recent protest against public statues of powerful men from our colonial past has sparked a worldwide debate about which histories should be told and what legacies should be celebrated. Major institutions around the world have been forced to acknowledge its past involvement in profiteering from the Atlantic slave trade. For example, both the Church of England and Bank of England apologise for historic slavery links (18 June 2020). It comes after insurance giant Lloyd’s of London and other well known high street banks, such as Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds acknowledge many former bank directors received compensation from the Slavery Abolition Act after slavery was made illegal in 1833. They have all pledged they will devote large sums to projects assisting minorities after being named in the academic database, Legacies of British Slave Ownership project set up by University College London.
Bank of England, London
Today Jersey’s economy is dominated by a financial services industry which accounts for over 50% of GVA (Gross Value Added – a measure of the value of goods and services) and almost 3/4 of all economic activity, if you include auxiliary sectors such as construction, hospitality and retail. The islands public services are dependent on the success and growth of Jersey’s primary industry. For example, the income tax alone, generated from the 13,500 strong workforce within finance are paying for the Government of Jersey’ education and health budgets combined.
Since 2015 I have been working on MASTERPLAN – a research project using photography, film and archives to tell the story of Jersey’s contemporary prosperity as an Offshore Finance Centre (OFC), or what often is referred to as a Tax Haven. Globally there is a whole network of offshore jurisdictions and supporters of OFCs argue that they improve the flow of capital and facilitate international business transactions. Critics argue that offshoring is a way to hide tax liabilities or ill-gotten gains from the authorities, including money laundering. To understand how Offshoring is affecting the balance of power and wealth in the world with consequences for global stability and the environment, watch this film here.
An animation summarising the key themes of the book Offshoring, written by John Urry. Read a review here
In some of my other photographic work I have been developing a number of research projects about Jersey’s colonial history and maritime economy with links to slavery such as, Entrepôt and The Seaflower Venture. Essentially, I am examining through the prism of colonial and family history, how Jersey’s original wealth generated by the proceeds from the North Atlantic fisheries and merchant networks in the 18th and 19th centuries lay the foundation for the island’s economic growth and development in the 20th and 21st centuries as an International Finance Centre. Theoretically, my project Entrepôt is based around Rosemary E. Ommer’s structural economical analysis of the Jersey-Gaspé cod fishery which reveals a functional three-pointed trading system in what she refers to as a ‘merchant triangle’ with production in Canada, management in Jersey and markets in the Mediterranean, the West Indies and Brazil. Her central question in her book is: ‘How did the cod-fishery, functioning as a commodity trade, shape the economic development of the metropole that managed it and the colony that produced it.’ (Ommer in Outpost to Outport: A Structural Analysis of the Jersey-Gaspé Cod Fishery, 1767-1886)
Images from Entrepôt, Belize and Honduras (2019)
In 2019 I spend 6 weeks in Belize and Honduras and in the colonial records I uncovered interesting details regarding several Jersey merchants operating as mahogany cutters and their slave populations. I also surveyed the colonial landscape and explored several estates belonging to Jerseymen and the communities that their mahogany works fostered. Additionally, I tracked down descendants currently living in Belize and the Bay Islands of Roatan and Utila (Honduras) with direct ancestral links to Joshua Gabourel who arrived here from Jersey in 1787. Some of this material includes:
Census records and Slave registers from Belize with names of Jersey merchants and their households
Inventory and Appraisement – list of land and property owned where ’negroes’ are listed alongside, goats, cattle and farm equipment etc
If you wish to learn more about the mahogany trade in Central America, and in particularly, British Honduras, read this essay Furnishing the Craftsman: Slaves and Sailors in the Mahogany Trade by Dan Finamore,Curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. It gives a very detailed account of extracting mahogany wood from its dense forests under strenuous hardship of African slaves and shipping it to North America and Europe (including Jersey) and be turned into fine bespoke furniture to adorn the large mansions of the merchant class known as ‘cod-houses’ (maison terre-de-neuve.) Mahogany and other exotic hardwoods were also used successfully in the growing shipbuilding industry in Jersey for decorative purposes.
J. McGahey, Felling Mahogany, Liverpool, England, ca. 1850. Lithograph. 6″ x 9″. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.)
