Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Natasha Myers

Category: 5: Major Project

  • 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

  • Rinko Kawauchi

    Rinko Kawauchi

  • Print Quotes

    NOTE: To be completed. I want to take a practical course on digital printing with the Camera Club and study this in depth.

    If commercial print companies are used see image guidelines for each lab. Images need to be either JPEG or TIFF), with whatever colour profile is required by the printer (usually Adobe 1998 RGB or sRGB) at the specified resolution (usually 300 dpi) and at the exact dimensions required.

    The Task

    It’s not a requirement to submit prints for formal assessment, so you may choose to submit your work on the self-directed project in a different format, such as a book or a multi-media piece. However for the purposes of this exercise please imagine that you’re going to submit prints.
    1. Search the internet for different companies offering inkjet and C-type printing. Compile three quotes for getting your work professionally printed, with a variety of different options such as C-type or inkjet, for portfolio review. (The pictures don’t need to be framed or mounted.) Prices will be available on the companies’ websites. This kind of information is useful to inform your project proposal.
    2. Imagine you will order from one of these companies. Prepare one image file exactly as specified by the printers. Please note that you don’t actually need to have your work printed professionally in order to complete this exercise.
    3. Write a brief entry in your learning log, reflecting on whether or not you feel that an inkjet can be treated as a ‘photograph’.

    Different labs providing C-type printing use different machines and different brands of papers that will produce subtly different results and varying levels of quality. Some companies often offer postal services, such as sending test strips for you to assess, so you can instruct their technicians to make any adjustments to the exposure or colour balance before making the final print. They will then store the adjusted file for any future editions.

    Lower-end C-types can also be ordered online at a greatly reduced cost with fast turnaround times.

     

  • Inkjet printing

    Inkjet printers use an array of different colours and tones of ink that are applied onto specially coated paper. Inkjet prints can be produced on inexpensive domestic printers to make prints up to A4 size, A3+ printers can be bought from eg Canon and Epson for slightly more. Costly ‘large format’ printers that can produce prints up to 1.6 metres wide and potentially many metres long (as long as the roll of paper that the printer can accommodate).

    Inkjet prints have had a negative reputation compared to traditional C-type prints for two main reasons. Firstly, cheap inkjet prints are more prone to fading by exposure to daylight – but some manufacturers now claim that their products can last at least as long (around 40 years). Secondly, technically they are not ‘photographic’ [ie light-writing] prints but prints of photographic images. This means many serious collectors may not buy inkjet prints.

    As well as making slightly larger sized prints, inkjet prints can offer greater black and white contrast and more vivid colour saturation. They also allow for printing on a wider range of paper types.

    Many established photographers make and sell archival quality inkjet prints (calling them giclee, Iris or archival pigment prints) printed on fine art papers.

    See:

    Mari Mahr website has monochrome archival pigment prints alongside more traditional black and white photographic prints.

    Guy Tillim (documentary photogtapher from South Africa. Does not have his own website – see eg https://www.lensculture.com/articles/guy-tillim-documentary-in-a-new-context#slideshow but this does not give details of printing process.

    John Riddy website

    Neeta Madahar  Sustenance series (2006).

    Types of printer

    Most cheap inkjet printers can make useful ‘work prints’, soft proofs, and important learning log material (if you’re keeping a physical log). Investing in a high-end inkjet printer is only worthwhile if you intend to make quite a lot of prints regularly and put significant time into learning how to get the best performance from it. Ink cartridges are expensive, particularly quality professional inks, and if the photographic printer is not used frequently (i.e. weekly), the print heads can become clogged, leaving unsightly ‘banding’ on the image. Regular cleaning can prevent this, although it does waste ink. Some printers can be modified to accept what is known as a ‘continuous ink feed’ instead of cartridges, which will reduce ink costs considerably.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeqqSffcoQc

    Preparation of the Print

    See also colour management

    Papers

    Papers vary in surface (i.e. gloss, semigloss/ lustre, matt), rag content, colour and texture. Different paper stocks vary in how they respond to the printer’s ink, and will absorb ink in different quantities. Different printer profiles need to be set in the printing software for different types of paper to avoid unwanted colour casts and get the right level of contrast.

