Summertime clothes

I processed these prints in the dark room today, my first attempt at self-processing my own photographs after successfully developing my second roll of film (the first got ruined). The pictures were taken in the Hilton Hotel in Manchester, an enormous tower of glass so thin it looks like it could blow over in the wind. We thought we'd treat ourselves to a night, and although our view from the floor to ceiling glass window wasn't quite as impressive as we'd hoped it was still a rather spectacular getaway. Particularly nice was the breakfast room, which, like Tom Ford's recent film "A Single Man", showed that the smooth curves and dark wood of sixties modernism can be stylish when it wants to be. As if all this wasn't enough we awoke to glaring sunshine pouring in through the window, giving us a rather freak day of blue skies and a shimmer of possibility that spring is actually on its way.. Though judging by the overbearing amounts of rain that has been drowning London over the past week it seems unlikely.

Since getting back to London I have managed to edit the footage I filmed the other week and have come up with a possible finished piece to show at the end of term. I also have to note that I finally finished reading Kerouac's beat odyssey "On The Road", which after two and a half years of going back and forth to feels like quite an achievement, almost as if I've been on the road with him for all that time and I've finally come to the end of the journey. Although the beats may not have been the most eloquent of writers they did know how to capture the spirit of the America of their time, and its hard to deny their influence on subsequent American culture, from Ed Ruscha's gasoline stations to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, or Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places to pretty much every single road movie that's ever been made.

No more self-pity..

I think that lately I've forgotten the pleasure that taking a photograph can contain, the capturing of an intimate or memorable moment in time to treasure forever. It should not be a laborious task, an agonising over composition and light and all the factors that it takes to make a photograph, but an instinctive reaction, a glance through the lens and pressing of the shutter and then treasuring whatever comes back from the processors, whether or not its perfectly sharp or nicely white balanced. Over the past few weeks I've felt my enjoyment waning, taking it all too seriously and beating myself up when I don't like what I see, trying to force the moment rather than let it happen. From today I will turn over a new leaf and remember the joys of taking a photograph, and hopefully, possibly, take a few shots that I can cherish until my dying day...

(Sorry if this is a little over sentimental/outright cheesy, I think I just had to come out and say it... This post was in some way inspired by this person, whose photography I'd forgotten I liked so much.)

Why I Love You

A film I made today

Lately I've been exploring the relationship between photography and film, and I've become increasingly interested in the gaze, or glance, and its cinematic as well as photographic effect. Last week I made a book that took one second of footage from David Lynch's Mullholland Drive and presented it as twenty-four still images, or frames. I chose the scene at first because of the way the film is deals with classic Hollywood cliches, the tragic Hollywood dream, so to speak. As I've been reading more around the subject I've been finding more and more significance within the short clip I used, which I have now remade into a film using the stills I took from the original. Edward Branigan writes that "glances are so important to narrating a story world that the only glance that is generally avoided is a glance into the lens of the camera. A look into the camera breaks the diegesis because it makes the conventional reverse shot or eyeline match impossible". What I took from this is that a glance directly into the lens of the camera breaks the suspension of reality that the audience undergoes when watching a film (specifically in a cinema, the context of the gallery space is different). This suspension of reality is important, it is the forgetting of ourself and our surroundings that allow us to be truly absorbed into the world of the film, and so a direct glance from someone on screen would remind us of the fact that we are in fact watching the film. One particular scene sprung to mind when I was thinking about this, specifically for the way it does exactly what cinematic convention says not to - the actress on screen confronts the lens directly, thus breaking the illusion the film has set up. The scene in question is from the end of Jean-Luc Godard's "A bout de Souffle":

The effect of this shot employed by Godard is quite startling, there is a sense of the absorptive experience being broken, of being addressed directly as Jean Seberg's gaze bores into the lens, before she turns her head and the film draws to a close. It is as if Godard is addressing cinematic convention, reminding us just before we leave the cinema that we are in fact in the cinema watching actors and actresses on screen. It's an aside, in the same way Shakespearean soliloquies would often address the audience directly, engaging with them so as to let them know they have an awareness of their presence. Whatever his intentions it succeeds in raising questions about the cinema and the act of viewing - the role of spectator and the sense of forgetting one submits to when watching a film.