A Jersey dresser made from mahogany wood and a staircase
For centuries Jersey’s maritime economy dominated island life and many merchants were engaged in the Atlantic trade, referred to as the ‘merchant triangle’ with commodities of manufactured goods and agricultural products exchanged in different outposts in the British Empire and other European colonies in the Caribbean, South America and Mediterranean. However, Jersey’s financial success derived from the North-Atlantic cod-fisheries established first in Newfoundland late 16th and 17th centuries and later in Gaspé in the province of Quebec in 18th and 19th centuries.
Charles Robin
Salted cod drying on rack Gaspé
Charles Robin Company’s headquarter in Paspebiac in the Bay of Chaleurs, now a museum
Jersey’s colonial past is linked indirectly with slavery as merchants and shipping were part of the supply chain of goods and products in the transatlantic trade. One of Jersey’s premier cod-merchants was Charles Robin who founded Charles Robin Company in 1766 (second oldest incorporated firm to be founded in Canada which only ceased operation in 2006 albeit under different ownership). Robin produced two salted cod-products called ‘green’ and ‘yellow’. Green was a cheaper cured fish and was sold to plantations in the West Indies as a source of protein to feed slave populations. Yellow, was marketed as a premier product and sold to markets in Brazil and southern countries of Europe, such as Portugal, Spain and Italy with their large Roman Catholic populations having a great demand for fish for fast days. From ports in Lisbon, Cadiz and Naples merchants traded cod-fish for other products such as salt (used in the curing process), wine, spirits, fruits and spices which they brought back to Jersey and British ports before returning to Canada. The maritime networks were complex and often financed from London. Read another article here from Jersey based critic, Ollie Taylor Fish, Finance and Slavery.
If you look up shipping news in old Jersey newspapers La Gazette de Jersey or La Chronique de Jersey ships would leave St Helier Harbour with supplies to slave stations in West Africa, such as the notorious Cape Cod Castle on the Gold Coast of Ghana. For example, on 8th June 1854 Newport, a 106-ton schooner brig owned by F Le Sueur, jnr, P Le Sueur and JF Le Sueur, mastered by sea captain, Charles Philippe Hocquard left port bound for Ambrez, Angola. On the ship’s manifest (a customs document listing the cargo, passengers and crew) were 25 cases of muskets, 20 cases of knives, five cases of hatchets, one case of bells and padlocks, to be delivered to a Senor Francisco Antonio Florese, who was known as a slave trader. On 21st September 1854 she was stopped and searched by HMS Philomel and taken to St Helena, where she was condemned in the Admiralty to be sold.
In 2015 I published Atlantus together with Dr Gareth Syvret (former photo-archivist at Société Jersiaise) which is a transoceanic photography project about the connected history between Jersey and New Jersey, prompted in part by the 350th anniversary in 2014 of Sir George Carteret naming of the State of New Jersey, USA after Jersey his island home in 1664.
Multi-functional newspaper & DIY exhibitionSir George Carteret statue in St Peter’s Village and former Constable John Refault who was has defended his decision to put it up in 2014 .
In 2014 a public statue of Sir George Carteret was unveiled in St Peter to commemorate his achievements in relation to the 350th anniversary of the state of New Jersey. Sir George was a prominent investor and consultant in the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading Into Africa, which was a major player in trafficking slaves from Africa as well as gold and ivory. Between 1662 and 1731, the Company transported approximately 212,000 slaves, of whom 44,000 died en route. By that time, they also transported slaves to English colonies in North America. Its profits made a major contribution to the increase in the financial power of those who controlled the City of London. Sir George received a dividend until his death and his son James Carteret commanded one of the slave ships, Speedwell with 302 Africans on board in the early years (1663-64) of trading from Benin to St Kitts in the Caribbean.
Please read the latest article by Jersey independent reporter, Ollie Taylor (Nine by Five Media) The whitewashing of George Carteret and watch a video below of its unveiling in St Peter with a commentary by the former Constable John Refault who describes Sir George Carteret as a hero, ‘Jersey’s greatest son’, one of “Jersey’s great figures” and a role model for youngsters.
