Kyler Zeleny grew up on a farm in Central Alberta, Canada. The farm isolated him, it taught him lessons about the prairie landscape and the importance of a vibrant imagination. As a result, he is left with a propensity towards open spaces, a residue of his upbringing, and megacities, a response to his desire to connect. His work is influenced by a fascination for elements of the past and a pondering for the future. As a result, he rarely lives in the present. He believes one of the highest virtues is not intellect itself but the pursuit of knowledge, whether that is learning how to weld or reading Bourdieu.

Over the last five years, his pursuit of knowledge has taken him onto the back roads of rural Western Canada and the occasional dip into Montana. Sleeping in his car, and showering in lakes and community pools, he occupies his time trying to understand present-day ideas of rurality and how it has been visually represented. This pursuit of understanding the rural consumes him, but that’s ok because he thinks it’s important work.

Out West

“This entire project is then further coloured by an engagement with the occult and is one that is as preoccupied with excavating the past as it is with recoding the present.” 

Out West is a visual travelogue documenting rural communities in the Canadian west. Over a hundred communities of between six and 1,000 inhabitants were documented. The project offers a version of the current state of affairs in the Canadian West, exploring how rural spaces experience an urban-rural time lag. The images conjure up a Vonnegut-like idea of being “unstuck in time”, where objects and the built landscape deceive the viewer as to what period they belong to.

The images in this book are part of a project documenting the built landscape of small rural communities (1,000 inhabitants or less) in the Canadian West. As demographic changes – ‘rural drain, urban claim’ – persist, many would argue that the rural is becoming a redundant sidepiece in a world that is increasingly concerned with the urban. The project investigates how rural communities in the Canadian West landscape struggle to hold onto their heritage despite the diminishing vitality of these towns.

Work from the project has appeared in exhibitions in Canada, The United States, England, Columbia, Austria and Australia. Conference talks as well as radio and television interviews on the work have been conducted in Canada, The United Kingdom and The United States. It has appeared in print in: After-Image Journal, Blackflash Magazine, Aesthetica Magzine, Of The Afternoon, and Ain’t Bad Magazine. In 2014 the project was compiled into a limited edition book in 2014 with the independent publishing house The Velvet Cell.

Bury Me in the Back Forty

From the Dakotas to Alberta, small towns on the prairies are a dime a dozen; peaceful and congenial sleepy towns that can often be substituted for another. Bury Me in the Back Forty is a long-term multi-media project that documents Mundare, Alberta, a seemingly typical rural community. Through photographs, collected objects, community archives, audio recordings, oral histories, drawings and sketches, the idea of a prairie town is performed. Together with these documents, these private objects and souvenirs tangle to tell an intimate story of rurality. The project is both a document, an inquiry, a performance, and a transgression. More importantly, it is simply a story being recorded, recollected, reconfigured and told—a layered portrait of rurality that is both unique and universal. What we are really left with is the stoicism of place, a lived existence, which roars at times and suffers so quietly at others.

This is not a straightforward document, it is meant to excite, awe, confuse, bore and most of all, it is meant to be revisited. The narrative that follows is somewhat of a fugitive storyline, a place where folklore and alchemy mix with the academy to create a collective, albeit paradoxically disjoined, narrative of life on the prairies. The fugitive narrative we are left with is made up of organic components synthetically placed to create a gestalt-like feel of community past and present. A form of community particle collider, forcing narratives together, merging them, grinding them against one another until something collective emerges, something new and indistinguishable from one another—real and imagined. These collisions inhabit an in-betweenness, an imagined community. This in-betweenness is not a place to shy away from, it allows us the opportunity to gleam into a possible future. Like Stonehenge was built in the past, but guiding future solstices, Bury Me is equal parts time machine and time capsule guiding us towards one of the many fates awaiting the rural, marking its constellations, telling us when it is time for growth and more importantly when it is time for dormancy.

This image is one of many from Zeleny’s Out West project, documenting “The built landscape of small rural communities in the Canadian West”(On Landscape Project, 2014). This image is basically split into two halves, which opposes the traditional use of the rule of thirds. However using the rule, it is clear that the road, narrowing into the distance creates a clear division, through the centre of the middle thirds of the photograph. There is also a clever use of line and shape in the image, with the straight yellow lines on the road in the foreground naturally leading the eye up the road. The viewer’s eye is then taken to the horizon at the top of the image, which forms a perfectly straight line. This straight horizon line enhances the contrast between the light blue and grey of the sky, and the rich greens of the fields below. The obvious contrasts in this image, as illustrated by the difference between the road and the fields, could show the stark differences between the rural and urban communities of Canada’s west – in the image we can also see areas in the road where nature has taken back over. By photographing this landscape, Zeleny creates a visual representation of the overdevelopment of rural communities, and how the urbanisation of landscapes is taking over rural communities.

