CURRENT PLAN

I am going to ask someone to take the pictures and see the outcome and whether I should take this idea further or make changes. I am going to do this to see whether the shots work logisitcally but otherwise I think the idea is interesting as you can really only see the outcome and whether it works when all of the 9 people's images are shown together. I should have it done and developed by next Friday so that discussions can be had during my next Tutorial.

IMAGE GUIDLINES FOR SUBJECTS

Below is a list of 27 images that I would like you to take, in numerical order. Some will be very detailed and others will give you a lot more freedom. What exactly you photograph is up to you but the guidelines are there to help you choose.

All of the images must be taken landscape and the flash should always be used.

1. Go into the next room and photograph the first object you see
2. Circle
3. Take a photograph of your bedroom how it is right now
4. Two green objects next to each other
5. Love
6. An obsession
7. The contents of your bag
8. Food
9. Photograph something that gives you pleasure
10. Put the camera on the floor, bottom down, and take a picture
11. Moist
12. The letter P
13. Photograph something you find weird
14. Take a picture of your front door from outside your house
15. Something big, next to something small
16. Nature
17. Fun
18. Open your fridge and take a picture
19. Photograph the shoes you wear the most
20. Beauty
21. Something beginning with E and something beginning with L next to each other
22. Life
23. Take a picture of the sky
24. Photograph of your favourite thing
25. A body part
26. Something you like, next to something you don’t like
27. Photograph something that reflects your current mood

Thank you for all your help. 

BRAINSTORMING IDEAS

I am thinking about 27 different images on each images that I want each person to produce and I am thinking about brainstorming different ideas of what could be asked for each image. I want a range from the very specific to the very broad. I will specify that the images should always be taken in a landscape format and that the images should not contain themselves.

1. Beauty
2. Photograph the shoes you wear the most 
3. Two green objects next to each other
4. Your bedroom
5. Your kitchen cupboard
6. Food
7. Fire... or Heat or Warm? 
8. A circle
9. The letter P
10. Fun
11. Lines
12. Go into the next room and photograph the first object you see
13. 6 of something
14. Put the camera on the floor and take a picture
15. What you do the most
16. Something beginning with E and something beginning with L next to each other
17. Busy
18. 2
19. The contents of your bag
20. Nature
21. Something purple and something round
22. Point the camera up and take a picture
23. Take a picture of the next person you see
24. Something wet or moist?
25. Something brown
26. Something small next to something big
27. Love
28. An obsession
29. Hair
30. Something weird
31. Photograph your front door
32. Life
33. Reflection
34. Take a picture out of the window from the highest floor you can
35. A body part
36. Something that gives you pleasure

I have been updating this list the past few days as things come to me, from this list I will now formulate the set of instructions that I will give to my subjects. 

LECTURE: Intro & The Photograph and the Wall: A Modern Story?

'The contexts and sites of photography are multiple - across pages, walls and screens, and the distinctions are never entirely clear-cut. For example work made first for magazines may be recycled and recontextualized by museums or in books, while many contemporary photographers and artists present their work simultaneously in different sites.

  What have the museum and gallery wall meant for the understanding and experience of photographic art?  This lecture considers some of the key photographic exhibitions of the past and introduces the challenges of contemporary exhibition practices.' 

NOTES FROM LECTURE:

• Module about context!
• Thinking about it from the point of view of the photographer and writer
• Genre - Landscape, portrait etc. 
• Institutions - Fashion, Art, etc. 
• Format - wall, page, screen. 
• These can overlap
• Thinking about how one photograph might be used in different contexts
• Rut Blees Luxemborg - used in exhibition, book cover, album cover

• Brassai - in journal and magazine
• Photos are used a number of different times, meaning could possibly change over time too
• When you see an image next to different images in a book - how does it change? 
• Never a clear distinction between the contexts
• William Klein 
• Image made for the page but we have seen it on the wall and so it has been recontextualised to fit the exhibition purpose 
• Curated own show
• Extracts from films, show reel 

