Presentation of Body and Object

Still Life Object

My idea for the Object project is fragmented identity in feminist point of view. At first I wanted to take photographs of dolls or faces, but after doing my research on fragmentation I decided I wanted to use a mask made of bits of a broken mirror as my object. This way the object would be gender neutral, which is what I want my statement as a fragmented identity to stand for; the fragmentation of identity is not only within female or men, but within everyone, regardless of their sex.

 

 

 

Because at first my interest was in the gaze of women my research was set more on artists such as Laurel Nakadate and Simone Beauvoir, but after I shifted from that idea to a more universal one, I did a little more research and this time about identity by reading article on exhibition "Idenity: Eight rooms nine lives". The exhibition is made of eight rooms where each of the rooms focus on an individual or individuals whose lives or achievements have influenced our thinking about identity. The idea of putting identities into different rooms, these boxes, was very interesting and in a way something what I had been thinking about with the fragmentation. But then in my opinion if one puts something into a box it always has a negative connotation; something that is there will be there, and that won't change. When thinking about identity as fragmented and ever changing, these pieces in the boxes together create this kind of fragmentation that I want to speak about. That is what I did with my bits of a broken mirror; the mirror that shows the face and the soul, yet is always distorted and not what someone else looking at the person sees in the person that is looked at. Because the mirror is on the face it's always untouchable to the person who has this mirror skin; everything the person sees, he/she is - the face of a person is always a reflection of others.

I also read an article about surrealism's women by Germaine Greer, where she talks about feminine and a real man and how in the time of surrealism the photographing and painting a woman has reflected the way we look ourselves in the mirror; the real men don't look in mirrors. This notion interest me and got along with my idea of a mirror faced person as a neutral gendered in contraction what I was thinking, and thus made my idea more complex and showed me the difference between different generations. 

  

For my visual reference I wanted to shoot the face as distorted as possible using a shallow depth of field. My first photograph with a large format camera was more abstract than the second one, but because the second one had more interesting focus point I decided to use that one. I wanted to make my idea as personal yet universal as possible and not to think about other artists' still-life photographs. I feel that my object speaks about the issue of fragmented identity because of usage of a broken mirror to which everyone can relate to. It does not look appealing, but strange and slightly frightening.

Body

My initial idea for the portrait was to capture a person in his/her moment in thought – not a pose for the camera/photographer/painter, but a secret or not so secret moment in his/her mind in the shape of his/her body, posture and face that in one way or another shows an emotion of that thought that they're in. Even though what I wanted to photograph is the complete opposite of someone posing, acting an emotion, I am using one of my research as film – in particular Bela Tarr's Kárhozat. Its dramatic despair gives a secret yet open view to human feelings and behavior, which I am interested in; to document in the means of making art.

As my photographic research I have been advised to look artists such as Sarah Jones, Helen Van Meene and Alex Soth because of their work has the notion of a photographer/camera not being there, the person photographed not posing but being themselves in their moments.

 

 

 

I am fond of the sort of nothingness that turns into everything one can experience in these photographs; something that that is silent yet screaming at the same moment, the moment of accident; the photographer shouldn't be there, yet they have been given this opportunity to come in and have these intimate moments with the people in the photographs.

In terms of aesthetics I'm interested in photographer Paolo Roversi's work especially his series Nudi, contemporary painter Hayley Quentin's work, and George Richmond's drawings from the 19th century.

 

 

 

What I want my represent is something very physical, very emotional and heavy into something light and transparent, almost as thin as air. I'm interested in the lightness and the single moment, thought, the softness of the simple being on its own harshness.

As my model I wanted someone with the quality of grace and lightness, and therefore wanted to use a model from Scandinavia or Asia. I ended up in asking a Norwegian girl Tine from the 3^rd year photography department because of her light skin and hair, and joyful appearance.

I find my result of this portrait to be in its way successful: it depicts the quality of a drawing while the person (Tine) in the portrait is in her own thoughts, in her own world. I tried taking the photograph in a moment when she had forgotten the whole situation of being portrayed, and in some way I find the photograph capturing that. But as I was photographing her I didn’t feel I could relax her into a state of feeling her being completely alone: something that I want to learn to do in the future.




Self evaluation


I feel my research for the Environment unit could have been more specialized compared to the research I did for the Object and Body unit. Nevertheless I feel strongly that my ideas come through in my visual work. I’m not sure to which context would I place my work in. 
 

I am quite particular with my visual choices, how am I to photograph something and in what way am to make the final print of it. Both of the environment series depicts this: my usage of round shape and transparent figure for the landscape series speaks about the other worldly, dead people from the past, whereas in the city series I embraced the film still quality by making the print as a size of a film still in a large canvas while using the regular sized paper. In the object work my visual approach was not much mostly cause I am not familiar with shooting objects. The portrait’s usage of drawing like quality was necessary while capturing the essence of a moment in a thought. 

I have managed my studies well and met the deadlines for shooting and printing in time. Shoot production wisely I don’t yet feel comfortable working in studio, which means I need to use more time in the studio to feel more confident of working in that environment. I enjoy working with no limitation in the creative process, using any kind of approach and coming up with any kind of result of the concept behind work is interesting, which is why I at times found it hard to work exactly what I wanted on the Object and Body unit. I also found the pastiches really hard to work on due their lack of any creativity, which took my interest level quite low, which then reflected upon the final result of the work and my work ethics of that project. In the future I will try to work more open minded with such tasks, because I do understand the reason why are we to make such work; to understand technical aspects of photography.