Neil Slavin

So although I am not shooting portraiture anymore, I'd like to mention what one of my very first ideas were for this project and it was only once I had seen this top left image of the Twins convention.  Twins is a topic that I have always wanted to try out before and thought it was possible but over a long period of time.  Things changed for me and my ideas almost got realistic at the start of the project because My boyfriend is an Identical Twin !! 

I also considered producing a small 6 image series of him and his brother and try and show the connection between twins to other normal brothers.  I think this idea would have looked good, I could have asked for two sets of brothers, one pair identical twins and the other pair just some close brothers, and asks the to do the same thing, I'e stand in a pub, I could go and see the difference between them, which as far as I have noticed, twins do have that one special bond, that others twins will understand. 

Twins convention, Miss USA - very deadpan imagery - Capturing What is America

The reasoning for actually including this series of portraiture with my research about landscapes is just the fact that it fits into my ideas of the same so different, because each image is of a different group of people in America.  The general idea of taking a large photograph of a particular group that meet up is the same concept as each other but the complete series next to each other had completely different outcomes, image looks and feelings due to all the groups being so different and from different backgrounds. I love these Images and if I were able to concentrate of the portraiture side to deadpan and not the other deadpan types like the landscape I have been looking at, then I may have been able to try something like this out.  

Simone Nieweg ( 1 )

Simone Nieweg (born in 1962 in Bielefeld) focused from the very beginning on photography and started her studies with Bernd Becher in 1984, immediately after the “orientation year” [the first year at the university, when students are supposed to familiarize themselves with the system and to make decisions about their final goals]. She dates her first independent work from 1986, when she switched to colour photography. Her first series centred around the anonymous architecture of gardens: the self-made toolsheds, garden cottages, or pigeon houses, this is something personal and could be re-created very easily. She then created photos of department stores and black-and-white city-scapes as well, but most impressive are the colour photographs of garden areas, where people use the land that is at their disposal, free of the city planners’ ideas about order, how to grow vegetables or to raise rabbits or doves, I really like the way that this is conveyed and the way in which the people's own land comes into it.

The way she photographs the garden space and tool sheds, and people's own land interests me and It is close to an idea I had of a shoot within people's gardens.  Its such a personal place to a family and can really tell a lot about a person or a family's home personality. 

This work I wanted to include as a post purely because they are so simple and are of the same topic and theme just completely different. The images are names very simply, i.e, field of cabbages. The idea behind this work is for capturing what is real and what is there.  The way the images are shot emphasis on the actual topic of the images which is growing things. 

I would like to re-visit these images again when it comes down to my final Idea, I would like to have a similarity in these images as I too look at the layout of people's gardens, consider why they have put things in certain places for example.  I could do something similar to this, and i shall remember it as a 'garden' idea for now.  I will still stick to a theme of the same but different.

Andreas Gursky - Gridlines

Andreas Gursky runs a sense of impersonality through all of his work.  He depicts structures and pattern of collection existence in his images.  I have included his work because he does not work in series like many of the other photographers I have looked at he does work in lines which I find quite interesting.  There are probably a lot more lines and grid lines throughout a scene than you know.  Maybe its just when certain situations are at their biggest that you notice these lines.  

Obviously you can tell with his images being so huge, the lines just look more apparent and visible when further back or higher.  This images of the supermarket has lots and lots on lines but the way the angle is of this images, his landscapes always have a sense of scale and the lines are just an aesthetic that he really like to see within a landscape image. 

Statement of Intent - Clear View of my Topic Area

A Clear View of What my Topic will be: 

I want to jus add in this short post and write a quick and Clear View of what my Own Project is going to be for this module.  I need to have 6 final Prints and want to show something with a theme all the way through the project imagery.

