Martha Rosler photos and photomontage to give you some ideas:
http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/photo/index.html
Category: To Do
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Martha Rosler
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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. -
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 -
Paul Smith
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.
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Brassai
The flâneur archetype takes different forms but can easily be identified in the figure of Brassaï (1899–1984) who embodies Rebecca Solnit’s description of the flâneur as “… the image of an observant and solitary man strolling about Paris” (Solnit, 2001, p.198). Brassaï photographed, in both senses, the darker side of Paris. He photographed transvestites and homosexuals at underground bars and clubs, and he photographed the streets of Paris extensively at night, published in the celebrated Paris by Night (1933).Brassaï (1899-1984) was a Hungarian-born French photographer who created countless iconic images of 1920s Parisian life.
He moved to Paris in 1924, working as a journalist and joined a circle of Hungarian artists and writers. His seminal book Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night 1933) documented the nightlife of prostitutes, street cleaners, and other scenes in his neighborhood of Montparnasse.
He also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals—among them his friends and contemporaries, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, and Henri Matisse. He was also interested in graffiti, seeing it as a form of Outsider Art that could open the door for new artistic expression.
His black and white images are very dark and moody with large areas of clipped black with rim lighting have influenced my work in Assignment 2.1 Bridge.
Showcases some of his most iconic photos
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Gillian Wearing
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gillian-wearing-cbe-2648
Gillian Wearing is a contemporary British artist whose conceptually driven photographs and videos investigate power dynamics and voyeurism in everyday life. Focused more on capturing the self-awareness of her subjects than on issues of aesthetics, Wearing employs prosthetic masks, voice dubbing, altered photographs, in her portraits of herself, individuals, and groups. This is especially notable in her series of work Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992-1993), in which the artist confronted strangers and asked them write what they were thinking, then photographed them holding the sign. “It’s always important as an artist to find a unique language, and that’s why the Signs excited me,” she said of her series. “They felt new. But I didn’t realize they were going to be so influential, on everything from advertising to people doing signs for their Facebook page.” Born in 1963 in Birmingham, United Kingdom, she moved to London in 1983, studying first at the Chelsea School of Art then Goldsmiths College where she became a part of the Young British Artists generation alongside Damien Hirst. In 1997, the artist was the winner of the prestigious Turner Prize for her 1996 piece “60 Minutes Silence“. She currently lives and works in London, UK. Today, Wearing’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., among others. http://www.artnet.com/artists/gillian-wearing/
https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/gillian-wearing/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2012/mar/26/gillian-wearing-dancing-peckham-video
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Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind (1903 – 1991) was an American photographer. Siskind’s work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement.
https://www.britannica.com/video/164452/Aaron-Siskind-influences-documentary-photography
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Jonathan Miller
Nowhere in Particular
Jonathan Miller writing about the book in the Independent
the capacity to resolve fine detail is confined to a surprisingly small area of the retina, the fovea, around which visual acuity falls off so steeply that it’s impossible to take in the details of a whole scene at a single glance. Try fixing your eyes on the last word of this sentence and see how difficult it is to read the surrounding text. The result of this restricted acuity is that our perception of the visual world has to be assembled in discrete installments. Although we are not explicitly aware of doing so we are constantly flicking our gaze from one part of the visual field to the next, and by bringing the specialised centre of the retina to bear on one sector of the scene after another we collect an anthology of sporadic snapshots from which we build up an apparently detailed picture of the world around us.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-scavengers-hoard-1116630.html
On Reflection
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John Thompson
!! to update and annotate as relevant to Kyrgyztsan.
edited from Wikipedia article
John Thomson (14 June 1837 – 29 September 1921) was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer and traveller. He was an accomplished photographer in many areas: landscapes, portraiture, street-photography, architectural photography. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artifacts of eastern cultures for his Victorian audience. He was however more concerned with the socio-economic situation of the people whose land he visited than landscape as a subject in itself (Jeffrey, 1981, p. 64).
On his return home, his pioneering work documenting the social conditions of the street is regarded as a classic instance of social documentary which laid the foundations for photojournalism. He went on to become a portrait photographer of High Society in Mayfair, gaining the Royal Warrant in 1881. His publishing activities mark him out as an innovator in combining photography with the printed word.
