Friday, 28 February 2014

Location

When considering location it was hard to find a place to start! The world was our oyster and that was a daunting thought. As a group we decided we wanted to host outside the UK and take full advantage. We began to throw some ideas around for the typical places, Paris, New York, Milan etc but thought these were a bit overdone.

Luckily we had decided on an initial starting theme of culture and in a group talk the 'Capital of Culture' came into conversation. It was previously held in Liverpool in 2008 which is how a few of us were aware of it. We decided to investigate if and where it would be held in 2014.




After a quick search online we discovered Umea in Sweden was named along Riga in Latvia. We decided to go with Latvia and then began out search for a venue!

Our next step was to find a venue in Riga to hold the festival. This was proving difficult at first, and as a group we decided to move on and research this at home and bring all the ideas to the Facebook group. In the end we decided to go with a venue Rachel had found.Riga City Exhibition Hall "Riga Art Space" It had three great rooms we could make great use of and also where it was set, we could possibly have an outdoor exhibition.

Rental Information:
Riga Art Space also offers venues for various activities:


Riga Art Space also offers venues for various activities:
  • Concerts and performances
  • Seminars
  • Meetings
  • Exhibitions
  • Fashion Shows
  • Outside View

Riga Art Space is a multifunctional exhibition hall which is primarily aimed at popularising and supporting the contemporary visual arts at the local and the international level.


 

Riga Art Space is a multifunctional contemporary art space, which in its activity strives not only to the contemporary visual art representation but also to the production of world level art projects by taking relevant and professional organisational measures.

http://www.makslastelpa.lv/en/partners 

We decided we will hire out the main room to hold all 60 images.

Were also going to hire out one other room for the social side of the event and to hold all the small prints on sale. 


Thursday, 27 February 2014

Lowery Gallery Visit - Alison Goldfrapp

Today we were lucky enough to go the Lowery gallery to be spoken to by director of the gallery, Michael Simpson. While we were there we looked at the Alison Goldfrapp exhibition which was the basis of his talk.

It was a mixed bag really, with some art some photography and even installations. It was a nice chance to see a mixed media exhibition and get a feel for video display alongside photography, painting, installations and much more.



'This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore some of her person inspirations through the painters, film makers, illustrators and photographers who have shaped her own inimitable artistic vision'.


Inital Shoots

With my initial idea of grouping age ranges of people I planned to gather a group of 20-25 year olds and do a studio shoot in a very similar style Martin Schoeller. I contemplated and planned for this but then decided that I didn't want to just rip off his work. I wanted to change a few things and make the shots my own although still linked to his style and the theme of identity.

I was very selective with my subjects and I just said to them 'I'm going to take a headshot of you'. I gave no more direction than that. This opened up the chance for them to do what they wanted, given the chance most people will smile and I think you can always spot a forced smile in a shoot. So I let them do what they wanted, some smiled, some laughed some did nothing!











I didn't spend too long shooting my images because they were so simple. I was using a 30mm f1.4 prime lens. This was the obvious choice from the start. I knew I wanted to throw the background completely out of focus but still retain pin sharp focus in the foreground. This wouldn't have been as effective with anything f4 and under. I could have shot on a longer lens to add more depth of field but I really liked the intimate feel of the 30mm.

I tried to keep the composition of my shots the same. I was using a set focus point on my camera and I'd pre focus on the eye and then re compose to get a fairly balanced composition.

All of the shots I've chosen to use were outside, I chose to shoot outside and use natural light just because I think it's much kinder to the face. Studio lighting done wrong can be really unflattering so for simplicity and continuity I stuck to shooting outside. Since I was shooting wide open at f1.4 I had to use a relatively fast shutter, I was always somewhere between 1/500th and 1/2000th and ISO 100. Some days were brighter than others so I just had to play around on the day.

I shot in RAW and then pulled my images straight into lightroom to do some very minor adjustments. I correctly exposed all the images as some had some blown highlights and then chose the images that I felt were the sharpest and most accurately focused.

Some of the images needed cropping slightly to fit in with the others but this wasn't an issue at all. I then applied one of my Lightroom presets to add a tone curve and increase contrast amongst a few other tweaks.










Karin Albinson - AAA (Sean Ryder & Friends)


We recently had the chance to see Karin present a talk about an exhibition she created in Manchester called AAA Sean Ryder & Friends.

The exhibition was featured around the Manchester musician Sean Ryder and the time Karin spent on tour with him in the years prior.

