“Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), a French photographer who is considered to be one of the creators of photojournalism and masters of candid photography. He sought to capture the ‘everyday’ in his photographs and took great interest in recording human activity.

As a reporter and co-founder of the Magnum photography agency, Cartier-Bresson accepted his responsibility to supply information to a world in a hurry. He documented the liberation of Paris, the collapse of the Nationalist regime in China, Gandhi’s funeral and the partitioning of Berlin.

Cartier-Bresson helped develop the street photography style that has influenced generations of photographers that followed, his work has such a large impact and influence on street photographers because his work was influenced by Surrealism.

The Decisive Moment

The Decisive Moment, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s influential publication, is widely considered to be one of the most important photobooks of the twentieth century. Pioneering for its emphasis on the photograph itself as a unique narrative form, The Decisive Moment was described by Robert Capa as “a Bible for photographers.” Originally titled Images à la Sauvette (“images on the run”) in the French, the book was published in English with a new title, The Decisive Moment, which unintentionally imposed the motto which would define Cartier-Bresson’s work.

During a workshop with Will Lakeman, we experimented with DreamStudio and the Photoshop AI.

On Photoshop I used neural filters and generative fill to create this image:

I then used it as a prompt in DreamStudio and made lots of different variations:

My personal favourite variation is this one as it’s the closest one to what I wanted:

Also, at the start of the workshop we experimented with DreamStudio, I put in the prompt “Cats in Roller-skates” to see what would come up and this came up:

Wikipedia definition of Nostalgia:

Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.

Nostalgia is associated with a longing for the past, its personalities, possibilities, and events, especially a “warm childhood”. There is a predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, for people to view the past more favourably and future more negatively. When applied to one’s beliefs about a society or institution, it’s been described as “an emotional strategy”, something comforting to snuggle up to when the present day seems intolerably bleak.

Nostalgia to me:

 My Moodboard:

These are things that make me think of my childhood – I thought I’d recreate this reminder in a Moodboard of things that I think of when I’m asked about my childhood.

The work in this exciting exhibition recreates the strange hold that childhood spaces have on our adult memories, all centred around the Jersey childhood mecca of old Fort Regent. Lakeman is a photographer who has nurtured an obsessive interest in ‘the Fort’, and has spent his adult life revisiting weird dreams of this iconic building and its heyday in the early 1990s.

This exhibition includes a lot of bright colours, I think when you’re young everything seems more colourful, which the AI that created these images portrayed very well. I think that when people think of their childhoods, it seems a lot more drastically fun than it would have been in reality. Lakeman was describing one of the images in the exhibition, which includes a snake slide, he said that from his memory, the snake slide was, in appearance, a lot more fun than it actually was. I think a lot of people do this subconsciously, they want things to be more fun than they possibly could have been. In a place like Jersey, where there isn’t much to do for young people, a lot of people who grew up while the fort was a leisure centre may make it more colourful or fun in their imaginations than it was. 

Will Lakeman used his childhood memories of the Fort to create the exhibition. The way the exhibition was structured was very interesting, it was separated into different sections to show the different sections of the leisure centre that were there, each one having a scent diffuser and audio track to make the area seem real, for example the funfair had a diffuser to give a faint smell of popcorn and low noises from the funfair and the “pool” area had a faint smell of chlorine and low water noises. This makes a lot of people who grew up when it was that way feel that they’re there again.  

A lot of AI image generators create very colourful images, in dreams all your senses are heighten, especially your sight, everything seems brighter in light and colour.  Lakeman described one of his experiences at the pool where he hadn’t eaten, and all the colours became more colourful, the yellow tones from the sun increasing and seeing squares all around the area, he created the experience into an image with AI. 

Using artsteps gallery creator, I made my virtual gallery.

 I first chose the space that my gallery would be in, in the past I have picked the Industrial Venue, this time round I picked the Modern Venue.

I then selected my images, both the ones I have chosen to print and some of the other images that I didn’t pick to be printed. This left me with 17 images to put into the gallery.

 The gallery with all the images in:

As I said before, most of the images are my final outcomes; the environmental portraits, the red and blue lighting images on the side of them, the images in the mirror (the coloured ones and the regular lighting ones), the images in the suit. I have also included some images that I liked during the project but didn’t include because they weren’t my best or I just had a lot of prints already, this was done to fill in any big gaps in the gallery.

Throughout the entire project I put a lot of work into it to create some strong outcomes. I really enjoyed being able to creative freedom during the project.

The environmental portraits was a part I struggled to come up with ideas for, changing my idea three or four times before choosing to do what I ended up doing, making images of one of the bakers at Vienna Bakery making the pastries.

One of my favourite parts of this project was experimenting with different lighting techniques, making images with both Rembrandt Lighting and Butterfly Lighting. We also got to do different colours of lighting, using different gels on the lights to make images with brightly coloured lighting.

We tried different experiments like making Diamond Cameos and Double Exposures, my personal favourite out all of them was the Double Exposures and having fun with it.

Finally, the identity mini-topic, this was my favourite part of the portraiture project. I got to express my own identity as an androgynous person through my photography, doing two separate shoots of selfies, looking androgynous. In one shoot, I’m wearing a shirt and blazer and have slightly harsher lighting, showing the masculine side of androgyny and the other shoot, I am showing the more feminine side of androgyny, wearing more typically “feminine” clothing and am in less harsh lighting.

Overall, this portrait topic was my favourite topic we’ve done so far in class, I got to have fun and express myself properly through the images.

How I mounted up the final outcomes:

Environmental Portraits

I will be framing these images up together as they’re both environmental portraits and the colouring of the images are similar, that slight dullness of the colour.

Lighting Experiments

This is my favourite image from the studio lighting and experimenting with lighting. I like how both colours are reflecting on the opposite eyes. I will be framing this image up alone, I feel as though it may drown out any other image.

I like these two images as you can see the frame of the mirror and it looks as though he is coming out of the frame of the mirror.

Identity

These images come from the androgyny side of my identity project, I will be framing these together as they are from the same shoot and have a similar appearance in all of them.

These images also come from the androgyny side of the identity project, this shoot was inspired by Claude Cahun’s “Untitled”, using a mirror and photographing my reflection. In all three of these images my arms are in an elaborate position and I’m not looking at the camera, this is why I am framing them up together.

I did a photoshoot inspired by Claude Cahun’s “Untitled”, I used a mirror and, unlike Cahun, faced towards my own reflection. This, in my opinion, is my best outcome from this shoot but I have a few others that are really good.

How I will be framing up my images during the mock:

 I went into the studio to complete my androgyny self-portrait shoot and ended up with about 89 images.

 After picking and editing my favourite images, I had narrowed it down to around 50 images.

My favourite images from this shoot:

Analysis of an image from this shoot:

I really like the set of images this image comes from – the lighting is in the correct place, slightly shadowing half of my body and face, I like the contrast between the brightness of the right side of the image and the slightly shadowed left side of the image. The colouring of the image also fits in with the term “androgyny” which was my aim, I think that the neutral tones (e.g. black and grey) really solidify the idea of androgyny that I wanted to follow. When I see this image, I immediately can see how confident I seem in it, I’m stood in quite a confident position with my head held high. Personally, I think that this image could link to Claude Cahun’s work in expressing her androgynous identity, especially since, like she has in a lot of her work, I have quite a blank expression