Roberta Viale

University of Westminster - BA Photography  

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MP1 - Pilot Project introductory text

Just the Two of Us it’s a journey through the change and evolution I experienced during the last year or so. It’s a book that visually discloses my most intimate moments, revealing the breaking points and the mental healing processes I dealt and will have to co-exist with.

It’s the story of the deepest loving relationship I ever had, the one that helped me face the loneliness and depression brought by the pandemic and the subsequent social situation. It is a voyage through the best and worst moments I coped with thanks to photography. 

I took many photographs while locked at home. I explored the body and the self through images and occasionally words, and hopefully this book will tell you about my discoveries. 

Here is a little mock-up of the book that I started to organise on InDesign

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Photobook research, inspirations, etc... - Part 4

For what concerns the subject matter of the photographs I want to include, so far I have mostly looked at two artists in particular: Pixy Liao and Chloe Rosser. 

Pixy Liao is a Chinese photographer who’s got a unique and very modern style. In 2007 she started a project, which is still going, called Experimental Relationship, centered in representing a new kind of relationship she was experiencing with her new 5 year younger boyfriend. She defined their relationship as something new for her, something that suddenly gave her a new power and authority. She stages situations in which both her and her boyfriend Moro play a part, showing the alternative possibilities of an heterosexual relationship. 

The images are incredibly good looking, clearly staged and prepared, many of them show the cable release too. To me they perfectly describe the practice almost every photographer had to turn to during this last year. The consistency of subject and home-y backgrounds, the loneliness and the constriction of shared spaces. There is a clear game of powers going through the narrative, she looks empowered, stronger and secure, while him looks submissive, weak. But at the same time they work together harmoniously. 

Her work inspires me on many levels, it’s engaging, entertaining but clearly personal too. The subject matter is obviously very similar to what mine will be, and I shall look at the coherence she created in order to try and make something as flawless. I will also include some self-portrait shot with a cable release, as to represent a new condition of solitude. 

Chloe Rosser is an artist based in London that I found on Instagram. She produced different projects always photographing naked human bodies in very weird positions. One of these is called Form (2013) and it’s a series of images of naked bodies in empty rooms. The body-forms are all represented from behind in clearly non-spontaneous positions. The photographs resembles uncanny living sculptures looking almost alienated from any other familiar surrounding. The work strikes me as a study on the aesthetics we naturally own as well as a critique on the always increasing social alienation we go through everyday. It almost represents for me our own disassociation from our own body. It almost looks like a work of abstract art, and it talks melancholy and abandonment.

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Photobook research, inspirations, etc... - Part 3

Another photobook I have and love very much is Nan Goldin - The Beautiful Smile. 

Nan Goldin is one of my all time favorite photographers. Her work turned out being a great documentation of New York’s lifestyle of the 70s, 80s and 90s, but what has always stroke me is the intimacy of some specific images she took. People agreed to be photographed by her in such private moments it never stops to amaze me. 

The book is quite a classic and traditional photobook. The cover is blue linen and very simple; the images inside are laid out in diptychs of very similar or coherent contents. Every photo is captioned which I think makes complete sense as this is now almost an archive of images of a specific past. 

For as much as I love the images, the book feels a bit distant from the intimacy portrayed, a little too documentaristic maybe. It makes sense as a whole, but it doesn’t feel like a personal object, but rather something to use as reference. What I think works the most is the narrative, which feels coherent and flawless, even if the subjects keep changing as well as the shape of the images. The choice of paper, which to me seems something like a fiber based, slightly glossier satin, is perfect for the color rendering but feels a bit to “commercial” for my kind of taste. Again, it makes sense as a whole, but in some points the fiber is starting to deteriorate. 

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Photobook research, inspirations, etc... - Part 2

Another book I came across while browsing the online shelves of Photobook Store is called Face to Face, by SEIICHI FURUYA & CHRISTINE GÖSSLER. 

On the website there is a little text describing the story behind the book [https://photobookstore.co.uk/collections/all-books/products/face-to-face]. It’s a very personal story, and it is also a culmination of a process of remembering. I related to it straight away and thought, after having a look at the images, its expressive power has something very close to my taste. 