    Giclee, archival pigment or Iris prints

    Giclée is the name given to inkjets by professional printers and artists, although this term is unregulated. The term ‘Giclée’, a neologism coined by French printmaker Jack Duganne, is derived from the French verb ‘gicler’, which literally translates as ‘to squirt’ or ‘to spray’ and describes the way that the printer nozzle applies the inks – or pigment inks – to the paper. Duganne chose the term as he was looking for a word which would not have the negative connotations then associated with the terms ‘inkjet’ which had happened due to fading occurring in early prints.

    While the term ‘Giclée’ originally referred to fine art prints created on IRIS printers (large format colour inkjet printers which became prevalent in the 1980’s) the term ‘Giclée’ has since been used in a wider sense to describe any prints made using an inkjet process. These prints are also often known as ‘pigment prints’ because of the inks (which contains miniature particles of colour, or pigment, suspended in a neutral carrier liquid) that are laid down by a digital printer. We use both ‘Giclée print’ and ‘Pigment print’ to describe an archival grade inkjet print produced directly to fine art paper.

    Anyone claiming to produce giclée prints should be using the best quality archival inks and equally high quality paper, with professional colour calibration of the print to the monitor.

    For more video tutorials on Inkjet printing and up-to-date reviews of different printers see: See You Tube videos

  • The Gallery Context

    Traditionally the photograph has been considered in terms of a print, and the high point of recognition for a photographer being an exhibition of their prints in a Fine Art Gallery. Galleries may present very different types of space in terms of lighting conditions, amounts and shape of space and general ‘feel’. But a tendency has been to galleries presenting white ‘neutral’ space. However the apparent ‘neutrality’ of this space needs to be questioned in terms of the implicit meanings this imposes on the image and the presumed ’empty mind’ of the viewer.

    I would argue that a more interesting approach would be to acknowledge the importance of both context and the viewer’s life experience in giving meaning to the image, as valuable and integral parts of the art itself. This could mean displaying the same image in different conditions and explicitly promoting discussion of the ways that different life perspectives and everyday experiences of different viewers affect the meanings attributed. This could in turn lead photographers to discover ever more interesting perspectives and innovative approaches to their own work.

    For the moment I do not have the equipment or skills to produce for gallery exhibition.

     5.1 The Origins of the White Cube

  • Print on Demand

     

     

     

    Photobooks

     

     

    Whether or not you intend to produce a book to present your photographs for Assignment
    Five, suppose for this exercise that you will. During this exercise you’ll familiarise yourself
    with a print-on-demand application and experiment with a book design.You don’t need to place an order for the book for this exercise.

    If you don’t already have one, set up an account with a print-on-demand service, such as
    Blurb. (You don’t have to use Blurb, but whichever company you use must offer the option
    of saving your book layout draft as a pdf document.) You’ll need to download Blurb’s Booksmart software from their site. This application is fairly intuitive.

    Import the photos you’ve made so far for Assignment Five into the new project.
    Experiment with layout, text, titles and captions; when you’re satisfied with a draft, save it
    as a pdf. If you’re using Blurb the pdf will be watermarked with their logo but this doesn’t
    matter. If you’re keeping your learning log online, link this document into a blog post. If
    you’re keeping a hard copy log, print the pdf on regular printer paper.

    Make some brief notes about how you found working with the software and briefly evaluate
    your rough book design, describing any particular design choices and noting any influences
    in terms of other books that inspired you.

    If you’re thinking about producing a book for your self-directed project, you may want to
    email the pdf or send a link to it to your tutor for their comments.

  • On-line Exhibitions

    Task
    An online audio-visual piece doesn’t necessarily have to be the piece of art in itself, but may simply be part of the ‘presence’ of the work, put together to promote it, possibly to coincide with an exhibition or publication, or to help generate interest more speculatively. 

    A post by Sharon Boothroyd on WeAreOCA discusses a piece of work that is particularly relevant both to our discussions on contemporary landscape photography and the slideshow format. The sequence in question was designed to be the exhibition. Read the post and if you have any comments of your own, add them and include a link in your learning log.

    Looking at the Land: 21st Century American Views.

    This is a photo slideshow without sound curated for Flakphoto by Andy Adams. See discussion in Post by Sharon Boothroyd on WeAreOCA and student comments.

    This slideshow actually left me completely cold. Maybe I missed something here. I was unsure why any of these images had been chosen compared to the on-line collections of images of American photographers I looked at in Part 2 of this course: Landscape as a Journey, Nor could I understand why they were sequenced the way they were. The display as photos confirmed this sense.

