23 May 2011

FINAL SERIES -LANDSCAPES

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In this project my attempt has been to represent the nature of light as an abstract substance occupying its own space.

Usually we don’t recognize light itself, but instead we understand its presence by the surfaces it defines. When light is reflected from surfaces, or shines through transparent materials, our perception of materiality shifts to light itself. Light becomes the visible substance of the metamorphosis between its own invisible self and a surface/material.
During experiments with sun light through glass and water I have investigated the creation of new independent and abstract forms, patterns and ambiguous meanings of light reflections and shadows. What fascinated me the most during this process, was the variety in the character of the light outcome and the possibility of unlimited perceptions of each unique image. I started photographing the light abstractions how they appeared on sheets of cartridge paper, as I almost felt that I was in the position of drawing with light according to the rules of light itself, not yet knowing how the result would appear.
I ended up with a variety of images that inspired in different ways due to their compositions, colours and depth. I found that each of them had an individual quality that could perhaps become stronger if I connected them to a theme. Among glass, waterfalls and vertical compositions, I found that various abstracted landscapes turned out as the strongest thematic series. My logic has been to begin the series with more abstracted parts of landscapes to gradually gain an understanding of composition and textures during a journey through the various landscapes. Still, this is only my personal analyze and understanding of these particular light images as a series –turn them upside down and completely different images will appear.

ARTIST REFERENCE -ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ

André Kertész 2 July 1894 – 28 September 1985), born Kertész Andor, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay

As Josef Sudek, André Kertész also photographed objects on a windowsill. After his wife Elizabeth’s death in 1977, he began placing objects that reminded him of her or of their life together in front of the window of his New York apartment and shooting color Polaroids of them. The series was eventually collected in a book called From My Window........
Now the city became a soft, distant backdrop for his miniature theater of memory. Buildings are distorted through the glass bust of a woman: a smooth, fluid, featureless shape like a pooling teardrop..........
Kertész eventually bought a second, identical glass bust and posed the two in a pool of sun, leaning their heads together in a mute tête-à-tête. It’s no surprise that glass—in windowpanes, wine glasses, marbles, sculptures, shards—is the star of both Sudek’s and Kertész’s still lifes: it gathers, refracts, and solidifies light, the real subject of every photograph. The camera lens is another glass window, which lets us see into the past but shuts us out.
André Kertész is possibly the most photographic of all photographers: he sought out the play of light and shadow; he liked the concentration and overlapping of forms, of moments; and in the everyday, in banality, he recognized poetry, beauty, and even, for all his innate modesty, the “sublime.”  (text from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website)

ARTIST REFERENCE -JOSEF SUDEK


Josef Sudek (17 March 1896, Kolín, Bohemia – 15 September 1976) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.
Sudek's photography is sometimes said to be modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography and thus worked "in the style of the times". Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic.

Josef Sudek: “a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”

Sudek, who lost his right arm in the First World War but nevertheless carried a panoramic box camera and tripod around Prague and the surrounding countryside, began to focus on
still life after German troops occupied Prague in 1939.
He started shooting through the window of his studio, turning it into a scrim: fogged with condensation, feathered with frost, or streaked with trails of raindrops. He placed objects on the windowsill, turning it into “a theater of ordinary objects”.

Sudek’s still lifes combine solid, durable objects with the most ephemeral phenomena, light and shadow, moisture and reflections. In pictures like his Glass Labyrinths, he blurred the distinctions between light, glass, and water: all are translucent, all are veiled as though by breath, all leave permanent traces in the gelatin-silver print. Despite their softness and absence of strong contrasts, Sudek’s contact prints illuminate the tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of a glass of water, the flaking cracks in old paint, the separate filaments of feathers. Still life is an art of intimacy and nearness; it addresses the world within our reach, the things we touch, hold, smell, and taste. It brings us “tête-à-tête with things.”

SERIES COMBINATIONS

  Landscapes
Glasses
 Verticality / corridors
Waterfall
Favourites/ best compositioned
  
I ended up with around 30 images that inspired me the most. Their compositions, tone and sharpness were very different and I could imagine lots of different objects or situations in each of them. I found that each of them had an individual quality that could perhaps become stronger if I connected them to a thematic series. I printed the photos and started grouping them in series of themes from how I analysed them, after which I photographed them as documentation and remembrance. I found that an obvious appearance would be the abstracted glasses turning clearer at the end of the series. Another common denominator was the appearance of vertical compositions getting more articulated at the end. Then I saw the appearance of blurred waterfalls from a distance, zooming closer to the very substance at the end. Finally I turned the images horizontal and found various abstracted landscapes again very abstracted turning more obvious. Well, again, nothing in these images is obvious, as it is only my individual analyze and understanding of them.

