#but i cannot deny the allure of the crisis Aesthetic

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

a merry Between Week to everyone! rest well!

extra layers:

[katiewattsart]

WEIRD&WONDERFUL INTRODUCTION

03/10/19

PHOT201

WEIRD & WONDERFUL

-       40 credits

-       Broad – can take anywhere

-       Develop a sense of narrative – embedded  

-       Advance technical skills

-       Self-reflective regarding my practice

-       Ideas – why?

-       Think of outcome

-       Think about timing

Tableaux & Staged narrative

Jean- Baptiste Greuze, The Village Bride, 1761 

Tableau is used to describe a painting or photograph in which characters are arranged for picturesque or dramatic effect and appear absorbed and completely unaware of the existence of the viewer. The term was first used in the eighteenth century by French philosopher Denis Diderot to describe paintings with this type of composition. Tableau paintings were true to life, and had the effect of, transfixing the viewer like never before. In the 1970s, a group of ambitious young artists like Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky began to make large format photographs that, like paintings, were designed to hang on a wall. As a result, these photographers were compelled to engage with the very same issues revealing the continued relevance of the tableau in contemporary art.

French – living picture

They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and may be theatrically lit.

Photographic tableaux viands, became inspired by the popular Victorian parlour game in which costumed participants posed to resemble famous works of art or literary scenes.

The genre paintings of 17th- century Dutch masters Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch fascinated Guido Rey. He carefully studied the paintings and then arranged similar tableaux for his camera. His photographs captured equally serene domestic scenes and mimicked the minute architectural details of 17th- century interiors, such as the leaded-glass windowpanes and the checkerboard floor.

Johannes Vermeer The Glass of Wine 1658–1660 

Guido Rey 1910 platinum print 

Tom Hunter, The Glass of Wine, 1997

Oscar Gustave Rejlander was specialised in the tableau vivant, photographs based on carefully staged, costumed and posed scenes to convey a specific message. His most famous piece Two Ways of Life from 1857 is an allegory depicting youth torn between the staid rewards of the virtuous life and more obvious temptations of sensual abandon.

Two Ways of Life,1857, printed 1920s, Oscar Gustav Rejlander 

The Two Ways of Life was one of the most ambitious and controversial photographs of the nineteenth century. The picture is an elaborate allegory of the choice between vice and virtue, represented by a bearded sage leading two young men from the countryside onto the stage of life. The rebellious youth at left rushes eagerly toward the dissolute pleasures of lust, gambling, and idleness; his wiser counterpart chooses the righteous path of religion, marriage, and good works. Because it would have been impossible to capture a scene of such extravagant complexity in a single exposure, Rejlander photographed each model and background section separately, yielding more than thirty negatives, which he meticulously combined into a single large print.

Perfecting the idea of combination printing, Henry Peach Robinson combined several negatives to construct the desired image. His most famous photograph is Fading Away from 1858 where he combined five separate negatives to produce the intimate narrative of a dying girl surrounded by her family. Photographic historians often dismissed the theatrically arranged salon and tableau photography of the 1850s as a misguided use of an inherently realistic medium.

Henry Peach Robinson – Fading Away, 1858

The 1970s ushered in a period of conceptual photography that played with process. The emphasis on arranging and constructing an image set the stage for a resurgence in staged photography. Terms such as “narrative,” “storytelling,” and “story creation” were once again part of the medium’s vernacular. Work became more theatrical as photographers exposed the artifice of making a picture. By the 1980s, the arranged, constructed, and staged photograph was once again popular. Like the Victorians and Pictorialists before them, photographers approached their work like a film director, moving from a developed idea or “script,” then constructing set and assembling costumes, props, makeup, and performers to create fictional events from history, legend, mythology, and daily life. Somerville, 2017

The Destroyed Room, 1978. Jeff Wall. 

A pioneer of the genre, Jeff Wall makes large-scale colour images that seem to capture people engaged in everyday life, but are in fact largely staged. He describes his work as cinematography, boiling it down to preparation, doing things in advance before taking the picture, and collaboration, having contact with people being photographed.

A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993 

Jeff Wall, Pair of interiors, 2018 

Much of 20th century, photography was about catching the decisive moment. Yet, this “decisive moment” can also be created by artificially constructing scenes for the purpose of photography only. Rather than capturing the moment, artists make specific choices when staging their images. By consciously placing elements and arranging compositions, they create the events, environments or emotions. The artist, in addition to their role as a photographer, also becomes a director, stage and costume designer, make-up artist and possibly performer as well.

