The disjointed nature and obvious fracture that this represents is a tool which I feel I can utilize to narrate the deeper stories which are inside the work I am making. The more I make work in the landscape upon the river the more I feel the project is becoming about melancholy as well as place and history.
These images were a passing comment in 'onLandscape Conference' with Jem Southam and Joe Cornish, where they discussed this project about how photography is driven by love. And that when a loss of love happens it can inspire an idea. This project by Andolski is exactly that and within these images I found in this project I am especially drawn to the cut panoramas.
The disjointed nature and obvious fracture that this represents is a tool which I feel I can utilize to narrate the deeper stories which are inside the work I am making. The more I make work in the landscape upon the river the more I feel the project is becoming about melancholy as well as place and history.
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Kevin Moore describes the work as "Returning to nature with elemental vigor". The books and advertising work produced by these two 35mm negative illusionists and the sequencing, edit and production of their book 'Lightning Tree' was really inspirational in my thoughts today. It made me feel through their crazy, fun and creative output that I was beginning to see an output and a structure to what I am making. And it also helps me feel more comfortable with the idea that I am enjoying what I make and that is okay too. (Book preview) The fun documentation of spaces create interesting visual twists and turns throughout their books, although these images look technically high quality the book gives a lofi impression. Not to be confused with Lomo the images have a rawness about the, as if snapshots from experience and time. They relay a sense of emotion and happening which is lost in the work of Alec Soth with such precision and stillness. This is continued to be conveyed through the sequencing of the book when the mediums cross, the page layout and sequencing interchanges and I felt a sense of movement and emotion in the book.
This book is published in a very simple way, it is constructed of A2 paper stapled, like smaller book this cost effective strategy is employed on a larger scale and works. It is confident, it feels good in the hand and the paper choices made complete the book. It inspired me to think about making my own book in a very different way, previously interested in hand binding and creating 'perfect' works, I think this style of book collating in a very dynamic and interesting way the photographs I have been making alongside the 5x4 / 10x8 traditional process would work well in a large printed book like this. The A3 page size gives space to play with but allows a 35mm frame to print with sufficient quality. The low quality reminds me of the film 'Somewhere to disappear' by Alec Soth in relation to his 'Sleeping along the mississippi' work, the photographs display the 'quality' so the supporting material can be lofi but be documenting. Whilst thinking of these themes I began to think that it needs to have an interlaced meaning or message behind the book, and I feel that although I see the river as a playground and an interactive space. Lots of responses have been of it as a barrier, a difficulty and unaccessible. Although surprising I recognize I have been fortunate to be able to have a place to escape too. The book is going to explore this idea, the restrictive nature of growing up in todays childhoods. The health and safety governed lifestyle dictated to us by overprotection. I plan to do this by looking for barriers along the river, stop points, obstacles and including them in the book. Obscuring the views with these objects. In my book I will continue shooting whilst exploring, making and developing my traditional work but pay particular attention to themes that present themselves. I feel that currently the potential themes are; trees, found objects - location/air, water (not the river), mud, old boats, green boats, used boats, portraits; users and occupiers, wildlife, barriers, obstacles, metaphors, fun. I plan to shoot a lot of images over the winter break, and travel the river, making notes and plans for the traditional landscape images. "Photography doesn't always have to be art, it can be life" - JEvans. My book is about life, not art, its about exploring and escaping and sharing the experiences I have/had with the audience to the project. Holloways book by Robert McFarlane; Whilst describing a Holloway, although applicable to any natural wilderness he cites "a place which one might slip back out of this world". Melancholy is not exactly a word on everybody’s lips. People don’t go around gossiping about how melancholic the new regional IT director is or drawing up lists of the more melancholy-inducing bits of natural scenery (Brighton Beach on an overcast morning; Rannoch Moor in Scotland; the West Siberian Plain).
