Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art

On Day 3 we visit the Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art located in Scheunenviertel (‘Barn Quarter’) is one of Berlin's oldest neighbourhoods.  KW was founded shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall by Klaus Biesenbach and a group of young art enthusiasts in a practically derelict former margarine factory in Berlin-Mitte in the early 1990s.  Labelling  itself as a collaborative creation space rather than a gallery, the KW presents shows that are dynamic and inspirational, and prepared by emerging and established artists working with diverse media.

Image courtesy of see-berlin.de

In contrast to Day 2's gallery visit to Hamburger Bahnhoff, KW's philosophy is that without a permanent collection, it can be more readily responsive to artistic innovation and to creative programming.

A new artistic team was appointed at the KW last year, coming from different countries around the world the team will work on projects with artists that will be exhibited at the museum and around the city of Berlin.  The new director, Krist Gruijthuijsen, envisions the art space as a community hub, one that fosters a mutual exchange between artist and audience.

KW currently has a solo exhibition by South African conceptual artist, Ian Wilson, and is one of their key reference points for the new year. Wilson has been exploring the aesthetic potential of spoken language since the late 1960s and serves as a framework for exploring roles of language, communication, and the broader significance of interaction between human beings. The exhibition is in constant flux and changes gradually throughout the course of its duration. Wilson’s early paintings and sculptures are physical objects, however, they also signal an inclination to take reduction and abstraction a step further, to the point of ridding art of physical properties altogether.

Ian Wilson, Circle on the floor, 1968, Installation view Ian Wilson at the Galerie Mot & Van den Boogaard, Brussels, 1998, Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels

Alongside Wilson's exhibition is the first institutional solo exhibition from Hanne Lippard. Lippard's artistic medium is her voice,  speaking uncomfortable truths with a voice dripping with comfort: composed, considered, articulate and calming. In response to Wilson, Lippard conceived a new production titled Flesh, an immersive installation, which takes up the entire ground floor hall of the KW building and confronts the visitor with one singular element—a spiral staircase. When ascending the stairs, one enters an awkwardly shaped space that incorporates the upper windows of the ceiling as a point of view outside of the exhibition hall. The newly created space is emerged by the artist’s voice, which slowly directs the audience towards a world where the meaning of language is being shaped, structured and categorised. Like Wilson, Lippard uses her body and words to counterfeit perimeters given by established standards in art production and creates a universe where the audience is physically as well as mentally brought outside of their confinements.

Image courtesy of KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Hamburger Bahnhof - Berlin's Museum for Contemporary Art

On Day 2 of our visit to Berlin we will be visiting the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart or Berlin's Museum for Contemporary Art - on Invalidenstrasse in the Moabit district.

Image courtsey of Top 10 Berlin.

The museum opened as an art gallery in 1996 and has a comprehensive collection of contemporary art with a variety of exhibitions. The museum’s name refers to the building’s original function as one of the first terminal stations of the rail system in Germany. It opened as the terminus of the railway line between Hamburg and Berlin in December 1846. The building’s late Neoclassical style was conceived by the architect and railway pioneer, Friedrich Neuhaus. It set an architectural precedent for the subsequent designs of Berlin’s train stations through the second half of the 19th century. For forty years it served as the terminal between Hamburg and Berlin until it was closed in 1884.

After modernisation in 1906 the old railway station opened as the Museum of Transport and Construction. In 1943 however, during the Second World War, the building sustained severe damage and in the subsequent division of Germany, it remained unused for decades, located as it was in the no-man’s land between East and West Berlin.

Historische Aufnahme des Hamburger Bahnhofs, um 1860 © bpk. Image courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Years later, after lengthy reconstruction and modernisation by architect Josef Paul Kleihues, the Hamburger Bahnhof reopened on 2 November 1996 as a museum of contemporary art. The museum expanded significantly to accommodate the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, presented to the museum in 2004 as a long-term loan. The former dispatch warehouses located behind the main building were renovated by the architectural firm Kuehn Malvezzi and connected to the historical building via a passage. The resulting structures, which became known as Rieckhallen, nearly doubled the available exhibition space. Today the Nationalgalerie’s Hamburger Bahnhof division is one of the largest public collections of contemporary art in the world.

Like other contemporary art galleries in other major cities, the Hamberger Bahnhof is a destination in itself, with a rich history and stunning architechtural features such as the addition of lighting installations by American artist Dan Flavin, which highlight the architectural elements of the building, bringing a touch of 20th century edginess without marring its 19th century beauty.

