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jameswellsmaphoto-blog · 7 years

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45. Evaluation. Key: F#- Part of the body of work. BP#- Blog Post No

My road from point A to point B has not been very straightforward. I am not even sure if I have reached a point B let alone continue on to whatever point C might be.

Right from the get go my original idea as fading into the background amounts new ideas. I had originally intended to look deeper into an old idea that brought urban and natural landscapes together to question or impact on the natural world. This idea was soon taken over by the visuals surrounding a dystopian future. Ideas around the boring social aspects of modern day inner city life were also coming to a point in my mind.

I also had a crippling sense that I do not know what I was doing anymore with regards to my practice. Confidence in my ability has somewhat slowed the beginning of my informed route into my ideas.

I had to start somewhere so a general look at city and a small look into people in the city got me going. But this did not carry much momentum and I soon found my self-trying to replicate older work. With mistakes and mishaps along the way I was somewhat lost and without much direction. I’d go out and shoot images of the city and look for something in those to try and find my way. Reading about the city got me bogged down in the social elements of what a city is. And although I found this intriguing and started to respond to this with surveillance style imagery, I was not happy with that direction and found my self-fighting it.

My attention turned to what the city was physically. Taking my time I went out to make studies of places in the city of Plymouth. Soon though I found my self bored of this and bored of the medium I was using. Black and white 5x4 photography was becoming a burden and a bore. Cold weather setting in, heavy equipment to lug around and time consuming shoots lead me to change my approach.

I moved towards using 6x7 format and trying out colour for the first time in a long while. This equipment being easier to use meant I could head out for longer trips and I ended up focusing my efforts on the natural landscape and fringes of the suburban. Due to bad film stock I felt lost again. The images were not how I wanted them to be. But I did look to find my way again with some experiments in combining some darkroom print work of the city and colour images. The combination of the two had reignited my joy for image manipulation.

This then continued with more experiments in post process. Creating cityscapes with many images and making some colour/black & white montage work.

Much of the work has come about by accident with errors on film that I then have turned around and repurposed for use in interesting ways.

All of these direction changes made if difficult to really stick to my main objectives and the goals that I had set myself.

I do not think I really ended up coming close to achieving my first goal. I had put it there to help encourage me to branch out to other departments to seek help and advice on printing my work in a range of different ways and methods. The closest I came to really helping my self to this was an induction in the FAB LAB. Even after a very informative induction and a flurry of ideas of how I could use this resource I have yet to go back and actually use it.

One major problem I encountered was the lack of work I had made to get printed. I am my own problem in this sense. The goal I had set seemed to fit under the title of Experimentation but it is not something conducive of now. It is safe to say that this goal is still very strong but ongoing. It is not long term, but it does need to be a short-term goal for later on once I have a good bed of work to go from.

I suppose some of my experimentation pertained to printing/finishing of work. On (BP28) I explore the role of using isopropyl alcohol to manually change the opacity of prints that are layered. Although it was not a print method it did feel like a finishing method. The only downside to it is its temporary nature. I am still thinking about ways to make it relevant for display at a show. I am sure the idea just needs more exploring so that I can find a way to make it more permanent.

I had some troubles with a printing method on (BP29). As you can see there I had trouble with bleeding of ink. I like the idea that I was pursuing but I was very much put off by it when it all went wrong. This had stopped me exploring it further and it was put aside.

One thing I need to do is to overcome a confidence issue. I used to be very proud and sure of my work. Almost everything I made I got excited about and it all went well and Id take things forward. That is not the case now though. I am currently finding it very hard to find my confidence in my work. I feel put off by most of the work I am making. Ideas come and go without me even giving them a second chance or moment of thought. I end up with so much that is swept to one side and never takes off. Four years out of my creative bubble has left me feeling rather lost as to what to do. Overcoming this lack of confidence will hopefully help all areas of my confidence. I found it very difficult to go to the FAB LAB induction and struggle to go to other things available to me.

This goal must be looked at now as a recurring short-term goal as I continue to experiment throughout the year. Until I have locked down what it is I want to do with my work I wont be able to fully realise how I want to see it visually.

In the grand scheme of things my second goal seems a lot less important now. My darkroom practice is just not something I feel is as necessary as I thought it was. Finding my feet with my work is taking some time; this goal does not fit with anything now.

I did spend a small amount of time in the darkroom and this small time has helped with darkroom confidence issues id been having. After a BA spent in the digital darkroom it was nice to get in the wet darkroom and get positive results right away, it was something I was scared of doing all those years ago.

