Word of the day: RESONANCE

I had to look it up to make sure I fully understood what it meant.

res·o·nance/ˈrezənəns/

Noun:        

• The quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating
• The ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions

Synonyms:         echo - reverberation

From Wikipedia: “In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at a greater amplitude at some frequencies than at others. These are known as the system's resonant frequencies (or resonance frequencies). At these frequencies, even small periodic driving forces can produce large amplitude oscillations, because the system stores vibrational energy.”

I checked this because the Aesthetica write-up on Zarina Bhimji’s work said: “It is the tension of translation, the exchange, the resonance between an extremely beautiful still landscape and the one on fire that gives energy and defines reality.”

I didn’t know that it could be grammatically correct to have resonance ‘between’ things.  An interesting idea to explore in the future.

Having done a little research on the Bhimji show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in advance, I was not expecting to really like her work.  The photographs looked haphazard, technically poor and rather boringly flat. Viewed in the gallery they are much more impressive though, and once seen in the context of the two films, which are at the heart of this project, they take on a whole new life.

Bhimji was born in Mbarara, Uganda in 1963 to Indian parents. Many Asians came to Africa as indentured workers during the time of the British Empire – particularly to build railways and other infrastructure.  Over time, these immigrants settled and prospered but in places faced resentment from indigenous populations.  In 1972 Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of all Asians from Uganda, giving them just 90 days to leave the country.  As British citizens, many moved to the UK.  The artist’s sense of this dislocation is very prevalent in all of her work.

Our gallery guide talked about Bhimji not being a documentary photographer but taking a more intuitive approach to tell a story - that she likes to create characters and then inhabit them, to create spaces for the viewer to exist in.  The facing images as one enters the gallery are quite haunting seascapes rendered in black and white, to avoid a travel brochure appearance.  The images have no real context and set the tone that this is not going to be a chronologically rendered story.

The rich colours, tones and delicate lighting really make the photographs worth a long look.  They were shot on slow film with long exposures, exteriors at dawn or dusk and interiors in the late afternoon.  The artist claims that digital technology could not achieve the same tonal quality (nonsense, surely?)   There are no people.  Just lingering signs of human life.  The horizontals are slanted and skewed; perhaps - as another student suggested - to give a sense of everything being unsettled, although the subject matter was solidly rooted.  This aspect bothered me a bit and had certainly been one of things that alienated the images from me to begin with, before seeing the films.  It was suggested that it would make more sense if seen as a still from a tracking shot.

Our guide talked about the tragedy of being driven away from the graves of loved ones when forced to flee a country (image called “Frightened Goats”). She has tried to depict not actual facts but the echoes created by this history.

The show contains a large body of work indicating the extensive research she has carried out – beautiful panoramas stuck together imprecisely from small prints, painterly Polaroids, lots of very dark interiors.  There are three maps cut to the shape of a little girl’s dress – of India, Africa and Europe.

A second room shows a different style – sumptuous colours and decorative patterns in light boxes.  This is work commissioned for Harewood House in Leeds and from her ‘Cleaning the House’ exhibition, with images also from the Gardens of Alhambra in Grenada.  She talks about crossing the boundaries of science and art, creativity and physics, and metaphors for the cross-fertilisation of cultures.  Harewood House was built on wealth from sugar plantations and slave-trading so there is an exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism.  One striking element was the depiction of newspaper ads asking for information about slaves who had fled their owners are etched onto mirrors.  Hard to read if you are looking straight at the words.  I found myself standing to the side, my own face out of sight, to read these properly.  Are we complicit?  Are we in denial, desperate to forget this shameful past?

A third room has chilli powder (used as a weapon of defence by the new immigrants in 70s Britain?) and other spices on the floor, beautiful images of dead birds and Indian shoes, close-ups of mosquitoes on cloth.  Symbols, reminders, words on parchment that are almost indecipherable.  A human story that I will never truly understand, but the whispers of it carry me to somewhere I have never been.

Both the films – Out of the Blue (2002) and Yellow Patch (2011) - are stunning. Loud, unsettling, haunting, beautiful, bitter – a dizzying journey for the senses.  I found myself immersed and mesmerised for the duration of each film, forced to really contemplate the loss, the passing of time, the exquisite loveliness, the mundane, the enduring.  Tiny details, agonisingly, meticulously, silently filmed.  Some of it feels a bit like a descent into some kind of madness but is actually quite calming.  I found Yellow Patch particularly appealing – so many frames that could have been stills but for the gentle breeze lapping at the piles of old papers and dilapidated furniture.  Bhimji uses wind and fire to bring life to these history sites.  She combines motion film and sound and still photography to create an extraordinary work of art – so personal and yet so universal.  It would be impossible for the viewer not to find some truth, some connection here.

