Looking at Art group, 17th May

Today we had the second full meeting of the South Bristol U3A Looking at Art group.  We went to the Grant Bradley Gallery in Bedminster, where they are showing the finalists of the RGB Photographic Competition, and a smaller show of 12 prints by a Bath photographer called Colin Powell.  More info about the show on their website here.

There were 12 of us in the group today, and Sylvie Duncan start us off with a well-judged but short introduction pointing out the things we could look for in viewing the images, including subject, form, composition, texture, the use of contracting light and dark, colour/monochrome, the type of paper and printing, and the choice of mounting.

We then spent about 30 minutes having a good look at the images, which were very varied in subject matter, style, scale and effect.  One of the gallery staff came and gave us some further thoughts about the competition itself, and some of the technical issues we could look out for in making our own photographic images.  And finally we had a bit of a free-for-all discussion about what we'd seen and learned.  It was a very useful session, and everyone, even some who started out saying 'I'm not interested in photography",  had things to say and had found things to hold their interest.

I found I really liked the portraits, especially several striking black and white portraits, which were immensely strong in conveying the sense of the person behind the face.  I wondered whether the choice of black and white is the trick here.  We see people and faces around us all the time, always in colour, and very often without really looking at them.  Partly because, culturally, we have been trained not to look closely at the faces of people we don't know: it can be seen as intrusive and sometimes an almost hostile thing to do.  By taking portraits in black and white we remove the distraction of colour - it doesn't matter about hair colour or the clothes being worn.  And we are also allowed to look closely, to really study the face, the lines, the skin quality, the shapes and expressions.  Which we could not do if the real person was there.

I found the several colour portraits less compelling.  I also found that I did not terribly like the  prizewinning image, (shown above,  copied from the grant Bradley website linked above, and by Gareth Iwan Jones).  In the Gallery, it looked less like a colour photo, and seemed to be almost entirely black and white except for her scarf and her very red lips.  I was confused because it seemed to me to be so obviously  contrived, constructed, a posed 'character' rather than an 'ordinary' but real person.  I wasn't sure of the point of this constructed person.

Moreover, its title, "The Third Woman' was obscure to all of us.  Whereas for some of the photos, the caption seemed to be an integral part of the whole, and added meaning, in this case it caused puzzlement but no enlightenment.

Which is something I need to think about for my final project piece(s), for which I still don't have a title, and must do before much longer.

Art I like: Idris Khan

Still thinking about my pathway project, I looked up Idris Khan, photographer, who produces work which overlays lots of images on top of each other, such as the full score of a piece of classical chamber music, so that the finished image is almost indecipherable, while representing the totality of the sound s inherent in the piece of music.  He does the same with images of buildings, or pages of text.  The effect is to produce interestingly complex but strangely familiar images, which seem to shave the depth and gravitas of the original, through the continuous build-up of lines as layer upon layer is put together.

Like this.....

Thus Spake Zarathustra... after Friedrich Nietzche(2007)
Digital C type print mounted on aluminum 
85 x 70 inches 
© Idris Khan ... After Ludwig van Bee

Image copied from Yvon Lambert Gallery here.

Idris Khan
Title		Struggling to hear... after Ludwig van Beethoven sonatas
Medium		lambda digital color coupler print
Size		102 x 70 in. / 259.1 x 177.8 cm.
Year		2005 -
Edition		5/6 Copied image and text from ArtNet website here.

More about Idris Khan in a  Guardian article here and here.

I like the way he crease something almost skid from these repeated images - and they are on a huge scale., so why was perhaps previously a duty volume of sheet music, is now a massive piece of photographic image, perhaps 2 or 3 metres long, demanding attention and reflection.  

College again already! 3rd January 2012

Only ten of us managed to make it to college for the first day of the new term today - and we had a very god session on art history with Jo Kear looking at portraits, and what makes celebrity.

This one, of Michaelangelo painted in 1504-6 while he was painting the Cistine Chapel ceiling was made by one of his apprentices, Marcello Venusti and was commissioned by the Medici family.

We looked at how the use of light and shade (chiaroscuro)  concentrates the viewer's attention purely on the face, and even then only half the face is illuminated.  The sitter seems to be looking confidently out towards the viewer, but also seems distracted, as though he will turn back to his painting in a moment.  We are told nothing about him apart from his face, no information about dress, location, etc.  It is a very concentrated portrait.

Other images we considered included this deep and meaningful portrait of Princess Diana, by Mario Testino in March 1997, 5 months before the car accident in Paris.

We all thought this was a lovely portrait of Diana, but also that it was carefully managed to project her intended new image as a single woman, no wedding ring, no fancy background, just a very nice dress.
In looking up the image, I found that it was actually a cropped down version of a slightly bigger image,  shown here...

This shows Diana a lounging in a slightly more relaxed pose.  Does this change our assessment of the picture?  I think not really, although there is slightly less simplicity in the bigger picture.  

Another dramatic portrait was this one by Martin Schoeller of Barack Obama tank in 2004, well before Obama won the Democratic nomination for the US presidency election in 2008.

I found this image very negative,  but some of us thought it was strong and carefully presented to show Obama as a powerful potential presidential candidate.  There is something strange about the focus (the ears and the neck are out of focus) and the lighting (the lack of shadows, and the reflected light source in the eyes) and also the camera position seems to exaggerate the nose.

