Thursday 1 March 2012

Two to return to

Two interesting links to bookmark:

Landscape documentary
On the BBC website there is another example of landscape being used to evidence a social documentary story: Auschwitz-Birkenau, then and now.

Parent, Woman and/or Artist
Over on the Little Brown Mushroom blog there is an article on 'being an artist and a mother' which is a fascinating read given my own hectic family life.  The challenge of finding the balance between the roles of 'parent, woman and artist' it seems is not an uncommon one and is something I wrangle with frequently.

Would like to go in to this more at some point, but struggling with time to go in to more depth right now.

5 comments:

  1. Have you heard of the film 'Shoah' by the French director Claude Lanzmann? In that film, made in the 1980's, he interviews old Polish peasants working in the fields just outside Auschwitz that you can see in the images. He asks them 'Did you know what was happening?. They reply 'Yes'. 'So why didn't you do anything about it?' 'Because they were Jews'.

    This is much more chilling the images. The images suggest the evil was in the past and we should look at it as history, whereas the film makes us aware that some of its causes are still with us.

    I would also interested in a photography project which showed parts of Palestine before 1948 and those same areas as part of the occupied territories. But it would be a very brave photographer who did it, not me ...

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  2. Also, my tutor made this very similar recommendation to me - the then and now theme, on this occasion landscape/environment. I quote:

    Lastly, Having read the piece you included citing Carleton E. Watkins, I would like you to take a look at the work of an American photographer called Mark Klett. http://thirdview.org/3v/home/index.html He is doing some very interesting landscape work using original images taken by historic photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson. He has a timeline that you can use to overlay the images that have been re-photographed demonstrating how the areas have been developed or remained unchanged over a century or more. Well worth a look.

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  3. Hi Jeremy

    The time lapse photography is something that I find fascinating too...I think there is something innate in us that draw us to it...the passage of time and its 'effects' on us and our landscape. I have come across Mark Klett's work before. There are others too. There is one guy who has photographed his face everyday for ten years....http://everyday.noahkalina.com/index.php....which is strangely compelling. There is another one on Gary Braash who has looked at the effects of global warming...
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/sci_nat_how_the_world_is_changing/html/1.stm

    I haven't seen the film 'Shoah' but I can imagine how chilling it was. And I guess this is one of the challenges of an art course where we have self selected a medium for our communication...making the story compelling in images rather than words I think can be really very difficult depending on the topic/project, but not impossible. Jessica Hines has taken an interesting approach which is primarly imagery but much more besides. http://www.jessicahines.com/

    Palestine...yes, someone else's bag!!!

    Thanks for the comments Jeremy.

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  4. T. John Hughes might also be worth a look. Found him in a book called 'Elements of Photography' by Angela Faris Belt. Not sure of his presence on web. Maybe if you google 'Cityscape Panorama Project' as well.

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  5. Thanks Vicki. Just googled it...again, strangely fascinating. These type of projects require patience and perseverance but they are worth it...his timescale is much shorter but amazing how much change there is in that short time...

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