Exhibition Visit
The shape of light
The shape of light exhibition included photography from the last 100 years presented in a sort of art timeline from room to room, this adds a new dimension to experiencing this exhibition because not only can you be consumed in the dramatic atmosphere of their photos but you can also see how the photographers used eachother for inspiration creating series of photos that work really well in the same location but are made by completely different artist.
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The abstract Darkroom
In the exhibition the shape of light we see photographers experiment with light shade and abstraction as a way of creating non descriptive pieces of Art which owed as much to the medium as the meaning. In todays task you will be working in the darkroom and the studio in a quest to create simple yet engaging abstract images.
ERIN SHIRREFF - Cyanotype abstraction.
Photographic Heroes
I choose an avenue of enquiry that interested me. In order for me to establish where this area of interest lies i have created a 5-minute presentation on three of my favourite photographers. The short presentation is mixed in with artist research i have done this is so you can get a sense of how the ideas for curatorship developed.
Chris Mccaw
Chris McCaw makes these amazing pictures of long exposures of the sun, he made this with paper negatives in a custom-made large format camera, this makes the force of the sun physically burn a trace of its arc into each photograph.
McCaw came upon this unusual technique quite by accident. During a camping trip, he had set up his first large-format homemade camera to capture the arc of stars moving across the night sky. This process takes over several hours, after the wait for the sun to go down, he opened the shutter on his camera, he woke himself up before dawn so he could close the shutter on that single long exposure.
Here is a brief collection of the pictures i would include into the exhibition, there all form his collection Sunburn, which is composed of 60 pictures, i went though and shortened the list to 8 this would be so in the exhibition there would be space to blow the pictures up really big so a whole wall could even be covered this would be hard to do as the pictures originals are quite small however they would look amazing in a room where it looks like the sunset. I've chosen these pictures because they stood out to me however it would be nice to make a survey on his fan base to see what the majority like from his collection.
McCaw came upon this unusual technique quite by accident. During a camping trip, he had set up his first large-format homemade camera to capture the arc of stars moving across the night sky. This process takes over several hours, after the wait for the sun to go down, he opened the shutter on his camera, he woke himself up before dawn so he could close the shutter on that single long exposure.
Here is a brief collection of the pictures i would include into the exhibition, there all form his collection Sunburn, which is composed of 60 pictures, i went though and shortened the list to 8 this would be so in the exhibition there would be space to blow the pictures up really big so a whole wall could even be covered this would be hard to do as the pictures originals are quite small however they would look amazing in a room where it looks like the sunset. I've chosen these pictures because they stood out to me however it would be nice to make a survey on his fan base to see what the majority like from his collection.
Didier Massard
Didier Massard launched his artistic career with the completion of a project that took him over ten years to complete, his series Imaginary Journeys. Now working exclusively on personal projects, the concepts of his works come from the recesses of his imagination, while drawing from our collective romantic notions, nationality and places. I personally like his pictures that include large animals, he captures a real sense of weight behind the creatures and makes them look intimidating by the picture looking up at the animal making you feel small, this concept really goes well with Chris McCaws large sunsets Sunburn collection. Imagine you walk though a room with adapted alien sunsets moving onwards on the journey your blocked by a 8 foot tall indian elephant filling the wall.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Defining a theme for my exhibition:
I originally wanted to focus on just straight photography until i came up with a way to include multiple different artist intentions into a title, Imagined worlds. This title is good because it helps bring together the 3 artists i studied for the photographic hero's task; Didier Massard creates these amazing fabricated photos, adapting and manipulating until he's created an imaginary landscape. Chris McCaw creates amazing long exposure sunsets using strange developing methods to again fabricate reality and distort the understanding. Hiroshi Sugimoto's work focuses on the transitions of life, spending weeks to create a single photograph, this shows his work to be Imagined in the sense that he knows the plan and the shot ideas before he has gotten to the location.
Exhibition Leaflet
The idea of this exhibition is to have an overarching theme, this will be Created worlds or Imagined worlds. This allows me to focus on areas of photography that aren't regularly explored because their controversial attachment to photography; when they aren't just a picture but a heavily modified art piece, some can even be completely fantasy. This exhibition will focus on that divide between what a photo really is, Hiroshi Sugimotos work is an amazing addition to the exhibition because it's the exact contrast i need between fantasy photos and straight photography however his photos still show the Created worlds as he spends so long looking for the scene that he wants to capture and so much work goes into each of this photos.
