Idea Blog - Family

As the semester winds down and I start to thing about the last four years that I have spent at  the Virginia  Commonwealth University I realize how much of impact my parents and family had on me not only coming back to school but for the project itself. It’s definitely fact that family life is important “A family unit is the unit which builds up a person’s personality. How you behave and what you become in life is very much dependent on your family life. Psychologists believe that a child learns the most from his or her family life. The way your family members deal with you has a life long effect on your personality.[2]”  It all started when I took trip out west to meet my sister.  I saw a new part of the country for the first time and realized that I truly did enjoy photographing for the reason that it allows me to present my preserved notions about the world.  Without the suggestion and support of my parents I would have never gone back to school.   In relation to my project my parents have been constantly been interested and provided input into my artist statement and which images the liked.  Many photographers would consider family an influence on there work.  Although it might not always be as clear cut as in Sally Mann’s famous series Immediate Family.  Sally Mann said “There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 by 10 business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I’m always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. [1]”  It’s interesting to me to think about the immediacy  of family the relationship of aesthetic to technique.  It was amazing to me how much tension could also be built just by using technology.  This is one reason that I had to get rid of a technique that calls attention to itself.  I feel that Sally Mann was using a technique to bring something more to work which what I initially set out to do.  Having gotten mixed reviews I am glad I found a method of processing that doesn’t call attention to itself.

"Art21 . Sally Mann . Biography . Documentary Film | PBS." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Apr. 2011. <http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mann/>.

"The Importance Of Family Life." Grandmas Profitable Free Business Craft Guides Corner. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Apr. 2011. <http://www.grandmascraftguides.com/Family_Corner/>.

Idea Blog - Family

As the semester winds down and I start to thing about the last four years that I have spent at  the Virginia  Commonwealth University I realize how much of impact my parents and family had on me not only coming back to school but for the project itself. It’s definitely fact that family life is important “A family unit is the unit which builds up a person’s personality. How you behave and what you become in life is very much dependent on your family life. Psychologists believe that a child learns the most from his or her family life. The way your family members deal with you has a life long effect on your personality.[2]”  It all started when I took trip out west to meet my sister.  I saw a new part of the country for the first time and realized that I truly did enjoy photographing for the reason that it allows me to present my preserved notions about the world.  Without the suggestion and support of my parents I would have never gone back to school.   In relation to my project my parents have been constantly been interested and provided input into my artist statement and which images the liked.  Many photographers would consider family an influence on there work.  Although it might not always be as clear cut as in Sally Mann’s famous series Immediate Family.  Sally Mann said “There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 by 10 business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I’m always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. [1]”  It’s interesting to me to think about the immediacy  of family the relationship of aesthetic to technique.  It was amazing to me how much tension could also be built just by using technology.  This is one reason that I had to get rid of a technique that calls attention to itself.  I feel that Sally Mann was using a technique to bring something more to work which what I initially set out to do.  Having gotten mixed reviews I am glad I found a method of processing that doesn’t call attention to itself.

"Art21 . Sally Mann . Biography . Documentary Film | PBS." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Apr. 2011. <http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mann/>.

"The Importance Of Family Life." Grandmas Profitable Free Business Craft Guides Corner. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Apr. 2011. <http://www.grandmascraftguides.com/Family_Corner/>.

Ryan McGinness

Ryan McGiness' lecture, entitled Art History is Not Linear,  showcased much of his work.  The main project that the title was about was the piece that he is working on in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.   McGinesss’ work I would consider to be geometric, complex, and intuitive.   For the VMFA project he selected over 200 objects which he sketched and then produced vector graphics of. He said this was the longest part of the process.  Once the vectors are made, he then uses a printing process method to make the final images.  However, he uses traditional paints and calls them paintings and not prints. The paintings which are layered are made intuitively and don’t have any planning beforehand.  Ryan said about his work at the VMFA, “using art history and downing down to the simplistic forms as a method to create his own art history.”  Making a commentary about art history in works that seem to comment on the basic forms and elements seems like an interesting idea.  I also really enjoyed the fact that he often built and drew stuff around his installations.   The idea of scale shifts and fractals are evident in his work. He also used black light paint which “could only be experienced in person.”  I like the idea of not being able to truly experience something in the digital medium.  When everything is so easily accessible today via the internet,  I feel there is something special about items that can’t be experienced in that way.

