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

The Dusseldorf School of Photography

Stefan Grohert (Ed.)

Aperture: New York

2009

Living Normally

Living Normally: Where Life Comes Before Style
Trevor Naylor, photos by Niki Medlik
Thames & Hudson: London
2007

This is what I was taking about just before with looking for interior shots of actual peoples houses.
However, this book is less helpful than its title suggested it would be because the photos didn't make me want to look at them. They were boring and technically didn't seem very skilled.
Here are some the ones I did like, though.

Books That Were Not Useful But That I Want Kudos For Looking At

Early Georgian Interiors
John Cornforth
Yale University Press, New Haven & London
2004

Not useful because: the cottage is late Georgian, and the interiors depicted are too lavish to be applicable.

Designs for Small Spaces
Jennifer Hudson
Laurence King Publishing, London
2010

This is a very cool book, with lot of strange and exciting things in it, however it is about designing new ways to live in small spaces, rather than interior decorating for small spaces (though I guess it is kind of that) which probably would have been more helpful.

A while ago I saw this a prototype (on the internet, not in the raw materials) for a house that was something like 2m²  and I have just spent a bunch of time searching for it but I can't find it so you'll have to take my word for it that it made living in a box look like a pleasant experience. The downside would be if you were messy (like me) there would be a high chance of filling the box up and having to swim through clothes to the doorway.

The Interior Design Course:Principles, Practises, & Techniques.

Tamris Tangaz

Thames & Hudson: London

2006

It's probably really obvious why this book wasn't help. It's probably right there in the title where it says "The Interior Design Course". I'm not sure, maybe I thought that an interior design course would include a section on how to photograph the interior that you just designed? Honestly, I'm not sure.

I found it really difficult to find books with tips on photographing interiors.

I skimmed a couple of books (and now that I try to find them I'm being to think that my initial searches must have been poorly phrased) and took down some notes, but the most helpful thing was talking to Jane (about what lens to use and getting a re-cap on how to use the RBs) and actually just taking photos.

Harvars Design Magazine

2008-9

Okay, so I hardly looked in here, but I like the cover images.

They're by:

Aneta Grezeszykowska & Jan Smaga

Dolma 4/52, from the series Plan, 2003.

How You Look At It

How You Look At It: Photography of the 20th Century
Thomas Weski, Heinz Liesbrock (Editors)
Distributed Art Publishers: New York
2000


Robert Adams

This is part of Adams' Series The New West, which centres around house development along the Colorado Front in the 1960s and 70s. Many families moved out there to be near nature, but found that the development that was to house them had taken place of the wilderness. The starkness of the image creates a sense of the mass produced which is associated to houses such as this and lawns as impersonal as that. There is a feeling of loneliness in the single silhouetted figure. 

More information here and here.

Eugene Atget

So, Atget is famous for executing a beautiful black and white  survey of Paris at the beginning of the 1900s. His work manages to be both documentary, in the sense of recording the superficial facts of the city's face, but also manage to evoke atmosphere and feeling without relying on a personal narrative. They are still, empty images that are full of the cultural life of the city.

Further info here.

William Eggleston

Much of the writings I've found on Eggleston's work (I've been looking here) discussed his focus on the use of colour. In a 1989 interview with Charles Hagen (that I found on his site under Articles & Essays) Eggleston talks about the importance of colour in his work and the abstract value of photographs, suggesting that a good composition will still be compelling when held upside down, where as a weak composition will not. 

I'm not sure how much I believe this, it sounds a little like the poet who said that a good poem should also be able to tell as story when held horizontally and viewed as an image. Which is rubbish.

That Belated Email Correspondence with my Client was Talking About

Hi Nik,

I've finished shooting up at Colonial Cottage, so I'm on to postproduction. In the mean time I thought I'd send you a couple of jpegs so you can have a look at what I'm doing.

I've talked to Image Lab about printing at A0 so that the files I give you can be sent straight to print. They advise printing A0 at 175dpi rather than the 300dpi that I suggested earlier, so I will set the files up to print at this resolution instead.

Thanks,

Ish

(I attached some jpegs)

Hello Ish – thanks for sending these in. They are looking great – and I look forward to seeing them all J.

