Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography - Gail Buckland

"The story of the invention and the life of the inventor assume exiting proportions when related as the tale of a 19th century English gentleman's philosophical quest for "truth" Great Britain, unmatched leader of the newly industrialised Western world, bred and nurtured Talbot"
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p11.

"In the history of photography there is no more seminal a figure than William Henry Fox Talbot and no photographs more compelling than the earliest photographs made"
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p12.

"Talbot's ambition was for knowledge, not fame, not friends, not wealth. Knowledge had to be striven for with all the energy and power within him."
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p14.

"The central concern of Talbot's life, however, was scolarship, not in any one discipline but in a multitude of subjects; he viewed all knowledge as interrelated."
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p14-15.

"The scientific view of life was connected to the artisitc; the derivation of a word explained as much about the world as looking at crystals in a microscope; cultivating plants was as joyous and as challenging as making pictures with the camera obscura"
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p15.

"Talbot encouraged his children to be attentive to the intricacies and delicacy of flora and at the same time discussed authoritatively new discoveries with the experts of the Linnean Society, of which he became a Fellow at age 29, an honour reserved for the most distinguished botanists of the day. In this context, his photogenic drawings and calotypes of trees, ferns leaves and plants take on a new dimension. These were not just random subjects easily available for pictures, but objects to be scrutinised and considered in their own right"
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p19-20.

This is in complete opposition to my own work, i know next to nothing about the plants I photograph, instead it is an unknowing collaboration between my other who has some idea for keeping a garden, and myself who sees these little subjects.

"The "idea" came to Talbot (or Talbot came to it) during his six-month belated honeymoon with Constance in 1833 while attempting to sketch  scenes at Lake Como with a camera lucida. His drawings were pitiful. He thought he might do better using a camera obscura as he had done before but realised that being a poor draftsman his attempts would always be hopeless. Suddenly, it seemed, Talbot imagined the outlines in the camera obscura as "fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined to quickly fade away" but "how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!"
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p25.

"Talbot, like many other Victorians, seems to have done too much in his lifetime. Perhaps, as Steiner suggests, he needed less sleep, but why did he work quite so hard all those waking hours? The answer is in his letters and papers. They reveal a man consumed by the idea of cultural evolution and the advancement of civilisation."
Gail Buckland (1980). Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. London: Scolar Press. p107.

Roland Barthes On Photography

"Western theories of art emphasize the importance of imagination and the insight or genius of the artist. So dominant has this philosophy of art been that literary criticism in academe throughout the better part of the twentieth century has tended to privilege literature of complexity and imagination over realism"
Nancy Shawcross (1997). Roland Barthes on Photography. Florida: University Press of Florida. preface X.

photography is inherently a realist medium, therefore to make photographs of note, one need not make photographs to be realistic, one must use that basis with insight into a message they want to convey, this is what makes photographic projects worthwhile

"Talbot's own remarks about his photographic work convey a sense of delight in the permanent rendering of nature's "fairy pictures, creations of the moment"; a sense of pride and in excitement over humankind's progress and his part in it"

Nancy Shawcross (1997). Roland Barthes on Photography. Florida: University Press of Florida. p32-33.

I guess i somewhat feel the opposite, humankind is progressing at a rate that seems uncontrollable, new technology is ever more expensive and always progressing far beyond the capabilities of its older generation. It doesnt seem dependable, all the fossil fuels being burnt and resources being used up making plastic objects that are used to a couple of years and then go obsolete. I feel disapointed in myself and in the social structure of the UK and the world, that it is unaffordable to be up to date. So in conclusion i do not feel excited to be part of this modern age, just another number, another leech on the world. The history of man has been put into sections - the Neolithic age, the Bronze age, Iron age, and within them subsections, what age are we in now? the plastic age? The age that built so much then lost it all? Humans in the last couple of hundred years, from the industrial revolution to now, made so many advances that we are able to contact the other side of the globe with complete ease, we can even travel to the other side of the globe in a short space of time. If there are historians in the future what will they say of us? When photography was invented this must have seemed as impossible as the clear sharp cameras we all carry around in our pockets, the same cameras that are part of the powerful computers that are able to connect with the other side of the world to share pictures.

"Daguerreotypes were treasured objects as well as mementos. The held the captured light of loved ones and favourite scenes in a device requiring careful manipulation and observation - a process, however, considered magical and thrilling. Daguerre had succeeded in giving the public the ultimate recreation of nature - one that lasted more than just a short while in a darkened theatre: it was, instead, a re-creation to be possessed and kept forever."

Nancy Shawcross (1997). Roland Barthes on Photography. Florida: University Press of Florida. p35

I guess i see my images as closer to Daguerre than Talbot, as although they are made to paper, and are negative, they are one time things that cant, or in my mind shouldnt, be reproduced, they are much like daguerreotypes, to be viewed as is. In this i do not see the daguerreotype as the invention of photography. Although textbooks tell us a deguerreotype is superior in sharpness and tone that a calotype is, the point is that a calotype could be produced more that once. what is interesting to me, is that in this digital age, we never make negatives, a digital camera makes immediately a positive, a recorded representation of the scene we want to share. while these images are immedietly positive without any further work, the key here is the sharing, in this digital age we share images, often instantaniously, and a daguerreotype is not built for this. When comparing a Talbotype (calotype) and a daguerreotype we are really comparing two different things, its like comparing a painting of a chair and a photograph of a chair. both might have been made with skills and both might have been made into a physical object, but there will only be one exact painting, however there can be infinite pictures.

so what i need to ask is am i not making photographs in my process? i am not trying to call a daguerreotype a painting, rather that it is an artform in its own right, something different to photography that uses a photographic process. Perhaps why the thing as a whole is called photography and not dagguerrography. but is this what i am doing? something akin to colourful photograms? but where photograms miss the camera and go straight to the light source, i am still using the camera. so perhaps that must be that they are: somewhere inbetween. something inbetween photography (a calotype), a dagguerreotype and photograms.

"By 1859 Baudelaire has seperated truth, at least as he believes the public to understand it, from beauty. He contends that nature is the only thing in which the public believes, and, therefore, the public believes that only the exact reproduction of nature is what art should be" - Baudelaire 1981, 152

Nancy Shawcross (1997). Roland Barthes on Photography. Florida: University Press of Florida. p53

Rona Pondick

Rona Pondick Sculptor

Quotes from http://bombmagazine.org/article/3351/rona-pondick

In arranging and curating the show, she selected a number of historic sculptures from different cultures—East and West, some dating back a few thousand years—from the museum’s collection to be shown alongside her own. This idea produced provocative juxtapositions, giving lucid insight into Rona’s working methods and interest in the fragmentation of the body and the more recent idiosyncratic hybridization of natural and animal forms with the human body, which she elucidates below.

Her work of 'human/animal' sculptures is what is being discussed here. I discovered her work from the tree sculptures, i m interested now also in her human animal sculptures. immedietly you can see evolution, talking about time and the evolution of mankind, it looks back to past times. i think its interesting that she chose to use these old historic sculptures with her work, these old sculptures also talk of metamorphises. god like creatures mixing humans and animals. the show looks back to a more primitave time from all over the world, but i think these times when these sculptures were made were not simple times they were full of religious wars and religious strife and famine and disease with a lack of medicine compared with now. however her sculptures to me speak of even earlier times, pre human, when humans are starting to become homosapiens from homoerectus.

RP If you look throughout history, what’s wonderful about art is that it’s mutating and spiraling. It doesn’t move in a linear way. We artists take things from maybe the last 100 or 1,000 years and twist them and re-do them, putting them into our own voices and time periods. In one section of the Worcester show I put a bronze Thai Buddha from the 15th–16th century next to my yellow stainless steel Dog that I finished in 2001 next to a Mexican ceramic from 900–1200 next to an Egyptian Middle Kingdom limestone from 2060–1780 B.C. I found it interesting that sculptures from different time periods and cultures—in many different materials, all made in different ways—looked like they made perfect sense together.

