A little bit on Joachim Schmid

Adam Hersey © 2014

Adam Hersey © 2014

Adam Hersey © 2014

Hello everyone, I hope this finds you all in good health. My first week back home has been completed and it has been a welcomed return to a slower pace of life, not that Falmouth is exactly what I’d call hectic.

Every time I come home I always tell myself that I’m going to sit down and actually read my book. While I’m away at uni I never tend to have time to just sit down and get stuck into my book. I’ve brought a book home from the library relating to my course, but I only got as far as the title before I lost interest. I’ll no doubt go back to it and force myself to learn something, but reading is far enjoyable when its for pleasure as I’m sure you’ll agree. My plan for reading is this, I will read a normal book, then after that I want to read a penguin classic. I’ve always been interested in the way some books and authors are spoken about and raised up on this plinth of greatness and so my aim is to slowly work my way through them and make up my own mind, I’ve read a few already and ‘Lord Jim’ by Joseph Conrad didn’t exactly set the world alight in my opinion. Whereas the Greek classics, ‘The Aeneid’, ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’ are all most definitely worth a read. Anyway I digress, the book I recently finished was Sebastian Faulks ‘Birdsong’, which blew me away, as you follow the life of a soldier through the course of world war one, and how mentally damaging it was to go through for all those poor men. The classic that I finished this week was ‘Treasure Island’ and having seen some of the copious amounts of adaptations on TV that there have been, I was immediately, a little suspicious of this Long John Silver character when he was introduced, I was onto him from the start. It turned out to be one that I think does warrant a read, as you see Robert Louis Stevenson mix old and new English. John Silver definitely feels like a precursor to Jack Sparrow as you see that the writers nick personality traits and characteristics from him to fuel their film character. The book is really enthralling if you want an adventure as it is quite innocent really with a kind of mild peril all the way through but you never really feel as though Jim Hawkins, the main character, is in any real danger. I am currently torn as to which book to start next. The choice is between ‘Papillon’ and ‘The adventures of Huckleberry Finn’  by Mark Twain, which is classed as child’s literature, but having read a few pages in Waterstones it certainly doesn’t read like it is.

The rest of my week had been fairly quiet as I look to continue with work in some way or another. I watched the football mid week which was disappointing, as I rooted for Olympiakos to maintain their lead against Manchester United but sadly no more misery was heaped onto David Moyes. I did think that the Olympiakos player called Campbell looked a bit of a handful though and is maybe one to watch as he has a good burst of speed and trickery to match. As for the draw for the next round, I think there will be some classic matches. Thankfully Real Madrid and Barca have been kept apart as I think it would make a great semi final or final to have a classico, so long as they both get through that is. Atletico could certainly cause barca more than a few problems especially with Diego Costa in the form he’s in. Zlatan up against Terry for PSG and Chelsea respectively will be a bit of a titan clash too. I don’t see Dortmund doing any damage to Real if I’m honest. I was smiling happily to myself as I saw that Manchester United were drawn up against Bayern Munich. I don’t know why but I have a real chip on my shoulder when it comes to Man Utd. I like to see them do as badly as possible whenever possible and fingers crossed they’ll get torn apart by Bayern. Sorry firstly to those of you who support Man Utd, and secondly to those of you who couldn’t give two hoots about football, I realise its not to everyone’s taste.

I have been on a few walks this week once to a national trust property and another yesterday to Cuckmere Haven which is on the south coast, between Eastbourne and Seaford. I used both opportunities to take some images for my project as I look to create an archive of images to use in the montages that I am producing. Cuckmere Haven was beautiful, if not a touch breezy to begin with. The walk takes you around the estuary and down onto the beach. It is a very picturesque location indeed, and still has some of the world war two pillboxes on the headland which were used as lookout posts for any signs of a possible German invasion. it makes you picture how dull and yet tense the lookout would have been as you lived with a constant threat but nothing ever coming from it.

