The A-level coursework consist of two modules, Personal Investigation (practical work worth 72 marks) and Personal Study (written work worth 18 marks) which are interlinked and informed by each other. All the work that you produced (both coursework and mock exam) in Yr 12 also contributes towards A-Level coursework and overall equates to 60% of the total marks and the remainder 40% accounts for the External Set Assignment (Exam) in 2024. The Personal Investigation accounts for 48% and the Personal Study accounts for 12% of the total coursework marks. The last week before H-Term 5-9 Feb is a Mock Exam and will count as final DEADLINE
What is a Personal Study?
The aim of this unit is to critically investigate, question and challenge a particular style, area or work by artists/ photographer(s) which will inform and develop your own emerging practice as a student of photography. The unit is designed to be an extension of your practical work in your Personal Investigation module where the practical informs and develops the theoretical elements and vice versa of your ongoing project.
Your Personal Study is a written and illustrated dissertation, including a written essay (1000-3000 words) and a lens-based body of work (either stills photography or moving image) with a number of final outcomes produced from your Personal Investigation unit.
PRESENTATION: This year you have a choice to make either a short film (3-5mins) or a photo book, either online using Blurb or by hand using traditional book binding techniques, which you design to include both your essay and a final selection and sequence of your photographs produced as a response to the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’. In addition, you are expecting to produce an appropriate amount of blogposts that demonstrates your ability to research, analysis, plan, record, experiment, present and evaluate. You are also encouraged to print and present a number of images from your practical work as final outcomes.
Explore Shannon’s blog posts to learn more about her Personal Study into patriarchy and women’s traditional role
What it says in the syllabus (Edexcel)
The personal study will consist of a critical and analytical written piece of a minimum 1000 words continuous prose, making links to the student’s own practical investigations, supported by contextual research. Through the personal study, students will demonstrate understanding of relevant social, cultural or historical contexts. Students will also express personal interpretations or conclusions, and use technical and specialist vocabulary. The focus of the personal study can be any concept, movement, person, people, artefact(s), or other source of reference. However, it must be related to their own ideas, investigations and practical work. The personal study can take any form but must: ● be presented as a separate piece in writing ● be a minimum 1000 words on the chosen subject ● be written in continuous prose ● be in a presentable format for assessment ● include a full bibliography, citing all references.
Students will need to consider: ● critical and analytical content ● expression of personal interpretations and conclusions ● contextual research and understanding ● links between research, analysis and own investigations ● use of specialist terminology and vocabulary ● clarity of expression and language ● appropriate structure and presentation.
The personal study must be the student’s own work, forming an essential part of their independent investigations. Development of the personal study may be supported through presentations to the class, discussions and individual tutorials. Teachers can also help students to focus their ideas for the personal study by asking them to produce a proposal or an outline of their intentions. Students may support their progress in writing the minimum 1000 words with visual examples of their own work and the work of others, sketchbook annotation, notes from visits, exploration of materials and the development of their own ideas. Any references to others’ writing should be acknowledged through a bibliography. Internet sources should be cited with a brief description of the source material.
To summarise: ● supporting studies will help to prepare for both practical work and personal study ● the practical work(film, photobook, prints and supporting studies) and personal study(essay) may be approached in any order, or progress simultaneously ● the outcome for the personal study must form a separate presentation ● work must not be added to or altered once submitted for assessment ● the practical work will be marked against all four Assessment Objectives, equal to 48% of all coursework marks. ● The personal study comprises 12% of the final qualification and is marked out of 18.
How to get started: Link your chosen area of study to your previous work, knowledge and understanding based upon your chosen theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’.
Up until now you have explored the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’ focusing on visiting tourism and heritage sites, such as St Malo and Elizabeth Castle and produced three different outcomes; A3 page-spreads, photo-zine and a short film. All these outcomes are exploring a sense of place and cultural identity through storytelling. It’s up to you to decide how you want to explore the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’ further and choose a medium that you enjoy most and feel will give you the best chance at producing a quality final outcome. This project will be the final chance you have to improve your coursework marks and grades!
For example, some of the subjects or issues you wish to explore within the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’, you may have explored previously in Yr 12 projects based around the theme of ‘HOME’, that included PORTRAITURE and FEMINITY vs MASCULINITY and LANDSCAPE and ANTHROPOCENE and STILL-LIFE and FORMALISM Or, you may wish to develop new ideas around COMMUNITY and FAMILY. It may be useful for you to revisit some of the projects you have already covered in your coursework, so far (see below).
The choice is between making a photobook; exploring a subject and theme in depth using photography as a tool for visual storytelling, either through observation (documentary) or staging (tableaux) a series of photoshoots. Making a film might be more in line with your creative skills set and offer other elements to storytelling, such as combining moving image and sound. Either option offers its own unique set of challenges and opportunities for you to express yourself creatively as A-Level Photography student.
PRACTICAL WORK: You have 4 weeks in lesson time in the remainder of the Autumn term, and at Christmas another 2 weeks to complete principal shoots and make new images. This include all relevant blog posts demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of: RESEARCH > ANALYSIS > PLANNING > RECORDING, EXPERIMENTATION > PRESENTATION > EVALUATION.
PHOTOBOOK: Returning after Christmas we will be spending the whole month of January developing and designing your photobook, which will also include your essay and somewhere between 40-60 images sequenced to tell a story.
FILM: If you are making a film, then you will be spending January editing your footage, including both visual (moving image/ still-images) and sound (ambient sound, voice-over, sound effects and music scores). Your essay will be published as a separate blog post.
DEADLINE: MUST complete 4-5 new photo-shoots/ moving image/ sound recordings this AUTUMN and SPRING TERM that must be published on the blog by WED 24 January.
ESSAY: We will be spending minimum 1 lesson a week on CONTEXTUAL STUDIES where you will be learning about art/photo history, critical theory and contemporary practice as well as developing academic study skills to help you writing your essay. However, it is essential that you are organising your time effectively and setting aside time outside of lessons to read, study and write.
DEADLINE: Final Essay MUST be handed in Fri 2 February 2024
MOCK EXAM: 5 – 9 Feb 2024. 3 days controlled test (15 hours) Groups: 13A: MON 5 – WED 7 FEB 13B: WED 7 – FRI 9 FEB
DEADLINE: Completion of photobook or film LAST DAY OF YOUR MOCK EXAM.
NEWSPAPER: From the work that you produce as part of this unit there is potential opportunity that we will be making a collective newspaper based on the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’. DEADLINE: 22 March 2024
Week 11: 20 – 26 Nov Developing Personal Study Review and Reflect
Lesson task Mon:Personal Investigation Choose one final project from past students.
For photobooks, look through sequence of images carefully and study their supporting blog posts. For films, watch film saved in shared folder here and study their supporting blog posts.
M:\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\LOVE & REBELLION\FILM\Personal Study
Present their project in class and comment on the book, or film’s quality, with reference to: Concept > ideas and meaning behind project Narrative > a sense of a story or subject being explored Editing > consistency and quality of imagery Sequencing > the order of which images appear on the page or in the film to tell a story Design > layout of images and choices of format, size, front-cover, title and other design elements Aesthetic > how something looks and overall beauty (or lack of) of final product.
Make an assessment using the mark sheet below and calculate a grade.
Lesson task Tue:Personal Study Read the essay and comment on its overall written and interpretative quality as well as its use of critical, contextual and historical references, eg.
Does the essay address its hypothesis?
Does it provide new knowledge and understanding?
Is the essay well structured with a sense of an introduction, paragraphs and a conclusion?
