#mph0402.1

[natasha--mitchell]

RESEARCH SUMMARY

‘Fenced’

Visual Research

For my visual research, I looked at photographers such as Stephen Shore, Thomas Ruff and Gabriele Basilico. These three artists really influenced the subject matter that I chose to explore in the project. I found the bleak, dull tones utilised in Ruff’s work as well as his subject matter of housing to be very aesthetically pleasing. It was the compositions of Shore’s and Basilico’s images that draw me to their work initially. They influenced me to explore symmetry and shapes in the urban landscape, which led me to the final ‘Fenced’ project. In addition, I was inspired to use dull, bleak colours in the project from the research of Ruff and Shore. All three artists looked at housing in their work which is what led to me to my theme of condensed housing and buildings in the city. They also took defining photographs of the areas in which they lived, focusing on particular places that depicted the certain era they were in. I am in the modern era, in which a lot is getting rebuilt and refurbished in order to look newer and contemporary, so the renewal of a city was naturally a part of my project. However, I slightly subverted this by photographing buildings in construction or demolition, as that is the integral part of renewal, as well as established housing, which is, too, a crucial element of the urban landscape.

Production

Initially, the term ‘urban landscape’ made me think of the man-made, cityscapes and the opposite of the natural world. I did many shoots in different areas as to explore the naturally occurring themes in the urban landscape. I tried shooting at night, where I live, central london and outer london to try and grasp the different elements of an ‘urban landscape’ and all it encompassed. Additionally, on these shoots, I would often have a different feature of urban landscape in mind such as apartment buildings, industrialisation or construction. Early in the project, I became interested in exploring ‘construction and destruction’; how a city is built up, how it becomes modernised and contemporary as well as industrial and almost natureless areas, which were inspired by the urban landscape itself. Unconsciously, I began to photograph layered images, which would incorporate a few aspects of the ever-changing urban landscape. I found these interesting because they accommodated most of the elements of urban landscape I was exploring and the compositions were interesting too, as I was initially looking at shapes that the landscape of building structures made. All the images I took were mainly isolating a specific subject and I never included people in my shots as I wanted to focus on the man-made and the lived in but without actual human presence, which gave the project a sense of eeriness and created a desolate atmosphere, much like the images from the house series by Thomas Ruff. I was also photographing building structures in a way that almost overwhelms the viewer, as they look so massive and overpowering. This warped perspective is was makes the images a little more powerful and would be compromised if people were in the shot.

Evaluation

For the final set of images, I chose five photographs that were coincidently all of the same area, Woolwich, that represented the compressed inner city, by depicting layers within fencing, as well as the compulsion to rebuild and renew. The images were all coherent as they all incorporated a ‘fence’ in the foreground, in addition to ‘layers’ of some sort. All of the images were edited with dull, gloomy tones to reflect the subject matter. I began with five series of images to choose from, however, the layered images are what resonated with me the most. I felt they said more about society in a city, gentrification and the environment more so than any of my other images, which were the main messages I wanted to get across in the project. All of the images barely have any nature or wildlife in them, which is a huge problem for cities in general. Also, all of the building and rebuilding is creating very expensive housing which has huge effects on areas and their inhabitants. I feel a strength I had in this project was that I had a lot of choice of images and sets, which all had thought go into them. However, a weakness of mine is that I had too many ideas of what I wanted to do so I didn’t have enough time to refine my chosen theme and, therefore, my images were not of the highest quality they could have been.

[elisharice-bapa-blog]

Research Summary- Street Photography

Visual Research

At the beginning of the project I was inspired by a lecture on the modern citizen and street, looking at the relationship between the people and their surroundings. Initially I wanted to portray your every day 21st century, modern cosmopolitan. I took great interest in the work of Duane Michals, particularly his series of images know as ‘chance meetings’, which highlights the somewhat conflicting ideas of the intimacy and alienation between people, which is present on the street. However, with having difficulty trying to recreate this somewhat obvious concept I decided to change my direction. I started to look at some of the photographs taken by the ‘Masters’ of street photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Walker Evans and seeing how they approached the genre. From this I learned that I wanted to take a more documentary method and actually connect with an area, keep returning and photographing the same places learning more about the environment with each photograph. This then led me Portobello Road where I was greatly interested in the community feeling in the area and the communication between the people, which I focused on capturing throughout my shoots there.

 Production

For my first shoot my desire was to capture the isolation and alienation portrayed on the streets. I thought the best way of doing this would be to capture people doing the same things but not communicating with each other or looking up from their mobile phones. For this I thought it would be best to use a slightly longer lens then the standard 55mm in order to still remain inconspicuous but also achieve a closer view of my subject, therefore not distracting them by being seen with a camera pointing at them thus still enabling me to capture candid moments.  However, I seemed to have experienced a technical fault during this shoot as many of my photographs came out over exposed even though the light meter in the camera read as correctly exposed, therefore rendering the negatives unusable to print.  After this mishap I decided I didn’t want to continue the concept of isolation as the photographs I did take weren’t very interesting to me at the time, So I changed my approach and decided to take a more documentary method of shooting, photographing the same area twice (Portobello Road Market) learning more about the area and the people occupying it each time I went. Sometimes after taking someone’s photograph I might approach them after and engage in general conversation enabling me to portray the area correctly in my images to how the atmosphere amongst the people felt.                                                            

 Evaluation

As my initial idea collapsed after the first shoot it took a little while to figure out what direction I was going to take for this project. However, after I discovered how I liked to photograph the street, by using full frames and more often than not a shallow depth of field it was easier to know how I wanted to represent a certain environment. As I returned to Portobello road I think it took the focus away from just capturing markets and more reflecting the societal feeling in a particular area. During this particular project I experienced a lot of difficulties when working with film. Although not my first time I made some very rookie mistakes such either checking the exposure or the focus was correct but never both a lot of the time which meant many of the negatives were left unusable. Due to the fact that it took me so long to develop a second theme I feel this project may come across immature, or that my final prints have been rather rushed together. I do feel as if I had more time explore this project I would continue on visiting Portobello Road market and developing a better sense for the place in my images. I would have liked to have a final set that gave the viewer the impression they were walking through the middle of the market place, capturing the true essence of the environment. Although I do feel as if my chosen final prints do give this impression to a certain degree, with move time this could have been a well thought out set of images truthfully describing an area after I had gotten to know it.

