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the ‘selfie’…

I spend much of my time working with children and young people, teaching them various elements of photography and art, and i’ve managed to do this for almost ten years self-employed which i am very proud of. But i am aware that times are changing and in order to maintain a level of interest in children and young people i have had to start to use the word ‘selfie’. If there was any word i could banish from everyday use it would be that. In fact i struggle to even write it here. I detest it. It is a vulgar, narcissistic term used to refer to the taking of one’s own picture using a hand-held device and then, more often than not, sharing that image via social networks. Normally the images are badly taken with camera phones and granted the cameras in phones are considerably better than they used to be, it’s not their fault it’s the people taking them…

Pictures of young girls with their cheeks puffed up, one hip jutting out with their hand resting on it, drunken, regretful nights out in the pub, or boys with their tops off showing how hard they have worked down the gym. Just a few of the more common examples of what has now become a whole new phenomena in social networking being used by presidents, actors, tourists and just about everyone. The pictures they take say ‘look at me, look where i am, aren’t i having a great time?’ Very few emotions (apart from the standard gormless smile/provocative pout) exist in these images and so the visual cues come from what else is happening in the picture- what time of day is it? Can we tell what type of room the image was taken in? More often than not it turns out that there is, in fact no depth to the image  and what you see is what you get- just a quick shallow skim across the surface of someone’s life. It can be argued that you catch a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors but i would argue that the images tend to be staged and give few clues- only what the taker wants us to see.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/history-of-the-selfie.html

The article above places some good context around the ‘selfie’ phenomenon (there are also some errors- Atget was not the crime scene photographer is was Wegee) but all things considered it gives good perspective from an arts point of view. Below is a quote from Kyle Chakya from the National #selfie Portrait Gallery;

““It’s less about narcissism—narcissism is so lonely!—and it’s more about being your own digital avatar.” Chayka adds, “Smartphone selfies come out of the same impulse as Rembrandt’s … to make yourself look awesome.””

They just used the word “awesome” and Rembrandt in the same sentence. I don’t think that was really what Rembrandt was thinking. I hope someone corrects him and perhaps does so in person and manages to take his phone off him so he sits and listens for three minutes.

As a portrait genre it is here to stay for the foreseeable future and so i have resigned myself to the fact that i will have to spend time correcting people when they say ‘selfie’ and ask them to use either self-portrait or auto-portrait. Whether i have worked with a group for several hours/week/months it makes no difference. I can enlighten them as to what it means to take pictures of people, and show them how to do it, and how to treat photography as a skill, an art form, and a tool for communication. But as soon as they go home and engage with social media and their friends, it’s back to the puffed up cheeks and duck face. I am happy to make a joke about this when i am working but it is part of a bigger picture of how to connect with people and how to maintain a sense of authenticity in one’s life when technologies are outstripping the need to or want to meet with people face to face and experience the sponteneity of conversation.

And here endeth today’s lecture. Because authenticity is too big a subject for now…

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Brocken Spectre

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I keep a running list of favourite words and things (mainly in my head) and sometimes I get the chance to use them as a basis for a series of images. I have been utterly obsessed with brocken spectres for several months (if not years) but haven’t been able to work them as an idea in to a project.

A brocken spectre is, in effect a selfish rainbow. It is the enormous magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun. They were first observed in 1788 by Johan Siberschlag in the Harz mountains in Germany. They are an optical illusion created when  sun shines from behind an observer who is looking down on to cloud or mist. The light projects their shadow which falls on to droplets of water at varying distances from the eye causing a halo of colour like a rainbow. Because of the angle of view only the observer can see this rainbow effect and this is what makes it a selfish rainbow.

When I first learned about brocken spectres it reminded me of the selfishness and illusionary nature of social networking and digital technologies; of how we lack the technical knowledge and understanding of how networks are created, as if they are some sort of ethereal experience which they are not. I have developed a deeply cynical view of social networks and am an unwilling participant (I am not a luddite)!

I have wanted to produce a series of images of people interacting with technology and the one idea I keep coming back to is that of the sitter being lit only by the light of the device they are interacting with. I like to imagine how Velazquez or Poussin or Rembrandt would have worked had they lighting choices other than candlelight or daylight?