Right, this week I am going to include a food review which has been called for by some readers. Now, the place I am going to review this week is ‘Habaneros’ the burrito bar in Falmouth. I’m going to give it to you straight; that place is downright awesome. You can basically get either a Burrito (obviously) or a fajita. You then get to cram them full of deliciousness, ranging from chicken to pulled pork and throw in some guacomole or mango sauce. They are literally as big as a babies arm and I think taste fantastic. Its good service as you can have a chat with the person making it and its pretty good price-wise too. Its cheaper and far tastier than a subway. One tip I will give is don’t bother about ordering the cheese onto it as you can just grate some on yourself when get back to the house and that way you can save yourself 30p. I’m not going to do these reviews every week unless there is a big call for it so let me know.

My work this week has caused a few headaches as I have struggles with getting the perspective right on my images. On one of them I have tried maybe a little too much as have merged a Spanish sea side town with the Cornish coastline. I’m not happy with the way the building looks to the right of the lamp post, but I’ve had to do it in this way other wise there would be a mahusive tree filling up the right hand side of the image. So maybe I’ll just file that under some artistic licencing. The other aspect I’m not 100% on is the perspective in the shot of the old ruins in the greenery of the gardens. I kinda just want to make the back end of it sit down slightly in the image. Apart from those minor technicalities I’m still happy with the way things are progressing.

Okay then, onto this weeks practitioner and boy is it a goodun. He goes by the name Joachim Schmid and creates contemporary portraits in a whole new way. Using images found in flea markets and car boot sales, the German Schmid, pieces them back together in order to create a new kind of almost super portrait.  The series is entitled ‘Photogenic drafts’ and is a sub strand in the ‘found photographs’ series. For this particular series he was sent a box of negatives which had all been scored down the middle and started piecing them back together. The way the images are hand montaged I think is particularly important. He actually sits and makes them and will then edit them later, rather than someone like myself who likes to produce it all on screen. It feels a bit like a Frankenstein approach as Schmid pieces together these people with no relation, with no prior knowledge of them and somehow instigates a sort of bonding between them to the viewer. We don’t know who they are, we will always try and impose some sort of idea or reasoning to images and I guess most of us will see these as maybe family relations halved and then put back together with maybe a sibling or parent to show genetic likenesses. Maybe to you they are snapshots of the past and present versions of the sitters. To my knowledge though all of these images have no relation to one another. I guess we shouldn’t be amazed by just how easily the human form integrates itself so easily with another but the way Schmid uses the lines of the face and shoulders to bring these people together is really quite sensational. This is another one of those projects when I kick myself for not having come up with the idea. I feel like it could also be making a comment on the way people were made to pose for photographs of portraits, as we see a similar body language running throughout the images. The images themselves are very striking with rich blacks really standing out upon first glance.

The portrait as an entity has become too clichéd now as everyone has their camera go to face, people more often than not will only smile. We have this need to always show ourselves as having a good time wherever we are or what we are doing. Some of the most powerful portraits, I feel, are the ones that just meet the sitter with their everyday face, as we are able to look at them in a more level  and unbiased way.

I think that’s enough for this week. See you all next time.

Adam

A very Brough outline of her work

Hello everyone, I hope you’ve all had a good week. My week has been a fairly busy one. I’ll start off from last sunday just after my last blog post and work from there in a fairly routine chronological order as per the norm.

The reason I’ve overlapped my weeks is due to the decision I made to include the the trip to the cinema that we embarked upon last sunday afternoon. For us in Falmouth the cinema is situated within easy walking distance and we don’t really seem to take advantage of that. We went to watch the ‘Lego Movie’, and before you all say ‘what are you… like four?,’ bare with me as I try and argue for it. Now you may see it as a kids film, but I personally think it was so much more. Obviously the whole film is just one big advertisement for Lego itself, (maybe the sales are down slightly) but it is also a real trip down memory lane and pumped full of nostalgia for anyone who used to play with Lego. It basically praises those of us of used to use the blocks to create whatever we wanted the ones who broke away from the instruction booklet that came with the packs, and actually used their imaginations to the fullest. In the film the ‘master builders’ see through the normal way of building Lego and can see the blocks in a completely new way. Not only does it try and sell this way of experimentation but the film is also very humorous, with many great lines being said. With a fairly big name cast including Morgan Freeman, Jonah Hill and Will Ferrell its turns out to be one of the clichéd movies similar to something like the original Shrek that has elements for both kids and adults. For a one trip to the cinema we all came away feeling pretty happy, I wouldn’t however buy the DVD as the jokes were good because you didn’t see them coming.

