A binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Binary opposition is a key concept in structuralism, a theory of sociology, anthropology, and linguistics that states that all elements of human culture can only be understood in relation to one another and how they function within a larger system or the overall environment.
Claude Levi-Strauss
With his belief in structuralism, Levi-Strauss asserted that the human mind classifies things through binary opposition, the contrasts between two opposite things. It is this binary opposition that leads cultures to think in terms of good and bad. Additionally, Levi-Strauss studied many myths and legends from all around the world and came to the conclusion that we make sense of the worlds using binary opposition. He found that narratives are arranged around the concept of binary opposites.
Some Examples:
Hot and Cold
Wealth and Poverty
Win and Loss
Female and Male
Devotion and Abandonment
Positive and Negative
Colour and Monochrome
Natural and Manmade
Kind and Inconsiderate
Old and New
In many binary opposition examples, people are broadly divided into two groups. This can create an ”us versus them” situation where people see themselves as fundamentally different from another group of people. Often, this kind of thinking gives rise to the concept of ”the other” where some people see other people as abnormal, unnatural, dangerous, or fundamentally different. The concept of the other is often used in literature as a way to explore characters, their motivations, and the broader societal implications of those motivations.
A problem with binary opposites is that they may oftentime perpetuate negative stereotypes. For example, if the binary opposite was man vs. woman, according to gender stereotypes, the man may be portrayed to be ‘strong’ whereas the woman is the ‘damsel in distress’. It is important to see how these stereotyes have changed in media forms over time. Also, in more recent years, binary opposites are not so clear cut – they can be complex and there may be multiple binary opposites between two characters.
My Future Project
For my future project we are going to be focusing on the idea of ‘Simple or Complex’, I would like to approach this concept by going for a walk from my mums house in St Saviour, to my dads house in St Clement. This normally takes about 40 minutes and will allow me to take photographs that will link to memories I have during my childhood, as we used to walk this route together sometimes. In addition to this, I will be taking portraits of my mum, brother and dad to put into my future photobook, as I think creating a book for this project will increase the successfulness of my initial concept and I hope this turns out well.
I would like to also include old family album pictures, ones that include images of my dad in my mums current house, as this will incorporate a nostalgic and very personal aspect to my project, this is important as the concept of going on a walk will be made more interesting by including images of my family in special locations we visited frequently when I was a child. Along will all of the personal elements, I would like to still really focus on creating outcomes that are landscapes images, as they are one of my strengths and I do find them interesting to take. The walk will also include aspects and close up shots of natural life and
I think the the concept of ‘Simple or Complex’ is one which can be approached very deeply and can have a lot of meaning connected to it. It just depends of your mindset and perceptive which means that you can either comprehend photographs as simple or complex, and this study challenges that idea in itself.
AO1 – Develop your ideas through sustained and focused investigations informed by contextual and other sources, demonstrating analytical and critical understanding.
To achieve an A or A*-grade you must demonstrate an Exceptional ability (Level 6) through sustained and focused investigations achieving 16-18 marks out of 18.
Get yourself familiar with the assessment grid here:
To develop your ideas further from initial research using mind-maps and mood-boards based on the themes SIMPLE or COMPLEX you need to be looking at the work of others (artists, photographers, filmmakers, writers, theoreticians, historians etc) and write a Statement of Intent with 2-3 unique ideas that you want to explore further.
ARTISTS REFERENCES
Research and analyse the work of at least 2-3 (or more) photographers/ artists. Explore, discuss, describe and explain key examples of their work relevant to your project and intentions. Follow these steps:
1. Produce a mood board with a selection of images and write an overview of their work, its visual style, meaning and methods. Describe why you have selected to study their work and how it relates to the exam theme SIMPLE or COMPLEX
2. Select at least one key image and analyse in depth using methodology of TECHNICAL>VISUAL>CONTEXTUAL>CONCEPTUAL
3. Incorporate quotes and comments from artist themselves or others (art/ media /film critics, art/ media/ film historians, curators, writers, journalists etc) using a variety of sources such as Youtube, online articles, reviews, text, books etc. Make sure you reference sources and embed links in your blog post.
4. Compare and contrast your chosen artists in terms of similarities and differences in their approaches, techniques and outcomes of their work.
STATEMENT OF INTENT
Write a Statement of Intent that clearly contextualise;
What you want to explore?
Why it matters to you?
How you wish to develop your project?
When and where you intend to begin your study?
Make sure you describe how you interpret the exam theme SIMPLE or COMPLEX, subject-matter, topic or issue you wish to explore, artists references/ inspirations and final outcome – zine, photobook, film, prints etc.
AO3 RECORD IDEAS, OBSERVATIONS AND INSIGHTS RELEVANT TO INTENTIONS, REFLECTING CRITICALLY ON WORK AND PROGRESS
PHOTO-SHOOTS
Each week you are required to make a photographic response (still-images and/or moving image) that relates to the research and work that you explored in that week. Sustained investigations means taking a lot of time and effort to produce the best you can possibly do – reviewing, modifying and refining your idea and taking more pictures to build up a strong body of work with a clear sense of purpose and direction
PLANNING & RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic responses to your exam theme and bring images from new photo-shoots to lessons:
Plan at least 3-5 shoots in response to your ideas and artists references. What, why, who, how, when, where?
Save shoots in folder on Media Drive: and import into Lightroom
Organisation: Create a new Collection from each new shoot inside Collection Set: EXAM
Editing: select 8-12 images from each shoot.
Experimenting: Adjust images in Develop, both as Colour and B&W images appropriate to your intentions
Export images as JPGS (1000 pixels) and save in a folder: BLOG
Create a Blogpost with edited images and an evaluation; explaining what you focused on in each shoot and how you intend to develop your next shoot.
Make references to artists references, previous shoots, experiments etc.
EXPERIMENTING:
Export same set of images from Lightroom as JPEG (4000 pixels)
Experimentation: demonstrate further creativity using Photoshop to make composite/ montage/ typology/ grids/ diptych/triptych, text/ typology etc appropriate to your intentions
Zine design: Begin to explore different layout options using InDesign and make a new zine/book. Set up new document as A5 page sizes.
Photobook design: Make a rough selection of your 40-50 best pictures from all shoots.
Make sure you annotate process and techniques used.
EVALUATION: Upon completion of photoshoot and experimentation, make sure you evaluate and reflect on your next step of development. Comment on the following:
How successful was your photoshoot and experimentation?
What references did you make to artists references? – comment on technical, visual, contextual, conceptual?
How are you going to develop your project from here? – comment on research, planning, recording, experimenting.
What are you going to do next? – what, why, who, how, when, where?
For more help and guidance on image analysis go to Photo Literacy
Photography Agencies and Collectives World Press Photo – the best news photography and photojournalism Magnum Photos – photo agency, picture stories from all over the world. Panos Picture – photo agency Agency VU – photo agency INSTITUTE – photo agency Sputnik Photos – photo collective made of Polish and East European photographers A Fine Beginning – photo collective in Wales Document Scotland – photo collective in Scotland NOOR – a collective uniting a select group of highly accomplished photojournalists and documentary storytellers focusing on contemporary global issues.
Below are inspirations and artists references exploring the exam themes of SIMPLE or COMPLEX.
See page 24-27 in exam booklet which provide creative starting points that may help you form ideas. Use them as a source information or produce your own individual response to the theme. Make sure you read the whole paper as any section, eg. Fine art or Textile design or Three-dimensional design may provide you with inspiration.
SIMPLE or COMPLEX > PEOPLE / PORTRAITS
A simple and direct approach to portrait photography can be very powerful. On page 24 in exam booklet August Sander is mentioned as a very influential photographer who made hundred of portraits of citizens in Cologne (Germany) where he lived and worked all his life. People of the 20th Century presents the fullest expression of Sander’s lifelong work: an endeavor to amass an archive of twentieth-century humanity through a cross-section of German culture. Here is a link to the entire set of images (619 in total) that he classified into 7 groups, The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City and The Last People.
