Major Practical Project - Gillian Bostock

Gillian Bostock's project The Roddis House documents the photographer's great aunt's house. It had been lived in for almost a hundred years, but as the owner was nearing the end of her life, Bostock documented its details. Her artist's statement for the project is as follows:

"This project revolves around my great-aunt's house in Wisconsin, which was designed by Gus A. Krasin and built under the supervision of my great-grandfather Hamilton Roddis in 1914. Last year, as my great-aunt neared the end of her life, the future of this house, which had been significant to the psyche of my extended family for nearly one hundred years, began to look uncertain. I turned to photography as a way of documenting and preserving that shared history.

As I unearthed buried objects found in drawers and dark closets throughout the house, I realized it was not only a documentary project but also a personal investigation of nostalgia and how we envision the past from the present perspective. How do we prepare for the passage of time and teach ourselves to remember the past? What do we leave behind by accident or on purpose?

This is how one family left their memories to be found and how I choose to remember."

The thoughts behind this project are slightly different to mine, with Bostock focusing on objects that had been stored away for years. However, I do want to document my home as I remember it in nostalgic memories, in a similar way to The Roddis House. Also, the style of her photographs is very similar to that which I am trying to make, with natural, neutral light and simple compositions.

© Gillian Louise Bostock

© Gillian Louise Bostock

© Gillian Louise Bostock

© Gillian Louise Bostock

© Gillian Louise Bostock

With this project, I particularly relate to the variety of different framings for the images - capturing both small details and whole rooms. And, as I am trying to do myself, the house looks lived in. I've realised that this is probably the most important thing for me in my project, to ensure that the viewers recognise that my house has adjusted to the family as it grows.
Bostock's images succeed in working well together as a series. Although they were probably shot over a relatively long period of time, the style and the tones are consistent enough to tie all the images together. This is something I need to consider. The image in the series that I consider to be most linked to my project is that of the bureau, covered with books and letters. I've been trying to utilise repetition and large amounts of detail in my photographs, and here I think Bostock really succeeds with that idea. There is almost too much detail in the image, but it is interesting enough for the viewer to want to spend some time with it, to try to decode the owner's personality. Also, although there is a lot of detail, the strong lines running both vertically and horizontally through the image help it to keep a solid structure. This also rings true of the image of the crockery cupboard. The edges of the frame match the edges of the cupboard, giving the viewer an opportunity to see the details fully.
Although the ideas behind Bostock's project are not exactly the same as mine, I am attempting to capture a similar style of image to hers. In some cases, I want to shoot areas of the house that aren't necessarily as well presented as these. To me that shows the reality of family life. I have taken several images that I am pleased with so far, but the next stage will be to ensure that the images I choose to make the final edit all work together as a series, not only tied together through subject matter, but through style, tone and composition as well.

http://gillianbostock.com/
http://inmenlo.com/2011/09/29/gillian-bostock-capturing-the-spirit-of-a-family-home/

Another 4 films have been sent off for processing, so the results of those will be posted when I receive them back!

Independent Art and Photography - Mock up

I decided to make a mock up of how I would like my final book to be constructed. I will also need to use this to figure out exactly how to print the final images, and where the image should be placed on the page. The idea for this book is to give a general overview of the city I grew up in. I want it to represent a wide view, using landscapes and views of the whole city, similar to those of Nicholas Nixon. Moving through, the focus will gradually become smaller and smaller, looking at views down streets, individual shop fronts, and then small details such as a piece of graffiti or a shop's notice board. Similar to Edward Ruscha's books, I want each page to be consistent, with the images all being placed in exactly the same area of the page. However, referencing back to some of the famous Japanese photobooks, also want to include a fold out section.

The book will be landscape, with the pages folding up and down as opposed to the usual left to right. The fold out section will include my shopfront images from the previous book, but this time presented in a long, panoramic style landscape, folding out to reveal the shops as if they were all on the same road (another reference to Ruscha).

I want the book to remain a very physical object, and an artefact in itself as opposed to just being a way to showcase the images. I want the viewers to be forced to interact with the object, and be able to spread the book out and look at it, with the middle section acting as a point of interest half way through.

