For my mock I was inspired by Francesca Woodman and also looked at a few other artists that I think will help me out in my future projects. I managed to do around 3 photoshoots which gave me a good selection of images and I was able to spend my time well by editing them and researching.
What to improve:
I need to plan out my ideas and think carefully about what I’m going to do because this time I just started the project without a plan and it was quite difficult at the beginning. Using more than one artist will help me as I will be able to experiment with more techniques and make my work more interesting. To improve, I’m also going to have to take more pictures in the studio because the lighting is better and I’ll be able to experiment more and I’ll also have to take pictures of more people so I can have more options.
Definition: Monochromatic colours are all the colours of a single hue. Monochromatic colour schemes are derived from a single base hue and extended using its shades, tones and tints. Tints are achieved by adding white and shades and tones are achieved by adding a darker colour, grey or black.
In my project: monochromatic editing and taking of photographs will play a big role in my project as all of the old family images I will be using are black and white, and as I will be recreating some of Kensuke Koike’s work, my collage of 3 faces I will create will be black and white and presented on my blog alongside his work, to demonstrate how I am taking the majority of the inspiration from his work.
Photo Montage/ Cut and Paste
Definition: 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. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image may appear as a seamless physical print.
In my project: The main reason why this will incorporated into my project is because I am very inspired by Kensuke Koike’ work. I like how multiple different images can be used to create a new piece with a new meaning, as it links to themes such as heritage, identity and family. Furthermore, it’s like creating a optical illusion but digitally (in this case in photoshop not physically) as position images to create more aesthetic than the last.
1st Photoshoot Plan:
1) Collect resources (images and old family photographs) from my dads side of the family, as my grandfather was a coal miner as has a miners statue and other various objects relating to his old profession
2) Make sure that I know the key information on the objects, e.g. when they were purchased and who is in the old family photographs so background information can be added
3) Go to the studio and take photographs of these objects and family photos, using the copy stand for these, focusing mainly on the lighting and the level of the camera in comparison to the images
4) Input images into Lightroom ready for editing and development
Here I have placed a photo of our setup, using the copy stand which includes the camera, lights, plain white surface for a background, a trigger and the tripod that holds the camera up but facing downwards. This helped me to take many legible images of my old family photographs, especially as the handheld trigger makes sure all the wires are out of the way.
2nd Photoshoot Plan:
1) Decide who I would like to photograph in correlation to creating a new face, made from three generations of family members, this photoshoot is based on first hand images I will be taking.
2) Once I have asked the models (which will most likely be my grandad, dad and brother) if they will be apart of my project and get their photos taken, I will take images of them outside in order to use the natural lighting.
3) Ideally with a plain background I will take their portraits, directing them when to smile in pose different ways, and at different angles.
4) Input images into Lightroom, I will identify which are the most useful for my project
Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg on the 2nd of May 1904 to an English father and a German mother. During the 1920s Brandt was sent to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, to receive treatment for tuberculosis. It is likely that he took up photography as an amateur enthusiast during this time. In 1927 Brandt travelled to Vienna, where he met the writer and social activist Dr Eugenie Schwarzwald, a pioneer of education for girls in Austria, whose home provided a venue for the intellectual elite of the time. Schwartzwald found a position for Brandt in a local portrait studio and introduced him to the American poet Ezra Pound.
Moodboard of images
In turn, Pound apparently introduced Brandt to the American surrealist artist Man Ray, who became a major influence on Bill’s work. Brandt Assisted Man Ray in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of surrealist film and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography. Brandt also learnt several technical processes from Man Ray – the use of extreme grain for graphic effect as well as the use of radical cropping.
One of Man Ray’s images
In 1932, after a period of travelling around Europe, Brandt married Eva Boros, who he met in Vienna. In 1934 they moved to London and settled in Belsize Park, North London. Brandt adopted Britain as his home and it became the subject of his greatest photographs. In 1936 the first collection of grants early photographs was published in ‘The English at Home.”