Questions


1. Has African Art influenced your work?

I would have to say it has, indirectly. African art is often taught in relation to art history which is what he is referencing.

2. How much of a role has graphic design played in your work?

Although the paintings are made intuitively, Ryan said that he is constantly drawing and working out geometric forms. I feel that this has probably made his quick judgments when making the paintings more informed.   I think part of graphic design is trial and error and just learning what works and doesn’t work.  Ryan said that he throws away quite a few of his paintings, because they just don’t work out sometimes.

Flemming Ove Bech

The images by Flemming Ove Bech which I have chosen to highlight correlate with my series for a number of reasons. They seem to be focused on the naturalistic landscape and the oddity that is presented by it. I believe that the initial image reading is simplistic but there is a greater death to his works. What I mean that is by taking pictures of uprooted trees for example he is making commentary on what it is to plant such trees and why we engage in such decorative measures. Also the other plants make me thing about decorations and things that we would find around our house and homes. Beatification has many different forms and each individual interrupts it differently. Even his portraiture seems to have an odd deadpan aesthetic to them. I also like the soft coloration the the images have. There isn’t much information on his website but his image speak for themselves.


Biography - 

Born in Aalborg, Denmark, Flemming Ove Bech now lives and works in New York City. He’s been studying photography at various different schools throughout his life, all I can say is that he’s an extremely good photographer.

On his website we can see various series, it seems like all of his works have a certain charm. I’m not sure if it’s because they are washed out and quite abstract, or if it’s because they come across as simple. But each one is different in its own way and has underlying detail.

For example this newest series I picked out which seems to be his fifth set of photographs. Although quite grey, they have some really interesting tones and even the framing seems on purpose but natural. For example the flowers above which have been captured quite beautifully.

For more from Flemming I recommend checking out his portfolio page by clicking the link below.

www.flemmingovebech.com

Robinson, Mark . "Photography by Flemming Ove Bech | ONEEIGHTNINE."ONEEIGHTNINE. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Mar. 2011. <http://the189.com/design/art/photography-by-flemming-ove-bech/>.

Links - 

http://flemmingovebech.com/
http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/11/flemming_ove_bech/
http://www.shanelavalette.com/journal/2010/03/30/flemming-ove-bech-this-is-not-broken/
http://futureshipwreck.com/2010/04/flemming-ove-bech/
http://the189.com/design/art/photography-by-flemming-ove-bech/

Images -

All images © Flemming Ove Bech

Idea - Mounting

As the semester is quickly drawing to the end  i’ve  begun to think more and more about the final presentation of the the project.  I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that plexi-mounting would be the best way of displaying my work.   I feel this way because of t the images being very naturalistic with a basis in landscape, demanding a method that would showcase   their luminosity.    I saw a print mounted in such a method in the VMFA  and I felt it would be beneficial to my project.  The diasec process is a specialized method of adhering to glass which is very similar to the plexiglass mount.

Works Cited -
Links -
http://www.grieger-online.de/en/products/image-presentation/diasecr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diasec
http://www.diasec.org/

Laurel Nakadate - Artist Lecture

Laurel Nakadate was probably one of my favorite presenters to date.  She was extremely well spoken, highly intelligent, and very much at ease and quick to answer any questions that came her way.    Laurel Nakadate described or work as performance with an integration of photography and film as a creative means of capturing her performance.  This was interesting because I immediately thought when looking at all her photographic still that they tended to seem cinematic. I would consider her art to fall into the three categories that I mentioned photography, film, and performance.  I like the idea of thinking about making performance piece with the end product in mind.   I think the project I found most interesting in relation to this was the Luckytiger series.  The images of her dressed in a bikini in typical locations were very interesting on there own.   However the final images had finger marked ink smudges on them form both Laurel and the stranger, whom which she meet on craigslist.  I think that she has taken a lot of risks in her work and  that she is lucky nothing every bad happened.  She mentioned that she would probably not try some of the things today that she had done in the past.  Although there were many memorable quotes from this lecture my personal favorite was in relation to her process of making films “The world is amazing and no amount of money can build a perfect set ... trust that it will work out and it will.”  This way thinking reminded me of how I have been photographing lately.   I am more interested in the natural beauty of the world and the relationships in the scene whatever the lighting conditions may be.  I used to drag in flashes and light everything in a very specific way, while this one methodology I think it was distracting from my intentions.