The book is divided by years and it represent Seiichi and Christine’s relationship through the use of diptychs. The only judgements I can make, unfortunately, are the ones related to layout and appearance, as I cannot physically access the book. 

The cover image is quite striking and beautiful, the way the images are layed out is engaging, coherent without being boring and quite modern as well. There’s an alternance of black and white and colored images which keeps it entertaining and also kind of set a slight different mood for every spread. 

The text is at the end only and it doesn't interfere with the narration of the images. 

Overall I think this is the book that so far resembles the most my final idea, although I cannot say that with certainty as I would need to hold the physical object in my hands. 

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Photobook research, inspirations, etc... - Part 1

I have been looking at so many photobooks recently I often had to stop looking to not get overwhelmed. I mostly use Instagram as first source of research, almost everyone has an account on there at the moment, and, as much as they are trying to change it, it still is a visual-based social media. 

Whenever you follow an account on IG, a window pops up with recommendation of similar profiles. This has been for me the worst and best thing about the app. 

Some of the main sources of my research so far have been the archives of Photobookcafe (https://photobookcafe.co.uk/collections/browse) and Photobookstore (https://photobookstore.co.uk/collections/all-books), as well as C4 Journal’s articles and reviews on different photobooks (https://c4journal.com/archive/). 

I also have some books myself that I treasure and go back to quite often for inspiration. One of this is Brandt Nudes: A New Perspective. The book, although of quite big dimension and weight, merges two previous books of the photographer and it is beautifully structured. It contains texts and images, and it plays harmoniously with the layout of both. I always thought about Brandt’s photography as one of my major inspirations as I find myself, more often then not, focusing on specific body parts, postures and almost abstract shapes during my shooting processes. I love how almost “classical” the book looks and feels; its presence is important, almost as it wanted to make a statement about its content. By looking at it, I realised how much I did not see my book of those same dimensions and physical presence. I want my work to feel as personal as possible, as if it could almost be hidden by the person who looks at it. It will not represent the feminine body as general, but it will be more specific, therefore more concise in form as well. 

The use of its different images layouts though, will be something I will consider, as well as its way of juxtaposing specific images or texts. 

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Making a photobook

Last year I picked the Page option in the Wall, Page and Screen module. That meant I had the chance to participate in a couple of workshops of book-making as well as was given informations about the process of creating a photobook from scratch. 

Since last year I was not able to physically print the book or even develop it further, the idea of wanting to create a photographic object stuck with me. The fact this year has been so challenging, especially in terms of accessibility to facilities and first-hand experiences, brought me back to the need of making something tangible and mine. 

Going through some of last year notes and files, I came across a list of questions Andre gave us as class exercise: 

Sometimes, when accessing objects such as books, I oversee some of these steps. I believe that, to be able to make a finite object with a specific impact, that has to be carefully thought and planned. It is always been very important for me, as a quite voracious reader, everything concerning the physical properties of a book; I often discarded books for their physical appearance of not-comfortable or not-suited for my hands, for example. I think this has to do with me being quite a practical and minimalistic person. 

My aim is to produce a book that feels the same as what it contains. I want to be able to go back to it every time I want and experience a little bit of what I experienced in the making of it, while taking the pictures. For as much as all this depends on feelings and emotions, I am aware of the importance of every decisional step of the bookmaking process. 

The main thing I will try and do throughout the whole project, is think about how I access objects, what sparks my interest and makes me want to keep those objects in my hands for longer. I will also keep researching many different photobooks, unfortunately mainly online for now, trying answering the previous questions (for as much as possible). 

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MP1 - InDesign mockup

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MP1 - December 2020

With the idea in mind of creating a work somehow related to the weird times we are living in, I started taking photos of my girlfriend. I wanted to try and represent the closeness we had, which for obvious reasons has become the feeling people started craving the most lately. 

She is the person I spent most of my year with: we have been spending lockdowns together and even went on holidays together during summer, when it was possible. By being so close and having many similar interests, she has been my main point of reference throughout this challenging year. 