But we should pay more attention to melancholy and even seek it out from time to time. Melancholy is a species of sadness that arises when we are open to the fact that life is inherently difficult and that suffering and disappointment are core parts of universal experience. It’s not a disorder that needs to be cured. Modern society tends to emphasise buoyancy and cheerfulness. But we have to admit that reality is for the most part about grief and loss. The good life is not one immune to sadness, but one in which suffering contributes to our development. Sometimes you feel sad and you can’t quite put your finger on why. It’s not one acute sorrow that’s eating you. You feel in a way the whole of life calls for tears. Melancholy is a key mental state and a valuable one, because it links pain with beauty and wisdom. Our suffering isn’t merely chaotic – a mark of failure, an error – it can be linked to admirable things. Often, sadness simply makes a lot of sense. We feel melancholy when we consider: The things we love are transient Yesterday will never come back. Every day you take a step nearer to death. The people who cared for us when we were young are getting older. We’ll be following their path to decline soon enough. The darker truths of the human conditionNo one truly understands anyone else, loneliness is basic, universal. Every life has its full measure of shame and sorrow. We spend our lives striving for things we mostly don’t get – and if we do, we are soon disappointed. They’ll grow up; they’ll encounter money worries, the difficulty of making a career, addictions, political conflict, illnesses and relationship frustrations. Ultimately, nothing we do matters. Our lives – our loves and cares, our griefs, our triumphs – will be washed away. RegretsAll the things you should have said to your grandmother before she died. We learn too late. You have wasted years. Everyone has. You can only avoid regret by switching off your imagination, by refusing to consider how things might have been. The contradictions of being alive Many of the things we most want are in conflict: to feel secure, and yet to be free; to have money and yet not to have to be wage slaves. To be in close knit communities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of others. To travel and explore the world and yet to put down deep roots. To fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, drink, sex and lying on the sofa – and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit. The wisdom of the melancholy attitude (as opposed to the bitter or angry one) lies in the understanding that the sorrow isn’t just about you, that you have not been singled out, that your suffering belongs to humanity in general. So often our sorrows are egocentric. We see them as special misfortunes which have come our way. Melancholy rejects this. It has a wider, much less personal take. Much of what is painful and sorrowful in our lives can be traced to general things about life: its brevity; the fact that we cannot avoid missing opportunities, the contradictions of desire and self-management. These apply to everyone. So melancholy is generous. You feel this sorrow for others too, for ‘us’. You feel pity for the human condition. And feeling such pity makes us better people. It offers to make our expectations of human conduct more accurate. Whoever I am with will suffer the same broad difficulties. It is hardly surprising if they go off the rails, get frazzled, lie from time to time, change their minds for no good reason (or refuse to change their minds when there is good reason). We are melancholy when we grasp that there are deep troubles essentially bound up with being human. And to take that fully to heart is to become more compassionate. Religions have been advocates of melancholy. The Christian Book of Common Prayer gives a statement to be recited at funerals: Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower. In the midst of life we are in death. It’s intended to strike home a universal, melancholy thought. At the funeral of a loved one we are not just witnessing the passing of one life. We are invited to see each other – and ourselves – as dying animals. This should not make us desperate, but rather more forgiving, kinder and better able to focus on what really matters, while there is still time. Hiroshi Sugimoto, North Atlantic Ocean, Cliffs of Moher, 1989 Ansel Adams, Aspens, Dawn, Autumn, Dolores River Canyon, Colorado, 1937 In Redheaded Peckerwood Christian Patterson is working out something that hasn’t been done much before, if ever: a kind of subjective documentary photography of the historical past. That requires that the individual pictures be true, as close as possible to the physical details as historically established, while remaining ambiguous and unsettling — because each of them is only an aspect of the story, and because in each of them something is wrong. The accumulation of them, meanwhile, is what thrusts the viewer into the emotional center of the story, in a way you could call novelistic. While each individual photograph pulses, sometimes alarmingly, all by itself, the meaning of the whole only coheres when all of its parts and all the subliminal connections between them have been fully absorbed, a process which takes time and perhaps distance. Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land. I always find Red Headed Peckerwood a really difficult project to settle with, it's beautifully clever in approach and output but theres always an underlying philosophy of truth. The work creates an engaging narrative of lies which when put together in series and viewed in his book become a story about history. This is a genius way of producing work and something which is bringing contemporary documentary photography to the gallery in a new and exciting way.
