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As I have a lot of pictures, contact sheets help to show them in a more condensed form and it helps me to see all the different colours (pictures in black and white or colour) and the kinds of lighting each photo has. It also helps me see the quantity of photos and what they consist of. Most of my photos are portraits or of people, so I would like to get more of different objects.

Image selection

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To help separate and select my photos I have used a star rating at the bottom and have flagged the ones that I think that I would want to use the most. The pictures with the highest rating I will look at more closely and highly consider using them as one of my final images. By the using the flag I have been able to narrow down and pick the photos that I have chosen to edit and might use in one of my final pieces.

Photoshoots

My first photoshoot was over Christmas while I was visiting my family in Ireland, I took pictures at the New years eve party that we had where I would be able to all of my family. I got a lot of photos there which I would like to use as in my final images as they just give a little insight into what my family is like. I also got photos with a lot of different people from my family, most of the photos aren’t ‘professional’ or taken how you would in a studio, they are quick snapshots of the night which show different elements of each of their personalities.

My second photoshoot was of my Dad and brother holding up their flags, my Dad was born in Belfast, Ireland and moved to Jersey in his twenties. My brother has both Irish and English heritage which comes from my mums side as she was born in Birmingham, England, but like me he was born in Jersey. I had my Dad hold up an Irish flag and my brother hold up an Irish flag and Union Jack, I am planning to edit and Jersey flag behind my brother so it can show all three.

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I have also used the copy machine take photos of older ones which I brought into school, these are phots of my Grandparents when they were younger and my parents while they were on different holidays. I also have some old headshots of both my mum and dad which I am planning on editing together. I like using these as they show how different and how much people have changed from when they were younger to how they are now.

Yoshikatsu Fuji

Yoshikatsu Fuji is a photographer born and raised in Hiroshima City and began his photography work in Tokyo. His work consists of historical themes and memory lingering on in contemporary events. His main piece was a photobook, ‘Red String’, which was inspired by his parents divorce. After he moved back to his home city he has a started a long term projects called “Hiroshima Graph.” This photo series attempts to see through the eyes of the third generations of the atomic bomb victims. It sheds light on the disappearing traces of the war so that future generations can see the history and what has happened.

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The ‘Red String’ is a glimpse into Fuji and his parents past and their life while Fuji was growing up. Throughout the book it show the slow separation of his parents from the very beginning to the end. In the text at the back of the book Fuji explains why he used the red string as a way of connecting the different photos through the piece. There’s a Japanese legend  that says predestined lovers are tied together by an invisible piece of red string, from the moment they are born.

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“My family will probably never meet all together again. But I can feel without a doubt that there is still proof inside each of us that we once lived together.”

Carolle Benitah

Carolle Bénitah was a French Moroccan photographer, who worked for ten years as a fashion designer before turning to photography in 2001 she explores memory, family and the passage of time. Often pairing old family snapshots with handmade accents, such as embroidery, beading and ink drawings, Bénitah seeks to reinterpret her own history as daughter, wife, and mother.

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Benitah took old family photos and made them into new ones but with her version of the story and her feelings towards the people and the photos. She used different styles to re-interpret her own history. For example, she used embroidery on many of her pieces as a way to express her thoughts and experiences, or on some, she used gold paint to cover a part of somebody or she would cover everyone and leave the background black and white.

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“Those moments, fixed on paper, represented me, spoke about me and my family told things about my identity, my place in the world, my family history and its secrets, the fears that constructed me, and many other things that contributed to who I am today”

I like how in Carolle Benitahs work its all the same style but with she adds different twists to each piece, like she says she uses many different materials to try and capture/show her feels through the images. I especially like the very bottom photo where there’s 6 girls standing on the beach, I think she has cut out and embroidered over the girls she is either doesn’t talk to and doesn’t like as she hasn’t tried to piece back together the head and body of one of the girls she cut out. The other cut on the left has also had her face scribbled over which shows that she has quite strong emotions towards the people in the photo. Even though the actual photo isn’t very clear you can see the age and can kind of work out the time it was taken showing that as you grow up you don’t always stay connected to the people you with when you were younger. As all the girls are looking up we know that its taken from high angle which allows for all the shadows to be seen but isn’t obstructing or getting in the way of anything else, the shadows also help create quite and eerie effect as their are just two white silhouettes standing in front of them instead of the people who use to be there.

