Possible Subject Material

Looking for some unusual subject material? Could do worse than try the Pumpkin Festival this weekend 3rd and 4th October at the Square and Compass at Worth Matravers.

The Swanage Blues Festival also kicks off on Friday 2nd – we have two, one in spring, one in autumn.  Low light band photography in busy pubs if you think that’s your bag – and it’s (mostly) free.

I’m going to be setting ‘people’ pics as homework fairly soon, so you might want to get started?

While we are at it, the Photographers Lounge in Swanage – a small (OK – very small)  but select gallery specialising in an eclectic mix of good photography – opens the show from its Open Shutter competition with a preview – on Friday 2nd. You won’t won’t find landscape photography of the Jurassic coast here, however good it might be.

So much choice…

So little time…

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Peter Funch – Babel Tales

Hi Richard

just dropping by to forward a link i meant to send last week. (You’ve maybe already seen the content, but i thought it was an interesting idea..)

Peter Funch - Babel Tales - "Smoking Smokers"

http://www.peterfunch.com/

Babel Tales : Surreal photography of Peter Funch

A Danish photographer, Peter Funch, who lives and works in New York City has created a photo series called “Babel Tales” which consists of pictures of people passing New York City street corners.

Every photo is an edit of several photo’s he took at exactly the same spot in a period of two weeks. He then Photoshopped the images he captured to create the Babel Tales…

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Is this art?

A question for you – what makes a photograph art? What set of circumstances and criteria determine this?  Do these splendid images meet those criteria?  Well worth mulling over – it’s the crux of this course, in many ways.

Martin Pugh - Running Chicken Nebula or IC 2944

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Holton Lee – Arts and Disability

For some time I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work alongside several disabled artists, often as the result of running a funded art project of some kind.  A lot of this work has taken place at or with Holton Lee – a local charity that works with Art, Disability and the Environment.

I don’t know this this artist – Gus Cummins – but his work is a powerful demonstration of how photography can be an important element of an artist’s work.  I suspect Gus doesn’t call himself a photographer.

I would encourage you to find out about Holton Lee – they have an excellent gallery space with a regular programme of exhibitions – have added a link to their site at lower right.   The preview for this one is the afternoon of Friday 16th October, and you can find out about the work from this exhibition at http://www.ictal.net/gus_cummins.html.

ictal 2008 02 - Gus Cummins

It’s important – especially for AS/A2 – that you engage with as much ‘real’ art as possible – by that I mean seeing it first hand, not just in a book or a website (unless that is how the artist has deliberately chosen to exhibit the work).  Think about how a real print, or video installation, might differ – colour, scale, surface, context, accessibility….?

Holton Lee has an archive of disability art – in fact has been selected to host the new National Disability Art Archive – but money seems to have dried up for a while, so still at the planning stage.  They also have studio space for rent by the day or longer – some of my A2 students from a year or so back rent one from time to time to do work there.

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Branislav Kropilak

The splendid image of mosque columns in Sebah’s photo posted by Ian reminded me of some much more modern work, so just putting this in as a brief counterpoint.

Garage No 1 (2005) - Branislav Kropilak

And a couple of pages you might want to explore:

On the value of the Polaroid – we discussed it briefly as a unique image (ie no copies or multiple prints) – an equivalent to the daguerreotype.

and an article on photography, the law and privacy.

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The work of Pascal J Sébah

Pascal J Sébah (1823 – 1886) lived in Constantinople, Turkey possibly of French or Syrian origin.  He owned El Chark (The Orient) , one of the largest and most prolific photographic studios in city.

Sébah achieved popularity because of his well-organised compositions, careful lighting and great attention to detail.  He used the albumen print which was invented in 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard.  It was the first viable means of making a print on a paper base from a negative.  Egg albumen was used to bind the chemicals to the paper.  Sébah used this to create “carte de visite” which proved very popular amongst wealthy travelers through Turkey and North Africa.

Sébah ran a very successful studio which he opened in 1857.  He specialised in travelogue shots recording key scenes from the region including a good deal of portraiture of ethnic groups, local tradesmen, etc .  The business was so successful that it was taken on by his son (confusingly J Pascal Sébah) to become official photographers of the Sultan on whose instructions an extensive collection of landscapes were taken from all over the Near East.

The picture below is Sébah’s rendering of the interior of the Mosque Amrou circa 1880.  It is held in the The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Accession no PCD3149-2022-0252-94 and reproduced at http://www.si.umich.edu/History_of_Art/demoarea/details/1980_1.201.html.

I really love this on two counts.  First it does much to bring history to life through its atmosphere.  Whilst this is a bygone era it is as though you are standing there today. The glimpses of strong light from outside give a real impression of heat, glare and stillness. Secondly I love grand linear patterns in architecture which give real perspective.

Whilst capturing perspective ideas in architecture is something I’m already keen to do in my own photography I’m aware that it is this element of athmosphere that seems to be missing from my work.  I need to be more aware about where light is coming from and the possible story it is telling.

Ian Finlay

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Willy Ronis

Famous French photographer Willy Ronis made it to 99 – he died this weekend in Paris.  Well worth looking up his work – many similarities with Robert Doisneau.

Willy Ronis - Le Petit Parisien, 1952

Willy Ronis - La peniche aux enfants, 1959

Images from www.hackelbury.co.uk, more at www.afterimagegallery.com

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Nick Brandt – Wildlife Photographer

If you’re wondering what relevance wildlife photography has to your fine art project, think again.  It is an unforgiving genre that demands huge technical competence and the fleetest of reactions.

And just occasionally along comes a photographer who lifts the results out of the simple documenting of other species into something much, much more.  Nick Brandt works in medium format black and white film, then retouches the scanned images in Photoshop.  Websites don’t do the work justice because the technology cannot yet render the range of subtle tones on screen as well as a final print.

Giraffes In Evening Light, Maasai Mara, 2006 Picture: NICK BRANDT

I think this is one of my favourites – you can see a lot more at http://www.atlasgallery.com/atlas.php

Would you prefer to see these images in colour?  you can read something of his working practice here.

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Rhythm

Just a few images from this morning that work with our short discussion around Rhythm as a possible theme last night…

Gazillions of starlings by Fi and He

Scenes from North Korea by Eric Lafforgue

Mars - from Orbiter

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Rafal Milach

Found this last night thanks to Google – I use iGoogle to constantly search for photography news items. I followed up original lead – http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS125883+10-Sep-2009+PRN20090910 – which isn’t very interesting, and found Polish photographer Rafal Milach’s own site at www.rafalmilach.com .  Later you’ll be asking  ‘How do I found out about contemporary photographers?’.  Well – this works, amongst other more deliberate methods.

He works across Europe, with some very strong work from Eastern Europe and Russia.  Easiest to think of his work as exploring as exploring social groups on the fringes of our expectations – an all women police unit in Poland, or illegal Vietnamese market traders, or the beach and fishing towns around Odessa.  A range of approaches from grabbed night shots to wonderfully lit and composed  [so go work out how he does this...] informal portraits – have a look at Olga, the Sevastapol waitress in the the ‘Black Sea of Concrete’ work.

It’s a Flash site, so I can’t link directly to images, but did find these elsewhere…

Komsomolsky district / Yelaterinburg - Rafal Milach

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