Do you remember the picture of a large bay window, the first paper negative ever to be made – that we watched in the film Fixing the Shadows – episode one of the first major television series devoted to the medium of photography, The Genius of Photography.
‘Fixing the Shadows’ from BBC Genius of Photography, Episode 1.
In the summer of 1835 William Henry Fox Talbot experimented with various chemicals to develop paper coatings suitable for use in a camera. He placed small wooden cameras that his wife called “mousetraps” all over his estate. The earliest surviving paper negative dates from August 1835, a small recording of the bay window of Lacock Abbey (left). In 1978, the German photographer Floris Neusüss visited Lacock Abbey to make photograms of the same window. He returned again in 2010 for the Shadow Catchers exhibition at the V&A to create a life-sized version of Talbot’s window (below right).
Henry Fox TalbotFloris Neusüss
That 1978 photogram was the start of our adventures in creating photograms of large objects in the places where we found them […] we took our equipment to Lacock Abbey and made a photogram of a fixed subject. This particular subject was for us not just a window in a building but an iconic window, a window on photography, opened by Talbot. The window is doubly important, because to be able to invent the photograph, Talbot first used photograms to test the light sensitivity of chemicals. His discovery became a window on the world. I wonder what percentage of our understanding of the planet we live on now comes from photographs? — Floris Neusüss
The idea of photographs functioning like windows makes total sense. Like the camera viewfinder, windows frame our view of the world. We see through them and light enters the window so that we can see beyond. Photographs present us with a view of something. However, it might also be possible to think of photographs as mirrors, reflecting our particular view of the world, one we have shaped with our personalities, our subconscious motivations, so that it represents how our minds work as well as our eyes. The photograph’s glossy surface reflects as much as it frames. Of course, some photographs might be both mirrors and windows.
Photo-historian, Gerry Badger who was part of the editorial team producing the television series The Genius of Photography wrote in the introduction of the book of the same name that John Szarkowski’s distinction of photographs as ‘mirrors’ or ‘windows’ is useful, but only to a point, ‘because most photographs are both mirrors and windows.’ (Badger 2007:8)
The exhibitionMirrors and Windows, anexhibition of American photography since 1960, opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMa) in July of 1978. The curator John Szarkowski’s attempted to categorise photographers whose work largely reflected the subjectivity of the artist in comparison with those whose work largely sought to see outside themselves. Szarkowski wrote in the catalogue essay that accompanied the exhibition:
“The two creative motives that have been contrasted here are not discrete. Ultimately each of the pictures in this book is part of a single, complex, plastic tradition. Since the early days of that tradition, an interior debate has contested issues parallel to those illustrated here. The prejudices and inclinations expressed by the pictures in this book suggest positions that are familiar from older disputes. In terms of the best photography of a half-century ago, one might say that Alfred Stieglitz is the patron of the first half of this book and Eugène Atget of the second. In either case, what artist could want a more distinguished sponsor? The distance between them is to be measured not in terms of the relative force or originality of their work, but in terms of their conceptions of what a photograph is: is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?” — John Szarkowski, 1978
MIRRORS AND WINDOWS has been organized around Szarkowski’s thesis that such personal visions take one of two forms. In metaphorical terms, the photograph is seen either as a mirror – a romantic expression of the photographer’s sensibility as it projects itself on the things and sights of this world; or as a window – through which the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality.
Take a look at the images below. Think about whether, in your opinion, they are mirrors or windows.
You could draw a horizontal line with the word ‘Mirror’ at one end and ‘Window’ at the other. You could add a list of words that help to describe what these words suggest.
Now, try placing each of these images somewhere on this spectrum. Annotate the images to explain your decisions.
Garry Winogrand – Los Angeles, 1969 Gelatin-silver printBill Brandt – Nude, East Sussex, 1968Nan Goldin – Nan and Brian in bed, NYC. 1983 CibachromeRobert Heinecken – Figure Sections/(Multiple Solution Puzzle), 1966Bernd + Hilla Becher – Lime Kilns, Kalköfen, Harlingen, 1968Richard Hamilton – Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Collage 1956Eugene Atget – Street Musicians, 1898William Eggleston – from Memphis, Tennessee, Dye transfer print, early 1970sRobert Rauschenberg – Windward, Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 1963Richard Long – A line made by walking, England 1967
HOMEWORK: Independent Study TASK 1: 1000 word mini-essay Essay question: How can photographs be both ‘mirrors’ and ‘windows’ of the world? DEADLINE: Wed 23 OCT
Follow these instructions:
Read two texts above (John Szarkowski’s introduction and review by Jed Pearl) and select 3 quotes form each that is relevant to your essay.
Select two images, one that represent a mirror and another that represents a window as examples to use in your essay.
Use some of the key words that you listed above to describe what the mirrors and windows suggest.
Essay plan Introduction (250 words): Reflect on the origin of photography and describe in your own words the difference between the two photographic processes, Daguerreotype and Calotype. Consider how they could be viewed as either a mirror or a window of the world according to John Szarkowski’s thesis. Choose one quote from Szarkowski’s text and comment if you agree or disagree.
Paragraph 1 (250 words): Choose an image that in your view is a mirror and analyse how it is a subjective expression and staged approach to image-making. Choose one quote from Szarkowski’s thesis and another from Jed Pearl’s review which either supports of opposes Szarkowski’s original point of view. Make sure you comment to advance argumentation in providing a critical perspective.
Paragraph 2 (250 words): Choose an image that in your view is a window and analyse how it is an objective expression rooted in a sense of realism. Choose one quote from Szarkowski’s thesis and another from Jed Pearl’s review and follow similar procedure as above ie. two opposing points of view and commentary to provide a critical perspective.
Conclusion (250 words): Refer back to the essay question and write a conclusion where you summarise Szarkowski’s theory and Pearl’s review of his thesis. Describe differences and similarities between the two images above and their opposing concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, realism and romanticism, factual and fiction, public and private.
TASK 2: Photo-assignment A creative response to documentary (realism/ factual/ public/ candid) and tableaux (romanticism/ fiction/ private/ staged) photography DEADLINE: Mon 21 Oct
RECORDING > Based on the theme of ‘OBSERVE, SEEK, CHALLENGE’ – and with relevance to your Personal Study – produce 3 images that are documenting reality – ‘windows of the world’and another 3 images that are staging reality – ‘mirrors of the world’.
PLANNING > Produce a blog post where you plan and sketch out a few ideas in relation to the photo-assignment. You may use some of the images or artists references we looked at earlier in the week as inspiration and put together a mood-board, that will act as inspiration for your shoot.
In the next lesson tomorrow (Wednesday) you will be given a camera to make initial responses. Be creative and use this opportunity to experiment with ideas or approaches to image-making that you might want to extend further in your Personal Study. The expectation is that you make a set of images during the lesson using the school environment (inside or outside) creatively. The photographic studio is also available where you can explore different ideas using different lighting techniques…Rembrandt lighting…Butterfly lighting…Chiaroscuro…reflected light…coloured gels etc.
DEVELOPING >In post-production you can incorporate different editing techniques…monochrome/ colour adjustments…montage/ composite…juxtaposition/ triptychs/ grids etc…using Lightroom, Photoshop, AI technology if appropriate to your intentions. The focus here is on creativity, imagination and experimentation. Add images to your essay as photographic responses to Szarkowski’s thesis and evaluate.
GUIDELINES: ESSAY WRITING
Marking Criteria
Literary Sources:
Read key texts that will provide you with knowledge and understanding
It demonstrates evidence of reading and will enable you to draw upon different points of view – not only your own.
Select relevant quotes and make notes when you’re reading…key words, concepts, passages including page number
Write down author’s name, date it was published, title, publisher, place of publication so you can list source in a bibliography
Bibliography:
List all the literary sources that you have read and arrange in alphabetical order. For example: Szarkowski, J. (1978), Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. Museum of Modern Art: New York
Quotation and Referencing:
Why should you reference?
To add academic support for your work
To support or disprove your argument
To show evidence of reading
To help readers locate your sources
To show respect for other people’s work
To avoid plagiarism
To achieve higher marks
What should you reference?
Anything that is based on a piece of information or idea that is not entirely your own.
That includes, direct quotes, paraphrasing or summarising of an idea, theory or concept, definitions, images, tables, graphs, maps or anything else obtained from a source
How should you reference?
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
Use this simplified list to check that you are on task. Every item on the list represents one piece of work = one blog post. It is your responsibility as an A-level student to make sure that you complete and publish appropriate blog posts each week.
AUTUMN TERM
WEEK 1: 4 – 8 Sept 1. Research & Context: Jersey’s maritime history and cod-trade 2. Research & Context: St Helier Harbour history and mood-board
WEEK 2: 9 – 15 Sept 1. Planning & Recording: Visit to SJ Photo-archive and St Helier Harbour 2. Editing & Developing: St Helier Harbour photoshoots
WEEK 3: 16 – 22 Sept 1. Essay: Origin of Photography > Deadline: 30 Sept 2. Planning & Recording: Visit to Maritime Museum and St Helier Harbour 3. Editing & Developing: St Helier Harbour photoshoots
WEEK 5: 30 Sept – 6 Oct 1. Zine: Research & Mood-board 2. Zine: Design & Layout
WEEK 6: 7-13 Oct 1. Zine: Final design & Evaluate 2. Zine: Print & Bind
DEADLINE: Zine > Fri 11 Oct
WEEK 7: 14-20 Oct 1. Talk: Steve Carter, Art Director – Mon 14 Pd 3 in the Hall 2. Windows & Mirrors: Written assignment 3. Windows & Mirrors: Photo assignment
WEEK 8: 21-27 Oct 1. Personal Study: Review & Reflect
Half-term: 28 Oct – 3 Nov Windows & Mirrors: Assignments Complete work and improve blogposts, or begin tasks below
WEEKS 9: 4-10 Nov 1. Personal Study: Mind-maps & Mood-boards
WEEK 10: 11-17 Nov 1. Personal Study: Artists Case-studies x 2
WEEK 11: 18-24 Nov 1. Personal Study: Statement of Intent
WEEK 12: 25 -30 Nov 1. Photo-shoots: Planning & Recording x 3-4
WEEK 13: 1 – 8 Dec 1. Essay: Hypothesis, Essay plan and Introduction (draft)
WEEK 14: 9 – 15 Dec 1. Photo-shoots: Editing and Developing
WEEK 15: 16 – 18 Dec 1. Group critical: Presentation – work in progress
XMAS BREAK 19 Dec – 6 Jan Photo-shoots: Produce at least 2-3 photoshoots Essay:Read key texts for essay and begin to write an essay introduction
In the final year of your A-level photography studies the focus is on narrative and visual storytelling. We will be continuing to explore the themes of OBSERVE, SEEK, CHALLENGE and build on your knowledge and understanding of how to combine images and text in creating photo-zines. In your development as a photography student we encourage you to engage with both traditional methods of image-making using your eye and camera, as well as utilising creative potential of new technology and tools such as generative AI.
In the first half of the term everyone will explore a set of collective/ creative tasks that will act as triggers and creative starting points in the second half where you will be exploring the theme more in-depth as part of your Personal Study unit which will lead you towards your final major outcome making a photobook, or film and writing an essay.
However, before that you will learn about different ways you can be a visual storyteller experimenting with making photo-zines in Adobe InDesign and a short film using Adobe Premier.
Other new software that you will be learning is audio software exploring the creative potential and possibilities of sound, that will be supported in a series of workshops by sound designer, Sam Hills (ex-Hautlieu student). Another alumni is Steve Carter who worked for many years in the film industry as an Art Director – including Hollywood. He will do presentation about his work and career and also provide feedback on the films that will be making.
BLOG > publish blog posts on a regular basis. You should aim for 2-3 blog posts per week. Mr Cole and myself will monitor and provide feedback online in comments provide updates on Go4schools tracking sheets.
Week 1: 4-8 Sept RESEARCH & CONTEXT Complete the following blog posts
Since prehistoric to modern time the sea has been Jersey’s connectivity to the outside world. As an island we are surrounded by water and it is through maritime routes that people travel and settle to form new families and communities. For island communities, their ports and piers hold symbolic as well as obvious practical significance. They facilitate trade and communication, and as an islands economy grows beyond the means by which it can support itself, they come to symbolise survival and possibility. People who live by the sea are defined by it and it’s intrinsically linked to the island’s history, geography, economy, identity and culture.
Stories of the sea, such as voyages, encounters and even shipwrecks holds mythological and romantic notions in the imagination of humans. Artists, writers, poets and filmmakers have for centuries been inspired by the sea and it’s many secrets.
Théodore Géricault,The Raft of the Medusa.1818–19. Oil on canvas. Read the story behind Gericault’s famous painting here
Jèrriais, the Island’s old Norman-French language, retains to this day many words of Norse origin. There are many Viking words to do with farming (especially ploughing and harvesting) and fishing, ships and the sea. For example:
bete, bait, beita ;
dranet, draw-net, dragnet;
flie, a limpet, flie;
greer, to rig, greidi;
haler, to haul, hala;
crabe, a crab, krabbi;
mauve, a seagull, mar.
The sea is also a food source where fish and shellfish are caught to feed islanders and exported to markets in Europe and the UK. 98 % of all the goods that enters the island from food to fuel are carried by vessels. Industries, such as fisheries, freight operators, ferry companies, marine engineering and Ports of Jersey employ many skilled people. Likewise, leisure activities from tour operators, rowing and sailing clubs and islanders who owns boats are dependent on the sea.
TASKS – must be published on blog by Mon 9 Sept
1.Research Jersey’s maritime history within context of the Canadian cod-fisheries and the Transatlantic carrying trade . Explain how the merchant network operated with ownership and management in Jersey, production of codfish in Canada and markets in the Caribbean, South America, Mediterranean and the Baltic. Write 500 words and use images and maps to illustrate your knowledge and understanding. See resources below. Try and comment on some of these questions:
What was the involvement of Jersey mariners in the Canadian cod-fisheries and the Transatlantic carrying trade?
Which ports did Jersey ships sail to and trade with?
What type of goods did Jersey merchants exchange for cod-fish?
To what extend, has the island of Jersey benefitted from its constitutional relationship with Britain and the legacies of colonialism based on a slave plantation economy during the first Industrial Revolution (1760-1840)?
RESOURCES
Make good use of the resources an reading material listed below that will provide you with an overview of the maritime history in the Channel Islands and context of Jersey’s involvement in North Atlantic cod-fisheries.
Jersey historian Doug Ford carried out much historical research in 2006 as part of the efforts to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Read: A respectable trade or against humanity?
The UCL Legacies of British Slave-Ownership website with the database of the 1834 Compensation Register which lists all people who claimed compensation when slavery was abolished. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ –
For an overview of maritime activity in the Channels Islands, see link here. Below are some of the key developments:
The Channel Islands are a group of islands off the coast of France. The largest island is Jersey, followed by Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, and a number of smaller islands, islets and rocky outcrops. The islands were separated from mainland Europe with rising sea levels in the Neolithic period; thereafter maritime activity commenced.
The Channel Islands
Needing to trade, the islanders were innovative. Over time they built up skills, earning money and investing capital in maritime businesses.
Stone and Bronze ages: The presence of Statue menhirs on the islands, such as at St Martin’s church on Guernsey and the burial mound at La Hougue Bie, Jersey, give evidence of populations either living on or visiting the islands.
Iron age: Archaeological evidence of trade from the Iron Age period is in evidence in the Islands, with goods manufactured on the western coast such as armlets, Breton pottery and amphorae from the Mediterranean indicating trade along the Atlantic coast from Iberia to Ireland. Armorica was the nearest trade zone.
Roman:Hoards such as the 70,000 coins found in the Grouville Hoard have been discovered, although their reason for being in Jersey is open to speculation. Roman settlements on the islands show evidence of an intricate trading network with regional and long-distance trade from 120 BC after the Romans occupied southern Gaul, especially using Guernsey where amphorae from the Herculaneum area and Spain have been found.
Middle ages: The arrival of Christianity including Samson of Dol, Helier, Marcouf and Magloire shows the rise in regular shipping to and from the islands in the 6th century.
Piracy/raiding especially by Vikings took place throughout this era. The Viking leader Rollo besieged Paris in 911, resulting in 933 with the islands, formerly under the control the Duchy of Brittany, being annexed by the Duchy of Normandy.
Travels of the Vikings
Piracy in the islands mainly died when Sark was colonised by Hellier de Carteret in 1563 and they lost their last refuge. Some pirates still hid out in isolated English and French bays, others sailed up from the Barbary Coast, or even Turkey, ransoming valuable captives or keeping them as slaves. It was replaced by legal piracy in the form of privateering. Ships issued with a letter of marque giving the ship the right to capture ships and goods of a specific enemy and to keep the profits.
During the War of the Three Kingdoms Jersey became a base for Royalist privateers between 1643 and 1651, most notably George Carteret who in late 1643 became Lieutenant Governor of the island (more about him later)
Early modern: Covering the period from the 15th to the late 18th centuries, the era saw trade increase with the technical improvement in ships and navigation, and the ability to sail out of sight of land for days on end, until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
The main trade continued cross channel, where the islands were given concessions. These included dried cod from Newfoundland and Gaspe coast, cloth, wine, wool, leather and household goods. You can read more here about Jersey settlements in Gaspe.
shore worker for Charles Robin Company drying cod on flakes in the Bay of Chaleurs, Gaspe, Canada
fishermen hauling in codPaspebiac, HQ of Charles Robin CoMap of Canada Atlantic provinces
Jersey cod-merchants also exported cod-fish to British colonies in the West Indies and later Brazil too in exchange for plantation goods, such as sugar, molasses, rum, cotton, coffee and tobacco which it brought to markets in America, Europe and the UK (inc. Jersey). Within that context Jersey benefitted from the profits made in the British Empire build on a capitalist model of a slave-based economy.
