Photo III - Project III: Listen, who are you, in fact?

 For the last project we were asked to respond to a monologue from the play Garden Party by Václav Havel. In this monologue the character Hugo delivers a statement about how human beings are essentially unfixed and ever-changing, and that the very nature of existence itself is fluid. This is empathized best to me in the verses about how “A” can be “B” (and so forth) and the quote “We all are a little bit all the time and all the time we are not a little bit; some of us are more and some of us are more not; some only are, some are only, and some only are not; so that none of us completely is and at the same time each one of us is not completely…”

This idea that we exist in a constant fluid state and that we could be a completely new person tomorrow  me thinking what, if any, parts of our body/existence prove a past, exist in the present, and we know will remain the next day. This led me to the ideas of permanent marks on our skin, like scars and stretch marks, because we know that they can only exist because of an event/growth in the past, and, that unlike the more ambiguous and highly changing other aspects of our body and skin, these remain fairly consistent until death. The way I look at it, there is no proof that my hand used to belong to my 10 year old body, but the scar on my arm that I got that year proves I was once 10. 

Initially I wanted to photograph my own scars and stretch marks for this project but this was too difficult to do myself (as I still wanted to be behind the camera). Instead a few of my friends volunteered to have themselves photographed (both scars and stretch marks). The photos were taken on hp5 35mm film with my fujica st-801, then scanned, edited, and printed digitally. 

Stretch 1, 35 mm photograph, scanned film

Knee Scar, 35 mm photograph, scanned film

Stretch 2, 35 mm photograph, scanned film

Responding to “First Priority is to make an entertaining picture” Martin Parr

 -Parr states that most images we see are propaganda, usually consumerist. He wants to show people the funny flaws of the world to make daily life possible. Martin states he his a documentary photographer, and therefore its his responsibility to speak to the times we live in. Personal (often exaggerated) interpretations of the world around him. He plays on the language of commercial photography (flash, bright colours).

-He became interested in photography through his grandfather, and decided he wanted to be a photographer in his early teens. Something interesting that Parr states in relation to his initial interest in photography is that, to be an artist of any kind, you must be obsessed. I think there is a lot of truth to this. When I’m in my more obsessed periods of my practice I find that is when I have my best ideas and make my better work.

-The camera as a way of seeing changes through time.

-Photographing non-conformist chapels: He did this in the 70s. Initially photographed a number of chapels on their anniversaries, then focused on a particular rural chapel. For him this was useful in reconnecting to a sense of community that he possessed in his childhood but had lost later on.

-Parr suggests his black and white photography is more “gentle” than his colour photography. He switched to colour in the early 80s, beginning with his project The Last Resort. He wanted to show the contrast between the shabbiness of this resort/town and the domestic life surrounding it. He says that nearly every artist has just one project that they are really known for, and this is his. I guess that this seems to be true, atleast with the well renowned artists (like Robert Frank and The Americans).

Photographs from The Last Resort:

-“Creating a fiction out of reality.”

-He finds that the middle ground in photography used to be ignored, but states today there is a more personal (and therefore middle ground) approach taken by photographers - like choosing to photograph their own family.

-Parr states that his first priority is to make an entertaining picture, and that there are different things going on in the photographs for those who want to discover it. When he is editing his pictures he likes to chose images with a bit of ambiguity and that capture his contradictory feelings towards a topic. 

-Using a telephoto lens, which is normally associated with journalism and sports photography. A telephoto lens allows you to zoom in very far. He has been using this type if lens on beaches now.

-“To achieve a good photograph you need to take a lot of bad photos. I have many more bad photos than good ones… the thing about photography is you have to be there before it happens. It’s difficult to define how a good picture functions, but you sort of know when it happens.”

-He believes the ideal platform for photographers is to produce a book. 

Photo Book exhibition

 

Prints from photobook The Girls We Are 

Leah Evans

The Girls We Are focuses on the transitional space between girlhood and womanhood by exploring the intersection between traditionally contrasting themes such as innocence and sexuality. The work consists of both my own photography as well as film pulled from family archives. This use of old film scans in the book adds a vintage feel to the work, while allowing me to employ photographs of myself, my sisters, and my mother in our youth. My photobook also looks at themes such as aging, sisterhood, and guilt through the use of photographs, poetry, text, photograms, and finally, the colour pink. Said Poetry and excerpts written by my sister Jordyn Evans compliment a number of the photographs, most prominently and appropriately with her poem “My Sister is Old at 21”. The Girls We Are employs a feminist critique on the sexualization of young girls and the expected embracement of sexuality by contrasting these issues.  

