Photography 1: Expressing your vision

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Assignment 3 - Formative feedback

Overall comments:

This assignment is another highly creative one. I should seek to improve the look and navigability of my learning log in preparation for assessment.

Feedback on assignment (demonstration of technical and visual skills, quality of outcome, demonstration of creativity):

In my last report I was told to learn to control my frame which I’ve done. My images are well composed and show a high level of picture making skills.

The exposure in image 9723 is wrong. It’s tricky shooting against the light, so I need to +1 on my Exposure Compensation button, sometimes more. I should now either brighten using PS Curves or use a detail extractor to subtly bring out the shadow areas.

I should set Adobe 98 Profile in my camera settings - I’ll need the gamut/dynamic range for my prints. I should aim for the very best quality now: if I’m not shooting raw, I should use maximum quality Jpeg settings and consider unique in camera Picture Settings for each shoot.

My tutor would like to see some assignment development posts. Ideally I should develop, submit and reflect on each assignment in separate posts.

Coursework (demonstration of technical and visual skills, demonstration of creativity):

My coursework is much more reflective and critical, which is good.

I don’t need to use so many bullet points and instead I should try writing paragraphs of continuous prose, which will reflect the confidence of my writing.

I am illustrating coursework posts which is good, but now I should caption them using Harvard.

Research (context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis):

I should start a Research tab on my blog to gather all of my extra research into one place.

Learning Log (context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis):

My writing needs more space to breath. I should research more appropriate templates for my blog.

I shouldn’t include lots of contactsheets without comment. Contactsheets are interesting if they show development and mine look like multiple identical shots.

I don’t need techncal info under my shots. More important is to present a large image on my blog. At the moment mine are small and don’t click through to a larger image for viewing.

I should use one of my own images from EYV as my header to express my learning journey.

There is no reason for the ‘POSTS’ tab which unfortunatley cannot be removed with my current blog format.

Suggested reading/viewing (context):

If I can, I should try to get into London to see an exhibition from time to time. It’s a pity to view everything online.

I should definitely try to look at some good EYV blogs from fellow students via the Photography Forum.

Pointers for the next assignment / assessment:

I will need to send my tutor some prints for Assignment 4. If I’m not feeling sure of my printing skills, I could save money and send in just two or three for now, and submit the rest online. I will need quality prints in a clamshell box ready to submit for assessment.

Hand written notes:

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Exercise 4.2 - Artificial Light

Contact Sheets:

These photographs are part of my family collction and span form 1993-2003, helping me to project 10 years of family history onto the walls of my house, published with the permission of my parents:

Final Selection:

A technique I have always loved using when it comes to artificial light is projection. I carried out this shoot when the sun had gone down and I turned off all the lights, closed the doors and windows and let the LED from my projector be the only light source. Balancing the settings on my camera for this task was quite complicated. I had to use my shutter speed and aperture to ensure that I captured the area the projector was illuminating, without flooding the rest of the image or losing some of the subtleties and silhouettes that I wanted. I eventually settled on an ISO of 3200, an aperture of f/13 and a shutter speed of between 0.6sec and 1/3sec.

I specifically decided with these photographs that I would like the projected images to be out of focus. I adjusted the projector to blur the images on the walls to show the blurred lines involved in the passing of time and the disintegration of memories. I also made sure that the projected images went over a few objects in the room to give context and placement to each photograph. I left a lot of black space in all of my photographs too which I wanted to symbolise the time that is still to come that we cannot yet see and the room for change that will inevitably come. I believe I have captured the beauty of artificial light with the help of fond memories and the melancholy of everyday life. I considered leaving out my image shot in the toilet, but this is not just about beauty, it is also an honest account of life in the home.

When looking at these photographs next to my daylight shoot, you can see the obvious differences between the quality of the light. For a start, the overall image is much darker here than when shot under natural light. There is also a much softer appearance to each image when using natural light, whereas here the lighting is quite harsh in appearance. The colours in this shoot are really quite intense where they appear but in my daylight photographs, colour entirely swamps each image without being too severe. I cannot comment on which one I prefer as both are so extremely different to each other and the effects of both can be utilized in different ways to achieve different outcomes.

Hand written notes and print-outs:

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Research Point

Sato Shintaro

Source: http://sato-shintaro.com/work/night_lights/index.html (1)

09 Night Lights by Sato Shintaro (1997-1999)

Sato Shintaro is a Japanese photographer who often uses the artificial lights all around him to capture the atmosphere in his birth place, Tokyo.

In his photographic series ‘Night Lights’ he has captured the chaotic streets of Tokyo and Osaka at night. It illustrates that night photography doesn’t have to be dark. He believes that it is a good idea to have exposures quite high so you avoid isolated pools of light within a black frame.

He has avoided the more aesthetically pleasing locations such as the beach and the well known “subcenters” and focussed instead on what he calls ‘the everyday disorder of the streets.’

These photographs are brightly lit and normally filled with the hustle and bustle of life, but Shintaro has removed the people and the purpose of the light is somewhat lost.

The light standing alone reveals a view of the well known streets from a less familiar perspective.

I think Shintaro’s photographs are very effective at doing this because they seem to be illuminating a lack of life on the streets. Like he says, the point of the lights becomes obsolete if nobody is there to see them or be guided by them.

There are 43 photographs in this series and each one of them beautifully represents the artificial and neon qualities of the available light in the busy streets of Japan. By capturing this he has allowed the viewer to step into these streets and have their own look around, undisturbed by others.

Rut Blees Luxemburg

Sources: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blees-luxemburg-viewing-the-open-p78570 (2)

https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/02/rut-blees-luxemburg-modern-project-liebeslied/ (3)

Viewing the Open by Rut Blees Luxemburg (1999)

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a German photographer who works mostly within London. She spends time exploring the changing city at night from busy office blocks to abandoned buildings and she captures these from unusual perspectives.

Her series Liebeslied: My Suicides (Meaning lovesong), of which Viewing the Open is a part of, was a movement of the photographer from photographing buildings to exploring an immersion in urban space. The photographs in this series mostly show natural elements, such as water and nature, illuminated by artificial light.

This series and its romantic title indicates the photographer’s changing relationship with her environment. In a way, her work is a lovesong dedicated to where she lives and works.

This particular photograph uses the qualities of the artificial light to make something unremarkable become interesting. There are sulpherous yellow and orange tones which light this piece of ground and this adds texture and beauty to the image.

Elizabeth Manchester for Tate comments, “Blees Luxemburg has transformed a scene of urban decay into an abstract study of colour and texture through the use of light, a subject traditionally central to photography.”

I agree with Manchester here that Blees Luxemburg has used her large format camera to create something special. She has captured something similar to an abstract painting in that there are areas of different depths of colour. The reflections from the water and cracks in the concrete also add a strong emphasis on texture.

The colours in this photograph are mostly earthy tones, but you are still able to distinguish that they are artificial which is a clever visual paradox. They also hold an eerie quality, as if something extraterrestrial has come to visit.

Brassai

Sources: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/08/interview-brassai-with-tony-ray-jones.html (4)

Conversations with Picasso by Brassai, 1999 (5)

The Eiffel Tower at Twilight by Brassai (1932)

This photograh is part of a photobook published in 1933 titled Paris by Night only three years after Brassai began to take up photography.

Brassai immediately took up night photography as soon as he was loaned a camera because this kind of photography excited him.

When talking about his inspiration, Brassai said, “Perhaps I was influenced a little in Paris by Night by the painter Georges de la Tour with his candlelight paintings which gave me an idea of what things can produce at night, the hidden things and concealed lights.”

Many photographers believe that you should only work with available light but Brassai disagreed with this and thought it was important to light the subject if necessary.

Emerson, the British writer and photographer, awarded Brassai a medal for his photobook and included him in his writing about the history of photography because he believed that Brassai showed that photography could be art.

Picasso was fascinated by artificial light and his favourite photographer was Brassai. Rather than just capturing what he saw, Brassai used his own artistic voice to convey his vision of Paris.

Brassai said that the light he had at night was ‘magnificent’ and he preferred it even to natural light. He believed that the light set off every object and the shadows helped to form them.

When I look at this photograph of the Eiffel Tower I see the classic romantic setting that Paris is often made out to be. The artificial night time light here has illuminated the tower’s reflection in the water and this leads your eyes down from the bridge and to the boats. These boats represent to me, that Paris is not just a romantic getaway and that people live and work here. The train across the bridge shows the constant movement of people even in the apparent tranquillity of the night.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Sources: The Photograph as Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton, 2014, pgs. 20-21, 46 (6)

Head #7 by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 2000

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is a photographer who I have researched previously, but I think is more relevant to my work now than ever before.

In his series Heads, he placed artificial flash lighting on a scaffolding construction above a New York street. The movement of people below prompted diCorcia to trigger the flash and photograph the illuminated person within it using a long lens camera.

The people he captured do not know they are being photographed and therefore aren’t posed like they might be for a regular portrait.

The result of this allows us to look at the ‘normal’ which would ordinarily pass us by without the subjects being controlled or influenced in any way by the photographer.

The use of artificial light here is fundamental to the process of the photographer. If it weren’t for his flash, diCorcia wouldn’t be able to capture the individual passers by and highlight specific subjects.

Having looked at his work several times, I find diCorcia’s work fascinating. Usually staged in natural lighting, this series is somewhat different from his normal, but is still a sensetive and thoughtful look at portraiture.

The other work I have looked at with artificial lighting focusses on places or landscapes and that’s why diCorcia is so interesting here, because his work is out of the ordinary.

Studio lighting is a common way to use artificial lighting for portraiture, but diCorcia has been that bit more creative and gone out in public with his lighting to capture something truly unique.

Hand written notes and print-outs

Bibliography

Shintaro, S. (n.d.). Night Lights. Retrieved from Sato Shintaro: http://sato-shintaro.com/work/night_lights/index.html

Manchester, E. (2003, February). Rut Blees Luxemburg. Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blees-luxemburg-viewing-the-open-p78570

Abel-Hirsch, H. (2018, February 23). London: A Visual Love Song. Retrieved from British Journal of Photography: https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/02/rut-blees-luxemburg-modern-project-liebeslied/

The ASX Team. (2011, August 19). Tony Ray-Jones Interviews Brassai” Pt. I (1970). Retrieved from American Suburb X: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/08/interview-brassai-with-tony-ray-jones.html

Brassai. (1999). Conversations with Picasso. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cotton, C. (2014). The Photograph as Contemporary Art Third Edition. London: Thames & Hudson World of Art.

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Exercise 4.1 - Daylight

Sally Mann

Sources: https://www.sallymann.com/new-gallery-2/ (1)

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/01/interview-sally-mann-the-touch-of-an-angel-2010.html (2)

Three photographs taken from Southern Landscapes by Sally Mann

Sally Mann’s photographic series Southern Landscapes explores the landscapes in the South of the United States and her reason for doing this was to “explore the region’s mystery and complexity.”

They appear in her photobook Deep South, which she spent six years exploring the topic of, making the transition from family photos against its backdrop to the landscape itself.

Mann comments on the lighting conditions in the South, “ the light in the South is so different from the North, where you have this crisp and clear light. There is no mystery in that light. Everything is revealed in the Northern light. You have to live in the South to understand the difference. In summer, the quality of the air and light are so layered, complex, and mysterious, especially in the late afternoon. I was able to catch the quality of that light in a lot of the photos.”

She was also interested in the way in which the light interacted with water. She used an old camera with a lens with no coating, allowing for a more soft and luminous light.

When she took these photos, she was mainly thinking about and focussing on the history of slavery in the South. She came to realise that the land would not look the way it does now if it hadn’t been for the slaves who suffered and died there.

I personally think that these photographs are absolutely beautiful. She has captured such an amazing quality in her pictures, using the lighting and the decision to shoot in old fashioned black and white.

The choice to shoot with an old camera here strengthens her intentions of looking into slavery in the South as it gives her photographs a timeless, yet quite mysterious and at times disturbing effect.

