During our first year of photography, we were given many different tasks and projects as a way to explore types of photography. It also gave us the chance to discover our strong points and weaker points within the subject as well as what we enjoyed. Personally, I would say that both my strong point and what I enjoy are both portraiture. What I like about it is being able to manipulate the appearance of someone, I think its very interesting that you can completely change the way someone is perceived by changing a setting in your camera, changing lights and changing colours. Of course this can be done with anything- objects, landscapes, however it being another human being creates a different connection to an audience. Recently we were given the opportunity to explore new things such as Animation, Film-making and embroidery. Animation and film making are a good stem from photography and were fun and interesting to look at, it allowed us to stake a step into those worlds to see if thats what we enjoyed- which is just how school should be. However, i personally enjoyed embroidery the most. As an art student, being able to physically alter imagery and making it 3D to the touch can bring life to a simple photograph. It can bring meaning, colour, and it can create a stronger tie between you and your photography turning it from digital to a physical piece of work.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Below is what I think was a few of my best works over the year (not in any order and chosen at random from different projects). After placing them onto this blog post I noticed the pattern of black and white. Although coloured images can creating meaning and hold just as much significance, I feel that black and white can allow photographs to focus on the subject of them, becoming less about aesthetic and more about context and although taking pictures purely as a way to please the eye is a huge part of photography, taking pictures with deeper meanings is powerful and that is what I love.

Of the many photographers I have looked at or studied, one of my favorites and most intriguing to me would be Wynn Bullock, specifically this image:

This image caught by Wynn was the one that caught my eye. When looking at this image what I saw was a cliff on a foggy day, taken from a distance, but after researching I realised that it wasn’t a cliff at all, the ‘trees’ are actually a form of seaweed that grow on grouped rocks that you find on the beach. So this image is actually a close up of some rocks, taken with a slow shutter-speed as the water flows and crashes on them. The reason why I liked this image so much is not only because I found so much to write about, but also because it shows how misleading photography can be, how well you can hide true meaning from an audience. I also looked a lot deeper into the image which you can look in the link below.

Rural Landscapes Case Study

For my personal investigation on identity and community, my initial idea is to focus on myself and my identity. Its something I’ve never really done as I prefer telling other peoples stories rather than my own. As an overall ‘final’ project before I finish school I thought it would be something interesting and different to do- including different forms of photography such as studio images, lanscapes, portraits, whatever comes to mind when I’ve decided fully what id like to do.

Our initial idea being that the subject would walk through doors, transitioning from one time period to another did not work practically due to the layout of the house in which we were filming. Instead, we had her walking just from one frame to another across the screen which actually created smooth transitions.

To start with, we picked out the three most successful videos which were about ten seconds each and cut them down in order to create the smooth transitions we hoped for. These clips were placed together and we started from there.

The first clip consists of our subject, Caitlin, with a bowl and a whisk. She walks towards the centre, puts the bowl down and picks up a suffragette sash and puts it on, then walks off and into the next scene. We chose to make this clip black and white to reference the time period as much as possible. In the background there is empowering music playing as well as a separate quote for each clip being spoken by a women of the time about women. For this particular scene, a women reads ‘the ministers suffragettes who form the women’s social and political union are engaged to meet him to win the right to vote for women of this century’

We are then led to the second scene, where the colours are dull but not fully black and white. In these scene, Caitlin walks into the scene, puts on a jacket and proceeds to pick up a woman’s rights- she then pauses, takes a breath and marches on into the next scene. The short quote that is played in this scene reads… ‘We now have ten million women backing this particular measure before congress, that’s ten million women who are united through their organisation.’

In the last scene, she is happy and ‘bouncy’. She walks in, looks at herself in the mirror, turns around and smiles at the camera, then exits. The quote playing is, ‘Whatever you’re going through as a woman, you have the choice to make for yourself for how gentle and kind you are with yourself.’

We also gathered images on the internet of womens protests, and played them through at a fast pace at the end of the video to send a powerful message.

• 

• 

• 

The title we chose is ‘WomanKind’, which is a play on words referring to ‘mankind.’

Idea

As a group, knowing we wanted to explore feminism, we decided to use this opportunity to create a video showing empowerment in the world of women. Our initial idea was to use one girl throughout the video and have her walking through doors that lead to different stages of feminism. She would start in in kitchen and would represent the fist wave of feminism (women’s suffrage) as well as the women of the time, hence why she would be in the kitchen, the stereotype and mostly reality at the time. She would then walk through a door, walk through time, to the seventies introducing the second wave of feminism. This stage would have more colour and saturation implying the good changes that had come, however not fully. And through the last door would come not another stage of fighting for equality but a hypothetical world where women feel free, safe and happy.

Storyboard

Each stage lasting ten seconds would add up to 30 seconds, our aim being to represent how women have fought over the century but showing it in a gentle way. As for audio our initial idea was to change the music for each stage, however, we decided that instead, having three snippets of speeches of women at he time as well as empowering music would be much more emotional and powerful.

What is an NFT?

‘A non-fungible token is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a digital ledger. NFTs can be used to represent easily-reproducible items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files as unique items, and use blockchain technology to establish a verified and public proof of ownership.’

2 LIVES

2 Lives is Jersey’s first Art Exhibition that connects Art and Finance, through the introduction of NFTs. This project is destined to shape the future of the Art world, leveraging NFTs as a tool to create new opportunities and communities. 2 Lives was created by Francesco Vincenti & Claudia Runcio who came to live in Jersey in 2020. Their vision is to create a format for future NFT exhibitions that can be replicated around the world in different shades and configurations.