Identity is the qualities, beliefs, personality and looks that make a person. A psychological identity relates to self-image, self-esteem, and individuality. Some aspects of peoples personal identity includes their skin colour, ethnicity, religion, which all play an important part in that person’s life because it’s how they view the world around them and themselves.

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Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun was a Surrealist photographer whose work explored gender identity and the subconscious mind. The artist’s self-portrait from 1928 epitomizes her attitude and style, as she stares defiantly at the camera in an outfit that looks neither conventionally masculine nor feminine. “Under this mask, another mask,” the artist famously said. “I will never be finished removing all these faces.”

Her first recorded self-portraits are dated as early as 1912 when the artist was about 18. In the early 1920s, she would change her name to the gender-neutral Claude Cahun, which would be the third and last time the artist changed her name. Along with step-sister and lover Marcel Moor, she moved to Paris and fell into the milieu of the Surrealist art scene. 

In the late 1930s, Moore and Cahun moved to Jersey, an island off the coast of Normandy, where they, disguised as non-Jews, produced and distributed anti-Nazi propaganda. After being caught, imprisoned, and sentenced to death, they successfully escaped such a fate when Jersey was liberated by allies in 1945.

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Cahun is considered to be a ground-breaking artist who fully embraced her gender fluidity long before the term came into use. Tragically, she never fully recovered from her maltreatment in prison and passed away on December 8, 1954, in Jersey, United Kingdom. Her work left a huge impression on photography and directly influenced contemporary photographers Cindy Sherman, Gillian Wearing and Nan Goldin. 

Gender Identity

Gender identity is your deeply-held inner feelings of whether you’re female or male, both, or neither. Gender identity may be the same as the sex you were assigned at birth (cisgender) or not (transgender). This concept is intimately related to the concept of gender role, which is defined as the outward manifestations of personality that reflect the gender identity.

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A photo sequence means putting a bunch of pictures in the order the viewer will receive those images, it can be for a book, an exhibition walking tour, or just the reading order of a few photographs displayed on a wall.

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Tracy Moffatt

Tracey Moffatt is a contemporary Australian artist known for her photographs and films. With a variety of narrative techniques, including text, collage, and set design, Moffatt explores issues of childhood trauma, Aboriginal people, and popular Australian culture. She approaches all her work with a film director’s eye for setting and narrative, and her photographs play with a dynamic array of printing processes. Moffatt was the first Australian Indigenous artist to represent Australia for the 2017 Venice Biennale, in a solo presentation of two new photographic series Passage and Body Remembers in the Australia Pavilion in the Giardini.

‘Something More; (1989) is a photographic series composed of six colour prints and three black-and-white prints. It is a now-iconic series of photographs that built Moffatt’s first widespread public attention, each of which borrows from film language to construct what is described as “an enigmatic narrative of a young woman looking for more out of life than the circumstances of her violent rural upbringing.” 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.

In Moffatt’s series ‘Up in the Sky‘ (1997), the artist employs the aesthetic conventions of Italian Neo-Realist films to portray scenes of an outback town in which there is some lurking violence. “My work is full of emotion and drama, you can get to that drama by using a narrative, and my narratives are usually very simple, but I twist it,” she has explained. “There is a storyline, but there isn’t a traditional beginning, middle, and end.” The 25 images in Up in the Sky read like stills from a black-and-white movie, set in an Australian outback town desolated by poverty, violence and despair. The narrative of the series is non-linear, but threaded through it are the figures of a young white woman and an Aboriginal baby who represent moments of peace and love amongst the menacing figures of grim nuns withered old men and feral townspeople.

Contact Sheets

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These are some of my contact sheets from the photoshoot, they consist of portraits that are taken from different angles and in different lighting so that I could find which look best for each individual person. I also tried to get as many different faces/emotions as I could so that there were contrasting emotions and it also made it easier to make different sequences.

Editing

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In most of my photos, I really like how they came out a first hand so I have only slightly adjusted the exposure, contrast and some others etc, highlights and shadows.

Final Images

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I have chosen to do two different sequences, the first one is us smiling either towards the camera or while looking away and the second one is the black expressions looking straight at the camera. These are two different and contrasting sequences as there are very different emotions being shown.

A multiple exposure photograph is a type of photo that is created by exposing the same frame of film to light two or more times. Harking back to the days of early film cameras, this allowed the photographer to superimpose one image over another, creating a ghostly image that showed two scenes at once.

