Devon and Miles: March 2010

Irving Penn Exhibition

The Irving Penn Exhibition was something I knew that I should see regardless of the fact it was not something I would most likely connect with, with the exception of the quality of the printing. Portraiture as a genre holds similarly frustrating restrictions to fashion photography in my mind. It seems to lack depth and is held back by guidelines and the set subject. How could one accept it as enough? However, after making my rounds around this exhibition I found a way to apply my approach to photography to portraiture. I realised that my own interest in photography revolves around creating miniature narratives around each image therefore to create a portrait I must see the person as my story or narrative, as if it has been handed to me.

Moving on, my favourite images in the first and second rooms were those in the V-shaped screen particularly the ones of Georgia O'Keefe, George Blanche and Maria Tallchief, Jacques Fath, and Marcel Duchamp. There was a particularly sinister end of the world type feeling about the Marcel Duchamp portrait. Moving into the following room I enjoyed the slightly cartoonistic image of Carson McCullers, the shadowed face of Louis Sonet, and the Picasso portrait at La Californie. Into the next room, the portrait of Truman Capote, the simple and Surrealist portrayal of Barnet Newman, and the angle of the portrait of Edward Albee fascinated me. I also noted the quality of the wrinkled silver gelatin- printed skin seen in the photograph of Willem de Kooning and the beauty and the shining grey hairs of Carmandelli Orefice. Moving relatively quickly through the final room, noting the portrait of Avedon, show casing Penn’s latest works I went back to the first room to remember the classic ‘Cecil Beaton with Nude’ (1946), the image of the troll-like creature- ‘Angel’ (1946), and the misty and serene image of ballerinas in frothy tutus-‘Nora Kaye and Andre Egleversky’. And back into the real world.

Final Major Project

This is my Action Plan:

I am using this blog to document my Final Major Project. This is my proposal:

Progress and Achievement:

My foundation course has made me a more independent learner. I have been more motivated to visit exhibitions and seek out blogs and books that will help me to develop my work in other ways. I have also learned to take inspiration from a wide rang of sources, using illustration, film, locations I see and people I meet to influence my photographs. I have also begun to think more conceptually, taking into account the idea behind the photograph more, giving my work more depth. I hope to use these new and improved skills in researching and working on my final major project.

Pathway Choice:

I choose to do media as my pathway choice. I love the ability to create a new world around myself by creating miniature narratives around each of my photographs. Throughout this year my must enjoyable and successful images and projects have been the result of finding a new and fresh location and story that I can adopt and develop. I have most recently been inspired by the presence of the photographer in an image. For my final major project I hope to be inspired by newly found locations as well as different ways to make myself present as someone else in an image.

Project Proposal and Realisation:

Considering my fascination with both narrative and the presence of the photographer, I would like to become the voyeur and experiment with a bit of role-play, photographing from someone else’s point of view. I hope to create a series of characters, and build their profiles and personalities by photographing from their perspective whether it be a predator tracking their pray, a perverted younger boy spying his attractive and older next door neighbour, or someone caught in the midst of an incident and following their experience. I hope to do this by observing how images by other photographers display an emotion or a presence in their work. An example is Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled #167’ in which she has depicted a grotesque crime scene with a compact mirror on the dirt in which one can see her own reflection, implicating her as the voyeur and perhaps even the accused, making her presence within the image obvious and unavoidable. I will need to visit various galleries for this purpose as well as to contemplate interesting methods to display the work eventually. I hope to display the photographs taken by my assumed personality personal to them, if it is a slobbish character for example have stains on the print or fingerprints and crumbs. I am also interested using film or other mediums according to what I feel is appropriate to the character. I also hope to become better acquainted with medium format, and now that I have the time over Easter and hopefully access to a darkroom, use more film, which I often prefer. I would also be interested to see how my images look in very large prints. The best way for me to find motivation and inspiration for such a project is take lots and lots of photographs in multiple locations using various techniques, as I am also often inspired by processes.

My images tend to contain both fantasy and this tension that suggests something bad is about to happen. I hope to develop this throughout my FMP.

Evaluation:

To evaluate my work over the course of my project I will keep a reflective journal and series of sketchbooks. I will track my progress by noting necessary alterations to my proposal by redrafting and expanding upon it and photographing or illustrating my processes at least once a week. I also hope to showcase my progressive work and photographs by creating my own blog.