Anastasia

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Here I am attaching my Major Project 1 video, I couldn't export it from my computer final cut doesn't want to do it for some reason. The same thing happened in semester 1. I will try to solve the problem, as soon as I will get it done I will upload it in good quality.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Major Project 2 Gallery Statement

Nowadays we live in a world full of amaziness and at the same time sadness. All those events that you hear in my video are pretty disturbing to most of our nation, I want you to understand these events that happened and still happening aren’t pleasant at all, but what I want you to do is to take a moment of your everyday life and Isolate yourself from all the negative things that have been happening in your life and try to appreciate what you have right now and focus more on the positive. Don’t let them overtake you.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Major Project 2 Video

Go to the link down below to see the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSx7yKwjehE&feature=youtu.be

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Isolation ‘’ Major Project 2′’

Project Synopsis

What I wanted to represent in my video is that no matter what happened and is still happening in our world I want everyone to just, time to time Isolate from it.

I understand that sometimes it might be difficult to take in such information as I'm showing it in my video, those kind of news are really disturbing. My aim here is to tell people that no matter what things happen and they will be happening and sometimes we cannot prevent them, so I don't want people to focus on the negative. I want them to try to isolate from them I'm not telling about forgetting them, I'm trying to say that I want them to take a moment and thing about the positive things.

My major project 2 video relates to my Major project 1, I wanted to connect the Water and Mother Earth as keepers.

Earth is been here before us humans appeared here, therefore I want to represent her as pure and as an example of life moving and changing always.

On my footage you can see a bath full of flowers, this was my representation of earth and on how beautiful it is. But then you can hear at the same time major events that have happened, events that are disturbing and unpleasant to us, however at the end you can see how the camera goes from above the water and moves under the water. This movement represents the act of isolation by diving under the water and having all of the disturbances above us. I've added as a background sounds of whales under the sea, as a meditation sound.

The main Inspiration came to me from my video of year 2 Wall/Screen/Page module, I made a video called A Dream Of Life. Which was about mainly meditation and achievement of your own dreams and try to do everything you can to make it happen. Later on I took it forward into the Major project 1 video, I wanted to go with a similar idea but not the same thing. I decided to make a video that would represent Water/Sea as a keeper, a keeper of everything as it has been here for decades. I shot a still moving image of the sea coast line and at the same time added on top of it major events that happened and had made an accent or change on our lives.

Major project 2 is similar to the previous one with the idea of whater as a keeper of all events. In this video I wanted to tell people that all those horrible events that had happened and are still happening and horrible and sometimes it’s not under our control to prevent them from happening. Therefore I want you to take a moment time to time and appreciate what you have and try to isolate from all the bad things and events that have been happening nowadays.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

The Labyrinthine City- Between the Everyday and Spectacle

In this lecture we have examined two aspects of the city and explored how we might apply methodologies to analysing photographic imagery.

Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, Dziga Vertov (Russian Propaganda Film)

- Make citizens want to participate in the city by revealing how it is organised, displaying the way the human body fuses with new technologies. - The film also examines many aspects of everyday life in the cities of early 20th century Russia.

  Montage /Photomontage

 - Reality as an artificial construct.

- In order to understand modernity it was necessary to study the fragmented nature of urban experience

Wizard of Oz - 1939 -  Imagining the future city

Photography and video represents small everyday moments and it brings back the time that we cant remember it in memory without any of them.     

How can we represent Everyday Life?

Novels Films Photography Painting Soap Opera Reality TV?

 Shirley Baker - ‘Women and Children and Loitering Men’

For her; everyday life was street culture, an essential and continuing aspect of early and contemporary documentary photography.

 The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

All of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved into representation. Images detached from life, separated from original context and re- united as an autonomous world- apart from lived experience. The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images which suggest we have become divorced from our remaining senses. The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image. It arrives at its mature form at the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Major Project 1

I wanted to make a video which would contain series of major events that happened in our world i obviously didn't include all of them but the most ones that were interested for me. 

My major inspiration i took it from my last year project which i named it A Dream Of Life, and inside that project one of the inspiration was the movie Samsara at first i wanted to make something similar to it but i decided to still sort of have a link in between which is more about inspiration and believe inside ourselves. In this video i wanted to show the beginning of everything, we can even say almost the beginning of life is water which i represent it as the Sea in my case, our earth contains a 71% of water as well as humans do also around a 70% of it. I want the Audience to think about how water is more than that in our lives, and state the fact that all those events had been occurred we remember them as long as we stay alive but i what i want to say by my video is that the water on our earth has been before us and will be after us and will see many more events. 

I named the video Keeper just because i am referring to the water as our keeper of major events on our planet Earth. 

