For this assignment, I decided to collect old images of my house. I thought I would take a different approach to this assignment instead of using family images, as my house projects the same idea as comparing photographs of my relatives. This is because I lived in this house ever since I was I born. Another important reason as to why my house is important to my family and I, is because my dad and grandad built and designed it themselves. For this reason there is many pictures of the process of building my house in my family photo albums, and I think creating a comparison of the changes of my house over the years is a more unique way of representing my identity and family.
Family Archives Photoshoot
I decided to take photographs of my house compared to the building process of my house, as well as individual photographs of sections of my house and re-photographed the images from my family album. I did this to experiment in photoshop with layering and making collages to compare the changes of my house over the years.
The images I highlighted in red are the photographs I believe are my least successful photographs as I don’t think the images line up that well and I didn’t like the composition of the photographs. The images I highlighted in green are what I believe to be my most successful photographs because the photos line up better or I like the idea of layering them in that way.
I’m going to use photoshop to experiment with layering and cropping to create a collage-like affect.
Photoshop Development
Original Image
Original Image
Edited Image
Original Image
Original Image
Edited Image
To edit these images, I cropped the original image of the physical photographs from my family albums, I then layered them over the new photographs and lowered the opacity in order to achieve a “ghost-like” effect. I also erased areas of the old images to keep the contrast between the old and new. I feel like this photoshoot was successful because it’s a more unique approach to the project, yet it still projects a strong contrast between old and modern times.
If I was to do this photoshoot again, I would take a wider range of photographs at different angles. This way, I could have lined up the older images better and had more images to work with.
Francis Foot was born in 1885, he is from Jersey, he was the son of Francois Foot (1847-1918) and Louisa Hunt (1843-1934). His father Francois was a china and Glass dealer in Dumaresq Street, at a time when the area was one of the more affluent in St Helier.
Foot started his working life as a gas fitter. However, he soon became fascinated by photography and the early phonographs and gramophone records and realised that he could earn a living from them.
So the family took on a second shop in Pitt Street, where Francis worked as a photographer, while his father and mother sold gramophones, records and other wares in Dumaresq Street. After his father’s death, Francis concentrated his photography business in Pitt Street.
Mood Board
I found the images from Google and Jerripedia. As you can see Foot is focused on event photography and portrait and photographing people.
Analyse – Margaret with Dora and George
This photo was taken by Francis Foot at 13:25, its called Margaret with Dora and George and it was taken in 1920. Foot has taken an image of what looks to be a mum with her two children. Foot used the background of a forest to contrast the white clothing of the children. To make them stand out, perhaps this shows how important the children are to the mother. The simple pattern of the clothes, juxtaposes the texture of the leaves and the trees, which reflects on how simple life used to be in the 20th century. Other than that, it is a basic family portrait.
Societe Jersiaise is home to a photographic archive holding 100 000 images. It is the primary collection of images in the nineteenth and twentieth century in Jersey. The archive contains images dating back to the mid-1840s. England and France are two nations who were highly innovative in developing the practice of photography from its early stages. Jersey, being sandwiched right between these gave it a rich history of photography that the archive stores away safely. This was also because when photography arrived at the Island 9 months after its discovery in 1840, it was practiced without the worry of patents restricting the medium. The archive came to be in 1873. Included in its creation were a museum and a library. The society immediately realised the importance of recording photographic history as well as buildings, monuments, and ruins. With passion for documenting through the medium of photography consistently developing for over 140 years the archive has resultantly gathered an immense record of Jersey’s history and, consequently, an amazing capsule of the history of the art of photography. By the boom of photography and its technological developments in the 1860s, the number of photography studios in St Helier has increased drastically. The archive is located in St Helier, on Pier Road which is right beside where the bustling Jersey merchant traders used to operate. Merchant trading and ship trading were huge markets in Jersey, this makes the location of Societe Jersiaise quite appropriate. The archive holds works from many photographers that operated in these locations during the boom. Early photographers such as William Collie, Charles Hugo, Thomas Sutton and Henry Mullins. Included as well are later nineteenth century photographers such as Clarence Ouless, Ernest Baudoux and Albert Smith. To follow in the 20th century the archive holds very value images from a rich point in history in Jersey. This being WWII; specifically, images from the German occupation and the liberation of the island. This proves the idea that we can learn about the different people and communities that developed through history by looking at Jerseys past. We get a direct link between what the photographers experienced and the image they took. This correlates with the idea that most people in modern times exercise some form of archiving. Archives such as family albums are common medium found in many homes. Family albums are an example of photos taken over a period and preserved within a family. They hold a special importance for many families. Just by opening it every once in a while, memories are reminisced on, evoking strong emotions and nostalgia. These archives are normally in physical form, normally a little photobook stored away in a cupboard or on the coffee table. These have tangibility about them, and a person can connect with the archive by physically picking up the album and flicking through the pages. However, some everyday archives are kept in digital format. As we move to a more digital age, almost everyone alive has a mobile phone stuck to their hand. This means that almost everyone is some form of archivist. Most of us have vast albums of photos on our mobile devices. Newer phones are always coming out with larger amounts of storage to facilitate these images. This means most of us are carrying around a rich archive of images we have created and preserved on our mobile devices. We carry around affluent history on our phones. Even the text messages we have accumulated over years and years can be seen as a form of an archive. These archives can immediately tell a comprehensive story about one’s personality and history. Detailed insight into a person’s life and their experiences, their relationships, their interests, where they live, their career and everything in between just by looking at their camera album on their phone. This further gives understanding of society and its technological development along with its cultural development and history.
