Unit 17 - first shoot and bad news

Tonight, I actually get around to taking some photos for once (2 months after starting the course). With the help of a fellow student, I actually managed to find 2 models for the Black Metal idea.

We set up the studio with the classic white/invisible backdrop in mind. It was tough because they weren't professional models and tended to freeze into the same position when I wanted them to pose. So I abandoned that idea altogether and just encouraged them to fool around and just caught them when they least expected it. We ended up shooting about 8 rolls of film in about 90 minutes, incorporating Colour and Black & White Negative and some Slide Film (to be cross-processed).

What ruined it was being told at the end that one of the tutors would be off on jury service for the forseeable future - and he's the guy that does all the colour processing and maintains all the equipment. So god knows when I will get to even view what I've shot tonight.

Bauhaus

No, no the Goth Rock band of the early 1980s, but this old place in Germany.

There are some aspects about this movement which I find laudable. For example, reclamation - its use of found materials (although largely because they couldn't afford to buy them early on). Also, the craft aspect, and the workshop approach to learning. So many of the modern technique of education were gleamed for the Bauhaus.

But there are also some aspects which make it less radical and revolutionary as some would have us believe. The later designs it produced were concerned largely with functional ideas and the need for mass production, which can only really be concerns for an organisation which believes in capitalism. And although the Nazis eventually closed it, they used many of the designs right through the Nazi era (anyone who knows anything about Nazi architecture will be well aware of the striking modernism employed in many of the designs, although this contrasts with much of the classically orientated stuff they also loved).

Dada poem

We're looking at the context to our work, and it's not all visual.

We've been looking at Dada & Surrealism, and we created a Dada poem last night, using cut-up techniques (follow the links for background reading).

Here's my effort:

Ideal Home/Home Ideal

make them work for you using

simple. Whichever room you

found a way to make it beautifully we promise!

and papers shown on the left,

from the floors, paints, fabrics

For proof, just turn the page

love with using patterns

to translate your dreams

together the perfect look with plan to transform, you can put

our cheat’s guide to colour

our essential colour palette. into reality when you plan a

confidence. If you’ve fallen in choose any colour combination

decorating scheme – so we’ve and they’ll work together

and pictures together,

we know how hard it is

It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 …

(This was an article in Ideal Home about some kind of decorating bilge that's all the rage these days)

Thomas Joshua Cooper lecture

Tonight, I went to a lecture by Thomas Joshua Cooper, the artist whose exhibition I visited a few weeks ago.

This was a long, rambling lecture, with slides. It included a lot of TJC's work and also people he considers to be influential.

TJC's work is the kind of landscape photography that interests me. It's not the chocolate box, National Trust style that can be found in photography magazines, and that which adorns corporate office calendars. There is something else at work - looking at specific detail rather than the wide vista, and concerns of texture, and of time and space.

TJC was evidently very nervous & self-deprecating, which helps to endear him to me. But a lot of what he said clearly has significance to him, or perhaps a certain kind of audience, which the people present may constitute (the audience was quite clearly a Bourgeois one). For that reason, I tended to feel ill at ease.

But it was worth coming along to. Now I need to get hold of his (relatively expensive) books at some point in the future...