The way she has used light in this series is very atmospheric. I think she has created a fantasy land, which looks to me like the stuff of dreams and fairytales. You can almost picture yourself in these photographs, stepping out from the darkness and being called towards the light.

Contact Sheets

Final Selection

For these photographs, I used the manual mode on my camera. I set my ISO to 100 and balanced the shutter speed and aperture around each other to maintain the correct exposure. My F-stop was from f/4.5 to f/5.6 and my shutter speed was from 1/250sec to 1/320sec. These minor adjustments were made alongside the availability of natural light as the sun moved in the sky slightly. I was originally unsure of what to photograph and so I went outside and sat down in my garden during the early evening light for some inspiration. Sat right beside me was a potted acer tree and I began to photograph its leaves. I was playing around with my exposure and my white balance to see what might look interesting and then I noticed the reflection of the sky in the glass table I was sat with. Using a tungsten white balance with the natural light cast a blue glow over my pictures and really enhanced the qualities of the sky. Sally Mann explored her local area through natural light and the effects cast over it by her old camera. I decided to use the same concept and explore the plants in my back garden using the natural light and the functionality of my camera. When I placed a leaf on the glass tabletop, it appeared to be floating through the lens of my camera and the dark shadows it cast against the blue sky made for an interesting composition. I did not want to simply photograph the light here, but I wanted to use it in a creative way to create some photographs in my own abstract style through observation.

Hand written notes and print-outs

Bibliography

Mann, S. (n.d.). Southern Landscapes. Retrieved from Sally Mann: https://www.sallymann.com/new-gallery-2/

The ASX Team. (2013, January 5). An Exclusive Interview with Sally Mann – “The Touch of an Angel” (2010). Retrieved from American Suburb X: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/01/interview-sally-mann-the-touch-of-an-angel-2010.html

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Part four - The languages of light

In auto and semi-auto modes the light meter is calibrated to the mid-tone. This means that the histogram will be centred around the middle of the graph.

To demonstrate this I took three pieces of card, one black, one grey and one white and photographed them all on automatic, in natural lighting with my flash off. I made sure that the tone filled the frame and then looked at the histograms:

As you can see above, all of the histograms look relatively similar. Because there is not much tonal variation we see a narrow spike at the mid-tone. If there was more tonal variation such as detail we would get a more gentle curve. The light meter can’t possibly know that a piece of paper is white or black, so it averages each exposure around  the mid-tone.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/dec/07/deutsche-borse-prize-photography-2012 (1)

Untitled by Rinko Kawauchi, 2009 for Illuminance

This photograph by Rinko Kawauchi was taken for her photobook Illuminance and is an example of a complicated exposure which is not quite as you might expect, but the picture still works.

The rose in the foreground is massively overexposed which gives it this ghostly glow and makes it shine out bright white. Although the lighting here is technically wrong, the rose is still distinguishable and the composition makes sense as an artistic photograph.

I then set my camera to manual mode which allowed me to see my light meter. The mid-tone is indicated by the ‘0′ on the scale and darker or lighter exposures are ‘-’ and ‘+’. I repeated the exercise I did above, this time taking care to look at my light meter and adjusting the aperture or shutter speed to place the dark, mid and light tones at their correct places on the histogram:

By switching to manual mode the aperture and shutter are no longer linked so you can make adjustments to either of them without affecting the others.

You can adjust the exposure in other shooting modes using the exposure compensastion button, but in manual mode you can look at your light meter whilst adjusting other settings so you can be in complete control of the camera.

Manual mode represents an intuituve kind of photography that isn’t controlled by the camera in any way. There’s no programming in the camera so it is all down to the mind of the photographer.

Bibliography

O'Hagan, S. (2011, December 7). Worlds apart: who has the best shot at winning the Deutsche Börse prize? Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/dec/07/deutsche-borse-prize-photography-2012

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Assignment three- the (in)decisive moment

‘The decisive moment is not a dramatic climax, but a visual one: the result is not a story but a picture.’ Swarkowski, 2007, p. 5 (1a)

‘You know it’s funny. You come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same.’ Eddie in Stranger Than Paradise, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1984 (1b)

Contact Sheets:

My final edits:

ISO-100, f/6.3, 1/250 sec

ISO-100, f/22, 1/15 sec

ISO-100, f/7.1, 1/125 sec

ISO-100, f/20, 1/25 sec

ISO-250, f/3.5, 1/30 sec

ISO-100, f/18, 1/50 sec

Assignment Notes

For this project I decided to invert the concept and create a series under the theme of the indecisive moment. Instead of freezing time and capturing a specific moment I decided to look at an extended period of time spanning from the past to the present.

I saw my preparation for this shoot as the research and study I did on the decisive moment as a concept where I looked at artists and their work and explained my own opinions on this. Following this, my initial idea was inspired by Don McCullin (1). I wanted to bring the disasters of the world into a safe and stable place. I was going to use some influential pictures from some of the world’s biggest natural and physical disasters and place them in modern, relevant settings. I then did some research into copyright laws and decided that it would not be appropriate to use other people’s photographs in my work and so I changed my concept.

One of my ideas from the original concept was to have a photograph of some impoverished children and place it on a swing set. I intended to do this on a rainy day when the sky would be dull, and the metal would be wet to capture the sombre mood. Based off this idea, I thought more about capturing childhood. This is when I came up with my final concept which was to use past pictures of my friends and family.

I got my friends and family to share with me a picture from when they were young and then I scanned them all in and printed them the same size. I captured them holding their photograph in front of their face in an orchestrated setting, relevant to childhood. The thought behind this was to show the past in the present, the indecisive moment being the full length of time held onto between all the years it takes us to age. We as humans are impacted in our development when we are a child more than any other time and so this experience of childhood is a crucial part of our lives that stays with us.

An important part of this project was setting. Just like Francesca Woodman knew she needed to be in an empty room for Space² (2) to be effective and Wong Kar-Wai needed the bustling streets of Hong Kong to capture the manic atmosphere in his film Chungking Express (3),I knew that my shoot would not make sense without appropriate surroundings. Therefore, I took most of my photographs in the playground of a local primary school, which I was kindly given access to one Sunday afternoon. I spent the afternoon staging my figures against playground equipment and floor markings which all nicely divided up my frames with lines and contextualized the photographs. I took two of the pictures at home. This was because one of them involved a large number of toys which I was unable to take with me to the school and the other one was of me and my parents, so it made sense for this to be shot in the family home.

I loved the way that Jacques-Henri Lartigue captured childhood in such a simple way in the photo of his which I researched (Gerard Willemetz and Dani, 1926 (4)) and how the black and white photograph did not complicate their innocence. Don McCullin’s photograph of Hessel Street, Jewish district, East End, London, 1962 (5) also shows childhood in black and white in a very beautiful way. He manages to convey innocence and fragility in a striking way with his use of setting and his eye for capturing intimate moments successfully. As well as putting my photographs in black and white, I cropped them in, so I had control of my frame and applied adjustments on Photoshop such as brightness/contrast, levels, hue/saturation and colour balance. I edited my photos in this way to remove any distracting colours in the background and because I like the way it looks for its striking qualities and ability to make the images appear somewhat timeless. You can see the differences from the originals by observing my contact sheets.

In conclusion, I hope here that I have been able to show a development in my work of technique and thought process. I have tried to be creative with my idea as I am so bored of seeing the regular decisive moment in the urban landscape as I have previously discussed in my research point. I felt like inverting the concept and exploring what might be considered as the indecisive moment was a better way for me to express myself and paint a far more creative picture of time.

Reflection

Demonstration of tecnhical and visual skills - In this part of the course I have shown use of a fast and slow shutter speed to capture the decisive moment.

Quality of outcome - I thought long and hard about how I wanted my images to look in my edits in post production.

Demonstration of creativity - I have inverted the concept to show the indecisive moment to make a more interseting project.

Context - I have done ample research into the decisive moment and referenced this in my assignment notes.

Hand written notes and print-outs

Bibliography

1a. Szarkowski, J. (2007) The Photographer’s Eye. New York: MoMa Thompson, K. &

1b. Jarmusch, J. (Director). (1984). Stranger Than Paradise [Motion Picture].

1. Don McCullin. (2019). Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/don-mccullin

2. Ateer, S. M. (2013, November). Francesca Woodman Space², Providence, Rhode Island 1976. Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-space-providence-rhode-island-ar00350

3. Kar-Wai, W. (Director). (1994). Chungking Express [Motion Picture].

4. Jeffery, I. (2000). The Phototography Book. Phaidon Press.

5. McCullin, D. (1962). Hessel Street, Jewish district, East End, London. Tate, London.

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Exhibition Visit

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/don-mccullin (1)

On the 6th of May 2019 I visited the Tate Britain and attended an exhibiton which featured the work of photographer Don McCullin. I have always had an interest in this photographer because I find his pictures incredibly moving and powerful. I focussed, mostly, as I was moving around the exhibition, on photographs I thought best represented the decisive moment so that the trip was relevent to my work. Don McCulin did not disappoint with his incredible reportage and war photography that moved me to tears at more than one point. His work was presented against a white border and framed in black. As his photographs are black and white anyway, this was a very impactful way to present them as the room was really stripped back and all focus was on his work. The photographs were printed in a fairly large size, developed in the dark room by McCullin himself, so that all the detail could be easily seen and they made a grand impression.

Finsbury Park, London by Don McCullin, 1961 (2)

Hessel Street, Jewish district, East End, London by Don McCullin, 1962 (3)

These first two photographs are from relatively early on in McCullin’s career at a time where he was working in reportage in Britain for a newspaper. He worked to show poverty and working class life in East End London and the industrial north. Both of these photos capture a decisive moment. The first is a more traditional definition of this with the couple arm in arm, caught walking down a snowy London street. I particularly like the second photograph with the young boy and the cat. Both so small and so young, in comparison to the poverty and opression going on in the place where they live. Both are so full of innocence and their meeting, imortalized by McCullin, is a curious melding of minds.

Congolese soldiers tormenting prisoners before their execution by Don McCullin, 1964 (4)

Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tormented before execution, Stanleyville by Don McCullin, 1964 (5)

Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tormented by Congolese soldiers before execution by Don McCullin, 1964 (6)

These three photographs were displayed side by side and close together in their own trio. They show a decisive moment being carried through, with the same figures appearing in each picture so you can make out what’s going on. The violence has been captured in a seemingly voyeuristic way, as if the soldiers don’t even notice McCullins presence as they carry out their acts of aggression. The expressions and body language of the prisoners juxtaposes that of the soldiers; defeated and pleading. This display of power from the soldiers almost seems pathetic as they humiliate these powerless young men who seem to now comply. These photos represent the death of a free Africa.

The Bogside, Londonderry, Northern Island by Don McCullin, 1971 (7)

Catholic youths attacking British soldiers in the Bogside of Londonderry by Don McCullin, 1971 (8)

The Bogside, Londonderry, Northern Island by Don McCullin, 1971 (9)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972) (10)

Similarly to before, these photographs were displayed together and show an unravelling situation in Londonderry, ending in the decisive moment. These photos capture the protests which led up to Bloody Sunday, part of The Troubles, which took part in 1972 where British soldiers shot 28 unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment.  All of those shot were Catholics. The youths, although clearly powerless as individuals, are doing their best to protest the British soldiers. The determination here, although despondent, is a clear symbol of the determination of Catholic people to stand up for what they wanted and what they believed in.

The Cyprus Civil War, Limassol, Cyprus by Don McCullin, 1964 (11)

Grenade thrower, Huế, Vietnam by Don McCullin, 1968 (12)

These photographs show two seperate examples of McCullin’s war photography. The first photograph shows the Cyprus Civil War which occurred when the Turkish invaded the country. It shows the ordinary poeple of Cyprus taking up arms and fighting in a war because they were compelled to do so. It also begs questions such as who is the man in the doorway? Is he a supporter of the armed man or an enemy, and therefore, are either of them in danger? It has a traditional sense of the decisive moment where the man running is caught in motion. As does the second picture, which shows a man throwing a grenade in Vietnam. I think this photo is really well composed as the man is framed within the ruins of the structure that used to stand there. McCullin gave a quote about this photograph, “he looked like an Olympic javelin thrower. Five minutes later this man’s throwing hand was like a stumpy cauliflower, completely deformed by the impact of a bullet.” This quote shows that the decisive moment continues beyond the release of the shutter and the story of this is captured within this image.