Jeff Wall , After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 2000. 

Duane Michaels, another of the pioneers of staged photography, is famous for creating narratives within a series, blending an image with text in a format similar to cinematic sequences. Additionally, he often worked in his studio with staged models. He believes that what he cannot see is infinitely more important than what he can see. He said he did not have to walk around looking for something to take a picture of since it was already in his head.

Things Are Queer, 1973 

Paradise Regained, 1968 

The staged scenes of Cindy Sherman were something of an innovation. Emerging just before the term “staged photography” was coined in the 1980s, she posed herself as a variety of characters to comment on the female roles defined by society and reveal gender as an unstable and constructed position.

“I think of myself as an artist, not a real photographer. In a way I am a performance artist. I was influenced more by performance art than photography or painting. The image is my own performance, and I am documenting myself”.

Sherman.

Sherman is famous for her use of make-up, costumes, props and prosthetics to create complex and ambiguous photographic images. She invents fictitious characters, photographing herself in imaginary situations, inhabiting a world of pure appearance.

“Her imagery is based on film, fashion, and other popular culture forms, and her characters have ranged from realistic to seemingly familiar to absurd – while each being fictitious.”-

Rochelle Steiner. Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs, Palm Springs Art Museum

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Hollywood series (also known as The Hustlers) in an area of Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood, frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts. The photographs are a unique mix of documentary and fantasy. Having set up the scene for each picture, diCorcia would find a man on the street and offer to pay him to appear in the photograph. The sitter's name, place of birth and the amount paid form each title. The careful staging of light is central to diCorcia's aesthetic. For the Hollywood series, he put his camera on a tripod and used artificial and flash lighting to supplement the Los Angeles evening skies. This creates a twilight effect, with rich details and heightened colour, which bathes the sitters with a kind of exotic allure.

Gerald Hughes (a.k.a. Savage Fantasy); about 27 years old; Southern California

'It might be said that twilight is a muddled form of clarity. The warm glow that suffuses the ' golden hour' in Los Angeles acts to filter the grim realities, the outright lies, the self- deceptions, which allow Hollywood, and by extension, America to flourish. 'Twilight' provides the rose-coloured glasses that make it possible to see out but not see in.’

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Ike Cole; 38 Years Old; Los Angeles, California; $25, 1990-92 

Nighthawks, 1942 by Edward Hopper 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, W, March 2000, #12 (from Cuba Libre), 2000 

Hannah Starkey

Using actors within carefully considered settings, Hannah Starkey’s photographs reconstruct scenes from everyday life with the concentrated stylisation of film. Starkey’s images picture women engaged in regular routines such as loitering in the street, sitting in cafes, or passively shopping. Starkey captures these generic ‘in between’ moments of daily life with a sense of relational detachment.

Her still images operate as discomforting ‘pauses’; where the banality of existence is freeze-framed in crisis point, creating reflective instances of inner contemplation, isolation, and conflicting emotion. Through the staging of her scenes, Starkey’s images evoke suggestive narratives through their appropriation of cultural templates: issues of class, race, gender, and identity are implied through the physical appearance of her models or places. Adopting the devices of filmography, Starkey’s images are intensified with a pervasive voyeuristic intrusion, framing moments of intimacy for unapologetic consumption.

Hannah Starkey, Untitled - October 1998 

Hannah Starkey, Untitled - May 1997 

‘Untitled’, May 1997 

Christian Tagliavini

Tagliavini takes inspiration from three of Verne’s most popular works: Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Tagliavini’s photographs invoke, rather than directly recreate, the novels, translating the atmosphere of Verne’s words into moody sets where people pose severely and mysteriously.

Sharbendu De Imagined Homeland

Rejecting colonial documentary methods, this photographer tells the story of Arunachal Pradesh’s Lisu people by harnessing mythological symbolism in his cinematic stills.

Marilyn Mugot – Night Project 

“As a huge fan of science fiction cinema from the 90s, I wanted to apply this aesthetic to Chinese landscapes,” says Mugot, of her latest series, Night Project. Referencing the post-apocalyptic worlds found in Hollywood blockbusters such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, she explains that the neon signs lining the streets of Chinese cities, which “are practically no longer made in the West”, lent themselves to her recreation of these dystopian futures: “China inspired me because it is a country in full mutation on all levels – architecturally, economically and culturally."

