I have been thinking about spaces and places, having been very busy with my new business my degree work has been a little slow this last couple of months. However, I have come to an idea of what spaces to places means: In my head when a space that has not had any meaning in the past is suddenly taken over for a particular use it becomes a place. So, for example, there was a small patch of land near me that had been a car park for the old REME then they had the driver test centre there in portable buildings it sat empty for a long while then they suddenly built a series of houses there, and it was transformed from a space to a place. The are many places that have this characteristic, parks and recreation areas come to mind. Thinking about the work on memory in this section, I think a space often becomes a place when you have an association with it. I think about the old lane down the side of my house when I was a child there was a point where my Dad helped my friends, and I build a tree house, and that space became a place in my mind for the rest of my life.

Exercise 3.5 had me researching the local area, and I came across the sculpture park in Farnham on several occasions, so I am thinking of using this for assignment 3

As some people know there has been a lot of things happening in my life over the last three years, from a period of unemployment to the Death of my Mum and the start of a new business. Part of this last thing has been the construction of a new studio for my photography, both for the business and for my practice. I am glad to say the Studiois now complete and up and running

Assignment 2 is now up for initial assessment all be it late due to the web site virus etc but its up and ready for marking, I an off to send it to Russell for his assesment.

You can see it here

Last July a virus hit this site and decimated everything, I went back to the last good restore without the virus and lost all the work I had done on Assignment 2, I have been devastated and completely unmotivated to move forward and fix things, However, today I have figuratively smacked myself in the face and kickstarted the process of recovery. I am now recreating the work I did and moving forward at speed.

Struggling to find inspiration for Assignment 2, The Aldershot murders is a bust as I can’t get access to the information in time. I looked at the idea of following the path that the Bluestones at Stonehenge took, but it’s not really working for me. One of my biggest issues is the lack of funds at the moment stopping me from driving all over the place. There were three Ideas around stone henge one was the path of the bluestones as mentioned as the quarry is quite close. The second was the path of the other stones but that is a huge journey from Wales. The last was the funerary procession to the henge.

To be honest these ideas revolve around theories that no one knows the answer too. Oddly if the idea does not fire me up I find I don’t want to work with it. I feel that the path to a voice of my own lies on a path of doing things that inspire me, which sort of stands to reason.

I have abandoned the idea of Stonehenge now but that leaves me with no idea for a project now.

I find myself in one of those horrible places where I can’t visualise my next assignment, I can’t remember being quite so adrift and devoid of ideas that I find stimulating. In my current financial situation there is not much room for travelling about for the assignment and so I am stuck with what I can get to locally. I wanted to do something that was not just “my trip from A to B” which seems rather plain and obvious, I was looking at the idea of my journey  from a boy to manhood based on the places I have worked, many of which no longer exist, but even this is not lighting the pilot light. I have looked hard for any books on Aldershot that take us on a journey I could recreate but that has so far drawn a blank. I would love to have done a Jack the Ripper style tour based on all the murders over the years in the area but the definitive book is not released until November by Keith Bean.

I really need to find a way to jump-start the creative juices as I am having a flat moment right now. One day I will be able to just rush off and do my own thing can’t wait for level 3 and my body of work.

Text is something that comes up in almost every module it seems to be something of an obsession with the course writers. I was fortunate enough to see the work of Michael David Murphy called “Unphotographable” at Brighton in 2012, my first visit to the Biennial. I remember being really taken by this work as it created the image in my mind rather than with my retina, which enabled me to create my own fantastic version of the story. As an avid reader of fantasy fiction since I was around 12 years old, I am really familiar with the joy of creating the image in your mind as you read and how this is often ruined when they make a film about your favourite book.

In this exercise I was tasked with taking a trip and writing notes, I took a walk along the Blackwater Valley Route and found it stirred lots of memories and some strong emotions, particularly at what has happened to the landscape since I was a boy.

You can read the notes I made in the exercise write up here:  Exercise 2.5 Text in art

Another exercise complete this time looking at the rights and wrongs of appropriation in art, tough question with only one moraly right answer.

Check it out here: Exercise 2,4: Is appropriation appropriate

A thought provokingexercise is now complete. I have always enjoyed the concept of typology but looking at it from the pespective of the landscape has given me a new insight into my own odd photographic predjudice and got me re evaluating my likes and dislikes.