1.  I notice that most of your images seem as if the use primarily only natural light? Is this true and what is your reasoning behind this?  Although not answered directly knowing Laurel Nakdate’s work I would have to say she uses natural light out of connivence of being able and free to shoot wherever and whenever she wants.  There is absolutely no set up time with natural light and with a good eye can be better than any light you could ever buy.

2. Seeing that you deal in both photography and film is there one medium you prefer more than the other?  Do you think it's important for photographers to understand film making?  After the lecture I really feel like this question is irrelevant.  She has made some feature films but the still seem to operate to me as a means of social experimentation and a performance.  She said that her work is a performance captured via film and photographs, therefor I think  her real focus is in performance and neither photography or film.  Her abilities in these two fields is merely a mechanism to display a final product which depicts in essences what happened during the performance.

Amy Eckert

Amy Eckert’s series “Manufacturing Home” shows many views of mobile homes that are decorate in order to be sold.  The images have very odd feeling to them.   Why do we do the things we do?  I think each family has a different living style and that’s what these homes display. Everyone makes different choices but ultimate we have  the concern  of having a safe haven to life in. The relation to my work is that the these homes are mass-produced and the items within them are also massed produced.  Ultimately these furnishings will be run down and end up outside or at least they would if these weren’t model homes. That’s what interests me the most about Amy Eckert’s work, the fact that the homes are staged realities, that is images of what could be.

Biography 

Amy Eckert is an artist based in Minneapolis, MN, where she was recently awarded a 2010-2011 McKnight Fellowship. Eckert received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1993, and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2002.  In addition to commercial projects for clients like Time Magazine, Dwell, Blu Dot, and The New York Times Magazine, Eckert’s work has been included in group shows at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Ft. Collins, Colorado; Silveryeye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; Voies Off Festival, Arles, France; as well as in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her project “Manufacturing Home” will have it’s solo debut at the Minneapolis Photography Center in June 2010. 

Eckert, Amy . "Manufacturing Home -  Photography by Amy Eckert." Manufacturing Home -  Photography by Amy Eckert. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2011 <http://manufacturinghome.com/default4.asp>.

Links - 

http://manufacturinghome.com/
http://rephotographica-slade.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-amy-eckert.html
http://www.mnartists.org/artistHome.do?rid=237500

Richard Rowland

Urban Fictions - Fergus Heron
Wednesday 5th May 2010
Over the course of the last twenty years the Chinese economy has developed at an extraordinary rate, becoming open to and increasingly intertwined with the West. However, the current social conditions that this process has led to are often not made easily visible. The depiction of China in the lineage of art documentary photography throughout the twentieth century has significant discontinuities due to conflict, revolution and international diplomatic relations that might be described as difficult.
Urban Fictions by Richard Rowland is a photographic work in the still and moving image that presents a complex social depiction of aspects of modern China. Its focus is a broad national narrative involving consumerism and rapid economic expansion together with a certain spectacle in the form of the image.

The idea of the nation as a kind of image was described in Benedict Anderson’s influential book Imagined Communities. Anderson proposed that how a nation is represented as an idea takes precedence over the lived experience of community. Put simply, the nation is something as imagined as it is real. In this sense Urban Fictions offers us a way in which we might imagine and observe early twenty–first century China as a newly international imagined community.

The still photographs in this work show a range of buildings and their immediate environments, mostly houses and apartment blocks. Some images show office complexes and business parks. Simulated international architecture abounds; hybrid forms of the Lodge, Townhouse, Almshouse and Villa make manifest imagined European dwellings. 

Despite their different subjects, all of these pictures share a straight and rectilinear form with diffuse light to illuminate detail and to enhance the similarities between pictures and differences between subjects. These aesthetic and technical considerations refer to an art documentary photographic lineage from Eugene Atget through to the work of Stephen Shore and Bernd and Hilla Becher. More recently, the works of Steffi Klenz, Sarah Pickering and Seung Woo Back adopt similar production methods, but deploy them quite differently to show a very different twenty – first century world, a world often poised between reality and artifice. 

