Wednesday 18 August 2010

Camera Lucida, Stress Positions and Photography as Procedure

I read Roland Barthe's Camera Lucida last week, twice. I didn't understand all of it but some of it was quite clear. Proustian referrences sometimes baffle me a bit but on the whole I could absorb the message. There were several things in the book that interested me, chiefly, how Barthes mentions that early photographs were an almost surgical procedure, requiring the models to sit still for stretches of forty-five minutes in bright sunlight. This element of pain or discomfort coupled with Barthes view that the photograph is intrinsically linked to death intrigued me. It's a possible avenue for exploration, either through a kind of 'endurance' photograph, wherein the shutter could be open for a set amount of time, say ten minutes, whilst the sitter must not move, without the use of an armature. Or, either a video or photography observation of a subject attempting to 'endure', the typically Catholic punishment of holding ones arms out crucifix-style whilst hefting a bible in each hand is a possibility, this treatment of the 'endurance' is also strongly linked to the idea of stress-positions, an ethically questionable method of non-marking torture linked with the interrogation of prisoners of war in Iraq. (The somwhat cartoony-image below is in lieu of some of the more graphic images.)

The 4x5 Sarcophagus Dream

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago that I was walking around a photography exhibition with my family when I realised the work on display was my own. It was not work I had previously made, this was a complete invention of my sleep-dormant mind. The exhibition consisted of life-size 4x5 photographs of members of my family and friends, with their hands folded and their eyes closed, pasted to the floor. The photographs were black and white, the most prominent was a photograph of my grandmother. The photographs were incredibly detailed, with white backgrounds, very similar to Richard Avedon's iconic images (below). I remember thinking in the dream the allusion to stone scarcophagi, such as those can be found in churches, with knights and people of the sort on them, eyes closed, hands folded. The images were pasted on the floor because the photograph had been taken hovering above the subject, as they themselves lay on the floor.


This dream prompted me to start thinking whether I could actually do this as a project. Ideally I would like to experiment with a 4x5 camera but, for the moment, I will be using the bronica and 400iso colour film as that's what's in the camera now. The first subject will be my grandmother, I'm hoping that the larger format of film will help to capture the detail and texture that are so inherent in Avedon's photos and my dream. Once the colour film is finished, and depending on the results, I will try using b/w film, whether to use high or low iso I haven't quite decided yet, but the likelihood is a very low iso (managed to find some ilford 120 50iso but 125iso will probably do) so as to capture the clearest and most detailed image. Will update as I go along with this image. Watch this space.

Friday 13 August 2010

The Gesundheit Project Submission

The Gesundheit Project is something I learned about from reading the Creative Review Blog (excellent source for up to date art, photography, graphic design etc info.). The project is a collection of contributions, each depicting the creative interpretation of a sneeze, finally culminating in an auction of the pieces. All media are accepted and further details can be found at the following address: http://www.project-gesundheit.com/ .
The image below is my own self-portrait submission which was accepted. Anyone can submit something free, details can be found by following the link above.





Title: The Prayer (Bless You)

Tuesday 3 August 2010

The Nude Polaroids Project

As mentioned before, this is something I've been considering for a while, nudity, copyright and other more concept-based concerns are I suppose, what have prevented me from having published the idea sooner. The seed of an idea emerged when I was browsing ebay several months ago, I am an avid eBayer and Polaroider and it was whilst browsing eBay for said Polaroid products that I came across something which struck me as rather odd. Someone was selling nude Polaroids. These were not the artistic nudes we are so used to seeing in 'high-brow' photography exhibits, these were, for the most part, either cheap-looking text-prints from photoshoots in the 1970/80s or either amateur private home-shot photographs, of various people, presumably the partners of the invisible camera operator. These photos ranged from the out and out amateur nude to the suggestive and cheap-looking studio shots. I began to investigate further, purposefully entering the multitude of search key-words (a skill which now seems almost second nature to many of us, whether in Google or eBay, we know exactly the 3 words we need to find what we want) for these nude polaroids. I turned up some further images, dim grey-black shots which seemed to hold a kind of crude and unknowing artistry and a particular moment in an anonymous persons life.
The three images above are some of the more mild-images, there are others whose depictions are much more frank, and again, others that are so completely un-erotic that they seem absurd, one particular image of a man of around twenty, sat in a pair of shorts with his legs wrapped around a potted-plant is at the forefront of these 'erotic Polaroids'.
These are not 'found photographs' in the traditional sense, infact, quite the reverse, these are not images people have no use for, have discarded and thrown away, rather they are prized images, given a monetary value. They are infact 'Searched-for Photographs'. (Herein lies my somewhat grey area of copyright, as they are not discarded images, do I have the right to reproduce them?).


These sale of images seems completely different to the typical sale of photographs, even that of the pornographic image, which the internet has enabled. This kind of sale of image seemed to suggest that there was value in the image as solid object. That the image becomes object when it is taken with a Polaroid camera, and then undergoes a second transformation, from object to commodity, to something of real physical value. Indeed, the prices of these images vary greatly, from as little as sixty-five pence, plus postage and packing, to as much as fifteen pounds (GBP). Another striking element is that the price is not proportional to the nudity in the photo, as it were. For example, an image of one cheap-looking completely nude studio shot can cost 50p, whereas a photograph of a woman's head and shoulders, without revealing any regions below, can be offered for £6.00. Perhaps this is linked to the quality or artistry of the photographer or model? Yet this seems unlikely. Perhaps the value accredited to a photograph particularly that of a Polaroid, a physically grounded image, is linked to its intrinsic origins of the human-story, and its role in it, much as the value of an antique can drastically increase if it were owned by a famous historical figure. For now I suppose this question will go unanswered.

Any Old Business

I suppose I have left it rather late to start a blog titled 'The Summer Project', considering it's the first week of August. Not that I've been sat idle, I have been working, a little, if not as consistently as I would have liked. Whilst I have several ideas and pieces currently on the go I thought it best to start at the start, blogging and uploading the work that I have done previously and, hopefully, catching up with the present fairly soon. Something I've had on my mind for a while is a project I've titled The Nude Polaroids Project. I've spent so long thinking about it I believe it deserving of its own blog-post, leaving this as a teaser to the subsequent, more fully-fleshed out brief. Amongst this there are several other bits and pieces I will posting about, some photography based, others less so. Suffice it to say all these various strands will be uploaded in due course.