Josef Paul Kleihues's redesign of the building could be compared to Gae Eulenti's transformation of the 1900 Beaux Arts Gare d’Orsay train station, a spectacular landmark originally designed by Victor Laloux, into the Musée d’Orsay, a museum of mainly French art from 1848 to 1915.

As part of the redesign she created a grand central aisle in a cavernous space that once contained train tracks under a dramatic barrel-vaulted glass ceiling. Original support beams were highlighted, and new industrial materials like wire mesh were used. Walls were redone in rough stone.

The renovated building was opened in December 1986, and critical reaction was mixed. Holland Cotter of The New York Times called it “fabulously eccentric.” But Libération, a French newspaper favored by art specialists and critics, said the museum had been “likened to a funeral hall, to a tomb, to a mausoleum, to an Egyptian burial monument, to a necropolis.”

The work on show at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum comes predominantly from three collections, which are permanently on loan to the museum; it houses the private collection of Erich Marx, which includes works by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys; an extensive collection from Friedrich Christian Flick, not without its controversies from his grandfather, Friedrich Flick, the arms manufacturer and steel magnate who used to supply the Nazi regime; and Egidio Marzona, which primarily consists of works of American and European Conceptual art, Minimal Art, and Arte Povera.

Key artworks in this museum include:

Andy Warhol, Chairman Mao, 1975

Starting in the early 1970s, the Pop artist made hundreds of images of Mao, using a portrait of the leader from the Little Red Book, a propaganda collection of Mao’s speeches and quotations from the Cultural Revolution, as his template. Warhol’s Maos are endlessly varied—ferocious, parodic, and beautiful—gestures of paint smeared onto the reproduced outline of the Chinese leader’s head and shoulders.

A print of Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof art museum in Berlin. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Anslem Kiefer, Volkszählung, 1991

Volkszählung is a huge sculpture of steel and lead that depicts a freestanding library, some fifteen feet tall, whose huge books, made of lead, are pocked with hundreds of dried peas in reference to the bean counters (“Erbsenzähler”) responsible for the project of counting human beings that reduces them to numbers. It was created in the aftermath of a controversial census in what was then West Germany.  Kiefer intentionally used lead to contrast heavy and light, fixity and movement (Brockmeier, J., 2015).

Image courtesy of the New Media Observatory

Joseph Beuys, End of the Twentieth Century, 1983

Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (The End of the 20th Century) consists of nine large basalt blocks which are strewn like dead bodies through the gallery space. The work looks unfinished: one block is still lying on a trolley as if it is still being moved in, though in reality it has been deliberately left in a state of incompletion by the artist thirty one years ago. Each basalt block has a cavity drilled in it, each cavity is lined with felt and mud, and has a cone shaped piece of stone driven into it. You can feel the concrete floor of the gallery about to collapse under the weight of these blocks, they have a presence that can be felt like the deep rumbling of a passing train. The industrial trolley testifies to the labour exerted in their arrangement.

Image courtesy of Visit Berlin.

Robert Rauschenberg, Pink Door, 1954

Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. He is well known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance.

Image courtesy of Black Mountain.

Fernsehturm, Alexanderplatz, Berlin

On our first day of the trip to Berlin in February, as well as getting on a flight in the very small hours of the morning, we will be visiting Fernsehturm in Alexanderplatz.

Image courtesy of berlinperspectivesonarchitecture.com

In the early 1950s, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) planned to build a new facility in Berlin intended primarily for the broadcast of GDR television programmes.  The Fernsehturm (television tower in English) was built in Alexanderplatz and commissioned by Government Leader Walter Ulbricht, who aimed to demonstrate the superiority of socialist societies.  The tower would dominate the skyline and construction showed that a better future was being built in the East.

The original design of the slender tower was devised by the GDR architect Hermann Henselmann. The sphere at the top of the tower was intended to remind people of the Soviet sputnik satellites and was to light up red, the colour of socialism.

The tower was constructed between 1965 and 1969 with only one method considered for constructing it, a method known as “climbing formwork”. The internal steel frame is built first and then the external concrete shaft is built around it.  Mounting the sphere at a height of 200m presented the engineers with a challenge.  The load-bearing steel frame of the sphere was initially precast on the ground and the segments were heaved up using cranes and then secured on the circular platform which forms the final section of the concrete shaft.

The Fernsehturm was also nicknamed "the Pope's revenge" because when the sun shines on the metal skin of the sphere, the reflected light creates the shape of a cross. This was quite unfortunate for the the atheist foundations of the communist GDR government.  Former US President Ronald Reagan once said in a speech that the GDR tried as hard as they could to get rid of the light cross, but without success, the Christian symbol continued to shine on the GDR’s power tower.

