Patterson fills the frame, the flower is everything. By doing this I think it makes the viewer look at the flower in a different way. It also doing taking the photo in this way makes the viewer spend a little longer observing it.
Artist Statement
Artist Statement
Every artist is, first of all, a craftperson thoroughly knowledgeable about the materials, tools, and techniques of his or her particular medium and skilled in using many of them.
However, in my view, no amount of technical knowledge and competence is, of itself, sufficient to make a craftperson into an artist. That requires caring -- passionate caring about ultimate things. For me there is a close connection between art and religion in the sense that both are concerned about questions of meaning -- if not about the meaning of existence generally, then certainly about the meaning of one's individual life and how a person relates to his or her total community/environment. This is not to say that every work of art is or should be a heavily profound statement, indeed many may be very light-hearted, but rather that consciously and unconsciously an artist engaged in serious work is always raising or dealing with the question: "What really matters?"
However, in my view, no amount of technical knowledge and competence is, of itself, sufficient to make a craftperson into an artist. That requires caring -- passionate caring about ultimate things. For me there is a close connection between art and religion in the sense that both are concerned about questions of meaning -- if not about the meaning of existence generally, then certainly about the meaning of one's individual life and how a person relates to his or her total community/environment. This is not to say that every work of art is or should be a heavily profound statement, indeed many may be very light-hearted, but rather that consciously and unconsciously an artist engaged in serious work is always raising or dealing with the question: "What really matters?"
For me, answering that question means recognizing the factors that produced and shaped me. I cannot escape dealing with these things if I am to live creatively as a human being or, to put it another way, if I am to take control of and maintain the integrity of my own life. Photography (and, more generally, visual design) has been my enabling medium.
In the broadest sense I photograph Nature, which includes human beings. Growing up in a rural community, I was surrounded by natural things. Unlike a child in a totally urban environment, my friends and peer group were not only other children, but also wild and domesticated animals, plants of every sort, brooks and waterfalls, rocks and sand. In winter I listened to the wind-chiming of ice-covered branches, wandered through spring's greening fields, splashed about for minnows in the river, and gathered bouquets of autumn leaves.
In the broadest sense I photograph Nature, which includes human beings. Growing up in a rural community, I was surrounded by natural things. Unlike a child in a totally urban environment, my friends and peer group were not only other children, but also wild and domesticated animals, plants of every sort, brooks and waterfalls, rocks and sand. In winter I listened to the wind-chiming of ice-covered branches, wandered through spring's greening fields, splashed about for minnows in the river, and gathered bouquets of autumn leaves.
However, the obviously beautiful in my environment was balanced by other realities. I saw the food chain operating, experienced the effects of droughts and floods, and daily observed the process of ageing. When my little sister died, the loss I felt was assuaged by my having learned early that this happens to everyone and everything.
I believe that the ability of human beings to be creative depends fundamentally on the health and well-being of our biosphere, the few kilometres of air, water, and soil that surround our planet like the skin of an apple. Quite simply, they are the physical and spiritual bases of our lives, and the only source of materials and tools that enable us to express our responses to questions and feelings about ultimate things. Creation and creativity are inextricably linked.
This awareness now forms the central core of my work. The abstracting of visual elements in order to recognize their particularity has become automatic, but seeing, combining, and creating them as integrated "wholes" will remain a life-long challenge.
Pictorial realism
Sam Taylor-Wood
I first saw this piece in the Tate Modern years ago (I think 2001)
It is a film but I feel it is still a photo essay but just a bit faster, this piece tells the story of decay.
When I first saw this in the Tate Modern I felt compelled to see it all the way to the end even through I knew what was about to happen I felt that I had to see it.
MASTER PHOTOGRAPHER
By Tim Parkin | Posted | 11, Free, Master Photographers
Unlike many of the photographers we have discussed in our ongoing Masters section, John wasn’t a photographer from childhood, being more obsessed with drawing wildlife. His passion for photography was inspired when his mother sent him an issue of Picture Post when he was in Africa when serving in the RAF as a nurse. This edition had some extracts from ‘The Family of Man’, a pivotal photographic exhibition that was put together by Edward Steichen which featured the work of Dorothea Lange, Cartier Bresson, Edward Weston, Bill Brandt. These images struck a chord in his burgeoning political psyche and he bought a camera and started taking pictures whilst still in the forces. On leaving he tried to make a living as a freelance photographer but the lifestyle didn’t suit (he didn’t’ like having to look for work).