Is is a shame that photography doesnt have this kind of history? sort of, it could be argued that since photography has a relevence to painting that there are some ancestral links to look to. it can be argued that photography doesnt have anywhere near the timespan as scultputre or paintings, as these date back to cave paintings and ancient monuments, but now i think art has eveolved to a point where a succesful artist, a successful photographer should look at all forms of art, not just photography, therefore the 'ansestors' a photographer should have looks back a long time for some aspects of a project. However of course you cant draw inspiration for speaking about photography from what an artist did 1000 years ago as they couldnt have been trying to say anything abut photography.

RP The first time I merged a fragment of my own body with an animal form a light bulb went off. I realized that animal-human hybrids have existed since the Neolithic era, and if you look throughout history, it’s an image that has repeated over and over. Now, when you look at the way science is advancing with cloning and genetic manipulations in both human and plant forms, it’s chilling how it all comes together.

Sometimes it takes me a while to understand what I’m doing in a piece, psychologically. When I’m working on a sculpture I don’t always understand what I’m doing and it can take me years to understand fully what it means. But I’m definitely aware of the emotional interpretations. People want to believe there’s a narrative. Because I’m bringing contradictory fragments together, I believe the viewers try to bridge the gaps and wind up projecting a lot of themselves into my work.

RP I don’t think I’ve ever made a sculpture that’s not a fragment or made up of fragments. One way I engage the viewer is to show a part of something rather than the whole. The whole is complete. It makes sense. It’s logical. The viewer is more passively engaged.

i think its the same with photography, it has to have little traces and flavours of something, of some idea, or a message, but then if it tries to show the whole thing it becomes a little pointless.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/03/art/rona-pondick-with-phong-bui

http://www.ronapondick.com/press/ronapondick_AMA_2012.pdf

Her work is all about metamorphasis, taking one thing and changing it, whether through fragmentation, or losing its colour or morphing two things together. is this what i am trying to do, make a metamorphisis out of the natural world? maybe, i guess i see these plants that should belong in the natural world as already metamorphasised. so maybe i am trying to further the development. taking macro shot of them serves to make them further unreal, to further take them out of any sort of earthly context. i guess its all just absurd. these macro shots of flowers having any sort of significance to anything, they dont really pertain to anything anymore, they have been changed so far from where they have originally come, maybe that is my point about humanity, that we have come so far from any original humanism. all the religious and political divides just put everything into a negative light.

Anna Atkins

She is considered to be the first person to ever publish a photo-book, however these prints were made by a camera-less technique, so maybe some people can argue over this point
Her mother died when she was just a baby, so she grew up close to her father who was a botanist, she she grew up knowing plants intimitely.
This knowledge and her friendship through her husband to WHF Talbot led to her making light prints of the things she new best. Another family friend was Sir John Herschel, the inventor of the Cyanotype. This is what she used to make her most notable works and books.
cyanotype process is quite important, as it was used to make prints of plans for architechural buildings - blueprints!
the tones of the plant materieals in the whites of the are quite nice. what is interesting is this early desire to record the natural world and set it in order. i can almost imagine these first photobooks being great for learning, she gave them out among her friends i think, im guessing by her husband and accquiantances that they had an interest in botany too, they would keep these tomes in their library to be taken out when they needed to recall a certain plant. I went to visit Charles Darwin's house, and i remember the size of it and his garden, i can just imagine a similar house with a library with another scientist or someone interested in the natural world with these books looking up the names of things. again its this point about imagination from early photographic works.
However really the amazing thing about her work, is the realisation that photographic technique could create accurate copies of extremely intricate things, to aid in learning.

Something else i personally find interesting about her work, having tried cyanotype process for myself, is that the images are unique, they are all straight to paper images, created by placing the object over the paper and exposing, then processing; the result is a photogram. does mean my images re technically photograms, i mean there is a camera involved, but there is no point when i make a positive, no point i use what is essentially a negative to make a 'truer to life' representation?

Carol Armstrong - A Scene In A Library

the text speaks about Talbots desire to show us the real world things, but then also to tell us about what the photographs, and what photography itself could represent - in talking about Talbots' mothers bonnets - p94. he uses the title to do this, this is an early example of how photography relates to text, often photography needs text to contextualise it

i didnt realise how much of an effect his mother and women around him in his life had an effect on him. i guess i was imagining a victorian inventor, the classic image, strong and masculine and unweilding and unfriendly, prone to rivalry and jealousy, this image i think was further embedded in my head by his rivalry with the other inventors of the time all concurrently trying to work on photography and release its invention to the public first

"Moreover, it shifts attention away from the feminine associations and scenic qualities of library photographs such as that depicting his sister Horatia's harp next to the library's real shelves, which directly implies the intersection between feminine accomplishments and the masculine retreat of the library." "Instead, it limits itself to a strict focus on the contents of the librray and the gentlemanly learning that they index" p94

"In this regard, it is telling that the most feminine and fanciful photographs that Talbot made were excluded from The Pencil of Nature's gentleman-scientist's purview, leaving the hint of romance to a bit of lace here and a verbal suggestion there, so that they become traces to follow, a trail of fragments to piece together, clues to pursue" p94

This quote is a key for me to understand all great photography, the first master of photography was weaving into his work just a hint of something other than the scientist orientated photographs his audience primarily was. All great photography that followed has had some measure of this, it tells the real world thing, the plain thing in-front of the camera, but then it has layers beneath it, to be discovered with scrutiny.
They key word 'traces', as photography is a trace of the world, the photographs have traces of something more than the ordinary. The are the beginning of story-telling, narrative, imagination and fiction in photography.


Articles of glass - "These items have a kind of dram in the unanswered questions they pose regarding their relation to one another and their reasons for being there. Moreover, the light and shadow that fall on therm through the open window seem as much at issue, as much a part of the photograph's air of suspense, as the objects are in their incomplete visibility." p93

Talking about talbots photographs of his books in the library 'books in disarray'- "Intervening in the ordered world of the library, collection-catalogue and inventory, then, is the fanciful principle of artistic composition" p96
he is ordering the world, but also creating something new of the world. the picture is about looking but not about reading, for the books are shown, are not legible, so one can imagine reading, but not read at all themselves as the books are illegible - again its about this idea of imagination and storytelling.
"whereas, in A Scene in a Library, looking leads to reading - the optical scanning of its visual contents causes that imperceptible cognitive switch to the linguistic scrutiny of the spines to see which are legible and what they index and then to the imagining of what lies between the covers, which we mostly cannot see, of the books whose bindings we can see" p96
maybe t counter what i said this quote says how the picture inspires imagination, but i would argue, because so much is already handed to you, you already know what the books are, you dont need to wonder what sort of books are in his library, what he has been reading, maybe if you dont know the books you can wonder what sort of text is in them, but i think you can do so much more in the other picture of 'books in disarray'


"in sum i would argue that talbot chose  a scene in a library rather than all the other photographs that were available to him, because he wanted to emphasise the bookishness of the book in which he placed it" p96
here we have another stroke of genuis, it is the photobook, a book that refernces being a book, like the great photbooks - a book of photographs, a book with photographs in it

lol i just got it - photography comes from nature - that is why one must photograph nature. photography was born from draftsmans tools, a tool that they would use to draw with, to then use this new tool to draw nature, like a pencil is tool, the natural light is a tool, the paper is a tool, the subject must be of nature too, to be pencilled onto the paper. in some way the chemicals come from nature, as all are mare of atoms, made in the dying of a star billions of years ago. to photograph anything we are really always photographing the past, not the present

Luisa Caldwell

she is an artist who mostly makes installattions, i read about her in https://blog.sculpture.org/2015/04/01/luisa-caldwell/ , it sounds difficult to be making scultpures and having to move studio spaces several times, i remember moving house how much stuff there was to fit in the truck, when i moved with my family, and how much went in the van when i moved by myself... scultpures being 3d objects, it seems fairly large in her case, i cant imagine how much of  pain to move them, and be paying for rent as well as studio space and the van to move it all...
i was interested in her work because i saw her flower 'paintings' made with lots of fruit stickers, they are quite visually interesting, and bold colours like fruit itself, is often quite bright
her installations are great too
i can see she has had some influence from spanish painters, with the compositions and the inclusion of the skulls in these still lifes. but with modern touches, for example a jim beam whisky bottle that cements it in the modern age

Sarah Shaw

quotes from http://www.ink-d.co.uk/blog/2015/06/interview-with-sarah-shaw

‘Shift’ brings together a new collection of paintings which explore different ways to express a multitude of ideas around history, time, consciousness and psychology

the key recurring image being that of something, whether it be a flux of humanity or a natural element, spinning in infinity – shifting in time and space through broken painted frames. I wanted the exhibition to have lots of interlocking reoccurring themes and colours running through, and visualised the show as a whole rather than a series of separate paintings.

sounds like my ideas, that i can picture the end result, the exhibition space as a whole, but not really the individual images that i present in that space.