This series interests me because he manages in his approach to bring back to life the emotions, feelings and environments as he travels along. The work is engaging the viewer and narrating a historical story, this is something I could benefit from including in my project, although I am aware not to make my own series to personal and develop multiple layers of narration throughout this layer is important to me. To narrate my own personal emotional reasoning in a way which is stimulating to any audience. He makes an american road trip of different proportions to Robert Frank and the like. "Lick creek Line extends and amplifies Ron Jude’s ongoing fascination with the vagaries of photographic empiricism, and the gray area between documentation and fiction. In a sequential narrative punctuated by contrasting moments of violence and beauty, Jude follows the rambling journey of a fur trapper, methodically checking his trap line in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States. Through converging pictures of landscapes, architecture, an encroaching resort community, and the solitary, secretive process of trapping pine marten for their pelts, Lick Creek Line underscores the murky and culturally arbitrary nature of moral critique. With an undercurrent of mystery and melancholy that echoes Jude’s previous two books about his childhood home of Central Idaho, Lick Creek Line serves as the linchpin in a multi-faceted, three-part look at the incomprehensibility of self and place through photographic narrative. While Alpine Star functioned as a fictitious sociological archive, and Emmett explored the muddy waters of memory and autobiography, Lick Creek Line finds its tenor through the sleight-of-hand structure of a traditional photo essay." This book is printed on matt paper which creates a lovely soft texture to the printed image. This texture softens the prints and removes sharpness slightly which creates a smoothness. The work is interesting, and for me in relation to the project it documents wild environments and a persons travels. The photographs are classic in style and although I find these less interesting do work in the way we expect to see a narrative constructed and is perhaps something I can consider towards the end of my project when sequencing. This gray area that he is exploring is continued by the reference and not visual representation of trapping, we never see a trap only a man kneeling over an object, this is echoed in my own work where currently the process is removing the river. Which is the main focal point, this connotes a loss and is something I am concentrating on exploring further.
Melancholy is a really good area for me to further my research. Irving Penn is a classic still life photographer, well established and contributing to vogue. These are a selection of his varied still lives which lend themselves well to the subject matter of the river. The possibilities of finding objects washed up onto the banks and beaches along my travels mean that I may be able to reproduce these beautifully interesting and inquisitive studies of found objects. I especially feel that the left image, Camel Pack found objects with grasses and pigeon feather 1975 is incredible, the inclusion of the environment that the object was found increases its poignance, it's texture and its feeling. I saw these images a retrospective book of his work and even inside the images are produced larger than original scale, this has powerful connotations and is something I should consider when making my own still lives.
I also need to consider and experiment with the technical element of creating these still lives, do I want to make the work in the field using flash heads or in the studio. This involves removing the object from the environment and as my work is centered around experience and place I feel that by doing so I may be changing the aesthetic. I will however experiment with using film as well as paper when making the still lives to have the option of enlargements. The background Penn uses with his textured finish and not sticking to super clean whites and shadowless aesthetic is a more classical painterly finish, it is another area which I want to explore and consider when making the work. I think that using a textured cotton canvas off white would work well with my ideas and outputs so far. The cigarettes in his pictures take on a new interest, the tarnished nature of their stigma works well in the photographs and alongside this they take on a new appeal. As visually interesting objects, this is the power of removing an object from the environment and taking the time to photograph it in a studio environment. The Hoo peninsula is geographically a very similar landscape Pegwell Bay These 5x4 color landscapes have a muted aesthetic with soft details in the sky which I really enjoy, they offer an insight into how I could produce a color series of images from my location and as part of my project. An insight which interests me but not arrests me. The project is beautiful, but similarly to my project and something I need to be aware of the horizontal and flat nature of the scenes can become repetitive, I feel here we are looking across the peninsula which may have been the idea and concept behind Collins approach but I do want to make a feeling of involvement, an experience for the viewer and therefore my photographs have to contain evidence of the environment and a sense of looking. By tilting the camera down towards the ground and recording the grain of the floor I feel I can relay to the audience the conditions the environment suggests.