Whilst working for a studio, he was asked to take over a portrait studio that was bought out by his employer and on the day the owner was told to go through the equipment with John, he was nowhere to be seen. John was confronted with an 8×10 studio camera and darkroom and ‘sort of guessed’ his way around it, in the end working their for four years. He was also working on his own documentary photography in Coventry, shooting
the new immigrant population.
In 1970 he was asked to teach photography after trying to find jobs as a printer in London (even working as a camera salesman at one point). The University of Derby became his new employer where he taught the Diploma in Creative Photography.
His landscape photography began just before he moved to Derby, coinciding with the break up of his first marriage. He spent some a winter in wales with the woman who was to become his second wife and got absorbed in the landscape but didn’t start photographing it. It was only on his return and upon receiving the offer of an exhibition that he thought back to that time in the landscape and returned to wales with a camera.
His landscape photography was always about ideas about place rather than just the place itself. He wanted to capture a sense of the forces that shape the landscape at large. The results are photographs that have a raw power with a presentation that can look uncomposed to the hurried eye but is actually exquisitely balanced.
Nearly all of John’s work is based on the exploration of a theme or topic and worked out as a series of pictures over time. For instance his original work on the metaphoric use of wounds of trees accompanied the break up of his first marriage. Then, as he became more entranced by the landscape, he started to try to capture some of the elemental forces at work (initially inspired by the raw landscape of Wales) such as the wind, change, play, water, etc. Each of these themes would be explored in minutiae, working from the study of one trip to the plan for the next. Taking visual discoveries and expanding on them to see where they took him. It is these series of pictures that many find so fascinating.
in the late 1980’s he stopped his landscape work when he read a story about how landscape photography wasn’t addressing the more political side of the world and he couldn’t take pictures of beauty when the world was being wrecked. It almost seemed like his desire to take beautiful pictures conflicted with his understanding of critical theory. He took an MA in film studies in order to try to work out a foundation point to continue working as a photographer.
He had started working on still life work (thistles and also the tulip project) around the time he was taking his film studies MA (I think the tulip work started as a way of avoiding his thesis writing).
He worked on tulip photography for over a decade (I strongly suggest buying John Blakemore’s Black and White Photography Workshop which is one of the best books on the art of photography I have read – and not a bad technical book to boot). His still life work is all about metaphor and gesture.
Although John retired officially in 2001 he has since been asked to return back to work and is still enjoying teaching.
I strongly urge anybody who finds this work at all interesting to buy a copy of John Blakemore’s Black and White Photography Masterclass. Despite the tutorial-esque title, the book is also a documentation of John’s working method – see the review here.
Tulip Journey
All these photographs remind me of William Morris fabric designs, they are not scientific representation of a tulip.
| The Stilled Gaze audio interview, with photography by John Blakemore
John Blakemore is a master photographer and printer from Great Britain, who has been practicing his art since 1956. Renowned for his richly detailed and nuanced landscapes and still-lifes, he has influenced generations of photographers through his classes at the University of Derby as well as countless workshops. Students and fellow photographers often acknowledge that Blakemore has "enriched their lives beyond compare."
We met at the Rhubarb-Rhubarb photography festival in Birmingham, UK, and talked for a long pleasant time about his career in photography, nine years of creating still-life images of tulips, the paradox of the "subject" of a photo, his process of working and re-working, and his fascination with the subtleties of print tonality. You can listen to 12-minute edited version of our conversation here. It was recorded at a busy outdoor cafe, so there is a bit of bothersome background noise, but his manner of speaking and articulate nature make it a very worthwhile listen. Here is an example of Blakemore’s thoughtful eloquence in words, from his latest book, John Blakemore’s Black and White Photography Workshop: What Kind of Journey? "It only remains now to reconsider the images that were made during a period in which I photographed tulips so assiduously; to question the nature of the tulip journey. "At the conclusion of any extended piece of work, one inevitably questions the results. What have I learned during this journey? What has this intense period of activity been about? "I learned little about tulips, not much – less perhaps than I could have learned in a few afternoons at the library. My search then was not a botanical one, nor, though I learned a little history (I hadn’t previously known of the period characterized as ‘tulipomania’), a historical one. I looked at images that might not otherwise have engaged my attention – obscure flower paintings, botanical illustrations – not however, as an art historian but as an image-maker seeking ideas and correspondences. "The tulip journey, then was ultimately a visual journey, an investigation and discovery of visual possibilities. The tulip became an object of attention and fascination. It became both text and pretext for an activity of picture-making. The photographs are not finally, or not primarily, about tulips: they contain tulips. To say this is not to diminish the role of the tulip. Had the vase of flowers on the table when I made the first tentative exposures exploring the space of my kitchen been, let’s say daffodils, then the journey, if it had ever begun, would in all probability have been shorter. "The daffodil, although it is a delightful flower, exhibits a stubborn rigidity of form; it lives and dies at attention. The tulip, however, is a flower of constant metamorphosis; it stretches towards the light and gestures to occupy the space. "I spent much time just contemplating the flowers, with the camera far from my thoughts. I delighted in the tulips’ voluptuous presence. Such periods of contemplation, of visual pleasure, are always a necessary part of my work process. It is a deepening of my experience of, and of my relationship to, my subject. "One cannot photograph experience, but to have lived it can change and develop habitual ways of seeing and of knowing."
