Springboard Project

At the beginning of this project we were shown over 40 images in order to inspire and make us think about what we might present for our project based around the idea of objectivity and subjectivity. Looking at the images chosen for us I didn't find myself inspired, they were all great pieces, but they didn't give me ideas or strike at the thoughtful creative part of me. I started thinking about an exhibition had seen some weeks before; it had been playing on my mind for sometime. It was the Edgar martin’s exhibition "The Time Machine". When first seeing this exhibition I was instantly enthralled. The way they’re photographed is designed to draw you in, at first you are amazed by the whole thing, and then you start looking into it with the detail. They are like looking at two images and it makes it seem more real even though the spaces never looked like this. There is digital manipulation and artificial lighting. The time machine is a project looking at hydroelectric power stations around Europe. I liked this idea of taking a range of space made for the same purpose and photographing it, so I thought I might apply it to another space. Over the past few years I have

Been photographing spaces designed for people to be in yet without anyone in the photograph, so rather than going to places with restricted access such as power plants I decided to go somewhere more recognisable so that the viewer could have more recognition with the image. After much thinking I decided on the idea of swimming pools photographed as typologies. I started calling around and made an appointment to shoot at a swimming pool in Northolt. I chose it as I found it was a modern building and a newly built swimming pool.

I used a medium format camera to photograph the spaces as I wanted to capture as much detail and tonal range as possible while not facing the restrictions of large format. I also enjoy having a slow process, I’m quite an impatient person so when I slow my method down I force myself to make more considered images. I used a mixture of transparency and negative film, although I prefer the effects of transparency they can be more temperamental in certain lighting conditions so using the negative gives me general images which I can work from.

After the shoot I feel confident about being able to make a series of them work really well together. I felt the images I got from this first shoot where faithful to what I set out to capture, I photographed end to end, the corners and the middle looking to the other side. The light was extremely flat and ran throughout the whole place meaning I didn't have to change the camera settings. This insured that each image has the same aesthetic to each one. It was when setting up my second shoot that I realised the idea would have to be changed a bit.

 I found another swimming pool to photograph but when I got there I realised that this swimming pool wouldn't look anything like the other images. The problem was that there was only one swimming pool in each leisure centre and they were all different. I noticed the sports halls they had. There was little difference in them and the difference the had was the difference I was looking for.

I prefer these images to the ones taken originally, not just because the images can work as a series but also because the strangeness of the setting is pushed further. The rooms have names such as "group space 1" and "projectile hall". They are areas built for amusement and fun yet when empty they look so cold that it is difficult to imagine anyone actually enjoying him or herself in such a place.

This is the way I want my images to be seen on a wall, or if I was able to have them exactly how I would like each couple would be in it's own room with each one on a different wall.

Projectile hall looking north            Group space 1 looking north west      Group space 2 looking west

Projectile hall looking south            Group space 1 looking south east       Group space 2 looking east

I have titled the images firstly after the name of the rooms and secondly the direction the lens is facing when taken. I did this to introduce formality into the location adding to how strange it looks.

My images are designed to look at space in an objective way and draw out an unsettling feeling in the viewer. I am interested in space and the strangeness of it. Places built for convenience. Most of all I enjoy looking at what many people would see as the dull and mundane and photographing it, by doing this it forces a viewer to look at it and to consider the space in a new way, to see what it looks like photographed.

