Katies Photographic Journey

Photography Session 5

Documentary photographer, Peter Spurgeon, was referenced in the research section of the EYV course folder, and I felt quite a connection to his work. Particularly in his Beyond Limits series, where I was surprised to find a similarity with his approach to photography and mine. He seems to enjoy photographing the rough intricacies of nature.

Red Berries © ktgb 2020

Beyond Limits Series – Copyright © 2020 Peter Spurgeon

It was the flash of red berries hanging though the bare trees that was the reason behind taking my own picture and for me, it was the bright splash of grey and lime green lichen that caught my eye in Peter Spurgeon’s photograph. I would love to know what made him take this one.

His photographs gave me the impetus to look at my surroundings with fresh eyes. Another example from Peter Spurgeon shows, a discarded white balloon stuck in the middle of nature. Living in the countryside I come across this so often, a bucolic scene interrupted by man’s laziness or disconnect.

This was my attempt on a similar theme.

Abandoned tyre 1 © ktgb 2020

Peter Spurgeon is also referenced in my Part 1 Research document.

Rethinking 1 Square Mile

Photography session 4

As I was floundering a bit with my Square Mile photographs, I rethought my ideas taking into consideration the ‘decisive moment’ asking the question, why am I taking this picture? Why here? Why now? Was my motivation places that interested me or, how I saw the place as opposed to how it is viewed by outsiders? What was important to me? I decided to capture my daily commute with my smartphone. The images felt more real to me and I liked the way the lights reflected in the rain.

Connecting to the wider EYV group

Photography session 3.

Attempted the same as for the second set of pics with the idea of getting the morning light. Note to self – make sure your camera battery is charged!

EYV Group discussion

I joined in the EYV group discussion on 28^th January 2020. This was interesting although I didn’t feel able to make any sensible contribution at this stage. There were useful points about how lines affect the movement of the eye:

Horizontal – slow

Diagonal – quick

Also mentioned the ‘decisive moment’ – not just the ‘what’ but the ‘when’ and ‘why’ of a photograph as proposed by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson, quoted in the Guardian, 2014

Interested to note that Sean O’Hagen of the Guardian feels Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’ has had its day, saying that ‘the notion of the decisive moment no longer holds sway as it once did’ (O’Hagen, 2014)the implication was that it is now too contrived. Perhaps people want more instantaneous, nitty-gritty shots. These are probably easier to do now as most people will have a smartphone and most smartphones can take multiple shots or ‘live’ photographs allowing for us to look back after the event and re-witness something that we hadn’t seen before.

We also covered the point as relates to Ex 1.2. It has to be small in relation to other objects in the frame but doesn’t have to be in the middle.

References

O’Hagan, S.(2014)Cartier-Bresson’s classic is back – but his Decisive Moment has passed. The Guardian On-Line. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/23/henri-cartier-bresson-the-decisive-moment-reissued-photography Accessed on: 1 March 2020

Stefan Draschan

People Matching Artworks

Stefan spends a lot of his time in Museums and exhibitions, waiting for the exact moment when the right visitor happens to view a matching artwork.

I really love these photographs. I like the way he has re-used art and made something new and different. It is witty. It is observant. It shows a real patience and a deliberation in what he wants to portray.

What is home? What is ‘1 Square Mile’ – emotional or physical?

Asked by Museum Bookstore about exhibitions and catalogues Stefan said, ‘I love a lot of exhibitions and see the catalogue as a memory of home, as some exhibitions feel like home to me.’

Museum Bookstore (2017) Interview with photographer Stefan Draschan. Available at: https://www.museumbookstore.com/blogs/blog/interview-with-photographer-stefan-draschan Accessed on: 1 March 2020

His photographs ‘play with colour, form, pattern, and size to emphasise the corresponding elements between the art and the subject.’ (MuseumBookstore, 2017)

More of Stefan’s work can be found at: www.stefandraschan.com

Fields

Photography session 2. 29-01-2020

About a week later the rain had finally stopped long enough for me to nip out again. This time the photographs were literally taken within one square mile. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was close to setting which created interesting shadows and there was a little bit of cloud around.

This is my real square mile; field after field after field …

Fields, fields and more fields. © ktgb 2020

I took the camera off auto so that I could have more control. Still no real idea of what I should be taking pictures of, so I snapped away at things that I found intriguing. The sheeps wool snagged in the barbed wire caught my eye; I loved the way the sun refelcted of the wire and how the wool glowed. The other two photographs I took because it showed the vast emptiness of the area and echo’s the feeling I have sometimes of being cast adrift in a sea of grass.

I can’t say there is any real technical skill being displayed here. Apart from having to remove a flaw in the camera which leaves two faint spots on the images, they haven’t been photoshoped. However, when I was removing the spots from the ‘View across the county‘ I did notice that if I cropped the sky away it gave quite a different perspective and concentrated your eye on the foreground. The light streaks across the image are from overhead wires which stretch out across the valley.

View Across The County cropped © ktgb 2020

First Steps

Like many people, I like to take photographs. There are many reasons to take them; to illustrate a point, a quick share over Wassap to ask an opinion on whether to buy skirt A or skirt B perhaps? But most often I would suggest, we take photographs to capture a moment. For me, this is definitely the main reason why I take them; as a way of holding on to something. It doesn’t work of course; people and places change all the time, but a photograph is more than just the image it is a way of accessing feelings and memories. This is what I focused on for the first EYV assignment. Having recently moved an hour and a half drive from the place I had called home for over 20 years this caused a fair bit of anxiety. I had lost my emotional anchors to one place and had not really gained any to my new ones.

Photography session 1. 23-01-2020

I have had to borrow a camera for this course and being unfamiliar with it I made a good number of mistakes. I was unsure what to photograph so I opted for places I went to on a fairly regular basis and one of those is my local cinema where I go more often for coffee or lunch. I left the camera on auto and found that lack of control over what bit I wanted to focus on gave frustrating results.

Although I liked the focus in Cinema 1, I don’t think I framed this well, needed to get down a bit lower. However, in Cinema 2 I had wanted the focus to be the tree and building towards the back.

And this is me …

This is the beginning of an exploration of photography. If the eyes are the window into our souls then the camera is a way of capturing what our soul sees and sharing those moments. I hope that photography will let me share my view of the world around me

Why am I blogging publicly (or semi-publicly)? Because it is a course requirement. I don’t think I would voluntarily do this.