I came away from this study tour really inspired to take a new approach to my work.  To let myself look at things differently – not getting hung up on technical perfection but to let more of what I see and what I feel have its own resonance.  And that will hopefully chime with others, if they can take the time to stop and see.  The worth – the power and beauty – of Bhimji’s work almost passed me by and than in itself was a big lesson.

Photos from today's study tour - good people!

Sketchbook inspiration

An interesting and inspiring piece (and I definitely could do with some inspiration!):
Sketchbook secrets


"It’s a diary for the visually inclined—a place where artists can most comfortably explore their personal thoughts, work out their visual needs, practice, maintain a visual history, and hopefully create the unpolished work that will eventually lead to amazing work for the world to see."

Exercise 12: Close and involved

I am always very reticent about using wide-angle focal lengths, partly because of the distortion and partly because it seems like a lot of extraneous visual information is included in the image.  My aim is to explore this more in future as a method of placing the viewer right inside the situation.  Thus far I only seem to have used it to deliberately show more scenery.

From Photo.net: "The classic technique for street photography consists of fitting a wide (20mm on a full-frame camera) or moderately wide-angle (35mm) lens to a camera, setting the ISO to a moderate high speed (400 or 800), and pre-focusing the lens. Pre-focusing? How do you know how far away your subject will be. It turns out that it doesn't matter. Wide angle lenses have good depth of field. If your subject is 10 feet away and the lens is set for 12 feet, you'd probably need to enlarge to 16x20" before noticing the error, assuming a typical aperture. This is why the high ISO setting is important. Given a fixed shutter speed, the higher the ISO setting, the smaller the aperture. The smaller the aperture, the less critical it is to focus precisely.

Street photographers traditionally will set the lens at its hyperfocal distance. This distance depends on the lens focal length and the aperture but the basic idea is that it is the closest distance setting for which subjects at infinity are still acceptably sharp. With fast film and a sunny day, you will probably be able to expose at f/16. With a 35mm lens focussed to, say, 9 feet, subjects between 4.5 feet and infinity will be acceptably sharp (where "acceptable" means "if the person viewing the final photograph doesn't stick his eyes right up against it")."

This is a big area of development for me as my comfort zone is to shoot on the widest possible aperture and preferably with long lenses!  I can't seem to find any wide angle street photography images that I am even remotely happy with.

The advantages are: feeling very involved - high drama shots sometimes with a feeling of danger or excitement, lots of information being included in the image to hold the viewer's attention, a more authentic/truthful feel to the image as the photographer has less opportunity to editorialise through choice of what appears in the image.

Problems include distortion, a chaotic feel to the image, a standard 'photo-journalism' perspective which at worst can look like a picture from a local newspaper.

Exercise 11: Standing back

I feel like a bit of a fraud with this exercise because I always seems to be 'standing back'.  One of my favourite leisure activities is to shoot passers-by with a long lens - my 70-200mm f2.8 being the preferred weapon.  I do also sometimes use a 70-300mm but this can only open to f5.6 when on full zoom and is often a bit too close anyway.

The big set-back with this of course is people and cars blocking the 'perfect' shot. I have dozens of throw aways due to my speedy husband straying into the frame.  I have found also that sometimes the shallow depth of field can be too distracting.  If a certain part or too much of the image is out of focus, even if the subject is very sharp, I find it can ruin a composition.  An example is the image below.  Although it is not very large in the frame, the bin in the right hand foreground is too distracting.  It gives the impression that the viewer is hiding or stalking - not a comfortable or satisfying image.

I like the intimacy of being able to get close to the subject without them noticing - it provides a frisson from the close contact without any kind of self-consciousness.  I also like being able to isolate the subject so the images are quite clean.  This style has always appealed to me much more than messy wise-angle street photography although I am trying to be more open-minded about this.

The three images below sum up the joy (and the downside) of long focal lengths for me.  The old chap has no idea he is being photographed but we can look at the pictures and imagine what kind of person he is, what his home looks like, how he interacts with the world.  Unfortunately I could not shoot without a railing being in the way which I am disinclined to crop out, as this would ruin the balance, but which I find to be a negative part of the capture.  It is also sometimes tricky to avoid the subject being at the dead centre of the frame as focussing has to be quick with these moving targets.

