Pastiche Initial Research

For Task 1 from Environmental project I've chosen Robert Adams photograph called 'On Signal Hill Overlooking Long Beach, California' from 1983.

 

The manipulation of light in this photograph gives off a ghostly effect, utilizing the smog of L.A. and the choice of black and white film, makes the scene almost reminiscent of the horror genre.

He has set up his exposure to favour the shadows of the trees, in order to silhouette them against the white foggy background, so that trees appear to be more cut out of the fog.

The trees stand on thick black grass in the foreground, exposed so that you can recognise more the presence of grass and trees, instead of fully realised trees and grass, reinforcing this theme of death that the photograph generates. In fact looking at the slither of the grey city sandwiched in between black dead trees and grass, and an abyss of endless fog, Adams has transformed this hillside view of Los Angeles, into a scene depicting either the city of the dead, or some form of ghoulish after life.

I've found the place which recalls me about this photograph. Basically few weeks before uni started I way on the hill, overlooking at town where I'm going to spend some time. I was wondering about to start some project about it, and there it is.

To my pastiche I'm going to add more ghostly effect. I'll try to do my best to take the picture as same as possible but with something mine. 

My area is quite creepy; according to this 'ghostly effect' which is in the top picture; I will play with that.

I'm wondering about long time exposure or camera/lens movement to add some more weird details. So far I took pictures which looks quite scary. Stylized models for people which you never would like to meet on the street and raw, cold landscape makes frightening and ghostly effect.

Camera Obscura at home

For my Landscape project I'm going to produce camera obscura. Already I've chosen places where I would like to produce my pictures.

My concept is to produce body of images showing my new surrounding. Basically place where I live, place where I spend most of my time and landscape which I have to get use of it. For me Medway is a lifeless town, where nothing interesting happens, just routine. I don't like it at all, but I would like to change it; bring SOMETHING which going to kill this boredom.

Also learn about something new. Show how exactly we see our surrounding.

From the beginning:

Via Camera Obscura we can see how we suppose to see world. This tiny hole in the wall is working exactly the same as our eye. But the thing is we would never see this way, because our brain is working and seen objects are transformed to see them properly.

Deconstructing Environmental Photographers

A series of photographs about the meeting of public and private life in New York.

A populace flows Through the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York - George Oppen, "Of Being Numerous"

Issues of surveillance, and the blurred line between private and public space were central to the formation of the city. 
In the early 70's—when I first photographed New York—the street and public spaces were fair game for a photographer, 
and people not only tolerated but enjoyed having their picture taken. But in the 90s, 
I found myself questioning how a photographer functions in public space: what is acceptable and what is not, 
because people were, by then, sensitive to the intrusiveness of cameras (of all kinds) in our culture.
New York is a chaotic and layered universe. Everyone sustains his own solar system of family, friends, 
and associates within this complex universe—sanctuaries amid the chaos. 
The city reconstructs the intimate core and the anonymous skin of New York. 
At the heart of this work is the meeting of two disparate worlds: 
what it means to separate them and what it means to put them together.
At its heart, as well, is my enduring interest in banality, 
and finding ways to draw from it whatever wit and irony I can.
 I'm especially intrigued by the meaning of myth and how everyday life can adopt a quality of myth when photographed. 
In this manner, 
myth can become a language of its own, 
and the mythic can illuminate that which is poignantly and simply human in a picture.
The myth of New York cannot be separated from the reality of it.
These photographs are of a New York as imagined as it is real. —Mitch Epstein






I have chosen three images created by Mitch Epstein. Those photographs are from a series called 'The City' which  he did between 1995 and 1999.


A series of photographs about the meeting of public and private life in New York.


New York is a chaotic and layered universe. Everyone sustains his own solar system of family, friends, and associates within this complex universe—sanctuaries amid the chaos. The cityreconstructs the intimate core and the anonymous skin of New York. At the heart of this work is the meeting of two disparate worlds: what it means to separate them and what it means to put them together.


I've chosen this photographs because I see lots of similarities between them.


Photographs of New York of the concert jungle where every single second is something happening. 
There are pictures of details which are elements of the city life. CCTV cameras going through the corner of the image. Located in two different ways to see what is in the front and behind.  Big city in the background, foggy, still asleep. Shows early morning when everything feels so innocent, but because of CCTV cameras we know that everything is under control. 


Next picture with some drawing on the window have so many details.  There is focus on the drawing, but we can see everything what is happening in the back. All composition is considered in details. 
Window drawing show two different situations. One is running legs, which we can link-up with person in the background - always in the move.  Second is a face, exactly lips. They are red, when we look at the more carefully we can see 'Empire' which is a sign of American lifestyle. 


Third photograph. Taken early morning, during sunrise. It's already quite bright and city just waking up to start a new day, but still is too dark for trains to switch off the light. 
Train (in the hole) is another sign of big city, such a New York. Is about everyday travel through the city, everyday run for better tomorrow.


This photographs include details, hidden in the corners, strong enough to remind us that this is the big city such as New York.

Andreas Feininger

Andreas Feininger ‘United States’

Bauhaus

Industrial photography, journalism

He paid more attention to link-up context of a picture with its expression.  In accordance with Feininger photograph should talk by itself, have its own history to confine text to minimum.

If context is a base of the upcoming photograph; approach and composition determine it quality.

Amalgam of narrative pictures and rigorist compositions are linked in one cohesive entirety.

Camera Obscura by Marja Pirilä

Sometimes light, a place or an objects calls forth memories and emotions, pushing one towards the unknown.