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Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko was known for his politically motivated photography, posters, paintings, and sculpture. “The avant-garde of Communist culture is obligated to show how and what needs to be photographed,” he said of the medium. “What to shoot—is something every photo group knows but how to shoot—only a few know.” An early influence came from Kazimir Malevich, whose Suprematist style contributed to Rodchenko’s adoption of an austere aesthetic and use of materials.

Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: “One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same keyhole again and again.”

Contact Sheets

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These are some of the photos from our photo shoot, they are portraits of me and my friends with different emotions, they were taken from different angles and with different lighting to try and find what works for each person.

Editing

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While editing I used both Lightroom and photoshop, in Lightroom I adjusted both the exposure and contrast as some of the photos were overexposure due to the lighting. I moved the pictures to photoshop where I layered images and reduced the opacity so that you could see the different layers which created a ghostly effect. On the right, I have used the same three images but have moved two away from the centre but are still overlapping whereas on the left I have used two different images which give two angles of the model instead of just the one.

Final Images

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These are the final four images that I have chosen because I think that they all have unique differences which make them eye-catching. I like the bottom image because of the pink tint as it stands out against the three black and white images, I also like how you can see the multi-exposure and her face clearly which makes the photo captivating. The top right and left photos are similar as they have two exposures, one of the models smiling/laughing and one of them with serious/blank features. The two contrasting emotions allow the viewer to see two sides of the model all in one photo, the photo on the left I also like how the black expression is bigger but still seems to be in the background of the photos while the laughing on is seen as in front.

Photomontage, a composite photographic image made either by pasting together individual prints or parts of prints, by successively exposing individual images onto a single sheet of paper.

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Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters was a German artist involved in both Dadaism and Constructivism. Schwitters is best known for his Merz and Merzbau works, which incorporated collage, found objects, typography, and sound poetry to construct unique compositions. In these works, the artist used magazine clippings, waste material, and other recycled items in an attempt to express the rapidly changing world.

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Alongside his collages, Schwitters also dramatically altered the interiors of a number of spaces throughout his life. The most famous was the Merzbau, the transformation of six (or possibly more) rooms of the family house in Hanover, Waldhausenstrasse 5. This took place very gradually; work started in about 1923, the first room was finished in 1933, and Schwitters subsequently extended the Merzbau to other areas of the house until he fled to Norway in early 1937. Photos of the Merzbau were reproduced in the journal of the Paris-based group abstraction-création in 1933-34, and were exhibited in MoMA in New York in late 1936.

One entire wall of the Merzbarn was removed to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle for safe keeping. The shell of the barn remains in Elterwater, near Ambleside. In 2011 the barn, but not the artwork inside it, was reconstructed in the front courtyard of the Royal Academy in London as part of its exhibition Modern British Sculpture.

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“I could see no reason why used tram tickets, bits of driftwood, buttons and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings,” he observed. “It is possible to cry out using bits of old rubbish, and that’s what I did, glueing and nailing them together.”

Final Images

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I have put together three photo montages, using the photos from out portraits photoshoot. The image on the right I have split two portraits with neutral expressions down the middle and I photoshop I have placed them together, I have tried to line the faces up evenly, while still showing all the features of the faces. The photo in the middle I have left in colour as I liked how vibrant the colours are and stood out underneath the two black and white eyes. The eyes are from other portraits of different people which I have tried matching up with the different elements of the background photo. And lastly the photo on the left includes two portraits, one is underneath another which has been split so that it looks like they are slowly coming apart revealing a different face.

I like all of these montages, as they bring different aspects and different ways of montaging photos together. I especially like the image on the right as I think the two halves of the faces compliment each other as they are two different skin tones as well as having darker/lighter clothing. the image on the left I think i should have kept more of the face from the photo on top to make it seem more like it was slowly coming apart and less like there has been a chunk taken out of it.

A diamond cameo is when 4 portraits of the same person are placed onto paper in a diamond shape, each photo having the model looking in a different direction

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In 1864 was when Diamond cameos started getting used, four small oval portraits were placed on a visit card in the shape of a diamond, each portrait being of the same person photographed in a different position. A special camera made by Dallmeyer was used in which the one glass negative was moved to a new position in the back of camera after each portrait had been taken, and when the paper print had been pasted on the card a special press was used to punch the four portraits up into a convex cameo shape. But if there had been a failure of just one of the four portraits through movement, poor expression or incorrect exposure meant that the plate had to be rejected and another four portraits made on a new plate.

In 1865 Frazer Crawford returned from Melbourne with ‘all the latest improvements and novelties in photography’ which included a camera to make Diamond Cameo photographs which, he said, was a new style that was ‘becoming so fashionable.’

