Zemni Images

Photography, moving image, design and illustration of Linda Mayoux

Steve McCurry

Category: To Do

  • Steve McCurry

    “Look carefully, be mindfully attentive to what is in front of you“.

    In Steve McCurry: The Unguarded Moment, the photojournalist Steve McCurry notes how he was prepared to engage with a subject no matter what the time frame. He felt that knowing the area or the place meant it would eventually offer up what he was looking
    for. One of his most famous images is that of a young boy running.
    In his one-minute masterclass, McCurry talks about seizing the moment. In his book, however, he recalls staying in the same spot for more than four hours before this image was made. He felt that something would happen and was focused and ready to seize it when it did.

    interview with McCurry

  • Eugene Atget

    The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that
    was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from
    1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm
    wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply
    about the small traders, street musicians, actors, artists, ribbon sellers, etc., who were being
    squeezed out of their livings by modernisation. He also cared for the architecture of the republic,
    much of which was crumbling and in a state of squalor, just waiting to be demolished. Atget
    was motivated more by the need to re-create, preserve and document the old city’s existence
    than by a desire to create imagery for sale.
    It’s not difficult to imagine these
    works as paintings. (Compare Atget’s
    Bitumiers with Gustave Caillebotte’s The
    Floor Scrapers, for example.) You’ll find
    more Atget images in the Bridgeman
    Art Library. Follow the link on the OCA
    student website. Some of Atget’s work
    showed surrealist elements. Look at his
    famous ‘corset shop’ photograph, for
    example.
    Project Photography as art
    Water Lilies Eugène Atget. Not Paris this time, but recognisably
    in a fine art tradition i.e. Monet.
    Bitumiers

  • Paul Smith

    website

    Much of Smith’s work is an exploration of different aspects of masculinity and the merging of fantasy and reality, often using multiple self-portraits.

    In Artist Rifles he attempts to confront his own reasoning for joining the army. The multiple self-portraits emphasise the effect of the military structure on a person’s identity as it is subsumed into the unit, to become as it were, brothers in arms. The fantasy element draws on drama of childhood games and virtual reality of computer war games. Similar themes of male fantasy are found also in the later series on football ‘Robbie Williams’.

    Make My Night is ostensibly a record of a very laddish night out. In each meticulously researched scene he combines multiple self-portraits as the anonymous everyman but this time is more overtly the narrator as well as the protagonist of a frequently observed ritual. With a wry humour he depicts a familiar world governed by group approval and time honoured rites, a world of bravado and sexual tension vies with drunken frivolity and a certain vulnerability to occlude any notion of a new masculinity. He reproduces the variable quality that machine printing of snapshots taken with a standard point and shoot camera generate in the hands of revellers; bleached out faces, over cropped subject matter or the slight blur of the finger over the lens, the hallmarks of an impromptu celebration.

    ‘This is not pornographic’ is a statement not just a title.The bodily distortions and violent nature of some of the images is deliberately intended to have a rebarbative effect rather than appear erotic. This is probably most evident in the shaving shot; where the cut throat razor evokes the fear of castration and the blended bodies lose all their sexual function. Within other images in this series Paul observes the passivity of a relationship with pornography, that of the supine voyeur. The male figure left masturbating in his chair is seen as the weaker participant in the image.

    In ‘Mr Smith’ his self-portraits have a scientific precision that calls to mind nineteenth-century studies of physiognomy. In these intricate studies of celebrity, using existing visual references from popular culture, the artist’s skin becomes elastic, taking on the iconic facial features of the stars. From behind his own skin emerge the faces of some of the most iconic and celebrated men of our time including Elvis, Andy Warhol, David Beckham and Robbie Williams.In the duality of these faces, which are at once celebrity and something/someone else, we begin to realise that what we are encountering is not perhaps that which we initially perceived.

    The series ‘Impact’ is a set of photographic images of bullet shrapnel that has derived from criminal activity. The bullets have been gathered by police forensic teams in a variety of ways ranging from being extracted during autopsies or removed from a bulletproof vest after impact. Looking at these images, the viewer is reminded of the broader context of gun crime, not through reports of bloody violence but rather in the textures and details that constitute the individual narratives locked away within these images.

