Once upon a time

Story telling in contemporary art makes references to fables, fairy tales, apocryphal events and modern myths. Some photos in the genre of Tableau photography are more open ended. We don't see how it’s set up but the finished piece of art that we are left to decide for ourselves what the story is by the visual narrative in the frame. With Tableau photography we can see a story by the narrative in a one frame, whereas normally we rely on a series of images to lead us to or own conclusion. However, this is something that we have been doing for years. When we look at a painting we look for visual clues in order to gather and opinion on what it’s about and any deeper meaning is shown in a painting obvious or not, it’s there for us to see. This photo by Jeff Wall, Passerby, tells a story of strangers crossing paths at night which is something that our society is aware of. The lighting, time and body language of the ‘strangers’ makes us suspicious. Even the discreet stop sign in the distance acts as a warning. When we look at this image everything about it tells us that something isn’t right. The fact that it’s a situation that we can all relate to makes it even more disturbing. We see a stranger at night, all we want to do is get as far away from them as possible because we can’t trust what they’ll do.

The photograph as Contemporary art by Charlotte Cotton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableau_vivant

DeadPan and contemporary

DeadPan is when an image, created for a gallery is aethetically cool, detached and sharp.  The results can be breathtaking, especially when the images are engaging us with emotion. Deadpan became very popular in the 1990's particularly with landscape and architectural subjects. Deadpan offers an alternative to painting and contemporary photography is taking over. Nowadays we have, more photography going on the walls of galleries than ever. In years to come there’ll be more photography than paintings. Our world is changing and technology changes too. I see it no differently to classical paintings becoming more abstract as years go by. When there was no digital photography and there were few professional photographers. The work was original but no it seems that every idea has already been taken. Contemporary art photography allows us to be more experimental and come up with something different no matter how strange the idea is. It seems the stranger the approach the more successful it is. Contemporary photography still has a narrative and is similar in some ways to Cinema. I think that if you stage an idea you can come up with something and present it in a way that is yours. For me, there are too many portraits around that are too similar. I like to see something different, unusual, something that makes me go wow I wish I’d come up with that Idea.

http://www.contemporaryworks.net/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3589720/The-new-passion-for-deadpan.html

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

American Photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, born 15 May 1925 is considered by his peers to have created the most original and disturbing photograpic imagery ever! In fact his work consists of dolls, masks, family and friends in abandoned places. His work is very experimental using multiple exposure and deliberate camera movement.
He wanted to reveal a higher truth than fact; use the reality to create a dream like scene. He had two main interests of the scientific nature if camera vision and the spiritual essence behind the visible world. The three main parts of his life were made up of art, career and his family; who were his main photographic subjects as well as his friends. His work isn’t directly about him but it does reveal him.

 He creates stories that never actually took place. Instead they are deliberately paradoxical questions or riddles allowing us to let go of all logical thoughts we have when looking at the images at reading into them. These images are a cross between parables and paradoxes. There are the themes of young to old to death, relationships between parent and child in dramatic settings. The females are usually the protagonists and he considers childhood to be a care free time that’s full of curiosity, a time of unbound optimism and imagination. When children play they imagine the reality to be something magical.

His photography shows the gradual change from childhood to adulthood using masks to show a head that’s too big for the small body. These masks had exaggerated features, idiotic grins and wrinkled skin. Sometimes the children are wearing big hands that too have out grown their body. This is to show the awkwardness of a teenage boy whose limbs have grown too quickly for the body to adjust.

There’s something about his work that touches me. Although disturbing as his work is ,I really like his approach to this topic of childhood and how he cleverly creates his unreal stories that I can really believe when I look at his work.

 http://themorbidimagination.com/tag/ralph-eugene-meatyard/
http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/meatyard_ralph_eugene.php

Tim Walker

Tim Walker is a British fashion photographer who's photographed for vogue over the last ten years. He has also worked as a full time assistant to Richard Avedon.  His work certainly is some of the most imaginative that i've come across. Who dyes cats a different colour, or projects a film on the side of a house or hangs cakes from a tree or furniture. He creates very imaginative sets that are never shot in the studio and he always uses natural lighting and no flash. If he has to bring an extra light it's to stimulate the natural lighting that's already there. His ideas feature very theatrical characters in a surreal world. He recreates modern day nursery rhymes and fairy tales such as princess and the pea.

