Francesca Woodman
After a chance experiment I have become very interested in the application and effect of generating and recording movement with the use of my camera. One technique that isn’t covered in Part Three is the effect of the use of the zoom whilst the shutter is open. My experiments are still in their infancy, but of all the things that are generating an interest, this is the one that excites me and can work nicely in conjunction with some other ideas that I have. Basically I want to be able to start with the female nude form, but to go in a similar direction to Mona Kuhn insofar as to distort or hide some of the body. I want to create something which is beyond the nude. I don’t want to be producing nude for the sake of nude, even though my love for the photographed nude form all stems from Edward Weston.
I have looked extensively at the work of Francesca Woodman and can see how she was using movement within her images to create areas (of the body) of varying degrees of opacity to promote a ghostly and ethereal feel to her work. Throughout her work there is an overriding feeling of the presence of other ethereal beings lurking, hunting and taunting her. This disturbing feeling is at the forefront of almost all of her work and cannot help but make one wonder if this feeling was at the heart of what caused her to take her own life at such a young age.
Woodman made good use of movement within her images to convey many different feelings. In the first image below, she has replicated (in the modern) one of those early Victorian images that you see of grieving relatives being comforted by the recently deceased. This ‘capturing the fleeting moment’ is often reinforced by her often used style of partially cropping thing on the edge of the image. This fortifies the feeling that the image was captured rather than staged.
The image below is another which incorporates motion blur. This time we see a single figure moving out of shot with the face covered. 3/4 of the body is blurred, but the lower legs are not, giving a feeling that the ‘spirit’ is in some way anchored to our world. The overriding feeling here is of a spirit having been surprised, and trying to escape recognition/detection. In a way, the static lower parts of the leg are augmenting the perceived movement or fleeing of the upper body.
Again we see the human subject blurred. There are a number of themes which can be seen running through woodman’s work, and within this image there are two of her strongest. The use of strong light and things being on the walls. Reading this image, I feel that to the left there is the ‘light of good’, and to the right of the spirit-like figure is the small yet foreboding blob of cancerous evil. Her spirit is trapped between the two. She is also facing the wall closed and insular, maybe contemplating the battle between light and dark.
Robert Capa
D-Day, 6th June 1944, was the day that all of Robert Capa’s skills came together to produce those iconic images for which he is now synonymous with. The first of these skill I have fallen foul of many a time, that of preparation. Without it, many assignment don’t even get off of the ground. It wasn’t by pure chance that Capa was where he was on that historic day. Another skill Capa possessed was that of being able to narrate his work. Many (especially within Magnum) would vehemently argue that there is no place in documentary photography for narration of Capa’s style, calling it storytelling. It has to be accepted that a photograph is only a version of the truth. With this in mind, Capa was careful to only add foliage to the tree, rather distort the tree itself. He tells of the Boatswain giving him a kick in the rear to help him off of the landing craft. This in itself does not alter the truth of what was happening, but adds a seldom explored or used patina to the fabric of war.
This image is possibly Capa’s best known. It is of an American soldier wading through the water to Omaha beach on D-Day 6th June 1944. The image is grainy and blurred, two things which, in photography you would try to avoid. Capa took many photo’s during that day (though sadly all but 8 of 106 were lost to an error by the developer) and more during the days that followed, most of which were of a superior quality. So the question begs; Why has this particular one proven to be so popular and defining? All of the images he took that were of this quality (or lack of) were taken whilst he was on the move, and subject to being hit by enemy fire, whilst in the water, whilst scrambling for cover, whilst ‘fighting’ for his survival. And so it is, that the result of this external pressure is directly recorded via the camera, and imparted to the viewer, we feel as though we are there, or as close as can possibly be. So what is lost in recorded clarity is more than made up for with a conveyance of the sense and feelings of the moment.
If we look at images produced for the media of today, many of the ‘I was there’ stories, more often than not will be accompanied by a photograph or video taken on a mobile device. This will often be of a low resolution or of a less than perfect quality. Because of the very nature of the photographic device used, these low resolution images are accepted and are indeed creating a yardstick for what is accepted as ‘authentic’ journalism. There is an irony here which is open to exploitation in matters of law. It remains to be seen how this will develop.
My experiments with movement within the frame.
I have compressed my experiment into six images.
My starting point was to turn the basic movement idea on its head, and take photos of static objects, but record the movement of the camera using slow shutter speeds. The first image below, of two red paintings on a pastel coloured wall, produced a very soft edged image.
f22 @ 4 sec, ISO 1600, focal length 85mm, subject distance 4.5m. Lens 24-105mm.
The next image was shot using the same settings, but with a faster shutter speed of 1.5 seconds. This has somehow brought the movement into sharper focus, recording the movement more as a blur than a haze. For the ultimate direction I want to take this experiment, the first image works better.
f22 @ 1.5 sec, ISO 1600, focal length 73mm, subject distance 3.4m. Lens 24-105mm.
The next step was more exciting and less predictable. I added camera zoom to try to create movement. What this is in effect doing is recording lens movement, which is shown as image enlargement within a fixed frame. The zoom effect can be seen faintly, linking the starting image to the enlarged finish.
f22 @ 2 sec, ISO 1600, focal length 45-105mm, subject distance 3.4m. Lens 24-105mm.
To make it clear what was being recorded, I went outside at night and took a photograph of some isolated lighting. What appears to be happening is that the light ‘tails’ all seem to be travelling from the centre of the frame, fanning out.
f11 @ 6 sec, ISO 1600, focal length 28-105mm, Subject distance 4.5m. Lens 24-105mm.
I little more experimenting and the result is this very interesting image. This is a photo was constructed by me shooting in a highly lit indoor area with the light behind me, at a window which was night beyond. So in short, this is a reflection of me taking a photo. This image shows nicely an almost layered effect created by the zooming in of the lens. I think this has been created by zooming in slowly (6 seconds).
f32 @ 6 sec, ISO 1600, focal length 150-300mm, distance to subject 4.5m. Lens 75-300mm.
This is the start of a longer experiment/project which I am undertaking. This is a straight forward zoom without too much camera shake. The progression here is that I kept the lens still for two seconds before zooming out to full extension and then holding for a further two seconds. This technique has produced two clear(ish) images of the model.
f22 @ 6 sec, ISO 1600, focal length 58-105mm, subject to distance 1.2m. Lens 24-105mm.
There are 85 images on the contact sheet, and because the images are all part of an experiment I could have chosen many of the images taken, so there is also plenty to see on the contact sheet.
I see! 