Wendy Rose Context & Narrative
My OCA Learning Log for BA (Hons) Photography
This images depicts the era and memory and evokes the nostalgia I was hoping to capture in a still life image. The colours, chintz, chair and tea towel are of their time and although a hand is not present in this image i like the way the apple is caught in mid-air, almost poltergeist like! The vignette edge hints at a dreamy state. I only wish the bag could have been more vintage to really recreate the memory of my Dads chair as I can see it.
I explored presets in Lightroom to add a sense of memory / nostalgia, The colours and tones in some of these presets resonate strongly for me.
I decided upon the tale / vague memory of taking my dads lunch apples whilst sleepwalking.
I located an old kitchen chair which felt nostalgic and added in an old tea towel. My plan was to shoot this as a still life but by using slow shutter speed and some fishing wire tied around the apple stalk I was hoping to add an element of movement to the apple. I tried to find somewhere in my home that could resonate with that era, I also used some old chintz curtains to add to the nostalgic feel. After attempting to capture the movement of the apple I also enlisted the help of my son to try to capture a hand taking the apple.
To add an extra layer to the image I explored the use of the presets in Lightroom, I quite like the effect that the dreamy preset brings to the image as well as the more vintage film styles. I feel that this extra element works well in creating a sense of nostalgia, memory, time and place.
The contact sheet shows a mixtures of these presets:
It is difficult to decide on just one memory when there are so many to choose from. Then comes the next consideration, deciding how I can recreate it. I think it would be interesting to recreate a more mundane memory as this seems to be where my diary is leading me so it might be more useful to explore. I also found some of the images by Nigel Shafran interesting, the subtle depiction of the everyday and banal.
Perhaps I would need to look at incorporating text to ensure that the depiction stays personal to my own memory and not altogether symbolic.
I remember, as a young girl, my mum preparing my dads lunch every evening ready for the morning. He always woke at 4am to get the first train out in the morning and would return home by 5pm. He was, and still is, a creature of habit. He would wake at 4am , eat his bowl of all bran cereal that my mum had left out for him. Leave for work at 5am with his ham sandwich on brown bread and apple packed in his leather work bag that sat on the chair. He would get home at 5pm, have his dinner at 5:30 whilst watching neighbours. He would then watch the news at 6 ,then he would be in bed by 7:30 to do it all again in the morning.
Even as he reaches 80 he still gets up early at 5am and goes out to get the newspaper, he is bed by 8pm. My mum still leaves his cereal out.
I once remember there being a mystery in the house, my dads lunch contained no apples all week. My mum was adamant that she put them in his bag! One night they caught the apple thief, it was me! I was sleep walking down to my dads work bag and hiding his apples? It always makes me smile when I remember my mum telling me this tale, I have no recollection of doing it except a vague memory of finding apples in my sock drawer.
This memory does involve me but I only have a vague recollection of finding the apples in my drawer and of course the memory of my dads bag , lunch and the cereal left out. These memories do not contain people directly so therefore I will not include them in my image. I will begin by trying to recreate the still life memory of those items.
It is interesting to look at the work of photographers such as Nikki S.Lee and Trish Morrissey. They have both produced believable images which are in fact a myth.
I found that my reaction to the images by Nikki S Lee was that she was mocking the group she was posing within. But what is also interesting is the notion that we can mask our true identity and adopt a new persona. I briefly touched on something similar when I looked at Selfies in assignment 1. I feel that Lee is masking her own identity so that we cannot form an opinion of her but we can form a judgement on the groups she poses with. It highlights how we view people differently based on stereotype, we do not see Lee in the same light in each image despite it in effect being the same person.
Trish Morrissey’s approach is interesting in that the images she has produced are completely believable even though she is an impostor! Can we really believe anything we see? These are not self-portraits but really an artificial portrait of the family she has infiltrated.
I find these images as more of a performance and less of a portrait, for me I want to see the person in a portrait or reveal something about them. This style attempts to highlight the fact that portraits cannot be trusted. I am aware that the camera can lie but I want to feel a connection and I fail to find that with these images.
Wendy Rose Context & Narrative 