The exercise is here: Exercise 2.3 Typologies

I finally completed exercise 2.1 I took the images last week but it took a while to source a copy of Two-lane blacktop my chosen road movie to watch. I have now finished writing it up and the exercise can be found here: Exercise 2.2: A Road

I finally finished the first exercise in part 2, I have to confess it took me longer than I would have liked firstly due to technical difficulties running out of toner in the laserjet so I could not read the paper properly then I had to read the article several times before it really sunk in what it was saying.

Once I sat dowanand really applied myself to the source material the meaning gave itself up to me and I was able to do the task set, which was to select two images not mentioned in the text and evaluate them with reference to the points made by Snyder in the text.

In the end it came down to the two types of Landscape Photography Snyder describes as Invitational and contra-invitational, and relates to the purpose and intention of the image, in the Invitational images created by Watkins the images are pleasing freandly and inviting and make you want to visit, where the images by O’Sullivan are hostile and surreal and are far less inviting, the former driven by a business need to encourage development of the land and the latter by a more scientific need to document the landscape.

You can read the full exercise here: Exercise 2.1 Territorial Photography

Today the TV group held a bookmaking workshop led by the OCA Tutor Polly Harvey. It was a really fun day of bookmaking where we were taught to create 4 book styles, a simple folded board book, a sewn single signature book, a Japanese binding book and a french pleat book.

It was a very informative day which left us taking home 4 finished projects, I tried to take a few images with my phone but it was such a busy workshop I soon fell behind here are a couple of the early ones and some of the finished projects once I got home:

Having had my tutor feedback and the report I was keen to wrap up Assignment one while I was still resonating with it, and before moving on to the next part. Russell said I should not redo the work but experiment and stretch it further, I have commented elsewhere how I liked this approach and how it made me feel like I was pushing myself and developing my practice rather than redoing something I got wrong, this was a much more healthy and developmental approach for me.

The area we agreed I would explore was making a set of Diptychs again but this time exploring pairing the birdseye views and cropping and rotating and flipping to make the image work in context. I went with a square format for the crops and tried to match each one so that they resonate with each other compositionally. I initially put them on a border because I misheard Russell thinking he said the ones I did before were good (I did not like them) however, this was not the case so the final images have plain white borders. I also could not make the fourth set work together and although I love the images alone in the initial set they did not work as a Diptych, so I found two new images from the Sewerage plant visit and used them imitating a domino effect, and am much happier with the final result.

In a really quick turn around Russell booked a Hangout with me this evening and we spent a couple of hours discussing my work the degree and photography, it was a really helpful session and you can see the full feedback in the assignment section.

There were some opertunities to extend the work which for the first time in my degree felt like a discussion on pushing the work to further heights rather than, “I don’t like that do it differently”, this felt much more educational and far more of a development of my practice than before, if I analyse it being told your work is wonderful leave it just as it as you have it, is nice but does not stretch you as an artist or photographer, also being told “I really don’t think that is any good do something else” tends to dampen the enthusiasm, I felt Russell hit this balance right on the fulcrum, he made me feel that he liked what I had done and that it was well developed, we discussed the project and he told me that he really liked the work I had done playing with Diptychs and that he felt I could push this further in an experimental way of moving the assignment beyond its current resting place.

I loved this discourse and the fact I am not fighting degree deadlines any moreand so I can take the time to push my work further. I will be experimenting with the ideas that came out of the session and looking at the Diptychs again.

To clarify what may read as an odd comment from the tutor report, Russell commented that I needed to look at colour balance in two of the images and mentioned “we discussed what caused this which is quite peculiar”.

The cause is indeed quite peculiar and is unique to the current revision of DJI go and the Phantom 4 Pro, when you take an image with the camera gimble pointing directly down there is a bug that throws out the colour balance making everything have a orang/brown colour tint. The cure is to clear the video cache and reboot the drone and controller, none of which makes much sense when compared to a conventional camera but is “a thing” with the complex interplay between hardware and software in a sophisticated drone like a Phanto 4 Pro.

