Photography
Saturday, 10 June 2017
Lolo Portraits
Lolo: Tagalog for grandad. He became the ideal model for portraiture when touring Ilocos Norte in the Philippines last year. Unaware, candid, and almost always sat down at our destinations, I wanted to capture my grandad's peaceful and observant nature as well as record the beautiful settings that we were in.
Wednesday, 7 June 2017
Anthropomorphia
Hairband characters born from hoarding inherent in my nature and my unwillingness to let go of things that belong to my childhood in the Philippines. Wanting to see what I could do with my vast collection of hairband and hair pins I began creating piles which soon became apparent were figurative apparitions of some kind: a furry bobble signifying a head and clips for arms. Fairly humorous in essence, I've given inanimate objects personalities, methods of expressing emotion through their poses, the positioning of their limbs and 'clothes' that they wear, personified them in a way that illustrates a childhood in the motherland that I miss very dearly. This series is meant to be playful and not one which I see much room for development in the future unfortunately.
Tuesday, 6 June 2017
Inspiration: Portraying Movement and Motion
Cliff Briggie
Infatuated with the idea of transient art, Briggie works mainly with liquids, ice and unstable media that are constantly transforming under the macro lens of his camera. He uses ice and water as a medium in which to diffuse and paint and capture the sense of fleeting moments, the encounter of these materials at a precise moment. The way the water, ice and colour combine and fuse and merge is entirely random and unpredictable and consequently creates unexpected amorphous shapes. Abstract and beautiful, the colourful crystallized ice often appears other-worldly, the fluidity of the composition heightening the senses. Some of them look like tendrils or dense clouds of smoke. There's something really hypnotic within his colour palette and the gentle rhythm which emerges from the combination of fluids. In other images where colour is more prominent it makes me wonder about hallucinogens and their effects and profound distortions of reality.
Monday, 5 June 2017
Sequences II
Part II of my Sequences series still sets out to document the passing of time but this time through exposure photographs, experimenting with two to five second shutter speeds, capturing fleeting moments and short intervals in an attempt to understand and depict the notion that "what we perceive as present occurs over an interval." The ghostly blurring of the figure as they walk up or down the stairs depict a moment but not necessarily the present.
For me personally, I find that the most accurate depiction of 'now' in photography are the ones that are blurred due to the motion of the subject. Like the character Nao's (from Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For The Time Being) observation of 'now' never truly being now but has actually become 'then' in the time you recognise it as now, motion blurred photography is like capturing multiple nows-turned-thens attempting to truly capture now.
Sequences is a series in which I explore the passing of time through photography. Initially I was mostly concentrating on the notion of 'now' and how photography can be used to describe it. But can the 'now' ever really be truly represented since the present is ever-moving, ever changing? Few photographers have succeeded in doing so such as the grandfather of candid street photography -Henry Cartier Bresson.
In Part I of my Sequences series I chose to take multiple images of a figure walking down the stairs, at rregular intervals and arranged them in a grid in chronological order in the style of Eadweard Muybridge and Duane Michals. Rather than narrating a story through these sequences, I simply wanted to plot moments during an interval to visualise the passing of time. These photographs individually wouldn't really work as a composition by themselves because I wasn't able to capture that 'decisive moment' like in Michals' images but strange as this subject matter may be, they work as a collective when grouped together in this manner and viewed in this specific way and order.
-
The lighting in the following sequences is very extreme in order to portray an atmosphere or mood, the monochromatic palette helping to exaggerate the melancholy and gloomy atmosphere of the particular day the images were taken on. It's very obvious that these photos are staged and absolutely not spontaneous due to the repetitive nature of the poses but the feeling of the passing of time is still evident within them.
-
Michals sequence of narrative photographs are quite similar to Muybridge’s pioneering work in photographic studies of motion in the sense that his still images are arranged in a way that indicates the passing of time, portraying one moment and the next after an indeterminate amount of time, clearly outlining some kind of story or event. Individually, the black and white images are quite intimate in nature and reminiscent of Cartier Bresson’s “decisive moment” series. The monochromatic aesthetic of his photographs create a certain atmosphere which I find both haunting and alluring. If I was to pursue the idea of how time is represented and how we relate and view it, I would do it through still images arranged in a chronological order such as those in Michals' sequences.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
