Discovering Bernd and Hilla Becher: Landscape/Typology
Whilst undertaking research for part one of Identity and Place I came across an exhibition by the German conceptual artists and photographers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. They took a large number if photographs of industrial buildings which they organised into grids. They had observed that structures such as cooling towers, grain elevators and oil refineries,…
Identity and Place – Part One: Assignment One – Research: Deadpan photography
Once I started trying to discover exactly what deadpan photography was, I started seeing deadpan portraits everywhere! I hadn’t realised how many famous portraits included subjects with deadpan expressions. Or maybe I hadn’t questioned the fact that they did, or wondered how different an image would be viewed if the expressions were something other than…
Identity and Place – Part One: Assignment One
Brief Your first assignment is to make five portraits of five different people from your local area who were previously unknown to you. You will almost certainly find it challenging to take photographs of people you don’t know; it’s often much easier to photograph somebody you’re already familiar with. This could be referred to as the ‘comfort…
Identity and Place – Part One: Exercise 4 Archival intervention
Brief “Memories evoked by a photograph do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in a network, an intertext, of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments” Kuhn, A. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (2002) London: Verso.…
Identity and Place – Part One: Assignment One – Research: “Take Nivarna” William S Burroughs
Whilst talking to my partner about portraiture and how to make an image that says something about the sitter, he mentioned a quote that he had heard many times due to the fact that it is spoken by William S Burroughs at the beginning of one of his favourite songs in the film “Made of…
Identity and Place – Part One: Assignment One – Research: Decoy
I came across this project online whilst looking at photographic portraiture in general. In this project six different photographers create a portrait of the same man. Each photographer was told something different about the man and consequently took a completely different portrait of him. I believe it was later used as an advert for Canon.…
Identity and Place – Part One: Exercise 3 Portraiture Typology
Brief In response to the work of the artists you’ve read about so far, try to create a photographic portraiture typology which attempts to bring together a collection of types. Think carefully about how you wish to classify these images; don’t make the series too literal and obvious. Once complete, post these portraits on your…
Identity and Place – Part One: Exercise 2 Background as context
Brief Study the backgrounds of Sander’s portraits very closely and reflect upon what you see. Where does the subject sit in relation to the background? If location-based, does the head sit above or below the horizon? Has the background been deliberately blurred through the use of a wider aperture and therefore shorter depth of field?…
Identity and Place – Part One: Exercise 1 Historic Portrait
Brief Do some research into historic photographic portraiture. Select one portrait to really study in depth. Write a maximum of 500 words about this portrait, but don’t merely ‘describe’ what you see. The idea behind this exercise is to encourage you to be more reflective in your written work (see Introduction), which means trying to…
OCAPhotography 