Final Major Project

For this project we were asked to produce our own project brief, we were able to work in any medium relating to photography and the ideas and concepts we could convey were purely our own creation. i quickly began having many idea's but one that i felt certain i wanted to convey was one which i had heard archetectual photographer Julius Shulman about, the way he described it was;

 "the passage of time and light lets you understand space, through photography you can understand time"


i was taken with this idea and started researching it, i found allot of photographers subscribe to this notion and talk about it in there work. aswell as this i stumbled across a french anthropologist named Marc Auge and found that in his studies he had used this idea and applied an extreme of it to certain places. the idea stands as there being places built for purpose which change little yet are perhaps the most unique places in the world whilst at the same time becoming unidentifiable from similar places to it. for example a french motorway will look very similar to an american motorway, although there will be subtle differences. i was quickly taken with this idea and started researching other parts of the theory. there was a section on time and entropy which quickly focused on because of what i began looking at. i watched a lecture by Sean Carroll called the arrow of time in which it explained the ideas around time within locaion and that we see time in relation to event that take place, 12pm is an event and ambiguous when you start to think about it's relation without knowing when it takes place. carroll questions whether time takes place if there are no events around it to keep track of whether it is taking place.
he talks about whether time is a pnentrative force or whether time is dependant on people observing it. the basic form of the theory is "if a tree falls in the forest and knowone is around to hear it does it make a sound"

form this i decided to photograph an area talked about as a non-place by marc auge but apply Shulman and Carrolls ideas to it. i decided to shoot it over and over again from the same view point and see whether by the end of it i wold produce the same image over and over, or whether there would be noticable differences, even when the time of day and weather is changed.

i decided for my location to use a classic example of Auge's non-space an photograph a flyover in shoreham. it is an area i have photographed before an one which i feel is an area of little chang. i also chose it for the fact that no-one walks there and it is kept seperate from the main road.

 this shot taken in november of last year is the basis of my shoot although this time i want to shoot it on medium format colour transparency due to the colour and tonal range of the material. i also think this time i will use my 6x8 back and shoot it portrait to greater capture size and shape of the concrete pillars. because i am going to be going back over a period of time i will use polaroids so i will be able to get the same shades of light and dark even with the change of the weather and lighting conditions. i also hope given my better understanding of compisition i will be able to get a more complete image of the the location without cutting off parts, as has happened in this image. this will be difficult because i do not want to use a wide-angle lens as i don't want the effect it gives and moving the camera back is difficult  due to limited space.

  I have now done my shoot, these are the polaroids i took durring the week. i made sure after each was taken i made a note of the time and date they where taken in order to be sure of the timeline of my photography. i was surprised by how much the colour changed day to day and i quickly began thinking about subtle changes in the colour to surgest the different times of day. one thing i was certain of after reveiwing the polaroid was that these where not going to look like the same photograph over and over, but by letting the world move around the location i was able to capture a different photograph every time. this linked back up on my idea of the location staying exactly the same while the world simply changed the situation around it.

i scanned in my negatives, i would have produced the images in the darkroom but the process isn't available at college. i used the flextight scanner because it's neg-holder doesn't have a glass front thus eliminating unnecessary marks and imperfection. over the course of the 10 day shoot schedule i shot two films. Picking the right transparencies was difficult, i decided to pick ones which would show the course of the day, morning midday and evening. i chose the 2nd of may, 4th of may and the 6th. in this way i was able to show a relatable 
narrative yet with a new twist by being stretched out over a week. in this way i examined colour at these different times.  i found that the colours basically went warm in the morning and afternoon whilst being cooler midday. i started to add subtle colour casts to surgest these times.

when i first started researching the idea's behind this project i found allot of famous photographers who had used the same idea to influence projects they had done. one of these was Irving Penn and his series of frozen food made into blocks. i thought this series related greatly to my own project. using photography penn had been able to freeze a moment in time, capturing something that was quite litterally also forzen in time. i had frozen a priod of time which whilst wasn't frozen there was still no noticable movement or illusion of time passing. although penns studio still life style is very different to my own it still got me thinking about my concept as a deeper meaning and in particular the organic nature i had haptured in parts of my images. i started thinking about the concrete being at a juxtaposition to the bushes and trees in the background, and in particular the way these aspects stop once the fly-over's presence becomes more noticable. almost as if the act of buiding it was the very thing which took a clear sence of time out of the location.

