Grandma and Grandad portraits

Last year for my portrait module I focused on the relationship between my grandparents, and who had more power, or loss of power, since my Grandad was moved to a care home. I forgot I had this contact sheet. I’m in love with it. I miss him.

Collaboration, work in progress

For my Situated Practice module, I have to go outside of the uni environment and work with an individual or company in the creative industry. For me, fine art photography in what I do, so I called up an old artist friend of mine, Jevan Watkins Jones. He was the artist in residence at Northgate Sixth Form when I was there a couple of years ago, and I helped him paint his frames for his exhibition and supported his art work. I bought this from him at his show Beneath The Surface, my first piece of original art work:

The Anatomy of a Rugby Playing Pupil, quite quirky hey !

Jevan is a fine artists who dabbles in painting, drawing and performance. And I’m a fine art photographer who dabbles in the theme of reality within photography. Me met 2 fridays ago and discussed what we could create together.

We started by deconstructing the brief we got given. Part of it was worded, “The form of imagery… can take any lens based form and presentation…”. So we started by defining the word ‘lens’. We spoke about the lens in a camera, then back to the camera obscura, then back to the simplest and most complex lens, the eye. But how do we materialise an image with out eyes?

We then discussed my chosen theme of reality. I raised the question, How do we visually represent the Real? My first idea was to use as the subject one object (what that would be was undecided, I suggested the subject to be “the most ‘real’ thing you can think of” but we couldn’t think of a reasonable subject), in this case I suggested a woman. How can we represent this woman visually, in how many different ways, and so which representation is most real?

So, we can have a photograph of the woman, a sketch, a painting, sculpture, textual description, computer generated image, an audio of her (her breathing, talking?), the woman herself, an imagination of a woman.

This idea was left to ponder, while Jevan explain a theater device.

As the stage lights are illuminating the actor very brightly, he can’t see him audience, but his audience can see him. I loved this idea ! It’s like a two way mirror you get in police line ups; the victims can see in but the culprits can’t see out, but this theater device just uses light, the main element of photographs. I noticed that a photograph itself holds the same spectacle. We the viewer can see into the photograph, but the subject can’t see out. We ‘cannot penetrate into the photograph’ as Barthes says in Camera Lucida.

So what if reversed the roles in a photograph. Make the viewer the subject, and the subject the all seeing viewer. An installation/performance was raised:

Imagine a blacked out room, fairly small, say 5m square or something. There’s an entrance and an exit. A viewer enters, stands in a specified spot on the floor and stares blankly ahead into the darkness. Lights turn on. The room is painted white, light bounces everywhere, blinding the viewer. The lights are directed directly at him, he cannot see passed the light (just like in our theater idea). Standing the other side of the room, in between the lights, is me. I’m looking at the lit viewer who is unaware of my presence. I take a photograph with my eyes and store it in my memory before the lights turn off again and the viewer is directed out of the exit. Upon his exit, (maybe) through audio, he is informed of my presence and that I took a mental photograph of him. Maybe a description of my attire would be said; “I took your photograph. I am wearing a red coat”.

So that’s our initial idea. An installation/performance which requires viewers to enter a space and unknowingly interact with a subject. It raises issues of reality, self consciousness, surveillance, self image maybe. What do you think? Please, whoever you are, comment on this post (not on Facebook!) and share your thoughts.

Go ahead !

I’m back !

OK. So I haven’t posted anything for the past 2/3 months and I think it’s about time I start using this blog, to post anything creative that I do, at uni and in my own time, so that you guys can share my ideas and thoughts and respond to them, with critical feedback, responsive images or whatever. I might also post some theoretical writings on photography, so you can see where I’m coming from with some of my crazy ideas !

To start with, some night time shots from nights wandering the waterfront with my flatmate Andrew. I’m getting in interest in trees and plants only illuminated by street lights. You get this strange murky orange tone to them, which is quite horrible really, I hate the colour of street lights, but I find flowers under this light strangely beautiful.

I used by Canon 450d with standard 18-55mm lens, on a tripod, most of the shots are ISO800, exposures of around half a second at F5.6 (depending on the wind!).

Young At Heart, Final Edition Completed

I have finally completed my first art book, Young At Heart, for our Individual Practice module.

http://www.blurb.com/books/2755639

“This book is about my relationship with my Grandad. It reflects on his life with me up until his last days, hoping to honour the sweet man he was, whilst raising the cruel yet inevitable issue of death.”

Individual Practice, Young At Heart, Possessions photoshoot

My book came in the post yesterday !! I love it. There are quite a few things to change though: the text is too big, some photos need to be cropped, enlarged, reordered, etc., some text needs to be expanded and more poetic rather than descriptive, I need to make it less formal and more personal, making it like a scrapbook, maybe handwriting the text and scanning it in, including sketches and doodles, newspaper clipping, family video stills, Grandad’s handwriting; just less white space in the book, and I need to include more photographs !

So far, I’ve included found family album photographs, 35mm film photographs I took in the last few weeks of his life, and a little self portraiture. Last week, I visited Grandma and borrowed some of Grandad’s old possessions to shoot in the White Studio at uni. My lighting set-up started as a softbox from high above to the left, and a snoot for the background (the possessions were on a coved white paper backdrop), but the shadows seemed out of my control, so I settled for a beauty dish directly above each possession. Using my Hasselblad, I centered each possession in the frame, developed the film, printed the photographs in the darkroom, scanned the photographs, edited them digitally, and here they are:

I took some digital photographs first (mainly to test the flash lighting) as a back-up if the film failed during developing. But as they were colour, they didn’t benefit much as most of the possession are black or dark brown anyway. Using 120 film slowed me down, concentrated my attention on composition, focus, angles and looking for any shadows. I much prefer using film. I also made sure the film was the same film I used to shoot Grandad in his last weeks (Ilford HP5) for some consistency in the book, and also because it gives just enough grain to main the photographs identifiably analogue.

What do you think ? Comment on the left there, the turquoise ‘Leave a Comment’ button. Thanks