Use and flow of language, prose, punctuation, spelling.
Use of specialist vocabulary relating to art and photography.
Analysis of artist’s oeuvre (body of work) and key work(s).
Evidence of wider reading with reference to art history/ theory, political discourse and/or socio-economical context.
Use of direct quotes, summary or commentary from others to make an informed and critical argument.
Use of referencing system (eg. Harvard) and a bibliography.
Use of illustrations with captions listing name of artist, title of work and year of production.
Make an assessment using the mark sheet and calculate a grade.
Lesson Task Wed-Fri: Review and Reflect complete the following blogpost
Objective:Criteria from the Syllabus
Essential that students build on their prior knowledge and experience developed during the course.
Develop your written dissertation in the light of your chosen focus from the practical part of previous coursework and projects.
From all the coursework (Personal Investigation) that you have produced write an overview of what you learned so far (both as Yr 12 and Yr 13 student) and publish on the blog.
1. Describe which themes (Nostalgia, Anthropocene, Home, Feminity/ Masculinity/ Identity etc,) medium (photography, film), approaches (documentary, tableaux, conceptual), artists (incl contextual references to art history, movements and isms) and photographic skills, processes, techniques and methods (incl learning new software) inspired you the most and why.
2. Include examples of both previous and current experiments and imagery to illustrate your thinking.
Week 12: 27 Nov – 3 Dec Introduction to Personal Study Explore theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’ and write a Statement of Intent complete the following blogposts
something done or presented in order to evoke feelings of nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a word that comes from Greek and means a sentimental yearning for the past. It can evoke feelings of pleasure with occasional notes of sadness. Nostalgia can be triggered by many things, such as music, movies, places, or people. Nostalgia can have positive effects on mood, social connectedness, self-esteem, and meaning in life.
wistful evocative romantic sentimental emotional about the past regretful dewy-eyed maudlin homesick
MIND-MAP and MOODBOARD
RESEARCH > It it is paramount that you explore the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA‘ in a personal and unique manner. Produce a mind-map and mood-board of ideas/ interpretations/ starting points working in small groups of 2-3 students and feedback to the class.
Consider what it is that makes you feel nostalgic about Jersey, your home, family, friends, a song, a memory, an experience. For example, you can generate ideas linked to childhood, family history or places, sites or locations that holds a special memory in your heart. These memories may be either positive or negative depending on what story you wish to explore as a photographer.
Revisit the sites of your childhood – the places where you played or spend time with friends/ family. You could choose sites or locations that triggers specific childhood memories or experiences. For example; beaches/ castles/ heritage sites/ bunkers/ home/ gardens/ family gatherings/ parties/ celebrations/ birthdays/ weddings/ holidays. Some of these sites could be Jersey landscapes and landmarks, such as Corbiere Lighthouse, Gronez Castle, Mt Orgueil, Elizabeth Castle, Fort Regent, St Ouen’s Bay, L’Etacq, St Brelade beach, Plemont, Ann Port, Rozel Bay, Jersey Zoo, Bouley Bay, Bon Nuit, Gorey Pier, St Helier harbour, People’s Park, Liberation Square, a St Helier area or neighbourhood and Parish church/ community hall or playground etc.
definitions: Binary opposites: a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.
Theory of binaries. According to French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, meaning is often defined in terms of binary oppositions, where “one of the two terms governs the other.”. An example would be the white/ black binary opposition in the United States, the African American is defined as a devalued other. An example of a binary opposition is the male-female dichotomy, where male is the dominant gender and women are subservient (patriarchy).
Patriarchy: a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it, both within family, workplace and government.
Synonym: a synonym is a word that means the same or nearly the same thing as another word
Antonym: a word of opposite meaning. The usual antonym of good is bad.
Binary opposition & narrative: Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist who developed the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. Levi Strauss theory on binary opposition talks about how narrative can be split into opposites, such as Good and Evil, Man and Woman, Rich and Poor, etc. Due to having these opposites, when together it creates the conflict in the narrative story and this becomes the central climax. Read more here.
NARRATIVE > STORYTELLING
In this module we will examine how different narrative structures can be used to tell stories in pictures from looking at photobooks as well as cinema. We will consider narrative within a documentary approach where observation is central in representing reality, albeit we will look at both visual styles within traditional photojournalism as well as contemporary photography which employs a more poetic visual language that straddles the borders between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fiction.
Write a Statement of Intent of 250-500 words that clearly contextualise;
What you want to explore?
Why it matters to you?
How you wish to develop your project?
Which form you wish to present your study (photobook, film, prints etc)
When and where you intend to begin your study?
Make sure you describe how you interpret the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA’ and any specific subject-matter, topic or issue that you wish to explore, including references to artists, art movement and any other inspiration. Revisit your mind-map and mood-board and hone in one or two ideas. For example, you may wish to consider:
How you wish to photograph places, people, objects – carefully selecting your point of view (framing), composition and lighting.
Will you be making images outside or inside, shooting on locations or use the studio.
Will your images be documentary (observational), or tableaux (staged) in your approach, style and aesthetic look?
What will you include?
What will you leave out?
How will you present these images to the viewer?
In a book, a film, or prints on the wall?
With or without accompanying text?
In a grid, typology study or a linear sequence?
Will you be manipulating images using montage/ collage techniques or apply AI technology?
Will you be using any specific photographic technique, process of software (Photoshop, Premiere, Audition, Blurb online book making)
What difference do these decisions make to the meaning of your images?
PLAN > RECORD > As a creative response to initial ideas set out in your Statement of Intent plan a relevant photoshoot this week that provide you with some visual material to develop your project. There are three photographic genres that you could consider when developing ideas and planning photoshoots, they are:
LANDSCAPE > PLACE > GEOGRAPHY > ENVIRONMENT > GEOLOGY – familiar vs unfamiliar – ordinary vs extra-ordinary – vernacular vs spectacular PORTRAIT > PEOPLE > IDENTITY > CULTURE > COMMUNITY – individual vs collective STILL-LIFE > OBJECT > HISTORY > MEMORY > FAMILY – private vs public
Produce a blog post from each shoot with careful selection, adjustments and editing of images in Lightroom. Review and evaluate shoot for further development and experimentation. Your first photo-shoot MUST be published on the blog by Wed 13 Dec.
Week 13: 4 – 10 Dec INSPIRATIONS: Artists References PHOTO-SHOOTS: Planning & Recording complete the following blogposts
THEORY > ANALYSIS ARTISTS REFERENCES:
Objective:Criteria from the Syllabus
Select artists work, methods, theories and art movements appropriate to your previous coursework work as a suitable basis for your Personal Study.
Investigate a wide range of work and sources
ARTISTS REFERENCES: Select 2-3 artists/photographers that have inspired your work already and that you would like to research in depth as a basis for your Personal Study. Compare and contrast their practice and work following these steps:
Produce a mood board with a selection of images and write an overview of their work, including methods, style, approach and subject matter.
Select at least one image from each photographer and analyse in depth using methodology of TECHNICAL > VISUAL > CONTEXTUAL > CONCEPTUAL.
MEANING & METHODS: Identify meaning and methods behind selected artists/photographers work and research at least 3 different literary sources (online articles, books, YouTube clips) that will provide you with different critical perspective and views other than your own.
The literary sources will also provide you with something to read for further contextual understanding and critical thinking in preparation for writing your essay. Make sure you save hyperlinks photocopies etc in a new folder: Academic References.
Incorporate quotes and comments from artist themselves or others (art critics, art historians, curators, writers, journalists etc) using a variety of sources such as YouTube, online articles, reviews, books
Make sure you reference sources and embed links to the above sources in your blog post.
