Zemni Photography Blog

Author: lindamayoux

  • Toshio Shibata

    The photographs of Toshio Shibata achieve a unique harmony by focusing on the interweaving and equilibrium of natural forces with man-made objects and structures.

    The question of beauty is personal of course. And the places I photograph are actually quite ordinary. They may be found in locations where the surroundings (mountains, sea, and sky) are unquestionably beautiful. But the things I photograph are not always beautiful in themselves.

    To me, beauty is not the only reason for taking photographs. There are various reasons to click the shutter – for example form, texture, and graphical interest, depending on the situation. Whether viewers see my works are beautiful or not, I hope they will have feeling and inspire the viewer’s imaginative power…I want people to see my works freely with their own eyes, perceiving something deeper from the entire work, its movement, structure, texture.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p195.

    At the moment of taking a picture, I almost don’t see details. I concentrate on the overall structure, forms and movement, and before I lose sensation I capture this as soon as I can. In many cases, I only notice details later in the enlarged print; sometimes I only see it when someone points it out…

    In printing, I can transform detail into a strong weapon.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p196.

    I think of my subjects like still lifes, separate from their surroundings. I aim to remove the subject from history and stories related to the land. In this way, I try to create images that are open to various interpretations. By eliminated the skies that exist in our real world, I hope to eliminate emotion or sentiment. Even though there are no clouds in my photographs, I feel strong sympathy with the idea of ‘”equivalents” – the idea to be free and reset subject matter from literal interpretation.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p199.

    Using a large format camera, he eliminates most references to scale, sky, and horizon while providing crisp detail and texture. Long exposures capture water’s strength and innate grace as it spills, crashes, and glides over constructed sluices and channels. Arching paths of highways are seen carving into mountainsides and sheer cliff faces are transformed into repeating patterns as they are interlaced with human engineering.

    Works in Black and White


    https://deadbeatclubpress.com/en-gb/products/toshio-shibata-day-for-night

    As the title Day For Night implies, the book shows a progression through a sequence of night-time photographs into a set of images made in the day. But in Shibata’s camera light and darkness swap roles. Intense light sources, both indoor and outdoor, make the nocturnal scenes even stranger than they would be if enveloped in darkness. The daylight pictures depict heavy masses of constructed earth and stone in a world that is anything but bright and airy. In the pivot between day and night lies a foreboding tunnel that subsumes both the luminous and the murky.

    “The title gives another layer to the book, I knew that technique since my childhood through watching ‘Rawhide’ on TV but until now I’d never seen my own work with such an eye.”

    The title “Boundary Hunt” refers to the intersection between natural and human landscapes. Landscape fragments – nets against landfalls, piles of stones, encrusted metal, blocks of cement – are set together with large monumental dams that are made to look small, skyless crops of combinations of landscape elements like trees against rocks and waterfalls. With the occasional dwarfed person with their back to the viewer.

    This large paper back flexible book is a series of polaroid snapshots shot between 2000 and 2004 in Japan and the United States.

    “The imperfection of the Type 55 film border has always fascinated me. When I look at the resulting image, I find myself on the boundary between a photograph and an art drawing”

    from Toshio Shibata’s afterword (included in English).

    The second video (Italian) discusses the importance of minimalism and negative space in Shibata’s black and white work, and Japanese photography in general. Arguing that the use of grey-black and white gives a sense of ‘morbidezza’, a word that in Italian art combines the senses of sensitivity/fragility with perishability/impermanence/death. The book has one photo on the right hand page of each spread, apart from one foldout panorama of multiple versions of the same image towards the end. This design emphasises the meditation on fragility.

    ‘Falling Water’ is a series of black and white images of dam infrastructure across Japan and the USA.

    “About two decades ago, I had the opportunity to photograph a set of photos for the large vertical book DAM. To view my subject in vertical way gave me the impression that I was losing delicate materials in the photo. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t make the assignment in time. However, I continued photographing dams, and the result is this book.”

