Identity is how you are perceived and what makes you who you are. A certain place you visit frequently can become a huge part of your identity, how you have grown up can play a big part on mental health which also creates your identity, sad looking/happy looking.

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.

Sam Contis– photographer interrogating identity

Sam contis and Claude cahun both have similarities of photographing identity, Claude leans more towards female identity whereas Sam looks more at personal identity.

Sam Contis lives and works in California. she attended Yale University’s School of Art in 2008. Her work has been shown internationally with exhibitions in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, and San Francisco. She has had recent solo shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York and in 2018 her work was included in Being: New Photography at MoMA, New York. She is a recipient of the 2017 Nancy Graves Foundation Artist Grant and the 2016 Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship. Contis’s work is represented in collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Deep Springs, her first book, was published by MACK in 2017 and her most recent book, Day Sleeper, a reimagining of the work of Dorothea Lange, was published by MACK in 2020.

my ideas

in my photos, I will be photographing people standing in a row showing off their clothes (identity) and covering their eyes to show how they represent themselves through their daily lifestyle. I will also be morphing their faces into emotions. I will cover the eyes so identity will only be shown from their outer appearance and not the eyes, hidden identity.

i will also be distorting their looks and editing the photo contrasts to show their inner self and how they want themsleves to be seen by others.

What went well:

For my mock I was inspired by Francesca Woodman and also looked at a few other artists that I think will help me out in my future projects. I managed to do around 3 photoshoots which gave me a good selection of images and I was able to spend my time well by editing them and researching.

What to improve:

I need to plan out my ideas and think carefully about what I’m going to do because this time I just started the project without a plan and it was quite difficult at the beginning. Using more than one artist will help me as I will be able to experiment with more techniques and make my work more interesting. To improve, I’m also going to have to take more pictures in the studio because the lighting is better and I’ll be able to experiment more and I’ll also have to take pictures of more people so I can have more options.

Monochromatic

Definition: Monochromatic colours are all the colours of a single hue. Monochromatic colour schemes are derived from a single base hue and extended using its shades, tones and tints. Tints are achieved by adding white and shades and tones are achieved by adding a darker colour, grey or black.

In my project: monochromatic editing and taking of photographs will play a big role in my project as all of the old family images I will be using are black and white, and as I will be recreating some of Kensuke Koike’s work, my collage of 3 faces I will create will be black and white and presented on my blog alongside his work, to demonstrate how I am taking the majority of the inspiration from his work.

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Photo Montage/ Cut and Paste

Definition: Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image may appear as a seamless physical print.

In my project: The main reason why this will incorporated into my project is because I am very inspired by Kensuke Koike’ work. I like how multiple different images can be used to create a new piece with a new meaning, as it links to themes such as heritage, identity and family. Furthermore, it’s like creating a optical illusion but digitally (in this case in photoshop not physically) as position images to create more aesthetic than the last.

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1st Photoshoot Plan:

1) Collect resources (images and old family photographs) from my dads side of the family, as my grandfather was a coal miner as has a miners statue and other various objects relating to his old profession

2) Make sure that I know the key information on the objects, e.g. when they were purchased and who is in the old family photographs so background information can be added

3) Go to the studio and take photographs of these objects and family photos, using the copy stand for these, focusing mainly on the lighting and the level of the camera in comparison to the images

4) Input images into Lightroom ready for editing and development

Here I have placed a photo of our setup, using the copy stand which includes the camera, lights, plain white surface for a background, a trigger and the tripod that holds the camera up but facing downwards. This helped me to take many legible images of my old family photographs, especially as the handheld trigger makes sure all the wires are out of the way.

2nd Photoshoot Plan:

1) Decide who I would like to photograph in correlation to creating a new face, made from three generations of family members, this photoshoot is based on first hand images I will be taking.

2) Once I have asked the models (which will most likely be my grandad, dad and brother) if they will be apart of my project and get their photos taken, I will take images of them outside in order to use the natural lighting.

3) Ideally with a plain background I will take their portraits, directing them when to smile in pose different ways, and at different angles.

4) Input images into Lightroom, I will identify which are the most useful for my project

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Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg on the 2nd of May 1904 to an English father and a German mother. During the 1920s Brandt was sent to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, to receive treatment for tuberculosis. It is likely that he took up photography as an amateur enthusiast during this time. In 1927 Brandt travelled to Vienna, where he met the writer and social activist Dr Eugenie Schwarzwald, a pioneer of education for girls in Austria, whose home provided a venue for the intellectual elite of the time. Schwartzwald found a position for Brandt in a local portrait studio and introduced him to the American poet Ezra Pound.

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In turn, Pound apparently introduced Brandt to the American surrealist artist Man Ray, who became a major influence on Bill’s work.  Brandt Assisted Man Ray in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of surrealist film and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography. Brandt also learnt several technical processes from Man Ray – the use of extreme grain for graphic effect as well as the use of radical cropping. 

In 1932, after a period of travelling around Europe, Brandt married Eva Boros, who he met in Vienna. In 1934 they moved to London and settled in Belsize Park, North London. Brandt adopted Britain as his home and it became the subject of his greatest photographs. In 1936 the first collection of grants early photographs was published in ‘The English at Home.”

Night photography became one of his specialities, and ‘Woman in Hamburg, St Pauli District’ (1933) may be his earliest experiment in the genre.  Brandt posed his wife Eva as a prostitute in the red-light district of Hamburg. Family and friends were to play many roles in his social documentary series. Brandt was also a collage artist, both in photography and later in life. Later in life, Brandt used beach-combed objects in collages. These were published as ‘Bill Brandt: The Assemblages.’