Bradford, Yorkshire, 1978 (13) and Consett, County Durham, 1974 (14) by Don McCullin

Finally, I was captivated by this pair of very powerful images. Both feature a figure walking past an industrial and polluted landscape. The photos themselves are beautifully shot with high contrast and a real overall feel for the environment. They are a social commentary about the condition of the planet and whether or not we can live safely within it. The picture of the woman with the pram is particularly thought provoking because it brings into question how we are bringing up children in a dangerous world. 45 years on, this is still a relevant issue today and the work of Don McCullin can be presented as a reference to current affairs.

Hand written notes and print-outs

Bibliography

Don McCullin. (2019). Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/don-mccullin

McCullin, D. (1961). Finsbury Park, London. Tate, London.

McCullin, D. (1962). Hessel Street, Jewish district, East End, London. Tate, London.

McCullin, D. (1964). Congolese soldiers tormenting prisoners before their execution. Tate, Stanleyville.

McCullin, D. (1964). Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tormented before execution, Stanleyville. Tate, Stanleyville.

McCullin, D. (1964). Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tormented by Congolese soldiers before execution. Tate, Stanleyville.

McCullin, D. (1971). The Bogside, Londonderry, Northern Island. Tate, Londonderry.

McCullin, D. (1971). Catholic youths attacking British soldiers in the Bogside of Londonderry. Tate, Londonderry.

McCullin, D. (1971). The Bogside, Londonderry, Northern Island. Tate, Londonderry. 

Bloody Sunday (1972). (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)

McCullin, D. (1964). The Cyprus Civil War, Limassol, Cyprus. Tate, Limassol.

McCullin, D. (1968). Grenade thrower, Huế, Vietnam. Tate, Hue.

McCullin, D. (1978). Bradford, Yorkshire. Tate, Bradford.

McCullin, D. (1974). Consett, County Durham. Tate, Consett.

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Exercise 3.3 - What matters is to look

I completed this exercise looking out of the two upstairs windows at the front of my house. I decided to look from both windows and not just have one perspective because it gave two different views of the same street, with different points of interest.

Alberto Giacometti was a master of drawing and he saw the problem of losing detail when drawing the whole figure. The more you try to fit into a drawing, the less detail you can include. Drawing would have to compromise one or the other and so he learnt to let the brain choose the right movement without concentration:

Seated Man by Alberto Giacometti, 1949

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/giacometti-seated-man-n05909 (1)

In this exercise I have used the same principles but applied them to photography. I started by looking at the closest things to me in the foreground. This was the telephone wires which stretched from my house to across the street. The middle distance consists of trees and houses and cars, layered against one another and then the sky, met with trees on the horizon, composed my background.

I then tried to see the whole view together, right from the foreground to the horizon, by moving my eyes across the landscape. This allowed me to see the whole visual field together. Once I felt I had included all the elements from front to back in my view, I raised my camera and took the shots making sure to capture everything from the telephone wires to the sky.

Although these photos may look quite simply composed, a lot of considertion has actually gone into them. Before I even thought about closing the shutter I took a very long look at my view in order to decide what would be included. The results are a full encompassing view of every element of my surroundings.

Hand written notes and print-outs

Bibliography

Gallery Label. (2012). Alberto Giacometti Seated Man 1949. Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/giacometti-seated-man-n05909

[lydiasonlinelog]

Research point

H. Cartier-Bresson: l’amour tout court

Source: https://vimeo.com/106009378 (1)

The documentary begins with Henri Cartier-Bresson saying, “what’s important is to look. But people don’t look. 75% of the people just press the button... Few have it.”

“We live in a privileged world. We don’t need to dig deep or go far to see the differences... Let’s use it to further something we believe in.”

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1932 (2)

“I took this one through the planks, I slipped the camera through but I couldn’t see. That’s why it’s a little blurry,” Cartier-bresson couldn’t even see the man leaping, he says it’s always luck and that’s all that counts.

“When you want it you won’t get it, wanting won’t work. If you’re open it’ll come.”

“One shouldn’t think about it but the basis is geometry... We know where the golden section falls... it’s in the eye. I go for form more than light, form comes first.”

The writer Yves Bonnefoy comments on Cartier-Bresson’s ability, “when others are distracted and unobservant, Henri is on the lookout, ready to react, not even needing to stop in order to help the geometry - as he calls it - play its obvious decisive role in framing the scene.”

Cartier-Bresson describes photography as, “sensitivity, intuition, a sense of geometry; that’s all there is to it.”

Painter Avigdor Arikha says, “the problem is that our gaze is always conditioned by recognition. In other words, we only see what we can recognize... In a portrait what interests or obsesses me is to capture the person, more than just resembling the person it has to be the person I take and put on the canvas.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson never wanted the people he photographed to realize what he was doing. When the models know that someone is observing them, they pose, they put on masks, they lose their spontaneity.

Cartier-Bresson finishes off the documentary by saying, “what’s important is what comes next, erase the past... Put yourself into question. It’s essential.”

Photography: A Critical Introduction by Liz Wells

(pgs. 91-92, 343-344)

Source: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucreative-ebooks/reader.action?docID=1968918# (3)

Liz Wells Writes:

Documentary photographers took considerable pains to control the nature of a scene without making any obvious change to it.

Therefore, Henri Cartier-Bresson lay in wait for all the messy contingency of the world to compose itself into an image that he judged to be both productive of visual information and aesthetically pleasing.

This is called ‘the decisive moment’, a formal flash of time when all the right elements were in place before the scene fell back into its quotidion disorder.

Increasingly, documentary turned away from attempting to record what would formerly have been seen as its major subjects. Instead it began to concentrate on exploring curtural life and popular experience, and this often led to representations that celebrated the transitory or the fragmentary.

Cartier-Bresson believed ‘the endeavour to make great statements gave way to the recording of little, dislocated moments which merely insinuated that some greater meaning might be at stake.’

Cartier-Bresson’s humanist work is often regarded as documentary or photojournalism but he is also seen as working outside the constraints of lables of this kind.

Photographer and theorist Allan Sekula believes, “documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.”

To have to engage with particular conventions, technical processes and rhetorical forms in order to authenicate documentary undermines the notion of the objective camera and with it, one might imagine, any claim of documentary to be any more truthful to appearances than other forms of representation.

The decisive moment is most often used in portraiture and documentary. Landscapes are generally not staged, and unlike photojournalism, there is rarely a sense of ‘decisive moment’ when contents and aesthetics come together to create a telling image.

The Present reviewed by Colin Pantall, 2012

Source: https://www.photoeye.com/magazine/reviews/2012/05_17_The_Present.cfm? (4)

Colin Pantall criticizes the decisive moment in his review of the photobook The Present by Paul Graham which was published in 2012:

Inside the book there are over 114 pages set out in a series of diptychs and triptychs, all shot on the streets of Manhattan. Turning pages and opening gatefolds reveals pictures which are all remarkably similar to the one before it.

Continuing to do this builds up a rhythm; turning, looking, folding, looking back and then repeating.

“What he wants us to see is the antithesis of the decisive moment and the spectacle of the urban experience. Instead we get a very contemporary contingency, a street with moments so decisively indecisive that we don’t really know what we are looking at or looking for.”

Everything is shot in middle-distance from the perspective of the photographer and together the pictures form an awkward shifting narrative that is photographic in intent and execution.

He is not so much showing us something as posing a question; what do we look at when we look at a photograph? In each diptych and triptych time moves on and the focus changes.

Encounters in The Present include hostile glances, blindness, disability, poverty and wealth. Graham doesn’t isolate and iconicize his subjects, instead he remakes them in his own image and that is what makes the book intersting; the fact that the pictures don’t look like anyone else’s. 

“There is a poverty of experience and environment here, an existence that appears deprived environmentally, emotionally and culturally. That’s the narrative; it’s a miserable life. Welcome to the Present.”

The Present by Paul Graham, 2012

Zouhair Ghazzal’s take on the decisive moment, 2004

Source: http://zouhairghazzal.com/photos/aleppo/cartier-bresson.htm (5)

Jewish neighborhood of Baghdad by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1950

The words of Zouhair Ghazzal:

“The decisive moment is more of a cliché than a reality, even for its own creator, it still has the status of a myth with too much of an unconscious impact on photojournalism to be dismissed too easily.”

Practically every serious photographer in the last couple of decades has had to forego the decisive moment to be able to create and produce in territories where there are less and less decisive moments, and more repetitive urban landscape.

At its core, the notion of decisive moment does not seem pretentious at all, the decisive moment is that infinitely small and unique moment in time which cannot be repeated, and that only the photographic lens can capture.

Even though it is possible for landscapes and buildings to be captured at their most decisive moments, Cartier-Bresson’s photography is at its best with bodies and their gestures, there’s something anecdotic in them.

“The decisive moment works best when the sudden cut in time and space that the photograph operates through the release of the shutter is meaningful, as it narrates to us in a single frame the before and after; while other photographs of the decisive type remain anecdotal, with no precise meaning, or with no meaning at all, relying instead on the juxtaposition of bodily gestures with symmetries created by light and space.”

Some of the top photographers of the last few decades, which willy-nilly did not base their photography on the decisive moment, would argue that the latter’s major weakness was precisely its sole reliance on gestures.

Modernity came all too abruptly to cities such as Baghdad, expanding them indefinitely, and creating for the most part urban landscapes that are so monotonous and dull, that no decisive moment would be able to capture.

Independant research

Sources: The Photo Book, published by Phaidon Press, pgs.10, 97, 225, 242, 262, 329 (6)

http://100photos.time.com/photos/eddie-adams-saigon-execution (7)

https://www.mindenpictures.com/search/preview/blue-wildebeest-connochaetes-taurinus-herd-descending-cliff-during/0_00114286.html (8)

http://www.cape.ag/?p=1252 (9)

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/27/snap-judgment-how-photographer-jacques-henri-lartigue-captured-the-moment (10)

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/barbara-morgan?all/all/all/all/0 (11)

Saigon Execution by Eddie Adams, 1968

This photograph shows Colonel Loan of the South Vietnamese police shooting dead the Vietcong suspect in the checkered shirt. It captures the exact moment that the bullet enters the man’s head and was taken during a minor skirmish in the Chinese section of Saigon.

After shooting the suspect, the general justified the suddenness of his actions by saying, “If you hesitate, if you didn’t do your duty, the men won’t follow you.”

The freezing of the moment of Lem’s death symbolized for many the brutality over there, and the picture’s widespread publication helped galvanize growing sentiment in America about the futility of the fight.

Addam’s photo started off a more personal and intimate level of photojournalism in war zones. Three decades later he commented, “Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world.”

Petroglyph and Star Trails, Sonora, Mexico by Linda Connor, 1991

In this photo the earth is represented by the foliage in the foreground and the outcrop of rock jutting from the corner. It looks as though it is turning beneath the sky at night.

There are star trails in this photo which indicates it was taken over a very long exposure, probably for several hours or as long as it took to capture the movement of the stars.

Different intensities of light emerge and the purpose of this was to show how different surfaces and textures are illuminated by starlight. The rock itself is highlighted.

In the introduction to her book, Solos, published in 1979 she says, ‘creative energy is an elusive force which is my privilege to serve and transform.’

I believe that despite the long exposure used in this photograph, it can still count as a decisive moment because it has captured a specific moment in time, mapped by the stars, that cannot be replicated by the human eye alone.

Horned Avalanche by Mitsuaki Iwago, 1986

This photo was shot in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and features a herd of wilderbeest who are migrating across a river. At the time this photo was taken, there were over a million and a half of these animals in the National Park. Hundreds drowned in these events.

Iwago studied the Serengeti and his photographs were published in the National Geographic magazine in May 1986. The study took 18 months to complete.

This picture was one of the most successful. The event seems to be covered in dust and appears as a confusing scene, but the figure leaping in the foreground manages to link the animals together from above and below.