Right, blimey, that was just sunday afternoon. Onto monday, the day basically consisted of a group tutorial, or at least that’s all I can remember of it. The tutorial went well as I showed the pieces that I put on the blog last week to the rest of my group of peers. The work was met with interest and was spoken about in a confidence boosting manner. The point was made that the ones with both black and white and then colour on top worked better in terms of getting across the sense of time passing. But then it ws countered by another saying the fading of colour to colour was also working well.

Monday evening saw my house mate and myself take a trip to truro to watch another opera. Having watched plenty of episodes of ‘Frasier’ in which he seems to constantly be at one,  I was intruiged to see how the whole opera thing worked. We went and saw one before christmas and thought it was pretty good, so went again on monday evening to see if the last one had been a one off. Turns out it wasn’t and the second one was even better than the first. Who’d have thought it ay?

The rest of Monday and then Tuesday was dedicated to creating new pieces as I was told I would need a heck of a lot more of the montages for the final hand in and show. Tuesday evening for me was a return to badminton on a social level, and it was superb, I made sure that I gave 110% for the whole three hours and it paid off massively in the way I played. By far and a way one of the best sessions I’ve had in recent memory. It was tainted slightly by the fact that we have only 4 more sessions to run through before the end of the season which was a bit of a blow. For those of you who read weekly know that badminton for me has become a major part of the week, as well as knowing that my uni experience will shortly be coming to end, you always have in the back of your head the thought that it is coming to end. I’ll miss the badminton lot and with the amount of third years that are leaving it this year I’m sure it won’t quite be the same without us next year.

I worked as an ambassador for the university on wednesday as it was that time of year again when the applicants come down with the heavy portfolio cases and beads of nervous sweat on theirs brows for the interview process. I worked giving tours of the accommodation and the photography building on campus and basically praising it all in any way that could. I did this whilst also talking to the applicants asking any questions they had and generally trying to make sure they knew what was coming and not to be too nervous, which is easier said than done sometimes. It took me back to my interview day and how bloody nerve racking the whole process is. It’s surprisingly hard to answer the question ‘why do you want to study photography?’ when you’re 18 years old. You’re not really sure apart from having a passion for it  and getting enjoyment out of it in college its pretty hard to say where you want to be in the future. Even harder still is ‘why falmouth?’ ‘Umm the facilities are really good, and the course looks like the right one for me.’ The amount of times they must have heard answers similar to these is probably quite a lot. Working as an ambassador is a pretty good thing to do and I recommend that the second and first years reading this do get involved in the scheme.

Thursday I booked another 1-2-1 with my main tutor Deb. She wanted to see me before we broke up for easter to check that I was going down the right track with my work and see if I had any queries. I showed her the new work that I had done earlier in the week, which is also what I am going to put on the blog this week and she seemed to genuinely like them.

Friday my dad came down and we went and had a little explore of some of the places that we hadn’t been in cornwall yet. Now I’ve been going since I was about 4 years old and my dad about 25 years or so before I was born, so the number of places that we haven’t been to is exceedingly small. Nonetheless we ended up going to a town called Stithians which was an old mining town and one of the best preserved ones. The town itself though is inland and therefore doesn’t get any money from the tourist industry that is predominantly coastal based and so is incredibly run down and desolate. Driving through it we hardly saw another human being.

Anyway we travelled back yesterday and I am now home for a month. Most other uni’s don’t finish for another 3 weeks so I am going to have keep myself busy until others start arriving back.