Shift' has many different meanings, and I do like exploring language which has different contexts, but I was thinking along the lines of it describing an event that occurs when something passes from one state to another and undergoes a qualitative change. Towards the end of the making of this show I began to think of the word 'shift' as being the perfect one to illustrate my current practice. It was also seemed perfectly in keeping with describing some of the qualities of paint, the shift in scale, the sense of time which I always attempt to evoke and the shift in movement of some of the inhabitants of the paintings. My work has undergone some transformations of late, and I have begun exploring a different kind of imagery and experimenting with different processes which have led to somewhat of a sea change in my practice therefore naming the show 'Shift' had personal significance.
 

her working process sounds a bit like me in that she is changing, but with her its the process itself, whereas mine is about the process of shifting from one idea to another

I wanted the large painting ' Search' to have an equation to real life, so the bending figures had a relation in size to the viewer - I had to compromise a little on this as I would have needed an even larger canvas, but the paintings I have made since the show started are exploring a more human scale. The thinking behind the range in scale was to explore a sense of the epic versus the intimate - and to explore something of our human relation to nature
 

ah yeah i need to think about scale really. so far only my idea has been that my little negatives are lost on a wall, their scale dictated by the process i use, can i actually think about a different scale, while still retaining their unique quality? what would this involve? would i scan my pictures and print them larger? or could i cut them to half frames?, destroy the negative, as i could destroy the flower that made it? could i make them into a collage? could i make them into a grid to cover a wall? could i make them into a long book like ed ruscha? the first idea that pops to my head is have them in order of lightnest to darkest, but what does that say of photography? nothing that hasnt already been said before... could i edit to some sort of narrative? cant really think of some narrative so far, maybe this is improved when i have more frames? so far i have my sight firmly resting on 3/4 walls with each 2-3 frames spaced several metres apart. i cant think away from this with my current amount of images

Theres something about old English traditions that always gets to me - It's really hard to put my finger on the feeling; its a kind of odd nostalgia, its something about how intriguing human beings can be with their odd customs and traditions and inventions - something about history and my sense of identity as an inhabitant of this country, and something about my gypsy heritage perhaps. When I started painting the dancers I wanted to get a sense of not only movement and colour and unity but also something darker beneath these customs - something about nature, life and death - in the end the paintings evolved into these odd maelstroms of humans in and out of time, dancing, moving , living, fighting through the painted space.

so does her painting take me back to times when i visited countryside villages where i saw morris dancers? the general aura of those towns? well yeah they definitelly remind me of morris dancres, infact if you were to ask me before reading, i would say that is what is depicted in the painting. but does it remind me of the aura of the villages? well yeah i can imagine being sat outside a pub on a sunny afternoon, theres a few bushes/large potted plants, the sort you get outside country pubs to the left of me, the dancers are dancing near a stone water fountain in the middle of the square. there are a few other people watching from the benches too, there are decorations in the square because some festival or celebration is happening. i can see the unity in the dancers as they come together in some particcular dance move, however i cant see about something darker, i can see about the customs and the connection to nature, perhaps i have forgotten what i would read in Terry Pratchett books about the point of countryside customs and their birth in keeping evil at bay... i think if i was to actually research into morris dancing and countryside customs there would be a darker side to discover, so i dont disbelieve her when she says this.

I can't remember who said it but I remember reading about an artist who said that he enjoyed images that change from something literal to something which has the possibility of becoming embedded in the mind - I would hope that the viewer is sufficiently intrigued at least that they would come back and take more time to look.

to be fair i think most people enjoy this more, and hope that work has a deeper meaning, after all that is what makes great art, it has to speak about several things, it must have a point, that isnt just the literal one, you must look at art and the more you look into a particular piece then the more you can see, and thats what makes it great.

When painting is at its best there is a kind of blankness in the mind for me - I'm not thinking about anything specific, just making speedy and intuitive decisions, sometimes about practicalities/material qualities of paint / sometimes about the best way to evoke a certain feeling/ always a questioning of how to best make the two dimensional space suit my purposes - my tutor used to describe it as 'accelerated consciousness' where the decisions you make are being made so speedily and intuitively obeying your own sense of aesthetics and 'rightness' in a painting.

what am i thinking about when i am making pictures? i think mostly i am grumbling because i cant get the tripod legs right, or the right angle or the bloody shutter cable has fallen out. am i thinking i need to make a nice picture? yeah i guess so... trying to find the right frame, but im not sure if im conciously thinking or not, i literally can remember...

The ironically named ‘Tiny Protest Paintings’ give a sense of the powerlessness to change the things I would like to, but the need also to express something in paint, no matter how useless

mmm yeah i cant change the world with photographs, are my photographs a protest? agaisnt human 'progression' or activity or against the social structure of the world i find myself in, like i mused about in my earlier posts? hmm maybeee not much of a protest though, they are taking what is and changing it for my own goals

quotes from http://www.sarahshaw.co.uk/news/2014/07/16/solo-show-at-the-artists-residence-gallery,-brighton/

Time collapses as past, present and future are represented in oil paintings that obey a non-linear chronology: they stand simultaneously as a visualising of the past and as a perception of the present.

Some of the works imagery springs from the artist’s imagination, whilst other work explores metaphorical or symbolic images/barriers/passages to speak of some of the conditions of being human and also of the concept of living through time.

again here is an artist who has found the key concepts they want to say to the world and found a way to do it.

quotes from http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/interview-aesthetica-art-prize-longlisted-artist-sarah-shaw/

I’ve always been fascinated with the flowers that people leave strapped to lamp-posts in memory of the people who have met their end at that place. They have always seemed so charged and poignant, both morbidly beautiful and strangely evocative of so many things: all the hopes, fears, disappointments, losses that we have all experienced at some point in life, whether it be the actual loss of a loved one or the loss of something else like love, youth or dreams.

well this is a very interesting take on it, am i leaving flowers for the death of the natural world, for the death of the ancient societies? i didnt think so maybe i need to read into more about why im interested? bc i visited the countryside as a child? that made me yearn for a simpler life? i think the ancient people had a simpler life? maybe but im guessing their lives were filled with danger and fear.

I’m still learning myself, but I would recommend trying to find your own voice as an artist rather than emulate others’, work hard, and persevere with knocking on doors despite the rejection you will inevitably receive and develop a thick skin because this path is a difficult one. It’s hard to live an emotional life which is visible and open to the criticism of strangers, but the sense of accomplishment and the sense of knowing yourself within the painting process is worth all the worry.

i guess the hardest thing at the moment for me is overcoming the doubt

http://blog.lawrence.co.uk/?p=286

quotes from http://www.artinbrighton.co.uk/artists/2015/12/2/an-interview-with-brightons-new-artistic-starlet-sarah-shaw

I allow myself to have a relative amount of freedom in the subjects I choose but they all have common threads running through them – especially in the Rorschach paintings which explored ideas around psychology. I have always played with ways in which to pictorially divide the canvas to achieve a certain effect, to attempt to speak of time, or to make a part of a painting function as either a barrier or as an opening – a pictorial device to invite a viewer into a painting or otherwise

Do you think you have something to say, or is it simply to create pieces for people to escape into?
I make work. All kinds of work, at all different times of day, whilst stuff is happening in the world, in my life, in other peoples’ lives - some of this stuff makes it back into the work.
I don’t come to a canvas with big ideas about ‘saying’ something. If I’m angry about something it will make its way into the work, if I’m sad that’ll be there too. If other people get something from it then that’s a huge bonus but I’m not even making it for them. I make work firstly for myself. It wouldn’t be real if I didn’t.

is this how i work? this seems more intuitive to me, maybe i need to paint not to photograph, - a photograph is too real, it has its basis in the world, so therefore it must say something of the world.