Iwago is described as ‘a virtuoso of the decisive moment’ for his ability to capture the nature of animals and their seasonal habits in his photography.

Bombay by Carl De Keyzer, 1985

This photograph appears on the cover of De Keyzer’s book India, which was published in 1987. The selection and sequencing of the pictures was not chosen by him and at the time he wasn’t happy with the results, although today it makes him smile.

The people in the car appear so happy despite the fact that they are ploughing through the water. This prompts the question of whether they know that there is trouble ahead or not.

Dirk van der Spek comments, “Laughing people in the land of Nehru and Gandhi, the land of cultural conflict between Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs, Biharis and Bengalis. The land that is also notorious for its gigantic natural and environmental disasters. Ostensibly it seems as if the people cheerfully accept these problems.”

In this respect, De Keyzer has chosen to capture the moment in the present and not look too closely at history, although it can still be found here. He has captured the joy in a moment of disaster.

Gerard Willemetz and Dani by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, 1926

This photograph has captured the enthusiastic moment as a young boy leaps over his sand castle, probably in the hopes of impressing his younger friend.

Lartigue began taking photos as a child and he continued to do so for the rest of his life. He worked within the very society which he was trying to capture which aided his success.

He was particularly intrigued by capturing frozen moments in his photography and he had an eye for small events which made great pictures.

William Boyd who writes for The Guardian describes Lartigue’s work: ‘this unique time-stopping ability of photography was what he wanted to celebrate with his pictures.’ Boyd goes on to say that Lartigue ‘showed how the snapshot could be a work of art.’

Martha Graham: ‘Letter to the World’ (Kick) by Barbara Morgan, 1940

Letter to the World was performed and choreographed by the dancer Martha Graham in 1940 and was performed at the college where she taught.

Graham had some radical ideas about dancing and thought that it needed to return to the basics again and revert back to classical dance. She believed that movement should take place around the centre of the body and she tried to renew dancing to make it palatable and relevant to her contemporaries.

You can see in this photograph that Morgan has shown Graham’s technique of movement around hte centre of the body. She is remarkably horizontal from the waist up and her skirt is flying behind her captured in motion.

Morgan photographed a lot of dancers and performers and most of her photographs show some kind of decisive moment, whether that be through an emotional look on somebody’s face or a troop of dancers caught in motion.

My thoughts

Sources: https://pixels.com/featured/a-decisive-moment-alfred-dolezal.html (12)

https://painterskeys.com/decisive_moment/ (13)

In my opinion there are three ways of describing the decisive moment. They are:

A more literal understanding of the term, as established by Henri Cartier-Bresson, where the decisive moment captures a sudden occurence of motion and hints at movement.

In a way, every photograph can be classed as a decisive moment. I think this because every time someone decides to take a photograph, a moment is frozen in time; a moment that cannot be repeated.

Lastly is what happens outside the frame. My other two criteria describe something which occurs within the photograph, but I also think that you can describe the decisive moment as what has happened to influence a picture. For example, the setting of the sun may inspire a picture of the night sky and the sunset is therefore the decisive moment.

Besides the originals, I find photographs of blurred figures moving around busy urban streets to be boring and unoriginal. It is no longer enough to shoot this if you intend to be creative as it has been done to death by amateurs and professionals alike. To make a decisive moment interesting it has to be given context or a further meaning. Showing a process or conveying a meaningful point is different from simply snapping a person mid stroll.

A Decisive Moment by Alfred Dolezal, 2016

A Decisive Moment is a painting which seeks to capture this photographic concept through media external from photography. The merry-go-round relentlessly rotates and so do the people on it. This painting is about the figures reviewing their current life situation. The carousel going around and around is representative of our daily habits, which we repeat and make no progress. Robert writing a letter for The Painter’s Keys comments on the idea of painting as a decisive moment, “Paintings also benefit from those times when a cloud forms to echo a foreground motif, where chance body-language signifies meaning, where pictorial elements line up or become separate from one another, where a sitter’s look suddenly gives away an inner being.”

I think that this is a beautiful painting but without the aid of the title and Dolezal’s description you wouldn’t necessary realise the meaining in the work. You can see that the carousel is caught in motion, which may be considered as a decisive moment, but it is not the same as photography which captures a moment in an instant. Painting is a process which takes time and deliberation. There is no element of chance or surprise which you may get from photography.

Hand written notes and print-outs

Bibliography

O'Byrne, R. (2014). H. Cartier-Bresson: l’amour tout court. Retrieved from Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/106009378

Cartier-Bresson, H. (1932). Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. Museum of Modern Art, Saint-Lazare.

Wells, L. (2015, January 30). Photography: a Critical Introduction. Retrieved from ProQuest Ebook Central: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucreative-ebooks/reader.action?docID=1968918

Pantall, C. (2012, May 17). The Present. Retrieved from Photo-eye: https://www.photoeye.com/magazine/reviews/2012/05_17_The_Present.cfm?

Ghazzal, Z. (2004). the indecisiveness of the decisive moment. Retrieved from Zouhair Ghazzal: http://zouhairghazzal.com/photos/aleppo/cartier-bresson.htm

Jeffery, I. (2000). The Photography Book. Phaidon Press.

Editors of Time Magazine. (2016). Saigon Execution Eddie Adams 1968. Retrieved from Time 100 Photos: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eddie-adams-saigon-execution

Blue Wildebeest. (2015). Retrieved from Minden Pictures: https://www.mindenpictures.com/search/preview/blue-wildebeest-connochaetes-taurinus-herd-descending-cliff-during/0_00114286.html

Nollet, D. (2016, August 15). A conversation with Carl De Keyzer. Retrieved from Cape: http://www.cape.ag/?p=1252

Boyd, W. (2016, May 27). Snap judgment: how photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue captured the moment . Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/27/snap-judgment-how-photographer-jacques-henri-lartigue-captured-the-moment

Barbara Morgan. (1974 – 2019). Retrieved from International Center of Photography: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/barbara-morgan?all/all/all/all/0

Dolezal, A. (2016, March 20). A Decisive Moment. Retrieved from Pixels: https://pixels.com/featured/a-decisive-moment-alfred-dolezal.html

Robert. (2004, August 10). The decisive moment. Retrieved from The Painter's Keys: https://painterskeys.com/decisive_moment/

[lydiasonlinelog]

Exercise 3.2 - Trace

Robert Capa

Source: https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/conflict/robert-capa-d-day-omaha-beach/ (1)

US troops’ first assault on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings by Robert Capa, 1944

Capa’s photographs of the US forces’ assault on Omaha Beach on D-Day (June 6th 1944) are an invaluable historic record of the Allied invasion of German-occupied France, which contributed to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi control a year later.

This event resulted in the loss of 2,400 American lives by the end of the first day. Capa’s legendary documentation of the event saw him join the soldiers as they advanced, experiencing the landing on Omaha Beach alongside them as he photographed the scene.

His art lay in risking where to be and when, in how he built and conducted the relationships that enabled him to be there, and in how he shaped and presented the narrative of events he witnessed.

His power as a communicator depended too on his mythic status as narrator, or more specifically, on being considered the ‘greatest war photographer ever’.

He combined exceptional courage in fully playing the role of the photographer-as-hero with a deep understanding of the value and purpose of doing so.

The following are quotes from Capa’s written account of June 6th 1944 titled Slightly Out of Focus:

"Waist-deep, with rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking beach in the background - this was good enough for the photographer"

“It was still very early and very grey for good pictures, but the grey water and grey sky made the little men, dodging under the surrealistic designs of Hitler’s anti-invasion brain trust, very effective.”

“Above the boots and faces, my picture frames were filled with shrapnel smoke; burnt tanks and sinking barges formed my background.”

A week later Capa learned that his photographs were the best taken of the event. Due to a darkroom error, only 8 of 106 were salvaged, the rest were heat blurred. These were all captioned, “Capa’s hands were badly shaking”.

I think the fact that Capa has titled his memoirs Slightly Out of Focus would imply that he is satisfied with the motion blur that a lot of his pictures have. Although they have this blurred quality, they perfectly capture the chaos and the fear that’s within the atmosphere of the setting. These pictures would not be the same without the blur, they are emotive and thought-provoking.

Robert Frank

Sources: https://medium.com/photos-we-love/robert-frank-elevator-miami-beach-1955-jona-frank-for-photoswelove-8d90a2c38d1d (2)

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/oct/16/photography (3)

Elevator Girl by Robert Frank, 1955

The elevator girl is stood between the two blurred figures, waiting for the man and woman to leave before she begins her next ride and for her to join the others in their purposeful march onward.

However, her posture suggests that before she moves on, she has to go up and down. She is stuck here in the elevator where she can create her own dreams in the hope that one day she can move on.

Jona Frank writes, “ She makes me think about a time when I was so stuck I just watched time drift past not knowing how or when I would join the accomplished and directed. I like to think she is not lost in the photo. Instead she is caught-up in a wide-eyed reverie.”

I think Jona Frank really captures the essence of the Elevator Girl in this quote as it can be seen as a failure to advance when the world around you continues to succeed and move on. It also has a sense of just waiting for the right moment to take hold of an ambition, which Frank desrcibes as her ‘wide-eyed reverie’.

Geoff Dyer also comments on this saying, “An elevator door is about to close, like a shutter that will open again, for a moment, not on another floor but in another building or another city.” This references both the physical elevator in the photo but also the spirit of the road trip that Frank took when he took this picture which is included in his photobook The Americas, published in 1958.

Frank’s intetntion was that, in some respects, he was travelling down the ever-same road as Lange and Evans. But, in doing so, he was not just observing how what is seen from and on the road has changed; he was actively bringing about a change in perception.

Frank had a fondness for what he called "in-between moments" which is shown clearly in Elevator Girl. He has stopped time to feature only his elevator girl and tell a stroy about her alone. The blurred figures have been captured to add narrative, but they are only mere accessories to the true story, which is that of the girl stuck in her mundane life.

The Americas is one of the most influential photobooks in photographic history which changed our conception of what a photograph could be.

Hirsoshi Sugimoto

Sources: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-7 (4)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3nGoZqw9U (5)

The Photo Book published by Phaidon, page 446 (6)

Carpenter Center by Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1993

Sugimoto says his work is a combination of concept and vision together. He thinks about what he will do and then imagines the way he will photograph the scenes.

In Theatres, Sugimoto decided to practice his photography by bringing his camera into the movie theatre.

He opened the shutter when the film began and left it open for 2-3 hours, whatever the length of the film is. When the end credits show up, the shutter is closed.

He has photographed entire movie images and then the film is processed. There is no movie image that shows, it’s just a white light left on the screen which highlights interiors of the theater and this reflects the light.

The people that were in the theater have disappeared. He wanted to say that too much information is really just “nothingness”. To show it, you have to have something surrounded by “nothingness” and in this case the movie theater is the case to hold this emptiness.

I see this series as an abstraction of what a film is. All of the components that go into this film are ignored and come across as being just merely incidental.

Sugimoto asks us how we should think of time. Most photography is instant and only deals with the here and now. However, Sugimoto has slowed time and held it forever within his pictures.

I think Sugimoto’s pictures are beautiful. He has shown the theater in a dream-like state which has proved it to be a fleeting experience. It holds only memories and stories and has no grasp on reality which shows the insignificance of a couple of hours within our entire lifetime.

Michael Wesely

Sources: https://wesely.org/2019/potsdamer-platz-berlin-5-4-1997-24-9-1998/ (7)

http://art.daimler.com/en/artwork/michael-wesely-potsdamer-platz-27-3-1997-13-12-1998-2000/ (8)

https://birdinflight.com/inspiration/experience/time-shows-ultra-long-exposure-in-works-of-michael-wesely.html (9)

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin by Michael Wesely, 1997 – 1998

The extremely long exposure times of Michael Wesely’s analogue photographs allow us to visually experience time and transformation. Between 1997 and 2000, he documented construction work at the Potsdamer Platz.

The exposures lasted up to 26 months which allowed Wesely to create temporal documentations of the process of urban development.

