Stimulus = Your Personal Identity : Heritage

Controlled Conditions Mon 24th Jan, Tues 25th Jan, Wed 26th Jan 2022 : 15 Hours

Objective = Finalise images, print and and display…

For the 2 x weeks leading up to the Year 12 PHOTOGRAPHY CONTROLLED CONDITIONS  you will need to refer to this resource pack for ideas and inspiration…

“SELF -PORTRAIT and IDENTITY JAC PDF”

(to find it just copy and paste the link below into the top bar of the folder icon on your screen)

M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Resources\Portraiture\TO DO

We have included a mini-unit to help you explore opportunities with self portraiture in photography as this may become essential to your project outcomes. We will spend 1 x lesson looking closely at this and discussing ideas for you…

Remember…your stimulus for the month of January is

Your Personal Heritage

TASKS OVER CHRISTMAS PERIOD

Over the festive holidays we would like to you start thinking about your personal heritage. What’s your story? Who are you? What are your origins? etc.

Therefore, what better time to discuss this with your family.

Find out about family stories, grandparents memories, their favourite places, family heirlooms/objects and documents etc.

TASK 1

Collect or find if your family members have any old passports, identification documents, postcards, letters, stamps, objects, jewellery, toys, photographs, diaries, medals, cultural objects etc.

All these can be collected kept safe and photographed on your return to school as part of YOUR PERSONAL HERITAGE – YOUR IDENTITY.

Aim to collect at least three.

TASK 2

In addition, take some portrait photographs of family members – mum, dads, aunties, uncles, siblings, grandparents, great grandparents. Perhaps during a Christmas gathering.

Think about lighting! Use natural lighting, pull an armchair into the window – think about the Hamptonne workshop using natural light.
Use artificial lighting – whatever is to hand, main lights, table lamps, fire light, candlelight, or even TV light can be effective.

Aim to take +50 images.

These images can be a starting point for you. Responding to YOUR PERSONAL HERITAGE – who you are etc.

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Now watch this and discuss the way in which artists tackle identity…

Blog Posts to make :

1. define “identity” and explain how identity can be influenced by “place”, or belonging, your environment or upbringing /gender identity /cultural identity /social identity /
   geographical identity /political identity /lack of / loss of identity / stereotypes / prejudices etc

2. Add a mindmap and moodboard of ideas and trigger points

Choose a range of photographers that you feel explore identity as a theme and create a CASE STUDY (detailed analysis and interpretation) on Claude Cahun and then compare Cahun to a chosen artist (that will have an influence on your final outcomes re : MOCK EXAM)

Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun: Jersey’s queer, anti-Nazi freedom fighter

Here is a link to blog post where you can find out more about Claude Cahun and also Identity Politics.

Clare Rae from Melbourne, Australia visited Jersey as part of the Archisle international artist-in-residence programme last year. Clare  has been researching the Claude Cahun archive, shooting new photography and film in Jersey and contributing to the educational programme. Clare Rae produces photographs and moving image works that interrogate representations of the female body via an exploration of the physical environment.

Clare gave a artist talk contextualising her practice, covering recent projects that have engaged with notions of architecture and the body, and the role of performative photography in her work. Clare will discuss her research on these areas, specifically her interest in artists such as Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman and Australian performance artist Jill Orr. Clare will also discuss her photographic methodologies and practices, giving an analysis of her image making techniques, and final outcomes.

Homework: Here is the task that she asked participants to respond to in a workshop. This could be a good starting point to for photographic exploration.

Untitled Actions: exploring performative photography

Outcomes for participants:

1. Produce a self-portrait, in any style you like. Consider the history of self-portraiture, and try to create an image that alludes to, (or evades?) your identity.

2. Produce a performative photograph, considering the ideas presented on liveness, performance documentation and Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. ‘Captured’ vs. pre-meditated?

3. Produce a photograph that engages the body with the physical environment. Think of architecture, light, texture, and composition to create your image.

For further context lets consider some of these artists’ influences on Clare’s practice.

Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob was a French photographer, sculptor, and writer. She is best known for her self-portraits in which she assumes a variety of personas, including dandy, weight lifter, aviator, and doll.

In this image, Cahun has shaved her head and is dressed in men’s clothing. She once explained: “Under this mask, another mask; I will never finish removing all these faces.”1 (Claude Cahun, Disavowals, London 2007, p.183)

Cahun was friends with many Surrealist artists and writers; André Breton once called her “one of the most curious spirits of our time.”2 (See Guardian article below by Gavin James Bower, “Claude Cahun: Finding a Lost Great,)

While many male Surrealists depicted women as objects of male desire, Cahun staged images of herself that challenge the idea of the politics of gender. Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today.  She was exploring her identity, not defining it. Her self-portraits often interrogates space, such as domestic interiors  and Jersey landscapes using rock crevasses and granite gate posts.