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The work that goes into his sets is amazing and i can't help but apreciate his imagination and how he chooses to show his ideas. He comes up with all the ideas himself and the sets take up to a month to prepare and two weeks to prepare for the shoot itself.  Tim Walker says that fashion photography allows him to create a fantasy. He creates a moment in an unreal situation. It's amazing to find out that he never manipulates his images. I think thats his very is truly inspirational.









http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyqIbkWaUpE

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/pictures-from-wonderland-tim
http://www.vogue.co.uk/biographies/100719-tim-walker-biography.aspx

Anna Gaskell

Anna Gaskell photographed through the eyes of Alfred Hitchcock. Her stories are based around the adventures of adolescent girls who overcome the injustices that they encounter but we never find out how the story ends.  These girls are caught in a situation of fear and anxiety. Her work makes the world look like a very grim place. She is not interested in the beginning or the end of the story but the in between narrative. She uses generic characters that remind us of real life.

Her work is very seductive and we begin to love her work and the aesthetics of the image itself before we reaslise the twisted truth that is actually being shown to us. Young girls are wearing fetish nurse outfits; combining the innocence of childhood with eroticism. This intense psychological photographic tableau is inspired by fairy tale but plays on their more sinister meaning. Who in these images are good and whose bad? Or is good and bad the same person?



The colours are very vibrant and strong set against a high contrast of shadow and light which makes me feel uneasy. The ambiguity is what frightens me; i don't know what's going to happen next, if something terrible is going to happen or it'll end happy ever after.





 http://the-artists.org/artist/Anna-Gaskell
http://www.postmedia.net/999/gaskell.htm
The photograph as contempoary art by Charlotte Cotton

Modernism / Postmodernism

Our world has constantly been changing due to things like war and technology. We have to adapt like animals to survive. I know that there's alot of things that we have that we don't need to survive but now that we have them could we live without them? Now i have my camera and laptop i couldn't imagine a world without them. The art world was made up of big classical paintings and now the art world revolves around photography. Photography can be used in art. You can class yourself as a photographer or and artist even if you don't take the photo. And no that a lot of people have the opportunity and resources to become photographer, more and more people are trying it. People could take a really good picture by freak chance and it could end up being published whereas before A really good photograph was left to the professionals and it took a lot of work. In some ways our modern day society has taken photography to a whole new level that has improved greatly but what I’m not keen on is this. Is there too much competition now? Do people appreciate photography like they used to? One thing is for sure; Analogue photography is slowly disappearing but will never be forgotten. It is its history that makes it such a precious thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography

http://photo.net/philosophy-of-photography-forum/00CTVK

Feminism

Our society has come a long way since 1897 when women suffragettes fought for womens rights to vote. We wanted equal rights as men. For years womens work was in the kitchen, cooking cleaning and looking  after the children until thhe husband came home only to be greeted with a meal that the woman had slaved over the stove for. Cindy Sherman played many steryotypical roles of the woman in her flm stills. Looking at her work, these roles are still apparent in todays society the only difference is that the men help out with the housework or children too. Yes things have changed and for the better but yet there are still arguments over whereether we are equal. This point could be argued forever.The point is things have changed. If a company was to be sexist then they could be taken to court. There's too much fear nowadays which can mean that if a man gets chosen over a woman for the job it could be seen as sexist. This is where our society takes it too far. It  was a huge battle that had been won when the suffragetes got the vote but now feminism has been taken to the extreme and is illogical. A woman can't even dress the way she wants without being judged or frowned upon. Women feel like they need all this make up and designer clothes to make us feminime. A man can dress scruffy and no one will think twice. Surely what makes us feminime in the  fact that we were born female. Let us be who we want to be.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feminism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200908/why-modern-feminism-is-illogical-unnecessary-and-evil
 Cindy Sherman, The complete Untitled film stills, The museum of Modern art

Semiotics

The word semiotics meant nothing to me until i found out it was the study of signs, a code that helps us communicate. Signs are used in a variety of ways such as words, gestures, architecture and even photography. For example we associate a lily with death and a rose with love. So what about a black rose? Would we assume that love is dying?  If someone is photographed in soft light we would generally assume that the person is sensitive or emotional and harsh light with high contrasts of shadow speaks for itself. A good example of this is Anna Gaskell's work.
 


