I have been experimenting with an online service Relive. It allows you to record your movement through space on your phone, and then add photographs taken while the app is running to a 3D, sharable, representation of your journey. It’s intended as an health/fitness/activity tracker thing, but it’s also quite useful as a way of creating a journey record with illustrations in embeddable video form, like this experiment made while Assignment 2 was still in its planning stage:
With the free version you are limited in terms of the number of pictures you can add to each ‘activity’ and have to compile the final video – and choose which pictures you want to use – as soon as you have finished recording. This always seems a bit rushed as the app (or more specifically its constant need for GPS data) drains my – admittedly fairly ancient – iPhone’s battery really very quickly. Despite all this, it’s quite a remarkable thing, unimaginable just a few years ago.
Assignment 3
Of course, I could upgrade to a paid plan, and get a lot more flexibility with editing, but given the battery life issues, I’m limited to fairly short periods of time when I can use it which rules out a full day trip. It would have been nice to use it to log my June overnight on Flotta (for assignment 3) but I was at least able to able to use if for the journey out from the mainland…
And of course, when I say ‘mainland’ I mean the Orkney mainland not the island lying on the other side of the Pentland Firth, which rather I think of as ‘The South.’ Which is just one way in which Orkney is – in my mind at least – a place and not just a space…
a demo of assignment 2 – post written in early july, but posted in late august
At Clive White’s last FL (as others have said, he will be missed) I took advantage of there being room in the agenda to demo assignment 2 by running the basic output of the code I’d written (adapted from the scrolling gallery I’d developed during the collaborative bit of the Keeping Up Momentum session on Collaboration/Contamination. It was still pretty mute (I’d recorded atmos and bike f/x that morning but haven’t had the time to edit them yet, let alone track them to the pictures) and I hadn’t cleared the grid I’d created to allow me to adjust the timings of the various captions running over the images.
I asked two questions:
Did the animation of the images create an understandable narrative?
What did people like (or dislike) about the images?
I also screen-shared a quickly thrown together version of the cyanotype map of my journey, (digitally) collaged with scans of Instax printed photographs taken with my phone, explaining that this would act as an index for the assignment, but this wasn’t the focus of their response.
fig.1: zoom attendees watch my screen-share
The first piece of feedback came as they watched my screen share (fig.1). I could see their faces as they concentrated on the screen and a laugh or two – at the ‘you didn’t notice when the path recrossed the river’ caption – suggested enjoyment on their part.
This was backed up by the active feedback that followed:
The video works as a narrative.
The variety of frame-sizes and formats (film/digital/b&w/colour) is a good thing, providing it is considered. (I haven’t finished working out exactly what is prompting my choices of which to use in each instance yet, but it is!)
Clive made a particularly interesting point – that the presence of my calibration grid combined with the sense of the images passing without – quite – the time to register what was there, made him think of I had Blow Up (Antonioni, 1965). I had intended to remove my grid from the final version, but now I’m less sure. Let’s see. I’ll run an output video with it on and another with it off…
Rather than framing to exclude the pylons – viewed as a very ‘Camera Club’ sort of activity, by Kate – leaving them in is a good thing. Which is good, as electricity’s journey is as central to this assignment as my own journey on a bike in the opposite direction.
The pairing of the two images of some industrial buildings and the pylons on the opposite side of the canal, linked by the repetition of a particular bush (fig.2) was picked out as being particularly effective.
fig.2 – between the reservoirs and the Lee (image 6/11)
Zoe wondered what ‘the source’ I had reached was; ‘the source of London’s power’ – both literally and metaphorically as the canal and the pylons channel into NE London and then the docks at Limehouse – I said. The title – Against the Current – is probably not enough, even when it is present on an opening caption card, before the sequence of images begins. I need to start working on my 100-word contextualisation, now.
Alan – who has experience of power generation sites – commented on the strange buzzy atmosphere (both in terms of the physical sensation and of the audible background hum) you get there. The huge substation at the end of the sequence (where power lines from four generation sites combine and then are distributed over the national grid – the ‘source’) is the one distinct place where I haven’t recorded an atmos track yet. I need to get up there and get one before I finalise the sequence.
So: stuff to think about and conformation that I’m on the right track here. A good feedback session. Thanks all! (And thanks for letting me use my screenshot of your faces on zoom).
Reference
Blowup (1966) Directed by Antonioni, M. [Film] Los Angeles: MGM
Observations and Ramblings – a suitably disordered list…
In a similar manner to Richard Long’s ‘textworks’ (see http://www.richardlong.org), write down 12 – 24 brief observations during a short walk or journey by some means of transport. This may be the journey you intend to make for Assignment Two, or it may be a different one. You don’t need to take any photographs.
