View
218
Download
2
Category
Preview:
Citation preview
There is a difference between looking at photographs--which has become a common cultural practice in connection with reading newspapers--or seeing the image. The latter refers to reconstructing the photograph by exploring the deep structure of the image--which involves the application of practical knowledge and creative insights and relies on the cultural or historical consciousness of the reader. Looking is the visual routine of readers, seeing is the visual practice of the literate. The professional or artistic disposition of photographers reflects a commitment to the image as an expression of ideas or feelings that are beyond words. - Hanno Hardt
Introductory Project for Year 13 Photography Students 2011/12 Develop artwork in response to the given starting point. Your work should also reflect your key photographic interests (through style, genre, technique etc). This work is for potential exhibition at the Lighthouse 21st October 2011, and is also likely to be a key piece of portfolio work. Your sketchbook / blogs should show in-depth developmental studies that fulfil the assessment objectives for A2. In particular there should be clear evidence of an increased level of analytical and critical understanding.
Project title: Soliloquy an act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers, especially by a character in a play oxford dictionary A device often used in drama whereby a character relates his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters Webster dictionary Context for project: The Lighthouse, Poole is keen to continue a successful partnership with Yr13 Photography students. They have requested work for exhibition over a period when two Shakespeare plays will take place at the Lighthouse: A Midsummer Nights Dream and Macbeth. This request coincides with a time when students are reflecting on individual future pathways and areas of focus for A2 study. The theme ‘Soliloquy’ has been chosen as an open-‐ended starting point to encourage students to research, explore, experiment and express themselves. What do I want to capture most in my photographs? I am more interested in capturing the inner truth. Human emotion and the essence of human being. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment. And so it becomes more often the good psychologist rather than the good photographer who makes good portraits. It is the sitter’s mind that controls the portrait a photographer makes, not the photographer’s skills with his camera or with direction. - Philippe Halsman “In my case, it’s been an interior dialogue and not an exterior dialogue. The question is: ‘Who am I?’ Too many photographers look no farther than the surface, not only of the things they photograph, but of their own lives and emotions. Duane Michals Writings on Sam Taylor Wood’s series: Soliloquy (www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hpj/graiwer.htm) As the title Soliloquy suggests, the series is an extended rumination on the entrapment of individuals within themselves – the exhausting and endless monologue that is the human condition. We view a brief glimpse of a privately coded vision presented as part of the undercurrent or optical unconscious of a singular individual, and we are acutely aware of the insurmountable gap in understanding that separates us as viewers from the intimate fantasy we voyeuristically observe. We are repeatedly reminded of the fundamentally subjective nature of human perception, imagination, and consciousness as we attempt to inject signification and narrative content into the enigmatic panoramas underlining each subject’s portrait. What at first seems an intensely private space of someone else’s imagined fantasy – a distant and unreal ‘elsewhere’ – subsequently evolves through our viewing of it and our efforts at comprehension and identification into a muddled amalgam of the image objectively exhibited to us by the artist and the artificial narrative and tale we as viewers have constructed and projected onto the work, thus subjecting it to our subjectivity. This world is waiting for us to give it meaning. Is it possible to convert your own (or someone else’s) imaginings, thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams and ideas into photographs / artwork? References in introductory presentation: Sam Taylor Wood, Italian altarpieces with predellas, Francis Kearney, Gillian Wearing, Rineke Dijkstra, Gregory Crewdson, Guy Bourdin, Manu Pambrol, Annee Olofsson, Richard Billingham, Nick Turpin, Steven Berkoff
Recommended