Photography Workbook

PORTFOLIO

TOMASZ MICHALAK

ABSENCE-PRESENCE 2010 DATE OF PROJECT

0.1

10/2010

VERSION

MONTH

Media arts and design semester I project ‘absence-presence’ by tomasz michalak

ABSENCE PRESENCE Project Brief You will be working as individual photographers, producing a set of photographs responding to the theme of ‘Absence - Presence’ - both informed by lectures and group/individual tutorials including feedback as well as your own research. It is left to our own imagination and creativity how you interpret the theme, yet you are encouraged to think beyond the literal representation of ‘Absence - Presence’. are expected to produced a series of 5-7 fibre-based black & white prints which works as a coherent set of discreet shots or as a sequence. You can photograph in any style or form. The paper size required is 8 x 10 inches (20 x25cm). Consider using a title for your body of work.

Research File The research file is central to the development of our projects. It should be a commentary on all aspects of your work from beginning to end. It should contain visual references and sources/samples of inspiration, contact prints, printing notes and all other documentation. It should

include discussions of your photographic and printing techniques and an analysis of your final body of work; how well does it work what could be improved, are the images coherent, did you realise your initial idea etc. A clear progression of your project from start to finish should be evident - this includes your editing and selection process. Please make sure that it is all easy to navigate through the research file.

Critical reflection You are ask to write a critical reflection that analyses how and what you have achieved in relation to the theme and your chosen subject matter. this written reflection should be about 200 words.

Submission the following must be submitted to the School Registry by 6.00pm on Monday 20th December 2010 or alternatively to J1.15 on Friday, 19th December 2010 (after the crate).

“We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing.

Action always generates inspiration. tel Bianca Brunner, ‘Ho t 3’. (The most relevan n inspiration to my ow circumstances).

Shizuka Yokomizo, from series ‘Stranger’. (The models have never met the photographer).

Claire Wheeldon, Childhood institutions’, 2001.

Eugene Atget, from series ‘Paris’, Coin de la Rue Valette at Pantheon, 1925. (My favorite inspiration for the project absent - present).

Guy Bourdin. ( I am fascinated by this photographer and in love with everything he pro duces. His photofo lio is an absolute must see for everyone).

, Kyna Gournley from series ‘Missing’.

Confert Richardson Press Gar y Winogrand, Ellio 1973. ns’, atio Rel blic ‘Pu ence, from series

Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘C lywood’ 1993. (Abso terms of concept of

Inspiration seldom generates action.�

Cinema Dome Hololute favourite in f Absent - Present).

19 Octobe r 2 0 10 Inspir ationa l note s

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r ding A f t er be prese ing giv nt-ab s e n this brie actually e nt . f I w as s asked t o m o e w ha t c o produce ideas he n f u se d d. T he p lped a li a s w ha t hotogra t tle, alt phers sh tion in we we r e h o u g o h general. w t n h e a y s inspir w e E r e s p a e m e awa ve r y g o cially G ational y. A f ter od sourc uy Bou e of ins rdin wh a f ew r e at my o piraa o s ll e pho t o g y ridicu wn live raphs ju les and and exp I star ted s a t b e b r s lew iences. tract id to see ab T his wa e as I s t a s e n t - pr e s sor t o f r ted to lo c e n t ra t sent alm ing on a ok breakin o s t e ve r y my own g point knowle w li h e w f r e e e r e . dge of t e xperien I ho p e t h he subje ce, I wil at by co l be able ct mat t ner and t t o h ave the in hus tak F ro m t h side e be t t er is day o photogr n w ards I a a p s o m e wa h s . m goin y relate g to r eco t o t h e pr I receive r d e ve r y oject as d a t s ch thing th w e ll as the ool. Any at will in must ad impor ta way, I f mit I am nt tutor e e l t h a ia t n I l s t ha t o am doin t really and me b o t he r e d g it for ssy. It is m if a y s r e c ord o self so I om e on e am doin f t h e wa finds it g a libra y I wo r k disorga r y r e se a the first e d nised through r ch f r o m pages of out the t o m o r ro this wor p r o w je ct. I af t e r n o k book w on and ith som ho pe to fi e intere ll sting fi ndings .

kick start your creativity

Research how-to Where do ideas come from?

Modes of working

»»Other people »»Travel »»Personla Exper »»History »»Papers »»Movies »»Creativity »»Visual obser. »»Diologue »»Nature »»Interaction »»Isolation »»Pain, pleasure,

Informed - Having knowledge of a particualr subject or situation. Associated with left side of our brain - logical, sequential, rational, detailed, analytical, objective.

»»Music »»Smell »»Intimacy »»Dreams »»Literature »»Advertisment »»Stress »»Drugs »»Politics »»Education »»Feelings »»Relingions »»Purpose

Intutive - Woking with direct percetion of truth, independent from conscious reasoning. Associated with right side of our brain - responsive, random, emotional, holisitc, synthesizing, subjective.

Practise Research

What to do now »»Experiment, explore, test »»Look at lots of images »»take notes »»read about the project/series/image »»read about the wider context »»exchange ideas with others »»take ltos of images »»edit, select, share your images »»review first edit and re-shoot, reconsider some atributes of creativity Challenging assuptions Being receptive to new ideas Recognizing similarities or differences Making connections Talking chances

How do you develop an idea?

Building on ideas to make »»Not thinking too much »»Thinking a lot »»Talking to friends »»Writing, note taking »»Experimenting »»Research »»Sleep »»Drawings »»Reject, change , develop, scrap »»Brainstorming »»Google »»Reading »»Looking at sth similar and dissimilar »»Prototype »»Workbook »»Mind mapping »»Mood board »»Accumulate ides

better ideas Looking at things in new wasys Taking advantage of the Research Practice

unexpected thinking outside the box Knowing how to see making thought visible thinking fluently connecting the unconnected finding what you are not looking for

Diane Arbus from Encyclopedia of Photography

A pivotal figure in contemporary documentary photography, Diane Arbus produced a substantial body of work before her suicide in 1971. Her unrelentingly direct photographs of people who live on the edge of societal acceptance, as well as those photographs depicting supposedly “normal” people in a way that sharply outlines the cracks in their public masks, were controversial at the time of their creation and remain so today.

Between 1955 and 1957 Arbus studied under Lisette Model. Model encouraged Arbus to concentrate on personal pictures and to further develop what Model recognized as a uniquely incisive documentary eye. Soon after Arbus began her studies with Lisette Model, she began to devote herself fully to documenting transvestites, twins, midgets, people on the streets and in their homes, and asylum inmates.

Arbus’s pictures are almost invariably confrontational: the subjects look directly at the camera and are sharply rendered, lit by direct flash or other frontal lighting. Her subjects appear to be perfectly willing, if not eager, to reveal themselves and their flaws to her lens.

“What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s.... That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.”

Her work was often compared with that of August Sander, whose Men Without Masks expressed similar concerns, although in a seemingly less ruthless manner. In July 1971 Diane Arbus took her own life in Greenwich Village, New York. Her death brought even more attention to her name and photographs.

In the following year Arbus became the first American photographer to be represented at the Venice Biennale. A major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, which traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada, was viewed by over 7.25 million people. The 1972 Aperture monograph Diane Arbus, now in its twelfth edition, has sold more than 100,000 copies.

“Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience.

[These people] were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

diane arbus Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot.

It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.

I’m very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I’ve barely heard of them and the minute they get public, I become terribly blank about them.

Sometimes I can see a photograph or a painting, I see it and I think, That’s not the way it is. I don’t mean a feeling of, I don’t like it. I mean the feeling that this is fantastic, but there’s something wrong. I guess it’s my own sense of what a fact is. Something will come up in me very strongly of No, a terrific No. It’s a totally private feeling

I get of how different it really is.

I’m not saying I get it only from pictures I don’t like. I also get it from pictures I like a lot. You come outdoors and all you’ve got is you and all photographs begin to fall away and you think, My God, it’s really totally different. I don’t mean you can do it precisely like it is, but you can do it more like it is.

I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn’t dropped it, but there’s something similar in what I’m trying to say. That once it’s been done, you want to go someplace else.

There’s just some sense of straining.

Nudist camps was a terrific subject for me. I’ve been to three of them over a period of years. The first time I went was in 1963 when I stayed a whole week and that was really thrilling. It was the seediest camp and for that reason, for some reason, it was also the most terrific.

It was really falling apart. The place was mouldy and the grass wasn’t growing.

I had always wanted to go but I sort of didn’t dare tell anybody. The director

met me at the bus station because I didn’t have a car so I got in his car and I was very nervous. He said, “I hope you realize you’ve come to a nudist camp.”

Well, I hope I realized I had. So we were in total agreement there. And then he gave me this speech saying, “You’ll find the moral tone here is higher than that of the outside world.” His rationale for this had to do with the fact that the human body is really not as beautiful as it’s cracked up to be and when you look at it, the mystery is taken away.

They have these rules. I remember at one place there were two grounds for expulsion. A man could get expelled if he got an erection or either sex could get expelled for something like staring. They had a phrase for it.

I mean you were allowed to look at people but you weren’t allowed to somehow make a big deal of it.

It’s a little bit like walking into an hallucination without being quite sure whose it is. I was really flabbergasted the first time. I had never seen that many men naked, I had never seen that many people naked all at once. The first man I saw was mowing his lawn.

I don’t need to know anything about the people I photograph, but it’s important that I recognize something about myself in them.

Rineke Dijkstra

Dijkstra concentrates on single portraits, and usually works in series, looking at groups such as adolescents, clubbers, and soldiers. Her subjects are often shown standing, facing the camera, against a minimal background. This compositional style is perhaps most notable in her well-known beach portraits, which generally feature one or more adolescents against a seascape.

an interwiew with Rineke Dijkstra This insightful Q&A with the Dutch photographer is excerpted from the stellar new book of interviews, “Image Makers, Image Takers.”

By Anne-celine Jaeger Posted December 16, 2008

When did you get into photography?

I was studying to be an arts and crafts teacher, but didn’t feel comfortable doing that. Then a friend lent me his camera once and I just thought, ‘this is it.’ I was 19. I did a photography course to learn the practical side of things and then went to Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, an art school in Amsterdam.

I’ve always liked observing. Even as a kid I was obsessed with watching people that looked special to me.

Do you think it’s important to be technically proficient?

It depends what kind of photography you do. It’s important to know the possibilities in terms of what you can do. For example, how I use the flash and light is very important in my images. For me it was a case of learning by doing because I never understood anything they taught me at school. about authenticity. I try to find people that have something special.

I don’t even know what it is. It’s intuition.

The pictures of the kids in the Tiergarten in Berlin, for example, came about because those children were actually playing a game and I was simply to get to know them just by observing them when I am taking the picture. I try and look for

an uninhibited moment, where people forget about trying to control the image of themselves. People go into sort of trance because so much concentration is needed from both photographer and the subject when you are working with a 4x5.

Even the tiniest movement means you have to refocus. I also need to be able to relate to my subject. For example, when I took the portraits of the girls in the Buzzclub in Liverpool, England I could relate to them. I tried doing the same in other clubs, but it just didn’t work.

What interests you about the transition of a person?

I think photography really lets you examine how a person is changing.

When I was photographing Olivier, the Frenchman who enlisted in the Foreign Legion, every time I went to see him I thought he hadn’t changed at all. But in the picture you can see the change in his eyes, in his expression. They were subtle, but you could see them clearly.

What do you look for in your subjects?

It’s important for me to know the location is right before I approach a subject. Then, I’ll find the subject

within that location and work from what the subject does. When subjects are posing for me, I don’t ever want to manipulate them too much.

What is your aim when taking pictures?

I want to show things you might not see in normal life. I make normal things appear special. I want people to look at life in a new and different way, but it always has to be based on reality. It’s important that you don’t pass judgement, and leave space for interpretation. For example, in the Almerisa series, the young Bosnian refugee, whose portrait I took for the first time in the early 1990s, it was important for me not to show any specific details of her surroundings such as the décor of the apartment. If you show too much of a subject’s personal life, the viewer will immediately make assumptions. If you leave out the details, the viewer has to look for much subtler hints such as how her shoelaces are tied, or her lipstick or the state of her The same goes for the picture of the boy in Odessa. You could show he is poor by including a trash can or a stray cat in the picture. But for me it’s all about subtlety and the fact that you really have to read the image to get clues about the boy. That makes it equal for everybody.

I like it when photographs are democratic. I usually find that portraits work best if you don’t have a specific idea of what you are looking for. You have to be open for anything to happen.

If you try and force something, there is always the danger of a picture becoming too onedimensional.

How did you come up with the idea for the ‘Beach’ series?

I broke my hip about 15 years ago and

started doing self-portraits after swimming in the pool where I was doing physiotherapy. I was fascinated by capturing something unconscious and natural in a photograph, something that was miles away from the boring and predictable businessmen I had until then mostly photographed. I was interested in photographing people at moments when they had dropped all pretence of a pose. Once I began taking these pictures, I realized I would prefer to do a series because it gave me a better grip on a subject What equipment do you use?

I use a 4x5 inch field camera with a standard lens and a tripod. The negatives are the size of postcards, which gives you really wonderful sharp detail and contrast.

The end result is that your photograph is almost more real than reality.

How do you set up your lights?

In the beginning I always had really complicated lighting set-ups because I thought: the more lights, the better the picture. Now I work with as few lights as possible.

For me, daylight is the main source of light, and the flash is really only there to lighten the shadows. I use one Lumedyne flash. It works with batteries so you can use it inside and outside.

How many frames do you shoot per subject?

I take about four or five sheets of film per subject, but I might shoot about five different people in a park on any given day.

I’ve realized that I can’t just go to a park and wait for the right person to turn up.

I have to start working. Then I get into it and become part of the environment. It’s

a development. For example, a picture I took of a little girl in Barcelona only came about at the end of my working day. I was actually finished and packing up but then I saw her. She was there with her dad riding that scooter, looking at me like ‘What are you doing?’ and it’s exactly the same look as in the photo. That’s what I’m looking for. It’s got to be emphatic. If you see the picture, it shouldn’t look forced, it should look like a snapshot. You’re not supposed to think it’s all set up. You should take it for granted and it should be totally natural somehow. I took three frames of her. That’s how long her concentration lasted. But I got my picture.

How do you edit your pictures?

I scan the negatives and make them bigger so you can see more. Then I might leave them for two weeks because you need distance to see properly. It happens to me that I take a picture and I think it doesn’t work at all and then I look at it three years later and I think it’s a great picture. It’s probably linked to having something in mind and being disappointed that your expectations weren’t met, but then realizing later that it was in fact a lucky moment. But in general I make sure the light, the facial expression and the posture of the body look right.

Where do you get your inspiration?

I like the work of contemporary portrait photographers like Thomas Struth, Paul Graham and Judith Joy Ross as well as some of the older generation, in particular Diane Arbus and August Sander a lot, but generally I get more out of looking at old paintings such as the Rembrandts, Vermeers and Versproncks at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I

think the light, as well as the emotional and psychological forces at play are so incredible in those paintings. I prefer the old classics to contemporary art shows.

What art form does photography come closest to?

Perhaps sculpture. I think it’s important that people understand and look at photography in a more abstract way. It’s about being able to imagine looking behind the image as if it was three-dimensional.

Why do you print your images large format?

I like it when a picture is monumental especially in a museum setting. But for me it’s also important that if you stand in front of my picture, you feel the urge to come closer. If photos are too large, people tend to look at them only from a distance. I like them to be printed big enough so people view them from a distance but small enough so that they step forward and look for all the details in the picture. I think there is a whole story in all those details. It’s about intimacy too.

Do you ever do editorial work?

When I first left art school I did portraits for magazines and newspapers but found it difficult because I wanted to create something more substantial that related to everybody, not just to one specific person. I learnt a lot about how to be technical, how to work with people and how to work fast, but now I’m more interested in my personal projects. Occasionally I do assignments for The New York Times Magazine.

Do you think people can learn

a certain way of seeing?

I think everybody can do it. Diane Arbus said that you just have to choose a subject and continue photographing it for as long as something comes out of it. You always have to use your own fascinations as a starting point. It’s the same if you are in a group of people: you will always look at the people who are the most interesting to you. The same goes for photography, you have to photograph what you like. Passion is really important.

What excites you most about photography?

I love being totally in the moment, when everything comes together and is just right. You actually see things clearer. But I can spend weeks in the park without ever seeing anything interesting and I never know whether it is because it simply isn’t there or because I just didn’t see it.

What makes one image stand out more than another?

A photograph works best when the formal aspects such as light, colour and composition, as well as the informal aspects like someone’s gaze or gesture come together. In my pictures I also look for a sense of stillness and serenity.

I like it when everything is reduced to its essence. You try to get things to reach a climax. A moment of truth

August sander father of modern portrait

August Sander (17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander has been described as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century.”

His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). By 1945, Sander’s archive included over 40,000 images.

In 2002, the August Sander Archiv and scholar Susanne Lange published a seven-volume collection comprising some 650 of Sander’s photographs (August Sander: People of the 20th Century, Harry N. Abrams).

August Sander is considered by many photographers to be the father of the modern portrait. He’s influenced the likes of Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, and Walker Evans.

“Every person’s story is written plainly on his face, though not everyone can read it.”

The late August Sander is best known for his body of work called “People of the 20th Century.” In the 1920s and ‘30s, both in his studio and out on his bike on muddy German country roads, Sander photographed every type of person he came across in an attempt to capture German society as a whole (...)

Sander photographed middle class families, farmers, students, blind children, war veterans, circus artists and beggars. In each photograph Sander had his subjects simply stare at the camera, and hold still.

Martin Weinstein of Weinstein Gallery declares Sander’s is his favorite photographer.

“For me what makes him a great photographer is the truthfulness of the portraits, the directness of the portraits,” says Weinstein. “It’s his attempt to not induce any type of emotion...

“Nothing seemed to me more appropriate than to project an image of our time with absolute fidelity to nature by means of photography… Let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age”

, you ntry girls re of Cou tu ic P e e n In th on for Dia inspirati e th e s. se in can pair of tw ture of a Arbu s’ pic ra V e th cook and da In Pastry e the foun se n ca ou y , er h nis ns work . ving Pen ed tion for Ir wife dre ss Painter’s of re tu could Pic d blou se, slack s an e it h w in for a mistaken easily be taken by photograph v A edon.

R ichard

Top right: 1. Gypsy 2. Bricklayer’s Mate 3. Country Girls 4. Pastry Cook 5. The Earthbound Farmer Bottom Right: 1. Farmers 2. Painter’s Wife 3. Young Girl in Circus Caravan 4. Village Schoolteacher 5. Varnisher

‘Why can people not just go and look at them and say: Aha, a large photo, a large head? Why can’t they just accept the picture as a picture and say: Thank you Mr. Ruff, you did that well?’

Thomas ruff

Thomas Ruff’s words amount to an ironic polemic against arbitrary interpretations of his photographs, and he likewise challenges the general availability of all things visible. From the mouth of a pupil of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art this comes as no surprise. Bernd und Hilla Becher, who teach at the latter institution, have promulgated a way of photographing architecture that is based on strict photographic realism, and in so doing have founded a veritable school.

But ‘accepting a picture as a picture’ neutrally, dispassionately and without passing judgment – that is no easy matter. Thomas Ruff’s portraits are unsettling simply on account of their immense scale. Every detail, every pore, every pimple on these large-size faces is visible. We would never stare so brashly at a living person. Ruff’s

photographs dispense with this barrier of modesty. We stare at the persons photographed – and they stare right back.

However, their distanced gaze in the pictures does not infest us. On the contrary, it awakens our emotions. We like or dislike the characters. Some faces appeal to us, others less so. And then we begin to think about who these people could be.

What are their occupations? Where do they come from? What is the story behind them?

Man is, by nature, curious. We want to know what is hidden behind the facade, and a face is in a sense a facade. In the 18th century, there was a widespread interest in physiognomy, with people trying to draw conclusions about someone’s character from his facial features. A great deal of this activity was pure speculation. But today, who would dare claim that a focus on the

physiognomic was completely foreign to him? We may see photographs with our eyes, but the images occur in our minds.

an interwiew with Thomas ruff JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART Photos on the left are from a photographic collection of “Nudes”

Philip Pocock: Unlike the Neue Sachlichkeit of Sander or Renger-Patzsch, there is a clear crisis of belief in the objectivity of your medium in your work. True or false?

Thomas Ruff: It’s both. It’s true and false.

They also used the camera as an instrument to take pictures. The difference between them and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost bit by bit the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality.

Pocock: What do you mean by real reality?

Ruff: Photography has been used for all kinds of interests for the past 150 years. Most of the photos we come across today aren’t really authentic anymore--they have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality. You have to know the conditions

of a particular photograph in order to understand it properly because the camera just copes what is in front of it.

Pocock: Why did photography become so important in the art world?

Ruff: Maybe it’s a question of generations. My generation, maybe the generation before, grew up with photography, television, magazines. The surrounding is different from a hundred years ago.

Photography became the most influential medium in the Western world. So nowadays you don’t have to paint to be an artist. You can use photography in a realistic, sachlich way. You can even do abstract photographs. It’s become autonomous.

Pocock: There’s little personality in your portraits, little use in the buildings, and a skepticism in photography’ ability

to communicate anything real in the Stars. Does this mean photography is empty in a traditional sense?

Ruff: It’s empty in it sense of capturing real reality. But, for example, if I make a portrait, people say that there’s little personality in it. They say that. But in a way there is because I know all of the people I photograph. Maybe the problem is that if in the same way I had photographed a famous person, it would be a different looking picture because we know another thing about this person.

Pocock: So they’re anonymous . . .

Ruff: They’re anonymous to you.

Pocock: You’re dealing with the absoluteness of the medium, its picture perfectness. Would you agree with this?

Ruff: Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to

Pocock: Have you turned that around on your teachers, like the portraits are clearly related to standard ID photos?

Ruff: Yes, sure. The portraits are definitely a construct based on identification photographs.

Pocock: And the newspaper photographs are not your own?

Ruff: I couldn’t do all that by myself. It was also important for me that they have already been printed, that they had been so-called important enough to be worth printing, even if they are only illustrations for a text. So the photograph itself doesn’t tell you anything; it’s the text that does. And if I cut off the text, what happens then?

go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not.

Pocock: And what about your relation to the picture?

Ruff: Well, maybe I can say it’s my curiosity that makes me do each one because I want to see them. And then I go on.

Pocock: When I look at one of your portraits, or buildings, it’s almost as though I can see more than is actually there.

Ruff: But I think that happens because it’s a picture. It’s a frozen picture, nothing moves. If you stand in front of a building, maybe you turn your head because there’s a noise, something moves, so there is not this concentration. But when a picture is on the wall,

frozen, you get a totally different kind of concentration. And with the portraits you cannot stand in front of him or her and see them as you do in one of my photographs. That’s impossible.

Pocock: It’s well known that you studied photography with the Bechers. Was that the start?

Ruff: At that time I didn’t know their work.

I took twenty of my most beautiful slides, landscapes of the Black Forest and holiday pictures. It was very strange because they accepted me. In the first year I had a brief talk with Bernd Becher about the slides. He said that they were more or less stupid because those photographs were not my own photographs but cliches, and they were an indication of the photographs I had seen in magazines. They were not my own.

Pocock: What quality do you look for in an news photograph?

Ruff: You know, all the newspaper photographs are standard, archetypal, like politicians shaking hands, or a rocket blasting off, a landscape somewhere. I can’t tell you more than that. I just see it and I know it’s the right photograph.

Not that it’ good but it makes a point for my idea.

Pocock: Some quick questions: What do you think of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon?

Ruff: I like them.

Pocock: Walker Evans, Eugène Atget?

Ruff: In my first years at the academy they were my most important influence.

Perhaps Stephen Shore and William Eggleston were of similar importance to me there as the older documentary photographers but within color. And I still like looking at them.

Pocock: How does the American school of the seventies large-format photography differ form the Düsseldorf school?

Ruff: I think it’s just a different landscape.

America looks different from Europe.

Pocock: Why color in the portraits and not much color anywhere else?

Ruff: Color is close to reality. The eye sees in color. Black and white is too abstract for me.

tecture but that average style you find in any suburb of any Western city. It’s color, shape, line. It’s more geometric.

Pocock: How do you see repetition in your work?

Ruff: I wouldn’t say repetition, but I would say I work in series. Not to prove to myself that I was right but I’m not satisfied with one picture but maybe with ten or fifteen or forty.

Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?

Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?

Pocock: No. Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over.

For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn’t used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It’s also a homage to Karl Bloßfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes.

So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.

Pocock: I feel a certain anxiety when I see the portraits hung in a series.

I’m reminded of that game as a kid: What is wrong with this picture?

Ruff: It’s not “What’s wrong?” but “It’s a big puzzle.” With one photograph there isn’t enough information. Even I couldn’t explain to an extraterrestrial all of mankind with my forty portraits of my friends. You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph.

Photography pretends. You can see everything that’s in front of the camera, but there’s always something beside it.

Pocock: What about the buildings you photograph?

Ruff: I choose the buildings like the people I photograph. I know them from driving around and sometimes it makes click. Then I have to go back and see if it is really something, if it’s possible to photograph it. I don’t look for high archi-

Pocock: Is it something you tried to avoid?

Ruff: In my series of portraits they are all young, Some of those commissions I would never use for exhibitions.

Pocock: Have you ever done portrait commissions?

Ruff: Not so much, but when I did portraits, people came and asked me. At that time everything was ready for doing portraits so I said, okay, sit in front of the camera.

Pocock: When you show so many portraits all at once, are you trying to convince us of something?

Ruff: Convince?

Pocock: To persuade us of something about these people?

Ruff: Maybe I have to say it differently.

I’ve been asked a lot why my portraits never smile. Why are they so serious?

They look so sad and like that. And I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe it has something to do with my generation.

