Protest E-on f-off

As I have previously mentioned I was unable to make the protest and therefore had to take a different approach to how I was going to make an artifact on something that I didn’t even go to. With this in mind an idea I came up with was to question what the point in a protest is. After going to the black panther exhibition in Manchester I decided I wanted to make a small piece similar to a moving image piece at the exhibition. The video below attempts to make people think not only about the protest in Coventry but the idea of protesting in general. I wanted this piece to be quite dramatic, in attempt to do this it was decided to have the more important words come up on screen as they are being said in order to explain the message in more depth and put a clearer message across. Me and my friend Rhys Evans did this together, I am happy with the results however I feel it may lack depth as there is maybe not enough differences in the views, it may appear to one sided as being against protesting but it still conveys the idea well I feel and does question popular views that some people might have using the power of the media.

Skatepark – Portraits

About a month ago I took images of a skate park at night and with this as my base I decided to take this further and create the same setting but with portraits of my friends in the images. I have taken these images below and am very happy with them however I now want to push this on and get actual skateboarders to come up to the skate park and use these as the subjects and create a set of portraits of skateboarders. I love the background in the images and think they look aesthetically pleasing and with skaters in the images instead of friends I feel an idea of transitional change from teenager to young adult will be shown as this is very much apparent in the age that most people skate.

Possible Final Major Project Idea

After a lot of research and looking into a range of different mediums with moving image, sound and still images I have decided that one idea I could take on is the football piece.

The idea I have for my FMP is to look at football and create an instilation that breaks down the idea of spectacle behind the sport. I still use the idea of sound but also with images of footballers just after they have come of the pitch in order to show the addrenilation they still have after an intense game and for viewers to read from their facial expressions a kind of incite into the game. With this idea I would be looking at Sunday league players however the images would be straight portrait shots in order not to give anything away about the level of football they are playing at to keep this idea of breakdown of the spectacle relevant. This is an idea to provoke the notion that the same sort of passion in the game can come across in a team that play in the park as well as on our television sets. To accompany this I would also like to create a sound piece as I think this worked well however would plan to record a lot more sound and in a similar way to the last piece edited it but with a wider range of football noises collected over a larger time frame and in different areas that the game can be played. With this sound piece I would create a visual on screen with the words that are being said by the fans and players etc, this would be done with larger words for the louder sounds and quiet sounds appearing smaller. I feel this would give more depth to the piece and would break down the spectacle of football in a better way, we would be understanding the sounds in a way that it seems when at a game however it would stand out that little bit more and have a slightly larger effect on the audience.

I also have a few other ideas that have come from this module that are very much focused on photography:

One is to look at skateboarders in the local area and do a night shoot of these people in a skatepark. I have experimented on a few friends and am happy with the results. I want to do this in order to look at transitional changes around skateboarding, as I used to skate I can relate to how these people are going through a change that is very apparent from the age of 15-19 in anybody’s life. At these times I feel people begin to come into adults so this is something I could also follow up and look at with other steriotypes that are going through the transitional change of teen to young adult.

One other photographic idea is to look at my life and documents everything that happens in the last 6 monts of my university life which I could make into a personal diary in a similar way to that of Corinne Day’s Diary.

Manchester – Cornerhouse

Another place I visited when in Manchester was a gallery and shop called Cornerhouse that showed contemporary art. At this time there was a lot of animation work on show. One piece that interested me a lot was a big screen in the middle of the room with a Chinese woman playing cello one side with the other showing an animation made of drawings took as through different places and showed us different people. The animation was very eligent and moved nicely along with the music. I did like the animation however this is not remains in my mind, the part of the instilation I found most interesting was the experience of the piece. On entering the room the sound was very loud which made me immediately go over to the large scale screen and begin to watch. This notion of the sound drawing you into the space and the surround sound created I began to think of how it could be relevant to my spectacle of football sound piece. I liked the feeling of being a part of the art in some sense, this is exactly what I would want to achieve if I made the football piece on a larger scale as I would want to portray the whole idea of a spectacle. With sound around you at a loud level it would make the audience feel more at one with what is being said than through a set of headphones or out of a tiny speaker as this is how football is wherever it is played. The whole pitch and surrounding areas creates the sports sound scape so by having it as a very loud piece that surrounds everybody in a room can help it relate more to the reality of the sport.