    I found many other on-line slideshows that I consider more effective in their impact, see my post:

    Time-based audio-visual presentations

     

  • Photobooks: Inspiration

    Types of Photobook

    Surveys and catalogues
    • catalogues for exhibitions
    • ‘Survey’ publications draw together a collection of individual images or a group of practitioners working in a similar area. Some surveys seem more didactic or directed at the art market, such as 50 Photographers You Should Know (2008), Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (2009), reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow (2005) and reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today (2010).
    Monographs and artists’ books Monographs are mass-produced (relatively speaking), but often they are the primary context for the photographic work. A monograph published to coincide with an exhibition of an artist’s work may  draw together several different bodies of work, but it will be devoted to one practitioner alone. An artist’s book may be produced in editions, but is generally more individual in terms of its design, the materials used and the printing technique or finish. Some may be printed, stencilled, stitched and embossed by the maker themselves. Others will be a collaboration with a professional bookbinder and a graphic designer. Early photobooks Many of these were topographic images for travel and tourism.
    • Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • Maxime Du Camp (1822–94)
    • Auguste Salzmann (1824–72)
    • Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819–96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.
    Some developed more innovative design
    • Soviet and Fascist propaganda books with novel design features, such as fold-out pages that extend the dimensions of an image

    Inspiration

    I have a large collection, but not had time to look through or properly review apart from getting some layout ideas.

    Colour

    • Martin Parr: documentary photographer. Some of his works have been mass produced and re-printed (e.g. The Last Resort, 1986 and 1998); others have been limited editions or even more exclusive artist’s books such as Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo, 2001. See: www.martinparr.com/books/. Layout in Last Resort has one, or very occasionally two, large images per spread, with white margin around and no border. This focuses attention on the content of the socially complex saturated colour images. There is a short introductory text at the beginning.
    • Paul Seawright : Invisible Cities a very large hardback book of colour images. Some images are full bleed crossing the whole spread, sometimes with some space to one side or top/bottom. Other spreads have only one half page image generally placed full bleed to one corner with the rest of the spread as white space. There is a text introduction to African cities at the beginning.
    • Urbex ‘Beauty in Decay’ this has beautiful limited palette images . The book is divided into chapters with some introductory text. But the book is mostly large images with  whitespace. Some images and spreads are on black background. A few text passages are on beige background. Some have black or white boders and vignettes to increase contrast.

    Black and white

    • Daido Moriyama  Tales of Tono – small portrait format book of very high contrast black and white images. Full bleed in landscape across a double spread on black background. This makes the abstract flashes of white shapes in the often barely readable images standout. Text is reserved for a narrative section at the end. I like the moodiness of this book and all the images demand close attention in themselves, as well as producing an overall edgy impression as a apparently random narrative.
    • Algirdas Seskus ‘Love Lyrics’ Lithuanian 149 contrasty documentary Black and White images in landscape format. No text except the number of each photo and date. One or two large images per spread. No border with generous white margin.
    • Arunas Baltenas  Vilnius  2007 images from 1987. Small misty sepia images one per spread with no border and lots of white space. Delicate handwritten titles and date. One page introduction in English and Lithuanian at the beginning. No other text. I find the delicate nostalgia of this book really beautiful.
    • Henri Cartier Bresson in India  Thames and Hudson. 1987 with forward by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. One large black and white photo per page with short caption. Black border on white paper. Occasionally one large and one small. The images themselves are quite low contrast. The black border makes the eye focus inwards.
    At the Brighton Photography Biennial I saw a lot of interesting innovative designs, but did not have time to note all the details.
    • David Galjaard Concresco. A book about Albania. Has a brown opening cover with short explanatory text. Then  double page spreads with small white text insert pages. For this and other work see his website: http://www.davidgaljaard.nl
    • Dara McGrath ‘Deconstructing the Maze’  This has two coloured photographs on one side and page of text on the other. The strength here is in the photos. For this and other work see his website http://www.daramcgrath.com/index.html
    • 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
    • Irene Siragusa ‘Six weeks in Dublin’.   Lots of photos of spattered blood. Small juxtaposed rectangular images. website
    Unknown author/title glimpsed over other peoples’ shoulders:
    • Book with glued images folded.
    • Aids (author???).  Small and simple brown cover. Photos of slits one on a page opposite a blank page.