Ernesto Neto

quote from http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/ernesto-neto/series

Ernesto Neto has produced an influential body of work that explores constructions of social space and the natural world by inviting physical interaction and sensory experience

quote from http://www.kiasma.fi/en/calendar/ernesto-neto/

Neto is intrigued by traditions and rituals of Huni Kuin, particularly by their desire to achieve happiness and harmony in life and to abide by the timeless wisdom of nature.

maybe thats what i want to say that to be in tune with nature is to be happy and relax, that nature is timeless, the city always has new development - however so that the natural world, plants wither and die and grow again, and slowly over time species evolve, i guess its a bit like the city, the buildings are built and knocked down and eventually the city evolves. so i guess the question is why am i more fascinated by the nature than the city? i think always its bee that in the grey i city is where i was most of the time, thats where i lived and grew up, an it was a rare occasion when i got the chance to visit outside and these were like little holidays, even if they were only for part of a day, when everything else can be forgotten. and this gradual repeated trips became part of my psyche, these little things that made me happy to break away from the city, that made me revere the nature, the countryside, much more than the city. this includes the wider views that refernce human activity, the fields, the hedgrerows, the tracks, the distant buildings, towns and smoke rising frozen in the evening air. but also the macro views of a single plant, a single leaf, a single berry that i pick and eat, the aumtumnal leafs falling from the sky in a breeze surrounding me in a golden falling rain, being lost in the middle of a forest, it makes me yearn for the primeval days when the UK was covered in forest and settlements were few and far between.

his work is quite primal and tribal, one can imagine some remote tribes in the brazilian rainforest or somewhere far into the bush of austrailia somewhere lost in time happy in their small role in the world tucked away from the wars, living by their traditions.

quotes from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/7772975/Ernesto-Neto-interview-for-Festival-Brazil-realm-of-the-senses.html

My work,’ Ernesto Neto declares suddenly, 'is about liquids, about drinking. I love to drink. Drinking is such a delicious thing. When you drink, ahh…’ – he lets out a sigh of pleasure – 'amazing beer, great wine, fruit juice, coconut milk or water, it is so good. I think we should pray a little bit every time we drink something.’

thats interesting becaue i didnt excatly get that feeling from looking at his work, i thought it was abut cultures and traditions and bringing people together to experience each other, not just through speaking, but getting to go to cultural places and feel the feel on your skin, the sounds, the sights, the flavours and smells.

One of the themes in recent Brazilian art is the way that the viewer is encouraged to interact with it. Very often, Neto’s work encourages you to do the opposite of what art galleries generally instruct: do not touch.

so far in the last year often my work has incorportated this element, with my last series about the both the wasted and lost time on train journeys, and the inbetween space, which required viewers to physically move the papers themselves. now i have this idea that the images will be everexposed and lost on the walls, with a better exposure underneath requiring the viewer to physically turn the papers. to see properly the picture.

You are supposed to lean against a Neto, recline on it, even put it on. In fact, Cliff Lauson, the curator of the new exhibition, says that it will be impossible not to do so at the Hayward – some of the work takes the form of a corridor leading from one part of the exhibition to another.

my work will not be this involved! it was nice in my previous piece as i wanted people to feel the paper, and feel this precious little thing in their hand.

'People are too scared all the time of something going wrong. But there’s no need to worry about that. Things go wrong all the time. My work is all about things going wrong!’

yeah he as well has totally embraced this feeling out of control things going wrong, and used it to make something creative, i need to find this instead of feeling suffocated by it

quotes from http://playgallery.org/stories/neto/

And another thing is, you let each thing have its own nature. You don't want to control: "Oh, no. This should be like this." The work doesn't want to be like this. It's a dialogue with the work, itself.

he is letting the work have its own life, he just shapes it and moulds it but it makes itself i think is what he is saying

You spoke of something in your talk, something that seemed really humble and human to me. You said that sometimes you just have to allow yourself to feel kind of down, or kind of depressed about your work, to give it some space, in order to move on. I was wondering if you could explain what you meant by that.

This is very personal and I don't know if this applies to everybody. But with myself, I realized that sometimes I would go to the studio and I would try to work and at some point, I couldn't do anything. I would lay down, and begin to feel myself getting depressed. Then, suddenly something would shift, and I would have a great idea, and begin to work again.

So, because of my experience, I began to think that depression is something that is a normal part of life. It's kind of necessary, to sometimes feel like a little animal. Sometimes you need to be down. You can not be up all the time.

again another artist talking about this processes of embracing the depression and the waiting, that it isnt always productivity 24/7 you need to take a break and that takes time, i gus my problem is that my break has been so long i dont have time for anymore breaks, and the timeframe was so short in the beginning that any break was too long

If I have an idea, and I make the work, and it turns out to be exactly the idea, I say, "Oh! It's exactly what I was thinking!" And, I think it's a stupid work.

Because it's boring. It didn't surprise you.

Because there's nothing. No transit. Nothing happened in between. If it's something that I can think, then what's the point?

this is kind of the opposite of how i feel, i feel like i must think in every moment and have some reason or thought behind everything i do in every moment, and perhaps for him there is a reason for everything, but he feel free to create and find the meaning later.

Daisuke Yokota

nocturnes particularly - and site/cloud
his figures and 'landscapes' look like aliens exploring an alien landscape, or an city on another world. some images look like neg\tives, some are positive, i think often they are shot at night. it all gives this other-worldly feel, and the textures really help with that. they remind my of picture i have seen from the first space apollo moon mission, they just have this texture and tone. the dirty scratched textures/surfaces, make them feel like they were shot in some other world, like shot by a spy, that has then smuggled them back to earth.

i think actually underneath all the textures the pictures are of quite banal things and scenes, a lot seems to be basic street shots, when you look under the textures. so what is he saying? is he trying to create something new and exciting out of something quite banal and dull? in site/cloud. maybe he is just taking pictures of the things around him, like he is stuck in this place and wants to break out, he wants to break his pictures to make them into something new

overll i quite like his website, i dont mind that you have to click through the images to get to the next one, but i think perhaps he has uploaded fairly large files, so each time i click for the next picture it takes a few moments for it to fully appear on the screen, maybe my wifi is just being a bit slow, but it hasnt had this problem otherwise, i think if he had slightly smaller files it would load nice and quickly and i could flick through them quicker, like i didnt have to pause in my looking at the photos and my thinking, if i didnt have to wait a couple of seconds each time after i click

his series never have any writing or explanation to give the viewer any context, they have a name but nothing else, this suits his work i think beause they are all quite strange images its good for us the viewers to make us think.

in backyard his images are not, i think, all shot actually in his backyard, but the name gives us thought to what the series is about, the name and the nightime shots counjures up imaginations of teenagers kicked out the house together using the night and the empty streets as their backyard, their playground.

his series fossil, seems like a refernce to hiroshi sugimotos fossils. the images are out of focus pictures, often of naked humans, printed to paper, then scrunched up and folded out again. its like the humans are just slight traces on the paper, again they sort of look like aliens, strange glowing blobs, maybe its a refernce to how aliens are shown in films and tv, the papers are scrunched up to accentuate the throwing away of the paper, a refernce to photography looking back, like the humans are lost in time, the pictures of them thrown aay, then he has found this old battered archive of images of humans in their natural form to present us to us, because the humans are quite primeval in their appearance, naked, like they are the first humans living among the Neanderthals,

some of his pictures appear in more than one of his projects, very strange

http://daisukeyokota.net/


Quote from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/22/daisuke-yokota-acid-loving-japanese-photographer

His process is meticulous to the point of obsessive. He shoots on a compact digital camera, prints and rephotographs the results on medium-format film, then prints them again several times using heat and light to mark or distort the images.
it sounds so interesting, i would love to see the process from start to finish

An early series from 2012, Back Yard, was shot in the backyard of Yokota’s home-cum-studio in Tokyo, but looks otherworldly, like much of his work. Ghostly, ethereal figures stand in a blurred grey landscape, or seem to have auras around their heads.
well shit, i am surprised, the photogrpahs, all of them together suggested a larger area than what i image as a backyard, maybe he just managed to photograph from so many different angles and set up new spaces that it all seems new, or maybe he just has a huge backyard!