[elisharice-bapa-blog]

Contact sheet- Shoot 3

(Contact sheet missing, not yet scanned)

Review- Here I returned to portobello road as I felt I was getting to know the area and the people I photographed there, as often stopping to talk to the people I had photographed. From this I feel as if my project took a more documentary approach as I was only photographing one area and the people in it and how they all interact with each other. Again for this shoot I carried on capturing full frames often using a shallow depth of field, and from this I feel as if I have found a particular style in which I prefer to photograph. 

[elisharice-bapa-blog]

Street Photography

For this project I was initially inspired by a lecture on the modern citizen and the street which walked me through all the different styles and ways of portraying the streets that photographers have already been exploring. Most commonly the street has been portrayed as a place of anxiety or freedom and photographers often use their images as an ‘echo chamber’ to how society is feeling. 

This inspired my own train of thoughts on how I would portray the 21st century, modern day citizen. My immediate reaction was drawn to how the streets offer a sense of intimacy but also alienates people, how we are often caught  doing the same thing as the people around us but not communicating with them. For example, you may commute everyday with the same people and yet never utter a single word to them. We all have these similarities in our day-to-day lives and yet we never share them, making the streets an inherently lonely place to be. 

[elisharice-bapa-blog]

Research Summary- Landscapes

Visual Research

Initially I had no real idea as to how I was going to approach the brief of Landscapes. This resulted in my research being very broad, looking at how different photographers, such as Gabriele Basilico, Paul Strand, and Rut Blees Luxemburg have approached Landscapes- each very different. From looking at such a broad range of approaches I found that I preferred images that made you think a little about what you were looking at and the context behind that, rather than just banal photographs of photogenic surroundings.

After reading ‘Thoughts on Landscapes’ by Frank Gohlke I took a more defined approach to the brief. Gohlke wrote that the best landscapes “propose the possibility of an intimate connection with a world to which we have access only through our eyes”. From this I realised I didn’t want to capture landscapes for what they are- banal, lifeless scenes, I wanted to be more abstract in the way I photograph, using my camera as an eye into another world- one we wouldn’t ordinarily see. This meant that I had to take an entirely different approach to what I had started with, focusing on capturing the ordinary in unique ‘unseen’ ways. For this approach I took inspiration from the likes of Edward Weston and Man Ray, looking at images where they took the ordinary and transformed it into something unrecognisable to its nature form. It was this that led to the development of the title of my project- ‘New World’.

 Production

The first two shoots I shot were definitely more exploratory than the proceeding shoots. This is due to the fact that I had no clear direction as to where I wanted to take this brief, resulting in me collecting an array of widely different landscape photographs with no real sense of cohesion. However, what this did allow me to do was identify how I didn’t like photographing landscapes. From this I leaned that I prefer not to shoot wide frames and like to focus on one area of detail in an image, making that the focal point. I also found that I favoured photographing at night because I like the way different places are lit and it’s better lighting to capture reflections and lights against different surfaces creating a more visually complex image. From shoots three and onwards, a structure begins to appear within my work and a more defined approach to the brief emerges.

It is here that the research I preformed really starts to impact my work, looking at the world with a more abstract, defined eye.

I decided I only wanted to photograph architecture and was going to use a zoom lens in order to take the building out of the context of its surroundings, focusing purely on the shapes and lines created within the frame. In doing this I created a new way of looking at the world, photographing ordinary buildings in unique ways giving the viewer a distorted and abstract interpretation of the everyday. It was this movement into a more abstract methodology that framed the theme of my work and in selecting my final images I looked for photographs that suggested something different to their natural state. Due to this I have finished with quite a futuristic, ‘new world’ style, body of work.

 Evaluation

Throughout this project I really feel as if the way I approached this brief has developed and grown into a fully-fledged concept and theme. At the beginning I faced problems with the method I wanted to take towards this brief, so initially this resulted in my first few shoots looking incoherent with no form or direction. It was the research I did that really framed the ideas behind this project; specifically Frank Gohlke’s ‘Thoughts on Landscapes’ really inspired and spurred this project on into the development of a clear theme.

I chose to title my theme ‘New World’, inspired by the likes of Man Ray and Edward Weston, I wanted to take the everyday and transform it into something unrecognisable from it’s true form. My subjects were buildings, focusing on modern architecture with lots of glass and metal, this resulted in quite a cold futuristic undertone to a lot of my images, strengthening my theme.

In addition to this I had to really think about what I wanted to capture in the frame. Following quite an abstract approach my shots were normally zoomed in with the objective of focusing in on a small section of a building. The aim of this was to extract the building from its existing environment, removing all known context and just looking at the image in terms of the lines and shapes created within the frame. I think this is clearly demonstrated in the final images I have chosen.

My main issue with this project, once I had decided on a theme, was with the method in which I shot the images. Many of my photographs are quite incoherent as some were shot with a wider angle and others were zoomed all the way in. To improve on this I might consider using a prime lens to avoid the temptation of framing a shot with the zoom. Overall I feel as if I have successfully combated the challenges I faced with this brief and am happy with the final result.