Tag / photography

by harrietread

My Take: Uses of Photography Wk 2

This week, I did my presentation on Robert Mapplethorpe, an iconic and influential photographer and artist who worked in the 70s-80s. He came from a conservative family, and moved to New York as a young man where he met the soon to be renowned artist and musician Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe inspires me as an artist and creative soul because he was someone who loved to and endeavoured to work endlessly, whether it was on a new art medium or a new idea in his photography. His work in the 80s focused mainly on the developing gay and lesbian movement in America, at a time when homophobia and stigmatism against AIDs was growing quickly too. Much of his photography at that time, such as the iconic Self Portrait with Whip, explored ideas around S&M, sexuality and homosexuality. He died of AIDs in 1989, but his desire to challenge audiences and push boundaries in art inspires me to give myself my own challenges, in my work, art and other aspects of my career.

by harrietread

My Take on Photography vs. Cinematography

A latest interest of mine has been practicing my photographic skills. Inspired by such talents as Ansel Adams, Lars Tunbjork and Bruce Weber, I have made sure my camera is used more in my day to day activities.

What has caught my interest lately is how different photographers are creatively motivated, and how this changes their style of photography. My fellow photographer partner in crime, who is studying a Bachelor of Industrial Design, prefers zoom and telephoto lenses, whereas I, with a keen interest in media and cinema studies, prefer a fixed wide-angle lens. My motivation is to capture story, meaning and artistic value through my photographs, and believe that my 24mm wide angle lens grants opportunities to mimic the styles of the Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson. However, the motivations of someone in the career of industrial design is to capture the most aesthetically pleasing image meant to communicate to a viewer the functions, appearance and design of a product.

by harrietread

My Take on Story-Telling

Today’s lectorial on storytelling really got me interested in my own experience with storytelling. Since I can remember, I have loved to create and imagination stories and worlds and fantastical journeys, and expressed these in drawings and attempts at writing books. Whatever I came up with, I had to get it down in some way, and I could spend a few hours or weeks obsessed with an idea; one of my primary school teachers thought I’d be CEO of Puffin or Penguin books. As I entered middle school and high school, that passion waned a little; I spent less time creating and more time consuming media, which isn’t so bad really. But now that high school and VCE is over, I want to get back and create again.

Something that I think became a weaker point in my productions towards the end of highschool was my ability to create a strong story, and instead spent all my time trying to impress myself and others with what I thought was avante-garde film techniques, cool editing and an unusual and difficult to function piece of steadying gear I got for ten bucks on eBay. It wasn’t until I looked back on these old films I’d made, and also until this lectorial, that it became apparent to me that the techniques, gear, cinematography and visuals that go into a film don’t mean anything without a solid story.

I also got this epiphany watching Casey Neistat’s vlogs and films, in which he encourages aspiring filmmakers to care less about the gear and equipment you use, and more about developing a story or idea. Story is what drives the film, and the equipment, regardless of whether they are a point and shoot camera or an expensive camera drone, are just the tools we use to present the story.

by harrietread

My Take on Casey Neistat

Modern media and communication technologies has given way to a whole plethora of talented people able to present themselves to a mass audience online. The majority of these talents and figures that become known worldwide are YouTube ‘vloggers,’ who blog regularly on a video based platform. And today, I want to discuss the interesting personality that is Casey Neistat.

Neistat is a filmmaker, producer, vlogger, co-founder of his own social media app (Beme), and also a very adventurous man. He has travelled so far that he has essentially gone around the globe several times, and thus has had an incredibly fulfilled life so far and he is only 34. His films, including his vlogs, are visually and technically stunning. While sometimes he prefers a point and shoot Canon Powershot to his marvellous EOS 5D Mark III DSLR, his films and videos maintain an elegantly edited and smooth finish. He is a respected media practitioner and producer, and working as a freelance commercial director has allowed his reputation to skyrocket and he has landed countless projects with companies such as Nike, Mercedes-Benz, Google and J Crew.

I just have one issue: the guy can’t keep a camera intact for more than about 30 seconds. Consistently, he has had mishaps involving dropping, breaking and damaging his cameras and having to buy new ones. If all heroes have a fatal flaw, his is that despite his incredible talent and inspiring productions, his technologies can barely withstand his active lifestyle.