Sunlight cross in the Fernsehturm Berlin, and the cross of the Berlin Dome aside, Patricio.lorente, 2015.

At 368 metres tall, the Fernsehturm is the highest publicly accessible building in Europe with  more than a million visitors from 86 countries going up to the observational level with it's breathtaking views of the bustling and constantly changing city of Berlin.

The Lives of Others Film Review

I am currently studying an MA in Creative Enterprise with Management and Arts at the University of Reading.  This term I am doing an International Study Visit module, and we are going to Berlin in February reading week.

One of my aims for the trip is to research further how art is used to depict events that have happened in Berlin and how this has had an affect on the viewers.  In preparation for the module we have a list of films we can choose from that are related to Berlin:

• Aeon Flux, Karyn Kusama, 2005
• Berlin Alexanderplatz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980.
• Cabaret, Bob Fosse, 1972.
• We Children From Bahnhof Zoo, Christiane F – Wir Kinder From Bahnhof Zoo, Uli Edel, 1981.
• Deutschland 83, Anna & Jeorg Winger, 2015.
• Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004.
• Funeral in Berlin, Guy Hamilton, 1966.
• Germany Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini, 1948
• Goodbye, Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker, 2003
• One, Two, Three, Billy Wilder, 1961
• People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), Curt and Robert Siodmak, 1930
• Rosenstrasse, Margarethe von Trotta, 2003.
• Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer, 1998
• The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), Florian Henckel von
• The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Martin Ritt, 1965.
• The Mysteries of Berlin, Cordelia Swann, 1979-82.
• The Bourne Supremacy, Paul Greengrass, 2004
• Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), Wim Wenders, 1987

I chose The Lives of Others, released in 2007, and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, an award-winning political thriller set in 1980s East Germany.  Captain Wiesler (pictured below) works for the Stasi, the secret police, and is asked to keep surveillance on a playwright, Georg Dreyman, whose loyalty to the party is under question.  Wiesler arranges arranges for every wall and floor surface of Dreyman's apartment to be threaded with wires, tapped so that, while perched in an upstairs attic, he can listen out for evidence of treachery.  During the surveillance Weisler is slowly drawn into Dreyman's life and begins to question his own ideals.

Image from bbc.co.uk

The film starts with Wiesler teaching a group of students in interrogation techniques.  The captive had been kept awake for many hours and had started to become upset.  Wiesler ignores the emotion being heard from the recording and listens instead to the precise use of language to indicate guilt, advising that an innocent person would be angry and protest, whereas a guilty one sticks to their story and cries at the inevitability of being caught in a lie.

Wiesler's demeanour is very impassive, quietly taking in other peoples' actions, assessing them through his many years of experience as a Stasi officer.  As the film progresses, his detachment weakens.  He becomes thoroughly absorbed in the lives of Dreyman and his girlfriend actress, Christa-Maria Sieland, drawing out their apartment layout in the surveillance room and following them around the rooms, even mimicking them cuddled up in bed.

The film sets themselves are very bland in colouring, as is the functional clothing worn by the characters, reflecting the utilitarian nature of East Germany at that time.  When the Berlin Wall finally comes down there is a shift towards more colour in the scenes and more fashionable clothing.

It is hard to imagine the level of control on peoples' lives when living in East Germany, the daily fears and suspicions they would have endured.  The Lives of Others depicts some of this feeling, however I thought some parts of the story were not covered in detail, and it is only from my additional research into the film that I now understand what it was trying to achieve.  This may be down to the film being subtitled and so the viewer has to concentrate on reading the translation rather than being able to freely watch the action on the screen. I also found that I may have projected feelings onto the actors; I kept waiting for Wiesler to condem Dreyman with the information he had gathered on him based on the first scene of the film and my understanding of the regime, but Wiesler turns out to be a saviour and protector when Dreyman is investigated by the Stasi.  A part of me then wanted the film to be based on a true story, however, a Guardian article from 2007 by Anna Funder, advises this could never have happened:

"The thoroughness of the regime was horrifying: it accumulated, in the 40 years of its existence, more written records than in all of German history since the Middle Ages. East Germany was run on fear and betrayal: at least one in 50 people - by CIA estimates, one in seven - were informing on their relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues. People were horrified to discover what had happened, again, in their country; what human beings were capable of."

I am interested in finding out more about the time just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and just afterwards, how it affected peoples' lives and how artists portrayed these events.  This will be the focus of some of my future research for this module.

