Overall, I think this was a very successful project, with the final photobook creating a strong narrative for the viewer to go through. I showed development and experimentation, doing multiple photoshoots and using a variety of archives. I think the interview and the physical manipulation of the archives was a good touch, since it caused the final outcome to be much more personal. I think I told the story of my grandparents and the effect of my grandma’s past well. I think my project could’ve been improved if I took more photographs, giving me a wider selection to choose from and therefore, giving me the opportunity to use the best of the best pictures. I think it would’ve been even better to include physical manipulation on my images, not just the archives, to tie my work in further with my main inspiration, Carolle Bénitah.
my imageCarolle Bénitah’s image
However, the thread arrangements I did on the archives were very successful, and despite being simple (especially when compared to Carolle Bénitah’s work) they added a lot to the pictures and portrayed the metaphors (love and pain) I wanted to show through my work successfully. This is another way I linked my work with Bénitah’s; I included a lot of indirect indications of the story I wanted to tell through my work, as she also used the colour red to show emotion in her work. Moreover, the quotes I included in my photobook (taken from the interview) added a variety in mediums to my photobook, as well as further promoting the narrative. However, I believe I should’ve attempted more complex embroidery, to relate more to Bénitah’s work. The cover was another feature that I think is very successful, the title and picture heavily relating to the photobook, without being a cliché. Using polish for my title and quotes was another factor that made the project more personal. Not only did this project have a good outcome, it helped me connect with my family more.
A sentence: an exploration of how my grandma’s passing effected my grandad’s life
A paragraph: I want to explore my grandad’s life after my grandma died, capturing pictures of him that show a clear lack of her. I want to show a then and now comparison of the two time periods. I want to show it as a story with flashbacks, interchanging with archives and new pictures.
Designing Photobook in Lightroom Classic
How you want your book to look– I want it to tell the story of my grandparents life together, contrasting with how my grandad’s life is now.
Paper and ink– Premium lustre paper- it is semi glossy and photos will look good.
Format, size and orientation– Standard landscape format (10 x 8 inches)
Binding and cover– Hard cover image wrap
Title– Upływ Czasu (The Passing of Time)- links in with the concept of the book and how time alters memories and life. Upływ can also mean flow- relating to the pattern of ocean/ water within the photobook.
Images and text– I will be using a mix of new images and archives, as well as text in the form of quotes within the book.
Image Layout
First thing I decided was that I want my layout to be standard landscape and first page to begin with an archive. I also have decided to add border around each archive- making the colour a light beige and having a width of 12pt.
This is the layout I decided on for my first pages, they cover a mix of my first photoshoot and archives. I want to cause the book to appear as though it has three chapters, each chapter showcasing my 3 photoshoots mixed with archives.
I put these two photos next to each other since the new image is a re-enactment of the old one. I will do this multiple times throughout the photobook.
I paired this image with an archives since the new photo causes my grandad to look as though he is staring at the other photo, creating the sense of longing to be present between the pages.
This is my final layout of the pictures in the photobook.
Essay Layout
I included my essay at the end of my photobook, using size 15 font for my title, size 11 for my main quotes and size 10 for the main bodies of writing. I used the Courier New font as I think it is very clear and easy to read.
I made the quote slightly lighter, to have contrast between my writing and another person’s views.
Final essay layout.
Text Layout
I firstly added writing on the first page- my name in the top right corner and the title of my photobook in the bottom left corner. I called my book Upływ Czasu, which in Polish means The Passing of Time. I put both the title and it’s English translation- the translation in a slightly smaller font and in a lighter colour.
I also added text (key quotes) from the interview I did with my grandad. I think it is effective since it acts as a more direct indication of the story. I decided to add the quotes in polish, making the photobook more personal.
I decided to not make the text too large, making it a size 15. I again went with the ‘courier new’ font, as I did for my essay.
Final layout of the text.
Cover layout
Idea 1
For this cover, I used an archive that I photographed with a thread arranged on it. I made it a two page spread so that it would be wrapped round the front and back cover. The title is in the top right corner.
Idea 2
For this cover, I used the same archive but only put in on the front cover and the spine. I added another image for the back cover, which gives the effect of the back of the picture. I placed the writing in the top right, a thread running between the two words.
For my title, I made a 55 sized font (courier std) and made it red, matching the deep red thread used on the cover and throughout the photobook.
I kept the spine simple, adding my name and the title of the book, making it size 16 and the same shade of red as the title.
