Sophie Calle

I adore Sophie Calle, and if you were to look into my AS photography book or the work I did for A2, you'd find it full of Calle-inspired works and full of artist research and artist appreciation pages for her.

I find I like Calles work so much as I can find so much of it in myself, the obsessive nature, the need for  everything to fall in a certain collective way, the want of irrelevant knowledge and the satisfaction in organizing and re-organizing yourself. I fall in love with each and every moment captured, each and every photo set and all the ways she uses to describe herself with other things, the way she forces her own personality into her life, just in the way she lives. 

The photograph below is from a "birthday cabinet", each year she invites the same amount of people as her age to a get together and one extra, who she doesn't know to show the uncertainty in the future, and how that should be valued, each present goes into one of these cabinets, to be used the following year, as a reminder of the things that have gone and the things that are to come. 

 

The cabinets inspired my collecting of bus tickets, I have a box for all my personal ones (though I seem to never have as many going in as I did before..) and a box for discarded tickets I seem to acquire. I find this to be an interesting way to show my own personal love for traveling, even if it's to not very far away lands, sometimes even going into the city or into the town is a good enough adventure for one day, but it keeps on my dream to travel to as many places as physically possible in one lifetime, and eventually find somewhere to stay and to enjoy for the remainder of my years. 

This collecting also inspired my first photography AS project, when I picked one thing of the street each day and dropped them all onto the top of the photocopier and photocopied them as they were, and due to the fact they were A2 print outs, they couldn't be scanned in well enough to be able to show them on my blog, but they were interesting, even if it was solely created out of peoples discarded items.

 This photo is from "hotel rooms" which is, as it looks and sounds, photographs of hotel rooms, and, again, my love of travel and my love of the differences in people and personalities comes into this as it shows the difference of both places and people. I find the difference in placed things interesting in these and how neat or tidy people can be, the way people hang certain things but leave others in bags and what consists of importance in placing on desks. 

Despite the fact it shows all these things most people cannot see the value in discovering things about people, be it friends, strangers or yourself, through little things like those shown in these sets. 

Most people I know tend to lie their interests in Sophie with the phone booth. Calle decorated a phone booth with a chair, drinks, flowers, photographs....etc and used it as a means to try and brighten a persons day when they were to come across it, to make a simple day-to-day thing enjoyable, it gave an interesting point to how we value our lives, just as Stephen Gill did with "outside in" but with different contexts. Gill tried to show we don't always pick up on the little details of our lives, where as Calle was trying to show how little details of our lives should be valued.

I really do love the phone booth and how well executed it was, it picks up on the differences of peoples lives, but finding something they all do to join them together.

 The photo below is the set "sleepers" when she invited her friends to sleep in her bed and recorded the way they slept, which highlighted difference in comfort and personal differences, and the sharing of an object used for the greatest satisfaction of sleep. The relationship between a person and their bed is incredibly strong, and unless you are used to sharing the bed, it's strange to have another person in it, it's even stranger to then sleep in it after wards, to have another person find comfort and joy in something so personal is like breaking the bonds you've built in the "relationship" you've built.

I love how in some shots, the intruder to the personal comfort zone just stares into the camera, aware of having their comfort documented, which in all respects should lead away from any comfort you have made or acquired. 

The documentation of another person in your bed must be something strange to feel, as if you are now a stranger to a good friend you saw not moments ago, which I find very similar to the song Stranger by Noah and the Whale.

The lines "everything I love has gone away, oh the dark night is moving slower, oh but sleep wont rescue me" is very significant in the connection between this song and the art work, as it sums my opinion of losing the close relationship between a person and their bed, and not quite being able to feel the same level of comfort in it again.

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Graphics (cd covers)

These are my CD covers for graphics at college, the first picture being the front cover, the second the little insert in the middle and the last the back cover. Our brief was that a band named "the stuctures" has asked us all to create their cd covers, and we had to create this band from our imagination, give them names and so forth and create their genre. 

Using my Leavesden Mental Hospital shoot from Photography AS, I gave the cd covers an 'alternative indie' feel, of sorts, and using photoshop, completely molded the images to what i needed them to do or to be. 

I'm genuinely really happy with the result, I like how the insert is black and white, and gives focus on the front and back covers, and I like how everything fits together.

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35mm film photography.

this is my black and white, 35mm, film used in my photography lessons.

Anyone that knows me well knows I adore film photography; rather than owning a series of pixels you picked out yourself, you are suddenly the creator of a true image, it's something real that you can feel and own, something almost magical. I was using film photography in last years AS classes, and this year I've had the fortune to continue to use it. 