This work also feel as if it is the obvious approach, go somewhere and deadpand documentary stepping back including the scene printing it very muted without much lighting and no dynamic finish. This although objective and a very popular traditional viewpoint is something which I feel doesn't sit with my standard approach. I want to create imagery which the audience can feel engaged with, spend time with and work around, therefore I am going to continue my approach. But, I will shoot some film to experiment with incorporating other mediums. Beachcombing the Alameda-Oakland shorelines of San Francisco Bay, photographer Peter Tonningsen has culled together an astonishing assortment of found objects to create art of surprising intimacy and transcendent beauty. Both somber and fun and flooded with color, the photographs in this book are captured by direct scan and reflect the symbols, forms, and objects of everyday life. The possibilities and implicit narratives that lie beneath the surfaces of this detritus challenge the viewer to reassess what art is. Flotsam & Jetsam is at once personal and universal, portraying a unique topography of this regional watershed while promoting awareness of the spoiling of our marine environments.
Flotsam & Jetsam forms a unique dialog about the use, condition, and fragility of our marine environment by looking at discarded objects connected to the sea; things I have collected from the shorelines of San Francisco Bay that have been either left behind or washed ashore with the ebb and flow of the tides. This project is about discovery and it calls attention to cycles; things we possess and then discard, what the Bay leaves behind with the rising and falling of the sea, and the repetitive process of finding, organizing and revitalizing such debris. The transformation of this detritus to art appeals to me, as I feel like a child on a spirited treasure hunt, conveying value to what is commonly overlooked. I search out these cast-off items, take them home, scan them, and then organize them into groups that appeal to me. I like how these objects take on new context and importance in the form I have adopted. Isolated against a black background, each group harmonizes a color, texture, content, or shape, with each item exposed for closer inspection and conjecture about its particular history and story. As a series, this collection serves as a broader anthology of our time, place, and who we are and it brings me closer to defining my home and the particularities of life surrounded by water; themes prevalent throughout my art. I am pleased too that, in a small way, my beachcombing calls attention to the vulnerability of this important watershed and helps cleanse the local shorelines for others to enjoy. I am also excited about how this series challenges the traditional definition of a photograph. Made without a camera, film, or photographic paper. I am drawn to the physicality of the scanning process and the immediacy and tactile nature this form embraces. Looking at these photographs, I feel as though I am under the object itself: in contact with it, touching it, sensing its weight, volume and texture, and I find that visceral quality curious and thrilling. — Peter Tonningsen for Lens Culture. Edward Westons abstraction of natural forms is something which influences me in my ideas around removing objects from the river and turning them into photographs in the studio. This process removes them from their natural surroundings and become photographs about the object as an individual subject. It is saying to the audience that they should look at the beautiful nature of these away from the context of the river. It is also suggesting that the rivers beauty is made up of different factors and that they are still interesting within their own right.
The objects I want to photograph will hold texture and so the lighting will need to compliment this. In Westons pepper it is his use of soft light which allows the smooth texture to present itself as human flesh, it is also the position and angle of the camera which continues this idea. When direct positive printed I will make the objects bigger than they are and so increase their importance in the viewers perception. Below are some images I have pulled off of the internet which are a reference point for the studio photographs I want to make. The texture interests me and the way you can abstract it from the object. |
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