Observe

What is the definition of observe?

To notice or perceive (something) and register it as being significant.

How does someone observe?

The character trait observant refers to the ability to pay close attention to details and to be aware of one’s surroundings. An observant character notices things that others might miss and is able to draw conclusions from small clues or hints.

How can we observe within photography?

1. Slow down and use all your senses to observe.

2. Don’t rush from one viewpoint to another. Take some time to study all the elements of a scene. 

3. Elements are all the different things that make up a scene and each will have different attributes – size, shape, lines and angles, colour, texture and tone. Spend some time observing a landscape and make a mental note of the individual elements that make up the whole. Observe how they interact with each other and contribute to the overall scene. 

4. Ask yourself questions every time you observe an element.

5. Take a walk with your camera and set yourself challenges to find different elements to photograph.

Seek

What is the definition of seek?

Attempt to find (something). Attempt or desire to obtain or achieve (something).

How does someone seek?

seek

• He sought revenge for his son’s murder.
• During the war, she sought asylum in Spain.
• They sought refuge in Canada.
• The company is seeking new ways to improve service.
• The mayor is seeking reelection.
• She seeks perfection in her work.
• attention-seeking behavior
• Immigrants come to America to seek their fortune.

How can we seek within photography?

Seeking in photography is about exploring deeper layers of meaning, expression, and connection through the lens. It involves experimenting with different styles, techniques, and subjects to uncover your unique perspective, while engaging with both the technical and emotional aspects of the medium. By reflecting on your work, studying the work of others, and pushing boundaries, you can discover new ways to express ideas and capture moments that resonate with you. Ultimately, seeking in photography is a continuous journey of self-discovery and creative growth.

Challenge

What is the definition of challenge?

A call to prove or justify something. To challenge something means to question, dispute, or confront it, often in order to test its validity, assumptions, or limits. It can also involve pushing against established norms or overcoming obstacles.

How does someone challenge?

To challenge something, you first question its assumptions or validity by critically analyzing the details and underlying principles. This might involve presenting alternative viewpoints, offering evidence that contradicts existing ideas, or testing its limits through direct action. Challenging can also mean pushing boundaries or asking difficult questions to provoke deeper thought or change, whether in a conversation, a system, or an established belief.

How can we challenge within photography?

Challenging within photography involves questioning conventional techniques, perspectives, and subject matter to push the boundaries of the medium. This can be done by experimenting with new compositions, lighting, or unconventional equipment, as well as exploring controversial or overlooked topics. You might challenge yourself by stepping out of your comfort zone, photographing unfamiliar subjects, or defying traditional rules like symmetry or focus. Additionally, challenging photography can mean rethinking how images are edited or presented, using abstraction, distortion, or manipulation to evoke deeper meanings and emotions. Ultimately, it’s about testing limits, confronting expectations, and finding fresh ways to see and capture the world.

Mindmap

Mind Map: Observing, Seeking, and Challenging Photography

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1. Observing Photography

• Key Idea: Passive, attentive awareness; capturing moments as they are.
  • Core Themes:
    • Patience
      • Slow, deliberate shots
      • Awareness of time and place
    • Details
      • Close-ups of everyday objects
      • Nature (e.g., textures, light)
    • Light & Shadow
      • Natural light, soft focus
      • Shadows and their shapes
    • Intimacy
      • Personal moments, stillness
      • Candid, quiet moments
  • Techniques:
    • Shallow depth of field
    • Soft focus or diffusion filters
    • Minimal editing, natural tones
  • Visual Elements:
    • Color Palette: Soft, muted tones (earth tones, pastels)
    • Textures: Grainy, fuzzy, blurred
    • Composition: Simple, direct framing
  • Mood:
    • Reflective, calm, contemplative
    • Presence in the moment

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2. Seeking Photography

• Key Idea: Active exploration, searching for meaning, narrative, or connection.
  • Core Themes:
    • Curiosity
      • Looking for stories and meaning
      • Exploring the unknown
    • Journey
      • Urban exploration, adventure
      • Travel or discovering new perspectives
    • Movement
      • Capturing motion, energy, or change
    • Connection
      • Human interaction, relationships, gestures
    • Nature
      • Landscapes, dramatic skies, wildlife
  • Techniques:
    • Wide-angle shots
    • Motion blur or freeze-frame
    • High contrast and saturation
  • Visual Elements:
    • Color Palette: Bold, saturated hues
    • Textures: Sharp, detailed, crisp
    • Composition: Dynamic, wide shots, dramatic angles
  • Mood:
    • Excited, curious, exploratory
    • Adventurous, dynamic, driven