Then, to speak about his music, there’s a lot of experimentation with delay, reverb and echo, which is playing with the way you perceive time. Of course, there’s no time in a photograph, but I thought about how to apply this kind of effect, or filter, to photography.”

theres no time in a photograph. ima have to think abuot that one for a while... because there is the time when you look at a photograph, as in how long you are looking at it for, but the photography itself remains static, where it is, if it is on a wall or a table or wherever, when you stop looking it is still there on the wall. 

there is no time in a photograph. it shows a completely still moment, a quick snapshot, a thin slice of time. what if the shutter is open for minutes or hours or days? is there still no time in the photograph? maybe he is referring to the raw materials, it is not time it is paper with ink on it, or paper with silver particles on

Yokota stands out, too, because his results tend transcend the sum of the parts. Or, to put it more brutally, his creative process does not (as with so many emerging young artists) appear more interesting than the results. The idea, execution and final work are all of an equal and often mysterious intensity. If his current work is a guide, his journey into photography and beyond will be interesting.

i need to find this for myself, my process does appear to be interesting to people, but if i cant follow it up with images more interesting, then its nothing

quotes from http://www.americanphotomag.com/shoot-print-repeat-interview-daisuke-yokota

At first I used a compact digital camera, and printed the image out. Then I photographed that image with a 6x7 film camera, using color film, even though the image is later black and white. I developed it at home, in a way so that imperfections or noise will appear—I make the water extra warm, or don’t agitate the film. Even before that, I let some light hit the film; I’m developing in my bathroom, so it’s not even a real darkroom, which helps, but I’ll hold a lighter up to the film, or whatever is around. I’m always experimenting—the goal is to not do it the same way twice. So then, to produce more and more variations in the final image, I re-photographed the image about ten times.

woah there if he is developing colour film in his bathroom, does that mean i can do it? he also sounds like me when im cooking a meal from scratch, i try to add ingredients in different orders and cook for different legnths of time, and add different herbs and chop things smaller or larger... i need to do more in photogrpahy

You mean, you developed and printed and re-shot each image ten times?

Yeah, more or less. There’s no set number, but about that much. It’s not so much about realizing an image I had in my head from before, but finding something in the process. “Back Yard” was pretty simple, just that. 

finding something in the process? this is all about me, but his aproach is more spontaneous, he seems not really to have a clear idea at all, where i have some sort of idea, i just get too lost, he just embraces that lost-ness, and lets his creativity flow, whereas i get stressed of having to explain what i am doing and why and then i do get properly lost and that stresses me further, and its just a neverending circle of feeling lost leading to stress to lost-ness leading to stress...

If you look at music or film, there is time there. In other words, the work has a clear beginning and end, and in between, you shut out your daily life—you throw yourself into the work. There’s no element of duration to your experience of a photograph; it’s closer to an object. I felt that this was an extremely weak point of photography. So, I’m aware that photography can’t function in the same way as films or music, but I wonder whether it isn’t possible to create a way for photographs to carry time within them. When you’re going to sleep, you think about the stuff that happened to you that day, right? You might see some images, but they’re completely distant from what really happened—they’re hazy. You’re trying to recall something, and photography can also recall things in this way. Of course my photographs do function as some sort of record, but there’s no agreement between the photograph and my own recollection of what happened. The impression is completely different. I think using these effects of delay, reverb, and echo (in photographic terms, developing the film "badly" and so on) might be a way to alter the sensation of time in a visual way.

this guy has so got it, he understands his work, his process, and the point of photography so well, yet he's still searching to say something of photography, he has found a point and interesting point, born from his influences that has helped him to make great work.

Lorenzo Vitturi

Quotes from http://www.timeout.com/london/art/lorenzo-vitturi-interview-ive-always-been-interested-in-states-of-precariousness

Why focus on Ridley Road market?
'The market is a symbol for Dalston, with its African and Middle Eastern communities, and how it's been changed by gentrification over the past few years. I really tried to find a way to express the beauty of the place, which is unique, and at the same time to describe the condition it finds itself in.'


immediately his work is about change, the simpler place gentrified to something else, from colourful vibrant working class to middle class plain society. he wants to show the place in truth, the thing that attracted him in the first place - the colourful communities with colours from their homelands, and how it is changing to something else, is it better or worse? I haven't been to dalston, but to elsewhere in hackney and Shoreditch and they are, or were when I visited them, wonderful vibrant places full of life and people everywhere, going about their business or hanging with friends or enjoying the sun and the parks.


You make three-dimensional objects and take pictures: are you a sculptor or a photographer?
'I studied photography but my work has always existed between sculpture, collage, set design and photography. Using all this organic stuff like fruit from the market, photography is the only way capture it - otherwise something might only last for five minutes.'

his work is about making something permanent from something that is just temporary, its about retaining that beauty, retaining organic 'matter like fruit from the market' for longer, like how one might buy frozen vegetables, the photograph is the fruit frozen in time.


Why does your work look like it's about to fall apart?
'I've always been interested in states of precariousness. I'm from Venice, which has been falling apart for centuries in the most beautiful way, so I think it's something that's a part of me.'

his home has influenced his outlook on the world, now he wants to create work which reflects his becoming into the world, the place he grew up in has made him who he his, which reflects into his work.
what about where im from how does that affect me? what is Croydon like? pretty grey, dull nothing there that anyone needs to visit. is this what im trying to say with my work? that the dullness pervades through me? I have nothing to say because there is nothing interesting or nothing of note from my upbringing?
perhaps a future idea is tell the story of Croydon, the millions of people, the differences, the problems, the communities, and the broken blur of all the people individually going through the town all mashed together, there is so much variety that there is no variety because it all washes together into a blur, its like all the things in London mix together into Croydon.
but what to do now? is that why im interested in something small and controllable, it has no relevance to the outside world? the potted plants are just there to look pretty and serve no other purpose; I guess if Croydon wasn't there, would the world miss it, is that what I wonder? or are the plants like the photograph, the personification of one person working to make something pretty that you see in the image, that one might see in a flower in a garden?


Why does your work look like it's about to fall apart?
'I've always been interested in states of precariousness. I'm from Venice, which has been falling apart for centuries in the most beautiful way, so I think it's something that's a part of me.'

perhaps that is the attraction of Croydon, there are lots of building works going on, it seems everytime I travel through there now, there is a new building being constructed, there is always a development happening, or the buildings that were being built reach further completion, theres always something new, however I feel that Croydon itself doesn't change at all, its the same streets the same people the same business. for example there was a record shop that was having a closing down sale, for what felt like 5 years, I wonder if they are still open now 10 years later.
so am I trying to say my work is a metaphor for that? not at all, but it must have some relevance to my work if that is my upbringing, that's where I was born into the world.


Can you see yourself moving away from the area?
'I've been making this work for two years, so maybe my next project will be about somewhere else. My girlfriend was living in the Central African Republic and she discovered this huge market in the middle of the jungle selling only Western products. I love the idea of finding the exact opposite of Ridley Road.'

imagine a place in India or Jamaica, that was full of people born in south London, oh my that would be funny to see.


Quotes from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/13/lorenzo-vitturi-ridley-road-markets-edgy-dynamic-east-london-photographer

the result, Dalston Anatomy, became one of the most acclaimed photography books of 2013: a set of pictures that are as far away from traditional street photography as it is possible to go, while still evoking the cacophonous energy of the street.

the more i think about it, the more i think my work would suit a book, i think the size of the images, with my idea of having overlapping images suits that. i could have a page with an image on, with an overlapping image, then a blank piece of paper double sized, then the next set of images on one page, repeated like this, however, i also have a vision of a large white space, where each frame is on a wall, or maybe a couple on each wall but spaced far apart, almost lost in the whiteness of the walls. then you get close and can turn the image to the next one. so perhaps for this review in 3 weeks that is my result on the walls, and for the photobook project i can create the other idea for that.

