ENVIRONMENT

Unit 4 Externally Set Assignment 2017

David Hockney created photojoiners. These are a collection of photographs taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times of the same subject. The photographs are then collaged together to create the place, person or object even though they may look distorted. This work also references the Cubist movement from the early part of the twentieth century and the Cubists’ depiction of space.

Multiple viewpoints

Cubists attempted to show several viewpoints within one, flat plane. Cubists also incorporated real objects and textures. How would you do this?

Other photographers have also created one image from several, smaller photographs.

German Photographer, Thomas Kellner has remixed landmarks in a unique photomontage style. He takes hundreds of pictures, scanning the entire structure one tiny portion at a time, then horizontally places the film strips of the individual pictures to reconstruct the landmark, creating an entirely new picture.

What does the number of images used by Kellner contribute to the enormity of the Environment being photographed?

“I think I am more of an artist than a photographer. At the moment I am working on architecture, but it is not classic architectural photography. There are definitions in art about ‘construction-deconstruction’ or ‘collage-decollage’ but I don’t think any of it really fits what I am doing right now.” (Thomas Kellner )

Big Ben The Eiffel Tower

Tate Modern

London Bridge

Daniel Crooks

Bill Vazan creates grids of photographs that often form globe like shapes. These are achieved by standing in a central position and taking a number of shots at slightly different angles (eg. top, middle and bottom). He then slightly adjusts his position and repeats this. He keeps doing this until he has turned a full circle.

JFK Turner

These works are by Szymon Roginski who said these works were inspired by Cubism. Roginski produced these works for the fashion designer Ania Kuczynska and began with a series of photo-shoots. The images were then printed, constructed into geometric shapes and assembled back together to create the original image. The photo-sculpture was then re-photographed to create the final piece.

Giacomo Costa

Anastasia SavinovaMiles Donovan Iosif Kiraly

Nicolas Kennedy

Sohei Nishino

This Photographic joiner of the city of London is a patchwork of around 4,000 Black and White photographs by Japanese artist Sohei Nishino. Nishino has mapped out ten cities including London, Paris and New York City. Nishino describes the process as "re-imagining" a landscape and it begins with a month long walk through the city. He photographs different sections of a City on Black and White film. He then hand processes the images and assembles them using scissors and glue in his Tokyo Studio. In an age where photographs are consumed on glowing computer screens and not printed out Nishino makes large, physical objects assembled from photographs printed by himself. The images are linked to ancient maps that abstracted land and our modern world of Google earth.

Pep Ventosa

Stephanie Jung Alexey Titarenko

Multiple viewpoints

Focus (Photopedagogy Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School)

Ralph Eugene Meatyard made his living as an optician. He experimented with various strategies including multiple exposures, depth of field, motion blur, and other methods of photographic abstraction. Two of his series are particularly concerned with focus and depth of field, both stretching the expressive potential of photography, film and cameras when looking with the ordinary world.

‘No Focus’

‘Twigs’

By reducing the depth of field, a more abstract composition can be created. This also creates great mood and atmosphere even when the main subject is something simple like the twigs in this series by Meatyard.

“I decided to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture. Pushing my old large-formatcamera’s focal length out to twice-infinity―with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur―I discovered that superlative architecture survives,however dissolved, the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testingarchitecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Seagram Building

Eiffel tower Chrysler Building Guggenheim

Sydney Opera House Villa Savoye

Saul Leiter (Photopedagogy Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School)

Leiter was foremost a painter who discovered the possibilities of colour photography. His images explore colour harmonies and often exploit unusual framing devices - shop signs, umbrellas, curtains, car doors, windows dripping with condensation - to create abstracted compositions of everyday street life in the city.

Leiter was fond of using long lenses, partly so that he could remain unobserved, but also so that he could compress space, juxtaposing objects and people in unusual ways. Many of his images use negative space, with large out of focus areas, drawing our eye to a particular detail or splash of colour.

Typology

A way to classify an environment and it’s inhabitants.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Michael PennJason Messinger Mark Able

Ed Ruscha, ‘Then and Now’

Kerry Lynne

Hans Eijkelboom

AnonymousJim Golden

Rachel Levy

Myoung Ho LeeMark Meyer

Construct a Landscape

Noémie Goudal makes large scale cut-outs that require scaffolding and a technical team to secure in order to make her photographs. She uses rope to secure or suspend these elements within the overall composition.

To recreate this, find a landscape in which you can situate your cut-out image. How will you secure that cut-out in its new landscape so that its support is barely visible? What kind of scale do you want that element to take on within the overall composition? How ‘believable’ will your image be? How curious?

Noémie Goudal’s practice is an investigation into photographs and films as dialectical images, wherein close proximities of truth and fiction, real and imagined offer new perspectives into the photographic canvas. The artist questions the potential of the image as a whole, reconstructing its layers and possibilities of extension, through landscapes’ installations.

Photographers Create Meticulously Faithful Dioramas of Iconic Photos.

