The grey area
The grey area is something that nobody really knows or has an answer for, I think that it is things that don't have much explanation. most things we see, hear or watch everyday have an explanation, the grey area is the stuff that we don't have that for. The grey area has an element of mystery and in a bit of a sinister way too.
Documentary photography is a series of images that tell a story about one subject, it doesn't necessarily explore one genre of photography like portraiture or landscape because it isn't focused on that it is focused on the story it is trying to convey.
Pictures are seen as reliable forms of evidence because they depict visually what happened at a point in time whereas if someone says something, people don't know if it's true, they just have to take that persons word for it, which is why people want to have photographic evidence for things. Photographs can be very reliable however, they can manipulate, because they only show what happened at one still moment, this is why photographs aren't completely reliable, something that is more reliable than photographs are videos, this is because it has the visual quality of a photograph but shows more.
Photographers know better than anyone that pictures can be manipulated and changed in lots of different ways, for example, photoshop, anyone can use it and make a picture look exactly how they want it too. A good example of a photograph being manipulated is Rhein II, this is an image that has been manipulated in a way that it is two pictures combined, a city scape and a landscape taken in the country side of a river, the picture looks convincingly real purely because of how good the editing and that is a good example of how two very different images can be put together and made into one with good enough editing.
Documentary photography is a series of images that tell a story about one subject, it doesn't necessarily explore one genre of photography like portraiture or landscape because it isn't focused on that it is focused on the story it is trying to convey.
Pictures are seen as reliable forms of evidence because they depict visually what happened at a point in time whereas if someone says something, people don't know if it's true, they just have to take that persons word for it, which is why people want to have photographic evidence for things. Photographs can be very reliable however, they can manipulate, because they only show what happened at one still moment, this is why photographs aren't completely reliable, something that is more reliable than photographs are videos, this is because it has the visual quality of a photograph but shows more.
Photographers know better than anyone that pictures can be manipulated and changed in lots of different ways, for example, photoshop, anyone can use it and make a picture look exactly how they want it too. A good example of a photograph being manipulated is Rhein II, this is an image that has been manipulated in a way that it is two pictures combined, a city scape and a landscape taken in the country side of a river, the picture looks convincingly real purely because of how good the editing and that is a good example of how two very different images can be put together and made into one with good enough editing.
Rhein II
Jack Latham
Jack Latham is a newly popular photographer, the way he photographs and what he photographs is interesting to me because he doesn't photograph what your average photographer might, his pictures are strange and mysterious. In his project 'the parliament of owls' he investigates the mysteries that lie beneath the bohemain club, the pictures he takes in this project are interesting because they are mysterious and he takes pictures in a very thinking outside the box sort of way.
'I started to develop a visual language that I felt was starting to convey narratives that I wanted to tell'- this is Jack Latham speaking about his first steps in his career in photography, he said this in an interview where he was looking back on that point in his life. I think that this is a good quite as it really shows his way of thinking, for a lot of people they would find narratives and that would lead the way in their images but for him the images lead the narratives, I find this interesting because that is the way that his mind works.
'I started to develop a visual language that I felt was starting to convey narratives that I wanted to tell'- this is Jack Latham speaking about his first steps in his career in photography, he said this in an interview where he was looking back on that point in his life. I think that this is a good quite as it really shows his way of thinking, for a lot of people they would find narratives and that would lead the way in their images but for him the images lead the narratives, I find this interesting because that is the way that his mind works.
class work task
In class we were all given one picture that was stuck on a piece of sugar paper, we were instructed to annotate it, Mr Nichols gave us a few minutes to annotate what were thought was interesting, what the light was like, what kind of picture it was and after we had annotated for a few minutes sir told us to pass it to the person next to us so that everyone would change photograph, we did this twice over.
These were the two images that I got, I thought that they were interesting because they are both portraits however, neither of them follow the normal characteristics of a portrait picture, they are both very mysterious, we don't really see either of the twos faces, and the lighting in both is very contrasted and can go from being very light to also being very shaded.