LPE Coursebook, p.86
The first bit of journey, I know like the back of my hand: up to Queens Road and past Alice’s school […] beneath the railway lines and over the High Street, stopping to get the paper at the smaller of the two Walthamstow Safeways […] past Mission Grove (where Alice went to school during the early weeks of the first lockdown) […] and then on North to Blackhorse Road Station before turning west to head to the wetlands.
Flats – great blocks of flats – rearing up opposite the station, where the taxi office’s portakabin used to be. They dwarf the dazzle-striped Standard Venue. It is closed, but still there. For now.
A petrol station, selling Spanish tiles and Italian marble, one generation of reuse on from its time as a hand car-wash. Ruscha no more.
Between reservoirs and across the Lea (and parallel to it, the Lee Navigation), past the Ferryboat Inn and then turn right. Burst into the open space of Tottenham Marshes!
Narrow boats and Dutch barges; down at heel and slightly sinister. Not that I mind that too much, being left-handed myself.
Dogs bark at my wheels.
People walking. People drinking (piles of cans beside empty benches; nooks opened up within the bushes behind them). People – men – fishing coarsely. Locals having an afternoon out, sat there watching the leisured pass by.
The leisured – like me – jog or cycle past along the towpath, taking their own time about it.
But Deliveroo delivers.
Masked men in black on electric scooters buzz past. Stealth and speed.
(Alternative lifestyles through the ages – navvies – building the navigation – bargees, gypsy, hippy, crusty, pikey. Dismissive/derogatory/offensive terms for people who are different enough to be ‘not like us.’ Some people choose to live here; others are born into it. I am passing though. The canal is a reservation for those who don’t – or can’t – find their fit elsewhere)
Further on, scruffy horses graze a narrow strip of still-common land…
Smell of manure.
Smell of sewage from the sewage works.
Smell of bacon from the cafes at the moorings.
But this isn’t Camden Town so why is the Camden Town brewery here?
Smell of beer.
A hundred yards or so further on, there ain’t no Beavers near the Beavertown brewery neither…
Gravel crackles and spits beneath my tyres. Bridges rumble as I cross from bank to bank. Ridged grips for horses hooves judder and shake the life out of you.
Nameless, numbered locks, then: Picket’s Lock -> Ponder’s End Lock -> Enfield Lock (where they made flintlocks).
Swooping under bridges with multilane traffic drumming overhead.
I remembers when it was all light industry around these parts…
Canals, navigations – like railways – are the tradesman’s entrance to the city.
The arteries of the industrial revolution, canals are grooved into the surface of the land; canals are contained by the place they run through.
Screened-off by bushes and embankments, they were hidden from genteel residents’ sensitive eyes.
The commercial properties that use(d) the water as a way of getting their goods from one place to another are mostly gone, though some remain. There are timber yards and distribution depots. An incinerator. A gas-fired power station.
Returning home, more new flats stick up like postmodern teeth above the greenery.
I think of post-independence Kyiv, mushrooming ugly on the east bank of the Dniepr.
I think of Oz.
Consider how you might present your observations. For some more inspiration on text-based artwork, you can search for the following artists:
Ed Ruscha
Barbara Kruger
Mark Titchner
This exercise is designed to help you think about text as an alternative or additional means of expression, and to provide an opportunity to experiment with presenting text creatively.
LPE Coursebook, p.87
The least imaginative way to use my observational text would be to turn it into a shot-list, and take pictures accordingly, but this would only work if the texts were primarily concerned with the visual and the concrete. Instead, most of them are either about ideas (communicable in words) or information derived from my other senses: smell and hearing in particular, but also a bit of touch as I physically cycle along the navigation, getting haptic feedback through my feet on the pedals, my hands on the handlebars and my bum on the saddle.
Some of the phrases/statements could be used as captions, either descriptively to anchor them or to act as a relay, expanding what they appear to show to a viewer (smell of sewage, on a picture that does not suggest it. say) but again, this is fairly standard practice…
In July, I took part in a two-part, OCA workshop on Visual Art and Text (organised by fellow-student Paola Alessandri-Gray and hosted by tutor Bryan Eccleshall). It was mainly concerned with the ways text can be incorporated into a work of art rather than using it as an add-on. In their different ways, this is what the three artists mentioned in the exercise brief do.
Ed Ruscha’s use of words to form part of the surface of large (huge!) painted artworks, intended for display in a gallery is far less familiar to me than his books containing photography, such as 26 Gasoline Stations (1963) or Thirty four parking lots (1967).
The way pictures like The Canyons (1979) or Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska (1980) – both in Marshall (2003; 190-191) – use words is to give specifics to two rather abstract landscapes (a low horizon, beneath an orangey-brown sky streaked with clouds) by including text on their surface. The Canyons has ‘Laurel Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Benedict Canyon’ running vertically above specific points on the horizon to the far right of the canvas; the place names from the title of the second picture decrease in size across its whole – enormous – width.
