Exercise 5.2

Select an image by any photographer of your choice and take a photograph in response to it. You can respond in any way you like to the whole image or to just a part of it, but you must make explicit in your notes what it is that you’re responding to. Is it a stylistic device such as John Davies high viewpoint, or Chris Steele Perkins’ juxtapositions? Is it the location, or the subject? Is it an idea, such as the decisive moment?

Add the original photograph together with your response to your learning log. Which of the three types of information discussed by Barrett provides the context in this case? Take your time over writing your response because you’ll submit the relevant part of your learning log as part of Assignment Five.

 

Vivian Maier – Wilmette, IL (Self Portrait, Full-length shadow) 1968

 

The Photograph I have chosen for this exercise is the one above by Vivian Maier.

I have written about her and my fascination of her work including the story of how she came to public attention, by her extensive unseen archives being sold off from the Chicago lockers she kept them in after being unable to pay the rent. I am fascinated by the thought of someone taking so many photographs, estimated at 150,000 yet she had no intended audience, taken purely for her own pleasure it would seem. Vivian Maier

The information I have read on her through articles and the documentary ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ it is alleged that she was a very solitary, isolated figure – through choice it would seem, even in her choice of paid work as a professional Nanny she existed on the fringes of those families she cared for, as in an outsider looking in. Whilst her photography had serious connotations documenting Chicago in the 1950’s, despite this apparent darkness to her and her photography, she includes her self in a number of ‘Shadow selfies’, whether by humour or her means to say I do exist. I am here.

 

Catherine Smith, Kent UK (Self Portrait, 2018)

 

I took this photograph of me, in my garden as a response to Vivian Maier’s image above. As I am always behind the camera trying to master and capture images with it, I often feel when I look back over my archives I am omitted from the events by my absence in them.  I was there but in my memory only, to others by not being in the documented photographs I was not.

I am clearly more comfortable behind the camera, but sometimes I have to remind myself to be included by taking selfies or getting others to use the camera for me. I don’t want to be written out of my history by my absence in the images. I wonder if this is a reason Vivian Maier took so many selfies too?

In trying to decide which of the three concepts suggested by Terry Barrett my homage photograph to Vivian Maier is I think it is all three, if that is possible.

By taking a very similar picture, almost down to the pose it registers for me as meeting ‘the internal context’, that is mirroring the information in the picture, the setting, the elongated shadow and even the black and white finish.

By taking the picture in harsh light, in a residential setting I am also making a nod to its external context too.

By taking such a picture in the belief that Vivian Maier felt excluded from the society she lived in and documented,  my thoughts that I often feel excluded from events as i am always the one taking the pictures, I believe it also registers with the idea of ‘the original context’ too – being why the picture was made at the time.

 

 

 

Page 112 – Which of the shooting modes did you use to shoot the final practical exercise (5.2). If each preset could give you a perfect photograph in any category, which categories would you have on your mode dial?

 

I took the above picture in Manual Mode.

My fantasy Mode Dial;

 

Page 152 of my Notes – Notebook

 

Bibliography

1. Maier V., Wilmette IL Self Portrait 1986, [Online] https://canadianart.ca/reviews/vivian-maier/ . Published 8th August 2013. Article ‘Vivian Maier; Where Instagram meets Winogrand‘. (Accessed 19th September 2018).
2. Youtube. [Online] Vivian Maier BBC Imagine (2013). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gQ5aUUhvlQ . Published by Nama’ Dejigas. Duration: 1:09. (Accessed 19th September 2018).