Both islands established Chambers of Commerce as the merchant families expanded and grew in wealth. These families included Tupper, Priaulx, Le Marchant and De Jersey from Guernsey and De Ste Croix, Robin, Janvrin and Hemery from Jersey, often intermarrying to avoid rivalry.
Ship building only became a serious business in the islands in the late 18th century with the requirement to build ships larger than fishing boats allowing Jersey merchants to take part in the Atlantic carrying trade. Between 1760 and 1815 Great Britain was at war for 36 years, which affected the maritime trade, causing dangers and opening possibilities of profit.
Late Modern: This period covers the rise of the British Empire into the Victorian era, through the First World War and then the Second World War. This saw the introduction of iron ships, steam, then oil powered ships.
Island-built wooden sailing ships were going further, opening up more ports in South America and even going to Hong Kong and Australia. By the 1850s Jersey had 300-400 ships with a tonnage of over 40,000.
The barque Wagoola, 550 tons, docked at Hobart with the ps Kangaroo in the background. Built 1856 Jersey. Owners: Redfern, Alexander and Co, registered London. Well known in the Hobart-London trade. Date of photograph circa 1875
Emigration: The ships provided an opportunity for emigration and many families moved to Australia, New Zealand or America. For example, a number from Jersey settled in Salem, Massachusetts and were among the accused in the 1693 Salem witch trials
St Aubin was the main harbour for Jersey merchants before St Helier became the central maritime hub. St Helier harbours were proving too small for the larger ships and increasing tonnages, with both drying out at low tide. Jersey added a few piers to its harbour, such as Victoria and Albert Piers.
St Aubin harbour in early 19th century
The change from sail saw a major decline in the maritime activities of the islands: commercial shipbuilding had boomed in the 1850s with 20,000 tons a year before collapsing to 3,000 tons built per year in the 1880s, as iron and steel were not available in the islands. By the end of the century, island fleets had just 150 ships with a total tonnage of just 11,000.
World Wars I and II. The First World War saw island shipping used for the war effort. The peace then saw a demand from visitors for transport with in boom in tourism. The islands were occupied by the Germans during the Second World War, and most island-based ships went to England in June 1940. Initially a number of fishing and private boats, then later smaller craft, made the perilous journey with over 200 escaping islanders. Not all survived: some were captured or shot, others drowned.
Arrival of a mailboat in 1952 – Picture Evening Post
Since the war, fishing has been reduced, with lobsters and crabs becoming the main catch in the islands with an annual value of around £10m in 1995. Private boating has increased with the construction of marinas. Freighting changing from loose and pallets to containers with Ro-Ro for vehicles. Hydrofoils and then catamarans and wave piercers appeared as fast passenger ships.
Today, Ports of Jersey operates all entry and exit points to the island, including harbours and airport. They have plans to re-develop St Helier Harbour into a modern commercial maritime hub – see their Harbour Masterplan here.
CONTEXT> Triangular cod-trade
For centuries Jersey’s maritime economy dominated island life and many merchants were engaged in the Atlantic trade, referred to as the ‘merchant triangle’ with commodities of manufactured goods and agricultural products exchanged in different outposts in the British Empire and other European colonies in the Caribbean, South America and Mediterranean. However, Jersey’s financial success derived from the North-Atlantic cod-fisheries established first in Newfoundland late 16th and 17th centuries and later in Gaspé in the province of Quebec in 18th and 19th centuries.
Charles RobinSalted cod drying on rack Gaspé
Charles Robin Company’s headquarter in Paspebiac in the Bay of Chaleurs in Gaspe is now a museum, see link here
Jersey’s colonial past is linked indirectly with slavery as merchants and shipping were part of the supply chain of goods and products in the transatlantic trade. One of Jersey’s premier cod-merchants was Charles Robin who founded Charles Robin Company in 1766 (second oldest incorporated firm to be founded in Canada which only ceased operation in 2006 albeit under different ownership).
Gaspe dry-cured salt cod. Yellow colourisation comes from cod drying on rakes for 10 sun days
Robin produced two types of salted cod-fish called ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ in the vernacular. ‘Green’ was a wet salted codfish that was not dry cured and therefore did not have the same shelf-life. It was ideal selling it at markets in the Caribbean or North East Brazil as it was much shorter run for Robin’ ships on the second leg of the triangular Atlantic trade. In his own 18th century diary Charles Robin refer to it as ‘West India fish’ and it was sold to planters who would feed the protein rich codfish to its enslaved populations for increased productivity in the plantations. In exchange, Robin would load his ship with plantation produce such as sugar, rum, molasses, cotton, coffee and tobacco before sailing across on the third leg of the Atlantic triangular trade route to the Mediterranean, England and Jersey.
‘Yellow’ was a dry-cured cod and marketed as a premier product and sold to markets in Europe, such as Portugal, Spain and Italy with their large Roman Catholic populations having a great demand for fish for fast days on Fridays. From ports in Lisbon, Cadiz and Naples merchants traded cod-fish for other products such as salt (used in the curing process), wine, spirits, fruits and spices which they brought back to Jersey and British ports before returning to Canada. The maritime networks were complex and often financed from London. Read another article here from Jersey based critic, Ollie Taylor Fish, Finance and Slavery.
If you look up shipping news in old Jersey newspapers La Gazette de Jersey or La Chronique de Jersey ships would leave St Helier Harbour with supplies to slave stations in West Africa, such as the notorious Cape Cod Castle on the Gold Coast of Ghana. For example, on 8th June 1854 Newport, a 106-ton schooner brig owned by F Le Sueur, jnr, P Le Sueur and JF Le Sueur, mastered by sea captain, Charles Philippe Hocquard left port bound for Ambrez, Angola. On the ship’s manifest (a customs document listing the cargo, passengers and crew) were 25 cases of muskets, 20 cases of knives, five cases of hatchets, one case of bells and padlocks, to be delivered to a Senor Francisco Antonio Florese, who was known as a slave trader. On 21st September 1854 she was stopped and searched by HMS Philomel and taken to St Helena, where she was condemned in the Admiralty to be sold.
CONTEXT:Sir George Carteret and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Sir George Carteret (1610–1680) was Bailiff when King Charles I was executed and had his son Charles II proclaimed King in Jersey. He had been a naval officer and was later to serve as Treasurer of the Navy. He was given large tracts of land in the American colonies by Charles II.
In 2015 Mr Toft published Atlantus together with Dr Gareth Syvret (former photo-archivist at Société Jersiaise) which is a transoceanic photography project about the connected history between Jersey and New Jersey, prompted in part by the 350th anniversary in 2014 of Sir George Carteret naming of the State of New Jersey, USA after Jersey his island home in 1664.
Multi-functional newspaper & DIY exhibition
Sir George Carteret statue in St Peter’s Village and former Constable John Refault who was has defended his decision to put it up in 2014.
In 2014 a public statue of Sir George Carteret was unveiled in St Peter to commemorate his achievements in relation to the 350th anniversary of the state of New Jersey. Sir George was a prominent investor and consultant in the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading Into Africa, which was a major player in trafficking slaves from Africa as well as gold and ivory. Between 1662 and 1731, the Company transported approximately 212,000 slaves, of whom 44,000 died en route. By that time, they also transported slaves to English colonies in North America. Its profits made a major contribution to the increase in the financial power of those who controlled the City of London. Sir George received a dividend until his death and his son James Carteret commanded one of the slave ships, Speedwell with 302 Africans on board in the early years (1663-64) of trading from Benin to St Kitts in the Caribbean.
Please read the latest article by Jersey independent reporter, Ollie Taylor (Nine by Five Media) The whitewashing of George Carteret and watch a video below of its unveiling in St Peter with a commentary by the former Constable John Refault who describes Sir George Carteret as a hero, ‘Jersey’s greatest son’, one of “Jersey’s great figures” and a role model for youngsters.
The unveiling of the statue of George Carteret attended by politicians and dignitaries in St Peter 14 September 2014
It is true that the biography of Sir George Carteret (b. 1610 d. 1680) include many extraordinary deeds such as commandeering ships in the Royal Navy and rising quickly through the ranks to become the Comptroller of the Navy in 1641 and eventually Vice Admiral. Between 1643 and 1651 he was both appointed Lieutenant Governor and Bailiff of Jersey. But it was his loyality to Prince Charles II, who was exiled in Jersey twice during the English Cicil War after the death of his father King Charles I that propelled him to power and influence. After the restoration of the monarchy he was granted lands in the new British colony in North America, including the Carolinas and a territory south of New York, which he named New Jersey after his island home. There are some people who only wish to remember this part of his life, but there is a growing demand that his links with the Royal African Company and the Atlantic slave trade must be included in the historical records. It’s important to recognise that history is never fixed and new research, new interpretations are made continuously as new material emerge and different scholars examine the archives. There are many different histories depending on who is telling them and it is your duty as future citizens to examine all points of view and analyse claims and counter-claims.
Portrait of Sir George Carteret by court painter, Sir Peter LelyStatue of Sir George daubed in white paint in St Peter
The statue pulled down in Bristol in 2019 was of Edward Colston who was the Deputy Governor in Royal African Company, which succeeded The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading Into Africa in 1672 with a new and broader royal charter than the old one, which included the right to set up forts and factories, maintain troops, and exercise martial law in West Africa, in pursuit of trade in gold, silver and African slaves. Read article here in The Guardian about Colston statue in Bristol.
The decision to erect the statue of Sir George Carteret was questioned by Deputy Montfort Tadier, who as Minister for Culture in 2019 said that it was a different case to the Edward Colston statue because that had been put up in Bristol around 120 years earlier, during the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign. He has lodged a proposal Jersey and The Slave Trade to discuss how the island deals with its past at the next States Assembly.
There was also controversy when part of the International Finance Centre was named Trenton Square after the capital of New Jersey, which was itself named after trader William Trent, who had links with slavery. Read more here
In the JEP last Saturday (13 June 2020) there were 3 Opinions published by columnists, Susanna Rowles, Tom Ogg and Gary Burgess. Very diverse points of view about how to address the issues of racism and the wrongs of the past, but all comments written by ‘white’ people. Where is the representation of BAME (Black, Asian and minority Ethnic) voices?
Read an islander who is mixed race talk about white privilege and another article in the Bailiwick Express that urges Jersey leaders to dismantle institutional racism in the work place and wider community at a protest for racial justice at People’s Park on Saturday 6 June.
Kneel for George Floyd protest in People’s Park, 6 June 2020, St Helier, Jersey
PRACTICE > ENTREPÔT – a photographic research project
Mr Toft has developed a number of long-term photographic based research projects exploring Jersey’s maritime history and heritage with links to slavery such as, Entrepôt and his recent short film The Seaflower Venture.
The Seaflower Venture is a short film based on the life of Charles Robin, Jersey’s premier cod-merchant who founded the most successful firm on the Gaspé Coast in 1766. Using extracts from his own diaries and a fictional biographical narrative of Robin’s life the film re-imagines a merchant triangle – a three-pointed trading system with production in Canada, management in Jersey and markets in Brazil, Italy, Spain, Portugal and England.
The narrative of the film is created around a sea journey of a Robin ship loosely based on an actual abstract journal of a voyage recorded in a Deck Log written by sea captain Peter Briard (senior) who was employed by the Charles Robin Company and successfully mastered the Robin ships ‘Day’, ‘Oliver Blanchard’, ‘Christopher Columbus’ and ‘C.R.C.’ from Gaspé to Naples and Palermo every year for nearly twenty years between 1818 to the late 1830s. It includes a two-hander poetic dialogue between a young and old Charles Robin based on an adaptation from two archival records, such as his own 18th century diary (The Early Journals of Charles Robin 1767-73 & 1787) and an unpublished biographical narrative (The Seaflower Venture) written by Phyllis Gertrude Ross held in the library at the Société Jersiaise.
Film stills from The Seaflower Venture
Specific footage in the film from the Recôncavo – Bahia’s rich agricultural and industrial maritime district in North-eastern Brazil – features images from a small rural town Muritiba in the municipality of Cachoeira where a coffee plantation was owned by Jerseyman, Jean Gibaut and later his son John Frederick Gibaut. From judicial records in Salvador a civic court case from 1851 confirmed that the Gibaut Estate was one of the largest plantations in the area using slave labour and pioneering mechanisation. Both Jean Gibaut’s brothers, Moses Amice Gibaut and Francis Gibaut were sea captains working for Charles Robin Company in Gaspé. Today descendants of the Gibaut family still reside in Muritiba, where a street, Rua Gibaut is named after the plantation where it once stood.
A daguerreotype held in the Society Jersiaise Photographic Archived with the inscription: John Frederick Gibaut, born in Bahia 22nd May 1823, daguerreotyped in Muritiba, November 1843.
Gibaut coffee plantation in Muritiba, 1844.
Jose Adilson Gibaut, great grandson of John Frederick Gibaut. 2 August 2018, Muritiba, Bahia, Brazil. Martin Toft
Entrepôt is a maritime photographic research project exploring the history of Jersey’s cod-fishing trade in Canada and its merchant networks in the West Indies, South America, Mediterranean and Baltic in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is examining through the prism of colonial and family history, how Jersey’s original wealth generated by the proceeds from the North Atlantic fisheries and merchant networks in the 18th and 19th centuries lay the foundation for the island’s economic growth and development in the 20th and 21st centuries as an International Finance Centre. Theoretically, my project Entrepôt is based around Rosemary E. Ommer’s structural economical analysis of the Jersey-Gaspé cod fishery which reveals a functional three-pointed trading system in what Ommer refers to as a ‘merchant triangle’ with production in Canada, management in Jersey and markets in the Mediterranean, the West Indies, South America and the Baltic. Ommer’s central question in her book is: ‘How did the cod-fishery, functioning as a commodity trade, shape the economic development of the metropole that managed it and the colony that produced it.’ (Ommer in Outpost to Outport: A Structural Analysis of the Jersey-Gaspé Cod Fishery, 1767-1886)
Mr Toft has just returned from 6 weeks research and field studies trip to the Caribbean where Charles Robin would send ships laden with salted codfish from his headquarter in Paspébiac via established trade routes with markets in the Caribbean, primarily the islands of Barbados, Dominica, Martinique, Grenada, St Lucia and occasionally also Jamaica, Cuba, Santo Domingo and Trinidad and Tobago dating from 1777 to 1931. In total he produced 25,000 new images and gathered other visual and textual material from research in national archives. Whilst there he published two dispatches on his blog:
In 2019 Mr Toft spend 6 weeks in Belize and Honduras and in the colonial records uncovered interesting details regarding several Jersey merchants operating as mahogany cutters and their slave populations. I also surveyed the colonial landscape and explored several estates belonging to Jerseymen and the communities that their mahogany works fostered. Additionally, I tracked down descendants currently living in Belize and the Bay Islands of Roatan and Utila (Honduras) with direct ancestral links to Joshua Gabourel who arrived here from Jersey in 1787. Some of this material includes:
Census records and Slave registers from Belize with names of Jersey merchants and their households
Inventory and Appraisement – list of land and property owned where ’negroes’ are listed alongside, goats, cattle and farm equipment etc
If you wish to learn more about the mahogany trade in Central America, and in particularly, British Honduras, read this essay Furnishing the Craftsman: Slaves and Sailors in the Mahogany Trade by Dan Finamore,Curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. It gives a very detailed account of extracting mahogany wood from its dense forests under strenuous hardship of African slaves and shipping it to North America and Europe (including Jersey) and be turned into fine bespoke furniture to adorn the large mansions of the merchant class known as ‘cod-houses’ (maison terre-de-neuve.) Mahogany and other exotic hardwoods were also used successfully in the growing shipbuilding industry in Jersey for decorative purposes.
J. McGahey, Felling Mahogany, Liverpool, England, ca. 1850. Lithograph. 6″ x 9″. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.)
A Jersey dresser made from mahogany wood and a staircaseImages from Entrepôt, Belize and Honduras (2019)
Week 2: 9-15 Sept PLANNING & RECORDING Complete the following blog posts
1. Provide a short history of the development of St Helier harbour and produce a mood-board of images that show changes from mid-19th century up until today, including future plans to transform the port into a modern maritime hub (1830s – 2020s). Annotate images and describe what they are depicting (ships, industries, harbour facilities, port workers, visitors, views etc.), location (pier, quay) and any other information that would be of interest. This mood-board will be used as inspiration for making your own images and photographic responses to St Helier harbour.
Here is a link to a folder with images from the Societe Jersiaise Photographic Archive and other visual repositories.
Saint Helier Harbour is the main harbour on the Channel Island of Jersey. It is on the south coast of the island, occupying most of the coast of the main town of St Helier. It is operated by Ports of Jersey, a company wholly owned by the Government of Jersey.
Maps of St Helier through time.
Map of St Helier in 1790. One little pier is visible in red which is the Old Harbour, also know as the French and English harbour.
1834 Le Gros MapAntique map by John Bartholomew & Co.1898
Etymology: Saint Helier Harbour is named after Helier (or Helerius), a 6th-century ascetic hermit from Belgium. The traditional date of his martyrdom is AD 555. His feast day, marked by an annual municipal and ecumenical pilgrimage to the Hermitage, is on 16 July. If interested, you can read more here bout the growth of St Helier.
History: The harbour was constructed in the early 19th century. Previously, ships coming into the town had only a small jetty at the site now called the English Harbour and the French Harbour. The Chamber of Commerce urged the States Assembly to build a new harbour, but they refused, so the Chamber took it into their own hands and paid to upgrade the harbour in 1790. A new breakwater was constructed to shelter the jetty and harbours. In 1814, the merchants constructed the roads now known as Commercial Buildings and Le Quai des Marchands to connect the harbours to the town and in 1832 construction was finished on the Esplanade and its sea wall. A rapid expansion in shipping led the States of Jersey in 1837 to order the construction of two new piers: the Victoria and Albert Piers.
The Old harbour: English Harbour and French Harbour have berths for over 500 motorboats and sailing yachts which dry out on the mud at low tide. The abandoned pub, La Folie Inn is also situated here and so is South Pier where you will find marine engineers South Pier Marina and St Helier Yacht Club.
