People And Possessions.
"People often have a strong and complex relationship with their possessions. Cynthia Connolly has photographed people with their cars. Peter Menzel has recorded the possessions of families. Elliott Irwitt has observed the relationship between dogs and their owners. Explore appropriate examples and produce your own work."
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Cynthia Connolly - People With Their Cars
Cynthia Connolly photographed "DC musicians with their cars", this was a collaborative project with another photographer called Pat Graham who took photos of the same musicians but not with their cars, she took photos of them performing live with their band, they accompanied each other when photographing similar subjects. Not only did they photograph together but they also started selling their photos on the Indie rock flea market outside Washington. I like these images because each person either drives or rides different vehicles such as bikes, motorbikes, skateboards, cars. trucks etc, it displays their preferred transportation method.
Peter Menzel - Hungry Planet Family Food Portraits
Peter Menzel wanted to explore the change in global diets, he worked alongside his wife Faith D'aluisio, together they produced a photographic study of many families across the world showing what each family ate the the space of 1 week; the photos contained the residents who lives in the house, as well as their weekly shop. I really like this idea as it shows that each family photographed have different incomes therefore some of the families may have to have a weekly budget as they don't have a lot of money so they have to spend it wisely, these images really do show this as some families have a lot of food whereas other families don't have that much, however, another factor may be the number of members in the family, some families may have more mouths to feed that others. It also shows us what each families' diet is like by the type of food that they buy, some family members have a lot of fruit and vegetables whereas others have pizza and other junk food like that; another thing is the ethnic background and dietary preferences, people with different religions will have different types of food such as Muslims will only eat halal meat, and vegetarians wont have any meat, and vegans wont have any meat OR dairy products, its quiet an interesting subject to look at. Other families may have pets from just one pet or to a lot of pets so pet food would be included as the pet is part of their family.
Elliott Erwitt - Dog Dogs
"This is not a book of dog pictures but of dogs in pictures." said Elliott Erwitt. Erwitt was a massive dog lover so it was only natural to not just take photos that included dogs and their owners, in fact he took around 500 of these images, all of these images were black and white and where taken from all around the world, I.e. France, New York, Florida, California, Virginia, Spain, England, Brazil, Italy, Nepal, Ireland, Japan, Greece etc. The thing that I like about these images is the fact that the series displays a range of different breeds of dogs and some people say that dogs represent their owners or that dogs look like their owners and i think this is quite true, if you look at dogs with their owns you can spot out particular characteristics that link them together and make them alike.
Personal features that different people possess.
For my first investigation I didn't want to take pictures of peoples possessions straight away, i wanted to start this project with a more obscure idea, the idea that I really started to like was collections of different things, at first I started to think about with each people collect as I know that members of my family collect different things, for example, I collect crystal objects, my nan collects bells, my grandad collects models of boats, my aunt collects shells and precious stones, and my uncle collects things make of wood and bone I.e. carved into something else, my nan collects fridge magnets etc. So at first instinct I was going to photograph them, but then I thought of a more unique idea. This idea was capturing personal features that different people possess, but as I said before, I didn't want to take photos straight away I want more of a project that I could complete over the space of a week. I decided to collect peoples fingetr prints, to do this I need to go to a shop that sells stationary like Rymans or Whsmiths to get in ink stamp pad, after getting this I divided several pieces of paper into small rectangular sections. I then started this project with taking the finger prints of a few family members then continued this with friends and other family members who I saw across the week while writing their names at the bottom so I know whose fingerprint is which so I can analyse them at a later date if I want to.
What next?
I plan to definitely scan these fingerprints once I have finished collecting them I might use a macro lens to photograph them close up to get the texture and the detail.
After this I want to book out the macro lens to photograph piercings and potentially tattoos that different individuals have to make a another series in the sub-theme i chose - 'person features that different people possess'. Also with the macro lens i am going to photograph peoples necklaces, rings and bracelets that people wear every day; basically I am going to photograph things that are personal to various different people.
What next?
I plan to definitely scan these fingerprints once I have finished collecting them I might use a macro lens to photograph them close up to get the texture and the detail.
After this I want to book out the macro lens to photograph piercings and potentially tattoos that different individuals have to make a another series in the sub-theme i chose - 'person features that different people possess'. Also with the macro lens i am going to photograph peoples necklaces, rings and bracelets that people wear every day; basically I am going to photograph things that are personal to various different people.