EXTENSION: CONTEXTUAL STUDIES1 Conversations on Photography: As a case study read one interview, identity 3 quotes and apply theory to a analysis of one image.
PLANNING: Produce a blog post with a detailed plan of at least 3-4 photoshoots that you intend on doing in response to analysis and interpretation of Artists References above. Make sure photo-shoots relates to the ideas on how you intend to develop your project as set out in your Statement of Intent. Follow these instructions: what, why, how, when, where?
RECORDING: Complete planned photo-shoot and bring images with you in the New Year to class. Begin to edit and show experimentation with images using Lightroom / Photoshops/ Premiere as appropriate to your intentions. Make sure you annotate processes 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, how, when, where?
Week 14: 11 – 19 Dec HOMEWORK TASK: WINDOWS and MIRRORS Essay: How can photography be both ‘mirrors’ and ‘windows’ of the world? Photo-assignment: a creative response to documentary (reality) and tableaux (fiction) photography DEADLINE: THURS 4 JAN 2024
WRITE >To show knowledge and understanding of the differences between documentary truth and staged tableaux photography you need to write a mini-essay. This essay will the last opportunity to develop your essay writing skills and can be viewed as a starting point for you to develop your own individual personal study essay with a unique hypothesis. Follow link and instructions here:
PHOTO-SHOOT > Based on the theme of ‘NOSTALGIA‘ – and with relevance to your Personal Study – produce 3 images that are documenting reality and another 3 images that are staging reality. Use either camera or AI technology, or a combination at free will. The focus here is on creativity, imagination and experimentation.
CONTEXT: For further understanding and context of the historical, conceptual and aesthetic differences between documentary practice and tableaux photography read the following sections below and click on the hyper links.
DOCUMENTARY vs TABLEAUX PHOTOGRAPHY
CONTEXTUAL STUDIES > 1 blog post. Describe the genres of documentary photography and tableaux photography and highlight the differences and similarities in the style and approach of the image-making process. For example: What do we mean by a photograph that is ‘documentary’ in style. How does a staged tableaux image construct a narrative different from documentary photography? Which of the two genres are best at representing truth? Or, is photography now unreliable as ‘evidence’ or ‘bearing witness’ and be a ‘window’ onto the world due to new technology, such as AI and other digital image manipulation software. In order to answer these questions fully, you may want to refer to your earlier essay; Photography and Truth: Can a photograph lie? See more here:
Aim to write 500-1000 words and include images to illustrate both genres of photography and show evidence of reading by including direct quotes from sources and referencing using Harvard system.
RESOURCES > First, Look through both these PPTs to get a basic understanding documentary photography and tableaux photography.
Photographer Rob Hornstra on documentary, storytelling and slow journalism
Rob Hornstra and writer Arnold van Bruggen spend five years working in the Sochi Region where the 2014 Winter Olympics where held. Here is a link to The Sochi Project
British documentary photographer Chloe Dewe-Matthews
Jeff Wall, Insomnia, 1994, Transparency in lightbox, 172,2 x 213,5 cm
Stranger than Fiction: Should documentary photographers add fiction to reality? Documentary photography belongs to the realm of truth, yet some photographers are testing the boundaries between reality and fiction in a bid to reach a public that is accustomed to these narrative forms in the literary and cinematic worlds. In contemporary photography today your have what some people call Fictional Documentary (similar to TV genre such as doc-drama) where you interpret real or historical events through fiction. This is often expressed through a personal and artistic vision which are operating somewhere between fiction and fantasy with some elements of truth or historical data that has been re-imagined.
See the work of: Cristina de Middel (Afronauts, Sharkification, This is What Hatred Did), Max Pinckers (Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty), Vasantha Yogananthan (A Myth of Two Souls), Ron Jude (Lick Creek Line), Eamonn Doyle ( i ) Paul Graham (Does Yellow Run Forever), Yury Toroptsov (Fairyland, House of Baba Yaga, Divine Retribution), Gareth McConnell (Close Your Eyes), Joan Fontcuberta
EXTRA READING: For a contemporary perspective on documentary practice read photographer, Max Pincher’s Interview: On Speculative Documentary To read this interview you must access it online from home as it is blocked from internet filter in school.
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.
My London: through the eyes of Liz Johnson Artur, Kalpesh Lathigra and Sirui Ma. Themes of family, discovery and the natural world inform the work of these three contemporary photographers.
Maybe consider producing a series of images or film about MY JERSEY that reflects on your lived experiences, anything from childhood to recent Storm Ciarán that affected many islanders and their families, homes, communities, neighbourhoods and areas of destruction in Jersey’s landscape, both in the countryside and urban areas, such as parks and green spaces. You could document both the destruction left behind by the storm in its aftermath and the rebuilding/ repairing. This photographic study could draw on your previous landscape studies, both natural and man-made > link to old blog posts
Read more here in the JEP or BBC Jersey about Storm Ciarán in Jersey.
You can also use generative AI either in Photoshop or DreamStudio. See this fake Tornado video that received over 400K views on TikTok
You could focus on trees in Jersey that has been uprooted, damaged and cut down and photograph them as a series of Typology studies. (make link to Yr 12 blog post) These images could be compared with archive photos of the Great Storm in 1987. Read and see more here about weather in Jersey through the ages on Jerripedia.
The Government of Jersey and other environmental agencies and groups, such as the National Trust for Jersey and Jersey Trees for Life are calling for a Tree Council to be formed that will oversee the planting of hundreds of new trees. You could document this process and record those involved in the replanting effort, such as tree surgeons, arboriculturists and volunteers.
Particular areas that were hit hard where many trees were felled by the storm, include ‘The bendy Tree’ on the Five Mile Road, trees in the ground of the Atlantic Hotel, along the Railway Walk and Grande Route de St Ouen (near St Ouen’s Manor).
Explore these options…
St Helier
Residential areas
Housing estates
Retail Parks and shopping areas
Industrial Areas
Car Parks (underground and multi-storey too)
Leisure Centres
Building sites
Demolition sites
Built up areas
Underpass / overpass
The Waterfont
Harbours
Airport
Finance District (IFC buildings)
FALLEN TREES a responce to Storm Ciarán in Jersey
Explore more her in the pdf: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\NOSTALGIA
Many of the photographers associated with new topographics including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Bernd and Hiller Becher, were inspired by the man-made, selecting subject matter that was matter-of-fact. Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. An exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York featuring these photographers also revealed the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development.
The New Topographics were to have a decisive influence on later photographers including those artists who became known as the Düsseldorf School of Photography.
What was the new topographics a reaction to?
The stark, beautifully printed images of the mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental…
Post-war America struggled with
Inflation and labor unrest. The country’s main economic concern in the immediate post-war years was inflation. …
The baby boom and suburbia. Making up for lost time, millions of returning veterans soon married and started families…
Isolation and splitting of the family unit, pharmaceuticals and mental health problems
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.
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
If you feel drawn to a particular location, site or landscape in Jersey you can photography that over a period of time, exploring different light, weather conditions. See work by Richard Misrach:Golden Gate, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes (influenced by Gustave Le Gray and combination printing), Michael Maarten:Sea Change, Mark Power:The Shipping Forecast, and his recent project in Guernsey;
Richard Misrach:Golden Gate Begun in 1997, the project is yet another chapter in Misrach’s ever-growing thesis on the fundamental changes which humanity exacts on nature. Although a seemingly immutable structure, Misrach demonstrates how looking upon the Golden Gate Bridge is a constantly changing experience, resonant with the erratic complexity of the natural world. Each photograph evidences how light and weather alter one’s view. This fact is further highlighted by the consistent perspective Misrach takes in composing each shot. It is not the act of photographing which embellishes the day-to-day changes of this landscape, rather it is something beyond the control of the camera. Misrach takes the position of its steady transcriber.
