Making an Image

 

PJ Lynch; Dublin, Ireland - Illustrator

My main idea for the “make an image” project pertains to Oscar Wilde’s short stories. I’ve always been a fan of Wilde since reading The Picture of Dorian Grey in high school and after reading his short stories, the symbolism represented in these tales and the vividness in which they’re portrayed makes for a great still life interpretation through photography. The most striking story is The Nightingale and the Rose; a story about a nightingale who gives her own life to create a red rose for a boy who is in love. So beautifully written, the boy’s love will only dance with him if he gives her a red rose. In the boy’s garden there are only white and yellow roses and the tree with red roses can not produce them anymore. The red rose tree tells the nightingale that the only way for it to make a red rose is for her to pierce her heart on one of its thorns and sacrifice herself for love. This story is very beautiful and cynical at the same time, it expresses how some people are so wrapped up in romance and how others are so superficial and don’t care about what sort of effort or sacrifices go into loving someone else. I think that concentrating on this story, several striking and meaningful images can be produced.

http://www.shortstoryarchive.com/w/nightingale_and_the_rose.html <–full story can be read here.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

My second idea is based on a short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This story has always been one of my favorites to read since high school. Psychologically, this story delves into the delusional thoughts of a woman who is experiencing what seems to be depression in relation to feeling trapped with her duties and social commitments and roles associated with being a woman in the late 1800s. She eventually seems to lose her mind when she has a manic episode and locks herself in the mysterious, yellow wallpapered room and tears it to shreds, “Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!”

http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html

Bellissimo!

Paolo Roversi and Sasha Pivovarova for Vogue Italia 2008, stunning shoot, definite inspiration for the current 4×5 project. Sasha Pivovarova makes the same facial expression in almost every photograph I’ve seen, she really only has one look… but I must say…

Vogue Italia, 2008

Vogue Italia, 2008

…what a beautifully vacant expression, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I’m almost one hundred percent positive that Paolo Roversi is my new favorite photographer for these reasons:

Paolo Roversi

Paolo Roversi

Paolo Roversi

Paolo Roversi

(Marla Singer anyone?)

I could just go on and on posting his photographs, molto bella Paolo.

Egg Abstractions

mountain city smog, heather noelle

mountain city smog, heather noelle

acid washed jeans, heather noelle

easter, heather noelle

golden egg, heather noelle

mr. egg, heather noelle

egg abortion

These prints (that I am considering for the finals in the egg abstraction project due next Wednesday – I still have to decide) are dark room manipulated fiber based prints. There was a great process involved in getting black and white fiber prints to look like they do here. I started off with a Man Ray influenced solarization where I flicked the main light on in the dark room half way through the development time. I waited until there was a dark black apparent on the print and ran, flicked the lights on and off, and waited another minute or so for it to solarize in the developer. I took the paper through the normal process of fiber paper, waited a day for them to dry, flattened them and then proceeded to chemically enhance them. First I took the prints and selectively submerged them into step one of the sepia toner, the bleach. When I liked the result, I quickly took the print out and put it into a separate tray of water. After a few minutes I used a “Bright Blue” toner with a soft paint brush to selectively tone certain parts of the image I wanted to stand out the most. The combination of the blacks and grays from the original print still remaining from the bleaching process meshed well with the blue toner, in my opinion. After I washed the blue toner off, I dipped parts of the prints in the sepia toner to give a smokey “rotten egg” feel to some. What i did not anticipate was the blue toner reacting with the sepia toner creating hues of green and even pink in some places which, to me, was a very happy mistake.

I also did some digital variations of the 35mm shots I took. I think I like them a lot more than the prints that I did. The colors are so vibrant and the images are so crisp; as much as I love analog, I think digital is where we’re all headed…and it’s CLEAR why. But, for the record, I am and will always be in love with the dark room. I think I’m straying a whole lot from the intent of this project; to compare and contrast dark room printing to ink jet printing to see how well technology can mimic the arduous dark room processes involved in making a fiber based print. I think it’s important to understand how they coincide, but in addition, I believe that they are very different and made for different techniques. I think that digital imagining is what ink jet printers are designed for and film is made for dark room printing. I understand that it’s interesting to know how to scan negatives to print from ink jet; but why would you do this when a high quality digital image is going to look much better? If you developed your own negatives, scan them in to see which ones you like and then print in the dark room. Maybe this paragraph is merely all my biases coming together but I do think the results would be at their best if digital images were printed rather than scanned negatives.

egg balloons, heather noelle

whites, heather noelle

Robyn Cumming

The photographer Robyn Cumming was brought to my attention by Julee Holcombe, and WOW is basically all I have to say!