Examples of the next step.
My photos of piercings and other jewellery.
The images above was mainly just a sample to see how well they went and whether it was worth making another photo shoot like this. I then decided after showing my teacher that the piercing ones are a bit cliche so I am going to ask people to take off their jewellery or to take out their piercings so i can take photos of them on their own and of the mark that they leave behind.
This was the next photoshoot, individuals taking there jewellery and piercings out and I photographed the markings left, looking back I can see that some of these are quite blurry due to the angle so the camera was unsteady which I didn't notice before and the lighting was quite bad in some of them too. I thought I would leave this idea here as there is nothing else I can do with this topic.
Fingerprints
Above are the fingerprints that I collected from my family, friends and teachers (as well as the one from my cat), I liked looking at each persons technique, some of them did it where they just pressed their finger onto the ink then straight onto the paper whereas others did it where they rolled their finger onto the paper and then they rolled it onto the piece of paper like the police do to people that have committed an offence, I found it interesting with how they used different techniques, different pressures used. I wrote their names at the bottom of the fingerprints in order for me to remember who's were who's, it would also be useful if i wanted to analyse them later on. I decided to do this particular project as i know that all fingerprints are different as it is part of our identity, that is how it links to the theme of people and possessions as it is a personal feature that each person possesses.
I then wanted to make some photograms out of these fingerprints, I used Tamika's fingerprint as the sample one, Once I scanned them all. I photoshopped Tamika's fingerprint into a negative so it would work in the darkroom as a photogram. The first time i tried to make photograms they weren't working, i tried quicker and longer exposure and developing times and it just didn't work, so I came to the conclusion that someone either botched up the chemicals when they made them, or the chemicals were out for two long and nobody had changed them so I changed the chemicals and completed the process again and it did work however because it was quite a dark image it needed a longer exposure and developing time. The first two at the top was before i changed the chemicals and the third one at the top is what it came out like after I changed the chemicals. The bottom two was me experimenting with the film holder on the enlarger, I put the negative image of the fingerprint and it zoomed in on a certain part of the fingerprint an I thought this was a really good effect.
Carolee Schneemann
Schneeman's work is all based around the idea of body, sexuality and gender, she tends to focus her work along the lines of naked bodies; she used her body to examine the roles of sensuality through film, photography and installations. I decided to look at this photographer as she looked at bodies and I was looking at peoples characteristics and body parts and so I looked at her work however it isn't really something that I would want to recreate or do my own photoshoot on.
Rosanna Jones - skin
I love Jone's work, she takes photographs and paints over certain parts to make them look abstract, she combines photography with art. She also distorts some of her images so you can only see the basic outlines, shapes and colours.
Close up - Dawn Ades and Simon Baker
http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/archive/close/
This exhibition explored the effects of close up photography from the nineteenth century; close up and magnified photography reveals things that are invisible to the naked eye. Some topics in this close up exhibition are natural form, every day objects and the human body; The photographs range from rayographs to ordinary modern photographs. This exhibition inspired my work with close up images of piercings and body parts and so on.
This exhibition explored the effects of close up photography from the nineteenth century; close up and magnified photography reveals things that are invisible to the naked eye. Some topics in this close up exhibition are natural form, every day objects and the human body; The photographs range from rayographs to ordinary modern photographs. This exhibition inspired my work with close up images of piercings and body parts and so on.
Negative fingerprints.
After turning all of the fingerprints into negatives I printed them and went to the dark room to start making photograms, i knew that these photograms would work as i did the same process with Tamika's fingerprint and it worked really well so i just had to use the same exposure time. One thing that i did experiment with was the type of photographic paper that i used, i normally used glossy, but i decided to try matt paper instead and i was very pleased with the results, the images came across quite old which was what i was going for so i decided to stick with the matt paper as it created a good effect. Below are the outcomes of the photograms.
I feel like these photograms went really well, you can see from them that the fainter and more dainty fingerprints worked the best for photograms as they ere more clearer; one decision I was glad I made was the type of paper, I used matt paper instead of glossy because it gave a much nicer texture and they looked older. The one problem with this paper was that i difficult to find out what side needed to be exposed to the light but once I figured that out the whole process went smoothly, I decided I wanted this to be onevof my final pieces.
