Rose's DART Blog

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FINAL ASSESSMENT

From around 15-17 I was super absorbed into Sydney’s graffiti scene and subculture. The scene had an attitude of peacocking or showing off, rather than that of defacing for the sake of defacing. The aim of the game was to get your ‘name’ up as much as possible in the hardest to reach and hardest to find places. There was no real prize, more so a title and being gossiped about by every other ‘lad’ and his Nike TN wearing friends.  

However, I secretly love and treasure the culture – and while I no longer am involved, I wanted to express the place it holds to me through my work.  

The black and white of the prints take away from the distracting colours and break down the image to the basics of what graffiti is about: its difference and separation from street art and the importance of the name. I intended this to act as a removal of the ‘peacocking’ and to focus more on the motives behind the names.  

I picked 8 photos from 2 rolls of film to put together the work – I wanted to document the different type of tags and tactics that people would use to spread their name further; tags, pieces and stickers (colloquially called slaps).

I also took photos of some of the locations, such as an alley covered in different names and tags. This documents the extremes some people take it to, like scaling pipes up a building or an overpass above a highway, but also shows the almost hivemind of the graffiti culture – once a spot gets talked about, all of a sudden it’s a race to get the first or best position there.

However this is also a dangerous culture – among the gossip and rumours, once you become well known within the scene, you risk your house getting raided for no reason other than someone might not like you. Law enforcement is also an issue, I myself got questioned by police while taking these photos, as they thought that I was one of the artists and was documenting my work.  

For a culture that is based off of rumours, gossip, pride and attitude, it has a certain character that is enticing and was what made me grow so fond of it for a few years. I wanted this body of work to act as an insight into the ‘lad’ culture of the graffiti scene and to paint it in a better light, rather than it simply being nothing more than a senseless act of vandalism.

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The first print I did that ended up becoming part of my final work.

Because I was photographing pieces of graffiti and not so much subjects relating to light and shadow, to make the work eyecatching and interesting, i wanted to focus on the rich tonal variations within the graffitis pieces - this one in particular i fell in love with because of the rich contrasts

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This was the fourth roll of film that I took, thankfully the roll was not exposed to light during the development process and every photo on the roll turned out fantastic!

This was the roll of film where most of the photos for my final assessment came from.

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this was the result from my first roll of film that i developed - at this point in time i was still getting used to the different manual exposure levels since my 35mm did not have a suggested light setting. 

The prints of the negatives turned out really well, albeit just a bit blurry.

Unfortunately my second role of film got exposed to light at some point and the entire roll of film came up completely black and over exposed.

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these are the final images chosen for this assessment.

the task - See What Will Happen, is important when it comes to the concept of the work. I left 3 pieces of photographic paper at a time on my window, leaving them for an extended period of time (1.5 hours, 2 hours, 6 hours respectively), to see what would happen. I aimed to capture my favourite space, my bedroom window seat, during the middle of the day, during a heavy storm the day after, and the night that followed the storm. 

The work shows how much the environment and time can effect a space, as well as how these changes can be physically documented in a way other than traditional video or digital photography. 

I loved how the luminogram captured these moments with an almost ethereal quality - the patterns of the rain looking spectral as my window gets wetter and wetter from the downpour, then how the street lights at night later interact with my still damp window from the storm earlier that day, all chaotic compared to the solid exposure of a sunny day. The idea of a storm and passage of time is present, yet not in the most obvious way.

I wanted this project to push me out of my comfort zone when it came to experimenting, and i feel like I succeeded in doing so, letting chance, time and nature take control of my work rather than being meticulously planned by myself.

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As i thought more about light, i began thinking about what light means to me - as it is an important aspect of photography and its history. I kept circling back to how i would always be around the windows in my room - quite unique with bits of stained glass. At night i would leave the blinds open and gaze at the street lights, and during the summer i would sit on the window seat and draw as it had the best light in the room and i loved the fresh air.

Pictured is where i began my project, leaving the paper up at the window that i would spend all my time. My goal became, ‘how many types of pictures can i produce from this window that showed different stages of the day/season etc’

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ran some experiments on photography paper involving water and light - i loved the unusual almost bacterial effect it had on the paper when treated as a luminogram. This alongside the rich and interesting mauve tones that came through prompted me to use this method to develop my body of work.

I decided to practice more with luminograms after our experiments in the studio in week 2, leaving paper outside with leaves ontop and letting the natural light create an image.

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In the darkroom in week 1 we experimented with photograms - here are a few of my experiments and a final a4 sized photogram that was completed in week 3 during my own time in the dark room after class