David Williams - Genius!

A photographer I adore who explores many themes and ideas that really interest me is David WIlliams. Been drooling over his 1995 series 'Findings...Bittersweet' today. Reading the accompanying essay by James Lawson the following paragraph stood out and was helpful to me in my approach to the archetypes series project i am working on.

"Williams’ evasive photographic method - blurred and often bleached images - allows him to explore the territory of feeling and imagination. It is where matter turns into spirit, the place wandered by German Romanticism. Where things with names turn into pigment and where matter turns into spirit, art can turn into abstract expressionism. Though discoverable by the individual, it is not a private land."

http://www.davidwilliamsphotographer.com/show.php?caseA=1&caseB=91&caseC=170

Ori Gersht and exploding flowers

it's not relevant to anything I am doing but how great is this? Ori Gersht freezes bouquets of flowers with liquid nitrogen and then captures them at the moment of explosion. Frozen using a fast frame rate we get to see a visual occurrence that is too fast for the human eye to process and can only be perceived with the aid of photography. Apparently this is what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconsciousness’ in his seminal essay ‘A Short History of Photography’. I find the images poetic, a symbol of love, peace and beauty subverted in an almost violent act.

PhotoVoice

While doing the essay for Media Technology and public spheres I came across a charity called PhotoVoice, who do amazing work in the field of participatory photography with marginalized groups worldwide. Have signed up for a three day workshop in London in February which I am very excited about. This could evolve into a piece of work for my second project as was thinking about doing a documentary style project with some kind of humanitarian slant. We shall see!!


From their website...."The courses are designed for those who want to learn more about participatory photography methods and participatory photography as a tool for social change. The workshop content will draw on PhotoVoice’s award winning expertise and the extensive learning gained from running participatory photography projects with excluded communities around the world. All training will be delivered by experienced trainers who have worked on PhotoVoice projects".

Georgian Spring by Antoine D'Agata

http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/georgian-spring-antoine-dagata

Inspired by Homer's Odyssey this Magnum Photoessay is just gorgeous on so many levels. I love the juxtaposition of the dreamy, ethereal images of the subjects with the tumbling, gritty, bleak images of the landscape they inhabit. The multi-media approach is a real inspiration for this first project, the voice on the film reads statements gathered from the subjects and other people he met as he travelled across Georgia. They lend a haunting air to the piece that somehow ties the two seemingly disparate worlds together. As my intention is to photograph each subject in both a very 'realist' everyday setting and a way that hopefully captures something of the more mythic dimension of their being, I think the weaving of spoken word through the images could be a very useful device.

Ps...cant embed the photoessay as it only plays half screen if I do so.

Madame Yevonde

I had been researching this intriguing lady who was a well known society portrait photographer in 1930's england, when a visit with the MA group to the National Media Museum in Bradford brought me face to face with some of the images from her beautiful Goddess series. Rich in colour (she was a pioneer of the Vivex tri-colour process) and using props and elaborate costumes, she created an otherwordly aura around her subjects, depicting them as the bride-madonna, allegorical women and even Nefertiti, the famous consort of an egyptian pharaoh. She was interested in the role models available to women and controversially at the time, did not shy away from female sexuality. Researching her has inspired me to look back on classical art and surrealism as further inspiration for this project. Inspiration perhaps is also to be found in her famous dictum "Be Original or Die"!!!!!!!!

The Goal Kneels - Rumi

The inner being of a human being is a jungle.
Sometimes wolves dominate,
sometimes wild hogs.
Be wary when you breathe!


At one moment gentle generous qualities,
like Josephs, pass from one nature to another.
The next moment vicious qualities move in hidden ways;


Wisdom slips for a while into an ox!
A restless, recalcitrant horse suddenly
becomes obedient and smooth-gaited.
A bear begins to dance.
A goal kneels!


Human consciousness goes into a dog,
and that dog becomes a shepherd, or a hunter.
In the Cave of the Seven Sleepers
even the dogs were seekers.