My first final piece.
The next idea.
At first i was going to photograph peoples characteristics with things like: can they curl their tongue? Can they touch the end of their nose with their tongue? Can they go cross eyed? Or can they do anything else that is quite unusual but i did really want to stick with the 'old' theme and i didnt feel like these would fit in with the brief that i made myself so instead I decided to go with another idea. This idea was to take a sample of the hair from the people/animals that live in my house, I collected hair from myself, my nan, my grandad and my cat, i also collected some of the hair on my grandads beard as he was going to trim it anyway so i collected all of the hair that i needed and put them in little money bags in order to stop them from falling out in my bag. Once in the darkroom I put one bit of hair in the film holder and arranged it so the hair was distributed in an interesting pattern. These photograms didn't need a long exposure time, I exposed them for roughly 5 seconds before I put them in the developer. As you can see below there is an odd one out which is the chemigram, this happened when I exposed the image and then dropped a little bit of developer onto the already exposed image, but I didn't come out that well as the image of the hair didn't really come through, so I decided that I wouldn't make anymore of the chemigrams.
The start of my second final piece
Above is the start of my first final piece of unit 4; i gathered all of my photograms together and took out the chemigram as it was the only one that didnt fit in with the rest of the set, i then thought that instead of lining them all up in a row which would be less appealing and pretty boring, i started to put them into groups that looked like they linked together but still made an interesting pattern when put together. The photos above are of the individual groups on their own.
When grouping them together I started to put them on the wall in order to photograph the groups all together and above is what they looked like as I put each group on the wall, I chose this formation because they were evenly distributed, one problem that I had was trying to get every single photogram straight so it took me a couple of hours to put them all on the wall.
Refining.
As you can see once all of the groups were on the wall I made some adjustments to the row of four at the top, in the second image you can see that I moved that row up so it was in line with the rest of the top row then in the last image I move that row up a little bit more as the zig-zag looking group of photograms made the whole piece look a bit unnatural, it looks like out of place as everything else is straight so that is why I moved it up.
The new idea.
I was originally going to make my last photoshoot on the topic that I previously postponed which was: Can anyone go cross-eyed? Can anyone touch their nose with their tongue? Can anyone curl their tongue? But i realised that I have only ever focused on my sub-theme which was different personal characteristics that people possess and I hadn't really explored away from that theme so I decided to go with my first idea and photograph a set of objects that I collect which were crystals.
Refining.
I did like the previous photoshoot but I felt like the images needed more refinement as the images were quite boring and you could see straight away what the images were of, there was no sense of mystery, so I decided that I would photograph the same images just at a different angle. These images are shown below.
Further refinements.
I felt like the re-photographed images came out a lot better, the sense of mystery was there, the images made the crystals look like they were floating in mid air due to the angle - which I took from underneath a sheet of glass. Even though this images were much better I still felt as though further refinement was needed, but not another photoshoot, I just needed to crop the images into a square, turn them into black and white and mess around with the brightness and contrast; The results of the refinements are shown below.
Third final piece
This final piece did look quite pixelated when it came as it at a low resolution but I decided to give it in as a final piece and evaluate it in my final evaluation for unit 4.
The fourth final piece.
This final piece turned out really good, it was a good way of displaying the best crystal images.
The drawing and photography exhibition.
http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/double-take-drawing-and-photography-3
This current exhibition was put together to show how drawing and photography can be combined, many photographers and artists's work is in this exhibition and the work ranges from Man Ray and his photograms to Paul Chiappe's art. It gives all the information of each artist/photographer who's pieces are in the exhibition, I found this exhibition really interesting and helpful, especially as I do photography and not art, it gave me an insight about other artists that I haven't heard of before.
http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/double-take-drawing-and-photography-3
This current exhibition was put together to show how drawing and photography can be combined, many photographers and artists's work is in this exhibition and the work ranges from Man Ray and his photograms to Paul Chiappe's art. It gives all the information of each artist/photographer who's pieces are in the exhibition, I found this exhibition really interesting and helpful, especially as I do photography and not art, it gave me an insight about other artists that I haven't heard of before.
