Imagine this space with clear walls and clear floors. Wide angle lens and a whole lot of empty space. Imagine the bed made and base covered, studio lights and high contrast.
Amy Moffitt
Amy Moffitt
These photographs are the first
ones taken in the set I will use for taking my real photographs. I am testing
the space to see if there will be enough room for the person and the bed but
also enough empty space.
At first these were just test
shots so it didn’t matter what was in the background and on the wall. After
looking at these photographs I quite like the different this in the background.
The things at first don’t seem to matter, they are of little importance. But
after looking at the photograph for longer you start to look at the different
things which help build the story line and potinually change to story
completely.
I have decided to make the set
look like a photography staged set. I have put a sheet up on the wall and on
the ground. I don’t want the set to extend right out to the end of the
photograph. I think there needs to be some of the space outside of the set so
you can see it is in a real life environment.
I would like the set to look like
it is a walk in staged set. I want it to have the feeling that any normal
person can walk in and become a movie star from any film they chose.
I've been inspired by the Wade Brother's over the past few days and have slightly moved my project. I am going to try and recreate film scenes. (Not always in the same way.)
For Example: American Beauty I would like the whole bed and floor to be covered in rose petals with one lonely man sitting at the end of the bed looking sad and alone while holding a rose. Not the same as the film, but you can see that inspiration has been taken from the film. I'm not sure if I should do just one film or a range of different ones...
"The Wade Brothers are David Lindsey Wade and sibling Lyndon Wade who are each recognized as one of the top lifestyle, fashion and advertising photographers in the world. They have received worldwide acclaim and exposure for their work in all forms of media. Additionally their work appears in galleries around the world."
Room 107 is a personal project,
with still photographs shot by Lyndon Wade and motion generated by The Wade
Brothers. Many of these still images are also hanging in the Lumas Gallery.
This work really stood out to be because
of how well it was made. Room 107 refers to a hotel room in which many
different types of people inhabited. Looking at all the photographs as still
images you can tell there all in the same room but each of the situations are completely
different.
2010 Photo series
Silver gelatine prints on fibre base paper Portraits of perpetrators of crimes not in jail but "as 'ordinary' people such as one might encounter in a street or supermarket."
Ex-Offenders at the Scene of Crime - David Goldblatt
Ex-Offenders at the Scene of Crime - David Goldblatt
Ex-Offenders at the Scene of Crime - David Goldblatt
Through photography my aim is to explore the idea of what it means to be normal/ordinary in today’s world.
My intention is to create images of real situations, but situations no one talks about. The scene will be the same in very photography, the people different. The scene will be very simple, just a bed, wall and floor. I don’t want there to be four walls to in close the photography. I want my photographs to feel like the model has walk onto the scene and let you glimpse into their lives. I also want it to be more about the people than the room, I don’t want about to wonder why there all doing in the same room – I want the view to wonder what the people are doing/feeling while being in this one room.
Influences/Inspiration
Cindy Sherman (Photographer)Untitled Film Series
Cindy Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American photographer and film director. Sherman is best known for her conceptual portraits. Cindy Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of woman in society, media and the creation of art.
The Untitled Film Series (1977 – 1980) consists of 69 black and white photographs all of which are shot and posed in by Sherman herself. All 69 photographs feature Sherman posed in different female roles. “I’m trying to make other people recognize something of their selves rather than me.” Cindy Sherman. What Sherman is saying is that by using herself, the viewer can use her body as a tool to reflect the idea onto there own lives. Although Sherman has made all the characters up we sense right away that we already know who they are and what there story is. Sherman chose it keep all the images untitled as she wanted to preserve their ambiguity. There are no men what so ever in any of the photographs as Sherman plays with gender and uses it as a “constructed position within her works. Sherman also plays with the idea of people’s person identities and how the mass media is used to shape them.
Gregory Crewdson (Photographer)Beneath the Roses
Gregory Crewdson (born September 26, 1962) is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged scenes of American homes and neighbourhoods.
Both of Crewdson photography series Twilight and Beneath the Roses highly stages movie like in creation, works of art. Crewdson uses large crews and the scenes are elaborately stages and lit. Crewdson’s photographs are shot in small Americans towns, but are dramatic and cinematic; walking along you would easily mistake it for a film set. Crewdson’s scenes are often disturbing and surreal.