Overall, the book employs a “coquette” hyper-feminine aesthetic in its execution and imagery, while addressing that the girl and the women coexist in many of us.

from left to right:

Heels, found film from family archives, inkjet print

Mirrored Fujica and Nets, 35mm film, inkjet print

Mom on Beach, found film from family archives, inkjet print

Yates Exhibition

 

A picture of my art that is currently being displayed at the Yate exhibition Identifying Self, which runs until February.

Below (left to right):

Mirrored Self, 35mm scan inkjet print, 18 x 24 inches, 2023.

Her House, acrylic paint and marker on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, 2023.

  

Girl Culture - Lauren Greenfield

-Girl Culture was a six year project (published as a photobook) by the artist Lauren Greenfield. The project looks at the way that American girls of all ages are affected my American culture.

Link to the book: https://www.amazon.ca/Girl-Culture-Lauren-Greenfield/dp/1452159289

-The project looks at “how the body has become the primary form of expression for girls and women, and the exhibitionist nature of modern femininity.”

-The work is inspired by both memory and current experience of the artist

-“… isolating moments and situations that speak to what girl culture is.”

-Looking at the toxicity of cultural beauty standards

I find Greenfield’s critique of the body as the main expression of femininity really crucial to the purpose of Girl Culture and overall something that I feel is important for me personally to remember as an artist and feminist. I think it is easy to fall back on representing the female body through only its physical characteristics without considering the key emotional and psychological aspects of girlhood and womanhood. 

Photo III - Project II: Projection and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

 Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-speaking Jewish novelist and short story author based in Prague, Germany. Kafka is best known for his novels The Trail and The Metamorphosis.

Kafka’s works involve mixing the fantastical with the everyday, allowing pathological delusions to take hold in reality. He explores themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. A shift from this state of normalcy to one of complete desolation is also common.

In his renowned novella The Metamorphosis (1915), Kafka tells a story of a man (named Gregor) who suddenly wakes up as a (human-sized) beetle. The book details how the man copes with the situation and (more so) how his family reacts to his transformation. At it’s core, The Metamorphosis explores the degradation and transformative power of alienation. Throughout the novella the dynamic between family members (particularity Gregor and his sister and father) is focused on through the lens of his families frustration, disgust, and lastly relief (due to Gregory’s seemingly inevitable death) regarding the giant beetle that they are now tasked with taking care of - a role that Gregor used to play for them. In summary, The Metamorphosis is an allegory for how a family reacts/copes with a loved one becoming a “useless”  member of society. 

For my projection project I was firstly inspired by the work of Christian Boltanski. As such, I decided to use the most basic form of projection for my assignment - just light and shadow. I decided to depict Gregor’s transformation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis because of my own interest in the novel as well and because of my current interest (what I am also exploring in senior studio) of human-animal relationships in art. 

My first idea for how to depict Gregor’s transformation was to have two lights from different angles projection two shadows onto connecting walls - one shadow of the beetle and the other of the man. However, when constructing the shape to create these shadows I realized that the spinning motion that occurs because of how the piece hangs was more interesting. Because of this I decided to use just one light and naturally spin the work in front of it - involving the element of performance and through this bringing action to the act of transformation itself.

Photo III - project 2 part 1: Presentation

 

Grete Stern

 Grete Stern (1904 - 1999) was a German-Argentine photographer (worked in Argentina, born in Germany) who helped modernize the visual arts in Argentina.

-Studied in Europe at the Bauhaus School where she met and later married married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola. When the Nazi party began to gain power in Germany the couple left for London and then Argentina.

-portraiture and collage. Approaching the typical photographic subjects in unconventional ways. 

Dream No. 7: Who Will She Be?, 1949. Photomontage.

Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home, 1949. Photomontage.

Hat and Gloves, 1930. 

Autorretrato (Self Portrait), 1943.