Like I use all-over lights, no shadows. We grew up in the seventies. The reality was that there was no candlelight. If you go through a place, through the car park, it’s always fluorescent, so no shadows, just the all-over light. And in the seventies in Germany we had a so-called Terrorismushysterie: the secret service surveyed people who were against nuclear power; the government created or invented a so-called Berufsverbot.

This meant left-wing teachers were dismissed, so sometimes it was better not to tell what you were thinking. All over we have those video cameras, in the supermarkets, the car park. In big places everywhere you’ve got those cameras.

If you stand in front of a customs officer, you try to make a face like the one in your passport. So why should my portraits be communicative at a time when you could be prosecuted for your sympathies.

Pocock: This notion of surveillance seems to link nicely with the Night work. How far are you with this new Surveillance series?

Ruff: I started thinking about it at the beginning of last year. I had the idea of combining the surveillance aspect of the portraits with the darkness of the Stars.

Pocock: Are they all that green and black?

Ruff: Yes, I use a light-amplifying

lens that is normally installed in tanks or military jets to see at night.

It’s another prosthetic use of the medium. If you use a microscope or a telescope you always see something you can’t see with the naked eye.

Pocock: Why is it green?

Ruff: It’s the authentic color from the phosphorescent screen and if it’s green, it’s green.

Pocock: Do you feel that one day you’ll give up photography for electronic processes?

Ruff: I’m happy to work again with my own photographs after being in the studio since 1989 with the Stars and Newspaper photographs. Now I go out at night.

Pocock: They look like pictures of privacy.

Are you investigating the idea of privacy?

Ruff: The first pictures I made were of backyards. It was January and really cold so I visited friends and took pictures from their rear windows.

Pocock: Is there a little bit of the voyeur in every photographer?

Ruff: These have been done with a device that detectives are starting to use, so they can work on stealing privacy.

Pocock: To solve crimes?

Ruff: Yes, this picture looks as though it could be a scene of a crime.

Pocock: The crime of photography.

Is photography itself a crime?

Ruff: It can be.

“For me, making a photograph is mostly an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process.�

Thomas struth

‘I was trying to analyse and to comprehend myself, my own family, the position of the family in western culture; I was thinking of why we are the way we are.’

Struth about the family portraits

Thomas Struth (born Geldern, Germany, 1954) is a German photographer whose wide-ranging work includes depictions of detailed cityscapes, Asian jungles and family portraits. Along with Andreas Gursky, he is one of Germany’s most widely exhibited and collected fine art photographer.

Struth trained at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1973 until 1980 where he initially studied painting under Peter Kleemann and Gerhard Richter before settling on Bernhard Becher’s photography studio.

He won a scholarship to work at P.S. 1 in New York for the year of 1978. His early works largely consisted of black-andwhite shots of streets in Japan, Europe and America. Skyscrapers were another feature of his work, with many of his photographs attempting to show the relationship people have with their modern-day environment.

In the mid-1980s Struth added a new dimension to his work when he started to produce family portraits. This was after a meeting with psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann. As a result, these works attempt to show the underlying social dynamics within a seemingly still photograph.

Basing himself in the art capital of Germany - Düsseldorf, Struth’s profile continued to rise in the 1990s, and in 1997 he was awarded the Spectrum International Photography Prize of Lower Saxony.

Struth had his first solo exhibition in the U.S. at The Renaissance Society in Chicago in 1990. He had an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2003. The centre of the exhibition was the Museum series, which featured seemingly ordinary shots of people entering churches, museums and other public places.

the Grand Prix International Henri Cartier-Bresson.

“There must be some middle ground between journalism and art where you can be honest and still be supportive.”

Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh’s photographs have documented the plight of refugees in camps across Central and East Africa and the Middle East. However, his photographs are distinctly different from the images of refugees we commonly see in printed news articles. Sheikh’s photographs implicitly assert that the individual refugees share humanity with their oppressive rulers. He does so by depicting the individuals in portraits rather than as victims of a social and political drama. Sheikh, an American citizen, was just awarded

In his extraordinary new book, The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan, photographer Fazal Sheikh writes about his first night at the refugee settlement of Bizen Khel in northern Pakistan. His companions are the village’s Afghan Muslim elders, all former Mujahedin freedom fighters forced into exile during the 10-year jihad against the Soviets and kept there by the subsequent civil war and the relentless rise of the Taliban.

Most of these men have lived just across the border from their homeland for nearly 20 years, but they continue to gather in the evenings to reaffirm their commitment to Afghan traditions and hierarchies. Sheikh sits with them around a glowing gas lamp and listens to their stories of martyrdom and pained endurance, many of which he prints verbatim in between the photographs in his book.

Sheikh’s emotional identification with this young man born in exile will come as no surprise to those familiar with his earlier work. The photographs that jump-started Sheikh’s career were his

portraits of Sudanese, Somali, and Ethiopian refugees in camps across those countries’ borders in Kenya. Shown in a small, now defunct New York gallery early in 1994, they were like no other pictures coming out of the camps, which had already been picked over by photojournalists airlifted in to grab shots of bloated children and skeletal mothers before

the horror got too old. Sheikh’s photos, later collected in a book called A Sense of Common Ground, were modest, respectful, and not just sympathetic but loving, as if he were recording not strangers in distress but an extended family pulling together for comfort and support. He underscored this feeling of community by identifying the people in his portraits,

rescuing them from the black hole of Third World anonymity by giving each of them the simple dignity of a name— in many cases, the only thing they had left except one another. “There must be some middle ground between journalism and art where you can be honest and still be supportive,” Sheikh said at the time (...)

film processing developer types

All developers exhaust themselves as they are used due to the accumulation of residual by-products as you process film. Some are designed to be “one-shot” developers that you discard after using them once. Edwal FG-7 is an example. This guarantees that you are always using fresh developer, which is vital for consistent results, but this is clearly not the most economical or ecological darkroom practice. For this reason, many photographers and photo labs use developers that can be “replenished”, which means that they can be brought back to full strength by adding a carefully measured amount of a special, concentrated batch of the same developer brand.

“Self-replenishing” developers like Kodak’s T-Max and XTOL have the advantage of allowing you to replenish them with a batch of developer mixed to the same dilution as your normal solution. You do this by simply bringing to volume of developer back to your normal amount, usually 1/2 or one full gallon.

KODAK XTOL a powder that comes in twoparts that can be mixed at room temperature. Designed as a general-purpose developer it gives very good film speed with good contrast and has the advantage of being self-replen- ishing.

sodium sulfite will reduce your development time and give you finer grain. To make a 9 percent solution of sodium sulfite, add 45 grams of sodium sulfite to 15 ounces of water. Add 1 ounce of FG-7 to make a 1:15 solution.

KODAK D-76 a general-purpose developer sold as a powder. It can be used either straight, as a stock solution (diluted from powder), or diluted one part stock to one part water. D-76 gives slightly finer grain and can be replenished when used straight.

KODAK HC-110 an excellent all-purpose developer that comes in liquid form, which makes it quick and easy to use. HC-110 produces negatives that are as fine-grained as those developed with Edwal FG-7 with sodium sulfite, but HC-110 provides greater contrast. HC-110 works well with Kodak

ILFORD ID-11 a very similar to D-76 but gives finer grain and is good for Expansion developments.

T-Max P3200, giving good film speed and contrast. Kodak lists a number of dilution possibilities for HC-110 on the bottle. Dilution B is one part stock solution to seven parts water (1:31 from concentrate).

AGFA RODINAL a concentrated liquid developer that produces grainy but extremely sharp negatives. Rodinal acts as a compensating developer when used in high dilutions.

EDWAL FG-7 a fine-grain liquid developer that has a slight compensating effect when used at dilutions of 1:15 or greater. Adding

ILFORD ILFOTEC HC (High Concentrate) a liquid developer similar to Kodak’s HC110 although my tests show that it gives slightly less film speed.

ILFORD PERCEPTOL a softer-working, finegrain developer that is useful for Contrac-

tion developments because of its relatively long Normal Development Times.

KODAK T-MAX an excellent and versatile high-energy developer designed specifically for Kodak’s T-Max films. T-Max gives good contrast and film speed with any film, but it is especially good with T-Max 100 and 400 when used at 75 degrees. T-Max developer comes in a liquid stock solution that is mixed 1:4 for a working solution.

KODAK T-MAX RS a developer very similar in quality to T-Max developer except that it produces negatives with slightly more contrast.

T-Max RS formulated to be “self-replenishing.” Kodak recommends replenishing at a rate of 1 1/2 ounces per roll processed.

This system is easy to use and has the advantage of making it impossible to over replenish.

film processing Black and white film development

Load film. Line up all of the equipment on your counter or table for easy access - film - film reel - film tank with all of its parts; - scissors - hook-type bottle opener.

Remember, you will be doing the film loading in complete darkness - no safe light!

Don’t touch the exposed surface of the film with your fingers. No matter how clean you think your fingers may be, there is oil on your skin which will mark your film. If your must touch the film, grasp gently across the wide part of the film with your thumb and index finger.

Turn off the darkroom lights, then pry off the flat end of the 35mm film magazine with a hook-type can opener. Push the film carefully out of the magazine, by pushing on the spindle end of the magazine.

With the lights still off, locate your scissors and carefully cut off the tapered leader, then cut the end of the film to a smooth arc and insert into your film development spool.

Once the sprocket holes of the film are engaged in the ball bearing of the spool, crank the 2 sides of the reel back and forth in opposing directions, until the film is completely drawn into the spool. Your type of spool may be different, read the directions that came with the product.

In total darkness crank the 2 sides of the reel back and forth in opposing directions, stopping occasionally to pull a few more centimeter of film from the magazine (don’t let the film touch anything, floor etc. as you will end up with dust on the film surface) and then resume cranking the spool until the film is completely drawn in.

When you come to the end of the roll, while still in the dark, find your scissors, and feeling for the junction of the end of the film and the magazine, cut across the film to release it from the magazine. Crank the spool a little to ensure that the end of the film is into the spool.

Place the film spool properly into your development tank, ensuring that all of the parts are in the proper place (gasket etc.).

Once the tank is light tight you can turn on the room light and you are ready to proceed with deve- lopment.

Measure chemicals Measure out the required chemicals.

Your tank instructions should give you the correct volume of chemistry that is required.

Dilute the developer 1:1 (if using stock solution) and take the stop bath and fixer straight out of the bottle.

Correct temperature Make sure that all chemicals are at 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). The most critical here is the developer, the other chemicals may be a few degrees above or below.

If your developer is above or below the 20 degree Centigrade mark, you may adjust your development time by 30 seconds for each degree Centigrade difference.

Example: If your temperature is 21 degrees, then subtract 30 seconds from your total development time.

Prewashing Pour enough water into the tank to cover the film and leave the film for

2 minutes. Agitate occasionaly.

Drain water.

Start development Start your timer and rapidly pour the developer into the tank, tighten the lid and give the bottom of the tank two firm raps on a hard surface, this will dislodge any air bubbles that are attached to the films surface.

film processing Black and white film development

Agitation If you have a tank that can be inverted without the solution spilling out, agitate continuously for the first minute of the development process by inverting the tank back and forth, (inversion interval of approx. 1 second) then agitate for 5 seconds at 30 second intervals until the last minute of development where you will revert back to continuous agitation for the remainder of the development time. Between agitation intervals, rotate the tank one-half turn, this will help to insure even development.

If you have long developing times (10 minutes and more) you should agitate for 10 seconds at 60 second inter- vals and there is no need to agitate constantly for the last minute.

If your tank cannot be inverted, agitate by sliding the tank back and forth over a distance of about 10 inches at a rate of two cycles per second during the agitation intervals. Rotate

the tank through about onehalf turn between agitation intervals.

End development Five seconds before the development time is finished, take the cap off of the tank (the tank still has a top and is still light proof), and dump all of the solution down the drain or into a silver recovery device if you have one.

Stop bath Immediately pour in the stop bath and agitate continuously for 60 seconds, pour out and return to bottle.

Fixer Add fixer, agitate continuously for the first 30 seconds, and then at 30 second intervals for 3 to 6 minutes depen- ding on the age/usage of your fixer.

Return the fixer to the bottle.

Water wash Open your tank and put the reels for 10 minutes into the water tank with the water running. In themeantime clean all beakers, your tank and the room your worked with.

Wetting agent When washing is finished put your reel into the wetting agent for approx.

2 minutes.

Dry the film Hang the film into the drying cabinet. Make sure to switch-off the cabinet if already in use before opening it.

bw printing Black and white film development

Contact Prints The negative is brought into contact with paper and a same sized positive is produced. Like film, pa- per is covered by an emulsion of silver salts suspended in gelatin that is sensitive to light. Unlike film black and white paper is not sensitive to red light so it is possible to work under red light in the dark room. From your contact sheet it will be easier to choose the final images you wish to print and they are also useful as an easy reference to the information contained in your negatives. They can be used to plan display by working to a suitable scale and cutting out the relevant images for layout design.

Contact prints must show as much information as possible and none of the tones must be lost. This you will achieve by using a lower grade of paper/filter, for example, using multigraded paper without any filter.

We use an enlarger as a light source and a contact printing frame in which we place the negatives - emulsion down against the emulsion side of the printing paper. The correct exposure should be tested on separate strips of paper using the following scale of exposure times: 3 secs - 6 secs - 9 secs - 12 secs - 15 secs - 18 secs

Exposure The same 4 determinants control exposure here as they do when using your camera. Length of exposure, aperture, sensitivity of light sensitive material – in this case paper grade, and quantity of light. This last one is determined by the brightness of the bulb in the enlarger, distance of the lamphouse from the board and the density of the negative.

Enlargements Make sure that your negative is clean before you place it in the negative carrier of your enlarger. The image is projected onto your base/easel to the required size.

Focusing can be done with or without the focus finder, however, I would recommend to use it for bigger enlargements. The lens is then stopped down two stops or more, this increases the sharpness of your print. Standard lens for print- ing 35mm negs is 50mm, medium format - 80mm and 5*4 – 150mm.

Test Strips It is important to make a test strip, (a) to determine the correct exposure, (b) to avoid waste of photo- graphic paper. The most useful test strip shows considerable over and under exposure which makes

comparisons easier. Use the same scale of exposure times as mentioned above and apply the follow- ing method: Expose a strip of paper for 3 secs. Cover the first step and give another 3 secs (total 6 secs) to the whole of the rest.

Cover another part and give 3 secs (total 9 secs), then cover another part and give 3 secs (total 12 secs) and for the last part give another 3 secs which will give 18 secs as a total. Black card is most suitable for covering the steps as this reflects little unwanted light.

Once you have worked out the correct exposure, you can expose the entire print, make sure the emulsion side of the paper is facing you.

Contrast of Print The contrast of your print is controlled by the filters you use. The lower the number on your filter, the softer your image will be. If the first test or print shows a lack of contrast or has an overall greyish ap- pearance, a filter with a higher number should be used while a print with clear light tones and dense black shadows may benefit from using a filter with a lower number. Whenever you change the grade of your filter, you have to make another test strip,

because using a different filter will affect your expo- sure time. Ideally you should be printing on grade 2 or 3.

Localised Control Burning in – extra exposure to increase density in light areas. Holding back, dodging or shading – reducing exposure to reduce density in dark areas.

Processing the Print We will start off with using resin coated paper. This means that the base on which the light-sensitive emulsion is coated does not absorb water or chemicals used to process the image.

Development Make sure that the developer has been prepared correctly. The most important factors that affect the quality of your print are agitation, temperature and time. Consistent agitation is achieved by rocking a small quantity of developer in the provided dish. The temperature should constantly remain at 20° C and developing time should be at 2.5 minutes.

Stopbath As with your neg developing, immediately stops development and conditions print for fix.This leave

print for 1 minute in solution.

Fixing Removes unwanted silver. Continuous agitation in the fixer is not necessary, but it should not be ignored completely. Turn the print several times during the fixing time of 5 minutes (this time is for resin coated only).

Resin coated papers will wash in five minutes in a very efficient wash. By this I mean an almost continious flow of water across the surface of the print with the contaminated water going to waste and having no subsequent contact with the print, in other words if you hold the print under a running tap! If you put your print in a dish and completely change the water every five minutes, your print should be washed after 15 minutes.

Drying Resin coated materials can be dried simply by wiping off surplus moisture with a fine sponge cloth and leaving face up on blotting paper in a warm place. Alternatively you could put them on a radiator or hang them up on a washing line.

Controls during enlarging The ‘straight’ printing exposure might not always turn out to be very satisfying

as it often fails to show the sub- ject how it was seen when taking the actual photograph, because this particular exposure may not suit every part of the negative. This occurs, for example in negatives of high contrast, i.e. solid black shadows or ‘burnt out’ highlights.

The most common techniques to balance the tonal range of the print are ‘shading’ or ‘dodging’ (locally reduc- ing exposure) and ‘burning-in’ (locally extending exposure). Both techniques have to be done very carefully as otherwise the final print will look unnaturally in the ‘treated’ areas and you are very likely to loose contrast.

A successful way of avoiding this is by using variable-contrast paper and selective filtration. Imagine, for exam- ple, that you need to shade and contrast-boost a simple patch of shadow in a picture which requires grade 2 fil- tration.

Firstly, expose the print, apart from the particular area (shading it during the entire period!), then change the grade of filtration to 4 or even 5 and expose the shadow area for as long as needed. You should always start of with a ‘straight’ exposed print, this will help you to work out which grade or exposure time is required in different areas.

Media arts and design semester I project ‘absence-presence’ by tomasz michalak

INVISIBLE I arrived in England in 1998. Early on, I found out that not being from an EU country I could not legally work and remain in UK. Since the political and financial upheaval, in my home country, excluded the possibility of returning, I resigned myself to a life of subterfuge.

During the next four years, I worked as a kitchen porter, paper boy, house cleaner and a handyman. All these jobs were paid, at a half of the then current national minimum wage, and never included entitlements, such as: holiday or sick pay. Not being legally employed, I was entirely at the whim of my employers.

The governments’ two-faced policy on illegal immigrants, has escalated the problem over the years. Immigrants are the backbone of many domestic businesses.

Your food in an expensive restaurant is only served by a celebrity chef, your morning paper is already outside your door when you wake up, and your house is cleaned when you return home. Who does this work?

Inspired by August Sander, Thomas Ruff and the Bechers family I decided to produce a series of portraits relating to the immigration problem. Using my exclusive experience of a live of subterfuge, I assembled this series of portraits, that highlights both their presence, and absence, in our lives.

Painter or Decor ator.

Frontal shot pre ferably sh owin g th surroun e din g o f a work place. I shall tr y to dep the scen ict ea cally an s realistid objecti vel as possib le. Stan y da lens wit h mediu rd m to small a per ture , sh o t from th e eye lev el. T he model s hould b e as natura l as p o s sible.

Garden er S ho t o u tside so the sam to the ‘p e thin g aper boy s as shot’ ap the expo ply. Bra sure an ck et d white balan ce.

Paper b

oy or le afl et distribu tor.

Shot wil l m o st p rob ably be don e ea rly in the mor nin g. C areful with sh utter sp eed as the ligh t are lik ely to be m inu scu le. Try to mach the feel of indoor photos.

I will try bra ck exposure etin g the . Are th e still on the b icycle s?

Chef or K itchen T he obje p ctive an d the str or ter. picture ess as in is on th the firs e realisti Standa t cally d rd lens epiction with m er ture, . ed ium to shot from small a the eye should plevel. T b e as n a he mod tural as el po st c a p p ossible. ture edit No in g wil l be don e.

Waitre s s Sho t a t work w ith a little bit o f a wor surroun k din gs.

Avoid dept o f fi eld. P lace the model c lose to th e wall.

ry limina an pre g from le not g in g rk u o tr s W I had to constrained sketch mu ch o ineke to e d by R to b Inspire . se e m e to by th tr ying a I was ation the Dijk str u sit el the as and fe hich w a is in w t c je e just b m su to r g milia as tr yin very fa g o. I w a r fo rs a d e in few y p en m ll p an o . Overa n e p to kee p g to ha with this in th y n y a pp uite ha I am q

shot. I think I have managed to cough something very interesting on the subject’s face. I need to think about cropping tightly.

This shot adheres well to the sketch. I like the expression on the subject’s face and her stressed sore of look. I am now convinced all these portraits should be com

posed in a sq uare format .

Care must be taken when re shooting no t to include too much of a ba ckground as it may be too distric ting fro m the subjec t’s face. Aper tu re 8 or more. Ca reful with bulbs in the background .

Perhaps I co uld change the objects on the tray as th ey appear a lit tle to sugges tive.

Indoor shot of a handyman or a gardener. It is very difficult shot as the little is so minuscule in the subject’s workshop that the shutter speed is a

little to slow for a portrait of this type. Flash is out of the question it would be too obtrusive. I risked it and taken 10 extra exposures. As far as the subject is concerned, I am quite pleased with the

expression. Overall quite good attempt but lots of room for improvement in the reshoot session.

I am going to try faster film something like ilford delta 400 or one of the Tri max films.

Chambermaid’s shot is the one I am very disappointed with. Firstly, the model’s expression is not matching the previous shots. Secondly, I did not place the subject close to the wall and the depth of field is not particularly

good in this shot. This is the first reject in the series but I will be try harder in the reshoot session. I must seriously think of a different subject perhaps.

This will be a difficult shot to improve.

Disappointed but willing to try harder next time.

unforic ycle I am y. No b o b a r b e a g.

Pa p t with u ut b o b ly a tunate to feel ething re how not su there is som I ot t it yet this sh e abou rejec t on’t lik to d I lf t e a th mys t bring urely ’s got c ann o er. It s lace th e g t the p it alto tial bu to be n te o p some n n e e d ot o n pressio ho and ex I will tr y to s ew s a n. of a n work o d n u gro k c a b the

gent window next time so as to add some feel to it.

Shot taken at 6:30am shutter speed 1/10 handheld, not bad.

re-shoot plan »» Be more emotionless »» Do not show emotions of any kind »» Do not put include yourself in the picture by croping, composing, etc... »» Do not try to express your opinion, be invisible as a photographer »» Let the object of the portrait stare dead-eyed into the lens »» Let the object avoid the camera altogether

»» Use wide angle lens to show some surrounding »» Minimise the depth use f8 or higher »» Consier using faster film speed »» Consider using flash »» Take more photos

Taylor Wessing Photographic portrait Prize what makes a good portrait by lucy davies

Our eyes have become restless of late, and who can blame them? Some fifty billion photographs were taken last year. We live in a world, as the curator and critic John Szarkowski memorably pointed out, where there are more photographs than bricks.

At the same time, photography continues to reconfigure itself. Its interaction with a world changing at warp speed brings complex interests into play. Fictitious realities promulgated by photo-manipulation trip us at the first hurdle. Distress comes in daily doses via feeds from the frontline of war. A maturing market for intrusive celebrity imagery has led us to expect access to the private emotions of strangers as a matter of course.

As an international, annual award, The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize is a welcome litmus.

Hooking sixty photographs from the stream to represent the best of what the genre has to offer forces us to ask what it is that elevates these portraits above the rest. What criteria do we bring to our measuring? it isn’t, as many centuries of quill and ink have tried to prove, something we can break down into schedules of symmetry or geometry. Portraits grapple with what it means to be an individual. Each image is a one-off version of a highly personal negotiation between identity and representation. ‘Beauty’ and ‘good’ are elastic concepts. You or I will see not only with our eyes, but with all that we are and all that our culture is. We tend to rely on assumptions gleaned from previous experience. But take heart: ‘If a picture has for everybody exactly the same meaning’ the photographer Philippe Halsman chided wisely, ‘it is a platitude, and it is meaningless as a work of art’. With this in mind, these portraits deserve our attention because they applaud our infinite variety.

The tiniest blip of light afforded by the release of a shutter burrows vigorously into crinkled eyelids chin bristle, liquid pooling in the red rim of an eye, and allows us the luxury of studying aberrations with the boorish curiosity we usually reserve for the mirror.

They map our appetites and fears. They transmit our times, throwing into relief an intriguing series of clusterings: a preponderance of redheads and disaffected soldiers, wary-eyed sitters, sitters who seem to have nothing particular on their mind, and sitters who weep openly for the camera.

Reality is exhaustingly cluttered. We prefer the more digestible version, but we don’t want to notice the artifice. The photographers represented here have harnessed and composed and framed their subjects in order to tell a story in a particular way. They are wonderfully adept at predicting what your eye will take in, weight, discern, perceive. The best kindle a charge of emotion - that person isn’t really there, but your brain responds as if he or she is, and floods you with warmth, or repulsion.

I am usually more engaged when information is withheld. As with the corpse in Agatha Christie novel, sometimes these images hesitate to give up their secrets. Open-ended portraits that provoke more questions than answers are like the beginning of a conversation, and invite us to unravel the meaning.

What it boils down to is that the more effort we bestow, the more our empathy is aroused. Use your own fascinations as a starting point and see where they lead. If any one of these images twitches you somewhere outside of your day-to-day, just for a moment, and makes you see the world in a new and different way, it has worked.

first pirze david chancellor

These portraits are the start of a new long term project documenting hunting, hunters, and the hunted, and those spaces associated with hunting.

As a child I was fascinated by the tales of Colonel Jim Corbett hunting man-eating Tiger in India. As an art student it was Peter Beard’s seminal work ‘The End of the Game’ that fascinated and inspired.

In 1965 he wrote the following: ‘The game is both the hunt and the hunted, the sport and the trophy. There was a time when the hunter killed only for his life and food, man had to be protected from the beasts, today the beasts must be protected from man’...

That was 1965, so where are we now..?

The hunter is still with us. When once his companions were aristocracy they are now self made men.

This was my starting point, but I should add, I’m not a hunter, I’m a photographer, a very recent observer of the industry, and I’m deeply convinced by what I’ve seen that it is only by dialogue and understanding that a sustainable harmony between nature and mankind can be forged. The relationship between man and animals is hugely complex and we’re both struggling to adapt to our changing environments. Hunting is an emotive subject, and in pretty much all it’s forms graphic, that’s obviously one of the reasons I chose to work on it, it can be toweringly beautiful and painfully raw at the same time whether it be by man, or animal.