My theory is that if I take great care to get the lighting, detail and composition just perfect, people will look at my images longer. The longer they look at them, the more likely they are to understand and to effect change. I am convinced beauty is an effective strategy to get someone’s attention. Richard Misrach, OAKLAND TRIBUNE, 3 OCTOBER 1998
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:Turning Back Inspired by the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, photographer Robert Adams’s most recent work presents a new look at the territory these explorers covered and the results of their effort. Titled Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration, the project considers the explorers’ historic journey as they returned to the East. Starting at the Pacific, Adams traveled along the Columbia River, recording the geography and how the land has been used. His photographs show the coastal tourist areas, the vast acreage of timber cultivation and clearcutting farther inland, and the small family farms of eastern Oregon. The pictures offer a reflection on the promise described by Lewis and Clark — a meditation on what was lost and what is retained, what we value regionally and as a people with a common history.
In conjunction with the museum’s spring 2007 exhibit “Robert Adams: Turning Back” we sent Daniel Houghton ’06 to Oregon to interview photographer Robert Adams.
Tom Wood: All Zones off Peak – Using public transport as a method of exploration
George Georgiou: Last Stop
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.”
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.
You can also look for contemporary photographers here on LENSCULTURE or visit the photo-agency MAGNUM Another good source for conversations with artists are on A Small Voice, which are conversations with contemporary photographers. You may not be able to listen to the podcasts in school due to network security, but at home or outside of school is fine.
Family can be interpreted in different ways, one is to consider it in relation to the concept of HOME – which can be interpreted as both family or community. Home is also more than just the four walls of your house where you live with your family. Jersey, the island where you perhaps are born or where you grew up can be considered a home too. Home can be interpreted as a community. If you are away from home you often think about your home with a sense of nostalgia. Home can be associated with memories, feelings, hopes, fears etc.
For further inspiration and context study the exhibition Home Sweet Home and book of the same name. Aldo read feature here on Lensculture
Some photographers explore family using a documentary approach to storytelling, others construct or stage images that may reflect on their childhood, memories, or significant events drawing inspiration from family archives/ photo albums and often incorporating vernacular images into the narrative and presenting the work as a photobook.
Documentary approach > recording life as it is > camera as witness
Documentary is storytelling through a series of images of people involved in real events to provide a factual report on a particular subject. Read more here Documentary Photography
Larry sultan vs Richard Billingham > artists photographing their parents > straight photography vs snapshot aesthetics > formal vs informal.
Tableaux approach > constructed or staged narrative photography Tableaux is a style of photography where people are staged in a constructed environment and a pictorial narrative is conveyed often in a single image, or a series of images that often makes references to fables, fairy tales, myths, unreal and real events from a variety of sources such as paintings, film, theatre, literature and the media. Read more here Tableaux Photography
Anna Gaskell vs Hannah Starkey > childhood vs adolescent > memories vs fairytales > literature vs cinema
Anna GaskellHannah Starkey
Alfonso Almendros vs Maria Kapajeva > family reflections > memories > childhood
Alfonso Almendros, Family ReflectionsMaria Kapajeva
Archival approach > photographs, moving image, sound recordings, documents and objects from public or private archives, such as family history, diaries, letters, financial and legal documents, photo-albums, mobile devices, online/ social media platforms. Archives can be a rich source for finding starting points on your creative journey. This will strengthen your research and lead towards discoveries about the past that will inform the way you interpret the present and anticipate the future. See more Public/ Private Archives
Rita Puig-Serra Costa (Where Mimosa Bloom) vs Laia Abril (The Epilogue)> artists exploring personal issues > vernacular vs archival > inside vs outside
Rita Puig-Serra Coasta, Where Mimosa BloomLaia Abril, The Epiloque
Carole Benitah (Photo Souvenirs) vs Pete Pin > family > identity > memory > absence > trauma
CAROLE BÉNITAH is a French Moroccan photographer. Her work explores ideas of memory, family and the passing of time. Often pairing old family snapshots with handmade additions, such as embroidery, beading and ink drawings, Bénitah seeks to reinterpret her own history as a daughter, wife and mother. Here is LINK to the gallery that represents her with a brief description of her work. Read also an interview with Benitah HERE.
Carole Benitah, Photo-Souvenirs
With each stitch I make a hole with a needle. Each hole is a putting to death of my demons. It’s like an exorcism. I make holes in paper until I am not hurting any more.
—Carolle Benitah
Pete Pin
Ugne Henriko (Mother and Daughter) vs Irina Werning vs Chino Otsuka > re-staging images > re-enacting memories
Phillip Toledano:Days with my Father DAYS WITH MY FATHER is a son’s photo journal of his aging father’s last years. Following the death of his mother, photographer Phillip Toledano was shocked to learn of the extent of his father’s severe memory loss. He started a blog on which he posted photographs and accompanying reflections on his father’s changing state.. Through sometimes sad, often funny, and always loving observations, we follow Toledano as he learns to reconcile the elderly man living in a twilight of half memories that his father has become, with the ambitious and handsome young man he occasionally still sees glimpses of.. DAYS WITH MY FATHER is an honest and moving reflection about coming to terms with an aging parent.
Philip Toledano from his book: My Mum died suddenly on September 4th, 2006
After she died, I realized how much she’d been shielding me from my father’s mental state.
He doesn’t have alzheimers, but he has no short-term memory, and is often lost.
I took him to my mother’s funeral, and to the burial, but when we got home, he’d ask me every 15 minutes where my mother was. I’d explain carefully that she had died, and we’d been to her funeral.
This was shocking news to him
Why had no-one told him? Why hadn’t I taken him to the funeral? Why hadn’t he visited her in the hospital?
He had no memory of these events.
After a while, I realized I couldn’t keep telling him that his wife had died. He didn’t remember, and it was killing both of us, to re-live her death constantly.
I decided to tell him she’d gone to Paris, to take care of her brother, who was sick.
And that’s where she is now.
This site is a journal.
An ongoing record of my father, and of our relationship.
For whatever days we have left together.
Mitch Epstein ‘Family Business
Julian Germain:For every minute you are angry you loose sixty seconds of happiness. A Portrait of an elderly gentleman. Photographs by Julian Germain with the photo albums of Charles and Betty Snelling
“I met Charles Albert Lucien Snelling on a Saturday in April, 1992. He lived in a typical two-up, two-down terraced house amongst many other two-up, two-down terraced houses… it was yellow and orange. In that respect it was totally different from every other house on the street. Charlie was a simple, gentle man. He loved flowers and the names of flowers. He loved color and surrounded himself with color. He loved his wife. Without ever trying or intending to, he showed me that the most important things in life cost nothing at all. He was my antidote to modern living.” Over eight years, photographer Julian Germain documented Charlie, an elderly man living alone on England’s Southern Coast, unfettered by the misplaced aspirations of the modern world; instead he spent the last years of his life absorbed in memories of his family, his love for flowers, music and the quotidian pleasures of the crossword. Germain’s charming photographs are a beautiful, gentle portrait of a gentleman in his twilight years.
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness; photo album; Charles SnellingFor every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness; photo album; Charles Snelling
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.
TASKS > produce a number of appropriate blog posts
PRACTICE > PHOTO-ASSIGNMENTS
Documentary: make one environmental portrait using a family member.
