Critique 3

I fell in love with the location where Kristen and I shot her photos and subsequently took two more gals out there for photos shoots and they are also in the portfolio.  Tons of gorgeous colors from the changing leaves, and even a little tree frog:

Each woman is unique and I tried (but not too hard) to pose them in different ways, but there are similar poses, yet there are differences.   I am happy with the work so far, even though some people think its too soft or sentimental. haaa! You know who you are!  

So the third critique was last week (and the week before) with Election Day in the middle, so we had a bit more time to get our work together for the critique #3.  

Since Jan and Ben went back to Europe at the end of October, they weren't here for the last critique which was a bummer! So they didn't get to see some of our best work.  Many of the students felt like they got it right with this last critique's work and it would have been great for Jan and Ben to see that.  BUT we had a great wrap up last class with them and took a few hilarious class photos (posted above).  Adam Jacono did a video interview with Jan and afterwards Jan presented some of the work he had been doing with the homeless here in Columbia and talked to us about his next project dealing with national identities and using Dutch masters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer's works and creating his own photographic version of some of their paintings. Really cool!  the photos of the homeless were really incredible, the colors are vibrant and the details are really rich. There will hopefully be an exhibit of his homeless portraits sometime in the spring, in downtown Columbia, possible quite literally on the streets/sides of buildings.  I think that is a great way to get people to notice the portraits in a town that pretty much neglects the homeless and treats them like outcasts.

Class Wrap up w/ Jan and Ben

Jan and Ben flew back to Europe this past weekend and there were many parties in their honor before they left, wishing them well, saying goodbye.  It was really great to have met them and to have them in the class for these past couple of months. So for their last class with us, Kathleen told us we needed to come up with a class photo idea that included Jan and Ben.  Someone had brought a very large American flag for Adam to use during his video interview with Jan and so some people wanted to incorporate that.  We ended up in the studio and I think it was Jan's idea to get a real desk in there and we could set it up like one of his Buereaucratics photos, and so we did. Hilarious!  We piled all sorts of crap onto the desk, photo magazines, cameras, film developing equipment, even an apple!  Poor Ben was relegated to being underneath Jan's desk, serving in his role as the "intern."  haaaa!

I took some photos during Adam's interview with Jan, which can be seen here!  

 

Here are our "Bureaucratics" photos:

 

 

In the woods

So on to other work, and another mom, this time my friend Kristen agreed to pose and I had a vision of her in the woods.  She said we could go out on her family's property near Blythewood, SC where there was a beautiful creek and lots of hardwood trees.  So last Thursday afternoon we took a ride out there and the results are what you see now in my portfolio here on this site. 

I had a great time out there, felt very inspired and really love the serenity and peacefulness this landscape offered.  I took several shots of her in the woods and we moved down into the water.  The water shots are my favorite and the light was incredible down there at the creek. Dare I say perfect.  I really had a blast out there shooting and I need to go back.

Second Critique

This was hard!  Difficult critique because 1) Jan Banning was here looking at our images again and 2) because we had to stand in the back of the room and not say a word!  We had to just keep silent and listen, which is extremely easy for me.  Not!  I actually had to keep my hands over my mouth so I wouldn't talk, haaaa!!  The images I showed were COMPLETELY different from the ones I presented in the first critique. I took photos of my friend Alyse and we did a boudoir-type session with hints of playfulness, laughter, a bit of sexy and sensuality. Not sure I got any "romantic" comments but the photos raised eyebrows I think!  Many of the comments were that they liked liked the photos, well done BUT they didn't represent a mother... haa!  I wanted to yell out, 'oh is that so?  So mothers can't be sexy?!!'  

I am still trying remember some of the comments wondering if many of the students were uncomfortable with the nudity presented in this way.  As a funny aside all to this, I showed my mom friends the images and explained what the comments were and a) they all wanted me to take some of them and b) they all said they "got it," i.e., they got my idea and what I was going for and were shocked that people thought that a "mother" had to look a certain way and sexy was not it.  For some reason today, my mind is drawing a complete blank on what Jan had said, probably because no one ever let him talk it seemed!  Oh I think he said something about my lighting and I talked to him after class about him showing me how to use lighting more effectively.  