http://www.cornerhouse.org/today/ (04/12/08)

Manchester – Urbis

While in Manchester I visited the urbis gallery which was exhibiting Emory Douglas work on the Black Panther Party. On the urbis website the exhibition is described as:

“40 years on from the 1968 Mexican Olympic Games, when John Carlos and Tommy Smith controversially raised their fists in a Black Power salute, this exhibition looks at the meaning and history behind this gesture, as told through the graphic artwork of Emory Douglas, the official artist of the Black Panther Party and its first and only Minister of Culture.

Douglas created a compelling, motivational graphic style. His art from this period, documents growing civil unrest and rapid change. Previously unseen in the UK, the exhibition shows Douglas’ work from this period, including posters, cartoons and campaign pamphlets.”

http://www.urbis.org.uk/page.asp?id=3248 (04/12/08)

I enjoyed this exhibition as it showed a clear definition of the messages being portrayed and flowed very well something that needs to be shown in any work we do. For me the project is very personal to Douglas and this comes across in the work, with a project like this I feel a personal approach has to be taken in order to put across the intended meaning by the artist something Emory Douglas states in an interview about his work. One piece in particular toward the end of the exhibition that I enjoyed watching was a moving image piece about the whole movement where text came up on the screen along with a voice over. The words on screen were the most powerful words and the ones that summed up the sentence being said. As a result this was rather dramatic and made the impact of the film larger. With this idea me and my group used this idea in making our artifact about the protest and question the point in a protest.

Interview – http://www.urbis.org.uk/page.asp?id=3285 (04/12/08)

Manchester Trip

“The night has opened my eyes” The Smiths

After editing the images down to a select 18 I feel I did what I intended to do. I have decided to pair photos together that were taken pretty much at the same time as one another and that work together. I have placed text with the images in a similar way to that of Corrine Day in her diary. I wrote of what was happening at the time however this text is meant to come inside with this idea of relaxing and enjoying the weekend. The text is very simple as the images are of normal moments but at places or with people that were personal to me during the course of the weekend, I hope this comes across in the images. As well as Corrine I would also say Richard Billingham has influenced me for this piece as it is a piece done with simple equipment that is cheap and easy something that Billingham is renowned for.

As you can see the images are not all pefectly exposed and some appear blurry but this was because of limited settings on my point and shoot camera. In some of the shots I did not want to use a flash as I liked the colour in the room’s as it makes it feel more intimate and personal in places. The piece I think reflects well on my moods and how I reacted to places like Mikes house where I have never been before and the city of Manchester that I was very unfamiliar with. This sort of idea very much comes from some of the photographs I have previously put on the blog for example the ones of my friends and places that are occupied by these people. One difference is that I gave myself a time limit and a certain objective to reaching a clear narrative. I have decided to call this “The night has opened my eyes” because I wanted to look at the fact that I have not documented the nights out and this reason for going to Manchester for my friends 21st but to look at the moment’s we shared in between these times. I feel the night does have effect on these photos as we look through the normal moments in life as apposed to those that appear as the usual documents of friends. I wanted to explain to the audience that these moments are just as special if not more.

I hope to get my memory final atefact on by tommorow at the latest but have had some problem getting it of avid edit.