Image from IMP Awards, 2007

The Great Wide Open

Following on from my personal photography project last year, Looking Into The Depths, that explored the impacts humankind are having on the environment, particularly the oceans, I have found that other issue-based photography or films capture my attention much more than they previously may have done.  I pay particular attention to the visual narratives being created, comparing their techniques with those I aimed to portray in my project to caution my audience of the effects of our actions.

My objective was to create beautiful images that confused the viewer so that they took a second look at the photograph and questioned what wasn't quite right about it.

As I was scrolling through the National Geographic Instagram feed the other day, I came across a post of Jared Leto's Great Wide Open videos made last year to celebrate America's National Parks and the incredible adventurers who explore its beauty.  Leto is described as an actor, musician, entrepreneur and environmentalist, and so I had to take a look at the videos to see if there was any link to preserving the National Parks.  However, rather than focusing on the environmental aspect, these videos tell the stories of the people who choose to push themselves to the limit through extreme rock climbing.  Rather than focusing on destruction and ruin, the Great Wide Open emphasises the stunning expanses and wilderness to be found in the National Parks, and the experiences felt by the people who visit them.

The fourth video in the series, The Wolfman, has to be my favourite.  It tells us about the wild animals found in Yosemite National Park and features interviews with more normal people than the fearsome rock climbers, showing that it appeals to all people from all walks of life, and the haven that it offers them, and the wildlife.

They are beautiful videos telling stories of how the parks have had an influence on the lives of the central characters and the sense of wanderlust to be found in this wilderness.  I like to think that seeing the beauty and benefits the parks bring to these people will influence others to take more care of the environments they encounter.

Portfolio Image Critique

The next stage of my final photography project is to write a critical evaluation of the development of the project, the success of your objectives, an awareness of an audience, appropriate decision making for the exhibition and presentation of the work.  This post will review three of the 12 images that were submitted for the portfolio looking at technical and artistic elements.

Image 1

This is my favourite image from the collection; there is an ethereal glow to the light dancing on the sand and the reflection of the cooling towers on the sand looks like it could have been there in real life, seamlessly blending the two images from completely different locations.  As a single image the cooling towers create an imposing feeling in the viewer from their monolithic size and thoughts that are conjured in the viewer's mind through association with the vapors and gasses emitted into the air.  When viewed in conjunction with the beach scene it reminds the viewer of the very real things this pollution could impact upon; therefore communicating the intended message of raising awareness of the damage humans are causing to the environment.

The image uses a wide depth of field so that all elements in the frame are in focus.  There is some lens distortion to the top of the cooling tower on the left which can be distracting as it is the most prominent tower.  This will require further work in post-production before the image is printed for the exhibition.

The eye is drawn up the image, with the seagulls landing and taking off first capturing the gaze, then drifting up to the unexpectedness of the cooling towers.  Initially the image may be classed as a broad landscape photograph, however, on closer inspection the individual details of the scenery are revealed from the hedgerows and fencing trying to contain the towers, to the Another Place figures identifying the beach as Crosby Beach.

Image 2

Image 2 is an example of one of the macro perspective images from the collection.  It uses purple tones to merge an image of saltwater mussels and shells found on beach-combing trips throughout the UK with the graffitied word "FEAr..." found on the side of the sea wall in Margate, Kent.  This image is one of a pair, combined with another close-up of the shells found in rock pools, that was merged with a coating of petrol floating on water.  As a pair the colours work well to link them and strengthen the message, however, as a stand alone image, this does not work so well.  As part of the collection the word seeks to reinforce the message of the sometimes unknown damage that is being done to our environment with human hands.  As an independent image this could be interpreted as fear of the sea and what can be found in it, rather than the intended message of the project.

The mussel in the bottom left-hand corner is out of focus, however, this is hidden by the filmy sheen of the wall the graffiti was sprayed on.  Also the translucency of the wording makes it difficult to clearly read the writing.  If I was to make this image again I would like to experiment with a more staged approach to the arrangement of the shells, using their shape to help spell out the wording and support the message.  None of the images from this project were artificial scenes, and so this approach may not fit with the 'found' and natural elements of the project, but would be worth exploring to see if it produced a more aesthetically pleasing image.

Image 3

The third image is one of three images intended to be displayed together that feature the white chalky cliffs of Kent.  I love the drama of this image, with the majestic cliffs seemingly dwarfing The Shard, the tallest building in Europe.  The repeated triangle shapes of the building and arch in the cliff strengthen the viewer's enjoyment of the image, bouncing the gaze along from left to right, ending in an awe-inspiring blue expanse of sky.