It is actually quite a dramatic editorial decision to zoom in on a person and cut out their surroundings and their interaction with it.  Great for people with very interesting faces or quirky clothes but possibly less so when just capturing the ordinary 'man in the street' and it can sometimes feel too sanitised and controlled.

I get the impression that really talented photographers can allow the surroundings to be left in shot and the isolation of the subject and the intimacy is still there but through killer composition or a very specific use of lenses and correct aperture.

Exercise 10 - 'best' moments

This exercise involves capturing bursts of activity from which to try to catch the best moment.  I have always found it very interesting to observe how much the composition and mood of a photograph can change within a few seconds.  This is a good way to improve street photography skills.

For the exercise, I spent the afternoon in the Liverpool Street/Spitalfields Market area and shot dozens of sequences.  Some worked and some didn't.  Trying to capture people walking towards me was difficult for obvious reasons of focussing, although I do like the end result when I can snap someone looking straight at me.  Many of the interactions I captured would have been difficult to predict so using this approach was quite useful.  I unintentionally managed to get someone picking their nose and a street vendor crying, as well as lots of warm human moments.

The first sequence in the previous post captured an older guy quite unpredictably asking a young man for some money.  The image I chose was the one showing point where the 'beggar' looks down at the young man's hand to see what money he has found in his pocket, maybe wondering how much of it he will get.  A female traveller coming up from the station seems to be looking on, leading the eye back to the exchange.

The second sequence was shot in Spitalfields Market right at the end of the day.  I noticed two guys in a food trailer having an intense conversation and sampling the leftovers as they cleared up. There was something unusual about their behaviour/demeanour that I couldn't quite put my finger on but they just didn't quite seem like stereotypical fast food sellers.  When I later Googled www.streetkitchen.co.uk, I discovered that I had photographed Mark Jankel and world famous chef Jun Tanaka!

The first image in the sequence is my chosen one as the 'best' of the set as it depicts the intensity of their exchange as had caught my eye in the first place.

One of my favourite images of the day was the only salvageable image from a sequence taken at an outdoor cafe on Dray Walk in the Truman Brewery complex.  It somehow captures the business of the area but also the very personal moment between two people when time stops for friendship.

Exercise 10: Moment and Gesture

Who knew that Bryan Adams was an accomplished photographer?

I was thinking this set of photos of Danny Trejo was pretty amazing (taken by Bryan Adams!)

www.bryanadamsphotography.com

But actually it can't be too hard to get a good shot of Trejo - he has a great face and demeanour.  Love the first image showing his craggy face and bright eyes.  Great textures and just the right depth of field.  With the next two I don't think Adams made the best use of the very bright light - they just don't work for me.  Love the one of the woman at the sink though.  All in all a nice set and some good narratives in there.

I had no idea that Bryan Adams was a photographer (and a good one) - seems that all the money he makes from it goes towards his foundation for education for kids.  Nice one Bry!

Kinderpostzegel Nederland stamps 2010

I received a Get Well card from a thoughtful, dear friend in The Netherlands today with the most wonderful stamps:

Kinderpostzegels

Gorgeous delicate images of children with soft lighting - their gaze turned away from the camera but still captured with so much expression.   I would love to know how the images were post-processed.  The link above does not do justice to the actual stamps which are more matt and muted.

The stamps are part of a campaign, (which is very successful according to my Dutch friend):

Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland (Kinderpostzegels) is a children’s charity with the slogan: 'for children, by children'. The annual Children’s Welfare Stamps Campaign is a striking example of this, forming the organisation’s showpiece. In this campaign, children help other children. Kinderpostzegels uses the proceeds to support projects focusing primarily on children.


Charity website

From what I can glean, the photographers were:

Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm

I am not very enamoured with the rest of their work to be honest - too empty and creepy, too clinical.  And the ones of the kids laying in the grass - surely these could have horrible connotations?  Maybe there is a Dutch cultural thing that I am missing here.  Interesting how I could dislike pretty much everything on their website and yet find the images on these stamps so arresting and appealing.

Thoughts on inspiration

Really interesting audio clip here on the relationship between artists and their muse with some great thoughts from Mr Waits as well:

http://2816monument.com/2011/03/31/me-myself-and-muse/

Love the idea of a gulf stream of creativity and ideas and we have to show our commitment to being portals.