Main harbour: The main harbour provides deep water berths for commercial vessels alongside the Victoria Quay and New North Quay. On Victoria Quay you will find fish wholesalers such as, Fresh Fish Company and Aquamar Fisheries. Albert Pier has now been re-developed from a ferry terminal to new berths for large vessels and yachts. Read about new development here and also look through ED.EM.04 – Victoria and Albert: on the Piers a photo-zine produced by the SJ Photo-archive.
Marinas: There are three marinas — the La Collette Yacht Basin, the Saint Helier Marina (built in 1980) and the Elizabeth Marina. The La Collette Yacht Basin is the only one of these to provide non-tidal, 24-hour access to the sea and is home to Jersey’s commercial fishing fleet.
Since 2008, Saint Helier Marina has been the venue for the annual Jersey Boat Show.
Here is a picture gallery of images from St Helier Harbour from 1940s t0 21st century.
Albert PierDelivery of coal on New North Quay
Maritime Museum: We will be visiting the Maritime Museum on Wed 18 September for a guided tour by local historian Doug Ford. You will have an opportunity to make images of objects on display which relates to maritime activities. Here is a link to their website for more information.
Tue 10 Sept > First school trip Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive and St Helier Harbour
Location: 08:45: Meet at Société Jersiaise, 7 Pier Road, St Helier ready for 09:00 start. Students make their own way and must bring own camera, (with card and fully charged batteries), good footwear, appropriate clothing and provisions for lunch.
Activities: Tue 10 Sept 09:00 – 10:00: Presentations by photo-archive team about relevance of photo-archive and showing examples of images and objects from the collections with reference to St Helier Harbour, Jersey’s maritime heritage and early photographic techniques. 10:00-10:15: Break 10:15-11:15: Workshop: In groups students will work with set of images from different collections and construct a visual narrative through sequencing. Each group present. 11:15-11:30: Break 11:30-13:00: Photoshoot 1: SH Harbour > Old Harbours (English and French harbours), La Folie Inn/ South Pier Brian Nibbs, former Harbour Master and blue badge guide will join us for a guided walk. 13:50-15:20 Photoshoot 2: SH Harbour > Albert Pier, Elizabeth Terminal, Elizabeth Marina. Each group will swap sites for photoshoots.
Wed – Fri: PHOTO-SHOOTS Upload new images from St Helier Harbour to M:drive and begin to edit in Lightroom. Follow these instructions:
EDITING:
Save shoots in folder on M:drive and import into Lightroom
Organisation: Create new Collection Set: St Helier Harbour Create a new Collection from new shoot inside Collection Set: Photoshoot 1
Editing: select 10-12 images from your shoot.
Experimenting: Adjust images in Develop, both as Colour and B&W images appropriate to your intentions.
Make sure you have standardised all the pictures in terms of exposure, brightness/ contrast, colour balance using Sync Settings
Export images as JPGS (1000 pixels) and save in a folder: BLOG
Create a Blogpost with edited images and an evaluation; explaining what you focused in your shoot and how you intend to develop your next photoshoot.
Analyse a couple of your best images using Photography Vocabulary Sheet, perhaps even comment on the Decisive Moment within the images, if appropriate
EVALUATING: Upon completion of photoshoot and make sure you evaluate and reflect on your next step of development. Comment on the following:
How successful was your photoshoot?
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?
HOMEWORK: Photo-assignment > Plan your own visit to St Helier Harbour, choosing a site that you wish to explore more in depth, and make another 150-200 images. Bring new images to school and edit following same process as above.
Deadline: Mon 23 Sept
Week 3: 16-22 Sept EDITING & DEVELOPING Complete the following blog posts
Mon -Tue > Essay: Origin of Photography Follow instructions in blog post below. Deadline: Mon 30 Sept
Wed 18 Sept > Second school trip Maritime Museum and St Helier Harbour
Location: 08:45: Meet at Maritime Museum, New North Quay, St Helier ready for 09:00 start. Students make their own way and must bring own camera, (with card and fully charged batteries), good footwear, appropriate clothing and provisions for lunch. 09:00-9:30: Outside harbour walk and talk led by maritime historian, Doug Ford on Jersey’s maritime history/ heritage 09:30-10:15: Inside guided tour of Maritime Museum led by Doug Ford 10:15-10:30: Break 10:30-11:15: Students explore and photograph exhibits at Maritime Museum. 11:15-11:30: Break 11:30-13:00:Photoshoot 1: SH Harbour > Victoria Pier and fisheries (Fresh Fish + Aquamar) 13:00-13:50: Lunch 13:50-15:20: Photoshoot 2 at SH Harbour > La Collette Each group will swap sites for photoshoots
Thurs – Fri: PHOTO-SHOOTS Upload new images from St Helier Harbour to M:drive and begin to edit in Lightroom. Follow these instructions:
EDITING:
Save shoots in folder on M:drive and import into Lightroom
Organisation: Create new Collection Set: St Helier Harbour Create a new Collection from new shoot inside Collection Set: Photoshoot 2
Editing: select 10-12 images from your shoot.
Experimenting: Adjust images in Develop, both as Colour and B&W images appropriate to your intentions.
Make sure you have standardised all the pictures in terms of exposure, brightness/ contrast, colour balance using Sync Settings
Export images as JPGS (1000 pixels) and save in a folder: BLOG
Create a Blogpost with edited images and an evaluation; explaining what you focused in your shoot and how you intend to develop your next photoshoot.
Analyse a couple of your best images using Photography Vocabulary Sheet.
EVALUATING: Upon completion of photoshoot and make sure you evaluate and reflect on your next step of development. Comment on the following:
How successful was your photoshoot?
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 4: 23-29 Sept NARRATIVE & SEQUENCING Complete the following blog posts
Mon – Tue: Continue to edit images from St Helier Harbour shoots > follow instructions in editing as above…
Wed – Fri: Narrative and sequencing Your first creative assignment is to produce a 16 page photo-zine in InDesign based around images from St Helier Harbour.
A selection of zines from trip to St Malo in 2023
A selection of zines from 2020 when students were exploring Jersey Occupation history.
NARRATIVE & STORY
NARRATIVE is essentially the way a story is told. For example you can tell different narratives of the same story. It is a very subjective process and there is no right or wrong. Whether or not your photographic story is any good is another matter.
Narrative is constructed when you begin to create relationships between images (and/or text) and present more than two images together. Your selection of images (editing) and the order of how these images appear on the pages (sequencing) contributes significantly to the construction of the narrative. So too, does the structure and design of the photo-zine. However, it is essential that you identity what your story is first before considering how you wish to tell it.
In order for you to understand better how narrative works in photography let’s consider the differences between narrative and story when making a photo-zine. For a more in-depth understanding of NARRATIVE and PHOTOGRAPHY go to blog post below.
Once you have considered the points made between the differences in narrative and story and thought about what story you want to tell about St Helier Harbour and the images that that you have made in response, consider the following:
EDITING: You may have to revisit your selected images that you used in producing page-spreads. For the zine-design you need a set of 12-16 images that are edited and standardised as either colour or B&W images, or a combination of the both. You may want to consider your final selection with reference to how individual pictures relate and tell a story according to the construction of a traditional picture-story.
SEQUENCING: Print your final set of 12-16 images as small work prints using print Microsoft wizard (4 images per page, 9x13cm). Cut images using guillotine and layout on table and begin to sequence them to construct a narrative. Produce a 16 page zine mock and past images into using masking tape. Consider the following:
Think about your theme or story. Think about start, middle and end images.
Which images are major (establishing shots, full page, double page), and minor (portrait, detail shots, small images, multiple images on the page etc.)
Think about visual relationship between images and their juxtaposition e.g colour, shapes, subject, repetition, landscape, portrait, objects, details etc.
What happens or changes over the series of images?
Are you using your best images?
Include archival images/ found images of St Helier Harbour – if appropriate.
COLOUR – SHAPESSHAPES – GEOMETRYREPETITIONOBJECT – PORTRAITTypography and graphic elements
Week 5: 30 Sept-6 Oct DESIGN & LAYOUT Complete the following blog posts
Mon-Tue: Zine research Wed-Fri: Introduction to InDesign
RESEARCH > ANALYSIS
Research zines and newspaper design made by artists and photographer that will provide visual stimulus for your page design. Produce a mood board and consider the following in your analysis:
Café Royal Books is a small independent publisher of photography photobooks or zines, and sometimes drawing, solely run by Craig Atkinson and based in Southport, England. Café Royal Books produces small-run publications predominantly documenting social, historical and architectural change, often in Britain, using both new work and photographs from archives. It has been operating since 2005 and by mid 2014 had published about 200 books and zines and they are held in major public collections
Editions Bessard is a paris-based independent publishing house created by pierre bessard in 2011. Focusing on working with artists, writers and curators to realise intellectually challenging projects in book form.
The new imprint Éditions Emile is named in honour of Emile F. Guiton, the founding father of the The Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive. The first set of publications is a series of small photo-zines comprising of 48 pages with an average of 30-40 images and a short text providing further context. With plans to publish three editions annually, each issue of ED.EM. will take a fresh look at a specific collection within the archive, by pairing it with either another collection or contemporary work, in order to re-contextualise the images, keeping the collections active and relevant for new audiences both in the island and beyond.
Week 6: 7-13 Oct PRINTING & EVALUATING Complete the following blog posts
Mon – Wed: Complete zine-design Thur-Fri: Print and evaluate
DEVELOPING > Show variation of design
Create 2-3 examples of alternative layouts for your photo-zine using Adobe InDesign and complete a visual blog post that clearly shows your decision making and design process using screen-prints.
Make sure you annotate!
See examples of previous students blog charting his zine design process, here.
Print, fold and bind final photo-zine and hand in for assessment.
Write an overall final evaluation (250-300 words) that explain in some detail how successfully you developed your project in response to themes of EXPLORE, SEEK OR CHALLENGE with specific focus on constructing a narrative presented as a photo-zine. Consider the following:
Did you realise your intentions?
How did you develop a narrative?
Zine; including any contextual/ artists references, links and inspiration between your final design and theme.
FINAL OUTCOME: ZINE Deadline: Fri 11 Oct
EXTENSION: Select images for printing and/ or create a virtual gallery
PREPARE AND SAVE IMAGES FOR PRINTING:
File Handling and printing...
Remember when EXPORTING from Lightroom you must adjust the file size to 1000 pixels on the Short edge for “blog-friendly” images (JPEGS)
BUT…for editing and printing when EXPORTING from Lightroom you must adjust the file size to Short edge for “high resolution” images (JPEGS) like this…
A5 Short Edge = 14.8 cm
A4 Short Edge = 21.0 cm
A3 Short Edge =29.7 cm
This will ensure you have the correct ASPECT RATIO
Ensure you label and save your file in you M :Drive and then copy across to the PRINT FOLDER / IMAGE TRANSFER
M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\Y13 St Helier Harbour prints
For a combination of images, or square format images you use the ADOBE PHOTOSHOP > NEW DOCUMENT + PRINT PRESETS on to help arrange images on the correct size page (A3, A4, A5)
You can do this using Photoshop, Set up the page sizes as templates and import images into each template, then you can see for themselves how well they fit… but remember to add an extra 6mm for bleed (3mm on each side of the page) to the original templates. i.e. A4 = 297mm x 210 but the template size for this would be 303mm x 216mm.
Making a Virtual Gallery in Photoshop
Download an empty gallery file…then insert your images and palce them on the walls. Adjust the persepctive, size and shape using CTRL T (free transform) You can also add things like a drop shadow to make the image look more realistic…
Here is access to a folder with images you can use freely:
Step 4: Create your own location or choose a template.
Step 5: Upload your images, put them in your exhibition, name it and give it a description.
Step 6: Present / view your Exhibition.
Week 4: 14-20 Oct WINDOWS & MIRRORS: Written and Photo-assignments Complete the following blog posts
Your task in the next four weeks is to produce a short film of 1-3 minutes based on a narrative that you have constructed using still-images made from St Helier harbour.
The production of the film will be supported by a workshop by Sam Hills, a Hautlieu alumni and sound designer who completed a degree in Audio & Music Production at Buckinghamshire New University in 2020. Using original recordings from St Helier harbour from his own sound archive he will introduce you to Audition in developing your own sound scape for your short film.
Here a few students films from the past…replace with film from Elizabeth Castle?
Micah de Gruchy, Jesus is greater than Lockdown, 2021
Chloe Best, Recovery Through a Looking Glass, 2021 – winner of Guernsey Photography Festival Student Award 2021
Week 7-8-9: 14 Oct – 8 Nov FILM & SOUND Complete the following blog posts
Mon 14 Oct: Lecture > Steve Carter Steve Carter is an alumni of Hautlieu School, who worked for many years in the film industry as an Art Director. He will do presentation about his work and career and also provide feedback on the films that you will be making.
1. CASE STUDY:Chris Marker:La Jétte (1962) > Narrative in moving images
what task do you want them to do?
Chris Marker, (1921-2012) was a French filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor and multi-media artist who has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Marker’s La Jetée is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel. What makes the film interesting for the purposes of this discussion, is that while in editing terms it uses the language of cinema to construct its narrative effect, it is composed entirely of still images showing imagesfrom the featureless dark of the underground caverns of future Paris, to the intensely detailed views across the ruined city, and the juxtaposition of destroyed buildings with the spire of the Eiffel Tower. You can read more here about the meaning of the film and watch the full version (29 mins) of the film here.
FILM AND NARRATIVE: Click here to learn more about conventions in film making and narrative theory with reference to the camera/ cinematography, sound and editing moving images.
2. IMAGES: Produce a mood-board of images that will inspire your visual language, style and aesthetic of your film. This can include similar set of images that you used in the zine layout or be a new set of images from St Helier harbour.
3. ARCHIVE: The film must include archival material, ie. images, footage, maps, documents relevant to your film narrative and historical research – use online catalogues from Société Jersiase or Jersey Archive.
4. STORYBOARD/ SHOT LIST: Develop a storyboard or a shot list that provides you with a clear plan ahead of how you wish to make your 1-3 mins film, including shot sizes, camera angles, movement, lighting, individual scenes and mise-en-scene (the arrangement of the scenery in front of the camera) from location, props, people, lighting, sound etc.
A storyboard or shot list is a graphic layout that sequences illustrations and images with the purpose of visually telling a story. Filmmakers and video creators use storyboards to transfer ideas from their mind to the screen. Creating an effective story board takes skill, but you can learn from storyboard examples to gain some pro tips. Read more here about differences between Storyboard and Shot list. See more examples of story boards here.
Storyboard from film: There will be blood, Martin ScorseseStoryboard
Camera movement – read more here In a storyboard, each shot will have a small section for brief text description. In this description, clarify what camera movement will be used in the shot.
Mise en scene plays a huge role in communicating the tone of a story — but what is mise en scene? In classical terms, mise en scene is the arrangement of scenery and stage properties in a play or film. Today, mise en scene is regarded as all of the elements that go into any single shot of a production. Click below to learn more about mise-en-scene
Four of the most important aspects of mise en scene are: sets, props, costume/hair/makeup, and lighting. Here are examples from filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson on how to apply color to these four aspects.
Mon 21 Oct: SOUND WORKSHOP > Sam Hills Go to this folder for shared audio files: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\SH harbour\Audio files
5. SOUND: Develop a sound design of audio files from various sources, such as original recordings from locations at St Helier Harbour as supplied by Sam Hills. Include other sounds too, such as; sound FX, sound archives, Foley sounds recreated in the Hautlieu recording studio and other audio elements such as interviews, narration and spoken words, singing and music scores.
Sound: Import audio files into Adobe Audition and edit on the timeline. Show experimentation with mixing audio files using…
Here is access to Sound Effect archives:
Hautlieu Media department: M:\Radio\Departments\Media\Students\Sound FX
Archives: You can find relevant material, such as images, maps and documents your visit to SJ Photo-Archive here, that you may wish to use in your film.
6. FILM EDITING: Organisation: Create new folder FILM on local VideoData drive on your computer. Download files from from camera card into:
Save still images into a sub-folder: STILLS Save video clips into a sub-folder: VIDEO Save audio files into a sub-folder: AUDIO
Still-images: Import still-images into Lightroom and create a collection FILM under project folder: ST HELIER HARBOUR. Edit and adjust images and export as high-res jpgs ready for import into Adobe Premiere
Moving-images: Import still-images/ video clips into Adobe Premier and edit on the timeline. Show experimentation with cuts/ transitions/ duration. Adjust exposure, colour grading profiling….
Title and credits: Consider typography/ graphics/ styles etc. For more creative possibilities make title page in Photoshop (format: 1920 x 1080 pixels) and import as a high-res JPEG file into your project folder on the local: VideoData drive.
Export: Export film as mp4 file and upload to Youtube account and embed on Blog. Follow these steps:
In Premier: Click on Sequence > Render IN/OUT
File > Export > Media
Export Settings: Format H.264
Output Name: use title of your film and save to V:Data drive
Click Export at bottom
Using Microsoft Stream: Open up Office 365
Go to All Apps and select Stream
Create > Upload Video
Browse to upload your exported film from V:Data drive
Write a short description, choose thumbnail and publish
My Content > Videos > embed film into Blog post with evaluation.
In Youtube: Set up an account at home (www.youtube.com)
Click Create (top right corner) > Upload video
Select file > your exported film from V:Data drive
Write a short description and choose thumbnail
Once uploaded, embed film into Blog post with evaluation.
EVALUATING: Write an evaluation on the blog that reflects on you artistic intentions, film-editing process and collaborating as a group. Include screen-prints from Premiere and a few ‘behind the scenes’ images of the shooting and production.
FILM AND NARRATIVE > more HELPFUL guidelines
Click here to learn more about conventions in film making and narrative theory with reference to the camera/ cinematography, sound and editing moving images.
