Bus Bricolage

The SPN Challenge for Week 18 stated: "Look for a window. Through a window, out a window or at the reflections on a window" - Arif Asci.

Phew, I made it this week! With the possibility of playing with reflections and refractions how could I really miss it? Natural superimposition? Yes please! Any excuse to use the word bricolage in a title...

Ok, so it was hard not to repeat one of my earlier entries this week by placing myself in the midst of the reflections. Of course, there are times when those images must be taken [see below].

This week I saw the challenge as a great way to explore the experimental and Modernist route. Looking in reflections and through glass allows several perspectives to overlap, or superimpose - to borrow a filmic term. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage experimented with this process of natural collage to achieve fantastic results.

In this image there are seemingly an infinite amount of worlds converging: the bus, the people in the bus, the world seen through the bus (trees, houses), the numbers reflected off of a shop window behind me, iron mesh from the shop front, etc. The end result is a chaotic barrage of visual, and textual, information; yet, the people in the photo remain perfectly placid and only the viewer is subject to this amalgamated perspective.

-PM

Week 15 - Aimless

Upon receiving the fifteenth brief from The Photographer's Gallery for the Street Photography Now challenge I was elated! "Wander aimlessly most of the time", set by Melanie Einzig. Great, we were given carte blanche for a week. As the days progressed and the entries started appearing on Flickr I had to sit and rethink the challenge. Primarily other photographers were focusing on pedestrians walking, normally, into or out of some wittily composed scenario.

This was not enough for me. Wandering aimlessly can be a meditative state, a vibrant pseudo-somnambulistic experience where you are led by instinct or impulse. Maybe I have spent too long musing on the Japanese philosophy of 'mono no aware', which celebrates the transience of things. Thus, photographing whilst aimlessly walking meant I was capturing fragments of a personal experience and producing a visual record of how I was led, and where I wandered.

-PM

Assassin Quest

Week 10. Photograph like an assassin. Silent and sudden.

I started this week with the intention of photographing like a real assassin, with head shots or something directly from Leon. But, in the midst of all snow, I found other photographers out snapping away. So, I began preying on other photographers and, not knowing if they were photographing for the SPN competition or not, recorded them recording the world. I looked at it as Assassin's Creed, cheesy I know...

Somebody [Part V]: Nape

What can a nape reveal about a person?

The reductive processes of phrenology and physiognomy within social science and photography allowed Victorians to classify bodies based on visual details and firmly believed that a study of the exterior provided a revealing insight into someone’s character or nature.

As a result people, since the 1840s and 1850s, have been encouraged to read portraits using physiognomic information, which instigates the dangerous process of stereotyping. The procedure of making an object, or informative landscape, of the body created topological images that could be easily arranged into ‘types’. This style of deadpan photography was suited to, and subsequently used by, the police force to measure the physiognomic criminal body against that of an ‘average’ person.

By focusing on depersonalizing the nape, the back of the neck, rather than the face I have moved away from the historical and instilled methods of physiognomic documentation. The nape can be hidden with hair, bared, shaved, wrapped in clothes and even painted but when objectified can the borderland between body and brain also reveal insightful truths about a person’s nature?

Somebody [Part IV]

On what was my final trip to Musgrave's Limb Fitting Centre the focus of my photography was to document whatever I able to. Due to the nature of the centre it would have been impossible to expect complete access so I, once again, prepared my full photographic kit ensuring I was ready for whatever I was allowed to photograph.

Although I was shown a different set of rooms on this visit it helped to build a more complete picture of the clinic when I looked at my photographs from the previous shoot. Slowly but surely, I have explored this small world that so few ever come to know and documented the findings.

Physiotherapy Room

The most fantastic element about this trip was being able to photograph people! This had been my aim of the project since inception so to have willing participants was wonderful; also, it is crucial to have the human presence in this project otherwise the images become too clinical. Although that is not necessarily a bad thing, my focus has been upon the fusion of the human body and technology so portraits are the best way to demonstrate and explore this symbiosis.

Peter

Margaret