Ilse Bing

 Ilse Bing (1899-1998) was a German Avante-Garde artist and commerical photographer. Bing produced her most well-known work during the interwar era. 

-Bing’s photgraphic style was dubbed “documentary humanism”. 

-In 1959, Bing stated that she “had said all that she had to say with photography” and thereafter chose to focus on drawing and poetry. 

“Her friendship with figures associated with the Bauhaus, including the architect Martin Stam and the photographer Florence Henri, as well as her acquaintance with André Kertész in Paris, encouraged her tendency toward the formalist techniques of modernist photography. Like László Moholy-Nagy, the self taught Bing turned her photographs upside-down and sideways to assess their compositional relationships; like Kurt Schwitters, she was attracted to the banal details of urban living--torn tram tickets, gate latches, and other apparently minor objects.”

       - International Centre of Photography

“I felt that the camera grew an extension of my eyes and moved with me.”

-Isle Bing, (quote pulled from MOMA article on her).

Laundry, Frankfurt, 1929. Gelatin silver print.

Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1931. Gelatin silver print.

French Cancan, Moulin Rouge, Paris, 1931. Gelatin silver print. 

Germaine Krull

 Germaine Krull (1897-1985) was a Dutch-German photographer and a pioneer of the avante-garde art movement, photomontage, the photographic book, and photojournalism. 

-Krull was part of the Neue Frau (New woman): a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 1800s with influence far into the 1900s. The term was used initially by writer Sarah Grand to describe independent women seeking radical change, later evolving as a general term for the feminist and independent woman. 

Germaine worked as a photographer for the French magazine VU, capturing images from infrastructure to intimate portraits.

The Hands of Actress Jenny Burnay, c.1930. Gelatin silver print.

Untitled, 1923-24. Gelatin silver print.

Advertisement for fashion designer Paul Poiret. 1926. Gelatin silver print, 8 5/8 by 6 1/4 inches.

Iness Rychlik

 Iness Rychlik is a Polish-born artist based in the UK. Rychlik uses her skin condition to imprint patterns/writing/drawings into her skin for her photography. Her art is centred around self-portraits which explore themes of pain, solitude, and vulnerability. Alongside her photographic practice Rychlik has also directed several short films. 

Iness Rychlik, Crooked Little House (2023)

Iness Rychlik, Beyond Repair (2023)

Iness Rychlik, Crumbs (2022)

Photo III - Project 1: Response to Persona

     For my “Response to Persona” project I chose to focus on the main scene that makes you question whether Elisabeth and Alma are different people or the same person. The repeated speech they each give about the restraints and expectations of motherhood and “motherness” as well as the splitting image of their faces together are what stuck with me most from the film. I decided to focus on the “split face” moment in Persona - but instead of splitting the image down the middle I decided to combination print the portraits over each other to create a sort of “hybrid face”. 

The photos are lined up to merge towards the middle 50/50 split of their faces, moving from a seperate portrait, to the other individual entering the frame, to a 75/25 split portrait, and finally the halfway split of their faces (and then back again in reverse for the other model). I also contrasted my models by having one wear white and the other black, white the white-based model posed against a dark background and the black-based model posed against a light background.

Here is the speech from the movie that I am referring to, as although it didn’t directly influence this work I think there is a lot that I may potentially pull from it in my work later on:

A party, wasn't it? It was late and rather noisy. In the early hours, someone said to you… "Elisabet, you have everything as a woman and as an artist...but you lack motherliness…”

“You laughed because you thought it was ridiculous...but you couldn't stop thinking about what he had said. You grew more worried... so you let your husband make you pregnant. You wanted to be a mother. When you knew it was definite, you became afraid... afraid of responsibility, afraid of being tied down, afraid to leave the theater... afraid of pain, afraid of dying, afraid of your swelling body. But all the time you acted, played the part of the happy expectant mother. And everybody said, "She has never been this beautiful." You tried several times to get rid of the fetus. But you failed. When you knew it was inevitable you started to hate the child...and wished it would be stillborn. You wished that the baby would be dead. You wanted a dead child. It was a long and difficult delivery. You suffered for days. The baby was delivered with forceps. You looked with disgust at your screaming child and whispered, "Can't you die soon? Can't you die?" The boy screamed day and night, and you hated him. You were afraid. You felt guilty. In the end, relatives and a nanny took care of the boy... and you could leave your sickbed and return to the theater. But the suffering was not over. The boy was seized by a massive and unfathomable love for his mother. You resisted desperately because you felt that you could not return it. You try and try...but the meetings with him are cruel and awkward. You can't do it. You're cold and indifferent. And he looks at you. He loves you, and he's soft, and you want to hit him for not leaving you alone. You think he's repulsive, with his thick lips and ugly body and his moist and pleading eyes. You think he's repulsive, and you're afraid. No. I'm not like you. I don't feel the same as you.”