The FarmerThe Painter’s WifeThe PastrycookThe Young FarmersThe BricklayerMother & Daughter
The Married Couple
The Catholic PriestThe IndustrialistThe PainterThe Girl in FairgroundThe Student
Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life, capturing bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families, to create a catalog of the German people, arranged by their profession, gender, and social status. First imagined in the 1920s, he pursued the project for more than fifty years during a politically charged and rapidly changing time, fraught by two world wars and the devastating repercussions of Nazism. Sander never finished the seven-volume, forty-nine portfolio magnum opus, continually refining and shaping it to convey an understanding of the world in which he lived. The photographs, remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character, provide a powerful social mirror of Germany between the wars and form one of the most influential achievements of the twentieth century.
The influence of August Sander’s series of portraits was a major influence (incl. Karl Blossfeldt’s studeis of plants and Albert Renger-Patszh images of German industry) on Bernd and Hilla Becher developing the concept of Typology – see more examples of this under ideas for Place / Landscape. Watch shirt film here where renowned German fashion and portrait photographer Jürgen Teller discusses Sander’s work
Environmental portraits: Sander mainly made formal and environmental portraits, often photographing his subject frontally using a deadpan approach meeting the gaze of the camera in a direct and straight forward manner. For more ideas and suggestions of activities around environmental portraits – see link here to Yr 12 task that you explored last year.
Key features to consider with formal/ environmental portraiture:
Locations: inside and outside
Environment: choose a location or setting that can add context to your portrait > tell a story about the sitter, eg. lifestyle, social class, gender etc.
Framing: full length body / three quarter length / half body < angle > low angle / deadpan / canted angle
Lens: standard lens (50mm) / wide-angle lens (35mm)
Camera setting: Aperture priority f/5.6 – f/8 – camera will adjust shutter speed automatically. < camera shake > minimum 1/60 sec, otherwise increase ISO to allow for faster shutter speeds. < ISO > outside 100-400 ISO / inside 400-1600 ISO < White balance > outside daylight / inside either daylight or tungsten/ tube light – depending on light conditions. If in doubt, choose AUTO.
Lighting: Use natural light where possible and direction of light from the side/ 45 degree angle. < Inside > use window light where possible < Outside > be aware of the position of the sun and harsh shadows, better to shoot in overcast weather as clouds acts as soft box and diffuses the light. < Avoid frontal and back light.>
Pose: formal (posed) / informal (natural, un-posed) /neutral pose and facial expression / no smiles
Gaze: eye contact / engagement with the camera
Props: Consider using objects, such as personal items, tools of the trade etc. that can add further context to the portrait and ‘story’ about the subject. Hands can act as props and add real value to a portrait – be creative!
Here are others suggestions of photographers influenced by August Sander and the deadpan approach to portraiture where the sitter is presented in a simple manner often using minimal gestures, pose, expression, props, location and lighting.
Gillian Wearing as Claude Cahun holding a mask of her face, 2012
Alec Soth: For over two decades, Alec Soth’s images – of disenchanted youth, religious fervour and rural poverty – have come to define our image of contemporary America. In a recent book, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, sees him bring his distinctive eye away from the great outdoors and into the privacy of the bedroom, photographing friends and acquaintances in a project that explores how we as humans connect with one another.
“When I started again I didn’t want to do a big American project, a complicated narrative and all this stuff coming together,” he explains. “I just wanted to be a photographer. I really wanted to strip everything down to just being in a room with another person. I wanted to get away from this feeling of exploitation and all those ethical quandaries you have to work out on the fly.”
See also his other long-term projects, Sleeping By the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, Songbook – all conceived and published as photobooks. On his website you can read and study his work more in detail, including several video podcasts, such as Pictures & Words, Real Time vs Storytime where Soth talks about the art of photography, storytelling and photobook making.
On portraiture and photographic storytelling
Alec Soth tells the story of Charles — a subject he encountered during the making of his celebrated body of work “Sleeping by the Mississippi.”
Richard Avedon: When renowned New York City fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon agreed in late 1978 to take on a commission from the Carter to create a portrait of the American West through its people, he was filled with uncertainty about whether the project would succeed. The following spring he went to the Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas. That weekend he created six evocative portraits that would set the tone and bar for five more years of photographing. In these sittings, he discovered people who conveyed through their faces, clothes, and postures not merely hard living but the full embrace of existence. Read article here
Director Helen Whitney and photographer Richard Avedon share their experiences collaborating on a documentary, “Richard Avedon: Darkness & Light,” about Avedon’s life and career.
Matthew Finn: When artists find inspiration in a muse, it’s usually a wife or a lover – but for photographer Matthew Finn it has always been his mother. Read article here in The Guardian where Finn talks about photographing his mother over a 30 year period.
Over a thirty year period, from 1987 onwards, Matthew Finn collaborated with his mother, Jean, to document her everyday life through a series of portraits taken in her home in Leeds. This is a record of the ordinary, of a daily routine with which we are all familiar. It is also a record of the gradual shift from middle age to old age, and, in Jean’s case, to the onset of mixed dementia and a move from the family home into residential care. It is a poignant body of work, filled with warmth yet conscious of the fragility of life. Quiet domestic interiors act as a stage for life’s everyday details, and though the focus is on the individual the bond between mother and son is a powerful constant, even as the balance of that relationship begins to change.
Jitka Hanzlová: is a Czech artist who lives and works in Essen, Germany produced a series of photographs, entitled ‘Female’, showing a compilation of approximately 50 portraits of women of various ages. The series was created between 1997 and 2000 and shows a multifaceted portrait of contemporary female identity.
In her photographs Jitka Hanzlová percieves everyday and incidental events. For this series she photographed women she met on her various travels to European and American cities. The images often arose spontaneously at the place of the meeting, or by appointment the next day. The women are portrayed as individuals with specific irregularities and facial features, which do not allow for stereotypical classification. The people we meet in these portraits are anonymous. In most cases the title only mentions their first name, in some instances even this has been left out. The identity, the profession and the living conditions of these models remain unknown to us. Even when Hanzlová seemingly reveals some biographical details about the subjects she observes, her images never become voyeuristic. On the contrary, as an artist she has the utmost respect for the women she portrays and cautiously tries to capture their self-assertion on film. Though the emphasis is on the women, they are always related to mostly urban surroundings, its colours and atmospheres. Subject and background interact directly. This synthesis gives each of Hanzlová’s photographs a unique expression.
Roni Horn: A girl’s luminous face rises again and again from the hot springs of Iceland. Watch the slight changes of her expression. Observe closely the face’s opaque surface that will not yield the soul. An enigma without solution. You know nothing about her. All you can see are her ever shifting moods and the water. It’s always the same face and yet never alike. Like the weather. Always changing and beyond meaning. A surface that invites you to project your own desires, thoughts, and dreams; and yet it will always resist the power of your gaze. Like the sky, the clouds, the rain.
‘These photographs were taken in July and August of 1994. For a six-week period I traveled with Margrét throughout Iceland. Using the naturally heated waters that are commonplace there, we went from pool to pool.’
Horn’s first photographic installation, You Are The Weather (1994-1996), a photographic cycle featuring 100 close-up shots of the same woman, Margret,[17] in a variety of Icelandic geothermal pools, deals with the enigma of identity captured through a series of facial expressions dictated by imperceptible weather changes.
Photo-shoot > Suggested activities Produce a series of portraits (full-body/ half-body) of your family members/ or friendship group using deadpan approach (straight-on) meeting the gaze of the camera in a direct manner. Make a variation and produce a second series of headshots/ profile shots from the side and a third set where you get up-close and frame only parts or areas of a face. You can follow instructions and guidelines here from previous headshot task from Yr 12.