The female gaze

I was leafing trhrough an old copy of i-D earlier when I came across a spread by artist and photographer Collier Schorr. I don't know too much about her, other than she is an artist who was born and raised in Queens, New York, yet bases much of her practice in the German town of Schwabisch Gmund. Although she incorporates both drawing and collage into her work, it is her photography, particularly her portraiture, which I find most striking. She has been documenting the lives of German people in the town for many years now, inspired in part by the famous series of portraits taken by August Sander but also by the emergence of German photographers Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff in the 90s - "Being intrigued by that work, and then going to Germany and actually looking at the landscape, I imagined the position of an entitled outsider, a character who does not belong but who has assumed some kind of ownership." Like contemporaries such as Rineke Dijkstra and Catherine Opie, she has an ability for capturing the intense, self-conscious gaze of her subjects, the subtle nuances of character and body and the vulnerability one feels when in front of the camera. To me her work is stark, honest and contains a delicate beauty which I guess I strive for in my own work.



Collier Schorr's exhibition 'German Faces' opens on February 19th at Stuart Shave Modern Art.

An evening with Mark Leckey

Last night we turned up to our Monday Night guest lecture a few minutes later than usual, and on walking through the doors of the lecture theatre wondered why it was noticeably busier than usual. It took the sight of a rather bearded fellow at the front to realise that it was Mark Leckey, winner of the 2008 Turner Prize, that was to be speaking to us that night. I was apprehensive at first, I'd always thought Runa Islam was the deserved winner of the 2008 prize and remembered not quite engaging with Leckey's installation of films at the time. Over the course of the evening I was to be proved wrong somewhat, and actually left liking the man himself and appreciating his work in a whole new light. The talk he gave was basically a summary of his artistic career so far, from his inclusion in the New Contemporaries exhibition whilst still a student at the end of the 80s, through to the beginning of his video work using found footage, which followed a period of not making art and distancing himself from an art world he felt increasingly disillusioned with. His first notable video work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, was an homage to various subcultures and the joint euphoria of music, in particular dance and rave.

He made work related to these themes for a few years, but what really interested me was a film he made in 2004 and that was displayed in his winning Turner Prize exhibition. Entitled Made in 'Eaven, it consisted of a camera panning around Jeff Koons' famous rabbit sculpture, his circling it and zooming in and out of the reflections of his empty flat. Although projected as a 16mm film you soon realise the impossibility of it - there is no reflection of a camera recording it - which reveals the true nature of the film as being completely computer generated. Mark Leckey has explained of his fascination with the sculpture that "I like the idea of something that's almost inhuman in its perfection, like Bunny. It's as if it just appeared in the world, as if Koons just imagined it and it appeared" and that is what he is attempting to address in his film, creating something tangible yet impossible. Something he talked about was his inability to fully appreciate or engage with objects in real life, he claimed he needs to see them on a screen, part of the culture of computers and the internet, which has led him not only to his investigations into the 'long tail' theory for the internet, but also, it would seem, a growing disillusionment with the art world (again) and his purpose as an artist. After a short Q & A he concluded that perhaps making a cult would be the only true form of art left. Perhaps this was a just a humourous remark to conclude the evening, but his thoughts on the art world and his ideas about the way we receive and read images left me leaving the theatre with something to think worth thinking about.

Made In 'Eaven - a really bad clip of the film installed as a 16mm projection.

Worth reading, Mark Leckey discussing his reaction to winning the Turner Prize and thoughts on how the media receives contemporary art.

Still images

I'm sitting in foyles cafe, I've just had a tutorial to discuss my ideas and am contemplating my brief for the term ahead: independent exploration. Yes, that's right, an independently led (i.e. basically no timetable commitments) exploration (could it be more vague?) into my interests and impulses as a studying visual artist. As well as trying to work out what exactly to do with all this free time I have been thinking and reading a lot about the relationship between the still and moving image, the connotations of narrative and time associated with each, the idea of reliving the past in film and distilling it with photography, and somehow blurring the boundaries of both in my work. Perhaps inspired in some way by Chris Marker's La jetée and with the intention of creating some form of narrative or sense of time having passed, a suggestion of experiencing the moment, whilst at the same time exploring the connotations of a still image in various forms - a photograph, a freeze frame. Right now it's all just ideas and borrowed theories but hopefully soon I'm looking forward to the creative process once again and trying to transform these ideas into something tangible.

