Informed Practice

In this essay I am going to talk about how the Inside/Out// 1994 text by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Influenced my Ideas. As well as what and how my contextual understanding has informed my practice.

To start off with we were given the text “Inside/ out// 1994” by Abigail Solomon-Godeau to read and make notes on. At first it confused me and took several readings over to fully understand and comprehend, after reading the text I found It was all about how different photographers present themselves, whether that is as an insider to the photograph they are taking or whether they are an outsider to the photograph they are taking.

The Inside/ out// text influenced me to take on the role of the outsider. I wanted to be seen as the outsider to the photograph, not knowing who the subjects in the pictures were.

Bearing this in mind, for my first shoot I went out into the local streets around where I live on a busy Saturday afternoon and shot trying to freeze movement in the frame. This paints me as the photographer as an outsider because I do not know the people in the shots, I don’t know their story, I am an outsider to their lives. I got this idea from a photographer called Vicky Roy, who photographed what he knew, this was the streets he grew up on in India, Homeless children and just general street scenes. Also photographers like Henri Cartier-Bression inspired this shoot because of his dramatic black and white street scenes, it made me feel inspired and wanted to try and recreate this in my own work.  For my second shoot I decided to further this idea going out into my local market square and taking long exposures of people however it was a rainy Monday so there were not too many people around to create the blurred movement affect I wanted to achieve. This adds to the idea of me as an outsider because you cannot see who the people in the images are which reinforces the fact as the photographer I have no connection to the subject.

 I got the idea for using long exposure to create blur within the images from Martin Roemers who took long exposure images in big bustling cities to show how hectic a place can be. I have also had experience with creating movement in images in the past. Like in my summer project I used long exposure in grand central station which started as a “holiday snap” but just thought that it would make a good photo seeing all the tourists standing still mixing with the blur of the native New Yorkers in a hurry to get one place or the other.

For my last shoot I decided to go into Cambridge to further perfect the idea of long exposure blurred movement in different locations. I used two different locations, spending time in each one figuring out which settings my camera needed to be on, I sat with my finger on the button and clicking away until I thought I had got a good selection of pictures to choose from, then moved on to the next spot and repeated the same actions. Frank Machalowski inspired me to use more people in this shoot than the first long exposure shoot with his project “monster” he created a blurred sea of people within his images that looks really affective and helps to draw your eye around the images.  Machalowskis images are visually striking and some images such as the ones in his work from the project “multiexpo100” resemble work by Idris Khan called “every Bernd and Hilla Becher”. Which I also tried unsuccessfully to recreate in one of my shoots, this ended up creating a more Martin Par like light trail instead of the intended effect.

To conclude I took on the work of other photographers and tried to recreate it in my own work using my own surrounding, this was using what I had around me to my own advantage, as I know the area well and I know which areas should be the busiest. I drew influence from the Inside/out//1994 text to try and represent myself as an outsider much like some of the photographers mentioned in the text.

In doing this I found that I could never fully be an outsider to what I was photographing because I was using locations that I have grown up around and know very well, making me an insider to the locations of my shoots. However, I am also an outsider because I do not know the people in the shoots, their background or where they come from just as they do not know my story. Thus meaning there is no connection between the photographer (me) and the subject.

One To One Session

Today I had my one to one session with one of my lecturers (my first because I missed the other one not realising what day it was on in time).

What can I say, I left that room feeling very confident about my work and how to progress in the next 4 days before my deadline ON FRIDAY! – that is the scary part- but I’m confident I have the time to get it all done before Friday the 13^th (hope its not as unlucky as its stigmas).

Basically the one to one sessions are there for you to talk to a lecturer about any concerns you might have, any help you need and also for them to see what you have done up to that point to maybe give you advice on how you can move your project further.

We talked for about 20 minutes on what I needed to do, the main objective being to get more work done! Especially in this blog where I need to relate myself into it write about my thoughts and feeling to do with the course or university and me as a photographer in general!

I definitely left that room feeling one hundred times more confident in where I was going what I was doing and what I need to do in the next week and future projects even!

His main piece of advice was to “take 10 minutes each day sit down with a cup of tea (or something stronger) and think. Think about everything that happened in that day and how it made me feel, what inspired me and how I’m going to move forward with it.

These three years on the course are about me finding who I am as a photographer, that’s not necessarily who ill be in ten years but it’s a start. Its about finding what kind of photography I’m good at and what I need to improve on.

I am definitely looking forward to the next 3 years. I just need to get my butt in gear sooner to manage my time better and get the work done more than one week before my deadline!!!!

Thank you for reading,

Rebecca

Guest Lecture 7- Katy Lassen

I am going to start by saying that to me Katy Lassen's lecture didn't really interest me in ways that the others have.
Katy Lassen was our seventh Guest lecturer of this semester and is a Fashion stylist that didn't actually study anything to do with photography at uni, instead she studied Media Studies and French.
The first thing Lassen told us in her lecture was that any fashion story is basically advertising and that stylists  work as fashion editors on magazines and commissioning stories by other stylists. All clothing companies need fashion stylist, even ones with an online presence such as ASOS and COS.