As with the Image 1, this uses a wide depth of field so that all elements of the photographs are in focus, the viewer could even read the bus stop location of St Georges Circus if they so wished.  However, the bus stop and construction boards do provide some clutter to the image; taking them out, or recomposing the scene, may improve the image and more effectively concentrate the gaze on the buildings.

As a sample of the Looking into the Depths project, these three images show the different macro and micro perspectives that were explored.  I will extend this critique process to the remaining nine images and use this, alongside Assignment 2: Critical Reflection to inform my choice of final images to be displayed at the exhibition in June.

Portfolio Submission

It is very nearly assignment deadline time.  Since the beginning of October I have been working on a personal photography project for my final year at university.  This assignment required me to demonstrate my research and exploration of an in-depth photographic project.  We were given free rein on the choice of topic and I chose to focus on the damaging affects we are having on our coastal areas.

My research has given me an insight into how other photographers and creatives portray this subject and the many different ways of getting this message across to an audience.  In this blog I have discussed why I decided to focus on this theme; the research undertaken; experiments I carried out with cyanotypes; the history of photography exhibitions and their audiences; the charities and organisations working on these issues; and other artists who have exhibited their work.

Working on this project has been thoroughly satisfying, not because I am heartened by the news stories I have come across, far from it, but because I had the opportunity to work on something I feel very passionate about.  If only one person who sees my images has a rethink about changing their recycling habits, or conserving water, or turning off a light when they are not that room, I feel I will have achieved what I set out to do at the start of this project.

Here are my final 12 images that will be submitted for my assignment.

Final images produced for "Looking into the Depths" project

Curation and Exhibition Research for Looking Into the Depths

With a final few tweaks to go and some paperwork to finish off, my personal photography project portfolio is nearly finished.  I now need to start researching in further depth how I will exhibit this collection of images in May.

We have a gallery space on campus for around 10 of us to display our work and this will be divided between us, but as yet we are unaware as to who will have what space, and how much of it.  I will start my in-depth research based on this space and adapt my idea once I have more details on how the space can be used.

In keeping with the environmental theme of my project I would like the viewer to feel as if they are at the coast when they come to my section of the exhibition.  I want to create an impression of bringing the natural world inside and make this an experience for the viewer.  I need to fully consider the logistics for how I can achieve this however, I would like to combine my images with unpleasant smells from the pollution depicted, such as drains, stagnant water, smoke.

Here are a couple of examples of environmental exhibitions:

In February 2015 Nemo 33 hosted an underwater photography exhibition of the work of Fred Buyle.  14 large format prints could be seen through windows, or by free diving or scuba diving into a swimming pool in Brussels.  Buyle is a free diver who captures unique moments of marine life who also works with marine biologists to assist them with their field work.

Image courtesy of Fred Buyle

Judith and Richard Lang unceasingly comb the beaches of California clearing them of plastic and then use that marine litter to produce works of art that are sold for hundreds of dollars and exhibited in galleries and museums from Singapore to San Francisco.  Half of their net profits go towards Ocean Recovery Alliance, a Californian charity that co-ordinates projects to help improve our ocean environment.

Image courtesy of Judith and Richard Lang

The Tate Sensorium use advanced technology to replicate the five senses and bring a whole new dimension to experiencing art at the Tate Britain.  The BBC World Service broadcast full details the Tate's IK Prize 2015 winner created by Tom Pursey and Peter Law of Flying Objects.

Image courtesy of BBC World Service

I will continue my research into how I can use these exhibitions, and others, as inspiration for my own exhibition.

Looking Into The Depth Project Update

I have been working on this photography project for four months now and it is now starting to feel like the end point is in sight.  I have seven blended images that I will use in my final portfolio and five more to work on so that they are a cohesive body of work.

The images that have made the cut so far are expansive landscape vistas and the blending is not jarring in any way or does not look too harsh.  The images I am struggling with are those that are closer to the subject of the image, so scale is sometimes an issue.

As in this image, the seagulls and cigarettes don't look quite right as the cigarettes are a lot larger than the seagulls, which is not the case in real life.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be experimenting with other images in post-production to get the blending as smooth as possible and so that the final photograph does not shock the viewer.  I want the portfolio as a whole to generate a reaction in the viewer, not one or two images that feel they do not fit in the project and so take the emphasis away from the key theme of raising awareness of the impact humans are having on our coastal areas.

In Other News...

An advert on Channel 4 had caught my eye recently, Drones in Forbidden Zones, as the cooling towers looked very similar to those I had photographed at Willington.  Low and behold, it was one and the same location.  The video is less than three minutes and well worth a watch.  It includes stories from people who worked there, it is so much more damaging to the environment than I realised.  It makes you think when you see the farmers' fields so close to somewhere that handled radiation, would any of that seeped into the crops that end up in our food chain?  Just as the plastic in our oceans ends up in the fish that gets served up on dinner plates.  Food for thought.