-the photos were taken with my 35mm camera (Fujica St-801) with Kodak 400TX film. I took them in the lightroom using studio lights and my camera’s flash. 

Feminist Avantegarde: Art of the 1970s

Exhibition (past): https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/feminist-avant-garde

-this exhibition consisted of 48 artists (including names such as Martha Rosler and Francesca Woodman) and over 150 works from the Verbund collection, which is responsible for this international touring of said body of work. Lesser-known artists included in the show include the poet, actress, and performance artists Katalin Ladik and the Austrian artist Birgitta Jürgenssen. 

This “exhibition highlights groundbreaking practices that shaped the feminist art movement and provides a timely reminder of the wide impact of a generation of artists.” The art exhibited as part of Feminist Avante-garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund collection consisted of photographs, performances, video art, and collage, and “reflects a moment during which practices of emancipation, gender equality, and civil rights protest movements became part of public discourse. [The exhibition] operates across public and personal realms - as well as used [the artists body] as central motifs - [through which] these artists sought to address broad political issues and confront patriarchy and sexism in art. In doing so they created new, positively assertive female identities.”

The publication:https://www.amazon.ca/Feminist-Avant-Garde-Sammlung-Verbund-Collection/dp/3791354469

-The art present in this book is “provocative, radical, poetic, ironic, angry, cynical, and heartfelt.”

Francesca Woodman, Several Cloudy Days, Rome, Italy. Silver gelatin print, 1977.

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful. Photomontage, c. 1967-72.

Photo book Proposal

 For my photo book/final project I want to focus on the transitional space between girlhood and womanhood by exploring but also intersecting traditionally contrasting themes such as innocence and sexuality. The project will employ my own feminist perspective on sexualization of young girls through worryingly youthful beauty trends amongst women. The book in a way will pull from and challenge themes of the lolita (for example, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita and the (far more troubling) film adaption and various book covers.. while using a rather “coquette” aesthetic in the books execution - that being hyper-feminine. I think this said space itself between girlhood and womanhood can be extremely uncomfortable and unsure, but is something that obviously a number of go through (not exclusive of course to cis-gender individuals). 

The book itself will be more of a collage work of sorts, with lots of inclusions other than traditional print styles, such as photograms, scans of writing, and maybe even painting/drawing. In short, there will be a contrast between the innocence of girlhood and self-empowerment in one’s sexuality as a woman. I think that this contrast may be difficult to pull off correctly (that is without leaning into something that unintentionally may come off as exploitative), but I think it will be a really interesting challenge and is something I am very interesting in exploring. The girl and the grown woman coexist inside of many of us.

Photographers that I will be referencing:

Karin Mack

- The feminist avant-garde of the 1970s

-Austrian post-war artist

-First explored woman’s role as housewife, then moved to work more centered around her own feelings as a woman.

Karin Mack, Zerstörung einer Illusion, 1977.

Sally Mann

-contemporary American photographer

- I will be referring to her series At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women in the creation of my own photobook:

           This series “capture[s] the confusing emotions and developing identities of young girls [and the] expressive printing style lent a dramatic and brooding mood to all of her images”

                       -Museum of Contemporary Photography

-lots of photographs of her children (Immediate Family series) … although I understand the artistic merit behind this work, I will not be including any nude photographs of myself as a child in this work as it is something I am not personally comfortable with. I will however be reusing some film from old family photo albums of my two sisters and I as children.

Sally Mann. Untitled from the “At Twelve” Series, 1983-1985.

my photo wall from Open Studio

prints are all darkroom, 11x14 and smaller.