This is part of a series named city of shadows by Alexey Titarenko, in this series Titarenko used black and white medium format with long exposures to create this effect of stillness in everything but the people, are extremely blurred. using this process Titarenko is able to produce this sort of ghostly image of a city. the sharpness of the stairs and railings at contrast to the grey swarm that is the crowd, and the hands on the railings still ghostly but the most recognizable part of them gives the sense on humanity being indistinguishable from one another yet also the idea of location having power over humanity with it's strong image  compared to the soft wash of grey. i feel this image connects very well to the ideas within my project, as i want to do titarenko is looking at location with event around it, and even with the events around it the area is still unchanged, although he has chosen a spot to make it obvious of things moving through the space, where as i am trying to find an area with little outside influence.

 another photographer i feel i am using a similar technique to is Nicholas Nixon, specifically his "the brown sisters" series. in this series Nixon photographed his wife and her sisters since the early 1980's with the body of work released in 2002, although work hasn't been seen it is possible that he continues to photograph them. this is one of the most interesting series i have ever seen and relate strongly to my idea, mine is a project based on location and is essentially doing the same thing. with nixon's work you can look through some photographs and see little difference, in others the change is remarkable. this is what i would intend to do with a longer time scale to work with build up on subtle changes from image to image until the place is (on reflection) quite obviously changed. through this technique nixon has done (as i intend to also do)
 captured the passing of time.

once i had made subtle changes to parts of the colour on photoshop i used the sharpen tool to bring out some of the detail of the film which you lose in the scanner. i decided to print the images as large as possible whilst still having borders. i went for a1 paper, the reson behind this was because i wanted to let people examin the detail and changes more closely. i decided to use a frame with window mounts because i wanted to remove the image from the outside world as to accentuate the idea of unique location frozen in time. i did however choose to remove the glass from the front because i wanted people to be able to investigate the image without having to look past reflections. the title of my images are a undisernable merge of numbers, for example; one taken on the 4th of may 2011 at 9:36 will have the title "452011936". i chose to do this because i wanted to have the time and date on show but without people being able to recognize it, JME McTaggart (writer of "the unreality of time") theorized that time was relative to events around it an idea also mentioned by Carroll. using this idea i am trying to challenge peoples perception of time, challenging my idea of time was the most interesting part of this project for me.

i feel that my images are faithful to my original idea. i set out to show a place changing whilst staying the same. i chose a place of hicgh activity yet low entropy. my favourite of the three images is the one taken on the 4th, i find the hard light coming in on the right pillar is very surgestive, to me it makes me think of time sliding into the location, and this is the part i am happiest about. having first been inspired by julius shulman saying;

"the passage of time and light lets you understand space, through photography you can understand time"

, i feel that i have acheived this idea. i am happy with the fact that i have taken the same image over and over and so much yet so little has changed in each one. I think i will continue this project and photograph this space over the coming weeks, months and years.

Portraiture

For this project we have been asked to produce one black and white and one colour portrait taken in a studio setting. For this we are to use either 5x4 large format cameras or medium format cameras. I was very excited to use the 5x4 camera as some of my favourite photographs are taken using large format negatives. I was less excited by the prospect of having to do a studio portrait as it combined two things which I do not usually use in my photography, studios and people. I started thinking about what I could with this project to make myself excited by the idea of photographing a portrait. To do this I first had to decide on what I thought constituted as a portrait, was it simply a person’s head and shoulders or could it be more suggestive. As with my colour project I started to think about the idea of making a portrait absent of a person. I looked at the word portrait, it is defined as

“A likeness of a person in any medium”

There are also spectacular portraits which contain the surgestion of a person rather than flesh, for example Robert Mapplethorpe’s Apollo is a photograph of a statue, and one could look at it as still life. Yet if you look at the connections and the fact that Apollo was not only a god, son of Zeus, but he was the most Greek of all gods and declared the ideal image of a man, we could determine that he is a portrayal of manhood thus making him a portrait of everyman.  This sense of photographing more suggestively is the root I think I will pursue for this project, the portrayal of something seemingly human yet with thought behind it keeping it relevant within the boundaries of this project.