Evaluation
AO1: Researching and generating ideas
At the start of unit 4 I chose the theme people and possessions, this was the theme that stood out to me the most, and it was the one theme that I thought I could do the most with as I started to come up with ideas instantly. I annotated the exam paper with notes about what I could do with each theme, crossing certain ones out like water, mixed media and performing arts as they were themes that I was confident and therefore there wasn't many ideas for those specific themes. To start the theme I done some research into the three photographers given in the exam paper, this was my starting platform. The first person I researched was Cynthia Connolly and her photoshoot called 'People with their cars' I like these photos as the photographs weren't just of cars, it was of other modes of transport such as motorbikes, skateboards and so on, it shows the preferred mode of transport of different people, you can also tell a lot about someone by the type of transport they decide to use. The next photographer that was given in the exam paper was Peter Menzel and his photoshoot called 'Hungry planet family food portraits' I quite liked looked at his work as it was quite different to other photographers work, he took photos of different families from across the world with their weekly shop, I quite liked this set of images because they were quite unusual and it was a photoshoot that I could also do. The last photographer that was given in the exam paper was Elliott Erwitt and his photoshoot called 'Dog dogs' straight away by the title I knew that this was a photographer that I would be interested in as he took photos with dogs, not just dogs on their own but just photos with dogs in them, I liked this idea as I love animals and I have a cat of my own and where I live there are a lot of cats so I thought maybe this was a possible photoshoot idea. After looking at those three photographers it gave me ideas of possible photoshoots that I could do, however, I didn't just want to copy the idea of other photographers, so i decided to think of a sub-theme, at first the idea that came to me first was to photograph what different people collect as I collect crystals, my nan collects bells and my grandad collects model boats, this would have been a good idea but it was as obscure as I wanted it to be so I decided to postpone that photoshoot for a little while. Straight away I knew I wanted to do something that drifted away from the idea of peoples ownership of objects and I wanted to make my first photoshoot of this theme something that no one else would do so I made my sub-theme 'characteristics that people possess' as soon as I came up with this sub-theme I knew what I wanted to do.
My first photoshoot was of peoples piercings and jewellery, so I got a macro lens, I could then get really close up, I thought the photos came out really well however they looked quite cliche and they weren't as unusual as I wanted them to be, that lead me to my next photoshoot idea, this idea was to have that person take out their piercing or to take off their jewellery and photograph them separately, I then photographed the mark that the piercing/piece of jewellery left on that person. I liked this idea a lot more as it was quite unique, however, there wasn't much more I could do with this photoshoot so I thought I should move onto something else, these close up photos that I took were inspired by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker and their exhibition called 'Close up' they looked at close up form from the nineteenth century, revealing what is invisible to the naked eye. I also wanted to look at close ups of the human body, one photographer that I looked at for this was Carolee Schneemann, her photos were quite unusual and pretty bizarre, but I quite liked them because in some of them you didn't really know what they were, however, after a little bit of research I felt like this photographers work wasn't something that I wanted to replicate and do my own take on, so I went to look at other photographers. The next photographers work that I liked quite a lot was Rosanna Jones, with every photo that she took she changes it in some way, for some she put tape over their faces and in other she disorted their faces and painted over them. This was definitely some that I would consider trying to recreate. The last photographer I decided to look at for a while was Bill Brandt, I really liked his work as it was close ups of different peoples body parts but in quite unusual ways.
Sticking with the same sub-theme I started to look closer at the characteristics of someone and the first thought that came to me was 'DNA' I really liked this idea as everyones DNA is different, which brought me to the next photoshoot idea - fingerprints, as everyones fingerprint is completely different, it is a part of our identity and I wanted to be able to display that. To start this idea I went to the shop to get myself and ink pad and took around 35 peoples fingerprints. I then scanned these and I was inspired by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray to use these scanned inverted fingerprints to make photograms as these two photographers do a lot of work with photograms so they really inspired me to turn these into photograms. Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy also inspired my next idea of putting samples of my families hair into the film holder of an enlarger and creating more photograms.
My last photoshoot for this theme wasn't inspired or influenced by anyone, it was the first idea that I had for this theme that I postponed until further into the unit so I thought it was appropriate to do it last in order to get another final piece out of it. I photographed my collection of crystals using different angles and I zoomed in quite a lot in order to capture the different dimensions and colours of the crystals when under light, I then went on to refine all of the images.