STAGED PHOTOGRAPHY > PERFORMING IDENTITIES > ACTING OUT
Claude Cahunplay with gender identities. Born Lucy Schwob, Claude Cahun 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.
I Extend My Arms 1931 or 1932 Claude Cahun 1894-1954
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.
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
In 2017 the National Portrait Gallery in London brough 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?
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.
Cahun 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.
Film Stills (1977-1980)
Cindy Sherman works play with female stereotypes. 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.
Cindy Sherman reveals how dressing up in character began as a kind of performance and evolved into her earliest photographic series such as “Bus Riders” (1976), “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980), and the untitled rear screen projections (1980).
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.
Clare Rae came to Jersey in 2017 and made a series of work, Never Standing on two Feet in response to Claude Cahun
Find more images and information here on Clare Rae’s website.
Exhibited in Entre Nous: Claude Cahun and Clare Rae at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne Australia 22 March – 6 May 2018, and subsequently at CCA Galleries in Jersey, UK, 7–28 September 2018.
Narrative photography, also referred to as Tableaux photography often have an element of performing for the camera. See artists such as, Duane Michaels, Tom Hunter, Anna Gaskell, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Philip- Lorca diCorcia, Sam Taylor Johnson (former Sam Taylor-Wood), Hannah Starkey, Tracy Moffatt, Vibeke Tandberg. Read also page 26 in exam booklet that lists other artists, Sandy Skoglund, Carrie Mae Weems, Deana Lawson and Laurie Simmons who are using photography to create complex narratives using staged events and artificial set ups. The historical context of this type of photography is Pictorialism – make sure you reference this in your research and provide examples from this period of photographic history and experimentation.
Duane Michaels: photo-stories eg. The Bogeyman, The Spirit Leaves the Body. A self-taught photographer, Duane Michals broke away from established traditions of the medium during the 1960s. His messages and poems inscribed on the photographs, and his visual stories created through multiple images, defied the principles of the reigning practitioners of the form. Indeed, Michals considers himself as much a storyteller as a photographer.
Tom Hunter: Headlines, Life and Death in Hackney Since 1997, Tom Hunter has turned his camera on his surrounding neighbourhood of Hackney, showing empathy without being polemic. He is known for a remarkable blend of political commentary, history of art and the technicalities of photography. Working to create photographs that are the result of an exaggerated link between newspaper headlines, paintings from The National Gallery’s permanent collection and Hackney lifestyle, Hunter often seems to ask more questions than he can answer visually.
Read more here about Tom Hunter’s work in The Guardian
Anna Gaskell crafts foreboding photographic tableaux of preadolescent girls that reference children’s games, literature, and psychology. She is interested in isolating dramatic moments from larger plots such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, visible in two series: Wonder (1996–97) and Override (1997). In Gaskell’s style of “narrative photography,” of which Cindy Sherman is a pioneer, the image is carefully planned and staged; the scene presented is “artificial” in that it exists only to be photographed. While this may be similar to the process of filmmaking, there is an important difference. Gaskell’s photographs are not tied together by a linear thread; it is as though their events all take place simultaneously, in an ever-present. Each image’s “before” and “after” are lost, allowing possible interpretations to multiply. In untitled #9of the wonder series, a wet bar of soap has been dragged along a wooden floor. In untitled #17 it appears again, forced into a girl’s mouth, with no explanation of how or why. This suspension of time and causality lends Gaskell’s images a remarkable ambiguity that she uses to evoke a vivid and dreamlike world.
Anna Gaskell
Jeff Wall
Gregory Crewdson
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Sam Taylor-Johnson
Tracy Moffat
Untitled – May 1997 1997 Hannah Starkey born 1971
Vibeke Tandberg
Photobooks to study where a theme or narrative is explored in subtle vairiations
In 2001, Rinko Kawauchi published three astonishing photobooks simultaneously—Utatane, Hanabi, andHanako—establishing herself as one of the most innovative newcomers to contemporary photography. Other notable monographs include Aila (2004), The Eyes, the Ear (2005), and Semear (2007). Now, ten years after her precipitous entry onto the international stage, Aperture has published Illuminance, the first volume of Kawauchi’s work to be published outside of Japan. Kawauchi’s work has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. In Illuminance, Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns.
Sophie Calle: The Address Book In the early nineteen-eighties, the French artist Sophie Calle, who is known for projects that involve immersing herself in the lives of strangers or allowing strangers a view of her own life, found an address book on the street in Paris. Before mailing it back to its owner—a filmmaker called Pierre D.—she photocopied the contents and then proceeded to call each person listed in it to ask questions about him. “I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him, and I will try to produce a portrait of him over an undetermined length of time that will depend on the willingness of his friends to talk about him—and on the turns taken by the events,” she wrote. She turned her encounters into short pieces, which were published almost daily over the course of a month in the newspaper Libération. When Pierre D. discovered what Calle was doing, he threatened to sue her for invasion of privacy, and she agreed not to re-publish the work until after his death. Siglio Press has just brought out the project—consisting of Calle’s writings and accompanying photographs—as a book, giving readers the chance to peer, along with Calle, into the touchingly elusive figure at the center of her investigations.
W. Eugene Smith: photoessay – classical storytelling Although he was only a member of Magnum for four years between 1955 and 58, acclaimed photographer W. Eugene Smith had a lasting impact on both the agency and photojournalism in general. Smith compared his mode of working to that of a playwright; the powerful narrative structures of his photo essays set a new benchmark for the genre. His series, The Country Doctor, shot on assignment for Life Magazine in 1948, documents the everyday life of Dr Ernest Guy Ceriani, a GP tasked with providing 24-hour medical care to over 2,000 people in the small town of Kremmling, in the Rocky Mountains. The story was important at the time for drawing attention to the national shortage of country doctors and the impact of this on remote communities. Today the photoessay is widely regarded as representing a definitive moment in the history of photojournalism.
Anders Petersen: Café Lehmitz, a beer joint at the Reeperbahn, was a meeting point for many who worked in Hamburg’s red-light district: prostitutes, pimps, transvestites, workers, and petty criminals. Anders Petersen was 18 years old when he first visited Hamburg in 1962, chanced upon Café Lehmitz, and established friends that made an impact on his life. In 1968 he returned to Lehmitz, found new regulars , renewed contact and began to take pictures. His photographs, which we first published in book form in 1978, have become classics of their genre. Their candidness and authenticity continue to move the viewer. The solidarity evident in them prevents voyeurism or false pity arising vis-á-vis a milieu generally referred to as asocial. The other world of Café Lehmitz, which no longer exists in this form, becomes visible as a lively community with its own self-image and dignity.
Read article here in The Guardian where Anders Petersen talks bout his famous photobook
Raymond Meeks: Halfstory Halflife Every summer, since as long as anyone in the area can remember, groups of teenage boys and girls have been congregating by a single-lane bridge that spans the tributaries of Bowery and Catskill Creeks in the Catskill Mountain region of New York. Just below it, in the wilderness, a waterfall drops sixty feet above a pond. Those daring enough to take the leap usually take a small run-up before flinging themselves off the precipice. Within the act of the jump and its timeless ritual lingers the last fleeting moments of youth, of endless summer days and reckless abandon. Beyond that, the unknown.
Known for his slow-burning chronicles of rural America, Raymond Meeks turns his attention to Furlong and its intrepid summer dwellers in his most recent book Halfstory Halflife. Sketching out his local area with a sensitive lyricism, Meeks observed its energy and atmosphere over the course of three years; the spectacle of the wait, the anticipation of the climb and the final leap into darkness, where time comes to a standstill as bodies are frozen in motion. These everyday experiences and rituals, simple and carefree in their nature, gain a weight and significance through the lens, as the bodies fall somewhere beyond the threshold of youth and into adulthood.