Richard Avedon is one of the most famous users of 5x4 photography. one of his most famous projects is "in the american west", where he went across america documenting people of interest. although the idea is a common one seen before avedon took a new twist on it by using a portable studio to remove the subject from the surroundings. it is of a beekeeper and i feel this is the most powerful image from the series. it shows strength yet vulnerability at the same time. the paleness of subject and background in contrast against the bees

makes me feel like neither one is dominant and that there is an understanding between the two. in this way i believe avedon is able to suggest dignity in the people he photographs whatever they may be or do.

this is part of a project by Mark Laita called "Created Equal". the idea of the project was to photograph opposing lifestyles yet linked in some way. this is a photograph of the ceo of a company and a cleaner within the same company. he has also photographed a french chef with a cook from a greasy spoon,  a homeless man with a property developer and amish teens with teen punks. these photographs started me thinking about how my photographs where going to relate  to one another and whether they will flow together with the concept or show opposing sides.

Martin Schoeller  has a similar style to Avedon, using blank backgrounds to bring out the detail within the subject more obviously. In Schoellers case the detail is used to some extent to disgust the audience. This is from a series he did of female body builders. Taking simple photographs of these women yet using the 5x4 camera he was able to suggest things whilst leaving a large amount of the assumption on the viewer.

I have planned to use the same ideas behind Oliviero Toscani's "bosnian soilder". The idea of photogrpaghing a person through what they have left behind which in a way is the only way to photogragh the dead. i will take my grandfathers clothes, i never knew him as he died before i was born.and explore the connection between me and him by photogrpaghing us in the same way. is there a connection deeper than blood. can two people who never met be linked and to what extent do our choice of presentation say about us. i feel that this would work very well with the confines of this project, the studio setting and extreme detail of large format film giving the clinical edge to make it a study of a person and thus more of a portrayal.

i have now done my shoot which went as planned despite the complexity with using large format for the first time. however once i got used to the way it moves and the process one must go through in order to expose the film i found it a very therapeutic way to work and although i do not usually enjoy working in a studio setting i found working with this camera a very gratifying way to work.

once the negatives where developed i realized the complexity of a large format camera and the error  i had made in the movements. even though i had applied the correct movements i had mis-calculated them slightly an had a horizontal band of focus. as annoying as this was at first i didn't mind as much once i had thought about it and in the end felt that in some ways it complimented the picture having the unfocused running parallel with the focused. it summed up the nature of the relationship between me and my grandfather, with the clear distinction of blood line in contrast to the uncertainty of our relationship to one another in respects to us having never met and with him never learning of my existence.

i decided to print the photographs in a darkroom rather than digitally. i thought that this would strengthen the role of humanity behind the piece and thus decided to make obvious flaws within the printing of it. with the colour i made used fogged paper to give the colours an off quality and the machines chemicals were old making this more noticeable, i also brought the edges of the negative into. with the black and white i was able to get all of the negative into the neg carrier and thus show the definitive shape of the exposure upon the negative. i also had to burn in the top part and i did this slowly leaving areas lighter than overs, also with the shoes having them fade out.  the most difficult part of the printing process was making the photographs look as if they belonged together and weren't to separate pieces.

i feel my final prints works well together and more than that support each other in the uniqueness of the way they were printed. i set out on this project trying to capture something in relation to myself and i feel i have succeeded in this. it seemed to me that the guidelines for this project were about the process we undertook in photography as much as the final outcome: and i feel my decisions on how i went about things added to my final images in a positive way. i have come out with two prints which i am pleased with. yet i have also come out with a greater understanding on the many ways photography can seem to be one thing whilst being another. i took a still life however the reason that they are aren't disconnected from reason means that they become a portrait.