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Link to my ‘Simple and Complex’ project

Kyler Zeleny’s work links to my own project due in a few ways. Firstly, the concept of capturing community and a sense of place is crucial in my work, as I’m documenting my childhood homes/places through landscapes. Also, Zeleny photographs rural areas and landscapes which is a similar subject to my own. This makes it easier for me to formulate ideas on my own compositions, photoshoots and ideas. Another part of Kyler Zeleny’s work that has really inspired me is his use of archival material relating to his own family and surroundings in his project “Bury me in the back forty”. I have used archival material in a lot of my projects for my coursework, but mainly only linked to portraiture. For this project, I want to draw upon my previous projects and the use of this material in Kyler Zeleny’s project, to find new material from family albums and possibly photographic archives to use alongside my landscapes.

In my exam project, I am intending to take typology style photos of different buildings in Jersey, and present them in categories. For example, industrial buildings, office blocks, apartment blocks and supermarkets. Most of my photographs will be taken in the town of St Helier because it has most buildings. An idea I am looking into at the moment for the presentation is taking photos of the corners of similar style buildings on a tripod like this:

Then I would edit the photos so all the corners line up. Then I will present it as a gallery/gif.

I started off by creating two moodboard for simple and complex images to help get a clearer idea of the style of photography i wanted to incorporate into my work. I ended up producing two moodboards that featured different ends of documentary-style photography,

SIMPLE

Simple moodboard – Insider perspective, isolated, staged, singular focus, dark surroundings, dimly lit areas, vibrant lighting, devoid of any background noise.

COMPLEX

Complex moodboard – Outsider perspective, candid, chaotic scenes, bright colour, multiple viewpoints, bright areas

For my simple vs. complex project I want to play on the idea of insider. vs outsider through different lighting and setting – now I am 18, i am thinking of taking a camera along with me into clubs or bars and documenting my night out through cinematic-style photography, incorporating elements of both candid and staged photography to represent the insider. vs outsider theme. Using different coloured lighting as a main focus of my photo creates emotion and will help in communicating my theme, e.g red light for chaos, excitement, adrenaline, or blue light for peace, calm, tranquility.

I then brainstormed and researched photographers to build a more solid structure of what exactly i wanted to photograph. For the complex side of my project, I am heavily inspired by documentation of different cultures and eras in photography, especially 90’s/00’s photography of the rave and club scene of Britain and Berlin, as they feature gritty, unfiltered images depicting a chaotic and gritty atmosphere through candid, blurred photography with bold, strong lighting, whereas for the simple side of my project, i drew inspiration from staged images that feature a singular subject in an often peaceful setting, as i felt it was a good binary opposite from the complex side and could easily communicate a story through such staged images. Below are some artists that caught my eye and showcase the insider vs. outsider perspective.

NAN GOLDIN – INSIDER

VINCA PETERSEN – OUTSIDER

TOBIAS ZIELONY – INSIDER

For my simple or complex exam project I am aiming to carry out at least 3-5 photoshoots to gather as much material as I can before entering the exam period. I am approaching the topic of simple or complex through architecture so St Helier is a good place to gather images. I want to photograph unique structures and shoot close ups of interesting features of a building in response to my project. Over my multiple photoshoots I am aiming to collect around 250-300 images from all around the streets of St Helier.

Photo-shoot locations:

Finance district:

Westmount apartments:

Waterfront and harbour:

Brewery and apartment complex:

Red houses:

Post office area:

La Frégate Café and Grand Hotel area:

St Brelades bay hotels and buildings:

Maufant:

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.

Main locations:

Covent garden

Regent street

Oxford street

Piccadilly / Piccadilly circus

Southwark

Trafalgar square

china town

borough market

Bond street

Carnaby street

The Thames

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.