  • John Darwell

    John Darwell is an independent photographer working on long-term projects that reflect his interest in social and industrial change, concern for the environment and issues around the depiction of mental health.

    He has produced many series around issues of pollution and degradation of the human environment around Manchester and Sheffield and other parts of the North of England. Some of these are in Black and White, other series are in colour.

    He has a comprehensive website of images.

    His work has been exhibited, and published, widely both nationally and internationally, including numerous exhibitions in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, the USA, (Houston Foto Fest, New York and San Francisco) Mexico, South America and the Canary Islands, and is featured in a number of important collections including the National Museum of Media/Sun Life Collection, Bradford; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

    In 2008 he gained his PhD for research into the visualisation of depression for his work entitled ‘A Black Dog Came Calling’. He is currently Reader in Photography at the University of Cumbria in Carlisle.

    ‘Things Seen Whilst Wandering Around Attercliffe’ (Cafe Royal 2014),

    ‘Desert States’, images from the South West United States (the Velvet Cell 2014)

    ‘Grangemouth and the Forth Estuary’ (Cafe Royal Books 2014). ‘Sheffield: Hyde Park, Meadowhall and Ponds Forge (Cafe Royal Books 2013) ‘DDSBs’ (mynewtpress 2013) ‘Sheffield: Tinsley Viaduct’ (Cafe Royal Books 2013).  

    ‘Dark Days’ (Dewi Lewis Publishing 2007) documenting the impact of foot and mouth disease around his home in north Cumbria, and

    ‘Committed to Memory’ (Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery 2007)a twenty five year retrospective.

    ‘Legacy’ (Dewi Lewis 2001) an exploration of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. ‘Chernobyl’ volumes 1 and 2 (the Velvet Cell 2014)

    ‘Jimmy Jock, Albert & the Six Sided Clock’ on the Port of Liverpool (Cornerhouse 1993).

     

  • Clive Landen

    Clive Landen is a British wildlife photographer concerned with our relationship with animals. His pictures are quite explicit and upsetting to view, but he photographs horror with profound sensitivity and an almost painterly quality that makes us really look at the subject matter.

    The Abyss  series about the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak (only one photograph now available on line?). Landen began this project because restrictions meant that he couldn’t pursue his work on the relationship between the land and hunting. The impetus also came from childhood memories of the foot and mouth outbreak of 1967. Whilst the body of work is a pertinent historical document, it is also a personal one. Landen collaborated with the military and was seconded to a regiment, which allowed him free rein to access the sites where cattle were being burned and buried. He describes a photograph of one dead sheep amongst many as a “portrait of the sheep which looks benign, at peace.” (Landen (2007) in Source no. 51.)   His landscape containing a row of dead dairy cows and skeletons of trees is one of the most moving of the series. The pall of smoke that clung to these sites is visible, providing an almost painterly, pictorialist quality.

    Familiar British Wildlife series of images of roadkills. Article Source magazine  Camera Club images

     

  • Brassai

    The flâneur archetype takes different forms but can easily be identified in the figure of Brassaï (1899–1984) who embodies Rebecca Solnit’s description of the flâneur as “… the image of an observant and solitary man strolling about Paris” (Solnit, 2001, p.198). Brassaï photographed, in both senses, the darker side of Paris. He photographed transvestites and homosexuals at underground bars and clubs, and he photographed the streets of Paris extensively at night, published in the celebrated Paris by Night (1933).

    Brassaï (1899-1984) was a Hungarian-born French photographer who created countless iconic images of 1920s Parisian life.

    He moved to Paris in 1924, working as a journalist and joined a circle of Hungarian artists and writers. His seminal book Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night 1933) documented the nightlife of prostitutes, street cleaners, and other scenes in his neighborhood of Montparnasse.

    He also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals—among them his friends and contemporaries, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, and Henri Matisse. He was also interested in graffiti, seeing it as a form of Outsider Art that could open the door for new artistic expression.

    His black and white images are very dark and moody with large areas of clipped black with rim lighting have influenced my work in Assignment 2.1 Bridge.

    Showcases some of his most iconic photos

  • Edward Burtynsky

    Edward Burtynsky, OC (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes. Burtynsky’s most famous photographs are sweeping views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. The grand, awe-inspiring beauty of his images is often in tension with the compromised environments they depict.