These were the two images that I got, I thought that they were interesting because they are both portraits however, neither of them follow the normal characteristics of a portrait picture, they are both very mysterious, we don't really see either of the twos faces, and the lighting in both is very contrasted and can go from being very light to also being very shaded.
image analysis
This is one of the images in Jack Latham's Parliament of Owls that I analysed, having now looked at the rest of the images in that project and I have concluded that this image is my favourite, due to the mystery involved in it, in my opinion I think that it was taken by resting a camera on a car and using the headlights on high beam to illuminate the forest around him. What I find most interesting about this image in particular is the fact that we have no way of telling what the source of light is, it could be a car light but at the same time it could be a flash light. One thing that catches my eye when i look at it is the phone, I think it is because of how central it is in the image, it isn't so much central horizontally but the man who is central frame in the image is holding it, it is however central vertically, another thing is that it is covering his eyes and that gives the image a sense of mystery, eyes are the first thing that a person sees on another person and as soon as you see someone and they see you it is the first way you connect, through their eyes, and this man is covering them so we don't really know who he is. The rule of thirds applies to this image, he is central and has two areas of trees and forest on either side of him. It is aesthetically pleasing to look at because he is very central frame and there is every indication that he is what we want to be looking at in this image. There is an element of who is he and what does he want, is he trying to hurt us? what does he want?, I like that Jack Latham's pictures make people ask these questions. The area that he is in looks like an area in particular that has no trees or bushes where he is standing but around him looks like tightly packed trees, this suggests that this is a public place or place that people have been before. Initially the image made me think that the image was mysterious because i didn't know where the light was coming from, that was my first and main thought on the picture, however, now there is more mystery as to who he is and where he is and what his significance is to Jack Latham's project.
I think that something that strikes me as most interesting in this image is the phone that he is holding over his eyes, is he holding it there to cover his eyes? this could be why he is holding it close to his face. He might be taking a picture of his own, and that is also interesting because if he was taking an image himself then that would be revealing a lot more about the image and where the light is coming from.
I think that something that strikes me as most interesting in this image is the phone that he is holding over his eyes, is he holding it there to cover his eyes? this could be why he is holding it close to his face. He might be taking a picture of his own, and that is also interesting because if he was taking an image himself then that would be revealing a lot more about the image and where the light is coming from.
My Response to Jack Latham's Parliament of owls
This is my response to Jack Latham's work in Parliament of owls. In class we were asked to go around the school and make a narrative of images, these images could only really be related in your eyes and they had to be slightly mysterious in the same way Jack Latham makes his images. The first decision I made was to make all of my images black and white, the story i decided to tell only really means something to me, the first thing I thought about is that Thomas Tallis school is still a secondary school to me, at least in my head I see it as more of a secondary school than a sixth form so I wanted to relate it to my 5 years in secondary school, so I decided to also take 5 pictures for each year, the series of images was a study of the school and their attitude towards me over each year and my attitude towards school over the 5 years. The name is colourful monochrome, and just like Jack Latham I am going to leave people guessing as to what it might mean. I think that even without the context the images kind of tell a story in that it is almost like going round the school and telling a story like that, you can defiantly tell that it is all the same place in all of the images. I think that the grass and the concrete, even though are very different compliment the filter that I have used in these images very well and gives it a nice more black than white look. I learnt that for me the most important threshold concept is number 7 which is that 'photographs are not fixed in meaning, context is everything', I like this one because it seems very focused on the photographers views on their own images and what it means to them, this I think also goes the same for Jack Latham and his work. If I were to do it again then I would change it by using a film camera and if not then I would use a tripod/make the horizon more straight when taking the images.
Homework task to play with genre conventions in a new set of images
In class sir set us homework, which was to take 30 pictures all under the same genre, we had the choice of landscape, still life or portraiture, I chose portraiture. Another part of the homework was that we had to play around with the genre conventions of the genre that we had chosen. In portraiture the conventions are that it is an image that has depict someone well, they are mostly used as profiles of people for id cards or online profiles, so as it being an image of themselves people want it to look appealing. The definition of a portrait is portraiture in photography is a photograph of a person or group of people that captures the personality of the subject by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses- wikipedia. So I am interested to see what I can do with the conventions of that.
This is a portrait by Jack Latham, the portrait doesn't follow the conventions of a portrait, the person in this image looks angry and because of what I believe to be a mix of the lighting and his body language, quite intimidating, he is sitting facing towards the camera which makes it look more like a mugshot but his head is turned to the side which makes it look less like that.
Here are two examples of conventional portraiture, one was taken by me and one is an image that is used on my student ID card, as you can see these are two very different types of conventional portraiture, the one on the left is an example of where there is a plain white back ground and the subject smiles and looks directly into the camera, the one on the right is an example of a portrait that conveys the emotion of the picture using the lighting and the surroundings just as much as the subject.
