Matt & Freya's Work

Week 1: In the first week in Matt's session, we talked about different artists and things about these artists.  We all had to write down a name of an artist and then tell everyone what it was, then we checked things about them like if they were male or female, or dead or alive.

Week 2: Following on from the things we did in week one, we were asked to bring in 3 photos. 1 photo that was taken between 1827 to 1945, another from between 1946 to 1999 and then the last one from between 2000 to now. We then had to go around the room and look at everyone's photos and guess which year each others were from to see if we got them right. Then finally we put them all into the groups on the wall to show which year they were really from.

(I took photos of the groups which I have put below)

Week 2:   This week with Matt we had to go out and find something to photograph. We had to do this to look at the sizes of photographs in comparison to the size of the actually object which we photographed. Then we had to measure both and try make the photograph the same size as the object.

The one which my group did is below.

Week 3: This week with Matt, him and our whole class walked down to a photography gallery need the train station in Leeds City Center  It was very different to other galleries i've been to before because it was quite small but very spacey and there was a bar and place where you could buy food and hot drinks too. 

In this gallery was the work of Ewen Spencer. The work was all about teenagers drinking / partying because he apparently found them interesting to watch and photograph them while they were like this. The photos were pasted on the wall in squares and as if they were wall paper because they weren't framed or anything and the pictures had a few air bubbles and creases in them like wall paper sometimes does. 

It was a very interesting visit and I liked it because he put the photos up in a very different way to what photographers usually do when putting their work in galleries.

(Some photos from this are below)

The Great Depression

Below are some photos of some things that our group thought related to the great depression.

(This one is an example to show a shop that has been replaced by something else due to recession)

(This shop below is a example of a shop which helps people in times of recession because people can go in a trade in things they don't want anymore in exchange for money)

 Paparazzi Photography 

With Matt we had to pretend to be paparazzi for the lesson. First though, we had a look and a talk about the famous paparazzi photographer, Mr Paparazzi (Darryn Lyons) and we also researched into press-photography finding out that it has been around since the 19th century. 

We also had a look at a photographer called Weegee who was one of the first photographers to do paparazzi style photos. He used to photograph crime scenes and extreme things like people who had just died. Sometimes he got to the scene quicker than police could get there.
Below is one of the photos he took:

Since the 19th century photography has been developed a lot, along with cameras and press-photography has become bigger / more people do it. These days I think some press-photographers do become a bit too intrusive though, because they literally follow celebrities everyone and don't let them feel like they have a 'normal life'.

After doing research and having a chat about things, Matt gave us a map and said he was going to pretend to be a celebrity and the map we had was the route he would be taking. So we had to fine somewhere within the route that he was taking and hide and wait till he walked past and get press / paparazzi style photos of him.

This is a photo I got from it:

Ethics of Photography

This session was all about ethics in photography and our own ethics. We had to try and think about things that we would and wouldn't photograph if we were photographers.

 Things I would photograph:
Buildings
Landscapes
Families
Cat-Walks
Children if asked
Bands

Celebrities

Vehicles

Fashion

Weddings / Events

Things I would NOT photograph:

Dead bodies
Naked children

Abuse

Animal Cruelty
Pornography

The Truth About A Photographic Image

The quote I found about editing photos is :

"You don't take a photograph, you make it"

This quote was said by Ansel Adams and I found this quote on the website below:

http://digital-photography-school.com/photography-quotes

Editing techniques- From the past and from now

In this lesson we first got given a pile of photographs and had to work out which ones were re-touched/edited and which ones weren't. We put them where we though they went and most people though most of the photos were edited, but it turned out all of the photos we were given had been edited in some way.

We also watched 2 videos about 2 different companies showing what they do to promote their products. The companies we looked at were McDonalds and Dove and they both showed very different things. The McDonalds video showed us how they photograph their products and explain why the products look different on the adverts to what they do in person. They showed that the move the ingredients forward in their burgers when they take photos so that you can see all the ingredients inside them.

Then on the Dove advertisement, it showed us a woman getting her photo taken then the photo got touched up a lot so the woman looked very different from what she did in the original photo, but they were trying to show the public how edited some companies can make their photographs.

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The Camera Never Lies:
How Truthful is the Photographic image?

Week 1: In the first session for this project we started talking about everything that we need to do for the project and what we would be doing in the next few sessions, to give us an idea on what the project is all about and what to expect in the other sessions.

Week 2:
Historical and Contemporary Image Manipulation

In this session we was given a pile of photographs and had to put them into two different groups. The groups were 'Manipulate' and 'Non-Manipulated' and we had to decide which photos were edited / manipulate or not. It turned out that every single one of the photos had been minupulated in some kind of way.

After we had finished sorting the images we then had a talk about the good and bad sides of image manipulation in things like advertising, beauty, fashion, food etc. We looked quite a lot at a woman called Amy Dresser who is a very well known and very successful commercial re-toucher. We watched a video from her that showed all the editing / manipulation that goes into advertisment, hers was showing what went into one of Dove's advertising campaigns, from make-up to re-touching.

Week 3:

Image Manipulation and Photojournalism

In this session we had a looked at different images that had been either staged, posed or edited and that were used in the production of news photographs.
We looked at a American photographer called James Nachtwey who is a war photographer and watched a video of him doing some war photography and how he did it then after him showing editors of a magazine the images he took.

When we watched the video I thought war photography was more about the violence and bad stuff in war but he didnt seem to photograph any violence and he seemed to stage some of the photographs to try and show war photography in them more. Also, when he was showing the editors of the magazine his work they seemed very picky about the photos and picked out every little detail in them to show the good and bad points about all the photographs.

We then looked at a photo-journalist called Ruben Salvadori and looked at a video about him where he spoke about his experiences doing photo-journalism. Instead of focusing on thigns like the buildings/the people around him he actually focused on the reactions of people when they saw photographers there. A lot of people seemed to pose more or try get in shots more when they realised photographers were there taking photos. I think when people pose for the shots and react to the photographers things look better than they could be, for example people start smiling if a camera is infront of them meaning they could actually look a lot happier than they actually. But in photography it helps sometimes because it gives photographers a better shot.

Week 4: Appropriation

In this session we looked at the history of Appropriation and had a look at some examples of people/artists that used other peoples work like photographs and then added things to them like text, to make it different so they could say it was their version.
Personally, I don't think it is right if someone gets loads of attention for something when they have just used another person work and added bits to it because the main part of the work was created by someone else who might not get any recognition for it.


Week 5: Staged Photography

In this session everyone in the class was given an image and we all had to decide if the image we had was staged or not. We then looked at different ways photographers stage their photos and how they set the shoots up and everything and then had a discussion on why photographers actually stage photos.

I think photographers stage their photographs because it gives them a better photo when they can choose where everything is and can use whatever they want in it instead of having to take a photo of something like a landscape that you can't change. I personally think staging photos is good because sometimes it can give photos more emotion or make them tell a story more. My favourite photographer that we looked at in this session was Gregory Crewdson because his staged photos just looked amazing because he used so much stuff in them and put a lot of effort into making them look good.