Making It Count

Its my second week back at university and the assignments are coming thick and fast now.  After my trips out over the Christmas holidays I am starting to feel like my final photography project is coming together now.  I've spent time in the digital darkroom blending images together to see how they work and if this idea would be successful, and good enough to submit as my final piece of work.

So far I'm pleased with the results, some are working better than others, but I've still got a few weeks before my deadline so have time to tweak and work out how I can group the images so that the final body of work is a cohesive one.

Here's a couple of my favourites:

And one I'm not so sure about:

I'd love to know what you think.

Making This Project Count

As my project is about the affect pollution and humans have on our shorelines I wanted to link it with charities that work to protect the coast.  There are so many more out there than I thought there would be and it seems like it is becoming more widely reported in the media.  Which I know is a bad thing because of the levels of pollution and damage that is being done, but it also has to have a small silver lining because it is raising awareness and emerging in more mainstream media.  For example, the article More Plastic Than Fish in the Sea by 2050 was published in The Guardian and features comments from  Dame Ellen MacArthur, who broke the record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2005.  I sincerely hope, by making more people aware of these atrocities we can start to make changes and reduce the damage that is being done.

To do my little bit to help I would like to support three charities through raising awareness of them at my final exhibition.  They are:

• Two Minute Beach Clean
• Surfers Against Sewage
• Break the Bag Habit

Two Minute Beach Clean is breeding a community of beach-loving volunteers helping to rid the world's beaches of marine litter and plastic pollution two minutes at a time.  People are encouraged to spend two minute picking up rubbish on their next visit to the beach, take a photograph and post it on Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #2minutebeachclean.  Why not give it a go and earn some social media fame.

Surfers Against Sewage is an environmental charity protecting the UK's oceans, beaches and waves so they can be enjoyed long term.  Their campaigns include targeting marine litter, protecting our waves, improving water quality, taking action on climate change, and increasing the education around these issues.  Take a look on their website for what is happening in your region and how you can support this cause.

Break the Bag Habit is a campaign targeting the reduction of single-use bags.  Not only do they contribute to litter on our streets, but they use resources such as trees and water to produce them, and take over hundreds of thousands of years to break down.  You'll also save on the 5p bag charge introduced by the Government last year.  Win win.  Its easy to sign up to the pledge and shows your support.

There are so many more I could mention, but it all gets a bit overwhelming so I have chosen those mainly targeting the UK and are easy to build into your daily lives.  We've all heard the messages to turn off lights when we're not in the room, to not leave the tap running when we are brushing our teeth, but what else can you do to reduce waste?

Happy New Year - Plans for 2016

Happy New Year!  I hope you enjoyed the fireworks last night and are starting 2016 off with lots of good intentions.  I’m not really one for New Year’s Resolutions, but I do have a few goals that I want to achieve this year.

This is it, my final year at university and it will all to be decided within six months time.  I’ll be shooting and soaring, bounding and leaping, into a brand new career and way of life.  How very exciting, and not even a little bit scary (well, maybe a morsel).

As have a lot of people, I've been thinking about what I learned in 2015 and reviewing the year.  It feels such a long time ago now, but back in February I organised an American Pancake Brunch with my fellow Event Management students; went to Costa Rica for five weeks in May learning Spanish, saving turtles and bird watching at an eco-lodge; and started planning what I'd like to do when I graduate university.

I've read a few other blog posts in the run up to the big NYE and a couple stood out for me.  The first was Monica Galvan's Choose to Live a Creative Life and the phrase "create more than you consume".  It's going to be my phrase (I couldn't do just one word as I know some people have) for 2016.  I want to create many new and beautiful photographs, and be more mindful about the products I purchase.  Could I buy handmade instead?  How will I discard what is being replaced and avoid my waste ending up in our oceans?

And the second was Beverley from Pack Your Passport's In Defence of Spending New Year Alone post.  My past few trips have been with other people and this post reminded me of the sheer satisfaction in travelling to a new destination alone, I am thinking about going on a trip when I graduate and at the moment leaning towards going back to New York, always a winner, but should I go somewhere I've not been before?  Maybe I'll create a Pinterest board with my options.

