Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Clare Hewitt

Category: 4: Collaboration

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Birgitte Lustenberger

    An Apparition of Memory

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

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

  • Nick Knight

    https://www.nickknight.com/press/inewsrfmg

    And it puts me directly in contact with the very large audiences of Weibo, Twitter, Facebook, SHOWstudio, Tumblr, and Instagram. I am getting through to them all instantly, and they, in turn, have all elected to see my photographs. It’s their feedback that makes it so exciting.

    I find working with Instagram because of its spontaneity, so refreshing. Sometimes I want to work in a very considered and meticulous way but sometimes I don’t and Instagram affords me that little bit of personal freedom. I am unencumbered. It’s reignited a love for photography.

    “Photography is often blamed, unfairly and incorrectly, in my opinion,” he says. “People are so distrustful of Photoshop, as if it’s some way of making people feel bad, that they’re being lied to. Even the word manipulation is negative, it’s one of the words that Kanye would cross out in the dictionary when he was taking out the bad words.  

    “Photography is a fantasy, there is no reality. So, the idea that photography, or image making, is in any way an abstract version of truth, is false. Photographers who are really good at their craft manipulate everything, because of course they do. All the great painters manipulate with their vision because you don’t want to see reality from me – you want to see what I see that you can’t see. That’s what makes it exciting.”

    “Knight is at the forefront of democratising photography and re-establishing its place in our social-media saturated lives.”

    Flora

    Roses from my Garden

    Nick Knight: Roses from my Garden
    https://www.nickknight.com/press/nick-knight-flora

    “If you step back and look at these images they’re very reminiscent of the Dutch flower painters of the 17th century, there’s a romance to them: they’re soft and gentle.

    “But if you stand close to them, you can inspect the structure the AI has invented and see they’re actually quite mechanical, brutal and tough. And I love that.

    i News – Rhiannon Williams (2021)

    Nick Knight cuts selected roses straight from his garden and arranges them specifically, using only daylight to illuminate his subject. Photographed on an iPhone, the digital images are enlarged and filtered through software that uses AI to infill the space between pixels. What appears at first glance to be a historical approach to flower photography is actually at the very cutting edge of imaging technology.

    Uses iPhone to photograph roses from his garden on his kitchen table. “He applies an Instagram filter (either Sierra or Hudson for the initiated, though he also dabbles with Ludwig) and plays around with colour and contrast before running the image through Topaz Labs, AI photography software that sharpens unfocused areas, and spending hours poring over the composite picture with his retoucher Mark.

  • Olivia Parker

    https://www.oliviaparker.com

    Olivia Parker (born 1941) is a Manchester-by-the-Sea-based American still-life photographer.

  • Mapping and Other Technologies

    A ‘map’ isn’t necessarily something used to navigate through unfamiliar territory; it’s also a visual ordering of features and information…a means of making sense of our physical surroundings in new ways. Alexander 2013 p67

    Liz Nicol the Rubber Band Project (1997)

    Ian Brown’s series Walking the Land (2007)

    Other artists and photographers who layer numerous different photographs include Idris Khan, Jon Spencer and Isidro Ramirez.

    Creative possibilities  have been opened up by digital technologies like:

    •  Google Earth (2005): allows users to make a journey to literally anywhere in the world from the comfort of their computer, scrolling around sites of interest from the vantage point of Google’s satellite images.
    • Google Street View (2007): is limited in terms of its global coverage, but provides a more intimate, street-level view of our landscape.

    ‘Stay-at-home street photographers’ who have used these images – trawling through endless Street View images, framing and selecting these digital views as their own photographs – as a form of ‘appropriation’ art include:

     Project 2.4: Is appropriation appropriate?

  • Authorship and Collaboration

    Authorship and Collaboration

    Task

    Whether working directly with another photographer or practitioner in the creative process,
    drawing upon the work or materials of others can offer new ways of thinking and new
    opportunities for creative output. Collaboration is also integral to operating effectively in
    professional arenas: you’ll need to utilise expertise that, for whatever reason, may not be
    readily accessible to you. Developing a positive approach to collaboration will lead to more
    opportunities and potentially make your practice more engaging.

    Reflect on your creative practice – your photography – and also maybe aspects of your life
    beyond or outside of this:

    • How have you allowed the input of others to shape your photographic practice?
    • What is your attitude towards drawing from the ideas of other people, or their work?
    • How do you discern between ‘collaboration’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘plagiarism’?

    “…we all more or less take the same photographs…But we don’t learn that at school and our parents don’t tell us, so there must be some kind of unspoken or unconscious code, of how we want to depict our lives, or our societies and this is not very well researched. We all contribute to that, there is not much originality and that’s also true for most of the photography we find in the art world. You find the same repetitive patterns there, they are just more consciously elaborated.”

    Joachim Schmid in CASPER, 2013 quoted Coursse material.

    “While the intent of photographing a sunset maybe to capture something ephemeral or to assert an individual subjective point of view – the result is quite the opposite – through the technology of our common camera we experience the power of millions of synoptic views, all shared the same way, at the same moment. To claim individual authorship while photographing a sunset is to disengage from this collective practise and therefore negate a large part of why capturing a sunset is so irresistible in the first place.”

    Penelope Umbrico in ALEXANDER, 2015: 61
    SunriseSunset_Draft1Download
    7.14am
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    7.22 am
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    12.42 pm
    17.54 pm
    16.13pm

    Project Process

    Keith Mason’s Proposal

    Place from Sunrise to Sunset – the differences between us (geography and life) and the similarities.

