Hi Stuart, Thanks for the semester. I've learned a lot. My photos are all uploaded as sets in Flickr. If you have any trouble accessing them please send me an email to anne.davies@vu.edu.au. Hopefully our paths will cross in the future. Anne

Reflecting and presenting

So today is the day for my presentation!

What have I done?
I have created a presentation entitled 'Mary St'. It is a photographic portrait of a street in my neighbourhood. This is the first time, other than a holiday photographic projects, that I have worked through a project from the conceptual struggle to the stress of presentation.

This is something I have wanted to do for a really long time and I have had great fun as well as plenty of challenges in thinking and working this through. It is definitely a work in progress...there is plenty of room for improvement and I'm hopping that I am brave enough to hear to comments of others today...it is both hard to ask for and open your head and heart to receive feedback.

I also find myself thinking about future 'street' projects...so I think this is the beginning, not the end.

Why have I done it?
I settled on this project because it seemed to give me an opportunity to work in a structured way on some of the things that have capured my imagination over time. I began with thinking about the graffiti on the walls in my area but soon realised that graffiti only has significance for me when it is situated, with a relationship to it's location and so I spread my wings to focus on the whole street.

I have always been interested in the detail of a particular place urging myself to wonder about the essence that makes one place similar to of different from another. I usually think about plants, buildings etc and only recently have I explored the place of people in my photographs. And so this project gave me a chance to:

• portray Mary St (trying to learn from Atget in Paris or Cazneaux in Sydney or Abbott in New York)
• explore the architecture (inspired by Sean Scully
• think about how people use the street
• to photograph shops and shoppers
• to look for the expected and the unexpected.

How did I get there?

Along the way I have:

• begun to make friends with my camera
• begun to make friends with my new Mac
• expanded my capacity to use Bridge, Photoshop and Aperture for the management of photographic projects
• taken care to document as much of the process as I could both in my blog and and my notebook
• with so many new things to learn to part that I have not done successfully was being a generous contributor to the flickr interactions...I regret this but time and priorities have been my enemies
• I have been to exhibitions and looked at photography books with new eyes
• I have pushed myself to discover and use as many of the functions as possible, especially in Aperture

What now?

I need to spend a lot of time developing my eye for technique.

I need to spend a lot of time further exploring and understanding the capacity of Aperture and Photoshop in getting photos to look their best.

I need to think more about the basic principles of what makes fine art fine art...questions about line and form, structure and emotion etc

Could I ever have an exhibition...I'd better read that book I bought, insired by Sue D, about being a contemporary artisit...tha's what I'd like to be. I think I've begun.

Collage

I have been thinking about the possibility of photographing collages in Mary St.

STICK IT!

I went to see the exhibition STICK IT! at the NGV at Fed Square.

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/stickit/

Works including those by Madonna Staunton gave me ideas.

ISABEL DAVIES

Isabel is my mother and she is a collage artists and I admire her work enormously...of course what I have learned from her will influence my work.

She has been an active member of the Australian Women's Art Register and you can see her work at: http://www.womensartregister.org/star-DAVIES.htm

SEAN SCULLY
Sean Scully talks about the idea of photo as painting...this has made me think about photos that have a collage quality about them.

MY THINKING
When I started to think about my photos as art I started to think about the ‘collage’ quality of my photos and I started to look for collages in the streetscape.
Thinking about photos as collages has given me a framework for making judgements about my photos. Why would I choose to put 5 stars on one photo and not another? I discovered that when I assign the keyword ‘collage’ to a photo it meant that I could see something pleasing with regard to one or more of the following:
· Layer
· Texture
· Line
· Blocks of colour
· Shape rather than content
· Geometry
· Abstract

Asking questions

Agnes Varda asked questions of the people she interviewed in Rue Dagguerre. I didn't have that luxury but the people in Mary St got used to me taking photos, I chated with them and I got used to including people in my images...this is a very new experience for me! I found it was much easier to do this once you had had a conversation.

Photos as questions
Anne Noble, in an artist’s presentation at her exhibition held 12 Sept.-25 Oct., 2008, at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, said that all photos are questions...I will never forget this! So, what are the questions that sit behind my photographs?...what questions do they answer?

What seems to be the everyday in Mary Street?
What’s out of the ordinary about Mary Street?
What’s the quality of Mary Street? What does it feel like? Look like? Smell like? Sound like?
What do I feel about Mary Street?

What would you find in Mary Street?
What kind of buildings are there in Mary Street?

Who lives in Mary Street?
Who passes through?
Who works in Mary Street?

Mary Street progress report!