Later I looked up more of Martin Schoeller's portraits - The Google Image search results are available here.  Seeing so many, all rather odd, portraits, put the Obama one into a better context.  He seems to have come out relatively well.  Some of the images are really strange, like this one of Paris Hilton

Or this one of Jack Nicholson

Then, rummaging through other images of portraits by Schoeller, I came across these, done for an article in the January 2012 edition of National Geographic on identical twins.  A really interesting, and less distorted, set of images of pairs of twins, showing how his 'up close and personal' portraiture can help distinguish the fine detail of differences between otherwise very similar faces.

The National Geographic photo archive link is here.


We all liked the interesting and unusual 3D construction portrait of J K Rowling, made by Stuart Pearson Wright in 2005 for the National Portrait Gallery.   The only images I could find online showed only the painting/construction, and not the surroundings which show the 'box' like room in which the images are located.  So this doesn't show quite the 3D impact of the whole.  I'm not are where Jo found the bigger image she showed us today.

 There is something almost dolls-house like about the way the portrait is mounted within a "room" depicting the simple writing requirements of Rowling in her early, unpublished years in Edinburgh, , and her still very private life.

We looked at several other images, including Sam taylor-Wood's video portrait of David Beckham sleeping, which I have seen at the NPG, and a rather unpleasant (deliberately so?) newspaper portrait of Damien Hirst in 1997.    We also looked briefly at four ancient busts of Roman Emperors - two of which looked to me just like former senior civil servant colleagues of mine...who shall be nameless.  The point of all this was to make us see what we could perceive of character from an un-named portrait, and how we ascribe attributes and personality on the basis of presentation.  Also, a brief discussion about who commissions portraits, who controls the page, how much leverage the sitter has, or not, over the pose, tone, style, etc.   All very interesting, and food for thought at future exhibitions.

College week 10/1 Art History 14th November

The title of today's lecture was "Case Study: How to fit a mountain into a photograph" and focussed on he work of American photographer Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984).  

Adams was probably dyslexic, didn't do very well at school but taught himself to play the piano, and subsequently photography after being given a Box Brownie camera as a present when he was a teenager.  He specialised in carefully planned shots of wild spaces, famously Yosemite National Park, California.  His wife's daily kept a studio in the park, which Adams eventually took over.  He belonged to the f64 Group of photographers who developed the concept of transcendentalism.  Adams himself was convinced of the importance of visualisation, i.e. of having a mental picture of the image he wished to create in his photographs, so he adjusted light,  exposure, etc, to produce a pre-planned image, sometimes enhancing the reality of the natural world by clever planning, angles, timing, etc.   Adams wrote, in 1948 that 


"The term visualisation refers to the entire emotional -mental process of creating a photograph, and as such, it is one of the most important concepts in photography.  It includes the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure, so that the procedures employed will contribute to achieving the desired result.  This much of the create process can be practices and learned beyond lies the domain of personal vision and insight, the creative 'eye' of the individual, which cannot be taught, only recognised and encouraged."


(Adams, Ansel, The Camera (first published 1948, most recent edition 1995), London: Little, Brown and Co., p.14)


We looked at several of Ansel Adams most celebrated photographs, including these: 

Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Par

                                                                                             Orchard, Early Spring

                                                                                     Winter Sunrise from Lone Pine

Nevada Fall, Rainbow

Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, California

Ansel Adams, photographing in Yosemite National Park from atop his car in about 1942. 

Adams work is still stunning in it range and the lowering power of the carefully positioned camera shots.  he would wait ages for the sky, light, etc to be just right, and his photos are iconic, and set the standard for many other landscape photographs later on.  


I like his work:  his photos have great dramatic impact and convey a sense of awe and wonder at the huge natural landscapes of America.  

College week 8/1 31st October Art History

Today's topic was 'Using People" and majored on the work of photographer Annie Leibovitz (b 1949, Connecticut, USA).  Art college trained, her work is carefully composed and thoughtful. She has worked in many spheres, including Rolling Stone magazine and lots of work with musicians, film stars and other celebrities.   Among her iconic images were some taken of Mick Jagger when she went on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1975.

 She also took a definitive photo of John Lennon, with Yoko Ono, only hours before Lennon was assassinated in New York in 1980, and which was used on the cover of the tribute edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

Some of her portraits refer back to previous painters, or to fairy tales or stories, even when the commissions are for fashion magazines or advertising.  Such as this 

She also has a body of very personal photos of her family, here her brother and father.

and here of her partner Susan Sontag.  

She famously photographed the Queen in 2006 and was filmed doing so by the BBC, who also recorded the fact that the Queen was less than happy with the photography session.  The results, though, were magnificent portraits of the queen, combining the sort of stately dignities she might have wanted, with the kind of fairy-tale mists and mystery of some of her other work.

She didn't like being the subject of photographs herself, as in this wonderful portrait by John Keatley in which she seems to be hiding from the camera, using her hand to shield her face but also mimicking the position she adopts, looking at the subject?viewer through one eye, when she is working the shutter.

More about her work in a Guardian article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2007/may/02/annieleibowitzoneofthemos