Flakes

Happy (belated) new year! This is just a post to announce that my every increasing addiction to blogging (or perhaps just making new blogs) has led me to start another blog project, which can be found here. Basically as the title suggests I'm aiming to document with photographs my twenty-first year as it unfolds. I'll most probably upload pictures as they are developed, and in the meantime, let's hope the start of my third decade is a good one...

On writing

I've been rediscovering a couple of favourite books lately.. Although I do have a tendency to stick with a few staple writers and perhaps don't allow myself to discover something new as often as I should, I'm all for re-reading books, and certainly for me the feeling of engaging with a book you loved the first time and have since forgotten is something I like quite a lot. The books in question are rather different on the surface yet perhaps are not all that different when considering them a little further. First up is Mrs Dalloway, seen by many as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, an ongoing prose stream of consciousness, striving to uncover the human condition through the thoughts and emotions of a small group of characters. At its core Woolf explores the difficulties of communication and the profound effects of memories and the passing of time. The second is J.D. Salinger's couplet of short stories, Franny and Zooey. Most famous for The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey focuses on the youngest of seven children of the Glass family, a family Salinger has written numerous short stories about, and who, coincidentally, provided rather a heavy influence for Wes Anderson's film The Royal Tenenbaums (not as original as you think). This short novella is heavy with dialogue and once again describes the difficulties language has of communicating inner feelings and emotions, and also discusses the meaning of spirituality. The first part in particular is a rather poignant vignette of a couple growing ever distant, conveyed by Salinger through simple and fragmented dialogue that allows us to witness the deterioration of their closeness.

Writing often influences and informs my own work and these two books seem incredibly relevant to me right now, and perhaps this is why I've picked them up of the shelf again. Woolf's ideas of the transience of time and the significance of fragments of memory have certainly been feeding into my recent work, and the attempt by both authors to highlight the limitations of language when trying to truly express oneself is something I feel I am attempting to convey in fragmenting and distorting images.. It's almost a sensory experience that I'm trying to depict, a feeling of nostalgia or intimacy that you can't quite pin down, trying to remove the image without losing the sense of what is felt. For me it's like listening to music - a lot of the time for me the lyrics are secondary to the melodies and textures of the sound, which often stir up more feeling and emotion in me than the direct images being sung aloud by the singer.

I'm hoping to make a short film in the near future and finally use my ancient cinefilm camera and projector. I'm sure Woolf and Salinger's writing will be somewhere in the back of my mind when it happens.

All that glitters

So, Richard Wright has won the Turner Prize. Despite my ardent support for Roger Hiorns (in my case still the rightful winner) I had a feeling Wright would swoop in and take it. Wright's piece, a giant wall painting in gold leaf, is incredibly intricate and painstakingly executed and yes, its beauty is undeniable. However I still can't get past the fact that, for me, it didn't really work in the space it sat in, and it wasn't an immersing awe-inspiring experience that everyone was claiming it to be. Admittedly Hiorns' offering wasn't necessarily as spectacular on first sight but I felt that his work contained a quiet beauty, the atomised jet engine creating a beautiful, desolate landscape that spoke of modern world materiality and that was a timely reminder of how everything eventually returns to dust. I do feel that Hiorns was let down by the fact that his most breathtaking work was half an hour away in a dilapidated flat in Elephant and Castle, sitting unaware to anyone that didn't take the time to watch the artist videos at the end. It would be nice to think that the judges took Seizure, arguably the most exciting and original art piece to be made in years, into consideration, however if they did then how did he not win? Perhaps, and this is probably just a cynical presumption, they wanted to reward the piece that showed most 'skill' in an attempt to save the prize from the many of the public and media's perception of pretentious joke (anyone else blame Martin Creed?)... That or certain members of the judging panel had a slightly predisposed bias..

Anyway, I shouldn't take away from Wright's achievement, his work has appealed to many and certainly is magnificent in its own right. It just so happened that he wasn't all my cup of tea.