Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Time-based audio-visual presentations

Author: lindamayoux

  • Time-based audio-visual presentations

    Like books, slideshows have a very ‘linear’ narrative, even more so than the photobook. The creator is in control of the order in which viewers see images and therefore has greater control over the meanings generated.

    Victorian ‘magic lantern’ shows –  idea of projecting a photographic image onto a surface for a temporary duration rather than creating a hard copy to be exhibited

    1960s, 70s and 80s  slideshow screenings at amateur international competitive events. Specialist equipment was developed, whereby two slide projectors would be automated (in terms of duration and opacity of each slide) whilst also playing a stereo soundtrack, all controlled by a domestic cassette tape.

    Automated displays of photographs as for example web galleries are now very common. Slideshow galleries on WordPress and SmugMug, the Slideshow module in Lightroom and iPhoto, as well as Windows consumer software, make it easy to compile this type of automated slideshow quickly and easily. But these are limited – the main control being over the images themselves: which images are show in which order, manipulation of each image to vary the effect of eg colour, viewpoint and crop, sequencing to vary these effects in a meaningful way, and the content and style of any titles and text to reinforce or challenge the meaning in the image. Some software like lightroom Slideshow module allows narration, sound and/or music and mixing of photos with video.

    More considered audio-visual presentations can be both works of art in themselves, and/or more effective as a means of promoting still images. Here the creator takes more control of the relative timing of viewing of each image – some take longer and some less time. There are also different types of transition. Effects can be superimposed to change the image – zooming and panning, changing colour and focus as each image is viewed, multiple images shown at the same time.

    Software used include:

    • Adobe Photoshop
    • Adobe Premiere
    • Adobe Animate
    • Adobe After Effects

    This means that substantial numbers of images can be combined – some similar and some contrasting to enhance a narrative.

    The boundary between video and still photography is becoming increasingly blurred. As high definition video is becoming a standard feature of both consumer and professional DSLRs, and shooting video is becoming more intuitive to digital photographers, it is likely that clients will start to expect photographers to offer video as well as still images.

    YouTube and Vimeo are two places where video content and slideshows saved in a video format (.mov or .mp4) can be self-published.

    Examples

    • Urbex: Beauty in Decay
    • Chris Leslie: slideshows of ‘Disappearing Glasgow’ with photos, background music and interviews. I find these very evocative as a social documentary portrait. These are in a linked series on vimeo – start with  https://vimeo.com/29799259
    • Xavier Ribas  ‘Concrete Geographies’.  Photos of concrete blocks in Barcelona. See his website: http://www.xavierribas.com. This has inside views and links to vimeos of other books like Sanctuary – no text, one photo per spread. Sometimes a cross-over image. But the onscreen resolution is not good enough to really see the images.
    • Alessandro Rota A Neocolonialist’s diary.  Small paisley pattern cover. Coloured photos of sheets in Lusaka. Dark night streets. Lights. See his website . And vimeo of the book. https://vimeo.com/28099164
    • Foto8 Magazine has many powerful photo-only documentary stories with music.

    More video-based:

    • Magnum in Motion and the subscription-based Mediastorm have powerful documentaries that mix video (often slow-motion and photo-like) and animated or still photos with narrative voice over.
    • 1 in 8 Million (New York Times) has a video gallery with video/photo mixes linked to videos with personal stories of varied New Yorkers.
    • Duckrabbit does training as well as producing documentaries blending moving as well as still images.

    Less effective I thought were:

    For links to my own work so far see: Create a slideshow. But this needs more work – when I have less work and risk of RSI.

    Audio-visual pieces – some points to consider

    (adapted from Course Guide)

    Some of the design tips for photobooks, most notably rhythm and sequencing, are equally relevant here.

    • Rationale: What is the purpose of the slideshow? What is the main concept? Who is it for? Why do you want to present your work in a slideshow? Is a slideshow the most appropriate treatment of the work? If there’s a lot of content within the frame, will the viewer have enough time to ‘read’ the image at the given pixel dimensions?
    • Selection and Editing: Edit your work strictly.  Do all the images sit comfortably next to each other. Do any seem out of place? Can this be resolved, or should they be omitted? How long will your slideshow be? If it’s intended solely for on-line use, then it will probably need to be shorter than a piece that will be shown on a loop in a gallery.
    • Sequencing: Sequencing is paramount: consider how certain images relate to each other (graphically as well as in terms of the ‘connotations’ of an image, or the juxtaposition of images within the sequence).
    • Text: Will you use text? What will you say? Will the text complement and reinforce the images, or challenge the viewer through contrast or contradiction?What typeface and style will you use?
    • Sound: Consider the relationship between the sound and your images? Have you got relevant audio and/or textual material to accompany the images? If not, what could you look for?  Adobe Audition and Sony’s Acid Music are quite easy to use giving music loops to combine and layer to compose your own simple music tracks. Websites such as http://freemusicarchive.org  offer copyright-free audio tracks for non-commercial use.