Lassen informed us that fashion editorials for magazines are often unpaid and sometime you even have to spend your own money.

Big Agencies include:

• CLM
• Streeters
• Art and Commerce 
• MAP
• D&V
• Art Partner
• Intrepid
• Smile Too 
• Joe Roots
• Visual Art 

Lassen told us that work experience is key, and that we should work with a variety of photographers, models, hair and makeup if we wanted to become fashion stylists and this also means you can build a team creatives that you work well with. We should do as much work experience, assisting and interning as possible so that we get to know what we are doing.

Katy Lassens key pieces of advice were:

• To network
• Be nice and Determined
• Enjoy it 

Thank You for Reading, 

Becca

Context Matters

We were given the task to research two images and in our groups discuss how many contexts you can assign to the images researched and describe the contexts you have assigned and why the images suit these contexts. Then we had to discuss in your group, in what ways the images need modification in order to fulfill the context or contexts discussed. For example, Crop, logo removal, change colour/de-saturate, addition of text, layer/repetition, etc. moving further from that we then had to present our findings to the rest of our group. (still a nightmare for me!) 

 First image: 

•“words kill war” – simple and to the point text

•the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has inspired Ogilvy & Mather Japan to come up with some very powerful advertisements for non profit organisation ADOT.COM.

•The ads combine weapons with tools of free speech to encourage leaders of the international community to find a peaceful solution.

•ADOT.COM: “As we at ADOT.COM try to play our part in making a better world where differences don’t dictate lives, we actively support many charities in the laudable work they do, from helping the UK homeless, to building a better future for the disabled and neglected children of Bulgaria. We also do our utmost in campaigning for causes where the challenging of norms and the fight against discrimination stands at the forefront. In addition, we believe the expression of creativity can be a great force for progressive change, as art has the potential to make people stop, think and act. Thus, we support musicians, artists and organisations that work to ensure the flourishing and growth of cultural creativity.”

•Made: April 2014

•Distrubuted on social media i.e. Facebook

•Target audiences: Political leaders, urging them to use words instead of starting wars

•ADOT.COM was the company that distributed the picture

•Advertised more widely

•Maybe cropped tighter

Over all I like the symplistic design and couldn’t really find anything to improve it.

Image two:

•Over one thousand people died on this day but the images still seen today do not show dead bodies nor mangled corpses, just the haunting moments of which the event happened.

•There was an agreement among print media and television broadcasters not to show any corpses in connection with the attack, and when an image of a dismembered hand titled ‘The Hand 9/11’ was published by Todd Maisel it was roundly critisised.

•When put into perspective, images nowadays are published no matter how offensive or explicit they are, so the lack of images of mangled corpses are shocking, because although they may not have been published, we know that they were at least taken at some point, but whether those photographers survived we do not know.

•The reason we chose this image to research into was because of the amount of questions that can be asked about the content and even what was happening at the time.

•Did this person have a family waiting for him? What was even crossing his mind while he plunged head first to his death?

•The New York times ran the image as ‘disturbing’ ‘exploitive’ and ‘voyeuristic’.

•As time passed, an investigation was called, who was the falling man and what was his story? The man was believed to have been trapped on one of the top floors of the building.

• We thought the most important thing to think about with this image in relation to it’s context is being empathetic towards the subject in this image. How does it make you as a viewer feel? Does it play with your own fears? Some people’s heart would drop when they think about their own fear of heights, or falling, and I can feel my own fear of death coming through just by looking at this image. It’s stomach churning, when you put yourself in these situations it helps you think about the context, the subject matter and the amount of lives lost and heartbroken families during the event.

Group Crit

Today, 8 days from the deadline we had a Group Crit it was the most nerve wrecking thing I've done in a while.

I have never been any good at talking in front of groups of people, its my worst nightmare, the thought of it sometimes puts me into a state of anxiety.
Never the less I went along. we got split into two groups then partnered off. Our task for this crit was to tell our partner about our work and then they had to present it to the rest of the group. At this point alarm bells were ringing in my brain. But I couldn't run, I have to prove to myself that I can do it I can overcome my anxieties! I've done it once I can do it again.

So I told my partner about my project and where I was going with it, and he told me about his. I sat and listened as each pair talked about the other persons work, trying to keep myself calm and remembering to breath.

The time finally came for us to present each others work, My partner presented mine with few interjections from me as to what I was going to do, because he had forgotten what I had said or didn't fully understand it. And I then presented his...

At this point I was already trying to stop from shaking with nerves and keep my voice level, but on top of this, My partner hadn't really given me a lot to present, he had given me two photos to present and a bit of text that explained what it was about that was it, so I presented what I could and he took over and did the rest, The lecturer making notes on each of our presentations did acknowledge that it wasn't my fault.

This lecturer also made comments that I needed to add more research into my visual logbook that I can relate more of my shoots to.

These group crits are all part of the course and learning I understand why we have to do them but I would prefer to have not been separated from my friends because i feel more comfortable talking in front of them compared to other people I am not that close with, I guess its just all part of growing up!

Thank You for Reading, 

Becca