    Exploring the Residual Landscape

    Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis. These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.
    Ed Burtynsky website

    Oil  2009

    His series Oil (2009) resolves an epiphany he had in 1997, when he realised just how tightly connected all of our global activity was to petrol and its raw material – oil. The monograph is divided into three sections:
    • images of extraction and refinement;
    • the consumption of oil and motor culture;
    •  abandoned ‘oilfields run dry’ and motor vehicles of all descriptions resigned to huge scrap heaps.
    The images within Oil  evoke a terrifying sense of the sublime. It is within the third section that the images have their most potent effect, for instance seemingly endless rows of impotent, rusting fighter jets in Arizona, or a channel cutting through a canyon of stacked worn car tyres in California. Some of the most striking images are those made at the Chittagong ship breakers in Bangladesh. The proportions of the structures that the workers pick apart, almost by hand, are awesome, and just as affecting are the horrendous conditions in which they work. Although not overtly critical in any explicitly rhetorical sense (i.e. like Kennard’s montages), it is impossible to read Burtynsky’s position as anything but one of grave concern for our consumption of this valuable substance. Some images in Burtynsky’s Oil can be interpreted from different perspectives: great stacks of compressed oil drums or bits of car parts might speak of excess and consumption but, whilst they refer to manufacturing in a past tense, these are also the raw materials for current industries, ready to be melted down and turned into new things.

    China

    He has made several excursions to China to photograph that country’s industrial emergence, and construction of one of the world’s largest engineering projects, the Three Gorges Dam. Burtynsky discussing his work made in China

    Other work

    Wikipedia Burtynsky was born in St. Catharines, Ontario. His parents had immigrated to Canada in 1951 from Ukraine and his father found work on the production line at the local General Motors plant. Burtynsky recalls playing by theWelland Canal and watching ships pass through the locks. When he was 11, his father purchased a darkroom, including cameras and instruction manuals, from a widow whose late husband practiced amateur photography.With his father, Burtynsky learned how to make black-and-white photographic prints and together with his older sister established a small business taking portraits at the local Ukrainian center. In the early ’70s, Burtynsky found work in printing and he started night classes in photography, later enrolling at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, Burtynsky formally studied graphic arts and photography. He obtained a diploma in graphic arts from Niagara College in Welland, Ontario, in 1976, and a BAA in Photographic Arts (Media Studies Program) from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, Ontario, in 1982. His early influences include Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eadweard Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins, whose prints he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 1980s. Another group whose body of work shares similar themes and photographic approaches to Burtynsky’s work are the photographers who were involved in the exhibition New Topographics.

     

    Photographic series

    • 1983 – 1985 Breaking Ground: Mines, Railcuts and Homesteads, Canada, USA
    • 1991 – 1992 Vermont Quarries, USA
    • 1997 – 1999 Urban Mines: Metal Recycling, Canada Tire Piles, USA
    • 1993 – Carrara Quarries, Italy
    • 1995 – 1996 Tailings, Canada
    • 1999 – 2010 Oil Canada, China, Azerbaijan, USA
    • 2000 – Makrana Quarries, India
    • 2000 – 2001 Shipbreaking, Bangladesh
    • 2004 – 2006 China
    • 2006 – Iberia Quarries, Portugal
    • 2007 – Australian Mines, Western Australia
    • 2009 – 2013 Water Canada, USA, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Iceland, India

    Video: Manufactured Landscapes

    In 2006, Burtynsky was the subject of the documentary film, Manufactured Landscapes, that was shown at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

    Video: Watermark

    Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal, who was his director on the 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes, are co-directors of the 2013 documentary film, Watermark. The film is part of his five-year project Water focusing on the way water is used and managed.  

    Technique

    Most of Burtynsky’s exhibited photography (pre 2007) was taken with a large format field camera on large 4×5-inch sheet film and developed into high-resolution, large-dimension prints of various sizes and editions ranging from 18 x 22 inches to 60 x 80 inches. He often positions himself at high-vantage points over the landscape using elevated platforms, the natural topography, and more currently helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. Burtynsky describes the act of taking a photograph in terms of “The Contemplated Moment”, evoking and in contrast to, “The Decisive Moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 2007 he began using a high-resolution digital camera.