In his photographs you can see several individual moments all linked together which gives an overall picture of each stage of the construction process.

The buildings appear transparent which allow you to see both the scaffolding and the solid concrete.

Weather and time can also be traced by the movement of the sun across the sky burnt into the image several times over. This demonstrates the changing landscape both day and night.

His subject here is historically significant and highly symbolic. The site was condemned to wasteland and was cut in two by the Berlin Wall. When the wall fell it was the symbol of German reunification and the beginning of a new era at the end of the Cold War.

Wesely is the only one who achieves the shooting this long and produces quality, not light-struck shots. He keeps the details of his technology secret.

The photographer builds his devices for each project himself. “These are not pinhole cameras and not industrially made cameras. All the parts of the cameras are handmade, except for the wide-angle lenses”, says Wesely.

Using neutral filters and a very small diaphragm makes exposure thousands of times longer than usually. According to Wesely, he can make exposure endlessly long, 40 years if necessary.

To me, Wesely’s work is inspiring because this style of photography is a technique that takes patience. It is a process spanning over years with no certainty of what the outcome may be. However, if the image is successful, you end up with incredible shots that show architectural development and document the process like no other method can.

This image can not be seen by the human eye alone and it captures the changing universe in a new and informative way that will provide a historical reference in years to come.

Maarten Vanvolsem and Gareth Davies

Sources: http://kusseneerscom.webhosting.be/portfolio_page/maarten-vanvolsem/ (10)

https://www.luca-arts.be/en/nieuws/maarten-vanvolsem-experience-time-still-photographic-images (11)

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/Timeandphotography/vanvolsem.html (12)

https://www.tickpan.co.uk/ (13)

Silent Move 12 by Maarten Vanvolsem, 2007

A linear camera rides past a parade of shops in Kingsbury, North West London by Gareth Davies

The technique of strip-scan photography itself is based on a partial exposure of the photo sensitive material, which is moving in front of the shutter or visa versa.

The technique is probably first used in 1843 in a panoramic camera, but it has since been used in all sorts of ‘scientific’ fields. A shift can be noted from the non-scientific use to the meta-photographic use of the technique in which photography itself is questioned.

With this meta-photographic use of the technique it becomes clear, that the generally prevailing thought about photography and time, can no longer be applied to this kind of photography.

The temporal component of the images, previously often ignored or reduced to a fraction of a second, now becomes the main subject of the images. Vanvolsem says, “ My work emphasises this notion of time that is inherently part of the strip images.”

This type of image is something which cannot be seen by the human eye without technology. Photos are often captured within a split second so this type of photography is trying to open up the view on photographic images.

What we see in these images is an evolving time with continuous changes along a horizontal line. This causes sharpness and blur and gives us the real importance of the photograph which is not the subject, but the dynamic time.

Silent Move 12 has a series of dance moves which is visible in the change of position. You get a front, side and rear view in one picture. I think this is an impressive style of photography which captures space as well as time and forces you to evaluate the preconception that time in photography has to be instant.

Alternatively, Garteth Davies uses slitscan to create panoramic photographs. He uses self built roatating panoramic cameras.

In comparison to Vanvolsem, his photographs contain far less motion blur and instead give the feel of compression instead. For example, in the image above, the cars and buses appear to be squashed and compacted.

I think I prefer Davies’ work because it captures a much longer chain of events occuring across a whole system of a location and really shows the character of a place. Vanvolsem’s images are far more fluid and I like the idea of a busy panorama without the chaos of motion blur.

Wong Kar-Wai

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ1fEC67GO4 (14)

Chungking Express by Wong Kar-Wai, 1994

On the opening scene of the film Chungking Express you get the feeling that you are in Hong Kong.

The most notable and recurrent technique used to dramatise moments in this film is step printing. This is where you shoot the scene in lower frame rates, then duplicate or triplicate them and project it at a normal 24 frames per second.

Kar Wai says, “it delivers something textured, it feels like it’s very speedy but actually it’s very slow.”

The point of this effect is to make it seem as if everything is speeding up while also slowing down. Two things are communicated visually from this.

One is that the subject seems detatched from the world around him and secondly when the subject is in slow motion it emphasizes the importance of that moment in particular.

Kar-Wai often requires his actors to perform as if they are in slow motion in order to drastically achieve this effect.

For Kar-Wai, time is always percieved differently, either objectively or subjectively. The speed of the frames and the manipulation of time are what allows us to appreciate and depreciate every moment. Time seems to elongate and isolate the characters in their own world.

A reader for A Void In Frame describes the film like this, “It speaks to the lonliness and the desperate need for company, an escapism of boredom, but at the same time it is a warning to distractions, the call for attention to things that truly matter in our lives.”

I agree with this statement as I see the motion blur in this film as the chaos of a busy life surrounding someone who already has their own business to contend with. You see the people passing by so quickly yet the character is there alone, progressing slowly.

Francesca Woodman

Sources: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-space-providence-rhode-island-ar00350 (15)

http://www.gerrybadger.com/francesca-woodman/ (16)

Space², Providence, Rhode Island by Francesca Woodman, 1976

This black and white, square format photograph is a self portrait of the artist. She is dressed in dark clothing and occupies an empty room with white walls. Light enters the room from the window shown on the right of the image.

Woodman appears to lunge forward in this photograph. She is oriented away from the camera and although her feet are in focus, the rest of her body from the ankles up is blurred and this obscures her face.

This photograph was taken in Woodman’s studio and she was experimenting with exposure time by setting her camera on a slow shutter speed and manipulating the light in order to capture the movement of her body, which blurred her hands and face.

This photograph is part of a series where all the images feature the artist’s body in a similar interior space. For this particular image she blurred and distorted her body, while in others she encased herself in glass display cabinets.

The title of the series, Space², indicates a concern not only with the dimensions of space but with the way in which space is flattened by photography.

Gerry Badger analyses her photographs. “Coupled with a dissolution of corporeal solidity, we have a voice which speaks longingly of fleeing from the earthbound confines of the flesh, bridging the gap between material physicality and immaterial spirituality, and giving poignant articulation to her own sense of mortality.”

In other words he believes that her photographs speak of breaking free of a space, specifically the body, in order to truly understand its workings both spiritually and with the perception of life and death.

It is also thought that there may be a feminist message behind her images too, and that Woodman believed the odds were stacked against her sex and no matter how she tried to escape the restrictions placed on her gender, she could only be truly free by art.

Badger sees the work of Woodman as combining ‘personalised psychodramas with the temporal and spatial displacements of long exposures and blurred movement.’ She commited suicide at age 22 and Badger believes her emotional state can be seen visually through the time and space she portrays in her work.

I think that Badger’s analysis of Woodman’s work may be correct. The fact that the room she is in is so bare speaks to me about an emptiness in this woman’s life and her blurred movement shows she wants to escape from it. I can also see the thought behind the feminist interpretation in that she is entirely blurred and obscured besides the high heeled shoes.

My work

Contact sheets

Final shots

For this exercise I decided I would photograph the same subject as my previous work so that I could compare the effects afterwards.

I photographed my sitter yawning again, but this time I used a slow shutter speed to capture the yawn in motion.

For these photos my camera was set to ISO-100, with an F-stop of f/36 and a shutter speed of 1 second.

I set my camera up on a tripod and as the subject opened his mouth I took photos until he had finished yawning. The pictures capture the yawn at various stages of the process.

On my contact sheet you can see that some photos have a closed mouth and some photos have an open mouth, but all of them show a transition from one stage into another. My contact sheets show some of my thoughts and the photos I selected and rejected.

By having a slow shutter speed I was able to capture not just a freeze frame of a moment, but a continuation of this and a development of a movement.

I altered the brightness slightly of my photos to correct the exposure and make them all the same in Photoshop.

If I compare the effects of a fast and a slow shutter speed, I can see that they both have different qualities. The photos using the faster shutter speed work nicely together as a set, because it makes an interesting collage of portraits but the photographs with a slow shutter speed work better individually, because they capture the whole sequence in one.

Hand written notes and print-outs:

Bibliography

D-Day and the Omaha Beach Landings. (n.d.). Retrieved from Magnum Photos: https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/conflict/robert-capa-d-day-omaha-beach/

Frank, J. (2016, May 17). Robert Frank’s “Elevator — Miami Beach, 1955” — Jona Frank for #PhotosWeLove. Retrieved from Medium: https://medium.com/photos-we-love/robert-frank-elevator-miami-beach-1955-jona-frank-for-photoswelove-8d90a2c38d1d

Dyer, G. (2004, October 16). The road to nowhere. Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/oct/16/photography

Sugimoto, H. (n.d.). Theaters. Retrieved from Hiroshi Sugimoto: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-7

Bryan, L. (2009, November 10). Contacts: Hiroshi Sugimoto 2. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3nGoZqw9U

Jeffery, I. (2000). The Photography Book. Phaidon Press.

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin (5.4.1997 – 24.9.1998). (n.d.). Retrieved from Michael Wesely: https://wesely.org/2019/potsdamer-platz-berlin-5-4-1997-24-9-1998/

Michael Wesely. (2010). Retrieved from Daimer Art Collection: http://art.daimler.com/en/artwork/michael-wesely-potsdamer-platz-27-3-1997-13-12-1998-2000/

Gramovich, M. (2015, May 26). Time Shows: Ultra-long Exposure in Works of Michael Wesely . Retrieved from Bird In Flight: https://birdinflight.com/inspiration/experience/time-shows-ultra-long-exposure-in-works-of-michael-wesely.html

Maarten Vanvolsem. (n.d.). Retrieved from Kusseneers Gallery: http://kusseneerscom.webhosting.be/portfolio_page/maarten-vanvolsem/

Vanvolsem, M. (2015, March 26). Maarten Vanvolsem: The Experience of Time in Still Photographic Images. Retrieved from LUCA School of Arts: https://www.luca-arts.be/en/nieuws/maarten-vanvolsem-experience-time-still-photographic-images

Vanvolsem, M. (2008, November). Motion! On how to deal with the paradox in dance photography. Retrieved from Image and Narrative: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/Timeandphotography/vanvolsem.html

Davies, G. (2019, May 14). Panoramic Photography by Gareth Davies. Retrieved from Tickpan: https://www.tickpan.co.uk/

A Void in Frame. (2017, March 15). Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express - Speed and Time. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ1fEC67GO4

Ateer, S. M. (2013, November). Francessca Woodman Space², Providence, Rhode Island 1976. Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-space-providence-rhode-island-ar00350

Badger, G. (2012, September). Francesca Woodman. Retrieved from Gerry Badger: http://www.gerrybadger.com/francesca-woodman/

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Exercise 3.1 - Freeze

Eadweard Muybridge

source: http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/muybridge_image_and_context/animal_in_motion/ (1)

Man/horse (vehicle) by Eadweard Muybridge - later image with greater graphic detail

Muybridge's photography of horses in motion began in 1872 at Leland Stanford's stock farm in Palo Alto.

This particular business association is said to have started because Stanford wanted to settle a bet around whether all four of a horse's hooves left the ground at speed; something Muybridge's single shot motion photographs of 'Occident' - one of Stanford's horses - proved correct.  

Muybridge's single shot photography of motion led to his most pioneering body of work, known as motion sequence photography. Here, separate instantaneous images of motion were displayed in a grid illustrating consecutive phases of movement.

The first motion sequence photographs were taken in 1878 when Stanford asked Muybridge to investigate animal locomotion as a phenomenon in itself. Muybridge set up a battery of 12 cameras at Palo Alto and developed a set of electro-shutters and timers. He then began taking a series of 6, 8 or 12 phases of the horse in motion.

Photography until the 19th century had not represented movement because long exposure times displayed it only as a blur. But Muybridge's instantaneous photography made motion visible, and therefore functioned to represent the fast-moving time and shifting cultural landscape of modernity.

