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A Machine For Living 01
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| A Machine For Living 02 |
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| A Machine For Living 03 |
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| A Machine For Living 04 |
This series captured the exact feeling I have when looking at certain urban places/buildings, especially at night. It is the strange melancholy that arrives with cold in the air and bite in the wind, and you feel suddenly displaced from where you are standing. The unnatural colours in these photographs are wonderful, I don't think he manipulated them much after taking them, I think it must be something to do with the long exposure method.
After seeing dan holdsworth's wonderful abstract photographs (especially the 'a machine for living' series) using long exposure, it made me want to try this kind of photography, so I bought a simple tripod, set up my DSLR (which I still am learning how to use..) and experimented with simple phone lights, olive and I. We tried different settings - for shutter speeds lasting up to thirty seconds. The results were really fascinating and some of them were quite painterly...especially how it blurs the face in certain ways.
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I was just looking at dan holdsworth's website and more recent work, and they were all very inspiring and beautiful... In the recent series Mirrors, it seemed like he split the image cleanly and maybe flipped it? I really like how it slightly abstracted the landscape...
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| cg 18a |
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| cg18b |
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| cg19d |
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| cg16a |
this reminded me again of the clean cuts in Nicky Coutts' series
Director's Cut, (which are also c-type prints, which are traditional photographic prints made from digital files rather than a negative) with figures/portraits:
'Directors’ Cut is a series of collage portraits of 18 actors imitating the role of either Charles Bronson or Henry Fonda in the last scene of Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti Western” ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’ (1968). The story charts the build up to a dual between the two main protagonists. Off screen the dual between the film’s director, Sergio Leone and Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa over copying and the origination of the Samurai or Western form was also an influence to these assembled portraits.'
I am appreciating how simple one-step collages can create such a dynamic image. This is inspiring as I always have a problem of doing too much to an image, so that it becomes 'busy' and cluttered. I'll be working on this.
of course, one would think about John Stezaker's
collages...
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| Marriage | (2006) |
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| She(Film Portrait Collage) ||| |
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| Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XXXl |
'John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.
In his Marriage series, Stezaker focuses on the concept of portraiture, both as art historical genre and public identity. Using publicity shots of classic film stars, Stezaker splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid ‘icons’ that dissociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny. Coupling male and female identity into unified characters, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony, where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his correlated images, personalities (and our idealisations of them) become ancillary and empty, rendered abject through their magnified flaws and struggle for visual dominance.'
and the iconic collages of the human figure and landscape:
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| Mask XXlX |
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| Old Mask || |
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| Mask C |
Even these ones, which adds to the ideas I had about projection mapping...
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| Shadow IV |
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| Shadow VI |
this is then making me recall the collages this visiting artist had done in first year... Maria Kapajeva's series Interiors...
I think she said that these were made from low quality found imagery. the idea that a low quality of an image can be a defining trait of a work resonates with me, it says a lot of things about the digital world and the proliferation of images. What is wonderful about these artists that use an aesthetically simple/ clean-cut form of collage is that such dynamic ranges of meaning are conveyed in each work, just by juxtaposing or merging images together. each of these examples result in different school of ideas e.g. gender or identity
I feel that when making digital collages it is almost impossible to plan the finished picture - a lot of it is in the process of finding/taking said images, and it is through the process of rearranging this material that you find a new relationship between them. When you hit the right combination, you will know. Personally, I have such a breadth of 'everyday' images in my camera roll from the past years that the possibilities are infinite - and that is overwhelming. I think it would be a good idea to have a rough concept of what I want to convey in certain works... right now I am especially interested in the simple manipulation of images by the basic functions on photoshop like skew, perspective, or warp. It speaks something about the manipulation (could be subconscious) of memories as well. but that's a whole other topic I will touch on in the future. I think I already am talking about this in my 'memories make me' collage digital print.