The Canyons becomes the sort of labeled panorama you find at beauty spots, or to make sense of the featureless view across no-man’s land between the trenches on the Western front; Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska situates the viewer firmly to the south of the Rio Grande with a journey north into the USA set out to what becomes a northerly vanishing point. Both paintings make me think about places and establish my physical relationship with them.
When I think of Barbara Kruger’s work, it seems so monolithic – and perfectly realised – in its red-black-and-whiteness that it seems impossible to take it as an inspiration for work of my own. To do so would be to take on board a whole methodology in order to do something that has already been pretty well realised by someone else. Kruger has staked her claim to a certain section of the artistic frontier, and the best I can do is admire it while keeping off…
Also is hard, initially, to see how Kruger’s work fits around the genre of landscape, but if you refine an online search (‘barbara kruger’) to include the term ‘landscape’ itself you find this:
‘The 2,500-seat amphitheater nudges the “H” of PICTURE THIS — massive, sans-serif caps inscribed on the landscape in various media. This was Barbara Kruger’s contribution to a 1988 landscape plan titled “Imperfect Utopia,” conceived for the [North Carolina Museum of Art] by architects … and landscape architects…’
– Twardy, nd
Unsurprisingly, the firm of landscape architects still feature ‘Imperfect Utopia’ prominently on their website:
‘Viewed from an airplane, the site reveals the words “PICTURE THIS”, each letter imprinted in the landscape and constructed from a different material, including chain link fencing, plants, natural rocks and wood decking. The letters also serve as seat walls, retaining walls and even buildings.’
– Quennell Rothschild and Partners (Landscape Architects)
This is no longer art to be displayed in a gallery; instead, everything is reliant upon the installation of work in a public space.
‘The idea behind the Krugerian exhortation was to imagine new contexts for art, beyond the typical gallery spaces of the museum’s bland brick home, designed by Edward Durrell Stone and built in 1983’
– Twardy, ibid
It is a reference to ‘new contexts’ in the second quote by Chuck Twardy that links Kruger’s landscaping of the park in North Carolina to Mark Titchner’s work displayed outside the space of ‘the gallery’ on billboards, hoardings and bus stops. While the full wordiness of Kruger’s work is only fully understandable from the air, Titchner’s recent, publicly displayed work (such as ‘Please Believe These Days Will Pass’ which got its third outing in the UK during lockdown #1) consists of statements and questions designed to provoke a reaction – in the viewer. The work becomes a place- and time-specific trigger, rather than art being and end in itself.
Titchner makes art having been engaged to display it in specific places – ‘hospitals, stations and libraries…spaces where we share the experience, but we don’t engage with each other‘(Simpson, 2020) – and will tailor his text so that it resonates in that particular location.
I think the idea of locating work in a non-art setting is really interesting, but I currently lack the resources to locate my landscape work in an exterior setting. And, unlike Titchner, I am not going to be approached by a creative agency who want to get my work onto billboards the length and breadth of the country. However, I made use of ‘appropriated gallery space‘ for the final revision of one of the assignments in Identity and Place, and – during lockdown, after all OCA work was channelled online – started collecting advertising hoardings that could form a starting point for constructing composited display sites for some of my work:
Four Lockdown Advertising Sites, Walthamstow
Chingford Rd (June ’20)
Mission Grove (April ’20)
Selborne Road (June ’20)
Hoe Street (June ’20)
However, this is not the assignment to take this idea further, I think.
Where words and journeys intersect most powerfully for me, is in one of my earliest self-consciously 21st century experiences : I was in a taxi, being driven home from an airport and the driver was getting instructions from a robot woman, who could knew where we were down to the last couple of metres... This was science fiction! The female voice was the AI projection of an early Sat-Nav…
I have begun to think about ways to use text to guide a viewer through the experience of my journey. I would like to make something that engages the viewer as a participant, rather than simply presenting them with a set of pictures set on a wordpress page…
some writing, some thinking and a trip outside london
wood #1
tree #1
tree #2
wood #2
Over the last seven days, I have pretty much finished the write-up for exercises 2.4 and 2.3; both will be published either today or tomorrow. I’ll be leaving the first exercise to finish off later, so that leaves exercise 2.5 (the Edgelands one) which should be done and posted by Friday.
This leaves the assignment. I’ve got the set of images ready to go (and just need to create the final digital files); I need to finish off the animated presentation of the images (mainly involving atmos and specific effects) and make a properly foldable version of a cyanotype map on a lighter weight of paper than the (good) cartridge paper I used for my first go.
I’ll make a start on this work – finalising the image files – as a bit of respite from all this typing.
On Thursday, I got the last two rolls of (colour) MF film taken during my break in Orkney back from Peak Imaging. They look really good I think. At some point over the next week, I’ll get them scanned and ready to go in Lightroom.
I’ve already developed and scanned the black and white roll I took at the same time, so – along with the pictures from my trip north at the end of June, that’ll be everything in place to start on the edit proper of the third assignment.