So I did have the opportunity to go to 701 and Jan was able to give a lighting tutorial, explained how light reflects or bends at the same angle that it goes in, onto and off the subject (ugh I hope I summarized that correctly!). Showed how he sets up the lighting for his portraits of the homeless and what he does while he's behind the camera. very cool! 

 

First Critique

Our first critique was this past Tuesday and Thursday, September 14th and 16th and I felt pretty good about my photos.  In hindsight they were not edited how I would have edited them now and would have presented them a bit differently.  I was playing around with the colors, and sizes so nothing was consistent.  I think the photos themselves were good, beautiful model, but I was playing around in photoshop and making them look different than when I had taken them straight out of the camera. 

So overall for the first critique, the images were seen as romantic and somewhat objectified (the single breast image), I liked that they were softly lit and a bit "romantic" even though I wasn't really going for that.  My goal was to present a beautiful body no matter the shape or size.  I do think that there is a particular audience for these photos and they are going to be females, particularly mothers!  And that is ok, because that is who I intended this body image project to be for.  Designed in book form, presented as a sort of visual guide to the shapes of a mother and oh, hey, look how beautiful she is.  

Arts 460 Class with Jan Banning

At the beginning of this semester Kathleen, told us that a Dutch photographer, Mr. Jan Banning, was going to attend some of our classes to talk about his work and to sit on 2 of our 3 critiques during the semester.  I was really excited about this opportunity! Some of the other students however, were quite nervous about it! haa!  

Jan Banning is known worldwide for his photography and had an exhibition of his work titled, Bureaucratics here in Columbia, SC from August 5 to September 19, 2010, at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art (aka 701 gallery).  He was also here as an artist-in-residence at 701 for six weeks.  You can read about the Bureaucratics work here, here, and here, and oh here too. You can purchase the book Bureaucratics and others from his website here. 

He came to our class on September 7, and talked to us about his work, showed us images from several of his projects and we got to ask lots of questions... or rather I asked him lots of questions! haa! He also brought with him his intern, Ben Kuhlmann, a photography student from Germany and we got to see Ben's work a little bit later in the semester.

Jan Banning's photography is fascinating and is a mix of photojournalism, documentary style, and fine art portraiture photography as well as a little bit of visual anthropology.  Exactly my cup of tea!  I was fascinated by his project/exhibition Bureaucratics, but really, really moved by his most recent work, Comfort Women/Troostmeisjes.  You can read an article about the project here.  The Comfort Women book is a series of portraits taken by Mr. Banning of Indonesian women who as young girls were forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army during WWII.  He photographed these women while anthropologist and Dutch journalist Hilde Janssen interviewed them about their forced prostitution as young girls.  

Description of Comfort Women by Jan Banning from the publisher:

"Raping women seems to be a normal byproduct of wars. During World War II, the Japanese military even set up a system for sex slavery: Tens of thousands of 'comfort women' in Asia were forced into prostitution at military brothels. In addition, many girls were abused sexually in railroad wagons, factory warehouses or night after night at home. Most of these women have suffered physical and emotional consequences ever since. 

Jan Banning and Hilde Janssen visited Indonesian women who during the war were victims of forced sexual labor. In this book, 18 of them break the persistent taboo against speaking out on the issue. Showing them in combination with Japanese war posters, the book presents male and female sides of war, and propaganda versus reality. Short narratives depict the fate of these and other former comfort women, painting a gripping picture of this hidden history." 

You can purchase the book here at his website, and I highly recommend it!

He also has published a book of portraits about the men who were forced laborers on the Burma and Sumatra railways, titled: Traces of War, Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways. One of the portraits in the book is of his father, Frans Banning, who was forced to work on the railway. Jan Banning's grandfather (Fran's father) was also a forced laborer during the war.  