The book is trying to tell the story about a persons mother and their loss of identity by losing her. She deals with her grieving by looking for her mother in a variety of objects and nostalgic things, but yet also gives them new life by photographing the old. She uses multiple different genres such as Still life, landscape and portraits combined into one photobook. For her photobook she uses a wide range of using each page such as one singular picture on a double page spread and sometimes two small images only covering the middle of the page. She also uses staged and natural images such as some being old pictures of people going about their daily lives and some where they are directly posing for the picture.
2. Who is the photographer?
I Feel that she made this photobook to share her experiences with losing her mother and to also help other people see a different side of a persons inevitable death and appreciate the time that they had with that person. I also feel that she wants the world to appreciate her mother and see her inner beauty like the way she saw it, and to also treasure her mothers legacy so her name goes unforgotten.
I didn’t end up doing my 3 photoshoots in order so this last one was a bit rushed, I am happy with some of the results of this photoshoot but if I had more time I would make some changes such as bringing more objects to school rather than taking pictures in my house.
When making my photobook I wanted to tell a story with my layout. I chose the standard portrait layout due to my mixture of still-life and portrait images. I personally feel that the majority of my best images are the portrait ones. I wanted a mixture of formats in my photobook so I did a few on a two page spread.
And I did some with three photos on a page
This is my final photobook before I get it printed
Overall I am happy with my final results, I feel that it tells the story I was trying to portray and replicates part of my childhood. For my next project I have learned that I don’t really want to do still-life images as they are a lot harder to capture the emotion that I am trying to express through my photobook.
Considering all my past photoshoots, I realised that my project from last year of ‘Girl Pictures’ is very similar, if not the same as my personal study project. I’ve decided to take a few of my images from that project and use them in my photobook as I got a good grade from that past project and believe they will benefit me in this one. The only issue with this is when I carried out the photoshoots for last years project, it was around spring time. It was lot dry and brighter outside and therefore colours in my images were very saturated this contrasts a lot with my current images in this project as it is winter, its dull and gloomy outside and there is not a lot of strong natural light. So creating darker, more greyscale tones in my photos. I plan on re-visiting my photoshoots from my past project and potentially editing them more to fit in with my current images.
CHOSEN IMAGES FROM PAST PHOTOSHOOT:
Re- edited images
I went back to refine these images and make sure they fitted in alright with my current photobook images. I decreased the texture, highlights and shadows and increased the haze to create the fairy-tale look on the images. This is because my current images all look like this and the lighting from the past photoshoot is a lot more bright and harsh.
EVALUATION: Upon completion of photobook/ film and presentation of prints make sure you evaluate and reflect on your learning and final outcomes. Comment on the following:
Did you realise your intentions?
What references did you make to artists references? comment on technical, visual, contextual, conceptual?
How successful was your final outcomes (book, film, prints etc)?
Evaluation
Throughout this project I have stuck with my main theme of my childhood memories. However, I have adapted what I wanted to do with my theme. To begin with, I didn’t want to include photographs of people but that changed after I looked through my families archives. I ultimately used a collage of old photographs in order to showcase how we each have our own memories, as well as creating a link to my essay on how photography and memories go hand in hand. To showcase the time of these memories, I made the collage on the back of the book focused on images of my grandparents and their lives while the collage on the front cover focuses on my parents lives. Moving on to the inside of the book, I changed my idea of slowly adding in more images since it ended up looking rather out of place, however I compromised on this idea by keeping blank areas throughout the book to symbolise how we only seem to remember key things or events from our past. Lastly, I changed how my images were edited. I had originally planned to have a mix of photos in black and white as well as colour, yet the contrast wasn’t effective and causing the images to lack consistency. Therefore, I ended up linking my images through the saturation which also connects to the idea of childhood memories as we tended to see the world in a brighter perspective.
Regarding my artists reference, Sternfeld, I feel as though I could of linked more to him yet I still feel as though the connection between each of our works are visible. Firstly, the theme of memory helps to present the similarities between the two even if we are focusing on different aspects of it. I also made some landscape images in his style, editing some to have lower exposure the same way he does. In order to improve my relation to his work I could add writing to my work about the images shown, it would also help to connect better to him if I focused more on landscapes overall.
Overall, I would count my project as a success. While there are ways to improve my work such as having more of a variety of images, like more archival photos, I would say that the presentation and final images chosen link and present exactly what I wanted my project to be about.
This image originally had many dark shadows in it so I increased the shadows and blacks to make the image a bit brighter.
I like this image as the wall divides the image into a foreground and background and the subjects in the image are very central. I also increased the texture as the wall was quite blurred and I wanted it to be more defined.
