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raygoodwinmajournal · 3 years

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Epochal Territories Shoot #1 - 14/11/2020

Getting back into the swing of creating can be rather difficult when one doesn’t necessarily know where they are going. This is partly where I found myself when starting my MA, because I wasn’t all too sure where I was going to take my work and what would be appropriate for postgraduate study. Yet, there were a number of things that I knew for definite which was returning back to my older work of documenting urban landscapes and trying go evoke feelings of alienation, estrangement and the dichotomy of hypermodernity.

Epochal Territories is really a gestalt of our fast paced, instant gratifying and estranging society, which aims to deconstruct these notions and investigate how these banal and bleak landscapes can convey these feelings. This all goes back to researching Karl Marx and his theory of alienation, and its multifaceted aspects:

Product of Labour

Activity of Labour

One’s Own Self

Alienation from Others

Marx’s theory of alienation spans from these four aspects, which including being alienated from production, activity, oneself and others. For the purpose of my project, the final two are more centred around what I am conveying, which is the alienation from myself, as well as the people around me.

My own alienation stems from how I view the world: my weltanschauung. From my own personal views, I see the world through the lens with a certain causticity, where everything becomes rather estranging, whether that is how people use social media, using social media at all, the way we act, what we eat, how we travel, how we make money, what money is and how the world operates. What my photographs try to convey is this feeling of alienation. The way I can describe my work is the feeling of being stuck in traffic or seeing that the train is getting more and more delayed - the feeling of complete disappointment, malaise, listlessness and ennui.

Where we live is incredibly important. Our homes and where we live is where we spend a lot of time, building bonds, creating families and living our lives. Yet, looking inward towards the home is a different experience, especially when your home is on the brink of demolition to make way for brand new, upmarket houses in an attempt to gentrify a dilapidated and crime ridden low social class area.

The Talbot Gardens estate is just that kind of place. Situated in Barne Barton, Plymouth, Talbot Gardens is home to a number of multi-storey flats and apartments. The estate was largely built to house the large number of Naval workers for Devonport in the 1960′s, but as the numbers of workers dwindled, the estate was handed over to Plymouth City Council, and the Devon and Cornwall Housing Association. These buildings - even for me - are rather ugly and completely dilapidated and certainly a reminder of another time. The concrete is extremely dull, covered in water marks and remnants of people’s homes lays in the street, such as the fridge and bed above. The area did feel rather unsafe, with some local occupants of the buildings glaring as I wandered around the ghostly estate.

There was a certain spectrality of the estate, knowing it was going to be demolished in coming years in addition to the lack of noise of people. The weather as abysmal, with rain beating down on the concrete paths and the wind whipping up a fine mist of rain. The only cover to be had was the entrance to the flats, which contained a number of wooden doors akin to what you would find on a shed or an outhouse. The entrance did however sometimes act as a wind tunnel, firing a jet of cold, wet wind through the walkway.

Shooting the Talbot Gardens estate was fairly straight forward, and oddly enough for me shot digitally. I am trying to keep costs down and shoot film as little as possible, if not at all purely because of the costs. I don’t want to not shoot it, so I am trying to keep film usage to a minimum. I shot entirely on my Canon 5D and the wonderfully cheap and cheerful Yongnuo 35mm F2, which I have had a love/hate relationship with because it has been idiosyncratic in the past. Yet, since wearing glasses, I have a newfound respect for the lens as I can see properly how it renders the image, and it does it rather well! It is also a way for me to get used to the 35mm focal length. I am a stickler for a 50mm only way of shooting, but 35mm just is that little bit wider to incorporate more of the surroundings, and features a wider depth of field when stopped down.

Something I have wanted to do is shoot a project entirely in black and white, which is sometimes easier said than done. I feel that B&W is a lot harder to shoot, as not everything can work. It has a way of rendering a space timeless, and focusing more on the form rather than the reality of the place. This was seamless to do, as I have the ability to create colour presets on the 5D, despite it being 13 years old. I wanted a very specific look to my B&W, as I am not a fan of heavy contrast and weak dynamic range. For this, I created a preset in the camera to have low contrast, slightly more sharpness and the addition of an internal replication of a green filter to bring out some more shadow detail.