The unveiling of the statue of George Carteret attended by politicians and dignitaries in St Peter 14 September 2014
It is true that the biography of Sir George Carteret (b. 1610 d. 1680) include many extraordinary deeds such as commandeering ships in the Royal Navy and rising quickly through the ranks to become the Comptroller of the Navy in 1641 and eventually Vice Admiral. Between 1643 and 1651 he was both appointed Lieutenant Governor and Bailiff of Jersey. But it was his loyality to Prince Charles II, who was exiled in Jersey twice during the English Cicil War after the death of his father King Charles I that propelled him to power and influence. After the restoration of the monarchy he was granted lands in the new British colony in North America, including the Carolinas and a territory south of New York, which he named New Jersey after his island home. There are some people who only wish to remember this part of his life, but there is a growing demand that his links with the Royal African Company and the Atlantic slave trade must be included in the historical records. It’s important to recognise that history is never fixed and new research, new interpretations are made continuously as new material emerge and different scholars examine the archives. There are many different histories depending on who is telling them and it is your duty as future citizens to examine all points of view and analyse claims and counter-claims.
Portrait of Sir George Carteret by court painter, Sir Peter Lely
Statue of Sir George daubed in white paint in St Peter
The statue pulled down in Bristol last week was of Edward Colston who was the Deputy Governor in Royal African Company, which succeeded The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading Into Africa in 1672 with a new and broader royal charter than the old one, which included the right to set up forts and factories, maintain troops, and exercise martial law in West Africa, in pursuit of trade in gold, silver and African slaves. Read article here in The Guardian about Colston statue in Bristol.
The decision to erect the statue was questioned by Deputy Montfort Tadier, who as Minister for Culture said that it was a different case to the Edward Colston statue because that had been put up in Bristol around 120 years earlier, during the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign. He has lodged a proposal Jersey and The Slave Trade to discuss how the island deals with its past at the next States Assembly.
There was also controversy when part of the International Finance Centre was named Trenton Square after the capital of New Jersey, which was itself named after trader William Trent, who had links with slavery. Read more here
In the JEP last Saturday (13 June 2020) there were 3 Opinions published by columnists, Susanna Rowles, Tom Ogg and Gary Burgess. Very diverse points of view about how to address the issues of racism and the wrongs of the past, but all comments written by ‘white’ people. Where is the representation of BAME (Black, Asian and minority Ethnic) voices?
Read an islander who is mixed race talk about white privilege and another article in the Bailiwick Express that urges Jersey leaders to dismantle institutional racism in the work place and wider community at a protest for racial justice at People’s Park on Saturday 6 June.
Kneel for George Floyd protest in People’s Park, 6 June 2020, St Helier, Jersey
Tasks
BLOG – evidence of the following using a combination of images, text and hyperlinks to online sources. Publish post on a regular basis. You should aim for 2-3 blog posts per week. Mr Cole and myself will monitor and provide feedback online in comments on the blog until more regular lessons are timetabled.
RESEARCH
Global context: Describe racism and how racial discrimination over time has led to Black Lives Matter movement. (1 x blog post)
Colonialism: Explain what it is and how the slave trade evolved as an instrument of power and suppression of enslaved people from Africa. (1 x blog post)
Local context: Reflect on issues of racism and Jersey’s link to colonial history and slave trade. (1 x blog post)
Collect found images, graphics, texts and slogans from a variety of sources from the internet and newspapers clippings for further experimentation. (1 x blog post)
Artists References: find inspiration from at least two artists, explain why you have chosen them, analyse key works and include hyperlinks to online sources. (1 x blog post)
RECORDING:
Photo-shoots: (200-250 images)
Jersey public statues, monuments and squares.
Focus on one, or multiple sites & explore how it functions socially ie. how the public use and interact with the statue and its location. Frame details and abstract compositions.
If you have any other ideas about images you want to make in response, please go ahead as long as you can link it to the themes.
For example, you could explore mixed identity, self, race, skin, masks, feminity, masculinity etc in a series of self-portraits or use a model.
Editing: process, adjust and select a 10-12 images for further experimentation.
Sites: Royal Square, Victoria Park, People’s Park, Parade Gardens, Liberation Sq, Weighbridge, West centre, Millenium Park. St Peter (next to pub)
EXPERIMENTING:
Montages: Create 3-5 montages/ collages using both digital (Photoshop) and analogue (paper, print, scissors, glue) techniques using a combination of your own images, found images, text and slogans.
Monument: Create your own digital public statue, Who would you consider worthy of adoration and recognition? Use a combination of same material and techniques as above, or create a 3D model and photograph in a series of still-life images
Protest: If you were to organise a protest what issues and causes would you fight for? Design 3 different posters using a combination of slogans, graphics, images and typography.