This work will seek to explore the intricate and complex relationship between man and animals and how both struggle to adapt to their changing environments. interview by richard mcclure

David chancellor huntress with buck from the series hunters july 2010

second pirze panayiotis lamprou

It’s not unusual for male photographers to turn their cameras towards their wives. Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, David Bailey and Nicholas Nixon are perhaps the most notable to have produced extensive bodies of work that focus on their respective spouses.

Few of those portraits, however, are quite so intimate as Panayiotis Lamprou’s study of his wife Christina, indeed, the Greek photographer admits that Portraits of My British Wife was originally never intended for public display. ‘It is a very strong image of a private moment, and at first I didn’t want to show it to anyone.’ he says.

‘It wasn’t until I visited last year’s Photographic Portrait Prize that I felt it would be an appropriate contest to enter - with my wife’s permission, of course.’

The portrait was taken at the couple’s summer house on Schinousa Island in the Aeagean Sea, where they were staying for the last time before it was rebuilt. Lamprou shot the portrait using a Hasselblad 501 camera on a tripod. ‘She works as fascia therapist in the field of somatic-psychoeducation, so she has a good relationship with the human body, not least her own. The portrait reflects her confidence and sense of freedom. To me, it expresses female power and independence, as well as my devotion to my wife’.

Family is a recurring theme for Lamprou. Earlier projects have

included a series of still-lifes taken in his grandmother’s house, while in 2005 book, Untitled History, is an investigation into mental health issues prompted by the premature death of his brother.

‘My older brother Yiannis had Down’s syndrome and died when I was six. I always wanted to find out who he truly was.’ he explains.

‘I volunteered at a Belgian institution for people with mental disabilities and then returned the following year to photograph the residents. It enabled me to find answers to many of my questions and was an important step photographically’.

Often working in the more esoteric reaches of his profession, Lamprou has collaborated with other Greek artists and musicians on several multimedia ventures. In Tears of Dream, he created a series of photographs based on musical pieces by composed Nikos Sokos that were designed to claim a new form of communication between image and sound. A current coming-together finds him conducting research with the sculptor loanins Georgakakis. ‘My subject is the space, the human presence and the movement of life’, he says. ‘I search the relationship between these elements’.

inerview by richard mcclure

Panayiotis lamprou portrait of my british wife from the series human presence august 2009

third pirze jeffrey stockbridge

The streets of Philadelphia have provided the primary source of inspiration for American photographer Jeffrey Stockbridge, who has assiduously mapped his adopted city since graduating from Drexel university five years ago. Inevitably, given Philadelphia’s high levels of crime and poverty, the bulk of that work has catalogued drug addiction, prostitution and urban decay. Having exhibited widely his images of the cit’s abandoned houses, he has now turned his attention to the people who inhabit those neglected neighbourhoods. His portrait comes from series-in-progress Nowhere But Here and depicts twin sisters Carroll and Shelly McKean, who go by the street names Tic Tac and Tootsie. At nineteen, the twins were kicked out of their home by their brother and had been living on the street for a year when Stockbridge met them, while scouting subjects in the socially deprived Kensington district. Both had turned to prostitution and were using prescription drugs to help dull the pain of their difficult lives.

‘A connecting theme throughout much of my work is the will to survive under harsh circumstances’ says Stockbridge. ‘Caroll and Shelly’s pose is confronting; they are staring directly into the lens and their facial expressions and body language appear strong and debilitated at the same time. Sitting on the stoop of a boarded

house act as a metaphor; the girls have been locked out for good, forced to live a life on street.

The Marylnad-born photographer uses a viewfinder camera on a tripod, exposing one sheet of film at a time, in order to obtain greater detail and clarity. The 4x5 negative allows him to make large-format colour prints, which he believes are necessary to convey the breadth and intensity of his subject matter. ‘Setting up the camera is like putting on a little performance, and my subjects are usually intrigued by its antique look’, he says. ‘When setting up, I always ask them to write in a journal I keep about their experiences living in Philadelphia. It’s a way to put people at ease and provides them with an opportunity to give their voice in contrast to what my camera might capture’.

His photographs have been exhibited at several Philadelphia galleries, including the Museum of Art, and he is now preparing for a solo show at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. ‘For me, being a photographer is about establishing a level of intimacy’, He says. ‘My goal is to dismantle the popular stereotypical view and humanise a subject that has long been dehumanised’. inerview by richard mcclure

jeffrey stockbridge tic tac and tootsie (twin sisters carroll and shelly mckean) from the series nowhere but here may 2009

madeleine waller The taylor wessing photographic portrait prize exhibitor

This portrait is of Laura, a regular swimmer at London Fields Lido, Hackney. Swimmers were asked if they would pose immediately they got out of the pool and again once they were dressed to show the transformation from amphibian to urban human. This was taken on one of the coldest days of the year.

madeleine waller wet and dry - laura from the series portraits of swimmers london fields lido january 2010

marcia michael back of girl from the series study of kin july 2009

marcia michael

The taylor wessing photographic portrait prize exhibitor

My work explores how the invention of photography prompted and furthered the creation of stereotypical representations of black people in Britain. The work was made as a reaction to finding very few positive, empathetic historical photographs of British black people and families in the national archives.

The negative and demeaning photographic and textual representations of black people that I found prompted me to make images of my own family, exploring the idea of heredity and its relationship to the historical and contemporary concepts of stereotyping, classification and social control.

In the 19th century photography was used to classify people. Anthropometric photography, introduced by Bertillion and used by Galton, involved compiling composites of types of people as well as of family likeness, both of which linkedin with theories of race and eugenics. I felt that this viewing and categorizing of the ‘other’ was not only an oppressive misuse of photography, but could be appreciated as a record of family identity passed on through the generations.

This paved the way for me, through my series of small images, to become an ethnographer, looking at myself through my own family.

From a contemporary viewpoint, 19th century anthropometric photography has its own beauty, partly due to the qualities of historical photographic and printing techniques.

Its analyzing and controlling gaze seems to expose a unique individual subject, rather than a specimen exemplifying type. With my work I hoped to create a valued personal and public record of my family, situated within the historical context of photography as a means of racial stereotyping, social control and exclusion; Exposing the individual beauty of the subject, which cannot be extinguished and is even emphasized by a formal, scientific style of image making; Appropriating the viewpoint and methods of a historically white, male institution, in order to collect and claim ownership of my family and identity.

Michael’s daughter Elisia was photographed as part of an ongoing series about race heritage and family. Elisia had chosen not to take part in her brother’s fifth birthday celebrations the day before and Michael says: ‘I needed something to give her an importance as she was a little overwhelmed by the party.’

michal Chelbin

The taylor wessing photographic portrait prize exhibitor

This portrait (on the left) was taken in a dormitory at a juvenile prison. Lena, aged seventeen (left) was sentenced for organising a rape; Katya aged sixteen(right) was sentenced for theft. Katya’s sister is also held in the same institution.

Born in 1974, Israeli photographer Michal Chelbin’s work has been shown in a number of group and solo exhibitions. Her 2008 Strangley Familiar series (top row) was seen in New York, Paris and Tel Avivv and her monograph The Black Eye (botoom row) was published in June 2010. Chelbin’s work was included in the Photographic Portrait Praize in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009.

michal chelbin lena and katya, juvenile prison september 2009

carpio wafa from the series syria may 2010

spencer murphy laurie, 2010 april 2010

russ mcclintock allegra september 2009

monika merva doki, i, hungary from the series family portraits july 2009

This five-room display gathers a range of artists who use photography to approach a topic or theme systematically, creating multiple images of similar subjects.

This typological method was pioneered by the German photographer August Sander, whose work can be seen in the central gallery. Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century was a vast series of photographic portraits classified according to the profession or role of their subjects. Sander’s process of analysing and ordering his images was matched by the rigorous, objective style of the photographs themselves. All of his subjects are observed by the photographer with the same neutral distance.

Sander’s methodology has influenced subsequent generations of artists. The photographic portraits of Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra and Paul Graham view their sitters in series, presenting them as individuals but also as part of a related group.

A similar technique is applied to spaces and architectural structures in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Again, these sequences depend on the accumulation of images, allowing contrasts or similarities to emerge between them.

Contemporary practitioners such as Simryn Gill and Alexander Apóstol continue to work in this tradition, producing sequences of images that can be read as themes and variations on their chosen subjects.

Tate modern photographic typologies

simryn gill photographic typologies

Dlam is a series of photographs of domestic interiors taken by artist Simryn Gill as she travelled across the Malaysian Peninsula.

Between May and June 2001, Gill knocked on the doors of randomly selected houses and asked the inhabitants if she could photograph the interior of their homes. The majority invited her inside, and the resulting photographs are a document not only of the spaces but also the artist’s interaction with the strangers she encountered. The title Dalam is Malay for ‘inside’, ‘interior’ or ‘deep’, suggesting a reference to both architectural space and inner, psychological experience of place.

In contrast to the randomness of Gill’s travels and her selection of interiors, she adopted a consistent methodology for taking the photographs themselves. In each home she would take just one photograph, focusing on the common area, devoid of its inhabitants. Gill would always shoot from the same height, using only natural light and framed either frontally or on a slight angle None of the images has been cropped or edited in any way The neutrality of the documentary style is belied by the intensely personal quest in which Gill was engaged with this series. Having left Malaysia in her late twenties, her choice of subject was bound up with her experience of exile and return.

Simryn Gill was born in Singapore in 1959. She lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

hiroshi Sugimoto photographic typologies

Fist top Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Theaters’, 1978 Orinda Theater, Orinda, 1992 Second top Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Theaters’, 1978 Third top Hiroshi Sugimoto, Stadium Drive-in Orange, 1993

To achieve the glowing white screens that dominate these photographs of American drive-in cinemas, Sugimoto used extraordinarily long exposures lasting exactly the duration of the movie shown there. Captured in real time, the movie is reduced to a blank screen. This ‘presence through absence’ is common theme in Sugimoto’s work.

The light emanating from the screen illuminates the immediate surroundings against the night sky, in which the trajectories of passing aircraft are clearly visible.

I’m a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes.

Hiroshi Sugimoto ‘Theaters’ 1978

Hiroshi Sugimoto ‘Theaters’ 1978 Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, 1993

Bernd & HIlla Becher photographic typologies

“They were constructed with no consideration of so-called beauty and serve their functionality alone. Which means that when they lose their function they are no longer entitled to exist, so they are torn down.”

— Hilla Becher Winding towers, France, Belgium, Germany (in 15 parts) The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began working together in 1959 and married in 1961, are best known for their “typologies”—grids of black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure.

To create these works, the artists traveled to large mines and steel mills, and systematically photographed the major structures, such as the winding towers that haul coal and iron ore to the surface and the blast furnaces that transform the ore into metal. The rigorous frontality of the individual images gives them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopedic richness.

At each site the Bechers also created overall landscape views of the entire plant, which set the structures in their context and show how they relate to each other.

The typologies emulate the clarity of an engineer’s drawing, while the landscapes evoke the experience of a particular place.

The exhibition presents these two formats together; because they lie at the polar extremes of photographic description, each underscores the creative potential of the other.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Winding Towers, Belgium, Germany. 1971–91.

I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid. lady gaga

studio flash workshop studio practise, chractersitic of the light source direction, quality and colour. the angle of the camera. the composition of the shot. the pose of the model.

As I never used polariods before I did not know what to expect.

I was shocked at the beautiful images we were getting. The feel and the texture of polaroid seduced me totally. I understand the popularity of it some years ago but cannot quite figure out why it did not survive.

During this practical exercises I understood why I love presets on digital cameras made by olympus. I am not prejudice in any way against image manipulation and digital post processing

but polaroid is something else altogether. The shear joy of taking a picture and getting fully developed product without the need for post-processing is something that appeals to me enormously.

Some people scan polaroids to process them digitally but I would never touch polaroid photo in this way. Unlike normal film photographs that always need a little bit of touch up in the printing stage, polaroid is as far as I am concerned complete product.

In the grid on the verso page from the top right corner the pictures convey the following moods/atmosphere: »» A ‘heroic’ portrait »» Classic straight portrait lighting »» Soft, even ‘beauty’ lighting »» Portrait inspired by H. Newton »» Portrait inspired by P. Roversi »» Backlit, ‘bright sunny day’ »» Sinister/mysterious

Finishing tOuches

image editing

I have been editing the images for about a week now. I looks that I keep changing my mind every day. I wish I had about a month to be able to live with the photographs and acquire some kind of distance to the project. I almost starting to believe in what Somerset Maugham once said: “It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection”. I wish I had someone ‘from outside’ not so involved in the project to help. I have decided that large white frame will be best suited to dress my photos in.

As far as the layout and presentation are concerned I elicit a help of a 3dmax software to create a mock-up gallery space. I have hanged my photos in various ways to better illustrate the impact they create.

I am convinced that the striped of photos in a single row is the best way to convey the message of my series.

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Media arts and design semester II project ‘PUBLIC/PRIVATE’ by tomasz michalak

PUBLIC PRIVATE Project Brief You will work as an individual photographer to produce a body of work based on the theme Public/Private. Public brings to mind notions of the open, outside and the urban (shared space and ideas, community etc.), while Private typically implies, perhaps, more notions linked to home, of the inside, the personal, the intimate, unshared or undisclosed, the solitary and the domestic. Consider how the use of your photography can help you apprehend both the notions of public and private as separate entities as well as entities that only exist because of each other.

Using your DSLR or SLR camera you are encouraged to explore this brief utilising the qualities of ambient and available light.

Consider how the atmosphere of a place changes according to the time of day, how different light qualities change your perception of a place.

You are expected to select a final edit of 5 to 7 images, which work as a coherent set of discreet shots or as a series. You can photograph in any style or form. Consider using a title for your body of work.

Research File The research file is central to the development of your projects. It should be a commentary on all aspects of your work from beginning to end. It should contain visual references and sources/samples of inspiration, contact prints (digital), printing notes and all other documentation and a typed project proposal and a critical selfevaluation on the templates provided which includes discussions of your photographic and printing techniques and an analysis of your final body of work: how well does it work, what could be improved, are the images coherent, how did you realise your initial idea. A clear progression of your project from start to finish should be evident and this includes your editing and selection process.

It should also contain documentation of any tasks set during the module. Please make sure that it is easy to navigate through the research file.

Critical reflection In conclusion of the module, prior to the work being marked, your work will be

presented to and discussed by your peer group. The purpose of this interactive critical review is to discuss and identify in a group the strengths and weaknesses of everyone’s work. It is also an opportunity to be encouraging and to give/receive constructive feedback to and from your fellow students so that you can make adjustments and refine your work before submission.

Submission Each student should submit in a grey box the following items to J1.15 on Friday 6th May 2011 between 2 and 5pm (the final deadline is 6pm on Monday 9TH May 2011): PROJECT A disk containing digital files of your final edit of 5 to 7 images.

This final edit uploaded onto Blackboard.

A4 Digital Prints of your final edit.

RESEARCH

My first POINT OF departure for a research regarding the project public/private is a last year exhibition in Tate Modern “Exposed”.

Have we become a society of voyeurs?

The proliferation of camera phones, YouTube videos, and reality television suggest that this is so. At the same time, amid endless political debates about terrorism, the ubiquitous security camera has become one of the icons of our age. We watch, and we are watched.

Aided and abetted by the camera, voyeurism and surveillance provide uneasy questions about who is looking at whom, and for what purpose of power or pleasure. Observers of the contemporary scene might be surprised to learn that no sooner had the camera been invented than enterprising photographers employed it to penetrate the secret lives of others. Surprisingly, there have been few attempts to examine the history of what we might call invasive looking, or its complex dialogue with everyday life and culture. However, artists themselves have been keen to explore its fascinations, dangers, and significance.

Indeed, voyeurism and surveillance are eminently photographic ideas. They have

inspired practitioners since the inception of the medium and they continue to motivate much groundbreaking contemporary photography and media work.

Published to coincide with a major exhibition organised by Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera proposes a wideranging exploration of photography’s role in breaching the divide between public and private. By presenting both contemporary and historical work, unknown photographers and figures of international renown, all dealing with the forbidden gaze – at unsuspecting individuals, at sex, at celebrity, at pain and suffering, and finally at all of us – Exposed challenges readers and viewers to think deeply about the camera’s role in transforming the very act of looking.

Extract from Exposed copyright @2010 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

street photography

Extract from Exposed copyright @2010 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

It is no coincidence that the scientific methodology of detective work, the vogue of the police or detective novel, a prevailing fear of revolutionary turmoil, and the popular use of an objective recording instrument such as the camera would all occur at roughly the same time – the late nineteenth century. Nor is it merely fortuitous that early street photography, the subject of this chapter, also evolved then, for it is related to these contemporary phenomena.

Historian suggest that the increasing concern for privacy at the end of the century, provoked in large part by the invasive presence of the small camera, was a reaction to broader, rapid social changes especially in evidence in the United States. The period of the robber barons, who generated fantastic wealth from industry, also saw extreme hardship, especially for the large immigrant populations entering the country. New York City’s slums were the most densely populated in the world – twice the size of the London slums that were known widely and picturesquely through Charles

Dickens’s novels. In such crowded quarters privacy was very relevant indeed.

Perhaps more than any other photographer of recent history, Diane Arbus took on the notoriety of voyeurism and, with characteristic courage, transformed it. Her work engages the voyeuristic impulses to give notice to people otherwise overlooked or avoided, and sees them for their brave difference. In 1978 Szarkowski traced Winogrand’s lineage from Evans through to Robert Frank, photographers who, like Arbus, were more interested in knowing the world than understanding themselves, or who by knowing the world could understand who they were in it. The remarkable openness of this work, together with a questioning of authority that began in the 1960s and continues today, has eroded the notion of documentary photography as an authoritative view.

Today, looking at subjects voyeuristically in public places is subsumed into an engagement with issues of surveillance and questioning of our relationship to intimate acts and scenes of violence.

The thing that is magnificent about photography is that it can produce images that incite emotion based on the subject matter alone — Brassai

W

hen you meet the man you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes,” comments writer Henry Miller on French photographer Brassai. And the sharpness of vision and depth of insight noted by Miller are revealed in Brassai’s lifelong photographic exploration of Paris—its people, places, and things.

Although Brassai was a leading member of the French “school” of photography, he was born Gyula Halasz in Brasso, Hungary. (He takes his pseudonym from his birthplace.) Originally Brassai had an aversion to photography. As a young man, he studied painting and sculpture in the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Later he became a journalist, coming to Paris in 1918. There he fell in love with the city and with the camera.

Opositte.

1. S treetwalker near Place D’Italie, Paris, c. 1932 2. Fromanteel-wallet-Campaign 3. Introduction at Suzzy’s

Brassai sees Paris as a subject of infinite grandeur, his photographs providing a sensitive and often extremely dramatic exploration of its people, its resplendent avenues, and endlessly intriguing byways. Brassai’s reputation was established with the publication of his first book, Paris at Night, now a

modern classic. Some of the pictures in this book are sharply defined, brilliantly lit, while others capture the mistiness of rainy nights. Still others concentrate on the shadowy life of the underworld.

As Brassai created more and more pictures of Parisian life, his fame became international. His pictures of “Graffiti” (writings and drawings scribbled by countless individuals on the crumbling walls of buildings) were the subject of his one - man show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Brassai has also had one-man shows in the Biblioth-Que Nationale in Paris, the George Eastman House in Rochester, and the Art Institute in Chicago. His work has been included in many international exhibits and published in many magazines. He was the last person to receive England’s P. H. Emerson Award, from Emerson himself.

I was delighted to notice in the letters that from the start I saw photography as a way to uncover and record the world that surrounded me, the city in which I lived, as comprehensively

as possible. There were a good number of critics, by the way, who reinforced me in my belief and my expectations about photography.

“Brassai is one of the few European photographers who have succeeded in giving their thoughts a concrete shape in an oeuvre forming a coherent whole, and who have become known to audiences in the same way as writers have.

It is a rare photographer indeed whose prints are engraved in our memories in remembrance of emotions comparable to those felt upon reading a literary work. From the outset Brassai considered all his works as a unified whole. He is probably the only photographer – at least in France – to have acquired such a vast audience and mastered his material to such a degree that he can express himself with a flexibility and apparent ease that is almost literary in its nature,” wrote Jean Gallien in the October 1953 issue of Photo-Monde.

By Brassai, Excerpts from the intro to, Brassai: Letters to My Parents, 1998.

From the Top 1. At Suzy’s, ca. 1932, Brassai 2. Bijou au Bar de la Lune, Montmartre, c. 1932, Brassai

I have to clarify another misleading point in the letters, They suggest that I was drawn to photography out of purely practical considerations. In reality, as soon as I learned to use the camera, I lost interest in having my pictures published as illustrations for commissioned articles.

From the moment that I realized that the camera was capable of capturing the beauty of the Parisian night (that beauty with which I had fallen passionately in love during my bohemian adventures), I pursued photography solely for my own enjoyment. At the same time I also

understood that it wasn’t at all irrelevant what form of expression an artist chose in a given era. Photography seemed to me a medium specific to our time. This realization in 1930 was another turning point.

From the Left 1. Dormeur au conotier sur un banc, 1930’s 2. A Prostitute Playing Russian Billiards, Boulevard Rochechouart, Montmartre, Paris, 1932 3. Toilette, Chez Suzy, 1932

Strangely enough, our century now relates to photography nearly the same way as I did myself then. There is, however, a delay of forty years. Through the seventies, the world was indifferent and even antagonistic to photography, just as I had been through the thirties.

It was only later that general opinion awakened to the fact that photography had become one of the primary forms of artistic expression in the modern era.

This realization resulted in a worldwide reappraisal of the value of photography.

Museums, universities, private collections, and art galleries that previously had accepted only paintings, sculpture and drawings opened their doors to photography, especially in the United States, which was less overwhelmed than Europe by the heritage of painting.

If I had made such a conscious decision in favor of photography, one may ask,

why the anxiety to free myself from it as soon as possible? Why did I write, in what was undoubtedly the most obscure of my letters, dated August 2, 1939, “It was obvious that, come what may, I had to free myself from photography”? Why did I still consider it merely a “springboard to my real self”? To understand this thinking, one shouldn’t forget that photography was my livelihood, a means of support that sometimes involved assignments that I carried out with reluctance. It was mainly this “subservience” that I was attempting to escape. On the other hand, during my stay in Berlin, I wrote that there had begun to emerge in me an “idea” that “had grown into a tree with wide-spreading branches.” This was the “treasure” of which I spoke, but that “I could not fully possess.” I was tormented by the fear that I would not be able to bring it to the surface, and I felt it was a more important task than creating a photographic oeuvre.

Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to elaborate further on this here...

People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film — Weegee

W

eegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography.

Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and ‘40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death.

Opposite.

1. W eegee (Arthur H. Felling), Lovers at the Movies, ca. 1940.

Weegee was born Usher Fellig in Złoczów (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia. His name was changed to Arthur when he emigrated with his family to live in New York in 1909.

Fellig’s nickname was a phonetic rendering of Ouija, due to his frequent, seemingly prescient arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies were reported to authorities. He is variously said to have named himself Weegee or to have been named by either the staff at Acme

News pictures or by a police officer.

Photographic technique Some photos, like the juxtaposition of society grandes dames in ermines and tiaras and a glowering street woman at the Metropolitan Opera (The Critic, 1943), turned out to have been staged.

Most of his notable photographs were taken with very basic press photographer equipment and methods of the era, a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera preset at f/16, @ 1/200 of a second with flashbulbs and a set focus distance of ten feet. He was a self-taught photographer with no formal photographic training. Weegee developed his photographs in a homemade darkroom in the back of his car.

This provided an instantaneous result to his work that emphasized the nature of the tabloid industry and literally gave the images a “hot off the press” sensation.

In 1943 five of his photographs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. These works were included in their exhibition entitled, Action Photography. He was later included in another MoMA show organized by

Edward Steichen, and he lectured at the New School for Social Research.

Advertising and editorial assignments for magazines followed, including Life and beginning in 1945, Vogue.

Naked City (1945), was his first book of photographs. Film producer Mark Hellinger bought the rights to the title from Weegee.[5] In 1948, Weegee’s aesthetic formed the foundation for Hellinger’s film The Naked City. It was based on a gritty 1948 story written by Malvin Wald about the investigation into a model’s murder in New York.

Weegee experimented with 16mm filmmaking himself beginning in

1941 and worked in the Hollywood industry from 1946 to the early 1960s, as an actor and a consultant. He was an uncredited special effects consultant.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Weegee experimented with panoramic photographs, photo distortions and photography through prisms. Using a plastic lens, he made a famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe in which her face is grotesquely distorted yet still recognizable. For the 1950 movie The Yellow Cab Man, Weegee contributed a sequence in which automobile traffic is wildly distorted. He is credited for this as “Luigi” in the film’s opening credits. He also traveled widely in Europe in the 1960s, where he photographed nude subjects.

Opposite.

1. Streetwalker near Place D’Italie, Paris, c. 1932

sexually explicit photography

Photography has been the voyeur’s stand-in from the beginning of the medium, a way to make permanent an intrusive, and sometimes forbidden, view of sex, either for private delectation or to share and perhaps profit from it. Most of the early pictures that embodied sexual looking were of people who consented to be photographed; many were paid for their services, and often the models were prostitutes (…) As soon as there were photographs there were pornographic photographs. Research on nineteenthcentury pornographic photography discusses the earliest pictures made in France, already produced for international sale. Sexual pictures made in the stereoscopic format exist in daguerreotypes and in the later versions of stereo cards, and were also common in various shades of “naughtiness” as postcards.

The imagery ranges from the exotic odalisque, decorously draped (or not), to pictures where there is not the insinuation of sex but its bald presentation.