The Jersey Heritage Trust collection represents the largest repository of the artistic work of Cahun who moved to the Jersey in 1937 with her stepsister and lover Marcel Moore. She was imprisoned and sentenced to death in 1944 for activities in the resistance during the Occupation. However, Cahun survived and she was almost forgotten until the late 1980s, and much of her and Moore’s work was destroyed by the Nazis, who requisitioned their home. CaHun died in 1954 of ill health (some contribute this to her time in German captivity) and Moore killed herself in 1972. They  are both buried together in St Brelade’s churchyard.

A few articles to read:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/14/claude-cahun-finding-great

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160629-claude-cahun-the-trans-artist-years-ahead-of-her-time

Link to Jersey Heritage: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/collection-items/claude-cahun

For further feminist theory and context read the following essay:

Amelia Jones: The “Eternal Return”: Self-Portrait Photography as Technology of Embodiment – pdf Jones_Eternal Return

Last year the National Portrait Gallery in London brings the work of Claude Cahun and Gillian Wearing together for the first time. Slipping between genders and personae in their photographic self-images, Wearing and Cahun become others while inventing themselves. “We were born in different times, we have different concerns, and we come from different backgrounds. She didn’t know me, yet I know her,” Wearing says, paying homage to Cahun and acknowledging her presence. The bigger question the exhibition might ask is less how we construct identities for ourselves than what is this thing called presence?

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 9 March-29 May

Behind a mask, Wearing is being Cahun. Previously she has re-enacted photographs of Andy Warhol in drag, the young Diane Arbus with a camera, Robert Mapplethorpe with a skull-topped cane, hard-bitten New York crime photographer Weegee wreathed in cigar-smoke. Among these doubles, you know Wearing is in the frame somewhere, under the silicon mask and the prosthetics, the wigs and makeup and the lighting. Going through her own family albums, she has become her own mother and her father. It is a surprise she has never got lost in this hall of time-slipping mirrors, among her own self-images and the faces she has adopted. Wearing has got others to play her game, too – substituting their own adult voices with those of a child, putting on disguises while confessing their secrets on video.

Read articles in relation to exhibition here:http://aperture.org/blog/feminism-gillian-wearing-claude-cahun/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/08/gillian-wearing-claude-cahun-mask-national-portrait-galleryCahun has been described as a Cindy Sherman before her time. Wearing’s art undoubtedly owes something to Sherman – just as Sherman herself is indebted to artist Suzy Lake. Looking back at Cahun, Wearing is both tracing artistic influence, and paying homage to it, teasing out threads in a web of relationships crossing generations.

Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. To create her images, she assumes the multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, and stylist. Whether portraying a career girl, a blond bombshell, a fashion victim, a clown, or a society lady of a certain age, for over thirty-five years this relentlessly adventurous artist has created an eloquent and provocative body of work that resonates deeply in our visual culture.

For an overview of Sherman’s incredible oeuvre see Museum Of Modern Art’s dedicated site made at a major survey exhibition of her work in 2012.

This exhibition surveys Sherman’s career, from her early experiments as a student in Buffalo in the mid-1970s to a recent large-scale photographic mural, presented here for the first time in the United States. Included are some of the artist’s groundbreaking works—the complete “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80) and centerfolds (1981), plus the celebrated history portraits (1988–90)—and examples from her most important series, from her fashion work of the early 1980s to the break-through sex pictures of 1992 to her monumental 2008 society portraits.

Sherman works in series, and each of her bodies of work is self-contained and internally coherent; yet there are themes that have recurred throughout her career. The exhibition showcases the artist’s individual series and also presents works grouped thematically around such common threads as cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tales; and gender and class identity.

Further reading and context:
Krauss_Rosalind_E_Bachelors
Johanna Burton (ed) Cindy Sherman, October Files, MIT Press From

A few articles/ reviews
Hal Foster https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n09/hal-foster/at-moma
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/03/cindy-sherman-interview-retrospective-motivationSee how students in the past have responded to Cindy Sherman

Shannon O’Donnell and her book: Shrinking Violet

Here is link to Shannon’s blog showing all her research, analysis, recordings, experimentation and evaluations

Watch her film below about feminism, her mother and her role in the family. This film was the starting point for her photographs above by re-staging herself as a domisticated female

link to her photo book: Shrinking Violet

Chrissy Knight portraits of Women of Yesterday

Another site of influence to Clare Rae is Francesca Woodman.  At the age of thirteen Francesca Woodman took her first self-portrait. From then, up until her untimely death in 1981, aged just 22, she produced an extraordinary body of work. Comprising some 800 photographs, Woodman’s oeuvre is acclaimed for its singularity of style and range of innovative techniques. From the beginning, her body was both the subject and object in her work.