I await a software patch that will cure this, but in the mean time I have a workaround for the problem, it was fairly simple to correct the slight blue tint I had added correcting the images and this was the corrected result:

I finally finished the first leg of A1 Beauty and the Sublime, I have handed it in metaphorically, i.e. I sent Russell an email to notify him it was ready for a Tutor assessment, and I am looking forward to seeing what he thinks of it. I am also looking forward to my first of the new video conference feedback sessions which I am told are very productive indeed. I am partly expecting that Russell will want me to trim back from 12 to 9 images, we shall see, I found it hard to do that as I am too invested in them. I have already exiled one of my favourite images because It was too similar to others that worked better. I may be wrong we shall see I should not try to second guess Russell.  I am much more willing and open to change on this assignment as I would like it to be a learning exercise that sets me up for the rest of the module.

After several hours more of editing, the triming rejecting and in some cases re-establishment of images I have finaly arrived at a set of images that I am happy to submit to Russell for his tutor assessment. I have already pre warned him its coming and now I have all the images and am tidying up the entries on the blog site I will email him early next week to submit the work for scrutiny. I am quite prepared for rework based on his ideas and comments as so far Russell has only given me very sage advice.

The work can be found in detail here: A1 Beauty and the Sublime

The initial submission looks like this:

There is so much to examine and look at today since the wall of things Russell gave me to look into, its somewhat mind expanding the latest discovery was lost on me last night on the small screen of my phone I did not see what was happening at all, today I looked up the word pareidolia, which I have to confess I had not come across before, I have seen the concept but not seen the word if that makes sense. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus: “The perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines.”

Peter Adams-Shawn takes images that find pareidolia mostly in wave patterns taken from his drone, what is also interesting is he mostly uses the bird’s eye view I have been experimenting with. I cant post his images here as I don’t have his permission but I am sure he would be delighted for me to provide a link for you to look for yourself First his Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/peter_adamsshawn/

Then an example:

View this post on Instagram

"Swooping surf" "From the deep" collection by Peter Adams-Shawn Print sales (Australia only) www.memoriesoftomorrow.net/prints/from-the-deep #surgimago #memoriesoftomorrow #peteradamsshawn #dronescapes #dronestagram #drone #yuneectyphoonh #yuneec #aerialphotography #seascape #fromthedeep #fromthedeepmotp

A post shared by Surgimago by Peter Adams-Shawn (@surgimago) on Mar 20, 2018 at 3:27am PDT

I find myself really drawn to these images, partly because they are made with a drone and that is something I am really enthused about at the moment, but also because he has been experimenting with a “Birdseye” view in many of his images, which is the view I have found to most invoke the feeling of the sublime, I find it noteworthy that images like the one above do take my breath away and in that it is both beautiful and a bit sublime however it is not really the feeling of virtigothat comes from these images, which leads me to speculate that there are a number of factors that can trigger the sublime in these images.

Essay five Making Art New

Beauty in photography is a book of short essays by photographer and author Robert Adams, written as claimed in the inside cover by the quiet voice of a working photographer, artist and craftsman who has long thought about his endeavour.

Essay five “Making Art New” I found this to be the most difficult essay to digest it opens with the idea that we are all obsessed with the question “what’s new?” He spends a lot of effort explaining that art is not ever new that the subjects are all old and have been done many times what he asserts is that though the subject is old in great art it’s the example that is new and fresh. Like the remaking of an old story with a new plot that illustrates the same message, we can determine a new freshness by the new example it gives.

He quotes painter Mark Tobey observing that “No young artist can grow unless he emulates someone bigger than himself” making the point that if we stop at emulation we stop growing as an artist and that great artists are the ones who extend what they have emulated in their own work. He is disturbed by the obsession photographers have with revisiting old technology relying on the value of making contemporary work by doing the antique thing once more and whilst it can be charming it often ends up being a sad footnote to history.

He claims that the artist must take on influences but know how to dominate them and make work in the belief that he sees something that others do not.

Adams also believes that art loses its freshness over time and even the best work of artists like Matisse lose some of its power over time. He asserts, however, that photography is new, not because its a new technology or that the technology is always evolving but because photography is forced to do what art used to do and discover meaning from life. “Photography can always be new because the surface of life keeps changing,”

He asserts that some of the areas of life that could make photography fresh are ignored because of a lack of will to photograph it, he askes why are there so few images of normal family life or of working in industry or the experience of being a student. I wonder if this is still true, in the 21st centurary, everything seems to be photographed, the advent of the phone camera, the selfie and things like Instagram facebook etc have probably changed that landscape forever.