There are those in which the woman is fully dressed but opens her clothing to

reveal her sex bluntly and definitively, sometimes hiding her face; the clothing might be beautifully arranged and artfully hand-tinted. And there exist some astonishingly direct daguerreotypes of women completely nude, opening their legs with a frankness that seems contemporary. The stereo reinforce the sense of viewing the subject, especially a sexual one, as a private act, making the viewer seem like a peeping Tom. Perhaps is not surprising that there are two early photographs of nude women in private spaces that are associated with Edgar Degas. Among the Impressionists, he was the most interested in the figure and in representing society.

Working women – seamstresses, laundresses, milliners, ballet dancers, as well as prostitutes – were frequently his subjects. The photographs are closely related to pastel paintings the artist was making at this time, pictures of women seen as from behind a curtain, or through a keyhole – women bathing, drying off. Degas said he wanted to show

them like animals, cleaning themselves.

Certainly, the vantage points from which these pictures are made, their sense of invasion, give them expressive power.

Degas’s spirit of investigation, the objectivity he shared with his impressionist cohort when observing the effect of light and examining subjects that interested him, differed in spirit from the Romantic poets and artists who preceded him, as well as the Surrealists who came later. Both saw the artist as a kind of outsider, sometimes with dark impulses.

Extract from Exposed copyright @2010 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

W

Opposite.

1. M erry Alpern, Dirty Windows 16, 1994

hen she sets out in pursuit of subjects Merry Alpern takes a hidden camera with her. She captures absolute strangers in intimate situations. Her quest is the unadulterated, immediate moment and not a pose struck by someone aware they are being photographed.

The persons captured in her camera’s viewfinder do not become suspicious, nor do they later discover their role in Alpern’s photographs. But then these are not portraits or photographs of persons but rather pictures of actions. Alpern’s final shots are such that her subject’s face – and thus identity – remains concealed.

The only face that occurs now and then in her Shopping series is her own. Yet she regularly has to face charges of breaking taboos and producing voyeuristic, illegal photos. “I don’t go out looking for something in particular,” comments Alpern. “What you see are things that just happen. In the way, you can view photography as maybe voyeuristic - and I guess by extension I am, too. But that is not my intention. For me, it is isolating a moment in time that will never happen again. A photograph allows you to examine that moment without any distrac-

tions so that maybe you can understand what is happening just a little better.”

For her Dirty Windows series [1993-4] Alpern took up a fixed observation post.

For weeks she sat behind a darkened window in Wall Street watching the goings-on in an apartment opposite where a short-stop hotel had recently opened.

Looking through a vertically divided, dirty window she was witness to such intimate scenes as undressing, kissing and sex, counting money and taking drugs.

Alpern’s photos convey an excitement, a sense of being an initiate of something private or even forbidden combined with her constant fear of being discovered.

However, the pictures also exude a specific elegance: the grainy blackand-white film, the sectional shots, the blurring induced by the dirty window imbue a certain tenderness. Not least of all the symbolism and aesthetic attached to viewing through a window heighten the enigmatic quality, which ultimately eludes us behind the window, and only ever hints at the story.

FROM THE LEFT 1. Merry Alpern, Dirty Windows, 1994 2. Merry Alpern, Dirty Windows, 1994 3. Merry Alpern, Dirty Windows, 1994 4. Merry Alpern, Dirty Windows, 1994

The Park is a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo — Martin Parr

t

he exhibition of Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki’s is shot in three Tokyo parks during the early seventies, The Park is a series of black and white photographs capturing couples meeting up for clandestine trysts and, more provocatively, the voyeurs who came out to watch them. First exhibited in 1979 at Komai Gallery in Tokyo, the uproar surrounding his methods caused these photographs to be hidden from the public for the next 28 years.

Opposite.

1. K ohei Yoshiyuki, from the series The Park, 1971

Mr. Yoshiyuki first stumbled upon this hidden world while photographing skyscrapers in front of Chuo Park in Shinjuku at night when he witnessed a couple having sex and quickly discovered an entire scene of young lovers—and their peepers.

He soon returned with an inconspicuous 35mm camera, a filtered flash and infrared film, and began shooting these hetero- and homosexual couplings, along with their spectators lurking in the bushes.

What is particularly striking about this series of photographs is not the graphic nature of the sexual acts portrayed, which are usually obscured by other figures or occur out of frame, but the densely packed tableaux of voyeurs who crowd in on the couples and sometimes attempt to join in. The raw, snapshotlike quality of these images implicates photographer, viewer and subject, which makes this work especially poignant and intriguing. In the tradition of Walker Evans on the New York subway or Weegee’s photographs of couples in the movie theatre, Yoshiyuki’s The Park is a social documentary of Japan in the 1970s that is rarely seen or heard of, as well as being a comment on photography itself.

As Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, “The Park is a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.”

FROM THE LEFT: 1. K ohei Yoshiyuki, from the series The Park, 1971 2. K ohei Yoshiyuki, from the series The Park, 1971 2. K ohei Yoshiyuki, from the series The Park, 1971 2. K ohei Yoshiyuki, from the series The Park, 1971

Mann’s photographs suggest that the camera is as adept at depicting the desires of the subconscious as it is in rendering the shapes of everyday life — Andy Grundberg, The New York Times

I

n the fall of 1992, a traveling exhibit opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The collection was called “Immediate Family”, and it was by a young and lesser known photographer by the name of Sally Mann. The images, taken from 1984 to 1991 detailed the complex childhoods of her three children; Emmet, Jessie and the youngest, Virginia. At the time of the first gallery opening, Mann was unaware of the media attention she would attract, and the controversy that her work would stir up. To her, they were little more than tender, maternal photographs of her children.

Opposite.

1. S ally Mann, Night Blooming Cereus

Yet to others, they were child pornography, and the mark of an irresponsible mother. Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” shows us the sensuous and sometimes disturbing side of childhood. The controversy that “Immediate Family” stirred up is a direct reflection of the times in which it was produced, and says more about the adult viewer than of the child subject. Sally Mann chooses to explore the concept of childhood and “growing up”

using a variety of the sensual, reality and the fantastic; all through a maternal eye.

“Immediate Family” is a collection of photographs taken in rural Virginia, where the children, and Mann herself, spent their childhoods. Mann photographed the children and the landscape through a massive 8 by 10 view camera, staging elaborate portraits that still lie within the realm of possibility. Mann states that these photographs are “of my children living their lives here too. Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictitions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things that every mother has seen” (Mann) In most of the images, the children appear nude, or partially nude.

They posture, as children do, but through a combination of suggestive titles and lack of clothing the images take on a more overtly sexualized appearance. Many have hastily labeled this as indecent, and consequently, something they would rather ignore.

The sensuality in Mann’s work is unavoidable. She sees the innate sexuality of her

children where others would shy away from it. She glorifies it. In the image entitled “Popsicle Drips”, we see a young, male torso, stained with liquid dripping down his lower abdomen to his thighs.

His hips are sensually thrown to the side, and his arms are fully out of view. Upon first glance, it is an incredibly disturbing image, for two reasons. One, without the title, this liquid substance could be anything. My first impression of it was blood, and the second was feces. When reading the title, it makes a bit more sense, but one has to wonder, how did the popsicle drips get down there?

It opens up an entire line of questioning on how staged this image really was.

Secondly, this image is the only one in the entire body of work that details male full-frontal nudity. This comes as a shock to those who were not expecting it, and it causes more of a discomfort than that of the full-frontal nude female.

This image is highly provocative in its subject’s pose, and the added popsicle drips adds an element of touch and tangibility for the viewer. Gender is an issue that many people bring up when dealing with Mann’s work.

The image’s meaning changes when the artist is a woman, and the subject is male. It has the tendency to become distinctly more sexual, and in turn, comes more under fire than the female/ female exchange. Emmet, the only male of the three children, is seen much less provocatively in the series than the girls are. When Jessie and Virginia are naked in bed, he appears with shorts. While the girls are busy posturing, he is only staring at the camera, almost resentful in the way that he is being depicted.

Even in the almost sad titled “The Last Time Emmet Modeled Nude”, we still only see him from the waist up, he genitals obscured by swirling water.

This photo “respectfully solemnizes a pre-adolescent boy’s newly awakened modesty, emblem of his loss of innocence and lingering vulnerability” (Boulanger). This image, above all, shows the modestly and uncertainty that Emmet felt about his modeling. In an interview that an older Jessie Mann gave to Aperture magazine, she tells how Emmet is dealing with the pressure that he is put under from the photographs of his youth. “Emmet is completely daunted by it. He doesn’t know what he wants, so he backs away from the whole thing” (Jessie Mann). This feeling is easily discernible in the images of him, and can explain why he appears nude much less than the girls.

Another overtly sensual image is “Dirty Jessie”. We see Jessie, who couldn’t be more than six or seven, lying vulnerably on the grass. Her legs are spread wide and her hands are placed over her nipples; obscuring them. She wears only panties and rubber galoshes. The shoes are partially kicked off, making her legs appear detached and broken. She appears so vulnerable and so frail, yet her gaze is so enticing. The image is taken from above, objectifying her. Her gaze falls directly into the lens as if beckoning the viewer to come join her. The name again suggests something sexual and playful; “Dirty Jessie”. This image becomes the most sexual due to the positioning of the camera above her, and the semi-modest touching of her nipples.

Jessie poses in many other of the most provocative images in this series, and seems to do most of the posturing. She appears in another of the most sensuous images entitled “Jessie at five”, where a game of dress up becomes a nude model session for the camera. Jessie is shown from the waist up, two other figures next to her, but thrown in the shadows. One of them is Virginia, Mann’s youngest daughter, who appears to be covering her face in an act of modesty.

Jessie poses in a way that one would not expect a child to do. It is a pose of a much more sexually mature girl than that of a five year old. Jessie wears a pearl necklace and earrings, along with lipstick and blush. The title is shocking in that this girl looks as if she could be twelve or thirteen, modeling for a fashion magazine. The image plays off of the concept of age, and what it truly means to be a child. Jessie obviously is, but she has made herself up to look much older, and she flaunts for the camera with a centerfold gaze. Jessie Mann comments on these actions most articulately, saying that “There are so many levels to childhood that we as a society ignore, or don’t accept. Rather than just saying it, she (Sally Mann) was able to capture it with photographs. It’s easy to discount these things unless you can really see them in the kids’ eyes, or see it in their actions” (Jessie Mann).

To depict what childhood truly is, Mann utilizes reality in a select few of her images. However staged this reality may be, she is dealing with what being a child means; and the fiercely private nature of bed-wetting, chickenpox and bloody noses. One image that seems to

White Skates, Sally Man, 1990

Virginia at 6, Sally Mann, 1991

stand out from the rest in terms of reality, is the aptly named “He is Very Sick”. It shows a very young Jessie and Emmet in a hospital room, sitting on a bed with whom is presumably their grandfather, lying in it. The old man reaches his hand towards the camera, letting it clasp the rails of the bed. Jessie leans her head against it, staring tragically at the camera. Emmet is slightly out of focus, and the look on his face looks more like a feigned sadness than a real one.

His arms are crossed defiantly, and he pulls his head away from the camera.

The old man in bed is shrouded by light, making his face barely visible. These are the moments that most families go through, and they are the ones that no camera-happy relative would be caught dead capturing on film. They are tragic and denied, and I can hear the mother’s words attempting to explain what is happening to grandpa to her young children.

“He is Very Sick”. Emmet does not seem to understand why he is being photographed, and he is presumably trying to hide his sadness. Jessie seems to be too young to understand that these are very private moments, and that they are not generally photographed. This image brings Mann’s work back into the realm of reality, and makes it familiar for viewers.

“The Wet Bed” is an image that falls somewhere between the real and the fantastic. The subject matter is a very real and frightening issue for children, yet the composition of the image takes it to a dreamlike state. Beautiful nude Virginia is seen sleeping, sprawled out on the mattress without a care, her quilt kicked off of her. It is a perfect depiction

of childhood until one reads the title “The Wet Bed”. The eye instantly darts to the stain permeating out from under her, and she becomes a vulnerable and victimized subject. She becomes the child that pees in bed, that is ashamed of what she has done. The bed floats in the shadows, becoming the only highlight in the photo. It is a reflection of Virginia’s sleeping, dreamy state, and it is brought back to reality through the darkened urine stain on the sheets.

The ambivalence towards the ugliness of the wet bed creates a whole different type of beauty, one that can only be shown through blatant reality. Another easily looked over detail in the image is the doll towards the bottom of the image, partially in the light. It lies on the ground, and mirrors Virginia’s sleeping state. This is an image that most mother’s see when they have toddlers, and Mann chose to bring her private world to the forefront of the public. This hasn’t sat well with everyone, as some think that the private world should stay that way, even concerning art. “Certain photographs have concerned critics, as has the transferal of the ‘private’ family imagery into the public domain” (Fletcher).

“Damaged Child” is another reality based image, in which Jessie appears with a very swollen right eye. Her hair is cropped short, and her sexless face is determined only by the frilly dress that she wears. Her face is the only thing in focus in the image, and it appears to be jutting out towards the viewer. She wears no smile in the image, and she looks sad and helpless. While other mother’s are busy bragging about their child making

the soccer team or winning a beauty pageant, Sally Mann is busy showing the less flattering side of motherhood.

She is showing the maternal need to tend to her wounded child, and is not concerned about the beauty of it. This is real life and she is not afraid to show it.

Jessie Mann feels that this was her way of showing her love for them, through the capturing of their lives on film. “She has a hard time letting us know how much she loves us. But I’ve also realized that each one of those photographs was her way of capturing, if not in a hug or a kiss or a comment, how much she cared about us” (Jessie Mann). Capturing such reality of motherhood and childhood on film reveals an uncanny look at what a child is, and how they at once need a mother incessantly, yet still push her away to develop their own identity.

Mann also tends to lean towards the fantastical image; the fiction based in reality. The landscape and the lighting provide a dreamlike setting in which the children reside. “Winter Squash” is a perfect example of the use of the fantastic in Mann’s images. A reclining Virginia is depicting next to a decrepit toy horse, a staple of childhood. She is surrounded by uprooted squash, all glowing with the winter light. The light playing off of the figures produces a glowing quality, and makes the image seem more dream-like.

Virginia is shown with her eyes halflidded, and her arm between her legs, modestly covering herself. She looks serene, and is transformed into a iconic Madonna like figure, her body free from blemish or scar of any kind. The toy horse is lying down in the dirt, its

paint chipping. If the horse has been discarded, what does this say about Virginia’s childhood and innocence?

This image deals with what a child sees, versus what an adult sees. Mann uses this theme often, mostly in the photos that deal with the fantastic. She transports us into an imaginative world that often disappears after childhood has.

“Hayhook” is another good example of Mann’s use of the fantastic in “Immediate Family”. The image is of the adults in the family lounging on the porch, while a young Virginia watches her sister hang by her hands from a hay-hook. The image is very neutral, not utilizing much contrast, except where the hanging Jessie is concerned. She glows a perfect white, a stripe down the center of the image. It is easy to forget what is going on elsewhere in the photograph, because the nude and highlighted figure of Jessie demands so much attention.

The adults are all facing away from her, ignorant to what the children are doing.

Jessie hangs, her head thrown back in apparent ecstacy. She is all alone in the image, yet is surrounded by adults.

Childhood is often made up of this, and many children feel isolated in their emotions and their presence. In this image, Mann uses a obviously posed and fictitious image to represent a very real issue that children deal with everyday in a world of adults. “Yard Eggs” also depicts the loneliness and isolation of childhood. It shows a much more mature Virginia sitting in the bushes, her long curly hair entangled in the branches.

She holds a straw hat filled with eggs, and her eyes are shut dreamily. She is

all alone in the picture, and is behind a fence between her and the house. Her hair blends perfectly into the branches, mirroring its organic shape. This is not a picture that any mother would come across, and it is obviously highly composed. Mann chooses to depict her child in this way to show how lonely childhood can be. Her whimsical yet sad images transcend reality to reveal deeper issues, and to give her children a voice.

“Immediate Family” is all about showing what really makes up a child and a childhood. Although Mann is composing the images, she lets her children have their own voice, and it is easy to see each of their personalities through the images. The fact that the work was created over many years suggests a sort of narrative; three children growing up and attempting to discover themselves and their sexuality. It is most notable in images of Jessie, where she seems to be on the threshold of childhood and womanhood. She stands on the precipice, yet is undecided (Ferrer).This happens everyday, and the fact that Mann chose to photograph it should not be grounds on which to deem her an irresponsible mother. She always made sure they were comfortable with what she was doing, and the adult Jessie recalls what happened previously before the work went on display. “When Aperature published ‘Immediate Family’, Mom and Dad sat us down, and we had a family meeting. They asked, ‘Are you going to be okay with this?’” (Jessie Mann).

Mann brings to the forefront what other mothers wish to hide, and this deeply concerns some critics. Though she is glorified by some, her unflinching view

of childhood has become infamous to others. This is much more about the current socio-political climate than it is about the actual images. Novelist Ann Beattie commented on Mann’s work, saying that “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose-what adults make of that pose may be the issue” (Ferrer). The issue of children’s sexuality has also been argued in response to Mann’s work.

“What adults understand as the sexuality of children is always defined by the adult world; in this view, childhood is not fixed but culturally produced” (Edge, Baylis). “”Immediate Family” needs to be considered within the cultural and social climate that produced it; an America which was busy legislating to prevent Federal Funds being used to promote, disseminate or produce material depicting sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children or individuals engaged in sex acts”(Fletcher). Pedophilia is a very real fear in today’s world. When images of this type, no matter how innocent, are displayed to the public, it is always possible that they will be deemed inappropriate. Child molestation is a frighteningly real issue that most would choose to ignore, and stamp out anything that even slightly resembles it.

Mann’s depiction of her children’s real emotions and sexuality frightens and disturbs many. “The reception of her work reflects contemporary concerns about child abuse and the nature of childhood” (Fletcher). Though she produces many beautiful works of art, she still falls under the blade of many, through a projection of their own insecurities onto her work.

Many mothers would like to view their children through themselves, denying them their own voice and stealing from them their sexuality and emotions. Mann refuses to do this, and faces the problem head on through the work of “Immediate Family�. Through the use of the fantastic, the sensual and the real, she lends us an insight into what childhood may really be about, and questions where the line between children and adults begins to blur.

By Valerie Osbourn, October 27, 2006

Vinland (1992) from the series Immediate Family. Photograph: Sally Mann

Untitled, At Twelve Series (Sherry and Granny)

A good nude photograph can be erotic, but certainly not sentimental or pornographic — Bill Brandt

c

Opposite.

Nude, East Sussex Coast,1978 by Bill Brandt

ontrary to legend, Bill Brandt was born not in London, but in Hamburg, Germany, on May 3, 1904. The asthmatic son of a banking family, he came to his own country for the first time in 1931, having lived in a sanatorium in Davos and in Vienna and Paris, where he was Man Ray’s assistant.

His ambition was to become an independent professional photographer. His first book, The English at Home, appeared in 1936. Based on the portrayal of types and stereotypes, this was a kind of manifesto of British society, through which Brandt undertook to show the British their real faces. The complete opposite of the ideal motherland of his dreams, he discovered a divided people, a stratified society with a well-defined caste system, in the grip of economic crisis. Two years later he published A Night in London; in the same way as his friend Brassaï, Brandt enjoyed the uncertain, magical lighting effects of the night. Prowling around almost invisibly, he recorded London, revealing social inequality. He did not hesitate to ask his close friends to pose for him for certain situations.

In 1937 Bill Brandt traveled north, where he undertook at his own expense a photoreportage on the economic and social situation in the great cities of the Midlands and Tyneside.

There he took his most memorable instantaneous photographs, such as the one of the emblematic figure of a scavenger for coal returning home, a modern myth of Sisyphus.

During the war Brandt was employed by the Home Office to show how well Londoners taking refuge in air-raid shelters were coping with air raids. He was also commissioned to produce a major photographic inventory of the capital’s important buildings. The work was carried out during the black-out, without flash, rather in the style of Atget. This reportage, notable for its use of light and shade, was published in Picture Post and emphasized Brandt’s interest in social documentation.

During the second half of his career Bill Brandt devoted himself to portraiture, landscapes, and nude photography. It was his revolutionary treatment of the

Nude, London 1954

KertĂŠsz. Increasingly turning to abstract photography, from 1951 to 1960, when he gave up nude work, Brandt undertook exterior views (on the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy, and the south of France), in which he brought together the eternal themes of women and the sea, birthplace and symbol of creation. last category which brought him notoriety. His first nudes were photographed with an old wooden plate camera which the police had formerly used, lacking a shutter and equipped with a wide-angle lens. These photos seemed inspired by Balthus, Hitchcock, and Orson Wells.

Their dramatic atmosphere is enhanced by the unusual viewpoints of the architectural backgrounds, imbuing them

with a menacing atmosphere of murder or suffocation, perhaps connected with the asthma from which Brandt suffered all his life. These unnatural perspectives, which shocked people at the time, based on the enlargement of volumes and close-up treatment of details, may be compared with the experiments of Picasso, the forms of Henry Moore, and, of course, the distorted work of Andre

At the same time, Brandt was taking portraits for Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper’s Bazaar of the artists, intellectuals, and writers whom he admired.

He detested naturalism. Rather he sought to decipher enigmas, and in his work portraiture is combined with a quasi-judicial chronicle of events. Going beyond external appearances, he tried to decode the mysteries concealed

Nude, Campden Hill, London, May 1949

behind a face, as in his intriguing portrait of Francis Bacon (1963), far from a straightforward rendering of the subject.

His passion for literature led him to illustrate Literary Britain (1951), which unfurls naturally with romantic, tortured scenes evoking Wuthering Heights. At Stonehenge, or on Skye, Brandt demonstrated his fascination for untamed sites, those providing a sense of majesty, the sublime, the infinite. The cult of nature fostered the attraction that open spaces had for him, allowing him to bring out the emotional appeal of the landscape.

This aspect of his work reached its high point when he chose 200 twentiethcentury photographs for “The Land�, a project completed shortly before his death in London on December 20, 1983.

In the context of the art of his time, whose aesthetic experiments are reflected in his work, Bill Brandt was one of the first photographers to have created an individual style. While allowing the vocabulary of his art to evolve, he consciously worked at creating a personal photographic language. Based on the alliance between form and content, the fruit of experiment, exploration of the i

maginary and an ever deeper investigation of the same themes, his work is notable for its splendid use of strong contrasts and densely printed images.

Text from Michael Frizot, A New History of Photography

celebrity stalking photography

We tend to think that our interest in looking at famous people in private moments, depriving them of their personal life for our benefit, is a contemporary phenomenon. In fact, it was a pronounced feature of late Victorian and Edwardian England and practiced in the United States during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. Average people, as well as those who should have known better, could be fooled by a camera in a man’s hat with a hole cut in it. And when society perpetuated a division between normal people and the elites there was much interest in crossing the boundary. Thus, in 1909, a detective camera focused on the veiled figure of Mrs William Thaw, wife of the railroad magnate and robber baron, whose eccentric and often abusive son, Harry, had shot and killed the dashing architect Stanford White over his attentions to Harry’s wife, the pretty young actress Evelyn Nesbit. (The trial was the most sensational of the period – he got off free). There is also an impromptu picture made of the anarchist Emma

Goldman, who was surprised while riding a streetcar. In England, the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee provided an incentive for photographers to capture her unawares, and in 1899 the British Penny Pictorial magazine had a page called “Taken Unawares: Snap Shots of Celebrated People”. The Trickery these photographers employed to get their picture was usually more ambitious and creative than the results. In fact, the term snapshot was often used with reference to pictures made of celebrities: photographers are described at public events as “raising their cameras quickly, sighting the object or person and making the exposure with almost the celerity of a sportsman raising his gun”.

Extract from Exposed copyright @2010 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

b Opposite.

1. P rincess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed with children

orn Alison Mowbray-Jackson 15 May 1960 in Southsea, Hampshire) is an English artist. She hit the headlines in 1999 with her lookalike photographs of celebrities in compromising positions, and went on to win a BAFTA for BBC 2’s series Doubletake.

Jackson graduated with BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from the Chelsea College of Art and Design as an adult student. Here she established herself as an abstract painter with a difference, completing a small number of critically acclaimed works. Soon after, in 1997, her graduation piece, Crucifix, was the first exhibit in a new South London gallery, and was priced at £1,500 (five years later valued at ten times that amount). Jackson went on to gain her MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, London.

She became notorious in England in 1999 for producing black-and-white photographs including images that apparently showed Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed with a mixed-race love child. The photographs were part of her graduation series entitled Mental Images.

She has gone on to produce similarly ob-

scured photos and films of celebrity lookalikes in surprising, shocking or strange situations, portraying them, as she has described it, ‘depicting our suspicions’.

She was the artist behind BBC Two’s series Doubletake, for which she won a BAFTA livepage.apple.com. She has recently depicted George W. Bush and Tony Blair lookalikes in a series of ‘behind the facade’ scenes, and has produced a film devoted to the latter which coincided with his exit from office entitled Blaired Vision, shown on Channel 4 on 26 June 2007. She is launching a new online celebrity news site soon, and is developing a new series for American television, and finishing a book for Taschen featuring 300 of her images.

She is also an Ambassador to the Spinal Injuries Association.

Opposite.

1. Dirty Harry 2. Camilla with wedding dress, 2001 3. King William in the act 4. Diana 2000

death & violence photography

The “terrible fascination” of looking at suffering and death, the moral ambiguity of the act, is as pertinent now as it was during the American Civil War. The captivated, almost aggressive looking at both sexual and violent subjects that photography permits, and violence’s amoral allure in particular, was of special interest to Susan Sontag. Her book On Photography was originally a series of articles written in the early 1970s in reaction to the disconcerting role photography had assumed at the time; it was now presented as art in galleries and museums, notably the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sontag found the medium’s openness and seeming lack of judgement problematic, especially in Diane Arbus’s work. Although Sontag was certainly aware of the ambition of photographers like Arbus to be identified and discussed as artists, she brought photography back into a social discourse, and seemed most interested in understanding the moral uncertainties within the medium (…)

Pictures of violence that invade the privacy of the person who has suffered are rarely taken by artists, though often ap-

propriated by them: Andy Warhol made paintings not only of Jackie Kennedy’s face in shock, but of violent car crashes and suicides and the electric chair. Like picture of sex, pictures of violence are part of photography’s early history. From the time of Civil War onward, the issue of propriety in death, usually violent death, has remained open to debate: Who should look at these pictures? Can we justify intruding upon another’s violent death, and to what end? Can we equate looking at a dead gangster with looking at evidence of the gruesome evisceration of apolitical prisoner in a remote part of Nicaragua? Is the experience of looking at them on the same order as viewing pictures of lynching victims, photographs that seem to have been made as a kind of trophy, to ensure that the races would remain separated?