I have already looked at some photographers for this project that have relevance to the idea of what I am going to do.  John Schott's images of Route 66 are a series of 'motels' along the whole route, whenever he passed a different one he took a photo of it, whats interesting is how they look very different in comparison to each other,  Like I mentioned earlier, I want to convey that for example, one certain property and the way it looks could contain similarities to whomever owns it.  This would prove differences in the people and the differences in what the property looks like.  I do think that this is interesting as it reveals an insight almost to how one lives.

I also think that the point I am trying to get at, is that through a deadpan minimalist images of a property, the photograph will be left detached, and dispassionate, so why is there still something in the image that a viewer tries to get and tries to draw out from the meaning as to why it was taken.  Why would an image so straight set and simple like Lewis Batltz's, Industrial Parks, seem like it has so much meaning behind the series.  Having taken image's of the same area or the same subject holds a theme linking them altogether.   I plan to choose a certain idea of the 'same' topic, and use similarities to Baltz' technique on leaving the nothingness in the image.

There will be a reasoning behind the deadpan image that I will capture, I want to document the 'same so different' as well as drawing to the fact of the changing world.  Todays world are constantly constructing and building, Nature and the way people treat nature is not of any interest to many in so that they would for example, rather have a patio than the grass, rather have a garage than empty spaces. I will still think of pending idea of what I will shoot to show the same but different and the difference sin my images once I convey this.

Petra Wenderlich

Petra Wenderlich photographed Black and White Churches in New York US, which also relate to my theme and topic but I am more interested in the architectural side to her work and the Quarries that she photographed.  I have put the three Image of the Quarries. They are technically three images of exactly the same thing, but you can see how different each of the images look. 

Quarries get dug out in different ways therefore the topic is the same and the outcome is different.  I only think this is an interesting concept because, there are so many differences in the world, so it is actually better to not be the same.  Quarries are a difficult subject matter because it is something that changes all the time, so therefore is always different. 

Feedback from Essay Proposal's

So today I had my essay proposal back and a small short tutorial about it and my tutor had written a few notes around my written words.  The first things mentioned is that I need to make a clear decision on what Title I want to go for.  I need to choose one, or combine them both and the other question she wrote along the side and have a mix question.  

I think I will probably go for the question that my tutor wrote a long the edge  and interpret the question through my two possible titles too;  how has deadpan become a recognised type of photography? I will probably have a changed title similar to this one just written.  

I always worry about essay's as they are certainly my weakest point in theory.  I tend to not reference properly and need constant checks foe help.  Here below shoes a note to read Michael Fried's book and a note that also says that I need to explain what I mean even further, and to talk about the subjective. 

I have more notes that signify that I need to explore and discuss further some of the points that I have made throughout this proposal essay.  I also need to need to explain hows certain parts of the essay are used and how it fits into my work topic.  

And lastly, I was advised to use the Dusseldorf school of photography book, and also the Michael Fried book, just because they are both books with big chunks of great information and the books consist of a top photographers at the that particular time, a lot of research containing a lot of work towards almost of of my original idea. 

Thomas Struth

This is one of the Ideas I had if I were to stick with shoot portraiture and the expressionless portrait like Thomas Ruff.  The reason this is still great for my work and still has a big link is because I am aiming to show the 'same' but 'different' within my images and here has exactly that.  

These Family Portraits by Thomas Struth, were taken the same year that he was commissioned to take a portrait of the Queen.  These Families are completely different in almost every way, every family id different, the thing I like about this work is that you can actually tell the differences in the families straight away by the way they are standing or sitting.  

These images are staged with a bit of direction by himself.  The families arrange themselves, and are asked to follow just one rule:  Everyone must look directly in the camera.  Each image captures three generations, inviting the viewer to imagine the relationships between the individuals. 

For Struth, the family portraits suggest inter-connectedness and individuality, representing both a shared genetic heritage, and the context in which individual personalities, psychologies and appearances are formed.  Exploring age, relationships and identities, they are, in Struth's words, "considered slices of an epic drama arrested in a certain moment". 

