Artists and Alchemists

I recently discovered this trailer for a film I’d never heard of: ‘Artists and Alchemists’, (2011). It sounds terrific.

Artists & Alchemists is a feature documentary film that explores the resurgence of 19th century chemical photography. By following ten renowned photographers creating daguerreotypes, ferrotypes and wet plate collodion photographs, Artists & Alchemists documents the sacrifice and personal vision needed to revive these once forgotten art forms. Viewers enter the studios of Jayne Hinds Bidaut, Chuck Close, John Coffer, Adam Fuss, Mark Kessell, Sally Mann, Mark Osterman, France Scully Osterman, Irving Pobboravsky and Jerry Spagnoli to get a first hand account of how each photographer incorporates this antiquated process into modern art. Interlaced with expert interviews, Artists & Alchemists investigates photography’s origins, technological evolution, and illustrates the profound impact in today’s world.

Link to the film website with much more information: http://www.artistsandalchemists.com/film

Now the only trouble is to find a copy, or where it is available for download…

How to mount slide film

What is a portrait?

An artwork has to fulfil two conditions to be a portrait. The first is that it depicts a person. The second is more complicated.

The picture should tell us something significant about the person, some aspect of their social status, personality, temperament or character. This should also be the realisation of the artist’s intention. We might not know much about that intention, especially when the artist is long gone, but this intention is usually readable in the pictorial and aesthetic strategy of the work.

Representations of people in the ancient world tended to be idealised figures from mythology or religious tradition so did not represent any particular person who ever actually lived. The earliest exceptions to this were probably the Egyptian portraits of pharaohs and later the Roman portraits of their emperors. For many centuries, portraits were only ever made of people with a significant place in society or the wealth to afford the commission, but since the time of Rembrandt, portraits have also been made of ordinary people that appeal to the artist in some way.

Since then, the portrait (and self-portrait) has been the vehicle for an extraordinary diversity of artistic experimentation, especially since the early 20th century.

This is a good general discussion, available from the library:

Brilliant, R (1991) Introduction, Portraiture, London: Reaktion Books, pp. 7-21

Abelardo Morell makes a room camera

Abelardo Morell makes a hotel room in New York into a Camera Obscura. Then he places a  view camera on a tripod into the room and makes an exposure.

Video link: https://vimeo.com/5212904

Camera Obscura Image of Times Square in Hotel Room, 1997

Aperture/Shutter speed/ISO explained

Pixel to Print

This is a brilliant graphic by Daniel Peters, explaining in a simple graphic way the connections between shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

The wider the aperture, the more shallow the depth of field. The slower the shutter speed, the more blur will result from a moving subject. The higher the ISO (‘film speed’), the more noise.

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James McArdle, camera obscura

PLACE, FACE & CYBERSPACE

After Abelardo Morell, another contemporary artist who actively uses the Camera Obscura as a tool is James McArdle. James is Associate Professor in the Image: Photography/Graphics at Deakin University.

His recent series ‘Evanescent’ is a series of pictures made with a lens and a black t-shirt forming a makeshift Camera Obscura, in which he projects an image of the tree canopy above down onto the micro-world of the forest floor. The results recapture the child-like joy to be had in the experience of optical devices, confusing ordinary spatial relations so that the macro and the micro become confused and conflated: ‘the world in a grain of sand’ to quote William Blake.

“In the  steep, trackless locations in which I am making these images, my means are necessarily … makeshift; my camera and lens able to be carried in a backpack. The resultant project is not systematic but intuitive…

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Camera Obscura work

PLACE, FACE & CYBERSPACE

This week we were talking about early photographic technologies, including the use of the Camera Obscura and the achievement – in the 1830s – of permanently fixing the image that appeared in it.

There are many artists making great work inspired by this amazing machine. I mentioned Abelardo Morell and his ‘Tent Series’, where he uses a portable tent as a Camera Obscura, its inside painted black. Using a camera on a tripod placed in it he takes exposures of the image which appears on the ground, in this arrangement:

Since 1991 I have con­verted rooms into Cam­era Obscuras in order to pho­to­graph the strange and delight­ful meet­ing of the out­side world with the room’s inte­rior.

In an effort to find new ways to use this tech­nique, I have worked with my assis­tant, C.J. Heyliger, on designing a light proof tent which can project views of the sur­round­ing land­scape, via periscope…

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How to write an artist’s statement

Good advice: http://www.agora-gallery.com/advice/how-to-write-an-artist-statement/

An artist statement is most often the front line of communication between an artist and the public. It will be used when you submit your portfolio to competitions, galleries, and museums. It may sometimes be displayed when people are viewing your works in person or on your website. If it’s online, your artist statement will be read by people from all over the world.

If you can make your statement clear, concise and consistent, you are doing better than about 90% of the artist’s statements out there!

Cite This For Me

This is  great online referencing resource: citethisforme.com

It allows you to copy and paste (for example) a link to a website you need to record, and it will put it into the correct format for your bibliography and references.

Make sure you set it to ‘Harvard’ referencing first-off.

Go to the big letter ‘A’ in the centre of the page and choose the drop-down menu. Select ‘Harvard’. It should then display this way (as above), with ‘Create citations in Harvard style’ showing at the top.

You then have the choice – on the left hand side – of what kind of material you’re citing. The choices are extremely varied. It’s just a matter of choosing the right one: book, journal article, website, etc.

Say I’ve just been looking at a website that I need to cite. The first step is to highlight and copy (shortcut: Command > C) the URL, or web address.

The next step is to select the ‘Website’ option in the ‘Add Reference’ section on the top left of the page.

Simply paste the URL into the box (shortcut: Command > V) and click ‘Autocite’.

You then get a bigger box that will give you the option to manually insert extra information like author’s name, if you know it; also, the important extra detail of the date you accessed the site, which is important in referencing websites correctly.

The final click will give you a reference that looks like this:

Notice you have an ‘in-text’ reference, as well as a Bibliography reference to use. One great time-saving feature is that you can copy each reference with a single click, and then simply paste into your final document.

Cite This For Me also allows you to create a profile and save your references. Alternatively, you can use it when you need it and copy and paste your references into your essay as you go.