My biggest problem though is still time. My time management skills are still way off and it has not helped me get into the darkroom. Too much time spent working on shots or avoiding them has left less time for processing and darkroom printing. This has ultimately forced me back into the digital darkroom.

I did however get some good prints made. As you can see (F19-F23) is a selection of prints that I am rather pleased with. They are not perfect but a massive improvement on where I have been before.

There are some straightforward prints here, they did not cause any problems for me, but there are some multi layer prints using more than one negative. These proved much more difficult. Relearning split grade printing and dodging and burning came in very handy here, but I overcame this with a bit of practice and advice from others.

It is safe to say this goal was in the end a bit of a failure. I am not going to keep this goal as a must. Instead I will continue to use the darkroom but not because I feel I have to out of some sense of what is ‘more real’, I will do it when my work requires me to use it.

The third goal is not going as well as I would have liked it to. I am still finding it difficult to read and then turn that reading into something I can use to help then write about my work.

It was a good goal to put in place; I knew that this would be the most challenging aspect of and MA level degree for me. I want to be able to bring my critical writing up to this level and this can only really be done by a proper understanding of the wider context. I find it easy enough to articulate my self during discussions, but as soon as pen and paper are involved I still struggle a lot. I feel as if I get a lot from things I read. Good ideas that help drive me forward, but it is understanding how to portray this in words that I am still on the back foot with.

I am my biggest problem here and I need to change that and turn it around to put myself in a better position to carry on forward. To do this I am taking this goal and revising it. It is still the biggest challenge I am facing with my MA but I am breaking it down into smaller goals. Every day I am going to make sure I do some kind reading that gives me practice in writing about it. I will try to make it as relevant to my practice as possible, finding a bigger range of information that I will be able to draw upon as I progress.

Goals four and five have taken a bit of a backseat. Combined they are essentially where I want to take myself in the future and how I am going to represent that future. The need to put my self out on social media and look at building a webpage are still priorities but they need to take time to grow alongside my work. Again I think breaking it down into small bits that I do each day will help me achieve this goal.

As for wanting to get a show in London for my work at the end of the year, I will still wish to get this goal complete. It is ever growing and ongoing discussion with peers will push this until it has happened.

In relation to my third goal I am still struggling to communicate what I am doing with my practice. My method revolves around me heading out and shooting themes then bringing them together afterward to find or create some meaning to them that challenges and communicates what I am thinking. The trouble with that is my end aim and overarching ideas are not solid at the moment, there is a fluidity about them that makes them hard to pin down.

A good place to start I suppose is at the start. (See F1). This clearly shows two paths of inquiry that I have found my self on. Split between city as a space and the people in the city.

These themes I have been exploring and photographing has stayed the same throughout this first part of the year. The city has been the main concentration of what I have been exploring. I have been looking at how a city is made up, and how urban spaces grow. The original idea to bring nature and urban together is now sitting at the back of my mind cropping up from time to time. A look into the visuals of Dystopia as explored (BP9) has put me on a tangent in my visual thought process, but has brought me to another perspective when thinking.

I have been thinking about city. What is a city? How is city represented? Some of the reading I have been doing has brought this down to a social geographical level rather than pure geography of city.

“Successive transport and communications innovations have, they would argue, loosened the ties that bind people to place, ….. . A related tendency is therefore to emphasise the footloose nature of contemporary life and to emphasise the stretching of relations of all kinds across both space and time.” (Hubbard p2)

This got me thinking about why you would choose to live in a city. Why does so much of the worlds population do this? A vast majority of people that live in cities seem to dislike the fact they have to share it with so may others. I feel that the sense of community has dramatically dropped in recent years. New suburban spaces pop up and people “move out” of the city. When really the new suburban will only become a new urban space as a city continues to grow.

“An unfortunate by product of this mode of thinking is that contemporary writing reduces the city (and, likewise, the countryside) to the status of a container or backdrop for human activities, downplaying (and, at worst ignoring) its profligate role in shaping economic and social relations.”(Hubbard p2)

Of course cities are Hubs of human activity. They serve us in everything we could need to thrive both socially and economically. But will that function of the city carry on when the cities become mega sized. We live work and play in the cities we are a part of. What happens when we do not need a city to work in? What happens when we do not need a city for our shopping needs? Will cities just be giant playgrounds? Places for us to be entertained? What happens when entertainment comes to us, food comes to us, and we no longer need to work? Will a city be a giant prison cell where we only go outside for a mandatory amount of time?

