The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and modern humans have been around for around a mere 200,000 years. Yet in that time we have fundamentally altered the physical, chemical and biological systems of the planet on which we and all other organisms depend.
In the past 60 years in particular, these human impacts have unfolded at an unprecedented rate and scale. This period is sometimes known as the Great Acceleration. Carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, extinction and widescale natural resource extraction are all signs that we have significantly modified our planet.
Scientists now agree that human activity, rather than any natural progress, is the primary cause of the accelerated global warming. Agriculture, urbanisation, deforestation and pollution have caused extraordinary changes on Earth.
Some people suggest the Anthropocene began at the start of Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, which created the world’s first fossil fuel economy.
Burning the organic carbon in fossil fuels enabled large-scale production and drove the growth of mines, factories and mills. Since then, other countries have followed suit. Demand for coal has increased, along with carbon dioxide emission, to the detriment of the environment.
Others argue that the Anthropocene began far earlier, when humans began farming. Even more people suggest it dawned in 1950, when nuclear weapons cast radioactive elements across the globe. The radioactive debris from nuclear bombs made its way into rocks, trees and the atmosphere – they may represent the golden spike that scientists are searching for. Currently there is no clear consensus.
contact sheets:
Best images – Salt mines:
Here I looked through my contact sheets and decided which images were my favourite and were good to edit.
basic edits – salt mines – colour
On photoshop I used the crop tool to line up my photos to straighten the horizontal line. I also used the spot healing tool to get rid rid of people or anything that was unnecessary to make the photos look natural. Then I lowered the brightness down to -5 and added some temperature and saturation to give it a bit more colour.
basic edits – salt mines – black and white
After the basic edits I decided to make them Black and white because the dark tones make the photos look as if they were taken on another planet because of the rock shapes and especially mountains in the background.
Experiment 1 – salt mines
For my experiment of my 1st photoshoot I used my photos with colour and used photoshop to experiment with my photos. For these photos I used the Gradient tool, which makes it look like a oil spill, An oil spill is the release of a liquid petroleum hydrocarbon into the environment, especially the marine ecosystem, due to human activity, and is a form of pollution,
How I intend on presenting these photos: I would like to mount 3 of my best photos and mount them on an black board
photoshoot 2
Comparing photoshoot 1 and photoshoot 2 they are both set in different locations, photoshoot 1 is a very dry and dull location with little greenery and wildlife whilst photoshoot 2 is full of vibrant colours making the photos look more interesting than the salt mines.
My intention with these photos is to make a collage on photoshop using all the trees and plants to show how nature is beautiful but then I will add some rubbish / plastic and tractors or adding images of objects that link into how humans are ruining the planet (Plastic waste, Farming, burning waste). The man holding the signs on the bottom right corner will be the main focus of this collage as his sighs say “Plastic is out of control, mother nature cannot self-heal” and I believe this is a super important message for people to see.
Experiment 2
My inspiration:
for this edit I selected multiple different photos from each photoshoot and I used the lasso tool on photoshop and cut my favorite part of the photos I have selected to be in the collage and then resize to fit into the frame.
step by steps:
Here I am using the magic lasso tool to cut out the Man, by selecting all the unimportant parts
The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
We are living in a time many people refer to as the Anthropocene. Humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere.
The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. 5 – 8. Anthropology, Biology, Geography, Human Geography.
Artist research -Edward Burtynsky
Ed Burtynsky (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of industrialization and its impacts on nature and the human existence. It is most often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime, a trait established by the grand scale of the work he creates, though they are equally disturbing in the way they reveal the context of rapid industrialization.
Burtynsky is the inaugural winner of the TED Prize for Innovation and Global Thinking in 2005. In 2016 he was the receiver of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts for his collection of works thus far.
Burtynsky is an advocate for environmental conservationism and his work is deeply entwined in his advocacy. His work comments on the scars left by industrial capitalism while establishing an aesthetic for environmental devastation, the sublime-horrors discussed in a number of essays on the topic of his work. He sits on the board of Contact, Toronto’s international festival of photography.
Artist research- Jeremy Carroll
Jeremy Carroll is the artist and photographer of these images featured in an exhibit called Entanglement. Each image depicts a human being caught up in the waste that is commonly found in seawater and along beaches such as discarded fishing nets, plastic bottles, grocery bags and flip flops.