I enjoyed the quote he gives from A. Hyatt Mayor who wrote: “The really original artist does not try to find a substitute for boy meets girl, but creates the illusion that no boy ever met a girl before”. Adams asserts that “Photography is by nature on intimate terms with old familiar subject matter; all that remains now is for us to create new illusions in the service of truth”

Essay four Photographing Evil

Beauty in photography is a book of short essays by photographer and author Robert Adams, written as claimed in the inside cover by the quiet voice of a working photographer, artist and craftsman who has long thought about his endeavour.

Essay four “Photographing Evil” reflects on Adams angst at failing to demonstrate evil in his photography, he opens the essay by describing the uneasy feeling he had about taking images of mines that were beautiful and did not convey the evil that they inflict on the world he talks of the wrongness of “the carcinogenic residues that were being dumped into streams and air” and of “the broken social patterns that mines bought to nearby towns” He ended up feeling somehow inadequate for the task of creating images that reflected these thuings. he was, however, heartened by the fact that many more worthy photographers seemed to have fallen short of this too, often seeming not to notice what was happening around them in the world.

He also notes that when you look at individual works such as Paul Strands “Woman, Patzcuaro” he realises that it was not a failure at all. He claims that “Photographers have been held to a different set of responsibilities than have painters and sculptors” and comes back to that premise that “Photographers want to and can give us the objective truth”, I am not sure this is a universal truth, I think its possible but not always the goal. He cites the criticism given to Bruce Davidson for carefully posing the subjects when in East 100th Street.

He then goes on to pose a rather wild question: “are the greatest paintings and sculptures generally speaking those that deal with evil” then immediately says that he thinks not! I tend to agree I don’t think the idea would have crossed my mind as it seems to me to be only one point of view, I can think of a lot of great art that has nothing to do with evil, but as an undergraduate, I guess I don’t have an opinion yet.

This essay continues to discuss the motivation for photographic art with some suggestion that it is all about some sort of social consciousness mixed with a duty to reveal evil wherever we find it. I have struggled with this since starting the degree in 2012, my first experiences on study trips etc seemd to suggest that to be a photographer on note you had to be an angry marksist or at least really angry about something, over the years I have seen lots of this and I felt it was what drove some photographers but I also feel “ANGRY” (just kidding) at being put in a box like this where my work will be less effective or relevant if I dont take on these traits, personally my own moral fibre is drawn more to releif and charity and to kindness and these are the things that stir me more than evil. all in all a very thought-provoking essay.

Adams final point on the matter is “When we are young, we want art that is filled with bitter facts, because we believe that evil can be overcome if we face it; when we grow older and begin to doubt this optimistic belief, we want art that does not simply reinforce the pain of our disillusionment.”

After some really bad weather and a fair amount of snow my flight test was finally booked for 19th January and I had to drive all the way to Newcastle to take it.

The test went well and I passed thanks to the wonderful Tom, my instructor and examiner, who made the whole process a lot of fun.

The test was based on a simulated commision to locate and survey a field where the customer required an aerial photograph of some cones, the test was marked on the quality of the planning and risk assessment and the ability to complete some controlled manoeuvres and to take an image of the said cones.

It all went well though it was rather surprising how small the cones looked on the display when taking the image:

As you can see the snow was still melting and the cones looked very small, but the image was a test of a concept and it helped me pass my flight test,

All that is required now is some good weather and some inspiration to take this project forward

Since the new Phantom has been with me the weather has been awful, there has been no chance to get out and practice and no opertunity to take any images, we have had rain, snow and high winds all of which are a massive problem for flying, my Operations manual has been passed fit and my flight test has been called off twice for weather.

Exercise 1.9 is now complete and the full write up can be found here Exercise 1.9

This exercise was a test of our ability to research and find images relating to a topic, in this case, different social perspectives, I found one item that pushes the boundaries of what was asked, as it called for images and I found a video, the video was not strictly landscape but it did describe a social landscape and we are always being told to think outside the box and stretch our minds to new possibilities.