And thanks for sussing out the dpi bizzo.

Bye for now,

Nik

Ish,

Thanks for this. How many images do you have and, are there any wide shots of whole rooms that have depth such as corners like that of the boy’s bedroom. I noted that your shot of the wash house was in more of a single plane. Another way to achieve depth is to place objects in the foreground but in that case you had cropped them out.

 Anyway we look forward to seeing your whole project when completed.

Regards

Paul

Hi Paul,

I have around 50 at the moment, down from 80, as an initial edit. I plan to get it down to three frames per room.There are a couple of wide shots, and there are quite a number which use corners to create depth. All up I would say there's a reasonably equal split of deep and flat compositions.

Thanks,

Ish

Great, let us know when they are ready to view.

This is How I Want to Live.

Flea Market Style

Emily Chambers with words by Ali Hanan, photos by Debi Treloar

Ryland Peters & Small, Inc.: New York

2005

So, in terms of text this book reads like an article in a women's magazine. Kind of like "oooooooooooooooo! Have you ever thought of not buying something new? Because there's this new fad where you shop at local markets! Here're some tips on how to do it!"

So I won't bother quoting any of it.

The photos, though, make me want to move in.

The photographs are light and make appealing compositions out of some rather crowded spaces. The size of the space and the amount of clutter is standard for most houses, I reckon, but not for most interior design/interior decorating, the kind that makes it into contemporary design books tends to be huge and minimalist, and not so helpful as a book like this. It's hard to find books full of photographs of the interiors of normal houses, though it strikes me as I write this that maybe I should have been looking at Home & Garden magazines all along?

I quite like this way of photographing a bed. I had never thought about photographing a bed being difficult, but one of the architecture photography books I looked at pointed out that it is essentially one is attempting to make a big rectangle look interesting. I'm not sure if becoming aware of that makes photographing beds harder or easier, but I like them a lot less now.

I prefer the flatter compositions to whole room shots. This could be a bad thing, I'll post some belated  email correspondence with my client in a second.

Why I am happy that I get spam from Vice

There is an interview with Miranda Hutton here

Miranda Hutton's Rooms Project is a long running series of photographs of the bedrooms of children who have died. These are wide angle, medium format images, taken using natural light.

Many of the rooms are still set up as the children had left them, they have become museums in their own right, shrines to the child who has died, an attempt to record them, keep them alive, hold on to a piece of them. This is a very heavy subject to deal with, as loss is very personal and the loss of a child is one of the most tragic.

The objects in the rooms have a sense of being a dead persons belongings in a way that museum objects do not, the personal nature of the objects is lost when they become institutionalized.
I'm waffling, of course, but I find it interesting that when the child's belongings become artifacts the seem more personal than they would if the child were alive, where as artifacts in museums (presumably also belonging to someone deceased) seem much less personal.

The images themselves are very loaded, and even without the titles the glow created by the long exposures give the images an eerie feeling that doesn't rely on their context.

Died three years ago (2010)

Died eight years ago (2004)

Died eleven years ago (2005)

Died four years ago (2005)

Died eleven years ago (2005)

Alec Soth

I got a very large compliment! Someone said my work reminded them of Alec Soth, so I've put up some of his interior images.

These images are hauntingly empty. It seems as if something has happened here. Soth's main focus is people, interspersed with these loaded scenery shots, the feel is quite different here, divorced from their contexts. His work is situated firmly in an American tradition along with Robert Frank and company, however aesthetically his images have a very different feel. 

The Last Days of W.

Paris Minnosota

Dog Days, Bogota

Niagara

Two Towels

Sleeping by the Mississippi

Green Island, Iowa, 2002

Kaskaskia

Green Island

New Orleans

Bible Study Book

This last one reminds me a little of my shot of the writing tablet in the parlor, however that has more to do with the arrangement of the objects than my photo taking because my image is tragically under exposed, where as Soth's is beautiful.

I think the similarity comes from the emptiness, which in his work is disheveled and long abandoned-looking, mine photos display much more furnished interiors, if my images seem abandoned, it looks to be much more recently.