With the way things are going, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation predicts that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050. Even without hearing this shocking prediction can tell things are looking grim with the horrifying and heartbreaking images of innocent turtles and whales found trapped in plastic or with a stomach full of garbage created and disposed of by humans.
While many of feel saddened by the harm inflicted on marine wildlife, many people still take an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to justifying the use of disposable, single-use plastic products.
Keld Helmer-Petersen stayed at the art school, institute of Design, in Chicago. He was both a student and a guest teacher and his future work was influenced immensely by what he learned at school. He developed a graphic black and white aesthetic.
He grew increasingly experimental, engaging in abstract studies of light in urban spaces as well as in the darkroom. He turned silhouettes and fragments of wires and steel constructions into rhythmic, dynamic patterns. Upon his return to Copenhagen, he continued in his graphic style, finding the steel world of Chicago reflected in harbour areas and railways.
Urban landscapes is a complex structure which is a result of the interaction between human and his environment. It also involves a social dimension and an economic dimension, a cultural dimension and an economic dimension. Urban landscapes are formed and shaped mainly under the influence of human activities.
urban design is concerned with the arrangement , appearance and function of suburbs, towns and cities. It is both a process and an outcome of creating localities in which people live, engage with each other, and engage with physical place around them.
MOOD BOARD
ARTIST RESEARCH
Nick Furo:
Nick Rufo is a 25 year old Los Angeles based digital & film photographer. His work often captures the world with a sense of timelessness that is often contrasted by intense isolationism.
His clients are Adidas, Air Jordan, AT&T, Audi, BONDA SKINS, Dockers, Goldenvoice, Gymshark, Haagen – Dazs, Herschel Supply co, Lifetime, The rap fest, Tubi, red bull, warner music, Zero fatigue
Riccardo Magherini:
‘Magherini takes multiple frames of the same location, and layers them to create unique images that distort the subjects within the picture, and create a sense of movement. Much like Hockney and Picasso, the pieces seek to capture the dynamic nature of the world and how it is never static. Even though the image depicts a building made of stone, a frantic energy is ever present.’ – THE PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT
Nick miners:
Night photography
Liam Wong
Born and raised in Scotland – within two years of graduating, Wong moved to Canada – becoming the youngest director at Ubisoft, the video game company behind Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed. In parallel with his blossoming career in video games, Wong was teaching himself photography.
In December 2015 he purchased his first DSLR (a Canon 5D III) and his debut photo series: ‘Tokyo Nights (TO:KY:OO)’ – capturing the beauty of night through moments after midnight – inspired by sci-fi, neon-noir, cyberpunk and Japanese animation – gained over a million views worldwide, accumulating a following online and kickstarting his journey into photography. Wong has since collaborated with many high profile companies, artists, musicians and directors. His work has been recognized by media outlets such as BBC, Forbes, Business Insider, Saatchi and Adobe. Full press list available here. In 2019 ‘TO:KY:OO’ became the largest crowdfunded book in the UK. It is available for purchase at: TO:KY:OO. Includes words by game creator Hideo Kojima and visual futurist Syd Mead.
Wong is now freelance and working on unannounced projects across film, video games and photography. Available for collaborations.
A regular public speaker – Wong has spoken at events around the world and is always open for opportunities to share his expertise. Past public speaking events include the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Game Developers Conference and Canon.
In the earliest days of landscape photography, technical restraints meant that photographers were bound to working with static subjects, due to long exposure times which rendered any movement blurry. This made landscapes and cityscapes prime material for their exposures.
Depicting a man having his shoes shined, the single image took ten minutes to make and just happened to capture the individual, who stood statically, one leg perched on a stool. The shoe shiner working on Paris’ Boulevard du Temple that day had no idea he would make history.
As the technical side of photography developed and cameras became more affordable, almost anyone could become a photographer. Whilst democratizing and diversifying the craft, this also gave form to some form of elitism, as certain artists began to distance themselves from the status quo by creating their own visual movements.
it is hard to trace the exact origin of landscape photography since the very first photograph that we have knowledge of was taken in an urban landscape during 1826 or 1827 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. Then in 1835 the English scientist Henry Fox Talbot came into play with various photography innovations.