For the images containing two perspectives I was really taken by the two images that looked like aerial imagery which fits in with the work I am doing on the assignment, Luiz Arthur Leitão Vieira is a Brazilian photographer I cannot find any reference in English to how they were taken but the images are a great representation of the use of the elevated perspective.

The bad news is that the Phantom was not viable for repair the cost would have been higher than the cost of replacement, I have therefore procured a new Phantom which arrived today, so I am now able to start working on the assignment again.

Here is a little video taken with the new drone on a test flight at Puttenham Common.

Having looked at Karim’s work I am somewhat stunned at the bravery he has as a pilot and a drone photographer.

His images and videos are stunning you can see them here https://karimphotography.com/drone/ What really impresses me is the sheer boldness of the piloting, having destroyed almost £2K of drone in a mere puddle to watch Karim fly a £7K drone into the face of a wave to catch a surfer makes my heart skip, some of the shots of mountains have me wondering where he was standing to get such a shot. In the wilds of Hawaii I do not know what the drone laws are if indeed there are any, but here in the UK, I am restricted by lots of rules and regulations that make it hard to even get the drone in the air.

I have to confess the crash has left me a little cautious although I have proper drone insurance now and a DJI care pack that would prevent me loosing so much in a future event, I am still having to work these issues out and exercise my brave muscle. I am therefore an admirer of work such as this which seems to have been shot with either a great deal of care or a complete disregard for the drone. This may, of course, be true as I saw an interview with one of the more flamboyant drone photographers in the USA where he was explaining that when the stakes were high and the pay was right it was perfectly ok to sacrifice the drone to get that special shot. I suppose this is true in the movie world where they spend millions on filming, killing a drone to get a special shot is just part of the expense.

I was studying the windsurfing videos made by Karim and wondering how he prevented all that spray going in the downward-facing vents on the drone, which hates moisture, and I speculate that with an Inspire drone its is possible to use a longer lens that would enable him to get higher and further back while maintaining the illusion of being really close, this would make the shot look a lot more daring than it first appears to be. We are also given no frame of reference as to how far from shore he is during these shots which also adds to the tension.

All in all, I really enjoy Karim’s work and find it inspiring to get out and make work that inspires others

In a recent email from my tutor while discussing the idea of using a drone to take images for my assignment Russel recommended two drone photographers/filmmakers, Karim Ilia and Gab Scanu.

The URL for Karim is: https://karimphotography.com/drone/ 

he one for Gab is password protected but I did find his work on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/gabscanu/?hl=en Some of which includes aerial photography.

I find the work to be quite stunning, at first I thought well its all right for people who can afford to travel to exotic places and get these images, however, it also occurs to me that where I live might be exotic to someone from elsewhere in the world, we do tend to think that to get exciting images we have to travel, which is the Douglas Adams Paradox about bypasses:

“Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.”

– Douglas Adams – the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Why did I write that? well, it occurs to me that as photographers we always want to travel to exotic places and take exotic things! Whilst there is not really anything wrong with that it makes me think about the people that live in these “exotic places” who probably think Aldershot is exotic, and whilst that makes me smile as living here I see nothing exotic about it, I suppose its no different to me travelling to some small town in Germany or France and finding it different photographically worthy etc. while the locals wonder why I am obsessed with photographing their “mundane town”.

Coming back to the drone photographers recommended by Russell one cannot deny they have found some stunning places to use their drones and I admit some envy at their opportunities to do that, one of the better sides of photography is the ability it has to let me experience the full wonder of an African watering hole or some other remote and wonderful place without leaving my seat and risking the upset stomach.

These images and films are awe-inspiring and make me want to produce images from my frame of existence that has a similar effect on people who live elsewhere in the world.

I have completed exercise1.8 on the Zone system the full write up and notes can be found here:  Exercise 1.8: Zone System In Practice

Here are the results:

Exercise 1.7 is complete I have shared my ideas on Drone photography with Russel and have had a positive response back containing some practitioners to research. You can see the write up here: Exercise 1.7: Assignment Preparation

A quick update on the state of the Phantom and my PFCO training.

Fist the drone is still away and everything is dragging out it seems like an awful lot of the circuits are fried and the cost is starting to look close to the cost of replacing the whole thing, a word of warning I did not realise when it set the phantom up that you cannot buy DJI care if you have had the drone active for more than 48 hours, I screwed up as I had fully intended to get that cover and instead of a small fee for a replacement it looks like a full new drone as the cost of a new body is really close to the cost of the whole thing.