From the publisher:

Allied victory in the Pacific celebrates its sixtieth anniversary in August. Among the celebrants will be a small, largely forgotten group reliving nightmares of captivity. Dutch, English, Australian and American prisoners of war worked among more than a quarter of a million Asians—so called romushas—forced by the Japanese to build railways in Burma and Sumatra. Conditions were desperate: between 50 and 80 per cent of the romushas did not survive. Here, Jan Banning has interviewed and photographed 24 Dutch and Indonesian survivors. His haunting images show them as they worked, naked from the waist up. Their words elicit, with a matter-of-fact disinterest, the misery of their constant understanding of death. Unsurprisingly, they have hitherto been loath to discuss their ordeals. 

If you have a chance to see his work, go, it's amazing and just really, really inspiring.  

Part 2: How I got here

So after a lot of thought and consideration I decided that yes I wanted to take female nude photographs.  My mind started to run through the people I knew and whom I thought would be a "great model."  I immediately thought of my friend Alyse. I asked her to participate in my photography project before I had even really defined it and she agreed.  

I was unconsciously thinking of the "ideal" body type I wanted to portray: thin, toned, well proportioned... and then I realized I was falling into the same trap as our mass media, the mass culture that thin is the ideal, that that beauty lies in how much you weigh or if you are a size 2 jeans.  And I said to myself that's crap! I can't do that!  All that I struggle against by raising my daughter to have a healthy self esteem, a healthy body image, there was no way I was going to portray nude females that were only the  "perfect" body size.  What kind of message would that send to my daughter?

Not wanting to step into that, I thought about my friends (who are mostly moms) and their different body types and one night I was in the shower and it came to me!  MOTHER'S bodies.  With all of the perfections and imperfections that a woman sees in herself and her body after having a child.  I thought about focusing my work on specific body parts, and relating them to body image. 

Did I want to focus on the mother's body as a temple, a shrine to honor and worship and represent that visually as an idol, or did I want to portray it as truth and reality?  I also wondered about portraying the sexuality and sensuality of a woman after having children.  I also thought about confronting the stereotypical, maybe even perhaps mythological housewife/mother lounging around, half naked eating bons bons on the sofa. 

So I presented some of these ideas to my professor and she was intrigued by the idea.  So off I went to shoot my first mom, my friend Rachelle. I photographed her in her living room by her big picture window, using her white curtains as a large softbox. I took about a 30 minutes to get the photos I wanted and had a great conversation with her. The next step was editing them and printing them for the following week's critique which I will talk about in the next few posts. The following week's critique was something completely new to me and to the rest of the class.  We were to have an internationally known photographer come to our class for several sessions to critique our work and perhaps help us with our portfolios. yikes!

Part 1: How I got here.

I am enrolled in a fine art advanced photography class this semester at the University of South Carolina. I’ve wanted to take this class for over a year now and finally this semester I was able to make my schedule mesh with family life, etc. The goal for this class is to build a cohesive set of images that can be used in a professional fine art portfolio. We have 3 critiques throughout the semester and will need to present 5-10 images for critique. Our professor has explained the different processes of getting your work published, such as via portfolio reviews and participating in exhibitions.  She also discussed self publishing our work through a book site called blurb.com.

We were given a week or so to explore topics and to figure out what theme or subject matter we wanted to photograph. I struggled with this for a long time.  My goal in taking this class was to go beyond my technical capabilities and commercial subject matter and venture into the world of aesthetics and fine art photography. I thought I would continue with the faces series of my own children and my professor Kathleen had me look at several photographers who's work revolves around their children and families, those such as Sally Mann, Julie Blackmon, and Elinor Carucci among others.

After looking at their work, I liked Julie Blackmon’s the best, Sally Mann’s the least and was intrigued by Elinor Carucci, wondering how in the world she got her parents to agree to be photo documented in their underwear! I do not understand her work and that is what intrigues me about it.

So after looking at their work and others from sites such as photo-eye, Flak Photo and Fraction Magazine, I was trying to figure out an avenue to explore regarding my own children since that is whom I take the most photos of and whom I have practiced on a zillion billion times.

I came up blank.  Nada, nothing. Showed some examples of my work and thought well, yeah so? How is this relevant to anyone else besides me?  I wasn't sure it was.  So I began to think of other things I wanted to photograph and immediately thought about the female nude portraits I took in 2008 for another photography project. And I started thinking.