Landscape photography was delivering something that only painting was capable of doing until that time – rendering reality in a two-dimensional format.
A lot of landscape images and portraits were taken during the Victorian era of photography, but it was in 1904 when Edward Steichen produced a photograph known as Moonlight: The Pond that landscape photography gained certain recognition in the art world.
Carleton Watkins is a true pioneer of landscape photography. He is an American photographer who is best known for his amazing photographs of the Yosemite Valley. To capture the extraordinary detail of the breath-taking landscape, Watkins famously packed up his mammoth-plate camera, which used 18X22 inch glass plates, tripods, and tents on mules and trekked through the Valley, returning with 30 mammoth-plate negatives that went on to kick off the National Park movement in the US.
Watkins was also hired by the California State Geological Survey as their official photographer where his team made a large number of photographs that held information about California. The images of Yosemite produced by Watkins were among the first images to be seen of the Yosemite Valley in the Eastern US, caused a stir in the US Congress and these amazing images were, as such, fundamental in convincing the congress and ensuring that Yosemite was preserved as a National Park.
By the time it was announced in 1839, Western industrialized society was ready for photography. The camera’s images appeared and remained viable because they filled cultural and sociological needs that were not being met by pictures created by hand. The photograph was the ultimate response to a social and cultural appetite for a more accurate and real-looking representation of reality, a need that had its origins in the Renaissance.
When the idealized representations of the spiritual universe that inspired the medieval mind no longer served the purposes of increasingly secular societies, their places were taken by paintings and graphic works that portrayed actuality with greater verisimilitude. To render buildings, topography, and figures accurately and in correct proportion, and to suggest objects and figures in spatial relationships as seen by the eye rather than the mind, 15th-century painters devised a system of perspective drawing as well as an optical device called the camera obscura that projected distant scenes onto a flat surface (see A Short Technical History, Part I)—both means remained in use until well into the 19th century.
Realistic depiction in the visual arts was stimulated and assisted also by the climate of scientific inquiry that had emerged in the 16th century and was supported by the middle class during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century. Investigations into plant and animal life on the part of anatomists, botanists, and physiologists resulted in a body of knowledge concerning the internal structure as well as superficial appearance of living things, improving artists’ capacity to portray organisms credibly. As physical scientists explored aspects of heat, light, and the solar spectrum, painters became increasingly aware of the visual effects of weather conditions, sunlight and moonlight, atmosphere, and, eventually, the nature of colour itself.
Carleton Watkins
William Henry Jackson is famous for his images from the American West and he was a painter, geological survey photographer and explorer. When Jackson served in the Union Army, he spent most of his free time doing drawings. In 1866, Jackson travelled to the West and along with his brother Edward Jackson, settled down in Omaha and got into the photography business.
Jackson worked for Union Pacific in 1869 where his job was to document sceneries along various railroad routes which were to be used for promotional purpose. Ferdinand Hayden discovered Jackson’s work and asked Jackson to join one of their expeditions to Yellowstone river region.
The next year, Jackson was invited to join the US Government survey of the Yellowstone river and rocky mountains that was led by Ferdinand Hayden. He was also a member of the Hayden Geological survey of 1871 and he along with other members of the expedition documenting the Yellowstone region played an important role in convincing the congress to establish the Yellowstone National Park in March 1872, which was the first national park in the US.
William henry Jackson
Peter henry Emerson was a British writer and photographer who argued about the purpose and meaning of photography. He argued that photography was a form of art and not something that was done for scientific or technical reasons. Inspired by the naturalistic French paintings, Emerson started to photograph country life as naturalistic photography. He got his first album of photographs published in 1856 called the “Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads.”
Sublime
The sublime evades easy definition. Today the word is used for the most ordinary reasons, for a ‘sublime’ tennis shot or a ‘sublime’ evening. In the history of ideas it has a deeper meaning, pointing to the heights of something truly extraordinary, an ideal that artists have long pursued. Taking inspiration from the rediscovery of the work of the classical author the so-called ‘Pseudo-Longinus’ and from the writings of the philosopher Edmund Burke, British artists and writers on art have explored the problem of the sublime for over four hundred years. In the introductory essay Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn trace the relationship between British art and the sublime, discussing ideas and definitions of the sublime used in the Baroque, Romantic, Victorian periods and modern periods. The accompanying piece by Ben Quash considers an intractable problem for Christian art – the notion of a separation between the sublime and the beautiful in God’s creation.
