I had two initial ideas about what I want my personal investigation to be on which were identity/perspective and illusions. Since I have previously explored illusion and have created pieces that were optical illusions I thought that although I am interested in this, I should further myself and explore the idea of identity (and possibly within my ideas of identity I could somehow relate it to illusions) relating to the threshold concepts #3 and #7, all about exploring contexts. I’m interested in a lot of identity photography which is why I liked this idea so much, it has a lot of paths to explore. I think that identity is something that is very relevant to the time we are living in and it is something that is talked a lot more about now than it ever has been, I think that to be able to create art from this would be very interesting and personal to our generation and that it should be explored as much as it can.
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He came into photography from the perspective of fine art and had a full time job in an art museum working in their darkrooms and then eventually for technology, meanwhile working away at photography on the side at the weekends. He was a self-driven photographer and was able to work hard enough to initially publish 25 copies of his book. I found interest in what he had to say about taking photos in a 'middle ground' and not in a big city, he talked about the emergence of the internet and how it is perhaps better to be able to take photos and find subject matter where there isn't a million other photographers trying to do the same thing, he had his own content to take photographs of that he understood.
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When he first visited Robert Frank to watch him take the photographs for the book that he had designed, he had had no interest in photography, he had been interested in painting and was majoring in art history and was a junior art director. When he watched Frank take photos, small gestures seemed to have meaning and he began to anticipate the clicks of the camera, he felt the flow of his actions. When he was on the streets after this experience, everything felt 'dynamic and alive' there was potential in everything he saw and human energy seemed so alive ever since he had witnessed the careful actions of Frank and he felt as though photography was 'not the static method' that he had previously believed it to be.
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Todd Hido is an American photographer and contemporary artist who created the series 'Homes at Night', which the photographs here are from. The series is of photographs literally of homes at night, he wanted to capture the ideas of families and individuals living inside their houses, wondering what their life inside was like, he wondered how they lived. He is inspired by the realist painter, Edward Hopper who famously painted rural and urban scenes that reflected on his perspective of American life. In many ways, Homes at Night reminds me of Hopper's work, it is a very similar style. I really love the Homes at Night series because I like how Hido manages to capture an eerie familiarness from outside the homes he photographs. We are given hints of life from inside the homes, with the lights glowing, but we never actually see a person in the photos. As a viewer to the photograph, with the lack of people and lack of information it gives us, we are almost able to create our own narrative of the home from just looking at it. I think that his photographs in this series are transfixing in an place of deep interest.
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Tom Hunter is a London-based photographer, originally from Dorset who takes photos that reference classical paintings, I am interested in his work presenting the realities of life in East London, binding documentary photography and artful photography together. After moving to Hackney in the late 80's he became fascinated with the area, the people, architecture, landscape, culture. I find strong interest in the subjects that he does and can understand on a personal level why he became attached to the area because of these elements of it. He combines the reality of photography with the element of fictional painting and they come together perfectly to relay his message. "I love the way photography is seen as the truth but that truth can be so easily manipulated. Reality and documentary are at the core of my practice as it is in photography but I find more truth in fiction. So it’s getting the balance between reality and truth I find most exciting and illuminating. Too much fiction and the real history and lives are lost, too much dry reality and no one wants to hear their stories".
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A perfect example for domestic photography is the collection 'Flowers for ________' by Nigel Shafran. These pictures document the inside of his home and his everyday life, something I have become increasingly interested in over lockdown because in some ways this is the most personal you can get with someone, they are showing you where you live and spend the most time. Through this you can get a glimpse of what the person is actually like. I hope to recreate a shoot like this during lockdown and experiment with how I can demonstrate identity through it.
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His revolutionary work has been honoured in galleries all over the world and through his multitude of awards, his work with sequences was very influential. These photographs are interesting to me because through his sequences he is able to tell a story and these stories were demonstrated so clearly that they really resonated with the audience. As part of my experimentation I would like to try sequences and creating my own narratives from the people I photograph, their relationships, their lives. I think that sequences are a good way to demonstrate who someone is because you can see their story almost in action.
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For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
Julian Germain created a series of photographs over eight years documenting the life of Charles Snelling, an elderly man who lived alone in Portsmouth. He showed these images alongside pages of photographs from Charles Snelling's own photo albums. I think that these images are personal and provide a narrative of how he lives, it's interesting to see as an outsider looking in, we can see how he lives and draw comparisons between our lives and get a sense of what kind of person he is. I like that we can gain an insight into the kind of person he is through the intimate nature of the images, he is mainly photographed in good lighting, the composition central, doing everyday tasks, holding all of his own possessions. The colours seem natural to me because it's the colour of his home amplified by the natural light, there is a sense that we are really there.