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3. Challenging Photography

• Key Idea: Confronting norms, perceptions, and pushing boundaries.
  • Core Themes:
    • Provocation
      • Disrupting the viewer’s expectations
      • Questioning visual norms and stereotypes
    • Surrealism
      • Distortion of reality
      • Unconventional perspectives and manipulation
    • Juxtaposition
      • Contrasting elements (e.g., old vs. new, organic vs. synthetic)
      • Unlikely pairings in a single frame
    • Abstract Expression
      • Non-representational or fragmented imagery
      • Focus on form, color, and shape
    • Identity & Culture
      • Challenging societal roles, norms, and identity representations
  • Techniques:
    • Double exposure, multiple exposures
    • High contrast, experimental edits
    • Unconventional angles and framing
    • Digital manipulation or collage
  • Visual Elements:
    • Color Palette: Bold, stark contrasts, neon accents
    • Textures: High contrast, rough, fragmented
    • Composition: Dissonance, imbalance, abstraction
  • Mood:
    • Intense, confrontational, radical
    • Thought-provoking, unsettling, transformative

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Connections Between Themes:

• Observing → Seeking → Challenging:
  • Evolving Narrative: Observing leads to seeking—understanding the world’s details fosters a curiosity to explore deeper. Seeking leads to challenging—questioning the narrative opens possibilities for disrupting norms.
  • Emotional Flow: Observing is introspective and calm, seeking is dynamic and driven, and challenging is bold and provocative.
  • Techniques Flow: A soft, reflective style in observing contrasts with the sharp, dynamic exploration of seeking, and ultimately, challenging photography embraces distortion, abstraction, and unpredictability.

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Applications of Each Approach:

• Observing Photography:
  • Portraits: Quiet, intimate moments (family, friends, strangers in natural settings).
  • Landscapes: Capturing nature’s stillness and fleeting moments of beauty.
  • Documentary: Truthful, observational work without imposing a narrative.
• Seeking Photography:
  • Travel: Capturing new locations, cultures, and people in an exploratory way.
  • Street Photography: Candid moments in everyday life, capturing stories.
  • Fashion & Editorial: Seeking to tell a visual narrative through clothing and styling.
• Challenging Photography:
  • Conceptual Art: Pushing visual boundaries to comment on culture or identity.
  • Experimental Photography: Play with techniques, collage, abstraction, digital manipulation.
  • Political & Social Commentary: Photographs that provoke thought, challenge authority, or explore societal issues.

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End Result:

• Observing creates awareness and understanding.
• Seeking leads to discovery and curiosity.
• Challenging forces reflection and change.

MoodBoard

My Main Categories Will Include Themes Such As–

1. Femininity
2. Teenage Culture
3. Anthropocene

Mind Map

Mood Board

Hannah Starkey is a British photographer who specializes in staged settings of women in city environments, based in London. In 2019 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. Hannah Starkey: In Real Life showed at The Hepworth Wakefield in April 2023. Her photography style consists of taking images of strangers on the street that don’t seem to have any relation to the models in the image. Her type of photography would be based on staged photography which could conclude that she is trying to make the images look realistic to what people may be feeling. The idea that what the artist is looking for isn’t always where she needs them to be, so she used the idea of the scenario she saw and turned it into her own reality by staging the images she produces. Although she has a specific theme to her images, she tries to get messages across about different women in the city. Although her images are staged it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t have a real meaning that the artists are trying to get across. Hannah Starkey’s work is purely based on women and how they are represented in the city which could either be a stereotype or an actual representation, she likes to describe her work as “explorations of everyday experiences and observations of inner-city life from a female perspective.” This is a topic I quite like and decided to write about. However, the main reason I chose to do this artist was because it links in with the windows and mirrors theory. Hannah Starkey’s work is based on a mirror as it’s her own interpretations put into an image, she is recreating what is personal to herself as being an individual female living in the city, she makes her own experiences or possible other female experiences known to public without a shame, but some people might not gather that her images are staged just by one glance and hence not realise that this image is a window, some people could view Starkey’s images as something else and others could take offence to them, it’s all o do with stereotypes and how women are portrayed. I like that she sticks to her theme and doesn’t add any male models into her images. It shows that she is dedicated to show some of her life events as a woman. 