1ST DRAFT
Imagined Landscapes
The idea of imagined landscapes has been chosen to show a genre, in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic settings. Each photographer exhibiting, creates a sense of other worldliness using their own individual techniques. Chris McCaw uses a unique exposure to show the creative and yet destructive nature of the sun. Didier Massard carefully constructs dioramas which when photographed portray lands of surreal magical beauty and Sugimoto explores the relationship between truth and reality.
Chris McCaw born in America in 1971
Chris McCaw uses giant homemade format cameras, exposing antique silver gelatin enlarging paper to direct sunlight for up to twenty four hours.. The effect is that over the time of exposure, the paper solarizes forming a positive image where the sun burns a hole. The remaining scenes show the process of creation and destruction.
McCaw started building cameras because he couldn’t afford to buy one. He built his first large format camera, 7x 17’ in 1995 costing £150. This time coincided with an age of digital photography, which made him want to hold onto the light and simplicity. The cameras he makes are by his own admission not pretty. .
Somewhere along the line he accidently captured the double exposure, which lead to a new way of image making. McCaw is reported to have always loved playing with alternate processes for making photography. In 2004 he was making large platinum palladium prints from 35mm photos of 1960s rock stars in concert. He also was building his own cameras and taking them out on his skateboard to weird locations. His ethos is always to push the boundaries of photography.
In his work Sunburn McCaw calculates long exposure of the sun, made with paper negatives in a custom made large format cameras, forcing the sun to physically burn a trace of its arc into each photograph. He came upon this technique by accident. He says that he opened the shutter of his camera on a camping trip to record the arc of stars moving across the sky and set his alarm to wake himself up before dawn. This would allow him to close the exposure that he had set up but he overslept so the sun had already risen. He developed the film and was shcked to see that the negative had a long thin curve in an arc where the sun had been. It had burned an arc into the film with its intense heat.
McCaw writes in his essay, “Notes on Watching Shadows Move’
“ This project has transformed the way I think about photography and the world. Not only do I find myself using photographic materials in ways I hadn’t imagined,
but I’ve also had to negotiate the physical realities of my subject as I never had before. Having no control over the placement and movement of the sun, I have had to instead move myself and my equipment to specific locations at specific times of the year, in order to catch the compositions I wanted”
The cameras built by McCaw are as big as 30 x 40 inches ,which are equipped by large aerial lenses designed ato allow a maximum amount of light through. He uses large paper negatives and varies exposure times from a few hours to a full day. This gives a neo primitive landscape and then the sun literally etches a path across the surface of the paper, creating an actual opening. Sunburn consists of 60 of these prints. The violent cutting of the landscape by the sun shows the sun to be both creator and destroyer and shows the viewer its pure strength. Chris McCaw always remains open to new methods of photography and it was through experimentation with
particular lenses and expired sliver gelatin papers that lead to such a technique being discovered.
The landscapes of Sunburn -2012- are beautiful in tone and light with silver tinted imagery ; at times they are punctured, torn or dissected by the sun’s rays literally. The landscapes are calculated exposures of the sun over many different horizons. The burning effect of the sun gives the photographs a 3d sculptural quality. Some are single exposures whereas others are multiple shorter exposures so the sun is captured as a series of dots, Another image shows a gash and then cloud and then a gash again. Some images stretch across three paper negatives as they chase the sun across the course of the day, rising, setting and descending.
Didier Massard
Didier Massard is a fabricator of photographs. He was born in Paris and specialized in art and archaeology. For 25 years he worked as a stills photographer, working for fashion houses such as Chanel and Hermes. He began his career into art with his series Imagined Journeys, a project which took ten years to complete. He combines his imagination with our romantic and touristic ideas about various places. He has created many exotic locations.
Massard says that each journey that he creates as a scene is “ the completion of an inner imaginary journey”
Roberta Smith wrote of this work in the New York Times stating ‘ colour and space combine with fastidious detail to create a sense of illusion and artifice that is more usual to painting”. Massard works slowly, completing only two or three images a year. They are recorded in his studio and then handcrafted. The images create a sense of magic in otherwise realistic settings. They are more like paintings of fairy tale landscapes. At first glance the work looks like oil paintings but they are actually photographs of carefully constructed dioramas that show imaginary scenes and landscapes.
A cathedral crumbles underwater and a mystical garden full of floers as tall as people show a sense of magical realism. He draws his inspiration from both imagined and real places like China and India.
He says “ There were many places in the world I wished to photograph and visit and I realised that they wouldn’t be as I imagine them. The images I create reflect an idealized world which I try to make credible with the use of fakery. There is a tension due to the fact that the viewer may believe that the idealized and fairy tale perfection doesn’t exist. At the same time, it could be a possible place’
Massrads pictures both resemble and differ from our familiar environments. They are largescale photographs ,which challenge the viewer. His Ektacolor prints are real images of imagined scenes, studio constructions complete with meticulous lighting. They are made without the help of digital manipulation, he thinks of his complex images in his imagination and our ideas of what a place is like based on history and information we record over time.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He has spoken of his work as an expression of “time exposed”. His work focuses on the movement of life and the conflict between life and death. He uses a 8x10 large format camera and extremely long exposures but he is also admired for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work.
