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Francesca Woodman

“It is difficult not to read Woodman’s many self-portraits – she produced over five hundred during her short lifetime – as alluding to a troubled state of mind. She committed suicide at the age of twenty-two.” (Bright, 2010, p.25)

Francesca Woodman (1958–81) explored issues of gender representation and the use
of the female body in her work. Self-portraits dominate her substantial portfolio, often
portraying dark psychological states and disturbing scenes. She uses her body, locations and props to evoke a sense of surrealism, mystery and vulnerability. In Space2, for example, her body almost disappears into the blur of movement. This visual strategy recurs in her work and, since her death, has been interpreted as Woodman using photography both to present herself to the camera as an exhibitionist and to help herself disappear.

Look up Francesca Woodman’s images online. What evidence can you find for Bright’s
analysis?

Google search for images by Francesca Woodman

I think that perhaps Bright is reading Woodman’s images with the hindsight of her subsequent death. I think it is natural for us all to explore our existence in time and space. Especially as in this instance she was possibly responding to an assignment brief, whilst studying at university. The title Space2, is actually Space squared.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-space-providence-rhode-island-ar00350

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/francesca-woodman

http://users.rider.edu/~suler/photopsy/surreal.htm

as a human being we can move around and occupy different parts of a space, whilst the space itself can not move. I have tried this out myself using long exposure to put myself in the image but not in the image at the same time. Looking at the idea of only passing through time and leaving traces of oneself.

  • f/29, ISO 64, 10 sec, 35 mm
  • f/25, ISO 100, 15.0 sec,
    35 mm
  • f/29, ISO 100, 13 sec, 28 mm

I like the smoky effect left by moving through the space. I was wearing a white top. In woodman’s images she was in an empty room. I liked the idea of being in and around my home.

Max Klinger – german surrealist painter,  Max Klinger (18 February 1857 – 5 July 1920) was a German symbolist painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer. Klinger was born in Leipzig and studied in Karlsruhe. An admirer of the etchings of Menzel and Goya, he shortly became a skilled and imaginative engraver in his own right.

I have always enjoyed surrealism in my photography, I like the idea of adding symbolism as well.

Brooke Shaden –  https://brookeshaden.com/gallery/surrealist self portraits – this is a photographer whose work I have followed for a time. However, I find her quite dark, she follows themes of rebirth and feel a little like Woodman’s work. Personally, I prefer images that are more hopeful and uplifting.

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Stephen Bull – Photography – review

Recommended by tutor to read P45, 67-70.

The first passages is in Chapter 3 – The meaning of Photographs:

Photography and Psychoanalysis: The unconscious, Fetishism and the Uncanny [P45]
This passage focuses on ‘mental context’ i.e. “the mind of the viewer as interpreter of photographs”. The author talks about this should be taken into account when creating photographs, but points out that this is very difficult as each person has different experiences.
Sigmund Freud, however argued that people share some common experienced, desires and anxieties, such as joy, fear, angler etc.  Thinking back to my Social Science course many years ago. I would say that this also depends greatly on the culture in which they were brought up.  Freud’s psychoanalysis central idea is that of the three states on consciousness, conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious.  In relation to the unconscious, Freud agued that people repress some desires and anxieties, mostly due to social constraints and feel that they should not be expressed, discussed or acted upon.
Relating this back to Assignment 2 and the point I think Les was making, is that the images I created from my mind in an attempt to photograph the unseen are in fact unconscious reactions to the stimuli.  I was aware of this but what I think is more interesting is the fact that the images were so like ‘stock photos’.  What does that say about what is in my subconscious?

The second passage is in Chapter 4 – Photography for Sale:

From Selling Products to creating atmospheres: advertising photography and image banks.
This section focuses on how our ideas of what is desireable has been shaped by advertising and the use of ‘stock’ images to portray ‘consumer happiness’. Christina Kotchemidova suggests that ‘the indexicality of the photograph’ helps create ‘ real fantasies’ and advertisers use this to consistently reinforce the message of what life should be like, that we subconsciously desire this, but as it bears no resemblance to our realities we repress them as unconscious desires.
Is this what I have created in my images? Certainly not consciously, but it does make me question them.  The fact that I have used substitutes for myself in the form of a wooden hand and not put myself in the images, even though I am trying to describe my feelings is telling me something, about myself.  