Environmental portraiture

American Gothic
Grant Wood
This painting is an example of environmental portrature. It is beautiful and has more dennotations connotations than i can mention here, it is relevent o the time and probably one of the most truthful images of the time it was painted. There is one problem it never happened, the house was there but the people were his sister, and the man modeled on his dentist. this is why a photograph can capture an environmental portrait in a more relevant and real way. it is a peice of documentry, and not subject to the artist changing whats in the frame at will. it is about circumstance meaningh it is almost impossible to fake.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Robert Howlett 1857

this photograph taken using wet plate process is what the V & A class as the first example of Environmental Portraiture. Shot against the chains SS Britan Brunel strikes a nonchalant pose showing his dislike of being photographed. The dirt on his boots spreading up his spats show is  uncaring attitude toward the fine clothes and a thin cigar carelessly held between loose lips. these are all things that weren't seen in portraiture before this. this is what makes environmental portraiture different, new and more interesting.

Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander is a photographer who I have been influenced by before and at the begining of this project i turned to this image for ideas. what i saw was a comment on places which take the identity of people. this is an idea i decided to think about and hopefully come out with my own idea.

James Dean
Dennis stock 1955
i find this photograph incapsulates the ideas i want to show in this project, i am less moved by the work of winogrand because of the amount of people in them, i think an individual within an environment is more interesting if it is a bare environment without the influence of others to change the photograph. this is a excellent example of this, shot in times square it turn thes usually highly populated tourist area with lights billboards and commersialized happiness into a lonely sidewalk barely recognizable from the usual travel agent image.
 Victor Burgin 1953
this is another photograph that style i wish to be able to replicate in my project. the sense of lonliness whilst surounded is something i think is a special thing to be able to do. the beniality of location works with the isolation of subject in a way leaving the viewer questioning the story and thoughts behind the subject.

 For my project i have decided to stay away from Howletts style and go more with the style of 1950, 60's and 70's street photographers.

My idea is to go to similar locations as  Friedlander and take photographs of people without there knowledge, hopefully it will show an individual in an environment deigned to be lonely.
To acheive this i will go to places like supermarkets,shops and the highstreets.

i chose to use black and white film, ilford pan 400. i also chose to use a 35mm camera rather than a medium format because i wanted to be able to take photographs quickly about without cumbersome size or equipment. i chose to set the aperture on auto on the lens and change the shutter so i could get a quicker process from walking to exposing. the way that i took my photographs was by choosing my subject and standing there observing through the lens, occasionally opening both eyes to be able to see action out of the frame crossed with whats happening in the frame. using this process meant my photographs weren't technically perfect but i was happy with the composition. i then chose to print the film in a darkroom as i felt this would make the imperfections within the images would look good with the slight imperfections of the darkroom printing process and give continuity through the series.


_______________________________________________


I have done my shoot and i am plesed with the outcome. when i started i was quite nervous about how close i was getting to my subject and how obvious i was making it i was taking a photogragh. however as i got more comfortable i stopped caring as much as how i looked and what they would feel about there photo being taken. You can see the progression through my film, the begining part is full of almost candid shots of people looking the other way, and taken from a didstance; yet later in the film i have shots of looking straight down the lens as i obviouly composed the shot with them in it.

The shots which i prefer out of the film is are the ones where i was brave enough to go up close yet the people were looking in other directions, this is because i think it works with the ideas i have outlined in a more fitting way.

_______________________________________________


Through out this project i have tried to make sure the photograpghs i am producing relate to an idea and concept and i feel i have done this successfully by the fact i can talk about my photographs aesthetically and conceptually. in the end i realized the true intent behind my images, they where about society more than anything, within the situations photographed who was in control the person or the environment. the subjects are all so wrapped up in there own head as a result of these lonely environments which strip the person to become a product of the environment rather than a product of our own humanity. i think my intention and idea behind this project can be summed up by a few lines from Allen Ginsbergs "A Supermarket in Calafonia"

"In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for

images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! 

Whole families shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the

avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"