An article in today’s Guardian by poet Lydia Towsey opens: ‘Botticelli’s painting of the Birth of Venus was the first female nude painted and exhibited life size.’
james; waulkmill, 2017
The rest of the article – about body image and eating disorders and the way being the subject of portraiture can help recovery from them – has a lot more in it to consider, but it was the phrase ‘life size’ that captured my immediate attention. Continue reading
‘This exercise is essentially the same as the previous one, but instead of taking photographs of the same person, here you must make portraits of three different subjects, but keep the background to the image consistent (see Irving Penn and Clare Strand, above). There are many ways of exploring this exercise. You could either select an interesting backdrop to use inside (studio) or perhaps select an interesting backdrop on location (street). Whichever you choose, try to be as creative as you can and be prepared to justify your decisions through your supporting notes.’
– IaP Coursebook, p.54
I would have liked to do something as simple and yet clever as Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows’ 1972 June Street collaboration where the occupants of a terrace of Manchester houses were pictured in their originally identical but now divergently individual living rooms. I found this series much less problematic than Parr’s later work on the Japanese Commuters that also forms part of the course material. I even have a couple of ideas for this – the various double front doors of the terraced maisonettes of the east London street that I live in or the small-shop interiors of the parade that runs perpendicularly along the far end of my street – but, lacking time I shall file this idea away for later use. Continue reading
‘Consider the work of both Callahan and Germain, then select a subject for a series of five portraits, varying the locations and backgrounds. The one consistent picture element must be the subject you have chosen, who must appear in all five images. Think carefully about where you choose to photograph them, either using a pose that offers a returned gaze to the camera, or simply captures them going about their daily business. The objective once again is to visually link the images together in some way.
Present your five images as a series and write around 500 words reflecting on the decisions
you made. Include both of these in your learning log or blog.’– IaP Coursebook p.51
My son, James is nearly fifteen, on the cusp of being an adult. He lives with his mother in Glasgow, while I live in London, but I do manage to get up once a month or so and see James. Every year we go on holiday to Orkney, where I grew up.
This year we managed to make a couple of day trips to some of the smaller islands that fringe Scapa Flow. For this exercise I’ve put together a series of pictures to make a single day from various days of outings. Continue reading
While I was doing the research for this project, I made a trip to Kyiv for work. All the photographs illustrating this post were made during this trip, on the city’s soviet-era metro system. I have known about these pictures for a long time now – indeed one of my clearest memories of the 2010 exhibition Exposed at Tate Modern was standing in front of the glass case containing the blackened Contax Rangefinder hidden beneath his coat by Evans to take his subway pictures – and have often taken photographs of my fellow travellers on public transport wherever I find myself.
fig.1 – on the Kyiv Metro
I have written about Evans’ subway shots before so – as this course is concerned with identity as well as location – will only add a couple of brief notes here. Continue reading
Closely consider the work of the practitioners discussed above [Walker Evans, Lukas Kuzma, Martin Parr, discussed here, and James Wood who I feel fits better in with section 3] then try to shoot a series of five portraits of subjects who are unaware of the fact they are being photographed. The reflection about your methodology will be as important as the final five images, so be prepared to write about how you found the experience (around 500 words) and present your findings via your learning log or blog.
– IaP Coursebook, p.47
For the exercise on reportage in Context and Narrative, I took two series of quite traditional street photographs. Now I wanted something less Gary Winogrand and more Phillip-Lorca diCorcia; something pulled back, something more truly covert.
fig.1 – untitled
I like Walker Evans’ subway pictures, but this time, I took as my starting place a different set of pictures by him – the eleven anonymous portraits of workers leaving a factory in Detroit, published in Fortune magazine in 1946 as ‘Labor Anonymous’.
The 150 pictures taken for that assignment caught their subject moving obliquely across Evans’ field of view from right to left. The camera Evan’s used was held at waist height and the pictures were cropped down into a regular composition before they were published. Continue reading
‘Make three different portraits using three different subjects. Prior to shooting your portraits, engage with your subjects and agree three different specific locations which have some relevance or significance to them individually. This can either be inside or on location, but the key to this portrait is the interaction you’ve had with your subject in identifying a place that has specific meaning for them. Each portrait should be accompanied by a very short piece of text explaining the choice of location or venue. Don’t be tempted to create a work of complete fiction here; it might make life easier for you, but you’d be missing an opportunity to really engage with your subject and collaborate with them in the image-making process’
– IaP Coursebook – p.40
All three of the people pictured for this exercise live in Kirkwall, Orkney and the pictures were taken during my annual trip north in August 2017. I am related to all three of them, so, to a certain extent, I was able to grasp the reasons why they had chosen the locations they had fairly quickly. None of their reasons seemed odd to me; all of them had chosen places with links to their respective childhood. Interestingly – like the places I’d chosen to represent my square mile – none of the locations turned out to be quite the same as the place that existed in my subject’s memory. Continue reading
Simon Chirgwin's Learning Log 