Early ideas

I have found myself being intrigued by Nigel Shafran’s Washing-up series. I was dismissive of his work in an earlier post but it raised questions as to why I liked Wolfgang Tillmans’ Studio Still Life and not Shafran’s. They are both showing us something about their daily life and the places where they spend a lot of their time. I started taking Shafran a little more seriously after reading an interview he had with Charlotte Cotton where he described his process.

http://nigelshafran.com/

Nigel Shafran and Charlotte Cotton interview 2004

This assignment is the culmination of ‘Putting yourself in the picture’. This assignment raises some challenges whichever route I take. If I was to include myself I would have to overcome my technical limitations of lighting and composition of a person. In this case me! The alternative would be to convey something about me without ‘me’ being in the image at all. This would be compounded by my reaction to ‘Washing-up’ which I found trivial and cold on first viewing.

I would learn something by taking either route. I am favouring the ‘self-absented’ route as I have seen contemporary artists tackle the ‘mundane’ and I feel I could learn a lot from researching it.

I need to develop my diary as instructed in the course notes. Up to now it has been a bullet point list of things that have happened in my day. I decided to stop until I had the makings of an idea. I would then write the diary based on my chosen subject.

I think I want to tackle ‘bookshelves in my home’. We have a number of bookshelves dotted around the house. Two in the study, two in the living room, one in the kitchen, one in my wardrobe and another collection in front of my bedside table. The kids have books on shelves but unsure whether to include these as they are in their personal space. That’s at least six images.

I think I will write a diary of my interaction with the bookshelves. Walk past, sit next to, interaction with nearby objects eg. hi-fi, ironing. Do they say anything about me and my family? What compositions can make them of interest? Pictures replacing words? (Wolfgang Tillmans) Maybe I should include the kids bookshelves as they are few and dominated by other items DVDs/technology?

A psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos recently said that humans are struggling to evolve to keep up with advances in technology which is leading to an increase in stress related health issues. Historically we studied books and analysed subjects in depth. Now we have access to a large volume of content but tend to skim across it. She likened the two to deep divers and jet skiers which I thought was an interesting analogy.

Abelardo Morell produced images around the house following the birth of his son. He was obviously spending a lot of time in these surroundings and studying subjects from a child’s perspectives. ‘There, a more reflective and private world of perception could be found quietly in operation everywhere he looked’[1]. He also has a number of images of books and dictionaries so some research in to this work will be useful.

Early shots – need to consider lighting and angle of view.