Crewdson works on the idea of narrative, but Crewdson’s images don’t tell you a story they make you think of one. The story is likely to be different in each viewer and very different to Crewdson’s story. Crewdson’s photographs look like stills from a film. But unlike a film it can’t tell a story from start to finish. The photographs are always open ended, the invite the viewer the make up their own story.
My other main influence is the emotional idea of what is Ordinary.
Ordinary – Adjective
With no special or distinctive features: normal
Normal – Adjective
The usual, average, conforming to a standard
Ordinary – What does it mean? The definition above states “With no special or distinctive features: normal. Normal? What is it to be normal? Do you have to conform to a standard to live a normal ordinary life?
In using ordinary people, not models I hope the feelings and emotions become stronger in my photographs.
Other / Photographers / Films / People:
Sophie Calle – Sam Taylor Wood - Helmut Newton -
Revolutionary Road – Blue Valentine – American Beauty – The Virgin Suicides – In My Fathers Den – Butterfly Effect -
Sam Mendes -
Bibliography/references
Bright, Susan. Art Photography Now. Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2005
Sherman, Cindy. The Complete Untitled Film Stills – Cindy Sherman. The Museum of Modern Art, 2003.
Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Thames & Hudson, 2004
Crewdson, Gregory. Beneath the Roses. Abrams: First Edition, March 1, 2008
Practical Considerations/Proposed Budget
Number of final works:I want there to be an even amount, for example photographs. I also what the photographs to look like a series, so the viewer can view each photography individually and as a group.
Size of final works:A3+, I want the photographs to be big and inviting to the viewer, as some of the images may be uneasy.
Method of presentation:Black Frames with glass
Detailed Equipment list:Canon EOS 450D, variety of lenses, tripod, lighting studio
1. As you walk into the DunedinPublicArtGallery you are greeted by a warm breeze of air on a cold winter’s day. The art gallery is very open and free, but yet warm and inviting. To your left is the small gift area, which draws me into the lovely artistic postcards. As soon as you walk into the door you are smiled at by a friendly face behind the counter. The super high ceiling which floods the whole entrance makes it feel like summer all year round. Because of this large space, even if the art gallery is really busy you feel like you’re the only person in the building. The only sounds are the sounds of the people chatting around you and the pitter patter of your shoes on the polished wooden floor, which is somehow comforting.
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
2. Marketing: Walking up George Street and into the Octagon you get a great view of the DunedinPublicArtGallery. The first thing you see are the huge banners in the long windows on the top floor of the gallery. You are able to see the banners clearly and the pictures are bright and interesting. The pictures have to make you want to go inside the gallery and see what’s going on. The ArtGalleries signs do a really good job of this.
The DunedinPublicArtGalleries website is also a good way of promoting the exhibitions on at the gallery. The website give a clear and simple overview of the shows currently on at the gallery, they are write just so to leave you wanting more. And the picture makes you want to see more. Also under the exhibition subtitle are past exhibitions and future exhibitions, you are never left with nothing to view.
The other marking tool that works really well is the DunedinPublicArtGallery leaflet. The leaflet comes out monthly and displays a nice overview (with colour photographs!) of what is happening at the art gallery during that month. (Great handbag size)
The Film Archive
3.The Film Archive is a small room off to the left hand side, under the staircase. The walls are painted a dark purple colour to make the room feel cosy. Along the wall displays the bookshelf of films/documentaries available to watch. I can’t say I have even taken the time to sit down and watch anything in the room. There is something about watching a film/documentary in public that I don’t like the idea of. It is different to watch a film/ documentary at the movies, you go to the movies with the same idea in mind as everyone else there at the time. Also what puts me off about watching a film/documentary at the DPAG is the fact the one of the walls is made of class. This is the door that you walk into, I think it is needed, or else the room wouldn’t be as inviting to the public. But there is something I don’t like about sitting with my back to the glass wall watching a film/documentary.