Townsend Duryea

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Townsend Duryea and his brother were American-born photographers who provided South Australians with invaluable images of life in the early Colony. 

Townsend Duryea began making Diamond Cameos about May 1865, saying that as he was ‘supplied monthly with all the most recent improvements by the most eminent photographers of England and America’, he felt it was his duty ‘to the public of South Australia to introduce any improvement or novelty worthy of note with as little delay as pressure of business will admit of.’ The novelty of the Diamond Cameo must have worn off by the end of the year as he offered his camera for sale in December, ‘complete with press and dies.’

William Hall

William Hall was a Scottish photographer that moved to England in his twenties, he did this to create a partnership with Stephen Grey ion Brighton who was a portrait painter and photographer. By July 1854, the firm of Grey and Hall had established a ‘Photographic Institution’ at 13 St James’ Street, Brighton. In an advertisement dated 13th July 1854, Grey & Hall announced the opening of their “General Photographic Institution”, where they made photographic portraits “by all the most recent  and improved processes, by License of the Patentees”. In 1862 Hall brought a business premises at 21 North Street, Brighton. The building had previously been used as a lace and linen warehouse, but Hall successfully converted it into a photographic portrait studio. By the early 1860s, William Hall was mainly producing small carte-de-visite portraits at his photographic studio.

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Between 1870 and 1873, William Hall was operating a photographic booth on the West Pier as well as a well-equipped photographic studio at 21 North Street, Brighton. The carte-de-visite portraits produced at Hall’s West Pier booth are distinct from the formal portraits taken at Hall’s main photographic studio in North Street. Whereas the portraits taken in Hall’s North Street premises contain the usual studio props – furniture, drapes, books, painted backcloth, etc., his West Pier portraits are more stark with plain backgrounds with only a collection of fake rocks and boulders to suggest a seaside setting. William Hall closed his West Pier studio after a couple of years.

Final Images

Here I have tried to make a diamond cameo out of some of the portraits I have taken. I edit this in photoshop by creating the ovals and putting the different angled portraits in them. I also tried to pick a neutral colour for the background as I wanted the photos to be the main focus. I like how in all the photos they are very similar as they were taken in the same lighting and the camera wasn’t moved, but the shadows move around the face due to the different positions of the face.

I tried to match the colour of the background to the with the other popular cameos so that they look similar but so that you can see the difference between the modern portrait and one taken in the early 1900s.

In this diamond cameo I have used an old cameo which I have chosen off google as my background and have used the framing tool to out line each circle where I want to place my portraits. I like how the black and white photos sit on the darker background, which isn’t fully black and has little specs of white which shows it age and gives an idea of when the background may have been used first. I couldn’t find a portrait which was looking to the left so i chose a similar portrait of her looking in the same direction but at a different angle and with different lighting.

A juxtaposition is an act or instance of placing two elements close together or side by side. This is often done in order to compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences.

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In some pieces where photographers have juxtaposed their photos, they have united them by the quality of light, different viewpoints, subjects, colours and moods to create tension.

Photographers tend to juxtapose their photos when they are trying to highlight or focus on their similarities or differences. They could be trying to show wealth and poverty, class differences, beauty and ugliness or even the different lighting. Photographers might also use this technique for people to see different ways of living in certain places around the world.

Henry Mullins / Michelle Sank

Henry Mullins and Michelle Sank represent 165 years of the practice of photographic portraiture in Jersey. That period has seen the island undergo major social and economic changes. Sank shows how the social divides that were placed during Mullins time can still be seen today. For example in the bottom left photo Sanks image of a farmer in the middle of a field contrasts with Mullins image of a woman in what seems to be upper class getting her portrait taken.

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Between 1850-73 Henry Mullins made over 9000 carte de visite portraits of Jersey’s ruling elite and wealthy upper classes. The collection that exists of his work comes through his studio albums, in which he placed his clients in an ordered grid with reference to mid-nineteenth century social hierarchies. 

“This sense of theatre, ritual and a richness of materiality are things I was very tuned into during my residency and consequently when making the work which crossed class, age and gender.” -Michelle Sank

My Experiments

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I have used two portraits taken by Julia Margaret Cameron and have put them next to two other portraits that are more modern and are in black and white which I have taken. I like how in Cameron’s photos you can see the age through the colours, how clear the portraits are and on the right, you can see the wore out edges.