Week 10: 11-17 Nov WINDOWS & MIRROS ESSAY: Truth in Photography: Can a photograph lie? Complete the following blog posts
Week 11: 18-24 Nov PERSONAL STUDY Complete the following blog posts
Week 3: 18 – 24 Sept RESEARCH & PLANNING Film: Elizabeth Castle Complete the following blog posts
NOSTALGIA is often linked with the past and Jersey is an island obsessed with its unique history and heritage. The site of Elizabeth Castle is such an example, and it offers up many creative possibilities for constructing a photographic story based on historical research and new recorded material, such as still-images, moving images and sound. Your task in the next four weeks is to produce a short film of 2-3 minutes based on a narrative that you have constructed from over a 1000 years of rich history of Elizabeth Castle or in Jerriais, Lé Châté Lîzabé.
Your film will be a visual feast made of footage from a combination of still-images and/ or moving images (video). Part of your creative challenge is developing a sound scape made from original audio recordings on site. For the film production you can choose to work alone or in a group of 2-3 students.
This element of the film will be supported by a series of workshops by Sam Hills, a Hautlieu alumni and sound designer who completed a degree in Audio & Music Production at Buckinghamshire New University in 2020. He will be assisting us on location at Elizabeth Castle on Wed 27 September and also come into school/ classroom and deliver/ assist with editing your audio in post-production and help developing your sound scape.
Here a few students films from the past…
Micah de Gruchy, Jesus is greater than Lockdown, 2021
Chloe Best, Recovery Through a Looking Glass, 2021 – winner of Guernsey Photography Festival Student Award 2021
TASK:Produce a number of appropriate blog posts.
1. RESEARCH: Elizabeth Castle and decide which particular aspects of its 1000 year history you wish to make into a short film of 3-5 mins – see below. Gather together research material, such as images, maps, documents, links to online sources and write a short synopsis of 300-500 words.
– Hermitage where St Helier is thought to have lived around 550 AD and a priory with about 6 monks. – 16th century fortress against French invaders. – Home to Royal exile Charles II during English civil war. – Construction of a two-story barracks hospital in the early 19th century. – Nazi occupation in 1940-45 where 100 German soldiers lived in Elizabeth Castle – Construction work on bunkers carried out by forced workers from Russia and other countries. – Post-war tourist attraction, current site of Jersey Heritage and living history.
2. VISUALS: Produce a mood-board of images that will inspire your visual language, style and aesthetic of your film. That can include found images of Elizabeth Castle and any other visual material, such as still-images from other filmmakers and films. See film,La Jétte by Chris Marker below.
3. ARCHIVE: The film must include archival material, ie. images, footage, maps, documents relevant to your film narrative and historical research – use online catalogues from Société Jersiase or Jersey Archive.
4. STORYBOARD/ SHOT LIST: Develop a storyboard or a shot list that provides you with a clear plan ahead of how you wish to make your 1-3 mins film, including shot sizes, camera angles, movement, lighting, individual scenes and mise-en-scene (the arrangement of the scenery in front of the camera) from location, props, people, lighting, sound etc.
A storyboard or shot list is a graphic layout that sequences illustrations and images with the purpose of visually telling a story. Filmmakers and video creators use storyboards to transfer ideas from their mind to the screen. Creating an effective story board takes skill, but you can learn from storyboard examples to gain some pro tips. Read more here about differences between Storyboard and Shot list. See more examples of story boards here.
Storyboard from film: There will be blood, Martin ScorseseStoryboard
Camera movement – read more here In a storyboard, each shot will have a small section for brief text description. In this description, clarify what camera movement will be used in the shot.
Mise en scene plays a huge role in communicating the tone of a story — but what is mise en scene? In classical terms, mise en scene is the arrangement of scenery and stage properties in a play or film. Today, mise en scene is regarded as all of the elements that go into any single shot of a production. Click below to learn more about mise-en-scene
Four of the most important aspects of mise en scene are: sets, props, costume/hair/makeup, and lighting. Here are examples from filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson on how to apply color to these four aspects.
4. SOUND: Develop a sound design of audio files from various sources, such as original recordings from site at Elizabeth Castle (ambient sounds, directional sounds), sound FX, sound archives, Foley sounds recreated in the Hautlieu recording studio and other audio elements such as interviews, narration and spoken words, singing and music scores.
5. SCRIPT: Write a short script that provides a narrative of your film. This can include historical research and be constructed as a dialogue or narration to be recorded as a potential voice-over r in studio
6. ARCHIVE: The film must include archival material, ie. images, footage, maps, documents relevant to your film narrative and historical research – use online catalogues from Société Jersiase or Jersey Archive.
7. PRODUCTION: Assign roles and responsibilities within your group, such as producer, DP (director of photography), sound recorder, editor etc.
RESOURCES
Jersey – Steeped in history and laced with cliffside walking trails, welcome to the largest of the Channel Islands. Don’t miss the top spots to check out in Jersey. If you’re looking for history, adventure, incredible food, and total relaxation, Jersey weaves it all together into something truly magical. It’s not quite British and it’s not quite French, but Jersey is 100% unique.
If you’re looking for an idyllic island escape Jersey might just be the perfect destination for you. This small island located in the English Channel boasts stunning natural beauty, rich history, and a diverse range of attractions and activities. In this YouTube video, we’ll take you through the top 10 places to visit in Jersey. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll be inspired to visit Jersey and experience its unique charm for yourself.
Elizabeth Castle – A fortress just off the coast of Jersey to explore 400 years of history – built on a tidal Island in St Aubin’s Bay and dating from the 16th century onwards. Learn more here by visiting Jersey Heritage or Wikipedia
To reach the Castle and begin your adventure, walk along the causeway or take the amphibious Castle Ferry. Spend your day exploring this sprawling 15-acre fortress: climb the battlements dating back to the time Sir Walter Raleigh was Governor of Jersey; explore the grounds that gave refuge to King Charles II during the English Civil War; uncover the story of the Castle during the German Occupation in World War II; then discover the oldest part of this site, The Hermitage, where Saint Helier is thought to have lived around 550 A.D.
Step back in time to 1781 and meet the Castle Gunner who will tell you his story of the Battle of Jersey, but be prepared to be drafted into the Midday Parade and witness the firing of the musket and cannon.
Jersey Heritage is currently restoring parts of the Castle to bring them back into public use and you’ll see scaffolding around two important, historic buildings – the Georgian Military Hospital and the Officers’ Quarters.
This work is essential to secure the Castle’s future and you can find out more about what’s in store for the buildings here. For a detailed conservation plan of Elizabeth Castle done in 2005, click here
Charles II – Living historyMaster Gunner
The Master Gunner will ensure that your backs are straight, your chins are high, and bellies are tucked-in as you stand to attention for the Midday Parade on the expanse of the Castle’s Parade Ground. Delight in the storytelling of the Gunner, who will enlighten you into the tales and mysteries of bygone times at the Castle, from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the Battle of Jersey in 1781. Then finally prepare yourself for the resounding bang of the signal gun and flintlock musket.
Read more on a Blog here about Elizabeth Castle or on Wikipedia here
The Historic Environment Record is a rich, publicly-accessible source of information about Jersey’s historic buildings, archaeological sites and finds spanning more than 250,000 years of human endeavour. New information is being added to the site all the time. Go to site here to learn more
The HER is also accessible in person. It is based at the Jersey Archive, the Island’s national repository of archival material and a key location for all reports on archaeological work and historic building recording carried out on the Island. This resource is available to a wide range of individuals, researchers, students and archaeologists. Jersey Heritage cares for the Island’s collections of archaeology, archives, art and social history, holding over 750,000 objects and documents.
Week 4: 25 Sept – 1 Oct RECORDING > FILM: Elizabeth Castle Complete the following blog posts
Mon-Tue > Chris Marker: La Jétte (1962)
Chris Marker, (1921-2012) was a French filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor and multi-media artist who has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Marker’s La Jetée is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel. What makes the film interesting for the purposes of this discussion, is that while in editing terms it uses the language of cinema to construct its narrative effect, it is composed entirely of still images showing imagesfrom the featureless dark of the underground caverns of future Paris, to the intensely detailed views across the ruined city, and the juxtaposition of destroyed buildings with the spire of the Eiffel Tower. You can read more here about the meaning of the film and watch the full version (29 mins) of the film here.
FILM AND NARRATIVE: Click here to learn more about conventions in film making and narrative theory with reference to the camera/ cinematography, sound and editing moving images.
Wed 29 Sept and Wed 4 Oct – school trip Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive and Elizabeth Castle
Location: 08:45: Meet at Société Jersiaise, 7 Pier Road, St Helier ready for 09:00 start. Students make their own way and must bring own camera, (with card and fully charged batteries), good footwear, appropriate clothing and provisions for lunch.
Activities: WED 29 Sept 09:00 – 9:30: Presentation by photo-archivist Patrick Cahill about relevance of photo-archive showing examples of objects from the collection with reference to early photographic experiments as an introduction to the history and origin of photography. 09:30 – 11:00:Task 1: Students study literature from Lord Coutanche library about the history of Elizabeth Castle and make notes of relevant bits of text, quotes, and references they can use in developing their film script and narrative Task 2: In groups students will work with set of images of Elizabeth Castle from different collections and construct a visual narrative through sequencing. Each group present. 11:00-12:00: Visit to exhibition: No Place Like Home
WED 4 OCT 11:15: Meet at West Park, St Helier where Duck vehicles is that will take us to Elizabeth Castle 12:00-13:30: Divide students into two groups Group A: Sound recording workshop led by Sam Hills. Students will learn practical skills in recording sound using Digi recorders and variety of different microphones. Group B: Students will be recording visuals, both stills-images and video footage relevant for their film 13:30-14:00: Lunch 14:00-15:30: Swap groups 15:30: Make our way from Elizabeth Castle to St Helier Students make their own way home
This unit requires you to produce an appropriate number of blog posts which charts you project from start to finish including research, planning, analysis, recording, experimentation, evaluation, and presentation of creative outcomes.
HOMEWORK TASK Essay: How are archives a repository of knowledge? DEADLINE: TUE 17 OCT
To show knowledge and understanding of your experience day at the Société Jersiaise Photo-Archive you need to write an essay. Follow link and instructions here:
Week 5-6-7: 2 – 20 Oct EDITING > DEVELOPING > PRESENTING > FILM Complete the following blog posts
Organisation: Create new folder FILM on local VideoData drive on your computer. Download files from from camera card into:
Save still images into a sub-folder: STILLS Save video clips into a sub-folder: VIDEO Save audio files into a sub-folder: AUDIO
Still-images: Import still-images into Lightroom and create a collection Elizabeth Castle under project folder: NOSTALGIA. Edit and adjust images and export as high-res jpgs ready for import into Adobe Premiere
Moving-images: Import video clips into Adobe Premier and edit on the timeline. Show experimentation with cuts/ transitions/ duration. Adjust exposure, colour grading profiling….
SOUND WORKSHOP: Sam Hills Go to this folder for shared audio files: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\NOSTALGIA\Audio files
Sound: Import audio files into Adobe Audition and edit on the timeline. Show experimentation with mixing audio files using…
Here is access to Sound Effect archives:
Hautlieu Media department: M:\Radio\Departments\Media\Students\Sound FX
Archives: You can find relevant material, such as images, maps and documents your visit to SJ Photo-Archive here, that you may wish to use in your film.
FILM EDITING Mise-en-scene > link to make blog post: Film Editing or MM’s old resources
Title and credits: Consider typography/ graphics/ styles etc. For more creative possibilities make title page in Photoshop (format: 1920 x 1080 pixels) and import as a high-res JPEG file into your project folder on the local: VideoData drive.
Export: Export film as mp4 file and upload to Youtube account and embed on Blog. Follow these steps:
In Premier: Click on Sequence > Render IN/OUT
File > Export > Media
Export Settings: Format H.264
Output Name: use title of your film and save to V:Data drive
Click Export at bottom
Using Microsoft Stream: Open up Office 365
Go to All Apps and select Stream
Create > Upload Video
Browse to upload your exported film from V:Data drive
Write a short description, choose thumbnail and publish
My Content > Videos > embed film into Blog post with evaluation.
In Youtube: Set up an account at home (www.youtube.com)
Click Create (top right corner) > Upload video
Select file > your exported film from V:Data drive
Write a short description and choose thumbnail
Once uploaded, embed film into Blog post with evaluation.
EVALUATING: Write an evaluation on the blog that reflects on you artistic intentions, film-editing process and collaborating as a group. Include screen-prints from Premiere and a few ‘behind the scenes’ images of the shooting and production.
DEADLINE: Wed 18 Oct SCREENING: Thurs 19 Oct and Fri 20 Oct (with popcorn) Prepare a short presentation of your film with Q&A.
EXTRAS:
Mon – Tue: RESEARCH > ANALYSIS ARTIST REFERENCES > CASE STUDIES > INSPIRATIONS
You will only be allocated two lessons for this piece of work and it is expected that you use your study periods or work from home to complete the task to a high standard. Follow instructions below:
Research and analyse the work of at least 1, if not 2 photographers/ artists. Explore, discuss, describe and explain key examples of their work relevant to your project and intentions. Follow these steps:
1. Produce a mood board with a selection of images and write an overview of their work, its visual style, meaning and methods. Describe why you have selected to study their work and how it relates to the themes of OBSERVE, SEEK, CHALLENGE and your project about Jersey’s maritime heritage.
2. Select at least one key image and analyse in depth using methodology of TECHNICAL>VISUAL>CONTEXTUAL>CONCEPTUAL
3. Incorporate quotes and comments from artist themselves or others (art/ media /film critics, art/ media/ film 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 in your blog post.
4. Compare and contrast your chosen artists in terms of similarities and differences in their approaches, techniques and outcomes of their work.
CASE STUDIES
other artists etc?
documentary based + ppt on documentary practice Walktrue: what is documentary – research 2 mins + cold calling
Urban/ industrial: Sebastiao Salgado (workers), Chris Killip (Tyneside), Mark Power (shipping forecast + Good morning America), Historical: Albert Renger Patz > Bechers/ typology studies > Dusseldorf School of Photography – get stuff from Yr 12 Landscape module something on documentary practice use of archives
DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
In our summer project based on street photography in St Malo we learned about Henri Cartier-Bresson and the decisive moment. Cartier-Bresson is often seen as the forefather of photojournalism and documentary photography.
What is documentary photography? Walktrue: research 2 mins + cold calling
In recent times documentary photography has expanded beyond observation and to become much more of personal interpretation and artistic representation of issues in relation to socio-economics, geography and politics. , often on the subjects of the environment or
Something on Photography and Place: how do you explore a sense of place through photography?
For a basic understanding of documentary photography, lets have a look at this PowerPoint:
When we begin to make work in response to REBELLION in the second half of this autumn term we will be experimenting with a different way to construct narrative using a staged approach to photography within the tradition of tableaux, as well as creating a series of self-portraits.
All texts from Bate, David (2016), Art Photography. London: Tate Publishing
Rafal Milach, ICELAND, Saudakrokur. Annual horse gathering country ball. 2010 (c) Magnum Photos
Sebastio Salgado
Chris Killip , British, (1946 – 2023) > recent exhibitions and books on shipping and tyneside
In Flagrante describes the communities in Northern England that were devastated by the deindustrialisation common to policies carried out by Thatcher and her predecessors starting in the mid-1970s. The book was accompanied by an exhibition at the V&A in London. It’s worth noting that the photographs initially came out of a joint exhibition in 1985 entitled ‘Another Country’, that Killip made with his close friend, the photographer Graham Smith.
“The objective history of England doesn’t amount to much if you don’t believe in it, and I don’t, and I don’t believe that anyone in these photographs does either as they face the reality of de-industrialisation in a system which regards their lives as disposable. To the people in these photographs I am superfluous, my life does not depend on their struggle, only my hopes. This is a subjective book about my time in England. I take what isn’t mine and I covet other peoples lives. The photographs can tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.”
Chris Killip, Foreword to In Flagrante, 1988
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,
Mark Power (shipping forecast + Good morning America),
New Topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of predominantly American photographers, such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel Jr and Germans, Bernd and Hilla Becher who were inspired by the man-made world, selecting subject matter that was matter-of-fact. Their photographs had a banal aesthetic, in that they were formal and mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.
LEWIS BALTZ
Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, chromogenic colour print.
Analysis and discussion… starting points and key features of The New Topographics
Foreground vs background | Dominant features
Composition | low horizon line | Square format
Perspective and detail / cluttering
Wide depth of field | Large Format Camera
Colour | impact and relevance
Nationalism vs mobility vs isolation
Social commentary | The American Dream ?
An appreciation of the formal elements : line, shape, form, texture, pattern, tone etc
Explore Robert Adams seminal photobook: The New Westhere
Critic Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said “his subject has been the American west: its vastness, its sparse beauty and its ecological fragility…What he has photographed constantly – in varying shades of grey – is what has been lost and what remains” and that “his work’s other great subtext” is silence…
Frank Golhke
Bernd and Hilla Becher
You could also look at these photographers who has been influenced by New Topographics…see below for images/ examples under RESOURCES…
New Topographics was inspired by the likes of Albert Renger Patszch and the notion of The New Objectivity
Albert Renger-Patz
TYPOLOGIES and the landscape
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
Read this useful introduction to the Becher’s work from American Photo magazine which describes their interest in the ‘Grid’ and their influence on future generations of photographers, members of the Düsseldorf School where Bernd and Hilla Becher taught between 1976 and 1996. Among his most renowned students are Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth.
Andreas Gursky. Paris, Montparnasse 1993
Thomas Struth (b. 1954) Ferdinand-von-Schill-Strasse, Dessau 1991 1991
Thomas Ruff
Candia Hofer
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.
Ed Ruscha, 26 Gasoline Stations
Ed Ruscha: Every building on the Sunset Strip
William Christenberry
Idris Khan
Bernd and Hilla Becher – Typologies of industrial architecture
Read this useful introduction to the Becher’s work from American Photo magazine which describes their interest in the ‘Grid’ and their influence on future generations of photographers, members of the Düsseldorf School.
