booooooooooookwork

All in All

When I started this project I wanted to make it something I could get excited about. I've done a couple of things for clients before through the Massey events team, which is a great opportunity, and I find that a lot of the work is just point and shoot, there's not development, it is about taking photos quickly and well and getting them back to the client. Which is certainly a skill, and an area I'd like to improve in, but for this assignment I wanted something that I could take beyond that, and I wanted an outcome that I would be happy with as a series outside of the context of the commission.

Rather a lot of stuff has gone wrong along the way, and there have been times when I wished I had taken on a client in a field that I'm not later hoping to go into. Now that it's over I'm glad I set myself a proper challenge and really invested myself in it.

Now that the scanner isn't shutting down on me and the printers are back up and running and I'm ready to hand some things in (to class, if not to my clients, who will have to wait another week or so while I finish all of the dust and scratch fixing) I am so happy!

My least favourite room was by far the master bedroom, I'm not happy with any of my photos from there. But I'm okay with it because every other room has at least two photos that I'm really proud of. Also this project has made me fall in love with the RBs.

I meant to do something of a critique of myself here.....
I had a really clear view of how I wanted to do this from the moment my client gave me their brief. I wanted to use medium format, wide angle, natural light and I wanted to have a mixture of details and longer shots. I pretty much decided on that, did a couple of digital shoots to survey and then just started. I'm infinitely glad that my decisions paid off because executing them took a lot of time and faffing around with deciding how I was going to do it would have been a nightmare.

Home

Home: What Our Homes Really Mean to Us
Stafford Cliff
Jane O'Shea (Editorial Director), Nicki Marshall (Editor)
Quadrille: London
2006

Home is a survey of heaps of different people, artists, chefs, fashion designers, other kinds of designers, editors, journalists, basically creative people, each of whom has their home photographed and talks about what home means to them.

Near the start of the book there's a quote from William Goyen about how strange the concept of home actually is. We come to this new place at some time on some day in whatever circumstances and it grows into a place that we feel a connection with as though it were a person.
Also the homes depicted are lovely in an I-could-move-in-there kind of way that real homes manage where show homes just don't. While the spaces very in size they all have the kind of clutteredness I'm dealing with at Colonial Cottage, but that's because life makes clutter, it's what makes places look occupied.

Thomas Ruff

The Dusseldorf School of Photography

Stefan Grohert (Ed.)

Aperture: New York

2009

Thomas Ruff is a prolific photographer. I went to his lecture last year, and wow. He said that when he started at Dusseldorf he was told that he had never taken his own pictures, he had just retaken pictures he had seen before.

Something of a harsh realisation, but also a good thing to be told.

Anyway, this is one of the first series he did after that.

The Image Factory

Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth, Photograph, 1978-2010

edited by Anette Kruszynski, Tobia Bezzola, and James Lingwood

Monacelli Press: New York

2010

When you (read:I) look at Struth's museum series it's kind of the perfect idea. It's just kind of perfect. The images are intriguing, looking at people looking at art is interesting. Maybe because art is so loaded with meanings and when you look at art, you kind of hope to understand that meaning.... I'm not sure, looking at people looking at art I feel like Struth has shown us all some big joke that you miss when your actually in a museum or gallery.

Says Struth, "I wanted to remind my audience that when art works were made, they were not yet icons or museum pieces." "When a work of art becomes fetishized," the affable, articulate artist points out, "it dies."

(from here)

candida hoffer

Spaces of Their Own

Candida Höfer

with texts by Herbet Burkert, Luisa Castro, Enrique Vila-Matas

Schirmer/Mosel: Munich

2010

So basically, Hofer hangs out in the most amazing libraries that you have ever seen and gets super famous. Jealous? I am! All those books, and the architecture, and the books again. Wow.

I don't know what else to say. Except maybe I want to live in a library?

and