Robyn Cumming

This photography is right up my alley, if I had all the materials that I’ve wanted to use, I think the work that I would produce would be somewhat similar in the sense of evoking a certain uncomfortable feeling from the viewer. I really like photographs that are creepy or disrupting but it’s not really clear why. It’s the same with movies. The movie Gummo (by Harmony Korine, who also did the movie Kids) is extremely disturbing, but nothing really happens that’s gory or vulgar, just the images make the viewer feel very uncomfortable. It’s not really clear why one would just stare blankly at movies like Gummo or Stroszek by Werner Herzog (1977) where a chicken dances in a cage for the final scene and a rabbit pulls a lever on a fire engine at a local fair. To me it’s very disturbing and makes me think…but WHY? I like the psychology to photography (and film), how an image can stir up such emotion in an individual and have such a different effect on someone else. It’s interpretation and personal memories and experiences that can trigger a feeling just by looking at something so still and sometimes silent or just plain ordinary.

Maybe we’re just all chickens trapped in a cage getting paid like a vending machine to dance around for everyone around us.

Susan Sontag: On Photography; America: Seen Through Photographs, Darkly

 

Diane Arbus

  ”[she] lined up assorted monsters and borderline cases – most of them ugly; wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings – who have paused to pose and, often, to gaze frankly, confidently at the viewer.”

 

Diane Arbus, Woman With A Veil on 5th Avenue NYC, 1968

 

Lartigue Racecourse At Nice 1912

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was stressed by Sontag to compare Diane Arbus’ Woman With a Veil on Fifth Avenue 1968 and Lartigue’s Racecourse at Nice 1912. The different representations of these women convey the completely different views of what a photograph should be aesthetically and thematically. With Lartigue, the women are staring off into the distance and sort of romanticized and implied as being beautiful even though their faces are not shown in the photograph. With Diane Arbus’, the woman is looking at the camera with such a bold, unselfconscious, candid expression that’s voyeuristic and honest. It projects an image with which we do not fall in love with (the aesthetics or the romanticism), but we fall in love with the curious investigation of the sad, pitiable woman in the photograph. Being attracted to the subject is different than being attracted to a photograph. With portraiture, the subject dictates the level of curiosity someone has or the level of admiration someone has. Diane Arbus is one of those photographers who is attracted to the unusual, the outcasts, the freaks sparking curiosity in onlookers for years after her suicide in 1971. 

 

Freaks, 1932

 

Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) with the tagline “Can a grown woman really love a midget?” is a disturbing movie exploiting people who are actually…well freaks. Seen pictured here is a man with no limbs who manages to get around just fine, shave and even lights a cigarette and smokes in one scene. The majority of people in this film actually have something seriously wrong with them physically. For example, real siamese twins, a man with half a body, the “pinheads”, midgets who look like children etc. It’s unclear to me whether this film is a matter of exploitation or recognition for these people. The haunting “one of us, one of us…” chant in the wedding dinner scene, in my opinion, sends a message: Who are the REAl freaks? the people who are different or unusual or the ones judging them because of it?

 

It’s strange that two of my favorite photographers have killed themselves, Francesca Woodman and Diane Arbus. Are their pictures so haunting to them that they drive them a little insane OR do they reveal their depression or instability by seeking out these disturbing people and places? Sometimes inner conflicts are projected into what we create, however, like Sally Mann, it’s mostly a scientific fascination with morbidity and the process of death. As eccentric as she is, she is stable, so the argument of the photographs getting to Diane and having them be “dangerous” to her doesn’t seem viable. In my opinion, she was a danger to herself just like Francesca Woodman, Sylvia Plath, Ian Curtis, Freud, Hunter S. Thompson, Van Gogh and everyone else who ended their lives leaving behind an admirable body of work. It maybe be that everyone has a secret fascination with suicide and tragedy as artists seem to be honored and recognized after they end their lives more so than when they were alive. 

photography is a “sharp eyed witty program of despair.” (Sontag, 48)

Susan Sontag: On Photography; Plato’s Cave

Blowup, 1966

For those of you who have not seen Blowup, an Antonioni film, this movie has the most ridiculous and irrelevant scene with mimes playing tennis as the final scene. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with the movie which makes it hilarious. I was watching it when it was randomly on television with my mom once and we just started cracking up. It’s funny that Susan Sontag referenced this movie in her book.