     Sources and overviews

    • The Photobook: A History, Volumes I,  ll and III Gerry Badger and Martin Parr
    • The Chinese Photobook: Martin Parr and Wassink Lundgren from the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition
    • Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
    • Channels on YouTube and Vimeo with videos of certain books;
    • Tate video about William Klein which shows his assistant with one of Klein’s early maquettes:
    •  José Navarro discussing OCA students’ photobooks
    OCA Student links Joe Wright

    Assignment 5: Perspectives on Kyrgyztstan

    ————————————-

    Photobooks offer a tactile one-to-one viewing experience for the reader were they control the place and time.  Photographer/designer can give detailed narrative guidance through the images by linear sequencing and juxtaposition in page layout. At the same time, the reader is freer to override this design and establish their own viewing experience.

    !! Rough notes and links. !! To be significantly updated for assessment with detailed

    Photobook Key Inspiration

    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/martin-parr
    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/alec-soth

    !! Sketchbook analysis of page design and layout of key sources of inspiration. bearing in mind copyright issues.

    Photobook History

    Early photobooks

    Many of these were topographic images for travel and tourism.

    • Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • Maxime Du Camp (1822–94)
    • Auguste Salzmann (1824–72)
    • Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819–96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.

    Some developed more innovative design

    • Soviet and Fascist propaganda books with novel design features, such as fold-out pages that extend the dimensions of an image
    • Japanese Photobooks
    Colour
    • Martin Parr: documentary photographer. Some of his works have been mass produced and re-printed (e.g. The Last Resort, 1986 and 1998); others have been limited editions or even more exclusive artist’s books such as Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo, 2001. See: www.martinparr.com/books/. Layout in Last Resort has one, or very occasionally two, large images per spread, with white margin around and no border. This focuses attention on the content of the socially complex saturated colour images. There is a short introductory text at the beginning.
    • Paul Seawright : Invisible Cities a very large hardback book of colour images. Some images are full bleed crossing the whole spread, sometimes with some space to one side or top/bottom. Other spreads have only one half page image generally placed full bleed to one corner with the rest of the spread as white space. There is a text introduction to African cities at the beginning.
    • Urbex ‘Beauty in Decay’ this has beautiful limited palette images . The book is divided into chapters with some introductory text. But the book is mostly large images with  whitespace. Some images and spreads are on black background. A few text passages are on beige background. Some have black or white boders and vignettes to increase contrast.
    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/martin-parr
    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/urbex
    Black and white
    • Daido Moriyama  Tales of Tono – small portrait format book of very high contrast black and white images. Full bleed in landscape across a double spread on black background. This makes the abstract flashes of white shapes in the often barely readable images standout. Text is reserved for a narrative section at the end. I like the moodiness of this book and all the images demand close attention in themselves, as well as producing an overall edgy impression as a apparently random narrative.
    • Algirdas Seskus ‘Love Lyrics’ Lithuanian 149 contrasty documentary Black and White images in landscape format. No text except the number of each photo and date. One or two large images per spread. No border with generous white margin.
    • Arunas Baltenas  Vilnius  2007 images from 1987. Small misty sepia images one per spread with no border and lots of white space. Delicate handwritten titles and date. One page introduction in English and Lithuanian at the beginning. No other text. I find the delicate nostalgia of this book really beautiful.
    • Henri Cartier Bresson in India  Thames and Hudson. 1987 with forward by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. One large black and white photo per page with short caption. Black border on white paper. Occasionally one large and one small. The images themselves are quite low contrast. The black border makes the eye focus inwards.

    !! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.

    Contemporary Photobooks

    At the Brighton Photography Biennial 2016 I saw a lot of interesting innovative designs:

    • David Galjaard Concresco. A book about Albania. Has a brown opening cover with short explanatory text. Then  double page spreads with small white text insert pages. For this and other work see his website: http://www.davidgaljaard.nl
    • Dara McGrath ‘Deconstructing the Maze’  This has two coloured photographs on one side and page of text on the other. The strength here is in the photos. For this and other work see his website http://www.daramcgrath.com/index.html
    • 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
    • Irene Siragusa ‘Six weeks in Dublin’.   Lots of photos of spattered blood. Small juxtaposed rectangular images. website

    Unknown author/title glimpsed over other peoples’ shoulders:

    • Book with glued images folded.
    • Aids (author???).  Small and simple brown cover. Photos of slits one on a page opposite a blank page.

    !! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.

