Throughout this semester, we were able to look and learn all about Film. By using both large and medium format cameras we began to get more confident this semester with the idea of using them. Something I found quite hard about taking photographs was the fact that you are unable to see what has been taken before developing them.

We have learned how to load, and shoot medium format cameras. On this day, we loaded up the film camera, and walked around in groups to take photographs of different things out and around university. We took images both inside and outside to experiment with the settings.

We then had time to be introduced to large format cameras. We were able to be in groups, again, and take photographs of each of our groups, taking it turn and making sure that we all had a go in order to make sure that we all understood what we were doing or to do in the future. This camera was easier to load, yet still complicating to remember due to it being steps.

We learned how to develop film, by transferring the film in pitch black to make sure not to ruin the strip of film. Our next session was about printing within the dark room and we were luckily able to print images properly. We were put into pairs and firstly created a test strip to make sure that we got the right exposure, and when we knew how long to expose the paper for, we did this. We then developed the photograph in the chemicals for the specified time. I am proud for how it all turned out.

We also found out some problems that can occur in the darkroom, such as if there is a light flashed randomly, for less than a second, it can cause the paper to fog up and some people within my class were unlucky enough to deal with this, develop their print only to find it to fog up. It was a very good learning point.

Learning about film has been extremely interesting!

Tal Silverman.

 

 

Tal Silverman is a London based Photographer who works primarily for advertising, design and editorial clients. 

There is not much written or shown about this photographer other than his images. They are really well taken, with lovely shadows on each object displayed. The majority of his images are taken in the studio, with a simple black background. However, it appears that some of his backgrounds could be photoshopped in, such as the shoe image. The drink with the ice in it has wonderful lighting in it, matching well with the table and background that it is placed on.

 

I believe that something I would love to take forward in The Objects of Desire project is, experimentation in the studio, looking at lighting and ways it can be used in lighting to represent the object. But I would also like to look out of the studio, using natural lighting and on location shoots with desirable backgrounds as well as a desirable object.

 

 

Adrian Burke

 

Adrian Burke is a London based photographer specialising in still life and animals.

Starting out on his own in the early 1990s, he has worked consistently since in the advertising, design and editorial fields.

This photographers lighting, attention to detail and problem solving have truly seen him work repeatedly with agencies and brands for many years.

He is a rather modern photographer and for The Objects of Desire, his main body of work that has been inspiring me is his advertisement work, his use of colour, creating an image that is striking, making the object or the brand that is advertised appear very bright and appealing.

Someone that inspires him is “Irving Penn”.

The images used are rather simplistic, simply shot in the studio with the brands being shown so it is easy to read what is being displayed, this is also created by the good use of lighting in his images.

I take great inspiration with the use of lighting and shadows used when enhancing the photographs.

 

 

Sam Taylor Johnson.

 

Originally a sculptor, Sam Taylor-Johnson began working in photography, film, and video in the early 1990s.

The split between being and appearance in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict – has always been in the centre of her creative work.

I briefly had a look at Sam Taylor Johnson’s work at the start of my ideas process through Enigma of time. I originally wanted to take photographs of something decaying or growing, like a tree, as she does with her fruit images. I found her images compelling and very clever, but also there is a sense of surrealism in her images.

 

Alexey Titarenko

 

Alexey Titarenko was born on Vassilievsky Island in Leningrad (now St.Petersburg) in 1962. He began taking pictures in 1971, at the age of nine, and graduated from the Leningrad Public University of Society-related Professions in 1978 with a degree in Photojournalism.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 he produced several series of photographs about the human condition of the Russian people during this time and the suffering they endured throughout the twentieth century.

“To illustrate links between the present and the past, he created powerful metaphors by introducing long exposure and intentional camera movement into street photography.”

His most well known series of this period is “City of Shadows”.

Titarenko’s prints are created in the darkroom. Bleaching and toning add depth to his nuanced palette of grays, rendering each print a unique interpretation of his experience and imbuing his work with a personal and emotive visual character.

 

A lot of his images are quite cinematic and not quite “black and white”, with vague colours in some of his images. The sense of composition is important to detail what the viewer is looking at, the majority of the time his images involve a lot of long exposures of people, which creates a soft effect on each person.

Catriona Grant

 

 

Catriona Grant has studied Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art and Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee.

She teaches at Edinburgh College of Art and works freelance with community groups on arts projects. Her most concentrated project, with which she has been engaged for over ten years, comprises a series of imaginative and intense studies of her family.

 

All of her images that I have seen involve different people, as we are made to believe, but due to the fact that their faces are always directed away from the camera, it is hard to be sure.It is shown that these are real people, who appear to be going through a lot of things, and due to the photographs having a door open to the left of her images, it is as we are the outsiders looking in on these situations.

Something I am inspired by is the transparency of the people in the image, creating the look of “they are a memory”. These images also have a sense of space, taking place in different rooms with a lot of negative space. Whether the person is sitting down or standing up, they are looking away from the camera and though it is unsure what they are looking at or thinking, there is a sense of isolation in her images.

Bill Wadman

 

Bill Wadman is an American portrait photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. His images have been seen on the covers and pages of major publications throughout the world.

He has been known and noticed for his long-exposure ‘Motion’ project and it has been featured in Popular Photography, Eloquence, and PhotoYou magazines.

He works well in both the technical side and the natural eye for photography. This photographer is interested in every subject.

Fluid and graceful is one way of describing dancers due to being noted for their routines of spinning across an open stage.

This photographer wanted to capture these movements, however, in an unconventional way. He wanted to use long exposure to actually capture and track their movements on camera as a still. He used modern ballerinas.

 

One of the dancers spoke about their experience with the photographer and coming up with the right amount of time.