Read interview here on Lensculture with Raymond Meeks
Theo Gosselin: Sans Limites Deliberately cinematic, Gosselin’s photography reveals friends in the act of escaping from their regular lives into newly enticing and perilous modes of existence, ever in search of the persistent though elusive idea of freedom. The result of the photographer´s most recent road trips across the US, Spain, Scotland and native France, Sans Limites presents a significant evolution of Gosselin´s long term project; photography sur le motif (“of the object(s) or what the eye actually sees”) and his attempt to communicate the actual visual conditions seen at the time of the photographing.
At times, Gosselin´s work approaches something akin to poésie bucolique; his photographs representing modern day pastoral landscapes that resemble 21st century equivalents of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, Manet’s Déjeuner sur L’herbe or Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses. At other times, his images capture moments more resonant of Bacchanalian scenes painted by Titian, Rubens or Levêque.
EXPERIMENTAL FILM > VIDEO ART > PLAY > CHANCE . REPETITION
Andy Warhol: The films Andy Warhol made in the 1960s are among the most significant works in the career of this prolific and mercurial American artist. In the short span of five years, from 1963 through 1968, Warhol produced nearly 650 films, including hundreds of silent Screen Tests, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.” Warhol’s films have been highly regarded for their radical explorations beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema. With works such as Empire (1964), his notorious eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, My Hustler (1965), a social comedy about gay life on Fire Island, and the double-screen The Chelsea Girls (1966), the first avant-garde film to achieve extensive commercial exhibition, Warhol redefined the film-going experience for a wide range of audiences and attracted serious critical attention as well as much publicity. In 1970, the artist withdrew his films from distribution; for the next twenty years, most critics and scholars could only reconstruct these works from reviews and other verbal accounts.
Yoko Ono, Fly (1971)
Marina Abramovich: Art Must be Beautiful
Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form. She created some of the most important early works in this practice, including Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she offered herself as an object of experimentation for the audience, as well as Rhythm 5 (1974), where she lay in the centre of a burning five-point star to the point of losing consciousness. These performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. They pushed the boundaries of self-discovery, both of herself and her audience. They also marked her first engagements with time, stillness, energy, pain, and the resulting heightened consciousness generated by long durational performance.
Martha Rosler: Kitchen Semiotics, 1975
In this performance Rosler takes on the role of an apron-clad housewife and parodies the television cooking demonstrations popularized by Julia Child in the 1960s. Standing in a kitchen, surrounded by refrigerator, table, and stove, she moves through the alphabet from A to Z, assigning a letter to the various tools found in this domestic space. Wielding knives, a nutcracker, and a rolling pin, she warms to her task, her gestures sharply punctuating the rage and frustration of oppressive women’s roles. Rosler has said of this work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”
Bruce Naumann: early video works For more than 50 years Naumann has worked in every conceivable artistic medium, dissolving established genres and inventing new ones in the process. His expanded notion of sculpture admits wax casts and neon signs, bodily contortions and immersive video environments. Coming of age amid the political and social upheavals of the 1960s, Nauman never adhered to rigid distinctions between the arts, but rather has staked his career on “investigating the possibilities of what art may be.
Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera), 1991
Nauman’s 1991 Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) is one of his most powerful works. Rinde is seen in closeup, repeating three phrases: “Feed me/Eat Me/Anthropology”, “Help me/Hurt me/Sociology” and lastly “Feed me/Help me/Eat me/Hurt me”. In a surprising essay in 1999, British painter Bridget Riley talks of the intelligence and humour in Rinde’s face, and that it “ensures that the work is not experienced as either menacing or threatening”, and she describes the polyphony created by Rinde’s classically trained voice, overlayed and competing with itself as it chants the one-man roundelays: “rather like a madrigal resounding in the space of a cathedral.”
Bruce Nauman: “Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear”
Bruce Nauman discusses his video work “Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear” (1994). The artist filmed himself poking his face and then slowed the footage down, forcing viewers to pay attention to the formal qualities of each frame. Nauman reflects on how fellow artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Andy Warhol also reconsidered time and duration. Bruce Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Working in the diverse mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art.
John Baldessari: Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)
Andy Warhol was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. Like his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, Warhol responded to mass-media culture of the 1960s. His silkscreens of cultural and consumer icons—including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Campbell’s Soup Cans, and Brillo Boxes—would make him one of the most famous artists of his generation. “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do,” he once explained. Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA, he graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. Moving to New York to pursue a career in commercial illustration, the young artist worked for magazine such as Vogue and Glamour. Though Warhol was a gay man, he kept much of his private life a secret, occasionally referencing his sexuality through art. This is perhaps most evident in his drawings of male nudes from the 1950s, and later in his film Sleep (1963), which portrays the poet John Giorno nude. In 1964, Warhol rented a studio loft on East 47th street in Midtown Manhattan which was later known as The Factory. The artist used The Factory as a hub for movie stars, models, and artists, who became fodder for his prints and films. The space also functioned as a performance venue for The Velvet Underground. During the 1980s, Warhol collaborated with several younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. The artist died tragically following complications from routine gall bladder surgery at the age of 58, on February 22, 1987 in New York, NY. After his death, the artist’s estate became The Andy Warhol Foundation and in 1994, a museum dedicated to the artist and his oeuvre opened in his native Pittsburgh. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
Andy WarholRobert Rauschenberg
William Klein is an American artist known for his unconventional style of abstract photography depicting city scenes. Although similar in subject matter to other street photographers such as Diane Arbus and Saul Leiter, as well as fashion photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, Klein’s images break from established modes. “I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn’t interest me. There were things you could do with a camera that you couldn’t do with any other medium—grain, contrast, blur, cock-eyed framing, eliminating or exaggerating grey tones and so on,” he reflected. “I thought it would be good to show what’s possible, to say that this is as valid of a way of using the camera as conventional approaches.” Born on April 19, 1928 in New York, NY, Klein studied painting and worked briefly as Fernand Léger’s assistant in Paris, but never received formal training in photography. His fashion work has been featured prominently in Vogue magazine, and has also been the subject of several iconic photo books, including Life is Good and Good for You In New York (1957) and Tokyo (1964). In the 1980s, he turned to film projects and has produced many memorable documentary and feature films, such as Muhammed Ali, The Greatest (1969). Klein currently lives and works in Paris, France. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
“No image-maker has fed on the energy and chance of the urban scene with quite the same appetite as William Klein,” David Campany in his recent book On Photographs.
In Painted Contacts (published by Delpire Éditeur on October 15), Klein upends the notion of archives as fixed and inviolable. He playfully defiles them with bright colors and graphic reframing that refocuses the viewer’s gaze, making the reupholstered contact sheet a new art form in and of itself.
During the late 1980s, Klein was commissioned to do a series of short films on photography. In a post-script to Painted Contacts, he explained his idea was to “have a camera track along a strip of contacts, stopping at the chosen image with the commentary of the photographer explaining why for him that frame was ‘successful’… As the camera moved you’d see the misses, the nothing photos and then the hit.” This approach—no… no… no… not yet… YES!—created a remarkable feeling of anticipation, in the viewer and even in Klein himself. “As the frames rolled by, a certain excitement would develop and if you knew my work you could guess what was coming and a suspense would build up,” he noted. “The red grease pencil marks started to appear and the camera would slow down and stop.”
Niall McDiarmid: Crossing Paths, Town to Town, Via Vauxhall
SIMPLE or COMPLEX > PLACE / LANDSCAPE
PHOTOGRAPHY AND COLOUR > SHAPES > GEOMETRY
Following on from William Kleins’s Painted Contacts and Niall McDiarmid’s street portraits colour as a focus could be explored further in the urban environment.