I have used a portrait of a young woman which was taken in the 1800s by an unknown photographer. I like how in both photos they are both in the middle and looking in the same direction but you can see clearly that they are from two different eras and not just by the quality of the portraits. The more modern hairstyle and clothing contrast with the older style that was worn during the 1800s.

Close up photography refers to a tightly cropped shot that shows a subject (or object) up close and with significantly more detail than the human eye usually perceives. The extreme close up shot is generally used to allow the viewer to enter the character’s personal space, revealing traits and emotions that might otherwise go unnoticed. The frame is so tight that using an extreme close up shot gives the viewer no choice but to experience the character’s feelings alongside them.

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Satoshi Fujiwara

Satoshi Fujiwara is a contemporary artist and photographer who was born in Kobe, Japan and is currently based in Berlin, Germany. He has produced and contributed to several art books such as Code Unknown, this book consisted of portraits taken by Fujiwara while he was on a subway in Berlin of his fellow passengers. As he knew he couldn’t publish pictures of people without their consent or knowledge he edited them so that identifying the person was practically impossible. Using shadows and various compositional approaches, as well as digital processing, framing, and trimming, Fujiwara modified the “code” of his secret portraits, thereby also circumventing the right of likeness. Accustomed to the homogeneity of Japanese society, he was struck by the diversity of people and the diffusion of codes he encountered.

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“I took these pictures over a period of several months while riding various subway lines in Berlin from morning to night. The city is home to people from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds. On the train, the air is not only filled with German, English, and other European languages, but also many languages from the Middle East and Asia. To someone like me, who was born and raised in a racially homogenous country like Japan, it seems as if these codes, unleashed from every direction and unmixed, form a diffuse reflection.” -Satoshi Fujiwara 

Contact Sheets

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These are a couple of my contact sheets which show the different types of close-up photos that we took. As you can see we tried different lighting and many different angles to try and get the perfect photos for each person.

Editing

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These are some of my edited photos in lightroom, in most of the photos I have only adjusted a few of the different settings, these include exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows. For the edit of the right, I decrease the shadows so that the final photo was darker, by doing this the shadows around the eyes and nose are more prominent. In the edit on the left, I have decreased highlights instead so the lighting on the left side of the face wasn’t as shiny or bright.

Final Portraits

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I have chosen these photos as my final ones as I feel that they each have different lighting which compliments the model in the photos. I really like the bottom left photo as it is a close-up of her face where you can see all the different features such as her smile lines, I also like that she is looking away from both the camera and the light which means the camera captures the shadowing around the nose and mouth as the light is on the other side facing the camera. Another one that I think shows the model’s feature nicely is the top middle, by the way, the camera angles and how she is looking towards the camera you can see the different heading in the eyes and the different texture of the hair as it frames her face.

A headshot is a tightly cropped photo of the face, from the shoulders up. The subject is camera aware — typically looking right in the lens. Years ago, headshots were reserved for actors and models. In today’s socially connected world, a modern headshot comes in handy for anyone looking to market themselves professionally.

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Bruce Gilden

Bruce Gilden is to be considered substantially a self-taught photographer. He is an iconic street photographer with a unique style, his photographic style is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash.

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Right from childhood, Gilden 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 Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

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His first major project was of people at Coney Island. He has photographed people on the streets of New York, Japans yakuza mobsters, homeless people, prostitutes, and members of bike gangs between 1995 and 2000. According to Gilden, he was fascinated by the duality and double lives of the individuals he photographed. He has also photographed rural Ireland and horseracing there, as well as voodoo rituals in Haiti. Gilden has also produced projects in India, Russia, England, France and America.

Contact Sheets

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I have done a few different photoshoots, which consists of me and my friends so that I can try and find the best way, angle and settings to take the best headshots. I have found that myself and other people prefer to be photographed in black and white as it tends to cover peoples ‘flaws’.

Editing

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In most of my photos, I have only adjusted the exposure, contrast and highlights. In the top photo, I have slightly increased the exposure and decreased the contrast because it was too dark on one half of the face and blended too much in with her hair. In the bottom photo, it was overexposed so I have decreased the highlights and have adjusted the exposure making it darker, without lowering the exposure and highlights the face and background was too bright and made the photo look washed out.

Final Portraits

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These are the six final images that I have chosen, each has good exposure and show the faces clearly. I like how the 5 lighter backgrounds contrast with the darker clothes and the one darker background contrasts with the lighter white in the clothing. I also like that all the photos look good in black and white, I chose to shoot in black and white because it made the models more comfortable and it helps to cover up ‘imperfections’.