The nineteenth-century public had different expectations of the representation of death than we do today; the were both more and less comfortable with it.

For instance, it was entirely appropriate, even sacred, to photograph loved ones

in death. At the same time, the first photographer to depict war, Roger Fenton, in 1855, made pictures of Crimea very much in keeping with the codes of British propriety, so none of the terrible wastefulness and destructiveness of that conflict were portrayed; besides, Prince Albert had commissioned the pictures.

Pictures of violence became more widely disseminated with the rise of the popular press. The same voyeuristic impulses that impelled photographers to make pictures of royalty and famous people and to publish them in the tabloids also impelled the press to photograph and publish its first execution, the electrocution of the murderess Ruth Snyder in 1928.

Perhaps no photographs are more shocking than iconic pictures from Vietnam: Malcolm Browne’s picture of the monk who immolated himself before American TV cameras, Eddie Adams’s shot of the quick and casual execution on the street of a suspected Viet Cong, or the children burned by napalm running desperately on a country road

while soldiers stand in the distance, hardly noticing, as captured by Nick Ut. With such pictures, a generation of viewers began to question the role not only of their government, but also of photography. These images represent in some cases photojournalist relished the moral ambivalence of their position as a way of embodying the marginality and anguish they saw in Vietnam and Cambodia-Bill Brue is an example.

Photographs of suffering have the potential to be politically explosive, which is why governments have been so interested in controlling who gets to see what. Most of us can instantly recall the single, anonymous man standing up to the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in June 1989; this picture has served as a cautionary example for regiments that do not want such photographs outside their power.

From the top: 1. Malcolm Browne, Thich Quang Duc, Buddhist priest in southern Vietnam, burns himself to death to protest the government’s torture policy against priests, June 11, 1963 2. Eddie Adams, Viet Cong Officer Executed, 1968 3. Tom Howard, the Electrocution of Ruth Snyder, 1928

With the advent of digital technology, such subversive pictures play an ever more pervasive and powerful role.

The Iranian government attempted to repress picture of any pictures from 2009’s widely contested elections. For a few weeks, the only available photos and first-hand accounts came not from professional media organisations but from private cell phones. Amateur videos and pictures of Neda AghaSoltan, the young women killed by the security forces during a demonstration, signified the change in information dissemination, and with it, the potential to witness repression worldwide.

If you do your homework you will know what is fair and reasonable to ask for. Don’t settle for less.

— Lee Miller

E

Opposite.

1. Dachau, Germany: Dead Prisoners, April 30, 1945.

lizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977) was an American photographer. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller was living in Hampstead, London with Roland Penrose when the bombing of the city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the US, Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue documenting the Blitz.

Lee was accredited into the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942. She teamed up with the American photographer David E. Scherman, a Life Magazine correspondent on many assignments.

Miller travelled to France less than a

month after D-Day and recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. One photograph by Scherman of Miller in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich is one of the most iconic images from the Miller-Scherman partnership.

During this time, Miller photographed dying children in a Vienna Hospital, peasant life in post-war Hungary and finally the execution of Prime Minister László Bárdossy.

After the war she continued to work for Vogue for a further two years, covering fashion and celebrities.

Throughout her life, Miller did very little to promote her own photographic work. That Miller’s work is known today is mainly due to the efforts of her son, Antony, who has been studying, conserving, and promoting his mother’s work since the early 1980s. Her pictures are accessible at the Lee Miller Archive.

Dachau, Germany: Human Remains in a Cremation Furnace, 1945.

Dachau, Germany: Prison Guard after Suicide, April 1945.

surveillance photography

Surveillance pictures are voyeuristic in anticipation, seeking deviance from what is there: the creeping presence of enemy activity; telling changes in the landscape below; evidence of incriminating behavior, such as spying, crossing borders illegally, or accepting bribes. Such pictures today are most often made by unguided machines that only watch, and often do so from a great distance, like the unseen and immutable Eye of God. Not all surveillance is so abstract; distance also serves to protect the individual voyeur, who may use long lenses or night-vision scopes to peer without recrimination. In the hands of dissidents and artists, importantly, such potential instruments of oppression can become instruments of resistance (…)

Indeed, surveillance has become especially compelling to contemporary artists working in photography and media, perhaps because it engages a certain anxiety felt in the culture. What characterizes most surveillance photographs is a spirit of distance, abstrac-

tion, and a certain placid ambiguity.

By definition, they are without affect.

Most often we have to be taught or told what these pictures mean. In this, too, they resemble conceptual art (…)

In surveillance pictures, as in other kinds of voyeuristic work, the way the picture is made is an expression of the circumstances in which the photographer finds him- or herself. We expect the picture made by a spy to be dark and unclear, for instance, for if it were in daylight and easily read it could not be surreptitious.

Many of today’s artists-photographers are drawn not only to the evolving technology of photography but to the subject of looking surreptitiously.

In addressing photography’s alwayschallenging identity with truth, they now grapple with what cannot be seen.

Extract from Exposed copyright @2010 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

I would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening.

A camera will be set outside in the street. If you do not mind being photographed, please stand in the room and look into the camera through the window for 10 minutes — Shizuka Yokomizo

T

he focus of Yokomizo’s photography and video work is the gap between self and other; the ineffable space that exists between “me” and “you”. The object of the artist’s scrutiny is almost always a single isolated human being, but her own presence is always also implicated in this process of re-presentation, as, subsequently, is the viewer’s. The terms of the encounter between the artist and her “participant” are meticulously constructed, and it is the nature of this relationship that defines the resulting image. Thus, in contrast to the merciless “stare” of documentary photography, Yokomizo’s images reproduce a strong sense of reciprocity, and an awareness of one’s own presence in relation to another.

Opposite.

1. S tranger No. 1, 1998, Shizuka Yokomizo

In the Stranger series, each photograph shows someone looking out through a window. The artist selected the subjects’ addresses and then wrote an anonymous letter asking if the recipient would stand

at a particular window, alone, with the room lights on, at a specific time of night so that she could photograph them from the street. The artist simply promised to be waiting. If they did not wish to participate they could close the curtains, while if they chose to open the door to meet her, the photograph would not be used. The actual face-to-face encounter would last for ten minutes, but then nothing else was to be exchanged.

In the Untitled (Hitorigoto) series, Yokomizo continues to explore the tension between the documentary and fictional aspect of photographic representation.

However the artist has placed herself on the other side of the window and, by collaborating with her friends, she replaces the sense of physical and emotional distance with a world of intimacy. Rather than looking outward to acknowledge the camera the subjects look inward, as if momentarily unaware of the artist’s

Opposite.

1. S tranger No. 2, 1998, Shizuka Yokomizo On the right.

1. S tranger No. 2, 1998, Shizuka Yokomizo

presence. However the scenes depicted are entirely constructed by Yokomizo and her participants. The situations are a combination of the artist’s imaginative visualisation of her friend and the subject’s own experience of their everyday life.

The photographs are made with a single, given light source unique to the setting; but the figures depicted appear to radiate an inner light, as if more present to themselves, and thus to us, than the world around them. As a result, there is a continual dialogue between the theatrical and the real, with the authenticity of the images difficult to discern.

Forever (and Again) is a two-screen video projection, juxtaposing four elderly women playing the same Chopin waltz on their pianos with scenes of their homes and gardens. Yokomizo has said of this work: “The music is a concrete marking of time, it gives tangible form to that which is constantly moving through us, just as old age is an accumulation of traces of time on our body. These elderly female pianists provide meaning and beauty to what they are constantly losing, and provoke thoughts and question about eternity...”.

At: 2:15 the subject enters the Louvre museum and walks to the Salle des Etats, stopping before the pinting by Titian, ‘Man with a Glove’. She takes notes and also a photograph. She stays in front of the painting for about half an hour.

At 3:10 she leaves the Louvre and crosses the Tuileries. She has herself photographed by a street photographer.

I started photographing the people I followed. It came really without thinking. I had a diary and started to record who I followed and where they went. I printed the photos in a basement I shared with another girl, Gloria Friedman — Sophie Calle

s

Opposite.

1. T he Shadow, 1981, Sophie Calle

ophie Calle (born 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle’s work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.

Calle’s very first work involved following strangers around Paris. Calle had been abroad for a number of years and the idea behind this surveillance was initially an attempt to reacquaint herself with the city. However, she soon discovered that observing the behaviour and actions of these strangers provided information with which to construct their identities.

After completing her schooling she travelled for seven years.

When she returned to Paris in 1979 she began a series of projects to acquaint herself again both with the city and people of Paris and with herself. These sought to construct identities by offering documentary ‘proof’ in the form of photographs. Her work was seen to have roots in the tradition of conceptual art because the emphasis was on the artistic idea rather than the finished object. The French writer Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay (1988) that described this project in terms of a reciprocal loss of will on the part of both pursued and pursuer.

Another project, The Shadow (1981), consisted of Calle being followed for a day by a private detective, who had been hired (at Calle’s request) by her mother.

Calle proceeded to lead the unwitting detective around parts of Paris that were particularly important for her, thereby reversing the expected position of the observed subject. Such projects, with their

suggestions of intimacy, also questioned the role of the spectator, with viewers often feeling a sense of unease as they became the unwitting collaborators in these violations of privacy. Moreover, the deliberately constructed and thus in one sense artificial nature of the documentary ‘evidence’ used in Calle’s work questioned the nature of all truths.

In Suite Venitienne (1979), Calle followed a man she met at a party in Paris to Venice, where she disguised herself and followed him around the city, photographing him. Calle’s surveillance of the man, who she identifies only as Henri B., includes black and white photographs accompanied by text.

One of Calle’s first projects to generate public controversy was Address Book (1983). The French daily newspaper Libération invited her to publish a series of 28 articles. Having recently found an address book on the street (which she photocopied and returned to its owner), she decided to call some of the telephone numbers in the book and speak with the people about its owner. To the transcripts of these conversations, Calle added photographs of the man’s favorite activities, creating a portrait of a man she never met, by way of his acquaintances.

The articles were published, but upon discovering them, the owner of the address book, a documentary filmmaker named Pierre Baudry, threatened to sue the artist for invasion of privacy. As Calle reports, the owner discovered a nude photograph of her, and demanded the newspaper publish it, in retaliation for what he perceived to be an unwelcome intrusion into his private life.

In order to execute her project The Hotel

(1981), she was hired as a chambermaid at a hotel in Venice where she was able to explore the writings and objects of the hotel guests. Insight into her process and its resulting aesthetic can be gained through her account of this project: “I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs, and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame...it’s the last thought in the process.”

In 1981 at Calle’s request, her mother hired a private detective to follow her daughter, photograph her in secret and record her every movement. It was, in Calle’s words, an attempt ‘to provide photographic evidence of my own existence’.

Entitled The Shadow and displayed in the guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.

She spends an entire day aware of her follower whom she writes about in frequent journal entries throughout the day. She writes of this unknown man with a kind of love as she imagines herself “showing” him her favorite places in Paris.

She is fascinated by the interface between our public lives and our private selves. This has led her to investigate patterns of behaviour using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behaviour so that her life, as lived and as imagined, has informed many of her most interesting works.

Opposite.

Sophie Calle, Room 25, from the series The Hotel 1981 Bottom Exhibtion of The Hotel Series

Color Management sRGB vs Adobe 1998

r YK use nd CM tested sRGB a I h a ve I am a ).

0 1 e last e and (over th 8 color spac 99 e Adobe1 hed the sam e ac or of th e auth have re e th s a n put th o ly si p lu c con le. Sim . g artic hassle e in w th o h rt foll n ot wo re a s in ga

The same old-wives-tale about Adobe RGB having a broader range of colours has been circulating on the internet since the 1990s.

It does in theory, but not in practice.

I know this stuff. Did you know I conceived the world’s first dedicated digital colorspace converter chip, the TMC2272, back in 1990 when I worked at TRW LSI Products? I’ve been working with the matrix math, hardware and software that does this for decades. I also coined the word “gigacolors,” for use with 36-bit and 48-bit colour data. I was only kidding, but the word is still used. TRW LSI was a small, ultra-creative division of TRW, and I got away putting the same mirth I use on this website into the datasheets I wrote. The industry copied us and the word lives on.

10 years ago when I was able to start doing this at home I also was all excited about Adobe RGB and a slew of other whacky, innovative colour spaces. After some experi-

mentation, even I discovered that default sRGB was plenty for everything I did, and eliminated the chance for grave errors.

Adobe RGB is irrelevant for real photography. sRGB gives better (more consistent) results and the same, or brighter, colours.

Using Adobe RGB is one of the leading causes of colours not matching between monitor and print. sRGB is the world’s default colour space. Use it and everything looks great everywhere, all the time.

Adobe RGB should never be used unless you really know what you’re doing and do all your printing yourself. If you really know what you’re doing and working in publishing, go right ahead and use it. If you have to ask, don’t even try it.

If you’re one of the few a full-time career professional photographers left standing and shoot for print, by all means shoot Adobe RGB, but if you’re a very serious amateur, beware.

Adobe RGB theoretically can represent a wider range (gamut) of colours, however: 1.) Adobe RGB requires special software and painstaking workflow not to screw it up. Make one mistake anyplace and you get dull colours, or worse. You cannot use Adobe RGB on the internet or for email or conventional photo lab printing.

If you do, the colours are duller.

2.) I’ve made Lightjet, Fuji Supergloss and inkjet prints of

100% saturated ramps in both colour spaces. I saw the same colour range in print with each colorspace. I saw no real gain of any wider gamut in practice, even with these special tests.

I didn’t see any of these printers have the ability display any of the extra gamut potentially represented by Adobe RGB. Want to try it yourself? Steal the image above, assign it the profiles of your choice, and print away. Most of what you’ll see will be colorspace conversion artifacts. if you do this correctly, both prints will look almost identical.

If you see a wider gamut, go for it. sRGB is the world standard for digital images, printing and the Internet. So long as you haven’t screwed with anything, you and the world are shooting in sRGB. Use sRGB and you’ll get great, accurate colours everywhere all the time. Use sRGB and you’ll automatically get great, saturated and accurate color everywhere.

See also Color Management is for Wimps. sRGB is specified in IEC 61966-2.1, which you may also see when examining color profiles. That gobbledygook means the same thing as sRGB. (sRGB uses ITU BT Rec. 709 primaries and a gamma of 2.2, same as most kinds of HDTV.) Adobe RGB squeezes colours into a smaller range (makes them duller) before recording them to your file.

Special smart software is then needed

to expand the colors back to where they should be when opening the file.

Since Adobe RGB squeezes colours into a smaller range, the full range represents a broader range of colours, if and only if you have the correct software to read it.

Played back on most equipment, the internet or email, the colours look duller, and when played back with the correct software, the extra chroma gain required adds a little chroma quantisation noise.

Printed correctly the Adobe RGB looks the same as the sRGB, so I asked myself, why bother?

If you use Adobe RGB you will have to remember to convert back to sRGB for sending your prints out or sharing them on the Internet. Otherwise they look duller than sRGB! If you have the right software to re-expand the colours you theoretically might have a slightly broader range of colours.

However, if at any point in the chain you don’t have the right software and haven’t attached the Adobe RGB profile you’ll get the duller colours as recorded!

Web browsers don’t have, and print labs rarely have, the right software to read Adobe RGB This is why people who shoot it are so often disappointed. Even if a place has the right software, if you forget to add the Adobe RGB profiles to your files these places will read them incorrectly and you’ll get dull colours.

Adobe RGB may be able to represent

a slightly larger range of colours, but no screen or print material I’ve used can show this broader range, so why cause yourself all the trouble? I’ve experimented with 100% saturated grads in these two colour spaces and never seen any broader range from Adobe RGB either on my screen or on SuperGloss Light jet prints.

Worse, if you’re the sort of vacuumoperating geek who wants to shoot Adobe RGB because you read about it in a magazine article, did you realise that because the colours are compressed into a smaller range that there is more chroma quantisation noise when the file is opened again? Ha! Keeping people lost and confused sells more magazines and more new equipment, which supports magazine advertising. That’s why you see so many articles on Adobe RGB elsewhere.

photoshop tutorial Fixing auto levels in photoshop cs5

Choose level and on the histogram we can see the gaps on the left and on the right which tell us that we need to slightly adjust the image. We can drag the little markers at the bottom of the histogram and move them insight. This is fine but why not hit Auto button? Let to do it and see what happens. Ups what’s the hell is that? Auto Level doesn’t work I am sure everyone agrees that instead of lighting or darkening the image auto levels shift and changes colours which is very undesirable in this case and in fact in all cases that I know of. I use Level to micro-adjust the exposure and do not want any colour shifts at this stage. What happens is that when you hit auto photoshop goes to each individual channel (R-G-B) and adjust them independently.

We do want to work collectively on RGB so the image gets darker or lighter without shifting colours. Let fix this.

Hold down the alt key and click the Auto button to see the palette where the problem lies (Figure1).

First change Enhance per Channel Contrast to Enhance monochromatic Contrast (Figure 2) this will ensure that any adjustment necessary will be applied to all three channels simultaneously so it will not change the colour balance.

The other problem is the clipping (the markers have gone too far into the histogram). We can choose how much clipping we actually need. Being

Figure 1

a photographer I never want any clipping (why waste any details my camera recorded?) so I will change the Target Colours & Clipping are to 0 for Shadows and 0 for Highlights (Figure 2).

The last but very important is to click Save as default (Figure 2). I now know that I can add Photoshop levels to my workflow without worrying that it will ruin my images. From now you can auto level any image and be sure that it will apply the safe adjustment which will work 100% of times.

Figure 2

photoshop tutorial-1 Advanced contrast adjustment in Photoshop CS5

Contrast seems to be very basic adjustment to do. However, there has been inherent problem with contrast adjustment (in many programs not only in photoshop) over the years. As soon as you start changing contrast it changes colour so you than need to adjust the colour balance. This is particulary difficult in case of pictures with a lot of skin tones. Ok, let’s have a look how to adjust contrast with maximum flexibility and control without touching the colours in the picture.

This is what most people do when they want to add contrast to the picture. They go to curves and make sure that the straight line looks like a kind of S curve.

This usage of curve adjustment results in my case at least in 95% terrible if not downright ugly photos. So let’s fix it.

First we are going to create an alpha mask in order to make a selection from the image. Go to channels click and hold the apple key and click once on the layer that says RGB (Figure 1). This odd looking selection on the screen is a selection based on luminosity which is fundamentally a grayscale image selection. However instead of converting an image to grayscale we only loaded the grayscale image as a selection.

Figure 1

photoshop tutorial-2 Advanced contrast adjustment in Photoshop CS5

Now go to curve adjustment and from the flayout menu chose Curve Display Options (Figure 2).

Once in the Curves Display Option we are going to change “Show Amount of:” from Light to Pigment/ Ink (Figure 3). This is very important as it will allow us to work in percentages rather than levels which are meaningless to me as a photographer. Clik OK to come back to curve dialog box.

Now click in the middle of the box and you should see 50% in Input box and 50% in output box (Figure 4).

Figure 2

We are only going to be moving the grey point up or down and we will be using an output box for it. In this case I am going to move it down. So click in output box and using the arrow keys (using with shift multiples by 10) and go down to 40 (Figure 5). Click OK. Change the name for that curve adjustment layer to H meaning highlight (Figure 6). So the contrast for the highlight area is done. Now let’s deal with the contrast in the shadow area.

Duplicate the H layer. Click on it and change the name to S meaning shadow (Figure 7).

Figure 3

Figure 5

Figure 4

Figure 6 Figure 7

photoshop tutorial-3 Advanced contrast adjustment in Photoshop CS5

Go to image->Adjustments->Invert (Figure 8). You can now see that what happens is that the mask has became negative (Figure 9).

Double click on the curve, click in the middle of the box and you should see 50% in Input box and 50% in output box.

Double click on the curve on S layer in to bring up the curve palette. Click inside the output box (Figure 10) and using the arrow keys on your keyboard (using with shift multiples by 10) go up to 55 (Figure 11). I have noticed that shadow always needs less correction than highlights (ration 1:2 works almost always for me).

Click OK and you are almost done.

Figure 8

Figure 9

What you have done so far (Figure 12) is to adjusted the images with 2 separate layers one for highlights and one for shadows. This is far superior to using just one single layer to adjust both things at once. What we can also say is that we adjusted the highlights for 10% and shadows for 5%. This means something. Imagine having 100 images adjusted in this way and you are starting to see the point of using percentages as opposed to levels. You can think about percentage almost like you think about stops in photography.

Figure 10

Figure 12

Figure 11

photoshop tutorial-4 Advanced contrast adjustment in Photoshop CS5

The most important bit comes now. Mask are very flexible in photoshop and allow us a number of additional manipulation. If I hold down the alt key and click on the H layer you will see that we can actually display the alpha channel (yes the black and white picture, Figure 13)

Figure 13

Figure 14

We can now click apple + L to switch on levels that will effect only that particular layer (see that channel H Mask, figure 14) l we are on. We can now edit the mask as opposed to the picture so we can be far more bold with our adjustment, here even to the point of moving the cliping triangle inside the histogram.

In doing so we are adding more shape and details to the mask not directly to the image. This is very subtle way of working and gives the best results when compare with any other methods that I know of. Good Luck with it.

I shoot a lot! It is quit common for me to bring home about 500-700 images from one session. So there is an obvious question how do I manage to edit this many images with what I have shown so far? Do I have an image editor to do all my edits? No! I do everything myself, I would never trust anyone to edit my pictures. What’s more I hardly ever spend more than 1 minute editing one picture! So how do I do it so fast? I simply use ACTIONS which are one of the best things in photoshop to speed things up. Actions are only useful if build on the sound foundations that we have done so far. It is outside of the scope of this workbook to cover actions thoroughly though. If you would like to find out more about them do feel free to fire me an email and we can arrange tutorial session. But first, let’s see how useful actions can be.

photoshop tutorial Actions overview in Photoshop CS5

Figure 3

Figure 1

In photoshop, you can use action to record editing steps. This makes editing images very fast and convenient as you can concentrate on the feel and look rather than on the sliders, pallets and so on.

Figure 1 shows the normal view which can be changed to a button mode (figure 2) which is very handy and convenient for fast application of adjustments. As you have probably already noticed I have recorded the steps I have been doing so far in this workbook (see figure 3).

Figure 2

Just by clicking on Retouch I am adjusting the image for auto levels and contrast using 10% highlights and 5% shadows. I found this ration 1:2 works in 90% of cases. However, this is just the starting point. From now on I can adjust Highlights in 10% increments just by clicking on the tabs. Same with shadows can be adjusted in 5% increments just by clicking on the tabs.

Using action adds incredible speed to image editing workflow. However,

a good set of actions are difficult to create or come by on the net. I found that creating actions yourself is the best way, as only than you actually understand what you are doing.

On the right image 1 with retouch applied. And image 2 with 5% shadows and 20% highlights applied all under 25 seconds.

photoshop tutorial-1 Selective sharpening in Photoshop CS5

concentrate on how to sharpen or not sharpen the flash tone.

After opening the file and editing it either in camera raw or in photoshop itself we should be now ready to do sharpening. It should always be done at the end of the editing process depending upon where the photo is going to end up (web, photobook, gallery print, etc). As you will see we are going to do it non destructively which means we will be able to come back to our file and change the amount of sharpening should we wish.

I have realised that I had not done any montage exercise that was apparently required. And to be perfectly honest until yesterday I had a plan to do it. However, during our crit today I saw so many badly sharpened pictures that I have decided to do a short tutorial on sharpening instead. I hope this will be far more useful that copying and pasting eyes from one person to the other.

Sharpening is a very contentious area and certainly a subject way too big to deal with in this short workbook.

Obviously different pictures need to be sharpen in different ways in different conditions depending on were they are intended and so on. Here I am going to

First thing we do is to duplicate the background as we do want this to be non destructive.

Any time I sharpen a picture that is orientated towards fashion, beauty, flash tone or whatever I always do it through the red channel and to be precise through red channel negative. I will show you how to do it.

First we copy the red channel. The next thing to do is to hit apple + I or ctrl + I if you are on the PC or go to image-adjustment and hit Invert.

What we want to do is to protect the red channel. No we have a negative red channel mask loaded. What this means is that the white areas will be sharpen while the darker and black areas will not. I hope you are getting used to using mask and understanging the difference between negative and normal mask. Anyway the

next thing we are going to do is to click edit this mask a little bit.

I like to overemphasis this mask a bit at this stage so I click apple + L to bring my level. Now I deliberately clip a little bit of highlights and shadows. As you can see now what is black will not be sharpen at all the sharpening will start from grey areas and progress to the white. This simply mean that the sharpening will be proportional to the image. This concept of doing editing in proportion is a key concept and a fundamental difference between image editing and image damaging that we so often see even in magazines and newspapers.

photoshop tutorial-2 Selective sharpening in Photoshop CS5

I like to overemphasis this mask a bit at this stage so I click apple + L to bring my level. Now I deliberately clip a little bit of highlights and shadows. As you can see now what is black will not be sharpen at all the sharpening will start from grey areas and progress to the white. This simply mean that the sharpening will be proportional to the image. This concept of doing editing in proportion is a key concept and a fundamental difference between image editing and image damaging that we so often see even in magazines and newspapers.

Now hold down the apple key and click inside the Red copy channel to load the mask as a selection. Now click on RGB to see the picture.