AO2: Experimenting and refining
My first photoshoot that I did for this unit was of different peoples jewellery and piercings, I did think that this photoshoot went well, however, as I mentioned earlier it was really cliche as a lot of people take photos of peoples piercings so I felt like I needed to do more to these images and do another photoshoot but I decided I needed to photograph the subject in a different way to make it more interesting as the previous shoot was quite dull, so when I did the next photoshoot I photographed the piercings and jewellery separately and photograph the marks left by them, however I realised that I couldn't really do much more with the refined images so I need to think of the next idea based on the same sub-theme. The next idea was taking peoples fingerprints with an ink pad, the biggest experiment with this idea was not having rules with how each individual makes their fingerprint as I was interested in how much pressure they would use when doing it, what technique they used, how much ink they used and so on, this way I could see which ones worked the best and from that I could then scan and invert them in order to make photograms out of them, the ones that were fainter and had more delicate lines worked the best as the darker ones were a lot more difficult to develop as they needed a much longer exposure time and therefore it was easier for the more delicate fingerprints to be exposed. The photograms needed a lot of refining as they were all different and people used different pressures so I had to do a few of them multiple times to get the perfect exposure, I spent the majority of my time in the darkroom trying to make sure the photograms were as good as they could be.
One problem when making those photograms was that the photographic paper had been opened so none of the photos came out as clear as I wanted them to be, therefore I had to get new paper as the fingerprints were too dark and you couldn't really see what they were, another problem that I came across when making these photograms was the chemicals, a couple of times I had to mix the chemicals all over again as the previous people mixed them wrong, also the chemicals were left out for too long therefore they were no longer appropriate to use. However for both of these problems I resolved them myself and my photograms came out really well. I also made photograms with hair samples from the people that I live with and I put the hair into the film holder of the enlarger and I believe that these went really well. For the majority of my photograms I used matt paper instead of glossy as it had a nicer texture and it looked older which was the effect I was going for.
In my last photoshoot I photographed my collection of crystals, I first photographed them with a white backdrop and a lamp on a dim setting so the crystals were not overpowered with a high amount of light, I took photos of the whole crystal and then I went in closer to capture all of the dimensions of the crystals that the light enhanced, all of the detail and the dimensions that were captured in the images wouldn't be noticed by the naked eye. However, once again the images in this photoshoot were straight forward and quite boring so I needed to take photos of the crystals again but in a different angle so you wouldn't know what it was that I was photographing. I took a piece of glass and balanced it on top of two chairs and I put each crystal on top of the glass and I went underneath the glass and photographed it from different angles, the one thing I love about the images from this photoshoot is that the crystals looked like they were floating. However I wanted to refine this photoshoot even more, So with the majority of the images I took I cropped them into a square to capture the main part of the image that I wanted the viewer to focus on the most, I also turned them into black and white and experimented with the brightness and contrast, that was the last refinement I made for this unit.
AO3: Recording and designing
Throughout this unit I have used some digital equipment such as:
For half of this unit I have used digital equipment as listed above, I used a DSLR for my first photoshoot in this unit, however, I then soon switched to using a macro lens in order to capture the finer details of the jewellery and piercings I did this because the DSLR didn't zoom in as well as the macro lens. At the end of the unit I used the bridge camera for the whole of my last photoshoot, as it zooms in really close up and I liked the idea that it wasn't clear what the subject was and it made the viewer this about what perspective it is, it makes them more curious as to what it was, where it was, what angle it was taken at.
For the other half of this unit I spent all of my time in the dark room, I started off using glossy photographic paper but I then switched to matt as I liked how the matt paper felt when it dried and how old it made the images look. As i mentioned before someone had fogged some of the glossy paper and therefore that is what made me switch to matt but after the first couple of matt photograms I really liked the effect they gave; another problem that was mentioned earlier was the chemicals, some of the chemicals were left out too long therefore they were unusable, so the majority of the time of being in there I had to remix the chemicals.
AO4: Responding and Evaluating
My first response for unit 4 were four photograms of fingerprints that I framed in fancy white frames, I chose those frames as the fingerprints themselves looked really old, together with the frames were made to look like self portraits, they looked like they should be put on the mantle-piece, just like family photos, when I went to the shop I thought about the colour as well as the size, I chose a white frame as the photograms were quite dark so I wanted to balance the colours out, the balance of colours also seemed to add age to the final piece.