Muybridge's photographs certainly comment upon the endlessly changing nature of time within modernity. However, in so doing they also 'attempt to capture the fleeting and the invisible'. (Tim cresswell)

I think that Muybridge was a pioneer of photography in his time because he managed to do something that nobody had ever done before. He managed to stop time and capture something that evades the human eye. Muybridge was able to take something that the human eye can only see in a minute second and transform it into a permenant image that people are able to view for as long a duration as they like. He was the first to make complete stillness out of motion.

AM Worthington and Harold Edgerton

Sources: https://archive.org/details/splashofdrop00wortuoft/page/70 (2)

http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/?s=hee-nc-57001#hee-nc-57001 (3)

Series XIV by AM Worthington - The Splash of A Drop - published 1895

Milk Drop Coronet by Harold Edgerton, 1957 - the aesthetic properties of milk

AM Worthington was an English physicist who observed the physics of splashes and became a pioneer in high speed photography techniques.

In the preface of his book he writes, “The reason that with ordinary continuous light nothing can be satisfactorily seen of the splash, is not that the phenomenon is of such duration, but because the changes are so rapid that before the image of one stage has faded from the eye the image of a later and quite different stage is superposed upon it.”

He then goes on to conclude that the impression you are left with is a confused mixture of each stage, like a blurred photograph.

He then decided to conduct a controlled experiment where he let a drop fall from a certain height and illuminated it with a flash of a short duration at any stage to exclude the rest of the splash taking place and only capture that one moment.

Following on from this in 1957, Harold Edgerton took what is considered to be one of the most important photographs of all time.

His photograph, Milk Drop Coronet, was one of many in a life-long quest to capture the perfect coronet. He took a similar image in black and white in 1939. Edgerton’s son describes the creation of the image like this:

A beam of light and a photocell was used in both examples to trigger the flash after an adjustable electronic delay.

The drop of milk is splashing into the thin film of milk that has formed on the surface from the previous drop of milk. The shape of the coronet is very dependent on the thickness of the film of milk, the size of the drop, and the height through which the drop has fallen.

Milk was selected as the liquid because it is white and translucent and attractive to photograph.

Edgerton’s contribution to the study of splashes in photography was his development of electronic flash technology so that there was enough intensity for colour photography even with a short enough exposure time to produce a crisp image.

He also devised the triggering scheme and delay used to capture this critical moment in the evolving shape of the splash. 

The work of Worthington and Edgerton is very similar. Worthington began an exploration into the phenomenon of splashes which Edgerton would later use to inspire his colour photograph of the perfect coronet formed by a splash of milk. Although his image is very aesthetically pleasing, a lot of physics has also gone into these images. It is planning an experiment and carrying it out fairly as well as taking a photograph, which I appreciate for the thorough consideration of the art form.

Jeff Wall

Sources: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/93456 (4)

The Photograph As Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton, pgs. 48-51, 131-32 (5)

Milk by Jeff Wall, 1984 - The aesthetic qualities of milk and the technical properties of the shutter imaginatively combined

Wall began making large backlit transparencies in the late 1970s. He felt that staging scenes for the camera could radically broaden the potential of still photography.

Another inspiration for his large pictures has been the grand theater of human figures in Western painting since the Renaissance.

In the early 1980s he embarked on a series of photographs devoted to the everyday lives of people at the margins of society. Many, including Milk, were derived from incidents that Wall observed and subsequently adapted and restaged with nonprofessional actors.

Milk features very harsh, impersonal geometry in the background and transforms the scene into a stage. The man has a clenched posture and the explosion of liquid turns the violence and anger into a vivid symbol.

The image removes the man from time itself and instead makes him a static figure of distress.

Wall’s work gives evidence to a detailed comprehension of how pictures work and are constructed that underpins the best tableau photography.

Wall describes his oeuvre as having two broad areas. One is an ornate style which the artifice of the photograph is made obvious by the fantastic nature of his stories and the other area is the staging of an event that appears much slighter, like a casually glanced-at scene.

Wall sets up a tension between the look and substance of a candid, grabbed photographic moment with his actual process, which is to preconceive and construct the scene.

Using a light box to display his images appears as not quite a photograph, nor is it a painting, but it suggests the experiencce of both. This use of a light box is seen to introduce another frame of of reference into Wall’s work which is that of backlit and billboard advertisements.

Wall also produces the occassional still-life, absent from people. He carefully constructs a group of peripheral things which pose questions about our own relationship with photographs.

The beauty of Wall’s photography is that, while it raises these complex questions, it still satisfies us as works of art.

I am a big fan of Wall’s photographs. I love how he is able to take mundane, everyday scenes and turn them into such a highly aesthetic piece of art. In Milk, his way of stopping time completely, yet capturing the movement of an inanimate object is an impressive way of showing that Wall is in control of absolutely every element within his frame and he knows how to use them to create a stage-like narrative.

Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

Sources: The Photograph As Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton, pgs. 20-21, 46 (6)

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/exposed-philip-lorca-dicorcia (7)

Head #7 by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, 2000

DiCorcia’s head series was made by placing flash lighting on construction scaffolding abova a busy New York Street, out of sight of the passers-by below. The movements of the pedestrians prompted DiCorcia to activate the flash, at which moment he photographed the illuminated stranger with a long-lens camera.

The resulting images show people who do not know that they are being photographed and so do not compose themselves for their ‘portraits’.

The coneptual engineering in Heads lies in the setting up of the apparatus to ensure that the subjects were unaware of being observed and photographed, and an embracing, on the part of the photographer, of this spontaneous and unpredictable form of image making.

The result is a heightened, revelatory experience of being able to take a sustained look at what ordinarily passes us by, and a form of photographic portraiture in which the subjects are entirely unable to influence their representation.

DiCorcia says, “I never talked to them... I don’t ask their permission. I don’t pay them, and eventually... I got into trouble.” The images were displayed in galleries and DiCorcia was sued by a man who claimed that his image was used in commerce and advertising.

The ‘commerce’ was putting them up for sale in an art gallery and the “advertising” was the use of the catalogue. However, DiCorcia appealed this and won.

DiCorcia believes there is no expectation of privacy anymore in a public place in this world. He doesn’t believe he defamed the people he photographed or that he was even ‘sneaky’ about it. He did not conceal himself or his camera.

He was investigating the nature of chance, the possibility that you can make work that is empathetic but not actually even meeting people. He photographed around 3000 people to get the 17 that he finally used in the series.

He claims his biggest problem was not to “get what you’d call a good one, but to get one that was different than the others.” He was investigating not whether people are all different, but how they are all the same. He showed how they tried to hide from those around them.

I am fascinated by this series of photographs. I love candid portraiture and how it affects the way a person is seen. People are most like themselves when they are not trying to pose or hide anything and I think DiCorcia has been really successful in showing this by taking such simple and well lit photographs of ordinary people.

My Work

Here, I have composed a collage of photographs which follow a sequence of someone yawning from start to finish.

The purpose of this exercise was to isolate a frozen moment of time in a moving subject.

For this series of photographs I had my camera set to shutter priority mode. I had plenty of natural light available so my ISO was set to 100 and as this is a straight portrait against a simple background, the F-stop was at f/5.6. In order to capture each stage of the yawn without blurring the photograph, I used a shutter speed of 1/60sec.

My process for this set was to have my subject stand still in front of the wall and look into the camera. I chose my settings and then set my camera to continuous shooting and then when I saw my subject about to yawn I pressed the shutter.

I decided to present my photographs in this format because it shows the entire process and each individual movement of the subject. Instead of showing a single shot with his mouth wide open, having a set better shows the process of capturing movement in photography and all the interesting movements inbetween that might otherwise be overlooked.

Hand written notes and print-outs:

Bibliography

Eadweard Muybridge: Defining Modernities. (n.d.). Retrieved from Eadweard Muybridge: http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/muybridge_image_and_context/animal_in_motion/

Worthington, A. M. (1895). The splash of a drop. Retrieved from Archive: https://archive.org/details/splashofdrop00wortuoft/page/70

Curated. (n.d.). Milk Drop Coronet. Retrieved from Visionary Engineer: http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/?s=hee-nc-57001#hee-nc-57001

Lowry, G. D. (2007). Jeff Wall Milk 1984. Retrieved from Museum of Modern Art: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/93456

Cotton, C. (2014). The Photograph As Contemporary Art. Thames & Hudson.

Cotton, C. (2014). The Photograph As Contemporary Art. Thames & Hudson.

DiCorcia, P.-L. (2010, September 14). Exposed: Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/exposed-philip-lorca-dicorcia

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Extra Reading

Photography at the Cinema, Fire and Ice, Peter Wollen, 1984, pgs. 108-113 (1)

Photographs appear as devices for stopping time and preserving fragments of the past.

Photography is like a point, film like a line.

According to Barthes, photography appeared as a spatial rather than temporal art, vertical rather than horizontal and one which allowed the spectator time to veer away on a train of thought, circle back, traverse and criss-cross the image.

Time should be a prerogative of the reader/spectator: a free rewriting time rather than an imposed reading time.

Is the signified of a photographic image to be seen as a state, a process or an event? Is it stable, unchanging, or, if it is a changing, dynamic situation, is it seen from outside as conceptually complete, or from inside, as ongoing?

The fact that images may themselves appear as punctual, virtually without duration, does not mean that the situations that they represent lack any quality of duration or other qualities related to time.

News photographs are perceived as signifying events. Art photographs and most documentary photographs signify states. Some documentary photographs are seen as signifying processes.

Different genres of photography imply different perspectives within durative situations and sequences of situations.

The subject freezes for the instantaneous exposure to produce a frozen image, state results in state.

From the moment they are published, images are contextualized and, frequently, if they become famous, they go through a whole history of republication and recontextualization. Far more is involved than the simple doubling of the encounter of photographer with object and spectator with image.

Still photography, like film, lacks any structure of tense, though it can order and demarcate time.

Aspect is a dimension of the semantics of time common to both the still and the moving picture and used in both to place the spectator within or without a narrative.

La jetée is a film by Chris Marker and is the exemplar of a fascinating combination of film and still: the film is made entirely of stills. La jetée shows that still photographs, strung together in a chain, can carry a narrative as efficiently as moving pictures, given a shared dependence on a soundtrack. I have watched La jetée before and I was fascinated by the length of the film which they had managed to create simply by just stringing images together and writing a narrative.

La jetée by Chris Marker - Source: http://www.janusfilms.com/films/1049 (2)

Photography and time: decoding the decisive moment, Rich Cutler, 2012 (3)

The ‘decisive moment’ is a phrase that is associated with the photographer Henri Cartier‐Bresson and his style of image‐making, after the title of his 1952 book The Decisive Moment.

Barthes coined the ‘hieroglyph’ – a picture with imbued meaning. It is a moment chosen so that ‘what has already taken place, and what is about to follow, can be most easily gathered’, and we can see ‘the present, the past, and the future’.

Cartier-Bresson articulated the decisive moment as ‘the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.’

The photograph is a dichotomous object – a reflection of the past in the present. The photograph is a truthful representation of an object in the past, and thus, unlike other media, we are presented with what Barthes terms the ‘having‐been‐there’ of the object. He then stated that all representations of an object evoke its presence.

Thierry de Duve acknowledges a notion that a photograph can be perceived in either of two ways – ‘event‐like’ or ‘picture‐like’. If we see the photograph as ‘event‐like’, it is a frozen moment that cannot reveal the entirety of the event. If the photograph is perceived as ‘picture‐like’, it is then an image that no longer has any connection with the event – simply a picture that is evidence of the past.

When we look at a snapshot, we experience time suddenly splitting into the past and future – always too late to witness the event or too early.

The time exposure depicts a state, not an event and, as there is no past or future time to spool off the image, we relate to the image temporally in the present, now. Its reality is also static and thus associated with space, not time locating it there in the past.

Photographs of the decisive moment depict an event. They thus fall within de Duve’s snapshot category. Photographs of the decisive moment are defined by their very deliberate pictorial composition. Equivalency between being ‘event‐like’ and ‘picture‐like’ allows photographs of the decisive moment to oscillate readily between de Duve’s time exposure and snapshot categories.

