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 thus:
“I made these prints by scanning the screens I got from disassembling computer monitors, laptops, tablets and smartphones - all devices we touch, that we are intimate with, and that replace natural sun light in our lives. While making the scans, I placed the scanner into sunlight with the lid removed. The resulting images are effectively scans of sunlight through screens: a hybrid scan/photogram. In the process, all the intimate history of the screen's use is registered in the image. I applied the Photoshop “cyanotype” pre-set filter over the images to emphasize the disparity between the new digital screen, the process of digital scanning, and the historical aspect of sunlight and photography that is the cyanotype.” http://penelopeumbrico.net/index.php/project/sunscreenscan/
In my homage, I wanted to use a collection of images of something everyday, as Umbrico tends to do this. I also wanted to make a collection of images which were not necessarily my own, echoing Umbrico’s work with the sunset Google images results, for example. For subject matter I decided to continue with my work on the paths in the previous exercise, and use the everyday, yet interestingly varied, images of tarmac. I opened another album and added all my path images to it. I then cropped them all so that they showed only sections of the tarmac paths. I then did my own Google images search and pulled in some images from tarmac adverts, to be mixed with my own photos. I edited each image to greyscale and pushed the contrast to maximum to create sharp differentiations of black and white. I did this because I was hoping to create cyanotype prints and felt that this would need sharply contrasted images.
I created four pages of composite black and which images, as can be seen above beginning on the third row from the bottom on the last image. I printed these onto transparent paper. I then laid the transparencies over pieces of cyanotype paper in full sun for around 20 minutes, which should have been ample time for the images to develop. However, when I washed the paper, these were the results:
These were not useable for my homage so I had another think. I decided to follow two strands of thought. Firstly, in order not to waste materials (Penelope Umbrico wouldn’t approve!) I decided to cut the transparency images and mount them on pieces of the cyanotype paper. The second strand was to take my composite images into Photoshop and mock them up to look like cyanotype, as Umbrico did with her screen photos. These I cut up and mounted on black paper, reminiscent of the dark screen edges in ‘Sun Screen Scan’.
I would have liked to use a long piece of paper to assemble my images but the largest I had was A1. My homage is therefore not the shape of Umbrico’s photo -assemblage, nor is it of the dimensions of one of Cornell’s pulled out drawers. It is, however, a photograph that, through the collection and work with the images, elevates humble tarmac to the realms of the extraordinary, and that making of the ordinary, extraordinary. is primarily why I take photographs.
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