Second bit of news is more positive, I passed my PFCO ground school with flying colours (pun intended) so I am now clued up on the rules for flying drones commercially and have completed the first step to gaining a Permission to fly Commercial Operations, just an operations manual to write and a flight test to take. oh and a drone to replace. I used the chaps above Heliguy who are a very professional and well-organised group and ran a brilliant course. I highly recommend them.

Went out on Saturday to practice with the phantom, did a nice long flight took some video while I was flying, practised the test manoeuvres for the PFCO and at the end thought I would try this in sport mode as I may have to in the test, (first mistake) the test wants you to fly in ATTI mode, not sport. now in sports mode the phantom flys faster but does not use obstacle avoidance.

What I neglected to account for is that when velocity exceeds thrust the drone continues in the direction it is travelling until thrust overcomes velocity (Second Mistake) this practically means when you zoom across the field at full chat and slam the thing into reverse it takes a while to slow down and stop)

I watched in horror as the phantom barely clipped twig which promptly grabbed the drone into the tree where it fell like a stone, I thought this would be fine until I realised it was stuck in a fenced-off culvert submerged in water, which they do not like.

I struggled to get to the drone and mostly failed my daughter even tried to wade up the stream but was beaten back by the brambles, The drone was suddenly recovered when spiderman turned up lept over the fence and grabbed the drone for me, no idea who he was just that he was a very fit soldier, to be fair Claire was almost through the brambles by this point.

In the cold light of day and after some time in a hot dry room I realise that the phantom is badly damaged the battery is ruined and the drone itself will not come on so I am sending it to a drone repair specialist to see if I can get it mended, this is looking expensive.

My newest toy has opened up a world of possibility for Landscape photography I have lots of ideas about using the drone to create images for my assignments. I flew it for the first time today and took some pictures, none are really any use for the assignment but they did start me thinking about how I could incorporate a different style of camera into my work.

For now here are a couple of my initial images nothing special except they are the first ones take with the Phantom:

The exercise ins now complete and can be viewed here: Exercise 1.6: The contemporary abyss

I was surprisingly motivated by the Tate Article written by Simon Morley, as it discussed the elements of the sublime that resonate with what I have been thinking, my previous post giving me a book mark to the quote from Burke sums up a lot of the energy I am currently feeling about the sublime.

This article has given me a lot to think about around the sublime and the link to threat or danger and pain in something that can also be beautiful because of this link. More pondering is required by me.

I just started looking at the text for exercise 1.6 Staring into the contemporary abyss, and had to note a quote that adds to my thinking on the sublime:

In the early eighteenth century Joseph Addison described the notion of the sublime as something that ‘fills the mind with an agreeable kind of horror’. It was an idea feverishly explored by artists such as Turner, John Martin and Caspar David Friedrich, and further taken up by the American abstract painters Rothko and Barnett Newman.

Staring into the contemporary abyss
The contemporary sublime
Simon Morley
1 September 2010
Tate Etc. issue 20: Autumn 2010

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/staring-contemporary-abyss

I will be commenting further as part of exercise 1.6 but I wanted to keep this quote safe for reference as it is very relevant to the musings I had earlier this week.

Looking forward to the assignment I recognise that in order to develop an Idea I will need to understand the meanings behind Beauty and the Sublime. I am fairly confident that I understand the meaning of beauty (at least my interpretation of it) so I will return to that later.

I have some preconceived notions about the word sublime, though I note from a quick google search that it has many interpretations as Jane Kemp told me, therefore I think I need to pick a notion that fits with the assignment.

On the university of Idaho I found this definition:

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.” [Edmund Burke, On the Sublime , 1756 ed. J. T. Bolton. 58]

https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/sublime.htm

A second quote from the same site states:

Sublime experiences, whether in nature or in art, inspire awe and reverence, and an emotional understanding that transcends rational thought and words or language.

