Identity mindmap:

I created a mindmap based on my initial ideas for my personal study. I started by finding some topics which interested me and then developed those ideas and started thinking about how I could turn these ideas into a shoot. I found this helped me to then go on and create a moodboard with artist references and helped me to clearly pick and find a theme that I was most interested in and had the more inspiration for.

Childhood

John Stezaker

John Stezaker was born in 1949 in Worcester, United Kingdom, and attended the Slade School of Art in London and graduated in the 1973. He is a contemporary British conceptual artist who is best known for his collages of found images taken from postcards, film stills, and commercial photographs. Stezaker’s work resembles early-Surrealist and re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image. Through his careful juxtapositions, Stezaker adapts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own meanings. He adds meaning to his images by intertwines images of landscapes, famous portraits and layers them creating silhouttes and curves. He creates interesting and fascinating small-format collages that have qualities of Surrealism. Stezaker said  “My ideal is to do very little to the images, maybe just one cut: the smallest change or the most minimal mutilation” as he feels what he does is destructive however also has meaning behind the actions. His works have been featured at many museums such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and many more.

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Ken Nwadiogbu

Ken Nwadiogbu is a visual artist who creates innovative conceptual drawings on various surfaces as he engages in multidisciplinary modes of storytelling. His interest in art, as well as his career began while earning his degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering despite the fact he had no formal training. His work was inspired by issues which related to him and those around him as he grew up, he began creating works that reflect his society with the hopes of making a change within his community. He calls his method of work contemporealism which is a fusion that is centered around hyper realism and contemporary art. Gender equality, African culture, and Black power are a few aspects of his current research and artistic practice. Nwadiogbu work constitutes a silhouette of a human, which he embeds an eye or parts of a face into his ultimate theme of creating consciousness to what represents our collective reality through art.​ Ken Nwadiogbu is constantly revitalising his practice by challenging modes of Black representation and he is constantly updating how he works by using new variants of photography to present his work for example NFT’s.

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Jim Goldberg

Jim Goldbergs was born in 1953 and is an American artist and photographer whose work reflects long-term collaborations with those who face neglection, been ignored, or otherwise outside the mainstream populations. Goldberg is best known for his photography books and multi media exhibitions especially for his trio serious of photography books called Rich and Poor, Nursing Home and Raised by Wolves. Goldberg is part of an experimental documentary movement in photography, using a straightforward approach based on a fundamentally narrative understanding of photography.
For my project I will be focusing on Goldbergs book ‘Raised by wolves’ which combines ten years of original photographs and text, home movie stills, snapshots, drawings and diary entries. He used this book to document the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. From 1985-1995, Goldberg was working on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco getting to know numerous homeless teens and building the relationships that would come to form the basis of Raised by Wolves.

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Pictorialism

Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. It was an approach to photography which emphasized beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality and was an imitate of art.

Time period:

1880 – 1920

Key Characteristics:

From the 1880s and onwards photographers strived for photography to be art and resemble hand made art by trying to make pictures that resembled paintings e.g. manipulating images in the darkroom, scratching and marking their prints to imitate the texture of canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery and using Vaseline on their lenses.

Artists associated –

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. In her works in particular, her artistic influence was Pre Raphaelite, with far away looks, limp poses and soft lighting. Cameron’s photographs were unusual in their intimacy and she had a visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus.

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Sally Mann

Sally Mann is an American photographer, widely known for her large-format, black-and-white photographs, at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death. Mann created a haunting series of photographs that tells a story about the one subject that affects us all, the loss of life. She created a project called ‘What Remains’ which was created in 2004 is a five part meditation on mortality and explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, spirit and
earth. In ‘What remains’ Munn reflects on her own personal feelings towards death as she examines the boundaries o contempary photography.

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Peter Henry Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson was born 13th May 1856 and died 12th May 1936, he was a British writer and photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting straight photography in an art form. Emerson is known for taking photographs which displayed rural settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography. Initially he was influenced by naturalistic French painting, he argued for “naturalistic” photography and took photographs in sharp focus to capture country life as clearly as possible. His first photo album was published in 1886 and was titled ‘Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads‘ and it consisted of 40 platinum prints that were inspired by these ideas. However after a while he became dissatisfied with rendering everything in sharp focus, as he didn’t like that the undiscriminating emphasis it gave to all objects was unlike the way the human eye saw the world. He then started experimenting with soft focus, but was unhappy with the result of this aswell. He was experiencing difficulty with accurately recreating the depth and atmosphere which he saw as necessary to capture nature with precision. Although he was getting frustrated with his photography he carried on to take many photographs of landscapes and rural life in the East Anglian fenlands and went onto publish seven further books of his photography through the next ten years.

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Modernism

Modernism was a broad movement surrounding all the innovative isms of the first half of the 20th century. Although different modern-isms were often incompatible they all rejected the dominance of older movements such as Classicism and Naturalism in favour of new experimental ways of producing art.

Time period:

Early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s. 

Key Characteristics:

It was a broad movement encompassing all the avant-garde isms of the first half of the 20th century. Early modernity is characterised by a belief that science could save the world and that a foundation of universal truths could be established.
During the modernism photographers began to embrace its social, political and aesthetic potential by experimenting with light, perspective and developing, as well as new subjects and abstraction.

Surrealism 

Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924 by the poet ‘Andre Breton’ and continued Dadaism’ exploration of everything irrational and subversive in art. Surrealism was more explicitly preoccupied with spiritualism, Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism. It aimed to create art which was ‘automatic’ which meant that it had emerged directly from the unconscious without being shaped by reason, morality or aesthetic judgements. The Surrealist also explored dream imagery an they were an important art movement within Modernism involving anything from paintings, sculpture, poetry, performance, film and photography.

Artists associated:

Rene Magritte

René François Ghislain Magritte was born on the 21st November 1898 and died on the 15th August 1967. In the 1920s, he began to paint in the surrealist style and became known for his witty images and his use of simple graphics and everyday objects, giving new meanings to familiar things. Often his images were depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art. Magrittes earliest paintings date back to 1915 which then sparked his career in surrealism. With his art becoming more and more popular he was able to pursue his art full-time and was celebrated in several international exhibitions.

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Post Modernism

Post modernism was a reaction to modernism and was influenced by disenchantment brought on by the second world war. Postmodernism was the collective name given to the shattering of modernism. In photography this was the direct challenge to the ideal of fine art photography whose values were established on an anti-commercial stance.

Time Period:

Late 20th century

Key Characteristics:

Postmodernism makes references to things outside the art work, e.g. political, cultural, social, historical,psychological issues.
Postmodern work are aware of and make reference to the previously hidden agendas of the art market and its relation to art museums, dealers and critics.
Postmodern work often uses different approaches in the construction of the work such as collaboration, parody, recycling and reconfiguration.
Postmodernism favours the context of a work including examining subject and the reception of the work by its audience.

Artist associated:

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he still lives. Wall is a leading contemporary photographer whose work is concerned with ideas about the nature of images, representation, and memory. He has been producing carefully staged photos since the end of the 1970s.

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