The Sky Is Washed And Dark is a series that captures the waste of time and the shortness of life. Everything that we have left behind without using it and grasping the moment in time and everything that we have experienced are to be seen in the skin of ours. It is either full of wrinkles or it is light and untouched. Either way, the time that has been lived is burned into our skin, the softness dissappears – it becomes hard and finally crumbles into dust. If used in doing nothing it has been all along waste.
It is a small part of our life we really live – all the rest is not life but merely time. It is not that we have short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realise too late that for all this time they have been preoccupied in doing nothing. –Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life
(Source: Life Is Long If You Know How To Use It (Penguin Books))
I'm very interested the human side of this waste. Why does one decide to live this way or why does not one decide to do so? How do we act if we make waste of ourselves. Why do we make waste of ourselves? What is this Waste Land we are living inside of?
Whilst pondering through these questions I was reading T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and even though it speaks a bit different topic in my opinion it does go across this idea of wasting ourselves, our bodies and minds, under the power of someone else than us.
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a forthnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked is bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as
you.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922
(Source: The Waste Land and other poems, Faber and Faber)
(Source: The Waste Land and other poems, Faber and Faber)
While doing my research I came across Christian Boltanski. I was very interested how Boltanski works around time: making time capsules and archiving dead Swiss people. I was very interested in Boltanski's recognition of changing points: at the age of 24 years Boltanski left his childhood behind. The way that Boltanski works and puts his work to be seen: always different and ever changing – no show/exhibition is the same. One can feel the changing of times, the passing of time.
While on Boltanski I also started reading some Marcel Proust's work such as "Remembrance of Times Past", in which Proust plays around the idea of fiction and non-fiction. What actually is real and what is made up in this body of work? While on the topic of Proust what I find interesting is his own life: how much of it was a waste of time and life, when he could not do anything but write due to his bedridden illness.
This then brought me to think about how today's society idolises the youth and forgets the old. The notion of waste is within these norms of society – one loses its vitality and place from what they used to be part of.
While working in this subject I came up with older people in their 70s to 90s who cherish their pasts and still enjoy life; their time that they're still living. They're not giving up their minds to their decaying bodies, they don't let their minds to break into despair, but embrace it with knowledge that the youth does not know yet. I then stumbled upon a style blog Advanced Style that is curated by Ari Seth Cohen. He takes photographs of older people who dress up stylish and creatively; they take care of their time, rather than give in to the notion of not being able to do things that they could do before.
I also read an article on BBC News The myth of eight-hour sleep, which speaks about how sleep patterns were different before the invention of light bulbs and industrialisation. Rather than sleeping continual 8 hours (say from 10-6, 00-8) in times before 19th century people used to go to sleep couple of hours after sundown for 4 hours then wake up for a couple of hours to do some reading, writing, etc. and then go back to sleep for another 4 hours. This way the sleep would keep people energised and the sleep would make their minds fresh, rather than having deep and disturbing dreams.
After industrialisation people started to cut away from this kind of sleeping, and after the invention of light bulbs sleeping seemed to them as a waste of time. They could be awake anytime they wanted – the ones that got money for light bulbs or candles.
For my visual references I looked up stills of John Cassavetes' films such as Faces (1968) and Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), which both of them have have inner conflict of the main character. What I find the most interesting is how close Cassavetes gets to the female characters with his camera. This way of fiming it feels as he is penetrating their thoughts, getting under their skin, which is what I want to photograph as well. I wanted to shoot pores of the skin and show the shortness of time that that skin reflects.
I also looked up some Edward Weston's nude photographs and abstract still lifes. I was really interested how cropping a face out of the photograph can make a human body very interesting object in itself and placing a real life object next to it one starts to really forget what is what.
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| Bonnie and Clyde, 1967, Bonnie |
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| Faces, 1968, Jeannie |
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| Faces, 1968, Jeannie |
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| Gene Rowlands |
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| Minnie and Moskowitz, 1971, Minnie |
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| Edward Weston |
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| Edward Weston |
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| Edward Weston |
I shot people around the
Medway area, mostly my contemporaries, my friends. I wanted to see how
their skin reflects of the waste of time. I shot the close ups by using
Bronica SQ-B with 110mm macro lens. At first I was very interested in
the idea of passing time, the waste of time, as waves. This then made me
think of water, how it represents an idea of identity in itself. How
much one waste water the cleaner one's skin is, but the more one uses
the water the more waste they produce whereas on the flipside the less
one uses water the more 'wasted' one's skin becomes and the more
unpolluted, wasted, water there is. This then made me want to take close
up photographs of the waves of water (see in the 1st Test Shoot Contact
Sheet first 4 shots) which I wanted to pair up with the close ups of
the people I wanted to take the photographs of.