The son of William Thomson, a tobacco spinner and retail trader, and his wife Isabella, Thomson was born the eighth of nine children in Edinburgh. After his schooling in the early 1850s, he was apprenticed to a local optical and scientific instrument manufacturer, thought to be James Mackay Bryson. During this time, Thomson learned the principles of photography and completed his apprenticeship around 1858. In 1861 he became a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts.
South East Asia 1862-1872: Singapore, Malaya, Sumatra, Siam, Cambodia and China
Singapore
In April 1862, Thomson left Edinburgh for Singapore to join his older brother William, a watchmaker and photographer, beginning a ten-year period spent travelling around the Far East. Initially, he established a joint business with William to manufacture marine chronometers and optical and nautical instruments. He also established a photographic studio in Singapore, taking portraits of European merchants, and he developed an interest in local peoples and places. He travelled extensively throughout the mainland territories of Malaya and the island of Sumatra, exploring the villages and photographing the native peoples and their activities.
Siam and Cambodia
After visiting Ceylon and India from October to November 1864 to document the destruction caused by a recent cyclone, Thomson sold his Singapore studio and moved to Siam. After arrival in Bangkok in September 1865, Thomson undertook a series of photographs of the King of Siam and other senior members of the royal court and government.
Prea Sat Ling Poun, Angkor Wat, 1865.
Inspired by Henri Mouhot’s account of the rediscovery of the ancient cities of Angkor in the Cambodian jungle, Thomson embarked on what would become the first of his major photographic expeditions. He set off in January 1866 with his translator H. G. Kennedy, a British Consular official in Bangkok, who saved Thomson’s life when he contracted jungle fever en route. The pair spent two weeks at Angkor, where Thomson extensively documented the vast site, producing some of the earliest photographs of what is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Thomson then moved on to Phnom Penh and took photographs of the King of Cambodia and other members of the Cambodian Royal Family, before travelling on to Saigon. From there he stayed in Bangkok briefly, before returning to Britain in May or June in 1866.
While back home, Thomson lectured extensively to the British Association and published his photographs of Siam and Cambodia. He became a member of the Royal Ethnological Society of London and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1866, and published his first book, The Antiquities of Cambodia, in early 1867.
There have however been accusations of plagiarism. In 2001 Phiphat Phongraphiphon, a Thai independent researcher in historical photography, published claims that Thomson plagiarised works by Thai court photographer Khun Sunthornsathitsalak (Christian name: Francis Chit) and published them as his own. Evidence to Phiphat’s claims include an analysis of a photograph in which the temple Wat Rajapradit, which was built before Thomson arrived in Bangkok, is missing.
Travels in China 1868-1872
Island Pagoda, about 1871, from the album, Foochow and the River Min
Images from Travels in Chinahttps://www.youtube.com/embed/RXPC31yH1pQ?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3
https://www.youtube.com/embed/FV-13nn1aAE?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3
https://www.youtube.com/embed/v=zGgrQ6QKaGo?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3After a year in Britain, Thomson again felt the desire to return to the Far East. He returned to Singapore in July 1867, before moving to Saigon for three months and finally settling in Hong Kong in 1868. He established a studio in the Commercial Bank building, and spent the next four years photographing the people of China and recording the diversity of Chinese culture.
Thomson travelled extensively throughout China, from the southern trading ports of Hong Kong and Canton to the cities of Peking and Shanghai, to the Great Wall in the north, and deep into central China. From 1870 to 1871 he visited the Fukien region, travelling up the Min River by boat with the American Protestant missionary Reverend Justus Doolittle, and then visited Amoy and Swatow.
He went on to visit the island of Formosa with the missionary Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell, landing first in Takao in early April 1871. The pair visited the capital, Taiwanfu, before travelling on to the aboriginal villages on the west plains of the island. After leaving Formosa, Thomson spent the next three months travelling 3,000 miles up the Yangtze River, reaching Hupeh and Szechuan.
Thomson’s travels in China were often perilous, as he visited remote, almost unpopulated regions far inland. Most of the people he encountered had never seen a Westerner or camera before. His expeditions were also especially challenging because he had to transport his bulky wooden camera, many large, fragile glass plates, and potentially explosive chemicals. He photographed in a wide variety of conditions and often had to improvise because chemicals were difficult to acquire. His subject matter varied enormously: from humble beggars and street people to Mandarins, Princes and senior government officials; from remote monasteries to Imperial Palaces; from simple rural villages to magnificent landscapes.