I would have loved to do an Idea like this one and explore how different, families can be from each other, I would probably do mine and compare families to my own.  I think this is something i will definitely try to do in the future because I know that I will not have the time to travel around to capture families in the time i have for this project. 

My Proposal

PROPOSED TITLE:   Has Deadpan Photography changed throughout the years?     OR

                                               Deadpan Photography: Why so popular today?  (CHOOSE ONE)

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC AREA:

The topic area that I have chosen to write my essay about is Deadpan Photography. I am going to explore further into how the ‘deadpan’ image came around and why it is so popular today, also why we can see it staying in photography for a long period of time.  The style that dated back to the art world approach of the Dusseldorf School of Photographers, which included members Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, has had some hugely impressive work come from the school, including a lot of what would be considered ‘deadpan’ image’s due to the time photography was going though.  The deadpan image is not just one of a person, but can also be architecture, landscape and even still life, but one genre of photography that has definitely used deadpan, and more commonly now, is fashion photography, with the likes of Juergen Teller creating imagery with such neutral flat expressions of the ‘blank fashion-model look’ that fills magazines, billboards, television and the Internet. The fashion photography deadpan look is something that I will include within research to see the differences between what would be a fashion deadpan look, to a documentary portrait.

Deadpan photography originates from a style of recording documents only, presenting evidence or specimens, study types, structures and forms, and yet it has progressed throughout many years, travelling through art and on to photography. Neutral expressions and head-on compositions have become very popular and the ‘expressionless’ image today is something we see almost daily. So, why is ‘deadpan’ so popular at the moment? Maybe its because that through many digital manipulation imagery that is in today’s world, we no longer trust the truth of a documented image, and by having a deadpan manner that takes away the answer of the image, leaves us thinking about how posed photography can change our thoughts from one to another.

According to Charlotte Cotton in her book, ‘The photograph as Contemporary Art’, she calls the deadpan aesthetic, ‘a cool, detached and keenly sharp type of photography’. Meaning that the deadpan look is dispassionate, not bias and that there are so much left inside the image that can be revealed by a viewer. What I am going to look for within my research towards this essay is how the different types of deadpan photography can be so completely different but include the same purposes at the same time. How there is historical sites, landscapes, portraits, industrial sites, street and social and architectural deadpan images yet they all reach to some of the same purposes of, for example, to set the stage for questions to be asked, to record a document, to remove the rhetoric or persuasion that can influence the audience and to show a ‘changing world’.

Images that I have looked and researched about before in previous projects include the work from Rineke Dijkstra and Yann Gross whose work really interests me, and work from Alec Soth and August Sander.  Each in their own completely different but all have similarities in certain series to the certain style of ‘deadpan’. By using the different works from different artists and photographers, I plan to unveil some sort of meaning behind what deadpan is, and what I think it does in the photography world today.

So, are all deadpan images the same? Do they still have a purpose like they were once made for? Will they always be as popular as they are now? Questions that may seem like they have no answers, but to everyone’s opinion, the ‘deadpan’ images are worldwide and I would like to take a detailed journey through how they have developed.  (Word Count: 607)

Identify the Resources you will need to complete your work: Library, Viewing, Images etc.

There are not too many resources that I will need to be able to complete my essay but the ones I do need should hopefully be easy to access and easy to use for my work.  For my practical side towards this module there will obviously be more resources needed, but will include these resources too.  The most Important source for my research towards my essay will be the University Library.  I will use the Library to looks for books that include Deadpan photography but also key texts about popular artists and photographers that shoot in that particular style.  The second most important source for me is the Internet, where I will be able to access online blogs, articles and books.  I will also be using my Visit to galleries as my sources for my essay as there are a lot of works that I have seen that can help me within my research.  Images will be sourced from anywhere that I will see inspiration or ideas but mainly from any books / articles that I find. 

Do a library search and identify KEY TEXTS/BOOKS and/or ARTICLES.