Hanging and Framing
4.The first thing you notice when walking into, Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood exhibition is the size of the photographs, they are huge! The size of the photographs are amazing, the draw you into a whole world, the Nollywood world. All the photographs have simple white frames that make the photographs look amazing. You don’t want the frames to be over powering and stand out to much. The frames do a great job of working with the photographs to make them look as clear as possible. In another exhibition at the DPAG, Beloved, not one of the frames are the same. The exhibition features many different types of paintings and photography. The exhibition is divided into colour coded rooms each with there own theme. Because the artworks were not about to be pulled together through hanging and framing, colour coding was a good way to bring everything together into one overall theme.
Pieter Hugo - Nollywood
Display and Wall Panels/Additional Information
5.When you walk into any of the exhibitions at the DPAG you are greeted with a write up on the wall about the artist, there live, work etc. It is written into the wall with vinyl lettering and looks really professional. The write ups are often long and many people opt to walk right passed them and look at the works, with sometimes no understanding of the arts practise. I find the write ups very interesting and give me a good base about the arts and his/her works if I don’t already know who the person is. I like the use of the vinyl lettering better than the panel. This is because the vinyl lettering is often displayed in a creative way and makes you want to read the information. Where as the panel textbox looks boring and not very interesting, even if the writing is. I often skim through the textbox, not wanting to spend too much time reading it. However the panel boxes are needed next to the artwork to display to information on artists, year, size etc. There is sometimes quite a lot of writing in these small boxes and the text size is quite small. It is hard to read the boxes if the gallery is busy, you don’t want to get in the way of other people who are viewing the artworks.
Nina Katchadourian - Seat Assignment
Explore
6.Looking through the DPAG gives you some great ideas on how to display me own work for my exhibition.
As you walk through the gallery you feel like you’re in a different place as you shift through the different exhibitions. This is a really good, because as you move though you forget about the last exhibition as you view the next. When working with a group exhibition it is important to take time to work everything thing out. You have to think about what works can be displayed next to each other and works that will not fight. You will need to be able to be flexible and be open to shifting your work around to see where the best space for everyone will be. As my work will all be set in the same place (With different scenes in each photograph) it will be easy you group them together. The work will need some white space in-between them so the viewer is able to view them apart and as one work.
As you leave
7.The things that stick in my mind the most about the DPGA are: how open the gallery feels, as you walk in you feel very free. This feeling helps to clear your mind and lets you like about the artwork you are viewing. You don’t really get this feeling in galleries such as The Blue Oyster. Because the gallery is quite small, compared to Te Papa in Wellington you are able to remember all the exhibitions you viewed that day. This is a good thing being an artist; you want your work to be rememberable when you are first starting off.
Visit at least one other gallery
The Blue Oyster Gallery
8. The Blue Oyster Arts Trust was founded in Dunedin in 1999 as a governing body of the Blue Oyster Art Project Space. The Space allows a diverse range of artists to work experimentally, free from restraints and irrespective of the stage of their career.
The Blue Oyster Gallery is a very different space compared to the DunedinPublicArtGallery. The Blue Oyster is just around the corner from the DPAG, but it feels like a mile away. The Blue Oyster is off the street, you walk down a steep graffiti alleyway. The Blue Oyster door is lit up by a blue neon sign above. The Blue Oyster is very small, not meaning in floor space (Well it is compared to the DPAG) but the ceiling is very low, and you feel very enclosed and trapped. My not saying the Blue Oyster is a bad gallery, because it’s not, it’s just very different. The Blue Oyster is a very artist based gallery and there is something nice about that feeling as you walk in the gallery that you don’t get at the DPAG. The Blue Oyster seems very open to new artists and experimental people who use the gallery as a stepping stone to bigger and brighter thing. The DPAG feels like a gallery of artists who have ‘made it’. You don’t feel as though the artists are connected to their works in the DPAG as they are in the Blue Oyster.
Marilyn Shows What Death Looks Like, 1946, Andre De Dienes
Are you ok? What are you doing? Who are you hiding from?
The types of questions you ask to this image when you don't know the person hiding under the blanket.
When I found out it was Marilyn Monroe reading the whole photographed changed for me. But it didn't seen to change for the rest of my class, which I found odd.
I think my 360' change in viewing this photograph was because of who the person is. It changed because I know so much about the late Marilyn Monroe.
Are you scared of death Marilyn Monroe? Is your life full of happiness?
