The Word Becomes Art

This is the final assignment for the two photography electives. It is to create an image which is a homage to a photographer of our choice. Having looked at a number of these, where photographers had staged scenes to emulate particular cultural references, I returned to the work of Penelope Umbrico, which was of great interest to me when I researched in in the previous exercise.  Penelope Umbrico creates photographic collections which are somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages in cabinets and drawers. Umbrico collects images, for example photos of broken phone screens, Google image results for photos of sunsets, photos of natural history illustrations from an encyclopaedia. Each collection, which usually comprises found images rather than her own photographs, is grouped together and ofent put through some kind of process which unifies the collected images and forms a part of the message that the photo-assemblage conveys. In this example, Umbrico describes her process ...

This exercise is preceded by some notes on familiar subjects for photography, or, indeed, many creative media. Examples are given for Google image searches for ‘landscape’ and ‘portrait’. The selection of images, despite showing different locations or faces, all look similar because they obey the conventions of the genre. The challenge is, therefore, to create an original image. I did a Google image search for ‘park’. As with ‘landscape’, these images mostly conform to a traditional composition, showing sky at the top, which is sometimes masked by the tops of trees, a mid ground which tends to look some way into the distance, and a foreground showing some object or figure of interest as a focal point. There are some exceptions, but this describes the majority of the images above. In response to this I went into the park and took a series of photos of landscape ‘slices’. By this I mean that I stood in one spot and took a number of photos of parts of the landscape, such as sky, tops of t...

In this exercise we are looking at light again, this time trying to replicate studio lighting for photographing either an egg or a stone. I chose a stone. For this I used the table in my attic, the main source of light being through a skylight above and to the left, and a lamp that I could move around to light different angles in order to reveal different facets of the stone’s form. I forgot to screenshot my entire contact sheet before I started deleting but this is most of them.  I began by lighting from the left. This created a dark shadow. ISO500, f6.3, 1/200s Light from directly overhead almost reduced the shadow to noting, as would be expected from the sun at noon. It makes for a bland image without much tonal variation. ISO250, f6.5, 1/200s Next I placed the light behind and slightly above the stone. This threw the foreground face of the stone into sharp shadow and created a dramatic composition. ISO100, f4, 1/125s Here the light was directly in front of the stone, with my ca...

I’m relieved that this is a research task rather than an exercise because, at the moment, sunrise is before 5am and sunset is around 9.30pm, so there is not much darkness to photograph! Instead, we are given four photographers to research, each of whom has a different approach to night or low light photography. Really I should have viewed them in reverse order so that I could have become more and more absorbed. As it was, I went from great excitement to slight boredom.  First I studied the work of Sato Shintano, a Japanese photographer who has a passion for urban night photography in his Tokyo home. He has created some distinctive and fascinating bodies of work within the genre. Given my recent explorations of depth of field, I was intrigued to read that he has spent time investigating ‘flat’ photography using telephoto to capture a shallow depth of field. By contrast with the OCA materials, which speak of photographs as windows onto a three dimensional view, as if one could look t...