Street Life in London
Images from Street Life in LondonThomson returned to England in 1872, settling in Brixton, London and, apart from a final photographic journey to Cyprus in 1878, Thomson never left again. Over the coming years he proceeded to lecture and publish, presenting the results of his travels in the Far East. His publications started initially in monthly magazines and were followed by a series of large, lavishly illustrated photographic books. He wrote extensively on photography, contributing many articles to photographic journals such as the British Journal of Photography. He also translated and edited Gaston Tissandier’s 1876 History and Handbook of Photography, which became a standard reference work.
In London, Thomson renewed his acquaintance with Adolphe Smith, a radical journalist whom he had met at the Royal Geographical Society in 1866. Together they collaborated in producing the monthly magazine, Street Life in London, from 1876 to 1877. The project documented in photographs and text the lives of the street people of London, establishing social documentary photography as an early type of photojournalism. The series of photographs was later published in book form in 1878.
The Crawlers, London, 1876-1877
He was elected a member of the Photographic Society, later the Royal Photographic Society, on 11 November 1879. With his reputation as an important photographer well established, Thomson opened a portrait studio in Buckingham Palace Road in 1879, later moving it to Mayfair. In 1881 he was appointed photographer to the British Royal Family by Queen Victoria, and his later work concentrated on studio portraiture of the rich and famous of High Society, giving him a comfortable living. From January 1886 he began instructing explorers at the Royal Geographical Society in the use of photography to document their travels.
After retiring from his commercial studio in 1910, Thomson spent most of his time back in Edinburgh, although he continued to write papers for the Royal Geographical Society on the uses of photography. He died of a heart attack in 1921 at the age of 84. In recognition of his work, one of the peaks of Mount Kenya was named “Point Thomson”.
A large collection of his glass negatives was donated to the Wellcome Library. Some of Thomson’s work may be seen at the Royal Geographical Society’s headquarters in London.https://www.youtube.com/embed/1iHxiVW3wjA?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3
Selected publications
- China Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868 -1872, River Books 2010.
- The antiquities of Cambodia, 1867
- Views on the North River, 1870.
- Foochow and the River Min, 1873.
- Illustrations of China and its people, 1873-1874 [1]
- Street life in London, 1878
- Through Cyprus with a camera in the autumn of 1878, 1879
- Through China with a Camera,[7] 1898
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Stock Photography
A key aim in this module was investigation of the differing requirements of major stock image libraries and landscape photography libraries and then submitting relevant images and starting to get concrete professional and audience feedback on my work.
Stock Photography outlets
- Shutterstock: a good place to start because they give good support materials and useful technical feedback. On You Tube many contributors make most of their income from Shutterstock because of volume of sales
- iStock Photo (part of Getty Images): photos, illustrations, video. Take 45% commission.
- Pond5
- Alamy
- Dreamstime
- Adobe Stock (took over Fotofolia)
- Smugmug Pro can make good money. Make own website and pricing.
- Foap: amateur phone Ap where you can sell direct from your phone
- Clashot: sell photos through an Ap you set your own price 50-80$
- Snapwire
- EyeEm
Shutterstock
I identified Shutterstock as the best place to start because You Tube contributors said Shutterstock was easy to use and very good at giving technical support and feed back.
Copyright issues
Illustration
What sells best
Preparing for upload
Metadata Keywords
Addressing reasons for rejection
Shutterstock Technical Guidelines
Inspect all images at 100% resolution
1) For Commercial Stock: trademark issues (send as editorial)
- no brand names
- no IPP
- keywords should not contain trademarks
- no isolated pictures of single buildings and avoid landmark modern buildings
2) Noise
- filmgrain
- compression artefacts
- posterisation
- check skies and shadows
3) Composition/Concept
- what is concept? what could it be used for?
