This week, we were tasked to create images that relate to our WIP without using our regular tools in image making – for me this meant creating images without using a camera.
I was previously unsure on how to go about this week’s task, however it occurs to me that one of my biggest inspirations is cinema and that I would be able to express something through film stills.
The selected film stills have been cropped, colour graded and I have added textural grain. Some of the images have been collaged where as others stand alone in a closely cropped image. I found the task to be rejuvenating, I realise that the images I enjoy making are not just restricted to what I have to capture myself. What I make in my studio and what is already out there feel like different threads from the same rope and it is refreshing to play editor with something that already exists. It is the same expression but a different method.
Describing Michael Queenland’s artistic practice in which he uses many physical surfaces and materials including photographs to contribute to a whole body of work; Charlotte Cotton makes the connection that in his case, and perhaps in my own, and many others; the camera is just one of a selection of tools he uses to make his work. He is not defined by the camera.
“To these playful subversions of art’s formal language he adds his photographs. In combination with other media,photography becomes just one phrase in an overall statement, subjected to a consciously ambiguous but highly specified treatment.” Michael Queenland (b.1970) – Charlotte Cotton The photograph as contemporary art, Thames & Hudson
Moving forward, I would like to keep up the practice of reappropriation, if not for the fundamental pleasure I got in making these images. I think it would take a lot of time and practice for me to create something I would want to publish but the seed is there. In relation to my project I do not want to use film stills in such a direct way; what could come of this however is an archive of images that would inspire the images I create, more so than cinema already has.
CRJ 