The term ‘Typology’ was first used to describe a style of photography when Bernd and Hilla Becher began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959. The couple described their subjects as ‘buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style’.
Partly inspired by the likes of Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander and The New Objectivity (that we looked at in the previous project)
Stoic and detached, each photograph was taken from the same angle, at approximately the same distance from the buildings. 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 Bercher’s influence as lecturers at the The Dusseldorf School of Photography passed Typologies onto the next generation of photographers. Key photographic typologists such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Demand and Gillian Wearing lead to a resurgence of these documentary-style reflections on a variety of subject matter from Ruff’s giant ‘passport’ photos to Demand’s desolate, empty cities.
ESSAY: Photography and Truth: Can a photograph lie? DEADLINE: Mon 4 Nov
Can a photograph lie?
Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, 1936
Are all photographs reliable?
Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945
A photograph is a certain delivery of facts?
Jeff Wall, Mimic, 1982
Claims of truth that most people take for granted?
Tom Hunter, Woman Reading a Possession Order, 1997, after Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, 1647-49
You often hear a photographer saying: ‘the camera was there and recorded what I saw’.
A common phrase is to ‘shed light on a situation’ meaning to find out the truth.
‘A picture tells a 1000 words‘, is another aphorism that imply images are more reliable.
Picasso famously said: ‘We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.’
Magritte’s painting La Trahison des Images in which he painted a picture of a pipe with the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (This is not a pipe) goes some way towards an explanation.
Documentary photography’s central moral associations are:
depicting truth
recording life as it is
camera as a witness.
The photograph as evidence
Since its ‘invention’ in the 1830s, photographs have been used as sources of evidence. The direct (indexical) relationship between the sun’s rays and the resulting image makes photographs seem reliable as sources of information. No wonder that photography was enthusiastically embraced by organisations like the police who began to use photographs as sources of legal proof. And yet, from the beginning, artists working with photography began to create images which relied on the manipulation of their photographs using techniques like combination printing, undermining their evidential status. Photographs are very persuasive since they look so much like the things photographed. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, when we hear about something happening but doubt its occurrence, we tend to believe it to be true when shown a photograph of it. However, she also describes the way that photographs are peculiar in the type of evidence they provide:
The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer – a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but ‘photographic seeing’, which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform. – Susan Sontag from On Photography
Some initial questions:
What can photographs be evidence of?
How many types of photographic evidence can you list?
Which of your official documents include a photograph of you?
Why are photographs considered, in some legal circumstances, to be a reliable source of evidence?
How reliable is your Instagram feed or family photo album as a record of your life?
The exhibition featured a wide range of photographs from fields such as medicine, conflict, engineering, astronomy and crime. Originally used as evidence of something, torn from their original context and hung on a gallery wall, the photographs could be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities and artistry.
This was further emphasised by the exhibition hang which drew attention to the formal similarities between some of the photographs:
A limited edition of 200 catalogues were produced to mark the show, again conferring on the photographs the status of art object:
Part of the fascination with all photography is that the medium is firmly grounded in the documentary tradition. It has been used as a record of crime scenes, zoological specimens, lunar and space exploration, phrenology, fashion and importantly, art and science. It has been used as ‘proof’ of simple things such as family holidays and equally of atrocities taking place on the global stage. Any contemporary artist using photography has to accept the evidential language embedded in the medium. — Michael Hoppen Gallery website
Do you know what London really looks like? Take our quiz and see if AI can fool you
After an image of the Pope fooled the internet, test yourself and see if you’re still one step ahead of artificial intelligence. Click here
TASKS: Produce a number of blog posts that show evidence of the following
Mon-Tue: ESSAY > Write a 1000-1500 word comparative essay on photography’s association with truth using both historical and contemporary images as examples.
The essay question (hypothesis), Photography and Truth: Can a photography lie? is designed to explore the idea of photographs as forms of evidence. Of course this is relevant to all photographs. To what extent can any photograph be relied upon to tell us the truth? With new technology, such as generative AI that produce content from images and texts that already exist on the internet, it also raises questions about originality, appropriation and authorship. These issues are central to contemporary artistic and photographic practice and students should be alert to them. Is the photographer always the one who presses the shutter? Does it matter?
DEADLINE: Wed 3 July
Follow these instructions:
Select two images that have manipulated truth, one historical using camera technology, one contemporary using AI technology as examples to use in your essay
Research history, theory and context of both images thoroughly and make notes.
Read several sources (both online and on paper) to acquire sufficient knowledge and understanding
Provide a critical perspective by referencing different points of view from sources.
Select at least 2 quotes per image from sources you have read that is relevant to your essay question.
Use Harvard System of Referencing and provide a bibliography
Use key terminology specific to art and photography from the matrix/ sheet below.
Essay plan – use as a guideline
Hypothesis:Photography and Truth: Can a photograph lie?
Opening quote: to set the scene choose an appropriate quote from key texts or source that you have read and understood. Or select something Will Lakeman said in class discussion around ethics using AI in photography.
Introduction (250 words): Describe how photography from its invention as a new technology in 1839 was viewed as a threat to traditional artforms such as painting and drawing. Provide an overview of why photography (like all other art forms) is an illusion and a representation of reality (reflect on your essay earlier on the Origin of Photography). Explain what AI is as a new technology, and how it is already part of lives, give examples (Google, speech recognition, generative AI etc). Discuss both human and societal benefits and potential dangers of AI, again use examples such as Geoffrey Linton resigning from Google to bring awareness, or Sam Altman’s (CEO of OpenAI) being questioned by USA congress. Select one quote by either Linton or Altman and comment (either for or against). Introduce the two images that you have chosen as examples of the above.
Paragraph 1 (250-500 words): Describe how photography in the past (before the digital age) could be manipulated, both in-camera and in the darkroom (eg. reflect on Pictorialism’s use of chemicals and scratching surfaces in distorting images and earlier masking/ collaging technique sin the darkroom.) Provide an example of an image (see case studies below) from history of photography where the truth was distorted. Describe circumstances, context, different points of view and new discoveries or theories around the origin or meaning of your chosen image. Use either direct quote, paraphrasing or summary from sources and comment (for or against). Make sure you provide your own interpretation of the image too.
Paragraph 2 (250 -500 words): Describe how photography now since the digital age has been altering the truth from faking images in-camera to using image manipulation software, such as Photoshop. Provide an example of an image (see case studies below) produced using artificial intelligence that looks ‘real’, but are in fact a digital construct. Provide analysis of how generative AI such as DreamStudio, Midjourney or DALL E 2 has increased our ability to create new images that has no relationship with either photography or the truth. Use same formula as above and use either direct quote, paraphrasing or summary from sources and comment (for or against). Make sure you provide your own interpretation of the image too.
Conclusion (250 words): Refer back to the essay question and write a conclusion where you summarise in your own words both similarities and differences between your two image examples. For example, compare and contrast how historical images in the past and digital images made today, using new technology such as AI, have altered reality and distorted truth. Conclude with a statement on how you envisage the future of photography and AI image-making might change our perception of reality, and attitude towards truth.
Bibliography: List all the sources that you have identified in alphabetical order. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources e.g. websites/online sources, Youtube/ DVD/TV.
Quotes and referencing: You MUST reference some of the sources that you have used either by incorporating direct quotes, paraphrasing or summarising of an idea, theory or concept, or historical fact.
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
CASE STUDIES
Explore case studies where images have ‘lied’ and truth has been manipulated, distorted, staged or altered. Choose two images – one historical and one contemporary – for your essay from case studies listed below that questions the notion of truth regarding the photographic image and its relationship with reality and explain why.
Case Study 1: Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, April 23, 1855
Case Study 2: Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, 1936
Vu magazine, Sept. 23, 1936. Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War coverage with the “Falling Soldier” photograph
Case Study 3: Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945
Joe Rosenthal’s original caption: “Atop 550-foot Suribachi Yama, the volcano at the southwest tip of Iwo Jima, Marines of the Second Battalion, 28th Regiment, Fifth Division, hoist the Stars and Stripes, signalling the capture of this key position.”
Case Study 4: Steve McCurry, Taj Mahal and train in Agra, 1983.
The images of renowned photographer Steve McCurry, who made the famous and iconic image of an Afghan girl for a front cover of National Geography has recently been criticized for making ‘too perfect pictures’ which not only are boring but reinforces a particular idea or stereotype of the exotic other.
Read this article by Teju Cole in the New York Times Magazine which compares McCurry’s representation of India with a native photographer, Raghubir Singh who worked from the late ’60s until his untimely death in 1999, traveling all over India to create a series of powerful books about his homeland.
Read this artcicle on Petapixel in In defense of Steve McCurry’s images
What is your view? Back it up with references to articles read and include quotes for or against.
Reference to Coldplay’s new video also highlight the idea of cultural appropriation that harks back to Britain’s colonial rule and exploitation of the Orient.
Case Study 5 > Jeff Wall, Approach, 2014.
Jeff Wall is a Canadian artists known for his large scale tableaux image presented in light-boxes. Today, most of his images resemble reportage and, as such, are likely to incense his detractors, who claim he’s not a “true” photographer. His most contentious new work, called Approach, shows a homeless woman standing by a makeshift cardboard shelter in which we spy the foot of what could be a sleeping vagrant. Wall tells me it was shot under an actual freeway where the homeless congregate and that “it took a month to make, working hands-on” – but he won’t divulge just how staged it is. Is this an actual homeless woman, or an actor? Is the shelter real, or was it built by Wall’s team of assistants to resemble one?
Re-creating images from memory is crucial to Wall’s practice – perhaps because it flies in the face of the tradition of photography as an act of instant witnessing.
“Something lingers in me until I have to remake it from memory to capture why it fascinates me,” he says. “Not photographing gives me imaginative freedom that is crucial to the making of art. That, in fact, is what art is about – the freedom to do what we want.”
In terms of truth or communicating an idea that make references to a real social problem such as homelessness, does it matter if the image is staged or not? Where does authenticity come into the picture?
Jeff Wall exhibition with his trademark images presented in lightboxes.
Case Study 6 > Boris Eldagsen. The Electrician, from the series PSEUDOMNESIA, 2022. Credit: Boris Eldagsen/Co-created with DALLE2/Courtesy of Photo Edition Berlin.
AI-generated image wins photography award, but artist turns it down
Artist wins photo award with AI generated image, sparking debate | DW News
Berlin-based photographer Boris Eldagsen rejected the recognition from Sony World Photography Awards, saying that artificial intelligence (AI) images and photography should not compete with each other in similar contests. In a statement published on his website, Erdagsen said that he applied to the competition “as a cheeky monkey” to find out if such events are prepared to handle AI-generated content. The photographer also urged for debate on the role of AI in photography. “We, the photo world, need an open discussion. A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not,” wrote Eldagsen.
Read Boris Eldgasen’s own comments om his website here, where you will also find hyperlinks to many articles and interviews given about the image and his refusal to accept the Sony World Photography Awards 2023.
Boris Eldagsen has accused the Sony World Photograph Awards of failing to distinguish between a photograph and a DALL-E 2-created image, while the organisers condemn a ‘deliberate attempt at misleading us’
The German artist caused uproar this week when he revealed the shot that won a prestigious award wasn’t what it seemed. But, he insists, AI isn’t about sidelining humans – it’s about liberating artists
Boris Eldagsen submitted an artificial-intelligence-generated image to a photography contest as a “cheeky monkey” and sparked a debate about AI’s place in the art world
Artificial-intelligence-powered image-generating systems are making fake photographs so hard to detect that we need AI to catch them.
Case Study 7: David Fathi> False image generated by AI using Midjourney showing Emmanuel Macron in contact with police officers and taking to the streets to protest against the retirement age reform in France.
‘Generative artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly advancing. Anyone can use image generation tools to create without needing specific technical or artistic skills. The images generated by these tools challenge the notions of work and creator, as if they were algorithmic ready-mades. Like Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, bottle rack or snow shovel, they are products of mechanization and automation (industrial for Duchamp, digital for these new creations) and displayed in an art gallery. The artist does not have to paint, photograph or sculpt; his choices and decisions shape the work. The algorithm draws from a huge database of images that mirror our world without replicating it accurately. The generated images look more and more realistic and close to reality but also act as a distorting mirror, exaggerating all the stereotypes and biases of our visual culture.
We are at a turning point where human production has not yet been contaminated by artificial production. However this will soon change as the tools themselves use their own creations as input. Gradually the feedback loop, an endless cycle where culture ceaselessly refers to itself, will come to dominate the database, risking getting stuck in nostalgia for the past and trapped in a closed , meta-stable, system. Duchamp’s ghost still haunts us, an unavoidable reference in the history of contemporary art, often quoted, copied or parodied by generations of artists that followed. He became an art cliché despite himself. Duchamp himself described his own art as “meta-irony” to describe his art – a form of critical distance holding its own questioning.
Artificial intelligence raises ethical, artistic and social questions that are only an acceleration of the same questions that have followed the inventions of printing, photography, computer or the internet. The growing automation only makes it harder to escape our current system and the “meta” has become a refuge. This constant self-reference, reflexivity, circularity of our art, our technologies, our culture is becoming a trap where the past’s ghosts still haunt our present thinking.’
Case Study 8: Philip Toledano > Trump as a poor man
Philip Toledano: (mrtoledano) For the final act of the trump series, let’s think about who donald trump would be if he didn’t have his fathers money. If he hadn’t had a gilded life of privilege handed to him. What if he was just Donny from Queens ? What would his life look like? What would he be doing ?
Philip Toledano: I’ve noticed a lot of work uses ai to recreate photography as it is now-some sort of reflection of reality -but what’s utterly intriguing is that AI has its own voice. For instance, this image of the two men fighting I would argue is much more interesting than the one I posted yesterday (can you see what’s different ?) because (metaphorically) I allowed ai to have a say -now this image asks more questions (which is ALWAYS a good thing in art)
READING > REFERENCES > SOURCES
Below are some background text on some of the topics of discussion, such as truth, ethics, realism, representation and genres of documentary photography and staged photography (tableaux). Reading a couple of these texts would provide you with the background knowledge and understanding that is required for you write a critical essay on the topic around photography and truth. It is your own responsibility to research relevant information and context around the two images that you have chosen from case studies above.
Documentary > Truth > Realism > Ethics > Representation
Artificial Intelligence > Ethics > Regulation > Media – current debates
In March, some prominent figures in tech signed a letter calling for artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” The letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit backed by Elon Musk, came just two weeks after OpenAI announced GPT-4, an even more powerful version of the technology that powers ChatGPT. In early tests and a company demo, GPT-4 was used to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.
Lets watch this interview on CNN with Dr Geoffrey Hinton who says ‘AI could kill humans and there might be no way of stopping it.’. The man often touted as the godfather of AI quit Google, citing concerns over the flood of misinformation, the possibility for AI to upend the job market, and the “existential risk” posed by the creation of a true digital intelligence. For more context read articles in The Guardian and NYT (New York Times) too
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”
AI Principles
The Asilomar AI Principles, coordinated by The Future of Life Institute (FLI) and developed at the Beneficial AI 2017 conference, are one of the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles. Read all principles listed, especially those linked with Ethics and Values.
The University of Florida hosted a panel on ethics in artificial intelligence on Tuesday, May 2, 2023, with faculty members exploring the important role of ethics as scientists race toward increasingly sophisticated AI technologies. UF faculty members Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Duncan Purves, Tina Tallon and Sanethia Thomas participated in the online panel, which explored various topics related to the ethical implications of artificial intelligence, including algorithmic bias, ChatGPT and the social impact of AI on different communities.
Josh Kline on the unfolding disasters of climate change and AI
Artforum editor in chief David Velasco visits Josh Kline at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art to discuss “Project for a New American Century,” his first institutional survey in the US. Kline, whose work graces the cover of the April issue, reflects on his world-building art, the unfolding disasters of climate change and AI, and why he still sees the future as a place of hope. In the April issue: Colby Colby Chamberlain on the art of Josh Kline.
You should provide evidence that fulfils the four Assessment Objectives: AO1 Develop ideas through sustained and focused investigations informed by contextual and other sources, demonstrating analytical and critical understanding AO2 Explore and select appropriate resources, media, materials, techniques and processes, reviewing and refining ideas as work develops AO3 Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions, reflecting critically on work and progress AO4 Present a personal and meaningful response that realises intentions and, where appropriate, makes connections between visual and other elements.
OBSERVE
VERB
a person who watches or notices something.”to a casual observer, he was at peace.
a person who follows events closely and comments publicly on them.”some observers expect interest rates to rise”
a person posted in an official capacity to an area to monitor political or military events.”elections scrutinized by international observers”
SYNONYMS: spectator, onlooker, watcher, voyeur, looker-on, fly on the wall, viewer, witness, eyewitness, bystander, sightseer, commentator, onlooker, reporter, blogger, monitor.
SEEK
VERB
attempt to find (something):“they came here to seek shelter from biting winter winds” SIMILAR: look for, be on the lookout for, search for, try to find, look about for.
ask for (something) from someone:“he sought help from the police” SIMILAR: ask for, request solicit, call on, invite, entre, beg for
(SEEK SOMEONE/SOMETHING OUT)search for and find someone or something:“it’s his job to seek out new customers” SIMILAR: discover, detect find (out), unearth, uncover, disinte
CHALLENGE
NOUN
a call to someone to participate in a competitive situation or fight to decide who is superior in terms of ability or strength:“he accepted the challenge” SIMILAR: dare, provocation, summons
a call to prove or justify something:“a challenge to the legality of the banning order” SIMILAR: opposition, defiance, ultimatum, confrontation with.