A few things

Here are just a few things I have been looking at recently:

http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n7/htdocs/mldd.php?country=uk (03/12/08) – This is a very interesting story of two people who love photography, this love brings them together and they become partners who share a passion and make this their art. The photographs on these pages are very intimate and for me present a truely beautiful relationship forming where the two subjects are so interested in one another that the only images that make sense are of each other as they do not want to let go of these precious moments. By documenting all these aspects of life they share the passion is very clear and offers the audience a feeling that is genuine and believable in a similar way to that of Nan Goldin.

http://pingmag.jp/2008/07/04/the-death-of-my-little-dead-dick/ (03/ 12/ 08) – This is an interview by Selena Hoy who asks questions on the break up and finds out what art Patrick Tsai is doing now after breaking up with the women in the previous website. I find this interesting as it proves how taking photographs of something you believe in can help so much, I feel real passion for what you are photographing has to come across in the work to reach an audience.

On the weekend just been I thought about this idea of a story over a certain time and decided to try and do something similar. As I was going to Manchester for the weekend with some friends I took my digital point and shoot camera in an attempt to capture intimate moments with my friends from university and a friend from home that now live’s in Manchester who I visited. I wanted to portray the three days in a sort of diary form from leaving Coventry to arriving back at Coventry. I went to really capture some moments that I will cherish as apposed to just something that happened on this weekend that most people do every weekend and make it very personal to me and give people the feeling of looking in on my own life but over a very short period of time. I need to edit these images down and put them in some sort of order so these will be up in the next couple of days.

Ravi Deepres

In todays lecture we were introduced to an artist named Ravi Deepres who did a piece of work on football called Patriots and with the “exploration of national, social and individual identity through observation of the dynamics and iconography of football supporters” http://www.surely.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/patriot/patriot.htm (27/11/08) tried to define how mass crowds become a collective who share identity’s in the coming together of the spectacle football. This interested me as my piece for spectacle looks at football and similar issues surrounding the sport, in opposition to Deepres I lean more towards a lower scale of football and represent how the passion of the game and this idea of shared identity comes through even with a pub team or a part of town represented through playing for a certain team in an area in a similar way to teams we watch on television. The principle is the same but on a different level.

After thinking about how I could take this on to a larger piece of work I started to think of taking portraits of footballers after just coming off the pitch. My reason for doing this would be to see the marks, dirty shirts and the whole feeling of how the game has just gone. This would tell a story on its own as people would read the expressions on peoples faces and produce from this an image of the actual game. I do not want to reveal to much about the footballers in terms of who they play for and positions, it would just be a plain background with the players literally 2 minutes after a full game. The reason for not revealing to much is to ask questions of who they play for and at what level. We will question from looking at them alone if they have just stepped of a local park or have played in front of thousands of people.

Images of Friends

These images below are just some that I have taken around, the images are not all perfectly exposed however this very much comes across in Nan Goldin’s work and was something that I wanted to experiment with. I aimed to take photographs  without worrying to much about exposure in order to create a very raw style. Some of the images are aimed up towards the lights in order to create a contrast in colour’s. The images are personal to me and are just shots of me spending time with my friends at university.

Richard Misrach – Golden Gate

Book: T.J Clark. Richard Walker, 2001, Golden Gate, Arena Editions

Golden Gate

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/30/Misrach_GG2.jpg (18/11/08)

I have always liked the idea of focusing on one place continuously over a length of time. The idea of having a visual memory of a place and how the setting has changed. This collection of images show the sky at a lot of diferent states and for me it is not the landscape but the forever changing skyline that draws me to these photographs. I like how the bridge is sometimes seen with it often being hidden by fog or mist. When looking through the images in the book you get a memory of each image and how at one point something can appear so different and then change, the site seen the previous day week or year is just a memory of the place at that time, this skyline will never return in exactly the same way. I love the beautiful colors and the fact that no single image is the same as another. This project is personal, they are photographs from Mishrach’s porch, this also adds a nice dimension to the images that he enjoys the basic things in life that he is surrounded by everyday and wants to show this beautiful place to more people.

Quotes taken from the Golden Gate book
“All that is neccessary to Misrach’s purpose is that there is enough sameness in the sequence for the camera to declare itself a clock, a timepiece”
“The truth of the Golden Gate is that it is a cliche, and the reality is that the cliche is beautiful. Photography is the right medium to expose that non contradiction because it is not afraid of repeating itself”