What I wrote
Photography on the Beach
How do you feel when you make your work?
Feelings
When I leave home for a photoshoot on the beach at sunrise with my dogs, my surroundings will be dark and quiet. As we near the beach, the dogs will know where we are and become excited. I’ll pick up on their anticipation.
On the beach I’ll be excited too. The light changes very quickly from darkness to pre-dawn, dawn and then sunrise. There may be reflections of the clouds on the wet sand. Often I will paddle. The movement of the sea depends on the phase of the tide and the wind speed. My dogs will chase any birds on the sand. All of these elements, light, sea, birds and dogs, are in constant flux and I enjoy trying to capture the essence of the dance. My senses are heightened, I’m in the moment, I’m happy.
How do you physically engage with your materials?
Planning and working
I’ve been doing this so much that I can quickly plan for the session and then be in the moment when I get to the beach. I want to have an idea of the light beforehand, so planning means, checking the weather, wind speed, the tides and times for sunrise and sunset. I’ll do this planning the previous evening. Depending on the tide at sunrise, for example, I will choose which beach to visit. Some beaches are narrow, or inaccessible at high tide.
If I want to make long exposures or panoramas, I need to make sure I take a tripod, maybe a tilt-shift lens and filters. For detail work, I’ll take a macro or telephoto lens. If I’m walking some distance, I’ll take a light camera with a wider lens to shoot mainly vistas.
Reflections
Post session reflection
Take some time to discuss this experience in your research journal. What have you taken away that will support your critical thinking and writing process in the future? How has this exercise broadened your understanding of the possibilities for writing in relation to practice?
from the task for week 3
I didn’t cover work in the studio or photo editing in my post. If I continue with the ‘wallet’ theme, these will have to be considered. As will writing and its role in the work. I don’t know how much writing would work in a ‘fine art’ theme. I already have loads of memories arising directly and indirectly from this wallet, but can I fit them into something cohesive?
I’m quite used to writing about what I’m doing from my previous work life and I find this reflective writing very useful, particularly as I haven’t settled on a theme for this work yet.
I think I could write more than I’ve done above, and show more work, if I were to continue the photography on the beach themes. The idea of the work being a performance, a dance, could be portrayed through blurred images, intentional camera movement (ICM) and abstracts.
Follow up task
Investigate the following links and identify:
- an artists’ interview
- an artist talking about their work
- writing as creative work
In your research journal compare and contrast these different forms of writing, thinking about the nature and purpose of the writing.
This is a bit of the first (an artist’s interview), but mostly the second (an artist talking about their work). Is there a difference?
The work is interesting in that the artist makes paintings using mundane objects to relate to ‘the black experience’ in Britain over recent decades, such as invisibility, lack of understanding and disdain. I’m not sure what the event reported in the Guardian that triggered the silent treatment at Lords was (match fixing, betting?), but it doesn’t matter. Would a ‘white’ team have been treated in the same way?
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/get-to-know-jennifer-packer/
This is also a bit of the first (an artist’s interview), but mostly the second (an artist talking about their work). The artist mentions two black women, Beonna Taylor and Sandra Bland, who died unlawfully at the hands of police in North America and her feelings about these tragic events. She also mentions the everyday objects she saw as she looked at photos of the raid on Beonna’s apartment.
I feel ashamed of my first reactions to this video. Male, pale and stale! I took the artist as someone who was trying to use the “Black Lives Matter” movement as a platform for her own black, feminist agenda to benefit her art. Fortunately I looked her up, saw some more videos and realised she was a well-travelled, articulate and established artist who considered all her work as political.
https://iitcoa3rdyr.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/perec_readings.pdf
Perec, Georges, ‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’, Wakefield Press (2010).
This is a review of the article in the title, where the author sits in a Paris square on separate occasions and notes all the everyday happenings there. It is an example of 3, writing as creative work.
The article is taken from Perec’s book “Species of Spaces”, which is a collection of pieces published over several years and includes ‘L’infraordinaire’.
First of all I learned two new (for me) words:- ‘infraordinary‘ and ‘endotic‘. These describe the banal, commonplace happenings or articles in our everyday life and how we often overlook such things and concentrate on the exotic or the sensational. The article asks us to look at more mundane things, maybe as most of our lives deal with the mundane. Why are they not examined more closely? On page 3 we are asked to , “Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. (YOUR WALLET?) Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.”
This part really speaks to me as the themes I’ve suggested for my project really fit with the article’s suggestions i.e. taking a close look at a commonplace article (e.g. my wallet – coincidentally this was carried out by Perec around the time my wallet was being used) or an everyday event – walking the dog. I am excited and re-assured by this article as it implies that my potential themes could be worthy of following up as research projects. (Do the last two sentences say the same thing? Am I too excited?)
I’m putting in the introduction of ‘L’infraordinaire’ here as it seems to say so much that is relevant to what I could do as my MA project.
Introduction to ‘L’infraordinaire’
What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep going up! Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals.
In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. ‘Social problems’ aren’t ‘a matter of concern’ when there’s a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, tower blocks that collapse, forest fires, tunnels that cave in, the Drugstore de Champs-Elysées burns down. Awful! Terrible! Monstrous! Scandalous! But where’s the scandal? The true scandal? Has the newspaper told us everything except: not to worry, as you can see life exists, with its ups and downs, things happen, as you can see.
The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask.
What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?
To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?
How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.
What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.
To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us.
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.
Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.
Question your tea spoons.
What is there under your wallpaper?
How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?
Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?
It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.
Ordinary Objects and Everyday Events
In her interview, Lubaina Himid says, “My work isn’t about being distant and admired. It’s about trying to broker a deal, open a conversation. It’s not about making something that is grand and mysterious. There’s plenty of mystery in the everyday. The more you know how something is put together, the more you can marvel at it, really. I want to make something that is sort of incredibly ordinary. And out of that comes some mysterious and special things.“
Jennifer Packer mentions and makes images of the everyday objects she saw as she looked at photos of the raid on Beonna’s apartment.
And then Perec … My ideas about the everyday walks with my dogs and/or with the wallet and its contents and their relationship with time … Before I heard of these artists I hadn’t known that I could be part of something else, something in the art world. Exciting!