I spent Thursday and Friday travelling to and from Evesham, to do the first bit of work that be couldn’t do from my attic for nearly eighteen months now. It was good to be out and about, and I took a fair number of journey and place-type pictures during the time. Two of the pictures at the head of this post came from that with the other two made in response to the Art and Text workshops hosted by Bryan Eccleshall a few weeks ago, where I was struck by the idea that my local authority is Waltham Forest, and that every street (but not the roads) contains a tree in its s(tree)t name.
Which leaves the thinking from the sub-head. Beside the LPE hangout (are they still hangouts, or has zoom rendered this term obsolete?) on Wednesday – 3 participants; very little WIP from any of us; quite a lot of talk about the changes to the structure of the course, particularly the new modules for level three, next; quite a lot of talk about DIC, which all of us have completed before starting this one – I have done a fair bit of reading around landscape generally as well as more general cultural stuff all of which should feed into the context-side of this module and the ones to follow.
In other news, I’ve just received a copy of Carole Angier’s new biography of WG Sebald whose Rings of Saturn was recommended to me by Russell (my tutor for DIC) and started reading Rob Chapman’s biography of Syd Barrett, which so far has lots of really interesting stuff about what was happening in London while Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg et al were doing their thing in New York and is full of links about all sorts of matters contextual.
Also, I seem to have regained the ability to read novels and am starting Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman while finishing off Turbulence – a series of linked short stories, structured around international air travel – by David Szalay. And of course Celebrity Masterchef has started on telly again…
Right. Reset. I seem to have pretty much stalled here with this module – at least in terms of getting stuff out there on this blog, and handing in assignments. What I have been doing is taking photographs, reading widely around the subject and taking part in various group things run by other OCA I have also been doing – probably far too much – thinking.
If I’m not to exceed the 4 year time-box to finish level two, I have until the 14th of April 2022 to finish Landscape, Place and Environment. That is 34 weeks (and a couple of days) to finalise five of the six assignments, or seven weeks an assignment. That would leave me with 6 more weeks to tidy everything up for assessment next July.
Put like that it doesn’t sound too bad, so let’s start sorting out a schedule.
Assignment two – the journey – is pretty much ready to go. The work that still needs to be done is on writing up the exercises and the contextualisation for the assignment. I know what I want to say; I just need to type it. I’ll set a deadline of the end of the month for getting it to my tutor. Three weeks (T-31)
fig.1 – kirkwall – from the peedie sea
I’ve just got back from two weeks in Orkney, and – once I’ve got the last two rolls of colour film back from the lab – have got all the photographs I should need (and will have the opportunity to take) for assignment three – space into place. I think I know what I need to write for the exercises and the assignment should not be as technically-involved/software-reliant as either of the first two. Wrapped by mid-October. (T-24)
Then comes the essay for Assignment 4. I have two ideas for questions here:
Are all our/my photographs, American Photographs now? do we/I look at places through the lens of the canonical American photographers?
What are all these photographs for? Why are we doing all this photography?
I’ll have it written by Christmas (T-16).
Assignment five – the self-directed project – is the last of the fully photographic projects in the module. Again, I have ideas, mainly around how to depict the place where I live. I have been taking photographs for this since I started LPE. I should be able to get it into shape by the beginning of March. (T-6)
Which leaves me 5 weeks to get Assignment 6 – the getting everything into shape for assessment one – with a week to spare. (T-1)
I’ll also aim to write one of these a week, to keep the clock ticking and to keep me on track…
Whether you live in an isolated village or a city centre, roads are something we all have in common.
Make a short series of photographs about a road near where you live. You may choose to photograph the street you live or work on, or another nearby. How you choose to approach this task is your decision, but use this exercise to develop the observational skills that will be challenged in Assignment Two.
The objective is to try to think about something that is familiar to you in a different way. You don’t need to make any preparations for this exercise. Work intuitively, and try not to labour the exercise.
– lpe coursebook, p.72
I am fairly familiar with (and have taken a lot of photographs in) the roads in the immediate area where I live, so for this exercise decided to to follow the one that I know least well. It runs pretty much north-south from the edge of Walthamstow to the centre of Leyton, a couple of miles to the south. I have passed along this road on a bus a number of times, but never stopped and explored on foot…
My route fits in with the idea of a road being a link between two places while a street is a destination. It would have been more rural before the railways led to the expansion of both small towns in the middle of the nineteenth century.
I picked a time – 8am on a Sunday morning – to do the walk. This had advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, there were almost no people about and very little traffic; however, it was a clear morning, so only one side of the north/south road was lit by the low, early-morning sun while the shadows from the buildings on the east had only just retreated enough for the whole of the western facade to be evenly lit, from ground up, as I made my south-north return journey, an hour or so after I had set out in the opposite direction.