And finally at the end:

Post Hippie Sublime
Post-Romantics, by the way, may seek the sublime in urban or social settings, often including ones that, as Edmund Burke first proposed 250 years ago, are violent.  Standing in downtown Manhattan and looking up, or atop the Twin Towers and looking down, or standing in front of a wall of speakers blasting Green Day (sellouts!) or DragonForce (a band which, by the way, sucks!) and slam dancing, or overdosing on caffeine and driving alone through the LA freeways at 2 a.m. at 95 mph…all these are attempts to capture that moment when the outside experience and your imagination overwhelm you and you feel connected to the larger experience of existence.  It’s no coincidence, then, that the leader of Sublime died of a heroin overdose.

The consumer-market driven Romantic sublime lives on in “extreme sports” like rock climbing, mountain biking and downhill skiing, not to mention sky diving and bungee jumping, alligator wrestling, random dumb-ass shit usually accompanied by the words “Hey y’all, watch this!  Oh sheeeeeeeit….” and ending in medical evacuation.

An article on the Artifice: https://the-artifice.com/the-sublimes-effects-in-gothic-fiction/ has a definition of the sublime in gothic fiction:

What separates experiencing the sublime from experiencing beauty is the disruption of harmony. As stated above, it shows elements of Romantic reactions to human experience while utilizing fear as well. According to Edmund Burke, the imagination experiences both thrill and fear through what is “dark, uncertain, and confused.” In setting the sublime apart from beauty, the sublime creates more than a positive, appreciative response to an aesthetic, such as a beautiful painting or sunlit meadow. The sublime stems from potent awe and terror that stresses someone’s limits, surpassing all other responses and overloading the recipient in both their revulsion and fascination.

I found the next passage particularly interesting:

In regards to the Romantic view of the environment, the sublime can occur when natural grandeur overwhelms an individual to the point of causing fright or a feeling of helpless insignificance.

And Finally from The Artifice:

Overall, approaching the sublime occurs when a sight or experience is “awesome” or ” awful” in the old meaning of both words: characterized by or inspiring awe, and awe is an emotion containing fear, wonder, and reverence. The sublime questions the stark dichotomy between pleasure and pain because a fear-invoking scene can also cause wonder, an odd sort of delight. In a contemporary sense, it could be viewed as watching a train wreck: horrifying, but captivating to the viewer.

When I analyse these comments they all point me toward one thing the balance between pleasure and pain, as noted above the human reaction to disaster is to become a voyeur something you see on a motorway when both lanes become congested after an accident as everyone turns into rubber necked voyeurs and make the situation worse.

This idea of an edginess to the sublime something that makes you take a sharp intake of breath, it reminds me of the feeling of vertigo you get when looking through the glass portion of the floor in the Eiffel Tower, or peering over a sheer drop either on a cliff top or at the top of a tall building.

I can remember being totally overwhelmed by this experience when I was an apprentice and the guy who serviced all of the cranes and hoists took me up in a lift to service a hoist. I was almost paralisedby the vertigo of looking down from the small platform, the image to the left shows a similar piece of equipment, the one we had back in the 1980s was old even then and rather than the nice sturdy scissor lift it was a single hydraulic ram that swayed and wobbled as you moved making the experience a hundred times worse.

This feeling of fear or vertigo is similar to the feelings described in the discussion on the sublime above, I can think of two events in my life that cross into the realm of art where this reaction was extracted from the audience by the artist, both are moments in cinema where the director has played the audience so well that the desired reaction is guaranteed.

The first was as a young man I took my Dad to see Jaws 2, this is a film riddled with this kind of suspense and everyone expects the shark to jump out all the way through the movie, one of the most clever moments is when Cheif Martin Brody is investigating the shaw line and sees something in the water, there is a very tense moment as he wades out to see what it is, the whole cinema is waiting for the inevitable shark attack when with a suddend build of sound a dead eaten body is thrown at him by a large wave. The reaction was for the entire cinema to jump out of their skins, a brilliant and unexpected twist.

The second of these is a moment in Jurasic Park where the children are hidden in the ceiling of the building and the Raptors are prowling underneath, we are momentarily led to believe that they have left when they suddenly leap up through the hole in the ceiling, I watched this several times in the cinema and each time everyone in the cinema pulled their legs up from the ground.

Clearly filmmakers have sound effects music and dialogue to increase the tension and suspense of the moment, however, it struck me that if it were possible to crerate an image that instilled a bit of fear into the viewer while being facinating and drawing them in it may go some way to describing the sublime in an image. More pondering to do on the subject as I know what I would like to do but not how to achieve it yet.