I feel like I am getting lost down a whole new set of ideas that are coming to me after rethinking about these texts. The idea I like most put forward by these are the ‘footloose nature of contemporary life’ and the ‘container or backdrop for human activities’.

They are words that go out with me whenever I go into town with my camera. But have I made anything that reflects those words yet?

I think that (F7) and (BP15) explore ideas surrounding people of the city but not with a direct connection to those ideas from the texts that I have just discussed. Another part of text has and idea has push those images forward. Anonymity and surveillance themes have driven a fair bit of my context when thinking about the people of the city. I have really enjoyed photographing from far off, and complete sense of not knowing the subject can let you give meaning, either with text or the way that you take the photograph, even a post process can give meaning to an image of someone you do not know.

Looking at Walker Evens for inspiration and more recently Shizuka Yokomizo. Both of them looked at an idea of anonymity. Evans used his Subway photographs to capture people in there rawest form of self. With no knowing that they were being photographed the only form of defense they had was the faces they choose to wear when in the public space.

Yokomizo’s Dear stranger took a different approach. Yokomizo gave people a choice to be photographed but would never actually come face to face with them. The only form of communication was a letter to the subject asking permission and giving instruction on how to be photographed if they choose to. I have looked into the themes in a different way. My images are a lot more disconnected than Yokomizos work and are closer in a sense to Evans Subway images. (F7.5) is a slightly closer look at what I was doing, and I think I did not capture what I wanted to and instead got something entirely adrift. I set out to find people doing boring things to document the drudge though the daily lives of city dwellers. Instead of this drain that life takes out of people I ended up with a set of images that just put people in place in the parts of the city there were wondering in. I wanted a true sense of anonymity. Few people would be able to tell you where in Plymouth these were shot. Most would not even know it Plymouth unless told. I became interested in this dislocation from the place these were shot. I could put any spin on these with just a few words. Even giving them titles in other languages to suggest a different place of origin.

I read a few lines that look into another angle of the social geography of the city.

“George Simmel (1858-1918) described the impacts of the city on social psychology, suggesting that the city required a series of human adaptations to cope with its size and complexity.”(Hubbard p16)

“Simmel suggested that we learn to cut out all stimuli which are not important to the business in hand.”(Hubbard p16)

These notions have got me wondering if I can bring the social side into the city/place side of my practice. These lines also got me thinking about our lecture on noticing.

Essence of noticing

As multi-sensate beings, we are inundated with sense impressions all the time, but only some of them ever register in conscious awareness. We may think that we are widely aware of what is going on around us, but in fact attention is highly selective

(Mason p31-32)

How can I turn this into information into a visual representation? This is one of the questions I need to think about. It could play an important role in the future of my work.

Throughout this project I have been trying not to get side tracked from my objective. But there again that seems to keep changing. I enjoy looking into this possible social geographic project thread, but I feel it takes me away from the architecture and dystopia that I wanted to start looking into.

My city images on their own do not massively excite me. Like a lot of the work I am making at the moment I am not happy. When I come to constructing images out of many I do start to enjoy my work. The urban elements of my work (F8) have all come together well to form images and a process I still enjoy. (F19-26) and (BP18-19) show this coming together of city, with shots of Brutalist building and construction images. Darkroom and digital images alike layered up to create photomontage images, reminiscent of work by Vorticist artists, (BP20). My obsession with Brutalist (BP21) architecture is prevalent throughout my entire work, the construction of new buildings has also been a strong theme (F27-28). Have these works been informing my theme of city and dystopia.

The in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, event, groups, into more significant culminations. (Mumford p29)

It is not for nothing then that men have dwelt so often on the beauty or the ugliness of cities. ( Mumford p29)

What if I create a theatre? A city of my own. I have been looking at layering images for a while now, but what about actual montage. Dadaism and Constructivism have been mentioned to me and I have also sat in on a Peter Kennard lecture. They are not relevant to what I am doing now but they will be very relevant come the next part of the development of my themes. The closest I have come so far to this is a Photoshop constructed cityscape. (F11-F29 & BP32-33) show the raw images and the final constructed cityscape. This fake space made up of real ones is an attempt to create a theatrical space for the players of the city to act. It is the foundations for a dystopian future created by my hand.

This is only the start in my constructive image experimentation that will hopefully carry me onto the final parts of my journey. This work has been a massive success for me. I have managed to put something together that at first glance could be completely believable. It is only in looking closely that you begin to see mistakes. The bridge is not perfectly cut from its image, the light over the image is not perfect and the buildings on the right hand side have a look of the leaning tower about them.