The first time I became really aware of this fact, and also when I questioned my respect for him, was when I watched his 78th vlog, ‘Quitter.’ In it, he ranted for a few moments about the inadequacy of SD cards in his Canon EOS 70D DSLR, and then proceeded to gratuitously axe the camera before immediately buying a brand new 5D Mark III. It was in this moment that I, a broke university first year, saw Neistat in a much less favourable light. To myself I thought, How dare he destroy the camera I can only dream of having and then calling its superior a ‘piece of crap’?

At the same time however, I still respect Neistat. If I saw him in the street, I would lose my cool and make an enormous embarrassment of myself trying to say hi to him. The thing is, this one big part that I dislike about him does something that I don’t see alot from other YouTube personalities; it humanises him and reminds me that even though he is an extraordinary human being, he’s still just a human being. That’s what I think that I admire most in Casey Neistat, being able to get a better sense of his personality. As my own films and photography are greatly inspired by his style of visual media, it is refreshing to get an understanding of how other creative minds think, work and act.

by harrietread

My Take on Burgin’s ‘Looking at Photographs’

From this week’s reading, Looking at Photographs by Victor Burgin, I got out two major ideas concerning the relationship between people and photography.

Firstly, there was a clear emphasis on the significance of subject and subjectivity. There is a lot of distinguishing between the ‘other’ and the ‘self,’ between the subjects being represented and the viewing subject. Secondly, there were many mentions in the text of how there is a ‘visual language’ in photography and imagery, a sense of there being a semiotic nature to it full of language and symbols.

My interpretation of the reading has led me to understand that these two factors are intertwined and interdependent.

The reading explored how, at a certain age, infants become self-aware; they are able to recognise themselves as a self in the mirror, and can distinguish separate beings as others. This is a trait believed to be unique to humans, and also elephants and dolphins. A product of this self-awareness is, as Burgin argues, the ability to reject reality and indulge the imagination; this becomes significant in the semiotic nature of photography.

This self-awareness gives way to encoding and decoding visual cues based on individual subjectivity. When someone observes a photograph in an album or a gallery, they view or recognise the subjects based on their own experiences and understandings that are unique to them only.

How this connects to the semiotic visual language of photography is that the human mind understands photography on a subjective level, and additionally on a unanimously cognitive level. For instance, Burgin summarised that the reason why composition is important and aesthetically pleasing is because it lets the viewer ‘prolong their imaginary command of the point of view.’

Essentially, on a cognitive level, the rules of composition in photography allow the human mind to become more invested in the subject and reject their reality for the sake of the representation. This is the same for all humans; we unanimously receive and decode representations using the same cognitive formula that is recognised in photographic and cinematic composition.

On a subjective level, our experiences, made more unique due to our self-awareness, shape how we experience the world and absorb visual language, and influence how our imagination runs and shapes our ‘frame of mind’ in which photography is remembered.

The visual language of photography is, as I understand it, a complex intertwining of the cognitive and psychological aspects of the human mind. Our ‘point of view’ or ‘frame of mind’ is a melded combination of how human reception of visual cues occurs and how our self-aware natures allow us to reject reality and substitute our own imagination, whether we are the author of a text or a receiver.

by harrietread

This past week, I went down to Mornington peninsula with 4 other friends on a photography expedition. Armed with a Canon EOS 1200 DSLR and a Nikon FE2 film SLR, it was a nice break from the world to go down south and indulge in the incredible natural world.

There’ll be a follow up post about the developed film, but I gotta say, it was a little daunting. I only had about 25 shots a roll, and neglected to bring more than one. Oopsie! I was also nervous because the night before, I had managed to tear apart my last film roll trying to take it out of the camera. Lesson learned: Read the manual.

The shoot itself was daunting, because the beach (whose name I forget) and rocky rock pools that we visited was the epitome of ‘treacherous nature.’ Clambering up rocks and over agonisingly lumpy stones was exhausting, but worth it entirely as we saw the ocean breathing and crashing so close to us.