It was a great presentation and really informative. We talked in depth about the type of prints, framing and display methods Karin used and she was happy to explain the process of selecting these and her reasons for doing so.

We were told that originally the gallery had agreed to pay for the exhibition as long as Karin went through their contacts etc. Originally this wasn't an issue but when it came to printing the images Karin said she just wasn't happy with the quality of the printers they were using. She spent several months researching and finding printers who could produce the quality she wanted. She also experimented with several types of print. She talked about printing on glass, aluminium amongst other things! Which was a really interesting insight and gave us food for thought for our own festivals.



Overall I really enjoyed seeing the exhibition and the video above is a credit to it. It was received well by the public, the gallery and the sponsors and she went on to sell some of the prints to manchester based businesses who still have some of them displayed today!







Thursday, 20 February 2014

Some thoughts with the group

Today we had a group session with Karin which was great. She showed us her AAA exhibition with Sean Ryder and talked us through her planning and budget for the exhibition and just generally how she went about it.

It was a really informative session and we took a lot away from it as a group. The sheer amount of planning was underestimated alongside the budget and costs of printing!

We were given a rough set of questions to get us thinking about our festivals and this has formed a foundation for discussion and research within the group. We used this as more of an excercise rather than an actual plan of action but it was a great way to get started with the group and got us talking about our plans.


Thursday, 13 February 2014

International Festival of Photography Lodz


HISTORY
Fotofestiwal was born in 2001 as one of the first photography events in Poland. Since then, both photography and the ways of organising cultural events have changed. Fotofestiwal has always been up to date with these changes. It is intended as a space for various forms of photography and a forum for discussion on art and society, but also as a search for alternative methods of talking about photography and presenting it.
The festival is held annually in May. Since the very beginning, it has been meant as a place for meetings and exchanging ideas. The festival was launched as an initiative of students and teachers of sociology and this has always influenced its character. Among the different forms and types of photography the humanist and social aspects of the exhibited works have always played an important role.
Throughout the years, we have come up with a fixed format focused around the Main Programme – curator exhibitions which at the same time provide the main theme for each edition. Cooperation with a group of top world experts has brought different perspectives on photography and the work of a curator:



Martin Schoeller

For our festival we have decided on a theme of 'Identity or ID'. This is a pretty broad subject which allowed us some freedom when choosing a photographer. I initially thought about street photography as this an area of photography I'm very interested in and most of my favourite photographers work on the street.

However I then came across Martin Schoeller. I'd seen the work before but never really investigated the photographer behind it or really looked into the project. I was really interested to find out more and decided it would be a great start for my project so I did just that.




I have chosen to use Martin Schoeller as my photographer for this module. Our chosen theme is identity which was a challenging subject initially. I've come across Schoeller's work a few times before and I really liked it. The 'hyper close up' portraits offer an insight into the subjects on a level that is unattainable in a normal portrait. 

His portrait work has influenced my ideas and I've decided to base my work around him and his techniques. I aim to shoot a series of 6 portraits of people in the same age range in order to confirm to the theme of identity. I'm going to try and use varied subjects so I can explore the diversity within a certain age range.

I have written a 500 word piece which describes his work and would accompany the exhibition in order to provide insight into the reasons I have chosen him.

"A native of Germany, Schoeller, who now lives and works in New York, makes portraits both of well-known actors, politicians, and musicians, as well as the distinctly “un-famous” who are presented at parity, enabling us to question our notions about celebrity, personality, and likeness. Informed by his early exposure to both the celebrity portrait work of Annie Leibovitz and the formal austerity of German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Martin Schoeller’s photographic portraits provide a topographic and serial representation of various human faces.

These large-scale photographs, with their hyper-real detail, give us close-ups that at once decontextualize the face as they detail its landscape. As a result, each image proves a compelling visual topography and an opportunity to precisely examine the apparent complexities and contradictions of each subject. When hung en masse, Schoeller’s photographs take on a haunting prosthetic agency, as if his subjects are gazing back at the viewer while we gaze at them.
There is a desiccated, slightly stunned look to each sitter facing Martin Schoeller's camera, as if they might have just witnessed some unfortunate event, such as a car crash, or perhaps a favourite sporting team's disgrace. There faces are rendered in frightening, almost forensic detail, with sharply defined lines, skin pores, even minute scars and, of course, their glittering eyes. In each colour picture, we see clear evidence of a life's journey.

When the mantle of celebrity slips, for just a click of a shutter, in these larger-than-life portraits, the famous are exposed. Schoeller treats his celebrities equally - not just as people but also as vistas of flesh across which some emotions are seen to wander. The photographs also show the effect of time on people who have always been in the public view.

