Styling Leeds - Vintage Fair

I was asked to do another weekend's photographs for Styling Leeds, this time at the Vintage Fair at the Corn Exchange on Saturday. I worked with Toria Brightside, who was being the style judge - handing out medals and goody bags to people we thought deserved to win, and I was photographing this. I will upload the photos as soon as they go on the Styling Leeds page :)

ManchesterManchester

When we visited Manchester to see the Roger Ballen exhibition, we were also set a one day brief on street photography. The brief was to produce 4 images that work together as a set, with a meaning, theme or context linking them. We looked at some quick examples including street fashion photography (similar to my Styling Leeds job), examples where the photographer had set up flashes in the street that were triggered when people walked past, and images that showed people lit by a selective light, and the rest of the image and busy street in shadow, creating a sense of isolation.
When I got to Manchester I started taking some photographs, I thought about different ideas, including a set of relatively unflattering photos of people putting food in their mouths, a set of people's blurred relfections in windows. However I decided to work with Paige to produce a collaborative set in the style of WassinkLundgren's TokyoTokyo, inspired by their talk the other week. Their TokyoTokyo series involved them shooting the same photograph of someone in the street, at the same time, however from two different angles.

I like this idea as its a completely new approach to street photography, creating interesting and sometimes funny results. I saw this as a good opportunity to try this out for myself. I worked with Paige and we developed sometimes subtle, and sometimes blatently obvious signals of who we wanted too photograph, and quickly ran to either side of the path we were on, and waited for our chosen person to pass. This produced some unexpectedly hilarious results from people's surprised, and sometimes angry reactions.

Manchester - Roger Ballen Exhibition

Shadow Land: Photographs by Roger Ballen 1983-2011
Shadow Land is a major exhibition of work by internationally-acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen whose work offers a powerful social critique and an extreme, uncanny beauty. The exhibition explores three decades of Ballen’s career, charting the evolution of his unique photographic style and demonstrating the contribution he has made to contemporary photography.

Having never heard of Roger Ballen before or seen any of his work, this exhibiton showing a variety of his works and projects was a good opportunity to be introduced to his images. A series that I liked and found to be memorable was the 'Uncanny Animals' images, taken in South Africa, which showed and looked at the relationship between humans and animals and how the animals can take over and adapt to human habitats

As a cat lover I was drawn to the images with cats in (especially this last one, how beautiful!) love the first one too, the shape of the cat creeping in at the edge after the bunny is awesome, such good timing. A lot of the images showing empty spaces like this had an abstract, graphic quality to them, looking as if the strong black outlines were black scribbles on a textured background. 

This was probably my favourite image from the exhibition. It was (rightly) a large print, on a wall not taken up by many other photographs which reinforced the strength and impact of the image. I love the peaceful feel of the girl asleep with the cat lurking on top, contrasting with the chaos of the textured wall and the image of presumably older generations watching her. I really wanted to find a poster or postcard of this in the gift shop however there wasn't anything there - would have loved this on my wall.

I'm a massive lover of cats in photographs, placed in either ordinary, relaxing, or unexpected and contrasting situations, I can't help but feel the addition of a cat can make a photograph ten times better! (in my opinion anyway). This has inspired me to maybe start up my own project looking at this, giving me an excuse to create my own photographs with such additions. 

Styling Leeds Trial Photographs

I was asked to do a trial at Styling Leeds this weekend, to go out and take photographs on Saturday of fashionable people in Leeds. I was lucky that it was sunny (I was worried rain/bad weather would mean no one would be willing to stop and they'd be all covered up in coats) and that it was busy in town. I wandered around a few different places to work out where the best place would be to stand, but also to get a variety of locations and backgrounds in the photographs, and hopefully photograph a wide variety of people and styles. My most successful spot was standing half way down the main shopping street, Briggate, as this was where the most people were passing, and also where an amazing busker was that I got to listen to all day! Here are some of the photographs that I took:

The photographs had to be in for 2pm on Monday, along with the signed consent forms and typed up email addresses that people had given me. Styling Leeds seemed happy with the photos and have asked me to work this Saturday photographing at a vintage fair in the Corn Exchange. Overall this was a good opportunity to be introduced to the process of photographing for a company and working to a brief/deadline. I really enjoyed photographing people and having the excuse to spend so many hours people watching! 

Visiting Speaker - Thijs Wassink (WassinkLundgren)

This video shows the editing process of the booklet ‘WassinkLundgren is still Searching’. While in Beijing and Shanghai on a grant, the artists didn’t have time to plan a book project carefully to the end, so they simply turned the production process around. WassinkLundgren Is Still Searching is a witty publication in which, depending on who is to receive the book, the artists tear out the ‘unimportant’ pictures after publication: a sort of editing as post-production. After the editing is finished, the remaining number of images and the date are written on the cover of the book.

This was definitely an inspiring talk, it was interesting to see such a different approach to editing down images from the book, contrasting to the long thought out process that is usually associated with editing down photographs. It made me think about and even reconsider how I would edit my photographs for the book; I would love to do my own process similar to this in a  future project, or come up with my own innovative way of editing.

These are some photographs from their book 'Empty Bottles' which consists of photographs that were created by the pair setting up a situation to photograph including empty bottles. They noticed that in Tokyo whenever there was an empty plastic bottle left on the floor, someone would come along and pick it up, therefore they decided to set up their camera looking at a scene, place an empty bottle somewhere in the scene and wait for someone to come along and pick it up, then take the photograph. I like this approach to creating a photograph, as it enables them to construct their own photograph in a fun and light-hearted way and almost control people's actions without them knowing it.

Visiting Speaker - John Bulmer

 

We had a talk with visiting speaker John Bulmer, known for his colour photographs of the North of England in the 60s. He explains that “It didn’t occur to anyone to take the north of England in colour – that was considered a black and white subject”. He talked about his considerations when sequencing his book that is still in progress. The book is to show various shoots he has been commissioned to do, and will be split up into 8 different chapters to create a divide between projects and the opportunity to introduce each one. He said that he considered the sequencing of his images on a purely visual basis, which makes sense as it was a pioneering move for him to shoot the north in colour at the time, and therefore his book needs to reflect this, with a focus on colour on a visual basis. He also said that he wanted to keep the layout of each image on the page simple,  he had a dislike towards gatefolds in a book as he hated the loss of an image in the bend of a book. This was an insightful talk to be able to find out how another photographer thinks about how they sequence their images, and also interesting to hear his opinion on gatefolds;something which I am looking into in my book module research.

Styling Leeds Weekend Job

'I work for Canvas8, a leading UK insights service for some of the world's top agencies and brands including Channel 4 and Mother London. We're recruiting for street-fashion photographers, as a Saturday or Sunday job, to take shots for our online community Styling Leeds. We piloted the project last year and had a brilliant response and more recently the kind folk at Trinity Leeds have agreed to financially back the venture. We are currently looking to expand our photographers' team further. It's a fantastic job for students to get involved with, and a super bit of experience that'll look good on CVs or as part of a portfolio. The work is exciting, relevant and straightforward and only requires a couple of hours on weekends.

I decided to apply for the Styling Leeds job after receiving this email on my Uni email address. I found the Styling Leeds Facebook page and that convinced me to apply, as I liked the photographs and the outfits people had on so much!

I like the idea of walking around town spying people with lovely outfits and approaching them to take their photo. In the past I would have thought I'd feel too silly doing this, however its something I've recently got used to through doing documentary style photos for other projects, therefore I see it as something I could enjoy. I emailed saying I'm interested in the job, and got a reply saying they liked my work, so I'm waiting to see what they say.