For my second shoot I went to the Maritime Museum which hosts an array of exhibits documenting Jersey’s history with the sea.
Like with my first shoot, I increased the saturation whilst editing and also used colour grading. While taking these images I also manually adjusted my shutter speed when taking pictures of the moving exhibits, giving them their blurred effect.
Whilst at the Jersey zoo I took an a lot of images, mostly focusing on plants and flowers being grown around the site, but also some of the animals enclosures. I wanted the focus on the natural shapes and colours found within the plants, and used Adobe Lightroom to edit my images, mostly increasing the saturation to make the images a little more visually pleasing.
To begin, I only made a few small adjustments, increasing the exposure and contrast and eventually got into the more advanced editing settings, increasing the amount of blue in the shadows using the Colour Grading wheels. By increasing the blue I feel that I made the water a bit more pleasant to look at, as in the original image it appears to be quite murky.
By comparing my images with Kawauchi’s I can see how successful I am in emulating the style of one of my artist references. Kawauchi’s image is from her photobook Illuminance, and depicts water droplets on a spider’s web, with plants surrounding it. These plants have red stems, which contrasts the green of the leaves and she uses a shallow depth of field to draw attention to the webs and the droplets. Kawauchi’s images are taken on film cameras and are square, contrasting my image which was taken on a digital camera and cropped to be portrait. My image has more of a focus on the texture of the leaves over colour but does also use a shallow depth of field. The image was taken through glass which leaves some of the reflection in the final image, which I feel adds an extra amount of visual interest.
I decided to plan out a series of photoshoots to carry out while outside of school. These shoots were inspired by my artist references and were taken in a variety of locations, giving me a range of images to work with for my project.
For my first shoot I decided to visit the local zoo, which has an array of interesting plants and flowers, alongside various rooms with steam and glass which I could use to create unique images inspired by my artist references.
I also decided to do another shoot at the Maritime museum as well, which has a variety of exhibits with interesting imagery, including interactive displays, themed around the island’s nautical history.
Colour photography has had a long and detailed history, being explored over many years across the world. Early photographs could only be taken as monochrome images, displaying subjects as tones of silvers, greys or browns.
While monochrome photography was an impressive accomplishment, people began to yearn for colour images which could capture both the detail and the colour of the natural world. Photographers experimenting with various chemical solutions and combinations to see if they could create full colour images. Other photographers took a different approach, collaborating with artists which would hand colour images using oils, watercolours and powdered pigments to manually add in the desired colours. This method was often used for portraits, with many surviving daguerreotypes showing signs of being altered using these techniques.
Unfortunately this was a slow and tedious process, taking even well trained artists a long time to colour images..
The world’s first permanent colour photograph was taken by the photographer Thomas Sutton, who had a studio based in Jersey, from 1848 until it burnt down in 1854. Unfortunately his image could not be printed until 1937 using a completely separate photographic process. These new processes focused on the idea of layering green, red and blue in order to create all of the variations of hue and tone within the image, often using filters or gels.
The Autochrome, developed by the Lumière brothers in 1907, was a key part of colour photography’s history as it proved that colour images could be made, which lead to even more experimentation of the process, and the slow disappearance of hand tinted images. The Autochrome used coloured potato grain starch and glass plates in order to create accurate and detailed colour images.
As the autochrome spread, more and more photographers began developing their own photographic vocabulary and techniques, separate to that used by black and white image makers at the time. Autochromes were used in a variety of ways, from art to science.
While Autochrome’s grew in popularity, other colour methods were also developed, like the Kodachrome a mass produced colour film camera that used a subtractive colour method.
Coloured film cameras were popularised in the 1960s, and it was not an immediate switch for many photographers who believed that colour images would ruin the medium. However many people were able to utilise the medium in a unique and interesting way while still following photographic theory, one photographer being William Eggleston, credited with helping the medium be see as a legitimate way to create art.
Eggleston used colour film to capture colour in a completely unique way compared to the looks of previous colour photography methods, and his style has been influential for other colour photographers across decades, even after the introduction of digital cameras.
William Eggleston is an incredibly well known photographer, most known for his breath-taking colour photography, and even credited with helping photography be seen as a real artistic medium. For this project I want to focus on his Kyoto series, taken in 2001. These images show a variety of subjects, and expertly utilise colour and light, as well as reflections, similar to the other artists I have looked at, with Rinko Kawauchi even crediting him as an inspiration for her own work. When describing his own work, Eggleston states, ‘I wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color. I was affected by it all the time, particularly certain times of the day when the sun made things really starkly stand out.‘
While on a school trip to Berlin, I had the opportunity to visit an exhibition of his work at the C/O Berlin, running from the 28th of January to the 4th of May. The exhibit documents his influence in the photography world, pioneering the use of colour for decades to come. Many of his images focus on the mundane, often exploring life in the American, however he has done an array of shoots worldwide.
The exhibit was well designed, placing Eggleston’s work in chronological order, allowing us to see his progression as a photographer as he transitioned from black and white to colour images. The exhibition also placed a large focus on Eggleston’s images taken in Berlin while the city was still divided, and juxtaposing them against his images of the United States.