    Available at https://beyondwords.co.uk/falling-water

    Colour

    The book Painting reveals 16 unpublished colour photographs by Toshio Shibata, a Japanese photographer who is known for his rigorous and meticulous compositions. The representation of intimate yet spectacular landscapes — natural, and especially artificial — are at the core of Shibata’s work. In keeping with the tradition of painting that Shibata studied in his early years in 1968, this book celebrates the abstraction of beauty. It has been designed in a concertina format that can also be turned into a suspended object — just like a kakemono, a Japanese unframed scroll painting made on paper or silk and displayed as a wall hanging.

    http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/artists/toshio-shibata

    • Nihon tenkei (日本典型) / Photographs by Toshio Shibata. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1992. ISBN 4-02-256508-X.
    • With Yoshio Nakamura (中村良夫, Nakamura Yoshio). Tera: Sōkei suru daichi: Shashinshū (テラ: 創景する大地: 写真集) / Terra. Tokyo: Toshi Shuppan, 1994. ISBN 4-924831-12-3.
    • Landscape. Tucson, Ariz.: Nazraeli, 1996. ISBN 3-923922-46-9.
    • Toshio Shibata: October 11, 1997 through January 4, 1998. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997. ISBN 0-933856-51-2.
    • Shibata Toshio Visions of Japan. Kyoto: Korinsha, 1998. ISBN 4771328056.
    • Type 55. Tucson, Ariz.: Nazraeli, 2004. ISBN 1-59005-075-4.
    • Dam. Nazraeli, 2004. ISBN 1-59005-081-9.
    • Juxtapose. Kamakura, Kanagawa: Kamakura Gallery, 2005.[1]
    • Landscape 2. Portland, Ore.: Nazraeli, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59005-238-9. Color photographs.
    • Still in the Night. Koganei, Tokyo: Soh Gallery, 2008. Black and white night views, 1982–86 of expressways in Japan. Captions and text in Japanese and English.
    • Randosukēpu: Shibata Toshio (ランドスケープ: 柴田敏雄). Tokyo: Ryokō Yomiuri Shuppansha, 2008. ISBN 978-4-89752-285-2. Black and white and color photographs.
    • Contacts, Poursuite Éditions, 2013, ISBN 978-2-918960-70-6

  • Origins of the Picturesque and aesthetic consumerism

    In the second half of the eighteenth century, definitions of types of landscape or view, seen from an aesthetic or artistic point of view distinguished between:

    • the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains)
    • the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights.

    See discussion in Part 1 Beauty and the Sublime

    In between came the picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing ‘pleasing’ elements of wildness or irregularity. Together with Gothic and Celticism it became part of the romantic aesthetic of the growing numbers of leisured middle classes.  Improved road communications and travel restrictions on continental Europe saw an explosion of British domestic tourism in the 1780s and 1790s. Many of these picturesque tourists who flooded areas like the Lake District sketched or painted using Claude Glasses  or used the camera lucida.

    The word picturesque, meaning literally “in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture”, was a word used as early as 1703 (Oxford English Dictionary), and derived from an Italian term pittoresco, “in the manner of a painter”. Prime examples are French landscape painters like Claude Lorrain. Gilpin’s Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture” (p. xii) and proposed a number of “principles of picturesque beauty”. Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price (1794  An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful) and Thomas Johnes, developed Gilpin’s ideas into more comprehensive theories of the picturesque and apply these more generally to landscape design and architecture advocating more organic shapes to views and structures such as follies and grottos.

    After 1815 when Europeans were able to travel again after the wars, Italy became a favourite destination for picturesque-hunters and artists. This reinforced ideas of the ‘picturesque’ in the sense of a view that has been ‘perfectly’ composed according to compositional and perspective theories (eg leading lines, golden mean) that were key developments in art in Renaissance Italy). Grand theories of wild natural beauty gave way to the tamer and more commercialised picturesque of the mid 19th century using these broad principles. These ideas also underlie standard compositional prescriptions in many books and magazine articles on techniques of landscape photography today.

    See Posts:

    Gilpin’s theory of the picturesque

    Francis Frith’s poscards.

    and weblinks:

    Susan Sontag describes this commercialisation of the picturesque as ‘aesthetic consumerism’ (Sontag, 1977, p.24). As Malcolm Andrews (1999) remarks, there is “something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, ‘capturing’ wild scenes, and ‘fixing’ them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls”. They ignore the complex social, political and economic interests and conflicts between classes, conservation and industrialisation, commercial interests and local people, those living and working in the countryside and those who simply enjoy it for leisure or regard it as part of their heritage.