VERB
invite (someone) to engage in a contest:“he challenged one of my men to a duel” · “organizations challenged the government in by-elections” SIMILAR: dare, summon, invite,bid, throw down the gauntlet, to defy someone to do something
WEEK 1: 10 – 16 June St Malo Trip and Street Photography
Blog post: THEORY & CONTEXT > Henri Cartier-Bresson and the ‘decisive moment’
Mon: THINK, PAIR, SHARE
1. Establish talk partners
2. Ask question: How does Henri Cartier-Bresson view the act of photography?
Name 3 things and write on Show Me Boards (SMB)
Watch first film: 5 mins make notes on SMB
For example: Why is a camera an extension of the eye? What is the physical pleasure in making photographs? How can photography be liken to hunting?
3. Thinking time: 30 sec
4. Talk in pairs: 2 mins & SMB
5. Sample students responses: Cold-calling
Tue: THINK, PAIR, SHARE
1. Ask question: Describe Cartier-Bresson’s theory of The Decisive Moment.
“The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.”
Watch second film: 5 mins make notes on SMB
2. Cold calling to sample answers.
3. Task: In your pairs, describe Henri Cartier-Bresson’s theory of the decisive moment using direct quotes from his own text. Select one image of his work and apply the theory to your understanding of the photograph with detailed analysis of its form(what it looks like), composition(how it is arranged) and capturing a moment(essence of movement) .
The decisive moment is particularly concerned with the overall structure and composition of the photograph, such as shapes, geometry, patterns, action and movement. Comment on these elements as well as other formal elements such as:
The seven formal elements are commonly known as:
– Line – Shape & Form – Pattern – Tone – Colour – Texture – Space
Also make use of other specialist photography vocabulary such as, rule of third, depth of field – see Photography Vocabulary below.
4. Circulate classroom
5. Cold calling to sample answers.
6. Add the above new knowledge about the decisive moment, including analysis of one his images to your blog post on Cartier-Bresson. If you don’t complete in lesson time, make sure you complete it outside of lessons in your study periods or as homework .
Wed: THINK, PAIR, SHARE
1. Ask question: Which camera techniques are useful for street photography and capturing ‘decisive moments’?
2. Thinking time: 30 sec
3. Talk in pairs: 2 mins & SMB
4. Sample students responses: Cold-calling
5. TASK: In pairs use a camera and explore techniques discussed above. 15 Mins of shooting, return to classroom, upload images in Image Transfer folder below:
“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 fathers of photojournalism and masters of candid photography. He sought to capture the ‘everyday’ in his photographs and took great interest in recording human activity. He wrote,
“For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to ‘give a meaning’ to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.”
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. He was influenced by Surrealism and began his career in film working with renowned French director, Jean Renoir as second assistant director to films such as La vie est à nous (1936) and Une partie de campagne (1936), and La Règle du Jeu (1939 – considered one of the most influential films in 20th century.
“The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s precise definition of ‘the decisive moment’
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Images à la sauvette (The Decisive Moment), 1952
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. The exhibition details how the decisions made by the collaborators in this major project—including Cartier-Bresson, French art publisher Tériade, American publisher Simon & Schuster, and Henri Matisse, who designed the book’s cover—have shaped our understanding of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs.
Thurs 13 June: PRACTICE & RECORDING > St Malo photoshoot (250-400 images)
“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Walker Evans, ca. 1960 from Afterword in Many Are Called, a photobook featuring Evans’ snapshots of subway riders in New York.
Street Photography:the impulse to take candid pictures in the stream of everyday life. Street photography is a form of documentary but it is decidedly not reportage and rarely simply tells a story. Sometimes a street photographer captures something truly unusual – an extraordinary face, an accident, or a crime in the making. But more often a good street photograph is remarkable because it makes something very ordinary seem extraordinary.
Flaneur: The street photographer is the archetypal flaneur, an urban type popularised by the French poet Charles Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century, around the same time that photography itself came into popular circulation. Baudelaire defined the flaneur as ‘a botanist of the sidewalk’ an apt description for most of street photographers. Read more here
Technology: The Leica handheld camera, commercially available as of 1924, was the ticket to allowing a photographer to be on the move, as well as to capturing movement. A 35-mm film camera, the Leica had a wide aperture that required a short exposure time, especially for pictures taken outdoors, and it could advance quickly, which allowed the photographer to take numerous pictures of a subject in quick succession. Read more here on the history of the Leica camera
The Leica became the camera of choice in the 1930s for photographers such as André Kertész, Ilse Bing, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others, all of whom worked primarily in Europe. Those photographers did not call themselves street photographers even if some of their subject matter fit the genre’s current definition, but instead they identified themselves as photojournalists, fashion photographers (many worked for magazines), or simply as experimenters with a new medium. The Leica continued to be the go-to device for photographers after World War II, especially for New York City photographers such as Roy DeCarava, Lisette Model, William Klein, and Helen Levitt. Robert Frank, who is best known for his book The Americans (1959) and was the leading influence on street photographers of the succeeding generation, documented culture throughout the United States and in Europe. Street photography took off in Mexico as well, with Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide. Paris had Robert Doisneau, Czechoslovakia had Josef Koudelka, and London had Bill Brandt.
An exclusive interview with photographer William Klein and a first-ever glimpse behind the scenes at his Paris studio.
Hunting for characters on the Streets of New York City with Magnum Photographer Bruce Gilden.
A preview of the exhibition Diane Arbus: In The Beginning, on view at The Met Breuer from July 12 through November 27, 2016.
Finding Vivian Maier Official US Theatrical Trailer #1 (2013) – Photography Documentary HD
In this episode, I try to take photos like Vivian Maier.
Photo-assignment: St Malo and decisive moments
American street photographer Gary Winogrand famously said that, ‘I photograph things to see what they look like photographed.’
Using Cartier-Bresson’s theory of ‘the decisive moment’ try and capture images where the overall composition and visual elements are combined with an essence of movement. Find a location or spot that works as a compositional structure and anticipate or wait for something to happen within the photographic frame, eg. movement of people, a passer-by, or a dog, or some other fleeting moment of street life. Consider the following:
SUBJECT MATTER/ CAPTURING A MOMENT> people and humanity, theatre of everyday life, poetics of streets, comic absurdities and humour, small acts of kindness, scenes of unexpected beauty, ordinary moments, visual pun and humour, gestures and poses, faces and crowds.
LOCATIONS & PLACES > inside the walls and on the ramparts, back alleys and sidewalks, beaches and coastal promenades, parks and public spaces, cafes and shops, street corners and intersections, signs and advertising, facades and architecture.
POINTS OF VIEW > low/ high/ canted angles, deadpan approach, light and shadows, intensity of colour, reflections in shop windows, shoot through glass, frame within a frame, focusing and un-focusing, up-close and details, shallow depth of field, artful and funny juxtapositions, geometry and space, lines and form, textures and patterns, signs and shop windows, advertising and graphics, reflections and mirrors.
APPROACH > capturing decisive moments, candid portraits, informal snapshots, inobtrusive observations (Cartier-Bresson style), interactive and confrontational (William Klein approach), spontaneous and subconscious reactions, poetic possibilities, inquisitive mind and roaming eye, looking and prying, shoot from the hip, serendipity and good luck.
CAMERA HANDLING >Lenses (focal length): use wide (18-35mm) to standard lenses (50mm). Focusing: automatic or manual – whatever you prefer. Exposure mode: S or T mode – (shutter-speed priority). Shutter-speeds: experiment with fast (1/125-1/500) and slow shutter-speeds (1/15-1/60). ISO: 100 (sunny weather), 200-400 (overcast ), 800-3200 ISO (inside or evening/ night). White Balance: auto
For further inspiration see the work of historical and contemporary street photographers below. Or, for a comprehensive Powerpoint presentation with many examples of street photographers, styles and approaches – go to folder here:
WEEK 2: 17 – 23 June Editing > Selecting Photo-shoots from St Malo
PHOTO-SHOOTS: Upload new images from St Malo to M:drive and begin to edit in Lightroom. Follow these instructions:
EDITING:
Save shoots in folder on M:drive and import into Lightroom
Organisation: Create new Collection Set: St Malo Create a new Collection from new shoot inside Collection Set: St Malo
Editing: select 10-12 images from your shoot.
Experimenting: Adjust images in Develop, both as Colour and B&W images appropriate to your intentions.
Make sure you have standardised all the pictures in terms of exposure, brightness/ contrast, colour balance using Sync Settings
Export images as JPGS (1000 pixels) and save in a folder: BLOG
Create a Blogpost with edited images and an evaluation; explaining what you focused in your shoot and how you intend to develop your next photoshoot.
Analyse a couple of your best shots and describe the Decisive Moment within the images
Select one image and compare with an image from Henri Cartier-Bresson in relation to the theory of the Decisive Moment
EVALUATING: 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 3: 24 – 30 June Developing > Experimenting Cropping and AGI: Artificial Generative Intelligence
This week you have some time to catch up with work not completed, such as:
Experiment 1: CROPPING: Using cropping tool only begin to make some radical changes by selecting areas of your images for a different visual impact. Produce at least 3 different crops for 6 images.
Experiment 2: AI Produce a set 10 AI generated images / variations using text prompts > 1 blog post with annotation
Compare camera-based images with AI generated images > 1 blog post
Inspirations: Case Study 2 on artist(s) using AI as part of their image-making process > 1 blog post
Review, improve or complete any outstanding research, analytical/ contextual blog posts on Henri Cartier-Bresson and the decisive moment > 1 blog post
Essay >deadline Mon 10 July
If all above is completed, begin research task below collecting a variety of picture-stories as inspiration for your page-spread design.
CROPPING
One of the founding fathers of Documentary Photography Walker Evans used cropping as part of his work. Another pioneer of the photo-essay, W. Eugene Smith also experimented with cropping is his picture-stories.
There are many different types of crops used for different effects. The way in which a photo is cropped can add or alter the meaning significantly, especially in photojournalism. Sometimes, artistic qualities within photos are destroyed by careless cropping in order to make it fit into a particular layout in a newspaper or magazine for example.
For more history and context see Pictures on a Page, written almost 50 years by legendary newspaperman, Harold Evans who was the Picture Editor for The Sunday Times Magazine. Pictures on a Page, generally considered the definitive text on photojournalism, graphics and picture editing. Read more here
AI EXPERIMENTATION
AI EXPERIMENTING > Using your images from St Malo as inspiration produce a variety of AI generated images (at least 10 variants) using Photoshop AI, DreamStudio or Midjourney. Explore your experiences in St Malo and generate AI images inspired by street photography and Cartier-Bresson’s theory around the decisive moment. Either ‘train’ AI on your original images or recreate street photographs using relevant text prompts linked to your photo-assignment last week – see above. Use key terminology, such as specific words and phrases linked to subject matter, capturing moment, locations & places, points of view, approaches, composition and formal analysis, camera handling and techniques.
Show creative process using a combination of screen grabs and annotation > 1 blog post
ARTISTS REFERENCES > INSPIRATIONS
Philip Toledano: I’ve noticed a lot of work uses ai to recreate photography as it is now-some sort of reflection of reality -but what’s utterly intriguing is that AI has its own voice. For instance, this image of the two men fighting I would argue is much more interesting than the one I posted yesterday (can you see what’s different ?) because (metaphorically) I allowed ai to have a say -now this image asks more questions (which is ALWAYS a good thing in art)
I’m also surprised to see how it handles the animal images I’ve been doing -especially the monkeys and apes-the images have such emotion in them -and finally, I’m very much enjoying the way in which you can abstract the human form …
From his series, another America …
Photos courtesy of the latest version of Midjourney, an AI program which generates realistic deepfakes – Copyright Reddit – Twitter. Read article here
AI-created images of Donald Trump, shared by @EliotHiggins’s account. – Twitter – Midjourney
AI-created images of Donald Trump, shared by @EliotHiggins’s account. – Twitter – Midjourney
David Fathi: False image generated by photographer David Fathi via Midjourney showing Emmanuel Macron in contact with police officers. Credit: David Fathi / Midjourney
AI Image generating software: DreamStudio, Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Dream by Wombo, Craiyonand new version of Photoshop with AI
Photoshop AI
A general tip in Photoshop is just to get familiar with Layers, Selections, Masking, and Groups. Almost every complex task just involves being better at these and most problems proceed from small misunderstandings in them. There are free videos explaining any of these, for people who want targeted learning there is a short video on every tool available on Phlearn. The site will try and get you to pay for Premium Content, but there’s loads of free stuff.
For example, these are all free/quick, the presenter is great, and most contain free sample files to practice on.You can teach yourself a good standard of Photoshop just by following along. Click here for tutorials.
Introduction from Adobe to Photoshop AI: Nearly three and a half decades since we first brought Photoshop to the world, we’re writing a new chapter in our history with the integration of Generative AI and Adobe Firefly into Photoshop. Today we deliver an incredible new capability into creators’ hands that empowers them to work at the speed of their imagination while fundamentally transforming the experience into something more natural, intuitive and powerful.
Generative Fill – Adobe Photoshop Quickly create, add to, remove or replace images right in Adobe Photoshop with simple text prompts powered by Adobe Firefly generative AI.
Learn the basics of Generative Fill that is now integrated into the Beta version of Adobe Photoshop. This technology allows you to write simple text prompts to enhance your own images directly in Photoshop.
What’s new in Photoshop
The new features introduced to Photoshop are designed to accelerate everyday creative workflows, streamline complex tasks, and reduce clicks.
Adjustment Presets
Adjustment Presets are filters that speed up complex tasks by enabling you to preview and change the appearance of images in just a few steps to achieve a distinctive look and feel, instantly.
There are 32 new presets in the Adjustments panel that you can hover over to see what your image would look like with each preset applied before selecting it. Once a preset is selected, it can be further refined by editing the automatically created adjustment layers in the layers panel.
Neural Filters is a new workspace in Photoshop with a library of filters that dramatically reduces difficult workflows to just a few clicks using machine learning powered by Adobe Sensei. Neural Filters is a tool that empowers you to try non-destructive, generative filters and explore creative ideas in seconds. Neural Filters helps you improve your images by generating new contextual pixels that are not actually present in your original image.
Click here for a tutorial on how to use Generative Fill
Gradients update
The Gradients feature has been significantly improved, and the workflow has been expedited.
The feature enables you to create gradients in just a few steps and now includes new on-canvas controls which help you have precise controls over many aspects of the gradient in real-time. A live preview that’s created automatically shows you instantly how the changes you make affect your image.
You can now also make non-destructive edits to your gradients, which means you can go back and make changes to your gradient without permanently altering your original image.
The Remove Tool is an AI-powered feature that enables you to replace an unwanted object by simply brushing over it, preserving the integrity of nearby objects and providing an uninterrupted transition on complex and varied backgrounds.
The Remove Tool is particularly powerful when removing larger objects and matching the smooth focus shift across the image. For example, the tool can remove an entire building or car from an alpine landscape image while seamlessly maintaining the fidelity of the progression from meadow to mountains.
Use the Remove tool for:
Big objects
An object near other objects
An object on a varied-focus background
An object with structure behind it (think lines, like a fence or horizon)
The Contextual Task Bar is an on-screen menu that recommends the most relevant next steps in several key workflows, reducing the number of clicks required to complete a project, and making the most common actions more easily accessible.
For example, when an object is selected, the Contextual Task Bar appears below your selection and suggests actions for selection refinement that you might want to use next, such as Select and Mask, Feather, Invert, Create Adjustment Layer, Fill Selection, or generate something with the new Generative Fill capabilities.
The revolutionary and magical new suite of AI-powered capabilities grounded in your innate creativity, enabling you to add, extend, or remove content from your images non-destructively using simple text prompts. You can achieve realistic results that will surprise, delight, and astound you in seconds.
Click here for a tutorial on how to use Generative Fill
DreamStudio
Tutorial as we explore the amazing capabilities of DreamStudio, from creating realistic portraits to coming up with prompts and structuring your work for maximum impact,
Follow more advanced tutorial hereExplore AI artist: Rune S Nielsen site here
Some experiments with realistic portraits. Image credits: created with Midjourney V5 by CineDScreenshot from the Midjourney Bot on Discord, highlighting the correct use of the “v 5” parameterThe result of requesting an image in the style of Vincent van Gogh. Image credit: created with Midjourney V5 by CineDOn the left: the old output from V4. On the right: the result of the same prompt in the new V5. Image credits: created with Midjourney by CineDAn example of a picture generated in Cinemascope by adding “–ar 21:9” to the prompt. Image credit: created with Midjourney V5 by CineD
DALL-E and DALL-E 2 are deep learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called “prompts”. DALL-E was revealed by OpenAI in a blog post in January 2021, and uses a version of GPT-3 modified to generate images. In April 2022, OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, a successor designed to generate more realistic images at higher resolutions that “can combine concepts, attributes, and styles”.
WEEK 4 – 6:1 – 19 July Picture story: design a page spread
Make A3 page spreads based on images made in-camera (analogue/ observational) and/or AI generated images (digital/ constructed). Follow the steps below:
1. Research Picture-Stories: Produce a mood board of newspaper layouts and magazine style picture stories. For reference use look at local stories from the JEP as well as international stories from magazine supplements in UK broadsheets newspaper ( e.g. The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Telegraphs, Financial Times etc). Look at also at digital picture stories from the internet (see photo-agency websites: Lensculture, Magnum Photos, World Press Photo, AgenceVU, Panos Pictures. Alec Soth’s LBM Dispatch
Find picture-stories here in this folder: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\YR 13 OBSERVE, SEEK, CHALLENGE 2024-2025\Picture-stories
2. Analysis and deconstruction: Look at the layout of pictures and analyse how individual pictures relate and tell a story according to the construction of a traditional picture-story. Identify what types of pictures are more important than others e.g. which are major (establishing shots) or minor pictures (detail, relationship shot), and which types of portraits are used (formal, informal, environmental and person at work) see Powerpoint: A Traditional Picture Story below for further guidance. Analyse also the use of headline, text and captions to convey and construct a particular meaning or point of view.