Sigfried Hansen: Hold the Line Street photography exists as a genre in incredibly many facets and manifestations. It is always about the right time to release the shutter, at a moment that captures and accurately reflects what is fleeting and coincidental. For Siegfried Hansen, street photography is not so much in the nature of reportage and documentation. What he is interested in is graphic elements, shapes, interwoven lines and structures that, when harmoniously related to oneanother, yield an abstract image. Whereas in the photographs of such prominent role models as Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész people play a major role, in the works of this Hamburg photographer faces and people are only suggested and are at best only dimly visible. No more is shown than is needed to create an interesting and balanced combination of people and objects.
Ricardo Cases:el porque de las naranjas At first sight, reality appears chaotic and anarchic. If events have any kind of logic to them, it lies well hidden behind an overlay of banality so thick as to make it invisible. And yet, at certain exceptional moments, life slackens and reveals itself. The automaton allows its innards be glimpsed, and its mechanism becomes momentarily evident as the logic of chaos.
In his new work, El porqué de la naranjas, Spanish photographer Ricardo Cases does not document the surface symptoms of reality, but instead renders the non-visible, the mechanistic. In his immediate surroundings – the fertile region of Levante in Spain – the photographer reveals ephemeral moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. Out on the streets he sets out to make visible the laws that regulate the universe, hunting down the elementary participles in the same vein as a nuclear physicist attempting to identify the Higgs particle. Cases uses the landscape as a laboratory, a place where these mechanisms can manifest themselves freely. The work is not a portrait of Levante itself, but of the spirit of Levante, and thus of the spirit of Spain as a whole.
Historical context: In the 1948 Danish photographer Keld Helmer Petersen published his ground breaking photobook 122 Colour Photographs. A decade later Saul Leiter roamed New York streets and made iconic colour photographs often exploring reflective surfaces. Later in the 1970s William Eggleston in Memphis and Stephen Shore on numerous roadtrips across America made colour photographs that were to influence a whole new generation of photographers, such as Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach and Martin Parr, one of UK’s most celebrated colour photographers exploring British culture.
Ray K Metzker – graphic monochrome street photography Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee and attended the Institute of Design, Chicago–a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus– from 1956 to 1959. He was thus an heir to the avant-garde photography that had developed in Europe in the 1920’s. Early in his career, his work was marked by unusual intensity. Composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarization and other formal means were part and parcel of his vocabulary. He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing, and has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process. Ray Metzker’s unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow, and line transform the ordinary into a realm of pure visual delight
Typology means the study and interpretation of types and became associated with photography through the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs taken over the course of 50 years of industrial structures; water towers, grain elevators, blast furnaces etc can be considered conceptual art. They were interested in the basic forms of these architectural structures and referred to them as ‘Anonyme Skulpturen’ (Anonymous Sculptures.) Each industrial structure was photographed from eight different angles on an overcast day with light grey sky mimicking the detached white background in a photographic studio. Their aim was to capture a record of a landscape they saw changing and disappearing before their eyes so once again, Typologies not only recorded a moment in time, they prompted the viewer to consider the subject’s place in the world.
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
Karl Blosfeldt
Albert-Renger-Patzsch
See also the work by Americans, William Christenberry and Ed Ruscha’s photographic works on types e.g. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1964). Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Or Idris Khan‘s appropriation of Bechers’ images.
Ed Ruscha, 26 Gasoline Stations
Ed Ruscha: Every building on the Sunset Strip
William Christenberry
Idris Khan
Not least of the Bechers’ legacy is their lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists who use the photographic medium today, most notably the students taught by Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy between 1976 and 1996. Among his most renowned students are Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth.
Andreas Gursky
Thomas Struth (b. 1954) Ferdinand-von-Schill-Strasse, Dessau 1991 1991
Thomas Ruff
Candia Hofer
Contemporary approaches to views of horizons between sky and sea, see inspiration from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto whose monochrome images are minimalist and spiritual in their expression.
If you intend to explore sea landscapes you must do contextual research in relation to the art movement of Romanticism – see below. Technically you must make images exploring diverse quality of light, expansive views and weather patterns at different times of the day. Make sure to use a tripod, cable release and apply exposure bracketing and experiment with HDR techniques in post-production. Other techniques such as panoramic images and Hockney ‘joiners’ and Typology studies are also appropriate.
Jersey west coast has unique identity and geography. For many it is place of refuse from work, school and where they go for relaxation, leisure, beach, surfing, walking. If we think about Jersey and an island surrounded by water and with a one of the fastest tidal moments in the world you can look at photographers who has explored the notion of sea or water in interesting ways.
Michael Marten: Sea Change Excellent use of diptych and triptych and exploring low vs high tides to see how it changes a landscape scene
Mark Power: The Shipping Forecats Intangible and mysterious, familiar yet obscure, the shipping forecast is broadcast four times daily on BBC Radio 4. For those at, or about to put to sea, the forecast may mean the difference between life and death. In The Shipping Forecast, Mark Power documents the 31 sea areas covered by the forecast,
Roni Horn: Dictionary of Water Water is a series of photographs of the surface of the Thames. It is ever-changing: now swirling, now scrunched like black tin foil, now in Turneresque lemon and flame colours, now plucked up into dune shapes. Each is annotated with tiny numbers, which refer to footnotes. The footnotes, hundreds in total, worry away in small type under the images – they happen, in other words, under the surface, and concern what the water suggests and conceals. (“Black water is sexy. / What is water? / What do you know about water? Only that it’s everywhere differently. / Disappearance: that’s why suicides are attracted to it. / You can’t talk about water without talking about oneself. / Down at the river I shot my baby.”)
[no title] 1999 Roni Horn born 1955
Robert Adams: Summer Nights, Walking
Kyler Zeleny: Out West
Helge Skodvin: 240 Landscape
Thom and Beth Atkinson: Missing Buildings
Daniel Stier: A Tale of One City
Tom Wood: All Zones off Peak – Using public transport as a method of exploration
Explore some of the ideas here in Constructed Landscape by Photopedagogy, or revisit artists, ideas and photographic tasks from Anthropocene project in Yr 12
‘The Great Wave’, the most dramatic of his seascapes, combines Le Gray’s technical mastery with expressive grandeur […] At the horizon, the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates the join between two separate negatives […]Most photographers found it impossible to achieve proper exposure for both landscape and sky in a single picture. This usually meant sacrificing the sky, which was then over-exposed. Le Gray’s innovation was to print some of the seascapes from two separate negatives – one exposed for the sea, the other for the sky – on a single sheet of paper.
This ongoing body of work consists of staged landscapes made of collaged and montaged colour negatives shot across different locations, merged and transformed through the act of slicing and splicing […] ‘Constructed Landscapes’ references early Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experiments with film […] the work also engages with contemporary discourses on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status.
The Great Wave … sunlight breaks through the clouds above the waves at Sète, France, 1856–59 Illustration: Gustave le Gray
Dafna Talmor: This ongoing body of work consists of staged landscapes made of collaged and montaged colour negatives shot across different locations that include Israel, Venezuela, the UK and USA. Initially taken as mere keepsakes, landscapes are merged and transformed through the act of slicing and splicing. The resulting photographs are a conflation, ‘real’ yet virtual and imaginary. This conflation aims to transform a specific place – initially loaded with personal meaning, memories and connotations – into a space that has been emptied of subjectivity and becomes universal.
In dialogue with the history of photography, Constructed Landscapes references early Pictorialist tendencies of combination printing as well as Modernist experimental techniques such as montage, collage and multiple exposures. While distinctly holding historical references, the work also engages with contemporary discourses on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status and veracity. Through this work, I am interested in creating a space that defies specificity, refers to the transient, and metaphorically blurs space, memory and time.