Joachim Schmid

Berlin-based artist Joachim Schmid, who has been concentrating on the recycling of vernacular photographs since the early 1980s, is a living embodiment of the visual scavenger. Schmid studied at Berlin University of the Arts from 1976 to 1981. He began his career as a freelance critic and the publisher of Fotokritik, an iconoclastic and original contribution to West German photography. In the pages of Fotokritik and in his regular articles and lectures for other outlets, Schmid published many examples of his critique of photography as a form of cultural practice.

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Living near one of the largest flea markets in Berlin, he had already amassed a rich, deep, and varied collection of vernacular photography which formed the raw material for many of his works. With the advent of the digital age, he has shifted his practice to the Internet, where he continues to ponder the future of photography in a globalized culture. In the current context of the frantic and furious proliferation of images, Schmid aligns himself with fellow artists who seek to tame images and keep them in line.

His series Other People’s Photographs (2008–11) takes the form of a set of 96 self-published books, each of which contains a selection of photographs found on the Internet and classified according to specific, nonsensical, odd criteria. Schmid notes that when images lose the thread of their origins, their incontinent production leads us into utter chaos. When this happens, the artist’s mission is to restore order – or at least a possible order, accompanied by a maliciously knowing wink. This provokes confusion in the naive and complicity in connoisseurs capable of savouring a caustic parody of the “official” classificatory methodologies of historians and museums.

Each volume of Other People’s Photographs brings together diverse elements on the basis of some unifying factor – however arbitrary and absurd it may seem – and thus suggests possible ways of categorizing the world. Schmid essentially mocks the supposed coherence of a theory of the catalogue and the archive.

Schmid’s use of extended series reflects his concern with photography as an encompassing, culturally dispersed social and aesthetic feature that runs throughout the public and private spheres of life. The fundamental richness of Schmid’s photographic raw material – along with the wit he often displays – derails any attempt to read his work as pure anthropology or social science. His artistic preoccupations reflect a close observation of photographic history and a fascination with photographic images themselves in all their alternately bizarre and conventionalized aspects.

Possible Layouts

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Final Images

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Experiment 1:

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Experiment 2:

Final Experiments:

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Family identity can be defined as the following: Habits, rituals, and traditions your family takes part in. Family legacy and history passed down via word of mouth or ancestor research. Values your family subscribes to.

My definition: How your family ties/ roots affect aspects of your life such as your culture and upbringing. This means that if this is included in my project there are lots of initial ideas, as I can explore my whole family tree, through generations.

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Here I have created a mood board to demonstrate my first ideas when it comes to my photoshoot to illustrate cultural identity. These photographs above consist of juxtaposition pieces people wearing clothing relating to their culture, objects relating to their culture and flags across a lady’s face. I think these images will influence my photoshoot as I can recreate images such as the middle one of the last row as I can create juxtaposition work on photoshop.

Yoshikatsu Fujii

Yoshikatsu Fujii, born and raised in Hiroshima City. He began photography work in Tokyo in 2006. His photographic works often deal with historical themes and memory lingering on in contemporary events. His works were exhibited at the several festivals.

Futhermore, Fujii is a photo based visual storyteller on long-form projects about, memory, family, contemporary events and history. His main medium is a hand-made limited edition photobook. Fujii’s project “Red String,” was highly inspired by his parents’ divorce, produced a hand-made limited edition photobook. Nominated for several awards, including the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards.

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The main reason why I like his work is because it is relatable to myself, as I can use my own images of family to recreate Fujii’s pieces of work. Furthermore, the message behind is work one that is relevant to many people’s family situations. The fourth image in this gallery is composed of 1/3 colour and 2/3 is a monochromatic image, this would good to recreate in photoshop and apart of my project where I used older materials.

Role in my project: I really like how Fujii’s work is displayed and represented as it tells a deeper story with a deeper meaning behind his work. In addition, I am going to recreate part of ‘Red String’ project in the exam using an old photograph from my grandparents wedding, cropping their heads off in Lightroom, getting it printed in good quality, sticking in onto foam board and threading red string all around the white boarder.

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Photo Montage- Zed Nelson

Born in East Africa, Nelson graduated from Westminster University, London, with a degree in photography and filmmaking. Having gained international recognition and numerous awards as a documentary photographer, Nelson’s recent work adopts an increasingly considered, in-depth approach to reflect on contemporary social issues through long-term personal projects.

Love Me, Nelson’s most recent book, reflects on the cultural and commercial forces that drive a global obsession with youth and beauty. The project spanned five years, involved photography in 18 countries across five continents, and was recently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

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Nelson’s seminal first book, Gun Nation, was a ground-breaking reflection on America’s love affair with the gun. Gun Nation has been exhibited internationally and awarded five major photography prizes (including First Prize in World Press Photo Competition, the Visa d’Or, France, and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, USA).

Nelson’s work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Britain, the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), and is in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Nelson has had solo shows in New York, Stockholm, Copenghagen and London.

Role in my project: I have some old family images that I am going to recreate, I am planning to use the same style as these but with my own family photos. Furthermore, I like how these images are composed of somewhat serous family photos, which match perfectly with what I am. I think the similarities and juxtaposition with his work and mine will make for a substantial artist reference and I like how they feel like they are deadpan family photos.

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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What

I will be photographing my grandads old belongings. He died before I was born, but his life was interesting as he was captured in the war by the Japanese while he was living in the Philippines.

Where

I will be photographing his belongings on a plain background at home

How

I will use sun lighting if I can and work with his belongings to make collages

When

Over the course of this week