Author: Harriet

Mikhael Subotzky

TwentySix Gasoline Stations by Ed Ruscha, 1963

Robert Rauschenberg

100 Chairs by Martino Gamper, 2012

Richard Serra, Hand Catching Lead,

Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculptures

Fiona Connor, COMMUNITY NOTICE BOARD, 2015

Tacita Dean, Purgatory, 2021

 Ememem, Concrete Works

Layne Waerea, Chasing Fog Club

Uta Barth, Ground

Andre Kertesz

Christina Pataialii , Solid Gold

Anoushka Akel, Bathing and Stokes Waves

Vanessa Gleye

Sarta Huges, Everything goes

Jessica Stockholder, Between the lines, 2017

ALFREDO & ISABEL AQUILIZAN, Pillars: Project Another Country

Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993

Dan Stockholm, By Hand, 2018

Darren Glass, Tongario National Park, 2008

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, The Tomb of Sir Walter Scott, 1800s.

Michael Snow, Venetian Blind, 1999

Michael Snow, Authorisation, 1969

Jule Eisenbud, 1960s

Floris M. Neusüss

Thomas Bachler

Today was full of hard decisions to make because I wanted to put up so many works but I could only choose a selection. I’m really happy with the works I chose in the end to go up because I believe they all complement each other very well. I wasn’t sure about my long work going from the top to the bottom, but I got feedback from a few of my friends and they said it was their favourite work. I also think next to the two A0 works it works as it gives a sense of looking and being in the ground then up to the sky, like how I wanted the two A0’s to be seen. On my original wall I didn’t have any of my photograms up on the wall, so when I got part of another wall I knew that I wanted to present some of my double exposure photograms. It was hard to create a composition I was happy with because I knew I wanted to keep some original size works. This was because this was the size I worked with in the darkroom and it’s the actual life size of the plants. So to the people looking at the work, I wanted them to get close to it and see the detail that you can’t from far away.

Overall I’m happy with how my vision turned out with my works because I can see the angelic, confusing, soft, layering components in each work. I think that the mixture of this and using nature as my starting point has been able to reflect on nature a lot. Nature isn’t self explanatory and simple, it is made up of multiple species and for a lot of people is a break from a busy city life. To me this is what nature is, it helps me slow down and reminds me that we need our own space and time too, being in tune with nature helps us be comforted.

I decided that I wanted these two works to be further apart because they can still give the effect of a whole image, while not actually being connected. I tried connecting the two but because they aren’t actually the same photo, they didn’t match and line up in a way that I would be satisfied with them being.

I also tried to create a longer piece of art, that went from the top of the wall all the way to the bottom. So then this work could fully give the effect of looking at it from your feet all the way up, but I’m not quite sure about it. I don’t know if it gives enough of subject matter or if it just looks like a whole lot of tone. But I like it matches my theme of dreamy, confusing, angelic type of vibe.

This reminded me of Pano Photography, where some people move the lens to create a sort of ‘longer’ photograph or something with more composition. Although it looks like I could have panned upward, I just took a section from one of my scanned photographs and turned it into 5 A3 works.

Today I had my class critique which gave me a few ideas with how to proceed with my work further, moving into hand in week. Here following are some of the things I took out from it:

• Connection between the two A0 works, do they belong together or separate?
• The concrete looks good contrasted with the warm coloured book paper which has pinhole photographs on it.
• Historical look to it.
• Having a larger work that hangs from the roof, gives a sense of going from your feet all the way up.
• Dreamy, something you’ve seen before, nostalgic?, holds atmosphere.

After our discussions, I decided I wanted to take down most of my work and start to decide how to present my work.

The first change I made was to print off my photoshopped double-layered photographs onto transparent tracing paper. I liked how the transparent paper turned out with the photographs I chose because with the white space there is a subtle seeing-through of the wall’s texture. I think also because these photos aren’t placed on normal paper also gives it a sense of the dreamy look, because I believe it this was just placed on normal paper it wouldn’t have the same, soft look about it as it does now. I was glad I found a way to incorporate my film photo’s because I was really happy with how most of them turned out.

I also rearranged my prints onto book paper and created more of these because I received a lot of feedback on them. At first, I thought that I wasn’t sure whether to keep them on the concrete but after hearing what people said about the rustic, original look that connected the two I thought that if I were to put them on a plain white wall it would wash it out. I also really like the collage put together look about it, makes it look historical and gathering flyers. But also looks like they are floating on the wall.

Michael Snow

I like the way Michael Snow works with the multiplication of images, he creates a sense of a story in a collage. In his work Venetian Blind he takes multiple film photographs of himself being blinded by the sun, each frame creating a different expression. Then is his work Authorisation he keeps taking the same photo multiple times and then adding them to the mirror, to me this creates a trippy effect. The further we get down to the bottom right we find it hard to sense what the original photo was because we are confronted with another approx 20 photos which makes the original photo small.

The use of collaging in my works is hard because nature is placed the way it is, it doesn’t have a sense of pattern. The only way I currently have a sense of collage, pattern and story is through the film strips I used in the darkroom by photograming them. Throughout my works I have a similar theme of a confusing, ghostly and soft touch to them which is why I found these works interesting. Because they both tell stories that make you think and have to understand.