He begab his work with photographing displays in natural history museums; a polar bear on fake ice standing over a seal and exotic monkeys in a plastic jungle. The pictures were shot in the American Museum of Natural History. The assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the photos carefully.
In the series Portraits Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 16th century. The photographer tries to recreate the lighting the painter would have used when painting the portrait. This idea is again shown when he photographed figures from Madame Tussaud’s where he took three quarter views of the most realistic wax figures using 8 by 10 inch negatives. They are set against a black background.
In 1978 Sugimoto developed his Theatres series which involved photographing old American movie palaces and drive ins with a folding 4x5 camera and tripod, opening his camera shutter and exposing the film for the entire duration of the feature length film, the film projector forming the only lighting. The screen is lit in the centre of the scene and the details of the seats and the theatre itself. The
lighting gives the photo a surreal atmosphere, which shows the idea of passing time.
In Seascapes-1980- he worked on a series of photographs of the sea and its horizons in locations all over the world. He used an old fashioned large format camera to make exposures of varying duration- up to three hours. The locations vary and the black and white pictures are all exactly the same size, divided in half by the horizon line.
To craft his black and white images Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 19th century style large format camera. This a clear example of straight photography, because of the amount of detail captured into each picture.
The idea of imagined landscapes has been chosen to show a genre, in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic settings. Each photographer exhibiting, creates a sense of other worldliness using their own individual techniques. Chris McCaw uses a unique exposure to show the creative and yet destructive nature of the sun. Didier Massard carefully constructs dioramas which when photographed portray lands of surreal magical beauty and Sugimoto explores the relationship between truth and reality.
Chris McCaw born in America in 1971
Chris McCaw uses giant homemade format cameras, exposing antique silver gelatin enlarging paper to direct sunlight for up to twenty four hours.. The effect is that over the time of exposure, the paper solarizes forming a positive image where the sun burns a hole. The remaining scenes show the process of creation and destruction.
McCaw started building cameras because he couldn’t afford to buy one. He built his first large format camera, 7x 17’ in 1995 costing £150. This time coincided with an age of digital photography, which made him want to hold onto the light and simplicity. The cameras he makes are by his own admission not pretty. .
Somewhere along the line he accidently captured the double exposure, which lead to a new way of image making. McCaw is reported to have always loved playing with alternate processes for making photography. In 2004 he was making large platinum palladium prints from 35mm photos of 1960s rock stars in concert. He also was building his own cameras and taking them out on his skateboard to weird locations. His ethos is always to push the boundaries of photography.
In his work Sunburn McCaw calculates long exposure of the sun, made with paper negatives in a custom made large format cameras, forcing the sun to physically burn a trace of its arc into each photograph. He came upon this technique by accident. He says that he opened the shutter of his camera on a camping trip to record the arc of stars moving across the sky and set his alarm to wake himself up before dawn. This would allow him to close the exposure that he had set up but he overslept so the sun had already risen. He developed the film and was shcked to see that the negative had a long thin curve in an arc where the sun had been. It had burned an arc into the film with its intense heat.
McCaw writes in his essay, “Notes on Watching Shadows Move’
“ This project has transformed the way I think about photography and the world. Not only do I find myself using photographic materials in ways I hadn’t imagined,
but I’ve also had to negotiate the physical realities of my subject as I never had before. Having no control over the placement and movement of the sun, I have had to instead move myself and my equipment to specific locations at specific times of the year, in order to catch the compositions I wanted”
The cameras built by McCaw are as big as 30 x 40 inches ,which are equipped by large aerial lenses designed ato allow a maximum amount of light through. He uses large paper negatives and varies exposure times from a few hours to a full day. This gives a neo primitive landscape and then the sun literally etches a path across the surface of the paper, creating an actual opening. Sunburn consists of 60 of these prints. The violent cutting of the landscape by the sun shows the sun to be both creator and destroyer and shows the viewer its pure strength. Chris McCaw always remains open to new methods of photography and it was through experimentation with
particular lenses and expired sliver gelatin papers that lead to such a technique being discovered.