Tableaux: construct a childhood memory in a photograph.
Archive: produce a montage that must include an archival image from your family/ personal photo- album.
RESEARCH > ANALYSIS: As starting points for your tasks, choose to look at a comparative study of the pairing of artists references above in each area of Documentary, Tableaux and Archive.
Write a thoughtful evaluation of each artists and consider how their work is referencing the theme of family – discuss the subject-matter, content, concept, context, construction, composition, camera, then compare, contrast and critique. Ask yourself: What? Why? How?
Remember to MAKE YOUR BLOG POST VISUAL and include relevant links, podcasts, videos where possible.
ARTISTS REFERENCES: Follow these steps to success!
Produce a mood board with a selection of images.
Provide analysis of their work and explain why you have chosen them and how it relates to your idea and the theme of FAMILY
Select at least 2 key images and analyse in depth, FORM (describe what you see, composition, use of light etc), MEANING (interpretation, subject-matter, what is the photographer trying to communicate), JUDGEMENT (evaluation, how good is it?), CONTEXT (history and theory of art/ photography/ visual culture, link to other’s work/ideas/concept)
Incorporate quotes and comments from artist themselves or others (art critics, art 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 to the above sources in your blog post
PLANNING > RECORDING: Plan at least 1 shoot as a response to each photo-assignment above. Show evidence of planning using mind-maps, mood-boards and write a specification with details of how, why, when, where, whom? Be organised and complete one shoot per photo-assignment per week.
DEVELOPING > EXPERIMENTING: Edit shoots and show experimentation with different adjustments/ techniques/ processes in Lightroom/ Photoshop appropriate to intentions. Reflect and evaluate each shoot afterwards with thoughts on how to refine and modify your ideas i.e. experiment with images in Lightroom/Photoshop, re-visit idea, produce a new shoot, what are you going to do differently next time? How are you going to develop your ideas?
EXTENSION: Explore your own family/ personal archives such as photo-albums, home movies, letters, boxes and make a blog post with a selection of material that will inform and develop your Personal Investigation. For example. you can focus on the life on one parent, grand-parent, family relative, or your own childhood and upbringing.
Either scan or re-photograph archival material so that it is digitised and ready for use on the blog and further experimentation.
Plan at least one photo-shoot and make a set of images that respond to your archival research above and/ or Personal Investigation.
For most of my life, my father was nothing more than a cut out in our family album.
An empty hole.
A reminder of what wasn’t there.
I have few childhood memories of him.
In one, we are dancing together in our tiny apartment in Moscow. In another, he is leaving.
My father would disappear for months at a time. Then, unexpectedly, he would come home.
Until, one day, it was our turn to leave.
The year was 1996.
My mother woke me up and told me to pack my belongings. She said we were going on a trip, and the next morning we arrived in our new home, in California.
We never said goodbye to my father.
For my mom, the solution to forget him was simple. She cut his image out of every photograph. But those holes made it harder for me to forget him.
I often wondered what it would have been like to have a father.
When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.
Inspired by the 1980s American soap opera Santa Barbara, my mother enrolled with an agency in Russia that posted listings in American newspapers and catalogs for so-called mail-order brides. She was 35. We arrived to the coastal town of Santa Barbara, and were met by an older man who would soon become her husband, and take the place of my own father. And this is where the story begins. The idea of touching something that felt untouchable.
I returned to Russia to visit the scattered remnants of my father’s memory. In fact, I hardly know anything about him. He died before I turned two. I have no personal memories of him. Almost nothing that could have recalled its existence has survived. There was just his camera. When I was nine, I found it in the closet where my mother had kept it safe for years. I took it apart to the last screw as if I was looking for something hidden inside. With my own unconscious hands, I destroyed the last object that bound us to my father.
There are still his photos, which he had taken and drawn himself. My father was an amateur photographer. In one of these photos, I am a five month old baby lying face down on my parents’ bed. My eyes are fixed on him, the photographer. My father, who has only thirteen months to live.
His untimely death made him an abstract character, a shadow at the gates of nothingness. He was almost forgotten. No one spoke of him anymore. His grave has been abandoned. All I knew about him was from a few stories that people who knew him told me. Despite everything, these stories told and repeated with more or less precision depending on the witness maintained a semblance of memory. Just as folklore is passed on, repeated and revised from generation to generation.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family
In this, her first book, LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982) offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s hometown. The work also considers the impact of that decline on the community and on her family, creating a statement both personal and truly political
Sophie Calle: Venetian Suite
Sophie Calle’s practice is characterised by performances using rule-based scenarios, which she then documents. Venetian Suite consists of black and white photographs, texts and maps that document a journey the artist made to Venice in order to follow a man, referred to only as Henri B., whom she had previously briefly met in Paris. Although Calle undertook the journey in 1979, the texts describe the actions as taking place in 1980. Venetian Suite records Calle’s attempts to track her subject over the course of his thirteen-day stay in Venice. She investigates and stalks him, enlisting the help of friends and acquaintances she makes in the city. Eventually Henri B. recognises Calle, and they share a silent walk. Even after this encounter Calle continues her project, shadowing Henri B. from a distance until his arrival back in Paris. The work was initially produced in book form in 1983; the same year Calle also presented the work as a sound installation in a confessional booth. In 1996 she configured Venetian Suite as a gallery-based work, the appearance of which deliberately recalls a detective casebook, with texts written in a style that mimics and deconstructs the narrative tension typical of detective novels or film noir. The text begins as follows:
For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them. At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him. (Calle and Baudrillard 1988, p.2.)
Matt Eich:I Love You, I’m leaving
This books is my meditation on familial bonds, longing, and memory. The series borrows from personal experience and the visual language of the everyday in order to create a fictional account that mirrors my reality. Made during a time of personal domestic unease, I photographed as my parents separated, and my family moved to a new city.
Yoshikatsu Fujii:Red Strings I received a text message. “Today, our divorce was finalized.” The message from my mother was written simply, even though she usually sends me messages with many pictures and symbols.
https://vimeo.com/102344549
I remember that I didn’t feel any particular emotion, except that the time had come. Because my parents continued to live apart in the same house for a long time, their relationship gently came to an end over the years. It was no wonder that a draft blowing between the two could completely break the family at any time.
In Japan, legend has it that a man and woman who are predestined to meet have been tied at the little finger by an invisible red string since the time they were born. Unfortunately, the red string tying my parents undone, broke, or perhaps was never even tied to begin with. But if the two had never met, I would never have been born into this world. If anything, you might say that there is an unbreakable red string of fate between parent and child.
Before long, I found myself thinking about the relationship between my parents and . How many days could I see my parents living far away? What if I couldn’t see them anymore? Since I couldn’t help feeling extremely anxious about it, I was driven to visit my parents’ house many times. Every day I engage in awkward conversation with my parents, as if in a scene in their daily lives. I adapt myself to them, and they shift their attitude toward me. We do not give way entirely to the other side, but rather meet halfway. Indeed family problems remain unresolved, although sometimes we tell allegorical stories and share feelings. It means a lot to us that our perspectives have changed with communication.
My family will probably never be all together again. But I feel without a doubt that there is proof inside of each of us that we once lived together. To ensure that the red string that ties my family together does not come undone, I want to reel it in and tie it tight.
MORE PHOTOBOOKS: A few photobooks dealing with memory, loss and love
Yury Toroptsov:Deleted Scene
On a mission to photograph the invisible, with Deleted Scene photographer Yury Toroptsov takes us to Eastern Siberia in a unique story of pursuit along intermingling lines that form a complex labyrinth. His introspective journey in search of a father gone too soon crosses that of Akira Kurosawa who, in 1974, came to visit and film that same place where lived the hunter Dersu Uzala.