Not long after the end of Lockdown 2.0, our equilibrium has broken. Going back to our respective work places and starting to “live” again interrupted our routine. She therefore decided to try and find new something new outside our relationship and I suddenly had to deal with myself by myself, again. I am not sure why my reaction to this has been so deeply felt. I found myself going through so many intimate photographs of her I almost could not think about anything else. I though I might use the moment and gather all those feelings together and put them into a work. 

I have the habit to write things down on the notes on my phone; many of them are related to what I go through and my relationships. I previously thought I wanted to make a book but I never got to physically realise one, but this time is different, I have a lot of material and a story I feel I want to put down. So I will make my 2020 into feelings and those feelings into a book. It will be a story of intimacy built and lost throughout a time where intimacy was the main thing to be avoided. 

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NEW MP1

After looking at the industrial images I took and thinking about a possible structure for the project, I found myself a little lost. My interest for it is still vivid, but the limited freedom of movement and accessibility, due to Covid-19, kind of let me down. The fact I decided to use film photography highly slows down my making process. Maintaining the same idea about landscaping and location photography will double the time and costs of it all, considering pandemic and weather conditions. 

My idea is to put this on a side-box for now. I will think of something more achievable in terms of time and accessibility, and will hopefully develop my original idea further on, for my own experience and portfolio. 

Thinking about a new idea, I can only mumble about this impossibility of being free and expressing myself as artist and photographer the way I would like to. It probably has been said already many times, in many different ways, but this pandemic really shaped new personalities and characters. We, as artists, have been forced to reinvent ourselves, to find new and unusual means of expression. I have been reading a lot, but also spending a lot of time with the people I live with. I have been thinking about how this year has seen such a different distribution of people around the space. Waling around the city when possible, I noticed the obvious new social-distance, but also the closeness people sometimes reach, way more evident now then ever. Being close to someone, spatially, is underrated. We don’t realise how much of our daily physical experience is defined by the relation we have with others, and the places and spaces we move around. 

When I think about this relationship, I think about two concepts I studied in high school called potential and kinetic energy. Potential energy is the energy between two objects considered as dependent on their respective positions. The kinetic energy is the one retained by an object due to its motion. 

I am not sure these two ideas can be described through photographs, but the fact that something ‘invisible’ such as the energy can have a written, visible formula, makes me want to explore the chance. 

The idea of contact, touch and their opposite, distance. 

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Dissertation - The Sublimity of Data: The Contemporary Sublime of Dan Holdsworth

By researching the work of Dan Holdsworth, I came across his many projects http://holdsworth.works/archive . His website is very well organized and it includes some texts, written by critics and journalists, also about his work in relation to the sublime. I find it very pertinent to my subject, as he is making use of very contemporary media to produce his photographic work, especially in his projects of the latest 10 years.  His archive can be divided into three periods: 90s to 2000 - 2000 to 2010 - 2010 to 2020. Each period has slightly different methods of approach to the subject he deals with, which kind of stays the same throughout. His main interest is about intervention of man over nature and he explores that mainly through landscape photography. While in the first period he mainly focuses on representing sceneries on the edges between human-made landscapes and natural ones, in the second one he focuses more on abstract and almost unnatural looking ones. The latest and more recent period of his production is purely defined by images of geological formations through the use of digital manipulated images. The entirety of his work though, rotates around the idea of uncanny and indefinite which I consider two of the basic aspects of the sublime experience. 

I therefore started putting down a structure for my dissertation: 

The introduction will be the historical part where I will place the sublime temporally and talk about the visions of Burke and Kant (and maybe some possible photographic examples). The introduction (ideally around 2000 words long) will then introduce Dan Holdsworth’s work in relation to my main subject of interest. 

The body will define D.H.’s practice through the three periods I outlined, a few examples of his projects will be described and used as examples to sustain my thesis for each of the periods. Ideally the body section will be 6000 words long and will explain carefully his evolution through time and my vision of it. 