'Since 1996 Marja Pirilä  have made many different kind of camera obscuras in Finland and abroad.
These works combine camera obscura phenomenon either to constructions with different shapes, materials and sizes or to everyday objects. The common thing for them all is that the outside world is reflected upside down through the lenses on mat glass, acryl or tracing paper. This camera obscura phenomenon is like a cubistic video which changes all the time according to the light changes and movements in the world in front of and around of them.'


 


                                                                                                                                                                 




I really like her idea of experimenting with shapes, materials and sizes of camera obscura; which makes other shapes and gives us totally different way to look on our surrounding. Basically its shows how our eyes works which out our 'brain editor'. Sound quite funny but that's true. Without this tiny system in our brain we suppose to see everything upside down.

Camera obscura is kind of our brainless eye. 

Going back to Marja Piriläs Camera obscura - interior / exterior series which speaks by itself. But the  original thought to create these pictures was born of a nocturnal insigh (in a room transformed into a camera obscura). Pirila have found out that she can on the same piece of film, capture a person, his/her room and the landscape going through the windows. Which means to portray the living environment of a human being! 

The photographs began to take form not only as the living environment of a human being, but also of the landscapes of the mind: reflections of thoughts, dreams, fears and reveries.

Disassembled by Todd McLellan

Todd McLellan specializes in automotive, commercial and conceptual work. 

Disassembled is his latest series of photographs of object from the past (vintage gadgets) which are in dismantled form. There are items such as a typewriter (which I like the most),  Pentax camera and alarm clock, the collection shows the craft of these mechanical objects.  Every single piece is positioned in an almost obsessive arrangement - by type, 

size and function - resulting in a clear portrait of an era that we basically have left behind... 

Camera Obscura by Alberto Morell

though a pinhole darkly

"The camera obscura is an optical instrument that was the forerunner of the modern photographic camera. It can range in size from a small tabletop device to a room-size chamber. The term is Latin for 'dark room', which describes the simplest form of the camera obscura, a darkened room into which light is admitted through a tiny opening in one of the walls or windows. An inverted image from the outside world appears against the wall or screen opposite the opening".

My idea for Landscape project is to make camera obscura and photograph upside down urban landscape.

Going through my research I focused on my favorite (and I guess the most famous) camera obscura photographer Alberto Morell.

Something really strange and also amazing happens when light enters a dark room through a tiny, tiny hole. 

Through this tiny hole placed in the middle of covered window coming light, which makes totally black room alive. 

Black walls looks like a movie screen, its surface covered with a fuzzy image of people and cars moving along. Thing is everything is upside down and you can feel a little dizzy. 

''A camera obscura receives images just like the human eye—through a small opening and upside down. Light from outside enters the hole at an angle, the rays reflected from tops of objects, like trees, coursing downward, and those from the lower plane, say flowers, traveling upward, the rays crossing inside the dark space and forming an inverted image. It seems like a miracle, or a hustler's trick, but it's high school physics. The brain automatically rights the eye's image; in a regular camera a mirror flips the image.'

Morell's breakthrough came in his own house in Quincy, a Boston suburb. He set his large-format view camera on a tripod in his son's bedroom, with only a pinprick of light entering, and opened the shutter. He left the room and waited. For eight hours. The result was mesmerizing. The developed picture showed inverted trees and houses from across the street hovering over the boy's toys like a scene from a fairy tale. "I was giddy," Morell said. "It felt like the moment photography was invented."

From that eureka moment, Morell has gone on to produce with his camera obscura one of the most original and enthralling bodies of work in contemporary photography. His views range from brazen New York City panoramas to warm Italian vistas. A few years ago he switched to color, enjoying its intensity, and began turning images right-side up with a prism.

I saw his photographs few years ago and I was so amazed. But that time I didn't know how he took them. 

Now I know how it's working and I'm going to do the same. Obviously it won't be in that big format, because I'm going to shoot it around Medway in my friends houses which are quite small.

I would like to get kind of this effect, but I didn't decided how I'm going to shot - in BW or color. 

Bodies and Objects by Christian Vogt

I went through Christian Vogt gallery and archive and found few more picture.  According to picture above there is big series called ‘In Camera: Eight-two Images by Fifty-Two women’

In every single picture except the model was a wooden box. For this reason pictures got another value, they become more interesting; sometimes a bit funny.

This series is a little confusing for me. Sometimes I think the box is more important than woman in the picture. But I think that’s the thing which makes these pictures more interesting.

1974 

stone, presentation-series

There is one more series which I found really interesting.  Is object photography but human body is included. In this part object is more important than the person in photograph. Basically is a presentation of the object and it’s not presented by itself, somebody is presenting it…

Cabinet of Curiosities

A cabinet of curiosities was an encyclopedic collection in Renaissance Europe of types of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined.
They were also known by various names such as Cabinet of Wonder, and in German Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer ("wonder-room").
Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities. "The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater.

According  to cabinet of curiosities, I think that people who owned cabinets were quite freak about all this stuff which they collected. For me it sound really fun, but I think I won’t get that nuts - is fine to collect small (or big) objects, but there are some limits…

For example porcelain figures, which lots of people collects. I don’t know what is inside their head but for me (if there is more than one of this kind of figures) looks sick and I find it quite disgusting.

  

Basically I have my box which I call ‘my wonder box’, but object in there are so random. They don’t have any specific categories and they don’t fit to each-other at all.

But they are thing which I’m going to have for rest of my life; hidden somewhere under my bed or in the loft.

They don't any material value. But they have very strong personal meaning such a good times memories.

I think this box should be named as a ‘lost and found’ because there are only items which I found. Every single item have its own story, date and some memorial meaning.  So always when I open the box I have smile on my face and my minds going somewhere to the date and place where I’ve found the ‘thing’.