The B&W preset was initially a fluke, because I set the parameters to what I thought would be correct. Low and behold, they were exactly what I was looking for. The only issue is that when shooting RAW, the image is automatically colour but has to be converted when post-processing. This is easy to do simply by reducing the saturation to zero which reverts it back to B&W.

I always know when a shoot is going well when I can feel a level of alienation within a space. I knew I didn’t belong in this area, and that it was, in it’s entirety, out of place. I felt as if I shouldn’t have been there, and time seemed out of joint. There was something askew about wandering around a housing estate which is going to be demolished to make way for brand new homes which would be entirely out of reach to the general population of the occupants of the current Talbot Gardens. I get the feeling that the people who live here are of a lower social and economic class compared to what would be coming in the next number of years, which seems to come across as an eradication of lower class workers and benefit claimants.

On the opposite side of the estate is a row of new houses, as well two boarded up areas where a building used to stand before an arson attack, and where a play park used to be. There was something odd about these barricaded areas hiding these anonymous areas, filled with dirt and tiles. The mountains of earth tower over the barricades, and are over shadowed by the new builds looming in the background. These in themselves are out of place, because they don’t fit with the surrounding run-down aesthetic, but offer an insight to what the area will eventually look like. The crest turning to the left acts as a compositional piece that flows from the bottom and leads to the middle of the scene, with the houses acting as the middle point. I am trying to compose the photographs in a similar fashion, with the point of focus being from a similar point and keeping the composition consistent across the board.

Something intrigued me about the boat on the trailer, and acted as a perfect model to be situated in the middle of the frame, with the surrounding ephemera encompassing the rest of the scene. The completely bare trees add to the spectrality of the estate, acting rather ghostly in the frame. I feel that with the trees in full bloom wouldn’t be the same compared to them being bare in the winter drawl.

My favourite photograph from this shoot is an entrance to the previously mentioned barricaded anonymous spaces. The gates are badly put together, barely matching up and attached to the walls by threads. Behind the gate is a pile of interior tiles - many of which were fine - in addition to a number of other collective pieces of detritus. You can see the other mound of earth on the left of the image, which shows how much it towers of the walls. These mounds of earth are in fact made from the ground around where the building(s) were, which on closer inspection contain pieces of the property such as bricks, drywall and insulation. Once bundled together, they become mountains of earth and collective house bits.

A touch to the side of the previous image, looks towards the estate once again, but still includes the precarious gates and features an empty trailer which presumably would hold another motorboat. Something I like about this image is how the estate isn’t the main focus, but instead of the car park in the foreground, with the surrounding trees and the estate being slowly included in the background. I also like the tones of the B&W preset that I created, with the high dynamic range and a nice selection of greys and low contrast.

After the estate, I made my way down towards the River Tamar near the Tamar Bridge and the Royal Albert Bridge. I found this area rather odd, because only a stones throw away is Cornwall and you can walk underneath both of the famous bridges. Amongst the wealth of fishing vessels is a small play park which has a set of swings and a sit on digger which is operated by ones hands. I found the empty swings to be somewhat ominous, and rather out of place being only a few feet from the river bank, albeit protected by a wall and some fencing.

A coda. The first shoot of the newly named Epochal Territories was in my eyes a success. I have created some photographs that I thoroughly enjoy and gained some insight into what I want to create, and how I want to create it. Shooting digitally in a setting that wasn’t commercial was also odd to undertake, because I am used to shooting my personal project work on film. But saying that, I did enjoy using the 5D for something that isn’t for work, and with my glasses can appreciate more that this now ancient full frame DSLR can do - I am amazed at how good the 5D MKi can do now that I can see properly. It was also good to discover a new location, which is exactly what I need for this project. Something I tend to do is replicate shots and reuse locations which I don’t want to do, and with this project I would like to explore more places in Plymouth with either unknown places, or places that I haven’t visited in a long time.

Bibliography

Asher Horowitz (no date). [Online]. Available at http://www.yorku.ca/horowitz/courses/lectures/35_marx_alienation.html. [Accessed on 21/12/2020]

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