My main challenge will be the printing process. I need to find a high quality paper that is not only able to be folded, but also can be printed double sided so that when I fold it the images will be displayed on both sides of the page. Although ideally I would prefer the book to be printed full bleed, I think I will have to include a white border around all of the images. When creating the fold out section, I will have to use a lap fold - folding a small strip on the side of the images and attaching it to the one next to it. this gives a crisp fold, but does leave a white line where the fold is. To make sure this blends in, all the images will have to have small white borders. Although this is a compromise, I don't think there is any other way of getting a crisp fold when creating the fold-out section. 

I shot most of the images this past week whilst back at home, mostly early in the morning to as to avoid including any people, which was a key factor for me when shooting in this style. The images are about the buildings and the construction of the place, not its residents. I will be scanning the images from the 3 films I shot in Norwich this week and then hopefully printing them digitally once I have found a solution to my printing problems!

Independent Art and Photography - Norwich Shop Fronts book

After a fantastic couple of workshops with wonderful book designer Anna Fewster, we were challenged to make our own handmade books. I took a bit of inspiration from Edward Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher to make a book about the independent shops and cafes in Norwich. I wanted to photograph them all with exactly the same framing, then arrange them in the book so that comparisons can be made between the shapes of the shop fronts.
I then embossed the cover with a very simple title and hand-stitched the pages together.

So although this is far from perfect, and the prints I used to create the pages are of a low quality, I feel this is definitely something I can improve on. I like the colour scheme, the grey cover reflects the grayscale images.
For me, creating a handmade book would be an interesting and different way to present the images for this project. Also, I feel like they should be kept in a confined order, which I wouldn't be able to control if they were simply presented as a set of prints.
To improve on this first attempt, I would need to make sure the prints are of a higher quality, but are still able to be manipulated within the book. I will also be featuring more images and not only shop fronts. Being handmade and handstiched is the main factor I will be transferring over.

Major Practical Project - Prints...

So I've been in a bit of a quandary. How am I going to produce the final prints of these images. Of course, the most time effective way of doing it is to make high quality scans of the negatives, then make digital prints from the scans. However, when I was making my back up scans, there was just something that wasn't right about seeing the images on a computer screen.
So the other option is hand prints. I went into the darkroom yesterday to have a bit of an experiment with the remainder of a pack of paper I'd had for a while, and I'm so glad I did.

So I have only printed 6 images so far, but I now know that this is the road I want to go down. Images are printed at 7"x7" size, on 8"x10" paper leaving half an inch border all around. But hand printed images have a completely different quality for me than digitally printed ones. It's also a much more raw, hands on way of making prints, which I feel fits in with this project.

The only question now is gloss or lustre?

Independent Art and Photography - Petra Wunderlich

Of all the students known for studying at the Dusseldorf school under the instruction of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wunderlich has probably stayed closest to the photographic style of her tutors. Her work focuses in on religious buildings in New York city, particularly those that just blend into the other buildings around. Like the Bechers, the work is in black and white, and for the most part she shoots the building head on, so the facades are flat to the viewers' eyes.

©Petra Wunderlich

Wunderlich can be seen to have followed on from the New Topographic style of documenting her surroundings - the images appear detached and unemotional. She has aimed to document most of the religious buildings with very similar framing, although not quite as rigidly as the Bechers work.

