Franken-fashion, Masks, Van Veluw and Hundertwasser

A few months ago an article in the magazine Dazed and Confused caught my interest. They had set up a project, working with various fashion designers, in which they challenged them each to make a mask out of scraps from around their studios. The project raised several particularly interesting themes, such as concerns with the recycling of materials and the use of everyday detritus to create art. Particularly interesting was the image below, a mask made of discarded rubber gloves in which various hand-signals are carefully intertwined and written with the fingers. In the image further down the mask is made of glass by Walter Van Beirendonck, in the article he says 'the glass creates a deformation of beauty'. I think the anonymity and trasnformative nature of the masks is a concept I would particularly like to explore in this project. Indeed, anonymity is directly linked to the mask, from renaissance masquerade balls to those worn by costumed comic-book heroes. The mask is also linked to the history of medicine, plague masks can be likened to the modern day surgeon's mask.

I began to experiment with the idea of the make-up as mask, I have several ways I wish to explore this which I haven't gotten around to as yet, however, I did start to think about the works of two particular artists recently, Levi Van Veluw and Friedrich Hundertwasser. The photographs below are my first attempt at exploring the use of make-up as mask, drawing lines in eye-liner across my face and photographing them using the previously mentioned Polaroid 403R. The first image is the stages of this and the second is used more as documentation. The photographs become documents of an event, like the images left after 60s performance art. That the camera is used to create photographs for documentation is also an applicable and interesting facet.

Levi Van Veluw's work involves covering his own face and head in various materials, including leather, felt and human hair. His work contains a dual attraction, curiosity and repulsion create feelings of ambivalence in the viewer. These works also follow the vein of performance art in that the photographs are all that is left as documentation of the works. I intend to further expand on his work in a later post.

Friedrich Hundertwasser was part inspiration for my face-contours photographs mostly because of their aesthetic similarities. When first starting these photographs he was not a direct influence, the lines were more a way of exploring the contours of the face through a simple pattern, however, after having studied the photographs more closely, the works of Hundertwasser and the likeness to the painting below became very apparent.

Passport Photos and the Polaroid Miniportrait 403R

I've finally managed to buy a Polaroid 403R from eBay. These cameras were used up until fairly recently to take passport-photos manually, but have now been phased out by machines or digital cameras. I think when trying to study identity and anonymity the passport image is key. The passport image is the identity on paper, it is recognised in bureaucracy as the proof that the person who owns the document exists and that their image and the information printed in the passport match. That there is no directly interposing negative, that the image is exposed directly onto the polaroid film is also linked in with validity, there can be no tampering with the image after it is made, the light reacts chemically with the film and the image is created.The camera comes with a built in angled flash and two fixed focussing distances, 1.2m and 1.92m, this means that every image taken with the camera will look fairly consistent with the preceding and following images, particularly when photographing the face. Though there are more complex lighting set-ups for the passport photograph, as in the diagram below, I have found that taking the images with the flash pointing directly at the subject on a white background is similar enough to the passport style for my purposes.

The image below is a grid of six 3.25" x 4.25" polaroid images. The camera has three settings for taking photographs, you can set it to take four separate images, two and two the same or all four the same. Though these photographs are only my playing and experimenting with the camera I have some more specific intentions for the next set which should be more relevant to my project.

Found Passport Photos

In my first year of Photography at college the tutor mentioned the idea of found photos and since then I've kept my eyes peeled for photographs on the ground. After three years I've found only two. Strangely the images are both passport style photographs. I'd held on to them for a while not knowing what exactly I wanted to do with them, as well as being worried that if I were to use them in a project or stick them into a book they would become fixed there and could not be used at a later date. I bought a small 'passport style' notebook from Muji and decided that this was a suitable vehicle for the photographs. So as to avoid a finality in their fixing to the pages I used photocorners so that I can remove them at a later date if need be. With each image I included the year and the address of where it was found. Though there is not the volume of material to contribute much to this project I felt that it would be worth including it if I am to look at themes of identity and anonymity.

The first image I found on a supermarket floor as I was sweeping up towards the end of my shift. There was some information written on the back, though beyond the name, Julian Fox, the text is quite cryptic. The text reads: 11540/Julian Fox/Full.

The second image I found on the steps of the Kimberlin Library and so assume that the person in the photograph is a student currently studying at De Montfort. I think this is an interesting facet of this photograph, that I may see or have already seen or encountered the subject of the photo and that they would be none the wiser. There was nothing written on the back.

Negativeless Photography and the Homemade Camera

Following my interest in 'direct' photography I began to look into how I could make my own pinhole camera. The pinhole camera is perhaps the most basic homemade photographic camera concievable. It doesn't even have a lens, instead light is focussed directly through the pinhole, meaning there is no need for focussing and that the camera has an infinite focussing distance. The camera is essentially a box. Though I knew the basics of pinhole photography I consulted several 'how to' sites before I made mine, the most useful sites I found are listed below.

http://www.mrpinhole.com/index.php

A good starting point, the site also includes many useful resources for working out the f/ stop of your pinhole camera and the exposure times it may need.

http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholecameras/exposure_01.html

Particularly useful for learning about exposure times, it includes a couple of the formulas used in pinhole photography as well as a description of the Schwarzschild Effect, also knowns as the Reciprocity Law Failure.