So these are my goals for 2016:

1) Review the images I have for my personal photography project and build a strong portfolio.
2) Plan and curate an exhibition of my final images in celebration of completing the project and promote awareness of what is happening to the vast seas and oceans of the world.
3) Graduate from university with a degree in Digital Photography and Event Management.
4) Continue to develop my photography skills (just cos I graduate, doesn't mean I stop learning).

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions and/or goals for 2016?  What are your plans for this brand new year?

T'was The Night Before Christmas

I’m back home down south for the holidays looking after my friends' cats, Poppy and Hector, whilst they are having a lovely time in warm and sunny Mexico.

Even though we have three whole weeks break from uni I have a couple of assignments that need to be handed in after the break so I’ll be beavering away on those; making a start on my new ones; and cracking on with creating images for my personal photography project, which means trips to lots of beaches whilst they're deserted, how divine.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, have a fabulous time, eat, drink and enjoy.

Attracting an Audience

As I work on this project I will need to be constantly aware of it’s final destination, a curated exhibition, and who I would like to see the final images that I produce.

Photographs started small.  They were collected, not exhibited.  As photography began to compete with painting, photographs got larger in scale.  But producing a large image meant collaborating with others to produce the print, this brought into question who had made the image.  As the medium of photography grew in the public's estimation, this became less of an issue and more of who could produce the largest paper.  Large photographs became photomurals for commercial and political use, particularly during the war.  Anyone could see an image at an exhibition, it was a shared experience for those who viewed these gigantic images, and created a community among them.

However, early photomurals were pasted rather than hung carefully on walls and unprotected from exposure to light and crowds; many were thrown away after their intended use.  In 1932, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the first to introduce giant prints to an exhibition and to focus on the scale of photography.  The exhibition was Murals by American Painters and Photographers.  Large prints were not welcomed in the art photography world, with the great Ansel Adams referring to them as 'expensive wallpaper'.  The smaller the image, the closer it was to the photographic original, and therefore, the creative act.

By the early 1980s artists like Jeff Wall and the so-called Pictures Generation, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, developed an interest in large images, bringing them back into acceptance. With mural size images on display today at exhibitions such as the Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Natural History Museum, London, and the Zanele Muholi's #Vukani/Rise at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

One of the main aims of exhibitions is to attract audiences, however, understanding those audiences and how to target them, can be intricate task.  The National Portrait Gallery's Exhibitions and Displays Policy states to "maintain, extend and broaden the range of audiences and increase our understanding of those audiences" as one of their main aims.  It is something even the big galleries need to think about.  The Manx National Heritage Museum lists 'think about your audience as number one in their list of how to prepare for an exhibition.  They suggest displays should entertain; give information; be attractive; use strong images; and be safe and accessible.

My project would ideally attract people who are environmentally aware, keep up to date with current affairs and are engaged with the arts.  However, it will also be targeted at those people who have an interest in learning more about lessening their impact on the environment.  My project will provide information on how they can do this, such as how they can use water more efficiently and reduce their waste, especially plastic.

Project Update

I am currently despairing of the grey skies that are a bit of a permanent feature in the North West at the moment.  So I've been in the digital darkroom trying to perfect creating a digital image and printing it.  I've got a couple of digital images now, but am having a few printer problems.  Watch this space and hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll have more successful news to report.

Delving Deeper Into The Research

My research so far had focused mainly on other photographers’ work, however, my subject area has been influenced by my own experiences and personal preferences, so I wanted to delve deeper and look for inspiration from other places.

When I'm not working on assignments I always have a book on the go.  I can go anywhere with a book, it keeps me occupied when I'm sitting in a coffee shop alone, or on a long journey (not driving though, I get car sick).  A couple of books I read over the summer immediately came to mind when thinking about this project.

In A Short Book About Drawing Andrew Marr explores the subject of drawing and painting, and how this has affected his own art.  There is a section in there about the natural world.  Marr argues many of us live in crowded cities far from open fields and skies.  "Advertisers, such as holiday companies, tease us with imagery of unspoilt landscapes lending a sense of sentimentality to the scenes portrayed.  A walk in beautiful countryside can induce a feeling of being vividly alive and in love with the world."  This quote made me think of an advertisement I'd seen for First Great Western trains who used the beautiful scenery of the South West of the UK to tempt customers to book a train journey with them.  This campaign was launched in February, when it was dark, cold and wet, in most parts of the UK.  Yet these images offered hope of warmer, sunnier days to come.  Richard Misrach, as discussed in my last blog post, used a similar approach with his photography, making industrial buildings look grand and implausibly beautiful.

Image courtesy of The Leith Agency

Marr also discusses the paintings of Claude Monet and how he recorded the changing environment.


