Idea Post: Gaining Inspiration from the World of Film 10.21.10

Most people relate to music, books, and poetry in the way that I almost solely relate to film. Ever since I was a child, I remember being nicknamed "Kid Video" and my poor parents were terrified of my addiction to film. I vividly recall my experiences with each film in the most acute detail. I simply could not be pried away from the tube. They scurried back and forth to our local video store, "First Video" to satiate my appetite for movie watching.

More recently I have been trying to utilize my knowledge and love for the moving image (film) as a means to translate my ideas into stills.



Cinematography- is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for the cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography. Many additional issues arise when both the camera and elements of the scene may be in motion, though this also greatly increases the creative possibilities of the process.

Role of the cinematographer

In the film industry, the cinematographer is responsible for the technical aspects of the images (lighting, lens choices, composition, exposure, filtration, film selection), but works closely with the director to ensure that the artistic aesthetics are supporting the director's vision of the story being told. The cinematographers are the heads of the camera, grip and lighting crewdirectors of photography or DPs. on a set, and for this reason they are often called

Directors of photography make many creative and interpretive decisions during the course of their work, from pre-production to post-production, all of which affect the overall feel and look of the motion picture. Many of these decisions are similar to what a photographer needs to note when taking a picture: the cinematographer controls the film choice itself (from a range of available stocks with varying sensitivities to light and color), the selection of lens focal lengths, aperture exposure and focus. Cinematography, however, has a temporal aspect (see persistence of vision), unlike still photography, which is purely a single still image. It is also bulkier and more strenuous to deal with movie cameras, and it involves a more complex array of choices. As such a cinematographer often needs to work co-operatively with more people than does a photographer, who could frequently function as a single person. As a result, the cinematographer's job also includes personnel management and logistical organization.

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Cinema Studies (Article)

By Joerg Colberg
May 22, 2007

After reading this interesting article by Arthur Danto about the MoMA Jeff Wall show it occured to me what really confused me about discussions like this one (and many others I’ve seen recently): Reviewers and writers often spend considerable time on explaining why certain photography in fact isn’t really photography but, instead, painting or cinema. It’s almost like these reviewers and writers restrict photography to something that, in essence, is really quite mundane, and whenver a photographer falls outside of that mundane, then it’s not photography any longer. So we are told we are looking at a photo by Jeff Wall, but it isn’t really a photo, because a photo can’t possibly have the complexity that we see (some of the discussion of Andreas Gursky’s work falls into the same category). I can’t accept this, and I think part of it might be a generational issue: I never grew up thinking that photography’s role is restricted to the mundane.

It’s interesting how this whole complex has so many facets - just look at how people use “photography” and “painting”, with the latter always treated like a true art form, whereas the former still always can’t really be because… Yes, why? Maybe it is not because there is something inherent in photography that makes it more simplistic than painting but, instead, because we think there is.

Having said this, I think the one big step that is still missing for contemporary photography really to become an established and accepted art form is to get full acceptance for it, so that people might say how similar some photography is to painting (just like a movie might be poetic, or a symphony might evoke images), but they won’t write any longer that some photographer’s work really isn’t photography but painting or cinema.

Colberg, Joerg. "Cinema Studies." Conscientious Blog (2007): n. pag. Web. 21 Oct 2010. .

Jeff Wall

Insomnia 1994
Transparency in lightbox 1722 x 2135 mm
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Cinematographic photograph
© The artist

The set for this work is an exact replica of the kitchen in Wall’s studio. The man seemingly suffering from a nightmarish episode of insomnia is an actor. The claustrophobic atmosphere is emphasised by the awkward positioning of the furniture – tables and chairs are placed at angles that defeat their function, and appear to block the fridge and cooker from opening. The door and cupboard, half ajar, could be read as metaphors for the mind, in its struggle to find an escape into sleep.

"Insomnia." Tate Modern: Jeff Wall Photographs 1978-2004. Web. 21 Oct 2010.

Put the Days Away by Sun Airway from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.

This is one of the most inspiring cinematography I've seen in a while. This independent film has a great, story, soundtrack and beautiful cinematography.

Cinematographer: Tim Orr

Artist Entry: Martien Mulder 10.18.10

MARTIEN MULDER

I have a strong emotional connection to the beautiful lighting she utilizes in her personal work, more specifically, her landscapes. Mulder's imagery evokes a sense of loss and sadness, especially in her use of light, shadow and color.

Dutch-born Martien Mulder combines portraiture, fashion, landscape and still life photography. She lives in New York and her pictures have appeared in magazines such as Purple, 10 Magazine, French Vogue and Fantastic Man, and exhibitions have been staged in New York, Amsterdam and Tokyo.