Jule Eisenbud

‘The Man Who Tried to Photograph Thoughts’

The motion and blur captured in these images with the black overexposure caving in the sides gives it a real vintage feel. The images look like they have been taken on the move which give the multiple figures in the middle picture and motion blur in the others. In some of my works I had motion blur, this was because the can wasn’t still while trying to capture the image. I wondered if I did this on purpose it would give this sort of effect where nothing is really in focus but you can still make out figures/ objects . The idea that Jule Eisenbud has imagined these images and put them onto the film himself also gives it a magical, ghostly and outer earthly kind of vibe. Some of my initial thoughts on these photographs:

• blur
• polaroids
• bleeding of darkness
• black and white
• imagining
• ghost/ spirits
• flying

Black and white film.

During my time when I was creating pinhole photos I was also taking my film camera around, loaded with Ilford XP2 Super 400 and capturing some close ups of flowers, bushes, shadows while also taking landscapes. This was so I would have a range of different concepts when overlaying them and working with there photograms in the darkroom. I enjoed working with the photograms because I was able to trial around with the setup with them and create some cool collage looking prints which I found fascinating in the powerpoint.

I have also been playing around with layering them on photoshop, I like how they turned out and gave a confusing effect to them but I don’t think any of these will be used as my final works. Being able to play around with changing the opacity of each image adds a ghostly effect to them and makes you try to understand the two different images.

Poems/ Lyrics.

After having a presentation from Dekieke I wanted to try around adding words, poems, stories or parts of essays into my works. I thought that this could add some meaning and more ideas about nature. I also haven’t worked much with adding text to my works so I thought it could be a cool way to start working with transparent paper.

Firstly, I found some poems and essays that reminded me how I feel around nature. I would add some personal poems or thoughts but didn’t think that it would suit (and I am not as good of a writer as the professionals are). Here are some of the following I was inspired from:

• There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale.
• When Autumn Came by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
• The Sound of Trees by Robert Forst.

I also went through some song lyrics of my favourite songs I listen to when hiking or being out in nature:

• In the morning when I wake, the morning is filled with sun the trees are filled with memories.
• Some place under the sun, theres a place I dream of where I free my mind and hear the sound of the season.

Printing on different paper.

After looking at a postgrads studio, they had shown us how to print onto different surfaces/paper types. This I thought would be a great way to expand my thinking and add an idea/ sense of the word in my works. So I sorted some national geographic magazines and gardening books to find articles and paragraphs related to nature, specifically trees. I really enjoyed this process when I was trialing around with it and came out with some really cool works. After my trials I found the ones I thought looked the coolest were ones more with a darker composition, in this way it looks like its blocked out some of the words and left us with only a portion to pay attention with. I think this also related to the idea I had behind my pinhole works which was that there is something confusing and not noticeable behind these works. This keeps us guessing to what it is.

Scale.

In the print lab I choose a few works that I thought would look better in a larger scale, so i choose 2 A0 size print and another 2 A1 prints. I was worried about the clarity and clearness of the image when printing that big, but because the scanning I did was quiet high resolution it turned out good. Having the bigger scale works of some of my double/ triple exposure works is a cool way to identify the different sections where the light has developed the different compositions.

Cyanotypes.

During this week we learnt how to do cyanotypes in the print lab, this was a cool way to manipulate photos only developing/ appearing in a certain place (where the chemical is put). It was also cool to think that nature is creating the picture of itself because we use UV to create the details of the image. I enjoyed using and learning this process but I didn’t like how the blue looked in comparison to all my other works being black and white.

One of my ideas was to recreate with my phone flashlight the outlining of what looks like a dead tree, just the branches. This was a hard experiment because when taking the can outside its light so it only needs 1min- 2mins to become perfectly exposed. So I tried 30sec on my first attempt but there was no exposure at all. My second attempt was three minutes which created a very light tree. So my final attempt was 5 minutes because at this point i didn’t know if it would work as well as it did in my head lol. I think that it turned out okay, looks like a tree to me. I had fun exploring different ways of capturing in this way portraying nature.

Floris M. Neusüss

Floris M. Neusüss is a German Photographer who is well known for his use of camera-less photography. “It is true that the subject resting on the photo-sensitive paper presents its reverse side to be recorded, the side that is in shadow, the shadow cast by the object itself. This intimate physical connection inscribes into the paper, and this, if you are open to it, is the real fascination of photograms: the tension between the hidden and the revealed.” I find his works confusing and eye capturing because they have multiple layers, motion and pictures within pictures.

This idea of him using lots of photograms within his works made me think about another way of using light to create work. And this was through the chemical that you put on fabric, layering a photo over, and then using the UV to create an image on the fabric.

Today I wanted to keep exploring with double exposure and the three pinhole cans as I really liked how they turned out last time. Being able to take two cans out at once was a fun and more time-efficient way. I believe some of them turned out really cool while others i didn’t really have the exposure right for, but I think that I can use them with layering or cutting bits out of them.

I also had my talk with Dieneke, this was good to get feedback and a perspective on my work that I don’t have. The points I took out of my work were that the ones that don’t have any definite white or black spots give them a really old/ vintage look. Playing around with the scale of works. Copy and mirror some works. Layering on photoshop of film images but also of different pin hole works. Still explore with different ways and processes.

Today we learnt how to make photograms, I picked some nature from around the university which was actually surprisingly easy and fun. Being able to pick the collection and placement of each leave and vine was a fun way to create lots of different compositions. Also being able to play around with double exposures was really fun and a beginning way into trialling it out because when doing pinhole double exposures can be risky.

These double exposures were fun to play around with timing and the changing of the plant’s placements. I like how when the plants are laid over each other twice it creates a darker imprint.

More test strips including some single exposures on the left. I like how the flower and leaves I used created a sense see through and texture on some of them. I want to try play with this more and find some more nature with see-through aspects.