My second response was also made of photograms but these photograms were of the hair from my family, there were about 22 of them, they were all completely separate however I grouped some of them together as I found that some of them linked together but some of them didn't, as I linked them together they were in different patterns as I didn't want them in one straight line as that would have been really boring. I also decided to just leave the photograms without anything extra being done to them as I wanted the focus to be just on the photograms. To present them I just decided to put them on the wall, I arranged them where there wasn't any big or tiny spaces, I wanted the images distributed evenly across the wall.
My third response was a photobook made up of the best cropped black and white photos of the refined crystals, I decided on a photobook as I liked all of the images and I wanted to be able to display them all, as the photos were all black and white I wanted the book itself to match the photos so I kept to the black and white theme, I felt like this was a great way to present all of the images as it kept them all together as a set and they all looked good together. When I got this book in the post it looked really good, the windowed effect on the front looked quite appealing, it was an extra way of displaying more of my images.
My fourth and final response was a poster print of the best (in my opinion) crystal photo, I wanted the best image to be blown up into an adequately sized poster so it displays all of the detail and the dimensions of the photo, not many people would take time to look at the photo in depth whereas if it is enlarged into a poster you are able to see even the tiniest detail. However, when my poster came in the post when I first saw it I noticed straight away that it was quite pixilated, I guess this was because the resolution was quite low as I got the image off of my website so it did not come out as clear as I wanted it too, but I still wanted to hand it in as a final piece as it still shows my progression and ideas across this unit.
Overall, I believe that I have done really well in this unit, I feel like I have came up with good ideas, taken great photos and refined them until they were as adequate as they could be, I have worked to the best of my abilities across the whole unit. However, if I was to develop my work that little bit more I would have made sure that I kept up to date with all of my written work so I didn't have to rush near the end of the course.
At the start of unit 4 I chose the theme people and possessions, this was the theme that stood out to me the most, and it was the one theme that I thought I could do the most with as I started to come up with ideas instantly. I annotated the exam paper with notes about what I could do with each theme, crossing certain ones out like water, mixed media and performing arts as they were themes that I was confident and therefore there wasn't many ideas for those specific themes. To start the theme I done some research into the three photographers given in the exam paper, this was my starting platform. The first person I researched was Cynthia Connolly and her photoshoot called 'People with their cars' I like these photos as the photographs weren't just of cars, it was of other modes of transport such as motorbikes, skateboards and so on, it shows the preferred mode of transport of different people, you can also tell a lot about someone by the type of transport they decide to use. The next photographer that was given in the exam paper was Peter Menzel and his photoshoot called 'Hungry planet family food portraits' I quite liked looked at his work as it was quite different to other photographers work, he took photos of different families from across the world with their weekly shop, I quite liked this set of images because they were quite unusual and it was a photoshoot that I could also do. The last photographer that was given in the exam paper was Elliott Erwitt and his photoshoot called 'Dog dogs' straight away by the title I knew that this was a photographer that I would be interested in as he took photos with dogs, not just dogs on their own but just photos with dogs in them, I liked this idea as I love animals and I have a cat of my own and where I live there are a lot of cats so I thought maybe this was a possible photoshoot idea. After looking at those three photographers it gave me ideas of possible photoshoots that I could do, however, I didn't just want to copy the idea of other photographers, so i decided to think of a sub-theme, at first the idea that came to me first was to photograph what different people collect as I collect crystals, my nan collects bells and my grandad collects model boats, this would have been a good idea but it was as obscure as I wanted it to be so I decided to postpone that photoshoot for a little while. Straight away I knew I wanted to do something that drifted away from the idea of peoples ownership of objects and I wanted to make my first photoshoot of this theme something that no one else would do so I made my sub-theme 'characteristics that people possess' as soon as I came up with this sub-theme I knew what I wanted to do.
