Starting Part 3

So, starting Part 3 now. Only a few exercises in this part - they look fairly simple and straight forward, although it may be quite difficult to find some of the subjects which contain the right colour combinations.

However, I think the Assignment will be particularly difficult and will need me to find a number of different subject types - I think I might force myself do some portraits for this one, could do something where people are wearing certain clothes against certain backgrounds. Some still life might also be interesting, but I'd like to do something which is found and unposed. Of course, I'm sure I'll still be able to take some shots of the street.

A key challenge for me overall with this part is that Colour doesn't overly interest me in and of itself - certainly not like Design principles.Hopefully by learning more about colour theory and how this can be used, it will become more interesting to me.

Andreas Gursky

There is an intense amount of detail and complexity in many of the photographs, but also a dominant sense of order. The photographs are usually from a high vantage point and at some distance

Another Deadpan photographer I wanted to look at further is Andreas Gursky. Quite a lot was said about him in "The Photograph as Contemporary Art", but not much of his work was shown. To be honest I think it must be difficult to get any sense of the work from viewing at the scale which is available on the web, but irrespective you at least get an impression of what these works must be like at full scale. 

Some of the photographs include humans and present collective human behaviour or activity. However, no individual is singled out and presented. And it's certainly not clear what, if any, comment Gursky is making about the people or the scene.

Boomoon

Came across Boomoon in Chapter 3 of "The Photograph as Contemporary Art". His website contains a lot of photographs across a significant number of series - is it his complete published work?

It's interesting to see how his work developed from his street photography of the 70's into the Deadpan style which brought him to my attention.

I was most intrigued by his series "To the stones" which are basically photographs of large stones or rocks which he's come across on his travels. He refers to them as portraits. They taken at eye-level in what looks like mid-day light. They are unsentimental to the point of being bold. And interestingly the stones are very much at the centre of the shot - which is what I think the site refers to as "plays with the risk of item-centrism".

In the shot below the stone forms a central point. I think the positioning of the horizon helps to keep the composition interesting (Boomoon treats the positioning of the horizon as a subject in other series - I guess this goes back to the explicit focus on perspective which I read that Struth shows). The snow on the side of the stone and the subtle highlights in the sky also add interest and keep the image gelled together.

The photograph below has a subdued blue tone. The position of the  horizon is again important. The cloud provides a nice counterpoint to the stone - it somehow equals it's weight.

In this photograph there are a number of diagonal lines pointing to the centre.

In another series - Naksan 2010 - he photographs the sea with the snow pelting down at 45 degrees. The photographs are decidedly similar in nature. They are neutral in tone and relatively low contrast. They contain no obviously emotive content - just the sea. They're taken in the vertical (another deliberate point to the fact that these are photographs. But the part of the frame below the top square is completely devoid of detail - when viewed on a white web page it looks like part of the page. His website says that snowy shore bonds the viewer to the scene. He then quotes the poet Shino Kuraishi with words which seem to relate very much to the Deadpan aesthetic - "The shore may be a stage but it is entirely anti-theatrical. It has nothing to do with spectacle, of a type that would satisfy the visual desires of the general public. Rather it is as if the stage was built for one beholder alone. These are photographs for a quiet dialogue with oneself." Within the text he refers to the viewer as photographer-beholder. This is photography which narrates on the experience of viewing photographs and in turn the experience of viewing the world (I think?!)

The Photograph as Contemporary Art - Chapter 3

The 3rd Chapter of "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" is als about Deadpan - "a cool, detached and keenly sharp type of photography". I think the key point here ia"detached", as in emotionally detached. This is a move away from emotional engagement with or judgement of the subject. While some of the subjects may be emotive, the photographer is ostensibly recording rather than commenting. The emphasis is on the objective rather than the subjective. Photography is therefore seen as a means to obtain an objective standpoint as opposed to presenting a singular vision - i.e. that of the photographer.