Martien discovered her love for photography as a teenager. Her first pictures date from her high school years, when friends would pose willingly in her home-made studio. After her art history studies, with a major in contemporary photography, she decided to take her own pictures more seriously. By composing handmade books of her photographs, she established a visual language that connected to the magazine world. She started travelling the globe, wherever assignments would lead her, and created personal work at the same time. She has always been interested in the relationship between people and their environment.

The variety of her subjects asked for a strong consistency in style and approach. Martien creates stories that are truly minimalist. People seem to be at ease in front of her, and static objects are brought to life by her quietly focused attention. The essence of any subject is revealed without force. Her pictures are “pure”, “personal” and “universal”, and therefor find their way into magazines, advertising campaigns and galleries.

Up until today her handmade books are a very specific way to present her work. The books are visual stories that reflect a personal experience. With a focus on the natural and the real, Martien is always looking for the things that are delicately abstract. As a stylist once said of her work: “It has a rare and lovely lightheartedness. She is one of the few photographers out there who is doing work that does not undermine one’s self esteem, the way so many fashion or beauty images do. Her work is calmly reassuring.”

http://martienmulder.com/about/

QUOTES:

"It’s really important to have pictures you believe in published in magazines that you believe in, because they are seen by the people you want them to be seen by. Magazines are a huge platform for creativity. And there are so many and they are so specialized. if you choose well, and if you have a precise idea of your work, you can use the magazines to communicate beyond what your picture can communicate. It is the context that matters a lot, when your pictures go off into the world."

"I enjoy pointing my lens at many different subjects in search for the same result…a calm delicately abstract representation of them."

"It depends on who I talk to and what their references are. But to someone who doesn’t know much about photography, I tell them I shoot portraits. I try to portray things as they are. People, but also spaces and objects sometimes. I create pure and personal images of my surroundings in a very easy, calm and reassuring way."

Tillmans, Wolfgang. "Interview with Photographer Martien Mulder." BaseNow:Where speech is free and talk is cheap.. BaseNow, 12 December 2008. Web. 16 Oct 2010. .













Interview with BaseNow

Martien Mulder on Booooooom!

Kahmann Gallery Represents Martien Mulder

Exhibition at Kahmann Gallery Highlights 10 Years of Martien Mulder's Work

Martien Mulder Photography

Idea Post: Memory 10.14.10

MEMORY

Images holding the essences of memory;

biding time, waiting, celebrating...

barely discernible stories of who was here and

what happened there;

visions of imagined spaces-layering time

within abandoned, unoccupied and frequently

dilapidated interior rooms and exteriors;

there is always something.

- Carol A. Beane

Jill Price can recall every detail of the last three decades of her life — whether she wants to or not. A rare memory condition causes Price to experience continuous, automatic playback of events.

"My memories are like scenes from home movies of every day of my life," she writes, "constantly playing in my head, flashing forward and backward through the years relentlessly, taking me to any given moment, entirely of their own volition."

NPR:Blessed and Cursed by an Extraordinary Memory

Price, Jill. "Blessed and Cursed by an Extraordinary Memory." NPR (2010): n. pag. Web. 11 Oct 2010. .

Jennifer Karady: Visualizing Memory, Photographing War Stories


I'm interested in the way our memories affect the way we remember specific locations or reminisce about certain places from our past. How these locations become sites of sadness and loss, hope and fear, etc.

Emotions Outlast the Memories that Drive Them
Franklin, Deborah. "Emotions Outlast the Memories that Drive Them." NPR. NPR, 13 April 2010. Web. 11 Oct 2010. .

Artist Entry: Phil Underdown 10.11.10

Phil Underdown

RELATION: Underdown's imagery really reminds me a lot of photographs I took last semester for my senior show. His attention to detail and focus on the ground level relates to my imagery and process.

