Myoung Ho Lee is an artist from South Korea, who has created a series of images that feature simplified trees in a natural environment. His work makes the viewer look at the tree in its natural surroundings, but raises questions about environment, reality, art and representation. This use of a clean white background creates separation and difference between subject and image. The process of his work can be broken down into four steps. First, the subject must be selected, then it will be separated from its environment artificially - with the white background - then photographed, and lastly he 'confirms the creation of identical chaos to the ‘Photography-Act’ itself by this separation and decontextualization.'
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Strand 2: Catherine Yass -
Yass is well known for her distinctive photographic and film based work. The technique of her work (cibachrome lightboxes) in which she layers prints using the negative side of an analogue slide over lightboxes which are in turn mounted on the wall, intensifies the blue hues within the photographs giving them a fluorescent feel. The lightbox also adds to the luminosity and 'other worldly' element of her prints. She has created series of photos of Spitalfields Market and a psychiatric hospital in London, steel mills in Wales, thermal bathes in Baden-Baden in Germany, and dormitories in Tokyo. “All of my work has been about the inability of photography to do what it’s supposed to do,” she explains. |
Catherine Yass has also created a series named 'Decommissioned', from 2013. In this series she photographed the former car showroom and dance studios that used to stand on the JW3 site, once they had been decommissioned and emptied. The resulting large format transparencies were placed around the demolition site: on diggers and in piles of glass and rubble – and then retrieved weeks later, after they'd been damaged, scratched, and transformed by colour reactions on the emulsion. The images have then been placed in the new building in light boxes and are in Yass’ words “small windows into a past and interior world illuminated by imagination and memory”.
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For this development, I decided to expand and develop my strand based around Daniel Crooks' work. I was inspired by Alma Haser's work and how she physically reconstructs portraits, using various methods. I had some portraits printed from my Crooks strand, and wanted to try physically weaving them together in the style of Haser, as an alternative to digitally as I had done before. I used both portrait and landscape images, and cut the larger image into strips, but only on one section - rather than the whole image. I then used the same image, but in a smaller size to weave through. |
Alma Haser - 'Child Poverty'
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I was then inspired by Haser's portraits of children either looking in different directions, or woven together with another angle of their face. This created 'different viewpoints', which I tried to incorporate into my images by weaving together two portraits where the subjects are facing opposite directions. I liked how in my image below on the left, the hair and clothing colors also contrast with the direction of the faces. I found the images from this development to turn out successfully, as I was able to create a clear contrast within one image, with both faces able to be seen clearly, but reconstructed.
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I then thought about how else I could reconstruct the portrait prints I had, and started looking at these images from Haser's website. She has cut long strips out of her images, as I have done when weaving, but has left gaps in between each of them or moved them slightly to create a disjointed effect. I tried the same, cutting strips out of the center of my images, as can be seen below, and rearranging them slightly before gluing them to a new piece of card. In my middle image, I flipped some of the strips upside down which made the portrait more disjointed. For the image on the far left, I used a smaller version of the same photograph which I cut into strips and glued on top. This had the effect of creating a fragmented image, where it is hard to tell which of the two images is layered on top.
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For my final image, I wanted to incorporate weaving into a larger image with multiple portraits, as I had only done weaving on images with one or two people previously. This image is of me, my mum and sister, as this presents different ages and appearances between each of us; which still incorporating similar features. I liked the technique I had used before - inspired by Haser - in which I used a smaller portrait (this time I used images of the same person, just in a slightly different angle apposed to facing straight forward, as the main image is), and turned it sideways before weaving it through. This distorted and 'rearranged' each face, while still allowing the face to be made out clearly. I liked the effect this created, as although each of us are different ages, our faces have all been weaved and distorted the same way - creating photographic equality in that sense.
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