The baroque sublime:
The sublime in art, it has often been suggested, starts with Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757). Before this, so the conventional narrative goes, the sublime was a notion that applied only to rhetoric. However, the sublime in this period was very much concerned with the potential power of style and composition in the visual arts as much as in language, though it had yet to be applied to nature. In recent years the early history of the concept of the sublime has proved a fertile area for research, with attention focusing on the impact of the writings of an ancient Greek writer known as Pseudo-Longinus, which were first translated into English in 1652.The essays and case studies in this section review this earlier sublime, covering the relationships between writing, rhetoric and art in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The romantic sublime:
Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.
Notions of the sublime are closely linked with the English Romanticism – artists and writers who were concerned with humankind’s relationship to, and reverence for the natural world; in particular those works of painting or poetry that celebrate the majesty and overwhelming power of the natural world. Paintings like Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth – with lashing waves and whipping storm clouds, clearly articulate Nature’s majestic and terrifying power. If one witnesses an extreme or terrifying situation and survives, one is then free to experience delight – a ship battling through a violent storm, traversing a precipitous mountain ridge, stumbling through a pitch black forest and finding, at last, a road. The tension between terror and relief is the source of Burke’s sublime feeling – a delight in surviving terror. This is especially the case in art where we become, in a sense, voyeurs of terror; the viewer understands that the terrifying scene they are witnessing is not real and is therefore free to feel a delicious frisson of fear at the idea of being there.
Joseph mallard William turner:
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colourisations, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. English artist and a Royal Academician. He is noted for his body of work that depicted the visual proof of the unfolding Industrial Revolution in England. Above all, Turner is known for his loose brushstrokes, vibrant colours, and his subtle rendering of light on landscapes.
Turner effortlessly enjoyed painting various landscapes styles. His art composition incorporated various drawings from all around the world.
Of all Romantic painters influenced by the aesthetic of the sublime, his works have been widely recognised as the most successful in capturing the effect of boundlessness which Burke and Kant saw as a prerequisite for the sublime in verbal and visual representation – the sublime being something that can be evoked but not achieved. Those works by Turner typically seen as sublime employ a formal language that avoids precise definition, instead using paint to hint at the terrifying and awesome but on a relatively modest scale when compared to the bombastic productions of painters such as Francis Danby and James Ward. Through juxtapositions of dark and light, obtrusive facture and subtle blending effects, combined with energetic centrifugal and vortex configurations and exaggerated distortions of scale, Turner’s works have been seen to both elevate and inspire perception in the beholder.
Portrait of Joseph mallord William turner
The Victorian sublime
After the Romantic era Victorian artists took a step away from the vastness of the sublime and developed a keener interest in the pursuit of beauty. The following essays and case studies consider why the sublime should have fallen out of favour in this period, and explore the work of those Victorian artists who continued to engage with a sublime aesthetic.
The chief philosopher of the Sublime, Burke in 1757, favoured this aesthetic idea over Beauty because, he said, astonishment, obscurity and vastness cause a more powerful physical reaction in us than Beauty’s orderly calm. Constable’s painting is balanced between these two aesthetic ideas.
RURAL LANDSCAPE
The term “rural landscape” describes the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed, and not set aside for preservation in a natural state. All kinds of rural land use are involved: agriculture, pastoralism, forestry, wildlife conservation and tourism. Planning also provides guidance in cases of conflict between rural land use and urban or industrial expansion, by indicating which areas of land are most valuable under rural use.
The cultivated land. It is the space intervened by the work of man, both for cultivation and for forest products, which allocates very little space for the development of infrastructure or public services.
The reduced public transport. The development of transport services in the rural area is low and low frequency. Its route usually joins the main routes with the nearest villages.
The low population density. The rural area has few residential areas, and the houses are very far apart. They are mostly inhabited by employees who work in the field.