In my conclusion I will then reflect on general points of my thesis, such as the role of the artist, an analysis of the observer mindset (which kind of audience would be more prone to be affected by a sublime experience when exposed to works such as D.H.’s?), my personal reasons of choosing this specific topic... I am planning to finish up by outlining my personal experiences in engaging with specific works of art (and photographs), reflecting on what is for me the meaning of art, life and knowledge. 

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MP1 - further attempts

Trying to manage my time is been hard lately. Lockdown 2.0 is almost a blessing for my Dissertation researching and Major Project developing, but I still am confused about how to organise the latter. 

My interest in industrial landscaping is still present, and I produced some more work around it, always focusing on the shapes and details of buildings rather than the comparison between them and natural environment. Since the topic of my dissertations is also quite close to the subject, I found myself thinking and rethinking about it and how I could render my interest visually. 

The intervention of man on nature is what I want to explore, therefore I need a way to make this evident while photographing industrial sceneries. I recently went to take some pictures of the Victoria Deep Water Terminal, in Greenwich. The structure is amazing and very imposing, the geometries and details are great too, but the access is limited. I did take some pictures of it (both digital and analog ones) but the result is not quite striking as the reality. Also, the impossibility of accessing the site, limited me in terms of composition and framing. 

I will try to contact their office and see if I can get access to the site to take some pictures of the structures, with maybe some contribution from the workers too. 

I am not 100% convinced with it, but I might get interesting results by doing some closer shots. 

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MP1 attempts

To start out with my shootings, I found some industrial settings in London and adventured there with my camera. 

I took many different shots of buildings, both office and heavy industrial ones, and tried to captured different angles of vision. 

The photos I took have become more interesting only once I put them on my computer and looked at them on Lightroom: rotated them, cropped them and edited them. 

I am interested in the peculiar shapes of the architecture of industrial places rather than anything else. I do not have an idea on how to compare those to the natural environment, but rather I want to explore them and their inner conceptuality. 

I might shift my focus on these forms mainly and create something conceptual by representing them. The message I intend, generally, is the same. I want to drive attention onto these kind of structures and the power of their forms and architecture. They are, after all, symbols of the interaction of man and nature. 

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Dissertation - further research

The concept of Sublime is becoming more and more complex alongside the evolution of technologies and media. 

The traditional conception of Sublime is maybe defined for the first time by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, who in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) tried to give a name to the feelings that the self experiences when confronted with something incommensurable, threatening, terrifying. Therefore, Burke sees the Sublime as a characteristic intrinsic of natural elements such as stormy seas, huge mountains, deep nights...

A little later Kant, in his Critique of Judgement (1790), shifts the focus from the external elements to the ones in within the human body. For him, the sublime was a way of describing what happens when the subject is confronted with something which cannot be explained by the reason. When a subject realises that what he is seeing is something bigger then himself and therefore finds himself unable to give it an explanation, then he is made aware of his incapacities, his limited powers and the limitations of his own mind. 

With the evolution of new technolgies, man started to be confronted with many different realities. The ‘invention’ of photography, especially, shifted quite quickly from a medium of faithful reproduction of reality, to artistic medium. 

During the first half of the 20th century, thanks to the lively artistic movements that developed (New Objectivity, Conceptualism) the role of photography has been reinscribed into many different aestethics. With the New Topographic show in 1974, landscape photography particularly, took a turn towards a conception of sublime defined as ‘mathematical’. This, related to reproduction of images of huge numbers and scale, grew quickly thanks to the industrial developements flourishing then. 

By considering such form of ‘sumblimity’ of photographic imagery, it is easy to understand how many more ways of provoking such feelings are available nowadays. Possibly, every aspect of our current life has a ‘sublime side’. What sticks and stays the same and at the basis of it is the sentiment of fear, awe, insecurity, uncertainty. In modern photographic practices, this can be created in many different ways. While researching contemporary photography, I came across the work of Dan Holdsworth. 

