352mc revised proposal and statement

Posted on May 20, 2015 by yasmintaylor

Proposal;

1.TOPIC / TREATMENT & AUDIENCE

A brief description of the project you will be carrying out including the methodology you will undertake, the presentation strategy you aim to employ, and the context for which you intend to create the work.

Title; Façade

I have always been interested in dance and have been since starting dance as a young child. Recently as I transitioned into photography I became more interested in the movement performed in dance, and so my interest formed the basis for my project.

For my project I intended to create a series of image that explores the movement of the body during dance. When watching dance the viewer does not ordinarily perceive the transition between movements, as dancing moves fast, and our natural habits of blinking affect the way that we view the dance. Therefore the dance that we see is not the real thing, what we are seeing is a façade of what our brains put together for us. With this work I seek to explore the façade and express it by breaking it away from how it would usually be seen, allowing an alternative way of viewing which will pose questions to the view and give them an understanding of the façade.

The images produced for this work will show the transition of movement from the start to the end of a move. This will be done through using long exposure images with a mixture of static poses in the image, which will act as a frame to highlight the movement and motion created whilst giving it an element of realism.

I will be photographing in the studio as my work relies heavily on the space of the studio becoming the background and the reassurance on honesty and validity, which will come from having an element of realness in the images.

Final Statement;

Final Statement: How my project changed and why

During the course of this project my project has changed a fair bit. I started the project wanting to look at the true emotions expressed by a dancer through their movement and long exposure. This later developed into just looking at the emotion and not movement, as the feedback I received suggested the close up still of the face for example would be more successful. However after some time this changed again as I came to the conclusion that although you can express emotion in an image it is very difficult to do so effectively and so wouldn’t work as well as I would want it to. So I decided to go back to looking at movement, but this time just the movement. My idea now was focused on the fact that dancing is a façade, it is not really as we see it so I want to express this in my work through the use of long exposure images.

352mc 800 reflective report

Posted on May 20, 2015 by yasmintaylor

Reflective Report

Reflecting back on the module I feel it was a challenging one. However I feel I have made a lot of progress since the start, in not only developing my technique but the questioning of my work, figuring out what it is about a piece of work that interests me, and most importantly the reason for the work.

Through the course of this module I have been focused on movement produced by dancing. With initial interest in looking into the way a dancer emotionally expresses themself. However as the project developed I understood that it is difficult to effectively represent emotion, and that I was more interested in the movement, and dancing as a façade.

My interest in this evolved after thinking about how we see dance, and the factors that stop us seeing it such as blinking, and speed. Therefore what we are left seeing is a façade its not the real thing. We can’t see each movement, but this is not something that people think about. My aim was to explore this through my work and make the viewer aware of the facade.

The methods used to create my final body of work proved more difficult than anticipated. The concept of my long exposure method was effective and simple, although technically it was difficult to get right in low lighting conditions with a moving subject. She needed to be position correctly at every staged throughout the shoot. This allowed for no error and led me to having to adjust and reshoot countless times to get the positioning and motion within the width of the backdrop.

My methodology meant that I had to manually flash the lights at the beginning and end of the subjects movement to capture a strong static pose which was easier than expected both conceptually and technically however I did not consider the remote trigger delays which caused the light not to flash when needed at times so this was a hindrance but did not cause any real problems.

To achieve the intended results required me using bulb mode on my camera, which allowed me to have further creative control over my images, allowing me to leave the shutter open for as long as needed and produce technically correct images, with atmospheric lighting.

The images produced were done so to explore the human body when moving. Looking specifically at the transition between the start and end of a movement, in order to express the façade of dancing by offering an alternate way of viewing.

Although I feel that the context is reflected well in my image I feel that the whole concept may not be understood correctly without reading about the project. The viewer should get an idea that the work is about movement and it’s transition from start to finish. However, I am not sure that they will understand that I am trying to express dancing as a façade. I don’t think that this is a topic that many will have thought about and so it is not something that would necessarily cross their mind. On the other hand they may feel that it is questioning the representation of dance, which would be partly correct. So my viewer should get a fairly good understanding of the reasons behind the images. Without this context the images risk becoming another image of movement and nothing more.

One problem I do face with this work is that the viewer might not believe that this is a documentation of dance and that dancing if a façade. They may believe this work to be a complete composed creation, instead of a documentation of something real, that exists outside of the context of my work. My work relies on honesty, this needs to come across through the aesthetics as it is important for the viewer to believe in what they are seeing. Although my work defiantly try’s to show honesty I am not sure how effectively this will come across to an outsider. I don’t know that there are enough visual elements in the image to portray this honesty however I don’t feel adding more element from the space such as plug sockets would increase the honesty. Instead it may take always from the focus of the image the movement, as well as being distracting.

My work is in keeping with current contemporary photographic practice as it is try to document and record the reality of dance in a more creative way, pushing the limits of how we can document topics within photography, creating a more original body of work that explores the limitations. The methods used to create the body of work has been done so through the improvement of technology, without the technology friendly world we live in my images would not be able to exist as they currently stand.