Reiner Riedler was born in Gmunden, Austria and went to Vienna with the intention of studying ethnology. He then attended a College for photography (Graphische) in Vienna and decided to dedicate himself solely to photography. Master Studies of Image Sciences at the Danube University of Krems.

He is a documentary photographer and deals with important topics of the present day. His view always centers on human beings and their environment. The main focus of his documentary work is to challenge our value systems. As a traveller he visits the periphery of our habitats, always searching for the fragile beauty of human existence with its desires and abysses. His recent conceptual works question the nature of photography and the way, how we look at the world surrounding us.

Reiner Riedler’s work has been shown in numerous countries at photo festivals, galleries and museums. He has been working for periodicals and magazines.

Riedler has produced a series of photographs followed by photobooks. An example of one of his books was one named ‘Sweat’. I really liked how his photographs turned out within this photobook as they produce an almost nightmarish looking series of photographs that were just produced from the formation of his sweat.

Within this photobook, Vreni Hockenjos stated that “Reiner Riedler has discovered sweat as an artistic form of expression. Fascinated by the image captured by the sweat on his T-shirt after jogging – like a spontaneous self-portrait – he has used the sweat produced by others to create a series of images. In order to achieve this, he approached the renowned Fraunhofer Institute in Munich which provided him with a special sensory material that could be placed above or underneath his perspiring models. In doing so, Riedler used the sweaty body as a kind of rubber stamp to create life-size negatives. He then photographed these and transformed them into monochrome paper prints.“

Image analysis

PICTORIALISM

Time Period:

1880’s-1920’s

Key characteristics/ conventions :

Aimed to make photography an art form, hands on process, aim was creating photos that resembled paintings/art using different techniques, floating existence, similar to music, ‘floating romance’?, dreamlike, staged images,

Artists associated:

Alfred Stieglitz, Julia Margaret Cameron, Peter Henry Emmerson & his theory on natural photography, the Vienna camera club, the brotherhood of the linked ring, Frank Eugene, Sally Mann [modern take on pictorialism]

Influences:

Allegorical Painting:

Key works:

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

Smearing Vaseline on lenses [making the images looks soft/fuzzy], manipulated images/negatives in the dark room [using chemicals], scratch the images/negatives using different tools,

REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Time Period:

1920’s

Key characteristics/ conventions :

Sharp focus images that are full of detail, shadows, abstract forms, architecture, geometric forms, structured images

Artists associated:

Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams

Influences:

Picasso, Cubism:

Key works:

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

No manipulation, clear focus, ‘face reality,

Social Reform Photography

Time Period:

Early 1900’s

Key Characteristics:

Photos on issues happening at the time, documenting the urbanisation, not meant to look nice/pretty

Artists associated:

Dorothy Lange, Lewis W Hine, Jacob Riis,

Influences:

Key Works:

Methods/ techniques/ processes

Documentary photography, raw/real images,

MODERNISM

Time period:

Late 19th century – Early 20th century [photography itself was a modernist invention]

Key characteristics/ conventions :

Photojournalism, emphasised the truth/materiality of a work of art, believed meaning was embedded in work/created by the artist themselves [not interested in context], tried to produce timeless pieces that did not link to history/tradition, rejected older concepts + movements,

Artists associated:

Margaret Bourke-White, Ansel Adams,

Influences:

Against the enlightenment [pro science and technology], dadaism [Hannah Hoch], expressionism, surrealism,

Key works:

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

Form, composition, focuses on object rather than content,

POST-MODERNISM

Time Period:

1900s – 1960s

Key characteristics/ conventions :

Believed in individuals creating their own meanings for art, came about as a reaction to modernism, a backlash against modernity, references things outside of the artwork [i.e: context such as politics, psychology etc], a mix of various styles,

Artists associated:

Heidegger, Derrider, Lyotard

Influences:

Mix of different concepts, disenchantment from WW2

Key works:

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

Nihilistic, rationality, objectivity, universalism, relativism, identity, colonialism, eclecticism,

Art Movements & Isms

Time period :

1880s-1920s

Key characteristics/ conventions :

trying to make photography more of an accepted art form.

1880s’- Photography was seen as less serious, photography is a optical process, the painters, sculptures saw photography as a quick way to create art (lazy). Painting, sculptures etc saw photography as a threat as they would’ve had to spend years on their practice.