My first photoshoot was of peoples piercings and jewellery, so I got a macro lens, I could then get really close up, I thought the photos came out really well however they looked quite cliche and they weren't as unusual as I wanted them to be, that lead me to my next photoshoot idea, this idea was to have that person take out their piercing or to take off their jewellery and photograph them separately, I then photographed the mark that the piercing/piece of jewellery left on that person. I liked this idea a lot more as it was quite unique, however, there wasn't much more I could do with this photoshoot so I thought I should move onto something else, these close up photos that I took were inspired by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker and their exhibition called 'Close up' they looked at close up form from the nineteenth century, revealing what is invisible to the naked eye. I also wanted to look at close ups of the human body, one photographer that I looked at for this was Carolee Schneemann, her photos were quite unusual and pretty bizarre, but I quite liked them because in some of them you didn't really know what they were, however, after a little bit of research I felt like this photographers work wasn't something that I wanted to replicate and do my own take on, so I went to look at other photographers. The next photographers work that I liked quite a lot was Rosanna Jones, with every photo that she took she changes it in some way, for some she put tape over their faces and in other she disorted their faces and painted over them. This was definitely some that I would consider trying to recreate. The last photographer I decided to look at for a while was Bill Brandt, I really liked his work as it was close ups of different peoples body parts but in quite unusual ways.
Sticking with the same sub-theme I started to look closer at the characteristics of someone and the first thought that came to me was 'DNA' I really liked this idea as everyones DNA is different, which brought me to the next photoshoot idea - fingerprints, as everyones fingerprint is completely different, it is a part of our identity and I wanted to be able to display that. To start this idea I went to the shop to get myself and ink pad and took around 35 peoples fingerprints. I then scanned these and I was inspired by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray to use these scanned inverted fingerprints to make photograms as these two photographers do a lot of work with photograms so they really inspired me to turn these into photograms. Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy also inspired my next idea of putting samples of my families hair into the film holder of an enlarger and creating more photograms.
My last photoshoot for this theme wasn't inspired or influenced by anyone, it was the first idea that I had for this theme that I postponed until further into the unit so I thought it was appropriate to do it last in order to get another final piece out of it. I photographed my collection of crystals using different angles and I zoomed in quite a lot in order to capture the different dimensions and colours of the crystals when under light, I then went on to refine all of the images.
AO2: Experimenting and refining
My first photoshoot that I did for this unit was of different peoples jewellery and piercings, I did think that this photoshoot went well, however, as I mentioned earlier it was really cliche as a lot of people take photos of peoples piercings so I felt like I needed to do more to these images and do another photoshoot but I decided I needed to photograph the subject in a different way to make it more interesting as the previous shoot was quite dull, so when I did the next photoshoot I photographed the piercings and jewellery separately and photograph the marks left by them, however I realised that I couldn't really do much more with the refined images so I need to think of the next idea based on the same sub-theme. The next idea was taking peoples fingerprints with an ink pad, the biggest experiment with this idea was not having rules with how each individual makes their fingerprint as I was interested in how much pressure they would use when doing it, what technique they used, how much ink they used and so on, this way I could see which ones worked the best and from that I could then scan and invert them in order to make photograms out of them, the ones that were fainter and had more delicate lines worked the best as the darker ones were a lot more difficult to develop as they needed a much longer exposure time and therefore it was easier for the more delicate fingerprints to be exposed. The photograms needed a lot of refining as they were all different and people used different pressures so I had to do a few of them multiple times to get the perfect exposure, I spent the majority of my time in the darkroom trying to make sure the photograms were as good as they could be.
One problem when making those photograms was that the photographic paper had been opened so none of the photos came out as clear as I wanted them to be, therefore I had to get new paper as the fingerprints were too dark and you couldn't really see what they were, another problem that I came across when making these photograms was the chemicals, a couple of times I had to mix the chemicals all over again as the previous people mixed them wrong, also the chemicals were left out for too long therefore they were no longer appropriate to use. However for both of these problems I resolved them myself and my photograms came out really well. I also made photograms with hair samples from the people that I live with and I put the hair into the film holder of the enlarger and I believe that these went really well. For the majority of my photograms I used matt paper instead of glossy as it had a nicer texture and it looked older which was the effect I was going for.