Image 7 is probably the most ‘stock’ image.  It certainly isn’t (or wasn’t) my reality as I in order to create this image, I bought all of the crockery new and the cereal which I don’t eat!  In my head this is what breakfast on a sunny morning should look like!  Actually I really love this image, because it fulfills my vision (perhaps this vision has been fed to me, by advertising I don’t know.  

Item 7 – Stan’s Object

I was given a bowl and was told the ‘object’ was within it. There were multiple objects, which were light, sticky and round. I ran it through my fingers many times and imagined a sunny morning breakfast.

My reflection is that in creating images I do need to make a decision about what I am trying to say, is it real fantasy or an attempt at honest portrayal of the facts, or indeed like my first assignment, somewhere in the middle?

Bull S., 2010, Photography, Rutledge, New York

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Assignment 2 – Feedback and Reflection

. . a thoughtful submission that fulfills brief . . .

Read Tutor Feedback report here

The first thing to say is that I again had a FaceTime conversation with Les, my tutor which I have come to really enjoy and find it so enthusing to be able to discuss and debate my ideas. Far from finding it daunting and worrying about any criticism I have learned that the conversation is really stimulating my thoughts and leading me to research places and people, I wouldn’t have found on my own. I so wish I’d started out doing this, because actually having those discussions really does help improve my work.

I also made the notes this time and submitted them for Les to amend and add references about photographers and artists we’d talked about. I’ll mention them later.

I think I ended up with more questions than answers from this assignment, but I don’t think that is a bad thing, quite the contrary. In all aspects of this assignment, I have had to discuss my objectives with people. From those that gave me items, to my husband who helped manage the process and to showing the final images to my tutor and others. If feels like a real collaboration and really helped me engage fully with the brief.

I am conscious that I mustn’t reflect and reminisce too much as I still have quite a bit of the course to complete.

I have set myself a goal to research each of the photographers, authors and artists that Les and Moira mentioned during the conversation and reflect on their link to my work for the final submission. I won’t however, attempt incorporate their ideas into Assignment 2. In stead, I think it will show better progression in my work if I incorporate it into subsequent areas of the course.

Research items:

http://lesmonaghan.blogspot.com/2016/12/who-would-want-to-be-face-of-poverty-in.html

Moira Lovell’s area of research

Stephen Bull’s – Photography p45, 67-70

Karen Barad’s On- touching – The Inhuman That therefore I Am (v1.1)

Phillyda Barlow, working with the idea of denial of touch.

Gillian Wearing’s – masks

Eva Stenram – Drapes

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Assignment 2 – Contextualise your work with historical and contemporary practitioners:

Notes made during researching for assignment 2

At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen – Shawn Michelle Smith

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03087298.2014.981422?journalCode=thph20


Walter Benjamin’s concept of the optical unconscious

Roland Barthes’s famous Winter Garden photograph

https://photoworks.org.uk/great-unknown/#close-no

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading

Having lost his mother, with whom he had lived most of his life, he goes looking for her among old photographs; time and again the face he finds is not quite hers, even if objectively she looks like herself. At last, he discovers her true likeness, the “air” that he remembers, in a picture of Henriette aged five, taken in a winter garden in 1898. (In the journal entry that recounts this discovery, Barthes simply notes: “Je pleure.”) In narrative terms, it’s an astonishing moment, comparable to the onrush of memories as madeleine meets teacup in Proust, or the scene in Citizen Kane when the maddened Kane first grasps the snow globe, emblem of all he has left behind. Barthes, however, is a temperamentally discreet narrator, so never shows us the photograph: “It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.”

“Camera Lucida is a short book, but with the winter garden photograph it begins all over again. Suddenly every photograph is for Barthes a memorial; the very essence of the medium is its spectral conjuring of death-in-life. Contemplating a portrait by Alexander Gardner of the condemned Lewis Payne – sentenced to death for the attempted murder of US Secretary of State WH Seward in 1865 – Barthes sees only this fearful temporal paradox: “He is dead and he is going to die.” And his book starts to sound weirdly premonitory: here is Barthes surrounded by his glum little icons, fantasising his own “total, undialectical death”.