    Fay Godwin suggests that ignoring the different interests and conflicts exacerbates polarisation of interests between users of the countryside: “I am wary of picturesque pictures. I get satiated with looking at postcards in local newsagents and at the picture books that are on sale, many of which don’t bear any relation to my own experience of the place… The problem for me about these picturesque pictures, which proliferate all over the place, is that they are a very soft warm blanket of sentiment, which covers everybody’s idea about the countryside… It idealises the country in a very unreal way.”
    (Fay Godwin 1986 South Bank Show Produced and directed by Hilary Chadwick, London Weekend Television quoted Alexander 2013 p84.)

     3.1: Reflecting on the picturesque

    Going beyond the picturesque requires thinking very carefully about what one is trying to say about ‘landscape’ and why. It also raises aesthetic challenges about how to communicate this in terms of following or subverting conventional theories of composition and the likely interpretation by different viewers.

  • The Beautiful and the Sublime

    “The Sublime” radio 4 podcast In our time

    Concepts of beauty

    “Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principle aims and art as beauty’s highest calling” Beech 2009 p12

    “Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life mat be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning” Adams 1996 p25

    “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Edmund Burke 1757.

    Beauty is very much an aspect of aesthetics or more simply our ‘senses’; sensuous music and sounds, textiles and textures, pleasant flavours and smells. There are essentially two perspectives:

    1) beauty as  ‘objective’ universal within human nature. Mathematical and geometric evaluations of pieces of music, human features and pictorial composition have been used to support this view.

    2) beauty as subjective ‘taste’  ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’. As personal and/or a matter of cultural identity, what is beautiful to one group of people may be vulgar and repulsive to another.

    Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), was regarded as the antithesis of sublime since it exemplified classical beauty through its formal harmony, elegance and subtle luminosity.

    Modernist debates and Marxist critiques of beauty have made it a political matter – a bourgeois preoccupation and tool of repression.

    Dadaists Otto Dix (1891-1969) satirised images of conventional, romantic notions of beauty and fascist ideals of perfection in his politically challenging paintings made around the dawn of the Second World War.

    Conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp‘s urinal placed in gallery context.

     Concepts of the sublime

     “the sublime is associated with awe, danger and pain, with places where accidents happen, where things run beyond human control, where nature is untameable.”
    Liz Wells

     Longinus (c300AD) passage about poetry and rhetoric in ‘The True Sublime’ in Book 7 of the Peri Hypsous: For by some innate power the true sublime uplifts our souls; we are filled with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy; just as though we had ourselves produced what we had heard.

    Kant, Hegel, johann sciller.

    Etymology: 1580s, “expressing lofty ideas in an elevated manner,” from Middle French sublime (15c.), or directly from Latin sublimis “uplifted, high, borne aloft, lofty, exalted, eminent, distinguished,” possibly originally “sloping up to the lintel,” from sub “up to” + limen “lintel, threshold, sill” (see limit (n.)). The sublime (n.) “the sublime part of anything, that which is stately or imposing” is from 1670s.

    British Art and the Sublime Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn

    The English word derives from a conjunction of two Latin terms, the preposition sub, meaning below or up to and the noun limen, meaning limit, boundary or threshold. Limen is also the word for ‘lintel’, the heavy wooden or stone beam that holds the weight of a wall up above a doorway or a window. This sense of not only striving or pushing upwards but also against an overbearing force is an important connotation for the word sublime. By the seventeenth century, the word in English was in use both as an adjective and as a noun (the sublime) with many shades of meaning but invariably referring to things that are raised aloft, set high up and exalted, whether they be buildings, ideas, people, language, style or other aspects of or responses to art and nature.
    By about 1700 an additional theme started to develop, which was that the sublime in writing, nature, art or human conduct was regarded as of such exalted status that it was beyond normal experience, perhaps even beyond the reach of human understanding. In its greatness or intensity and whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, by the time of the Enlightenment, the sublime was generally regarded as beyond comprehension and beyond measurement.

    Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757 broke the idea of the sublime down into seven aspects, all of which Burke argued were discernible in the natural world and in natural phenomena:

    • Darkness – which constrains the sense of sight (primary among the five senses)
    • Obscurity – which confuses judgement
    • Privation (or deprivation) – since pain is more powerful than pleasure
    • Vastness – which is beyond comprehension
    • Magnificence – in the face of which we are in awe
    • Loudness – which overwhelms us
    • Suddenness – which shocks our sensibilities to the point of disablement
    The ‘romantic sublime’ was a particularly common theme throughout 18th and 19th century painting with religious and spiritual overtones. Sublime was a term that was used in art writing alongside adjectives such as ‘awful’, ‘dreadful’ and ‘terrible’, which today tend simply to denote ‘less than ideal’ but which in the 1700s were understood explicitly as expressions of awe, dread and terror, and were associated with the sublime as standard elements in aesthetic discourse. Sublime landscape painters, especially in the Romantic period, around 1800, tended to take subjects such as towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms, rough seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches that, if actually experienced, would be dangerous and even life-threatening.


    John Martin

    JMW Turner

    Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the sea of the fog / above the mist 1818 

    James Ward:  Gordale Scar 1812-1814

    Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) defines the sublime as not just an aspect of aesthetics, but of psychoanalysis. He related it to his idea of ‘the uncanny’ which refers to a feeling of discomfort when seeing something that is simultaneously familiar and alien. ‘Das Unheimliche’ not just in terms of location, but in terms of identity. The un-settlement, or cognitive dissonance that can result from an encounter with the uncanny is what can stir the sense of the sublime.

    So becomes something that occupies the imagination. Something that triggers a psychoactive response in an individual.

    Philip Shaw ‘Modernism and the Sublime’

    Lucio Fontana (1950s) punched holes (or buchi) through his canvases, the aim being literally to break through the surface of the work so that the viewer can perceive the space that lies beyond. Fontana regarded this gesture as a means of disclosing the unlimited space of the sublime, announcing ‘I have created an infinite dimension’. In some works slashes executed with a razor seem to erupt outwards, conveying the force of the original assault towards the viewer in a way that is both energetic and terrifying.

    Mark Rothko   Robert Rosenblum in‘The Abstract Sublime’ (1961) writes: ‘the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths’. Rothko’s biographer James Breslin writes: ‘Rothko … constantly felt the imminent danger of being ‘smothered’ by encroaching physical, social, or domestic circumstances. His new paintings created a breathing space. Yet these paintings do not seek simply to ‘transcend’ the walls of an unalterable external reality by soaring upward into either an untrammelled freedom or a vaporous mysticism. Rather, by (in Rothko’s words) pulverising the verge of dissolution – his works free us from the weight, solidity, and definition of a material existence, whose constricting pressures we still feel. Rothko combines freedom and constraint and if these paintings create ‘dramas’ with the shapes as the ‘performers’ they stage a struggle to be free.’

    “in many cultures, a confrontation of the sublime is a requisite rite of passage. Within my project, Threshold Zone (2008) I explored and attempted to rationalise my own response to both man-made and naturally formed underground spaces. I felt curious, and was determined to make some work in these spaces, but I was also acutely phobic of being underground, particularly when working alone. These spaces were generally physically unfamiliar to me, yet my mind was filled with familiar fairytales and contemporary narratives relating to the dangers that lurk below ground in the darkness. I channelled these feelings into a creative strategy, in which I placed my camera in a space referred to as ‘twilight’ or ‘threshold zone’ of a cave that receives some daylight, and the ‘dark zone’ that receives none. The resulting, highly contrasting images which are presented as back-lit light-boxes, I hope illustrate my encounter with the sublime’ Jesse Alexander 2013 p 40.

    The sublime radio 4 Podcast In our time

     Exercise 1.6 The contemporary abyss

    Since the very beginning of photography, the city has provided opportunities for the photographer: landscape and other subject matter.

  • Preconceptions about Landscape

    TASK:Abandon technique. Pick up a pencil and draw a very rough sketch of a ‘landscape’ picture or brainstorm.