For his next project, Vitturi turns his magpie eye to his native city, Venice, where notions of precariousness and transience take on an almost epic dimension. "I'm interested in the fragility of things and what you can do with that as an artist," he says, "so Venice is an obvious location. But it is also my home and I feel strongly about what is happening there. Everywhere, even Venice, is becoming homogenised. Likewise Ridley Road. You want it to be protected somehow from the gentrification and the creeping sameness, you want it to exist in its own way on its own terms."


Quotes from http://www.vogue.it/en/photography/interviews/2015/01/22/lorenzo-vitturi/

The images reclaim the manual and physical element of painting and sculpture moving in the direction of an oxymoronic and auratic restoration of the photographic work.

what does this mean? that he uses his knowledge of painting and sculpture, to sculpt and paint, and that the their aura is captured and then restored using photography, which seems oxymoronic compared to painting and sculpture, what with photography being about stillness and frozen time and painting and sculpture being about form and colour and movement

“Dalston Anatomy” is, in fact, a representation of a disappearing reality – the multicultural aspect of Dalston neighbourhood, constantly threatened by an intense and unstoppable gentrification wave that has forced many of the locals to leave the area.

The still lifes are a very important part of “Dalston Anatomy”’s poetics: deciduous compositions created by Vitturi and that, due to the perishable nature of their components and the precariously balanced shapes, have a life-span of a few minutes, a few hours at most.

his work reflects the area, he has a clear way of saying his point to us the audience, that the place and all these wonderful people and colours and moments are disapearing

“Dalston Anatomy” is not intended to narrate a single story: each image of the book contains the ingredients for a potential story – “I try really to find different way to represent the uniqueness of a place, through the use of its material, its textures and its shapes, its colours, something that completely feels like all ingredients of a universal language, that’s why I wasn’t really interested in a single story, and that’s why also the book doesn’t follow any single narrative, just use this kind of colours, shapes, and reading textures”.

several interesting points here, that his book isnt a narrative, which is interesting, as due to a books nature most books are, maybe if i was to see the book i would naturally be looking for a narrative. i also think its so interesting that he is in a way documenting the place without directly photographing the place at all, maybe my work is about my home, my family? my ma who makes the flowers into pots?, hmm maybe sort of, more my own reaction and stresses taken out into a photo form in a simple way. he shows the place so vividly, he gets his point across, its a work of imagination really - like storytelling, is it photographic truth? or is it just a flavour and the rest is up to you to work it out? the textures and colours and shapes give us a flavour and we can imagine the rest, it goes back to what i was reading in Hanno Hardt's Constructing photography fiction as Cultural Evidence, about we need a cultural awareness to understand photographers work,, and thats why some works of 'fiction' or 'storytelling' work well.

There are always these kind of two forces that work together, but I’m saying that for example now that I started to work with galleries and I have to deal with all the needs of the collectors, I still really decide and I got a lot of problems, for example, to maintain the roughness of Dalston anatomy also in the pictures themselves, because I didn’t want to mount the pictures, and really sleek, and really clean with the really expensive frame, so I mounted on wood trying to really create a unique piece that was something… You know, so a way I’m trying to push your vision, and at the same time you have to survive”.

sounds like he had some ideas of what he didnt want to do with his project, but had to bow to pressure to make money to live, sounds like hard pressure, at least he is able to talk about it afterwards and be in a good place

Quote from http://www.americansuburbx.com/2014/01/interview-interview-lorenzo-vitturi-2014.html

To understand this you have to imagine the market, its products and its people like a whole single body, which I dissect using the camera as a surgeon’s knife and my studio as a laboratory. During the anatomy process I selected the elements/fragments which I thought were more interesting, exclusively in terms of their shape or colour.

This is a beter way of saying what i was trying to explain in my previous paragraph

Following their selection, I brought all these fragments in my studio and I mixed them all together, during a sort of promiscuous game where sculpture, collage and painting melt together, and I recreated a series of new anatomies, whose features only exist in my own visionary world.

perhaps dalston market only exsists in his imagination, i think actually this is true, because we are all different people, we all see different thing up to the point we look at the same piece of artwork, and this leads us to make different assumptions about it, so dalston market would not appear the same to anyone else but him.

From the beginning I knew that the book was the best medium to communicate what I had in mind, therefore throughout the process of collecting images, forging atmospheres, making sculptures, I was already editing the book. This helped me to find a optimal visual coherence between all the different visual outputs I was coming up with.

hopefully this knowledge of mine, with the end result in my mind, i will be able to edit already in my mind, as soon as i see my images coming out of the R4a machine (colour paper processer).

My studio is quite an explosion of chaos as well but when the chaos starts to overwhelm the entire space I need to control it and go back to order, or I would not find space to sleep (I live and work in the same place). But I can tell you that while I was working on Dalston Anatomy, sometimes it really seemed that the market itself- with all its smells, materials and colours had entered into my studio. I remember coming back at home and having the feeling that I was walking into the market again.

This sounds amazing, he was really living inside his artwork, living and breathing every moment, he put his soul into this work, thats why it is so good

LV: In a way the physical proximity with the materials and the objects I collected helped me to build a deeper relationship with the market’s world and with the sculptures themselves: minute after minute I could witness these objects’ transformation and I could provide documentary evidence of their temporary life.

more clues that he was inside the work, that while he was making it he was learning a greater understanding of why he was making it and who was helping him make it, like i said earlier its a documentry piece without the need to photograph the actual location, in this way its a beautiful piece of storytelling

My interest in sculpture begun when I was working as a still-painter in the movie industry in Rome.
The fact of building large scale sets by using sculpture, architecture and painting, and these sets’ precarious life (they were made to last just a few minutes, during the shooting) made me start to think about objects that are only made with the purpose of being photographed.

Fiction, which has always been used in order to transmit some key messages such as power and belief – through art and religious representation – has now been extended to every domain of society and the self. I find that fascinating and scary.

such an important quote

Quotes from https://thephotographersgalleryblog.org.uk/2013/12/16/in-a-changing-market-an-interview-with-lorenzo-vitturi-on-dalston-anatomy/

The last revelation was that all these images I was producing were not just simply the result of my secret imagination, but they were in fact deeply connected with a wider reality. They were fragments of a bigger picture, my own “bigger picture” – which also clearly includes the place I live in and the community that I love and care for.

What I am interested in is not to criticise gentrification but to visualise what this process of transformation will leave behind. I am interested in what soon will be seen as memories – debris from a lost time. I wanted to freeze Dalston’s colourful mix of cultures just before this transformation changes the neighbourhood’s appearance completely.

speaks about photography and its use to freeze time

In fact if you visit the exhibition, you will realise that it works whether one looks at it from the side or from above, at one piece, at two pieces together, or at the whole installation. To me the world appears like a chaotic alphabet of shapes, colours and patterns that I record in order to mix them and remix them in my studio, trying to reach a state of temporary harmony in the final image .

Neeta Madahar

quote from http://www.purdyhicks.com/display.php?aID=16#8

The photography and film practice of Neeta Madahar (born 1966, London) explores the beauty and unexpected drama found in familiar surroundings, representing the physical world in unusual ways enabling the viewer to immerse themselves in the acute details. Her series, Flora, consists of 17 of Madahar's female friends photographed in a style reminiscent of 1930-50s celebrity glamour images alongside plants whose names have been adopted as women's names. Like earlier bodies of work, Flora functions within the inter-relationship of nature, artifice and perception.

quotes from http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/neeta-madahar/

She says: “I’m attracted to the high level of construction and theatricality present in the work of these photographers. Another common strand is the pleasure in materials, textures and shaping of light. For example, many of Beaton’s images contain sparkling, shimmering surfaces that are so bright they caused areas of his photographs to become blown out. The exaggerated, excessive flamboyance evident in the portraits of many of these photographers is also something I embraced in Flora.”

“My interest in the fantasy, feminine projections that constitute Flora was to see what kind of images could be made in the present day, when an aging female photographer and sitter that share a friendship – inherently entailing some history, intimacy and trust – collaborate on an equal, non-hierarchical footing. Our awareness of gender, identity politics and how the vast array of images that are in circulation, portraying idealisations of women, operate on our subconscious was embedded in the process of making the work.Flora has given me greater insight into perceptions of beauty amongst my peers and how these impact upon self-esteem and confidence. Given the regular frequency with which articles about beauty, aging and sexuality appear in the media, I am also increasingly angry at the blatant way the visibility and career trajectories of women are thwarted by current prejudices.”

from my hetero male perspective, these arent concerns i have thought about or have wanted to delve into.  suppose i worry when i explain to my partner why she is the prettiest and she doesnt believe me

“I don’t think of myself as enjoying some kind of power to marry the natural with the artificial, although clearly I am interested in the construction of images rather than purely documenting what I have found without intervention. The blurred boundaries between nature and artifice and how the interaction of the two is interpreted through perception fascinate me.”

i think her approach to making images is very different from mine. she likes to create things before hand and carefully craft things, which she then carefully photographs. i guess i miss out that careful construction of tiny things and go straight to the documentation. i try to be careful of my framing and of what i am photographing. i hope the creativity in my work is the framing and playing with the camera, the processing of the paper and the playing with it and thinking about it afterwards. 

i suppose the marrying of artificial and natural is the marriage of the image of a flower on photographic paper, the flower being the natural thing, the plant pot being the man-made thing, the soil being cultivated, the paper being of natural material processed by mankind, the silver being what was natural mineral ore, taken and manipulated and changed to create something to be made use of, and the process of the chemicals as well is the act of man meeting the natural world. 

so to sum up:

the plant is the beginning natural
the plant is put into a plant pot and changed a little bit

the silver is mined and changed completely
the tree is cut down and processed to paper
the silver and paper are added together
the somewhat natural flower is imprinted onto the paper, the natural dies in this moment

the paper with  is processed in chemicals, the dead natural flower, mutated, died and is now embalmed in chemicals to keep it in that state forever

“My use of photography came after I had worked in painting, drawing, installation and video. I love the elegance, problem-solving logic and language of mathematics, but my route to photography came through the exploration of fine art. There are a wide range of artists that influence me including Tacita Dean, Ed Ruscha and Fischli/Weiss. The art I love makes me lose my breath. I never tire of experiencing it and of course, wish that I had made it first.”

i might be awful at maths, but i love logic solving, i am addicted to sudoku puzzles, being able to finish the logic i guess just feels great for me, and logic and reasoning is something that usually comes naturally to me, not always. i think i struggle a lot with fine art too, a lot of times i see it as circumstantial, one can take any old shit, and apply knowledge to it; one can polish a turd, but its still a turd. not that i see neeta madahars images like that, much the opposite! they are creative and wonderful, full of life/ however if worry if this is what is happening to my images by myself, that i am taking shitty boring pictures, that have some aesthetic quality, and applying background and research to them and trying to call it art, worth something? as they say context is key, hopefully this much is true.

Quote from http://www.db-artmag.com/en/56/on-view/back-to-the-garden-at-the-60-wall-gallery/

Neeta Madahar, who scatters origami flowers on photographic paper and exposes it for the photograms of her series Cosmoses (2006). The delicate floral shapes on monochromatic backgrounds give the viewer the feeling of gazing into a kind of endlessness.

I was wondering how she made these pictures, but if anything this statement has left me with more questions about the technical side of the project

Quote from http://www.saulgallery.com/works-by/neeta-madahar/show:statement

Madahar continues to work with nature in her second project Falling (2005), tapping into associations with childhood and dreamlike states of the imagination as she documents the each stage of the flight and landing of a sycamore leaf.

yes i definitely got the feeling of dreamlike swirling from her images in falling. the origami flowers even if they are still are swirling and moving and dancing, its like she took a several second exposure of ballerinas from above in a pure white place, i dont know like an empty place like how purgatory is depicted in cartoons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbPeGqjH7sA interview of Neeta Madahar

she says she likes photography for the fleeting moments she likes to shoot, because it invites you to look and look and look

she talks about the construction of her flowers in cosmoses and how the construction and the handmade-ness is important

is this important for me? well the stretching out of time of something that will wither and die is important, to say about loss and disapearing

Chloe Sells

Quotes from http://www.hungertv.com/feature/chloe-sells-senescence/

"The work is informed by Sells’ travel abroad to countries previously unknown to her. Through this she explored how places are defined, experienced and whether this is continuously shifting or static."

how are places experienced? i think i will try to relate this to my 3 trips to helsinki over the last year ad my experiences of living in south london

my first trip was in the summer, it was warm and colourful and full of things to see and do. people were smiling, we went to flow music festival and to a summer cabin near a lake, took a short cruise to stockholm and visited many cafes and restaurents. it was about +26 on average for midday

my second trip was just at the start of winter, before the heavy snows, there was light snowing (which would be considered moderate or heavy in england) near the end of my trip. it was mostly grey, there were so so many things do to so i amused myself by walking to the nature-reserve area several times and visiting some bars and cafes. to be honest overall i liked the holiday even if it wasnt sunny and warm. it was between -2 and +2 on average.

my third trip was at the end of winter, just about before spring had started, there were remnants of the heavy snow, where it had been piled in the sides of carparks, but the largest piles hadnt melted yet. the holiday was more similar to my trip in the beginning of winter, but we did a few more things, and i was able to go further into the nature reserve as the path through the water wasnt iced over this time. on average it was about +8.

so what do my experinces add up to? i think in relation to this quote each time i went there i experineced something a bit different, the days were varied and there was something different or new each day, but when in the present thinking back i there there was a general overview to the experince each time, like in the summer, it all merged together into a wash of orange smiling green happyness, in the winter it was a grey dark but positive vibe, right before christmas. in the spring it was a hopeful feeling, people cycling around and traveling to activities, but still mostly inside.

so perhaps in the moment the experience is shifting, and looking back it is a static feeling, but only for a short trip, if i was to stay longer, and if i compare each trip then they are varied and shifting of course.

Now i should think of her work in the context of living in south london. i suppose i was born into adult life with a hopeful look after having some fun in college and getting some decent grades i thought yeah i can go out and get a job and support myself. but i think the economic situation at the time put an end to that, it was impossible to get anywhere near the jobs and opportunties i wanted, as they called out for higher qualifications or more experience, even the basic jobs were impossible to get, they were numerous, but the applicants were far more numerous, i didnt have a chance of standing out from the masses. so i put more energy into my part time job ad that kept me going for a while, it wasnt were i wanted to go with my life fully, but it was enjoyable and really helped me out in things. 

eventually i found an area where i found a small bit of success, which made me want to learn more, so i started my degree in photography. it was very difficult at first having had previously no eduction in photography, but a pushed through and by the end i got a good grade, and i was well engaged with photography, i still had a thirst to go further though, so i enrolled in a masters degree program. at first it wet well and from my previous education i was able to keep up with the texts and themes, though as time went on it became more and more of a struggle and i question every action and thought i have. its like somewhere along the way i lost my drive and thirst, i dont know what i want to say anymore. i have nothing to say other than regurgitating what others have already said. and the struggle of the complete lack of money if felt as i commute from south london where it is cheaper to live and i can just about afford the train fare, this stress and commuting takes all my energy away.

so what is my experince of south london, is it shifting or is it static? i think its always shifting, life feels out of control, always shifting under my feet, i think after finishing my degree i have come back to that feeling of staticness, just the same thing day after day, nothing moving or progressing. 

maybe this is what has been reflected in my work, the static greyness, the wash of familiar grey? taking pictures of flowers is taking control over a picture, to represent a colour or light or something that others cannot see, that i cannot even see until i make the picture, the clicking of the shutter and the processing of the paper is the thing that feels good, that helps me to feel i have some control over what i am doing? the flowers are the little pretty fragile things that are always there in the house, they arent static, they change with the seasons, some flowers die and are replaced in the same plant pots of the old flowers. its like ive got so lost in the world of infinite things to photograph, i needed to return to something simple, close to home to get me through the lack of control. just to forget about all outside of the simple beauty of a flower. my partner tells me time and time again i need to find a way to de-stress and not worry about the things out of my control, so maybe thats why i focus on these little pretty objects.