These types of pictures belong to a class of images referred to by Susan Butler in The Mise en Scene of the Everyday, an illuminating essay that explains the approach taken in much of the aforementioned work with reinvigorated concerns about ‘social landscapes of the constructed environment’. This approach is often characterised as drawing upon considerations of the ‘typology’ or ‘the archive’, a systematic method of picture making together with the organisation of such pictures in sets or series that invite comparison, contemplation and scrutiny. It is an approach according to Butler ‘relying on indexical descriptiveness in the external world to the point that systematic description itself becomes symptomatic – both in relation to what is described and in relation to a certain will to knowledge that becomes evident through repetition.’

This approach ‘documents’ its subjects, but is self-critical of what is involved in doing so. It acknowledges a certain artifice and ambivalence in what might be termed a ‘documentary aesthetic’, a way of seeing the world as well as the photograph itself. The subjects of Urban Fictions are in a sense already images, even before they have become photographs.

The use of both the still and moving image in Urban Fictions to represent some immediate realities of modern China also recalls the complex convergences that occurred during the origins of documentary photography as it developed out of documentary film. In the late nineteen-twenties and early nineteen-thirties, the ‘anti-aesthetic’ realism of John Grierson who established the term ‘Documentary’ encountered the poetic and painterly considerations of Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings in the mid nineteen-thirties and forged compelling new ways of representing reality.

The moving image elements of this work therefore operate in a complementary but quite different way to the still images. It is the incidental spaces and moments absent from the still photographs that are their focus. Human presence enters the work in the moving image. The subjects of these pictures oscillate between the specific and the uncertain. In some of the former, a marriage ceremony is completed, a military guard stands to attention flanked by large advertising photographs and a construction worker takes apart a wall brick by brick. 

The latter images that punctuate the duration of the piece are more poetic and form a counterpoint to the sensitively observed everyday activities of work and leisure. However, the differences between images are not always so absolute; while treetops gently sway in the breeze in one image and in another gentle ripples appear on the surface of water, elsewhere, close - ups of construction machinery, piles of aggregate and the leftovers of takeaway meals in the street form strange still – life subjects that remind us economic activity is never too distant. 

The image undergoes shifts in size throughout the duration of the piece. The full screen implies a full view of a given subject. Smaller images shift from the left to the right of the screen. Sometimes a double image appears giving a split screen effect emphasizing the incidental and fragmented character of the image. This reminds us that vision itself is incomplete and that the relationship between vision and knowledge is not straightforward.

Urban Fictions therefore raises complex questions about the evolving economic, social and cultural condition of modern China. However, in doing so, this work also asks questions of its own form in which the photographic image as a kind of document is complicated by the understanding of it equally as a kind of formal and rhetorical picture. The relationship between visual documentation and artifice offered by Urban Fictions enables us to ask some compelling questions through its images of modern China of the complex, shifting and uncertain character of an increasingly international world.

Fergus Heron
Senior Lecturer University of Brighton

Kathy Rose

Kathy Rose’s works seemed to have a lot of tribal or spiritual qualities to it.   I would describe her work as being performance, mixed with animation, and sound design.  What interested me the most about her work was the involvement of sound and the cultural influences that were evident in her work.  She said that she was influenced by Japanese artists. Kathy said  “Just going into a drug store in Tokyo can change your life around because the designs and art are very different.”  Having been recently in Germany, I instantly related to this.  I probably photographed many things I wouldn’t have cared to photograph back in the United States.  Everything seemed new and exciting and really made me want to expand my work through exposure to other countries.  In relation to her creation process, Kathy had said that every part of a piece tends to be built up together.  She doesn’t necessarily start with a score and make a piece, or have a full choreographed dance ahead of time, or the animation finished.  Each element is mixed with the others until it all comes together in one coherent final project.  I can’t say that any one piece really jumped out at me as being my favorite, but one piece made me think of a question which went unanswered.  In one of her reels there was a sound clip that repetitively said six, six, six.  I immediately began to wonder what her intent was in provoking an anti-religious demonic notation such as this.  I thought that a lot of the sound design was rather dark and wasn’t too shocked by this, but more surprised by the fact that no one asked about it. 

1. You seem to work in many mediums which is your favorite?

The many mediums that appear on her website now make sense to me.  There aren’t many mediums. It’s just a way of displaying her compiled pieces in video or still format.  Her work is a combination of animation, sound, and performance.

2.  What new projects do you have working?

She didn’t really say exactly what she was doing next but commented that one project always leads to the next.  So that the new project in one way shape or form will be related to the previous.