You have to start looking more deeply into the photograph to be able to talk to the image. You need to stop and take the time to really look at the image. It helps to only read a few images a day and block out the other ones. This way you will really be about to focus on what you are doing.
My first memory of the first image I remember came from my father. He had three framed photographs he got from a second hand shop. In the photographs were Madonna, Annie Lennox and Marilyn Monroe. The photography of Marilyn Monroe really stood out to me and it had inspired me to become a photographer. The photograph was from, Milton H. Greene’s series, Ballerina. My father as accepted the fact that he is never going to this photograph back.
Other artists/models/film I always look back to are: (Not in order)
Richard Avedon
(Born 1923-2004) American Fashion and Portrait Photographer
"His fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."
Richard Avedon - Marilyn Monroe
Cindy Sherman
(Born 1954) American photographer and film director
"Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representations of woman in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art."
Cindy Sherman - Centerfold series
Sam Haskins
(Born 1926-2009) South African Photographer
"Best known for his contribution to nude photography and pre-photoshop in-camera montage."
Sam Haskins - Gill and Curl
Greg Crewdson
(Born 1962) American Photography
"Crewdson is best known for his elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighborhoods."
Greg Crewdson
Elliott Erwitt
(Born 1928) Advertising and documentary photographer
"Erwitt is known for his black and white candid shots of iconic and absurd situations within everyday settings."
Elliott Erwitt
Edward Hopper
(Born 1882-1967) American painter and printmaker
"In both his urban and rural scenes, his space and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life."
Edward Hopper - Nighthawks
Film Noir
(Early 1940s to the late 1950s) Hollywood crime drama genre
"Associated with a low-key black and white visual style - Roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the stories derive form the hard-boiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the US during the depression."
Film Noir
Alfred Hitchcock
(Born 1899 - 1980) English film director and producer
"Hitchcock pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. Also pioneered the movement of the camera in a way that mimics a persons gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism."
Alfred Hitchcock
Annie Leibovitz
(Born 1949) American portrait photographer
"Richard Avedon's portraits were an important and powerful example in her life. Leibovitz is widely considered one of the Americans best portrait photographers."
This is an image I took for a project last semester. The quality and colour is terrible and I didn't use it as a final print. I decided to reshoot this image to see if I could get it right...
Amy Moffitt - Life is Ordinary
This is the recreation of my first image. I decided to take a lot of the information out of the image and focus on what the story is portraying. I also change the hight of the camera, this way your eye is drawn in straight from the left, right up to the focus of the image, the male body. I also changed the light source. The light in the new image is a much better colour and is in a better place.
Overall I am very happy with my finished image.
Cindy Sherman (born January, 19, 1954) is an American photography and film director. Sherman is best known for her conceptual portraits. Through a number of different series of works, Sherman her raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of woman in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art.
Through a photographic series Untitled Film Stills, (1977-1980) Sherman achieved international recognition. The Untitled Film Stills consists of 69 black-and-white photographs. Sherman herself poses in different roles and settings, such as Italian neorealism, American Film Noir of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The stills are untitled to preserve their ambiguity. Sherman uses herself as the model, her own props and her own apartment.
Cindy Sherman - Untitled Film Stills
Cindy Sherman’s latest work is entitled, Art Patrons. Like almost all of Sherman’s work, she herself is her own model. Sherman wears layers of makeup, hairstyles, and rich wardrobe. The exhibition, which is untitled, features Sherman dressed as affluent woman in elaborate gowns and jewellery, set against backgrounds of lavish homes and gardens. The photograph is taken against a green screen and then digitally merged with the background photos which are shot separately.
Cindy Sherman - Art Patrons
In some ways these two series are very similar, Sherman in both uses herself as a model, the photographs are shot her self and she does her own makeup and props. But what is very different about these two works is are different they actually are. The Untitled Film Series are very raw, they seem so real. All the photographs look like they are snap shots from someone else’s life or they could even be stills from a film. Where as in Sherman’s latest series, Art Patrons they images looked so stages and so well thought out. Even though Untitled Film Stills are exactly that, it doesn’t seem so. Art Patrons’ are the complete opposite of the Untitled Film Stills in the way they portray the artists intended story. I like both series, but the Untitled Film Stills series would still have to be my favourite.