“It was really difficult to move at the exact right speed to capture the ribbons of movement, but after a few hours, I finally figured it out. If you actually had been sitting in on the session, I would have looked like a crazy, dancing monkey trying to cross about 6 feet of space fluidly in about 6 seconds. But the photos look amazing!”

 

I looked into this photographer, as I am very interested in the idea of capturing movement and creating a ghostly figure in the aspect of tracking their movements. I find it fascinating to see what comes up on the camera due to the fact that it isn’t always guaranteed what is going to happen and as a first year at university photography student, I want to take the chance to experiment in the studio with studio lighting.

I believe that these images are extremely soft and the photographs really create and show the fluid movements and the tiniest about of movement in the flow of the dancers. The skin tone and the red clothing is very noticeable against the black background.

 

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. Her background in design is evident in the work she is now renowned for.

She layers found photographs from existing images with aggressive texts that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to.

Her trademark is black letters against the red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read:

“I shop therefore I am”

“Your body is a battleground”

“Not stupid enough”

“We don’t need another hero”

“Look and listen” etc.

 

A lot of her text and work questions the viewer. And how they may perceive the image. She focuses and bases her work around feminism, classicism, consumerism, desire and more. She originally began to take her own images, however, she soon decided to use photographs that have been displayed in the past, with text that works well with the image.

Despite the text being surrounded by red, which works extremely well due to it being very striking, it doesn’t take away from the meaning or the actual image. The viewer is still able to see what they are looking at.

 

Her images are very directing to either herself “I”, the viewer “you”, “your”, or the world “we”, and “they”. Making her images relate even more so to the society that we have all been brought up around, they are also very personal and striking.

 

I personally take inspiration from Barbara Krugers work due to the way that it is created, for the meaning, but also the aspect of aesthetics, the look of the image, being spread across the faces of the people, which is effective due to the mystery behind it all, and yet, they are quite public.

 

MISHKA HENNER

 

Mishka Henner was born June 8, 1976. He is a Belgian artist living and working in Manchester, England.

His work has been featured in several surveys of contemporary artists working with photography in the internet age.

Some has described him as a modern-day Duchamp due to his appropriation of image-rich technologies including Google Earth, Google Street View, and YouTube and for his adoption of print-on-demand as a means to bypass traditional publishing models.

Many of his works resulted in print-on-demand books, films and installations that featured in large-scale museum surveys in France, Canada, and the US.

He is known for conceptual art, appropriation art, documentary photography and post internet.

 

Photographs taken by Mishka Henner are extremely interesting as they are usually close up shots of people. It appears as if the people in the photograph have been printed on a square piece of see-through paper, placed on-top of each one at different angles, layering it more and more which is what gives the image a faded soft feeling.

The photographs themselves appear to have maybe been taken in a controlled environment due to that fact that the models faces are well lit and soft boxed. She is looking directly into the camera lens, which is what gives the photograph a personal feel. There isn’t a lot of colour in this image and I think that it was intended that way because the photographer wanted the audience to see the model and only the model in an interesting way. As the image goes on, its clear that it is fading out and it is getting lighter each time.

However, unlike a lot of this photographers other pieces, it is obvious that these photographs are in black and white, which gives the photograph a much more atmospheric feeling, making the background match well with the background, concluding that the image looks even more faded than in the coloured photographs that have been used. It has, again, been layered and the focal point is the girls face due to the fact that it is the lightest part of the image, despite it being all the same colour. This shows that the photograph has been taken in a controlled environment because of how soft and light the girls face looks. She has a neutral looking facial expression, making the photograph appear a lot more atmospheric.

I think that these images are extremely effective due to the piercing direct stare of each person and due to the way that we can only see the persons face, we as the audience, are unable to see the background, the body, we have lost the ability to see past the blank expressions on their faces and because of this, there is a slight eery vibe to the images.

Alma Haser.

 

Alma Haser was born in 1989 into an artistic family in the Black Forest, Germany. She is now based in London and on the southeast coast.

She is known for her complex and meticulously constructed portraiture, which are influenced by her creativity and her background in fine art.

She is an extremely interesting photographer.

She creates striking work that catches the eye and captivates the mind.

She expands the dimensions of traditional portrait photography, and she takes photographs further by using inventive paper-folding techniques, collage and mixed media to create layers of intrigue around her subjects, manipulating her portraits into futuristic paper sculptures and blurring the distinctions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery. She received her first camera when she was six years old and would take photographs of her and herd dolls before she retired the camera in favor of drawing. It was an “around the world” trip with her family when she was 13 years old that inspired her to revisit her former passion.

One of her projects, named “Cosmic Surgery” was made by photographing the subject, then printing multiple copies of the sitter’s face and folding them into origami structures. That, is then placed over the original face and the whole construct is photographed again.

She mainly decides to choose friends to sit for her, and preferably uses ones with distinguishing features and a unique sense of style. She wants the photographs that she creates to “unsettle” the viewer. The pastel colours used in her images also begin to unsettle due to there being a weird aspect to the images always, such as their faces and this in juxtapoisition with the actual image is both playful but also extremely creepy.

“I hope that people find them beautiful but at the same time are taken aback because they are so awkward and weird” “I think they do freak people out slightly, but I like that. I just want them to look closer.”

 

She also has other portrait projects, such as “The Eureka Effect”, “Twins” and “The Ventriloquist”

 

The Eureka Effect is a signature body of work, expanding the dimensions of traditional portrait photography and, yet again, she takes her photographs further by cutting and manipulating them, merging them with leaves and flowers to create works that are to catch the eye of the viewer, which is something that she tried to create in this project too.

 

Twins was created as Alma Haser has stated that twins have always fascinated her and their closeness in looks and attributes. The two in her images are not twins as they did not even know one another before the photo-shoot but they replicate one another very well.

 

Twins: