Initial 10x8s

I used a 10x8 camera to create these photos. Again I used the paper, however a couple of these I shot on ultra gloss paper which didn't look as nice to me as semi-gloss paper. Also when developing the ultra gloss papers, using the little plastic clips I managed to put a scratch in the emulsion of one of the papers, even when I was being careful, just poking the paper into the developer, it picked up the scratch.
I feel these negative pieces of paper have such a beautiful natural quality that if I was to display these I would display them, as the negatives, directly on the wall behind glass, so they wouldn't get damaged and to draw the viewer in so they interact with them on a very intimate close level.
Again I focused on repetition as the project is the methodical relationship where I return to the camera to feed it paper and light. But also I let my imagination take me, and I shot several landscapes, these dark, mysterious, rich, textured 'dreamscapes', represent my feelings and emotions towards the passage of time: time moving ever forward, my worries over forging a career after uni, my consideration over the choice to study a Masters degree, my fears, my memories of choices made in the past, the rural wilderness I choose to escape to and my desire to float on down the river and into the horizon.

5x4 Paper Photographs

This is my favourite of the photographs i took on 5x4 of the TV as the screen was on for a bit, and the camera was not visible at all through the viewfinder so I was surprised and happy when I saw this come up in the developer.

I spoke to Peter Renn, Paul Corcoran, and Beytan Erkmen and I google searched and found the ISO for the black and white, multigrade resin coated Ilford darkroom paper to be ISO 3. This gave me extremely long exposure times. I used a lightmeter, which let me put the ISO down to 3, set a shutter speed for 60 seconds and it would tell me an aperture. Often if was f1.4 so I would have to do maths and count up the apertures, doubling my exposure times each time. Then remember to add more time for the reciprocity failure of the paper.
Usually the times were varying from 24 minutes to an hour and a half, but several of the photographs were taken over night for 12 hours, like the one of the kitchen.
I would often set the camera up, then leave to then return to it when it was time to close the shutter and put the darkslide back into the negative holder, and pack everything away.

This repeated methodical process is where the project is, it is not defined by prints I may put on the wall. Each one represents an individual moment between me and the camera.

I love the texture on the paper that shows up in these scans. It gives them an organic feel. I started trying to document the time passing, with the repetition of the TV screens, and often I photograph while I am watching TV or using a computer, but this has turned my view of this time related project to one of personal relationship with the camera - discussed in my blog posts with the tag "reflections".

Conflict Time Photography

A while back I went to see Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern. I spent around 3 hours in there slowly moving around the exhibit reading everything and making notes on the framing and display and mounting of each of the works, unfortunately I lost my notebook before I had typed it all up, here are my very few notes, literally only 2% of what I wrote as the exhibit was quite extensive!

Conflict time Photography


The exhibition starts with 3 paragraphs about the Dresden Air Raids in February 1945.

Kurt Vonnent Jr – Was a Prisoner kept in an underground meat locker during that time
“looking back without becoming frozen in the process”

25 minutes after the bombs on Hiroshima, were taken from the top of a hill that shielded the photographer and his surroundings from the bomb blast.
They are in thin black frames, large white space of mount board as a frame around the photographs.
The third photo out of the four black and white photographs has a lot of dust and scratches from the film. Interesting to me, makes it seem to me that the camera had been involved in a bomb blast and as such had been broken and thrown around. The other 3 shots didn’t have as many scratches in them. The scratches looked to be in the film rather than the prints.


Luc Delahaye 2001 US Bomb Taliban Positions
He used a large format camera. The print is huge, about a meter tall and in a 16x9 ratio, or something similar. It had a thick wooden frame that was next to the picture; mount board didn’t surround it.
There was a small amount of smoke in the center and some lesser smoke in the right hand side in the distance. It looks like beautiful field taken in the golden hour and looks serene almost, if the smoke wasn’t there and the knowledge that bombs were being dropped.


Luc Delahaye 2006 Iraq Insurgents Bombs on US
There is a broken vehicle in the center, to the side of a road. The whole picture is grey. The photograph is filled with an eerie sense of calm before the storm, or shock and confusion over what just happened.

More on Hiroshi Sugimoto

"While Sugimoto's photographs date from the mid to late 1980s to the present day, he relates that it was in the period after he moved to New York when he conceived of the idea for his three series: Dioramas, Theatres and Seascapes. He started to work on them concurrently in 1976-77. In fact, he is continuously adding to each series, refining and expanding them. These series have no past or present, they are in effect all produced simultaneously, creating his own sense of time."

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p7.

"Sugimoto is not only trying to relate his vision, he is trying to alter ours."

"Sugimoto's photographs resonate with tradition. They reflect his love of object, detail, and technique - the traditional purvey of classical photography. His techniques play on those of Louis Daguerre, the 19th-century originator of the daguerreotype, one of the first photographic techniques. The camera Sugimoto uses is not far from the one that Daguerre might have used. Departing from Daguerre's photographs and dioramas which he created in the 1820s in Paris, Sugimoto's series are tableaux which move the images away from becoming just a memory or entertainment and into the more encompassing realm of art and into an exploration of meaning"

"In his Seascape series he takes what appears to be untouched landscape and inverts it to show that while land (sea)scape may appear constant it is in fact both temporal and subject to human definitions. Sugimoto himself states that the sea is 'an early example of human naming something outside the world inside himself'"

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p8.

"Photography can be seen as a time machine, for it freezes a moment, preserving it for the future. But whose future?"

"Sugimoto's series Hall of Thirty-Three Bays certainly points to his concern and indeed the eternal concern for the end of time. But Sugimoto's work is more about human conceptions of time, and millennialism is but one, albiet dramatic, manifestation. Sugimoto's series are all explorations into definitions, and as stated abovee provide a language through which we can access certain polemic questions that keep arising. Sugimoto is a contemporary artist and his conerns are in tune with current concerns, but his sense of time/space reflects not time as linear, but many different times: there is buddhist time, time cycles, tides, merchant's time, farmer's time, photographic time and serial time. Each time is a human construct, for it must be constructed for us to be able to perceive it as such. By restructuring our vision, Sugimoto challenges us to reposition our role in this production"

Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole. (1997). Towards the End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p16.

"The skyscrapers stand still, but their shadows race. Roads stay the same but the cars on them become transparent; at night their headlights form red and white rivers. Now place a body in that space: it participates in all these velocities at once. When swept up in high-velocity systems such as transportation, money, information, the body virtually disappears, just like the cars. But the body also inhabits medium-speed spaces: in the place where it sleeps, for hours at a time, nothing moves. Inside the body, processes are slower yet: once formed, the bones stabilize permanently; over a life-time the brain and other organs decay quite gradually.Sugimoto is like that. At first sight his images could be mistaken for Platonic forms, outside time, perfect. But like Metabolist analyses of the environment's different speeds, they isolate and separate the layered velocities across which the subject moves. When consciousness is placed, for instance, inside the cinematic system, whose images pulse at a regular 24-per-second, it quickly joins the speed of the apparatus, and mostly enjoys the show. Yet however absorbed inside the high-speed of the screen, some residential branch of consciousness remains behind to monitor the auditorium, where other and slower speeds obtain; the motionless confinement of the theatre that is is known to the bones and the Sitzfleisch; the unchanging architecture of the movie theatre's interior (at least of the interiors that Sugimoto chooses to photograph). As a subject of cinema the moviegoer is lost inside the apparatus - she or he literally disappears, like the evaporated cars in the speeded-up cityscape, or the banished movie on the screen"

Bryson, Norman. (1997). Hiroshi Sugimoto's Metabolic Photography. In: Coolidge Rousmaniere, Nicole and Jeffett, William Hiroshi Sugimoto. Norwich, England: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. p16.

Richard Long Research

Richard Long is a British Artist, specialising in sculpture.

His work reminds me of Cairns on mountainsides, of cave painting and of neolithic structures like Stonehenge. I researched these images for the Independent Study Project before this, when I was trying to understand different narrative concepts. I felt this work was strong and challenged my immediate knowledge and reading of narrative. Now when I re-look at these, a lightbulb suddenly shines. They are also passages of time, his journey, interpreted into form representing a linear structured narrative, however his work pushes the boundaries of what is linear, it is very much a contemporary imagination.

This one is my favourite, because of the leading lines of the path he made, the eye is lead down the path how I want to walk down it. The rocks and the shape of the ridge form another set of leading lines distinct against the continuing ridge in the background. I like the composition of the ridge almost towering over the sky and the subtle diagonal curve slashing through the image adding to the drama of the disparity between the light fluffy clouds and the dark hard volcanic rock of the mountain.

Franscesca Woodman Research

While researching Michael Wesely, I stumbled across Franscesca . She was an American photographer who took self portraits. Her pictures were interesting, but I liked reading about them, how they were displayed was interesting to me, she had small prints that force the viewer into an intimate relationship with the print. It makes me consider how I would like to display my work, as large prints to make the viewer step back and consider the photograph, or bring them in, to cradle the prints and look for tiny details in a small print in their hands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Woodman

Idris Khan Development

On reflection of Idris Khan's work, I created this piece where I overlayed every image that I had used as my Facebook profile picture since I joined the website. What better way to document the passage of time in relation to myself than using my own face as I choose to represent myself to the online community around me.
It took me a few minutes to work out the best way to do this. At first I changed the blending modes in the different layers in Photoshop on all layers to 'overlay' but that rendered the overall image more or less black with a few red spots, and only the bottom few layers were visible. This wasn't the desired effect I was going for. I then tried using 'lighten' and 'darken' blending modes in a pattern. This almost worked but only the top few layers were visible. I then counted the number of layers, and divided 100 by that number, I then changed the opacity of each layer, starting with 10, and gong all the way up to 100 in 2 increments, changing each layer. so the to layer was 10, the next layer down was 12, the layer below that was 14, and so on until I reached 100.