My Thursday group and I visited the National Museum of Scotland a few months ago and whilst there I took the photographs below. I was struck at how the light from the small screens brought out the features of those in the image, and I also rather enjoyed the space landscape in the background- a simulacrum which only adds to the idea of modern life as rubbish (Baudrillard). The images below are simply ideas- they are not formed finished images but just the start. I get the irony of shooting these pictures with an iphone, and I will shoot the finished project with my DSLR which will only add to celebrate the selfishness of technology, But, lest we forget, once upon a time photography in it’s infancy was cutting edge technology, as was the development of ready mixed paint available in tubes, or the use of perspective…

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Reflections

invite-reflections

The HYPE group currently have an exhibition of photography, collage and painting at Armadale library (until 31st October). The work was created for the Scottish Mental Health Art and Film Festival. We took as our ambiguous theme the idea of ‘reflections’, allowing participants to interpret this brief as they wanted. Photographs were taken at a variety of locations in West and East Lothian and we used small round mirrors to reflect ourselves and our environment. Participants were encouraged to take photographs of each other and, as for all my workshops, the fake, smiley thumbs up pictures were banned making those being photographed think a little more about how they want to be portrayed in the images. Luckily there are so many beautiful spots to photograph this helped distract from the actual act of being photographed! I have included several of their portraits of each other and a few additional images taken by the group.

The collages began as line drawings from photographs. Participants then filled these drawings with paint, proline markers or samples of wallpaper, chosen by them and carefully cut to size. It was very restful making the collages and this produced a very nice atmosphere in the group.

Below is a gallery of (bad ifone images) of participant’s work with their comments on the work they have created.

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C, aged 15

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Back in January of this year I was working for two separate organisations delivering art workshops to children and young people excluded from mainstream education (primarily behavioural issues). I took this photograph of one of the boys during our photography class and promptly forgot all about it. I often felt like this after the classes. No matter how hard I tried to find that hook to get their attention- get them interested, find what they were interested in, I struggled to have them focus for more than a few minutes. My projects are always participant-centred; I find where their interests lie and tailor projects to fit but when that stage becomes challenging projects no longer become about their interests and this can have an adverse effect on the work produced. At this point my involvement becomes more about the experience than trying to produce an outcome which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura

Been covering classes for the head of the photography department this week. We agreed that I could teach image formation. So I trashed his room by turning it in to a Camera Obscura and had the students sit around in the dark. This is a photograph taken by a student of the image projected in to the room. I have worked on it in Photoshop (flipped 180 and mirrored for a more dramatic result- I’m not correcting the perspective).
It was a good lesson and obviously there was a lot more to it than have them sitting in the dark staring at a dull image projected on to the wall. Hopefully the learning will have sunk in!

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Andrei Tarkovsky

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Stalker, 1979

 

I’ve been back a few weeks now and settling in to new work challenges and the cooler climate. I started watching the Dogma 95 series of films again, which led me to discover the works of film maker Andrei Tarkovsky who is a huge influence on Lars Von Trier. I am now going though the seven films Tarkovsky made in his lifetime which are all available to view for free online. They are beautiful, intense and loaded with metaphorical references and his distinct cinematic style is changing the way I now view cinema. He wrote several books on cinema and, with time I look forward to reading more of his thoughts and ideas which, just like his films will act as a source of inspiration.

Below are a few quotes from Tarkovsky…

“An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”

“I think in fact that unless there is an organic link between the subjective impressions of the author and his objective representation of reality, he will not achieve even superficial credibility, let alone authenticity and inner truth.”

 

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Picasso speaks

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“Among several sins I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint my objects it is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art, intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, ‘love must be proved by facts and not by reasons’. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing”

Picasso Speaks, 1923

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Man Ray’s letter to Knud Merrild

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I have been doing some reading on Man Ray recently- he is an artist known to most photographers for his pioneering Rayograms and solarisation and if, like me you trained in photography pre-digital days you would have experimented with these techniques in the darkroom.

The quote above is from a letter Man Ray wrote to an artist friend who’s work he greatly admired. Knud Merrild was a Dutch post-surrealist and modernist artist who ended up in California the same time as May Ray (who fled Paris in August 1940). Merrild’s work was bought and admired by several great artists and writers but he never gained the fame and notoriety of his contemporaries. He suffered a heart attack and returned to Denmark where he died in 1954.

Recently there has been much press about the cut in arts funding across the whole of the UK and It’s got me to thinking about how little the arts are valued within modern society- I mean good art- art that makes you think and feel emotion and want to do and try harder in your own practice- not the insipid zombie art people buy to match their sofas, or the kind of art that is all about the ego of the artist (I still long for the day when we have a row of plaster cast dicks from all of the well-known artists still alive lined up on pedestals in order of size from small to large and the largest one gets to be ‘top artist of the world’).