    The Long Now Foundation

    In July 2008 Burtynsky delivered a seminar for the Long Now Foundation entitled “The 10,000 year Gallery”. The foundation promotes very long-term thinking and is managing various projects including the Clock of the Long Now, which is a clock designed to run for 10,000 years. Burtynsky was invited by clock designer Danny Hillis to contribute to the Long Now project, and Burtynsky proposed a gallery to accompany the clock. In his seminar, he suggested that a gallery of photographs which captured the essence of their time, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, could be curated annually and then taken down and stored. He outlined his research into a carbon-transfer process for printing photographs that would use inert stone pigments suspended in a hardened gelatine colloid and printed onto thick watercolour paper. He believes that these photographs would persist over the 10,000 year time-frame when stored away from moisture. ——————————————

    Edward Burtynsky, OC (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes. Burtynsky’s most famous photographs are sweeping views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. The grand, awe-inspiring beauty of his images is often in tension with the compromised environments they depict.

    Exploring the Residual Landscape

    Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

    These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

    Ed Burtynsky website

    Oil  2009

    His series Oil (2009) resolves an epiphany he had in 1997, when he realised just how tightly connected all of our global activity was to petrol and its raw material – oil.

    The monograph is divided into three sections:

    • images of extraction and refinement;
    • the consumption of oil and motor culture;
    •  abandoned ‘oilfields run dry’ and motor vehicles of all descriptions resigned to huge scrap heaps.

    The images within Oil  evoke a terrifying sense of the sublime. It is within the third section that the images have their most potent effect, for instance seemingly endless rows of impotent, rusting fighter jets in Arizona, or a channel cutting through a canyon of stacked worn car tyres in California. Some of the most striking images are those made at the Chittagong ship breakers in Bangladesh. The proportions of the structures that the workers pick apart, almost by hand, are awesome, and just as affecting are the horrendous conditions in which they work. Although not overtly critical in any explicitly rhetorical sense (i.e. like Kennard’s montages), it is impossible to read Burtynsky’s position as anything but one of grave concern for our consumption of this valuable substance.

    Some images in Burtynsky’s Oil can be interpreted from different perspectives: great stacks of compressed oil drums or bits of car parts might speak of excess and consumption but, whilst they refer to manufacturing in a past tense, these are also the raw materials for current industries, ready to be melted down and turned into new things.

    China

    He has made several excursions to China to photograph that country’s industrial emergence, and construction of one of the world’s largest engineering projects, the Three Gorges Dam.

    Burtynsky discussing his work made in China

    Other work

    Wikipedia

    Burtynsky was born in St. Catharines, Ontario. His parents had immigrated to Canada in 1951 from Ukraine and his father found work on the production line at the local General Motors plant. Burtynsky recalls playing by theWelland Canal and watching ships pass through the locks. When he was 11, his father purchased a darkroom, including cameras and instruction manuals, from a widow whose late husband practiced amateur photography.With his father, Burtynsky learned how to make black-and-white photographic prints and together with his older sister established a small business taking portraits at the local Ukrainian center. In the early ’70s, Burtynsky found work in printing and he started night classes in photography, later enrolling at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

    From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, Burtynsky formally studied graphic arts and photography. He obtained a diploma in graphic arts from Niagara College in Welland, Ontario, in 1976, and a BAA in Photographic Arts (Media Studies Program) from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, Ontario, in 1982.

    His early influences include Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eadweard Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins, whose prints he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 1980s. Another group whose body of work shares similar themes and photographic approaches to Burtynsky’s work are the photographers who were involved in the exhibition New Topographics.