More lists...as I have begun to take photos and sort through them I have started to use keywords in Adobe Bridge to sort and group the images.

Adobe Bridge keywords for Mary Street project (so far!)
Abstract
Bakery
Bicycles
Bricks
Buildings
Chimneys
Collage
Dogs
Doors
Facing the wall
Fences
Graffiti
Humour
Letter boxes
Lights
Locks and handles
Looking up
Looking down
Looking east
Looking west
Looking south
Mary and Steve
Mary Street
Messages
Night
Numbers
Pedestrians
Plants plumbing
Reflections
Roofline
Rubbish
Rubbish bins
Second hand
Shadows
Shopping trolley
Shops and shopping
Signs
Street signs
Streetscape
Stripes
Text
Thirds
Utilities
Walls
Windows
Wires

There are quite a few overlaps with the first concept map and the list from Varda's film.
Each time I set out down Mary St with camera in hand I find something new.

Agnes Varda's film Daguerrotypes (1975)

What a great piece of good fortune!

On Wednesday 14th April I went to see this Agnes Varda film at ACMI.

I have admired other films made by Varda including 'The Gleaners and I' and I knew it would be inspiring in some way. As it turned out the connections with my Mary St project couldn't have been better.

Agnes lived and worked as a filmmaker in Rue Dagguerre and she set out to make a film about the street.

As I watched the film, transported to Rue Dagguerre, I took notes about what I saw/thought about as I watched the film.

Anne’s list
Those I know
The every day
Shop sellers
Goods
Relationships
Observers
Business people
Interactions
Children, older people
Windows
Looking in
Being inside
Tools of trade
Division of labour
Shape of the shop
Wrapping
Coming and going
The signs
Goods/wares
When the shops are closed, home, shop keepers lives
Cleaning
Storage
Relaxing
Passing traffic, cars, trucks
Looking out
Don’t forget humour
Unusual connections
Setting up
Closing up
Looking through, windows
Mirrors
Connections between components eg purple jumper and purple poster
Hairdos and clothes
One shot takes us to the next
Dreams
Nature
Stills, posed, not moving
Approach, essay
Who’s shopping?
Who’s passing?
What’s happening on the street?

Agnes Varda’s questions
How did you come to work in Rue Daguerre?
How do you see you life...work, family?
What do you dream?

Mary Street: My first concept map

When I began to develop the idea of a project about Mary Street I made a concept map in my notebook recording the range of ideas that I might pursue. This is a list of the headings and subheadings in the concept map:

Boundaries
Fences
Joins
Bookends

Writing
Business signs
House names
Street signs
Numbers
Graffiti
Parking signs

Street
Cobblestones
Gutters
Metal covers for utilities

People
Residents
Passers by

Streetscape
Streets and laneways
Corners and intersections

Buildings
Walls
Windows
Doors
Letterboxes
Fences
Verandas
Roofs
Building materials
Curtains
Awnings
Safety screensKnobs and locks

This thinking stood me in good stead as I began to photograph.

Sean Scully

Sean Scully is a painter and a photographer. Born in 1945, he grew up in Ireland and England. Now he lives and works in New York City, Barcelona, and Munich. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Scully)

A painter
While beginning as a figurative painter, Scully has been painting in an abstract style for over 30 years using thickly applied stripes and blocks of colour that ‘that allude to architectural elements such as portals, windows and walls’ (http://www.jamilehweber.com/conte/exhibition_scully.html).

I grew to love his distinctive work in 2005/6 when his Body of Light series was exhibited at the NGV in Canberra (http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Scully/Default.cfm).

In his essay on the NGA website, Kennedy says that ‘the abstract, coloured shapes in Scully’s paintings’:
· engage in relationships of harmony and disharmony
· are wonderful colour poems that take us beyond the limits of everyday.

On the same website, Kennedy reports Scully as saying, ‘I try to take advantage of an urban language, a language architecturally grounded yet impregnated with emotion. I want it to be [a] common, normal urban language able to transform my painting into a sensation, into a feeling’ (Kennedy, (http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Scully/Default.cfm?MnuID=4&Essay=1)

A photographer
It was at this exhibition that I discovered that Scully was also a photographer and I bought the book ‘The Color of Time’.

The Color of Time, both an exhibition and a book, was a retrospective of Scully’s photographic work spanning ‘twenty-five years, beginning in 1978 with his photographs of ten anonymous doors in Sienna, Italy’ (http://www.jamilehweber.com/conte/exhibition_scully.html). These earliest photographs depicting massive dark doorwayswere originally taken as ‘an aide-mémoire, Scully surprised himself by creating a remarkably consistent series of ten works that strongly reference abstract, even monochrome, painting’ (Lucie-Smith in White, 2004).

