MissAniela

My talk at BHCC

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Last Wednesday I presented a talk at the Brighton & Hove Camera Club (BHCC). The idea was suggested to me by Juliet Greig and Paul Kondritz at a Brighton Flickr meetup on the beach in June. A month or two later I met with Rod Orrell from the club, and we discussed what my presentation (planned for January 2011) would entail.

However, a cancellation came up and Rod asked if I could come in and do it, well, now instead. I was all ready to go!

Above: setting up. Thank god I brought along my laptop and mouse, because my PP presentation wouldn’t open the club’s Mac for some unknown reason…

The idea of uploading a video of my presentation has been suggested to me before, and it would indeed be a better way to show my talk instead of typing out a description of it. Unfortunately I didn’t film this one on my own DV camera, nor on my 5dm2, Matthew was taking photos instead. We did have Robin Schlaht from Zima Productions, over from Canada, filming my talk for an upcoming documentary ‘Catalogue of Light’ which will be out in 2011, but as yet I have no access to his film and don’t imagine I will for some time anyway. Next time I do a talk, I will ensure I get someone to film the whole thing, at a flattering angle too, so I can stick it up here and save my weary fingers for something else.

To proceed… my presentations have a similar thread running through them, beginning with an introduction to how I got into photography, what opportunities led from using Flickr, what I’m doing now, etc. However, I always adapt my presentations for the audience and context. This time, I was to fill two 45-min sessions with all but a tea break between them. So, it was the longest one I’ve done. I wanted to keep the presentation snappy and avoid having people falling asleep with such a hefty duration, so I decided to interweave the conceptual parts about ‘art’ and ‘photography’, women, and all the other in-depth ramblings that might appear in theoretical essays, in between the more ‘fun’ stuff; the breakdowns of how I do the clone or trick images, and other kinds of processing I use.

I’d been to a BHCC meeting the week before, in order to set the scene, meet some members, get a feel for the atmosphere. It did help me to understand the setting a bit more than my imagination would allow me to envisage, or, by going on the rumours from Rod and Juliet of it being ‘an old boys’ club’ but ‘not quite’ as there are an increasing number of female members. I will say now – that although I got the initial impression that the members were all quite ‘mature’, the evening of my presentation seemed to draw more from the younger section of its demographic, and I don’t think I’ve ever had so many women approach me afterwards. I think there was a good gender balance, and age balance too, than what I expected on my night.

I took the two sessions I did at Photocamp Bradford and kind of weaved them together. At Photocamp I gave a keynote which introduced myself and offered some thoughts on the way the internet and new ways of sharing photography are blurring the lines between ‘art’ and ‘commercial’, and ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ within photography. I also gave a workshop on composites which talked about, and deconstructed, several different types and levels of photo manipulation I use on my work, and how others might also use them. See the blog post on Photocamp here to get an idea of that content.

For this talk, I added a bit more dialogue about nudes, commenting on how nudity for me is just another outfit, appropriate in some contexts but not in others: showing some of my Balthus-inspired images as examples of my nudes. I also commented on how I have, through time, strived to display nudity in an dynamic and empowering manner, to avoid the contradictory self-conscious look that one gets when they go the lengths of stripping off only to hide their nipples. (Of course, my nudes are by no means perfect or necessarily liberating). Indeed, recent nude images like this one, The rubber room, go beyond any idea of the ‘erotic’ into a realm positively demonic, or at least, weird. Saucy or sinister, I had no problem sticking a variety of interpretations of my naked body onto the projector for a roomful of people to look at.

I entered into a section on cloning: detailing how I got into it, why I liked it, how one goes about doing it, and how I have continued to use it to more ethereal, ghostly ends as in my recent Hellingly and West Park shots. I tried also to name-drop local place names I’d used as locations to remain relevant to the Brighton audience: Rainbow Books in the Lanes, Devils’ Dyke, Grand Hotel Eastbourne, Arundel and Beachy Head, etc.

In the break I barely had time to finish my Penguin bar and tea as there were many questions and comments from very nice people who were enjoying the presentation, which was great. I also sold a few copies of ‘Self-gazing’.

Above: People looking at my Blurb books in the break

The section on trick images, after the break, urged people to do as much as they can in the shooting of these types of images. Even though they appear intricate, gaudy even, a bit too saccharine (I imagined) for some of the people present, I wanted them to know that I wasn’t advocating jumping straight into Photoshop to blindly swivel bits of images round for hours till the desired effect is achieved. Instead, shoot as much as possible ‘as is’: my image ‘The adrenalin’ (below) I used as an example to show that all the elements should ideally be ‘where they were shot’ originally. So, in this image, I was really ‘there’, the objects were really ‘there’, hanging. The only physical change I have made is to remove Matthew, who was hoisting me up, which of course involved some planning of the shots being taken. I wanted the image to look as ‘real’ insofar as being ‘unreal’, or ‘surreal’.