Yury Toroptsov is not indifferent to the parallels between hunting and photography, which the common vocabulary makes clear. Archival documents, old photographs, views of the timeless taiga or of contemporary Siberia, fragments or deleted scenes are arranged here as elements of a narrative. They come as clues or pebbles dropped on the edge of an invisible path where the viewer is invited to lose himself and the hunter is encouraged to continue his relentless pursuit.
Rita Puig Serra Costa: Where Mimosa Bloom
https://vimeo.com/124694405
Dealing with the grief that the photographer suffered following the death of her mother, Where Mimosa Bloom by Rita Puig Serra Costatakes the form of an extended farewell letter; with photography skillfully used to present a visual eulogy or panegyric. This grief memoir about the loss of her mother is part meditative photo essay, part family biography and part personal message to her mother. These elements combine to form a fascinating and intriguing discourse on love, loss and sorrow.
“Where Mimosa Bloom” is the result of over two years work spent collecting and curating materials and taking photographs of places, objects and people that played a significant role in her relationship to her mother. Rita Puig Serra Costa skillfully avoids the dangerous lure of grief’s self-pity, isolationism, world-scorn and vanity. The resonance of “Where Mimosa Bloom” comes from all it doesn’t say, as well as all that it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief. Despite E.M.Forster’s words – “One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another” – Rita Puig Serra Costa proves that some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated.
Laia Abril: The Epilogue’
‘The Epilogue’ is the book about the story of the Robinson family – and the aftermath suffered in losing their 26 year old daughter to bulimia. Working closely with the family Laia Abril reconstructs Cammy’s life telling her story through flashbacks – memories, testimonies, objects, letters, places and images. The Epilogue gives voice to the suffering of the family, the indirect victims of ‘eating disorders’, the unwilling eyewitnesses of a very painful degeneration. Laia Abril shows us the dilemmas and struggles confronted by many young girls; the problems families face in dealing with guilt and the grieving process; the frustration of close friends and the dark ghosts of this deadliest of illnesses; all blended together in the bittersweet act of remembering a loved one. Read more here on Laia Abril’s website
Twelve women photographers, both current and former Magnum members, meditate on process in an expansive exhibition at the International Center of Photography.
It’s not about the fetishisation of a subject. But about the motivations and intentions of bearing witness to what’s happening in our world. Each project contributes to a picture of the possibilities of interacting with others and having photographic exchanges. It’s timely. I hope it’s inspiring too.”
Charlotte Cotton, Close Enough’s curator
Alessandra Sanguinetti: ARGENTINA. Buenos Aires. 1999. The Necklace.
Over a period of five years, Alessandra Sanguinetti documented the relationship and transition to adolescence of two cousins in Argentina. The images has been published in two photobooks: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. Read more here
ciggarette 001
Exploring the possibilities of photography has been at Magnum’s heart since its inception. Founded in 1947 in the shadow of World War Two, the agency marked the alliance of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, bound by their curiosity in photography and the world. Storytelling was central from the beginning. The show’s title playfully rifts off Capa’s famous saying: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.“ The quote evokes the idea of an intrepid documentarian, an image to which Magnum is bound despite not being entirely accurate then or now. “If you think about the photographic spectrum within Magnum, it’s always surprising that it’s still dominated by Robert Capa on one end, with frontline, photojournalistic work, and Cartier-Bresson on the other, with more formal concerns expressed in street photography,“ says Meiselas. “But, between those two, my male and female colleagues take more diverse approaches with their photography.“
Today’s collective remains an amorphous entity with a greatly expanded membership for whom Capa’s charge will mean many things. In the show’s context, one might interpret ‘close enough’ as remaining an ethos of sorts. But one with different connotations: relating to an intangible photographer-subject relationship, as opposed to the physical proximity of the camera. A sense of relationality snakes through the exhibition present within each project. It also emerges between the photographers themselves: three generations of women who belong, or have belonged, to the collective. As Meiselas reflects, “What has interested me as the bridge between the earlier culture of women in Magnum – Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Marilyn Silverstone, Martine Franck, and myself – and this new generation, is how they see the world differently. It’s not to say that there aren’t men within Magnum and outside our community who develop extended relationships like these. The show was not conceived to exclude men, but rather to be inclusive of women and allow them to reveal the kinds of connections that they have in their work as they interface in dialogue with each other.“
Susan Meiselas is joined by Olivia Arthur, Myriam Boulos, Sabiha Çimen, Cristina de Middel, Bieke Depoorter, Carolyn Drake, Nanna Heitmann, Hannah Price, Lua Ribeira, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Newsha Tavakolian. It would be impossible to do justice to the individual projects here, but to learn more from several of the participating artists, listen to discussions, co-produced by Magnum and British Journal of Photography, here.
‘I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.’
Best known for her powerful portraits, Cameron’s photographs were highly innovative: intentionally out-of-focus and often including scratches, smudges and other traces of her process. In her lifetime, Cameron was criticised for her unconventional techniques, but also appreciated for the beauty of her compositions and her conviction that photography was an art form.
Julia Margaret began her photographic career at the age of 48 when she received her first camera as a gift from her daughter. She quickly and energetically devoted herself to the art of photography. Within two years Cameron had sold and given her photographs to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), which in 1868 granted her the use of two rooms as a portrait studio, effectively making her our first artist-in-residence.
The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London holds the largest collection of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work and has an excellent online catalogue of some of her most reveried portraits as well as a lot of detailed information about her life and work, including her methods of working
Cameron’s: working methods: Her mistakes were her successes
Cameron included imperfections in her photographs – streaks, swirls and even fingerprints – that other photographers would have rejected as technical flaws. Although criticised at the time, these imperfections can now be appreciated as ahead of their time. In her work Iolande and Floss, for example, swirls of collodion used during the photographic process merge with the swirls of drapery, enhancing the dreamy, ethereal quality of the image.
We don’t know if Cameron herself embraced these ‘flaws’ or if she simply tolerated them. We do know, however, that she sometimes scratched into her negatives to make corrections; printed from broken or damaged negatives and occasionally used multiple negatives to form a single picture, which tells us that she didn’t mind a certain level of visible imperfection, at the very least.
One of her most extreme examples of manipulating a negative can be seen in a portrait of Julia Jackson. Cameron scratched a picture into the background of this pious portrait of her niece, to create a hybrid photograph-drawing. The drawing of a draped figure in an architectural setting evokes religious art.
Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition: Arresting Beauty at Jeu de Paume, Paris
Pictorialism: An international movement comprised of loosely linked camera clubs and societies that sought to highlight the artistic possibilities of photography and argue that it was a fine art equal to painting, sculpture, and other traditional mediums. Active from the late 19th century to around 1914, the Pictorialists preferred romantic or idealized imagery, used soft focus, and framed or staged scenes according to the compositional principles of painting. In order to emphasize the artist’s hand and counter the argument that photography was an entirely mechanical medium, they often used labor-intensive darkroom processes to produce unique prints. Outside of the darkroom, they mounted international salons and exhibitions and published portfolios and journals, through which they further influenced how photography was discussed and regarded.