The practitioner of the week is one that I mention a couple of weeks or so ago called Jenny Brough. Its is going to be another fairly short segment simply due to her genre of photography, which is fashion, which I don’t really have clue about. So for this week I’ll bumble my way through and hope that some of what I say is vaguely accurate.

Brough was a former student down in Falmouth and came and gave a refreshingly honest talk at during our symposium week a few weeks ago. Her story is fairly interesting as it gave us all an insight into the kind of slog you have to go through in order to get to where you want to be after uni finishes. Having graduated Brough took a year or so to get herself together to think about what she wanted to do, to develop an idea of a style. She got herself a part time job and then from there pushed on to what she wanted to to photographically. She then went and worked as an assistant for first Rankin for a short period of time and gained valuable experience and then went and worked for another practitioner who’s name escapes me. All the while she was having to sofa surf her way around London to get to where she wanted to be. At the end of her work for the guy I can’t remember the name of she was allowed to use his studio for her own fashion shoot. Having done the shoot, that work then got picked up and placed in a publication. From there things have gone from strength to strength for Brough, and she now does fashion shoots all over the world, recently going to New York for her first shoot over there.

Her work has a very strong, confident and bold style to it. On a personal level I think all the models look really harsh and menacing and I know that there is a lot more to it than I know, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand the clothing choices that the stylist make in fashion shoots. I assume they are going to the experimental, out there approach.  At the end of the day though I guess they are trying to sell a product and so have to make it all seem as appealing as possible. Underlying all of Brough’s work is a sense of beauty and form as she looks to accentuate the male and female forms.

That’s enough for this week, thanks for reading! The first three images are my newest pieces and then the there are six fashion shots form Jenny Brough, who, I should also mention is one of the nicest photographers I’ve spoken to about their work.

Adam

You’ve got to check out John Goto

Another week rolls around, and there’s good reason to be excited down here in Cornwall, the sun has finally decided to show itself again. Friday was the first day of the year on which we could legitimately play the ELO song Mr. Blue sky; and boy did we play it loud.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were incredibly tough sledging as confidence levels took on an all time low. Being in third year is a stressful experience as everything you now produce, you feel, has to be the constantly the best work that you’ve produced at uni. Always in the back of your mind is the end of year show and you want to hang something that is both strong visually and also interesting. I spent the three days trying to create some of my own work, using the old postcards that I’ve bought as the base background images while forming digital composites with the images that I myself have taken on top. If I’m honest I was fairly pleased with the way in which the pieces turned out.

Thursday led to me having a tutorial with the tutors in order to seek approval for the direction in which I was taking the project forward. It proved to be quite informative, as she helped me to understand a way in which to look at my work conceptually in a contemporary scenario. We spoke about how the images are talking about the sense of time and memory. We feel like we see memories vividly but really over time they fade and some parts can become distorted. Memories of places are usually weighted negatively or positively depending on how the experience with the place in question went. Sometimes its possible to have ideas and memories blend into one another, as I for one tend not to think of memories as stills but rather in a more cinematic way, like replaying parts of a film. (I realise I used the word memories close to a thousand times in the last two sentences). Working in this form of montage I was wary of mimicking the style of the 1920’s-40’s Dadaist movement by artists such as a the previously written about John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch. That style appears to be very surreal and bizarre as you see many many images spliced together to create one larger piece of work. As much as I admire the work that was produced in that time period I wanted my own to be less busy visually, more sedate, with an air of understated majesty. I have been looking to mainly play on the way one vision can merge into another and have therefore been experimenting with the way that that can be achieved and I have found that using pathways and lines to be the most effective of doing so. As the pathway leads from past to a new present, the memories of a place get overwritten and replaced by the small incremental changes that occur in the world that surrounds us. In order to create my images I have decided to try and allow some elements of the older postcards images to flow through into my own images, and to make sure that there is a distinctive way of telling where one boundary of an image ends I decided to include the edge of the images so that there is always a faded square visible in the images to denote the separation.