The works are framed unique C-Type photographic prints produced in the darkroom, using a time consuming process, involving layering photographic negatives with colours and patterns. The original negatives are photographs of different still lifes, formed by compositions of various elements including decaying organic matter and archeological objects. The influence of painting is very high in these works, not only in the use of still life and the arrangement of the elements within the work, but also in the overlay of colour and pattern in the darkroom. The work is also linked to collage, within the process itself, but also in the arrangements and framing of the work. The prints are often cut into irregular shapes and then framed; this could be viewed as a collage within the frame.

So is her work something I want to emulate? in part yes, and in part no. i have been shown her work, long time after i started making work, and there are similarities. the obsession over a time consuming process in the darkroom, the still lifes. what do i think of her collages, do i want to do this,?well it is something that could lift my work, and the way i cut the paper before i load it into the darkslides, almost invites collage after i have processed them, i think its something i need to consider when i have more frames to play with. but i love the playful nature, the hands on act of touching and altering the frames, as my photographing process is altering the way the flower is perceived by me.

could i layer a well exposed frame, underneath a blown out frame? could i take a petal from each flower to show the actual flower itself, then the flower would touch the paper, and over time change it as the petals leech chemicals in? maybeeeee, i feel i want to approach this gently, as the flowers are delicate things, i dont want to kill or detroy anything.

Quotes from http://unseenamsterdam.com/chloe-sells

Chloe Sells wants to shock her viewer "into looking at the world differently through the use of beauty" and believes 'beauty' to be an "undernourished conduit, a forgotten destination, an instrument of subversion that can alter perspective through its physical and visceral nature".

Do i want to show the world through beauty? do i want to show the world is beautiful? or do i want to show that the world was beautiful and has been distorted into something else. shit why didnt i think of that sentence before? yeah i think thats what i have wanted to say all along.

I find inspiration for my work through travel, reading, and the work of other artists. I think through my eyes and so in my waking hours I am generally engaged in some type of aesthetic conversation, whether that be with myself or another person. I live in Europe and Africa, but Asia is my favorite continent to explore. My favorite place to go is outside.

her favourite place to go is outside, outside of her home, and outside of comfort. the way she grows is by looking at other artists work and reading and seeing new things, i wont ever be inspired if i am just stuck in the same place never looking at anything new.

In my work, on the basis of aesthetics alone, I am content for people to take away an instance of beauty. However, I don't believe that beauty's power is limited to aesthetic pleasure. Despite being a bad word in the art world, I think it is an undernourished conduit, a forgotten destination, an instrument of subversion that can alter perspective through its physical and visceral nature. If I can shock my viewer into looking at the world differently through the use of beauty, I have done something right.

maybe to get my point across that the world was beautiful but now isnt, i do need to take a leaf from the flower, to destroy it, that i might need to participate in this act is quite abhorrent. but i realise the work is a myth, its not really true, there are many beautiful things and places in the world. my friends recently came back from holiday from many beautiful places, one remarked that barcelona was the most beautiful city he had ever seen. so this work i guess is just my own cynical view of my self and the situation i find myself in.
so if that is the case, who cares about that? why would my work be relateable? well i think the economic situation and the difficulty of jobs and the hopelessness of society is something that is felt by a lot of people, for example i see the doctors strikes over the nhs cuts in the news often, and i see the homeless in brighton every day i travel there, scotland wanting to leave uk, i see the drunks in helsinki with no hope, i see the drug addicts who cant break the addiction. i think its that hopelessness and distorted view that people share, their dispointment in the current climate. maybe my work and my views are a bit left-wing, im not entirely a left-wing person, but i dont much like our right wing government either, and that seems to be something people can relate to.

i suppose my views are dominated by disapointment in society and disapointment in myself, i think perhaps a lot of people are aligned with that way of thinking, even if their disapointments are not anything to do with mine.

I use the natural world throughout my imagery and create pictures that describe remnants of places that I have lived, traveled and explored. After making the pictures, I have an in-depth darkroom process that layers colors and textures to create unique pieces. I use this combination of processes to consider ideas about how we experience our environments and how we understand what is exotic or familiar.

she says about the pieces unique-ness, i dont know how important uniqueness is in my work. each one of my frames is unique, i suppose this is reminiscent of living things how everyone thing is different, everyone is unique. really it boils down to i am excited about the fact each frame is a unique object. i couldnt sell them as prints or in editions; each one is one original, of which there are no copies. i guess a different option would be to use polaroid to take pictures, why dont i do this? i suppose it boils down to interest, i had an interest in my large format camera and its use, the fun of using it. whereas i never had much interest in polaroid cameras, they arent so precise or complicated to use.

Text from http://www.foto8.com/live/chloe-sells/

Paul Graham and Seizing the Everyday Moments - in NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/arts/design/paul-graham-and-seizing-the-everyday-moments.html?_r=2

“Stare,” wrote Walker Evans, the canonical 20th-century photographer. “It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare; pry; listen; eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

What do i know? i need to look and stare and look at more.

“Boredom is part of my work. I accept it and embrace it.” He was describing the off-handed concentration with which he looks at the normal flow of everyday activity and documents it in narrative sequences.

i dont feel i can embrace boredom at the moment for the next few months,  must be constantly busy, and if i find myself not busy then i must fill my time with researching.

Afternoon light spilled in from a bank of windows as he described his routine. “A good day is one where I’ve overcome my procrastination, actually gotten out the door to shoot, weather cooperating.” He can get lost answering emails, surfing the Internet, grazing for new camera equipment. Pointing to the monitor at his desk, he leveled a modest bombshell with his tidy British accent.

he sounds like me, endless procrastinating, but he has found a way to be productive, be successful and get things done; i need to find a way that it works for me.

Given the 14 bodies of work Mr. Graham has produced over the last 30 years, his claims to distraction are more akin to Zen koans about diligence and rigor: “Sometimes I have to kill a couple of weeks doing other things, appearing to be very lazy while I’m actually finding my way through a problem.”

interesting what he says about distraction being a zen koan. i cofess i dont think i have heard the term koan before. so i had a quick google to understand the word. it seems a koan is a riddle that must be studied and thought about and the first answer that might spring to your head is just not it and completely misses the point, it must be thought about deeply for a long time without thinking of something else for the answer to be found. 
i think this is interesting as i think he is saying that he is studying distraction, trying to search for and find the deeper meaning in it, and only by studying it for a long time can he understand, he cant just come to the answer in a first moment.

Mr. Graham had in mind what the French refer to as the “social fracture” while making “American Night,” on his first travels in America. The title alludes to the Truffaut film, “Day for Night,” a filmmaking term for creating nighttime scenes by underexposing footage shot in broad daylight.

he references this by overexposing his images, where the filmmaking technique was to undeerexpose to get a faux nighttime, he is making a faux washed out scene, it is almost completely devoid of detail to say they are all a whitewash, a blur, maybe they are of similarity to him, where he has a yearning for the houses that he does depict in colour.

Susan Kismaric, former senior curator of MoMa - The everyday moments he captured “are, after all, how we spend most of our time, mindlessly active or lost in thought — they provide what appears to be the undercurrent of our existence,” she said. “Paul’s work is innovative, inventive and freshly imagined, while rooted in photography’s magic, that is, its ability to transform the mundane into a picture with resonance.”

Maybe actually i need to embrace this times of procrastinating, but they always lead to further stress that i didnt accomplish something while i was procrastinating, i think the problem also for me is i havent found a way of capturing something procrastinatory and turn it into something creative.

“Why is everyone addicted to prepackaged spectacular moments, as if that’s all that’s worth photographing?” Mr. Graham said. “There is so much more to the flow of life all around us that isn’t revolving around perfect page-one moments.”

how can i make this work in a body of work?

Mr. Graham is alert to “someone sitting at the bus stop, or someone smoking a cigarette,” he said. “You know, some moment of quiet beauty that arrived into your life and was humbling, really.”

Call it that dumb, just-being-there quality or a second glimpse of the “it-ness” of those moments, perhaps a clarity of the kind evoked in the metaphors in imagist poetry: “So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens,” wrote William Carlos Williams. So much, indeed.

additional information http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/11/paul-graham-interview-whitechapel-ohagan