22 May 2011

CONTACT SHEETS -REFLECTIONS

During my experiments with cyanotype printing I got really fascinated by the very different light reflections and shadows that appeared through glass and water. Instead of progressing my cyanotype experiments I started photographing the light abstractions how they appeared on sheets of cartridge paper, as I almost felt that I was in the position of drawing with light..that the light became a substance. A metamorphosis between the water, glass and light created these new independent and abstract forms, patterns and ambiguous meanings. Intuitively I chose particularly interesting parts of the photographed "drawings" and cropped the narrow portrait format in relation to the format nature of the falling shadows.

17 May 2011

CYANOTYPE - WATER

After exposing two sun sensitive cyanotype sheets through different glasses with water, my hope was to receive an outcome that reflected the transparency of water in a new way. To discover the nature of water with a new appearance, I think the inverted light and dark appearance adds a new perspective of understanding the light in the motives, and the different layers of transparency (water and glass) shown as different blue tones also apply an interesting depth. I though find a limitation in the fact that only different blue tones appear, when reflected light in itself contains the full colour palette.
I also tried to flash different sheets in the moment they were applied to a water surface, but because this type of photographic paper starts to develop in contact with water, my sheets turned out nearly white.

16 May 2011

ARTIST REFERENCE -DYLAN DE WITT -PHOTOGRAM

"Unique photograms of water. They are made by flash-exposing a sheet of photosensitive paper submerged in a tray of water. The shape of the water surface at the moment of the flash creates the print."
http://dylandewitt.com/portfolio/photograms/


To investigate cyanotyping further, I think this reference is a really interesting way of showing the importance of light, not only as a direct technique, but also to freeze and visualize something normally transparent -invisible, like the patterns in moving water.


CYANOTYPE EXPERIMENTS



These are my first experiments with the cyanotype technique. My attempt was to visualize some items that we are familiar with in an abstract way to investigate the understanding of form. I used organic objects such as grapes and parsley, and tried to place the objects so that only parts of them were visible. I also used a mirror to affect the paper with reflected sun from other angles to add more movement and depth in the pictures. 

PHOTOGRAM / CYANOTYPE -INSPIRATION

-A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image varying in tone, depending on the transparency of the objects used. Areas of the paper that have received no light appear white; those exposed through transparent or semi-transparent objects appear grey.

-Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints. 
It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection. Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a sillhouette effect. By using thisphotogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.(via Wikipedia)

LIGHT PROJECT - IDEA: THE VISIBLE INVISIBLE

Inspiration -various artist

What I think could be very interesting to visualize in this light project, is the untouchable or non solid space that surrounds us. When light captures dust particles, steam, smoke etc. we discover how the invisible or transparent transforms into a visible structure. Perhaps I will find it difficult to capture these situations or make the needed experiments, but I think I will try while I keep my mind open for other ideas.

10 May 2011

FINAL IMAGES + PROPOSAL

 Bridge
 Down hill
 Junction
 City/suburb/town
 Right turn
Tunnel


During my initial research I have been inspired by different aspects and ways of illustrating travel and time as motion.

I have experimented with travelling as a “space lapse” sequence like Mauritius Seeger, but in order to play with the idea of gathering the character of different moments, I searched for a technique to abstract the result of a time lapse sequence of travel.

During a trip around the North Island, I started photographing the road and surroundings through the front window of the car. As the whole journey was very characterized by getting quite fast from A to B I gained my main impression of the Island through the landscape and cityscapes in this window frame while driving.

What really interested me was the possibility of grouping different situations of surroundings to unify the character of the moments.
When driving, the surroundings kept on changing, while the road remained the constant factor. Because of this, I found it logical to group the pictures in terms of the constant; the form/type of the road. I found that the situations: Bridge, up/down hill, junction, city/suburb/town, right/left turn and tunnel together could describe the flow of the whole journey. 

In my process I have experimented with an interaction between Photoshop editing and time lapse sequence work in Premiere 5. At the end I found that overlapping between 30-50 photos from each situation in Photoshop could merge the surrounding moments while travelling into a series of abstract time related situations.

My attempt has been to abstract an overall impression of my journey through a series of unified situations in the moving surroundings. The understanding of each merged surrounding depends of the way we recognise the constant elements like the type and form of the road, signs, structure, marks etc. in the overall composition.

9 May 2011

ARTIST REFERENCE -IDRIS KHAN

Idris Khan (born 1978, Birmingham, UK) is an artist based in London.
His work comprises digital photographs that superimpose iconic text or image sets into a single frame; he explores the history of these items by creating multi-layered photographs.

Another artist that I think is an interesting reference is Idris Khan. As he overlays pictures of existing art, texts, architecture etc. he abstracts the way we usually would recognize the original work. I use the same technique just using my own photos creating moments from my own experiences.