My images playing with the conventions of portraiture
These images are a mix of different styles and ways I have played with the conventions of portraiture. The first way that I played with the conventions was the positioning, framing and what the subject was doing in the photo, what I wanted to do was make sure that the subject wasn't looking at the screen and if they were then that they weren't looking at the camera, if those both failed then i wanted to make sure that the image was blurry, three of the main conventions of photography are that the subject is looking at the camera, they are smiling (unless it is a mugshot) and that it is a well lit sharp image, like the image of myself used for my student ID card. The way that I would describe these images are messy portraits, the images that I took are all strange in their own way and I think that the strangeness of these images is what makes them effective, similarly to Jack Latham's work, i took inspiration from the aspect of Jack Latham's work that you really don't know what the people in his images are doing/thinking. Another way that I played with the conventions of portraiture is through editing, portraits are usually very skin matched tones like white and black and easy colours too look at, so I decided to edit the colours and make very vibrant colours in some of them, not to make the images un appealing but to make them appealing in a different way to what most portraits would look like. I have added images of animals in this set of pictures because portraits can be of animals as well, people don't usually do it but animal portraiture is a type of photography. I chose portraiture because I enjoy taking portraiture images, and it is something that I frequently do, some of these images are even taken from my camera roll, I like taking and being in pictures and my phone has a portraiture camera in it, so this seemed to be the best option.
WWW
I think that the images that I took went well and I also think that they work well with the few that I took from my camera roll and I think that they all seem similar but if you look closely are quite individual in their own way.
EBI
I think that if I did it again and also if I get a similar task to this next time I would take images that are more closely linked together, with this I think that it was more like I took images when I thought it would look good and it wasn't the conventions of portraiture.
WWW
I think that the images that I took went well and I also think that they work well with the few that I took from my camera roll and I think that they all seem similar but if you look closely are quite individual in their own way.
EBI
I think that if I did it again and also if I get a similar task to this next time I would take images that are more closely linked together, with this I think that it was more like I took images when I thought it would look good and it wasn't the conventions of portraiture.
MY favourite image out of them
I really like this image because of the colours and the way that I edited it, the image is edited so that everything in the frame seems vibrant and colourful, it is also taken in portrait mode on my phone so the background is blurred out, you can't see my eyes even slightly because they are one way glasses, I am not smiling and finally you can also see someone in the reflection of the sun glasses that are sitting on my hat so in a weird way it is two portraits in one. I think that the only convention in this image is that I am looking into the camera but the image is so bizar that it doesn't really matter.
My Grey Area Project
Mr Nichols for homework asked us to find an unusual event, new story or something similar to this in our local area (around South East london), a few thoughts came into my mind about what I could do, first I thought about looking at old newspaper archives and things like that but this really wasn't catching my attention due to the fact that I didn't really know the stories well enough. From the beginning I had my mind set on doing it to do with Blackheath, this was for two reasons, in my opinion Blackheath is a very interesting place, it is in South East London which is known for its bad areas and poor areas and yet Blackheath is a vastly rich and wealthy area in the middle of all this, with places like Charlton and Lewisham around it which are also known for their particularly bad areas. However, I had all of this in my head and wanted to make it into something, it wasn't enough to make anything out of it, so I thought to myself where in blackheath is significant for being strange or being a bit of a grey area, The Blackheath Dips, this is an area of the heath if thats what you could call it, 3 huge dips in an area of land just next to greenwich park and on the very corner of the heath. Blackheath dips has a strange history, I will begin with saying there is no real name for it but many people call it different things such as: Blackheath dips, dips, ditches, Vanbrugh park, dog park, etc, the list goes on but the point is that there isn't an official location, not even on google maps. The history of dips begins with the black death, dips was originally a burial ground for the black death which is funny because people think that the whole of the heath is where people got buried but it wasn't it was dips and smaller places like that, so it has always been a ditch in the ground but then if we go forwards a few hundred years to the London blitz, three high explosion bombs got dropped on the bumpy patch of grass that was dips, which made the three huge ditches in the ground which is why dips looks the way it looks today. During world war 2 dips was also a gun placement, they used dips in world war 2 to place anti aircraft guns which I find quite interesting, dips has always been used for something but has never been an official place that has been owned by anyone, it isn't really considered an area of the heath, it just a nameless park that people have always used, the closest to an official name is across the road the patch of grass is called Blackheath common. In more recent history a car has crashed into dips, bars put up where the incident happened, multiple fires have happened, on purpose and by accident, causing there to be multiple bushes and areas throughout dips to be burnt and black instead of being green like the rest of it, two trees have been struck by lightening causing them to be split into three, dips is a highly bushy and tree-heavy area which is why it makes sense that fires and trees getting struck by lightening happens there. In 1992 a tv show called 'the blackheath poisonings', this was a dark tv show about a man investigating his fathers death. Much more recently dips has become known for its criminal activity with people being in 'homophobic attacks', even in the area of dips they now have signs warning the attackers and everyday people who are simply walking through. These homophobic attacks are becoming so apparent that multiple news pages have been reporting it multiple times on their pages. If you look at the timeline of events at dips, its history is so strange that it has been used for so many things and now finally