In my last photoshoot I photographed my collection of crystals, I first photographed them with a white backdrop and a lamp on a dim setting so the crystals were not overpowered with a high amount of light, I took photos of the whole crystal and then I went in closer to capture all of the dimensions of the crystals that the light enhanced, all of the detail and the dimensions that were captured in the images wouldn't be noticed by the naked eye. However, once again the images in this photoshoot were straight forward and quite boring so I needed to take photos of the crystals again but in a different angle so you wouldn't know what it was that I was photographing. I took a piece of glass and balanced it on top of two chairs and I put each crystal on top of the glass and I went underneath the glass and photographed it from different angles, the one thing I love about the images from this photoshoot is that the crystals looked like they were floating. However I wanted to refine this photoshoot even more, So with the majority of the images I took I cropped them into a square to capture the main part of the image that I wanted the viewer to focus on the most, I also turned them into black and white and experimented with the brightness and contrast, that was the last refinement I made for this unit.
AO3: Recording and designing
Throughout this unit I have used some digital equipment such as:
- DSLR
- A bridge camera
- A macro lens
- Glossy and Matt photographic paper
- Chemicals in the darkroom
- Perspex glass
- An ink pad
- Hair
- Crystals
- jewellery
For half of this unit I have used digital equipment as listed above, I used a DSLR for my first photoshoot in this unit, however, I then soon switched to using a macro lens in order to capture the finer details of the jewellery and piercings I did this because the DSLR didn't zoom in as well as the macro lens. At the end of the unit I used the bridge camera for the whole of my last photoshoot, as it zooms in really close up and I liked the idea that it wasn't clear what the subject was and it made the viewer this about what perspective it is, it makes them more curious as to what it was, where it was, what angle it was taken at.
For the other half of this unit I spent all of my time in the dark room, I started off using glossy photographic paper but I then switched to matt as I liked how the matt paper felt when it dried and how old it made the images look. As i mentioned before someone had fogged some of the glossy paper and therefore that is what made me switch to matt but after the first couple of matt photograms I really liked the effect they gave; another problem that was mentioned earlier was the chemicals, some of the chemicals were left out too long therefore they were unusable, so the majority of the time of being in there I had to remix the chemicals.
AO4: Responding and Evaluating
My first response for unit 4 were four photograms of fingerprints that I framed in fancy white frames, I chose those frames as the fingerprints themselves looked really old, together with the frames were made to look like self portraits, they looked like they should be put on the mantle-piece, just like family photos, when I went to the shop I thought about the colour as well as the size, I chose a white frame as the photograms were quite dark so I wanted to balance the colours out, the balance of colours also seemed to add age to the final piece.
My second response was also made of photograms but these photograms were of the hair from my family, there were about 22 of them, they were all completely separate however I grouped some of them together as I found that some of them linked together but some of them didn't, as I linked them together they were in different patterns as I didn't want them in one straight line as that would have been really boring. I also decided to just leave the photograms without anything extra being done to them as I wanted the focus to be just on the photograms. To present them I just decided to put them on the wall, I arranged them where there wasn't any big or tiny spaces, I wanted the images distributed evenly across the wall.
My third response was a photobook made up of the best cropped black and white photos of the refined crystals, I decided on a photobook as I liked all of the images and I wanted to be able to display them all, as the photos were all black and white I wanted the book itself to match the photos so I kept to the black and white theme, I felt like this was a great way to present all of the images as it kept them all together as a set and they all looked good together. When I got this book in the post it looked really good, the windowed effect on the front looked quite appealing, it was an extra way of displaying more of my images.
My fourth and final response was a poster print of the best (in my opinion) crystal photo, I wanted the best image to be blown up into an adequately sized poster so it displays all of the detail and the dimensions of the photo, not many people would take time to look at the photo in depth whereas if it is enlarged into a poster you are able to see even the tiniest detail. However, when my poster came in the post when I first saw it I noticed straight away that it was quite pixilated, I guess this was because the resolution was quite low as I got the image off of my website so it did not come out as clear as I wanted it too, but I still wanted to hand it in as a final piece as it still shows my progression and ideas across this unit.
Overall, I believe that I have done really well in this unit, I feel like I have came up with good ideas, taken great photos and refined them until they were as adequate as they could be, I have worked to the best of my abilities across the whole unit. However, if I was to develop my work that little bit more I would have made sure that I kept up to date with all of my written work so I didn't have to rush near the end of the course.
Unit 4 final pieces:
- Set of hair photo frames
- 4 framed fingerprint photograms
- Poster print of one of my crystals
- Photobook of crystal photo's
- Set of hair photo frames
- 4 framed fingerprint photograms
- Poster print of one of my crystals
- Photobook of crystal photo's