The abundant vegetation. A large number of plants, grasslands, and trees are spread throughout the rural territory in a uniform way, naturally or by human intervention.
The division of the land. The rural area has delimited lands that can be smallholdings (small agricultural properties and not very profitable by type of soil ) or large estates (large properties and very profitable for its nutrient-rich soil).
The low percentage of environmental pollution. The rural area has a reduced level of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide emissions, compared to urban areas that have a high concentration of vehicles and transport.
Rural tourism. The country houses and the farms are usually a destination requested by people living in the cities, to enjoy the tranquillity and recreation during the seasons or on weekends.
Rural photos
Examples of rural photography
Rural photography refers to photography in the countryside and covers the rural environment. Rural landscapes consist of agriculture. A rural area is an open swath of land that has few homes or other buildings, and not very many people. A rural areas population density is very low. Many people live in a city, or urban area. Their homes and businesses are located very close to one another.
Deadpan photography goes back all the way to the 1920s. It’s a very distinct style of photography that has somehow made its way into the 21st century, quietly and persistently influencing you in a way you might not even be aware of.
According to sources the origins of the word “Deadpan” can be traced to 1927 when Vanity Fair Magazine compounded the words dead and pan, a slang word for a face, and used it as a noun. In 1928 the New York Times used it as adjective to describe the work of Buster Keaton.
It is less clear when it was first used to describe the style of photography associated with Edward Ruscha, Alec Soth, Thomas Ruff and many others. Charlotte Cotton devotes a complete chapter to Deadpan in The Photograph as Contemporary Art and much that has been written since references that essay.
In summary Deadpan photography is a cool, detached, and unemotional presentation and, when used in a series, usually follows a pre-defined set of compositional and lighting rules.
This style originated in Germany and is descended from Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, a German art movement of the 1920s that influenced the photographer August Sander who systematically documented the people of the Weimar Republic . Much later, in the 1970s, Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their devotion to the principles of New Objectivity, began to influence a new generation of German artists at the Dusseldorf School of Photography (4). These young German photographers included Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer and Thomas Ruff. The Bechers (4 & 5) are best remembered for their studies of the industrial landscape, where they systematically photographed large structures such as water towers, coal bunkers or pit heads to document a soon-to-disappear landscape in a formalistic manner as much akin to industrial archeology as art. The Bechers’ set of “rules” included clean, black and white pictures taken in a flat grey light with straight-on compositions that perfectly lent themselves to their presentation methodology of large prints containing a montage of nine or more similar objects to allow the study of types (typology) in the style of an entomologist.
The deadpan aesthetics is considered a technically perfect photograph which depicts a landscape, still life or a person by a direct centred composition. The photographs usually have a single central theme (a mining tower, face, mound of clay, etc.), the background is usually unimportant (which does not apply for more sociologically oriented concepts), ignored or is neutral and sterile. Other photographs are based on the richness of motifs (immense landscape, crowd of people, clump of trees, etc.), in which it is impossible to identify the main motif. The first paradigm was denoted by Robert Silverio as a negation of composition and the second one as a disintegration of composition.
Above all the other formal attributes, there is a high level of modality, based on which a photography has an impression of being very realistic and believable. Colours are slightly desaturated, dull. Composition gestures are constrained or minimized. Photographs seem depleted, describing a given reality without unambiguous attitude of an author. However, no photograph can be purely descriptive and unemotional, although, the photographer may seek to marginalize their subjective input and focus their attention to their objectiveness. Besides high-level craftsmanship, the visual language of the deadpan aesthetics is mainly built on the absence of a photographer’s emotional input. They deliberately give up their emotional or political view and keep a certain distance from the theme.
However, paying attention to a strongly emotional theme is not totally excluded. Such emotional theme can have an emotional impact on a photographer, but they still keep their distance when taking the photograph and do not involve their emotions in the photograph. In that way, thanks to the neutral attitude of the author and the way of interpretation which is cold and objective, the recipient is provided with a strong emotional content of the photograph. When analysing deadpan photographs, it is important to perceive their content from a wider, more comprehensive point of view. Creation of such photographs results from an approach which is more anthropological and scientific than critical and artistic. Formal characteristics of the deadpan aesthetics can be described as means of expression of scientific and systematic methodology in photography.