• Early photo exhibition - 1858
• London photographic society
• Doesn't look like contemporary art space, looks more like artist studio. 
• 'Salon hang' style not the way we would usually see images like this
• also showed stereoscopic photography (3D), man in corner, faded by exposure, probably has list of pieces of work numbered to look at while you can go around and then take home with you
• 1861 - Not purpose built for gallery, woodcut illustration
• 1917 - Steiglitz 
• His gallery. He showed cubists etc. for the first time in America. Starting to look like what we would think of as a gallery today. Contemporary lights
• As well as gallery he had magazine 'Camera Work' - had to subscribe, he thought that the magazine was as important as the exhibition. If you keep it, it lasts longer
• Anthology called called camera work documenting all of the magazines
• 1929 - poster for massive exhibition that was shown in Japan and Europe
• Clusters of images, cabinets filled with publications and movie viewers
• USSR room - thinking photographically and graphically and architecturally
• Seemed very contemporary
• Film and photo shown in books
• 1946 - Edward Weston - serene calm exhibition showing small images at the MOMA after the war
• Before the war exhibitions were much more extravagant. Thinking about how we can show photography but after war it went back to a much smaller and calmer manner
• 1955 - 'Family of Man' Steichman exhibition. 
• One picture should fold into the next. Didn't want you to dwell on images for too long but most of the photographers weren't happy about this. It was arranged with a route through so you didn't linger. 
• Last two images - atomic bomb cloud and then an image of a meeting from the united nations. 
• The last image after that was 2 children holding hands, walking into the distance. 
• Arranged thematically
• Childhood, death etc. 

• Warhol 
• Got hold of FBI pamphlet somehow. Photos of images of the most wanted men that was a privately circulated document and he blew it up and made it very public. They wanted it to be taken down but he didn't
• Richard Avedon
• Works mostly for page of Harpers Baazar etc but recontextualised this for an exhibition
• Richard Hamilton perspective in the Tate soon!
• made for all sorts of purposes - gallery, book, album cover etc. 
• Victor Burgin
• Floor replaced by photo simulation/print of itself for a path across the room 
• entirely site specific
• path was black and white but you can't tell this because all of the images are black and white
• Georges Rouse 
• started with sculpture but got interested in photography through having to photograph his sculptures
• Michael Fried

EXHIBITION: The Photographers Gallery: Warhol, Lynch & Burroughs

I recently attended this exhibition and thought it was worth mentioning as again I am looking into how specific works have been shown within a gallery setting, much like I plan to do with my own work. It was a white wall gallery. Each artists work was shown on a different floor and a mixture of photography, mixed media and video were shown along with books working alongside the imagery. It was really interesting to see how the work complemented each other while still staying separate. 

TUTORIAL: 07/02/14

I had a one-on-one tutorial with my Tutor, David Campany today to discuss where I currently am in the process of working out what I am going to do with this project. It was well needed as I was feeling quite confused by all the different ideas that I could potentially do. I discussed through my current idea of the feet and how you can tell what the person is like by the shoes that they are wearing. I had also been thinking about the idea of working this in with hands and the old stories/fables based around what you can tell about a person through looking at their hands. I still wanted to work this idea in with the disposable camera as this gives of ideas based around a self portrait as I would be interested in using these images as a self portrait, without the self. When discussing this, we weren't sure whether the detail would come across through using the disposable cameras because it wouldn't work if the images were filled with flash, possibly slightly blurred because for this idea it is very detail specific.

We went on to discuss idea 1, the idea where one camera is given to one person along with a detailed list of instructions and the images that are then received, effectively become the portrait of that person. When discussing this idea it felt as though it had a lot more grounds to work on and that it could work a lot better. We discussed the idea of giving 9 cameras out to 9 different people, as I really like the idea of this number in a grid format. I would then show it in 27 different grids showing each of the images that each person has produced. To effectively allow the audience to form an opinion on each person, their space in the grid will say the same throughout and by doing this you allow them to walk through and process each of the images in a certain way while comparing the result of that particular person with the rest of the subjects. The question will be shown alongside each of the grids.

When thinking about other ways of which this could be displayed, we discussed how well that having this in a book format could work. Through having the grids on a page it allows the audience to view it in a more specific way, it is right there in front of them and they can flick between the pages much easier to make comparisons. I really like the idea of this context and this could work really well alongside the exhibition.

When thinking about other ways it could be displayed within a gallery context, there is always the possibility of showing it using a projection. Showing the question and showing the images following. This gives myself as the power in choosing how the audience view the work and so it is much more specific. I'm not sure which way I will go with exactly but I think this will become much more obvious once I have the images in front of me.

RESEARCH: Relevant links to articles on hands

http://blog.freepeople.com/2013/08/hands/

http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/mind-read/what_do_your_hands_say