Another important aspect here (and also relates to a word in the definition which opened this entry with), is sharpness. Many of these photographs are intended to be displayed at significant scale. They're taken with large format cameras to increase the level of detail that can be captured and displayed.

There is often an element of removal of the human in Deadpan, Dan Holdsworth took photographs of build landscapes such as shopping centres, but at night and with long exposures - "The image has a distinctly non-human atmosphere, as if showing us an essence that could not be seen by the naked eye. Rather than asking who took this photograph, one might reasonably ask what took it, the sense being that the unsettling contamination of the night is being recorded mechanically, by a surveillance camera perhaps."

Boo Moon took photographs of the East China Sea. Again his work is out of time and without human involvement, they are without history.

An artist that I found particularly interesting in this chapter was Thomas Struth. In his photographs there is an awareness of the photographic form in his work. We are encouraged to take interest in the perspectives and how they are captured in the photograph. To me this seems to be moving away from the sense that the photograph is objective? Surely any thing which has a perspective is not objective?

Struth is also keen to capture the human. He's taken a series of photographs of people viewing art in galleries. They capture (but don't comment on?) this aspect of human behaviour.

Thomas Ruff also includes people in his photographs but again in an unemotive way. He took a series of photographs over the course of a number of years of head and should shots of his friends. They're effectively very high quality passport photographs which "confound our expectations of discovering a person's character through their appearance". He displays on a large scale so that great detail is shown (down to the pores in the skin).

Elsewhere in the chapter we see other photographers who take photographs of people in context of natural surroundings with a neutral, eye-level perspective and flat expressions form the subjects which present limited insight into their lives and personalities.

Overall the Deadpan style is quite interesting to me. I think Gursky, Moon, Struth and Ruff are artists I'll do some more research on.

Amend
After doing some further reading I realised that I'd missed that Deadpan is sometime used to describe what should be the norm as an approach for documentary photography. Which makes sense.

Assignment 2 - Reflections

As I did with the first Assignment I wanted to write down my reflections now that I've completed the submission.

As last time, I'm reasonably happy with the photographs I've taken. Despite some of my initial concerns that I lacked any real structure to the way I approached the shoot, I think the photographs work as a set but equally are quite diverse.

Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills
I think I've successfully displayed applications of all the design principals. And I've donee so without shooting the obvious. I think a number of my shots demonstrate more than one principal but are "good" photographs rather than just being demonstrations of a principal.

And I don't think any of my shots have the technical shortcomings that were present in my first Assignment. I also refrained from over processing in Lightroom which is a mistake I made last time.

I guess my only shortcoming here was that display any movement in any of my photographs - they're predominantly quite flat, but maybe that was a direct result of my chosen subject matter.

Quality of outcome
I think I've followed the presentation structure recommended by my tutor with consistency and clarity. I've also added Sketches to help explain my thinking behind each composition (although I'm not sure that even with some of the sketches my thinking is overly clear - I'll see if I get any feedback on this). So fairly comfortable with this.

Demonstration of Creativity
I don't think I've taken any photographs which show a massive amount of creativity or originality, but I think there is some ingenuity and imagination in there. As above, I think there is diversity but also consistency - which I'm quite pleased with.

Context
Again, I think my write-up is fairly complete as is my blog. So reasonably comfortable with this.

So, I'm looking forward to getting my feedback and cracking on with the rest of the course!

Redeye future events

Couple of future events I'd like to attend which Redeye are pulling together - talks by 2 artists I've come across in the book I'm reading at the minute Richard Billingham (10/1/13) and Peter Fraser (17/1/13). It'll be great to hear in more detail from a respected artist. Hope I can attend....

Redeye Slide Jam - Liverpool

I was pretty lucky in being able to combine my day wandering the streets of Liverpool taking photos for Assignment 2 with going to the Redeye (http://www.redeye.org.uk/) Slide Jam in Liverpool's Open Eye gallery (http://www.openeye.org.uk/).