Making of “La cour du dumaine du Gras” (by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1826) “La cour du dumaine du Gras” (by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1826)

Making of “Nessie” (by Marmaduke Wetherell, 1934)

Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger’s project, Ikonen, an ambitious project to meticulously recreate iconic historical scenes in miniature. The ongoing project includes immediately recognizable shots—the Wright Brothers taking flight, the Loch Ness Monster poking its head out, “Tank Man” halting tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests—because the images have been seared into our collective memory.

“Every field has its icons, guiding stars, which reflect the spirit of time in form, media and content,” says the photographers. And when something is photographed, it has a way of transcending time rather than becoming isolated. Historical symbolism is fluid and our perception of it can change the same way history can. This, perhaps, is why Cortis and Sonderegger pull away from their miniature scene at the very end, revealing what each photograph actually is: paper, cotton balls, plastic and plenty of their own spare time.

Alan Wolfson

The photos

Remember this? Iason’s exam piece from last year.

The set was photographed providing a blend of past and present.

Aaron Farley

Liesl Pfeffer combines her photographs to create abstract nature-inspired collages.

Angie Buckley

Nick Van Woert

Other photographers who construct landscapes by re-photographing their own images.

Sophie Calle's work inhabits a space between fact and fiction. She crosses private boundaries to explore the meanings which might be hidden there and exploits public spaces, investing them with a sense of intimacy.

Observations: Sophie Calle and Dryden Goodwin

In ‘Cast’, Dryden Goodwin presents portraits of strangers captured by the artist as he has travelled through London. The title ‘Cast’ suggests a plurality of meanings, all of which have resonances with the work, from casting a line to casting light or shadow, from casting a film role to casting a sculpture, from casting suspicion to casting a spell.

IMAGINE YOU ARE A STRANGER VISITING THE CITY FOR THE FIRST TIME....

Look around you and describe what you see as if you were seeing it for the first time. What do you notice first? Look again and begin to see the more complex relationships between spaces and people. Look at the habits and rituals people go through as they go about their daily lives, working, playing, shopping etc.

Take a bus / tube / taxi journey and notice your fellow passengers. Who do you think they are? Keep a diary and photographs of everything you see and everyone you encounter for 24 hours, including snatches of conversation, and the interactions you observe.

Covert observation of personal spaceDear Stranger,

I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not know…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 the window on 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 on __-__-__ (date and time)…I will take your picture and then leave…we will remain strangers to each other…If you do not want to get involved, please simply draw your curtains to show your refusal…I really hope to see you from the window. Shizuka Yokomizo, 'Stranger' project

The frame is dictated by the shape of the window and so the choice is not the photographer’s. Are these truthful, objective representations or the individuals who are photographed?

Surveillance

Derived from the French word ‘surveiller’, meaning ‘to keep watch’ or ‘to watch over’, the surveillance camera has been used to police borders, to assist war-time reconnaissance, to gain advantage over political enemies or simply to gather information. Techniques of surveillance are closely linked to developments in photographic technology – from the earliest aerial photographs to satellite pictures. In the twenty-first century, cameras on street corners, in shops and public buildings silently record our every move, while web-based tools such as Google Earth adapt satellite technology to ensure that there is no escape from the camera’s all-seeing eye.

Jonathan OlleyGrosvenor Road RUC Police Station, Grosvenor Road, Central Belfast 1998

Jonathan OlleyRUC Police Station and British Army Patrol Base, Strabane, Co. Tyrone 1998

Thomas DemandCamera 2007

Laurie LongCompact, from The Dating Surveillance Project 1998

Laurie LongHairbrush, from The Dating Surveillance Project 1998

Mary Alpern: ‘Shopping’With a tiny surveillance camera and a video camcorder hidden in her discreetly perforated purse, Alpern wandered through department stores, shopping centres, and fitting rooms.

The images in "Shopping" (all 1999) are painstakingly culled from hours of accumulated footage, are in a sense arbitrary and unmoored - even the camera was detached from the photographer's eye.

Intervention: Paint

Britt Bass and Morgan Blake: Blake’s photos are actually printed on transparencies, and then laid over Bass’ painted canvas.

Fabienne Rivory

David Hepher

The roll of film was left to sit in a ‘film soup’ for 2 days and thoroughly dried in a darkroom bag.

Film Soup Recipe

300ml hot water1 cap detergent <–yes cap, not cup!!1 tablespoon vanilla tea leaves*film roll left in film soup for exactly 48 hours, dried, exposed, and cross-processed.

Intervention: Film

Ajay MalghanFascinated by the corrosive effects of everyday acids and driven by nervous energy, Malghan stepped away from the digital workflows of his other photography series and started bathing strips of film with crass chemicals including coffee, vinegar, soap, hydrogen peroxide and oven cleaner.

Jennifer West

Jennifer West uses standard products to process her films: coal-tar dye, eyeliner, whiskey, hot sauce, urine, deodorant, skateboard wheels. And she likes to finish them in equally conventional ways, either “rubbed with Jimson Weed Trumpet flowers, or dripped and splattered with nail polish, or sprayed with Lavender Mist air freshener”. Or why not with all three?