Blogpost: Produce 1 Blogpost with moodboard of picture stories + analysis of one in relation to Traditional picture story
3. Headline, text, captions: Think of a creative title and write a selection of headlines that tell your story. Write also an introduction/ abstract that provide further context for your pictures story. Also write captions for each picture: who, what, where, when and put into a new post
4. A3 Page-Spread Designs: Produce at least two different designs/ picture-stories from your photographs. Class tutorial on page design using InDesign. Be creative in your layout and experiment with different ways to communicate your message by clever cropping, sequencing, juxta-positioning, typography, use of graphics etc. Think of catchy headline and also write a short text (50-100 words) and captions for images. Start with a rough sketch of how the page might work and begin to lay out pictures, major and minors.
a) Design a traditional newspaper layout b) Design a magazine double-page spread
5. Experimentation: Edit your final layout and designs – make sure you show experimentation in your blog of different design and layout ideas combining images, graphics and typography in a personal and creative manner. Produce at least 3 versions of each design
Blogpost: Produce 1 Blogpost which shows evidence of you design process using screen grabs and annotation.
6. Evaluation: Reflect on your final design ideas and explain in some detail how well you realised your intentions and reflect on what you learned/ What could you improve? How?
7. Presentation: Print, mount and present final designs and any other final outcomes, such your best 3-5 images and present as final print.
Blogpost: Produce 1 Blogpost with your final page-spreads and write an evaluation.
TASKS: Experimentation with AI Produce relevant blog posts using combination of images and text:
1. RESEARCH Define what AI is and how it is used to generate images and visual content using new technology. Produce a moodboard of images for inspiration to develop your own set of AI images – see Resources below > 1 blog post
2. EXPERIMENTATION: Select appropriate images from Anthropocene project and produce at least 5-10 different versions of images using generative AI in Photoshop, or any other AI Image generating software, such asDreamStudio, Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Dream by Wombo, Craiyon.
Either ‘train’ AI on your original images or add elements to your photographs using relevant text prompts linked to the Anthropocene project. Use key terminology, such as specific words and phrases linked to subject matter, capturing moment, locations & places, points of view, approaches, composition and formal analysis, camera handling and techniques.
Show creative process using a combination of screen grabs and annotation > 1 blog post
3. PRESENTATION: Evaluate your creative outcomes and select a set of final images for printing and save to this folder below > 1 blog post
” It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.”John McCarthy’s definition in his 2004 paper, What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI), is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. Since the development of the digital computer in the 1940s, it has been demonstrated that computers can be programmed to carry out very complex tasks—as, for example, discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chess—with great proficiency. Still, despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match human flexibility over wider domains or in tasks requiring much everyday knowledge. On the other hand, some programs have attained the performance levels of human experts and professionals in performing certain specific tasks, so that artificial intelligence in this limited sense is found in applications as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer search engines, voice or handwriting recognition and now generating content by text prompting producing images, music and films.
The birth of the artificial intelligence conversation was denoted by Alan Turing’s seminal work, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” , which was published in 1950. In this paper, Turing, often referred to as the “father of computer science”, asks the following question, “Can machines think?” From there, he offers a test, now famously known as the “Turing Test”, where a human interrogator would try to distinguish between a computer and human text response. While this test has undergone much scrutiny since its publish, it remains an important part of the history of AI as well as an ongoing concept within philosophy as it utilizes ideas around linguistics.
At its simplest form, artificial intelligence is a field, which combines computer science and robust datasets, to enable problem-solving. It also encompasses sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning, which are frequently mentioned in conjunction with artificial intelligence. These disciplines are comprised of AI algorithms which seek to create expert systems which make predictions or classifications based on input data.
Over the years, artificial intelligence has gone through many cycles of hype, but even to skeptics, the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT seems to mark a turning point. The last time generative AI loomed this large, the breakthroughs were in computer vision, but now the leap forward is in natural language processing. And it’s not just language: Generative models can also learn the grammar of software code, molecules, natural images, and a variety of other data types.
The applications for this technology are growing every day, and we’re just starting to explore the possibilities. But as the hype around the use of AI in business takes off, conversations around ethics become critically important. To read more on where IBM stands within the conversation around AI ethics, read more here.
More information about AI can be found here on IBM or see RESOURCES below.
AI Image generating software: DreamStudio, Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Dream by Wombo, Craiyon and new version of Photoshop with AI
Photoshop AI (beta version)
A general tip in Photoshop is just to get familiar with Layers, Selections, Masking, and Groups. Almost every complex task just involves being better at these and most problems proceed from small misunderstandings in them. There are free videos explaining any of these, for people who want targeted learning there is a short video on every tool available on Phlearn. The site will try and get you to pay for Premium Content, but there’s loads of free stuff.
For example, these are all free/quick, the presenter is great, and most contain free sample files to practice on.You can teach yourself a good standard of Photoshop just by following along. Click here for tutorials.
Introduction from Adobe to Photoshop AI: Nearly three and a half decades since we first brought Photoshop to the world, we’re writing a new chapter in our history with the integration of Generative AI and Adobe Firefly into Photoshop. Today we deliver an incredible new capability into creators’ hands that empowers them to work at the speed of their imagination while fundamentally transforming the experience into something more natural, intuitive and powerful.
Generative Fill – Adobe Photoshop Quickly create, add to, remove or replace images right in Adobe Photoshop with simple text prompts powered by Adobe Firefly generative AI.
Learn the basics of Generative Fill that is now integrated into the Beta version of Adobe Photoshop. This technology allows you to write simple text prompts to enhance your own images directly in Photoshop.
What’s new in Photoshop
The new features introduced to Photoshop are designed to accelerate everyday creative workflows, streamline complex tasks, and reduce clicks.
Adjustment Presets
Adjustment Presets are filters that speed up complex tasks by enabling you to preview and change the appearance of images in just a few steps to achieve a distinctive look and feel, instantly.
There are 32 new presets in the Adjustments panel that you can hover over to see what your image would look like with each preset applied before selecting it. Once a preset is selected, it can be further refined by editing the automatically created adjustment layers in the layers panel.
Neural Filters is a new workspace in Photoshop with a library of filters that dramatically reduces difficult workflows to just a few clicks using machine learning powered by Adobe Sensei. Neural Filters is a tool that empowers you to try non-destructive, generative filters and explore creative ideas in seconds. Neural Filters helps you improve your images by generating new contextual pixels that are not actually present in your original image.
Click here for a tutorial on how to use Generative Fill
Gradients update
The Gradients feature has been significantly improved, and the workflow has been expedited.
The feature enables you to create gradients in just a few steps and now includes new on-canvas controls which help you have precise controls over many aspects of the gradient in real-time. A live preview that’s created automatically shows you instantly how the changes you make affect your image.
You can now also make non-destructive edits to your gradients, which means you can go back and make changes to your gradient without permanently altering your original image.
The Remove Tool is an AI-powered feature that enables you to replace an unwanted object by simply brushing over it, preserving the integrity of nearby objects and providing an uninterrupted transition on complex and varied backgrounds.
The Remove Tool is particularly powerful when removing larger objects and matching the smooth focus shift across the image. For example, the tool can remove an entire building or car from an alpine landscape image while seamlessly maintaining the fidelity of the progression from meadow to mountains.
Use the Remove tool for:
Big objects
An object near other objects
An object on a varied-focus background
An object with structure behind it (think lines, like a fence or horizon)
The Contextual Task Bar is an on-screen menu that recommends the most relevant next steps in several key workflows, reducing the number of clicks required to complete a project, and making the most common actions more easily accessible.
For example, when an object is selected, the Contextual Task Bar appears below your selection and suggests actions for selection refinement that you might want to use next, such as Select and Mask, Feather, Invert, Create Adjustment Layer, Fill Selection, or generate something with the new Generative Fill capabilities.
The revolutionary and magical new suite of AI-powered capabilities grounded in your innate creativity, enabling you to add, extend, or remove content from your images non-destructively using simple text prompts. You can achieve realistic results that will surprise, delight, and astound you in seconds.
Click here for a tutorial on how to use Generative Fill
DreamStudio
Tutorial as we explore the amazing capabilities of DreamStudio, from creating realistic portraits to coming up with prompts and structuring your work for maximum impact,
Follow more advanced tutorial hereExplore AI artist: Rune S Nielsen site here
Some experiments with realistic portraits. Image credits: created with Midjourney V5 by CineDScreenshot from the Midjourney Bot on Discord, highlighting the correct use of the “v 5” parameterThe result of requesting an image in the style of Vincent van Gogh. Image credit: created with Midjourney V5 by CineDOn the left: the old output from V4. On the right: the result of the same prompt in the new V5. Image credits: created with Midjourney by CineDAn example of a picture generated in Cinemascope by adding “–ar 21:9” to the prompt. Image credit: created with Midjourney V5 by CineD
DALL-E and DALL-E 2 are deep learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called “prompts”. DALL-E was revealed by OpenAI in a blog post in January 2021, and uses a version of GPT-3 modified to generate images. In April 2022, OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, a successor designed to generate more realistic images at higher resolutions that “can combine concepts, attributes, and styles”.
For inspiration and ideas – see RESOURCES below of artists using AI.
Further Inspirations > Experimentation > Development
A FORT REGENT INSPIRED ART EXHIBITION RECREATING THE STRANGE HOLD CHILDHOOD SPACES HAVE ON ADULT MEMORIES
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.
Will 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. With the works accompanied by a custom soundscape, smell and touch, Playtime encourages visitors to revisit their own dreams. The exhibition opens with a special preview evening on Wednesday 24 May between 5.30pm and 7pm and runs through until Sunday 2 July 2023.
If you were ever a visitor to Pluto’s Playtime, spun around the roller disco on your Bauers, felt bilious on the pirate ship or slunk around in the shadows of the Exploratorium, this exhibition is without question for you. In a broader sense though, this exhibition is about nostalgia and how it is not always reliable. You can’t photograph a place that has long ceased to exist, so Will Lakeman has responded by using photo manipulation, collage and new technologies of artificial intelligence to recreate the Fort as he remembers it, not as it ever really was. The resulting images try to evoke the odd, fantastical memories we carry of childhoods everywhere.
Artist Will Lakeman said of the upcoming exhibition “I’m really excited for people to see this show, which I now realise I’ve been trying to make for most of my adult life. I have a really intense interest in a specific era of Fort Regent’s history – the funfair and swimming pool – but I have hardly any photos of myself there. I had to try and recreate my memories, and the more I tried the stranger the results became. The show involves photographs, reconstructions made with Artificial Intelligence, a soundscape, found objects and even some smells. Although it’s rooted in “the Fort” I tried to capture something universal in the experience of being a child, beyond excited to go to the leisure centre. I hope it says something to everybody.
“Everyone has the potential to make art that is meaningful to them. Anyone can be a good photographer, you do not need expensive gear, you just need to care. AI is the next thing that will become democratic. I would love to see other people’s weird dreams.”
Will Lakeman: ‘Through my work I try and communicate something of the weird, vivid sensations of my dreams and nightmares. I dream inside a world of intense colour and strange symbolism, but I also daydream in my waking hours as I drift around the place. I also experience synaesthetic hallucinations where my sensed become confused.
As a photographer I’m mainly inspired by cinema, especially the work of David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Stanley Kubrick. I also love the writing of Philip K Dick and Kazuo Ishiguro. Photographers I enjoy include Todd Hido and Greg Girard.’
David Lynch’s films: Twin Peaks (…), Eraserhead (..) and Mulholland Drive (…)
Read an interview with Will in Bailiwick Express here – see exerts below.
From ghostly pictures taken at night to eerie images of the Fort recreated by artificial intelligence, Will Lakeman has shared how dream and nostalgia inspire his work.
Pictured: Will says he didn’t take a single good photograph until he was 24.
“I did not take a single good photograph until I was 24,” he said. “I spent 24 years taking pictures that were not very interesting. It was not until I took one where I had an emotional experience that they started getting better. The first photo I took that I was really happy with was one of the Esplanade car park.”
As he started working at night, Will began working with nocturnal images, a series of which went on display at Private & Public Gallery in 2019. Those were partly inspired by his synesthetic hallucinations during which he can “taste colours and feel sounds.”
“I would try and get the sort of sense you get when you see something in a dream, bigger and clearer and more colourful,” Will explained.
Using artificial intelligence, Will has been manipulating images of Fort Regent based on his own dreams of the place.
Dreams and nostalgia are two big influences in Will’s work and both combine in his latest project. Using artificial intelligence, he has been manipulating images of Fort Regent based on his own dreams of the place.
Will had been wanting to focus on the Fort for a while but couldn’t find a way into it until he stumbled upon AI. His efforts have somewhat been stumped by the lack of pictures of the Fort, an appeal for images has not yielded much results so far, so Will has been creating his own collages and using pictures of the Fort as it is now, as well as the small number of archive images he has been able to find.
“I grew up here and I spent a lot of time there like many people,” Will said. “I am interested a lot about nostalgia, when people talk about what life was, they are not talking about reality but what their memory is.
Will wants his images to be “spooky, very colourful and weird”.
“I am interested in making those images, but I also understand that it is not reality and that you cannot go back there. I try to make them spooky, very colourful and weird, because even in a nice dream, there’s always something that happens that is a little bit weird. I wanted to try and capture that in an image, to make people remember and think about their own dreams.”
The process to create one image is a lengthy and somewhat fortuitous one. Will has to ‘feed’ the AI source images as well as instructions drawn from his dream diary until he “stumbles” upon something that looks right.
“The AI understands words and sentences but not in the same way as humans do,” he explained. “It’s like a painting where someone is throwing paint at the canvas rather than using a brush.
“Sometimes it’s really frustrating, you just do it over and over again and it looks nothing like you hoped it would, and then suddenly it looks exactly like it did in your dream.”
“It’s like a painting where someone is throwing paint at the canvas rather than using a brush,” Will said about the process.
The image comes out the size of a postage stamp so once Will is happy with it, he then has to make it “bigger and bigger”, adding elements as he goes, which he says can be quite “time consuming”.
While it’s an unusual process that Will says does not resemble any other type of creative process, he believes more artists will turn to AI in the future.
“Everyone has the potential to make art that is meaningful to them. Anyone can be a good photographer, you do not need expensive gear, you just need to care. AI is the next thing that will become democratic. I would love to see other people’s weird dreams.”
This article first appeared in the Dec/Jan edition of Connect magazine 2022, which you can read full version here.
Planet AI: Asking AI to Draw Famous People as Babies!
planet.ai. Artwork created by artificial intelligence. Subscribe here on Youtube to see examples of work or follow here on Instagram. They also sell prompts for Midjourney – see here for more details.
AI generated pictures of Coronation after party. Check out Charles!!!
Phillip Toledano believes that a photograph should be like an unfinished sentence. Born in London, he lives and works in New York City, where after a decade as an advertising art director, he returned to his true passion, photography. Below are some recent images he has created using Midjourney that were shared in Instagram.
mrtoledano Political art usually works in two ways -either it points outwards, to support and encourage people to rise up, or it points inwards, at a political figure, to ridicule, to weaken, to enrage-that’s that’s hopefully the point of this particular series. Two of trumps (many) characteristics are his misogyny and his obsession with projecting strength -these images make him become his fears
If you look at images of trump, you begin to notice just how many emotions he seems to be missing-there’s plenty of him looking angry, or petulant, or stern, and then there’s what passes for a smile. But real laughter? sadness? Concern ? Joy? Completely and strangely absent – the only option is to create them with ai. Midjourney
Trump is so hyper masculine, so extraordinarily misogynistic, it made me wonder. This is an exploration of what might be his deepest fear-to become what he despises the most
One of the things I find utterly fascinating about Donald Trump is the carefully curated tough guy image he’s crafted over the years -there’s something interesting in piercing that hyper -masculine bubble and showing the world the softer side of Donald
mrtoledano For the final act of the trump series, let’s think about who donald trump would be if he didn’t have his fathers money. If he hadn’t had a gilded life of privilege handed to him. What if he was just Donny from queens ? What would his life look like? What would he be doing ?
Philip Toledano: I’ve noticed a lot of work uses ai to recreate photography as it is now-some sort of reflection of reality -but what’s utterly intriguing is that AI has its own voice. For instance, this image of the two men fighting I would argue is much more interesting than the one I posted yesterday (can you see what’s different ?) because (metaphorically) I allowed ai to have a say -now this image asks more questions (which is ALWAYS a good thing in art)
I’m also surprised to see how it handles the animal images I’ve been doing -especially the monkeys and apes-the images have such emotion in them -and finally, I’m very much enjoying the way in which you can abstract the human form …
From his series, another America …
Photos courtesy of the latest version of Midjourney, an AI program which generates realistic deepfakes – Copyright Reddit – Twitter. Read article here
AI-created images of Donald Trump, shared by @EliotHiggins’s account. – Twitter – Midjourney
AI-created images of Donald Trump, shared by @EliotHiggins’s account. – Twitter – Midjourney
David Fathi: False image generated by photographer David Fathi via Midjourney showing Emmanuel Macron in contact with police officers. Credit: David Fathi / Midjourney
The Machine Seems to need a Ghost (but the ghost cannot quite make itself at home in the machine) is a work in progress currently composed of three typologies that explore all these questions around the keywords of feedback loop, hauntology, meta, etc., as a neural network of linked ideas and images:
OpenWalls Arles Vol. 4: TRUTH
The prompt for this year’s theme was French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s line that photography is “catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” The aim of OpenWalls 2023 is to challenge Lartigue’s notion in a modern context – to not only interrogate the idea of truth in a post-truth age, but to insist upon photographic authority as collaborative, considering multiple truths from across the six continents from which the winning images are taken.