True 35mm film photography works by placing the film into a manual camera,  preferably a manual SLR (like my Practika MTL5, in which this blog is named after), choosing your shot, setting the aperture and shutter speed so the light meter indicates that the shot will indeed come out, and pressing the shutter release. This series of events ensures that the light will settle on the film emulsion so when it is processed it will come out negatively, creating the negative.

different films have different ways of processing, so that you can use them in the darkroom, but as an avid fan of black and white film, I can tell you it's easy to process, takes around 15-16 minutes, and 20 minutes for the film to dry, after that, you can scan each photo onto a computer, or instead choose to work in the darkroom.

There will, of course, be scans of darkroom work uploaded, but at this point in time, I don't have access to a scanner, but I do already have the scan in's of each negative, so until then, here are my photos.

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Painting & drawing work.

 These two drawings have quotes above them, they are quotes from my AS cigarette packet work, (which you can find the post here or the pictures here, here and here) it's to show people as a shell, rather than real people

Kevin Bauman

Those four photos were from my little photo shoot over at Leavesden mental hospital on the 22nd October 2011, all taken with a Nikon D3000. I took two of my friends on the 40 minute walk from my house over to the place where my mother once lived with her family (not as patients, but as both my grandparents worked there for a period of time), and where people went when they lost their minds. It's an incredibly sad place to walk around, and the scenery has completely changed, what was once a reception and a few main wards have become flats and what was once a dining area has been completely knocked down and a park was built in its place, the only things still standing either serving their purpose or left unchanged is the barn and sewage plant, the cemetery, the house at the end of the grounds and the chapel. The chapel doesn't really concern me much, it's not weathered or worn or tired, it stands as it was, completely unchanged, as if it'll stand there forever, whereas the barn & plant, the cemetery and ground house are abandoned and have been for many years, without much care or attention, though the plant was bought by a Shane Anthony Lanigan, in hopes of using it for something, but never did. I find the emptiness of the place eerie, never mind the knowledge that it once housed people with dire thoughts and vivid hallucinations. 

I've always been a fan of abandoned places, it's always been the wonder of why that does it for me, the fact that they stand so weak looking now, but so so strong. I would like to think they reflect me, maybe.

Kevin Bauman did the set 100 abandoned houses and photographed around his hometown, Detroit. He did it to show how awful Detroit had become, with it's constant lack of people to occupy the space, but the fact is, sadly, that all abandoned places only light an emotion in someone that has been destroyed by something themselves, by a person or place or feeling. People that have been down but not destroyed simply can't see the same impact, which is actually incredibly frightful, but you can't fight that in a person, you have to allow them to believe it's a useless space till they can feel the same thing.

It's difficult, but they'll come around.

I also find the fact that all the photos are face on, it's almost horrifying, as if it's staring you down, and trying to merge itself with you to rekindle the dying emotion that we suppress all our lives.
We've all been abandoned.
I simply can't understand that someone could not see the pain in these pictures, they may not understand them, but there is an overwhelming attack of pain and partial panic in these, and I think that's what I actually like about them.

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Abandonment and loss (AS work)

I find there's a sort of universal feeling of abandonment with everybody now, no matter where you go, or who you talk to, or what you believe, there's a sense of abandonment or loss with everyone.
Last year during Photography AS I pretty much continually showed all this loss and hurt in my work, and molded my work around the thoughts and feelings of the abandoned mind, as it were.

"The mediation between expectation and thought"

Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix s5800 this year.

Chris Martin-Taylor in Watford town center.

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"The worst abuser"

14 prints out of 78 cigarette packets I photographed.

I asked a numerous amount of people to either write on a packet or give me something to write on them,

I kept 8 of my favorite's ranging from "I miss my old life" to "I want to die" but my personal number one is the green Mayfair Menthol 10s packet with "it's OK" written on.

These were both finals for last years AS, and were very much influenced by my prior diary's, the people around me and my own thoughts and emotions; both were titled by the first line of two diary's.
It's something that's said regularly, by regular people, but really, I have actually suffered a lot of loss, and a lot of hurt has come from that, and the sort of loss I've dealt with is something that doesn't leave you, it instead leaves you with emotion that drowns you very quickly unless you find something to force it at, to hope it leaves you. I showed going through loss alone in "the mediation between expectation and thought" through showing complete loneliness in a seemingly busy place, and how when you really burst out of that place, there's no real relief, you must carry on going, despite the fact you feel you've dealt with whatever is killing you, and in "The worst abuser" I showed collective loss, how everybody feels abandoned by something, but really, it's all the same thing. It started off as a show on addiction, how we're all addicted to something, be it beauty, weight, cigarettes, drugs, food.... anything, yet it's all very similar. I found throughout setting up, though, that people tended to feel really possessive over the packet that held their quote, as if they were trying to hold on to whatever was hurting, rather than let it hurt them again, and I quickly changed my plan to loss.