Monet's Impressionist painting style sought to capture a moment in time without the detail and smoothness of previous painting eras, which resulted in stark depictions of the industrial revolution and its more adverse effects such as pollution.  In Le Pont du chemin de fer a Argenteuil shows a new bridge cutting across an idyllic rural scene, with a train belching steam into the air.  This is in direct contrast to traditional, picturesque connotations a viewer would have with paintings of landscapes and creates a bleak and grim view of the changing environment.

Image courtesy of Christie's

I will do some further research into these two approaches of depicting industry and how I can use one or the other in my own project.  Do you think using beautiful imagery is a more effective way of engaging with the viewer?  Is it more effective than showing people shocking, atrocious images?

Recommended Settings

I'm still happy with my project idea of portraying the impact humans have had on the environment and so these last could of weeks I have been spending some time researching the technical considerations and how I might be able to try something new.

As this is my final university project I wanted to try a style of photography I had not attempted before whilst I still had experts on hand to help.  Back in March there had been a Google Doodle to mark the 216th Birthday of English photographer and botanist Anna Atkins.  Atkins is credited with being the first to use a photographic printing process that produced a cyan-blue print, a cyanotype.  Atkins used the process to create a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her seaweed collection.  Cyanotypes were used extensively by engineers as a simple and low-cost process to create copies of drawings, and were named blueprints.

Image courtesy of Anna Atkins, Ceylon Fern, 1854

I was very taken with the vivid blue colour of the images that were created through this process and wanted to try it myself.  I ordered a starter kit from Silverprint and scoured the local hedgerows for some interesting props to create my image.  It took several attempts, with the first completely disappearing after a couple of hours, but I did manage to finally produce something I was pleased with.  You can't see it very well on the image below, but just at the top of the feather it has captured where it has slightly parted.  Some parts are a lot more detailed than I thought they would be

I need to do a lot more experimenting as the white is still fading away after a while, and I want to try it with a digital negative to perfect this before I have to submit my images.  I am also attracted to double exposure images and think this could be used to portray the good vs. evil sides to the environment.  This is another new process I need to learn, and then turn into a cyanotype print.  I have lots to be working on for the next couple of weeks.

Please do let me know if you have tried making cyanotypes.  Can you recommend any other kits to try?  Or where I might start with learning how to create a double exposure print.  I'd love to hear what you think.

Think Of A Project, Any Project

It's my final year at university.  I can't quite believe how fast it has come around.  When I handed in my notice at work in 2013 I was quite calm in the knowledge that I had a plan for the next three years, but now, those three years have become eight short months.  So many shades of scary.

I'm doing a double module in Photography this year entitled Digital Photography: Production, Curation and Exhibition.  There are three assignments, create a Portfolio; write a Critical Evaluation;
and host a Production Event; the conclusion to the project.

First things first, I need to think of a topic for my project.  The world and everything in it is my oyster, I can chose any topic I like.  That's quite a lot to consider.  To try to narrow this down I thought about the things I am most passionate about and what I felt would be worthwhile exploring in greater detail.  I have a great love for wildlife, nature and the coast.  For one of my modules last year I went a placement to Costa Rica where I volunteered at a national park where they monitor sea turtles.  Although it was probably on the periphery of my mind, I'd never really considered just how much plastic makes it's way into our seas and, in turn, our marine life.  In Costa Rica, I experienced it first hand with daily beach cleaning patrols.  For a beach that is monitored for plastic on a regular basis, we still managed to collect several black bags full of plastic each day.

When I got home, as always seems to be the case when a thing you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere, this video showing a research team who found a turtle with a 10-12cm plastic straw lodged in it's nostril, was released in August this year.

Video courtesy of Christine Figgener

*****warning: strong language and graphic scenes*****

Over the summer I kept an eye out for other news articles about plastics in our oceans and anything else related to this subject.  I went to the Environmental Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in London.  The competition is an international showcase for the very best in environmental photography and film. Honouring amateurs and professionals of all ages, it provides an opportunity for photographers to share images of environmental and social issues with international audiences, and to enhance our understanding of the causes, consequences and solutions to climate change and social inequality.

Eduardo Leal's project, Plastic Trees, was made to raise awareness of the problems caused by plastic bags on the Bolivian Altiplano.

Image courtesy of Eduardo Leal

These images are not specific to this area of the world, I know I can remember seeing plastic bags caught in trees in my local park, it is something we are all witness too.

I am currently researching other photographers who have created photography projects on the impact people and industry have had on the environment to further inform my own project.  More information on this in a couple of weeks.

If you would like to support Christine's research into sea turtles, visit her Go Fund Me webpage.