Emmaline Zanelli. OpenWalls Arles Single image winner
My goal is not to uncover a single objective truth, but rather to explore the many subjective layers of a truth that are personal and relevant to the persons I am photographing
– Julia Gunther – OpenWalls Arles Single Image Winner
Guillaume FlandrePart of the ProblemHeather Agyepong,Too Many Blackamoors (#4)Jesse Glazzard First BathJulia Gunther, OpenWalls Arles 2023 Single Image Winner – Eunice
Ultimately, the winning image of this edition of OpenWalls projects demonstrate that truth can be wielded to empower an endless range of human impulses, whether preservation, rebellion, remembrance or imagination. Truth’s flexibility might be the most valuable legacy of the supposedly post-truth age.
WEEK 1: 10 – 16 June ESSAY: Photography and Truth: Can a photograph lie? DEADLINE: Mon 17 June
Can a photograph lie?
Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, 1936
Are all photographs reliable?
Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945
A photograph is a certain delivery of facts?
Jeff Wall, Mimic, 1982
Claims of truth that most people take for granted?
Tom Hunter, Woman Reading a Possession Order, 1997, after Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, 1647-49
You often hear a photographer saying: ‘the camera was there and recorded what I saw’.
A common phrase is to ‘shed light on a situation’ meaning to find out the truth.
‘A picture tells a 1000 words‘, is another aphorism that imply images are more reliable.
Picasso famously said: ‘We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.’
Magritte’s painting La Trahison des Images in which he painted a picture of a pipe with the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (This is not a pipe) goes some way towards an explanation.
Documentary photography’s central moral associations are:
depicting truth
recording life as it is
camera as a witness.
The photograph as evidence
Since its ‘invention’ in the 1830s, photographs have been used as sources of evidence. The direct (indexical) relationship between the sun’s rays and the resulting image makes photographs seem reliable as sources of information. No wonder that photography was enthusiastically embraced by organisations like the police who began to use photographs as sources of legal proof. And yet, from the beginning, artists working with photography began to create images which relied on the manipulation of their photographs using techniques like combination printing, undermining their evidential status. Photographs are very persuasive since they look so much like the things photographed. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, when we hear about something happening but doubt its occurrence, we tend to believe it to be true when shown a photograph of it. However, she also describes the way that photographs are peculiar in the type of evidence they provide:
The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer – a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but ‘photographic seeing’, which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform. – Susan Sontag from On Photography
Some initial questions:
What can photographs be evidence of?
How many types of photographic evidence can you list?
Which of your official documents include a photograph of you?
Why are photographs considered, in some legal circumstances, to be a reliable source of evidence?
How reliable is your Instagram feed or family photo album as a record of your life?
The exhibition featured a wide range of photographs from fields such as medicine, conflict, engineering, astronomy and crime. Originally used as evidence of something, torn from their original context and hung on a gallery wall, the photographs could be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities and artistry.
This was further emphasised by the exhibition hang which drew attention to the formal similarities between some of the photographs:
A limited edition of 200 catalogues were produced to mark the show, again conferring on the photographs the status of art object:
Part of the fascination with all photography is that the medium is firmly grounded in the documentary tradition. It has been used as a record of crime scenes, zoological specimens, lunar and space exploration, phrenology, fashion and importantly, art and science. It has been used as ‘proof’ of simple things such as family holidays and equally of atrocities taking place on the global stage. Any contemporary artist using photography has to accept the evidential language embedded in the medium. — Michael Hoppen Gallery website
Do you know what London really looks like? Take our quiz and see if AI can fool you
After an image of the Pope fooled the internet, test yourself and see if you’re still one step ahead of artificial intelligence. Click here
TASKS: Produce a number of blog posts that show evidence of the following
Mon-Tue: ESSAY > Write a 1000-1500 word comparative essay on photography’s association with truth using both historical and contemporary images as examples.
The essay question (hypothesis), Photography and Truth: Can a photography lie? is designed to explore the idea of photographs as forms of evidence. Of course this is relevant to all photographs. To what extent can any photograph be relied upon to tell us the truth? With new technology, such as generative AI that produce content from images and texts that already exist on the internet, it also raises questions about originality, appropriation and authorship. These issues are central to contemporary artistic and photographic practice and students should be alert to them. Is the photographer always the one who presses the shutter? Does it matter?
DEADLINE: MON 10 July
Follow these instructions:
Select two images that have manipulated truth, one historical using camera technology, one contemporary using AI technology as examples to use in your essay
Research history, theory and context of both images thoroughly and make notes.
Read several sources (both online and on paper) to acquire sufficient knowledge and understanding
Provide a critical perspective by referencing different points of view from sources.
Select at least 2 quotes per image from sources you have read that is relevant to your essay question.
Use Harvard System of Referencing and provide a bibliography
Use key terminology specific to art and photography from the matrix/ sheet below.
Essay plan – use as a guideline
Hypothesis:Photography and Truth: Can a photograph lie?
Opening quote: to set the scene choose an appropriate quote from key texts or source that you have read and understood. Or select something Will Lakeman said in class discussion around ethics using AI in photography.
Introduction (250 words): Describe how photography from its invention as a new technology in 1839 was viewed as a threat to traditional artforms such as painting and drawing. Provide an overview of why photography (like all other art forms) is an illusion and a representation of reality (reflect on your essay earlier on the Origin of Photography). Explain what AI is as a new technology, and how it is already part of lives, give examples (Google, speech recognition, generative AI etc). Discuss both human and societal benefits and potential dangers of AI, again use examples such as Geoffrey Linton resigning from Google to bring awareness, or Sam Altman’s (CEO of OpenAI) being questioned by USA congress. Select one quote by either Linton or Altman and comment (either for or against). Introduce the two images that you have chosen as examples of the above.
Paragraph 1 (250-500 words): Describe how photography in the past (before the digital age) could be manipulated, both in-camera and in the darkroom (eg. reflect on Pictorialism’s use of chemicals and scratching surfaces in distorting images and earlier masking/ collaging technique sin the darkroom.) Provide an example of an image (see case studies below) from history of photography where the truth was distorted. Describe circumstances, context, different points of view and new discoveries or theories around the origin or meaning of your chosen image. Use either direct quote, paraphrasing or summary from sources and comment (for or against). Make sure you provide your own interpretation of the image too.
Paragraph 2 (250 -500 words): Describe how photography now since the digital age has been altering the truth from faking images in-camera to using image manipulation software, such as Photoshop. Provide an example of an image (see case studies below) produced using artificial intelligence that looks ‘real’, but are in fact a digital construct. Provide analysis of how generative AI such as DreamStudio, Midjourney or DALL E 2 has increased our ability to create new images that has no relationship with either photography or the truth. Use same formula as above and use either direct quote, paraphrasing or summary from sources and comment (for or against). Make sure you provide your own interpretation of the image too.
Conclusion (250 words): Refer back to the essay question and write a conclusion where you summarise in your own words both similarities and differences between your two image examples. For example, compare and contrast how historical images in the past and digital images made today, using new technology such as AI, have altered reality and distorted truth. Conclude with a statement on how you envisage the future of photography and AI image-making might change our perception of reality, and attitude towards truth.
Bibliography: List all the sources that you have identified in alphabetical order. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources e.g. websites/online sources, Youtube/ DVD/TV.
Quotes and referencing: You MUST reference some of the sources that you have used either by incorporating direct quotes, paraphrasing or summarising of an idea, theory or concept, or historical fact.
Use Harvard System of Referencing…see Powerpoint: harvard system of referencing for further details on how to use it.
CASE STUDIES
Explore case studies where images have ‘lied’ and truth has been manipulated, distorted, staged or altered. Choose two images – one historical and one contemporary – for your essay from case studies listed below that questions the notion of truth regarding the photographic image and its relationship with reality and explain why.
Case Study 1: Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, April 23, 1855Case Study 2: Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, 1936Vu magazine, Sept. 23, 1936. Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War coverage with the “Falling Soldier” photographCase Study 3: Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945
Joe Rosenthal’s original caption: “Atop 550-foot Suribachi Yama, the volcano at the southwest tip of Iwo Jima, Marines of the Second Battalion, 28th Regiment, Fifth Division, hoist the Stars and Stripes, signalling the capture of this key position.”Case Study 4: Steve McCurry, Taj Mahal and train in Agra, 1983.
The images of renowned photographer Steve McCurry, who made the famous and iconic image of an Afghan girl for a front cover of National Geography has recently been criticized for making ‘too perfect pictures’ which not only are boring but reinforces a particular idea or stereotype of the exotic other.
Read this article by Teju Cole in the New York Times Magazine which compares McCurry’s representation of India with a native photographer, Raghubir Singh who worked from the late ’60s until his untimely death in 1999, traveling all over India to create a series of powerful books about his homeland.
Read this artcicle on Petapixel in In defense of Steve McCurry’s images
What is your view? Back it up with references to articles read and include quotes for or against.
Reference to Coldplay’s new video also highlight the idea of cultural appropriation that harks back to Britain’s colonial rule and exploitation of the Orient.
Case Study 5 > Jeff Wall, Approach, 2014.
Jeff Wall is a Canadian artists known for his large scale tableaux image presented in light-boxes. Today, most of his images resemble reportage and, as such, are likely to incense his detractors, who claim he’s not a “true” photographer. His most contentious new work, called Approach, shows a homeless woman standing by a makeshift cardboard shelter in which we spy the foot of what could be a sleeping vagrant. Wall tells me it was shot under an actual freeway where the homeless congregate and that “it took a month to make, working hands-on” – but he won’t divulge just how staged it is. Is this an actual homeless woman, or an actor? Is the shelter real, or was it built by Wall’s team of assistants to resemble one?
Re-creating images from memory is crucial to Wall’s practice – perhaps because it flies in the face of the tradition of photography as an act of instant witnessing.
“Something lingers in me until I have to remake it from memory to capture why it fascinates me,” he says. “Not photographing gives me imaginative freedom that is crucial to the making of art. That, in fact, is what art is about – the freedom to do what we want.”
In terms of truth or communicating an idea that make references to a real social problem such as homelessness, does it matter if the image is staged or not? Where does authenticity come into the picture?
Jeff Wall exhibition with his trademark images presented in lightboxes.Case Study 6 > Boris Eldagsen. The Electrician, from the series PSEUDOMNESIA, 2022. Credit: Boris Eldagsen/Co-created with DALLE2/Courtesy of Photo Edition Berlin.
AI-generated image wins photography award, but artist turns it downArtist wins photo award with AI generated image, sparking debate | DW News
Berlin-based photographer Boris Eldagsen rejected the recognition from Sony World Photography Awards, saying that artificial intelligence (AI) images and photography should not compete with each other in similar contests. In a statement published on his website, Erdagsen said that he applied to the competition “as a cheeky monkey” to find out if such events are prepared to handle AI-generated content. The photographer also urged for debate on the role of AI in photography. “We, the photo world, need an open discussion. A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not,” wrote Eldagsen.
Read Boris Eldgasen’s own comments om his website here, where you will also find hyperlinks to many articles and interviews given about the image and his refusal to accept the Sony World Photography Awards 2023.
Boris Eldagsen has accused the Sony World Photograph Awards of failing to distinguish between a photograph and a DALL-E 2-created image, while the organisers condemn a ‘deliberate attempt at misleading us’
The German artist caused uproar this week when he revealed the shot that won a prestigious award wasn’t what it seemed. But, he insists, AI isn’t about sidelining humans – it’s about liberating artists
Boris Eldagsen submitted an artificial-intelligence-generated image to a photography contest as a “cheeky monkey” and sparked a debate about AI’s place in the art world
Artificial-intelligence-powered image-generating systems are making fake photographs so hard to detect that we need AI to catch them.
Case Study 7: David Fathi> False image generated by AI using Midjourney showing Emmanuel Macron in contact with police officers and taking to the streets to protest against the retirement age reform in France.
‘Generative artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly advancing. Anyone can use image generation tools to create without needing specific technical or artistic skills. The images generated by these tools challenge the notions of work and creator, as if they were algorithmic ready-mades. Like Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, bottle rack or snow shovel, they are products of mechanization and automation (industrial for Duchamp, digital for these new creations) and displayed in an art gallery. The artist does not have to paint, photograph or sculpt; his choices and decisions shape the work. The algorithm draws from a huge database of images that mirror our world without replicating it accurately. The generated images look more and more realistic and close to reality but also act as a distorting mirror, exaggerating all the stereotypes and biases of our visual culture.
We are at a turning point where human production has not yet been contaminated by artificial production. However this will soon change as the tools themselves use their own creations as input. Gradually the feedback loop, an endless cycle where culture ceaselessly refers to itself, will come to dominate the database, risking getting stuck in nostalgia for the past and trapped in a closed , meta-stable, system. Duchamp’s ghost still haunts us, an unavoidable reference in the history of contemporary art, often quoted, copied or parodied by generations of artists that followed. He became an art cliché despite himself. Duchamp himself described his own art as “meta-irony” to describe his art – a form of critical distance holding its own questioning.
Artificial intelligence raises ethical, artistic and social questions that are only an acceleration of the same questions that have followed the inventions of printing, photography, computer or the internet. The growing automation only makes it harder to escape our current system and the “meta” has become a refuge. This constant self-reference, reflexivity, circularity of our art, our technologies, our culture is becoming a trap where the past’s ghosts still haunt our present thinking.’
Case Study 8: Philip Toledano > Trump as a poor man
Philip Toledano: (mrtoledano) For the final act of the trump series, let’s think about who donald trump would be if he didn’t have his fathers money. If he hadn’t had a gilded life of privilege handed to him. What if he was just Donny from Queens ? What would his life look like? What would he be doing ?
Philip Toledano: I’ve noticed a lot of work uses ai to recreate photography as it is now-some sort of reflection of reality -but what’s utterly intriguing is that AI has its own voice. For instance, this image of the two men fighting I would argue is much more interesting than the one I posted yesterday (can you see what’s different ?) because (metaphorically) I allowed ai to have a say -now this image asks more questions (which is ALWAYS a good thing in art)
READING > REFERENCES > SOURCES
Below are some background text on some of the topics of discussion, such as truth, ethics, realism, representation and genres of documentary photography and staged photography (tableaux). Reading a couple of these texts would provide you with the background knowledge and understanding that is required for you write a critical essay on the topic around photography and truth. It is your own responsibility to research relevant information and context around the two images that you have chosen from case studies above.
Documentary > Truth > Realism > Ethics > Representation
Artificial Intelligence > Ethics > Regulation > Media – current debates
In March, some prominent figures in tech signed a letter calling for artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” The letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit backed by Elon Musk, came just two weeks after OpenAI announced GPT-4, an even more powerful version of the technology that powers ChatGPT. In early tests and a company demo, GPT-4 was used to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.
Lets watch this interview on CNN with Dr Geoffrey Hinton who says ‘AI could kill humans and there might be no way of stopping it.’. The man often touted as the godfather of AI quit Google, citing concerns over the flood of misinformation, the possibility for AI to upend the job market, and the “existential risk” posed by the creation of a true digital intelligence. For more context read articles in The Guardian and NYT (New York Times) too
The Asilomar AI Principles, coordinated by The Future of Life Institute (FLI) and developed at the Beneficial AI 2017 conference, are one of the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles. Read all principles listed, especially those linked with Ethics and Values.
The University of Florida hosted a panel on ethics in artificial intelligence on Tuesday, May 2, 2023, with faculty members exploring the important role of ethics as scientists race toward increasingly sophisticated AI technologies. UF faculty members Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Duncan Purves, Tina Tallon and Sanethia Thomas participated in the online panel, which explored various topics related to the ethical implications of artificial intelligence, including algorithmic bias, ChatGPT and the social impact of AI on different communities.Josh Kline on the unfolding disasters of climate change and AI
Artforum editor in chief David Velasco visits Josh Kline at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art to discuss “Project for a New American Century,” his first institutional survey in the US. Kline, whose work graces the cover of the April issue, reflects on his world-building art, the unfolding disasters of climate change and AI, and why he still sees the future as a place of hope. In the April issue: Colby Colby Chamberlain on the art of Josh Kline.
In this project we will explore the theme of NOSTALGIA and respond to a number of different creative tasks, such as classic street photography on a trip to St Malo and produce a set images using AI (Artificial Intelligence) in response to the exhibition, PLAYTIME by Will Lakeman.
Theoretically, the project will explore photography’s fraught relationship with truth looking at seminal images from the history of photography that ‘lied’ and compare with how new technology such as AI generating digital images will potentially alter our perception of reality. This debate will also include discussing the ethics of AI technology, as a force for good that will benefit humanity and its potential dangers, and how it will impact our society as a whole in the future.
‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers of chatbots, quits Google | Newshub
Produce at least 3 photo-shoots over H-TERM in response to recent Storm Ciarán. The storm 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. Begin to edit images at home using Lightroom (you can download Adobe software using your school account) and produce blog posts for each shoot. Alternatively, bring images to class after half-term.
This photographic study is the starting point for our landscape studies, both natural and man-made > see link to blog posts here
RESEARCH AND EXPLORE: The New Topographics and how photographers have responded to man’s impact on the land, and how they found a sense of beauty in the banal ugliness of functional land use…
Create a blog post that defines and explains The New Topographics and the key features and artists of the movement.
ANSWER: What was the New Topographics a reaction to?
EXTENSION: Research and explore TYPOLOGY – the study and interpretation of types that became associated with photography through the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher
See resources below for more information and inspiration for your studies…
JERSEY and Storm Ciarán
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)
Pay attention to the light…strength, warmth, direction, shadows
Use the weather conditions to your advantage…fog, mist, wind, storms, rain, sleet, snow, bursts of sunshine, frost, ice, condensation
FALLEN TREES a responce to Storm Ciarán in Jersey
Explore more her in the pdf: M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\YR 12 LANDSCAPE PROJECT 2024
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
New Topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape…
The beginning of the death of “The American Dream”
LEWIS BALTZSTEPHEN SHORE
TYPOLOGIES and the landscape
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.
Read this useful introduction to the Becher’s work from American Photo magazine which describes their interest in the ‘Grid’ and their influence on future generations of photographers, members of the Düsseldorf School.
Stoic and detached, each photograph was taken from the same angle, at approximately the same distance from the buildings. 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.