My Ideas
A photo essay about the life of a lilly
Whereas today we know better, photography can be manipulated. It has always been able to be manipulated. Is photography art? |
"If one finds a photograph beautiful, it is because one finds something beautiful
in its subject. A painting may be beautiful, on the other hand, even when it
represents an ugly thing."
Roger Scruton (1984)
I believe this argument is flawed because the photographer has a great deal of choice technically and creatively. Just like painting a photography is staged and created. A choice has to be made to capture both a painting and or photograph in the first place, and in both elements have to be considered things such as:
- line
- shape
- texture
- form
- colour
- value
- space
All these visual elements make up the composition. However, with photography there are technical elements to think about to:
- depth of field
- shutter speed
- lighting
- filters
- post production
It is my believe that photography is both art and a recorded document. Although a photographs doesn't just have to record the truth as a fact, it can also record the truth as an emotion. Just as Cezanne or Matisse captured an emotional truth the same can be done with photography, and just like a painting some of the visual elements can be manipulated to capture something else entirely.
One Photographer that does this is
Paul Strand
“Strand first studied photography at the Ethical Cultural School (New York City) with Lewis W. Hine, who introduced him to Alfred Stieglitz and the “291” gallery. He received encouragement from Stieglitz and was strongly influenced by the work shown in his gallery, particularly that of Picasso, Cézanne, and other modern artists. Strand had briefly worked in the soft-focus pictorial style that was still dominant in art photography, but in 1915 he began his first experiments with abstraction. His close-ups of kitchen bowls and other works of this early period (The White Fence, for example) were studies in design; sharply delineated shapes and patterns were of prime importance, though the images never completely lost touch with reality. Stieglitz recognized the power of these works and saw that they pointed toward a new realism; he gave Strand a one-man show at “291” and published his photographs in the last two issues of Camera Work (the final issue was devoted exclusively to Strand’s work). Pictorialism had reached the end of its creative period and Strand’s new images shaped the aesthetic of “straight” photography that was soon to dominate photography as an art form in America.In 1919 Strand began to explore nature as a source of imagery – trees, leaves, grasses, rock formations, and landscapes – and it became an enduring theme in his work. His other major concern was people. From his early photographs on the streets of New York City, to documents of New England, Europe, Egypt, Africa, and elsewhere, he portrayed a sympathetic and direct appreciation of the humanity of his subjects.As Strand’s work matured it lost its early abstraction. He photographed directly, often using a flat, frontal viewpoint. He no longer searched for effect in unusual points of view or in expanded contrast, and he became almost self-effacing in his attempt to reveal objects without introducing overt comment. “No picture of Strand’s is brilliant for brilliance’s sake,” observed Leo Hurwitz. “To him the object is all important. His photograph is his best effort to render the emotional significance of the object. His approach is one of utmost simplicity. In this sense his photographs are impersonal, selfless; yet they are characterized by a strong emotion” (The Mexican Portfolio).In the 1920s-1940s Strand pursued his concurrent interest in film. The films on which he worked included Manhatta (also called New York the Magnificent), made in 1921 with Charles Sheeler; The Wave, made in 1933 for the Mexican government; and Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains, made in 1935 for the U.S. Resettlement Administration”1
Read more about Paul Strand Biography by www.leegallery.com
He photographs everyday objects in unusual ways.
His objective was never to get the viewer to respond to the subject-matter rather he wanted to turn the object into a composition. Just like Edward Weston photographed clouds in Mexico 1920's, not as a study but because of the shapes they made
Aaron Siskind
Siskind started out as a documentary photography but became increasingly interested in the properties of photographs as opposed to their subject matter. By 1942 he set out concentrating on shape, pattern and texture.
"the meaning should be in the photograph and not the subject photographed"
(Nathon Lyons, 1965)
Or as Siskind himself explained, a photograph, like a painting, should be valued 'as a new object to be contemplated for its own meaning and its own beauty.
(Richard Howells, pg 163, 2003)
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