• Boston.com; Article

‘Here’s Looking at You’

By Greg Cook, Globe Correspondent / November 4, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2007/11/04/heres_looking_at_you/?page=full

• The Telegraph; Article

‘The new passion for Deadpan’

By Sebastian Smee, Citibank Prize, February 11, 2003

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3589720/The-new-passion-for-deadpan.html

• Mary Pearson Blog; Article

‘Deadpan Photography’

By Mary Pearson, December 2, 2012

http://marypearson1.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/deadpan-photography/

• Book 1

‘The Pleasures of Good Photographs’ 2010

Essays By Gerry Badger

• Book 2

‘Photography after Conceptual Art’ 2010

Edited By Diarmuid Costello & Margaret Iversen

Chapter 3, Photography and the Deadpan

• Book 3

‘The Body in Contemporary Art’ 2009

By Sally O’Reilly, Thames & Hudson, world of art

• Nightworkers; Article

‘Deadpan Photography’

By Karen Hope, April 5, 2010

http://nightworkersstyle.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/deadpan-photography.html

  

• Book 4

Water Towers 1931-2007

Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1988

• Book 5

‘Positions in the Life World’

Martha Rosler; M Zegher; Ikon Gallery

Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery

• Book 6

‘American Prospects: Photography’

Joel Sternfeld; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

San Francisco; Chronicle Books 1994

• Cotton, Charlotte (2009)

‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art: New Edition’

London: Thames and Hudson

• Vinegar, Aaron (2009)

‘Ed Ruscha, Heidegger, and Deadpan Photography’

Art History Magazine, Volume 32, Issue 5, Association of Art Historians 2010

CCCU Library Search

Joel Sternfeld, ‘First Pictures’ 2011.

Location; Broadstairs, 779.092 STE(OS)

Kevin D. Moore, ‘Starburst: Color photography in America’ 1970-1980

Location; Broadstairs, 778.60973 MOO

Alec Soth, ‘From here to there: Alec Soth’s America, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis’

Location; Broadstairs, 779 SOT

Rineke Dijkstra, ‘Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits’ 2004

Location; Broadstairs, 779.2092 DIJ(OS)

August Sander, ‘August Sander: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum’ 2000

Location; Broadstairs, 770.92 SAN

List the KEY PHOTOGRAPHIC TEXTS you will need. 

IMPORTANT - if you have a problem getting hold of resources from within the University are there alternative sources? LIST THEM.

All of the Key Photographic Texts that I will use within and for my essay will be sourced from the lists above of the books, articles and Internet pages that I have researched.  I have looked at resources within the University and have done a Library search to find key texts that will help me in my essay.  My lists from above do not just have resources from the University but also alternative sources, journals, articles and Internet blog pages that I have found on the Internet. 

From Portraiture to Landscape

I wanted to add a Blog Post in to this module to show my Change in Ideas for this project.  I originally said that for this project I was going to be Photographing the Expressionless Portrait and link with Deadpan, which is what my essay is based on.  I was also going to be writing my essay about Deadpan Portraiture, and link it into todays world.  I have now changed my ideas from this and would like to say why and what my new idea is compared to my original.

Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff was another Photographer who was at the Dusseldorf School of Photography.  He was a pupil at the school and left with some very interesting takes on photography.  His Deadpan Head shots are very well know and are probably the only piece of work from the other photographers at the School who mainly focused on the Portrait.  He started off with using bright colourful backgrounds for his portraits of his friends before he then realised that the portraits were more effective and meaningful when against a white or grey background, the colour is distracting on the eye, but the white and grey left no shadows and less emotion.

