Gerry Schum

After a few misspellings of the name I finally found tons of information on the late artist Gerry Schum. (except for the wiki page, that was in Dutch or something). Schum's work was interesting for me to look at along the lines of 'film still's'. For any of you who might not know his work his aim was to use TV as a direct artistic medium, wanted the broadcasts to be works of art instead of art documentaries or reports etc. For that reason, he refused to comply with the requests for commentated broadcasts put to him by the TV stations after the initial transmission: 'During all the 38 minutes of the Land Art show there is no word spoken. No explanation. I think an art object realised in regard of the medium TV does not need a spoken explanation.' This conviction was one reason his hopes of establishing the broadcast on a permanent basis were not to be fulfilled.

I found that information at this link: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/die-fernsehgalerie/

During the time of making the piece 'Land Art', Schum collaborated with other artists such as Barry Flanagan, Robert Smithson and , some of whom  continued to work with T.V. or video even after Schum's death.

Film Still? ..Cindy Sherman-esque

So after having a tutorial with my lecturers it was suggested to me that my images gave off the notion of being almost like a film still, having been photographed from the telly. I thought this was pretty interesting and had a look at some artists that were suggested to me that took photos of that nature.

The first was Cindy Sherman. Her photos are definitely interesting and gave off the idea of the 'film set', I loved how the photos had a vintage vibe and how it does feel like you as the viewer are somehow capturing this moment that has been previously captured. Here are some of the images from her site, linked here: http://www.cindysherman.com/art.shtml. The second last image is my favourite as it has that real wind swept film moment.

Collage it..

Here is the collage image I made using Photoshop by compiling my Macro face photos. (He was not at all impressed). I intend to print this out digitally in college and present it as a part of my finished project. The face section is made up of the 31 macro shots all combined and layered on top of one another, the background is made of duplications of the face all with the brightness lowered so as to not distract from the main image.

Sequences Project

The idea of this project is to shoot a roll of film and produce a contact sheet from the dark room that shows evidence of a sequence or sequential thinking. From that contact sheet I am to select and produce in the dark room six enlarged images. The limitation being that I am to use one roll of film only and must produce my work from the dark room.

Afraid to mess up my one roll of film I decided to practice taking my images first using my DSLR camera. One thing led to another and I was soon half ways through making my digital collage on Photoshop.

I began by using the Macro setting on my camera to zoom in extremely close to sections of my boyfriends face (whom might I add was not too happy at playing model again). I took a series of 6 images across his forehead and moved down to take 6 across his eyes and down again across his nose and eventually ended up with 31 images which when collaged on Photoshop would complete his face again. Below are examples of some of the photos I took. (These photos were not at all digitally edited or enhanced as I did not want to take away from the experience of using the SLR camera)

After capturing the images digitally I still had to some way get them on to film, so I hooked up my laptop to my television and set up a (kind of) tripod structure using my book case and several DVD boxes and (after much research) set my shutter speed to 1/60 of a second so as to not get the TV static or pixels on my images and one by one I re-snapped the photos on the SLR camera.

This project for my was definitely a sequential process in the way that without even realising, one thing led to another and soon as all of it tied together I had my images on film ready to develop.

Final Images Contd.

Final Pick of Images

I found myself continually photographing the fronts of buildings around the city, much like I had done for my previous 'Dark Room' project before the summer and I wanted to break away from this idea but not so much as to make the project more difficult for myself than it needed to be. I do find it very interesting to photograph buildings so I decided to do this but to just alter my angle! I found that this idea worked for the first few pics so I just kind of ran with it then. Here are the first four of my eight final images and keep in mind they are A4 size and kind of difficult to view each as an individual finished print on the computer screen.

Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz is a photographer, well known for his great series of work 'The New Industrial Parks' and his kind of minimalistic photographs that we see in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria. I first came across Lewis Baltz during my studies last year and have admired is work since.

I love his ability to find beauty in negative, stark and basic spaces. His bold approach to photographing spaces straight on is interesting, I love to see what he has decided to leave in the frame and equally what he has decided to crop out. Here are some of the images of his that I looked at in relation to my own project and research.