- arrangement not optimal. leading lines, rule of thirds. use in-camera grid
- distracting elements
- horizon line crooked
- negative space so customers can insert text
- shoot from different angles
4) Focus
- Focus a bit too soft. try single and continuous focus
- Camera shake: stabilise yourself against a tree, elbows in and don’t breathe
- avoid zoom lens or move closer
5) Exposure
- under or over-exposed – use histogram and correct
- not good lighting
- avoid midday, ‘golden hours’ 1 hour before or after sun
If rejected
- look at on-line resources
- use critique section on forums
- sometimes they do make an error
- make correction and re-submit
So I started to develop a quite diverse portfolio – following You Tube advice not to specialise at this stage or narrow my stylistic options. Before selecting images and places to work on I did a search of the Shutterstock image library to see which subjects, places and styles were over-represented and for which places and styles I could fill a market gap that was in line with subjects and styles that appeal to me. There were few images for all the places I selected, and the images that did exist were overwhelmingly high/over-saturation high over-sharpness images. Many of which I find very ‘over the top’ – but was not sure if images were that way because they were what the market wanted or whether other types of image might be successful also.
The general advice from You Tube contributors with long experience of stock photography with similar tastes/social aims to my own is to develop a range of different types of image and style. This means that the numbers of people discovering your images will be much larger, encouraging them to then look at your whole portfolio. This also serves to test a number of different market and types of user. Then once something sells, to produce more of that style/subject matter and develop a number of niche markets. This is a different approach from higher end professional photography portfolio sales where it is important to have a more distinctive ‘voice’.
My Shutterstock portfolio includes:
- Lake District (48 images in colour and monochrome processed in Lightroom and/or Viveza)
- Norfolk: Burnham Overy Staithe (34 colour images processed in Lightroom, including abstract seascapes)
- Suffolk: Orford Marshes (10 colour, monochrome and split tone images processed in Lightroom and/or Silver FX)
- Norfolk: Hunstanton (39 ‘English seaside on a cold New Year’ colour images processed in Lightroom) and Norfolk: Cromer (5 colour images including 2 that were substantially processed in Lightroom to correct lighting and perspective, and 2 ‘nostalgic sea-side images in Analog Pro)
- Cambridge: River Cam (17 abstract and 17 semi-abstract images and 18 ‘Abstract reflections’ that I aim to develop further together with more ‘Edgelands’ images as part of Assignment 4 ‘Cambridge Chronicles’
- Suffolk: Aldeburgh (28 high colour images of Aldeburgh Carnival 2016 around ideas of ‘Englishness’ and ‘English Holiday’ ‘English seaside’ and quirkiness processed in Lightroom only) that I intend to revisit as part of work on ‘English seaside nostalgia’ together with:
- Suffolk: Orford Quay (16 ‘Brexit’/’British’ images processed in Lightroom that will form part of Assignment 5 ‘A Very British Day Out’ together with photos of National Trust’s Orford Ness for which I need a professional photographer’s license to publish)
My experience so far has been broadly positive – good resources database on areas like intellectual and privacy rights, technical tutorials and quick and helpful response to some queries I had. I have learned a lot technically. and the experience has taught me a lot so far. Most of my 220 images were accepted when submitted first time (having consulted all their documentation first). The main reasons for rejection have been because of issues like titling, editorial vs commercial categorisation or keywording. Only 3 have so far been terminally rejected on jpg quality issues, but even these I think I plan to re-submit as more artistic creations using NikFX.
Sales have been less successful. Shutterstock is generally considered by You Tube contributors to give highest income because of volume of sales rather than percentage of price. But in order to make substantial income you need to have around 2-3,000 images and constantly have a drip of new images going on. I have so far sold two images for the huge total of USc50! The first download was someone local in Isleham, Suffolk and the second someone in Korea.
The first two images are suitable for backgrounds, rather than editorial. They are also desaturated and different from the overwhelming majority of highly sharpened and highly saturated tourist images. Possibly this distinctive style is one of the ‘niches’ where I may eventually choose to focus. Particularly as I enjoy the experience of taking and processing these types of landscape image and would like to develop my photographic as well as software processing skills.
Carnival image
A third image accepted after two months (showing that images are not necessarily lost) was
Adobe Stock
https://www.creativelive.com/blog/photographers-guide-earning-money-adobe-stock/
https://theblog.adobe.com/contributor-spotlight-anne-bracker/