I like this quote because it offers hope and that is something all artists need to keep going- without hope there is nothing as an artist. I know we need it across every facet of life but it is the one thing that keeps me going- the idea that the ‘thing’ I am creating at that present moment will give me satisfaction and, in turn, perhaps inspire others, provoke an emotion in them or change how they think or feel about a certain something.  But I also like the fact that Man Ray uses the word ‘illusion’ as if Merrild is creating some sort of magical world (or personality). Like a great author, Man Ray is lost in Merrild’s work- the illusion has taken hold and is all-encompasing to the point of obsession. I’ve had a few art obsessions – most recently travelling to Vienna to see Klimt’s The Kiss and while there discovering the Striking Heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt- all these journeys in art, where just reading a few lines about a certain artist takes me deeper and deeper in to a journey.

But back to Man Ray and his love of Merrild’s work. We do not compliment each other enough or reward ourselves with a moment of happiness before moving on to our next creative obsession. It doesn’t matter that the world has not sat up and taken note of our latest creative outpouring. What is important is the journey and the acknowledgement from those who get it- whose opinion is treasured (not friends- they will always tell you they like it with little critical discussion). I can imagine Merrild’s happiness at receiving this letter from Man Ray and the impact it potentially had on his work- how such a letter could push his work on further and inspire him to keep going.

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Future Self!

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We are careering towards the launch of the Future Self exhibition in Stirling on Monday and it’s down to the last few tasks- order the vinyl lettering and layout the interpretation text and then it’s just the 113 portraits to hang!! Writing the interpretation text is the bit i don’t like doing- it’s really hard to concentrating three month’s work in to a few sentences. I want to write about all the planning meetings, upload all the worksheets, show you the photographs the children took themselves, share their funny anecdotes, tell you more about them and their stories. Until then, here’s a little formal writing on the project…

“Future Self is a photography project which aims to support children and young people at the transition stage within primary school before going up to high school.

 Future Self supported children and young people from the Primary 7 classes of Bannockburn, Cornton and Fallin Primary Schools to explore what they might like to do in the future with regards to career or further study, reflecting too on how they might change in the coming years and the skills they need or would like to develop. As they reflect on their time at primary school and look forward to starting high school, Future Self aims to use transition work being done by class teachers as a starting point for reflection on their school career to date and how they may develop and hone their skills whilst at high school to realise their ideas for future careers.

 Through discussion and exploration in class and at home, and creatively through photography and costume, the children created a double photographic self-portrait of themselves as they are now and who they think they might be in 20 years time. The children are encouraged when taking the photograph of them as they are now, to consider a piece of advice they should give their future selves to enable their career goals. Then, using costume and make-up the children are transformed into that ‘future self’ and re-photographed. These two separate images are then merged in Photoshop and here today are the 113 portraits of the children who took part in the project.

 At the beginning of the project the children visited the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and learned about pose and symbolism in art. Back in class the children learned about representation in photography and how the way we choose to represent ourselves in public can reflect upon our later lives.

 Future Self has reached a broad spectrum of children across Stirling.  Engaging in creative experiences can create a thriving learning environment, transforming levels of aspiration, enthusiasm, motivation, self esteem, critical thinking and openness to new ideas.”

 

 

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Heartlands Project

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I was commissioned to develop a project with two primary 7 classes from Whitburn which took as it’s topic the Heartlands development. This development, just outside Whitburn, is currently the largest development project in Britain. Taking the history and surroundings of this site as inspiration my brief was to create a full day’s workshop with half of the day taking place on site and the other half back in the classroom.  The difficulties lay in relying upon the Scottish weather, class sizes and access to enough of the site to be able to produce a set of good quality, varied images.

I chose to focus my attentions on the beech trees – one in particular which you can see above. I used a digital projector to create a template of this tree on to A0 mount board. The children would create a collage of lots of small photographs taken during their visit, printed on to A4 sticker paper, cut up and stuck on to the Beech tree template.

We could not have asked for better weather during the two school’s visits allowing us to wander the site taking a variety of images. The children were asked to focus their attentions to photographing to specific colours; brown, green, grey, blue and white.

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The children really enjoyed taking their pictures and learning the geology of rocks on the site, they listened intently to Alex Muirhead, Development Director of the site.

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After their site visit the children returned to their school where I joined them and we began printing their photographs out on to contact sheets. They were encouraged to choose a job suited to their skills; cutting out the pictures, dividing them in to the separate colours, helping with the printing, taking the sticky backs off the prints and sticking them down.

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We almost finished their collage! The class teachers were happy to finish their collages in class next week but below is an (almost) finished collage. The pupils and teachers alike were very happy with their work, which will go on display at a sharing day at Whitburn High School in September so I hope to be able to post photographs of the finished tree collages. 

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This project was successful on many levels not least of all because the children learned new photography skills, gained confidence in their creativity, worked as a team to produce a piece of work and of course built upon their knowledge of the Heartlands development.