A fellow student pointed out that this still is from the Snow Patrol music video Open Your Eyes, and that video was taken from the artist Claude Lelouch in his work C’etait un Rendezvous (translates into It Was A Date). The video is of a journey through Paris, from A to B. The video camera is mounted to the front of the car, so we never see the car itself. The car goes past famous sites like the Arc de Triomphe, the Luxor Obelisk, The Louvre, The Moulin Rouge and ending up at Montmartre at the Basilica de Sacre Coeur, where the car driver gets out and embraces a young lady.

The brief states the following:

You must respond to the image and use it somewhere in your narrative sequence. If appropriate you may rework the image. You will consider and explore a range of different methods of constructing a narrative. Building on previous work in this module, use these experiences to produce a proposal outlining the aims for your project. You must shoot a minimum of 20 images, but your final edit must be limited to 6 – 12 images of a size that is considered appropriate to the context of the work. You may use moving image and CGI if appropriate.

So there we go. At first I was completely stuck; what the hell was that image about ?! But now I have the basis for a good idea.

With previous work, I enjoy using geographic instructions through the use of maps to create my imagery (as with Every 1.8 Miles, see link here). With this work, I used the limitations of the distance from my home to a random location in Suffolk, and the frames I could fit on a roll of 35mm film, to create 8 images documenting the floor/ground and the litter on this ground, every 1.8 miles to my random location. It told a linear narrative, from my house to the random location.

Initially, and rather too ambitiously, I thought I could do a similar thing here. Knowing now that the brief’s image was from a film shot in Paris, I could document my journey from Ipswich to Paris recording it with photographs/video.

This seemed a bit ambitiously to jump straight in, so I came up with another similar idea to get me working and to get me thinking about how I could create a narrative by recording journeys.

This is what I done:

Using Free Map Tools website whilst simultaneously carefully watching the video on Youtube, I marked each turn of the car and followed its route on my map, leaving a trail. Whilst doing this, I noted each left and right turn the car would make. For example, the car starts by turning right, then takes the first right, then second right, then fifth right, then forteenth right, then second left, etc., until it arrives at it’s destination. Here is a print screen of that map (its quite hard to see but there’s a red line from left to upper right):

Using these ‘instructions’: “Take the second left”…”Take the first right”…, I applied them to my own location. So, starting at my student halls of residence (specifically at the end of Page Lane, near Wykes Bishop Street), I started my journey following the same instructions.

(I was on my bike, and was using my canon 450d so I could quickly review the images once I had got back to my laptop). I was in for a long journey, knowing some instructions were “Take the tenth right” and “Take the fourteenth right”. After an 11.5 miles journey, I ended up in Nacton ! Here is the map of the route I took:

(The markers I used to dot along my journey make is much easier to see the route taken). I did however encounter quite a few problems. For example, if I had the instruction, take the second left, and I came to a T-junction, I could only take the first left. Round abouts with many exits were also a problem, as were no through roads ! But, in my head, I stuck to (a shabby but structured) method. for example, this is how I dealt with a dead end:

But despite my ‘instruction translation’ issues, I took my photographs. Now, they’re not the most spectacular images. I took one of the sky and one of the ground at the start and the end of my journey, leaving me with 4 images. I don’t know if the sky images would work well on there own, similarly are just the 2 ground images strong enough on there own ? What matters to me is, that is doesn’t matter what the image looks like ! Like Marina Abramovic says in her audio disc accompanied in her book The Artist Is Present, “The process is much more important than [the] result in the performance art”. (Albeit she is talking about ‘performance’ art, but why can’t this be performance art ?)

(from top to bottom: Sky at Start, Ground at Start, Sky at End, Ground at End)

I like how there are subtle differences in the start and ending pairs of images. Your can tell the starting location is quite urban; rocks and rubble on the floor, cigarette butts, pieces of metal, a piece of rope, brick, paper, weeks, etc., and the end location is more rural, tree canopies cropping the sky, fallen crisp leaves, grass, soil on the ground.

That is what I like. The subtle but clear expression of two separate places, through which a journey (maybe) is perceived.

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 !

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!).

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.”