I like putting all the sharpening in the separate folder so at this stage I use left hand fly out menu and choose New Group from the layers. This creates a folder with the currently selected layer in it. I usually call that folder sharpen.

Than I go to view and hit the actual pixels. I want to see the picture in 100% state in order to sharpen it properly. The marching ants still visible so let’s go and hide them. Go to view and click show extras, this causes the marching ants to disappear and we can start sharpening.

Now click sharpen and unsharpened mask to apply your sharpening. It doesn’t really matter how much sharpening we are adding at this stage as we are going

to fine tune it in the next step. The point here is that we do it through the red channel mask and in doing so protect the skin tones. So with this image I choose amount of about 150 which i slightly too much. I click OK and we area almost done. However the fun part comes now.

Click and hold the alt key and click on the add vector mask at the bottom of the layer palette. This adds a black mask and hides all our sharpening. Now take a brush make sure that white is your foreground color and brush the areas you want to be sharpen. You don’t have to be very precise as you are going to stay in the boundaries of your selection through the red channel that protects the skin tones anyway.

photoshop tutorial-3 Selective sharpening in Photoshop CS5

Now if you think you oversharpen just play with the opacity slider to fine tune it as you wish. Remember, put the cursor inside the box and use up and down arrow on your keyboard to increase or decrease the Opacity level in the control fashion. Holding the shift key will multiple the increments by 10.

What we know have is a sharpen picture

in proportion. This means that the iris of the eye is sharpen less than the white part of the eye and so on. We did not applied flat sharpening to the area but done so in proportion to the image.

project idea ’bloggers’ First idea development and exploration

I had an idea of portraying people who spend quite a lot of their time on the computers. They do so mainly to communicate with others thorough the written language of internet posts called ‘blog’.

Just like ghost writers who hardly ever disclose their identity, bloggers are hardly ever known by other than their names and more often their assumed names.

This duality of private writing for public consumption, was something that caused me to think about it in the first place. Something else which struck me about bloggers was that most of the writing and posting is usu-

ally done in the privacy of their own homes, and not infrequently at very late hours. I was very keen on photographing bloggers at work especially because it meant photographing in low light which I like very much.

I am using a dual monitor set up that is in my opinion the only way to work with lightroom software while editing images. Two 30 inch mac displays are excellent although their capacity at displaying adobe 1998 colour space is poor to say the least. Anyway, their matt display and good viewing angle was sufficient for the job.

The lightroom seems to be quite a good editing software similar to aperture yet their usefulness is always questions when in the end I have to open the image in the photoshop for the final touch ups.

After the initial few shots, it became apparent, that the project was really poorly conceived. There was obviously something wrong with this idea of ‘bloggers’ as I simply fell out of love with it. Without dwelling too much upon it and listening to my instinct I decided to abandon this project and concentrate on something completely new. Perhaps if I had more time I could develop this idea further.

Anyway at yesterday I read about he projects of Sophie Calle. Especially the project ‘Hotel’ has intrigued me a lot.

Having spent the last few years in a hotel business and having to deal with quite a few non paying guests during those years set me thinking. I have been trying to recall our last non paying guests and how strange they behave. I was thinking of photographing left overs from con guests who simply took advantage of the hotel policy, or receptionists’s kindness and run away without paying for the room. I remember that some of them left valuable things like 3 pice suite, wallets, books and many more object that could be used as a starting point to ascertain their identity and perhaps build up their character profile and so on. Anyway I was almost on the verge of starting this project when another project came to me like a flash of inspiration. Read on...

project idea ’portraits’ Second idea development and exploration

RESEARCH

My first departure port for a research regarding the project public/private is last year exhibition in Tate Modern “Exposed�.

“I n c o m b i n ee a c h [ w o r k o f a nd re la d i n a pa rti a rt], li n es emot tions o f cu la r wa a nd colo o f l i n eiso n s . T h e s e r e l af o r m s , s t i r o uyr , c e r t a i n f o rum m o v i ng f a nd co lo u rs t io ns a nd co a est h et ic a n d ‘s i g o r m s, I c a l , t h e s e a e s m b i n a t i o n s c o m m o n n i fic a n t f o l ‘ s i g n i fic a t h e t i c a l l y to a l l rm’ is n t fo r

portrait editing Exploration of various option of taking it further with editing

In my editing I was influenced by the aesthetic of the last year exhibition at Tate Modern ‘Exposed’. I have decided to develop and present the project as a black and white series. This together with the square format, convey artistic and classical aspiration of the photographs.

As with the previous project, I did not want to priorities any of the photos in a series, and, decided to display them in a straight row.

My only regret is that due to 35mm camera limitation, it was not possible to print them out in a large format (see next page for the effect).

I believe that each of these photographs could be displayed singularly and still generate positive response/feedback. This is due to their formalistic nature that renders them aesthetically pleasing, regardless of the subject matter.

project self-evaluation BA (HOns) Photography MOdule: digital PHotography Project Title (How did this develop from your working title and what was involved in the decision making process?)

The project started without a title and no other words apart from ‘portraits’ was used to describe the series I was working on. During the critique, the title ‘Come Back’ was suggested, but I did not find it particularly suitable.

Subject (Reflect on the subject matter of your project and the background research on this subject) The portraits were initiated by a suggestion from my girlfriend of a photo session with her best friend Julia.

Separated from her husband for over a year due to work commitments, Julia was desperately unhappy. The prospect of spending a solitary Easter Holiday drove her to send a desperate plea for her husband to come home.

Torn between her own need to see her husband, and his duty as a soldier, she tries to use photographs as a sort of bait. She hopes that they will do the talking for her and convince her husband to return.

Julia is not aware at this moment, that I have taken portraits of her which deliberately exclude her head. In fact she has not seen the photographs as yet.

In my research I focused mainly on artists that photograph nude and often sexually explicit subjects. The last year exhibition at Tate Modern ‘Exposed’ formed the basis and a starting point for my research. I have also been deeply influenced by a lecture about formalism, and the notion of ‘significant form’. The book ‘Trace & Transformation’ by Joel Eisinger which I have read an reread several times, convinced me, that I should try and shoot my portraits giving special attention to forms, shapes, shadows and lines.

Photographs of Edward Weston, Sally Mann and Bill Brandt, that I used for my initial sketches were the sort of reference images that helped to conceive the poses of my model.

The portraits were initiated by a suggestion from my girlfriend of a photo session with her best friend Julia.

Separated from her husband for over a year due to work commitments, Julia was desperately unhappy. The prospect of spending a solitary Easter Holiday drove her to send a desperate plea for her husband to come home.

Torn between her own need to see her husband, and his duty as a soldier, she tries to use photographs as a sort of bait. She hopes that they will do the talking for her and convince her husband to return.

Julia is not aware at this moment, that I have taken portraits of her which deliberately exclude her head. In fact she has not seen the photographs as yet.

In my research I focused mainly on artists that photograph nude and often sexually explicit subjects. The last year exhibition at Tate Modern ‘Exposed’ formed the basis and a starting point for my research. I have also been deeply influenced by a lecture about formalism, and the notion of ‘significant form’. The book ‘Trace & Transformation’ by Joel Eisinger which I have read an reread several times, convinced me, that I should try and shoot my portraits giving special attention to forms, shapes, shadows and lines.

Photographs of Edward Weston, Sally Mann and Bill Brandt, that I used for my initial sketches were the sort of reference images that helped to conceive the poses of my model.

Aims, Objectives, Concept (How and to what extent have you have achieved the aims and objectives of your project? Describe the main concept driving your project.)

The main concept of the series was to capture the private moments of intimacy without actually showing any explicit nudity.

I was aiming to show the body parts which are not normally associated with privacy but thanks to transformative nature of photography can be seen as private, intimate and indeed personal.

as a record, and the notion of a ‘significant form’.

Form, medium, presentation (What is the final form and method of presentation of your work and why did you make these decisions?)

References (How useful were the references you explored – the artists, writers and filmmakers and how do you think your project would function in similar contemporary fields of production?)

I have decided to develop and present the project as a black and white series. This together with the square format, convey artistic and classical aspiration of the photographs. As with the previous project, I did not want to prioritize any of the photos in a series, and, decided to display them in a straight row. My only regret is that due to 35mm camera limitation, it was not possible to print them out in a large format (see workbook for the effect). I believe that each of these photographs could be displayed singularly and still generate positive response/feedback. This is due to their formalistic nature that renders them aesthetically pleasing, regardless of the subject matter.

Research Methods (What methods did you use to research this work and how did this research inform your project?)

I have carried out extensive research on photographers who participated in the last year Tate Modern exhibition ‘Exposed’. This exhibition fitted perfectly into the theme of my project ‘private public’. I have found the range of photographs exhibited very stimulating and inspirational. I have included them in my workbook for reference purposes, as well as an aid for initial sketches.

Having a little more time for this project enabled me to do extensive reading, especially with regard to material, that we have discussed during morning lectures.

This provided a certain amount of incentive and set me thinking about things such as: photography as an art form, photography

Consequently, curiosity about the formal nature of photographs was born, and together with it, the interest in photographers such as: Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand and Edward Weston.

The references I came across and explored were very helpful. The theme ‘public private’ is a very broad term and encompasses a wide range of photographic practises such as street photography, nude photography, celebrity photography end so on.

Therefore I am sure that I will be coming back to those photographers just as I was coming back to the once I explored while working on the previous project ‘absent present’. Most of those artists are what is commonly referred to as ‘cannon of photography’ which however limited, can be very useful and inspiring.

nd. est frie f h er b n d h a s o it a r tr ra e a po office , to tak as an army sperate lfriend y a de d ir ll a a g y ro re b m g has is a y h d b p r e d a n ra e p tin g k io photo used by this een as band is stat b is e h �. v T a Ih ca turn h us year. e pain ay for his re iend’s e for over a rn. Th The fr e y to d hom d retu a n n d a e e n m loit th n ot b t tentio only live fro to exp r his a cided of por traits e d I , plea fo girl to say: “I g s is facin ted, a serie t of persuahe s y sh e lead t n ifficult and sugge r tain amou black and d e h t , e are of uation de. After a c reed on five which is w it s a e g h g tu ss Bein y of t have a ey otene nd soli rabilit vac y a irlfriend, we cer tain rem o in a way th vulne S her pri a al. g . e e g e y c v z n n a m a ti h ey co blic g reflec lp from he images the pu out what th nd he m .T a s o , h fr n b p e io a s gra her fac y reveal, as y un photo e hiding om m ce white red by bout what th mes fr n e o d c n is s e s h in te s en g u ch a tograp a . Their t so m of pho otography ntit y, w e e p are no le y t h b e ch to p a recognisa r th es a fo ro e p v p f, ri o alist a f th e d stead Par t o ing of a form hadows, in y ing. n nd ds o displa n ta s a a rs rs e u d y re ed to stic s, colo ind m ri decid I h u rm e e y t y b fo li a vo on rce om re e their ving fo phs fr tapos the dri otogra ope will jux h p e h h t . This I et a ch ther d hite frames To fur w ld o b in l. them a p p ea r tistic an d a

project evaluation BA (HOns) Photography MOdule: digital PHotography - tutor - RC marks - Project (70%) - 52%

Research File (30%) - 55%

Total - 53%

Conceptual engagement with and creative response to a brief.

You state that you main concept was to capture private moments, but your images are staged and therefore no longer private.

Coherence and realisation of project work in relation to genre/theme.

Slightly incoherent in the meaning of private moments of intimacy and your understanding of intimate body parts.

Overall image quality.

The final prints look impressive but unfortunately the images were not printed by you but at a photography lab.

Control and utilisation of tools and processes.

Again this is difficult to assess, the psd files are already edited and there is no notation of your process in your workbook.

Documentation of research, development & production.

The workbook again looks impressive but actually there is very little indication of your work.

Critical response to research & development & understanding of context.

Some good reflection but a little confused in some of your ideas.

Further Comments This project is not fully realised and conceptually confused. To be asked to take intimate images of your girlfriend’s friend, for her boyfriend, is a little unusual and you do not attempt to address this. Instead you as the photographer seem to disengage from what you are doing and simple restage an idea of ‘intimacy’. You also suggest that the body parts you shot are not associated with privacy, are you sure about it? It would have been more interesting to explore this boundry between you and the subject. The image themselves are very good.

Your workbook looks impressive but it is very difficult to work out what is your work and what is copied from books or other sources.

There is very little reflection on your research or project development. The photoshop tutorials do no demonstrate what you understand or how yo applied this to your work. Overall you need to engage more with the module so we can help direct you through the project.

A picture paints a thousand words...

Year

II

The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture, the less happy I am with it.

— Philip-Lorca diCorcia

U Opposite.

From top to right and down Philip-Lorca diCorcia Head No. 24, 2001 Head No. 8, 2000 Head No. 22, 2001 Mexico City, 1998 Rome, 1999 Tokyo, 1998 Text on the right from: en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Philip-Lorca_diCorcia

sing a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture’s spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations. His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire.[3] During the late 1970s, during diCorcia’s early career, he used to situate his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus, that would make the viewer think that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someone’s everyday life, when they were in fact carefully staged and planned in beforehand. He would later start photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world.

When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject in a special way, often isolating them from the other people in the street.

His photographs would then give a sense

of heightened drama to the passers-by accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions. Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached to the world around him, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject’s name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city’s anonymity. Each of his series, Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, A Storybook Life, and Lucky Thirteen, can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia’s formal and conceptual fields of interest. Besides his family, associates and random people he has also photographed personas already theatrically enlarged by their life choices, such as the pole dancers in his latest series.

His pictures have black humor within them, and have been described as “Rorschach-like”, since they can have a different interpretation depending on the viewer. As they are planned beforehand, diCorcia often plants in his concepts issues like the marketing of reality, the commodification of identity, art, and morality.

I

c on c e ography er I am t o h p ia c or wev I find diC well conceived ho way the t he ery ptually v is aesthetic and having an h on a of not sold . T he ide it at this e k li k o lo ab ure final pict f people scare me o w e entire cr stage.

This Polaroid was a test shot for a series I did in the 1990s called Hustlers, about male sex workers looking for business on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.

When I picked each location, I didn’t know, at that point, who would be the subject. For this one, I chose as a background the famous Capitol Records building, which looks like a stack of LPs. I set up the tripod and lights, then left my assistant waiting while I got in a car and approached one of the men standing around. I had a thing I would say: “I’m not interested in sex, but I will pay you the same amount of money as you would get for the lowest common denominator sex act to take your picture.” And that’s how I met this guy.

Male sex workers tend to assume one of the Village People roles, but this guy was different. He looked like a rocker, wearing a leather jacket with that symbol in studs on the back. In this shot, you are not given any of the usual gratifications that photography offers, the normal hints to character that seeing a face brings. That’s what I like about it: he is summed up by the jacket.

On the left Philip-Lorca diCorcia from the series my best shot

One reason I did the project is because Hollywood is all about false fronts and roleplaying. This seemed the perfect analogy: a male sex worker pretending to be a punk rocker.

On the right Interview by Sarah Phillips guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 June 2011 22.29 BST

When you go on to the street, you bring an element of unpredictability and chaos to the situation. I try to control it, with light and framing; but after that, things happen that are either a blessing or a curse. I like that.

Top Jeff Wall A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993 Left Katsushika Hokusai Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga, ca. 1832

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that.

— Jeff Wall

J

eff Wall is a Canadian artist that creates tableaux which according to the dictionary means: the term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist’s models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. Throughout the duration of the display, the people shown do not speak or move. The approach thus marries the art forms of the stage with those of painting/photography, and as such it has been of interest to modern photographers. (from wikipedia) For a piece of art to qualify as tableau it must be produced for the gallery wall (large print), must be pictorial (beautifully composed) and must take into consideration the intrinsic qualities of the camera (chance). Digital manipulation is often a prominent technique used in the creation of work within the Tableau Form, since photography is often said to lack human agency and one of the salient qualities of the Tableau is that it must be an object of thought. (wikipedia) He is a very conceptual photographer whose pictures are quite often concerned with the philosophical

problems of representation. He derives inspiration from great artists such as Diego Velazquez, Hokusai and Edouard Manet as well as great writers such as Franz Kafka or Ralph Ellison.

Wall calls his photographs “cinematographic” as they produced using a combination of actors, sets and special effects such as A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993, where the woodprint

by Hokusai is recreated in Britain using actors is to a large extend a montage of a 100 pictures taken over a period of a year.

Jeff Wall exhibits his photographs which are usually of life like sizes as a transparencies mounted on light boxes. This idea of representation was apparently inspired by the back-lit advertisements found at bus stops.

I don’t know what to think about Wall.

To me he is less of a photographer and more an artist producing a very conceptual installation art works. I can’t image myself working with crew, models lighting technicians and assistants and

all this just to reproduce a scene that has already happened either in life or in the paintings of old masters. However, his final works are excellently produced in fact hardly anyone can recognise the montage behind them such seamless is the post processing and editing. I like Wall’s insistence on the size of his final prints. This makes me seriously think of switching to medium format or analog photography.

I read that it was Eugene Delacroix’s painting The Death of Sardanapalus 1827 that caused Wall to return to picture taking after 7 years of hiatus. Delacroix picture shows the final moments in life of Assyrian king. Having learned that his army had been defeated he orders the slaughter of his concubines, eunuchs and horses as well as the destruction of his palace. It is exactly this terrible funeral pyre scene that Wall reconstructs in his messy picture of The Destroyed Room 1978. This picture is often interpreted as a Wall’s metaphor for the increasingly violent conflicts of modern life.

inspired by Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere 1882.

We can see that the women is looking straight out at us just like Manet’s barmaid and by doing so creates the illusion that there is another part of the picture unseen but present place from which we have a vantage point. Wall copies of borrow the structure and positionining of the lightbuls in order to give it the picture its depth. The women and a man a similarly reflected in the in a mirror. This picture seems to be revolving around male artist and a female model as well as the viewer’s role as onlooker. The camera in the centre captures the act of making the image and at the same time looks straight at us. There is a ver good reading extract from David Company “ A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Room” Jeff Wall’s picture for a woman on the blackboard.

Another of Wall’s photographs Picture for Women 1979 was

Picture on the next page is my favourite by Jeff Wall. Its a picture inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel published 1952 Invisible Man. The novel is about a man who hides in the cellar of a large apartment building in New York. He installs about 1300 illegally connected light bulbs as he believes that without light he is not only invisible but also form-

Eugene Delacroix The Death of Sardanapalus 1827 Musee du Louvre, Paris from book Jeff Wall - Photographs

Jeff Wall The Destroyed Room 1998 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa from book Jeff Wall - Photographs

less. Wall uses the light source behind his pictures is a clever way of brining his own ‘invisible’ subjects to attention and thus giving form to overlooked in our society.

quite like Wall’s take on it. I also hear that quite a few people in the school decide to read the book after seeing the photograph. this would mean that it works at least in some ways.

I am again in two minds about this type of photography. It seems to me that staging elaborate photographs of scenes from literature is equivalent to filming and refilming great literature. It requires the viewer to have a knowledge of some other things in order to truly appreciate it the work.

This requirement makes Jeff Wall’s artwork for me at least somehow elitist. Rehashing stories that exist in our minds is a cheap trick that we approve of because it pleases us that we recognise something we’ve read about.

Photographing literature is not often done these days although it was once the main business of the visual arts. Perhaps it is bacause Illustration is a term held in a rather low esteem now but I think that Wall’ picture which is so rich in details and thoroughly absorbing has managed to pull it off quite successfully. Having read the “invisible man” quite a long time ago I must admit I

All text written by myself baed on abook by Sheena Wagstaff Jeff Wall Photographs 1978-2004

Edouard Manet A Bar at the Folies-Bergere 1882 Courauld Institute, London from book Jeff Wall - Photographs

Jeff Wall Picture of Women 1979 Collection of the artist. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery NY. from book Jeff Wall - Photographs

“I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century.”

“My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway.”

“the truth is the light and light is the truth.”

Jeff Wall’s After ‘Invisible Man’ By Ralph Ellison, The Prologue 1999-2000.

All quotes form Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

STUDIO PORTRAIT LIGHTING

by Andy Golding

P

ortraits of extraordinary quality can be achieved with modest equipment and limited space, provided a few simple concepts of lighting, exposure and approach to the subject are understood and controlled. This article will help enable you to shape and control light: creating ‘small’ and ‘medium’ sized light sources, and explain where to place them, and how to use fill-in, back, and background light.

The lighting kit used here was a flash monolight kit, costing around £250, which included two stands, reflectors and reflecting umbrellas. In addition, I used a £125 Sekonic light meter, and a Nikon D200 set on a tripod. A one meter Lastolite or Flexfill type white flexible reflector was used to control fill light.

Many of the effects shown here could however be achieved with a powerful handheld flashgun (with a guide number of at least 33 at 100 ISO) set on a stand, with an umbrella attachment and an extension pc cable to connect to the camera. However, such a setup would have no modelling lamp, which enables you to see the play of light on your subject before the flash fires, and its lack of power would limit flash to subject distance.

Stylistic options include a neutral approach, for the passport or school portrait; a painterly look, to flatter or to add gravitas; and a dramatic style, to emphasise authority, or for a character actor’s head shot. Of course, each requires a different lighting set up.

Lighting size and lighting quality First principles: the smaller the light source, the harder edged the shadows; the larger the light source the softer edged the shadows.

A small source of light gives a rapid transition from light to shade, and creates small bright

of piece ssar y r and e c e n y clea lutely he Abso g. In a ver xplains t in it dy e sing u n wr A g y a my lightin ise w conc f portrait et up. This so o s e s r g basic it lightin e futu y m l in th le k simp er y usefu clude it in v in come lad I can ok g bo I am work highlights. A larger light source casts soft-edged shadows, gradually transforming from light to shade, and creates substantial highlights, often big enough in close up to reveal the shape of the light itself.

Light sources which have a diameter equal to a quarter of the distance (or less) to the subject are said to be small, and include direct sun, flashgun, torch, bare lightbulb, candle, spotlight, small flood lamp set in a small reflector, headlamp, and security lamp.

Light sources whose diameter is one quarter to equal the distance to the subject (eg a one metre light up to two metres away) are termed medium sized. Such sources include bounced or diffused light; light from a north facing window; from living room or restaurant ‘up lighters’; large lampshades; photographic softboxes, and reflecting umbrellas.

Sources that are equal or greater in diameter to the distance from the subject are said to be large. Examples include light from an overcast sky, or from a photographic studio lightbank.

Direction/angle A direct flashgun or a monolight flash head with no reflector will create the smallest of light sources, and give very hard-edged shadows. In dark surroundings, small source sidelights, angled across your subject, produce contrasty, dramatic light. This type of lighting is associated with setting sun, theatrical spotlights, searchlights, and the bare bulbs of interrogation cells. All facets of the face and textures of the skin will be revealed in sharp relief. The sudden shift from light to dark recalls nighttime under moonlight, or the good and evil play of expressionist or film noir cinema.

the source provides light that more fully surrounds the subject, and the gradual shift from light to dark gives roundness, shape and three dimensionality to faces and bodies. Shapes and textures are softened and smoothed. The style is particularly reminiscent of Vermeer’s paintings, which have influenced photographers like Lewis Hine, Arnold Newman and Helen Van Meene. tep by step set up Set up all equipment well before the sitter arrives: lights on stands, camera on tripod, backdrop erected, reflectors at the ready. Take some test shots, and work out basic exposures and lighting setups.

If using a studio and backdrop, set up the camera as far from the background as possible, so the background fills the full frame.

Then determine the subject position – again, usually as far from the background as possible.

A good distance from the background gives more possibilities for controlling the play of light and shadow from your main light.

If the subject is close to the background, it is impossible to avoid shadows on the background. Equally, the more space there is behind the subject, the more opportunities you have to control the spill of light from the main light, and to introduce separate backlight and background lights. A stool or chair may be useful. However, many subjects perform best when standing, so mark a spot on the floor where they may stand.

The medium source main light The most risk free starting point for impressive results is to use medium source light. A silvered or white umbrella with an opaque

From overhead in light surroundings, small sources can emulate midday sunlight or living room light. Direct from the camera position, small source can suggest the confrontational style of fashion (think of David Bailey); documentary, like Diane Arbus and Martin Parr; or celebrity portraiture, such as that of Richard Young.

Medium source side lighting recalls the north light of an artist’s studio (through which no direct sunlight can fall). The breadth of

,often black, backing, is designed to enlarge the light source by reflection, and should be behind the flash head in relation to the subject. A translucent transmission umbrella is designed to diffuse the light, and should be used in front of the light and subject.

Use the umbrella in combination with a wide angle reflector, so all the light is directed into the umbrella. If it spills around the edge of the umbrella, you may lose up to half the power of the lamp.

With the lower umbrella rim at head height (effectively at an angle of 11 o’clock in relation to the sitter’s eyes) and the stand a metre to your left, you will recreate a window-like light and a photographic portrait convention. The light will gradually give way to shadow around the left edge of your sitter’s left eye. Their head and shoulders will be given form and shape by this light source, and the texture of their skin and clothing and will be smoothed and appear lustrous.

Eyes and shiny accessories will sparkle with substantial highlights, which on close inspection will reveal the light shape. A softbox is often preferred, as its square shape more accurately implies the light from a nearby window.

Exposure Light readings are best taken with a flash meter set for incident light reading, which is most accurate for most situations: incident meter readings measure the light falling on the subject, not the light reflected from it. Set your digital camera to its native (or lowest) ISO, normally 100 to 200. Match the ISO setting on the meter. Set the white balance of your digital camera to Flash, or to 5400K (or learn how to set a custom balance for each lighting set up). If using film, use ISO100–200 daylight balanced film, and check manufacturers’ specifications for film best suited to skin types.