Ideas Changing

I said all along from the beginning of this project that I was originally going to concentrate on the expressionless portrait and also concentrate of why it is so popular in todays world.  The deadpan shots here by Thomas Ruff are really striking and your left wanting to know more about the subject.  I would have really liked to do something similar for my project but I have decided to try something a little different.  Although I do think the expressionless portrait and had lots of different ideas for connections between my other modules, but I want to show something a little different for the final 6 prints and see how it turns out.
Below are three of my Own Photography Images, I shot these last year and named them 'Innocence', this was because of the expressionless portrait.  They actually look very similar to the three Portraits of Thomas Ruff's (above). You can tell that it takes aways emotion and makes you want to know more, but with the halo of flowers above their heads, I was trying to show an expressionless portrait that still meant you can see something about them, and leaves the viewer guessing. The Deadpan Aesthetic is most definitely there and I think I portrayed it very well.   I was really happy with these three images and used them in the Exhibition. But because I have produced three portraits like Thomas Ruff's portraiture, I want to try out something new. 

MY Own IMAGES (SUBMITTED IN EXHIBITION LAST YEAR - YEAR 2)

In My Other Modules I've considered Nude:

In my Major Practical Project I started with my Nude's from my previous work and considered carrying them on.  Thomas Ruff has done some Nude work her (below) but they are not his own work.  He has played around with the internets pornographic photos and made the nudes almost unrecognisable.  He was interested in the constructive nature. I would not consider doing this as my project at all but thought it was worth including as it is the only nude piece I have seen from the lectures.  

____________________________________________________________

From Portraiture to Landscape

So as I have mentioned above, I have explored the expressionless Portrait before and although very intriguing, I would like to try something different.  I have had many ideas to include the expressionless portrait linking to my dance idea for mixed media and linking to the body for Major Practical, but I figured that it doesn't have to be linked and I could try something different but relevant.  So instead of just concentrating on the 'Deadpan Portrait', I now have turned my ideas to focusing on a 'deadpan' image still but concentrating my idea on a piece of work called: 'Same so Different'.

This project will consist of my finding a suitable project topic, I might try a landscape project, and photographing the same 'topic', but then each image could look completely different.  I have mentioned this idea with Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, John Schott and Candida Hofer, who have all taken images of the same 'topic' but have had lots of different outcomes.  I am hoping with this I can prove that sometimes the way something is presented whether it be a property or object, you might be able to read the personality of what it is about. 

Candida Hofer

As far as the beauty goes in Candid Hofer's work, it is not just made through her photographic work, yes she captures these images in a fantastic way on a large format camera but it is the actual place that happens to be absolutely stunning.  Hofer has travelled around Europe and photographs the insides of Libraries and Opera Houses.  This image here at the top is probably one of the best in my eyes, purely because of the way the house looks and the way that huge curtain is pulled half up.  Places like this are so fascinating and beautiful, so I do think that with works like  this, if the subject is a good looking place, you are likely to have good looking images. 

I tend to think this with all of the American photographs.  I feel as if America had so much more photographic opportunity and has places that are more picturesque. But maybe thats just because I am not an American.  Maybe they think the same about the English Photographer. 

The reason Candid Hofer's work has relevance to my own Ideas is because she goes round to all of these different countries and places and photographs the 'same' thing.  She photographs either Opera House's or Libraries in each of the places.  Because every single opera house and Library is different, that outcomes can have completely different looks.  This is the reason behind my work and what I will be trying to convey.  I want to show that the 'same' thing can have a totally different outcome and look from one already taken before.  If the subject matter I choose are places of things right next to each other, this could be interesting because the outcomes could look so different. 

Candida Hofer's work is beautiful, and the large format camera captures everything in sharp focus which makes her images stand out even more. I would like to think of a subject matter that looks good when looking directly at the front, like these images here. I want to have a frontal composition to also capture the document side to architectural landscape imagery.  

 The last thing I want to mention about Hofer's work is how it is all in colour, I do not think that the images would have looked if they were shot as black and white images, the colours really make different parts of the room stand out.  I can already say that whatever my subject and photo series is going to be of, I can see myself using black and white.  I can see this because I would like them to all look the similar, and to show their difference's, if I kept my subject in colour I do not think they would flow well together.