    Photobook How To

    https://photography.zemniimages.info/photobooks-publishing/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJCLNKoZ8gE

    https://youtu.be/OxlgFLIfOSE

     Sources and overviews

    To do a proper annotated bibliography of a selection of the many photobooks I have in my library. Linked to the annotated sketchbook analysis.

    • The Photobook: A History, Volumes I,  ll and III Gerry Badger and Martin Parr
    • The Chinese Photobook: Martin Parr and Wassink Lundgren from the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition
    • Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
    • Channels on YouTube and Vimeo with videos of certain books;
    • Tate video about William Klein which shows his assistant with one of Klein’s early maquettes:
    •  José Navarro discussing OCA students’ photobooks

  • What are Artist’s Statements?

    An artist’s statement is sometimes referred to as a ‘statement of intent’. It can be seen as a marketing device, or simply as a means of describing practitioners’ interests. They:

    • vary in terms of their length and the details they cover.
    • may relate to a specific body of work or it may talk about practice more generally. probably contains information about any training (art college or other qualifications or experience relevant to their practice) and prizes, grants or awards that the artist has won, which are relevant to their practice. But is not the same thing as an artist’s CV, which lists any training, qualifications, awards, exhibitions and publications in much the same way as a conventional résumé.
    • huge variety in the style and format of artists’ statements; some will sound convoluted and esoteric and others will be more down to earth.

    The Artist Statement (UCA)

    A good artist statement will support your professional practice, for example:

    • Giving brief information to support an exhibition or catalogue
    • Submitting a proposal
    • Applying for a grant

    It should be:

    • Concise
    • Effective in communicating the details you wish to emphasize
    • Written in the first person
    • Written primarily in the present tense

    It should be adaptable in order to take into account:

    • Your audience
    • Your purpose or motivation for writing it

    It might contain information on:

    What your motivation is for the work you do:

    • What issues are you exploring and why?
    • What concepts, themes or convictions underpin your work?
    • How do your life experiences influence your work
    • How does your personality influence your work?
    • How have your ideas developed?

    The techniques and materials you use:

    •  How and why did you choose them?
    • What scale do you work in?
    • Do you have a particular process of working?
    • Do you intend to explore other techniques or materials?

    Your background:

    • Are you a student or a practicing artist?
    • Details of your educational history if you feel it appropriate
    • Have you contributed to any prestigious shows or events?

    How you contextualise your work:

    • Where do you feel you fit into the Contemporary Art World?
    • Does your work challenge the work of others?
    • Have you appropriated or referred to the work of others?
    • Your goals and aspirations and to what extent you have realised them
    • Personal reflections on your work

    Artists statements from other photographers

    Many photographers do not have artists’ statements on websites. They have a fairly straight biography, then either let the images speak for themselves, or put short text for each series of images and/or include interviews and articles where they talk about their aims and methods in some depth.

    Michael Tsegaye: – has a very short and succinct artist’s statement. Then informative overviews of his different portfolios. See post: Michael Tsegaye rough notes

    Nii Obodai – a biography and ‘meaning’ statement. All in the third person – I think this makes things less direct and more flowery. See post: Nii Obodai rough notes

    Mathua Mateka – quite a long artists’ statement with a lot of personal information that may or may not be relevant to understanding his photography. See post: Mathua Mateka rough notes.

    Emeka Okerere – another long one in third person. See post: Emeka Okerere rough notes.

    Paul Shambroom : very short, in 3rd person and mostly about his achievements rather than what he is trying to do. More of a biography.

    Alec Soth – example of understatement (in the knowledge that he is already famous!) Nothing about his approach or underlying aims.

    Jorma Puranen’s introduction to Imaginary Homecoming  cited in the coursebook is no longer at the link given. The definition of landscape:

    “A landscape is speechless. Day by day, its only idiom is the sensory
    experience afforded by the biological reality, the weather conditions, and the actions that take place in the environment. However, we can also assume that a landscape has another dimension: the potential but invisible field of possibilities nourished by everyday perceptions, lived experiences, different histories, narratives and fantasies. In fact, any understanding of landscape entails a succession of distinct moments and different points of view. The layeredness of landscape, in other words, forms part of our own projection. Every landscape is also a mental landscape.” (Jorma Puranen,1999, Foreword to Imaginary Homecoming, Oulu: Pohjoinen)

     

    5.6 My Own Artist’s Statement