At every moment a new species rises in the chest
now a demon, now an angel, now a wild animal.


There are also those in this amazing jungle
who can absorb you into their own surrender.
If you have to stalk and steal something,
steal from them!

Joyce Tenneson

Found a photographer whose explicitly stated aim is to explore female archetypes in her work. the images are full of symbolism and rich beauty. very inspired by this.

Flor Garduno - "Poet-Photographer"

Discovered the work of Flor Garduno in my search for photographers who are interested in delving deeply into those aspects that are at once individual and universal within each of their subjects. Acclaimed as mexico's "poet-photographer", she was a student of the legendary Manuel Alvarez Bravo before embarking on her own practice. Her series Inner Light in particular resonates with me; a collection of sensual nude portraits of female friends, each rich in metaphor and expressing an emotional and archaic language that appears to be as much a voyage through her own interior landscape as one which illuminates the multi-faceted psyches and personalities of her subjects. In fact they are so brilliantly conceived it could be said they both depict and transcend the individuality of her subjects. Most of her compositional metaphors are consistently only bipartite: to the female nude is added always only one single, mysterious symbol. The symbols used have a universal quality; flowers, wheels, swans and even a skull feature, motifs that figure widely in the myths of many cultures world-wide and as such enter the realm of the Jungian collective unconscious. Beautiful.

Test Shots 1

Test Shots 1

Experimented in the studio with a very pared down version of the mood I am trying to create. Wanted to see how the blurred movement would look and which combination of slow shutter speeds, moving subject and moving camera would create the desired result. The final images I want to create will be quite stylized, costume and symbolic object likely to play a prominent role. Got some images that I feel are heading in the right direction but there is still a lot missing. First steps though, optimistic but it's still a long walk!

The Look

Been thinking about the qualities i need for the kind of dreamy ethereal shots i want to create to depict the archetype series. took this on the beach in devon last week. reflections, blurred motion, movement, dreamlike......translate these qualities into a studio environment and work more with symbolism and I should be on the right track!

....and so it begins.

The MA is well and truly underway and so life must now be breathed into this blog, a record of my visual and academic wanderings over the next two years. I have decided to begin by working with Jungian archetypes, using these templates to explore the multi-faceted territory of the mythic feminine. These archetypes are at once personal and universal, resonating with all women through the various stages of the life cycle.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious owes its existence to hereditary forces, its content is not comprised of personal experience and its landscape is essentially one of archetypes. They are the 'motifs' of mythological research. Hubert and Mauss in the field of comparative religion define them as "categories of the imagination". So we are dealing with definitive forms in the psyche, what Jung described as "active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions'". The word active is key here, implying a generative capacity. Thus in this view of the psyche the mental events we each experience over the course of our lives are not determined by our personal histories alone but by the collective history of the species as a whole reaching back into the mists of time. Jung saw myths as direct expressions of this archetypal nature......

"Just as some kind of analytical technique is needed to understand a dream, so a knowledge of mythology is needed in order to grasp the meaning of a content deriving from the deeper levels of the psyche....The collective unconscious -- so far as we can say anything about it at all -- appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious". - 'The structure of the psyche, 1927'.

First port of call then, review of world mythology, read up on my Jungian theory and re-read 'women who run with the wolves', a seminal book on myth and female archetypes written by a Jungian psychoanalyst.

st as some kind of analytical technique is needed to understand a

dream, so a knowledge of mythology is needed in order to grasp the

meaning of a content deriving from the deeper levels of the psyche....The

collective unconscious -- so far as we can say anything about it at all –

appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for

which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the

whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective

unconscious”

ust as some kind of analytical technique is needed to understand a

dream, so a knowledge of mythology is needed in order to grasp the

meaning of a content deriving from the deeper levels of the psyche....The

collective unconscious -- so far as we can say anything about it at all –

appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for

which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the

whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective

unconscious”