Doing research on my project recently I came across this video, Real Dove Beauty Sketches is a short film made as part as a marketing campaign. The video shows several women describe themselves to a forensic sketch artist, who cannot see them. the same women are then described by strangers who they had met briefly. the sketches produced from their own descriptions are visibly less flattering and inaccurate when compared to those the stranger had described. I personally find it quite remarkable the difference between how you see yourself and how you are viewed by others.
0 Comments
I love immersing myself in the creative process. I feel art can open up people’s minds to new ideas, providing the chance to create something beautiful that affects everyday people, to make them look around and inspire them.
My work has spanned over various themes, media and techniques. For a long time I have been interested in mixed media artwork. I have worked with textiles, paint, drawing, photography and metals. After a recent workshop on aluminium casting I became immersed in the casting process and I’ve thoroughly loved the process of the sandcasting and the final outcome. Something that really interests me is the idea of the everyday person. As with many people I love people watching, it intrigues me to what the person is doing, how they came to be here and what their story is how they came to be at that exact spot in that exact moment in time. Marc Garnger was stationed against his will in Algeria, during the war for independence between 1954 and 1962. By becoming the personal photographer to one of his superior’s in the French army he managed to avoid direct combat. One of his assignments contracted him to take ID photographs of the Algerians living inside the internment camps.
Over 10 days he made around 2,000 portraits, mostly of women. Portraits photographed against bare walls. They had no choice in being photographed, and at the commandants orders they were photographed without their veils. Unused to showing their full faces and hair to anyone outside their family, they stood in front of the camera as if they were naked, some looked lost others seemed angry. “They were firing at me with their eyes,” he explained, these women were angry at being exposed against their will in this way. “I was trying to give them back their humanity and their dignity through my portraits,” he said. Diane Arbus was is one of the most distinguished American photographers of the 20th century, She was known greatly for her eerie and off beat portraits of the people she came across in New York, she visited seedy hotels, public parks, a morgue and other various locations. He slightly unnerving photographs of children, intimate portraits of famous figures, and urban scenes became iconic. In the early 1960s, Arbus began producing captivating portraits of people on the outskirts of society, including clowns, exotic dancers, circus performers, and transvestites.
Nikki S lee is a Korean artist who looks at identity and vernacular photography. Her most famous project is ‘Projects’ where she depicts herself in various photographs in which she poses with various ethnic and social groups including drag queens, punks, exotic dancers, senior citizens, Latinos, hip-hop musicians, skateboarders, lesbians and Korean schoolgirls. As part of her work she emerges herself into various American subcultures and creates an identity which is an extension of herself.
Another of her projects is entitled ‘parts’ the photographs feature Nikki lee pictured in various locations with a male partner, however the photographs are cropped so the partner is impossible to make out. This project plays with missing narratives and absorbs the viewer so they are forced to make up their own. She teases the viewer, leaving them with many unanswered questions towards who has been removed and the relationship between the two. She controls what we see telling us that there is something missing. Her photography shows a moment, capturing the quintessential experience. Her photography transforms the everyday into marker of time and experience. They leave us with a curiosity to understand what is in or outside the frame. Lee’s images encourage us to question the integrity of snapshots, culture, and community while allowing us to enjoy the many faces of constructed identity and memory. Sometimes you sit through a lecture and at the end you are totally inspired and amazed about what people get up to and the types of people out there, David Clegg’s was one of those. David Clegg is a fascinating man from the moment he started talking he had everyone transfixed. His works looks at memory and personal history something that we can all relate to. Working in care homes and hospitals his work on memory loss is innovating and revolutionising. Memory is a fluid concept, each time we remember something we are actually remembering the last time we remembered it rather than the actual event itself. Therefore memory becomes unreliable and can change over time. As we remember something we recreate it using a different neurone path. After working as an artist and running a gallery for a few years, David decided that wasn’t for him anymore and got a job in a care home. Working at the care home he met an 87 year old woman named Sheila, Sheila had dementia, her memory was fragmenting she was afraid of losing it altogether but one thing she wanted to do was write her life story, and so David Clegg sat down one day with a pen and paper and Sheila began “I was born Sheila Val Jean Hugo, a descendant of Victor Hugo, writer of The Hunchback of Notre Dame." As it turned out Shelia had been friends with many famous actors and musicians: she had dated lion tamers and the infamous Acid Bath murderer. It took two years for Sheila to piece together her extraordinary story titled Dust on the Rubber Tree. By visiting care homes he met more people with dementia to collect and record their stories. He named the project The Trebus Project in remembrance of Edmund Trebus, a polish war veteran, who filled his home with things that most would call rubbish, convinced that in time a use would be found for them. Working intensively and over long periods of time with the same people he built up a fascinating record of lives that would otherwise have been lost to history. He worked with how people understood space and documented objects made by people with dementia. Collected photographs of the way people moved things in the care home things people often looked over. David Clegg told us story’s if the people he worked with, such as Francis who worked as a poet but as her memory fragmented she cut up her poems and tried to rearrange them to try and make sense of them. He told us about a woman who wouldn’t do anything but write she would write everything down in an attempt to hold on to them, she would write until the paper turned black and you could no longer see words. He even talked about his own mother who lost the kitchen the space had completely folded up in her mind and no longer existed to her. What began as an art experiment has grown to become the largest archive of first person dementia narratives in the world. David Clegg was a fascinating man whose pioneering work is helping to give us a better understanding of not only memory loss diseases such as dementia but also helping us understand memory as a whole. Richard Renaldi created a series of photographs that involve approaching and asking complete strangers to physically interact while posing together for a portrait. He creates a relationship that isn't otherwise there between two strangers who are pushed past those boundaries we are taught of posing intimately in a way you would usually only reserve for those close friends and loved ones.
Jr is an artist that has featured greatly in my work, I love his powerfully expressive portraits. After beginning his career as a graffiti artist, he found a camera on the Paris metro and began to combine the two. His work is influenced by his fascination with the combination between public art and portraiture. Many of his work looking at the local inhabitants on a large scale. The work that predominantly moved me was the project ‘The Wrinkles of our city’ project which looks at age and the aging process and how it affects the identity of both the people and the city.
I am especially interested in age and identity. The inhabitants who often go overlooked in the city, the ones you just walk past without a second glance. JRs work celebrates and brings awareness to these people. http://www.jr-art.net/ Brandon Stanton is the revolutionising individual transforming the way we see others. Brandon explains ‘I’ve always felt like an artist because I recognize a lot of beauty’ after losing his job Stanton began taking photographs of people on the streets of New York documenting the occupants who live there. "I saw a lot of beautiful things," he said, "but I never really had the technical skills to draw or to paint or to portray them. When I got the camera I thought ‘Oh here is a way to really frame my perspective of the world.’ As he started to meet and talk to the people he wanted to take the pictures of, he discovered their stories and histories, by collaborating these quotes and the photographs he creates a daily glimpse into the lives of strangers in New York. The captions often involves an anecdote or story. By asking leading questions he tries to find something unique about the person. He takes photographs of things people wouldn't normally see on the street and presents them in a way that those same people walking past them could enjoy and appreciate.
Brandon’s innovating way of capturing character and stories reminds us that we are all human, that we all are living our daily lives all just trying to get by. It shows we all have restrains, and limitations, it shows we all have hopes dreams and ambitions. We are all the same and we are all unique. |
AuthorHannah Watson is currently a student at Sheffield Hallam University, studying towards a BA in Creative Art Practice Archives
May 2015
Categories
All
|