Kodak- box camera, photography became popular and easy…

Machine process, was believed to be an unhuman art form so not accepted.

Influences:

Allegorical paintings

Peter Henry Emmerson- Emerson’s Naturalistic Photography

In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) expounded his theory of Naturalistic Photography which the Pictorialist used to promote photography as an art rather than science. Their handcrafted prints were in visual opposition to the sharp b/w contrast of the commercial print

Artists associated:

Alfred Stieglitz

Clarence H White- represents female clothes, landscape

Frank Eugene- represents women sexualised, male gaze, naked.

Key works:

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

scratching the negatives- create fake brush strokes

Vaseline on the lenses – blurry, dream like

chemical process- in the dark room place tint over negative… manipulate tonality.

Realism/ straight photography

Straight Photography…were photographers who believed in the intrinsic qualities of the photographic medium and its ability to provide accurate and descriptive records of the visual world. These photographers strove to make pictures that were ‘photographic’ rather than ‘painterly’, they did not want to treat photography as a kind of monochrome painting. They abhorred handwork and soft focus and championed crisp focus with a wide depth-of-field.
Realism… (closely associated with ‘straight photography’) photography grew up with claims of having a special relationship to reality, and its premise, that the camera’s ability to record objectively the actual world as it appears in front of the lens was unquestioned. This supposed veracity of the photographic image has been challenged by critics as the photographer’s subjectivity (how he or she sees the world and chooses to photograph it) and the implosion of digital technology challenges this notion opening up many new possibilities for both interpretation and manipulation. A belief in the trustworthiness of the photograph is also fostered by the news media who rely on photographs to show the truth of what took place.

Time period:

1915- modern day

Key characteristics/ conventions :

Capturing things as they are

creating an abstract art from through shape.

Observations.

detailed sharply focused photos without manipulation.

Influences:

Cubism

Paul strand – cubism

people wanted to go back to the documentary side of photography

Artists associated:

Paul strand

Stieglitz

 Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz pioneered Straight photography in New York while the Hungarian-born László Moholy Nagy exploited pure photography to maximize the graphic structure of the camera-image. These straight or pure approaches to photography continue to define contemporary photographs, while being the foundation for many related movements, such as Documentary, Street photography, Photojournalism, and even later Abstract photography.

walker evans

“To photography truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or aren’t latent in all things”

Edward western

Key works:

Straight photography emphasizes and engages with the camera's own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus and rich in detail. The term generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes, but sharply depict the scene or subject as the camera sees it.

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

Modernism

Time period:

Key characteristics/ conventions :

Artists associated:

Key works:

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

Post Modernism

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.
At the end of 1970s artists suddenly began to
use the codes and conventions of commercial
photography against itself

Postmodernists see all kinds of things as text, including photographs, and insist that
all texts need to be read critically. For postmodernists a text is different from
modernists’ notion of a work. A work is singular, speaking in one voice, that of the
author, which leads the reader to look for one meaning. For postmodernists many
readings (interpretations and understandings) of a text or a work of art are
desirable - no single reading can be conclusive or complete. Postmodernism also explores power and the
way economic and social forces exert that
power by shaping the identities of individuals
and entire cultures. Unlike modernists,
postmodernists place little or no faith in the
unconscious as a source of creative and
personal authenticity. They value art not for
universality and timelessness but for being
imperfect, low-brow, accessible, disposable,
local and temporary. While it questions the
nature and extent of our freedom and
challenges our acquiescence to authority,
Postmodernism has been criticised for its
pessimism: it often critiques but equally often
fails to provide a positive vision or redefinition
of what it attacks.

 2nd world war disrupted modernity project. Anything that was new at beginning of 20th century e.g. tech, knowledge - Modernity used industrial revolution - industrial revolution turned humans against each other e.g. war, bombs, nuclear weapons - sceptics, no belief, no universal truth, - Post modern art, underlined as political motivation.

While reproduction is photography’s main
contribution to postmodernist practice, a
photograph is also readily adaptable; it can
be blown up, cropped, blurred, used in
newspapers, in a book, on a billboard. Other
formal devises used by postmodernists
practitioners are seriality, repetition,
appropriation, simulation or pastiche (which
is opposite to principles of modernity: the
autonomy, self-referentiality and
transcendence of the unique and precious
work of art.)