Compile a digital contact sheet from your shoot and evaluate your work, identifying images of particular interest to you, or, potentially, to a wider audience.
– lpe coursebook, p.72
fig.1 – my contact sheet of photographs taken on Sunday 11th April, 2021, between 08.20 and 10.00
The pictures in the contact sheet (edited down, from a great many more) are ordered by the time they were taken, so they don’t give a proper picture of a single journey from Walthamstow to Leyton. A clearer narrative structure to the sequence would help here as this would make more of the changes in architecture – retail and modern housing, to more grandly residential/quasi rural space and then back to (more trade-focussed, this time) retail again.
Although the absence of people in the pictures fulfils my intention not to drift inadvertently from one genre (landscape, or cityscape) into another (street) some sense of the people who live in the area might help to produce meaning from the places I’m passing though. The people who live here are different in terms of class, and of race, from the people who live on the other – more gentrified – side of the Lea Bridge Road (where I started my journey). And people like to identify (and identify with) other people in pictures they are looking at; is there enough human interest here for someone who does not know the area to do more than glance at any of these pictures?
One thing that may help with this, is that quite a few of the pictures fall into the category of being challenging – a description I picked up from Alec Soth’s video page-through of William Eggleston’s book The Democratic Forest – in that they are quite dense visually. They repay a bit of time spent by a viewer decoding what is going on in them while considering what caused me to take the picture in the first place. There are also references to other – mainly American – photographers in some of them – I can detect traces of works by Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Saul Leiter and Stephen Shore, as well some Eggleston-y bits; some of the colour is reminiscent of Joel Meyerowitz’s New York Kodachrome work; there are shapes out of Lewis Baltz’s New Topographic pictures. My reflection in countless shop windows (and the crime-scene-empty streets) of course points to Atget. The pictures are photographs not snaps. They are meant.
Of course, the extent to which they resemble other photographs taken by other people, in other locations just could be a function of my not being very familiar with this particular road. Perhaps, I have not necessarily seen what is there, instead seeing ‘photographs’, and then taking them. If I made a second journey in a few weeks time – and I will definitely go back and make more studied pictures of some of the buildings here, in a way that may contribute towards my self-directed project for assignment 5 – I might begin to see what is specific to the place, rather than what fits my preconceptions about the place, and also what is ‘mine’ in the photographs I might make.
I wonder if the pictures will get more interesting as time passes and things change? Things that are just there in the pictures – like the cars’ paint colours in Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places – may take on greater significance once they are no longer current. The blossom on many of the trees fixes the time of year. And there is definite documentary content be read – the yellow testing-centre sign outside the sports ground, or the repeats of the poster for the cancelled December fun-fair in the windows of shops, which haven’t been open at all since before Christmas…
Watch one of the films mentioned in this section or any other ‘road movie’ of your choice. Write a short review (around 500 words), focusing on how the road features within the film’s narrative.
– lpe coursebook, p.72
Vanishing Point – a 1971 film, directed by Richard Sarafian – opens with a police roadblock being set up in a small western town (we discover later it is in California); the atmosphere conjured brings to mind the build up to a shoot out in a western. A white car approaches at speed, stops, heads back the way it came and then turns again and begins to pick up speed towards the roadblock again; motion freezes and a caption takes us back two days and a thousand miles east to Denver, Col0rado. From this point on, the road leads Kowalski and the viewer towards the roadblock and the films conclusion. The road, is both, literally, a way through landscape and also, metaphorically, the path taken by Kowalski’s life, as he hurtles towards the film’s (and his own) ending.
The road is an existential space (as is the desert it passes through). Kowalski’s progress along it, outrunning the law forms the spine of the story, while his motivation – the why of it all – is only hinted at in flashbacks – he was in Vietnam; he was a policeman; he was a dirt-track motorbike racer – and in snatches of interaction with characters he meets on the way. While in motion along the highway, he is characterised by the radio DJ who has picked up on the police’s attempts to coordinate their efforts to stop him as he crosses state lines as ‘the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul’. On the road, he occupies a fluid, self-determined space; the road block that ends his attempt to reach the coast will stop that motion, dead.
The road is also real, adding structure to the story and a physical route through the USA west of the Rockies, although if you try to place the actual locations where the film was made on a map, it quickly becomes apparent that there is a deal of fictionalisation in play too.
It passes through spectacular landscapes, familiar to us from Hollywood Westerns and the photographs made by O’Sullivan and Watkins et al, with many obvious signs of the later development that followed in the wake of the 19th century surveys as first the railways and then the great interstate highways cut across the continent. There are swathes of Robert Adams’ tract housing and gas stations that might have been snapped by Ed Ruscha a decade before the film was made.
Civilisation has closed in on the desert and the west is no longer a wild frontier. Kowalski can go off-road for a period of quasi-religious, existential confusion, but he needs to rejoin the highway to take his story to its conclusion, at the roadblock in California.