     

    Photographic series

    • 1983 – 1985 Breaking Ground: Mines, Railcuts and Homesteads, Canada, USA
    • 1991 – 1992 Vermont Quarries, USA
    • 1997 – 1999 Urban Mines: Metal Recycling, Canada Tire Piles, USA
    • 1993 – Carrara Quarries, Italy
    • 1995 – 1996 Tailings, Canada
    • 1999 – 2010 Oil Canada, China, Azerbaijan, USA
    • 2000 – Makrana Quarries, India
    • 2000 – 2001 Shipbreaking, Bangladesh
    • 2004 – 2006 China
    • 2006 – Iberia Quarries, Portugal
    • 2007 – Australian Mines, Western Australia
    • 2009 – 2013 Water Canada, USA, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Iceland, India

    Video: Manufactured Landscapes

    In 2006, Burtynsky was the subject of the documentary film, Manufactured Landscapes, that was shown at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

    Video: Watermark

    Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal, who was his director on the 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes, are co-directors of the 2013 documentary film, Watermark. The film is part of his five-year project Water focusing on the way water is used and managed.

    Technique

    Most of Burtynsky’s exhibited photography (pre 2007) was taken with a large format field camera on large 4×5-inch sheet film and developed into high-resolution, large-dimension prints of various sizes and editions ranging from 18 x 22 inches to 60 x 80 inches. He often positions himself at high-vantage points over the landscape using elevated platforms, the natural topography, and more currently helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. Burtynsky describes the act of taking a photograph in terms of “The Contemplated Moment”, evoking and in contrast to, “The Decisive Moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 2007 he began using a high-resolution digital camera.

    The Long Now Foundation

    In July 2008 Burtynsky delivered a seminar for the Long Now Foundation entitled “The 10,000 year Gallery”. The foundation promotes very long-term thinking and is managing various projects including the Clock of the Long Now, which is a clock designed to run for 10,000 years. Burtynsky was invited by clock designer Danny Hillis to contribute to the Long Now project, and Burtynsky proposed a gallery to accompany the clock. In his seminar, he suggested that a gallery of photographs which captured the essence of their time, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, could be curated annually and then taken down and stored. He outlined his research into a carbon-transfer process for printing photographs that would use inert stone pigments suspended in a hardened gelatine colloid and printed onto thick watercolour paper. He believes that these photographs would persist over the 10,000 year time-frame when stored away from moisture.

     

  • Gillian Wearing

    Gillian Wearing: Do You Feel You Know Me a Bit Now?

    https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gillian-wearing-cbe-2648

    Gillian Wearing is a contemporary British artist whose conceptually driven photographs and videos investigate power dynamics and voyeurism in everyday life. Focused more on capturing the self-awareness of her subjects than on issues of aesthetics, Wearing employs prosthetic masks, voice dubbing, altered photographs, in her portraits of herself, individuals, and groups. This is especially notable in her series of work Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992-1993), in which the artist confronted strangers and asked them write what they were thinking, then photographed them holding the sign. “It’s always important as an artist to find a unique language, and that’s why the Signs excited me,” she said of her series. “They felt new. But I didn’t realize they were going to be so influential, on everything from advertising to people doing signs for their Facebook page.” Born in 1963 in Birmingham, United Kingdom, she moved to London in 1983, studying first at the Chelsea School of Art then Goldsmiths College where she became a part of the Young British Artists generation alongside Damien Hirst. In 1997, the artist was the winner of the prestigious Turner Prize for her 1996 piece “60 Minutes Silence“. She currently lives and works in London, UK. Today, Wearing’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., among others. http://www.artnet.com/artists/gillian-wearing/

    https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/gillian-wearing/

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2012/mar/26/gillian-wearing-dancing-peckham-video

  • Aaron Siskind

    google images

    Aaron Siskind (1903 – 1991) was an American photographer. Siskind’s work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement.

    https://www.britannica.com/video/164452/Aaron-Siskind-influences-documentary-photography

  • Jonathan Miller

    Nowhere in Particular

    google images

    Jonathan Miller writing about the book in the Independent

    the capacity to resolve fine detail is confined to a surprisingly small area of the retina, the fovea, around which visual acuity falls off so steeply that it’s impossible to take in the details of a whole scene at a single glance. Try fixing your eyes on the last word of this sentence and see how difficult it is to read the surrounding text. The result of this restricted acuity is that our perception of the visual world has to be assembled in discrete installments. Although we are not explicitly aware of doing so we are constantly flicking our gaze from one part of the visual field to the next, and by bringing the specialised centre of the retina to bear on one sector of the scene after another we collect an anthology of sporadic snapshots from which we build up an apparently detailed picture of the world around us.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-scavengers-hoard-1116630.html

    On Reflection