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After watching the interview with Juan Orranita, I learnt that his photo book, Stains of Red Dirt is heavily influenced by his interest in social and political matters where he lives in South Africa. His photo book is full of spontaneous, heavily coloured images with a lot of reference to red, he says that colour binds everything together metaphorically and literally, saying ‘colour is the language that I’ve chosen to talk about the issues that concern me’. He initially started by taking spontaneous photos of his family and their home as well as his surroundings, using natural lighting. Over the course of his journey, he decided to experiment with more materials that meant that even more colours became the subject of his photographs, tying in more hues of yellow, blue and pink. Initially his aim was to document Johannesburg from his perspective, and decided to capture the landscape of Johannesburg because of its deep connections with colonialism. He wanted to explore, to make it become subject of being seen in different ways, ‘it’s about what we see and how we choose to see it’ is what he says. He explores this all through the language of colour. His change in theme which we can see demonstrated in the book seemed natural because of the personal images inter-spaced throughout which made it seamless. The history and social context of South Africa was very important to Orrantia and had to be portrayed in the book. I think that researching his photo book was helpful to my investigation because this was all about personal perspective and himself making a statement about what he believes in regard to social and political contexts in South Africa. To explore identity, it is important to understand people's stance and the way they want to portray issues like these.
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In class we watched the Ways of Seeing documentary in which John Berger discusses the relationship between words and photos, the way that captions, titles and surrounding text effects the image. Berger had a large influence on how we interpret art and photos, blending together Marxist ideas and art theories. Berger critically discussed how advertising influences us into buying certain products that we don't necessarily need and haven't thought about until we become subjected to these heavily influential advertisements that entice the audience into buying through an idealised image of a better life. Berger said “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”.
Duane Michals - This Photograph Is My Proof.This is a further example of text on images that I looked at but this isn't from advertising. I found this image to be particularly intimate, the writing and the image together giving it a new meaning: emotional, moving and bittersweet. Without the context of the writing, the image would be perceived in the opposite way to its true meaning. The idea of having a handwritten message at the bottom really interests me and I think that when I try experimenting with text on images I would like to do something like this, getting the people I take photographs of to handwrite a caption, much like Michals did when he wrote this caption himself.
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Hicham Benohoud - The Classroom.In this photograph you can see a child who is holding several wooden props, posing them as his arms and legs. I would say that the genre of this photograph is abstract because the props have been used in a way to make the wood look like they are part of the boys body, the composition is very free and from first appearance looks like something that a child would create. I find the composition of this image unusual, at the front as the main focus we have the boy and the props, whilst in the background there are five children sitting at their desks, working away with their heads down. The contrast between the two focuses is extreme because they are two complete opposites and you wouldn't expect them to be set together. I think the fact that they are so opposite is what creates a relationship between the foreground and the background. When I looked at this image initially I felt confused but the longer I looked at it, the more interested I became in the relationships to all the elements shown in the image. I think that these photographs were taken with the idea of some kind of childish freedom in mind, it seems that the child in focus has been allowed to use whatever they want whilst the ones in the back just sit.
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In this image, you can see the child standing on a stool with material obscuring their face, with the same setting of the children at their desks behind. Unlike the last image, you cannot see the face of this child and the props have been used specifically for this as well as a stool that elevates the subject of the image. What I find interesting in this image is the covered identity because in a lot of the other images you can see a lot of faces but in this one the main subject's face is removed and you can see some of the faces in the background. The composition is very central once again, the subject in line with the light above their head. I think that this photograph evokes a sense of emptiness because of the lack of identity which makes the photo more captivating. Given that this series is all about how society controls behaviour through taboos and expectations, I think that the lack of identity presents this and shows how children are conditioned to behave a certain way. Taking away the face, which is something that sets individuals apart, removes the idea of freedom and the individuality and singularity we should have access to. I think that this series and the ideas that it is based on will help with my investigation into identity, specifically for how societal expectations and taboos shape our behaviours and influence how we act.
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‘How do these seemingly calm images, which look so serene, manage to suggest deep violence – invisible but very real violence, the kind of violence that touches the individual in the depths of his being – even though they are anything but spectacular?’ (Caujolle in Benohoud 2001).
Colin Gray is a photographer from Hull, England, who began to take photographs of his parents when he was five years old, he would take them constantly at all holidays, celebrations, events. Over 30 years he managed to build up enough extensive material documenting the relationships between his parents, and in the particular collection that the images to the right originate from is called "In sickness and in health", documenting the final stage of his parents relationship. He started this series in 2000 and in time it demonstrates the gradual decline in his mother's health and his father acting as carer, until his mother passed away. Gray found comfort in the photographs in the way that they showed the process of everything that had ever happened between his parents and it helped him to deal with the loss. I think that this series is very delicate, personal and touching. He managed to capture his parents and everything that they were, I think this will be very helpful for my investigation and I hope to create something personal like this.
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Helmar Lerski's 1936 series 'Metamorphosis through Light' demonstrates 175 photographs of the same person's face under lots of lighting conditions. He had a background in German expressionist photography and grasped the power that light held over photography and explored the 'othering effect'. He thought that a face was a 'psychologically charged surface' that could be illuminated by light - 'light bouncing off surfaces to form illusions'. When you see the exterior, you cannot know of the interior even if the subject, photographer and viewer are on the same page.
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