With this image, I decided to decrease the highlights and increase shadows, texture and clarity. I did this because I wanted the hair and the background of the sea to be defined and detailed.
I compared these images as they are very similar but just slightly different. I like the above image as her hair is naturally moving in the wind and it also appears lighter which adds some contrast to the image. However after editing both images and comparing them, I’ve decided I’m going to choose the bottom image as it is subtle, there is too much going on with the above image. Also I think I may use this at the end of my book as the image is of a girl looking out to the sea, this suggests she is thinking of her next location to go, or just thinking about things. It brings all my images together and indicates the end of my photobook.
How have Julia Margaret Cameron and Justine Kurland explored what it means to be feminine in their work.
Femininity is represented in several different ways – what it means to be feminine reflecting on how it’s changed from the past to the modern day. People have different perspectives and ideas on what femininity is and it can be represented and shown through photography, this can be seen very apparent now as there are increasingly different ideas on gender and how it is embraced. In my essay I will be exploring the way both artists Julia Margaret Cameron and Justine Kurland represent femininity through their work whilst also using Claire Marie Healy’s book girlhood as my main reference when exploring the ideas of femininity and specifically how images can depict deeper meanings. I’ve chosen these two artists as Cameron was the first artist to use the new medium of photography to explore femininity in the 19th century. She upheld some aspects of the traditional Victorian woman, such as the ideal of motherhood, in most ways her photographic characters transcended Victorian gender views by defying convention and asserting their independence. Justine Kurland juxtaposes this as her work is seen as more contemporary and more relatable when referring to femininity. Kurland’s book Girl Pictures, involves photographs which were taken 20 years ago, and depict unruly teenagers in the equally wild landscapes of America. It is interesting how both Kurland and Cameron’s photography are almost binary opposite styles however were delving into the same theme and ideas, that is why I’ve chosen to study and compare their work. I think it’s important to explore how ideologies have changed around this topic and most importantly how a camera can capture and document a story around a topic. I will be responding to this research by making my own images using the same narrative/ theme, femininity, exploring what girls my age and specifically in Jersey, a small, limited island, has to offer for young people.
Julia Margaret Camerons work links heavily with pictorialism, from the 1880s and onwards photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resembled as paintings. There are several different photographic techniques that can be used by pictorialist to make their images appear to be art such as manipulating images in a dark room, scratching and marking their prints to imitate the texture of the canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery based of allegorical and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes. Cameron was highly influenced by pictorialism however around her time, before 1850 photography was practiced by a few amateurs and portraitists. It was a time of great experimentation. As Grace Seiberling reports during the 1850s the comments of critics on photography exhibitions illustrate that there were few fixed standards for a photograph’s appearance. By the 1860s, however, when Cameron started her work, photography had changed dramatically. Thousands of professionals and amateurs had taken up the form. With the rise of commercial photography amateurs were pitted against professionals, photographs had to be clean, complete and precisely detailed. Although others had put forward the notion that impressionism might be artistic, this was a minority view. Portrait photographers used all the light they could get – resulting in rather flat-looking images, the subject matter of photographs for ‘professionals’ featured portraits, narrative and genre scenes. Photographs had become commodities for the masses rather than a novelty or an art form. Following on this inrush of professionals and their societies, journals, manuals, manifestos and criticism a group of amateurs started to create new kinds of portraits. Cameron may be said to be in this group along with Lewis Caroll and Clemintina Lady Hawarden. These three worked against now established conventions by experimenting with light, groupings, posing, negatives and printing. Soft – focus photography in the early phase of Camerons ten-year career was not only a creative experiment, but a political and even religious gesture. Cameron wished on the one hand to restore a line back to painters and early photographers and on the other hand to tie photography to eternal laws of nature and art, as she understood them. Referencing to Lewis Carroll (author of Alice and wonderland) in the book girlhood by Claire Marie Healy she makes a reference to an image by Peter Blake, 1970, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and describes: ‘if girlhood is often thought of as a hole we drop into and scabble out of by our nails – hoping that we might emerge into adulthood unscathed from all its events – then what happens if we drop into that hole, following one of its most recognisable products as we go? Not through, but perhaps down…’ she states ‘I prefer to see Blake’s Alice as a girl who, like one dropped into the hole of adolescence, troubles easy definitions’ linking this to what it means to be feminine; images can create deeper suggestions about ideologies in this case girlhood.