My thoughts before I took these images was that I would be taking about 50 images at the most and the end result after the process of sorting through the images would be about 20-30 images, in reality I had about 100-150 images and the end result after sorting was 50 images, I much prefer to have more than less, it gives more space to have lots of different and interesting images. The reason I took 100 images and I had so many is because I walked around the whole of the blackheath dips with my camera and took a picture of every part I thought to be relevant to my project, after I took all of these images I had to make a few decisions, the first being how I was going to edit the images, at first I was thinking about making the images very vibrant and bright however, this didn't seem right for where the images were taken, the blackheath dips isn't a nice place, especially in recent years, multiple reports of criminal activity under for multiple different reasons, more commonly violence but also drug reports and sexual misconduct, so this place really isn't a bright a colourful place, I thought about lowering the colour but then again I think that is just slightly too boring and if I was going to lower the colour then I might as well go black and white with a black and white filter. The blackheath dips looks very different with and without colour, I think that with colour the greenery and the nature that still lives and remains there makes the place look a lot better, without any colour it looks like a waste land that has dirt and rubbish everywhere, people get attacked there, I think that it really adds to the idea that it isn't such a good place but also has a long history. The way I am going to present it by combining the images with some sort of natural objects like branches and twigs and a projection that has a video of/about dips pointed at the images and the natural objects.
Presenting my images
The first thing that I decided that I was going to present my work at one time on a wall. I didn't feel ending this individual project with with a book gave my work enough justice. I decided that the presentation had to have some element of messiness too it because the project as a whole feels more messy than neat due to the subject matter, the project is about the grey area so even just that has almost an eire tone to it.
Before starting I knew 2 things, one being that I was going to present it using ropes and blu tack, and another that I wanted to project a key part of the project over the top of the images. The image that I wanted to project over the top of the images was at first going to be an image of the place where I had taken all the images, an image of the whole place instead of just small parts of it. I soon realised that this was going to be challenging so I decided to use something else. When I was doing my research I had came across a google maps, interactable map on the internet of where all the bombs during the blitz over London, one thing that happened to the place I did my project on was a bomb got dropped on it creating the massive crater that it is today. On the map I took a screen shot of the area that I did my project on and that is what I decided was most fitting for this part of the project.
When it came to presenting the images I thought that an interesting way would be to tie them to the ceiling with ropes. Doing this in a normal class room wouldn't be very accessible or adjustable. I decided that doing this in the studio would be best as there is a lighting rig on the ceiling up against a white wall which was perfect for projecting onto. There is a projector that can be moved around the room and the whole class can fit in the room when it came to actually presenting them.
I presented this to the whole class on 18th October, nobody completely got what my project was about but this was going to happen from the beginning, it is difficult to understand just from a sequence of images and a projection of a map however, people were getting understanding certain parts of it and piecing together some information. I think to summarise what my project on the grey area was about would be that I was trying to tell the story of this one places that has changed purposes multiple times over the course of about 200 years, how it has gone from being a world war two anti aircraft gun placement area to now being a criminal hotspot.
Before starting I knew 2 things, one being that I was going to present it using ropes and blu tack, and another that I wanted to project a key part of the project over the top of the images. The image that I wanted to project over the top of the images was at first going to be an image of the place where I had taken all the images, an image of the whole place instead of just small parts of it. I soon realised that this was going to be challenging so I decided to use something else. When I was doing my research I had came across a google maps, interactable map on the internet of where all the bombs during the blitz over London, one thing that happened to the place I did my project on was a bomb got dropped on it creating the massive crater that it is today. On the map I took a screen shot of the area that I did my project on and that is what I decided was most fitting for this part of the project.
When it came to presenting the images I thought that an interesting way would be to tie them to the ceiling with ropes. Doing this in a normal class room wouldn't be very accessible or adjustable. I decided that doing this in the studio would be best as there is a lighting rig on the ceiling up against a white wall which was perfect for projecting onto. There is a projector that can be moved around the room and the whole class can fit in the room when it came to actually presenting them.