Untitled, May 1997

This image is quite detailed and has two models, both models are posing for the image but not in a way you would when you know that someone is taking an image of you, this image is staged, this is meant to portray a women’s daily life and how women’s lives have been changed throughout the years. I really like how colourful this image is as most of the artists I looked at had images in black and white, although the aim of black and white photos is to restrict any distractions to the image, the idea that black and white images are easier to observe. However I do quite like a coloured photo as colours could link together and make the image look more put together, everything looks like it falls in place, this could make the image look staged but still shows that the photographer has a main target they want to capture. This image is quite powerful in presenting what a female might feel on a day-to-day basis. Starkey states that she thinks the outcome of her images is mainly based on an experience led thing rather than just projecting how a women might act or feel. She states that the female eye senses anything that is tied up in those kind of sexualised images- the sort of image that’s being used to sell stuff. She also suggests that things are changing and will continue to change in her time of working/ taking photographs, her aim was to evaluate how women are represented and what access women must make these representations themselves. She states “When you come into your professional career or your education, you will always have a legacy of what’s gone before you. You tend to want to rebalance or readjust that. So for me, that was all about the representation of women and to try to find a different way” which can suggest that she wants to see how much power she holds as a women and what she can put out on social media, how many views she might get and what type of retaliation she might get back from her work. Her work is basically an experiment to see how much recognition women get and to find out when they well get noticed. She also states how she disliked the way women were represented “I guess from about 2000 onwards, the mainstream media seemed to be very heavily influenced by the language of porn, and there was a while when it became so suffocating. It seemed like the “go to” way to present women – it’s not about prudishness or double standards, it’s just that there are many ways to make a woman look attractive, but the dominant aesthetic was just this one way.” The reality of the world has been shown and objectifies women in many ways, when taking an image of a women to always make sure she looks good, good enough to represent all women, this leads to women’s photos being edited to look thinner and prettier which effects many people today, the idea women need to look a certain way to please the public eye is quite disgusting and all women should be proud and content about their appearances. This isn’t seen as a problem just for women but men too. There has been much written about how men and women might photograph each other differently, and while it’s not something that is necessarily straightforwardly easy to quantify or put into words, it shows us how social media is fake and nothing is seen to be true anymore and Hannah Starkey has researched the how women are identified as she relates to that topic a lot more and likes to have a different message and interpretation for each image. 

Mind map –

In this mind map, we pointed out the main links we thought of when thinking about ‘observe, seek, challenge’. We used an old exam essay for inspiration, to take ideas and thoughts from. We talked about terminology and links to topics and ideas that could help with our new personal study.

Mood board –

My mood board represents my main ideas for my personal study. I want my theme to be me, in more detail, the positives and negatives of growing up as a girl, I’m only 1 of millions of girls so the only story I have to tell is mine.

With divorced parents and issues throughout my 17 years of life, I believe that this idea could not only show perspective, but things that people wouldn’t realize or view if they were not in the same position. Not just with my life in particular, but girlhood in general.

Statement of intent –

The intent I have with my personal study, is to portray a life beyond the viewers. I want to allow them into my life and my past memories that no one would have known about. My photoshoots will portray this by either subtly or obviously explaining my idea of girlhood itself. The struggles and beauties all different aspects I have experienced through my life through girlhood.

I want to begin my photoshoots / personal study in a bedroom, have a motherly figure in an immature bedroom to show childhood, and end the study with the idea of the end of year 13, that could be in school or at a party or however I decide to portray it or how it develops throughout the process.

I will be planning 2 photoshoots, one being type documentary/window photoshoot (realism/ factual/ public/ candid). The other being a tableaux/mirror photoshoot (romanticism/ fiction/ private/ staged).

Documentary

The first I think of when thinking of this word is our street photography work a year ago so I will be getting some inspiration from photographers that I have already analysed back then. This would work well as Its completely natural and there wont be any input from me to change the subjects. National geographic is another think that comes to mind when thinking of documentary photos, so I could show the destruction or beauty of our environment. Maybe match car traffic with the crops in field.

Tableaux

When thinking of Tableaux photos, I think of our masculinity vs femininity work. Since I have already explored this in depth I might go about exploring 2 other binary opposites. Another Idea I had was to stage some sort of setting or story, maybe a crime scene, or a drug deal, ext. Another Idea I had was to recreate some of the romanticism paintings using photography, this allows me to link to some masculinity vs femininity photographers. Another Idea I had was to represent a few different human emotions. I got a few of my ideas from here.