So, My brief for the project!

Brief for photojournalism.

I intend to produce a series of images of people and their environment, this series will include images from people on the streets and how the interact with daily life. People who are on their way to work, people in the streets or at work, i.e. the Saturday and Wednesday markets in York and Beverley. People and others, this will be how they interact with others in their day to day routines and strangers who they bump into in the street. I will also include people within the college, staff and students and how their college life flows.

I am influenced by mainly two photographers, one is extremely well known in street photography from the less…modern era. Henri Cartier – Bresson he influences me in the kind of how he uses composition and elements within the image to create the composition that makes the effect or mood that he wants to portray.

The second photographer who influences me is modern; Eric Kim shoots people on the streets… NOT in that way that many of you are probably thinking about… He has a creative eye and wanders the streets of Hong Kong, taking images of people who are at work or in their daily routine. These two artists will blend together to create a well composed and creative image.

I will produce the images in a high contrast black and white with punchy shadows to create an enticing image. The reason I chose to take them in black and white is it can force me to contrast (see what I did there) more on the composition and mood of the image its self and people can focus on the people in the image rather than the colors or anything else.

Concept

Keeping your images to themes.

When going out and photographing something, you really need a theme to concentrate on or base your images around loosely. If you do not do this then your images, however good, may not be organised and all over the place. Your images want to be in sequence, thats where they're happiest!

If you take a look at other artists they have portfolios or books of different themes such as Lee Friedlander with his book "America by car" and Robert Frank with his book "The Americans" these artists have a series of images which are compiled into books or portfolios.

My ideas

In my imagery I want to focus very loosely on some themes within my imagery because I think that they give a good perspective to them.

Most of my imagery will consist of street photography but i will have different themes within this. My main theme will focus on the urban environment its self and the sub themes will be;

• Architecture- I will take images of buildings from a low perspective as if I am looking upwards, this will separate the buildings from the busy street life, I will take the images in RAW as most occasions the dynamic range will be too low and the sky will be blown out and I will have to recover this in Photoshop.

• Reflections- A bit like Lee Friedlander I will take images of reflections of puddles, polished surfaces, windows etc. These give a different perspective than an image taken straight on. I could also use double exposures as a form of reflection because they give a similar effect.

• People and their environment- This sub series will focus on people within cities and urban areas and how they interact with others and their environment. This will include people going to work and in their everyday life.

Mood boards and Mindmaps?

Does "Photographers block" have you procrastinating your photography? Not knowing what to photograph is one of the biggest pains when it comes to photography, you have a shiny new lens or camera and you're stuck at home bored out of your mind, all you want to o is get out there and take photos but... YOU SIMPLY CANT!! 

Having no idea what to photograph brings on a horde of excuses such as "Its raining" or "the weathers shit" when really that's all they are, excuses.

A mind map is very commonly used to generate tons of ideas for anything really, they have been around for hundreds of years. Firstly think of one word you would like to photograph as a subject such as "reflections" and then branch off sub categories like "windows" and "puddles." these will get you thinking about different ways to shoot the different sub categories.

The next idea which is more related to photography. A mood board is a great way to generate ideas relating to photographs themselves. You take a bunch of images from the subject you would like to photograph and put them in a montage of images which you like and would like to replicate in your own style, here is my example.

Lee Friedlander- Reflections

Lee Friedlander is an american photographer known for his work on reflection photography and his series of photos named "America by car" in these images he has taken them from an angle of which is different to most photographers. He has taken these images either in a car looking out of the window or he has taken the images whilst including himself within them. This gives a new perspective on reflections.



In this image,  lee has included himself in a reflection on a shop window except he has blanked his face out with a poster which makes us look at the image behind him of JFK. It appears to look like he is JFK due to the angle of the shot.

In these two images, Lee has photographed them from the window of his car, Lee uses the reflections of the wing mirror to compress the perspective of things behind him such as the man and woman in this image and the bridge in the one below. due to this change in perspective of the mirror, we are drawn into the contents of it.







I liked the perspective Friedlander gives in his photography so I thought id try it out for myself! in this first image I thought id take one similar to Friedlander's reflection images and it worked, but then I felt like getting a bit creative, after all thats what photography is all about!

The next two images are from large puddles on the streets of Manchester whilst doing a bit of street photography. The images have been flipped to look as if they were taken normally but due to them being reflections in puddles, the perspective of them is changed and this gives a strange approach to the image! We almost miss the fact that they are taken in a reflection and our minds instantly assume that they are normal photos until we delve deeper into the image to reveal that it is no ordinary photograph of a tram line or skyline.

These two images just go to show that rather than always looking in the usual places for an image, try looking somewhere you wouldn't normally to give a different perspective because you never know how they can turn out!

What artists percieve

Achievement

Whether a sense of achievement is within college or in what you perceive it to be, a sense of achievement can be many different things. This blog is all about how artists perceive their image.

Robert Frank is a swiss photographer who went to America to escape the consequences of Hitlers reign. He published a  book called "The Americans" where he displayed how things are percieved by himself in 50s America.

"The Americans" is a famous book by Robert Frank conveying the life of Americans in the 50s, as you can see in the cover photo here, there is black and white segregation on a tram in the city. The way Robert took his images is a different approach to photography as he does not take images how he thinks things are perceived, he takes them how he alone perceives them, this gives his photographs a more personal touch.

I then went out and photographed the theme of "achievement" in and around college in a way that I perceived it, not in a way that it is usually perceived by others.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was an American photographer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal." This is the reason why Arbus was renowned as a "bully photographer" she would pick on people who are "abnormal" especially the disabled and "ugly"!

drag queen

As we can see in this image of a drag queen, Diane Arbus shot it with an attempt to make this person even uglier than usual by photographing them with no make-up, the hair bunched up in rollers and the cigarette in his left hand is also emphasis on this point. Diane also used direct and harsh flash to make the skin tones greasy and washed out!

Twins

Diane photographed these two twins as a posed shot on the streets because she must have thought that because they are twins, this meant that the are different or "abnormal" the two twins may look the same and dress the same, but they are not feeling the same. The twin on our left is pulling a frowned face whereas the one on the right is happy and smiling, this is what Diane used as the hidden message of the image that two peaople will never be the same, no matter how similar.

The image above is one of another drag queen in the streets of New York, Diane yet again picked on this "woman" for their differences and tried to emphasise the lack of attractiveness by using the harsh light to cast shadows in the skin which reveals wrinkles and this light makes the skin greasier! She also shot from a low and unflattering angle with a moderately wide lens to make the subjects face wider than it actually is.

It is this "bully" in Diane's photography which separates her from the crowd. Very few photographers would actually purposefully try to show the worst in people, it is usually the opposite as our jobs as photographers, we are supposed to make people look BETTER but Diane deviated from this style and chose her own which she is clearly good at.