For the last ten weeks I have been attending a night school class once a week at Central St Martins Art College in central London. I was intrigued by the aim of the course which was to help the participants to develop their personal style. The course was run by Karl Grupe who is a photographer and educator whose main business is a company called The Mango Labs.
The course was interesting, fun and stimulating. I don't think I have come out the other end with a clear view of my personal signature...I have come to realise that this will come with time and only through my work....but I learned a lot.
My key learning points from the course were...
1. We spent a week documenting the in a Visual Diary anything which stimulated us visually...from a picture in a magazine to a piece of rubbish on the street...anything that interested was to be recorded. From this I realised that almost all my visual stimuli are from photographs taken by other photographers. I do not seem to access my day to day environment as a source of visual stimulus....I need to work on this.
2. We looked at the work of some art photographers such as Uta Barth whose work is conceptual in nature. Barth for example examines visual perception in her photographs. For example she did a series which on the face of it look like a set of out of focus images. Her intent however was to force the viewer to examine areas of the photographic frame which in many instances are out of focus...for example the background of a portrait taken with a fast lens wide open...My key lesson here was to open my mind to different concepts behind photographs rather than just to look at the aesthetic qualities of photographs in isolation. The photograph below is
Uta Barth Field #9
3. We examined how high key and low key images can add mood to a photograph, examining the work of a number of photographers. Some interesting images here by Nick Meek who has created a signature style with high key images as in the example below:
4. We completed a couple of exercises to demonstrate how stimulate spontaneous and instinctive responses. One involved shooting an image every 60 seconds in a location (in our case the West End of London) - this approach is an interesting one and I felt that in certain circumstances could be quite effective. For example taking images out of a window on a rail journey could establish an interesting narrative. The second exercise was to shoot blindfold in a location which one had not previously seen. What surprised me most about this was how many usable images came out of it. Here is a sequence of three of my images which I shot blindfold in a basement car park. They have a surprising cohesiveness and sense of mystery.
5. We undertook a project to work in the style of another photographer. This was similar to the assignments I have undertaken for the OCA courses I have completed. The key difference was that I did not get to choose the photographers. One of the photographers we were challenged to emulate was Wolfgang Tillmans - a photographer who does not appear to have a style. Here was an interesting thought - a personal style could be simply to be democratic in one's approach to photography. Some of Tillman's work is still life in nature and he captured images of photographic paper folded over so that one could not see what was on it. I liked this idea of photographing a photograph and transforming it into something else. Here is one of Tillmans works:
And here is one of mine...it is a photograph of a portrait photograph:
6. We also looked at portraiture in two of the sessions. In the first we visited the Taylor Wessing Portrait Photographer of the Year exhibition at the National Portrait Museum. It was fascinating to see the huge variety of work on display. This ranged from traditional work to much more inventive styles such as this edgy portrait of Tony Blair by Kalpesh Lathigra.
We also spent some time looking at how Diptychs can be used to explore a subject in portraiture more widely or to convey contrasts. I discovered the work of Mark Laita who has produced a series called Created Equal. This work may well prove to be a great influence on my own work as I pursue my level three studies. Here is one of Laita's Diptychs:
All round this course was extremely thought provoking and I came out of it with a much wider view on how photographers create their personal signature. It gave me lots of ideas for my future photography studies and work.