The unease we feel looking at Ha Phan, Vietnam is partly, of course, because we are aware of impending violence and death in this example, but this feeling is innate to de Duve’s snapshot, which depicts a real object frozen in a seemingly impossible position. The narrative element is an event so the interest lies not primarily in the situation itself but in how it starts and ends, implying questions such as: Why did the plane fall? What is going to happen?

Ha Phan, Vietnam by H. Mine (1967)

Hand written notes:

Bibliography

Wollen, P. (1984). Photography at the Cinema, Fire and Ice.

La Jetée. (n.d.). Retrieved from Janus Films: http://www.janusfilms.com/films/1049

Cutler, R. (2012). Photography and time: decoding the decisive moment.

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Assignment two - formative feedback

Overall comments:

It is creative and daring but I could take it further.

Feedback on assignment (demonstration of technical and visual skills, quality of outcome, demonstration of creativity):

Framing- consider everything so it’s within my control.

Perhaps reshoot a couple of times to really refine my images.

The picture of the skirt is the strongest and the pictures of the garments together are the weakest.

It is a creative and original project.

I should explain why I chose to hang them on a washing line.

In my research, I could take my personal opinions further.

When starting the Decisive Moment project, I shouldn’t be afraid to be creative.

The main thing is to make sure I control everything within the frame, either at the time of shooting or afterwards in the edit. The next thing is to work assignments in a bit. Shoot, edit, refine.

Research (context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis):

At degree level I should want to start developing my own research tangents as well as follow the course. Anything relevant to my visual journey can go in research posts, it doesn’t have to be just photography.

Learning log (context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis):

It would be good to now start developing the reflective side of my learning log now which will help me to ‘own’ my own learning.

Suggested reading/viewing (context):

My tutor has given me some extra reading on the Decisive Moment to support my research.

I should keep my eye out for the next EYV hangout to discuss ideas and projects with other people on the course.

Pointers for the next assignment/assessment:

Rather than following too closely in the footsteps of Cartier Bresson, the assignment is an opportunity for a creative response to one of the most familiar tropes in photography.

I should research intentionally, then follow my own creative trajectory.

Hand written notes:

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Assignment two - Collecting

 ‘Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details although they need not be like one another.’ - Walter Benjamin (1936) 1999, p.79

Hand written notes:

Things

Hiroshima by Ishiuchi Miyako 

sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csVx_QRPvps

http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/inside-the-photography-of-ishiuchi-miyako/

Hiroshima by Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako is a book showing items from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

There was a lot of famous work coming out of Japan in the 1960s documenting the aftermath of the nuclear disaster and this is more contemporary work which deals with the same issue in a modern way.

It mostly contains items of clothing, but also shows accessories such as hair combs and eye glasses as well as shoes.

These photographs were mostly shot on a light table but now Miyako relies on natural light to illuminate her photographs and on duller days she sets up a lamp.

The book presents subtle design in a simple way as not to overcomplicate the issues and to focus only on the disaster which took place and not the artist herself.

Seeing the photographs of Miyako in colour is a completely different experience than viewing the well known photographs of the 1960s in black and white. As Jörg Colberg said, “I don’t want to say that any one is better, just different.” I think that adding colour to these photographs really brings them to life and helps the viewer to see the disaster as a real life event, just like most of us see today’s reality in colour.

Amanda Maddox describes these photos as having a ‘ghostly presence.’ I agree with this way of seeing the photographs as they often appear transparent and lifted off the page. In this way, Miyako communicates that these people are dead and their tattered posessions are all that remains of the lives that once were.

Views

Twentysix Gasoline Stations by Edward Ruscha

source: https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/transforming-artist-books/summaries/edward-ruscha-twentysix-gasoline-stations-1963

Twentysix Gasoline Stations is a black and white photobook by Edward Ruscha and contains photographs of petrol stations, along the highway between Ruscha’s home in Los Angeles and his parent’s house in Oklahoma City.

The photographs in this book are not all presented in a linear sequence as five photos are presented out of order. This was noticed by curator Clive Phillpot.

Because they have been taken from the highway, they all contain quite large amounts of foreground and they all appear as factual observational shots.

Writer and critic Johanna Drucker commented, “ in 1962 this work read against the photographic landscape of highly aestheticized image-making work which carried photography’s claims to art status forward on the double engines of fine art imagery and/or humanistic critical vision.”

In other words, these photographs represent the urban landscape in a completely new way. They do not intend to show beauty or aestheticism, they are simply a documentation of a view which exists in space. This differs from artists such as Ansel Adams who was very much interested in capturing ‘the beautiful’ in his work.

These photographs alone are something I don’t find particularly interesting and I think many people would agree. However, the concept of taking a standard view like this and presenting it as a collection is a journey that the photographer has chosen to take you with him on.

Heads

Untitled by Bettina von Zwehl

sources: http://www.bettinavonzwehl.com/archive.html

http://www.artnet.com/artists/bettina-von-zwehl/6-from-untitled-ii-MYK4uvlOSqh-KeSMk5epIQ2

The Photograph As Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton (2004) Thames and Hudson, ISBN 978-0-500-20418-4, pgs.31-32

Bettina von Zwehl created three untitled series where the sitters are given instructions that disarm them and prompt less self-conscious gestures for the camera.

Their appearance is not controlled by them. For all three parts Zwehl asks her sitters to wear clothes of a certain colour and agree to undertake simple tasks.

In Untitled 1 Von Zwehl got her subjects to go to sleep wearing all white clothes. They were then woken and photographed whilst their tiredness was still displayed on their faces.

Untitled 2 features different subjects all wearing blue polo-neck jumpers photographed after physically exerting themselves. Their faces are flushed although they try to remain composed. Untitled 1 and Untitled 2 were both taken in 1998.

Untitled 3 has new subjects once again. They all wear black vests. Von Zwehl has photographed them from above as they lay down on her studio floor and try to hold their breath. They appear strained. These portraits were taken in 1999.

When you ask your subject if you can take their portrait, they will normally try to prune themsleves beforehand to make their appearance as attractive as possible. In these untitled series, Von Zwehl takes away this opportunity from her subjects by controlling their activities beforehand and then sitting them naturally.

I think this is an interesting way to look at portraiture as each subject is captured in their most natural state and their appearance is somewhat fixed by the photographer.

Hand written notes and print outs:

Planning:

Contact Sheets:

My final edits:

Assignment notes:

I love photographing people. Nothing intrigues me more than observing the human body and seeing how it works and moves through a camera lens. It is fascinating to see how people behave in front of the camera which is why I chose to do some further research on Bettina von Zwehl who takes away this instinctive autonomy. Her sitters are given instructions and then posed in a controlled way. They are also dressed in a directed way.

Ishiuchi Miyako looks at clothes from Hiroshima and photographs them in a very simple and striking way. Von Zwehl and Miyako both use clothing to communicate in their work in very different ways. Von Zwehl eliminates a sense of identity through her garment choices but Miyako does the opposite and highlights it. Although both photographers have produced conceptually interesting work, I don’t find the photographs themselves hugely dynamic or moving. Similarly, Edward Ruscha took a series of seemingly mundane photos – they were of petrol stations - which in fact had a huge impact on the acknowledgement of photography as an art form.

When I first looked at the brief for this assignment, my initial reaction was to take it down the route of ‘things’ and photograph fashion. I put this under the category of ‘things’ rather than ‘heads’ because I had planned to photograph the clothes hugging people’s skin and wrapped around their body’s and have my images cropped in, so their faces weren’t even visible.

My idea developed into removing the person from my photographs all together. Fashion doesn’t have to be modelled and it can still hold the impression of a person and their identity. I live at home with a small family of three; my parents and me. Each of us can be easily told apart not just by our physical appearance but also by our largely different styles of clothing. To make this shoot work I chose some of the most colourful clothes from each of our wardrobes.

To photograph single garments, I used a shallow depth of field. This way, I was able to focus entirely on the garment and have a soft blurred background. For these shots I used between f/5 and f/10 with my camera on aperture priority mode. The day I took these photos was very windy and the natural light available changed as the clouds moved over the sun, which is why there is a small difference in my f-stop between photos. To capture the garments together and still have this blurred effect in the background I stood further back from the subject, maintained a low f-stop and zoomed in, like the technique I used in exercise 2.3 to take a portrait.

What I have pictured here is a mundane home activity, hanging the laundry on the line. The photographs themselves are relatively simple and I found them to be messy in full colour what with the lines cutting across the frame and the several layers appearing in the background. This is what inspired me to put them in black and white. Having experimented with this on Photoshop, I realised my images were still lacking a main point of interest which is when I decided to use the selective colour technique.

To apply selective colour to my photos, I first loaded my image into the software and duplicated the layer. Using the quick selection tool, I highlighted the garment and separated this into a separate layer mask. I then applied the black and white filter and adjusted the toggles of the duplicate image to enhance the garments and make them stand out. Through adding this effect, I have tried to symbolise and represent the individuality of each member of my family in a collection of our clothes. This project has taken on the main theme of identity so in a way, I started this assignment with ‘things’ and ended it with ‘heads.’

Reflection:

Demonstration of technical and visual skills - I used the aperture priority mode on my camera to ensure that my f-stop was visually appealing.

Quality of outcome - I determined that my outcomes needed adjusting to help them stand out so I edited them accordingly.

Demonstration of creativity - I have tried to turn something mundane into a conceptually interesting project.

Context - I have researched three different practitioners and referenced them in my notes as inspiration.

Hand written notes and print outs:

Bibliography

Benjamin W. (1999) Illuminations. In W. Benjamin, Illuminations (p.79) Pimlico; New Ed edition

Colberg J. (17th August 2011) Presenting Hiroshima by Ishiuchi Miyako, Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csVx_QRPvps

Maddox A. (6th August 2015) Inside the Photography of Ishiuchi Miyako, Retrieved from the iris: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/inside-the-photography-of-ishiuchi-miyako/

Edward Ruscha 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations' 1963 (n.d.) Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/transforming-artist-books/summaries/edward-ruscha-twentysix-gasoline-stations-1963

Archive (n.d.) Retrieved from Bettina von Zwehl: http://www.bettinavonzwehl.com/archive.html

Past Auction (n.d.) Retrieved from artnet: http://www.artnet.com/artists/bettina-von-zwehl/6-from-untitled-ii-MYK4uvlOSqh-KeSMk5epIQ2

Cotton C. (2004) The Photograph As Contemporary Art. In C. Cotton, The Photograph As Contemporsry Art (pgs.31-32) Thames & Hudson world of art

Reshoot

After talking with my tutor and assessing my images through feedback, I have realised that my final photographs could be refined. Therefore I decided to reshoot this assignment to make my photos more consistent and better executed.

Contact Sheets:

Final Edits:

In this reshoot the main thing I have focussed on correcting is the framing. I took the photos through the viewfinder of my camera and tried to line them up as best as I could but of course there is the factor of natural human error. Therefore, in post production I used a grid to crop my images so that they are as symmetrical and well aligned as possible. I also shot all of these photos in the same position and direction in my garden, making them as consistent to one another as possible.

There are two reasons I decided to hang my clothes from a washing line as opposed to laying them flat on the ground. The first is that, as I have previously mentioned, this shoot is about the mundanity of life and hanging up the washing is a simple household chore. More importantly, I am representing the clothes as people, without actually shooting portraits so I wanted my clothes to hang and reflect the way they would naturally hang from a person’s body.

Hand written notes and print-outs:

[lydiasonlinelog]

Research point

Wim Wenders

‘The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes.’ - Wim Wenders (1997) quoted in Broomberg and Chanarin, 2008

Source: The Photograph as Contemporary art - Charlotte Cotton - 2014 - Thames & Hudson - ISBN 978-0-500-20418-4 - pgs. 123-125

Wenders’ photographs have a related sense of the pictures within our environments being recognized and formalized.

Wenderes is better known for his feature films but he uses photography when a site carries its own story and does not require him to construct one cinematically.

In this photo (Wall in Paris, Texas - 2001), the cracks and peeling plaster reveal the brickwork beneath which creates an allegory of the deterioration and fragility of the place, further emphasized by the power lines crossing through the image.