Justine Kurland:Girl Pictures Between 1997 and 2002, the photographer portrayed teenage girls as rebels, offering a radical vision of community against the masculine myth of the American landscape.
daisy chain 001
The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth—cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. “I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals,” says Kurland. She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes—paying no mind to the camera (or the viewer). Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.
candy tosspink tree leechesboy torture lovegolden fielddouble headed spit monstership wreckedguardian angel the wallsnow angel
Doug DuBois: My Last Days of Seventeen The title, “My last day at Seventeen,” was first uttered by Eirn while I was taking her photograph in her parents’ back garden on the eve of her 18th birthday. Although Eirn argues her remark was more properly phrased, “ it’s my last day as seventeen” the sentiment is the same: there is a time in everyone’s life where the freedom and promise of childhood are lost to the coming of age and experience. The process can be gradual or abrupt; it can begin at age 18, 12 or 40.
The photographs were made over a five year period in the town of Cobh, County Cork in Ireland. I came to Cobh at the invitation of the Sirius Arts Centre in the summer of 2009. Ireland had just begun its sharp decline from the boom years of the Celtic Tiger. I spent my days trying to ingratiate myself with contractors to gain access to building sites that lay abandoned throughout the Irish countryside. I got nowhere.
Doug DuBois image from book, My Last Days of Seventeen. 2015
Ewen Spencer:Young Love
In the year 2000, Spencer was commissioned by Graham Rounthwaite at British music,
fashion and culture magazine The Face to create a series focusing on youth clubs
across the United Kingdom. From Cornwall to Lancashire, Spencer photographed teens
goers as they drank, danced and fell in and out of love and lust.
Dana Lixenberg:Imperial Courts Imperial Courts, 1993-2015 is a project by photographer Dana Lixenberg about Imperial Courts, a social housing project in Watts, Los Angeles. The project contains work made over a period of 22 years and consists of a book, exhibition and web documentary. Look at the website which include all her photographs and video interviews.
Imperial Courts subtly addresses issues of inequality and injustice while avoiding stereotypical representation. Using multiple platforms, from silver gelatin prints, a carefully edited publication, video installation, and an online web documentary, the project serves as an evocative record of the passage of time in an underserved community. The power of Lixenberg’s work can be found in the intimacy, compassion and quiet confidence of her images, and of the individuals we meet through the series. Read interview here with Dana Lixenberg in the Guardian newspaper
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.
Jim Goldberg:Raised By Wolves. The personal story behind the making and the legacy of Goldberg’s seminal work about marginalized youth, which occupies the liminal space between documentary and narrative fiction.
Often considered Goldberg’s seminal project, Raised by Wolves combines ten years of original photographs, text, and other illustrative elements (home movie stills, snapshots, drawings, diary entries, and images of discarded belongings) to document the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The book quickly became a classic in the photobook canon and, thus, the original is essentially unavailable.
Read article here in the Guardian and a thorough insight here on Magnum Photos. For more Theory and Practice, read here
USA. San Francisco. 1986. “Echo Waiting (Polk and Sutter).”USA. San Francisco . 1989. Dave and Cookie jonesin’. Coming down off of drugs.USA. Hollywood, California. 1989. “I’m Dave.”
Jim Goldberg: Rich and Poor The photographs in this book constitute a shocking and gripping portrait of contemporary America. Jim Goldberg’s photographs of rich and poor people, with the subjects’ own handwritten comments about themselves on the prints, give us an inside look at the American dream at both ends of the social scale.His pictures reveal his subjects’ innermost fears and aspirations, their perceptions and illusions about themselves, with a frankness that makes the portraits as engrossing as they are disturbing.
USA. San Francisco. 1983. “We look like ordinary people! We have a terrible life.”
Jen Davis has spent eleven years working on a series of self-portrait ’s dealing with issues regarding beauty, identity, and body image. Her poignant and beautifully articulated photographs have recently been published Kehrer Verlag in a monograph titled, Eleven Years.For over a decade Jen has bravely turned the camera on herself revealing a journey of self analysis and self awareness that while very personal, it incredibly universal. Her work reflected a mastery of light and color.
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
PEOPLE and PORTRAITURE
A simple and direct approach to portrait photography can be very powerful. August Sander is 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 & DaughterThe Married CoupleThe 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.
Alec Both:Broken Manual In Alec Soth’s Broken Manual (2006–10) he documents men living off the grid. His atmospheric images, both colour and black and white, are of monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways who all have in common the need to disappear in America.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qzi9bF3lqgY?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&cc_lang_pref=&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=0&rel=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&color=red&controls=1&On portraiture and photographic storytelling
https://www.youtube.com/embed/cks_13JE3iw?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&cc_lang_pref=&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=0&rel=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&color=red&controls=1&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
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jd-gMm3ngtY?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&cc_lang_pref=&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=0&rel=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&color=red&controls=1&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.’
https://www.youtube.com/embed/HEOV8kbio7A?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&cc_lang_pref=&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=0&rel=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&color=red&controls=1&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.
PHOTOGRAPHY & GENDER PERFORMING IDENTITIES > ACTING OUT > MASQUAREDE
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.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/tiszC33puc0?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&cc_lang_pref=&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=0&rel=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&color=red&controls=1&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, Justine Kurland, 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
SHAN O’DONNELL
Here is a link to her website, a short biography below and examples of key works:
I am an artist born in Jersey, Channel Islands. Currently based in Cardiff, Wales my practice explores themes around the gendered experience with a focus on femininity and masculinity as gendered traits. Through deep research and a sociological approach my work explores the self and identity.
My fascination lies with questioning society and challenging traditional views of gender through my work. My work is informed by my personal experience and through interviewing specific demographics to help gage a sociological understanding of how gender is viewed or challenged within mainstream society.
MASCULINITIES: LIBERATION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY
MASCULINITIES: LIBERATION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY Through the medium of film and photography, this major exhibition considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity from behind the lens, the exhibition brings together over 300 works by over 50 pioneering international artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Catherine Opie to show how photography and film have been central to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture. The show also highlightslesser-known and younger artists – some of whom have never exhibited in the UK – including Cassils, Sam Contis, George Dureau, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas, Karlheinz Weinberger and Marianne Wex amongst many others. Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is part of the Barbican’s 2020 season, Inside Out, which explores the relationship between our inner lives and creativity.
In the wake of #MeToo the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, female perceptions of men, hypermasculine stereotypes, tenderness and the family, the exhibition shows how central photography and film have been to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture.
Here is a downloadable teaching resource that includes information, activities and tasks that will help you develop ideas.
Sam Contis: Deep Springs
List some from Windows & Mirrors > historical Contemporary – see old blog posts on family/ community/ documentary/ tableaux
Trish Morissey, Claude Cahun
Windows & Mirrors Windows: Dave Heath, Danny Lyon, Mark Cohen, George Tice, Joseph Dankowski, Paul Caponigro, Richard Misrach, John Divola, Lewis Baltz, Mirrors: Duane Michals, Robert Heinecken, Ralps Gibson Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samares, Emmet Gowin, Robert Mapplethorpe
Surrealism: Jerry N Uelsmann
Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara – see 2016 blog for video + intyer
FILMMAKERS / CINEMA
Have a look at the many references to video art, avantgarde cinema and experimental filmmaking listed in these blogposts below
The syllabus states clearly that you have to be aware of some of the methods employed by critics and historians within the history of art and photography.
To demonstrate your knowledge and understanding you will have to write a paragraph in your essay providing historical context about your chosen artists/ photographers and how their work and practice is linked to a specific period of photographic history, art movement/ ism or theory.
For this task you need to select an art movement and ism that is relevant to your Personal Study.
Pictorialism
Realism / Straight Photography
Modernism
Post-modernism
Follow these instructions:
1. Start by watching the films below, study PPT presentations and read articles here which will provide you with an overview.