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/photography-between-invisibility-and-the-unseen

Photography and Optical Unconcious – Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski

http://debraflynnphotography.co.uk/OCA/can-blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/04/photography-and-the-optical-unconsious.pdf

https://onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/the-optical-unconscious.html

In this article, I believe the author is saying that ‘optical unconcious’ is a viewer’s unconcious reaction to stimuli in an image that is unseen to them. Thereby, a shape or a colour or even the way someone smiles could trigger a reaction that other would not register, i.e. the unintended consequence of the image?

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I’m Back!

Hello blog, have you missed me?

I haven’t been slacking, just finishing my 2nd Assignment which I am happy to report is almost there. Just need to write it up, so you’ll be seeing more of me over the next few days and weeks.

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Part 2 – Project 2 Image and text – Exercise 1

Exercise

Cut out some pictures from a newspaper and write your own captions.

  • • How do the words you put next to the image contextualise/re-contextualise it? 
  • • How many meanings can you give to the same picture?

Try the same exercise for both anchoring and relaying. Blog about it

All images taken from www.bbc.com/news on 2nd January 2019

  • women celebrate 100 years of being able to vote
  • with so many phones out there must be somebody famous!
  • courage is everywhere
  • Alien landing flatten’s town
  • Worst wind in a century 
  • was this disaster natural or man made

  • Looking like mum
  •  
  • has anyone read the body language manual!
  • Ms Merkal and Mr Trump didn’t agree
  • Stand off
  •  
  • Green is the new black!
  • specialsts entered the contaminated area wearing protective suits
  •  
  • There are two sides to every story
  • man reflects on the past
  •  
  • Wasteland
  • collecting waste from the river
  • plastic in our waterways is killing our  planet
  • These shoes are killing me
  • Don’t wear shoes on the carpet
  • lady removed her shoes to ensure her safety on the wet carpet.
  •  
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Reading and Links

I came across this article when researching Robert Frank’s Americans

Robert Frank – The American – https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/arts-culture/inside-robert-franks-the-americans/

Experimental Relationship https://www.lensculture.com/articles/yijun-liao-experimental-relationship-2   

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/oleg-tolstoy-who-s-driving-tokyo

https://www.lensculture.com/2018-lensculture-street-photography-award-winners

Postmodernism / Modernism

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism

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Assignment 2 – Photographing the Unseen – Item 2

Item 2 – Ralph’s object

Using the same methodology as for Item 1, I was blindfolded and given the item to hold for 5 mins, and recorded my comments. As previously, I have not yet seen the actual item. These will be viewed once all images are complete.

This item although small like the previous item it immediately felt very different. It felt like it was metal, there were two long protrusions and a couple of shorter ones, there was a groove down the middle and I could feel an ‘S’ shape. I really couldn’t make out which way up the object was supposed to go or what it was.

Sound File can be heard here

Notes made after touching / feeling the object

I thought about the kind of image I wanted to make from this item, but struggled to come up with any solid thoughts, I felt very confused and intrigued, but also that the object had some symmetry about it and it was definitely metal.

At first I was going to try and incorporate the hand again, but it just didn’t fit into the ideas I had. I also considered a slide, which I thought would give me the metal groove I was wanting. But eventually, I wanted to capture the confusion and lack of clarity that I had. The idea of a kaleidoscope came into my head so I looked up how to make a kaleidoscope in photoshop.

I found this tutorial on the internet: How to create a Kaleidoscope – then needed to take an image to use to create my image. I found a metal colander which had the inside curves I was looking for. I also liked the idea of shining a light through the colandar. I added a blue gel to the speedlight to give a blue light and took a range of images with the colander in different positions. These can be seen in the contact sheets below.

Although the image chose looks quite dark in the contact sheet there was nice light spatter on the carpet above it. I was also drawn to the two ‘feet’ on the top which reminded me of the two protrusions on the item I’d felt.

I used this image to create the kaleidoscope effect as per the tutorial.

I have annotated below the amendments made to the colander.

This layer was added on top of the kaleidoscope layer and masked to merge them together. The original image was also very blue, so I added a hue and saturation layer to desaturise the colour . I also added some radial blur to the background highlights to give it a softer look. The wavy lines in the centre represent the ‘S’ shape I felt. The image can be view either way up in order to represent the fact that I couldn’t figure out which way round it should be.