Friday was music filled as we enjoyed the weather listened to some tunes. In the evening I had another badminton match, annoyingly it was against the team at the top of the table and we lost quite comfortably. So ends the winning streak of two weeks. I didn’t play anyway near to the standard that I wanted to either which was again annoying. After that defeat the only student way I could think of was to drown in the sorrows and so went out into town with some of the people from badminton. A good night was had by all. I don’t think you could ever class a night that includes table fussball as a bad one.

Yesterday was a glorious sunny day so a trip to the beach felt necessary. You would never have guessed that it was early march by the way the people were crammed onto Gylly beach. The evening entailed the badminton AGM, which is basically a way of making sure that the club continues in good hands next year. We elected new captains and what not, and I feel that the club will be even stronger next year.

My practitioner of the week is a man called John Goto. Goto creates montage photographic images that have a satirical edge to them. His work is not out and out seamless merging of two or three places but is instead fitted together in a far more obvious and noticeable manner. Yet as the viewer see’s the work they are immediately able to relate to the image and it suddenly doesn’t matter how obvious the combination may be, but rather focuses on how believable the situation is. The reason I personally like Goto’s work is down to the way in which he includes classical architecture into one of his projects. ‘Navigating by Hesperus’ looks at the way the world can be created through the power of imagination. He creates images of what he believes America looks like from previous imagery he has seen or literature that he has read. The results of this are really interesting to look at as we can see elements of American cities in the work and yet find it laughable at some of the inclusions that he puts in the work. There is a weird sense of juxtaposition in the images as we see modern qualities, through maybe the architecture, and the square digital, pixel-esque blocks, which are meant to represent the way in which the mind has gaps in the memory, or at least that’s what I’ve read them as, they could also be just a reference to the whole side of digital creation, reminding the viewer of the origins of the work.

However, my favourite series that he has done is one entitled ‘High Summer’, which is where I feel I have adopted the style of my current work from. The series is comprised of images that look at bringing in elements of early beautiful landscape painting while including modern land use elements too. The images for me are really balanced pieces that raise questions regarding the current state of the land we live in, while also reminding us of how magnificent it was, still is, and can be in the future. I’m particularly enamoured by the inclusion of the classical architecture as I said previously, as I see it as a strong addition to the work, and I personally don’t get tired of viewing it, as the buildings mirror the beauty of the landscape.

I’m going to include lots of images today, some from both of Goto’s projects I have just spoken about and some of own current work.

A big thank you to those of you still reading SIX MONTHS in since I started writing the blog.

Have a dandy week.

Adam

A symposium talk a day keeps my own practice at bay

After another week missed I am going to cram in two weeks worth of information into a bumper issue post. If I’m honest I can’t even really remember what happened last week, I think it included a tutorial which I seem to remember went along the same vein as most of the others. The reason behind last weeks debacle was because it was my birthday weekend. I turned the big 2, 1 and therefore wanted to celebrate as much as I could. My birthday was on the Sunday, which obviously traditionally doesn’t lend itself to going out, so I decided to go out on the Saturday. I very grateful to those who went out with me and I had an awesome time.

On Sunday I had a superb day with my house mates, we ate out for both breakfast and dinner and watched a film in the middle of both of those.

I’d like to dedicate the main bulk of this post to what has occurred over the last week. I don’t think I’ve had a busier week while being at uni. For us photographers we were treated to the symposium which for those of you who don’t know is a week when the course manages to persuade practitioners to come down and give us talks. The talks centre around how their practice works and how they got to where they are now. Along with the talks, the third year students are allowed to sign up for portfolio reviews with some of the big wigs. Usually you would have to pay a huge amount of money to have a review in a speed dating kind of style chat. You are allocated 20 minutes to talk and show your work and at the end of that time you are shuttled off to the next one. Having never experienced a portfolio review before I didn’t know what to expect (strangely enough), and so on Monday I was rightly nervous. I had a review with a woman called Jenny Brough, who was extremely helpful and beautifully honest with her opinions. She was able to give me helpful tips for moving on after uni and how try and get to where I want to be. Not only that but she was a fan of my work and praised my ideas, which was a nice confidence boost. Having tutorials with the same tutors week in week out can end up leaving you in a bit of a rut. It was very refreshing to have a fresh set of eyes look over your work. On Monday the first talk that we were given was from a woman named Peggy Sue Amison, who is an incredibly well connected woman in the photographic world. She writes, gives reviews and helps put people in contact with one another. Overall the talk was interesting but wasn’t totally my cup of tea.

