Tag: Movement

A3—Rethinking, approach and contact sheets

After discussing a possible direction for A3 with my tutor and being encouraged to show a side of myself that people might not know, I went back to the drawing board.

I have to admit that it took some time to identify a new path. To my mind, it is a fairly rare thing for someone in middle age to reveal something new about themselves. Family, friends and colleagues have had years to get know me and the chance to surprise them becomes less likely the more time goes by. Nevertheless, it dawned on me that there might be one thing about me that would surprise people: my terrible fear of dancing. I have a reputation for being a competent, confident person who remains calm under pressure and thinks well on his feet. I am not shy: I am comfortable leading large teams, teaching adults and speaking in front of hundreds of people. And I absolutely love music and I feel its power—when I’m by myself. But ask me to put music and movement together in front of other people and I turn white with cold fear.

So that would be it. But I wanted to do it on my own terms: rather than making a self-portrait just about fear, I would do a series on where I could get to. I’ve been ashamed of this long enough and resent both the way I have allowed it to make me feel and the fun I’ve missed out on.

I decided to do a series of me dancing and even looking a bit silly as I enjoyed music on my iPod. I would incorporate colour and use flash to freeze my movement. I darkened the room so that the flash would be the only light and give me greater control, both of the exposures I want to use and to strengthen the effect of the gels on the flash. I had originally thought of using a single exposure or perhaps of blending a number of exposures to give a greater sense of movement but, in the end, I opted to go with four exposures—one from each of the different coloured gels I had used.

Here are the contact sheets from the series I took:

Assignment 3, contact sheets

A1—Two Sides of the Story

Most people who give the issue more than a moment’s thought realize that a two-dimensional image does not give us direct access to three-dimensional “reality.” But since a camera contains a light-sensitive surface that is exposed for a specified period, the artifice of an image extends to include a fourth dimension: an often unquestioned perception of time. A camera is a time machine, after all.

A photographer may just have two fundamental controls: “where I stand and when I press the button” (Hurn and Jay, 1997: 25). But although David Hurn is probably being facetious about how simple image-making is, he might have usefully added that another part of the subjectivity the photographer brings to the image is how long to press the button.

We have become very used to photographs freezing time faster than sight allows, but the camera is just as capable of creating exposures that are much longer than what the eye can register. Japanese photographer Hirhoshi Sugimoto has explored this with his series of long-exposures in movie theatres to the point of information overload: his photographic record shows screens that are grossly over-exposed and therefore blank. And Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows series on St. Petersburg uses long exposures to capture the blurred movement of people in a dreary black-and-white cityscape (Titarenko and Tchmyreva, 2001). While Titarenko’s shutter is open, crowds leave vapour trails and begin to fade.

David Campany suggests that still images not only prompt our memories but shape how we understand the phenomenon of memory itself: “In popular consciousness (as opposed to popular unconsciousness) the still image continues to be thought of as being more memorable than those that move” (Campany, 2003).

None of the images I have prepared for this assignment is any less “true” than the photographs of frozen motion that we have become used to. In fact, both pictures in each set are artificial and neither reproduces what our eyes see. Both are ‘still’ images, but one is less still and hints at how quickly perception and memory fade.

We have simply become used to the photographic convention of stillness. But it is just one side of the story.

References

Campany, D. “Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problems of ‘Late Photography’’’ (2003) At: https://davidcampany.com/safety-in-numbness/ (Accessed on 14 July 2019)

Hurn, D. and Jay, B. (1997) On being a photographer: a practical guide. Portland, Oregon: Lenswork Publishing.

Theaters — Hiroshi Sugimoto (s.d.) At: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-7 (Accessed on 14 July 2019)

Titarenko, A. and Tchmyreva, I. (2001) City of shadows. St. Petersburg, Russia: APT Tema.