Story Board

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Photography and Social Discipline

(Reading: Sekula Allan, The Body and the Archive)  

                                             Carte de Visite

The carte de visite was a type of small photograph which was a thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker paper card. Each photograph was the size of a photograph card were traded among friends and visitors as your identity. Mostly the bourgeoisie/ the middle class was in to this kind of things. Bourgeoisie is a sociologically defined class, referring to people with a certain cultural and financial capital belonging to the middle or upper stratum of the middle class.                                                                                                       Photography can be use to collect the items that you make collection as an evidence.

William Henry Fox Talbot- Articles of Glass, from the Pencil of Nature, 1844.

- Photography could  honour people or shame people.

- Sekula drawn attention on 2 branches of science for classify people to types. ( health, intelligence etc. )

· Physiognomy

- Person’s nature / Person’s identity. - Looking someone’s face and understanding their souls.  

Example; Charles Le Brun, Physiognomic Comparisons between men and animals,1670.

     ·Phrenology

- The brain creates person’s character. - Gives the idea of skull addicted shape. - Increasing need to population data. ( How they behave?- Who they look like? ) - Your character is individual. - To make an archive and collect information about population.        

Example; Phrenological Bust of Black Hawk,1838

Realism vs. Nominalism

Realism; the attitude or practice of accepting a situation as it is and being prepared to deal with it accordingly.

Nominalism; the doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality. Only particular objects exist, and properties, numbers, and sets are merely features of the way of considering the things that exist.

Are general types something real, something existent?

Realists: Yes they are.

Nominalists: No they are not. They are mere names.

Specimens of composite portraiture, Combination of Portraits, Francis Galton.

- Sekula tried to warn us by looking at historical moments.

Stereotyping  & Conceptualising

- We generalise what we see.

Example; Cover design for Time Magazine, Nancy Burson,1993 - The New Face of America.

#5IMAG016W #AdvancedResearchMethods #JournalTasks 

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Philosophy as Method: Ethics, Aesthetics, Ontology of Photography

   Philosophy  of;

- Photography - Mind - Art - Law - History - Religion - Philosophy is an activity: it is a way of thinking about certain sort of questions.   ( Nigel Warburton (1999/2011)

Philosophical method is characterised by;

- Use of logical argumentation - Systematically, continuity - Questioning of even the most fundamental beliefs - Clarity (hopefully) - Thoroughness - Critically - Openness to re-examination and change their mind  

Ontology asks what is photography

- It asks definitions - What makes photography photography? - What makes it different from all other forms of image making? - Modernism - Photography shows indexicality, truth, objectivity, realism, definition

Ethics

- Feminine - War - Violence - Terrorism - Slavery - Pollution - Killing - Natural disasters - Ontology of photography allows some level of connection with reality, morality of the actions/ situations themselves.

Ethical Questions

- Who should photograph these events and their victims and how? - Who benefits from the photography? - Where should such photographs be shown and to whom and why?

 Consequentialism: 

The moral value of an act is based on the act’s                

consequences: if the consequences are good, the act was good.

 Deontology: 

You have to do your duty, you have to do what is right in the first   place.

Aesthetics

- The beautiful in art and nature - What beauty is - What colours are used - How the image is composed

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Introduction

We talked about making photo books and how we can choose our concepts for it. There were some photographs which helped me a lot to think in a different perspective. Here are the examples;

by Lee Miller ( Surrealist Artist, photographer )

Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair Cover Photographer: Annie Leibovitz ( Example of gender trauma concept )

Gregory Crewdson - Beneath the Roses

War Photography concept. Photographer: Nilüfer Demir

And the last one is a very strong and meaningful image of Aylan Kurdi, a three year old Syrian boy. It happened in Turkey, they were trying to reach the Greek island of Kos from Bodrum. However the bodie of Aylan Kurdi and another child were discovered by two locals on the same morning.This concrete image has brought a lot of shock to the world.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Cameras before photography - looking at machines

Camera obscuras were discovered and used to view the world, including being used to view natural wonders such as solar eclipses etc. The obscura was used as looking devices - to observe the world.

Obscuras were machines that were used to capture the world visibly in which to look at it. In some cases, to look at subjects that the naked eye couldn’t. In early paintings, the mirror was understood as the pinnacle of a good and proper painting. Reflections of reality, as lifelike as possible, were desired by painters that therefore showed how great their work was. Good paintings looked like reflections of reality and often included a representation of a mirror in them, urging the notion that the painter was a skilled one. Mirrors were also used by painters to judge and critique their own work, being used to look at their paintings through the reflection of the mirror.

A ‘Claude glass’ was a piece of reflective surface that was used to frame a view of your surroundings. It was used to not capture the surroundings photographically, this wasn’t invented until early Fox Talbot’s inventions of light sensitive materials. The glass was instead used to simply view.

Upon the invention of photographic prints that we know today, there was no longer any need to paint perfect reflections of the world. The cameras as machines took over the role of the painter. It was now much easier and faster for a photograph to be taken of a place, documenting it, than for a painting to be made. This shift in representations of surroundings led to the birth of abstract in paintings, due to the painters past representational skills no longer being required.