William Collie was a Jersey photographer from the 19th century. Some of Colliers previously unpublished photographs featured in an exhibition at the Musée Dorsay in Paris in 2008. This exhibition boasted some of the first photographs taken on paper in Britain from 1840 to 1860. Below is one of those photographs. It was taken in 1847. It is of Jersey Market women.
This photograph leads onto the next interesting element to note about Williams work. Williams works capturing these portrait style images was one of the earliest signs of tableau photography recorded. Tableau photography is an intentional form of photographing characters who are arranged for picturesque or dramatic effect and appear absorbed and completely unaware of the existence of the photographer/viewer. His work is featured at Societe Jersiaise’s archive. The archive further gives us knowledge of some of the first photos ever taken. William’s contribution is highly valuable. This is not just because he was one of the first to bring photography to the island but because we start to see the contribution of artistic entries into the archive as apposed to just documentative entries. The archive can provide an archaeological view into when photography started to shift from a documentative process to a more artistic one; all due to Williams early tableau works.
The above photograph is part of Williams ‘Market Women’ collection. The image is of a professionally composed tableau portrait where a young lady is dressed as a Jersey market woman. She is wearing what would be working class clothing of the time. The mise en scene of the image tells the story of a market environment with the hanging basket and what seems to be produced on the ground. The subject has been directed to look away from the lens. This enforces a notion that the subject is absorbed and used to create a dramatic effect; this almost gives the character a sense of elegance but also sovereignty. This sense of emotion the lady is portraying could give us an understanding of the historical context of the image as in the 19th century Jersey saw massive changes in society. A large influx of immigrants from England made Jersey a more connected island than ever before and brought with it cultural changes and the desire for political reform. During this period, the States reformed to become more representative of the population and the Jersey culture became more anglicised and less religious. The island also grew economically, and the built-up areas of the island expanded, especially St Helier, with the development of public transport on the island. This lady could have been represented as a part of this powerful time in St Helier as she is portrayed as a market woman, aiding in the growth of the town. William Collie was probably the first photographer to use the calotype process in Jersey. This is a technique, were a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was exposed to light in a camera obscura; those areas hit by light became dark in tone, yielding a negative image. The image has an artistic contrast created by the calotype method of photography that Collier was renowned for. The negative light gives a wide tonal range from dark tones in the subject’s hair to a pure white tone just an inch down on her collar. This contrast also gives the background a grainy texture as the shadows on the bricks are accentuated. I believe this allows the viewer to focus on the structure of the image and creates a clear contrast which builds the foundation of the image and shines focus on the features of the character being shot.
In conclusion a lot can be gained from archives in terms of physical, political and social contexts in our society by looking at history in a sensory fashion; looking at images gives us a way to see through the eyes of people living different lives before us. We learn about the different emotions of each social structures at different times by interpreting the photographers’ emotions that get portrayed into an image. This will be the fashion I approach documenting communities in St Helier. I want to be able to capture detailed history of the communities at the time but at the same time interpreting William Collies artistic approach to capture the emotion of the social structures through my images.
Victor Hugo was born February 26, 1802 in Besançon and died May 22, 1885 in Paris. He was a French poet and playwrighter , he marked the history of the nineteenth century, and is still recognized thanks to his literary works, and also by his political speeches. He wrote works very well known as Les Châtiments (1853), Les Contemplations (1856) and Les Misérables in 1862.
To Jersey from France
Because of his political opinion, Victor Hugo could not stay in France during the reign of Napoleon III, and had to refuge in a discreet place. He moved to Jersey in 1852 and he stayed until 1855. Thanks to his refuge he was able to publish his political pamphlet against Napoleon III Napoléon le Petit and Histoire d’un crime. During his period of leaving in jersey he also composed and published some of his best work like Les Misérables, Les Châtiments 1853; Les Contemplations 1856 and La Légende des siècles 1859. Very quickly Victor Hugo becomes very interested in photography. He wants to use it as a political tool to show his image in France. So it becomes a family affair. His sons Charles and, François-Victor, organize a photographic workshop . The Jersey workshop was a unique adventure. It was both a look at the landscape that sometimes inspired Victor Hugo’s drawings and a testimony to an outlaw in exile. The Jersey Workshop was a photographic studio in the greenhouse at Marine Terrace. Victor Hugo’s project was to create a book on the Channel Islands illustrated with images. But the book was never finished, he still produced an intense production of salted paper prints. The purpose of the workshop was to preserve the memory of the exiles, the portraits which were taken were placed in many albums which were sometimes adorned with paintings or collages by Charles Hugo.
Archive images are images that are stored and kept away images for people to be able to see them in the future, for the purposes of learning about the history of an image or to see the difference of an image through out the years to analyse it.
This is an archive image of St.Brelade’s that was taken with the view of the bay facing towards Ouaisne, in between the years 1850- 1920 as an assumption due to there being no information on when the image was taken.
Juxtaposed Image
Here is the image that I ended up editing by the use of two images of St.brelade’s bay from years ago and St.brelade’s bay today. The process i went through in creating this image was by getting up both of the images on photoshop, then cutting out certain parts of the old St.Brelade’s bay, then copying and pasting it onto the new one and adjusting the cut outs to fit in the image.
I decided to use this archived image of Corbiere Lighthouse as I know I already have photographs of this heritage sight and therefore can layer these images in order to show the juxtaposition of the site over time.
I am going to layer this image I have taken of Corbiere Lighthouse because the images have similar angles and both the images have a lack of colour, which I think will add an overall gloomy mood which would be interesting to contrast.
Photoshop development
To juxtapose these images, I layered the archived image over my own photograph to project the contrast of the area over time. I then lowered the opacity of the archived image to create a ghost-like affect, almost representing time fading.
The photograph on the left was taken in 1870 by Ernst Baudoux of the view through trees up to Princes tower with boarded windows and chapel at La Hougue Bie.