Peter Blake, Just atthis moment, somehow or other, they began to run 1970, screenprint on this paper,24.3 x 18, Tate
Justine Kurland’s work links more to a contemporary and theoretical style of photography. Kurland created a famous book called ‘Girl Pictures’ which involves images she took between 1997 and 2002, later creating and publishing the book in 2020. All the images show young girls that Kurland has found whilst on a road trip throughout West America in bucolic /natural environments. She used the style of Tableaux photography to ensure her images had a story behind them, the girls are almost always doing something as a group in the photos. I think an important reason as to why the book Girl Pictures is so put together and flows well is that Kurland did not plan to do this project, she was on a road trip, found teenage girls and asked if they would be in the pictures, continued to travel through America, and then left the images for about 20 years and came back to them during lockdown and created this ‘narrative’ around femininity and girlhood. The project can also be seen as very nostalgic for Kurland as she used to travel and practically live in her van, however not anymore, “Somehow, it’s detached from where you actually are, because the work itself took on a kind of form once I started working on these road trips. I had to sell the van to stop doing that because driving is so fun, and I regret selling it every day.” – Kurland states in an interview with Vanity Fair. In an essay that accompanies Aperture’s new bound collection of the work, she calls that van, which she drove around in at the time of Girl Pictures, an ‘invisible collaborator’. “I could find girls wherever I stopped, but they went home after we made photographs, while I kept driving,” she wrote. “My road trips underscored the pictures I staged—the adventure of driving west a performance in itself.” Not only can the project be nostalgic for Kurland, but also the girls who participated. Rebecca Schiffman, one of the girls who is now grown up, performed a song dedicated to the memory of another girl Kurland photographed, Lily Wheelright who died in 2007 at the age of 24. This project has so many deeper connections and it emphasises the theme of femininity and how emotionally connected girls can be with one and other, the book brings together a sense of community and love. Justine Kurland states: ‘I staged photographs of teenage girls as surrogates for myself in a fantasy of a coming world, one where solidarity between girls offered intimacy and protection, where girls were made stronger through the presence of other girls focused on teenagers because of their perpetual state of becoming – a latency that resounds with the freedoms and simple joys of childhood. I wanted to foreground girls’ lives, centring them by creating an all-female society. I employed the trope of the teenage runaway as a shortcut to freeing them from the cage of their suburban bedrooms and bringing them into a world of their own making, so we could get to the more difficult work of determining how we might be together.’ Kurland’s images give a narrative that the girls were running away which almost backs the stereotype teenage girls usually have which is being rebellious, however, the way femininity is displayed is not too radical, its simply just girls being free as the landscape offered its own drama. The girls built forts, made campfires, trespassed in abandoned buildings, explored highway underpasses and found swimming holes nestled between shady trees and pillowy patches of moss. The girls performed scenes of caretaking that became actual caretaking: feeding each other, brushing each other’s hair, walking arm in arm. Justine intended for them to playact a state of communal bliss.
It is very apparent that both artists have explored what it means to be feminine with different approaches, different values and beliefs at the time due to the different waves of feminism. It’s important to explore where photographing what it means to be feminine originated from, Julia Margaret Cameron. Compared to now, how much ideas surrounding femininity have altered and the different ways it can be expressed. Cameron’s soft – focus pictorialist portraits of women in their long drapery clothing, just existing within the image, however the soft feminine features still being picked up… her large-scale close-up portraits were seen as a rejection towards conventional photography in favour of a less precise but more emotionally compelling kind of portraiture. Kurland’s images offer more to observe and analyse, she was able to tell a story throughout her photobook, what it means to be feminine is to be free, loving, caring and not so held down by the stress when transitioning from a teenager to an adult. The girls weren’t doing anything other than surviving as a group yet also as an individual in natural environments, this implies that that is what girls should be doing in an ideal world and where they are able to thrive the most. All of this linking to my response which is creating a photobook which illustrates what girls in my friend group do to ‘escape’ the stress which is usually overlooked by people close to us, the pressure that is suddenly put on us as we transition from teenagers into adults, and most importantly how limited young people are living on an island with nothing except each other and seasonally pretty beaches and lanes. Unlike Kurland’s narrative of running away young people in jersey can’t really run away unless they are privileged or aspire else were, the pressure of having to always be realistic when as a girl you can’t help but be deeply emotional about situations when all you wish to do is be free. ‘Teenage girls take in how things look: the way girls today might describe objects as simply ‘aesthetic’ or, in the words of something I saw on TikTok, their need to romanticise absolutely everything’ – Claire Marie Healy, girlhood. Using Jersey to the only advantage it has, I photographed me and my friends in natural environments just existing within the dramatic, gloomy dark landscapes.