Mirrors were used by painters in which to create a perfect perspective in their work. Gridded optics were used in order to create perfect perspectives and linear realism in the work. This led to paintings being made from reflections and projections, this led to the  camera obscuras becoming a tool for the artist.

Modern artists today are using camera obscuras  as modern instillations and works

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Photographer Inspiration - Beyond The Frame - Steven Shore

Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. 

Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, published by Aperture in 2004, presents a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade, has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added twenty rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a series now many decades old.

At age fourteen, Stephen Shore (born in New York, 1947) had his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At seventeen, Shore was a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, producing an important photographic document of the scene, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-three, he became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz forty years earlier to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has had numerous one-man shows, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. He has received two NEA grants and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. Since 1982 he has been director of the photography program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Notes lecture: Photography as method: Ethics, Aesthetics, Ontology of photography

Philosophy practice should be broken down into these subheadings:

·Use of logical argumentation

·Questioning of even the most fundamental beliefs

· Thoroughness

· Criticality

· Openness to re-examination

· Clarity

Ethics: -‘Deontology’ - You have to do your duty, you have to do whats right in the first place, regardless of the outcome

‘Consequentialism’ - The moral value of an act is based on the acts consequences

‘Indexicality’ - Direct representation of what it is being shown

Ontology - What is photography?

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Photographers Gallery: Burden of proof: The Construction Of Visual Evidence

The exhibition that we visited at the Photographers Gallery examines the way experts and historians create photographs as evidence in instances of crimes or acts of violence. Eleven cases are presented, spanning the period from the invention by Alphonse Bertillon of ‘metric’ photography crime scenes in the 1800′s to the reconstruction of a drone attack in Pakistan in 2012.

Alphonse Bertillon: Metric Photography Of Ctime Scenes, 1903:

In the late 1800′s, the advances in psychology challenged the reliability of memory to be less of a recording and more of a reconstruction of facts. Photography became merged with calculations and plans that became the start of police technology. Bertillon was there inventor through the use of photographic ‘overhead’ imagery of crime scenes.

When thinking about which methodology best suits the exhibition,The photographs of Alphonse Bertillon were that of recording murder and crime scenes. These photographs became artefacts that told history as it happened and how it was. The photographs were exact representations for how the scenes of criminality were. This deems the practice to be that of artefact making and recording.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Exploitation or Empathetic Identification - Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Does photography acting in a socially repressive way?

Should photography be able to assist?

Inside out essay

Predatory practice - documentary photography - exploitative practice  

Social docmentarists are baeudelairean flaneaurs  - i.e gentlemen that go for a leisurely stroll to look at paris … take photographs without getting involved nor social aim for why that take the photographs.

Insider - photographers have better position of engagement and privileged knowledge  - more thorough empathetic understanding of subject, represent it with truthful practice

Legalistic - insider represents in biased ways

Photography can only show us the surfaces of things

All photography can show us is appearances

How can we as photographers guide the way the photo is received by the viewer

Every building on sunset strip

No engagement with people

Homes for america

Nan goldin - insider photographic laungue, stating strong connection between subject and photographer

Jeff wall diatribe - recreating scenes of racism

[savtchenkoanastasia]

THE EASTER RISING 1916:   SEAN SEXTON COLLECTION Photographer’s Gallery

This exhibition investigates the significant role played by photography in the process that led to Irish independence, using the 1916 rebellion as a central focal point. It features approximately eighty rarely seen photographs and ephemera including souvenir postcards, albums, stereoscopic views, press and military photographs. Overall it’s pretty much an archival exhibition. I think what they’ve tried to tell by this exposition of photographs is to show the people how actually it occurred in the process but with more details.

 All the images excluding in the ones in the middle of the room which were displayed behind a glass table, were hanged at the level of the human eye.  The photographs on the wall were hanged on a frame, the frame itself was wooden and the photograph inside was in the middle of the frame occupying just the size of the image which was around A6/A5.

On that exhibition I really liked the green wall part, not particularly because of the photographs mainly because of the presentation. It looked very eye-catching and wasn’t too much as some people I believe may think, it was very contrasty between the other walls.

The text panels under each image was very short and simple explanation with what the photograph showed or in some photographed a bit more detailed history of it. The text panels itself in many cases can totally change the first perspective that you had by looking at the photograph, because you may see one thing without knowing the whole history or just relate to your own ideas and imagination, and after reading the text panel it can change you view on that image. I personally like to first examine a photograph and after I’ve done that I read the text panel, in that way I find It more interesting.

[savtchenkoanastasia]

The final video : Unfaithful Youtube link in case you can't play it here : http://youtu.be/FHyTKuzXoa4

[savtchenkoanastasia]

Ideas + Storyboard