I presented this to the whole class on 18th October, nobody completely got what my project was about but this was going to happen from the beginning, it is difficult to understand just from a sequence of images and a projection of a map however, people were getting understanding certain parts of it and piecing together some information. I think to summarise what my project on the grey area was about would be that I was trying to tell the story of this one places that has changed purposes multiple times over the course of about 200 years, how it has gone from being a world war two anti aircraft gun placement area to now being a criminal hotspot.
FInal grey area project and piece
For my final project I thought for a bit of time as to what I should do for my final project, I came to the conclusion that it should be something quite different from my last project as I want to have variety amongst my work and this project does not have to relate to the previous one. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to do something that everyone knows about, CCTV and surveillance, my investigation into the blackheath dips is a very kept quiet sort of story which only people in the area of blackheath most likely know about. If you go out in London, you will come across at least one CCTV camera, this is interesting because you will always be being watched in some sort of way. Busses, trains, the underground, shops, workplaces, schools, police cars, dash cams, most places will have CCTV, it is estimated that for an average London citizen in their day of work will be seen by as many as 200 CCTV cameras, this is interesting as this means people are almost always being watched in London.
People use CCTV as a sense of security, so that if anyone does anything against the law to them then they have caught it on camera. In a city like London especially there is almost ten million citizens who live here which is almost two times as many people that live in Scotland and that means there is a lot more space for crime and people breaking the law, we can make the link between CCTV and crime so it would make more sense that London has this many CCTV cameras as there is so many people.
People use CCTV as a sense of security, so that if anyone does anything against the law to them then they have caught it on camera. In a city like London especially there is almost ten million citizens who live here which is almost two times as many people that live in Scotland and that means there is a lot more space for crime and people breaking the law, we can make the link between CCTV and crime so it would make more sense that London has this many CCTV cameras as there is so many people.
All of the images that I took
I started taking images soon after and what I wanted to do was take lots of images of different CCTV cameras that I saw around London, I couldn't have more than a few images on my board, this was slightly a restriction, I felt that the number of images would have been a good way of conveying the vast amount of surveillance in London. In total I took about 27 images, the images that I took I think were still trying to convey the shier amount of cameras in London, but at the same time I think that I was also trying to show how casual and almost un noticeable even though they are constantly in public for everyone to see, people may not notice them going about their day to day lives however, at the same time people may subconsciously not want to notice them, after all it is a very scary thought that everyone in London is being picked up by dozens of cameras every day no matter where they are, the concept behind them is security but at the same time it makes people feel even less secure as anybody could be watching them. It also makes people feel less secure is because CCTV camera have always been used to keep an eye on things and make sure that if someone breaks the law then it is caught on camera as evidence, so they have been also building up this reputation for so long as guilt inducing, that people feel like they have done something wrong if they see themselves on CCTV or think that something is going to happen if they see CCTV footage.
The images that i decided to use in my sequence of images
I decided to use these images as I think that they have the most variety and convey the most sense of being watched which is exactly what I wanted to do, I felt that this sequence of images fitted the best together out of any of the images as they were taken the best, seem to induce a sense of guilt and convey the idea of always being watched. The images themselves were taken where lots and lots of people go everyday, this is interesting because the location included a London train station which has thousands of people walking through it every day to get trains, three cameras, two on the same, central London street a different camera on a different street, a camera on a bus which travels through central London meaning that it is very busy and a school cafeteria belonging to a school with 3000 people in it every day. All of the locations of the CCTV cameras are very busy places and I wanted to convey the whole idea of always being watched through this and also the sense of guilt by taking the images of just the CCTV cameras and nothing else, the images that I put into this sequence I think best fit that description.
Final piece
In lesson we were asked to each make a board which we could put our sequence of images on, everyone had to do their own one and personalise it the way that they wanted it to look. They would then be displayed in a school exhibition along with other photography work from other students across the school. I decided to space my images out as to make them seem more like screens across the board, behind all of these images is a large image of myself that fills out the whole board behind the images with a blacked out background and my face glitched out, this is representing the whole idea of how CCTV camera footage incites guilt, in this image the type of filter is to make the image look like CCTV, there is nothing but darkness around me and my face is pixelated out. I tried to position that CCTV cameras in a way that they looked almost like tv screens connected to CCTV cameras and also in a way that matched the pixels.