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

  • 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.

  • Natasha Myers

    Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University.

    She convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory in 2010 to serve as a node for collaborative interdisciplinary research on plant-based ecologies and economies. 

    Her first book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. This book maps protein modeling techniques in the context of the ongoing molecularization of life in the biosciences. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. What, it asks, does life become in their hands?

    Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds

     I like to think of art practices as forms of dissensus that can rearrange our sensoria and sense making. I think about disrupting the intention of the camera, the logic of the grid in ecology, and producing data forms that cannot be arrayed along a chart or graph, that resist quantitative analysis. Becoming Sensor is about disrupting modes of attention and forms of knowing about the more-than-human that are so entrenched in settler common sense. It’s a kind of de-schooling, an unlearning, which can help us forget everything that we thought we knew about “nature.”

    Plants also provoke rethinking the senses, sensing, and sense making. People tend to think plants can’t communicate because they have no eyes, ears, or mouths. We wanted to render our bodies available to sensing plant sentience, sensing what plants are up to, how they move and grow, and tune into their sensibilities and gestures.

    https://culanth.org/fieldsights/becoming-sensor-an-interview-with-natasha-myers

    Becoming Sensor is about disrupting modes of attention and forms of knowing about the more-than-human that are so entrenched in settler common sense. It’s a kind of de-schooling, an unlearning, which can help us forget everything that we thought we knew about “nature.”

    EVANS, Meredith. 2020. “Becoming Sensor in the Planthroposcene: An Interview with Natasha Myers.

    Art in the Planthroposcene: Refuse the aesthetics of ruin porn, which constrains our imaginaries about plants expressing their powers to sites of cultural decay and times of human extinction. Cultivate, instead, a taste for Planthroposcene porn: art that keeps people in the game by staging intimate relations among plants and people. MYERS, Natasha. October 2018 p.9.

    Becoming Sensor aims to make strange the ways that the conventional ecological sciences have not only been deployed to colonize land, but also to colonize our imaginations; how they evacuate all other ways of knowing the living world, most especially those local and Indigenous knowledges that are attuned to the sentience of lands and bodies.

    https://becomingsensor.com

    Contact

    website: https://natashamyers.wordpress.com

    Contact

  • Stephen Gill

    Overview

    https://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio/nggallery/album-1-2/Night-Procession/thumbnails

    “Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones…”

    Iain Sinclair

    Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) became interested in photography in his early childhood, thanks to his father and interest in insects and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope.

    https://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio/nggallery/album-1-2/Night-Procession/thumbnails

    Please Notify the Sun

    https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=147976830509294

    https://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio/nggallery/album/please-notify-the-sun/thumbnails

    night procession

    Ghostly images of animals caught in trailcam footage.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/night-procession-portfolio

    Birds

    Photographs of single birds in everyday locations. The birds themselves are photographed very small, so the viewer has to search through the images of urban decay to find them.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/birds-portfolio

    The Pillar

    Birds taking off, and flying around a post in a field.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/the-pillar-portfolio

    Pigeons

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/pigeon-portfolio

    Abstract

    Photographs of light filtered through colourful gloops and textures, apparently of decaying substances.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/please-notify-the-sun-portfolio

    A series of disappointments

    Scrumpled newspaper looking like animals and figures.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/a-series-of-disappointments-portfolio

  • Diane Burko

    Diane Burko’s work in painting, photography, and time-based media considers the marks that human conversations make on the landscape. A Professor Emerita of the Community College of Philadelphia with additional teaching experience at Princeton University, Burko has received multiple grants from the NEA, the Pennsylvania Arts Council, the Leeway Foundation and the Independence Foundation.

    After focusing for several decades on monumental geological formations and waterways through landscape painting, Burko has shifted in the past 20 years to analyze the impact of industrial and colonial activity on those same landscapes. Burko’s practice seeks to visually emulsify interconnected subjects– extraction, deforestation, extinction, environmental justice, indigenous genocide, ecological degradation, climate collapse– so viewers might feel their connection viscerally through the beauty of her work. While her work deals with impending climate catastrophe, rather than lingering in dystopia, it celebrates the sublimity of the landscape by honoring the intricate geological and political webs that shape the identity of a place.

    Burko has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, including shows at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Minneapolis Art Institute, National Academy of Sciences, Phillips Collection, Tang Museum, Wesleyan University Center for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies in Giverny, Bellagio, the Arctic Circle, and the Amazon Rainforest. In 2021, her solo exhibition Seeing Climate Change at the American University Museum was cited in the New York Times as one of the best shows of 2021.

    Throughout her practice, Burko especially cherishes her collaborations with researchers in the sciences. She learns the most from “bearing witness” to the land.

    https://www.dianeburko.com/about

  • Birgitte Lustenberger

    An Apparition of Memory

    https://christopheguye.com/shop/an-apparition-of-memory

    https://christopheguye.com/artists/brigitte-lustenberger/biography