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”