‘Scully's nomadic wanderings in search of the façades and surfaces, the colours and shapes that speak to him of human hands and the passage of time have taken him to the Dominican Republic, England, Ireland, the Scottish Isles, Germany, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, and the United States.’ (http://www.jamilehweber.com/conte/exhibition_scully.html)

About this work Scully says: ‘What I’m trying to do with the photographs is to capture a state of being associated with a particular visual moment…My photographs of façades are an attempt to bring the subject matter into the realm of painting via photography.’ (Interview with Lucie-Smith in White, 2004)

Essays by Arthur Danto and Mia Fineman, written at the time of the ‘Color of Time’ exhibition explore the complex relationship between abstraction, figuration, nature, and the built environment that is so prevalent in Scully's art. Danto argues that Scully finds his inspiration in ‘the world of the everyday and the commonplace, where experience begins and against which it must be checked...in shacks and hovels, rather than palazzos and cathedrals...’

And this inspires me to create an aesthetic experience by focusing on the everyday:
· doors and windows
· geometry
· detail
· texture
· line
· colour
· boundary and meeting point.

Scully encourages me to consider the abstractness composition and to look for the beauty in the constructed world and the intersection between the constructed, lived and the natural world.

References
Galerie Jamileh Weber, http://www.jamilehweber.com/conte/exhibition_scully.html Accessed 4/7/10
Sean Scully, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Scully Accessed 4/7/10
White, Garret (Ed) 2004 The Color of Time: The Photographs of Sean Scully, with essays by Mia Fineman, Arthur C. Danto and an interview with Sean Scully by Edward Lucie-Smith, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl.
Sean Scully: Body of Light, http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Scully/Default.cfm%20Accessed%2047/4/10%20and%2018/4/10.
Kennedy, Brian P The Art of Sean Scully: A human spirituality

More about Eugene Atget

Characteristics of Atget’s photography James Borcoman makes a number of interesting observations about Atget’s work including ideas about montage and shape.

Montage

‘Atget also made the startling discovery that the world creates its own montage of objects through a kind of "layering" just waiting for the photographer's lens. Such photographs as Avenue des Gobelins, 1925, pose questions about reality by shifting contexts and creating ambiguities through the layering of window reflections.’

Shape
‘Atget's prints are often known for their deep shadows and washed-out highlights, large enough in size to create broad abstract shapes. Although it has been assumed that these were the product of careless printing techniques, it is remarkable how such shapes operate as strong formal elements within his pictures.’

And finally...’ Just the right portion of asymmetry was always introduced by Atget, a concept which a recent study of his work interprets as the possible influence of the asymmetrical symmetry of Rococo composition.’

References
I forgot to note in my last blog that the references that I have used in my research on Atget are:

Borcoman, J. "Masters of Photography: Eugene Atget." http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/atget/atget_articles3.htmlAccessed 7/4/10

Golden, R. (2001). C20th Photography. London, Carlton books.

Rosenblum, N. (1997). A World History of Photography. New York London Paris, Abbeville Press.

"Eugene Atget." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Atget. Accessed 7/4/10

Self portrait

A nice challenge!

Week 3

The Mary Street project is taking shape. I’ve been taking hundreds of photos...early in the morning as the darkness turns into daylight and then at the end of the day as the sun is low in the sky. Following my earlier ideas I’ve been taking streetscapes, walls and detail. So far I have been taking all my photos with a hand held camera...this presents some problems in low light of course and even thought I have some shots that are OK I think I’ll use a tripod on my next excursion with low light.
I’m really enjoying thinking about the photographers who have gained a reputation for their photos of cities and my interest in Atget and Cazneaux is helping to shape my approach to taking photos in Mary Street.

Eugene Atget (1857-1927)

His life
Eugene Atget was born in Lisbourne in France in 1857 close to 100 years before I was born and he died in Paris in 1927, the year before my father was born. He was orphaned young and after finishing school he was employed as a sailor and cabin boy, then later an actor, an artist and eventually a photographer.

Bernice Abbott. Portrait of Eugene Atget c.1927 (Gelatin silver print)

Perceptions of his work
He is described by Golden (2001) as documentary photographer and during his life his ‘deceptively simple...documentary pictures...were considered little more than functional illustrations’.

However, well known photographers such as Man Ray and Breton, and artists such as Picasso and Matisse saw ‘something new in these robust and direct photographs’. After his death another photographer, Berernice Abbott, devoted 40 years promoting his work.

The photographer
Atget shot on 18 x 24 cm glass plates using a bellows camera with a simple lens and because of the limitations of this technology he preferred to ‘photograph in the early morning when there were few passers-by’. This gave ‘a certain empty and surreal charm to his cityscapes’.

He took more than 10,000 photos of Paris and to earn a living he sold his photographs to museums, architects, decorators, and publishers, as well as artists.
‘Atget created many series...’ including
· Streets and shops
· Street traders
· Vehicles

I was attracted to taking a closer look at these photos in particular to try and understand what had made him such a successful photographer and artist and what could I learn that would help me to create a portfolio of photos that would provide a rich picture of Mary Street.

Taking a lead from Atget I would adopt both a documentary and an artistic approach to photographing Mary Street:
· emphasising the everyday
· with and without pedestrians
· highlighting the shops at the Nicholson St end
· focusing on vehicles and workers
· depicting cityscape and streetscape
· paying attention to the line that takes the viewer’s eye from the foreground into the distance
· paying attention to the structure of the image, light and dark, contrast and shape.

So, week 2...Stuart set a task...head outside with our cameras to take 12 specific photographs. So how did I feel? Challenged by the task, I really liked thinking about each idea and searching for a response, looking around for things that caught my eye and trying to match the 12 ideas.
At the same time I had to make friends with my camera in the manual mode. I had not used this much and had not really adjusted from my SLR to the digital SLR. It felt heavy and clumsy. But by the end of this task, even though it was such a short time, I was already feeling much more confident. These are 11 photos from this activity (seem to have lost the 12th).

beautiful.............extreme close up............

mixed lighting..........................drab...........................................blury........................................

portrait of a stranger.........self portrait....................surface........................

tasty........... .................ugly.............................wide angle....................

This confidence meant that I have been excited to begin photographing for my folio.
In the first week I started playing with the idea of streetscapes walls and small messages and started taking photos to see how the idea worked. This was OK but I think it might be a bit restricting and so I began to wonder how I could develop the idea in my photographs this week.
At the same time as I was wondering I began to think about a photographer that I might choose to present later in the semester. The first person I thought of was Harold Cazneaux. I have long admired his photos. I was struck by the idea that Cazneaux was photographing Sydney at the same time that Atget was photographing Paris...and this gave me an idea about how to extend the photographs I had begun to take in Week 1. I could study the work of these two photographers and try to understand how they had achieved such spectacular success in photographing. Then I could explore these in my photographs of Melbourne.But of course I would have to have some kind of focus, something that was do-able in 12 weeks. I was driving down Johnston Street which is full if interest for me but this seemed too big a project. And so I decided to construct a portfolio which would be called ‘Mary Street’. Mary Street is hardly a street, not more than a lane in some places. It runs east from Lygon Street through to Nicholson Street...just 6 blocks. I live just around the corner and I know it well. I feel very happy with this idea.

Oops! Here is my second try.

Streetscape 3................Wall three......................Message 3..................

As I tried out my idea I settled on three windows:

• Streetscape
• Wall
• Message

Here are my first two tries!

Streetscape 2 Wall 2 Message 2

Thursday 4th March



OK. Got my blog up and running.

I was both excited and challenged by our first session on Monday. It's interesting being a student and not a teacher. I feel comfortable but overwhelmed by the unit expectations and what I would like to achieve in 12 weeks. So I'll have to be careful...many say less is more but how to choose.

Thanks Stuart for getting me thinking. I am already benefiting form being part of the group. It gives shape to my photographic life and I know it will be significant in helping me to conceptualise the things I see and photograph.

For instance windows...

I had not heard of the mirror/window idea before but as you introduced the idea I had an idea about how to develop a long-standing interest. For many years, like many others, I have taken photos of graffiti. Now there are many photographic books on the topic. Elongated format books with art on trains, books focusing on the work of particular artists such as Bansky and more recently books about the history of street art.

I have taken photos in my neighbouhood of the things that have captured my imagination...whimsical ideas, political statements, beautiful stencil art and also small messages. And this is where my puzzle began. I don't think it is enough to just photograph graffiti. I say So what? Even if you have captured something that others may not have seen I think a concept is needed. So I've been thinking about this for quite some time with some ideas sticking in my mind.

One idea is about 'writing on the wall'. Stuart, the idea that you raised on Monday about classifying or contrasting was interesting in this regard. People write different kinds of things on the wall...tags, political statements, emotional expressions, information etc. some are big and some are small. The small messages are interesting and when you raised the idea of a window I drew in my book a set of squares.

At the centre was the message but seen through a series of 'windows', the streetscape, the building a feature and then the message.

So on Tuesday I set out to try the idea.