The meter is placed in front of the subject, as close to the face as your sitter will tolerate comfortably. A domed diffuser on the meter should cover the sensor and be aimed at the camera; this averages light and shade falling on the subject. More accuracy can be achieved with a flat diffuser aimed back at the light from the lit side of the face. Set the meter to read flash. You can opt to test fire the flash using the PC cord, or simply to read flash when the flash is fired. Set to flash-only, an icon will blink until the meter receives flashlight, which is extremely useful if the PC cable is short.

Finally, you will have a meter reading for the lit side of the face. Set the aperture on the lens indicated by the meter. With the 200 Joule unit used for this article, the reading was around f/11 at 1.5 metres.

Make sure all room or studio lights are off. Use a shutter speed of around 1/125. Prepare your sitter. Focus on their nearest eye.

Take an exposure. Ideally, you will have achieved a painterly-style portrait, though you may find the shadowy side of the face is too dark, and the background darker than its appearance in full light.

Fill Light Meter the light falling on the lit side of the face, using the flat diffuser, then meter the shadowy side of the face, with the meter resting on the cheek towards the nearest wall or other vertical surface. In a white room or small studio, the light falling on the other side of the face will be produced by the reflection of the main light from the side wall (the fill reading). In the examples here, the main light reading was f/11, and the fill reading f/2.8. This is a difference of four stops, a lighting ratio of 16:1.

A difference of more than three stops gives a darkness moving towards blackness (near total at more that five stops); this will give more drama than might be required for a family portrait, a publicity still or for publication.

To lower the lighting ratio and contrast, a fill light source can be introduced. The least complicated fill source is

a white reflector close to camera and subject. A reflector cannot be brighter than the main light, so is always unobtrusive, while a second light can readily conflict with the atmosphere of the first light and introduce double shadows. As we are conditioned to think of the single light of the sun or moon as the ‘natural’ way of light, second main lights also look ‘unnatural’.

Angle the reflector from the camera side outwards, at an angle of around 45o. Take another reading towards the reflector - it is likely to have increased by one or two stops – thus now reading around f/5.6 in relation to the f/11 of the main light. This is a lighting ratio of 4:1. Take another shot at f/11 (always peg the exposure to the main light). A more evenly lit portrait will be revealed.

Backlights and background lights Take a reading from the area of the background appearing in the shot. If it is twice as far from the subject as the main light, the reading will be around two stops less (4x less light) - a reading of f/5.6. A white background will be rendered grey, a light grey background dark grey. This can be adjusted by flagging (masking) the main light so it does not spill on to the background, making the background darker. A flag that masks the light to the middle of the background will produce an elegant shading of the background from light to dark, which can be organised to be the opposite of the facial light – a so called chequerboard effect. The first flash can trigger a second flash by switching on a flash sensitive sensor to enhance the background of the photograph.

A second light set up to shine on the background becomes a background light. By varying its power, it may be possible to evenly light the background to white if the angle of view from the camera is narrow. A perfectly evenly lit background requires at least two lights, one at each side, angled in at 45o.

To light a white background to pure white, set it to a stop or two higher than the main light (f/16 in this case) but continue to expose for the face.

The second light can be aimed from a high angle to fall across the hair and shoulders of your sitter. This backlight can be set a stop higher to give white rim light around the edge of the face, or a hair light. Aim the meter from the back of the head to the backlight.

Light shapers and modifiers Careful positioning of a single backlight will enable it to creatively spill on to the background to create a play of light suggestive of a rear window, or theatrical spot.

To prevent unwanted spilled light (eg if a background is to be rendered pure black, or if white surroundings are bouncing in too much reflected fill light) use heavy duty black card to flag the spill, or fit custom made ‘barn doors’, snoot or grids. These ‘light shapers’ and flags can be used to pool and contain the light as desired, in conjunction with the deepest possible lens hood, to prevent any of your lights falling on the lens.

Medium source – dramatic To increase the drama of the reflecting umbrella’s medium light source, move it in an arc away from the camera position. Test a series of angles, up to full side on light at 90o. Gradually, the fall of light across the face will move towards an equal division of light and shade. At around 70o to the side, most of the sitter’s left side will be in shadow, except for a triangle of light around the eye – this is typical of ‘Rembrandt lighting’.

Small source direct and dramatic For highly dramatic lighting, remove the umbrella and use a small reflector. Set it above your head (12 o’clock) angling down to the subjects face; small hard shadows will form under the eyelashes, nose and chin. The effect can mimic fashion photography – but would require make up and styling for full effect.

Nonetheless, the look can be startling and confrontational. A reflector placed below the face just out of frame will control the density of the shadows. If used with a medium source from the same angle, it will create a glow of light from below the chin – synonymous with glamour portrait lighting. With no reflector, this lighting can be made to simulate midday sunshine, provided the space around your sitter is plain, light and reflective.

Moved high and to the left, the small source will emphasise the angularity of the face; cheekbones nose and brow will stand out in sharp relief, as the hard-edged shadows form across the face.

The sitter can be made to look as thought they are caught in the spotlight, or radiating power.

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that.

— Jeff Wall

W

hile doing some research for the project I managed to get hold of Tom Hunter book published by Hatje Cantz Publishers. It’s very pleasant book to browser through and read. I must say that the text which accompany the photographs does a lot to in helping to understand and get a better feel for what Tom is up to. I am still at the stage of formulating my opinion of him and his art and therefore don’t want to be in any way definite. My relationship with his works oscillates between love and hate and until I make my mind about it I shall reserve my judgment. Consequently, I decided to limit myself to just reproducing some extract from his book.

Tom Hunter and the Modern world by Michael Bracewell

On left: Woman reading possession order by Tom Hunter

The photographs of Tom Hunter – his principal subject being the lives and homes of his local community in Hackney, the squatters and travellers with whom he lives – have always

been political, in rather the same way that they have always been meticulously composed, and lit with acute sensitivity to the nuances of light as an emotional presence.

Much has been written, I recent years, about his interpretation, working locally, with local people as models, of compositions by Vermeer and the Pre-Raphaelites, in his series, Persons Unknown and Life and Death In Hackney, respectively (…)

Hunter reinterpretation of Vermeer and the Pre-Raphaelites would have been claimed –wrongly- as an act of appropriation: an act of ironic plagiarism in the spirit of cultural piracy.

But Hunter’s art, in fact, is a direct reversal of the established postmodern model. Rather than emptying his historical precursors – reducing them to shells of image – he restores their meanings to the modern world.

Postmodernism tends to repudiate the notion of subjectivity, preferring the idea that society and culture are

Home by Tom Hunter

simply a circuit board of signage (….) You could call it a twenty-first century usage of a nineteenth century method, brining political Romanticism (Goldsmith, Shelley, Dickens) up to speed with a culture of comm-odification (…)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, major British cities are post-industrial more than post-modern. London, Liverpool or Glasgow can be seen as literalising the very wording of post-industrial – they are places after the industrial power-base has been dismantled, where the vacated shells of industrial buildings are either left to rot or conopted into the marketing of urban lifestyle. Hunter’s neighbours and subjects, on the other hand – squatters and travellers – are living through the consequences of chooseing to reject the cycles of capitalist lifestyle: their radicalism takes the form of direct action – building a creative and secure community on wholly independent basis.

Most importantly, Hunter’s art describes the humanity of

these people and their homes in a way which breaks down both voyeurism and journalistic truism; his theme is dignity, as much as anything, carried on the workings of romance.

In many ways, the Romantic tradition in which Hunter is working can be regarded, vitally as a cyclical reinvention of Modernist concerns – the relationsip between the individual and society. In lens-based media, this is a terrain which was pioneered during the middle of the last century, in the work of both great photographers such as Humphrey Spender, and the young directors of the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s. ‘And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled cities of Tibet. ‘The matter of our work is everywhere present, wrote thet old alchemist, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s throw of King’s Cross’.

The Way Home by Tom Hunter textual infor from: http://www.ephotozine.com/ article/documenting-lifethrough-photography-10574

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts, it is the most democratic insofar as it’s instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth. But I also want the work to have a visceral impact that draws the viewer in through photographic beauty, lushness, vibrant color.

Perhaps they’re democratic. I think ultimately they’re quite optimistic. I never see them as being ugly or repulsive.

— Gregory Crewdson

BM You mention drawing a viewer in through repulsion. I do find that your work is, at all times, steeped in paradox. It is constantly inviting and combative, violent yet serene, beautiful and ugly. I’m curious about your involvement with that moment which becomes the image, because I know you construct the scenarios that you photograph. In the process of constructing them, surely you’re involved in the storyline itself. For instance, the photograph of the fox in the forest with the grape arbor. These delectable, nutritious grapes are hanging down even as the poor fox lies on its back, dead as a doornail. The background is a visual hint or ghost of urban serenity. When you’re constructing images, when do you have your initial sense of what the image will be, how does that process work? Is there a prefigurative story that develops in your mind? Do you know how that fox arrived in this forest?

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, from hover series, 1996, 20×24”, silver gelatin print. Courtesy Luhring Augustine.

GC I’m a romantic. I think. I’m a very intuitive artist in terms of the final image. I spend upwards of a month creating every image. We were speaking of paradox; I’m drawn to photography by some irrational desire to create an image of a perfect world. I strive to create that perfection through obsessive detailing, through a weird kind of realist vision.

When the mystery of the photograph emerges, my irrational need to create a perfect world meets up with some kind of failure to do so. This collision between failure and

compulsion to make something perfect creates an anxiety that interests me.

BM Have you ever intuited where that desire to create something perfect derives from, in you, personally?

GC I think it has something to do with repression. (laughter) BM Ah-ha!

GC My father is a psychoanalyst and in the early years had his office in the basement of our brownstone house in Brooklyn. I would put my ear to the floorboards above his office and listen to his sessions, trying to imagine what was going on, creating a mental image of what was happening downstairs.

BM A visual image.

GC Yes. Not quite knowing what he was doing but knowing that it was a secret.

BM That’s fascinating, because a viewer of your photographs senses that he or she is invited to he a voyeur. Your viewer stumbles upon an impossibly symbolic or Aesopian or pre-Adamite scenario that’s…

GC Aesopian?

BM Aesopian as in out of an Aesop’s fable. Because your work is fabulous, it’s fabular. One particular image that you created, I find almost fundamental. After I saw it, it became part of my own visual landscape: the one of the birds who seem to have created a circle of spotted eggs, like a little Stonehenge of the Birds. But then in the background lurks this suburban set-up: houses, a couple of trees, and a ladder going up into one tree for no particular reason, then some mountains behind. Tell me, do you identify with the birds or something as the maker both of the scene and as the maker of the photograph? Are you envisioning a fable here? Is there a “moral to the story?”

GC That’s interesting. I don’t know if there’s a moral to the story, but I intentionally created a sense of ritual that is left as a question. This ring of eggs occurs as some kind of formation, perhaps a paranormal event and, certainly, there is the possible emergent meaning. To go back to an earlier question that you asked about paradox, in all of my photographs I’m very much interested in creating tension; between domesticity and nature, the normal and the paranormal, or artifice and reality, or what’s familiar and what’s mysterious. We could call that an interest in the uncanny: the terrifying and the familiar. I intentionally ground all these mysterious or unknowable events within a recognizable and iconic situation, which is the domestic American landscape. Ultimately, I would describe myself as an American realist landscape photographer. (laughter) Despite the artifice in the pictures, I’m not interested in revealing the artifice as much as creating a believable or credible world.

BM I find these worlds disconcertingly credible. I’ve been there, I’ve seen those birds. I didn’t see them make that circle but what’s so powerful about the image is that I believe I’m stumbling upon something I’ve stumbled on before—and not in a dream. This is not surreal work. It has super-real qualities. You’re not just the photographer, actually, you are a sculptor and a storyteller. Your photographs really go so far beyond seizing an image out of the world. In fact, you’re not doing that at all, you’re beginning with a narrative, you’re listening in on a conversation

downstairs. In a way, the photographic element is almost tertiary. How do you relate to the ladder or the bird or the house or the water tower or the mountains? What do you invest personally as you’re constructing the scene that becomes the photograph?

GC Everything. I’ve been asked many times, what’s your relationship to nature or the suburbs? I’m not that interested in either as subjects as much as I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear, or desire. Everything in the photographs: the birds, the iconography, the images, and probably most directly, the actual casts of my body parts, deal with my own psychology. They are used as tropes to investigate my interior life. I want to take familiar tropes like the suburban home or aspects of the landscape and project onto them some kind of personal meaning.

BM I love the reductive or democratic aspect of the work, which makes equal the suburban home with the eviscerated animal, the blistered calf with fluttering, impossibly iridescent butterflies. There’s an equalizing that you do which is combative, therefore very American. The work is ambitious and ambiguous. I think the viewer must try to set aside any notion of beauty or ugliness. In fact, I’d love to know if you have a definition for the word ugly or if you have a sense of the word beauty. I’m really interested in this democratization, because you define yourself as an American artist. Although American is so undefinable in and of itself. How do you view your responsibility to the viewer and how do you view the viewer’s responsibility toward the image? Or is responsibility even the right word?

GC I’m not sure what my responsibility is to the viewer. Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts, it is the most democratic insofar as it’s instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth. But I also want the work to have a visceral impact that draws the viewer in through photographic beauty, lushness, vibrant color. Perhaps they’re democratic. I think ultimately they’re quite optimistic. I never see them as being ugly or repulsive.

BM How would you define ugly? Visually, can you imagine something you find repulsive?

GC In general?

BM Yeah.

GC Yeah.

BM What was it?

GC While I’m thinking about that, I will say that I always set out to make the most technically, formally, aesthetically beautiful photograph I can.

BM A decaying calf with vines growing out of it, with thorns growing out of them—this to you is…

GC It’s a beautiful image. I mean it’s disturbing for many reasons; it’s a cast of my leg as a corpse. But, ultimately, if it wasn’t a compellingly beautiful image, I wouldn’t be interested. I’m enthralled by bringing it to life as a beautiful,

Untitled from series Twilight 1998-99, C-print, 50-60 inches.

hopeful image of transcendence.

BM I’m drawn to these images in the same way that Ralph Waldo Emerson was drawn to open the casket of his first wife. He was moving the gravesite and he looked at his first wife and he later looked into the coffin of his five-year-old son, Waldo, who had died of scarlet fever. I think we’re a strangely squeamish culture, some critics have thought it was either a nightmare or that he really didn’t do it. There’s evidence, in fact, of other people in the 18th and 19th centuries re-opening the graves of their beloved, almost as an empathetic performance or a statement of their own continued connection with these people and the connection to their own mortality. When I look at the lushness of death as it’s described in your work, and the beauty of these bonnets of butterflies and these grids of grapes and ropes and strings, I see it all as a marvelous embrace of humans and what we go through in a lifetime.

GC I can answer your question about what’s horrible to me. Ultimately, probably what scares me most is reality. (laughter) When it’s a representation, when it’s separate from the world, it more effortlessly becomes poetic or beautiful.

BM Do you think to embrace what you fear most is an aspect of being an artist?

GC Definitely.

BM Also, in your work there’s a magnificent collapsing of time; the corpse is a flower, the carrion is, in fact, the beautiful butterfly. It really is just a matter of time before it gets reintegrated and grows again. That’s often so present in the work, there’s a quality of life and death being simultaneous.

GC That image we spoke of earlier, the transformed leg, locates that moment where the body is incorporating itself and becoming one with the landscape. There’s a confusion and collapsing of the boundaries that hold the body apart from its surroundings. The vines are growing into the leg and sprouting thorns.

BM They’re growing into the leg?

GC Yeah. So there is this mergence between the body and nature.

BM That merging of the grotesque and the sublime is always in the foreground of the photograph. Then, as the eye seeks refuge in the image, it goes back through the amber light; and very often, you put in these serene images of a house where you’ve lived, a barn you remember, a garage or a scene of domestic tranquility. That combination of foregrounding the nexus of sublimity and the grotesque and then putting in the normal, as it were, the everyday…

GC Well, the everyday we strive for, but we don’t actually achieve that either.

Untitled from series “Hover�, Gelatin Silver Print, 20 x 24 inches

BM I think it makes for an incredibly kinetic experience as a viewer, and that goes back to the whole notion of storytelling and narrative. I’m sure you know the installation by Duchamp in Philadelphia, Etant Donnes. Was Duchamp an influence at all?

GC On this most recent work, an absolutely significant influence. Duchamp worked on that installation in absolute secrecy in his guest bedroom.

BM Secrecy was part of the whole aesthetic experience.

GC Exactly. He worked on that piece for the last ten years of his life. I’ve always been captivated by that image. Essentially and interestingly enough, I have only seen the installation through photographs. A few years ago, I had a chance to view the actual installation and I decided against it. It’s like my relationship to my work where I’m only interested finally in the image, not the installation. And I wanted only to know the installation through an image. At some certain point, partially because I was haunted by that photograph of the Duchamp piece, I wanted to incorporate the body into the landscape.

BM Have I accidentally hit upon the most important visual influence?

GC Absolutely.

BM (laughter) That’s amazing. I remember seeing it in Philadelphia for the first time. You approach the peephole through which you have to look, like a young Crewdson with his ear to the floor, and look through this chink in the artificial barn door and see the image of a naked woman, her legs spread, her hair, just a hint of her chin, a lantern up in the air. I wanted so much to move to the right so I could see her face, and of course, Duchamp’s peephole does not allow that. This sublime frustration enhances the metaphysical implications that Duchamp was after, which are that we can’t wholly see the Other. I find with your images that there’s a sense of wanting to move physically to the left or the right and see a hit more, but you’re not going to let us and that’s the way life is. This is one of the great acts of intuitive brilliance in the work, it seems to me.

GC Okay, there’s a lot to respond to. In terms of Duchamp, early on in my first efforts to include the body, I tried using mannequins. Those first images were absolute failures. At some point.

I realized it had to be personalized through my own body. Once I made that clarification, it became clear that I had something at stake, that it was my body, my corpse in a sense, and it all started making more sense. Even though these photographs are made in my studio, to me they’re voyeuristic. I’m drawn to photography ultimately through some voyeuristic impulse. The camera gives you an alibi to search into places in your psyche, to unmine the secret mysteries in your life. In the recent photographs, as you suggest, I purposely created a kind of voyeuristic peephole to make it appear like you’re looking in on a secret world.

BM Such as in your photograph of, I don’t know, (laughter) a pile of turquoise scarabs in a

vine forest with a black oval?

GC It’s a halo.

BM Oh, floating halos, of course, religious for sure; you also present grids of vegetable, mineral or botanical units, repeated units, like butterflies, or grapes, and the viewer has to wander through that grid. Maybe these grids which you establish give us a sense of stability and the confidence to enter into the scene a little deeper. All the plentitude that you offer and the richness of the color are inviting. We trust you so we strive deeper into the image and that’s where you get us in trouble.

GC I love that.

BM I want to talk a little more about the notion of you as a sculptor. The photograph of the image is a communicative device insofar as it brings the image to us, so we don’t have to go, say, to Philadelphia. You are a multidisciplinary artist. Can you tell me about your work as a sculptor? As diorama?

GC Well, ultimately I do everything so wrongheaded every step of the way. I’ve figured out how to do everything by mistake. You see the perfect images here—but if you came to my studio, it’s an absolute chaotic mess, completely disorienting and confusing. Yes, the work definitely has connections to sculpture and installation and film, but what I’m most interested in is the final picture. I don’t consider myself very good at any particular craft. The only reasons I make installations are because I have an image in my mind of how I want the final photograph to be and I just have to create it to make it look like that. It never, ever looks like what I have in my mind. Something, as I said earlier, always goes wrong.

BM Have you ever killed an animal?

GC Never.

BM Let’s talk about your hover series. At first glance, it would seem to be a radical departure from the earlier work. Gone is the lush color, the controlled studio construct. Now you’re in New England, photographing in black and white, apparently from a crane, or certainly from an altitude, a neighborhood, but it’s clear that Crewdson has been there first. It seems to me that you’ve gone to the opposite end of the spectrum to explore precisely the same human problems. Again, the American myth seems to be at play. Also, the notion that something has happened, something we can’t put our finger on: why, wherefore, what will be the ultimate consequence? There seems to be a very dangerous activity at play. Whether there are humans in the landscape—for instance this photograph of a perfect circle in a backyard—I can’t see any human beings, all I see are their artifacts. It’s almost as if a neutron bomb hit the place, but nobody was at home anyway. It’s all the detritus of our lives, and yet there is this mystical circle, reminiscent of the birds. What is the circle to you?

GC It goes back to my interest in ritual. There’s a lot to speak to in terms of this departure in the work; but to address your question about the circle: an article concerning Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is my favorite film of all time, suggested that the circle is the perfect metaphor for romantic obsession. For me, the circle is a metaphor for obsession, some kind of possibility or non-possibility.

BM Emerson wrote that the eye is the first circle.

GC Wow, I like that.

BM He also said, “There is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning,” which is ultimately the definition of romance. Because when we feel romantic about something, we believe in its perpetuity, that in every moment’s end, there’s a new beginning.

GC Exactly, that carries through all my work. I should speak about the project more because on the surface it is such a dramatic departure. At a certain point I was making photographs of my body as a corpse, photographed in this extraordinarily claustrophobic and horrific fashion. I felt like I needed, for various aesthetic and personal reasons, an absolute change. So I consciously worked to change everything in my production. I went from large scale color work produced in my studio, making dioramic constructions, to photographing outside in an actual place, incorporating the community. I went from photographing in color to photographing black and white, photographing from a very low angle to photographing from the vanishing point of an elevated crane.

BM You have gone from first person to third person narrative.

GC Exactly. But ultimately, what wound up happening is that despite every effort to change all aspects of my production—you can’t get away from yourself. So I found myself investigating similar themes concerning defamiliarization, the uncanny and probably for me, most interestingly, the relationship between nature and domesticity, particularly some kind of disturbance of the landscape and disturbance of normality. What’s most important in this work is the point of view, which is an elevated point of view from an alien perspective looking down on these everyday events. I photographed from the elevated point of view for a number of reasons: one, I liked that sense of voyeurism, looking in upon the world; the other is I liked that free-floating perspective, where it forces the viewer to ask quietly, where am I? The impossibility of point of view.

BM In this new work you seem to be an omniscient narrator as opposed to the earlier work, the “I am here, in the forest. This is my leg, I’m hurt.” In this sense you are more transgressive insofar as you’re not simply all-knowing but you’re omnipotent, because clearly you went into a community and convinced people to change their everyday behavior, change the way their street looks. This fellow here in this extraordinary photograph is sodding the street while his neighbors look on and a policeman in the background watches. Behind all that is Crewdson at work again as the sculptor and omnipotent narrator.

GC The man laying sod is like the bird in the other pictures. He’s a surrogate for me.

BM The birds are surrogates for you?

GC Yeah, in some way. Let me use this picture as an example. I had this image in my mind of a man obsessively attempting to sod the street closed. It’s optimistic, to join one lawn to the next. Part of the project in this work is to convince this neighborhood to take part in this ritual. A lot of the events unfold from this floating perspective.

It’s like bearing witness to an event that is on one level very ordinary, sodding your garden or planting rows of flowers, but exaggerating that ordinary event and making it somehow irrational. Sodding the street closed or

planting flower beds down the middle of the street is an ordinary event gone inexplicably wrong. One of the great things about being an artist is that you have an image in your mind and you can do it. Or you can try to do it. So we sodded the street closed and I got in the elevated crane, and I was lifted and floating over this scene.

It’s the most beautiful thing in the world to hover.

BM I’m fascinated by how it worked out, that you’re becoming a bird in essence. A bird’s eye view has turned all the humans in the photograph into the stuffed birds of your earlier work. They all have their hands in their right pockets. They all look terribly posed.

GC That’s true, they do. I never noticed that.

BM They’re ashamed of one hand or the other. Who knows what that hand was doing? And the fellow in the middle diligently placing the sod, I see it as such a continuation of the earlier work.

GC I was drawn to this neighborhood because it seemed to come right out of my photographs. I wanted to do a suburbanization of Robert Smithson’s Earth Work. So for this photograph I knocked on this woman’s door. She wasn’t home, so I wrote a letter to her and said, “I would like to create a perfect circle of mulch in your backyard and photograph it. Do you mind?” And the next day she left this message on my answering machine, I’ll never forget what she said, “Do what you have to do.” That was amazing to me. I went back that Sunday and she wasn’t home so I worked with the landscapers and we created this mulch circle. I got in the crane, found the perfect perspective and shot. We cleaned it up and she was still gone. I never met her.

BM Are you consciously aware of thematic, or schematic, continuity in your work, that the world itself has become a kind of diorama for you? What does that mean in the long run—the world as a kinetic diorama?

GC It’s sort of a Connecticut diorama. (laughter) BM As a movable, inedible feast. How does that work, what does that mean?

GC I’ve never really made much of a distinction between photographs made in the studio, or in the outside world—I think those are false distinctions. Essentially I’m interested in photographic beauty, in narrative, the photograph conveying a kind of mystery, a strangeness and a recognizability. I don’t care how I get there. That is inconsequential.

BM I’m reminded of one of my favorite ideas of Emerson’s, which is that the world is the externalization of the soul. Since he is an American philospher/artist, and since you have such a sense of Americanness in your work, how would you respond to that idea?

GC That’s a beautiful statement, and of course it’s quite narcissistic. But as an artist, I fully admit to being narcissistic and a pathetic fool as well.

BM King Lear goes to Concord. It strikes me that really you are still Gregory Crewdson with his ear to the floor upstairs trying to find out what the hell people are thinking.

GC Or what I’m thinking.

BM Or thereby realizing what you’re thinking. It’s so far beyond dreamscape or surreality—it is a fresh reality.

GC That’s what I’m interested in—there’s a paradox in that, as I said earlier on, in a weird way I do consider myself a realist. But finally what I’m trying to do is use realist detail to describe something psychological.

BM To reverse Emerson’s aphorism, the soul is an internalization of the world.

GC Wow. That’s good.

BM I think when I see your photographs, I feel like I’m in the photograph. I internalize it so instantly that there doesn’t seem to be a distinction much between me and it. I relate to it very much as a myth. We live myth. And once you believe myth has a certain value, then everything has a mythic quality. The worlds that you create or manage are really mirrors of the worlds we all create and manage. There’s a great line, “A novel is a mirror walking down the road.” It seems to me that a photograph made by you is also a mirror walking down a road.