Time period:

1960s- now

university’s, America and Europe, people begin questioning the failing modernity project.

Key characteristics/ conventions :

Postmodernism makes references to things outside the
art work…e.g. political, cultural, social, historical,
psychological issues

Postmodernism favours the context of a work including
examining subject and the reception of the work by its
audience.

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…eclecticism,
intertextuality, collaboration, pastiche, parody, recycling,
reconfiguration, bricolage

Artists associated:

Cindy Sherman

Her numerous alter egos cast doubts upon a definitive sense of self, and her copies of sourceless material subscribe to postmodernism's claim that originality has ceased. Deconstructing the myths we have about ourselves and our surroundings, Sherman's work is an ideal example of postmodern art.

Richard Prince

Barbara Kruger

Associated with postmodern Feminist art as well as Conceptual art, Kruger combines tactics like appropriation with her characteristic wit and direct commentary in order to communicate with the viewer and encourage the interrogation of contemporary circumstances.

Sherrie Levine

Where is originality? Parody of walker Evans

In 1981, Levine photographed reproductions of Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans, such as this famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of an Alabama sharecropper. The series, entitled After Walker Evans, became a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism. Far from a high-concept cheap shot, Levine’s works from this series tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past, and our own lost illusions.

Laurie Simmons

Martha Rosler

Walter Benjamin

In the 1930s, cultural theorists, Walter
Benjamin wrote two essays on photography
that are frequently cited by current critics.
In these essays Benjamin stressed aspects
of the photographic medium different from
those that modernist photographers, like
Paul Strand and Edward Weston were
advocating. While they heralded the
honesty of the medium and the infinite
detail of the negative and the beautiful
photographic print, Benjamin pointed out,
that unlike the painting, the photograph is
infinitely reproducible.

Key works:

Tableaux-

Tableaux photography is a style of photography in which a pictorial narrative is conveyed through a single image as opposed to a series of images which tell a story such as in photojournalism and documentary photography. This style is sometimes also referred to as ‘staged’ or ‘constructed photography’ and tableaux photographs makes
references to fables, fairy tales, myths and unreal and real events from a variety of sources such as paintings, film, theatre, literature and the media. Other tableaux photographs offer a much more ambiguous and open-ended description of something that are subjective to
interpretation by the viewer. Tableaux photographs are mainly exhibited in fine art galleries and museums where they are considered alongside other works of art.
Tableau photography involves a performance
enacted before the camera and embraces
studio portraiture and other more or less
elaborate peopled scenarios in constructed
settings directed or manipulated by the
photographer to suggest a story. The word
tableau derives from tableaux vivant (plural)
which in French means ‘living picture’ and the
term describes staged groups of artist’s
models often using dramatic costumes,
carefully posed, motionless without speaking
and theatrically lit, recreating paintings ‘on
stage’. Before radio, film and television,
tableaux vivants were popular forms of
entertainment in the Victorian and Edwardian
era.

Methods/ techniques/ processes:

PICTORIALISM

time period : 1880 – 1920

Key characteristics/ conventions : to make photography an accepted art form – was influenced by allegory paintings – was to separate photography as an art form from photography used towards various scientific and documentary purposes.

Artists associated: Louis Dagueree, Alfred Stieglitz,
Henry Peach Robinson, Clarence Hudson White

Key works: Daguerreotype, Calotype

Influences: One of the key figures in establishing both the definition and direction of pictorialism was American Alfred Stieglitz, who began as an amateur but quickly made the promotion of pictorialism his profession and obsession.

Methods/ techniques/ processes: gum printing, putting Vaseline on a lens, using specific chemicals

REALISM / STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Time period: 1915 – up until this day

Key characteristics/ conventions : to photograph things as they were without any manipulation

Artists associated: Paul Strand (inspired by cubism), Walker Evans, Edward Western

Key works: Walker Evans – subway series, The Stone Breakers – Gustave Courbet

Influences: Within the Realism Art movement, artists moved away from the previously Romantic style that had dictated artistic creation in favor of capturing a truthful representation of life. This led scenes, objects, and subjects to be depicted in a meticulous, accurate, and detailed way.