Today was the September meeting of the TV Group, founded back in 2012 so that we could get access to some tutoring, still going strong this was one of our biggest meetings. Our resident Tutor Jane Taylor was with us giving good solid and constructive feedback. Almost everyone had something to share and we went around the room looking at the work and ideas everyone had to share.

I always feel very inspired by the crazy ideas the people in this group have that produce such interesting work, everything from polaroid to Nazi Germany was discussed in this session and some very powerful work was shared.

I pitched my ideas for Assignment 6 based on the work of Emily Allchurch and the idea was received with interest, Jane said she thought the idea had an interesting slant to it and encouraged me to pursue it further. I also spoke about the sublime and Assignment 1, Jane’s advice was not to get too hung up on the sublime as it has many meanings.

I have not yet finished the exercises in part one so I will not fix my ideas about assignment one yet until I have soaked up the learning that is to be had from part one.

It was a really good day and was nice to see everyone here, we also discussed the Body of work Project the group is taking on so that we can mount an exhibition of our work in February 2019 at the Lightbox in Woking. This is all very exciting and I think everyone is really getting excited about making the work for the exhibition. within the next few weeks, it looks like we will have the contract in place with the gallery at which point the whole thing will take on a far more realistic perspective.

Emily Allchurch from her website: http://www.emilyallchurch.com/

The inspiration came from Russell my tutor who introduced me to the work of Emily Allchurch, who has captivated my imagination, in her work she recreates old oil paintings using composite photography to produce her expression of the original work in photography.

I am currently researching the possibility of using similar techniques to reflect the transition required by Assignment 6.

Read more about it here: Exercise 1.5

Is it Art?

I read the Masius De Zayas essay, at first I thought he was trying to shoot down the idea of photography being art, but on re-reading I perceive that he was trying to place paintings in a box and propose that photography had somehow gone beyond what conventional art was capable of. His language and rhetoric are very old fashioned and reminiscent of a colonial Britain divided by Class, However, his ideas about photography having two aspects: The documentary show it as it is the style of facts and the Photo art style of imagined and staged photography. This seemed to me to resonate with the idea of photo fact and photo fiction I discovered during my DPP studies.

Read more here: Exercise 1.4 

Exercise 1.3 is now complete, lots of old masters studied and the similarities compared. This was an interesting exercise in looking at what conventions are observed by Landscape painters, I also went further and looked at the norms that have been carried over into Landscape photography and found that the Landscape photographer of the year has been running long enough now to start to draw conclusions about the attitudes photographers have towards the genera of Landscape

Read more about the Exercise here: Exercise 1.3

I found an A4 Moleskine hardback notebook that I had bought when I started TAOP and not used. It seems perfect for my new Landscape learning log / Sketchbook. Since I had become accustomed to clipping and sticking things in my log in IAP this seemed a perfect solution to my needs. I like to jot down thoughts and needs in a book and this will help to drive this blog as I proceed.

Spent a fair amount of effort getting my kindle working and setting up Caliber so that I could access the PDF articles we are being asked to read. I found that because they are mostly rendered images they did not convert properly, and were hard to read on my kindle forcing me to scroll around the page. I used Adobe Acrobat DC to convert them to text, this left me with some raw text files that had nasty page throws so I edited them into a readable block of text. The result was a converted MOBI file that worked on my Kindle, I found these much easier to read as they worked using the single page throw buttons. There was something about the editing process that seemed to soak the contents into my mind so that when I finally read it through on the kindle it made a lot more sense.

I found from my first read-through I was left wondering what I had read, but reading the converted more of the meaning behind the text came out, having digested the words, I then took a printout of the text and went through highlighting key passages and concepts, which left me with everything I needed to complete the exercise.

The first spadeful of earth has been overturned and I have completed the first exercise, this involved getting my sketch pencils out and doing some drawing:

The exercise can be found here: Exercise 1.1

Having met the August Deadline for my IAP module I have now signed up for the Landscape module as my first HE5 Module. I have had a conversation with my Tutor Russell Squires and find myself ready to go. I am spending some time setting up this blog after a conversation on the Collage Forum about what the assessors really want from a blog. So this time I have made more separation between the modules and will run a conversational blog on the main page with links to exercises and assignments on the right hand side of the page