2. Copy the text from the sheet here and produce a blog post with the information needed for each art movement as basic knowledge from which to develop your study further.
3. Choose one of the art movements/ isms relevant to your Personal Study and write 500 words which would form the basis of paragraph 1 in your essay on Historical/ theoretical context and publish on blog.
Homework Task Produce a photographic response to Art Movement/ Isms Deadline: Mon 18 Dec
Make a creative response to your research and analysis of an art movement/ ism that is relevant to your personal study project. This could be a new photo-shoot or re-working images/ material already made. Aim to produce at least 3 different creative outcomes and produce a blog post with your responses and an evaluation.
RESOURCES >ARCHIVES
Archives can be a rich source for finding starting points on your creative journey. This will strengthen your research and lead towards discoveries about the past that will inform the way you interpret the present and anticipate the future. During this term we had planned for us to visit two public archives, first the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive which contains over 100,000 items dating from the mid-1840s to the present day and is the principal Jersey collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century photography. The second was Jersey Archive that has collected over 300,000 archival records and is the island’s national repository holding archival material from public institutions as well as private businesses and individuals, including important photographic collections such as Jersey Evening Post and many of the iconic images of Surrealist artist and activist, Claude Cahun, who we will be studying in depth as part of the theme REBELLION. However, due to current restrictions on school trips we will instead explore their archives and resources online and postpone visiting the institutions.
‘island’ – a piece of land completely surrounded by water
Before we continue, let’s consider more closely what the concept of islandness is. As ontology is concerned with the nature of being, islandness could be defined, or described as:
The property of being or belonging to an island, especially insofar as it affects society and culture.
Or put more simply: A focus on islands and island communities.
If we consider this more carefully, we think of islandness within the context of:
Island characteristics
A sense of place and identity
Isolation vs connectedness
Insularity– (geographical, cultural, political, social and economic constraints)
ISLAND IDENTITY
What makes Jersey special and why does that matter? These two simple-sounding questions underpin the creation of a new ISLAND IDENTITY project led by Deputy Carolyn Labey, Deputy of Grouville, Assistant Chief Minister and Minister for International Development.
RATIONALE: Our national Identity – how we see ourselves and how others see us – matters a great deal. In Jersey, our ability to work together, care for each other, grow our economy and look after our environment depends on us being bound to each other by more than a shared geography and set of rules. Whatever our backgrounds or occupations, we can benefit from a shared sense of belonging and a shared understanding of what it means to be Jersey.
The ISLAND IDENTITY project has produced a website and a report that has identified distinctive qualities of island life in Jersey. You may wish to explore one of those key themes more in-depth as a concept for your project. They are:
Constitution & Citizenship Communities International Economy Education & Sport Heritage, Culture & the Arts Environment
RESEARCH: Produce a poster that reflects on one of the key areas listed above.
1. What makes Jersey special and why does it matter to you? 2. What does it mean to be ‘Jersey’, now and in the future? 3. What can we all do to solidify a cohesive and positive Island identity? 4. Are there barriers to a positive and inclusive Island identity? (What requires a greater focus and what is being missed?)
Consider ways you could explore the topic through photography and/or film.
Develop a concept and provide a number of creative starting points for a project.
Poster must be visually stimulating using a combination of images, graphics and text.
Present your poster and ideas in class by Fri 19 Nov.
Publish poster on the blog and write an evaluation by Mon 22 Nov.
CONSIDER Island Identity: Jersey’s geological sites of special interest and its natural landscape, Medieval architecture and castles, Neolithic structures and archaeology, German fortifications, influence of Norman culture and language; ie. cultural festivals/ social rituals/ Jérriais speakers/ place names, agricultural heritage; Jersey cow, Royal potato, cider making, knitting, maritime history; privateering, North Atlantic cod-fisheries, worldwide merchant trade, ship building, International Finance Centre; tax heaven, Tourism; a Victorian seaside retreat, 1960s, 70s and 80s heyday of mass tourism, Current housing crisis and cost of living, Environmental protection and sustainable living, Future issues for young people of Jersey???
Illustrate it with images where appropriate and include hyperlinks to resources and any references that may help you to develop your ideas further.
The brief is to show JERSEY through your eyes as students of photography. Reviewing your past projects, moodboard and mindmap write 250-500 words where you consider the following:
What makes you feel nostalgic about Jersey, or where you live?
What are the distinct qualities of island life?
A sense of place and identity
Explore the notion of the ‘Jersey way’ or ‘Jersey-ness’.
What makes a person’s identity? Identity is simply defined as the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is. Elements or characteristics of identity would include race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical attributes, personality, political affiliations, religious beliefs, professional identities, and so on.
What does the word “identity” mean to you? Identity is about positive traits; it also can be negative traits. It’s a combination of things that you do; it’s your talents, it’s your strengths, it’s your passions, it’s what you love, it’s what you care about.
JERSEY – A CROWN DEPENDENCY
RESEARCH > Explore why Jersey is a Crown Dependency. Produce a blog post with text and images (incl video links) that illustrates your understanding of Jersey constitutional relationship with the UK.
The Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown dependency, which means that it is not part of the UK but is rather a self-governing possession of the British Crown. However, the UK Government is constitutionally responsible for its defense and international representation.
TASK: Choose one binary opposite below that is linked with the theme of ‘islandness’ and Jersey’s constitutional relationship with the UK and produce a set of 3 images that illustrates each word.
inwards vs outward
negative vs positive
closure vs openness
isolation vs connectedness
autonomy vs dependence
Week 14: 11 – 17 Dec Theory & Practice: Art Movements & Isms HOMEWORK: Photographic response Deadline Wed 14 Dec complete the following blogposts
Week 15 + XMAS: 18 Dec – 4 Jan Essay: Academic study skills Book/Film: Plan 3 photoshoots for Xmas
ESSAY
Mon: Literary sources:
Research and identify 3-5 literary sources from a variety of media such as books, journal/magazines, internet, Youtube/video that relates to your personal study and artists references .
Begin to read essay, texts and interviews with your chosen artists as well as commentary from critics, historians and others.
It’s important that you show evidence of reading and draw upon different pints of view – not only your own.
Take notes when you’re reading…key words, concepts, passages
Write down page number, author, year, title, publisher, place of publication so you can list source in a bibliography
Bibliography
List all the sources that you have identified above as literary sources. Where there are two or more works by one author in the same year distinguish them as 1988a, 1988b etc. Arrange literature in alphabetical order by author, or where no author is named, by the name of the museum or other organisation which produced the text. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources in alphabetical order e.g. websites/online sources, Youtube/ DVD/TV.
Quotation and Referencing:
Use quotes to support or disprove your argument
Use quotes to show evidence of reading
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
TUE: Essay Question
Think of a hypothesis and list possible essay questions
Wed: Essay Plan Make a plan that lists what you are going to write about in each paragraph – essay structure
Essay question:
Opening quote
Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?
Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography and visual culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian where appropriate.
Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced
Bibliography: List all relevant sources used
BOOK/ FILM
Thurs: Plan Photo-shoots
Produce a blog post with a detailed plan of at least 3-4 photoshoots that you intend on doing in response to your Personal Study in the next 3-4 weeks – including Christmas break. Follow these instructions: what, why, how, when, where?
RECORDING: Produce a number of photographic response to your Personal Study and bring images from new photo-shoots to lessons: READING: Key texts (interviews, reviews, articles etc.) about your subject, photo-history and chosen artists in preparation of writing your essay in January.
Mitch Epstein ‘Family Business