Methods/ techniques/ processes: uses the camera and photograph to gather information

MODERNISM

Time period: 1910 – 1950

Key characteristics/ conventions : clean lines, sharp focus and repetition of form.

Artists associated: Olive Cotton, Alfred Stieglitz

Key works:

• Wall Street, 1915.
• Abstractions, Twin Lakes, Connecticut 1916.
• Chair, Abstract, 1916.
• Blind, 1916.
• House, Benbecula, Hebrides, 1954. .

Methods/ techniques/ processes: cropping and framing a single body part, distorting and accentuating its curves and angles.

POST-MODERNISM

Time period: 1950 – to this day

Key characteristics/ conventions : explores power and the way economic and social forces exert that power by shaping the identities of individuals and entire cultures

Artists associated: Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky

Key works: Postmodernism makes references to things outside the art work…e.g. political, cultural, social, historical,
psychological issues

Methods/ techniques/ processes: Bricolage, surrealism, expressionism, intertextuality, eclecticism

As a teenager, Fred Mortagne shot his friends skateboarding through the historic city centre of his home Lyon. He grew to film and photograph some of skateboarding’s most iconic characters. Bit by bit, Mortagne began to blend still photography into his film. “I became used to visualising angles that would be good for photography, but didn’t necessarily work for video”, employing a 24-90mm lens with a high ISO so he can get a better grain within his images he has become known for picturing from angles no one else sees. Mortagne got one of his earliest shots of a skateboarder coursing through a hotels carpark while leaning off a balcony of a hotel room on the 17th floor.

Nearly 25 years since Mortagne started filming skaters he released his first photobook titled “Attraper Au Vol” (Catch in the Air) and features images of skaters on locations all over the world. “With skateboarding, you travel a lot trying to find new spots, we skate around modern buildings which often also happen to be very photogenic”. Mortagne explains that when you film skateboarders it is very close up so you lose the dimension of where the skateboarders fully are, and he wanted to recapture that dimension within his photography.

“Attraper Au Vol”

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Attraper au vol (Catch in the Air) is the culmination of Mortagne’s photographic career, from 2000 to 2015. A feast of lines and angles, his black-and-white compositions blend his subjects into their environments, offering an abstract perspective on architecture, geometry and the human figure. “Well, it’s my first major book. We didn’t even really have to talk about it but it was obvious we would just go dig through my whole photo library. So I dug out a lot of things. Obviously all the famous stuff. And then actually there’s also a lot of new material that I shot that makes up almost half the book too.”

There are three island territories within the British Isles that are known as Crown Dependencies; these are the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey which make up Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man. The Crown Dependencies are not part of the United Kingdom, but are self-governing possessions of the British Crown.

FINANCIAL RELATIONSHIP

Independent research demonstrates that Jersey adds a net £14 billion to the UK economy every year, supporting an estimated 250,000 British jobs. This economic benefit is dependent upon Jersey’s independence in setting political and fiscal policy. Jersey’s banks attract over £80 billion of funding from markets outside the UK sterling zone and provide 1.5% of the funding of the whole UK banking sector. The Island is also a conduit for almost £0.5 trillion of foreign investment into the UK, much of which might may not reach the sterling zone otherwise.

ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP

Jersey necessarily imports an array of goods and services to meet the needs of the population. The vast majority of these imports come to the Island from the United Kingdom. Reciprocally, the UK is also a major export market for many of the goods and services provided by businesses and industries in Jersey, including high-value produce such as Jersey Royals, oysters, and dairy products. The majority of Jersey’s communications links (flight paths, shipping routes and digital traffic) are with the UK. Jersey has strong links with the UK business community and, in particular, the City of London in its capacity as an International Finance Centre. Jersey provides vital liquidity and makes a significant contribution to the UK’s economy.

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

The United Kingdom is Jersey’s closest international partner. Deep social, cultural, economic and constitutional links between us have been built up and maintained over hundreds of years. Jersey’s relationship with the English Crown began with the Norman invasion of England in 1066, after which William the Conqueror sat as both William I of England and Duke of Normandy, the latter of which Jersey was a part. The cultural links between Jersey and the UK have developed significantly since the end of the Second World War. Nearly a third of the resident population in Jersey were born in other parts of Britain meaning there are strong family links between this Island and the UK. The majority of international phone and digital traffic from the island goes to the UK.