As the time went by and
I had photographed two test shoots I realised I couldn't use water as a
reference to the waste of time and colour as the technic, because it
wasn't powerful enough. I then decided to photograph myself (see 3rd
Test Shoot Contact Sheet) – who else knows and represents what I want to
talk about with my project than me, myself. I photographed the shots
with self release wire and a mirror with a long shutter speed (3
seconds), which made the shots a bit blurry, representing the passing of
time. I shot the film in black and white in order to get closer to the
time rather than to the reality, the colour of skin. Even though I found
some of the shots very interesting and almost close to the point I felt
that it wasn't quite what I wanted the photographs to look like
visually, they needed something more to pinpoint my idea of the waste of
time.
I then came up with the idea of using glitter on top the print paper in the darkroom while exposing the paper before putting it through the machine to create the kind of feeling of time passing. This glitter would represent the burning of the skin, the passing of time, the waste. As a reference I looked up a Finnish photographer Helen Korpak and her photographs of my friend and I.
Because of the glitter being so small and sticky I couldn't through with this process and I was forced to think how else I were to show the representation of time. I decided to put the glitter on the skin – I knew it wouldn't be just what I wanted but it would be good enough and better than not having it.
For my final prints I shot two rolls of film of two people with glitter on their faces and hair. This time photographing I knew that I had to get even more closer than I had been before. I wanted the shots to look almost nothing like human, I wanted them to be extremely abstract with a shallow depth of field yet with a few really sharp points, where the viewer could recognize pores of skin and glitter.
Whilst working in the darkroom I still wanted to try and put something on the prints to have the effect of photogram. I cut out little round pieces of plastic, but in the end the effect was not what I wanted. The plastic pieces were too big compared to the glitter on the skin. I then did not use it for my final prints.
While printing these photographs and creating a series I found the moment when they all were together very poetic. They reminded me of a Russian poet Marina Tsvetaev's poem 'Where Does Such Tenderness Come From?", which depicts the closeness and intimacy yet abstractness as does this my series. I also got my name from one line of the poem.
“Where Does Such Tenderness Come From?”
Where does
such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where
does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than
anyone’s.
Marina Tsvetaev, 1916
(Source: Poetry, March 2012)
Contact Sheets from the shoots:
(The marked ones are the kind of ones that I found most poignant for my project. Some of them were chosen for the final prints, some of them weren't.)
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| 1st Test Shoot Colour |
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| 2nd Test Shoot Colour |
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| 3rd Test Shoot B&W |
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| 1st Shoot B&W |
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| 2nd Shoot B&W |
Experimentations in the darkroom:
Final Prints:
My idea for the commission and its topic waste is a bit
problematic and I acknowledge that. I'm speaking about time and photographing
something that one cannot take hold of or hold in their hands, even though I am
still talking about 'waste'. Obviously to some people this might not be what
waste is about at all, but to me it is what waste is precisely. The waste that
this unit has been dealing with is something that we don't actually see and
hear about if we don't want to, even though it is everywhere. The waste problem
in the world of today is catastrophic, but even what is worse is the way that
people are dealing with it: ignoring it in every way possible. Not taking real
action and not making difference when we actually still could.
This is why I wanted to back away and look into the topic as
distantly as possible. I wanted to make my work more about us humans and try to
see this waste something immaterial, something that we all experience and have
been experiencing since forever. What waste is about? I then came to think the
waste of time, what it means and what it means in different relations. While
doing my research I had all along in my head the photographs I wanted to take:
hyper close ups of faces with something going on in them. In this I find I
succeeded and am happy about, even though I couldn't do everything that I
wanted to for the prints. I couldn't experiment enough, which is a shame,
because that is what I would like to do in order for my projects and work to be
the best they can be.
My research and the way that I work is pretty wide range and
I like to include things that might just link to the topic in one way or
another. I find this way of working more exciting and true; it is not forced
and it makes my work more authentic. I am interested in a lot of things and a
lot of other artists as well as their works, and a lot of times I feel I can't
use photography in itself as a visual reference.
Because of my instant choice of what I wanted to shoot and
what my project was about I didn't meet any difficulties while working on this
project. I had enough time to take test shoots in four different occasions (I
forgot to make contact sheets of the first test shoot) and then shoot final
rolls in two occasions. This then led me enough time to print the photographs
in the darkroom for three different times (most of my work were printed in one
day).
Most challenging part of this project was to not do what I
wanted to do i.e. see above.
This work should be published in an exhibition as large
prints because of the content behind it.
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