    I found this quite difficult because I have been doing landscape drawings and paintings for OCA Fine Art courses (See my Landscape Art and Prints on Zemniimages). These have broadened my own preconceptions of what landscape can be to anything from figurative panoramas, through expressionist close-up to near complete abstraction. Though this diversity is not yet reflected in my photography – one of the reasons I find this course exciting.

    • what shape is the picture? 19C conventions were usually landscape format with broad vistas. But some late 19C landscapes and also earlier drawings were much more focused on particular elements in portrait format eg trees. Japanese and Chinese landscapes were also  often vertical. There can also be very long thin panoramas, or tall thin verticals also.
    • what sort of terrain is depicted? 19C conventions and also Chinese and Japanese landscapes were concerned with mountains, trees, flat fields, sky, water, river. Sometimes cottages, houses, castles. 
    • what is in it?  Are there people? 19C conventions and before generally used landscape as a backdrop to religious or historical paintings. ‘Landscape paintings’ in both Western and Asian traditions generally had one or two people or a small group of people dwarfed by the natural elements. Sometimes they are excluded altogether eg  Monet’s waterlillies and abstract landscapes like Richter. 
    • how are the subjects arranged? According to rule of thirds composition. Pleasing. But might have high, low or central horizons, and diagonals and triangular relationships or swirling circles.
    • how might you describe the ‘mood‘ of the picture. Awestruck, calm, Turner’s turbulence.  David’s mystique. Whistler’s mistiness. Colour and dramatic distortions in Hockney.

     Rosalind Krauss ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View

    Compares two versions of the same image by Timothy O’Sullivan ‘Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake (Nevada)’

    1868 photograph which later became a celebrated example of art photography for its abstract composition, and contrast between mistiness of the water and the detail of the foreground – ‘Twentieth century sensibility welcomes…as a model of the mysterious, silent beauty to which landscape photography had access during the early decades of the century’ ‘the mysterious beauty of the image is in this opulent flattening of its space’.

    1875 lithograph published in King Survey Report as a geological study. This increased the detail and thereby removed the mystery.

    She argues that different types of image are legitimate for different types of discourse. She examines the transition in painting, and a little later in photography, from early 18C landscape with feelings of depth that had been commissioned particularly to hang in houses of patrons, to flattened perspectives more suitable for displaying on larger exhibition gallery walls. ‘Transformation after 1860 into a flattened and compressed experience of space spreading laterally across the surface’. Voiding of perspective but with sharp value contrasts. Serial landscapes like Monet’s haystacks.

    But is an issue if the effects and our appreciation of a work does not relate to the original intention of the artist? eg in the case of O’Sullivan if what we value today are effects caused by the limitations of the photographic process that O’Sullivan would have changed if he could.

    Many 19C images were also intended to be viewed through stereoscopes. Shutting out surroundings to focus on the ‘view’ or sequence of ‘views’. Makers of stereo views often structured the image around a vertical marker in the fore-or middle-ground to center the space. Copyright was often with the companies, not with the photographer.

    Atget – need to understand the number, sequencing and repetition in relation to the way they were used and cataloguing systems. He himself did not give an artistic evaluation. What does this imply for our evaluation of his photography as art?

    When does a ‘view’ become a ‘landscape’?

  • 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

  • Steve McCurry

    “Look carefully, be mindfully attentive to what is in front of you“.

    In Steve McCurry: The Unguarded Moment, the photojournalist Steve McCurry notes how he was prepared to engage with a subject no matter what the time frame. He felt that knowing the area or the place meant it would eventually offer up what he was looking
    for. One of his most famous images is that of a young boy running.
    In his one-minute masterclass, McCurry talks about seizing the moment. In his book, however, he recalls staying in the same spot for more than four hours before this image was made. He felt that something would happen and was focused and ready to seize it when it did.