Inspirations
Mohamed Bourouissa
Tracy Moffatt
Peter Rodchenko
El Lissitzky
Steve McQueen
Red dots cover the faces of all the men who enslaved people in John Trumbull’s painting “Declaration of Independence” (1818) (collage by Arlen Parsa)John Baldessari, Dots
Lorenzo Vitturi: Dalston Anatomy
Zanele Muholi. Watch video of South-African born artist talk about her work here
Watch this short film about artist Khadija Saye who tragically died in Grenfell Tower fireKhadija Saye Lorna Simpson: Five Day Forecast 1991Greyson Perry: The Walthamstow TapestryLee Friedlander: American Monument
Peter Kennard
Luke Willis Thompson – Autoportrait
Essay
TITLE : “What makes an image iconic?“
Primary Source: Read this article by Susan Bright and answer the following question; What makes an image iconic?
Read texts in detail, make notes and identify 3 quotes
Use examples mentioned in texts and compare with the image above (BLM protester carrying white man to safety)
Construct your own interpretation of the photograph by applying the theory and critical thinking learned from the text you have just read.
Incorporate the 3 quotes above into your analysis and interpretation of the image and make sure you comment on the quotes, either for or against in developing a critique and informed argument.
Read and reference both from primary and secondary sources
1000 words = intro, analysis, discussion, conclusion – easy
Make a photographic response: Can you make an iconic image?
In the new academic year beginning in September we will be exploring the themes of LOVE & REBELLION in an exciting programme of study that will be centred around visual storytelling and include a variety of outcomes such as designing photo-zines, photobook, write an essay and produce a film.
An island lockdown has been in place during the coronavirus outbreak and most people have been confined to their own home, for better or worse. Drawing on these experiences we are setting you weekly photo-assignments based around the concept of HOME SWEET HOME
Some of these assignments may lead onto more sustained investigations in preparation for our main project in the autumn and are designed to improve your photographic skills when it comes to portraiture, composition and use of natural light. In addition the final assignment is envisioned as a Summer Task that will allow you to be creative with your camera and bulk up your own image archive, that will help you build a coherent body of work from which you can develop personal stories, interesting visual narratives and refine different outcomes mentioned above as part of LOVE & REBELLION. The main shift in your photographic studies from Yr 12 to Yr 13 is to begin to consider images in series that are part of a much larger visual investigation and photographic narrative, rather than just make one good picture!
In the photo-assigments below you will be assessed on effort, camera skills, creativity and overall aesthetic quality of your photographs. You are required to make a self-assessment of each of your shoots using mark sheet at the end of the post.
Download HOME SWEET HOME PlANNER and use it weekly to help you with monitoring and tracking your own progress
EVIDENCE From each assignment complete the following and publish on the blog on a weekly basis: Use Planner above to help with monitoring and tracking progress
PLANNING: Who, What. When, Where? How do you want your images to look and feel like? Include visual references to artists/photographers in terms of style, approach, intentions, aesthetics concept and outcome. Use inspirations listed here or find your own.
RECORDING: Consider guidelines provided for each assignment such as source and direction of lighting, composition and framing, backdrop and location. Use tripod where appropriate and take your time shooting and connecting with your subject.
EDITING: Upload and process images from each photo-shoot. Make a rough edit of 8–10 images and evaluate.
EXPERIMENTING: Show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop appropriate to intentions.
ANALYSIS: Select at least 1 key images and analyse in depth using this methodology: TECHNICAL > VISUAL > CONTEXTUAL > CONCEPTUAL. Compare with examples of artists references where appropriate.
EVALUATION: Evaluate each assignment and make a self assessment based on the criteria, EFFORT, SKILL, CREATIVITY and AESTHETIC using this mark sheet and post on the blog.
GUIDELINES Consider the following before and during shooting
LOCATION: at home in the living room, kitchen or bedroom, consider natural light (window light) and backdrop. Location can also be outside of the house during daylight
MODEL: family members, parents, brother, sister, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends.
POSING: ask model to try out different poses and control how you set up the people you are photographing choosing appropriate location and backdrop.
FRAMING: full-body, half-body and head-shots, experiment with different angles and use appropriate focal lenght (ie. wide-angle lens 18-35mm, standard lens 50mm, telephoto lens 70-300mm).