Gregory Crewdson – Twilight 

'I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.’

Gregory Crewdson

Miles Aldridge

Works like an auteur filmmaker. His many influences include film directors such as David Lynch and Federico Fellini: photographer Richard Avedon and the psychedelic illustrations of his father, Alan Aldridge. Each image is immaculately crafted, often starting with story-board drawings so that the final image lies somewhere between cinema and photography.

Home Works #7, 2008 

Chromo Thriller #2, 2012 

Gary Salter

Exploring the human condition through glimpses of what most would consider mundane, and finding instead characters that are fundamentally relatable, revealing the remarkable in the unremarkable. He enjoys travelling and documenting situations and everyday people, finding inspiration and a story in the unobserved.

Julia Fullerton-Batten Old Father Thames

As a teenager I moved from Germany to live in Oxford on the banks of the River Thames, though the stretch of the river there is called Isis. The Thames has been a fascination for me ever since. I now live in West London but am still just a short walk from the river. Its constantly changing face with the tide and the seasons, the activities on and around the river are for me compulsive viewing and inspiration. But above all there is the history of the Thames along its entire length with an infinite variety of stories that encompass birth, baptism, death, flooding, sun-bathing on the shore, the stories of the ‘Ladies Bridge’, messages in a bottle, riverside scavenging youngsters, prostitution, damaged masterpieces, and countless other whimsical, idiosyncratic and tragic happenings.

1814 Frost Fair, Contortionist 

My own fascination with the Thames has now taken a more concrete form. I have made it into a project and am in the process of choosing, researching and photographing a selection of cultural and historical narratives from along its banks. The result to-date is my still unfinished work – Old Father Thames.

ANNETTE KELLERMAN, 2018

SWEET MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, 2018

Married and father of a baby daughter, Private Thomas Hughes had boarded a troopship in September 1914 to go to fight with the Third Army Corp Expeditionary Force against the Germans . An extravagant whim encouraged him to write a message to his young wife and place it in a green ginger beer bottle with a screw-on rubber stopper bottle and throw it into the sea.

The message said: “Dear Wife, I am writing this note on this boat and dropping it into the sea just to see if it will reach you. . . . . Ta ta sweet, for the present. Your Hubby.”

He also wrote a covering letter: “Sir or madam, youth or maid, would you kindly forward the enclosed letter and earn the blessing of a poor British soldier on his way to the front this ninth day of September,1914. Signed Private T. Hughes, Second Durham Light Infantry.”

Thomas died in battle two days later, aged 26. His final words written 85 years previous remained unread until in 1999 when fisherman Steve Gowan scooped the bottle up in his net as he fished for cod in the Thames Estuary off the Essex coast. The note was still dry and intact.

Private Hughes’s wife, Elizabeth, had died in 1979, 20 years before the bottle was found. Their now 86-year-old daughter, Emily, pleaded with Mr. Gowan to return the letter to her. She was only two years old when she last saw her father as he headed off to battle. Her reasoning was: “It is too late for the letter to be opened by the person it was intended for, but the next best thing is for it to be handed to his daughter. It’s incredible that something lying on the seabed for almost a century has survived intact for so long”.

MUDLARKERS, 2018

In Victorian times, when it was low tide on the River Thames in London, it was a common sight to see groups of dirty, ill-clad, barefoot young boys and the occasional girl foraging on the muddy, slippery foreshore of the river. Moving on calloused feet they scavenged for anything brought up on the river that they could sell. They were aptly named Mudlarkers. Their booty might be merely wood, coal, rope or bones, truly rubbish, but if they were lucky, they could find something of higher value, perhaps buttons, coins, objects of historical value, and very occasionally, precious metal items.

Mudlarkers belonged to the poorest among society, maybe homeless orphans or children of large, destitute families. Sometimes they were joined by the elderly, also penniless, who hoped to find enough to pay for a small meal or for alcohol. Mudlarker kids were still active on the Thames until early in the 20th century. Modern day Mudlarkers go mudlarking as a hobby.

They explore the muddy, shoe-sucking shores of the Thames better clothed, well shod and use metal-detecting and other sophisticated equipment to help them make their finds.

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