It is this believability / unbelievability that id like to explore when making constructed cityscapes. Making them appear at first glance real. And to explore an unreal version completely skew.

As with most of my method and process I either get bored, distracted or dislike work. This then leaves me to explore completely different avenues. At one of these points (BP27) I start to look at using colour and different formats to try and break the norm and get excited about my work again.

This path leads me to try a technique shown on (BP28 & F30). This experiment was a major success, but it does fall down. The manual opacity method I have been trying works well, but the results are only temporary. This might not lead to success when trying to display work. I am sure there is much more that can be explored here and more experimentation needs to be done. I take satisfaction in the juxtaposition of the tower and the hut in the wilderness. A ghost building from long ago. Like a city gone to die in a graveyard of a new world.

(F24 & BP29) is an example of a similar version of the experiment that was unsuccessful. This time I had chosen to draw on the under layer in the hopes it would transfer to the above layer. As you can see this do not go very well. But it was food for thought. Trying alternative versions of this as I progress could produce better results. Success from this experiment came from its secondary artefacts. The eye image on kitchen cloth and the inspiration to create my own draw cityscapes. These can be seen on (F9 & F17 & BP30). These doodles and secondary artefacts have been helping me with my work. Partly as distraction and partly for concentration. They have also inspired me to practice these more as an expanded art form for my practice. An informative extra that is keeping me sane during writing and deep thought process.

The discussion of my work starts to draw to a close on an accidental experiment. Well a fortunate mistake.

(F31- F34 BP35-36) are examples of work that goes wrong but produces amazing mistakes. The images taken on the camera its self came out okay, they were as id expect from the camera experiment. Infact they came out better than I was hoping. But the cherry onto was the colour swatches that appeared between the images them selves. I am still unsure as to what happened but I am not going to complain about it. I am very happy about them and they have sprung many ideas into my mind.

Chance and the nature of unpredictable things, making a mistake be accident and making one on purpose. These are all themes I want to get my self stuck into in the coming months. There seems to be a lot about chance art that I need to explore to broaden my work.

The last work I want to talk about is not chance it is a defiant decision that I have made regarding my constructive work.

(F35-36 BP37) are two examples of bringing together an accidental mistake the urban that I have been shooting. They come together in two different ways. One success and one failure. I am not very please with the first, the silhouette does not work and will not be a feature of my work again. I am not sure what drew me to do this. Some notions about the fires that would have torn Plymouth down during World War Two. This is not a subject I want to get involved with.

The second image, that of the civic centre under the colour mask of one of the mishaps is a beautiful image. The shapes in the colours compliment the shapes of the building and add a beauty to a building that many would say is an eyesore. With those colours you could add fire like connotation to the image. But id like to think they are colours of a dystopian sunrise or set. As I sit here writing this the swell of Hanz Zimmers Intersteller soundtrack plays in the background giving the sunrise/sunset analogy a lot of depth.

The conclusion I have drawn from this first module is that I am not on a path that take me one way. I am still trying to pin down a theme or mode that translates into work that I can be proud of and understand. A complete rewrite of my project proposal is needed.

I am now going to be looking at with more depth the City. I will look at a multitude of angles to bring to a head a body of work that explores themes of people/place/city and city/place/city. As part of this I will continue my work exploring the city of Plymouth, as that is where I currently reside. I will also be branching out to other cites in the UK that I can access. As well as access to cities/places I cannot through the input I will be getting from others as part of the collaboration that will help inform my work.

I am going to continue to explore the nature of mistakes and try to use them as much as I can. Experimenting constantly to try and generate new ways of creating chance images.

Other experiments that I want to begin to look into stem from Dadaism and Constructivism. These art movements have become very influential to me and I hope that they will help direct my post image making methods.

The combination of all of these elements is where my biggest challenge will be. I am going to have to find a way to successfully bring together my themes surrounding people as city and city as city. And whilst doing that add the essence of the dystopian future that I am so interested in. I will also work hard to gather as much information as I can were relevant to contextualise my work and its place in current art practice.

References

Hubbard, P. (2006). City. 1st ed. London: Routledge, pp.2 16 18.

Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice. 1st ed. London: RoutledgeFalmer, pp.31 32.

Miles, M., Hall, T. and Borden, I. (2004). The city cultures reader. 1st ed. London: Routledge, pp.29-30.

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