©Petra Wunderlich

©Petra Wunderlich

©Petra Wunderlich

Something that I draw inspiration form in Wunderlich's work is the fact that there are no people in the photographs. The images are purely about the buildings and their architecture. They show the effect of human intervention without needing to show the humans themselves. Personally, I feel that the way that buildings either side of the subjects have been included strengthens the images. It places these places of religious worship into a context, and allows the viewer to recognise that, no matter where you are or how unpleasant looking an area is, there will always be one constant - a religious building.
Although I see links between my style of work for this project and these images, the subject matter for me will be different. My whole aim for this series of projects was to keep them very personal, to document the things that are close to home. Therefore, ratehr than photographing only one type of building in Norwich, as I did with the independent shop fronts and Wunderlich has done with the religious buildings, I want to build up a general impression of the place. This will probably involve some work similar to these images, but interspersed with more general, cityscape images. I will be shooting in black and white film however - I want to keep the same feel as photographers like Wunderlich and Ruscha, but relate it to my own situation. Therefore, when shooting buildings, I will take inspiration from images like these, shooting the buildings flat, head on. I will also establish a context for where the buildings are, which is something that Wunderlich hasn't done.
Although we see a glimpse of what lies on either side of the religious building, without reading the viewer has no idea where in the world they are. Perhaps this was her aim, to keep them anonymous, but for me it is important that the viewer has a point of reference in the project.

Major Practical Project - The second shoot.

So here are the results of my second shoot at home. Here, I was trying the idea of stepping back a bit, using as wider angle lens and not being so close to my subjects. I also wanted to shoot more busy photographs, with almost too much detail in them. I was looking to show more that the house is lived in, and how the building has had to adjust to four people growing up in it.
I have another shoot planned for next week, where I will be looking to photograph in the rooms I haven't yet - bedrooms, the bathroom, shed, garden, even potentially the loft. Given that my location for shooting is so small, I need to inspect almost every inch of it in as much detail as possible.
Again, here are the contact sheets for 4 films worth, along with the images that I feel are strongest and could go through to the final edit.

With the majority of these images, I feel that they work well together, but the series is by no means complete yet. At the moment, most of the images are of a similar tone, with lots of brown and orange. They are also all quite busy. To improve the series as a whole I need to introduce some images with slightly varying tones and colour casts, and also focus on taking images that are not necessarily so busy, but still show the fact that this is a functioning family home.

 With the three following images, I feel that they are almost there compositionally, but may just need slight adjustments to exposure or perhaps a subtle crop. In the case of the final image, I feel that there is something to be photographed here, but may need to go back and spend more time with my framing.
In the first one, there are clear exposure issues, and I need to pay more attention when taking the photo to where in the frame I want to expose for - the window or the drying up area.

I feel that when combining the two sets of images I have taken already, I probably have about 9-10 final images. However, for this project I want to end up presenting quite a lot of relatively small prints, perhaps in a grid. Therefore I aim to collect at least 20 final images.

Dissertation/Major Practical Project - An extract form my dissertation...

So I've been really thinking about WHY I am doing this project. I know that I want to communicate my feelings about the house I grew up in, and that I feel nostalgic about that place. It's working to my advantage that I am doing huge amounts of research about the phenomenon of nostalgia, and I want the ideas that I have been writing about in my dissertation to be able to be converted into a visually interesting photographic project. Therefore, I've been going back to the beginning of this essay, work that I wrote weeks ago, to refresh the ideas in my mind and hopefully allow me to bring them into my next shoot.
This section describes the definitions of the word nostalgia, and how the word has come to change meaning in more recent times. Throughout this essay I hope to examine all the ways that photography can influence the viewers ability to feel nostalgic.

          To increase clarity, I feel it is necessary that I deconstruct the idea of nostalgia, and make it distinct in this context from more general memory. The word nostalgia, as defined in The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (10th edition, 1999), means a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past”. The word’s roots reflect its meaning, coming from the Greek ‘nostos’ meaning ‘to return home’ and ‘algos’, meaning ‘pain’. (Pearsall, J., ed., 1999, p972) Svetlana Boym describes how the term was established in her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001). According to Boym, nostalgia was originally considered to be a curable disease of the mind, first recognised in the seventeenth century within soldiers who were serving abroad. They were noted to be experiencing extreme longing for their motherland, so much so that it turned into an obsession, with physical symptoms accompanying the psychological ones. Remedies such as leeches and opium were suggested, with briefly returning to their home seeming to act as a definitive cure (Boym, S., 2001, p3-4). The focus of early descriptions of nostalgia heavily emphasise the pain and longing experienced, being framed as a negative thing which impeded happiness in the present. The doctor who coined the term, Johannes Hofer, is cited in Boym’s book, describing nostalgia as “the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land” (p3) With suggestions that the feeling of nostalgia was actually a disease, and terms such as pain and longing being attached to it, it is clear that this kind of sentimental remembrance would have been actively discouraged.