West explains her approach “more DIY than Heroic Sublime.” But she also feels very much part of a tradition of visceral film-making and painting, citing Tony Conrad’s electrocuting and pickling of film, Carolee Schneemann’s emulsion handworking, Ed Ruscha’s use of beet juice and Pepto-Bismol in his paintings, Stan Brakhage spitting on and scratching his negatives with his fingernails, and so on.

The works in Out of Focus are made from West’s film negatives and prints, and represent (or as she puts it, “picture”) a half-second of moving film, meaning around 12 or 15 frames.

Eric William Carroll Intervention: Film

Intervention: Infrared

David Keochkerian: Infrared Photography

Richard Mosse uses discontinued Kodak Aerochrome film to intentionally subvert traditional photos taken from the Congo to help draw attention to an often overlooked conflict

Sean Lynch

“The photographs were taken in Hackney Wick and later buried there. The amount of time the images were left underground varied depending on the amount of rainfall…“Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and collaborating with place — allowing it also to work in putting the finishing touches to a picture — felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark.”

Intervention: Post printingStephen Gill: Buried

Intervention: Post printingCatherine Yass

I floated this image in the canal for a week. It's a photograph of the place where I floated it. The water peeled away the layers of emulsion within the transparency to reveal the different colours embedded in the film. There's a kaleidoscopic effect as the light dances and ripples through them – just as it did on the surface of the canal.

Burnt

Intervention: Collage

Chris Kenny Jenny Odell

Liz Orton Jelle Martens Abigail Reynolds

Intervention: Stitching

Hagar van Heummen Shaun Kardinal

Mood and Atmosphere

William Eckersley

James Frank Tribble Justin Broadway

Gilles Coulon Kasper Bossers

Surreal EnvironmentMan Ray

MagritteHerbert Bayer

Refined in the 1970s by photographers such as Duane Michals, fantasy and surrealism continued to be a fertile ground for experimentation.

Lynn Skordal Bene Rohlmann Collage Analogico Toshiaki Uchida

Joe Webb Hannah Hoch

Surreal Collages

Laszlo Moholy Nagy

Ex-students responses to politically motivated collage techniques and Moholy Nagy.

Jamie Denny

Florence Clapcott

Tom HunterLife and Death in Hackney,

John Everett Millais‘Ophelia’, 1851-52

Tom Hunter: Life and Death in HackneyThis maligned and somewhat abandoned area of Hackney became the epicentre of the new warehouse rave scene of the early 90’s. During this time the old print factories, warehouses and workshops became the playground of a disenchanted generation, taking the DIY culture from the free festival scene and adapting it to the urban wastelands. Hunter’s images draw upon these influences combining the beauty and the degradation with everyday tales of abandonment and loss to music and hedonism. The reworking of John Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ shows a young girl whose journey home from one such rave was curtailed by falling into the canal and losing herself to the dark slippery, industrial motorway of a bygone era.

Appropriating Environments from Fine Art Painting

Tom HunterWoman Reading a Possession Order

Tom Hunter: Persons Unknown‘This series of photographs was taken in my street in Hackney, 1997. Myself and the residents who made up this community were fighting eviction as squatters. The title of the series comes from the wording used in our eviction orders. The postures and gestures reference Vermeer's paintings and set out to give status and dignity to our community.’

Tom HunterThe Art of Squatting

Jan VermeerThe Art of Painting, 1666

Tom HunterThe Anthropologist

Jan VermeerThe Geographer, 1668

Jan VermeerWoman in Blue reading a letter, 1662

Jeff Wall

Jeff WallGust of Wind, 1993

HokusaiGust of Wind, 1832

In the case of A Sudden Gust of Wind the source material is a Nineteenth Century Japanese woodcut, though Wall also references paintings from Western art history. In the main his use of historical source material is less obvious – and less precisely referenced – than is the case with ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind’.

The work is carefully constructed. Wall photographed different elements of the scene over a period of several months, before seamlessly collaging these together in digital post-production. It’s not clear what brings the four main protagonists to this place; two look dressed for the location but the other two look more like businessmen in their suits and overcoats. Whatever the contents of the file of papers, it seems likely that most will now be lost to the unexpected gust of wind that has also taken the Trilby hat of one of the men.

Gregory Crewdson (27 mins)Gregory Crewdson summary (5 mins)

Gregory Crewdson works within a photographic tradition that combines the documentary style of William Eggleston and Walker Evans with the dream-like vision of filmmakers such as Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch. Crewdson’s method is equally filmic, building elaborate sets to take pictures of extraordinary detail and narrative portent.In a Crewdson photograph, the world as we know it has been re-ordered to a perfect, still, moment. In the Hokusai print, the artist has drawn us another world. We are no longer seeing the world as we know it, but a world previously unexisting — we are (if the artist is succesful) excited by line and shape and colour and somewhere in there, content and narrative. We do not need to believe, only imagine.

Ex-student response to Crewdson.What happened before, what happens next?