GC That’s nice.

BM What’s your sense of your lifetime project? Do you have one or is it a day-by-day of finding out things?

GC As artists we walk around with a single story to tell, some kind of central narrative. And I think the struggle is to attempt to reinvent that story over and over again in different forms and to visualize that story through, in my case, photographs, and try to make it new each time.

interview taken from http://bombsite.com/issues/61/articles/2090

Flash EXERCISES some thoughts I don’t use the built-in flash. Most often I try to use the external flash to minimum. The new crop of professional cameras work so well in low light, especially if you are using the right lenses, that on-camera flash is obsolete.

Since it won’t bounce, you’d never want to use it as a main source of light. At Uni I noticed that most people were surprised that they can adjust flash compensation.

My initial though was that they were really very ignorant but letter I realised that it not necessarily must be their fault. The placement of flash compensation buttons on modern camera is accidental and appear to be a total afterthought to say the least (especially on the cheaper models of cameras). Perhaps camera makers don’t think amateurs use flash composition much? From my experience I almost always shoot with flash compensation between -2 and -3. I never use flash in its default 0 and never, never in +1 position.

I am big believer that modern camera makers are going towards fleshless photography at least to some extend. This accidental snapshot shoot at f4, s60 and ISO 3200 proves that point. So it seams to me that unless you are going for the effect that cannot be created without flash don’t bother with it. However if you do need to use it use with thought and not just to brighten up the picture but to add additional meaning which would not be possible otherwise.

F4, 60 s, ISO 3200

Simple exercise with fill in flash. External flash in the following setting: Pic1 no flash Pic2 Flash Compensation 0; Pic3 Flash Compensation -1; Pic4 Flash Compensation -2;

Simple exercise with fill in flash. External flash bounce of the reflector (my favourite set up) in the following setting: Pic1 no flash Pic2 Flash Compensation 0; Pic3 Flash Compensation -1; Pic4 Flash Compensation -2;

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shooting movie There is nothing I like more than taking pictures. After all those lessons and with my head full of ideas I decided to put some of them into practise. I quickly drawn some sketches based on the location I know from my walks with a dog. Something a long a James Bond movie a girl with a gun and a gangster or the part of him. I am very much inspired by fashion pictures of Helmut Newton and others. Fashion is a strange genre of photographic practise that makes do with all sort of images types (fashion, documentary, film stills, nudes, etc). I found that fact quite liberating and inspiring. So I got my friends together and decided to do a little improvisational session where I would shoot something resembling film stills.

rt y r a pa ba ll o a s d in h g a tten somet A g irl ough r h t s e y a rea lis ha lf w d sh e is ns an la ced p ha ppe le o oh e wh r t p t s a d h t gua r ra ys w ith Sh e t a tra p pla ce. e ds h r t a g th e gu tectin e but n p a o c e s r a to e t and n ed. ed tha ta y tu rea lis h er. S r o f ut lo o ko

She bumps into the guard on the roof of a building. He tries to stop her. Pretending to be taking out a lipstick from her purse she reaches for her gun. Will she be able to use it remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

Could not do it decided to run for her life. He is chasing her. She turns back to measure the distance and perhaps to shoot. By this time all the guards are coming after her the situation reaches its climax what will happen now?

james Bond project - film stills First attempt to tame the flash outside and use it for adding drama to my photographs. Let’s see.

This session was such a fun. I was shooting only in the breaks between bursts of laughter. There wasn’t that much flash used in them just enough to delineate the areas of highlights and shadows which I could than adjusted in the post-capture process. We really had a good fun doing it and I hope we will be able to repeat it perhaps with more people soon.

Next time I definitely need to try shooting later in the day (late evening) and with more flash heads available to create better play of lights. There is only this much that can be done with one flash gun.

As always the biggest problem with flash is that is harsh no matter what. So I was bouncing it off reflector with flash head covered with pillow case to soften it as much as possible. This was however softening the power of the flash as well so I had

to keep my flash compensation set to +1.

I am looking forward to trying out the flash equipment from Uni on my next project.

First time I noticed that I do need people to help. One assistant at least if not 2 would be so helpful.

Eghh, it was fun shooting this. My favourite shot on the left the one where the flash was best controlled.

I love Helmut Newton quote at the bottom which in some why explain the shots and film stills.

“ Fashion pictures rarely have nay logic, each one is a moment without a beginning or an end”

My Thoughts on Flash I like to be as spontaneous as possible which is why I loathe using tripod and flash guns.

When I shoot I hardly every use flash which is unnatural and obtrusive source of light not to mention difficulty in controlling it.

Instead I have adapted the way to expose and process so that I can shoot at any time of day, anywhere, without using flash.

Part of the secret is to work with not against the available light. Last but not least, is the post capture processing so often demonised by some that the gives final shape to the photograph. — Tomasz Michalak

First idea for a shot. Policeman with a gun looking at a body he just shot. Mysterious light and dark surrounding are supposed to make it ambiguous. The beam of light on his face adds the drama as well as well as puts him in the spot almost like in the theatre. That’s at least the idea of how I would like it to be shot.

The location Off street little road in Richmond where I live. I could not take the model any father due to time and money constraints. Although this shot was more about the lighting not the place so it worked fine.

Composition Obviously he could not be facing the camera as this was meant to be a film still shot. Head looking down I position the model on a little platform and kneeled down a bit. I was playing with a distance from the wall and decided to keep the model quite close to it so some light was also falling onto the wall as well.

Lighting Struggling to keep flash from overpowering the scene.

Bouncing of the reflector is my favourite set up and it did work here brilliantly. I only wish I had and external head flash with a honeycomb grid to on it to put some nice patter on the background.

Editing Editing as shown on the next page. Nothing fancy just a standard conversion to BW and some dodging and burning.

Couple of standard actions for grain and sharpness just to keep it simple and enhance everything I intended while shooting.

Flash head

Reflector

35mm camera

Dimensions: Exposure: Exp Bias: Flash: Exp Program: Metering Mode: ISO: Focal Lenght: Lens: Date Tima Original Make: Model: Serial Number: Artist: Software:

4256 x 2832 1/10 sec at f / 2.0 -1 EV fire Manual Pattern 100 85 mm 85.0 mm f1.8 15/10/2011 17:55 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D700 2113361 Tomasz Michalak Ver. 1.02

Woman running away in a stolen car. She is either passing a car or is being stopped by the police car whose light is shining through. That was the initial idea which I was hopping to achieve.

Fact file Model: Location: Time: Camera: Lense: Exposure: Flash:

Sun through clouds

Julia Richmond Midday Nikon D700 85mm f1.8 125/5.6 -3.0

Reflector: Flash: Type: Display:

Medium Size Nikon SB800 Bounce mahma.co.uk

The location Parking place near my home. Car parked with the a little bit of sun shining from behind.

Composition

Flash head

Simple set up of girl behind the stirring wheel. I did not realise how difficult it was going to be to reach the model with 28 mm lens. I ended up lying flat on the bonnet of my car. As usual flash bounced of the reflector to enhance the sun.

Reflector

Lighting 35mm camera

As usual flash bounced of the reflector to enhance the sun. I so much wanted to use direct flash in this shot however I decided it was too harsh. I hate flash guns for their harshness. This shot was ideal I thought for direct flash and yet again it did not work.

Direct flash sucks.

Dimensions: Exposure: Exp Bias: Flash: Exp Program: Metering Mode: ISO: Focal Lenght: Lens: Date Tima Original Make: Model: Serial Number: Artist: Software:

4256 x 2832 1/20 sec at f / 2.8 0 EV fire Manual Pattern 100 28 mm 28 mm f2.8 16/10/2011 17:21 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D700 2113361 Tomasz Michalak Ver. 1.02

Typical old Hollywood movie style photo. Dark alley with women walking and a murky character following. The play of shadows will be crucial to add the necessary drama. I will try to use direct flash and lot of it as I am going for very high contrast, almost a night shot. Still not sure if I should show the whole figure of a man or only his shadow to sort of imply the danger. I think I will shoot for the whole body and cropped off latter if it suits.

The location A little side road of the main road in Richmond near the place I live. I had to shoot late in the evening as the roads were quite busy otherwise. But it all worked out fine in the end.

Street light

Composition Wanted to optically enlarge the women in front and enlarge the shadow from behind from the man. Shooting 28 mm is very large for my liking but could not fit all in on 50 mm that I would normally prefer to use. The street light came as a big help and our flash just finish it all off.

Lighting The street light came as a big help and our flash just finish it all off. I faced some problem with flash triggering. At some stage I had to ask my assistant to fire it manually on my command. It did work which surprised me quite a bit. Flash used more as a fill in again but this time I had to match the light from the street lamp which took some tries and error..

Editing Again like previously nothing fancy just a standard actions, conversions and grain. See next page for some more details. do need to say that this pic look great in High Contrast Yellowed Polaroid effect but I left it as the rest only BW which my not be doing justice to the drama of the scene.

Flash head

Reflector

35mm camera

Dimensions: Exposure: Exp Bias: Flash: Exp Program: Metering Mode: ISO: Focal Lenght: Lens: Date Tima Original Make: Model: Serial Number: Artist: Software:

4256 x 2832 1/10 sec at f / 2.8 0 EV fire Manual Pattern 400 28 mm 28.0 mm f2.8 19/10/2011 17:56 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D700 2113361 Tomasz Michalak Ver. 1.02

This is confrontational shot. A woman is walking or running up the stairs and someone is following her. Suddenly she decides to turn and face her oppressor. Her face is lit from one side only and no doubts this time that I should only show a back of a man to imply the drama.

Fact file Model: Location: Time: Camera: Lense: Exposure: Flash:

Renata&Freddie Hobart Hall Midday Nikon D700 85mm f1.8 250/4.0 -3.0

Reflector: Flash: Type: Display:

Big Size Nikon SB800 Bounce mahma.co.uk

The location Shot at the place where I work. Hobart Hall Guest House 300 years old building with vintage frescos on the walls.

Composition I wanted to show a women but in a rather mysterious and seductive way. I needed very gentle lighting on one side of her face and just enough light to show the outline of a man figure. The problem with shooting this on the stairs was that the man constantly coming out too small and therefore not seriously looking.

A foot hight crate under his feet sorted the problem out.

Flash head

Reflector

35mm camera

Lighting Reasonably static image allowed to use fairly slow shutter speed and thus use the remaining available light only enhanced by the fill in type of flash light. I use a huge reflector for this shot to bounce the flash on both of the models as the man figure was coming out too dark in many shots. Again problems with triggering flash which in some shots had to be flashed manually by my assistant.

Dimensions: Exposure: Exp Bias: Flash: Exp Program: Metering Mode: ISO: Focal Lenght: Lens: Date Tima Original Make: Model: Serial Number: Artist: Software:

4256 x 2832 1/250 sec at f / 4.0 0 EV fire Manual Pattern 100 85 mm 85.0 mm f1.8 18/10/2011 11:53 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D700 2113361 Tomasz Michalak Ver. 1.02

A girl attends a ball or a party half way through something happens and she realises that the whole placed is a trap with guards protecting the place. She trays to escape but the guards realised that and are on lookout for her. This is was one of the first shots I I really liked the fill in flash on the model here. Still cannot believe how bright it was when I see the original.

The location Twickenham Bridge near the place that I live. Normally fairly boring place I pass quite often when walking the dog but I thought for this session would lend itself into something quite different altogether.

Sun

Composition I did not want to use wider lens than 50 and was quite surprised that although I position the models quite close to each other on the picture the were miles apart. What we would do without the preview on our digital cameras! After couple of repositioning I finally got it right.

Lighting When I look at it now it look easy as if the flash was almost not needed there. But it was tricky pic to shoot and I am still not convinced that the beam of light from the flash is sufficient. I did not needed much and did not want to overdo it. Terrible problem with flash triggering again. I must invest in the radio triggers next time for sure.

Flash head

Editing

Reflector

See next page for details. Not much done here either. Some ambient sucked out and flash enhanced as usual. Pretty much standard that I did in all the rest of the pics from this series.

35mm camera

Dimensions: Exposure: Exp Bias: Flash: Exp Program: Metering Mode: ISO: Focal Lenght: Lens: Date Tima Original Make: Model: Serial Number: Artist: Software:

4256 x 2832 1/10 sec at f / 2.0 0 EV fire Manual Pattern 100 50 mm 50.0 mm f1.8 11/10/2011 15:55 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D700 2113361 Tomasz Michalak Ver. 1.02

This shot was meant to represent a women getting out a car and having this kind of a dreamy look on her face. It looked good on the sketch but the picture somehow came out too fashion like no enough film still like.

Fact file Model: Location: Time: Camera: Lense: Exposure: Flash:

Sun through clouds

Julia Whitton Midday Nikon D700 70-200mm f2.8 200/2.8 -3.0

Reflector: Flash: Type: Display:

Medium Size Nikon SB800 Bounce mahma.co.uk

The location Parking place near my home. Car parked with the a little bit of sun shining from behind.

Composition

Flash head

Reflector

Building on a previous shot in the same location I wanted to achieve the drama through the bounced lighting that would add to the ambient behind shining through the back window.

I purposefully chosen the pose with a model looking outside of a frame which I was hopping was going to enhance the effect I was going for.

Lighting 35mm camera

Just a little bit of flash bounced of the reflector in order to enhance the light on the model’s face. This bouncing of the reflector must be by now my favourite way of using external flash outside.

Dimensions: Exposure: Exp Bias: Flash: Exp Program: Metering Mode: ISO: Focal Lenght: Lens: Date Tima Original Make: Model: Serial Number: Artist: Software:

4256 x 2832 1/60 sec at f / 2.8 -1/2 EV fire Manual Pattern 100 70-200 mm 200 mm f2.8 23/10/2011 16:34 NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D700 2113361 Tomasz Michalak Ver. 1.02

I implore anyone marking my project to view the finished files on my personal website. The downsizeing to required low quality jpg was absolutly ridiculous. Please have a look at them online or alternatively ask me for printed version of my portfolio.

www.mahma.co.uk

project self-evaluation BA (HOns) Photography MOdule: CONSTRUCTED PHOTOGRAPHY

Project Title (How did this develop from your working title and what was involved in the decision making process?)

I did not think any project title would be suitable for the images I was working on. All the images are disjointed individual pieces not related to each other, rather than by the fact that they purport to come from various movies from the 30s and 40s. Therefore “movie stills” are the only name I use but I would be as happy with the name “untitled” or simply no title at all.

Subject (Reflect on the subject matter of your project and the background research on this subject) I have carried out fairly extensive research in the time given. I was mostly influenced by photographers such as: Steven Meisel, Paolo Roversi, Peter Lindberg and Herb Ritts. As for image editing the biggest influence was Lilliam Bassman. I have read only a few books due to time constraints. However this was sufficient to fire my imagination, and run with the project.

Aims, Objectives, Concept (How and to what extent have you have achieved the aims and objectives of your project? Describe the main concept driving your project.)

The main concept driving my project was to emulate the feel of

black and white movies of the 1930s. I was aiming for my photographs to imitate the frozen frames from old cinema. I wanted them to have a nostalgic, aged feel. There had to also be something intangible about them. The above reasons influenced my decision to shoot and edit them in high contrast B&W. The vital part of old cinema is that it is to a large extent dependent on lighting as a major narrator of a story. Similarly, I used the flash for atmospheric effects, and to indicate the preferred reading of my photographs.

Form, medium, presentation (What is the final form and method of presentation of your work and why did you make these decisions?)

There is no method of representation as such, as the images had to be emailed for evaluation. I find this most unsatisfactory, as the quality of the minute details as well as the texture of some of my images has been compromised by the file size limitations. I would strongly advice a visit my website www.maham.co.uk to see them presented correctly. I have also noticed that movie stills are usually shot in horizontal form, however that’s not the way they are being advertised and sold. Most cinema advertising is presented through posters and covers, and they in turn are inevitably shown in vertical form. As a result of this I have decided to accompany (see workbook) each image I shot, with an imaginary movie poster, which puts them into a specific context. My images are presented in a kind of open form. This means that they can easily be reframed and fitted into a different context by graphic designers, editors or magazine publishers.

Research Methods (What methods did you use to research this work and how did this research inform your project?)

Given that the project had to be completed within 4 weeks I had only managed to read a few books by Jeff Wall, Gregory Crudson and Tom Hunter. All of them specialise in constructed photography with subtle differences. However what unites them all, is the usage of light as a creative medium. I did not fail to notice that most of the projects of the above mentioned artists require vast resources and not infrequently unlimited time. I wish I had the time to research the subject in more depth, but even so I am looking forward to doing something of a similar nature in the future.

References (How useful were the references you explored – the artists, writers and filmmakers and how do you think your project would function in similar contemporary fields of production?)

The references that were suggested were very inspiring and useful.

I would be quite tempted to shoot a book cover, or to illustrate a story for children.

Group Project: The Narrative or Sequence.

Projects, Submission and Contact Details

Working in groups of four, you will produce four linked images of narrative based constructed photographic work. The outcome of each group will be a body of work, which communicates and interrogates an issue or concept.

In week four you will present a (5 minute) group PowerPoint outlining your proposal, preliminary research and related images.

We suggest you shoot one scene or test in the studios or on campus so by arrangement we can support the lighting and staging.

Consider the potential context for your work: Editorial, campaigns, advertising, fashion, the gallery, portraiture, tableaux, posters, billboards, flyers, etc.

In documentary photography a found scene is supposed to convey the photographer’s meaning or the supposed reality of the situation. This generally assumes a direct relationship between the photograph and reality and tends to reveal effects rather than causes (can a photograph of a march against a war reveal anything about the conflict?) In the studio, or on location, meaning is created through juxtapositions and connotations of objects, people and lighting. Previsualization, construction and lighting are crucial considerations in constructed photography.

As Brecht says: “. . .less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp Works or the AEG tells us nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification

of human relations - the factory, say - means that they are no longer explicit. So something must be built up, something artificial, posed”. (Extract from “A Short History of Photography” by Walter Benjamin, 1931.)

Contemporary practitioners construct images with passion, or controlled dispassionateness, insight and sometimes wit, questioning and confronting a wide range of issues.

Group Project: The following should be submitted in your grey portfolio box to J1.15 by 6pm on Monday 19th December 2011. One disk (per group) with all the final images included.

Individual Research File containing the following: One mounted image (directed by each student in group) Research including reflections on specific images and texts, which informed your work and practice.

Research including lighting diagrams and test materials.

Project proposal and Self-evaluation for group project.

A3 print (directed by student) Monday 19 December 2011.

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18 18 18

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19

19

Recce at Hobart Hall, tw10 6UL Ideas, notes, site location, etc The issue was raised if the Title “Liaison” was to be the only link to the images. We are all agreed and sign up to the fact that the images have to have one story running through the series, and that the images would be consistent in layout, colour and mood.

The selected layout is to be Landscape.

We debated the layout for some considerable time; we initially thought (wrongly) based on the last body of work that the layout was landscape. Having taken a few test shots and debated the look of our source imaged we came to the conclusion that Landscape was the chosen format due partly because one of the most inspirational images we all like and wish to replicate/ emulate was landscape.

We are also strongly focused on the fact that one of the images has to be owned by one member in that he has the final say of the image capture and lighting set up etc, but in addition the image has to flow with the rest of the images. The body of work (4 images) forms a coherent group and therefore our individual grades depends on the whole body of work so certain decision will by virtue of the constraints of the brief be by committee. Having said all that we are all pulling in the same direction and have a strong focus on the style of the images, the message we are wanting to say and the narrative we want to run through the images.

Film selections Again a debate was had about the use of colour negatives or black and white. Taking into account the style we want to capture, the timelessness of the images, the format i.e. 6 X 7 slides we are fortunate to be in a position to scan and display digitally.

Our selection for display will be Black and White.

Supplies of Transparency film is more limited that standard 120 film, but we have searched suppliers website for varieties and ISO ratings.

As much as we want to have a very clean looking image with little grain we feel that at such an important time we would be wise keeping the Polaroid back and the 120 film at the same ISO of 100.

As we are aiming to display the images black and white we thought that black and white Polaroid’s would be the most appropriate way to accurately assess how the light appears prior to shooting. We are looking at purchasing Fuji FP-100B .

The lens most similar to the SLR standard lens is 90mm we wanted to explore the possibilities of additional lenses to see if the angle would be more suited to the composition During our initial recce and capture we were mindful that the shooting height with the mamiya will be closer to waist height, so all our digitals were shot at this sort of height. In addition we also used an equivalent 50mm in a conventional full frame camera.

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Liaison BAck to the drawing board Initial sketches for the project Liaison

Exchange

Meeting

Games

Games 2

Waiting

polaroid testing Polarioid use for testing exposure setting I love polaroids and its instantaneous results. However, we found that as a testing device it rather inaccurate in fact quite useless.

Colour casts, uneven exposure and discrepancies between one exposure and another makes polaroid very poor testing device.

Digital cameras even the very basic ones are far superior in testing the lighting conditions that can be transported onto the film camera. However, the unpredictability of polaroid can be seen as an artistic effect which I guess is the thing that appeals to me the most. it’s a pity though that the final product needs to be scan in order to enlarge it to a bigger size.

To someone like me who is not familiar with a fetishistic pleasure of actually holding a print (my photography was always born digital) it is difficult to buy into benefits of analog photography and polaroids.

I will definitely try playing with Polaroid’s again but at the same time I will search for digital development imitating various Polaroid’s effects.

Another drawback is the fact that polaroid film is quite expensive and together with cost of developing and scanning and time it all takes makes me think twice about it. If I every use Polaroid it will definitely be for its other benefits than testing tool, that’s a fact.

Timetable of the project Dates, locations, times and purpose

Date

Location

Time

Purpose

28 October 2011

Harrow

15:00 - 18:45

Discussions of the Group project including a Tutorial with Andy Goulding. Approx 1500 to 1730.

Familiarisation with parts of the Mamiya and test shooting portraits of Tomasz and David

31 October 2011

Richmond

19:00 21:00

Visit to the Hotel to recce the rooms and location for accessibility and room sizes and layout. Discussed images we thought would work in the given rooms and sketched the layouts

04 November 2011

Richmond

15:00 - 18:45

Using the layouts we constructed the scene, removed objects such as picture frames, flowers mirrors etc and brought in objects to create the scene. Using ourselves and a member of the hotel staff we took test shoots with the digital cameras.

12 November 2011

Richmond

11:00 - 18:45

First live shot with models.

As we had taken very accurate measurements of the lights positions and the camera we could quickly recreate the scene as the models were briefed for the style and type of shots we were going to capture During shooting some rework of the set was required; measurements were taken again.

16 November 2011

Richmond

19:00 - 20:00

initial review (Ray unable to attend due to work commitments) of the developed films.

18 November 2011

Harrow

14:30 - 16:00

A full review of the images from the first shot using light boxes.

Assessed the quality of the images and revisited if we needed to reshoot or address the style of further shoots.

A further brainstorm of new images to reinforce the current images to give the series a coherent theme.

20 November 2011

Richmond

21 November 2011

London

25 November 2011

Harrow

02 December 2011

Harrow

11:00 - 18:30

Second Live shot with same models.

This time the shoot was more fluid; we felt the last images lacked a little mobility.

During shooting some rework of the set was required; measurements were taken again Films were dispatched to Metro Print and collected the same day.

14: 30 - 16:30

Scanning lecture, followed by scanning our own finished work

17:00 - 19:00

Retouching Lecture followed by discussions as to the extent of retouching for our finished work Scanning lecture, followed by scanning our own finished work

15:30 - 16:00

Tutorials with EP & AG. The reality was the tutorial continued for about 60 mins, not due to poor content but more on the issue of taste or subject selection.

The feeling was we have more scope that we had initially edited; we need to just have a fresh look at the edit.

17:00 - 19:00

Given we did not need any more shooting time we used the Studio time for reediting the images following the tutorial.

The conclusion was to bring to the crit week 11 more images in both colour and mono.

image editing

original image

finall image after editing

image editing

original image

finall image after editing

image editing

original image

finall image after editing

image editing

original image

finall image after editing

project self-evaluation BA (HOns) Photography MOdule: CONSTRUCTED PHOTOGRAPHY

Project Title (How did this develop from your working title and what was involved in the decision making process?)

The project title “liaison” was though up very early in the project development as a response to the images we were thinking of doing.

Subject (Reflect on the subject matter of your project and the background research on this subject) I watched old black and white movies until I was so fed up with them I decided to do some photography.

Aims, Objectives, Concept (How and to what extent have you have achieved the aims and objectives of your project? Describe the main concept driving your project.)

We wanted to create images in the style of film stills which I think we have managed to successfully achieved. The photographs were meant to emit sophistication and glamour, objectives which I think, I have achieved. All this has been enhanced by careful editing and post capture processing.

Form, medium, presentation (What is the final form and method of presentation of your work

and why did you make these decisions?)

The images are ready to be used as film stills in cinema foyer. (see my previous project for examples). They also easily lend themselves to be recontextualised as advertising images.

Research Methods (What methods did you use to research this work and how did this research inform your project?)

I based my research on findings from my previous project. I was not keen on traditional research. As the images were very much bordering on fashion photography in our initial concept I decided not to prepare too much but to certain extend let the chance play its part. I new generally what I was going after at the moment o shooting but what I really wanted was to discover what I was looking for in the process of work. I hope that our project to some extends shows it.

References (How useful were the references you explored – the artists, writers and filmmakers and how do you think your project would function in similar contemporary fields of production?)

The references provided by the Uni were extremely useful. Some of them found themselves in my workbook. I absolutely loved the short lighting tutorial organised by Andy. Looking forward for more.

Final Image No: 1 Image directed by Ray.

Final Image No: 2 Image directed by Mark.

Final Image No: 3 Image directed by David.

Final Image No: 4 Image directed by myself.