          However, in more recent times, the word has come to be associated with the warm, sentimental emotions often conjured when looking back into the past - the feeling of happy times that we cannot return to, often accompanied by a reminder of joyful innocence. It has taken on a whole new set of positive connotations. Experiencing nostalgia can be seen as a form of escapism, a comforting sensation. Geoffrey Batchen refers to it in his book Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance (2004) as “an illogically warm feeling toward the past, a kind of pleasurable sadness” (Batchen, G., 2004, p14) Positive adjectives have become attached to descriptions of the term. Also, according to Elena Stephan, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, “Nostalgia refers to unusual and meaningful memories that are preserved, if not idealized, across time”, described as such in their article entitled Mental Travel into the Past: Differentiating Recollections of Nostalgic, Ordinary and Positive Events (2012). (Stephan, E., Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., 2012, p290) The key word here is ‘idealised’ - looking back to a memory that may never have existed in such a way as we remember it, but is conserved in our mind as a positive event. In the context of photography, these glorified memories may be conjured whilst looking at an image of a loved one who is no longer here, or one of a specific place and time that we imbue with all the positive associations from that time in our lives. In Robert Rowland Smith’s article The Real Thing (2012), which specifically refers to how nostalgia is affected by photography, he describes how this sentimental remembrance “offers stale and illusory comforts from the past in place of the bracing air of the present” (Rowland Smith, R., 2012, p74) Comforting memories that are safe, and easy to return to, and which act as a moment of escapism from a potentially stressful present reality.

          Roland Barthes has written on the subject of nostalgia extremely extensively, with particular reference to his book Camera Lucida (1993). Batchen, in the introduction to Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009), describes the book as “perhaps the most influential book yet written about the photographic experience” (Batchen, G., 2009, p3) In Part Two of Camera Lucida, Barthes describes a personal journey that he undertakes - sorting through an old box of photographs of his late mother, trying to find an image of her that matches the representation he has in his memories. He then describes that “none seemed to me really “right”: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face” (Barthes, R., 1993, p64) No matter how many images he reviews, none of them provide him with this ‘living resurrection’. Until he comes across a print of his mother as a child, taken by an unknown photographer, which he describes as having captured her true essence; he has “rediscovered” her. (p69) Barthes describes how “For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance” and that this unknown photographer had “produced a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer” (p70) The sudden change in his opinion, from suggesting that photography can never really live up to our own recollection, to being stunned that a certain photograph could bring back to him all the emotions and memories he associates with his mother, represents two theories. Firstly, that photography can truly transport a person back to the moment the image was taken, encapsulating their emotions at the time and bringing those feelings back into the present. In contrast there is the suggestion that Barthes describes first: that no photograph can ever match up to the images of moments we keep in our memories. Perhaps it is because those moments never existed, and because a photograph, with all its truth and honesty, has the ability to snap us back to reality.

Independent Art and Photography - New Norwich photographs

The last time I photographed in Norwich I was focusing on independent businesses' shop fronts. I tried to mainly include places where I used to go when I lived there, alongside new shops that have sprung up sine I have left.

I tried to photograph most of the shops in the same way, with the same composition. I tried to keep the framing quite tight, with the windows and door of the shop fitting neatly into the frame of the image. Keeping the composition consistent allows the viewer to notice the differences between each image more clearly. I shot these images to print for use in a book, with the edges of the book acting as a restraint for the images.
I think there is a project here, but I just need to refine exactly what I am trying to show. At the moment I feel I am just compiling a directory of good shops in Norwich. However, it could be that, if I take a lot more of this style of image, I could document the town incredibly regimented detail, similar to Edward Ruscha's work. I do still need to figure out how much emotional involvement should be protrayed in the images however.
In terms of aesthetics, I do feel that these images work consistently with each other. But now I just need to think about which direction to take the project in.

Whilst in Norwich I did also come across some rather interesting graffiti...