Matthew Finn explores personal relationships both within the corpus of the family as well as the wider stage of personal relationships through photographic projects. With no commercial constraints or deadlines, Finn cultivates a working practice of an auteur, in charge of all the elements of the work where the craft of the print and the process as a whole are equally important. Finn makes bodies of work including his series of portraits of students, commencing in the early 1990s, and durational bodies of work that focus on the province of family life and close relationships.

Finn’s most notable works include the thirty-one-year process of making intimate, domestic portraits of his mother and the twenty-eight years he documented his relationship with his uncle. Today Finn collaborates with family members as he pursues the universal themes of love, loss, bereavement and intimacy. Through these current and completed projects Matthew Finn has expanded the frontiers of documentary photography, bringing a new and deeply psychological reality to the genre.

What I like about his work: I really like that his work is all monochromatic, even throughout his ‘School of Art’ project, which doesn’t focus on Finn’s family, he still considers using this style of photography. This means that there is a nostalgic tone and imaginary to his work, and I would to recreate this kind of feeling throughout my work. I think that the composition of his photography means that

‘Mother’ Project

Finn states “My father is not present in these photographs just as he wasn’t in our lives and yet he haunts these images. He was also the main reason that this project became so important to both me and my mother. He died twenty six years ago. On the evening before the funeral, my mother, cigarette in hand, told me of half-brothers sisters that I would meet the following day at the funeral. This was a complete shock to me. It seemed that my father was well known around Leeds and had been married several times (at the same time).”

Image Analysis: I really like this photograph above, this is mostly because the concept behind the imaginary is clear within this style of photography, this means that the bright lighting and the fact that her face is in the middle of the image. The love that he shares for his mum is something that is very obvious throughout this image, and I would like to replicate this in my own project. Furthermore, the fact that his mother is touching her face may be a link to the lack of love she has experienced from Finn’s father, who was distance and was married to multiple different women at once. Her individual strength of character and the fact that she has been able to deal with this kind of family issues if definitely shown throughout this project.

“School of Art is everything I’d hoped it would be. This is a subject I love and Stanley / Barker always does a fantastic job. But it’s MOTHER that was the punch in the gut. Your introduction is one of the finest I’ve ever read. It’s perfect, and supercharges the photographs.”- Alec Soth

This are some of my favourite images from the whole of Finn’s whole ‘Mother’ project, I think that the contrast within these images is very strong and is most present, with the bright lights highlighting his mothers figure along with the darker backgrounds means that her significance is implied. Is it clear to the viewer throughout these four photographs alone that his mother was someone that he looked up to, and her bright figure supports this concept. This style of photography is one that is very hard to replicate, this is because of the quality and the quantity of the images.

Finn also states: “It turned out that I was the youngest child and that I was the only one who didn’t know anything about these entangled lives. Now I was able to begin to piece things together: to understand why I would see my father’s car all over Leeds during the summer holidays, outside a terraced house with an unfinished painted fence, outside a semi with an overgrown garden. These were the places he called home.”

“Matthew Finn’s work draws us into the always fascinating dynamic between mother and son. That he is the only son of a single mother intensifies this connection. Matthew and his mother, Jean, are a family of two, and their lives are deeply intertwined. They are dependent on each other, and Matthew is, in many senses, the ‘man’ in Jean’s life. Through the lens, Matthew seems to find perspective on this intensified version of what is the most natural, elemental bond – that of a mother and child.”- Elinor Carucci

What aspects of his work will be present in my project? I would like to show my admiration for some of my closest family members through my future project, just like Finn has done with his Mother and also his Uncle. I’m not sure what kind of photography style I will adapt to do this, but I would like to take image of my mum, dad and brother and make sure that they are a significant part of this project. Furthermore, I would like to make a lot of my images monochromatic as this means that their is a nostalgic feeling towards my work.

CLAUDIA ANDUJAR

Claudia Andujar– a Brazilian photographer born in Switzerland, 1931- began working in photojournalism through a project on the Karajá people in central Brazil, a project which is her most renowned one. As well as being a photographer, Andujar is also an avid human rights and environmental activist: co-founding the Comissão Pró-Yanomami, an advocacy organization that supports the rights of the Yanomami people.