WORK/QUOTES: "The Trapper's Lament" During the course of the last year a large number of beavers established themselves along the small, crooked creek that winds along one side of my property in the Adirondack park in upstate New York. As they built more and more dams and eventually began felling trees adjacent to the house, threatening access to the fields as well as the house's septic system, a trapper was reluctantly called in. I am still wrestling with this decision, and decided to photograph what was left behind after the beavers were removed. These images of the aftermath of that decision depict a landscape where a variety of forces and impulses collide, photographs of a crime scene where I am both chronicler and perpetrator. Here is a landscape where our mythologies of nature and the realities of our daily lives combine in an uneasy confusion, an analogue to our relationship with the environment on a cultural as well as a personal level; I moved to the Adirondacks because of my love of nature and I try to live my life with respect and concern for the future of our planet. I recycle, I drive a Prius, I give money to environmental organizations... and I kill Beavers. This is the landscape of that confusion, the trapper's lament. - Phil Underdown, "The Trapper's Lament" "Darius Himes Selects Phil Underdown for 1st Curator's Choice Award!." Hey Hot Shot! (2010): n. pag. Web. 11 Oct 2010. . Grassland 2005-2009
In the 1940s, a wetland was filled and leveled to create an airstrip. An artificial grassland was born. Over time the original trees and plants of the wetland returned only to be cut back by mowers and grazing animals. In the 1990s, the abandoned airstrip became the Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge. Now the runways crumble as plants sprout through cracks in the tarmac, and the sun, rain, and snow take their toll. Mowers still cut the grass to hold back the succession to forestland. From the outside world, development, changing agricultural practices, and habitat loss slowly press on its borders. Grassland exists in a hybrid state. Like an imitation of a natural landscape, it attempts to be something that it never was, and can’t be without constant intervention. In this mowed plain, the ultimate ordered terrain, we see a panorama of policy; of decisions made in faraway offices where flatness and straight lines flow from an engineer’s pen rather than from some natural process. Trees appear like plots on a map, isolated in Grassland’s vastness, only at the edges allowed to grow unchecked. One year this half gets mowed, the next year that half. A tractor fills the niche that would be occupied by brushfires. For the grasshoppers who make constant take offs and landings in the late summer, or the coyotes whose droppings remind us of their presence, the creator of these runways is irrelevant. After four years of photographing in its 500 acre expanse, I am beginning to bring Grassland into focus. These images are a type of fiction; a story of a place told through the traces of its inhabitants—a tire mark here, a bird house or a puddle of broken glass there. Signs of its past, present, and future mark its rationalized topography like small-scale reenactments of the dramas playing out in the world around it. An archeology of the present, the images depict the landscape of this time--managed but wild, planned yet unpredictable, expressed not through traces that have left their mark for centuries or millenium, but through phenomena that are more fleeting and ephemeral, some playing out over a season or years, others lasting a mere afternoon.

Underdown, Phil. "Grassland." Phil Underdown Photography. Brooklyn Digital, n.d. Web. 11 Oct 2010. .

Hey, Hot Shot Winner, Phil Underdown- Interview.

Hey, Hot Shot!

Feature in Fraction Magazine

Phil Underdown

Artist Entry: Phillip Maisel 09.06.10

PHILLIP MAISEL

Maisel's work is created by photographing multiple images he flips through on facebook by shooting one long exposure. My night work involves capturing an image anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes.

BIOGRAPHY:

The opening reception for San Francisco photographer Phillip Maisel's latest series, "A More Open Place."

The title of the series refers to a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of the popular social network Facebook, who was quoted as saying “We’re going to change the world. I think we can make the world a more open place.”

Each image is a long-exposure photograph of a computer screen taken while flipping through a photo album on Facebook. More than 100 million photos are being uploaded to Facebook every day.

"I am interested in our reaction to this massive influx of photos and the modern experience of engaging with this technology.

I see the combination of technology and photography as playing an increasing role as a databank for our memories. At the same time, despite Facebook’s current popularity, its lasting prominence in our collective lives is uncertain. If Facebook dies, do our memories die with it?"

These quotes were from an article that can be found here :

A More Open Place: Photography by Phillip Maisel

Other Related Websites on Maisel:

Phillip Maisel on Conscientious Blog

Anderson Gallery Submission: March 23, 2010

THEY WERE SO CLOSE TO ACCEPTING MY SUBMISSION!

Artist Lecture #5: Sanford Biggers

Yet another awesome guest lecturer to come to VCU this semester! It's even more exciting that Biggers taught at VCU, but currently works at Columbia University. Biggers was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. In the early 1990's he traveled to Japan, and its influence (Buddhism and is evidenced in consequent works. Although his lecture came off as very unfocused, I really enjoyed his enthusiasm for his work and sharing it with us!

I found this article while researching Biggers' work. The website can be found here:

http://www.sanfordbiggers.com/essays-publications-interviews/interview-valerie-cassel-2002-2007.html

"Sanford Biggers is not a hip-hop artist, but rather a contemporary griot who utilizes the language of hip-hop to magnify the

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confluence of world cultures. Through his conceptual work, Biggers provides a linkage between traditional African and African American cultural sensibilities and the sacred ritual practice of Buddhism, through a contemporary authentic American expression, Hip-hop (a synthesis of poetry, music, and politics) that emerged in the wake of the civil uprisings of the late 1960s and the urban nihilism of the 1970s. It is through the language of Hip-hop that Biggers allows his audiences to see the similarities, not the differences of what would be understood as disparate cultural expressions. To embrace the genius of Biggers’ conceptual work, his audiences must open themselves to three facts: first, that Hip-hop is not only an authentic African American aesthetic product, but now the pervasive and global language of an entire generation; the concept of spiritualism is present in the sacred as well as the secular; and third, materials have the ability to transcend its specific function, particularly in the face of an overarching aesthetic vision..."

I really enjoyed his installation of a dance floor in a museum that unfortunately I cannot find. Biggers said, "Dance is a place of communion...not hampered by the constraints of the museum." I also enjoyed hearing stories about his experiences collaborating with other artists and musicians. His work takes on so many forms...