Second Contact Sheet

 

For shoot two I stuck with the same film, camera and lens. I chose a similar day to shoot on (the saturation of colour on this contact sheet is a lower than the actual negatives and has a grey cast) with bright sunshine when there were no clouds obstructing the sun. The aperture was all at either 11 or 16, just like the previous roll of film. I had only the third location, the large bushes at the edge of a field, in mind. The other places were discovered en route. I chose a place with sufficient mixture of plants and brick as I liked the idea from the original pictures I took with the underwear, but did not feel the locale or the outcome to be satisfactory enough to use in my selection.

Fibre Paper and Toners Workshop

 

Standard Contact Print and Test Strip

Selenium Toner

 

Gold Toner

Research: Jeff Wall, Alejandro Chaskielberg and Logan Crable

In my search for photographers who have worked at creating images that are either staged, or compiled from several negatives to make a larger - fictional - scene, I found three whom I wanted to include here as research.

Jeff Wall is a Canadian artist best known for exhibiting his photography work as backlit phototransparencies. The pictures themselves are mostly multifaceted scenarios, often set up in homage to the work of famous painters and artists ('The Destroyed Room' and Delacroix, 'A Sudden Gust of Wind' and Hokusai). They require multiple photographs to be digitally and seamlessly montaged together and tend to take a year or two to complete. His pictures are all about the little details whether they are packed with areas for inspection or more minimal in their levels of interest.

The time he spends on each piece, and the use of phototransparencies, is inspiring but obviously something I do not have the option to take up. His art history influenced compositions and use of both digital post production and film photography are elements I can draw from in my own work.

 

Alejandro Chaskielberg is an Argentinian photographer who last year published the book La Creciente of photographs made on the Paraná River Delta. The portraits are all shot under moonlight and aided by flashlights, fire and strobes. In a deliberate attempt to avoid the standard documentary style they are all posed portraits reenacting typical moments and aspects of their day to day life. This brings a definite and distinctive style to the pictures, the shadows and deeper colours especially being darker than they would have under daylight or just flash.

Logan Crable is based in Brooklyn, New York having graduated with a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design in Spring of 2010. I discovered his work by searching the internet for the phrase 'fictional scenarios' combined with 'photography' and my results turned up a statement from Crable on this page.

“In this body of work I have created fictional scenarios using allegorical characters to represent different abstract moments. I push the realistic element in my photographs to make them believable but surreal. I want to blur the line between reality and fiction. This is a strange world that goes much further than what one first perceives. Understanding that these pictures have a strong sense of narrative is also important to me. I want them to appear as unfinished stories, enacting themselves long after the viewer is gone.”

This quote has elements of what I propose for my series. The 'fictional scenarios', and also the blurring of reality and creating pictures with a 'strong sense of narrative' are similar to my aims. Although his pictures are portraiture rather than the more still life I will be working on, the point behind them appears to be related.

Research: Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle is a French writer and artist, working in the fields of installation and conceptual art, she also regularly uses photography in her pieces. When I explained my initial idea it was suggested I look at her work for inspiration. 

Her 1979 book Suite Vénitienne depicts a project consisting of (as descibed in Stuart Jeffries' 2009 article in The Guardian) Calle on a trip "to Venice to follow a man she had met at a party, [where she] phoned hundreds of hotels until she found out where he was staying, and then persuaded a woman who lived opposite to let her photograph his comings and goings from her window."

 

The INIVA website's DARE resource site describes her subsequent piece, 'The Hotel'.

"A year later she returned to Venice where she got a temporary job as a chambermaid. She made a piece of work about her imagined ideas of who the hotel guests were, based on their personal belongings."

It also includes a quote attributed to Calle where she further explains...

"For each room there was a photograph of the bed undone, of other objects in the room, and a description day by day of what I found there."

Picture 1 was found here.

Picture 2 was found here.

Although Calle's work is intriguing, and definitely something I can draw influence from, these particular projects of hers are too based in documentary of reality compared to what I want to do. I will have to look at someone whose work is based around constructing images that, whilst of potentially possible situations, does not rely entirely upon ideas of truth and being a record of actual happenings.

Two Pictures chosen from First Shoot

 

These are two pictures, unedited, selected from those in my first shoot. I think of them as being the two most successful images from the film and those most likely to feature as final images. The unusual colours came from the scanner and were not my intention.

The first one I picked over the other, similar, shots because I preferred the composition of it to the first picture I took, which had the hat to the right of the frame, and because it was sharper than the one after it. I chose to use one of the pictures of the hat there, as opposed to one of it leaning against the wall because I wanted to use the picture of the shirt that I had taken in the same location and them all to be in different places so as to differentiate their situations.

First Shoot Contact Sheet

(Ignore the pictures of cats and the last picture of the fourth column)

This is the contact sheet from my first shoot.

The colours have been adjusted digitally to resemble their original hues.

I shot on Kodak Portra 400 ISO colour film with a Bronica ETRC and a 75mm Zenzanon lens. The camera was mounted on a tripod for all exposures and a light meter was used to measure the shutter speeds necessary, with the aperture at 11 in the first seven pictures and at 16 for the last four. The items of clothing picked for the images were sourced in a fancy dress shop in Hammersmith (the hat and the underwear) and from my own wardrobe (the shirt). The locations were all chosen on the day, although the first two were known to me prior.