  • On-line sales outlets

    Zazzle

    photo-box

    red bubble     Has calendarss etc

    greeting card universe

  • Joan Fontcuberta

    Joan Fontcuberta co-opts all forms of media and public communication. In essence, he creates modern-day Trojan-horse-type bodies of work and presents them, deadpan, in scholarly journals, hard-bound “scientific” books, large-scale legitimate museum exhibitions, and as newsworthy “discoveries” that fool even the most professional of experts, journalists, and their readers.
    He produced a number of series:

    • Miracles & Co. (documenting the miraculous powers of a
      secluded religious sect);
    • Orogenesis (which “tricks” military satellite terrain-imaging software to create images derived from paintings and photographs rather than satellite imagery);
    • Herbarium and Fauna (botanical and biological findings of previously undiscovered bizarre plants and animals);
      Sputnik (mythical story of a Russian cosmonaut who is still lost in space),
    • Pin Zhuang (when a US spy plane crashed in China, the Chinese re-assembled the pieces into a variety of working spacecraft);
      Hemograms (exploring identity through blood and its self-expression as abstract art);
    • A series of photomosaics using photo-imaging freeware and Google’s image search engine to re-create popular media images (as usual, the supporting text often contains the “real” message).

    He is the author/creator of more than 20 books, including The Artist and the Photograph, which “proves” that Picasso, Dali, Miro and other famous painters actually used photographs as the original source material for some of their greatest masterpieces. That work created a real shock and backlash from the art world, because so many people believed it was true. (Serious museums joined in the joke and presented the “original” photos side by side with the actual paintings, and even experts in their fields got duped — and then angry). His latest book, “Landscapes without Memory”, is published by Aperture.

    Joan Fontcuberta

  • Thomas Demand

    Thomas Demand, (born 1964 in Munich, Germany) is a German sculptor and photographer. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.

    He invites us to question the reality of what we are looking at—not just in his photographs, but in everyday life as well. At first glance, his images appear to be photographic records of “real” and oddly familiar places. Then the viewer realises that they are looking at something entirely artificial. It is this sudden realisation that something so apparently real that gives Demand’s work its undeniable psychological impact

    His art-making process begins with selecting photographic images from the mass media, often of rooms or spaces that are politically or historically charged (for example, the kitchen in Saddam Hussein’s hideaway in Tikrit, Iraq).

    Trained as a sculptor, Demand then creates life-size replicas of the chosen image using colored paper and cardboard. But he strips his creations of the detail, frames of reference (and of any people) that would create a specific context; Saddam’s kitchen, for instance, could be almost anyone’s.

     

    The next step is to photograph the tableaux.

     

    Then, finally, he destroys his constructions.

     

    .

  • Exhibiting documentary photography

    Exhibiting your images
    In many cases of social documentary the natural vehicle to bring the work to the public is
    exhibition followed by or simultaneous with a book. There are a number of issues to be resolved:
    • Who will stage the exhibition?
    • Where will it be seen?
    • Who will it be seen by?
    The work itself will have been based around some decisions made before the shoot took place.
    There must be a context and there will be a relationship between the subject and context that
    you will explore. This may influence format and quality which may in turn impact on the nature
    of the equipment involved. If your images are made using a mobile phone then you’re unlikely
    to get A1 reproduction.
    The aesthetic supporting the work may justify a departure from conventional sharp prints or
    solid colour. It may be that the exhibited prints are from a professional level piece of equipment
    and yet are printed postcard-sized – again an aesthetic consideration of the photographer.
    All of these factors will support the condition of the work relative to the reality that you as
    photographer want to convey. Your work may be seen as part of an installation where the viewer
    becomes part of the experience. It may be placed exclusively online as a media-based piece. The
    book may be interactive or stand separately from the exhibition. You’ll need to look at the cost
    of bringing the work to the market – the viewers that are its intended destination – before the
    project starts.

  • Can documentary photography make a difference? How?

    This discusses non-profit – the future of the photographer/author and the delivery of images
    rights-free to give voice to a cause. Is there a connection to be made with the work of Riis and
    Hine in the first half of the twentieth century? Can a documentary photographer really make a
    difference?