Tanja Deman is a Croation artists who was Archisle’s International Photographer-in-Residence in Jersey in 2017. Her art is inspired by her interest in the perception of space, physical and emotional connection to a place and her relationship to nature. Her works, incorporating photography, collage, video and public art, are evocative meditations on urban space and landscape. Observing recently built legacy or natural sites her work investigates the sociology of space and reflects dynamics hidden under the surface of both the built and natural environment.
Tanja Deman Fernweh
Fernweh series explores the concept of a modernist city through its extreme relations to the landscape. The images are placed on a blurred line between a past which reminds us of a future and a future which looks like a past. Scenes are referring to the modernist ideas and aspiration of a man conquering the natural wild land and subordinating it to the rational order, and the consequences of those aspirations, which switched into the longing for an escape from urban environments.
Tanja Deman Collected Narratives
Collective Narratives is a series staging a moment of contemplation of nature and built environment. Natural spectacles, framed in theatrical space are contemplated by an audience. These constructed images consolidate: geological formations; a projection of an urban environment; an arena; a deep chasm; a theatre and a crumbling slag-heap through a very active kind of watching. Deman says about her work, ‘while making the series ‘Collective Narratives’ I was interested in different types of spectatorship and architectural settings in which they are taking place. Moreover, the notion of a ritual in which a large group of people gathers and participates in order to experience something together by observing, intrigued me. I see these spaces for cultural and sports spectacles, as zones of pure potential, where the world must be rebuilt or re-imagined every time they are in use. Having liberated them from their utilitarian, commercial restrains, and the environments in which they were created, I allow them to cross the boundary of reality. Together these scenes examine time and the strange modes of spectatorship attached to the inanimate world. A collective witnessing of phenomena that are usually experienced in private atmospheres.
ARCHIVES: In the Photographic Archive at the Society Jersiaise there are significant works by early Jersey landscape and architectural photographers such as Thomas Sutton
Remains of ruined coastal defence tower, Tour du Sud, La Carrière, St Ouen’s Bay, Jersey. Plate from Souvenir de Jersey, published 1854.
Other photographesr in the Photo-Archive who explored Jersey landscapes, topographical views, town, countryside, build-environments etc . Samuel Poulton, Ernest Baudoux, Albert Smith , Edwin Dale, AK Lawson, Paul Martin, Godfray, Frith (put in surnames first for searching online catalogue here.
Baudoux, Ernest. View of Victoria College, St Saviour, with boys standing informally outside
NATURE: In their most recent collection of work, The Meadow, photographers Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley explore the connections and relationships formed between humans and the natural world. Over the course of a decade, the two have taken numerous photographs of an area of land in Carlisle, Massachusetts. Combined with Kelley’s writing, the collaborative project resulted in this uniquely-crafted work. The land they have chosen serves as an ideal subject, composed of paths and abandoned farmland reclaimed by the vibrant foliage.
Embodying a diaristic style, the final product has the feeling of a handcrafted scrapbook recollected from someone’s bookshelf. Tucked as if by accident between the pages are small booklets bearing the photographers’ experiences, and the occasional fold-out triptych which embellishes the arts-and-crafts vibe. A detailed appendix documents the numerous foliage, fungi, and pebbles found during the exploration of the meadow. They even transcribe the logs of the previous property owner, who chronicled day-to-day the teeming life he discovered on a series of wooden doors.
Photography’s rich and experimental history paves the way for many to think about objects – both as subject matter ad as finished products – in provocative ways. For example as a simple idea you can explore objects in your home environment where you live; kitchen utensils, food (fruit/ vegetables), tools etc exploring shapes, colours, textures in your home. Another idea is to empty your cupboards and a make still-life arrangement of its content – recording details, up close, shadow / light, reflections etc.
As part of our ROCK project and last year as part of your HERITAGE project you make a series of different still life images. It may be useful for you to re-visit some of these projects and also produce blog posts on the historical context of still-life paintings developed in Dutch/ Flemish 17th century.
Anna Atkins was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images, British Algae. Photographs of British Algae was published in fascicles beginning in 1843 and is a landmark in the history of photography. Using specimens she collected herself or received from other amateur scientists, Atkins made the plates by placing wet algae directly on light-sensitized paper and exposing the paper to sunlight. Her nineteenth-century cyanotypes used light exposure and a simple chemical process to create impressively detailed blueprints of botanical specimens.
See how contemporary artist, Tom Pope has responded to Anna Atkins plant studies and work with cyanotypes, uncovering her family links with plantation economy in the Caribbean and slave ownership during British colonial history in his ongoing research and performative work, Almost Nothing But Blue Ground
Karl Blossfeldt: Art Forms of Nature
Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His artistic work is based on an irrepressible curiosity, intensive preparatory research and continual engagement with the technical and aesthetic potential of the medium of photography. His visual language is characterized by a close observation that opens up a deeply humane approach to our surroundings. Familiarity and empathy, friendship, community and closeness can be seen and felt in his pictures.
Tillmans’ is also a prolific photobook maker and has made many (40+). One of his most celebrated is Concorde which was published by Walther König, Cologne. The photographs were taken at a number of sites in and around London, including close to the perimeter fence at Heathrow airport. consists of images of the Concorde flying over Tillmann’s home in west London. Study his series here at Tate Modern which has also been exhibited in various museums as an installation.
Michael Wolf, Hongkong books
Lorenzo Venturi: Dalston Anatomy
Lorenzo Vitturi’s vibrant still lifes capture the threatened spirit of Dalston’s Ridley Road Market. Vitturi – who lives locally – feels compelled to capture its distinctive nature before it is gentrified beyond recognition. Vitturi arranges found objects and photographs them against backdrops of discarded market materials, in dynamic compositions. These are combined with street scenes and portraits of local characters to create a unique portrait of a soon to be extinct way of life.
His installation at the Gallery draws on the temporary structures of the market using raw materials, sculptural forms and photographs to explore ideas about creation, consumption and preservation.
Mark Dion:Archeaology Archaeological excavations aren’t limited to ancient Egypt or Stone Age villages. In 1999 during the Tate Thames Dig artist Mark Dion and volunteers collected found objects from the river bed and displayed in the cabinets.
Tate Thames Dig 1999 Mark Dion (b 1961)
See previous work by students Matt Brown who explored Bouley Bay using normal camera, drone photography and underwater photography and Megan exploring La Motte / Green Island collecting objects and experimenting with cyanotypes
My idea is to make a photobook in which I explore the area Bouley Bay, overall I want to capture the activity, views, and close ups of key feature such as rocks, shells, heritage, the hill climb, and the bay. I could also look into the history of the bay and the Jersey Folklore, involving the Black Dog. It is important to me as I grew up in that area, and have many memories of it. And I hope to capture it in the same way in which remember it. I wish to develop my project by exploring the bay and collecting lots of objects to photograph in a studio, and also to take long exposure, aerial, and underwater of the bay, as I have been inspired by many photographers, such as, Martin J Patterson (@ mjplandscapes on Instagram), Jaun Munoz (@ drjuanmdc on Instagram), and David Aguilar (@ davidaguilar_photo).
I started my project with the intention of exploring issues of pollution and plastic specifically, taking inspiration from the photographer Mandy Barker and experimented in my first shoot by taking images with string infront of the lens looking at rules of manipulation. I then found the photobook ‘The Meadow’ by photographers Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley which is what first interested me in photographing and exploring specific areas, as well as gathering objects and photographing them. I also discovered the photographer Chrystel Lebas and her photobook ‘Field Studies: Walking through Landscapes and Archives’ which is where I read about the changing environment. She compared her modern images to the photography of Edward James Salisbury in the early 20th century and walked in his footsteps, going to the same areas he did to explore how the environment had changed over 100 years. This is where I decided that the concept for my project would be looking at how the natural environment had changed over 90 years at the location La Motte. I found archival images from this area and thought i would build my photobook around them, comparing and contrasting them to my own images. I noticed Lebas’ influences from sublime ideologies by Edmund Burkina his book ‘Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’,with her images being vast and other-worldly, which is an aspect I wanted to reflect in my own work. From then on, I did an additional five shoots where i went and took landscape images of La Motte and at the same time gathered natural objects that i found on the island and the beach i.e. rocks, seaweed, flowers. I did multiple shoots where I photographed these objects formally with plain background and edited them to reflect the work of early botanists where they used light sensitive paper to create photograms. I did this as i thought it would give my project and photobook a scientific appearance and reflect that of an investigation into a specific area. Towards my final shoots, I walked around La Motte and tried to find man made objects that I could photograph to perhaps represent how the natural landscape had changed.