The very first photograph taken by Woodman, Self-portrait at Thirteen, 1972, shows the artist sitting at the end of a sofa in an un-indentified space, wearing an oversized jumper and jeans, arm loosely hanging on the armrest, her face obscured by a curtain of hair and the foreground blurred by sudden movement, one hand holding a cable linked to the camera. In this first image the main characteristics at the core of Woodman’s short career are clearly visible, her focus on the relationship with her body as both the object of the gaze and the acting subject behind the camera.

Woodman tested the boundaries of bodily experience in her work and her work often suggests a sense of self-displacement. Often nude except for individual body parts covered with props, sometimes wearing vintage clothing, the artist is typically sited in empty or sparsely furnished, dilapidated rooms, characterised by rough surfaces, shattered mirrors and old furniture. In some images Woodman quite literally becomes one with her surroundings, with the contours of her form blurred by movement, or blending into the background, wallpaper or floor, revealing the lack of distinction of both – between figure and ground, self and world. In others she uses her physical body literally as a framework in which to create and alter her material identity. For instance, holding a sheet of glass against her flesh, squeezing her body parts against the glass and smashing her face, breasts, hips, buttocks and stomach onto the surface from various angles, Woodman distorts her physical features making them appear grotesque.

Through fragmenting her body by hiding behind furniture, using reflective surfaces such as mirrors to conceal herself, or by simply cropping the image, she dissects the human figure emphasising isolated body parts. In her photographs Woodman reveals the body simultaneously as insistently there, yet  somehow absent. This game of presence and absence argues for a kind of work that values disappearance as its very condition.

Since 1986, Woodman’s work has been exhibited widely and has been the subject of extensive critical study in the United States and Europe. Woodman is often situated alongside her contemporaries of the late 1970s such as Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke, yet her work also foreshadows artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Nan Goldin and Karen Finley in their subsequent dialogues with the self and reinterpretations of the female body.

Here is an article in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman

British Journal of Photography http://www.bjp-online.com/2016/01/on-being-an-angel-francesca-woodman-foam-amsterdam/

For those interested in exploring identities, stereotypes, gender, alter-egos through self-portraiture using varies techniques such slow shutters-speeds, use of dressing up, make-up, props, masks, locations (mine-en-scene) Often these images are questioning ideas around truth, fantasy or fiction an involve artists making images in both interior and exterior environments

3. Organise and carry out your photo-shoots !!! You MUST complete a minimum of 2 PHOTO-SHOOTS in readiness for the mock exam itself

Decide whether or not YOU will become a feature of your work…will you point the camera at yourself? (how important is self-portrait to “identity”?)

4. Show your experiments and outcomes as a response to chosen artists over the next few weeks…and begin to plan how to finalise and display your ideas.

Some suggestions for you to look at…

1. Carole Benitah…memories of childhood, loss and belonging
2. Jessa Fairbrother…mother and daughter relationship
3. Phillip Toledano…loss, death, memory, grief
4. Laia Abril…loss and memory, eating disorders and body image
5. Diana Markosian…cultural, geographical and political identity
6. Rita Puig Serra Da Costa…death, grief, loss and family identity
7. Yoshikatsu fuji…relationship breakdown
8. Nancy Borowick…relationships and support
9. Julian Germain… people as individuals vs community
10. Corrine Day… vitality / pressures of youth

Argentina x Identity

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/luis-cobelo-chas-chas-magic-realism-from-argentina

Lorna Simpson—gender identity

Dara Scully

Skate Culture https://www.huckmag.com/outdoor/skate/inside-londons-skate-scene/

YOU NEED MORE IDEAS…? keep looking below

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/karen-navarro-the-constructed-self

Binary Opposites / disruptive sequences

PERSONAL POSSESSIONS x IDENTITY

CREATIVE IDEAS LINK CLICK HERE

Always explore, describe and explain :

LINKS to high scoring A GRADE exemplar EXAM PROJECTS 

CHARLIE CRAIG YEAR 13

TOM WEBSTER YEAR 13

STANLEY LUCAS YEAR 13

NICK GALLERY YEAR 13

ORLA WORTHINGTON YEAR 13

Micah De Gruchy Year 12 Identity Unit

Lawrence Bouchard Year 12 Identity Unit

Oliwia Florence Year 12 Identity Unit

Thinking about your project in stages…

1. Developing and planning ideas
2. Taking the photos
3. Selecting and editing the photos
4. Printing the photos
5. Adjusting the prints
6. Displaying the prints

Presentation and display of your final images…

Juxtaposition / two frame arrangements

The daily grind can be a test of endurance. In Tokyo Compression, Michael Wolf recorded the extreme discomfort of Japanese commuters pressed up against windows dripping with condensation on their journeys to and from work.