I like Wenders’ photography because it contains meaning which has to be extracted through observation. I love to discover the hidden side of things with visual clues which Wenders has used in Wall in Paris, Texas.

Bazin

‘Deep focus gives the eye autonomy to roam over the picture space so that the viewer is at least given the opportunity to edit the scene himself to select the aspects of it to which he will attend.’ - Bazin (1948) quoted in Thompson & Bordwell, 2007

sources: http://mpcinematech.blogspot.com/2012/10/use-of-deep-focus-in-contemporary-cinema.html

https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/michaelwalford/entry/deep_focus_cinematography_/

Shooting in deep focus means that both the foreground and background of a shot are in focus at the same time.

Bazin believed that deep focus has three advantages:

It brings spectators into closer contact with the image.

Deep focus gives the viewer choice in what they see.

It allows for ambiguity essential to works of art.

By shooting in deep focus less cutting is necessary so the spectator is less manipulated by the narative and more free to read the shots in front of them.

In this film still from Citizen Kane (1941) you are able to see the couple in the foreground, the man in the middle-ground and the boy through the window in the background. We are able to see events unfolding before the characters do which is why I think that deep focus is a good technique for use in work intended to  be spectated like cinema.

Ansel Adams

‘to remain independant of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself’ - F64 Group Manifesto, 1932

sources: http://photographyhistory.blogspot.com/2012/04/group-f64-manifesto-1932.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/11/ansel-adamss-subversive-images-of-japanese-internment/417057/

https://allthatsinteresting.com/manzanar-relocation-center#1

Ansel Adams was part of the F64 group which had the intentions of the quote above. The position of the aperture was an important decision politically as well as aesthetically. The period and culture they struggled to be independant from was the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pictorialism and painting prior to that.

Edward Weston made the point that the camera was able to see the world more clearly than the human eye, because it didn't project personal prejudices onto the subject.  The group made keen use of aperture f/64 in order to provide the greatest depth of field, thus allowing for the largest percentage of the picture to be in sharp focus.

The Manzanar Relocation Center was one of ten Japanese concentration camps that the United States government created during World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In 1943, when the above photo was taken, the government forced people at camps like the Manzanar Relocation Center to answer a “loyalty questionnaire” that asked them if they would serve in combat and swear unqualified allegiance to the United States. If they answered yes they were eligable to leave and people who answered no faced being sent to the Tule Lake Relocation Center, which segregated “loyals” from “disloyals.”

This photo cleverly uses a large depth of field to show both the centre itself and the beautiful view behind it. It highlights the freedom of America right beside something very captive and restricted, attacking the political wrongs of the country. I like the way that politics can be used in photography to make a point through art.

Fay Godwin

Sources: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/565694403173018728/?lp=true

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/08/margaret-drabble-fay-godwin

Fay Godwin was a photographer who was inspired by the countryside and most often shot landscape photographs.

Her work was in black and white and featured the vastness and character of the scenery she was captivated by.

In 1990, Godwin published a book titled ‘Our Forbidden Land’ which showcased photographs of the countryside restricted by rules or fenced off such as the photo above titled Night Guard. It features Stonehenge fenced off to stop people getting to it and walking on the land.

These photos ask questions about whether land like this can or should be restricted. Should the countryside be given public access and how can we say that this type of land can truly belong to a person?

Godwin has used a deep depth of field to capture both the expanse of the land but also the restictions to it in a political way to get her point across. The message of this book has been presented in a subtly visual way and has helped to change the laws governing access to the countryside in Britain.

Margaret Drabble went to visit Fay Godwin’s work at the National Media Museum and commented on Our Forbidden Land; “Our Forbidden Land (1990) is an impassioned attack on the destruction of the countryside. The text is strongly argued, and the photographic documentary of what the Ministry of Defence, bad planning, guard dogs, greed and neglect are doing to Britain is eloquent.” I completely agree with this comment and I am glad that laws have since been changed as I stand behind Fay Godwin and her environmental politics.

Gianluca Cosci

source: https://www.gianluca-cosci.com/panem-et-circenses

Gianluca Cosci uses the opposite technique to both Adams and Godwin in that he has opted for an extremely shallow depth of field in his series Panem Et Circenses.

Here he has used just slivers of sharpness to reference the effect of corporate power on the public experience of urban space. In the photograph above we see what appears to be a light shining down on the ground from a bench above, surrounded by blurred store fronts and community spaces. This is Panem Et Circenses # 2  taken in 2002 - 2003.

Cosci says, “I think my work has a certain political atmosphere, even though, perhaps, it is not immediately detectable. I try to put the same emphasis on both the subject of my photographs and the way in which it is photographed.” Whereas before looking at previous photographers I have found political meaning with a deep depth of field, this time I have found it in a very shallow depth of field.

Cosci has also said on his website, “ I am interested in the point of view of the excluded, the marginalised. Often one is forced to have only restricted views, in awkward positions, difficult to maintain. Nevertheless we could take advantage of this apparent fault to observe and understand things in a different, unexpected way.” After reading this I have pictured these photographs as the views of people living on the streets and it has changed the way I look at them. Now I see all that they have, that space on the ground where they lay, and all that surrounds them is unatainable wealth and the greed of other people. It is quite a moving political statement.

Mona Kuhn

source: https://www.monakuhn.com/portfolio/works/

We often see photography using a shallow depth of field in advertisements and from lifestyle photographers. This is because they offer a freshness and vitality and they can present a simple and attractive aesthetic statement. Food photography is another example of this.

Mona Kuhn uses another aesthetic code of shallow depth of field which is intimacy. In her series Evidence, she seeks to represent the unclothed body as a natural essence of who we are.

A foreword for Kuhn’s work was written by Gordon Baldwin and he wrote, ‘In and of themselves, they are comfortable in their glowing, smooth skins, but their highly enigmatic expressions hint at psychological tensions presumably resulting from their interactions with each other, their immersion in their utopian community they have chosen to inhabit, or the events of their lives outside this terrestrial paradise. A complex yet balanced layering of representation and human relationships.’

I think this is a particularly beautiful piece of writing which really captures the essence of these photographs. I feel like Baldwin explains that Kuhn is trying to show that although we may not be comfortable in our own skins, we can never escape from them. It is a romanticised documentation of insecurity and self deprication.

Kuhn is one of my favourite photographers because I am particularly interested as an artist in the portrayal of the human body and how nudity can effect that. I love the haziness of Three Figures (2006) because it communicates the nervousness and discomfort surrounding intimacy and the way others view who we are.

Kim Kirkpatrick

sources: http://baphot.co.uk/snappers/snappers_k_n.php

https://web.archive.org/web/20160914080818/http://kimkirkpatrick.com/GalleryMain.asp?GalleryID=97163&AKey=FGWAF5R9

http://ww2.gazette.net/gazette_archive/2001/200124/entertainment/visarts/58838-1.html

The technique of soft focus has often been associated with memories and reverie. Kim Kirkpatrick is a photographer who uses shallow depth of field to re-imagine abandoned industrial sites in the American landscape. He manages a fine balance between areas of focus and blur within each image.

Oh his website, which is now difficult to locate, Kirkpatrick mentions how his early work is all about colour and our daily environment. He looks for hidden, subtle beauty within our everyday surroundings and invites the viewer to see what is truly important through colour, tight focus and composition.

Kirkpatrick says, “I take pictures where nature and man meet, where one is taking over the other.” He has photographed the areas which people would normally ignore or walk straight past.

He uses a viewfinder camera, the same as Ansel Adams which can make his high resolution images possible. However, standing under a dark cloth, it takes at least five minutes to take one 8x10inch negative although Kirkpatrick explains that at this size the image “never falls apart, even when you get closer.”

I much prefer the more rural side of landscape photography but I appreciate Kirkpatrick’s talent to take something mundane and make it beautiful with his camera. He achieves eye catching photography of details that the average person would just miss.

Guy Bourdin

source: https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/30-guy-bourdin/overview/#/artworks/10380

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/guy-bourdin-exhibition/

Human vision doesn’t normally see the world in deep focus so using this technique photographically can create psychological tension to make the viewer feel overwhelmed or uncertain.

Guy Bourdin was a fashion photographer who consciously played with the artificiality of the image; ‘its gloss rather than its reality’ - Brooks (1981) in Cotton & Verthime, 2003, p.128. He photographed everyday scenes in a way which suggested an intense psychological situation. It is seemingly impossible to pin down an exact source of unease at any specific point within the frame.

The photograph above was taken for Charles Jourdan, in Spring 1975, who is a French fashion designer primarily known for his shoe designs. You can see that this photo is taken to advertise shoes as they are the only garment visable.

The fundamental significance of his photographs lies in Bourdin’s knowledge that it is not fashion but its image that seduces and fascinates us. His photographs sought to shock and ignite the viewer’s curiosity.

This photograph, although taken for fashion purposes, has an intersting narrative. You can see that it is a woman who has supposedly been killed which is indicated by the white line drawn around the body inclusing her dress. You are made to wonder why the shoes have been left, or why they were taken off and what the involvement of the car is.

This photo has been cleverly shot as the brightest point in the frame are the pink shoes so whilst you are thinking about the narrative, your eyes are naturally drawn to the garment.

My work

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lydiaslens/

I then had the opportunity to assess one of my own photographs. I looked back thorugh my own personal archive of photography and selected a photograph which I felt illustrated one of the aesthetic codes discussed above. Regardless of whether or not I had the same intention when I took the photo, I was still able to find something that fit one of the aesthetic codes:

I took this photo in 2016 and it features a blade of dried out grass sat against a setting sun. I think this photo fits the same code as Kim Kirkpatrick as I used a shallow depth of field with an aperture of f/4.5 and used colour as my main focus. Using this shallow depth of field I was able to focus on the blade of grass and capture the detail of the light hitting it in different directions. The background has a very soft focus and the colours therefore blend together and create an ombre effect. The difference between mine and Kirkpatrick’s work is that my photo was taken in a rural setting.

Although my photograph is in no way political I will still give it a title to fit the code and give it a meaning. I have decided to call it Burning Hills as the vivid colours in the sky give the impression of fire and the almost silhouetted grass appears singed and smoldering; this photo was taken on the Malvern Hills.

Hand Written notes and print outs:

[lydiasonlinelog]

Exercise 2.4 - Woodpecker

I used my garden trellis as a subject in front of a background with depth. I took a close viewpoint and zoomed in. Focussing on my trellis I took a shot and then without changing the focal length or framing, I set my focus to infinity and took a second shot. I used the manual focus on my lens to achieve this:

The point of focus structures the composition by drawing your eye to different parts of the photo. The part of the image which is in focus naturally draws the eye, with a shallow depth of field. To create an effective deep depth of field image the trick is to include close foreground elements. Close foreground detail can also balance the frame and when successful a close viewpoint with a wide angle lens can give the feeling that you are inside the scene.

Again without moving the camera I selected a small aperture and found a point of focus that gave an acceptable sharpness from foreground to infinity. The focus is consistent enough throughout the entire image that the entire field is the same and the entire scene can be made out:

Doing this exercise is also a way of thinking about attentional focus. You could say that in photography having a good grasp of detail allows you to master the technical aspects while seeing the connections between things can make meaning.

Hand written notes and print outs:

[lydiasonlinelog]

Exercise 2.3 - Focus

I chose a spot that had good light and with a simple background and had my subject stand a fair distance from it. I had a wide aperture and a moderatley long focal length then took a viewpoint about a meter and a half away which allowed me to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame and focus on the eyes:

A wide aperture will create a shallow depth of field especially when combined with a long focal length and a close viewpoint. Human vision won’t allow us to look at the vague blur in our own periphery, but in a photo, these areas can form a large part of the image so we must handle them with as much consideration as the main subject.

A camera’s viewfinder image is obtained at maximum aperture for maximum brightness so it will therefore have a shallow depth of field. The aperture can be changed manually on a camera and it can be surprising to see the effect of a single f-stop on the image’s appearance. In my photo I set the aperture to f/5.6. The camera was on aperture priority mode with an exposure time of 1/80 and an ISO of 160.

Hand written notes and print-outs: