Experiments with Photographs and Film

We were shown a film called NOVA which was about some young modern artists putting together compositions in an art gallery and it was showing them talking about their work as well as the process making it. There was a short animation film shown called Topologies (excerpt) by Quayola, which showed what appeared to be paper with 3D shapes coming out of it and moving around.It reminded me of stop-motion animation and it gave me the idea that I could take a a burst of photos of my friends moving around and then put them into a video to represent a similar thing of something slowly moving around the screen, I added a tapping sound to it to sound like it was flicking through the images and to add to the sense of movement on the screen. I did this with a few different photo bursts to see whether it was very effective or not.

I think these videos are very successful as they seem to work really well composition wise. However I don't really know how to develop them further at this point when comparing them to the other experiments I have been doing so I have decided to just keep them as one off experiments for now.

My focus artist was David Hockney who is a well know artist that works with photographs and also has a series of water compositions. There was a piece that he did called Sun On The Pool Los Angeles April 13th 1982 which he created using Polaroid photos. I decided to focus on my holiday photographs which were not done with Polaroid so I decided to try and imitate this style he used with my own water photographs, leaving white gaps between each photograph to try and give the impression of Polaroid photos. I chose the photos based on water, placing the underwater photos near in the last two rows and then the photographs that were on the surface or close to the surface on the top row. I decided to do this to create the illusion of someone actually going underwater deeper and deeper, so the top row is what they would see just as the person enters the water and then the further down they go they start to see different fish and then they reach the bottom and they see the sharks and the sand of the sea floor. I did this piece large scale on A1 paper so that I could use bigger photographs to allow you to be able to look closely at each individual photo and then all of them together as a composition. 

Sticking with my theme of people, I decided to focus on the photos that I had taken over the summer of family and friends when we went on holiday to Spain. I fell in love with the beautiful blue colours in the photographs which also influenced my decision to stick with just the holiday photographs. In this work I decided to cut out different shapes in the water area and I wanted the shapes to represent the movement of the water. I feel that this piece is not entirely successful as it is very busy and not all of the shapes are noticeable (i.e. the swirl in the bottom right corner). I think that it would have been better if I had stuck to one type of shape instead of trying to combine different shapes as it doesn’t allow the composition to flow nicely.

I did a black and white photocopy of this piece to focus on tone so that I could compare the two. I feel as though the black and white version is not as successful as the coloured version. There is less depth in the composition and for me it looks tacky and seems to lose the extra detail you get from the coloured version. I love the different blue tones of the water in the coloured piece which I feel you really miss out on in the black and white piece and it also seems to lose its balance without the colour.

I decided to try again doing paper cutting but using my own drawing, as I had drawn the figure from the photography onto white paper I decided to cut the figure out and stick her onto black sugar paper so that there would be contrast between the figure and the background. I also thought that by doing this it would allow the shapes cut into the background to be more visible and it would make the composition more balanced with white shapes and the white main subject of the piece.

This is the finished version of the previous image. I cut out some wavy shape to try and represent the movement of the water however I changed the drawing from the photograph I drew it from by just focusing on the figure and not including anything else from the photograph. I did not feel that this piece worked well as I think it was too simplistic and I think that the lack of detail in the piece makes it hard to appreciate it. It definitely was not as successful as the first style I tried with my other charcoal drawing composition I think perhaps it was the black background and the negative space that stops it from working.

As the last drawing composition failed to work successfully I decided to try it again however this time I used Biro pen for the figure to try and get more detail into this piece as there was a lack of it in the last composition. I kept the white background in this piece of work to see if the style of paper-cutting would work better and decided to then stick it over black paper to make the cut out shapes stand out and contrast with the background. I also did less cut out shapes in the background to try and not make the piece to overwhelming and to try and prevent the focus moving from the figure in the piece to the black shapes seeping through the background. I sprayed hairspray over the Biro pen drawing and moved the paper around to try and create a water effect as she is in the water in the photograph. However once I had sprayed the hairspray over the piece and manipulated it around I realised that by doing this I had actually stripped away the detail from the figure and made her almost translucent which was not what I wanted as it meant that the figure now looked lost compared to the shapes and contrast in the background. As this didn’t work I decided to refine it and draw back over the figure to make the lines bolder so that the figure would stand out again.

This is the piece once I had refined it and as you can see the figure now stands out a lot more in comparison to the background which has improved it greatly from before. However I feel that the composition still doesn’t work, it could be the style in which I have cut out the shapes but I felt as though this style actually had worked really well when I did it on the photograph. I think again that it is the lack of detail in the background that prevents the piece from actually working much like the last composition I did with the charcoal drawing. When compared to the photograph pieces and my first drawing composition I noticed that there was detail on the majority of those pages with little blank space which I realised seems to make the paper-cutting more successful so I decided to stop for now with the drawing compositions and to focus more on the actual photographs.

Artist Study

One of the artists I have decided to look at is David Hockney. The idea came because I had some photographs that I took on holiday in the swimming pool and I decided to cut them up, creating shapes that I felt reflected the water in the photographs. This reminded me of David Hockney’s ‘Water’ pieces and I felt that his work was inspiring and relevant to the direction I am taking my personal investigation. David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, print-maker, stage-designer and photographer. He was an important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 60s and is considered to be one of the most influential English artists of the 20^th Century.

Figure 1 - Mother

I really like his piece “Mother” which is a photographic collage that is shown in Figure 1. This piece of work consists of many copies of the same photograph of his mother that have been cut up into smaller rectangles. Hockney has over-laid these photos to create interesting lines and edges in the piece whilst also changing the shape of his mother’s face by spreading the photographs out more instead of keeping them all really condensed. He has also changed the shape by having multiple copies of some sections of the face placed next to each other in different positions which almost distorts collage and gives it a pixelated effect. I really loved how he has used the same photograph multiple times to create a collage instead of combining loads of different photographs, I feel as though it works really well because it has the same colour scheme throughout with similar tones so you can still focus on the subject of the piece which is his mother, rather than your attention being drawn away by contrasting photographs. I felt really inspired by this piece as I thought I could try a similar method but using pictures of my own family and friends which makes it more personal to me. I also thought that I could perhaps use this style to create a collage of a friend or family member who had sat through various poses in the photographs to create a new pose and body shape.

Figure 2 - Robert Littman Floating in My Pool

Another piece that I felt really inspired by was “Robert Littman Floating in My Pool” shown in Figure 2. Like Figure 1 this piece consists of a collage of cut-outs from multiple copies of the same photograph. This time Hockney has only used the images that have parts of the figure in them, with the majority of the piece being left as a white background. I feel as though this really speaks for itself and is a literal representation of fill in the blanks because the background is white which is ‘blanc’ in French and you can clearly see that the figure is mainly under water so your brain automatically starts to fill in the ‘blanks’ with the rest of the water that has been deliberately left out of the collage. Again I find it interesting how he has placed the photographs as they have created lines and edges on the piece. It is also interesting how there are two specific cut-outs that show two different parts of the body that have been completely separated from the other photographs and have been place on the right side of the piece with space between the two. Perhaps this was done to give an illusion that there are more people in the pool as these two specific cut-outs appear to be from a different photograph as the angles of the body parts are slightly different than those in the main piece of the collage, however the shorts appear to be the same so he could be layering them in a different position to give a sense of movement in his piece. As the colours and tones are so similar in the collage it is very hard to pinpoint exactly if the cut-outs are all from the same photograph or not, the photographs are very tightly placed with smaller cut-outs which makes it hard to differentiate.

Another artist I am looking at is Claire Pestaille who I found after I did a collage piece with a photograph of my mum and I discovered I had done something very similar to her Cinema II series. Whilst looking at her work I found that I quite liked what she did with her compositions and I decided to try her style of collage on my own photographs. Claire Pestaille’s work looks at historical and contemporary iconography with her pieces focusing mainly on women and femininity through disruption of photographic imagery. She uses lots of portraiture from the Golden Age of Hollywood, incorporating stills from films as well as contemporary and vintage photography.

Figure 3 - Milada Mladova, New York, 1939

I was really inspired by her ‘Crystalline’ series and particularly liked the composition shown in Figure 3 of Milada Mladova, 1939 in New York. This piece is a paper collage which consists of a disrupted vintage photograph that is geometrically divided, squared and cut, and contains duplicates of the photo which have been reassembled within the format of a grid to produce a simultaneous double. The image used is black and white is the rest of her work. The black and white I feel really helps you to focus just on the figure and the technique of the collage as your eyes are not disturbed by any other colours in the backgrounds or other areas of the image because it just focuses on tone. I think this style works very well in this composition because the movement of the squares is very subtle so you follow the path of the disruption to the right of the piece.  I was really inspired by the techniques of the gridding and wanted to incorporate this into my own work. I will use this with my coloured holiday photographs because the main colour component of these images is blue which I think will still allow the focus to be on the technique of the collage and the figure much like Pestaille’s black and white collages.

Claire Pestaille’s style of work is very different to David Hockney’s. Whilst they are both collage artists the main difference is Hockney largely uses colour in his collages unlike Pestaille who focuses on black and white and sepia. I think that the reason for this is because they use different sources to make up their compositions. Pestaille uses lots of old, vintage photographs from before coloured photography was invented where as Hockney uses a lot of Polaroid images which he has taken mainly in the 80s when coloured photography and pola-colour was widely used. You could argue that there is some similarity with gridding as David Hockney has done some collages where he has put the Polaroid images in a grid like structure with them forming square like shapes which is similar to Pestaille’s ‘Crystalline’ series however the difference being there is white space between the actual images in Hockney’s work.

Figure 4 - Motherhood

The third artist I am looking at is Annegret Soltau. She combines photographs of faces and people by tearing images and then stitching them together using thread to create a new, grotesque composition. I really like the technique she uses and I think I could take this as well as the idea of using thread and incorporate it into my collages. I could also combine the different artist styles to see if they work well together and compare them.

Artist Research

David Hockney

Prehistoric Museum Near Palm Springs, 1982

Robert Littman Floating in my Pool, Oct. 1982

Photographing Annie Leibovitz While She Is Photographing Me, Mojave Desert, Feb 1983

Celia's Children Albert + George Clark Los Angeles April 7th 1982

Nicholas Wilder Studying Picasso, Los Angeles 24th March 1982

Patrick Procktor, Pembroke Studios, London, 7th May 1982

Sun on the Pool Los Angeles April 13th 1982

David Hockney's photo collages and montages, known as 'Joiners', caught the eye of the public in the 1980's. The creation of the joiners had actually occurred accidentally. In the late 60s he noticed that photographers were starting to use cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures, which he wasn't particularly fond of because they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles where he decided to take some Polaroid shots of the room and glued them together, not actually intending them to be a composition on their own. When he looked at the final composition, he realised it actually created a narrative, as if the viewer of the piece was moving through the room. After this discovery he began working more and more with photography and exclusively pursued this new style. From 1982, he explored the use of camera, making compositions of Polaroid photographs arranged in a rectangular grid, later on using prints to create photo collages where he compiled a complete picture from a series of individually photographed details. The idea behind his use of grids was to try and make his pieces have an element of cubism.

Claire Pestaille

Carmen Dell' Orifice

Chrystal Time

Candelabra 

Madelaine

Isabelle

(Romance: The Big Sleep)

Claire Pestaille's 'The Crystalline Project' is a collection of disrupted vintage photographs, film stills and studio portraiture of women from the golden age of Hollywood. Duplicate images are geometrically divided, squared and cut, then reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle within the format of a grid in order to produce a 'fractured circuit' or a 'simultaneous double'. The grid format becomes both the 'compositional and conceptual device' for the theatrics of the deconstruction of the collage to take place, it is a place where identity is questioned, formed, reconstruction and also at time made unrecognisable.

Cinema II was another series of collage work that she did, it was actually one of her fist series produced which was inspired by film stills and Hollywood portraiture. It was based around stop motion and the concepts of time and movement as Pestaille finds this really interesting. The compositions produced in this series utilise single and double images of iconic portraits of Hollywood actors and actresses. They are sliced in vertical strips and the portraits are then layered to form a surreal visual experience and the optical sensations of vibration, movement and mutation.

Annegret Soltau

Motherhood

Grima

Motherhood

Annegret Soltau uses needle and thread to create grotesque looking collages, she rips up different images, mainly of peoples faces and combines them by stitching them together to create a new composition.