The following two links are alternative ways of approaching pinhole photography, the first is a pinhole camera using Polaroid 600 film for instant results whilst the second is about making a pinhole camera out of Lego which uses 120 film.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/duchamp/2177521907/

http://www.foundphotography.com/PhotoThoughts/archives/2005/10/medium_format_p.html

The image below is my homemade pinhole camera, though at the moment it is somewhat garish. The main body is a thick cardboard box bought from paperchase, the hole was punched with a small thumbtack. There are still a few more modifications which I intend to do to it, these are only minor things such as attaching a small nut to the bottom so as to fix it to a tripod, attaching a strap of some sort to it as it is too large to comfortably carry in a bag, and finally to cover or paint the interior and exterior black. The interior must be painted so as to avoid reflection from the red paper which it is lined with otherwise this could fog the image. Painting the exterior is purely cosmetic as I do not want to walk around with a multicoloured argyle-print box.

Another technique which I intend to play with for this project is the Sunprint Kit. This is a kit I purchased a coupe of years ago with light-reactive blue paper which, when exposed to the sun, changes colour to a paler blue or white. The principal is the same as the photogram or rayograph however the paper requires only sunlight to activate it and water to fix the image. The paper is also less light-sensitive than typical photopaper and so requires no darkroom. The images below are of the kit and the results which can be achieved.

Initial Ideas Continued

Heather ordered a package from Topshop.com which arrived today. The item was sent in a brown polka-dot paper bag as packaging. I began to play with the bag by placing it on my head as a kind of mask. I started to think about the cliched image of the person wearing a brown paper bag on their head and decided to photograph it. Without my glasses the bag seemed featureless and almost unrecognisable, but once I put the glasses on and began to shape the bag around my head it started to take on more human qualities. I began to pull faces beneath the bag, I'm still not sure, but I felt that you could work out the expression or emotion conveyed even through the bag.

I noticed a likeness to Magritte's painting Les Amants/The Lovers (below). I began to consider looking at ideas of identity, anonymity and, without meaning to sound too trite, the idea of metaphorical and physical masks. This also tied quite well into my intention of acquiring a Polaroid 403 or 'Passport' camera which takes four images at once or four separate images, as I have previously stated, I believe there is an intrinsic link between Polaroid and 'the truth'. There is also a tenuous link between the 'truth' behind the passport image and the way in which it ties in with identity. Many photographers and artists have dealt with identity through the use of the 'passport' style photo-booth image, an idea which as even slipped into mainstream film in the form of the French film Amelie.

Les Amants is a painting in which the cloths have been used to obscure and hide the faces of the sitters, the suit of the man suggests the idea of the 'everyman'. The image has become iconic and appeared in popular music and culture and yet the face obscured by cloth has deep psychological connections to Rene Magritte's childhood, his mother having committed suicide and being dragged from the River Sambre with her face partially covered by her night dress, indeed this would require further study in a separate post as it raises particularly interesting Oedipal concerns. I think the anonymity of the paper-bag is an interesting area to explore and so intend to create some 'anonymous' portraits, obscuring the face of the sitters with the paper bags.

Below is an example of an image taken with the Polaroid 403 camera, using Fuji FP-100c, (the same film stock I was using for my previous project). These cameras and this kind of film was used up until fairly recently to take standard passport photographs, thus is inseparable from the idea if identity. Further below is an image of the collected work from a project by Japanese artist called Tomoko Sawada. Her work deals with the maleability of identity and the 'truth' of a passport photo.

Initial Ideas

For this project I want to move in a somewhat different direction from my previous one. After having focussed on the use of Polaroid images I began to become more and more interested in the works of Richard Learoyd and Gary Fabian Miller, whose works dealt with the 'direct' image, removing the interposing negative which is usually integral to analog photography. Having attempted to resolve my antecedent project using a 'direct' means of projection I decided I wasn't completely satisfied with it and would like to further pursue this kind of photography. I intend to begin by looking at Pinhole photography, a style of photography so basic it doesn't even require a lens, as well as the rayographs or photograms of Gary Miller, Man Ray and Curtis Moffat. (all below in the order mentioned)

I've also been meaning to explore another idea, quite apart from my previous project, the idea of cutting up the body by using the framing of the image. Initially this began to be conceived of in the terms of an almost Frankenstein-like experiment, re-organising and restitching the body back together in different configurations. Juxtapositions and the use of a lomography camera called the Golden Half would be key to this idea. The Golden Half is a 35mm camera which doubles the number of exposures per roll whilst halving the image size. The images when printed mean that two half-frame images can be placed side by side on the same piece of photographic paper, giving results like the images below. The images create a story in dyads and juxtapositions, the seemingly random throwing together of the images can create unusual twists and add an uncontrolled element to the work, making chance a key factor in the creation of the diptych images.

The image above (lower) is one taken by a friend, illustrating an initial conception of the dividing up of the body over several images. The image above (upper) is an example of the creation of a story through the juxtapositions, the way the balloons in the second image seem to mimic or continue the bubbles being blown in the first image.