None of this is politically neutral of course. The idea of the libertarian man venturing into the open spaces of the American west and – unrestricted by the petty laws of the Eastern Seaboard – finding true freedom is central to the way much right-wing thought has developed since the time the film was made. Arguably, the mindset behind the ruthless exploitation of the west’s natural resources has set the scene for the ongoing climate emergency.
Vanishing Point has a good story but the road it follows leads to an end as dead as the one Kowalski finds as he hits the roadblock and his car turns into a fireball. Whether the film endorses his quest for existential freedom or not remains open to question.
Wrote up tutorial notes for assignment 1 (after prompting) and got them to tutor.
in other news…
Finished reading for Exercise 1. Need to establish which two pictures I’ll analyse.
Found scattered parts of nodal-point rig and established settings for taking panoramas using the 85mm nikor on my d610.
Attended the Keeping Up Momentum ‘Cahoot’ session with Diane Ali on Saturday morning. Finally got round to automating Life During Wartime from Context and Narrative as calling card for the group work. Fun to collaborate with others but need to get better at stopping these becoming a momentum-sapping excuse for further procrastination!
This Week:
Walked down High Road Leyton for exercise 2.2. Edited resulting photographs and wrote first part of post.
Got Formative feedback for A1 – more favourable than I thought it would be.
Richard Misrach’s on Landscape and Meaning arrives from Amazon. Looks interesting.
Immediate To-dos:
Finalise + publish Exercise 2.1
Decide between Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop as road movie for A2, rewatch and review. Think VP is a better fit for the question, but let’s see,
Write up A1 Formative Feedback.
More Long-Term:
Panoramic try outs (and can nodal bar be used for stereoscopy?)
Get some of the Self-Directed ideas down as project briefs.
Cyanotype for maps/display surface?
Work through reading around road trips + make short notes
you get ROAD movies but practice STREET photography – what’s the difference?
You get a lot of results if you do a search on the phrase road street difference. Put simply:
road= a route or way on land between two places that has been paved to allow travel by transport.
street= a paved public road that only appears in a city or town, not in rural areas
– from Woodward English Vocabulary
But of course, it isn’t that simple. The above works generally for cities in the USA (where you have the added convention of having avenues running perpendicular to streets in a grid system) but isn’t standardised across towns and cities in the UK. I live in Devonshire Road, it has buildings on both sides, is in a city and doesn’t really go anywhere (although it’s not a cul de sac); in other words it’s really a street, whereas Boundary Road (which it is perpendicular to) marks the (old) boundary between Leyton and Walthamstow, which now runs along the middle of the Lea Bridge Road, as it takes you all the way from Epping Forest (in the east) to the bridges over the Lea navigation (in the west) and over it to end at the Clapton roundabout. There is a Roman road called Watling Street that runs from the south coast, through the outpost of London, and on towards the wilds of Wales, but Watling Street is a name given to it later. No one knows what the Romans called it, but presumably it was a Via – or way.
For this part of the module, I’ll use the simple definition that a road leads somewhere (and can of course be a metaphor such as the road to ruin) while a street is (part of) a destination, like Oxford Street in London, or ‘the street’ which runs through the centre of Kirkwall comprising Bridge Street, Albert Street, Broad Street and Victoria Street. Here the street seems to denote the commercial centre of an urban area, and possibly therefore can be seen as an example of metonymy, where a part comes to represent the whole, like the American idea of Main Street standing as a token for all of small-town America…
journey (noun) = an act of travelling from one place to another
Again this can be literal – the journey to work, or the journey to Southend on a train or in the car – but like road, journey also is used as a metaphor: this module is part of my learning journey , after all. The key thing is that a journey is an ongoing process – it focuses on the getting there (the road) rather than the there itself (a street perhaps) – and so journey is also used as a verb.
journey (verb) = to travel somewhere
– both Journey definitions, from Google Dictionary
I am comfortable with what I am doing both with a camera and with what I do when I get home with the files I have made. I have made definite choices about which camera and which lenses to use to make the images in the first place, and have done my utmost to slow down and adopt a more contemplative approach to image making than I have followed for the non-technical assignments for earlier courses, whether my heavy tripod was involved or not. I think this comes across in the pictures which are (mainly) geometrically composed upon a single, flat plane.
The pictures were taken at times when the light was falling on them helpfully, either to bring out textural detail, or to reduce contrast between the pictured elevation of a building and the sky visible above it, or sometimes both. Exposures have been long, maximising depth of field. Generally I waited for a cloudy day, to soften the winter light further, although possibly this has led to a muddying of the colour in some of the images.
I have some way to go with doing my own printing (and with the final processing needed to allow images to make the transition from screen to print) but this is not truly relevant to the work presented here, online. However, I intend to address this – whether to produce some sort of filmed presentation or actual prints, to be posted in a clamshell box – for assessment in a year’s time.