In the final version, I changed the cover images to what was originally the first pages in the book. I felt that these images were more powerful in portraying my ideas as well as captivating the essence of my project.
I summed the topic of my project in one word being ‘Waste’ as it reflects the three concepts behind my work:
The ‘Waste’ featured in the images
The action behind humans throwing away the things they do not consider important.
The consequences of disposing items to ‘Waste’ away.
The title is written sideways to give a ‘scientific document’ feel.
I repeated the same pattern of images throughout the book, to give an organised aesthetic. The circle images are placed alongside their close-up comparisons to show the detail in the items depicted. I chose to make many of my images full scale, as they all have dark backgrounds. Black is used in a minimalistic style to emphasize the items, as well as being associated with darkness and negativity to reflect the topic of pollution.
James Casebere pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. For the last thirty years, Casebere has devised increasingly complex models that are subsequently photographed in his studio. Based on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Casebere’s abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative and oftentimes suggestive of prior events, encouraging the viewer to reconstitute a narrative or symbolic reading of his work.
Caspar David FriedrichJames Casebere
While earlier bodies of work focused on American mythologies such as the genre of the western and suburban home, in the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to institutional buildings. In more recent years, his subject matter focused on various institutional spaces and the relationship between social control, social structure and the mythologies that surround particular institutions, as well as the broader implications of dominant systems such as commerce, labor, religion and law.
Thomas Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes he finds in images taken from various media sources. Once he has photographed his re-created environments—always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity—Demand destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND FOUND IMAGERY
Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen and Doug Rickard all use found images from the internet, Google earth and other satellites images as a way to ask questions and raise awareness about our environment, state operated security facilities, social and urban neighbour hoods and prostitution.
Mishka Henner, Levelland Oil Field- Texas
US oil fields photographed by satellites orbiting Earth.
Mishka Henner Dutch Landscapes
Mishka Henner: I’m not the only one, 2015 Single channel video, 4:34 mins
Photographer Trevor Paglen has long made the advanced technology of global surveillance and military weaponry his subject. This year he has been nominated for the prestigious The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize which aims to reward a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year. The Prize showcases new talents and highlights the best of international photography practice. It is one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of photography. Read more here
Trevor Paglen
Doug Rickard is a north American artist / photographer. He uses technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographs on his monitor, to create series of work that have been published in books, exhibited in galleries.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOVEMENT > TIME > SPEED
Eadweard Muybridge was the man who famously proved a horse can fly. Adapting the very latest technology to his ends, he proved his theory by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras. This experiment proved indisputably for the first time what no eye had previously seen – that a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in the action of running. Seeking a means of sharing his groundbreaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.
British-born Muybridge, who emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, is one of the most influential photographers of all time. He pushed the limits of the camera’s possibilities, creating world-famous images of animals and humans in motion. Just as impressive are his vast panoramas of American landscapes, such as the Yosemite valley, and his documentation of the rapidly growing nation, particularly in San Francisco. His dramatic life included extensive travels in North and Central America, a career as a successful lecturer, and the scandal of his trial for the murder of his wife’s lover.
This exhibition brings together the full range of his art for the first time, and explores the ways in which Muybridge created and honed his remarkable images, which continue to resonate with artists today. Highlights include a seventeen foot panorama of San Francisco and recreations of the zoopraxiscope in action. His influence has forever changed our understanding and interpretation of the world, and can be found in many diverse fields, from Marcel Duchamp‘s painting Nude Descending a Staircase and countless works by Francis Bacon, to the blockbuster film The Matrix and Philip Glass’s opera The Photographer.
Animal LocomotionHuman Locomotion
Etienne-Jules Marey (French, 1830–1904); Chronophotography Unlike the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, who depicted movement as a series of discrete moments on separate, sequential negatives, Marey’s analyses of motion are characterized by multiple exposures on a single photographic plate. In this photograph, Charles Fremont, a civil engineer who assisted Marey in his laboratory, used Marey’s method to study blacksmiths at the anvil; the dynamic synthesis of their arced blows traced the pattern of manual effort involved in the task. Fremont’s photographic investigations into the conservation and expenditure of energy during human labor established principles that laid the foundation for modern industrial production.
ARCHIVES
Henry Mullins is one of the most prolific photographers represented in the Societe Jersiase Photo-Archive, producing over 9,000 portraits of islanders from 1852 to 1873 at a time when the population was around 55.000. The record we have of his work comes through his albums, in which he placed his clients in a social hierarchy. The arrangement of Mullins’ portraits of ‘who’s who’ in 19th century Jersey are highly politicised.
Henry Mullins Album showing his arrangements of portraits presented as cartes de visite
Henry Mullins started working at 230 Regent Street in London in the 1840s and moved to Jersey in July 1848, setting up a studio known as the Royal Saloon, at 7 Royal Square. Here he would photograph Jersey political elite (The Bailiff, Lt Governor, Jurats, Deputies etc), mercantile families (Robin, Janvrin, Hemery, Nicolle ect.) military officers and professional classes (advocates, bankers, clergy, doctors etc).
His portrait were printed on a carte de visite as a small albumen print, (the first commercial photographic print produced using egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper) which was a thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker paper card. The size of a carte de visite is 54.0 × 89 mm normally mounted on a card sized 64 × 100 mm. In Mullins case he mounted his carted de visite into an album. Because of the small size and relatively affordable reproducibility cartes de visite were commonly traded among friends and visitors in the 1860s. Albums for the collection and display of cards became a common fixture in Victorian parlors. The immense popularity of these card photographs led to the publication and collection of photographs of prominent persons.
For my exam project i am going to continue with the trend of vehicles in my photos. However i am going to include portraits into the images. I am going to photograph my driving friends in the style of Robert Avedon as well as my motorbike friends to take photos photos in the style of Danny Lyons. I admired Danny Lyons’s photos during his time with hells angles. These are the types on photos i want to recreate but in a modernised form using modern bikes as well as different styles of bike such as sport. I will reference Avedon by taking photos of my driving friends in a portable studio. Additionally i intend to mix the styles of the two photographers by maybe photographing people in front of their cars but only part of the car so i can keep the upper body style of Avedon.
For my exam project, I will focus on looking at the theme of SIMPLE OR COMPLEX by taking images that relate to the sublime – an emotion defined by terror, ecstasy and sheer beauty. In order to capture the sublime within my images, I will turn my camera on the woodlands around my home, with my images aiming to display an innate feeling of danger, while simultaneously showing the beauty of the natural landscape.
I will take a range of images including close up shots, as well as more grandiose landscape images that relate closer to the feeling of the sublime (this linking with the COMPLEX side of the initial project theme). For these images, I will take inspiration from Chrystel Lebas’ work, as her work (specifically her woodland images) give off a sense of danger and beauty in the way I would also like to capture in my images. I think this sense of danger would add to the idea of the sublime and, with nature being forefront in the sublime anyway, settings such as a woodland would be a good way to capture the idea of the sublime.