Typologies
A photographic typology is a single photograph or more commonly a body of photographic work, that shares a high level of consistency. This consistency is usually found within the subjects, environment, photographic process, and presentation or direction of the subject.
One of the golden rules in typological photography is consistency. Not only do you need to photograph a certain type of subject, you need to create a body of work that clearly points to the differences and similarities between each one.
The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began working together in 1959 and married in 1961, are best known for their “typologies”—grids of black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure.
They began collaborating together in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957. Bernd originally studied painting and then typography, whereas Hilla had trained as a commercial photographer.
They took photos of Industrial structures including water towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks and factories. Their work had a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white. Their photographs never included people.
some of Bernd and Hila Becher’s work
The Becher’s were influenced by the work of earlier German photographers linked to the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s such as August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt and Albert-Renger-Patzsch.
August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander’s first book Face of our Time was published in 1929. Sander has been described as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century”.
Adam sandlers work
Karl Blossfeldt early photographs reveal an interest in the typology of plant forms which was to become a fundamental concern of his later work. He shot his plants in front of natural backgrounds, lit them with weak daylight whenever possible, and used either a vertical or horizontal perspective.
Karl Blossfeldt works
Up close
Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow.
Right from childhood, he has always been fascinated by the life on the streets and the complicated and fascinating motion it involves, and this was the spark that inspired his first long-term personal projects, photographing in Coney Island and then during the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Bruce Gildens work
David Goldblatt was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country’s landscapes.
Following a series of portraits of his compatriots made in the early 1970s, photographer David Goldblatt, for a very short and intense period of time, naturally turned to focusing on peoples’ particulars and individual body languages “as affirmations or embodiments of their selves.” Goldblatt’s affinity was no accident: Working at his father’s men’s outfitting store in the 1950s, his awareness of posture, gesture and proportion technical as it was formed early and would accompany him throughout his life.
David Goldblatt’s work
Sequence / grid
A sequence, sometimes called an image sequence, is created by using editing software such as Photoshop, to combine all photos from a camera burst into a single image. This single image then shows the path of an object or subject.
This technique is often used in action sports photography in order to depict an athlete performing a trick or extreme feat that would be difficult to document or understand with a single frame photo. A sequence is created by shooting with your camera in burst mode to fire off a quick series of back-to-back photos.
Duane Michals (b. 1932, USA) is one of the great photographic innovators of the last century, widely known for his work with series, multiple exposures, and text. Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’s singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once.
Duane michals, Things are queer, 1973
the spirit leaves the body , 1968
Shannon O’Donnell:That’s Not The Way The River Flows (2019) is a photographic series that playfully explores masculinity and femininity through self-portraits. The work comes from stills taken from moving image of the photographer performing scenes in front of the camera. This project aims to show the inner conflicts that the photographer has with identity and the gendered experience. It reveals the pressures, stereotypes and difficulties faced with growing up in a heavily, yet subtly, gendered society and how that has impacted the acceptance and exploration of the self.
Shannon O’Donnell
Tracy Moffatt: The nine images in Something More tell an ambiguous tale of a young woman’s longing for ‘something more’, a quest which brings dashed hopes and the loss of innocence. With its staged theatricality and storyboard framing, the series has been described by critic Ingrid Perez as ‘a collection of scenes from a film that was never made’. While the film may never have been made, we recognise its components from a shared cultural memory of B-grade cinema and pulp fiction, from which Moffatt has drawn this melodrama. The ‘scenes’ can be displayed in any order – in pairs, rows or as a grid – and so their storyline is not fixed, although we piece together the arc from naïve country girl to fallen woman abandoned on the roadside in whatever arrangement they take. Moffatt capitalises on the cinematic device of montage, mixing together continuous narrative, flashbacks, cutaways, close-ups and memory or dream sequences, to structure the series, and relies on our knowledge of these devices to make sense and meaning out of the assemblage.
Tracy Moffatt
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is placing two images together to show contrast or similarities. For inspiration look at some of the page spreads from ED.EM.03 where pairings between portraits of Henry Mullins and Michelle Sank are juxtaposed to show comparison/ similarities/ differences between different social and professional classes in Jersey mid-19th century and early 21 st century.
