Paul Seawright- secterian murders

Paul Seawrights secterian murders was pointed out to me by a tutor. His work is alot like what i want to achieve with my images. The images are somewhat detached to what the photographer is wanting to say and only with the addition of text does it become clear the meaning of the image. It leads the audience into a false sence of security about the images and causes a 360 change in how you view the image once u have read the accompanying text.

I will go into more detail about the work of paul seawright as he is the basis of my essay which i will submit as a post as it holds revilence to my work.

Sara Gadd- Hydropathic

Sara Gadds collection entitled Hydropathic is a collection of images surrounding the history of Craiglockhart. The images are simple, with a dramatic and colourful lighting to create different effects.


 At the end of the 19th Century Craiglockhart was built as a Hydropathic centre for water therapies and healing of various illnesses. At the start of World War I the building was requisitioned and turned into a military hospital for the treatment of sick officers, more precisely those suffering from neurasthenia or shell shock.The story of the patients during wartime is a horrific one and the outcome of their healing is tragically ironic. The pool became a tool of war where men wandered, tormented by nightmares and hallucinations, shocked and confused, unable to forget the flashes and blasts, the mud and the blood, the memories of mutilated and dead friends.


The images are simple, and yet very dark and atmospheric due to the lighting. They are also alot different to the rest of the stuff ive been looking at! I like how again this project relates to the past and history, which is why i looked at it in the first place. 

gabriele basilico

Gabriele Basilico is one of today's best known documentary photographers in Europe. Cities and industrial landscapes are his fields of investigation.
Trained as an architect, he takes photographs of pieces of architecture and works for publishers, industrial concerns, public and private institutions. Much of his work focuses on main towns and huge black and white city scapes but what interests me more is the more local and smaller villages and towns he photographed classed as his 'vintage works.'
His photos are high contrast  black and white images, high in detailing. With focus on lines and structure, he seems to be able to have the right eye to turn a normal structure into something so unusal. I get the feeling of almost a film noir style about some of his 'vintage' collection. theyre just very well structured images.  It reminds me kinda of the work of Bill Brandt.

 

Zarina Bhimji -cleaning the garden

After what i said in my last post about creating images that refer to a place but without being obvious i looked into the work of Zarina Bhimji and her collection entitled 'cleaning the garden.' The images, while simple and pretty, have a very serious point behind them, about slavery. 

Several of the large-format color photographs show an 18th-century British country house and its garden. The garden was designed by Capability Brown, who in the early Romantic era was much in demand for cultivating the look of wild nature in the parks of rural estates. As it happened, the fortunes of some of his clientele, including the owners of the house in the photographs, were based on the products of a very different kind of garden: British-owned sugar plantations worked by African slaves in the Caribbean.While researching this history, Ms. Bhimji came across 18th-century newspaper advertisements for the return of runaway black slaves, some of whom are referred to as Indians, others as Moors. The words from these notices, reproduced on mirrors, appear in the show next to the images and relate the images to the more serious meaning. The news paper clippings, well the text, has been etched into the mirrors and while the text is very old fashioned i cant help but feel it is a look thats very contempory. It also makes the audience relate as they seem themselves as they read about these slaves.

So do oblique shots of another garden, that of the Alhambra in Spain, built by North African Muslim conquerors known in Europe as Moors. To their creators, these gardens, with their exquisite logic and symmetry, were an earthly reflection of paradise. 

The enigmatically sensual images that result suggest, in the context, some core of disruptive psychic energy underlying both the gardens and the histories that produced them. Ms. Bhimji delivers all this information subliminally; the installation gains in intricacy the longer you give it. And the pictures are stunning.  This is very close to the approach that i wish to try and achieve in my photos, a sence of past, history, to give a contrast with pretty photos that contrast the tramatic past. The form in these images are pretty straightforward. and while they are not just images of gardens but  amix of places and imagery, they are all tied by the underlying subject of the slave trade.

Where next?

Where next with my project?

Well after my feedback from my presentation i think i need to focus away from these well known historical places, or work on creating a style for myself, as my lecturer said all these images are rather touristy, and i did think that myself, i mean i like the idea of creating an image that is beautiful and astetically pleasing to contrast the tragity that happened there, but i also dont want to fall into a typical 'tourist pictures' infact i think by looking at smaller, well hidden locations i may be able to avoid this. Also i think i should try for the less obvious shots, as i said before, like the images of cavendish house, my fave photos out of all of them was the simple wall with the leaves and tree, its not obvious where it is, and the colour is reflective of the fire that happened there, which makes me think maybe i could try and add an association to a place in there, rather then just adding text too.