#dart1130

[xue-xia-blog]

W2 Photogram 4 March 2019

Picture 1 - Group photos of all in class experiments

Picture 2 - 8 - Photograms, steps and notes please refer to the table at the last

[despina1001-blog]

Artist Research - Reuben Wu

Reuben Wu is another artist that I found while looking for film photographers whose work really took me by surprise. Wu's style of photography is surreal, focusing on the unique use of lighting, time of day and subject matter to capture his artwork.

Reuben Wu is a photographer, director, music producer and member of the band Ladytron, based in Chicago, USA. He was born in Liverpool and grew up in North West England, training in industrial designer at Sheffield Hallam University. 

He graduated in 1997[2] and finished his MSc in 1998 at University of Liverpool before working as an industrial designer. Wu hand drew the artwork of the UK edition of Ladytron's first album 604 and began to document his travels on tour with the band via photography. His visual art career began in 2012 once the band took a break and he was able to focus full-time on his own creative output.[4] Wu had since created artistic content for GE, Apple's "Shot On iPhone" campaign, Jaguar Land Rover, Google and Interscope amongst others. 

Wu's work is reminiscent of another planet, photographing landscapes at sunrise and sunset with long exposures to create a distant feeling. Looking at these works I feel like I'm staring at the landscape of another world, and begin to wonder not so much where it is but what it is like there. I feel inspired to travel looking at these images, which is something that I think would be interesting to bring into my own work.

[freyashi]

Shadows

[joshuapurvis2020-blog]

#Dart1130 photography attempts

[lisesdart]

Visual diary - week two

This week I experimented with leaves, flowers baking-paper with writing on it and trash.

On the first attempt the words written on the baking paper were not visible as the ink was not opaque enough. It worked better once I darkened the writing. I liked the leaves on the first attempt more than the others because they overlapped some places which gave it more dimension than just black and white.

I also figured out that the trash I used kind of ended up as just a blob, so I need to find trash that is more distinct. I also want to experiment with folding the paper to give it more dimension as well. I would also like to experiment with something that would spread the light out unevenly like a piece of glass or a prism. I would have som cardboard or paper and cut out a place for the prism to sit so that the light would be distributed underneath the light-blocker.

Artist I like and want to draw inspiration from:

Monica Donovan, a Norwegian artist who takes pictures of trash she finds on the streets and makes the picture look beautiful. This artist is not related to darkroom photography or photograms, but I like what she does with the pictures she takes to spread awareness on pollution.

I like the way Pablo Picasso has layered his photograms. And I want to layer mine more to get more dimension.

https://discover.goldmarkart.com/pablo-picasso-diurnes-photograms/

I have also decided that I want my assessment to be focused around organic materials such as flowers, leaves, sticks etc. in a combination with trash from the streets. I also think I want my different pictures to describe how pollution is taking over nature. So the first couple pictures will have little to no trash and then as the pictures progress more and more will become trash.

26. September 2019

[freyashi]

Assignment 2

There are two sections, the first section is the photo of my neighborhood and the garden statues of my homestay family. My homestay mother is half Greek. She is consequently very much culturally attached to the classical style. These are more intimate representations of identity (maybe culture background).

The second section are photos of the buildings in Sydney city, near the NSW Art Gallery and the statue outside the Art Gallery. These are more public representatives compare to the first section. They are more like the representation of the public cityscapes of Sydney.

These are some meanings I made, and can be tell by words.

[rosesdart]

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.

[rosesdart]

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