Andujar’s images are in documentary style- starting her career as a journalist her work was orientated around news reports. Andujar’s style in these images features very much on lighting and vibrant colours- these images are from two different projects of Andujar’s: one of which is a photojournalist perspective documenting psychodynamic therapy which was accompanied by an article published in Realidade magazine, January of 1970, with text by Jorge Andrade (collection titled “They’re Looking For Peace”) and the other being a photoshoot with a model called Sônia, who was from Bahia who was working in São Paulo (collection titled “A Sônia”). I have decided to study Andujar’s work as a response to the exam theme of simple v complex due to her use of lighting and dramatic, almost cinematic compositions which give an outsider perspective towards subjects- as Andujar was a photojournalist her images were always an outsider perspective however the compositions and how Andujar took the images makes the images look staged and painting-like, making the viewer question the true origin of the images and I would like to recreate this style and intention of images using staged settings and models.

“They’re Looking For Peace” although a piece of documentary photography, the images look as if they have been staged- showing dramatic, film-like snapshots of the emotional stages of psychodynamic therapy: the editing of this image also maximises this perspective due to the flood of vibrant colours (which based around the time of these images release would have been done in a darkroom or would have been the actual lighting in the room) and stark overhead lighting which emphasises shadows where, due to the nature of the subject focus, creates an idea of a mask surrounding the subjects- specifically the ones which seem to be the patients of this therapy. The saturated colours of the works also add to the high emotional turmoil which is perceived- a large part of colour theory is it’s adaptation to emotions and human psychology- possibly something Andujar was aware of when taking this image where orange and red are defining colours: where based on colour theory, orange represents comfort and happiness while the gradient into red represents danger and caution making this image possibly present a snapshot glimpse of peace (while undergoing psychodynamic therapy) this is further reinstated by the open body language of the main subject lying on the floor: however as the colour gradient goes more into red the subjects become darker toned, more closed off and surrounded by shadow. Andujar uses practical methods such as applying vaseline to the lens of her camera, using flash lighting devices, oil lamps and infrared film- creating visual distortions, streaks of light and saturated colours. “A Sônia” is an example of these methods: Andujar retook the pictures and superimposed them on top of each other then added filters, the series is then presented as an x-ray of the female body with inverted tones and vibrant colours: the image above may also be an example where Andujar used oil lamps to create the high saturation of colour.

Helge Skodvin

Helge Skodvin lives in Bergen, Norway. He is trained as a carpenter, but since he laid down his hammer and took a BA in Photography at London College of Printing he has been working freelance for major newspapers, magazines and publishing houses. He is a member of Moment Agency and he is represented by Institute Artist. He is also working on large photographic projects, mainly featuring landscapes

In 2015, Skodvin produced the book 240 Landscapes. The book features 77 colour images of the Scandinavian landscape, with a classic Volvo 240 carefully positioned within the landscape and composed in the image. “The Volvo 240 became a symbol of Scandinavian and Nordic values. The safe, the sound, the commonplace. Square and homely, yet solid and reliable. Function over form. No frills. Taking you from A to Z. A car. An ambassador for the Scandinavian social democracy. Helge Skodvin has spotted Volvo 240s still chugging around the roads of Norway.”

Kyler Zeleny

Zeleny is a Canadian photographer, educator and author of Out West (2014), Found Polaroids (2017), and Crown Ditch & The Prairie Castle (2020). He holds bachelors in Political Science from the University of Alberta, a masters from Goldsmiths College, in Photography and Urban Cultures and a PhD from the joint Communication & Culture program at Ryerson and York University. His work has been exhibited internationally in twelve countries and has been featured in numerous publications including The Globe & Mail, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Vice, and The Independent. He occupies his time by exploring photography on the Canadian prairies.

Zeleny’s 2014 publication Out West depicts small, rural communities (1000 inhabitants or less) in the Canadian West. Each double-page spread contains a square image on the right, with a supplementary population count of where the image was taken on the left. Like Skodvin, his composure of each image is carefully monitored. The result is a series of relatable, yet individual images that portray a very different part of the world.

Easton Chang

When you think of car photography and what it represents, people often are led to the idea of a superar in a moody and dark car park at night. This is exactly what I wanted to achieve. The work of Easton Chang perfectly fits this ideology. Based in Sydney, Chang developed his work and style shooting all things on four wheels using modern, cutting edge methods and creativity. With his strong past experience in the Australian editorial industry. Easton now works with the best production, retouching and CGI teams to produce world-class stills and motion images to the automotive industry.

Chang’s images portray what people imagine car photography to be so well that it would be silly to not try and replicate it. Though I don’t have access to cars like what Chang does, I still feel that I can create something unique using his style.