‘What we want to leave in Jersey is a seed and a promise of prosperity, a moving platform on which creators, artists, business professionals and students can grow.’

An NFT Artist: Beeple

Also known as Mike Winklemann, Beeple is now the third most valuable living artist after selling an NFT collage for a record-smashing $69 million. The historical sale brokered through Christie’s in a first of the kind of the famed auctioneer whipped up a frenzy of interest for NFTs and the broader sphere of cryptocurrencies.

The Charleston native had previously set a NFT art world record after selling $582,000 worth of cryptocurrency art in five minutes. Beeple’s 1.7 strong social media following results from him sharing animations and illustrations every single day over the last 13 years. You may even be familiar with some of his creations. The digital artist has developed concert visuals and Flying Lotus videos for renowned rap performers Eminem and Nicki Minaj.

What is embroidery? Embroidery is the craft of decorating fabric or other materials using a needle to apply thread or yarn. Embroidery may also incorporate other materials such as pearls, beads, quills, and sequins. When it comes to photography, this can be a good edition to your images- it can add texture, depth and can make images more interesting overall.

We started by learning 4 different techniques, these being: running stitch, back stitch, couching stitch and the satin stitch. My personal favourite would be the back stitch as it creates a smooth, thick and constant line of thread. We practiced these stitches on a small piece of material.

We were then assigned a task to cut any pieces of material around the room (being the People Make Jersey tapestries from the Jersey Museum) and had to create our own piece of art using the embroidery techniques we had learnt. We were also asked to take pictures every few minutes to create a short gif animation afterwards.

Cindy Sherman

Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. For four decades, Cindy has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography.

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills comprises of over seventy black and white photographs made between 1977 and 1980.  When thinking about this series, some aspects of her entire body of work immediately come to mind: disguise and theatricality, mystery and voyeurism, melancholy and vulnerability. The artist initially started these series in her apartment, using her own interior as setting for the scenes. Her subject links very closely to ours, as she recreated typical movie scenes of a woman. Her film stills allowed the audience to imagine and make up scenarios and stories from a simple photograph.  The 70 Film Stills immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain her best-known works.

“Each individual image creates a distinguished scene. Untitled Film Still #21 for example, reminds of a scene from an outdated television show or movie, with the woman in the picture as leading heroine, wearing a vintage 1950s outfit and looking captivated by something outside the frame. This creates suspense: we will never know what happens across the street from this woman. It makes the image not so much about what is happening in the picture, but more about what happened before and after the moment it was shot. This narrative element is characteristic of Untitled Film Stills. The scenes are recognisable as film stills – imitating typical cinematic angles, lighting, and dramatisation – but they come from no particular movie.” – Josephine Van de Walle.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

In the time period that these photographs were taken, the second wave of feminism was ongoing and women were protesting for their employment rights- above, you can see Cindy posing as a woman in the kitchen in image 1 and 8 representing the typical housewife- however in image 1 she is wearing a male blazer, perhaps hinting at the fact that this is not where all women belonged. During this wave of feminism we come across a phrase called the ‘Male Gaze’ which means: ‘the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer’. This is represented in image 6- Cindy is posing as a woman in her nightdress, showing her body with her face partially covered which potentially represents how women were objectified in movies of the past and often even in the present.

A community of the future will celebrate diversity, equality and inclusion and propose a new digital world; a metaverse where everyone is equal regardless of class, race, gender and age. A digital ecosystem that transcends all virtual identities into a utopia for peace, prosperity and progress.

After making the general brainstorm and mood board, we looked further into the separate subjects. The statement above mentions equality, and being a group of girls we decided to base our NFT work around the subject of feminism. As a group we are going to look into the timeline of feminism, where it began, where it is now and how could it look in the future. However, rather than looking at it as a whole, we will be looking at how women have been presented in the media. We are going to briefly research different movements and feminine activists to get an idea of what was happening outside of the media but will be further explore the presentation of women in movies within the past, now, and of course, the future. As this is only a statement of intent, the following ideas may be changed in some ways but these are our initial ideas: For our 30 second animated video, we would like to create a stop motion that takes us from the past into the future, of a female or females showing the audience how they were presented in certain movies or media across the timelines (this would be either about the fashion, what they were doing or both). Where as for the A2 piece, we would like to create a collage of images, drawings and objects that conveys all the messages of the video.

Once I had chosen and edited my favourite/most successful images, I had to decide where to place them, how to place them and in what order. I began by laying all my printed images (small) on a table and visually putting them into groups and pairs. I made these decisions by looking at certain colours, shapes of the photographs as well as what they were of.

I then took 4 sheets of a4 paper and folded them in half creating a booklet of 16 pages. I made decisions of what images should go where and I stuck them down roughly in the booklet. This was my template to work from.

• 

This then allowed me to easily design my zine in InDesign. I did change a few things and added colour to the background to some of the pages.

In Lightroom all while holding shift, I used the letter X to discard an image and the letter P to flag it- this created my first selection (as you can see above- my flagged images).

After the previous steps, I went through the flagged photographs, rating them from 1-5 stars one by one. Some were very similar so I compared them and got rid of most.

As the final step, I chose my favourite images of all and using Lightroom I made adjustments- surprisingly after editing them, some of the images rated two or three turned out better than some of the ones rated four or five.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•