Conceptual approaches using extended formats

Description:

1. Generate a concept/subject/idea that can expressed with an extended format such as a series/typology, multiple pairing, grid, panorama, joiner, cluster, etc. (Refer to examples below and from the textbook.)
2. Shoot, process and print the project
3. The total number of images generated will depend on the format and what you need to express your idea. Discuss with instructor.

Due dates:

Prelim critique: 11/5 (Wednesday)

Final critique: 11/12 (Wednesday)

Evaluation of work will be based on:

• Originality, clarity and development of idea or concept
• Use of extended format fully explored
• aesthetic: photographic design
• techncial: camera
• techncial: prints
• development of project from prelim through final submission

Series/Typology

Dinah Fried depicts fictitious meals based on characters from classic fiction. Clever.
http://laughingsquid.com/fictitious-dishes-photo-series-depicts-meals-from-fictional-characters/

Jeffrey Milstein creates a typology of aircraft.

Jeff Brouws (and numerous others going back to Bernd and Hilla Becher) are obsessed with cataloging and "collecting" with their camera. For instance, Brouws isn't interested in singular train cars, but the almost endless variations between numerous cars. Working with a mode called typology, he creates grids that simultaneously show similarity and contrast.

There is a long, unfortunate history in photography of objectification based on race, gender, stereotypes and notions of "otherness". Photographer Myra Greene turns the tables on this history with her clever and effective series: "My White Friends"

Roni horn is a conceptual artist who uses photography frequently in her work. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/roni-horn

Multiples (diptych, triptych, etc.)

Uta Barth is a photographer of place. Instead of creating visual descriptions of places, like a traditional landscape photographer would do, she is more interested in evoking or suggesting how we experience places. Often working with multiple frames, she changes the scale, plane of focus (in some she focuses on the "space between" foreground and background), in an attempt to more closely mimic the process of human perception, as well as the passage of time.

On more of a documentary, story-telling mode, Lucia Ganieva, creates rich biographical portraits of people relating their persona to their vocation, past, workplace, etc. using diptychs and triptychs. Notice how the frames work together to build meaning.

Grids and Joiners

Keith Johnson now works almost exclusively with grids, exploring the hidden language of forms found in the natural and human landscape.

Susan Bowen implies what we might see over the course of a long walk...the visual wanderings of our curious eye. She uses plastic cameras, only partially advancing the film between exposures to create one long, continuous flow of visual stimulation.

Robert Richfield has an interesting take on the panorama. Instead of stitching together a seamless expanse, he presents it with the frame divisions. How does this affect the meaning of his work and how we "read" it?

For examples of Contact Sheet Sequences, look at Thomas Kellner.

Essentially these are a form of what the book author terms joiners, or many-make-one, extended images that functions like fragmented panoramas both vertically and horizontally. David Hockney is well known for working this way. The following images, by Hockney, show some variations of this approach. How do they differ?

Layers

Idris Khan quite literally quotes Bernd and Hilla Becher's work with industrial architecture, but layers the multiple variations of structures within a single frame instead of a grid.

Margaret Hiden is explores how family histories can be told through narratives that blend the past and present to form richer tapestry of telling. Here, images function much like memory... where our present is continually colored by the echos of the past.

Extending the Single Photo: Narrative sequence

Please read chapter 7 by Monday, October 20th.

As photographers, the frame is perhaps our most important tool. With the camera, we "frame" our subjects, including what we feel is important for the picture, and excluding what isn't. Essentially, we are editing from the visual world with our frame. A common goal in photography is to try and get it all in one frame—to create a singular image that conveys our full expression, sharp, clear, with a single point of view. 

Further, we capture single points in time,  often orphaned from the longer story. They float, untethered without revealing what came before or after, or for that matter, what else was going on at that time. 

There's value in all this—but it can also be limiting!

Cartier Bresson "The Decisive Moment"

How can we extend the story of a photograph? What happened before our  decisive moment? What happened after? What did the other person see? What about the fly on the wall? Sometimes we need multiple images, multiple frames to convey the breadth and richness of our visual story.

For this phase of the course, we will explore the following modes.

Narrative Sequence
Typology/Series/Multiples
Joiner/Cluster/Panorama
Digital Collage

1. Narrative Sequence

The first assignment is to explore the use of narrative sequence, or visual narrative, to tell some kind of story through time. Think about change and movement...what changes? What moves? What stays the same? How does this change tell a story?

Duane Michals used extended sequences of images to convey complex and (often amusing) narratives. Some of these visual story lines went in a straight lines, sometimes they made bizarre circles and spirals.

Grandpa Goes to Heaven, Duane Michals

Change Meeting, Duane Michals

Countless photographers have borrowed his approach to make narratives of their own.

E.Sariozkan

elodie fougère

The Personal Telling of Story

Jennifer Shaw

New Orleans photographer Jennifer Shaw illustrates the trials her family faced during and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The images are told through the use of toys and figurines.

http://jennifershaw.net/hurricane-story/

Metaphoric narrative

The photographer Masaru Goto created a compelling narrative documenting the difficult subject of his mother's sickness, decline and eventual death. He draws a comparison between the life-cycle of cherry trees passing through the four seasons from the blossom stage through the shedding of leaves as extended metaphor for the phases of a human life, from full glory to eventual decline. The result is sad, but poetic and contemplative.

Ideas to get started:

• Create a character and story...depict this visually, telling the story through a sequence of images. Shoot in a way that links the images together in a coherent way.
• Choose or stage a sequence of actions and consequences that are related...show us the before, during and after in a compelling way. Even better, throw in a twist or surprise.
• Illustrate a recent (or current) news event using a fictional or illustrative approach. Instead of photographing the actual events, recreate the event in a compelling or believable way through a sequence of images
• Take a photo every hour for a day...document what you are doing or seeing. Or what someone else is seeing or doing. What stays the same in every photo? What changes?
• Same place different time...photograph the same place, the same way, but at a different time...vary by minute, hour, day, week...decide one method and keep it constant
• Same person different time...photograph the same person, the same way, but at a different time...vary by minute, hour, day, week...decide one method and keep it constant.

Prelim critique: 10/22

Final Critique: 10/27