Quality of outcome
I took my time finding viewpoints in my part of London, where I could frame subjects I had tucked away over the last year or so, waiting to photograph them. I was pleased to be able to time this part of the module to fit the time of year when Berndt and Hilla Becher took most of their pictures – when the trees were leafless and the Northern European skies were covered with flat cloud. without necessarily making landscapes from them. Many of the basic ‘viewpoint’ images were then reframed to further emphasise their composition and to move them on from being simple ‘views’. I have played around with how they are presented and in the end have settled on showing the London series as single images, as large as I can get them within a wordpress page.
The patterning and repetition in the picture of the clock tower (fig.1) is fascinating; I could stare at the image for ages. I can see echoes of other artists’ work in the Thomas Struth-like street’s end vanishing point of fearsome symmetries (fig.4) and perhaps something of a Turner sea storm in the swirl of leaves and branches around the city cow (fig.3); the bands of colour – orange, green and grey – in the out-of-bounds outdoor gym (fig.5) hints at abstract expressionist colour-field pictures; there is something going on – Edward Hopper? – with the similarity of the sodium lighting and the sunset in fig.6. They are obviously pictures that have been made; they are there to be looked at, and I hope people will.
The Orkney pictures on the other hand are very much ‘holiday pictures’ taken while pausing during days out or when I stumbled upon something. They are immediate, of an instant, where the other pictures are deliberate and considered. By combining them into a slideshow (to be taken as one image), any nostalgic or emotional reaction to the actual pictures is deflected onto their presentation; They become distanced. I may even have accessed some form of Brechtian alienation in their performance…
Demonstration of creativity
The Orkney pictures create a sense of space for me, with their big skies and distant horizons; those taken in London – even though I have backed off as far as I can from the subject – are much more enclosed – claustrophobic even – with no clear view through to the distance. The horizon is blocked by buildings or walls or – in the one picture that promises an escape from the urban – the swirl of leaves and branches that enclose the Lea valley cow. The use of (bespoke) animation and sound effects to evoke a mechanical slide show creates a sense of contrast between the Orkney pictures (set in the past, looked at later) with those taken in London, as well as showing a different use for pictures of place. There is a ‘past tense’ sense to them when compared with the ‘now’ of being confined to one small corner of a bigger city.
I hope the links between each of the pairs of pictures and the titles which echo the voice-over’s commentary show my ability to make visual associations and to draw on other cultural clues – in some cases here, references to English-Language Romantic poetry, in others – to create a more complex overall sense of meaning to the series while tying it back to early nineteenth century ideas of both the beautiful and the sublime.
Context
I have almost completed a log entry for each of the exercises – only one still to go, on conventions in landscape art, but I want to talk about it first at the tutorial. What is there is clear and – I hope – well written. It certainly should be, given how long it has taken me to get to the point of saying ‘enough’ and hitting Publish! . Of course, it all could be shorter (I’ve still not managed to get the hang of confining myself to 500 words or ‘brief notes’ – the writing around one of the exercises is too long to be submitted as the Assignment 4 critical review without pruning) and I must get better at writing stuff down, quickly and turning it into – if necessary, less polished – posts. So, I need to maintain the quality of thought that goes into the posts, while keeping an eye on both the word count and the amount of time it takes me to put words down in the first place.
I also have a list of ‘further reading’ things that I need to turn into brief, contextualising posts, before the thoughts get lost…
Learning Outcomes
It is too early to be talking about outcomes resulting from the whole course with any sense of confidence in their being achieved, but a start is being made. I have been thinking about the many ways to portray places and the uses that different groups of people make of pictures of our environment. I have started to ponder why it is that we make the images we do and what they then may mean in different contexts. I have also made progress in making connections with a number of different groups of fellow-students and have opened myself up a bit more to peer review of my work as I go along.
There is much still to do, but I have made a start. I hope it is not a false one.
‘accept advice’ – card drawn at random from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s pack of Oblique Strategies
The fifth learning outcome for LPE asks us to ‘exercise your communication skills confidently and interact effectively within a learning group‘. During my last course, I regularly attended the course group hangouts (building up relationships with various fellow students that will outlast our common work on DIaC) and also made use of the OCA Forum’s Critique section to put up early stages assignment work to see of what other people made of my ideas before they were too difficult to change; increasingly, I augmented this by attending the Forum Live sessions, hosted by Clive White. While it was still active, I participated in the Photography Reading Group and found it a great way to get some discussion going around context. I also make a point of going out and looking at other students’ (and ex-students’) logs; I try to make useful comments, and have received very handy feedback on my progress, in return.
I have continued this approach of active engagement with other students, during my work on this module.