As for the close up images, I would like to explore the idea of the Golden Ratio that can be seen all throughout nature, linking human concepts of mathematics (Fibonacci) with nature. I would also like to explore still-life/object photography by collecting objects from the natural woodland and photographing them in a home-made studio in the style of Talbot’s fern images or a cyanotype image created by Anna Atkins (linking with the SIMPLE side). I like the look of these images as they appear fairly simple and have a level of detail (as well as a somewhat abstract look) that gives them complexity. I will also take images during the blue hour, in order to further my knowledge and skills of taking night photographs.
The images with a blue background (cyanotypes) are images made by Anna Atkins, while the beige background (calotypes) are Henry Talbot’s.
An artist with a similar approach but different outcome would be Karl Blossfeldt, whose work captures natural form and shape in objects such as flowers and other plants in a formal, yet alluring manner.
After I have taken my images I will explore the use of AI software such as Dall-E or Midjourney to recreate my own images. This will diversify my images (not only within this project, but also with my images from previous projects) and juxtapose the idea of taking images of an ancient setting such as the woodland with the use of modern software to recreate them. I will research the AI software so I can make better use of them later in the project. The use of AI would also link to the complexity of the software itself, linking back to the main theme of the project.
To start collecting ideas for my exam project, I put together a mindmap to put together simple themes, ideas and starting points regarding what I consider to be ‘simple’ or ‘complex’. The mindmap contains some ideas of what I could use as subject matter, how I can edit or manipulate my images, as well as different themes I could consider while starting this project.
Next I created a moodboard of images that relate to the theme of ‘simple or complex’, which I can use to inspire ideas for this project. For this project, I would like to explore a different style of photography, such as object photography, or explore different areas with my camera.
To make my images in this project different to the images from past projects aesthetically I would like to change how I use colour in my images. Colour being the main focus of my previous images, changing the focus of the images in this project would then make them different to my previous work.
The theory of ‘Binary opposition’ within photography and in a larger context reveals how everything in life revolves around a system which we can use to classify everything around us into a variety of 2 different groups. These groups can be seen as two opposites which are strictly against one another, e.g. ‘simple or complex’, ‘hot or cold’, ‘win or lose’, ‘left or right’, ‘love or hate’, etc. The term ‘Binary opposition’ can also be applied within literature and language where there are ‘Synonyms’, a word which means the same as another, against the opposing term of ‘Antonyms’, which is a word that is of opposite meaning. Furthermore, this shows how we are always surrounded by the theme of ‘Binary opposition’ as it is applied within everyday life in objects, cultures, systems, politics, ethics, language, etc.
Further examples of binary opposites.
Therefore, this ‘theory of binaries’ comes from a larger bracket of ‘Structuralism’ which is apart of psycholinguistics of how we create meanings of language. This was furthered through the early work of a famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and then this was further studied by the French anthropologist Levi Strauss and another linguist academic, Roland Barthes, during the 1900s. This theory explored into the insight of how we understand words and not their direct meaning, and how they have opposing terms as well. They concluded that words are a part of symbolism regarding societies ideas, and that their relationships were a fixed idea amongst one another and that one term is always valued more than the other. An example of this can be seen in the understanding of the word ‘coward’, someone who is weak and scared, and its opposing word ‘hero’, used to describe someone who is impressive in their nature and what they may do, which can link towards attitudes which we can refer to as ‘dominant ideologies’, which means the shared ideas/beliefs which justify the interests of different groups. A further exploration into this was in the study of literature as there are many layers from the meanings of words and how they are made and reinforced through the theory of ‘binary opposition’. For example, this can be seen in Simon Armitage’s poetry as he creates this reinforced idea of binary opposition through the ‘sincerity’ opposed to ‘insincerity’ of societies dislikes towards cultures.
Claude Levi StraussRoland Barthes
How I will use binary opposition within my own work –
Simple –
The theme of the binary opposite of ‘Simple’ in photography, can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. This can be linked to the ideas of still life and how you can easily compose objects together with the use of how they may appear or the colours, and how well they work together which can represent how simple life can be portrayed through the use of different objects. There are many artists and photographers who have explored the theme of still life photography extensively in a variety of different ways, such as through abstraction or contrasts, an initial selection of these artists and photographers are:
Thomas Demand
Jan Bruegel
Willem Kalf
Paulette Tavormina
Richard C. Miller
Henry Fox Talbot
Josef Sudek
Andy Warhol
Complex –
The theme of the binary opposite of ‘Complex’ in photography, can also be interpreted in a variety of different ways. This can be seen through the contrasting ideas of the complexity of still life and how they can hold a deeper message within them besides using different objects/colours to create a contrast against one another. In my own work I have chosen to explore how different kitchenware/utensils create unique reflections and shadows and how this can be linked towards the theme of feminism and the links that are still around, although they have mainly died out, of women holding traditional household roles such as being in the kitchen or cleaning. I will represent this theme within my own work through using harsher and bolder shadows through uniformed kitchenware/utensils to represent the past and how women are still linked towards this whereas to show the change of this mindset in my own work, I will use more colourful and bright kitchenware/utensils to represent how women have mostly been able to move past the stereotype. Artists/photographers who I have found that can link towards this theme of shadows/reflections in still life are:
Write a Statement of Intent that clearly contextualises;
What you want to explore?
Why it matters to you?
How you wish to develop your project?
When and where you intend to begin your study?
Make sure you describe your how you interpret the exam theme SIMPLE or COMPLEX, subject-matter, topic or issue you wish to explore, artists references/ inspirations and final outcome – zine, photobook, film, prints etc.
For my Personal Investigation project, I wanted to create something using an artist reference and a personal interest. From a young age, I have developed a strong and true passion for cars. This is a result of my Dad training and working as a mechanic for almost 40 years. As a child, I was consistently taken on track days all around Europe 3-4 times a year as my parents couldn’t leave me at home alone at a young age, but I also loved the experience. Being older has allowed me to take these experiences to the next level, as I can now drive on the tracks myself and experience the real thrill first-hand.
“It’s what non-car people don’t get. They see all cars as just a ton and a half, two tons of wires, glass, metal, and rubber, and that’s all they see. People like you or I know we have an unshakable belief that cars are living entities… You can develop a relationship with a car and that’s what non-car people don’t get… When something has foibles and won’t handle properly, that gives it a particularly human quality because it makes mistakes, and that’s how you can build a relationship with a car that other people won’t get.”
Jeremy Clarkson
When conducting research for individuals to study, I came across a Norwegian photographer called Helge Skodvin. In 2015, he produced a project called 240 Landscapes, in which were 77 colour images depicting the Scandinavian weather, landscape and architecture. Each image also features a carefully positioned Volvo 240, an iconic and robust car which a majority of people owned in Norway when Skodvin was growing up. Even today, many can still be found in barns, garages or even still driving. I am hoping to recreate something similar in Jersey, as the island has a distinct coastline, as well as a flourishing car community.
My car of choice for this project will be a Mazda Mx-5, as it is also an iconic car for its time, and I have easy access to a range of these cars due to being a member of a group. The Mk1 (NA) Mx-5 (1988-1997) revolutionised the way modern sports cars were built. With it’s reinforced scaffolding chassis and iconic pop-up headlights, the small Japanese sports car became an almost instant success with various car cultures around the world. The MK2/2.5 (NB) Mx-5 (1998-2005) was as successful as its predecessor. The car was almost identical, however being much better built, as well as a few body parts being changed. The pop-up headlights were removed and a majority of body panels were redesigned. Despite these changes, the car is fundamentally the same.
This concept of car photography worked extremely well for Skodvin, so why can’t I do the same? I believe that I have strong starting point and something from which I can produce a successful project. With the topic being simple and complex, I feel that this topic relates to both. Landscapes can be either simple or complex to capture, with the same being said for cars. The outcome could be a complex landscape with a simply-placed car, or vice-versa.