 

How you interpret an image depends on your background and your culture. When I saw this image I thought that it was of a woman who had entered a beauty pageant, mainly because of the banner that goes over her shoulder and the way she appears. The man makes it look as if they could have been prom king and queen. So I was surprised to find out that they are in fact Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel Westling of Sweden. This just proves how we see something and interpret it completely different to someone else. I’m sure there would be plenty of other people who would have said something different to me where either they guess the right answer or not. My judgement was on what I see on TV and in the media.

http://www.crhfoto.co.uk/crh/semiotics.htm
http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/rhethtml/signifiers/sigsave.html

Cindy Sherman

 

I have looked at Cindy Shermans Horror pictures which are grotesque representations of metamorphoses and dislocations of the human body. The horrifying theatrical masks have a surrealist quality. And These set of images are so different from her other works but she still draws me in; I’m intrigued to the thoughts that go on in her head when she’s coming up with her ideas.

‘There’s a shift in conception from the real understood in post structuralist terms as an effect of representation, to the real understood in psychoanalytic terms as an event of trauma.’

It was once said that the eye takes a photo at the moment of death, preserving on its retina the deceased’s final instant vision. Efforts have been made to recover these images which if possible would be perfect to catch killers. Maybe this is why victim’s eyeballs are destroyed or killed from behind, in darkness or while wearing a mask. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho the camera focuses on the woman’s eye as she lies on the bathroom floor.

Cindy Sherman says that the close ups of masked faces are run up to the film. She uses fanciful characters with ambiguous identity. She also says that horror movies are like rehearsals or preparations for the worst that can happen. It allows us to experience an ultimate moment of vision.

http://themorbidimagination.com/art/cindy-shermans-smiling-horrors/

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore, an American photographer, born October 8 1947 best known for his dead pan images of American ‘on the road’ landscapes. He started off using black and white photography and ended up a pioneer for colour photography.

He developed an interest in photography when he was as young as eight. He began using a 35 mm camera shortly after receiving a darkroom kit. His great influence came from a Walker Evans book called American photographs. By the age of fourteen he had already sold three of his prints to Edward Steichen, Curator of photography at the Museum of modern art.  At the age of seventeen he was photographing Andy Warhol and other artists. And by the age of twenty four he became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of art. His work has influenced many photographers such as Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld and Thomas Struth. His work, like a painting is considered to be a work of art.

When you look at his images you’ll see that they are visually perfect. The color is perfect. Framing is perfect and you can see that a lot of consideration has been taken to make sure that everything that is in the shot is there for a reason.

http://www.phaidon.co.uk/agenda/photography/video/2010/september/01/being-stephen-shore/

http://seesawmagazine.com/shore_pages/shore_interview.html

August Sander 'In Focus'

German photographer, August Sander, born 17 November 1876, spent more than four decades documenting the German people during the aftermath of the war. This was a period of great social, political and cultural uproar. He was described as the most important German portrait photographer of the twentieth century. He joined the ‘Group of Progressive artists’the society of the Weimar Republic in a series of portraits.  The portraits consist of all different types of people such as the farmer, tradesmen,artists, women, different classes, homeless and veterans. The people in his work are always against a simple background. Their clothes, gesture,  hair style ect are the clues as to who they are and what their profession is. I find his work really touching. There’s something about his portraits that makes me sympathise with the people. Sometimes it’s something as simple as their facial expression that does it.

I love this image. It makes mme wonder how the child has stayed on the bike. It touches me seeing the dog looking up at the camera as if it's seen someone and is being  protective over the baby. 

 This girl is in a carnival but what affects me about this picture is how unhappy she is. The framing tells me that she wants to escape.

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=514seumIn
 In Focus, August Sander, The J. Paul Getty Museum

John Stezaker 'A Retrospective'

John Stezaker recently exibited his work at the Whitechapel Gallery.  His work combines old film stills and vintage postcards which are collaged together  to create a new surreal image with a new meaning. Rather than a photographer i consider him an artist. As an artist i consider his work to not only be interesting to look at but it's very cleverly put together. Whilst looking at his exhibition i found that  i started thinking about the meaning on a much deeper level, a level that you wouldn't have gone to with the original image. The titles of the works are very simple and are the starting point of my thoughts as to what the picture is trying to say. I think that John Stezaker wants to deliberatly ambiguou. The images speak for themselves as there are obvious themes of marriage and male and female roles.



My favourite images are the ones that combine head shots with landscapes. It makes me look through the faces to what lies beyond almost like a layer of them has been taken away and this is what is being revealed to us. This man looks like he has nothing. Does this mean his life is empty? Is he living in a world of darkness that he can't escape. The truth is we don't know. We are left to keep guessing and speculate which is the beauty of it. http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art348600
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stezaker