I agree with Sontag that photography is very voyeuristic in the sense that you’re seeing from someone else’s point of view, looking at people you may not know (at least for portraiture). It’s like you’re looking at them without their permission, they don’t know you’re looking at them, only the photographer they’re aware of.

Sally Mann

Photography is becoming so commercialized now that cameras are getting smaller, more user friendly, with less focus on producing art and more focus on consumerism; Creating the best accessory that you can buy! “The digital camera is a great invention because it allows us to reminisce. Instantly.” – Demetri Martin

The last part of the chapter Plato’s Cave sums up my thoughts entirely.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution…. The most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” (Sontag, 24)

Man With A Movie Camera, 1929

What Remains

Sally Mann - bones from her dead greyhound

What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann is a beautiful documentary exploring the VERY personal life of photographer (and death enthusiast) Sally Mann. This film imspired me to not be afraid to push what’s accepted as a norm to get your point across to the public. As eccentric and morbid as Sally Mann can seem, I see a lot of myself in her fascinated with morbid parts of life and her issues with her father. However, I could NEVER see myself going to a forensic training facility to take pictures of dead and decaying corpses. I’ve staged death in some of my photography but I can’t imagine actually facing it dead on. I took the course introduction to forensic sciences last semester and some of the pictures shown were a little hard to handle. I really can’t imagine someone going into that field professionally. They must have to disconnect themselves from human emotion and look at the situation strictly scientifically and professionally. However, I have taken pictures of dead animals which is slightly gross and morbid. I found a dead dog(?) on the beach, it’s skin leathery and withered and it was the craziest looking thing I had seen so I took a picture of it. I guess I have to eat my words sometimes.

dead dog on sand, heather noelle

Edward Weston nude on sand anyone? haha!

I’m a dead beat

I don’t think there is a way that I can talk more about the reading, but, I borrowed a photography book from work and I need to mention it here. It is called Europa and contains stories and poetry accompanied by photography and it’s actually very interesting. I need to double check the author but I can not stop staring at the pictures in that book. They’re abstractions of the landscape and they are absolutely stunning. I will post them when I can scan them in. 

I haven’t had a spare moment to get myself to do anything other than school work, working, or sleeping for the past three weeks or so, therefore instead of talking about an artist lecture or the BFA, I’m going to write about this incredible guy I found about who used to work at UNH. Clement Moran was a physics professor at UNH who set up a dark room in Demeritt Hall where he taught a photography class as well. Over all he had about 15,000 images of campus life from 1914 to 1940 when he died. 

It’s so awesome to see how much the university has changed since then. Surprisingly looking through the photographs I recognized a lot of the buildings which is strange to think about how long they have been around and still standing. I think his photographs are all stunning in their own way, but especially the picture of the group of girls in a circle. There’s something so mystical about that picture that I keep going back to it after looking at his other work. I just find that picture to stand out among the rest as exceptional.

MFA

Out of all the wonderful photographs in the exhibit Photographic Figures, ~nothing compared~ to the gigantic portrait of Sinead O’Connor’s enormous bald head…

Sinead O'Connor Malibu 1990, Herb Ritts

But in all seriousness, the photograph that caught my eye the most was a piece by Gerard Pietrus Fieret, a schizophrenic photographer who photographed his “women friends” in the ’60s showing the their free-spirit lifestyles. It caught my eye immediately hiding in the corner, it must be my psych intuition that drew me to the crazy schizophrenic guy’s picture above all others. 

 This is not the photograph displayed but it gives a good example of how he stamps copyrights all over the print. I find this to be incredibly awesome because he seems to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia since he feels the need to claim rights several different times to his work, probably in fear of someone stealing credit for it. I think his work is raw and beautiful and because it’s from the 60s I’m automatically drawn to it since I envy the music, culture and fashion of that time. 

Museum trips, however, always seem to anger me. There was an installation of a bunch of…for lack of a better word…shit hanging up on the wall of this idiot who thinks drawing doodles of penises and swastikas is artistic…well it’s not mr. or ms. whoever you are. It was an immature collection of crap done by someone who is laughing at anyone who calls it “fine art~”

yeah, no. I’m sorry but that’s just plain awful. At least be good at painting/drawing if you’re going to do something as outlandish as draw an elephant with a dick for a nose with a swastika on his head and try to call it art. This “artist” gets an MFA. Major Fail Award.

york beach, maine

So, I am pretty far behind in my blog but i will update with the best pictures from the beach and then catch up later. 

As a side note I have tonsillitis and it’s very painful :”(

save the world lose the girl, heather noelle costigan