Schoeller’s portraiture brings viewers eye-to-eye with the well-known and the anonymous. His close-up style emphasizes, in equal measure, the facial features, both studied and unstudied, of his subjects—presidential candidates, movie stars and artists—leveling them in an inherently democratic fashion. Schoeller’s photographs challenge us to identify the qualities that may, under varying circumstances, either distinguish individuals or link them together, raising a critical question: What is the very nature of the categories we use to compare and contrast"

Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Flash Forward Festival - Boston

The Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward program is an annual competition that showcases the work being created by the very best emerging photographers from Canada, the USA and the UK. Every year, judges from each of the participating countries review submitted work and identify those young people that they believe show great promise as professional fine art or documentary photographers.
The Flash Forward 2013 Group Show features a select cross-section chosen from the bodies of work featured in the competition catalogue. The photography covers all genres from documentary, photojournalism and fine art studio practices and shows how each of these young photographers are affected and influenced by their mentors, interests and choices of subject matter.
The Flash Forward 2013 Group Show pays tribute to the diversity of the annual program and its growing profile, offering evidence that the best emerging photographers are at the cutting edge of the direction that photography will take in future years.
The Magenta Foundation gratefully acknowledges the nurturing support of Flash Forward Festival Presenting Sponsor TD Bank for its ongoing commitment to Flash Forward, in all its formats, since launching in 2004.
The following artists are featured in the Flash Forward 2013 Group Show:
Bright Spark Winner: Alma Haser, UK
Canada
  • Aaron Vincent Elkhaim
  • LM Chabot
  • Philip Cheung
  • Graham Ereaux
  • Mika Goodfriend
  • Jason Gowans
  • Laurie Kang
  • Christine Lawrence
  • Myrto Papadopoulos
  • Evan Rensch 
United Kingdom
  • Chloe Borkett
  • Toby Coulson
  • Victoria J. Dean
  • Vangelis Georgas
  • Kajal Nisha Patel
  • Emma Jane Spain & Jake Green
  • Yuji Hamada
  • Zoe Maxwell
  • Valentina Quintano
United States
  • David Emmit Adams
  • Garrett Baumer
  • Clarissa Bonet
  • Caleb Cole
  • Peter Di Campo
  • Justin Kaneps
  • Daniel Kukla
  • Fabiola Menchelli Tejada
  • Laura Morton
  • Walker Pickering
  • Irina Rozowsky
  • Bryan Schutmaat



Tuesday, 11 February 2014

Other Festivals

Guernsey Photography Festival had a range of major international photographers work displayed, including: 
  • Martin Parr - 'Small World'
  • Richard Billingham - 'Rays a Laugh'
  • Carolyn Drake - 'Paradise Rivers'
  • Samuel Fosso - 'African Spirits/Tati'
  • Tony Ray Jones - 'The English'

The above with the main major photographers showcased at this festival but they also had work on display from:

  • Jocelyn Allen
  • Tim Andrews
  • Adam Patterson
  • Francesco Giusti
  • Nelli Palomaki




New York Photo Festival





Saturday, 8 February 2014

Humans Of New York

When considering a photographer for the festival I decided to revisit one of my favourite photographers this year.

Brandon Stanton is a photographer behind a project that took social media by storm this year. The project entitled 'Humans Of New York' is a collection of street portraits taken across New York.

Accompanying the portraits is a snippet of conversation Stanton has shared with the subject, more often than not about their life. Some are humours others are intimate and some are thought provoking. I've been inspired to shoot some street portraits from this project for my personal work and I always turn to the book for inspiration and motivation.

I came across his work on a photo blog last year and I was instantly hooked. New York as a place is very fascinating and almost photographed to the point of death however I felt like HONY was a breathe of fresh air.



"My name is Brandon and I began Humans of New York in the summer of 2010. I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive catalogue of New York City’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. I worked for several months with this goal in mind, but somewhere along the way, HONY began to take on a much different character. I started collecting quotes and short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets alongside the photographs. Taken together, these portraits and captions became the subject of a vibrant blog. With nearly four million followers on social media, HONY now provides a worldwide audience with daily glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City. It has also become a #1 NYT bestselling book.. It’s been quite a ride so far. Feel free to follow along."



I was lucky enough to purchase a copy of the book, which compiles hundreds of portraits and really is a roller coaster of emotion. This project certainly fits under the theme of Identity but I'm not sure if it's right for the festival. I'm going to consider my options with some other photographers and then make my decision.