One of Bill Brandt’s self-portraits
Night photography became one of his specialities, and ‘Woman in Hamburg, St Pauli District’ (1933) may be his earliest experiment in the genre. Brandt posed his wife Eva as a prostitute in the red-light district of Hamburg. Family and friends were to play many roles in his social documentary series. Brandt was also a collage artist, both in photography and later in life. Later in life, Brandt used beach-combed objects in collages. These were published as ‘Bill Brandt: The Assemblages.’
“Woman in Hamburg, St Pauli District”
This is an iconic image from Bill Brandt – the use of monotone in this image creates harsh contrast between the light and dark tones – for example the harsh dark tones in the bottom right, and the brighter white tones in the middle section of the image. This helps to frame the focal point of the ear, in the bottom of the image. From the focal point, the eye is then drawn along through the leading lines of the shore to the left and up along the cliff. – This is influenced by the clear use of the rule of thirds in this image. The lighting is natural, and it is cold in temperature. The high amounts of grain in this image also add to the texture of the image, and help to keep high contrast between the different tones in the image. There is underexposure towards the edge of the cliff, which highlights the lighter bits of the cliff cleverly. I think that this image links to the idea of concealing parts of someone / something’s identity, while exposing others. – I will try to use this concept in my shoots.
Joachim Schmid
Berlin-based artist Joachim Schmid, who has been concentrating on the recycling of vernacular photographs since the early 1980s, is a living embodiment of the visual scavenger. Schmid studied at Berlin University of the Arts from 1976 to 1981. He began his career as a freelance critic and the publisher of Fotokritik, an iconoclastic and original contribution to West German photography. In the pages of Fotokritik and in his regular articles and lectures for other outlets, Schmid published many examples of his critique of photography as a form of cultural practice.
Moodboard of Joachim’s images/collages
Living near one of the largest flea markets in Berlin, he had already amassed a rich, deep, and varied collection of vernacular photography which formed the raw material for many of his works. With the advent of the digital age, he has shifted his practice to the Internet, where he continues to ponder the future of photography in a globalized culture. In the current context of the frantic and furious proliferation of images, Schmid aligns himself with fellow artists who seek to tame images and keep them in line.
His series Other People’s Photographs (2008–11) takes the form of a set of 96 self-published books, each of which contains a selection of photographs found on the Internet and classified according to specific, nonsensical, odd criteria. Schmid notes that when images lose the thread of their origins, their incontinent production leads us into utter chaos. When this happens, the artist’s mission is to restore order – or at least a possible order, accompanied by a maliciously knowing wink. This provokes confusion in the naive and complicity in connoisseurs capable of savouring a caustic parody of the “official” classificatory methodologies of historians and museums.
Each volume of Other People’s Photographs brings together diverse elements on the basis of some unifying factor – however arbitrary and absurd it may seem – and thus suggests possible ways of categorizing the world. Schmid essentially mocks the supposed coherence of a theory of the catalogue and the archive.
This is a classic example of Joachim’s collage work -this is a monochrome image, with quite an even distribution of dark and light tones in the image. The image has quite a fine texture, which helps the two images to blend easily together – but not seamlessly, for the images are placed slightly far apart to showcase the differences between the two – even though they look so similar. This image is overexposed to the top right, which contrasts with the dark elements in the hair of both subjects. This helps to frame the focal point – the centre of where the two images are put together. These two images were found by Joachim – the fact they blend together so cleverly by accident is so clever, and I think this feature helps the viewer to look closely at the differences between the two images too.
Schmid’s use of extended series reflects his concern with photography as an encompassing, culturally dispersed social and aesthetic feature that runs throughout the public and private spheres of life. The fundamental richness of Schmid’s photographic raw material – along with the wit he often displays – derails any attempt to read his work as pure anthropology or social science. His artistic preoccupations reflect a close observation of photographic history and a fascination with photographic images themselves in all their alternately bizarre and conventionalized aspects.