    Concept – take pictures of the sunrise and sunset on a particular day this week, plus three during middle of the day (say 11am, 1pm, 4pm).  Your shots could be from the same location (front door step) or varied. The result could be a visual time line of participants / group, or layering the photos into a collage or similar.

    My original idea: What colour is autumn?

    I would like to collaborate with people interested in collectively developing a series of alternative ‘essence of autumn’ images that are less stereotypical and more creative and meaningful for the 21st century than the ones we normally see.

    In Europe this month is now technically in autumn. But in UK there is abnormally warm weather over much of the country. What I see in my garden and walks by the river ranges from remnants of bright green to dull fading greens of dying grass, grey whites and browns of dried seed heads and white purple-veined convolvulus flowers spreading in dark green hedge shadows. The occasional yellow flowerhead, faded red poppy and blue cornflower. There are only occasional splashes of the traditional autumn oranges and reds of turning leaves that I assume will at some point in the near future burst to fill the conventionally picturesque autumn scene, Though actually what I see are mostly terminally shrivelled rusty browns of diseased horse chestnut trees.  I am anticipating later the melancholy end-of-year dark browns and purples of decaying wet leaves, punctuated with white grey mushrooms and fungus.

    I apologise for the late night lyricism. But I have many questions, for example:

    • What is colour anyway, given that we all perceive things rather differently? What does the camera capture when we talk of colour? How ‘accurate’ can photography be? and, given the variations in individual perception, what do we mean by ‘accurate’ amyway?
    •  What are the geographical differences in ’objective colours of autumn’? Are autumn colours different in urban areas and cities than in rural areas? In other regions of the Northern hemisphere? In the Southern hemisphere Spring?
    • How is ‘objective’ colour linked to our subjective emotional associations? How do different colours convey different moods associated with autumn? How does this vary between cultures? 
    • How does climate change and what we actually see this year affect our conception of ‘autumn colours’?

    These are only my initial late night thoughts. Other people may have very different conceptions and questions to shape the discussion. On a practical manageability level in the timeframe, photographs could be existing photographs, new images through the window of the street or garden, a walk around where you live or further afield, objects brought home, something more abstract etc etc etc etc.

    Collaboration process

    I proposed my original idea because it was very relevant for my landscape documentary work – raising issues about ‘photographic truth’:

    • how do concepts of ‘autumn’ relate to ‘reality’ and what is an ‘autumn picture’ compared to a picture ‘taken in the autumn months’
    • what might be meant by ‘accuracy’ of colours in digital capture and digital manipulation
    • how might concepts of autumn be changing as a result of climate change
    • how might different collaborators and viewers respond to the same concepts and issue.

    My idea got 2 likes, but no direct requests to collaborate.

    So I chose Keith Mason’s idea because it would enable me to ask similar conceptual and practical questions about sunrise and sunset. One of my main priorities at this stage of the course was to go back to basics to improve my photography technique. Before then getting back to more familiar territory of visual communication through experimenting with different digital styles, narrative construction and book design.

    Communications and organisation on Teams proved a bit difficult because of a combination of technical learning curve, lack of clear guidelines on exactly what to do (eg how to form a ‘group’, and differing time schedules of other work. All likely to be issues at the beginning of in other new collaborative processes, but made especially difficult because of the very short timeline to make decisions. Initially a third person asked to join our group, but left because they wanted to get on immediately and Keith was busy. So Keith and I made a group of 2 people and had a chat on Teams.

    Photographic process

    I also needed to start immediately – partly because I wanted to work when the weather forecast was sunny and therefore more conventionally ‘sunrise/sunset’ than the rest of the grey and rainy week.

    I woke up just before it got light and rushed down the road to catch the sun, but then it was difficult to know with the clouds exactly when sunrise started and ended. Then similarly with the cloudy sunset, I just stayed till I got too cold. But waiting around for a sunset that never really happened was a good excuse to just hang around, looking as if I had purpose, but enabling ‘participant observation’ ie eavesdrop on all sorts of random conversations, watching how people enjoyed their evening and get greater spontaneous understanding of how people felt about the location and the time of day.

    I don’t think I got any stunning images. I was still getting to grips with a new camera, so the project was really good to experiment with settings in very different lighting conditions. The sunrise also is the time along the river when it is crowded with joggers and rowers with their accompanying minders on bikes. So it was also good practice in making instant decisions on how to balance the shutter speed, aperture and ISO to get different effects. Then thinking how I can ‘improve’ through minimal processing in Lightroom.

    Technical Issues and questions

    Shot on Canon R5 with 28 – 105mm Zoom with autofocus and image stabiliser

    The sunrise and sunset images were shot at 1250 – 1600 ISO at -1EV in order to expose for sunlight highlights and get enough shutter speed to get reasonably sharp movement. Tripod would have not achieved this. These images were pretty noisy so I used Lightroom Denoise AI. Is there any way I can get better sunrise and sunset shots? Am I missing something obvious?

    In order to develop the book we worked on Teams, which proved pretty smooth to combine text chat and video calls to both pc and iPhone.

    We each sent an initial selection of images. I did an initial design mock-up, we then reviewed our selection of images to make a narrative.

    I think this was probably easier because there were only two of us. It might well be much more complex with more people.

    https://photography.zemniimages.info/theory-genre-concept/appropriation-and-authorship/