    interview with McCurry

  • Eugene Atget

    The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that
    was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from
    1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm
    wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply
    about the small traders, street musicians, actors, artists, ribbon sellers, etc., who were being
    squeezed out of their livings by modernisation. He also cared for the architecture of the republic,
    much of which was crumbling and in a state of squalor, just waiting to be demolished. Atget
    was motivated more by the need to re-create, preserve and document the old city’s existence
    than by a desire to create imagery for sale.
    It’s not difficult to imagine these
    works as paintings. (Compare Atget’s
    Bitumiers with Gustave Caillebotte’s The
    Floor Scrapers, for example.) You’ll find
    more Atget images in the Bridgeman
    Art Library. Follow the link on the OCA
    student website. Some of Atget’s work
    showed surrealist elements. Look at his
    famous ‘corset shop’ photograph, for
    example.
    Project Photography as art
    Water Lilies Eugène Atget. Not Paris this time, but recognisably
    in a fine art tradition i.e. Monet.
    Bitumiers

  • Frank Newbould

     

    One of the most striking campaigns in relation to the developing mythology of the British rural landscape was a series of posters painted during 1942 by Frank Newbould (1887–1951).The resemblance between Newbould’s posters and travel advertising of the time is also worth noting. Substituting strap lines encouraging would be holidaymakers to explore their country with a command to defend it was a novel strategy.

  • Paul Smith

    website

    Much of Smith’s work is an exploration of different aspects of masculinity and the merging of fantasy and reality, often using multiple self-portraits.

    In Artist Rifles he attempts to confront his own reasoning for joining the army. The multiple self-portraits emphasise the effect of the military structure on a person’s identity as it is subsumed into the unit, to become as it were, brothers in arms. The fantasy element draws on drama of childhood games and virtual reality of computer war games. Similar themes of male fantasy are found also in the later series on football ‘Robbie Williams’.

    Make My Night is ostensibly a record of a very laddish night out. In each meticulously researched scene he combines multiple self-portraits as the anonymous everyman but this time is more overtly the narrator as well as the protagonist of a frequently observed ritual. With a wry humour he depicts a familiar world governed by group approval and time honoured rites, a world of bravado and sexual tension vies with drunken frivolity and a certain vulnerability to occlude any notion of a new masculinity. He reproduces the variable quality that machine printing of snapshots taken with a standard point and shoot camera generate in the hands of revellers; bleached out faces, over cropped subject matter or the slight blur of the finger over the lens, the hallmarks of an impromptu celebration.

    ‘This is not pornographic’ is a statement not just a title.The bodily distortions and violent nature of some of the images is deliberately intended to have a rebarbative effect rather than appear erotic. This is probably most evident in the shaving shot; where the cut throat razor evokes the fear of castration and the blended bodies lose all their sexual function. Within other images in this series Paul observes the passivity of a relationship with pornography, that of the supine voyeur. The male figure left masturbating in his chair is seen as the weaker participant in the image.

    In ‘Mr Smith’ his self-portraits have a scientific precision that calls to mind nineteenth-century studies of physiognomy. In these intricate studies of celebrity, using existing visual references from popular culture, the artist’s skin becomes elastic, taking on the iconic facial features of the stars. From behind his own skin emerge the faces of some of the most iconic and celebrated men of our time including Elvis, Andy Warhol, David Beckham and Robbie Williams.In the duality of these faces, which are at once celebrity and something/someone else, we begin to realise that what we are encountering is not perhaps that which we initially perceived.

    The series ‘Impact’ is a set of photographic images of bullet shrapnel that has derived from criminal activity. The bullets have been gathered by police forensic teams in a variety of ways ranging from being extracted during autopsies or removed from a bulletproof vest after impact. Looking at these images, the viewer is reminded of the broader context of gun crime, not through reports of bloody violence but rather in the textures and details that constitute the individual narratives locked away within these images.

  • Marcus Bleasdale

    Marcus Bleasdale (born 1968) is a photojournalist, born in the UK to an Irish family. He spent over eight years covering the brutal conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and has worked in many other places. Much of his work is linked to fundraising for aid and human rights agencies and there is often a link to ways t donate. His videos are extremely powerful and also discuss what people can do to change the situations the are seeing.

    His images are in both black and white and colour and he also does video. They get their power because he is well informed about what he is shooting and knows why he wants hat shot and also has access to people and situations most outsiders would not. But he also has an extraordinary sense of composition and tone. Some of his images at composited (no examples available for download) but I generally find these less powerful.

    http://www.marcusbleasdale.com/sources/ipad/index.php#home

    Rape of a Nation.    http://mediastorm.com/publication/rape-of-a-nation