The Tuesday was the busiest of days as we were given talks by first Tim Clark, the editor of 1000 Words Magazine, then one by Jenny Brough, a fashion orientated photographer, followed by Harry Borden, a celebrity image maker and then finally the picture editor of UK Vogue called Mike Trow. Of those Tim Clark was the closest to where I picture I myself in the future. As an editor of a solely online based magazine he was able to give some insight into the highs and lows of such a job. The magazine prides itself on slowing down the viewers viewing. It is only released quarterly and therefore gives people time to read the articles and book reviews at a good leisurely pace without feeling the need to rush before the next one comes out. I like how they incorporate book reviews into the website as I for one struggle to keep up with what is new and exciting in the book sector of contemporary photography. Clark said something that I found very cool, ‘bloggers are the curators of the 21st century’. Now although I wouldn’t class myself as an out and out curator, I found myself really understanding this quote. I hadn’t looked at my blog in that way before, but in essence I choose what I want you guys to see each week in the photographic world. Now I am not saying that I have the popularity to start trends on who’s cool and who’s not photographically, but on a very minute scale the person that is thrown into the Adam Hersey blog limelight each week is for me who’s hot at that moment in time. Curators are very skilled at creating a space in which the work is seen in its strongest light. They position, hang and light the work in galleries and I am able to do the same but in the digital medium.

Jenny’s talk was reminiscent of her portfolio review as she spoke very honestly and with a good sense of humour about her work. Humour was also at the forefront in Mike Trow’s talk as he spoke about how he got to where he is and what goes on the industry. Vogue seems so high in the echelons of fashion photography that it seems also impossible to penetrate into the inner circle. It is run in such an elite manner that it would take years to reach a position of any credibility within the company. I am going to pass over Harry Borden quite quickly as he fairly egotistical and he is in a position to be as he has photographed many famous people. I found myself not really that enamoured by the imagery but instead absorbed by the story of the before and after to the images. The stories of how the other half live were really fun to listen to.

In amongst all the photographic talk I was visited by my family. I went hither and thither darting around the Cornish coastline on Thursday taking some images for my own project and generally exploring. Also on Thursday I went to a talk by a woman called Uta Kogelsberger who uses many different mediums along with photography in her practice.Working in a highly contemporary way she created video installations of some note. The one that particularly struck me was a piece which looked at the American gun festival. Kogelsberger videoed the festival which consisted of tracer bullets being fired at a hillside in a desert which was laced with fireworks. The effect was a great combination of the noise of the firing and the imagery of the fireworks and the vibrant colours. I thought that that project was worth a mention. The culminating shot of the project was a long exposure of the shots being fired and the fireworks exploding. It was a truly fantastic shot which was alive with potency and yet was underlined with a sense of the macabre as you are reminded of the very real danger and bizarreness of a collection of gun owners shooting at the side of the hill.

On Friday I had a portfolio review with her too which could have gone better, she made me realise the weakest images in my portfolio and couldn’t grasp the idea of the project simply from the imagery. She also called some of my work gimmicky, which is fair enough as everyone it entitled to their opinion. She could have been more helpful but Lottie Davies more than made up for it for any of her shortcomings. Davies was again, like Brough, genuinely interested in my work and appeared to like it. She was also helpful in pointing me in the direction of magazines and journals which would be good to work for in the future if things go my way.

What I think I will do is look at each of these symposium practitioners over the coming weeks in my blog to give you all a bit more background information on them.

I think that’s enough for this week. I don’t want to start rambling. Thank you for reading.
Here are just a couple of links to those that were particularly pertinent for me:

Current Issue

http://www.jennybrough.co.uk/
http://www.lottiedavies.com/

Adam