LIGHTING: consider source and direction of lighting
INSIDE: use natural light through window as side light
OUTSIDE: Avoid direct sunlight or dull grey overcast light in the middle of the day. Choose softer light, early morning/ late afternoon, sunlight diffused by clouds etc.
For further inspiration and context study the exhibition Home Sweet Home and book of the same name. Read feature here on Lensculture
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT 1: Home Sweet Home Environmental Portrait – RULE: Use tripod Candid portrait 50-100 images DEADLINE: Wed 24 June
ENVIRONMENTAL PORTRAIT: A formal portrait with emphasis on environment and setting of the model that may suggest the person’s social, economic, cultural background.
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT 2: Home Sweet Home Establishing shot — RULE: Use tripod Detail shot 50-100 images DEADLINE: Wed 1 July
ESTABLISHING SHOT: a group portrait of two or more members of the family where you are constructing an image that tells a story. This image can be naturally observed or staged. The main focus is conveying a sense of narrative.
Masahisa Fukase: Family ‘My entire family, whose image I see inverted in the frosted glass, will die one day. This camera, which reflects and freezes their images, is actually a device for archiving death’. – Masahisa Fukase
For three generations the Fukase family ran a photography studio in Bifuka, a small provincial town in the northern Japanese province of Hokkaido. In August 1971, at the age of 35, Masahisa Fukase returned home from Tokyo, where he had moved in the 1950s. He realised that the Fukase Photographic Studio, which his younger brother managed, combined with the growing family members, constituted the perfect subject for a series of portraits. Between 1971 and 1989, he returned regularly and used the family studio, the large-format Anthony view camera and the changing family line-up as the basis for the series. True to his style, Fukase often introduced third-party models and humorous elements to juxtapose the ineluctable reality of time passing and the dwindling family group. He continued the series through his father’s death in 1987, up until the closure of the Fukase studio due to bankruptcy in 1989, and the consequential dispersion of the family.
Alan Craddock with his wife Joan and their daughters (left to right) Jacqueline, Barbara and Kim (standing). Residents of June Street, Salford, 1973.
Daniel Meadows: June Street Salford, Manchester, 1973
DETAIL SHOT Focus on a detail of a person or close up of something that conveys something about the individual character or identity eg. age, race, gender, sexuality, fashion, hobby, lifestyle etc.
GB. England. Dorset. From ‘West Bay’ and From ‘Common Sense’. 1996.
PHOTO-ASSIGNMENT 3: Home Sweet Home Interior — RULE: Use tripod Exterior 50-100 images DEADLINE: Wed 8 July
INTERIOR: Photograph your home with no people in it. You could focus on the locations where you shot your portraits. Make sure to consider rooms with interest, eg. space, decor, furniture, objects on display etc.
EXTERIOR: Photograph your home from the outside, using different points of view from the garden, road. Consider different angles, details as well as deadpan approach. Include fences, hedges. Produce a typologies of every house on your street photographed from the roadside.
SUMMER TASK: Home Sweet Home Self-portrait — RULE: Use tripod Family archives 250 – 400 images DEADLINE: Tue 2 Sept (first day of term)
The last photo-assignment is more of a SUMMER TASK that will enable you to explore the concept of HOME more broadly beyond the confines of the four walls of your house where you live. Jersey, the island where you perhaps are born or where you grew up can be considered a home too. Home can be interpreted as a community of friends that you identify with and share common interests collectively. If you are away from home you often think about your home with a sense of nostalgia. Home can be associated with memories, feelings, hopes, fears etc.
SELF-PORTRAIT: With social distancing rules easing you are now allowed to move more freely about and meet people outside of your immediate family. However some of you may have personal experiences of self-isolation and want to explore this in a series of self-portraits.
For this task you can draw on knowledge and understanding you learned from your IDENTITY project and find inspirations from artists listed here.
Untitled (self painted grey, cradling photograph of eye as a child, obscuring my own eyes, in front of backdrop held by partner), 116 x 85cm, Photograph mounted and box framed in black, 2016cofUnder Oath, 2017
Jonny Briggs: In search of lost parts of my childhood I try to think outside the reality I was socialised into and create new ones with my parents and self. Through these I use photography to explore my relationship with deception, the constructed reality of the family, and question the boundaries between my parents and I, between child/adult, self/other, nature/culture, real/fake in attempt to revive my unconditioned self, beyond the family bubble. Although easily assumed to be photoshopped or faked, upon closer inspection the images are often realised to be more real than first expected. Involving staged installations, the cartoonesque and the performative, I look back to my younger self and attempt to re-capture childhood nature through my assuming adult eyes.