The landscapes of Sunburn -2012- are beautiful in tone and light with silver tinted imagery ; at times they are punctured, torn or dissected by the sun’s rays literally. The landscapes are calculated exposures of the sun over many different horizons. The burning effect of the sun gives the photographs a 3d sculptural quality. Some are single exposures whereas others are multiple shorter exposures so the sun is captured as a series of dots, Another image shows a gash and then cloud and then a gash again. Some images stretch across three paper negatives as they chase the sun across the course of the day, rising, setting and descending.
Didier Massard
Didier Massard is a fabricator of photographs. He was born in Paris and specialized in art and archaeology. For 25 years he worked as a stills photographer, working for fashion houses such as Chanel and Hermes. He began his career into art with his series Imagined Journeys, a project which took ten years to complete. He combines his imagination with our romantic and touristic ideas about various places. He has created many exotic locations.
Massard says that each journey that he creates as a scene is “ the completion of an inner imaginary journey”
Roberta Smith wrote of this work in the New York Times stating ‘ colour and space combine with fastidious detail to create a sense of illusion and artifice that is more usual to painting”. Massard works slowly, completing only two or three images a year. They are recorded in his studio and then handcrafted. The images create a sense of magic in otherwise realistic settings. They are more like paintings of fairy tale landscapes. At first glance the work looks like oil paintings but they are actually photographs of carefully constructed dioramas that show imaginary scenes and landscapes.
A cathedral crumbles underwater and a mystical garden full of floers as tall as people show a sense of magical realism. He draws his inspiration from both imagined and real places like China and India.
He says “ There were many places in the world I wished to photograph and visit and I realised that they wouldn’t be as I imagine them. The images I create reflect an idealized world which I try to make credible with the use of fakery. There is a tension due to the fact that the viewer may believe that the idealized and fairy tale perfection doesn’t exist. At the same time, it could be a possible place’
Massrads pictures both resemble and differ from our familiar environments. They are largescale photographs ,which challenge the viewer. His Ektacolor prints are real images of imagined scenes, studio constructions complete with meticulous lighting. They are made without the help of digital manipulation, he thinks of his complex images in his imagination and our ideas of what a place is like based on history and information we record over time.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He has spoken of his work as an expression of “time exposed”. His work focuses on the movement of life and the conflict between life and death. He uses a 8x10 large format camera and extremely long exposures but he is also admired for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work.
He begab his work with photographing displays in natural history museums; a polar bear on fake ice standing over a seal and exotic monkeys in a plastic jungle. The pictures were shot in the American Museum of Natural History. The assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the photos carefully.
In the series Portraits Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 16th century. The photographer tries to recreate the lighting the painter would have used when painting the portrait. This idea is again shown when he photographed figures from Madame Tussaud’s where he took three quarter views of the most realistic wax figures using 8 by 10 inch negatives. They are set against a black background.
In 1978 Sugimoto developed his Theatres series which involved photographing old American movie palaces and drive ins with a folding 4x5 camera and tripod, opening his camera shutter and exposing the film for the entire duration of the feature length film, the film projector forming the only lighting. The screen is lit in the centre of the scene and the details of the seats and the theatre itself. The
lighting gives the photo a surreal atmosphere, which shows the idea of passing time.
In Seascapes-1980- he worked on a series of photographs of the sea and its horizons in locations all over the world. He used an old fashioned large format camera to make exposures of varying duration- up to three hours. The locations vary and the black and white pictures are all exactly the same size, divided in half by the horizon line.
To craft his black and white images Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 19th century style large format camera. This a clear example of straight photography, because of the amount of detail captured into each picture.
SEPARATING artists into rooms
Now I've chosen an other all theme, Imagined Worlds, I can start separating the artists into separate rooms with different subtitle. In each room I want to have 2 different artists that share a theme such as how they were created. The first subtitle I've chosen is Digital, this will include a new artist ANDREAS GURSKY who photoshops his pictures from hundreds of his own pictures, with this artist I've chosen to pare him with Didier Massard who I've already written about above he also creates fabricated photos from images and general culture. These artists would look really impressive together because it shows how technology has evolved from darkroom works to realistic landscapes that are fabricated or layered.
ANDREAS GURSKY
Driven by an interest and insight into ‘the way that the world is constituted’, as well as what he describes as ‘the pure joy of seeing’, Andreas Gursky makes photographs that are not just depictions of places or situations, but reflections on the nature of image-making and the limits of human perception. Often taken from a high vantage point, these images make use of a ‘democratic’ perspective that gives equal importance to all elements of his highly detailed scenes. Hayward Gallery reopens with the first major UK retrospective of the work of acclaimed German photographer Andreas Gursky. Known for his large-scale, often spectacular pictures that portray emblematic sites and scenes of the global economy and contemporary life, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant photographers of our time.
Andreas Gursky – Kamiokande, 2007