Bas Princens

Bas Princen's work is very intriguing (http://www.oftheafternoon.com/bas-princens-images-of-vast-structures-and-spaces/). His photography captures the interplay of the natrual andman-made environment with a centre point of buildings and the construction and destruction process of buildings. There is something fantastical about the images, but also very matter of fact. In truth, i'm unclear as to whether the images contain any manipulation of reality or just a very specific perspective of it. Size, scale and even time and place are often difficult to grasp here. The images often have a flatness as a result of little, or at least very constrained/restrained shadow - I think this increases the sense of dislocation from context and place.

There is something of the Dusseldorf school here, but also something more playful.

Alex Prager

I bought the November 2013 copy of British Journal of Photography at the weekend. Probably the most interesting work (to my current taste), was by Alex Prager. Prager's work is highly stylized, cinematic and reminiscent of 50's Amerciana. Some (but not all) of the work is of a grand production scale, costumes are carefully chosen, people in the work are considered characters, lighting is very deliberate, perspective, focus and composition are highly controlled. There is an element of humour, but also a under the skin darkness and anomie. Overall the images are exquisite to look at.

Ruben Brulat

Robin Brulat takes photographs of the natural and man-made environment in which he situates himself, naked, small and almost hidden in the frame (http://www.oftheafternoon.com/self-portraits-from-ruben-brulat/). I think this interests him as a way of engaging and representing engagement with nature.

The images have a not quite instant appeal. At first when you see them they look like, distant, cool almost inhuman landscapes and cityscapes, and then you see a naked body and your head spins for a second as the image takes on new layers of significance and meaning.

The images have a stillness to them. The perspective is also quite flattened. The lighting is also quite straight on, though often other lightsources exist within the frame also.

Exercises, Learning and Technology

As I approach the end of this part of the course I was re-reading the course notes and looking through some of the exercises I've done on light.

I'm aware that I've rushed some of the exercises and even skipped certain sections of them. In each case I did this where I felt that I got nothing more to learn by doing the exercise. I genuinely don't mean this in an arrogant way, it's just that I feel that I know what I need to know about ISO settings and the effects of increasing/decreasing exposure.

Having said that I was struck when re-reading the course notes that I probably still don't make a conscious decision (in the way proposed in the notest), re exposure or white balance settings. However, when shooting RAW I know that I can comfortably alter these settings after on the computer. But this of course raises the question of whether this is lazy/cheating/ignorant etc. And also whether by not potentially having the experience in doing things fully manually in a fully committed way the photography will in some way be inferior.

I learnt a lot of my skills as a photographer shooting 35mm film in an SLR about 30 years ago. However, it's significantly easier to experiment, practice and therefore learn and understand in a digital environment. What I mean by this is that previously, when shooting film I understood that tungsten lighting would produce a horrible orange cast over my photos unless I used a blue filter or special film. However, my options here were very limited and if I got those options wrong, I couldn't correct anything. This meant that my creative options were actually very limited. And unless I had a lot of equipment, a lot of time and a lot of film - so in other words I had a lot of money and/or was a professional photographer - I would be very limited in terms of what I could achieve. I could take great photos, but my subject matter would be significantly more limited to what I could do now. So what I concluded here was that the technology was enabling me to be more creative by giving me more options (consistently through time), but that a clear eye as to how to remove the orange colour cast of tungsten lighting (for example), was still very important. In fact the creative aspect of this is even more open because I can do far more than stick a blue filter on the front of my lens and hope for the best.

I also reflected on how artists in DaVinci's time would learn their trade by sourcing materials for and mixing paints. No-one would really recommend an oil painter these days to mix their own paints. But that's not to say that an understanding of how light passes through paints of varying consistencies would be useful.

I guess my point is that I'm comfortable that as long as I have a base, core understanding of white balance (as an example), I'm OK not knowing individual Kelvin values of each light source because advances in technology mean I don't need to. I just need to have the creative eye to know when the white balance needs changing, and how to go about changing it, in order to achieve my required effect.

Noemie Goudal

And here's another artist who plays around with the photographic frame... Noemie Goudal (http://www.oftheafternoon.com/noemie-goudals-installation-photographs/). Where Goudal differs is that he/she puts the photograph itself into the scene and then rephotographs that as an installation. The original photograph transforms the scene and inturn the final photograph.







In honesty, in my view the idea here is better than the resulting photograph. However, the installations are probably far more impressive.

Myoung Ho Lee

Myoung Ho Lee kind of does a reverse of the artist in my last post (http://www.oftheafternoon.com/myoung-ho-lee-captures-tranquil-trees/). Again, he inserts a frame into the picture, but this time as an artificial backdrop to his central subject within a landscape, a tree.







Again, I think this encourages reflections on the arbitrariness of the chosen frame which the photographer chooses to put on the landscape and also the arbitrariness of the chosen subject.

Daniel Kukla

Daniel Kukla (http://www.oftheafternoon.com/daniel-kuklas-abstract-mirrored-landscapes/ ) has taken a series of photographs where he's situated a large mirror on an artist's easel in different landscapes and made the reflected landscape part of the picture.







The mirror provides an interesting graphical juxtaposition, but more importantly raise interesting reflections on the artists perspective as well as the arbitrary/constraining nature of the photographic frame.

Magritte's boots

I was taking some pictures of the boots for my assignment this morning and I was reminded of the painting of boots/feet which Magritte did:



I think one of the reasons why it suddenly struck me was because some of the compositions I've found to work are very similar to this - head on to the background and slightly pointed down to the shoes. And the shoes be closer at the heel and further separated at the toe.

Interesting.

Brendan Barry

Found Brendan Barry on aCurator - http://www.acurator.com/blog/2013/10/brendan-barry-motels.html . Barry (http://brendanbarry.co.uk/). Has taken a series of photographs of motel rooms. They are inspired by and in-turn invoke the American short-story. They cunjur (spelling?) up a narrative. And so the photographer has joined forces with a writer who is going to write a series of hot stores inspired by his photographs.

The work is interesting from the perspective of Lighting because the dominant source of light in these photographs is the TV. This is evocative both as a source (we can all remember that disorienting feeling of falling asleep with TV on, only to wake later with only it's eery glow lighting the room), but also in terms of how it lights the room with a cool colour cast and and upwards direction.