Aaron Yeandle: PPE 19 PPE or Personal Protective Equipment is specialist equipment health professionals wear to protect themselves and people from germs. This barrier reduces the chance of spreading infection through touch, being exposed to viruses in the air and stop person to person transmission. Images of hazmat suits and medical professionals in full-body scrubs and surgical masks are inundating the media and society. The sight of so many people wearing these outfits makes many of us feel anxious and concerned. However, we do recognise that masks and Personal Protective Equipment are effective in helping to reduce the spread of disease and viruses.
During the seventeenth century the bubonic plague epidemic swept through western Europe. Plague doctors who treated the infected wore Personal Protective Equipment to protect them from infections such as miasma, or “bad air”. Miasma at this period of time was understood to carry disease’s and viruses. This menacing suit typically consisted of a head-to-toe leather or wax-canvas garment, large crystal glasses; and a long snout or bird beak. These photographs are my contemporary interpretation of the historical and contemporary fusion of Personal Protective Equipment in these strange and uncertain times.
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.
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.
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 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
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. Read articles in relation to exhibition here:http://aperture.org/blog/feminism-gillian-wearing-claude-cahun/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/08/gillian-wearing-claude-cahun-mask-national-portrait-gallery
Claude Cahun has been described as a Cindy Sherman before her time. Wearing’s art undoubtedly owes something to Sherman – just as Sherman herself is indebted to artist Suzy Lake. Looking back at Cahun, Wearing is both tracing artistic influence, and paying homage to it, teasing out threads in a web of relationships crossing generations.
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.
FAMILY ARCHIVES: Both public and private archives can be a rich source for finding starting points on your creative journey. This will strengthen your research and lead towards discoveries about the past that will inform the way you interpret the present and anticipate the future. See more Public/ Private Archives
For example, you can focus on the life on one parent, grand-parent, family relative, or your own childhood and upbringing. Ask other family members (parents, grand-parents, aunties, uncles) if you can look through their photo-albums too etc.
Family photo-albumsDigital images stored on mobile phones, uploaded on social media etc.
STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE:
RESEARCH your own family/ private archives such as photo-albums, home movies, diaries, letters, birth-certificates, boxes, objects, mobile devices, online/ social media platforms and make a blog post with a selection of material that can be used for further development and experimentation using a variety of re-staging or montage techniques.
DIGITISATION: Either scan or re-photograph archival material so that it is digitised and ready for use on the blog and further experimentation.
PLANNING > RECORDING: Plan at least one photo-shoot and make a set of images that respond to your archival research. This can be re-staging old photos or make a similar set of images, eg. portraits of family members and how they have changed over the years, or snapshots of social and family gatherings.
EXPERIMENTATION: Choose one of your images which relates to the theme of family (e.g. archive, family album, or new image you have made) and destroy the same image in 5 different ways using both analogue and digital method techniques. Eg. Reprint old and new photos and combine using scissors/ tearing and glue/ tape. In Photoshop use a variety of creative tools to cut and paste fragments of images to create composites. Extension: Choose a second image and destroy it in 5 new or other ways.
EVALUATION: Evaluate each assignment and make a self assessment based on the criteria, EFFORT, SKILL, CREATIVITY and AESTHETIC using this mark sheet and post on the blog.
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.
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
There are different ways artists and photographers have explored their own, or other families in their work as visual storytellers. Some explore family using a documentary approach to storytelling, others construct or stage images that may reflect on their childhood, memories, or significant events drawing inspiration from family archives/ photo albums and often incorporating vernacular images into the narrative and presenting the work as a photobook.
Rita Puig-Serra Costa (Where Mimosa Bloom) vs Laia Abril (The Epilogue)> artists exploring personal issues > vernacular vs archival > inside vs outside
Rita Puig-Serra Coasta, Where Mimosa BloomLaia Abril, The Epiloque
Carole Benitah (Photo Souvenirs) vs Diane Markosian (Inventing My Father) > family > identity > memory > absence > trauma
Carole Benitah, Photo-SouvenirsThis is the closet thing I had to an image of my father. A cut out of him in my mother’s photo album.
Ugne Henriko (Mother and Daughter) vs Irina Werning or Chino Otsuka > re-staging images > re-enacting memories
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