Item 2 – Ralph’s object – final image
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Assignment 2 – Photographing the Unseen – Item 1

Item 1 – Helen’s object

Context:

Helen is my sister, I gave her the brief and she provided me with the first object and test piece for this series of images.

sitting on the sofa in her lounge, I was blindfolded and then given the object.  I remembered I should be recording about half way through my 5 mins, so my husband only started recording on my phone at the end.

To hear the recording click here

I cannot post the pic of me handling the item or the item itself because I haven’t finished the set yet, but I’ll add to the final assignment document.

Copy of my written notes

When I first held the object, I was a little underwhelmed, but I found it really interesting to be experiencing it without seeing it.  I tried to create a visual image in my head based on what I was feeling.  I got quite fixated on the groves in it and that fact that I thought my fingers were creating a little cage around it.  I have very small hands, so I think it was a surprise that this object fit in my hand in this way.

I wasn’t sure I would be able to come up with an image at first, but on the drive home (my husband was driving), things began to start popping in my head and I drew the image above quite soon after.  Once it was in my head, I couldn’t / didn’t want to change it.  The colours came from the colours in a picture of an idol in a museum I took in Egypt a few years ago.  When holding the item, it immediately popped into my head.  This was a bit of research done in the middle of the night!!! looking through my old pictures for reference. 

I definitely wanted to emulate the sandy yellows and blues.  I used one of the images to look at the lighting:

key lighting came straight down and there was secondary light coming from the front.

Once I had the idea in my head, I started thinking about the technical aspects of the image.  I knew I wanted to include a hand and initially I wanted this to be my own.  However, I also realised that that would make it quite difficult logistically to take the shot and I wanted to do as much as could in camera.

My props list was:

  • hand
  • stone
  • sand
  • a container for the sand
  • blue paper/cloth for the background
  • lighting (two speedlights, umbrella, honeycomb)

I went to the beach and picked a few stones off the beach I settled on one that was oval in shape and fitted nicely within the palm of the hand.  It was also a sandstone colour to fit with my Egyptian sand theme.  This ended up being a wooden anatomical model that I could make to look like it was holding the stone in a little cage.

We had some sand and found a dark wooden picture frame to be the base for the sand.  I had this idea for a kind of zen garden in the sand, so that I could incorporate the grooves, but this element didn’t really work.

Once all the items were gathered, I set them up on the table in my kitchen with a one shoot through umbrella and a speedlight with a honeycomb dish held directly above this.

The set up and lighting for Image No 1

Technical Information

The images were taken with a Nikon D810 full frame camera with a 85 mm 1.8 lens.  Two speedlights were used to provide a key light above the set up with a dish and honeycomb and a secondary light shot through an umbrella.

The contact images below demonstrate how the shot was set up and the lighting was adjusted to get the feel desired.  It also shows how the set up progressed up until the the sane was poured over the stone.

Editing

The image chosen was one of the last taken. I chose this one because the sand wasn’t too heavy over the stone.

The image was edited using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The sand above the thumb was removed by merging the image with another image where there was no sand.

printscreen of photoshop file

various tools were used including:

  • colour balance
  • curves
  • photofilters
  • high pass sharpening
  • layers and masks
  • displacement maps
  • added shapes and blending modes
  • overlay

    I used a curves layer to make the hand look cooler and stone/sand yellower.

    The Final Image

    Helen’s Item – Image 1

    The item was very small and could be completely enclosed in my hands which are themselves small.  The object was smooth to touch and cold at first but warmed up as handled.  There were distinct grooves carved around the base and a couple of spikes at the top which felt like cats’ ears.

    The item reminded me of an Egyptian idol which led to the idea of the sand and the colours.  I have added some ‘secret’ grooves to the stone and I added a metal overlay to the nails to emphasise the cold touch.  The fingers represent the cage around the stone.

    Item 1 – Helen Final Image (so far!)
    Reflection

    I really enjoyed this and am really looking forward to doing the next item.  I have tried to be really strict and finish writing this up before moving on to the next one and I have decided not to view any of the actual items until I have finished them all.

    For the next and subsequent items, I will try and make sure that it’s quiet and that I’ve got all of my equipment ready before we start. i.e. get my phone ready to record my comments.

    I think I would like all of images to be portrait but of course it may depend on how the next ‘feeling’ session goes and what image I am compelled to make.  It will be my aim to print these as A3 paper to be presented alongside images of the items. do I need to make such detailed notes for all of the rest of the images? I will ask my tutor about that.