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Dissertation initial structure

After having an initial tutorial with Eugenie during Summer, where I explained to her my interest in the Sublime connected to landscape photography, she suggested to also have a look at other ways in which contemporary photography deals with the idea of sublime, for example something connected to fear of solitude, distance, space. 

I then looked into the work of Katie Paterson, a Scottish visual artist who deals with ideas such as distance, scale and space. Her practice is very different from the one I was thinking of exploring; in fact she is more of a conceptual artist, and she creates the sense of sublime by dealing with almost absract concepts and ideas. 

I found one of her works particularly interesting: A place that exists only in moonlight, 2019. 

That’s a book of short phrases meant to represent artworks which exists only in the imagination (http://katiepaterson.org/portfolio/place_that_exists/). 

The Sublime here is in the process of imagining, relating personal ideas and visualisations to poetical phrases. 

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Dissertation ideas

During lockdown and Summer, I started exploring the theme of the Sublime in within photography. 

After reading some Susan Sontag and watching many documentaries on Global issues and the pandemic itself, I grew inspired towards learning more about the many different “abilities’ of the photographic medium. From the technical aspects to the most recent uses of the medium, I started looking and researching especially landscape photography practices, which of course led me straight away to the work of Burtynsky and Gursky. 

I found out that Ed Burtynsky has basically invented a conception which is referred to as Contemporary Sublime in landscape photography. 

When researching Sublime as an aesthetic cathegory, I came across many different definitions: 

“A mark of some ordinary human limit surpassed or denied”

“A beautiful woman dying”

“wide and undetermined prospects”

“speculations of eternity and infinity”

“wildness and incommensurable”

“image at the point of dissolution — something at its climax, about to disappear forever” 

“experience of terror that “robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning”.

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MP1 - inspos

Some of the artists I considered who have somehow dealt or discussed or challenged reality representations. 

- Mitch Epstein with his work American Power, where he explores through photography the production of energy in USA, and the impact it has on landscape and population. 

- Stephen Tourlentes’ work Of Lengths and Measures. By photographing American prisons by night which, illuminated by strong lights, create a weird spotlight in the desert. The presence and location of these institutions reflect back upon the society that builds them. In fact, the rural location of many of these prisons keeps them on the periphery of our consciousness. 

After the meeting I had with Ulrike, she suggested a few other names I had not come across yet, such as Richard Misrach and Mishka Henner. 

While Misrach has an approach pretty realistic, Henner is more of a conceptualist, which I found really interesting too. In fact, Henner’s practice is purely centred on interrogating the photographic medium. By means of appropriation of public images, he creates works that challenge the relationship between photography and contemporary experience. 

Feedlots, 2012-2013 (image taken from Google Earth)

Fields, 2012-2013 (image taken from Google Earth)

Also, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s practice of representing reality as something almost abstract is something that appeals to me a lot. 

Ligurian Sea, Saviore, 1993

Cinerama Dome, 1993

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MP1 - proposal

Since I got very interested in the documentary side of photography, especially in light of the recents social and political happenings, I feel like my MP should go in that direction. 

By being forced home by the global pandemic, I of course spent a lot of time reading, researching, watching movies, exposing myself to visual representations of various kind. I have reflected on how we often learn about new realities only through photographs, which then become the only way to get to know something we cannot experience in first person. Nowadays, more often than ever before, photographs are manipulated, decontextualised, edited in order to pass a certain specific message an idea. 

Photography was born as a medium of faithful reproduction of reality, it became ‘a thing’ thanks to its faithfulness to its subjects. With the advancing and developing of technology, it started losing that initial power, becoming a way or representing a reality that was not necessarely objective, but rather a subjective one. 

I think the ‘life’ of a photograph can be divided into three steps: Reality, Representation and Reaction. 

My interest lies in this ‘always moving’ process and I am going to try to express it through the production of different photographs (taken with a medium format film camera) of a ‘manipulated reality’. The idea is to explore the representation of issues such as capitalism, industrialisation, pollution... and consider the ways in which they are often portrayed and shown to us; the ethical aspect and to what extent the ‘beautyfication’ of the representatiton of these subjects is useful and effective in the process of rasing awareness.