I went to the gallery during the day as I wasn't sure I'd be able to view the installations during the evening. I was particularly interested in the work on Fan Shi Shan and his Two of Us project (http://fanshisan.com/index.php?/project/two-of-us/). I've come across it somewhere previously, but it was great to see the work at such a large size where the subtlety of the colours and the stillness of the compositions really came across.

In terms of the slide jam, it was a great evening surrounded by people with a great interest in photography. Some of the photography was more interesting than others all of them filled their 5 minute slots with enough interest to make me want more. I'm listing them all hear so that I can take a closer look:

Mark Peachey

Chris Mear

Yan Preston

Alan Moore

Paul Smith

Simon Hall

Alison McLean

Colin McPherson

Kevin Casey

Fran Martinez

Gavin McQuarrie

Tony Mallon

Phil Portus

Sharon Boothroyd

It certainly made me walk away thinking that this is something I would like to display my work in at some point further down the line.

Assignment 2 - post shoot reflections

I've finished taking all the photographs I need for Assignment 2. It consisted of a morning in Crewe, a day in Stoke-On-Trent and a day in Liverpool. Basically I just wandered the streets looking for inspiration - which I found in abundance, particularly when on the outskirts of the inner-town, where things were a little less polished and populated.

At first (in Crewe), I mainly found verticals and horizontals and really struggled with points and patterns, though this changed as I moved on to Stoke and Liverpool. I also split the day in these latter locations between day and night.

I managed to stick to all of my original intentions - http://stevenbriggs7.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/assignment-2-preparatory-thoughts.html .

I've got all the photographs in Lightroom and I've got my initial selected shots which I'm now continuing to review - making sure I've chosen the right images and covered all the requirements of the brief. However, so far I'm quite pleased with the photographs I've produced. I think I need a week or so to pull the assignment submission together.

Assignment 2 - preparatory thoughts

Preparing for Assignment 2 has been very different to preparing for Assignment 1. For the first Assignment I spent a lot of time looking at the brief and coming up with ideas of what to shoot before taking the first picture. Given that the subject for the second Assignment is street details and the requirements are abstract design principles I've not been able to develop any ideas based on shooting a specific subject. Instead I'm just having a few sessions of walking the streets with the brief in my hand and looking for inspiration.

I've had one session so far, wandering round the backstreets of Crewe. I created some images that met parts of the brief, but I think I just captured the easy ones that most fit my preferred style - lots of verticals and horizontals. So I'm taking to to the streets of Stoke-on-Trent tomorrow and I need to be more mindful of points, triangles, patterns and rhythms.

I'm back to Liverpool on Tuesday. Again I'll be focussing on the back streets.

Actually there are a couple of constraints that I'm putting on myself rather than just walking out blindly.

1) I'm going to avoid including people in the pictures unless they're explicitly part of the design. I want to do this on the basis that people will always draw attention and cause distraction from the design.

2) I also intend shooting in colour. My original thought with this Assignment was that I would shoot in B&W but somehow this felt a bit flat and also contrived when I looked at my first shots for the exercises.

3) I'm going to use a prime lens with a full frame equivalent focal length of 55mm. I think this will help give all the shots a consistent feel and as a standard focal length lens it create a natural, "normal" feel to the shots. In addition, it will force me to approach the subject and work hard to get the right composition as opposed to lazily using the zoom.

4) The nights have "drawn in" and I've noticed how the fluorescent street lighting has an interesting effect of reducing the variation of colour and tone and so making things seem a little more graphical and geometric in nature. I want to see if I can capture and use this in some of the shots for this assignment.

5) I intend to spend far less time processing the photographs in Lightroom. I think I over processed some of the shots in my first Assignment (though I was doing a lot less processing that I used to do on my shots before I began the course!), and so will be trying to shoot in jpegs in order to limit myself and encourage me to get it right in camera.

6) I want to try and take inspiration from the photographers I've been inspired by up to this point. The ones which seem most relevant are Lewis Baltz, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Inaki Bergera, Tina Hillier, Bob O'Connor, Marten Lange, Orjan Henriksson (all of whom I've written about in this blog).