Tutorial

Today I had my first tutorial about my work so far this year.

It has been agreed between Nick and myself that I need to do a number of things:

• Push myself harder
• Take risks
• Do the opposite of the norm
• Shoot more often
• Shoot with more construction
• Shoot with less construction
• Shoot to make mistakes
• Learn from said mistakes
• Try new things
• Learn from research but don't try to emulate research subjects

New people to research:

• Mike Billingham
• sam Taylor Wood
• Diane Arbus
• Nan Golding
• Duane Michaels
• John Hilliard

I've come out of the tutorial feeling very positive about my work and where it can go. I'm going to try focus less on construction of images and more on the content of them, how to edit them and how to display the images i'm making.

Design Work

This is a flyer I did for a gig i'm putting on tomorrow night, it was made using adobe illustrator.

Andy Goldsworthy at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park

In a break from the usual photography and new media exhibitions and installations I usually go to see, yesterday I decided to go check out new work from Andy Goldsworthy at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Taken from the YSP site:
Exhibition generously sponsored by Roger Evans with support from The Henry Moore Foundation.
This extraordinary exhibition brings together an unprecedented range of work by Andy Goldsworthy, forming the largest and most ambitious project ever curated at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Revealing the breadth and direction of Goldsworthy's most recent work, the exhibition features new permanent outdoor commissions, new indoor stone, tree and clay installations, together with sheep paintings and blood drawings in the Longside Gallery. The works are given meaningful context by photographic archive material and key works from the artist's career. By charting significant and developing themes, the exhibition provides an opportunity to reassess the range of Goldsworthy's achievements and the scale and complexity of his work.

This wasn't the first time i'd visited the sculpture park. Its actually one of my favourite exhibition centers in the country. I think the indoor gallery spaces are set out in a clean, minimal and most importantly naturally lit in a purpose built building. I also love the long walks between pieces in the outdoor areas, a lot of the work is site specific and is generally very sympathetic to the countryside surroundings of the work.

Andy Goldworthy's new work for this exhibition all has thorough information on how the pieces were created, and documenting their existence in the spaces which they are left. I thought this was a really nice touch because at times the work could be quite confusing, in a sense that it could have almost disappeared at some locations and I didn't feel like I was getting a full picture of what had gone into the work and from that I've picked up a few new ideas about how to document my work. A series of photo's taken at monthly intervals were great, and very well shot.

The first shoot...

Here are the shots from my first shoot with Linxi:
(click the thumbnails for larger versions)

My favourite shot from this set is the last, a shot I took of Linxi and myself kissing from underneath, the shot was the least constructed but in my opinion most successful piece, it was from this shot that I went on to take the shots from shoot 2. I worked out that too much construction doesn't work as well for this style of work and that it is more about fluidity than control. I found that to just keep shooting and then editing my work down into the best shots works better than taking fewer shots which are more thought out.

Time to catch up...

The last week or so has been very hectic finishing off my dissertation so not much has progressed for actual practical work but the good news is that I have 4 or 5 new models ready to shoot in the next couple of weeks.

I've also got my computer fixed, finally! But even better news than that is that I haven't lost the shots from the first shoot with Linxi, They will be posted online this week.

I've also just got a new job working as photographer for www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk which will allow me to shoot some of the bigger bands at the Apollo and Machester Evening News Arena along with smaller gigs at The Academy. All of which will be great experience in a real journalistic context. I will be working to tight deadlines and will have to get the best shots of the bands and artists i'm shooting.

I'm currently reading the Cindy Sherman book 'October Files' - it s a series of essays written about the themes Sherman uses in her photography. In the book the second essay written by Douglas Cramp says something which I find really interesting:

The photographic activity of postmodernism operates, as we might expect, in complicity with these modes of photography-as-art, but it does so only in order to subvert or exceed them. And it does so precisely in relation to the Aura, not, however, to recuperate it, but to displace it, to show that it is too now only an aspect of the copy, not the original. A group of young artists working with photography have addressed photography's claims to originality, showing those claims for the fiction they are, showing photography to always a 're'presentation, always-already-seen. Their images are purloined, confiscated, appropriated, stolen. In their work, the original cannot be located, is always deferred; even the self that might have generated an orignal is shown itself to be a copy.
Douglas Cramp 'The Photographic Activity Of Postmodernism'

Reading that back makes so much sense, and even though I've never thought about my work like that before I believe the statement to be true and I want to explore it further.

The second photoshoot...

I'm starting here with the second photoshoot of Linxi simply because I already have the shots online and ready, I will post the previous shoot and compare once I can get the first shoot from my computer - A definate downside to digital photography is the reliance on technology. An entire shoot, or more can be lost in an instant.


From a total of 81 shots taken during this shoot I narrowed it down to 9 shots I am completely happy with. Another thing I want to explore is the narrative between shots, even if i'm only telling a story of how I got from one shot to the next.


All these were shot on my Canon DSLR, they were shot in full colour then edited in photoshop by simply desaturating the image and adjusting the colour curves.


why? because I like the classic look of them in black and white, and I feel they add a greater depth to the subject. I also like the balance between dark and light which becomes much more apparent in the shots. I think it plays an important role in the defining of the sexual nature of these shots.

Welcome to IA 07/08

This is the blog/journal for my 3rd year Interactive arts course 07/08 @ MMU

currently I am working on my theory/dissertation piece to be handed in on the 19th October 2007, Once finished and marked I will place it on here.

Also researching:

Natacha Merritt and her book Digital Diaries.

At the introduction of the book it also mentions Bunny Yeager and Cindy Sherman as influences so I am following those people up to get a reference point for Natacha's, and hopefully my own work.

important links:

http://www.digitalgirly.com/ - Natacha's main website

great article about Natacha on getunderground.com

digital diaries amazon link

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman Wikipedia Entry

Bunny Yeager

Natacha's work has had a huge impact on the way I work, whether that be directly or indirectly. Something her work has taught me is that to get the best out of a photo-shoot, I need to be involved and interacting with whatever may be on the opposite side of my lens. I think this is what's important about her work. This is is why her work is so raw and distinct. Other photographers achieve this only through extreme construsction of an image, for an easy example just look at any of Robert Mapplethorpe's work. Though his work still extremely sexual, in my opinion it doesn't have the sense of voyeurism which is ever-present in Merritt's shots.

Both the voyeurism and the instant nature of Merritt's work interest me greatly. I also like the fact that Natacha is constantly 'editing' her shots by simply deleting any she doesn't like with the touch of the delete button, and the idea that she could lose the perfect shot by just glancing over LCD display and accidently deleting something important. I guess her work isn't about having the perfect shot or knowing photographic theory. Its about an instant, and with that you can then link her directly back to photographic legends such as Henri Cartier-Bressan.