Taking a picture of me laying outstretched on a flat surface then trying to manoeuvre it to look as if I were flying, for example, would be a meticulous and laborious task that in all likelihood would, in the end, look crap.
I showed some ways that people might like to use compositing, even if they aren’t mad about the OTT trick stuff. I showed them examples of where I have subtlely composited images together to get the best from a couple of shots, but not for the effects of an illusion per say. For example, Nicky & kot, which took the best shot of Nicky and the best of Mr Biff. Or Dear gourd, where I used compositing to contrive a lighting situation between me and the pumpkin. Or ‘The adjustment’ (below) where I took the arm from one shot onto another, so my arm could be in the air, not a trick, not a distraction, just a surreal addition that makes the image, in my opinion, more successful, a little surreal but not an impossible ‘illusion’:

I then discussed the qualities that I see in traditional ‘art photography’ and modern ‘commercial photography’, and how they are being blurred by today’s hybrid-type artists emerging through the web. I notice some people are using self-portraits to hone and leverage a fashion photography style, others going into portrait photography, others wanting to pursue art exhibitions primarily as a ‘fine artist’. I then moved onto talking about how my work is of a specific type, perhaps, because of the medium through which I’ve shared it from the beginning: images that look attractive as thumbnails/postcard-size, subconsciously drawing attention in cyberspace where attention spans are short and monitors are small and iPhones are even smaller (again, more on the Photocamp blog entry).

However (I was running out of time but squeezed it in) I wanted to add something new to this talk: to mention a few negatives to the way I work, to the way I have become used to seeing images. For a presentation of 1hr 30 mins, it seemed a more appropriate context to do this extra probing (probably too pessimistic for a 30 min presentatiom where time is tight and you want to make the best impression).

I commented that I am somewhat in a bit of a ‘Flickr bubble’ in that I spend some much time on the site compared to the time I could be spending, say, looking at other websites or non-internet sources like books and galleries. Most of the time I do spend on Flickr is looking at other women’s self-portraits. That’s not a bad thing of course – but my aim is to become a little more open-minded to taking inspiration from other places, even just for the sake of my own sanity. Last week’s visit to BHCC, watching members’ projected competition entries of all kinds of different subjects, was inspiring enough: I felt that even in that one small evening my mind had opened to something new, maybe become slightly sensitised again to all the subtleties in photography that I often feel inclined to overcoat in post-processing. I occasionally get the sense of being somewhat enslaved within a rich diet, of processing mostly everything to a sugary sweet level where anything without popping colours is, to my desensitised eyes, insubstantial.

What’s more, whilst self-portraiture might be a great thing for ‘building confidence with a camera, having complete control and independence over everything you do and not having to give verbal direction’, there is a chance that you might get sucked into self-portraiture so much that you don’t then have the inclination, or resist gaining the expertise, to pursue other models and subjects as avidly as you might have otherwise. Not having experience giving verbal direction is barely useful for those who want a career in fashion and portrait photography, directing models and assistants every day. My instinct to stick myself into every photo I take doesn’t always feel like a fantastic USP. It can sometimes feel limiting and boring, and yet with a sense of entrapment where I can’t even help myself: I’ve been accustomed to having instant access to a human angle to turn every inanimate scene into one which graces my own form and physiognomy, a repetitive and tedious sight that only once in a while will, to me, transcend the banality of the situation and look somewhat different, interesting enough to be taken further in post-processing.

Playing devil’s advocate against oneself is always a good thing, an exercise of which can only come perspective of one’s work and clarity over the context in which we exist. I thank Rossina Bossio for partly being an influence over that!

My recent UrbEx/abandoned buildings phase has been a great way to open up my mind to a different scene of photography, even though I have used these locations for self-portraits (with collaborative help from Matthew). They have given me a different context in which to set a scene, an intriguing, menacing environment to adorn with strange body shapes and moves. Next week I’ll be writing a blog post about my recent antics during four trips to abandoned mental asylums and showing outtakes and shots etc of those trips.

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Above: flowers kindly bought for me by the club!

Big thank you to the Club for having me, and making me feel very welcome!

Images of the evening are thanks to ML.

Thanks for reading!

Over the next fortnight or so I will be launching new website and blog, which I intend to go with a bang! Stay tuned!

Tags: brighton, brighton and hove camera club, camera club, hove, powerpoint, presentation, self portraiture, slides, speech, talk

Posted in Events, exhibs, Tutorials/'making of' on November 14th, 2009 | 14 Comments | Tweet This!