In Harlem Trolley Bus, Robert Frank showed the divisions within American society in the mid-20th century. Dryden Goodwin took pictures of exhausted travellers on London night buses and wove a protective cocoon of blood capillaries around them.

Connections with film making…

The idea for this project comes from Luke Fowler‘s series of half-frame photographs recently published in the book ‘Two-Frame Films‘. The project is intended to encourage students to concentrate on the editorial aspect of photography, the selection and juxtaposition of photographic images and how this might affect the ways in which a viewer engages with the work. Fowler is better known for his work in film but has used a half-frame camera as part of his practice. This work explores the relationship between two juxtaposed images. A half frame camera exposes two shots on each 35mm frame. A roll of 36 exposures therefore produces 72 images in pairs. The resulting diptychs are still images but reference the theory of montage, first articulated by Russian film makers in the 1920s, specifically Sergei Eisenstein

Making a Virtual Gallery in Photoshop

Download an empty gallery file…then insert your images and palce them on the walls. Adjust the persepctive, size and shape using CTRL T (free transform) You can also add things like a drop shadow to make the image look more realistic…

CONTROLLED CONDITIONS : Essentials

Always ensure you have enough evidence of…

1. moodboards (use influential images)
2. mindmap of ideas and links
3. case studies (artist references-show your knowledge and understanding)
4. photo-shoot action plans / specifications (what, why, how, who, when , where)
5. photo-shoots + contact sheets (annotated)
6. appropriate image selection and editing techniques
7. presentation of final ideas and personal responses
8. analysis and evaluation of process
9. compare and contrast to a key photographer
10. critique / review / reflection of your outcomes

INDEPENDENT, READING, RESOURCE

MORE : PHOTO-MONTAGE

History of Photo-montage (Europe 1910 onwards)

Pop Art developments (USA and UK 1950s-)

Examples and Inspiration

In her artist statement Montana based artist Sarah Eisenlohr explains that her collages use places of existence to create fictional ones in an effort to demonstrate the ways in which humans have transformed the earth. These scenes often carry undertones of spirituality and faith. “I consider the figures’ desire for shelter, warmth, and something stronger than themselves as symbols of serenity that I seek through spirituality, while the use of sublime in my work points to a relationship with the divine,”

California based artist Eugenia Loli draws inspiration for her surreal art collages from vintage magazine images. Loli intends for her images to serve as a snap shot from a surreal movie from which the viewer can create his or her own narrative.

Task 1

1. Create a blog post that includes a clear understanding of the history and background of photo-montage.
2. Include a moodboard / mindmap
3. Add examples of Early – late 20th Century Photomontage eg Hannah Hoch

Task 2

1. Choose a specific photo-montage artist and write/create a CASE STUDY
2. This must include a detailed analysis of 1 x key image by the artist
3. Add TECHNICAL -VISUAL-CONCEPTUAL-CONTEXTUAL understanding

Task 3

1. Create a set of 3-5 photo-montages using a mixture of your own imagery and “found” imagery….(this could be archival imagery) either using Adobe Photoshop methods or traditional cut-n-paste methods
2. TAKE 100-200 NEW PHOTOS TO CREATE MATERIAL FOR YOUR EXPERIMENTS — based on STEREOTYPES
3. Show your process clearly…remember to add screen shots etc
4. Evaluate your process…describe and explain what you have done, why, how etc

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KEY COMPONENTS AND DISTINGUISHING FEATURES of PHOTO-MONTAGE

SOURCE MATERIAL YOU CAN USE

TECHNIQUES

Ensure you have enough evidence of…

1. Mood-board, definition and introduction (AO1)
2. Mind-map of ideas (AO1)
3. Artist References / Case Study (must include image analysis) (AO1)
4. Photo-shoot Action Plan (AO3)
5. Multiple Photoshoots + contact sheets (AO3)
6. Image Selection, sub selection (AO2)
7. Image Editing/ manipulation / experimentation (AO2)
8. Presentation of final outcomes (AO4) ENSURE THIS IS A SEPARATE BLOG POST
9. Compare and contrast your work to your artist reference(AO1)
10. Evaluation and Critique (AO1+AO4)

Ensure you discuss / describe / explain your images using key words and vocab…