This is one of my favourite images from the series, due to Eggleston’s vibrant use of colour and texture. The image features varying patterns, transitioning from the dirty floor tiles to the transparent plastic that helps unify the colours of the array of flowers. It feels simple, as if Eggleston had taken the image without much planning, able to capture the beauty within everyday life, a recurring theme within his entire body of work. ‘Everything must work in concert. Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other,‘ says Eggleston about his work, further explaining the detailed thought process that goes into such simplistically beautiful images.
I want to explore the themes of Simple and Complex through more abstract, lighting focused images, similar to the work of my artist references.
I want to use these images to explore the themes of self representation and identity through more abstract less person based images. I feel like this would create a unique set of work while still being aesthetically pleasing.
I wish to develop my project by taking inspiration from my artist references for my photoshoots, and trying to take more creative risks with my images and being more experimental in the shooting stage.
I will begin my study by looking at the work of photographers Jiayue Yu and Rinko Kawauchi, while still keeping an eye out for any future references that could fit into the project as well. These two artists explore the ideas of identity through more abstract images, which I like a lot. They photograph a variety of subject matters, from flowers and insects to buildings and the sea.
Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer with an incredibly unique photographic style, especially within her book Illuminance, which explores light, shape, and colour through a variety of mainly abstract images. The images are placed in the book without any kind of titles or explanation given to the reader, instead allowing them to interpret the compositions on their own.
Her images are often soft and dreamlike, sometimes overexposed, placing a focus on the way lighting is used throughout the project. By using a film camera, Kawauchi is able to create timeless images, capturing immense amounts of detail and creating a physical attachment to the images created instead of the cold, methodical creation of digital images.
In Masatake Shinohara’s essay for Aperature regarding Kawauchi’s work, she says, ‘Her act of photographing is less a way of referring to the appearance of everyday reality than it is a revealing of the luminous open space within which sensuous elements are free-floating. That is to say, in her practice, a sequence of photographs does not fix the appearance of everyday events, but rather evokes the realness of ambiguous ether that existed prior to the fixation of the predominant worldly setting.‘
This is one of my favourite images from the series, a simple shot showing sunlight reflecting off of the sea. I especially like the colours used, with the light yellow sun contrasting the shadows of the dark purple shadows created, making a harmonious and visually pleasing colour scheme. It is slightly blurred, once again tying into concepts of memories and dreams and parts of surrealist artwork. This image is from Kawauchi’s book Aila which was published in 2005. It explores the line between life and death through abstract photography, capturing everyday scenarios in breathtaking detail. In an article written by Christy Lange, Kawauchi’s intentions are analysed further, ‘by photographing them, Kawauchi makes the fleeting moments of life even more fragile – not less so – because she makes them static and visible for us. We can see them as we would in our mind’s eye – with the blurred and imperfect vision of memory.‘
Jiayue Yu is an award-winning photographer based in Shanghai, known for combing photography and 3D sculpture in order to create pieces inspired by literature and art alongside her own experiences. Her work often explores various complex emotional states through their use of lighting and composition.
Yu created a zine called Wave which she took over a month long road trip she went on with her father as a chance to reunite after not seeing him for about six years. The images are all in black and white and focus on the beaches that they passed on their trip, showing a variety of subject matter and locations. By keeping the images monochrome with an old film-like grain, Yu is able to create pictures that appear much older than they actually are, potentially representing the lost time and memories that Yu and her father missed out on during their separation. The images look like fading memories, captured by Yu’s camera to hold onto forever.
Another series of images from a different project called The River That Flows In Winter. The colours used are mostly warm and soft, evocative of a memory once again. The images are mysterious, being displayed without any kind of explanation, leaving their meanings up to the interpretation of the viewer. They utilise things like reflections and windows, creating texture and depth, and almost never show the figure in full to the viewer.
This is one of my favourite images from this project, with Yu’s use of colour and windows once again. The image shows the lights of an apartment building at night, shining through the darkness which is seen from the window Yu is shooting from. The colours are soft and dreamlike, leaving the image slightly blurred while still being clear what it is. The shading on the curtains inside is intense and dark, while the night scene outside is light and full of shades of green contrasting the red curtains. The lights from the apartments shine through like stars, mostly in various shades of yellow. The image appears as if the viewer is trapped inside by the curtains which are a lot more focused than the dreamy outside world through the window.
I decided to start the project by writing out any ideas I had based off of the theme of Simple or Complex:
SIMPLE:
COMPLEX:
I then decided to look for artist references with work that I would like to take inspiration from.
Laurence Philomene is a photographer who uses the camera as a way of documenting their life as a chronically ill trans person on HRT. Their images are incredibly vibrant and depict everyday moments with a fantastical feel.
Jiayue Yu is an award winning Chinese photographer who explores concepts surrounding inner worlds and emotion by combining her images with 3D elements, creating complex, multi-layered compositions. Her colours are often soft and warm, like a fading memory.
Alvin Ng is a Southeast Asian photographer who explores the his relationship with the world around him through the lens of Asian folklore and religion, creating unique images inspired by these stories.
I like the styles and techniques of each of these artists and plan on looking at them closer as artist references.