For assignment one, I had got so far as working out what form my submission would take, and had done the coding necessary to make a slideshow to display one set of archival photographs taken in Orkney (conventional beauty/the sublime) which would then be set alongside ‘equivalent’ pictures, taken in Walthamstow (testing the conventions), before I offered the raw concept and my first go at how I would present them up to my course mates. The next couple of paragraphs were written up immediately after.
‘Wednesday, 17th February: tried out the slideshow and a selection of Orkney images at this month’s Landscape hangout. Response to both was good. People liked the slideshow, for its slide-iness – the effects (fan and slide-changer mechanism) got some nicely nostalgia-tinged(?) recognition, and opened up further some earlier lines of discussion around options for online display of images.
fig.1 – cows, flotta
fig.2 – cow, walthamstow
‘The idea of pairing of pictures was thought to work well (and the concept between past and present, rural and urban was generally viewed as being a successful way into the assignment at the present time). Singled out was the group of cows in Orkney paired with the single cow in the undergrowth on Walthamstow marshes. This is good. I just need to finalise my edit and get the various assignment posts together. A week or so, I think…’
The week became a fortnight, during which I refined my ideas and did some more work on both the selection of pictures and their presentation. I wrote my first WIP post and linked to it from a Critique Category forum post. I also sent the link directly to the people I from my group at the two Keeping Up Momentum sessions that straddled my finishing DIaC and starting LPE. After producing a collaborative, animated exhibition piece (I should really do a post about the experience, but until I do, Paola, another of my group, posted it on the WeAreOCA blog, if you have a few minutes) we carried on meeting as we got on well and found that – coming from different course pathways – gave a wider range of thoughts about one another’s work.
I didn’t get much back from the discussion thread on the forum (although I did get a catalyst for my idea of the sublime being comparable to a radioactive isotope decaying into successively less toxic forms of its element over time) but the comments on WordPress and the emails back from my keeping-up-momentum group were positive about the direction the work was taking, helping me come to some final conclusions about which photographs to include in the final pairings and – where there were multiple possibles among the Walthamstow pictures – which one to use.
Two suggestions definitely changed the final edit – I had been inching towards using the foggy carpark picture as a pair for the ring of Brodgar but the shrouded park gym was easily the majority choice (partly because of something I had not noticed – there were as many uprights in the apparatus as there were stones in the Brodgar picture) and there was something about the strength of the pub window picture that outweighed its being the only portrait format picture.
That should probably have been that, but prompted on the OCA forum by the organiser, I added the assignment to the agenda for the first of the two, March Focus Lives on zoom. I moved much closer towards completing the assignment – reediting the slideshow to reflect the changes to the two sets of pictures, redoing the voiceover and then playing with the timing to make the whole thing tighter – finalising the processing of the Walthamstow pictures and making a start at the contextualising words. I published a ‘nearly there’ version of the assignment post and prepared for a final feedback session.
I’ve had a very positive reaction to every version of the slideshow I’ve put online. The clanking projector gate f/x and the rattle of the cooling fan appears to be instantly recognisable, evoking memories of slideshows past in anyone who experienced them as part of growing up; placing the Orkney images in this context – along with my voiceover – was seen as undercutting the tendency of some of the pictures to represent a hackneyed sublime. All this is good.
fig.3: farmer with a boat, version 2
Things became less clear when displaying the pictures as diptychs (from the earlier, wip post) got an equally positive response. By doing that, I think it becomes about the pairings (and not a little like an extended version of the first assignment for The Art of Photography) rather than beauty and/or the sublime. After playing with the manner of juxtaposition (fig.3, above) I decided to stick with showing the London pictures separately from their Orcadian equivalents. Viewed online, as these pictures will be, I think they look better and have more impact as full-width images that fill as much of a screen as possible. The contrast between the large scale photographs taken as landscapes and the ‘holiday snap’ slides is more apparent too.
There is, of course, always the possibility of reviving the diptych idea when it comes to compiling series of images for assessment (and when the individual assignment brief becomes less important than the learning outcomes). We shall see.
There was also a suggestion that the two sets of images could be combined into a single, much more complex, animation. A brilliant idea, but my heart sank. I can imagine this working well and coming even closer to my memory of Roger Mayne’s 1964 multi-channel Venice Biennale slide show installation (with music). However I can also imagine just how much work it would be to program. Again, possibly, something to play with later…
I think discussing work, like this, while it is still unfinished, is really useful, but that it requires an openness on the artist’s part to what is being said. There is a constant need to suppress one’s desire simply to be told that what they are doing is great. Similarly, when looking at the work of others, it’s important to come up with reasons for the judgements you are Suggestions should help what is there to develop further, rather than being a statement of how you would have have done a similar thing totally differently. Generosity, from both sides, is all.
Reference:
OCA (2021) Course guide for the assessment of photography units. (Version: March 2021 event) Barnsley: Open College of the Arts
Landscape, Place and Environment - Simon Chirgwin 