  • Clare Hewitt

    Clare Hewitt is a Photographer based in Birmingham, a Senior Lecturer in Photography at The University of the West of England, Bristol, and Archivist for Vanley Burke with Art360 Foundation and The Feeney Archive Project.

    After completing a degree in Law at Oxford Brookes University, she went on to study Commercial Photography at the Arts University Bournemouth.

    Everything in the Forest is the Forest

    https://clarehewitt.co.uk/everything-in-the-forest-is-the-forest/#0

    Clare’s practice often focusses on ideas relating to loneliness, isolation and collaboration. In Everything in the forest is the forest, she has worked with a community of 12 oak trees to visually understand how they thrive through connection and communication, to inspire similar behaviour amongst human beings. Everything in the forest is theforest was selected to be exhibited at Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden, in September 2022.

    EVERYTHING IN THE FOREST IS THE FOREST

    Clare Hewitt was awarded a GRAIN Bursary in 2019 to support the development of Everything In The Forest Is The Forest, with particular focus upon the making of work in the woodland and developing the work as a collaborative project.   Clare began to look at the affects of isolation through working with a community of individuals and a woodland of oak trees.

    As well as developing 24 pinhole cameras, supported by STEAMHouse, which were located high in the oak trees in the form of bird boxes, Clare also developed methodologies to make work utilising the forest floor and the roots of trees.

    The pinhole cameras and the other various approaches were ongoing for more than 12 months.

    Although trees appear to be individual organisms above ground, scientific research shows that their complex communication methods facilitate survival, nurture and pass on wisdom, and send warnings when they are under attack. In a time when loneliness is increasing, segregation is being encouraged politically, and isolation driven through technology, there is much that can be learnt from the unity of the forest.

    Clare is now working towards a major show of the work that will tour nationally.

    Other work

    In her work in progress, Kamera, Clare exchanges letters with a prisoner on death row in Kentucky, including a landscape photograph with each letter sent. The images become part of his cell walls, and he responds with letters, stories, drawings and occasional photographs.

    Clare’s work has been selected for awards including Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward, the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain, the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition, and inclusion in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition. She was the recipient of the GRAIN Bursary Award 2019, and received a special mention in Krakow Photomonth’s ShowOFF 2022.  Her work has also been exhibited at The Palace of Westminster, Midlands Arts Centre, The Royal Albert Hall, The Royal Photographic Society and Library of Birmingham.

    Clare Hewitt is a photographer based in Birmingham.   In 2011 she was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed at The Photographers’ Gallery, and has since been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, 2013. In 2016 and 2017 she was included in the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward emerging photographer selection for Eugenie and Kamera, and the British Journal of Photography’s nationwide Portrait of Britain exhibition. Clare has been shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s IPE #161, and selected for 209 Women, a photographic portrait project that marks the centenary of women achieving the vote in the UK in 1918.

  • Awoiska van der molen

    Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city. Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom. 

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molens photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing; expressing these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

    ???

    She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places:

    Sequester (2014) “photographed throughout the whole of Europe” including the volcanic Canary Islands,contains monochromatic “landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey”.

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molen’s photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Awoiska van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing. She plays out these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books#sequester

    Blanco 

    (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees.

    “Spending long periods of time in solitude in remote landscapes, Awoiska van der Molen slowly uncovers the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities. Using her personal experience within the landscape for her creative process, she instinctively searches for a state of being in which the boundary between herself and her surroundings blur”.  

    Anna Dannemann, The Photographers’ Gallery | Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2017.

    The Living Mountain 

    (2020) is “a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit.”

    ‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’. 

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books

  • Mat Collishaw

    https://matcollishaw.com/works

  • Sanne de Wilde

    http://sannedewilde.com/

    Part 2: ‘The Island of the Colorblind’ was turned into an immersive painting-installation that is meant to make the viewer experience what it is like to be/paint colorblind. The installation takes the idea of cooperatively creating content with subject and viewer another step further. The space the viewer enters, consists of four walls covered in 4 infrared wallpapers, picturing the Micronesian island, on the inside. On the outside it is a ‘work in progress’ that grows as participants pin the painting they made on the wall outside when leaving the space. Visitors entering the room are invited to sit down. On the table in front of them they find a set of headphones, paint, water and brushes and printed pictures. As they put on the headphones a voice guides them through the painting-process while telling them the story of the colorblind community on the island Pingelap. The text of the audio used in “The Island of the Colorblind -painting installation’’ is based on the mythical story of how the islanders believe colorblindness came to the island and is mixed with quotes and questions that came up during the painting sessions with the achromats.