The Commission

Brief


For this project we have to work on the theme of waste as if it where a commission task.
This is to help us become more flexible and able to respond to a diverse range of tasks and briefs, and to familiarise ourselves with the demands and expectations of a commission.

The assignment requires us to look at the theme of waste as an index for the industrial globalised world we live in. Global actions such as consumption, recycling and the artefacts of waste have an interconnected relationship with people at every local level and the theme for this commission promotes reflection about the world in which we live.
The body of photographic work we produce can use the genres of portraiture, environment or still- life.

Developing an idea


As soon as we began talking about the industrialised world, and the Global consequences of consumption, I had images of what could happen in the future if we continued in this manner.
As the words 'Global' and 'Industrial' where used within the brief I could not help but think visually of these effects on a large and devastating level, and the barren life less landscapes it may or has created.
Within the brief there are several examples of how to interpret this theme of 'waste', and the two that inspired me most where:

Andreas Gursky 'Untitled XIII'

and...

Yao Lu 'Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Fuchun'.

Gursky's piece in Mexico City captured me because at a glance or viewed from a distance it is unclear as to what  you are viewing. It could be an abstract painting with it's obscurities and droplets of colour darted throughout it, however when you look closer you begin to make out familiar shapes or things, products. Eventually you can make out the empty cans and boxes, you see the products you use in every corner of the globe as waste. This endless sea of waste products I found quite inspiring, as Gursky keeps in the horizon line for perspective, it helps you recognise that it is in our world, on our landscapes, it also helps you recognise the sheer scale of it.

Yao Lu's 'Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Fuchun' stuck out to me for it's camouflage. It is in the print style and framing of old traditional Japanese, and Chinese scroll paintings. Showing a beautiful landscape of lakes and mountains and the ideal scenery. There was something unsettling about it though that I could not recognise, also I did not know why this was in our brief on waste.

This is in fact a scene of a rubbish dump in China, however they often cover these dumps with a green 'shield', a green netting. 

So this is quite a horrid large scale putrid dump of waste, that they attempt to hide and transform into something else, once you recognise this, I get a sense of shame from this piece because it has been camouflaged. 

These two photographs began to make me think of a landscape on an almost 'post apocalyptic' scale, these scenes devoid of natural or clean life, and just an endless masked wasteland.

This idea of the endless wasteland made me think of a Korean animation known as 'Sky Blue'. 

Sky Blue 

In this film civilization has been destroyed by war and pollution, the survivors built a living city, named 'Ecoban' to survive in, as most natural resources have been exhausted, and the world has been so polluted, that this 'living city' is powered by pollution. The skies are blocked with smog in every corner of the globe, blocking the sun, and bringing endless toxic rain. 

This setting, and the beautifully drawn, but wholly dead and empty, landscapes in this film spurred my idea of our waste and what it does. I began thinking of portraying less, the waste we cause and dump, and more what will become of us if we continue down this path, with images of these 'epic' landscapes of the barren, with only a hint or two of the humans that where once there.

Pieter Hugo - Permanent Error


South African photographer Pieter Hugo's series 'Permanent Error'  is a series of photographs around a Ghanian dumping ground for global electronic waste, this dumping ground for 'E-Waste' is home to many slums, with people that must traverse the dumping ground, damaging their health burning the techno-trash to harvest precious metals.
In recent years, our consumption of electronic goods has increased rapidly, and today's gadgets and goods become obsolete within merely a couple of years, creating around 50million metric tonnes of 'e-waste' a year.
Much of Hugo's work is done in Ghana, in the new global waste ground for discarded computers, games, mobile phones, printers etc.
Hugo's photographs show the slum-dwellers burning trash in this bleak landscape; the toxic fumes they create endanger both their own health and the environment in which they live, and keep their livestock, creating a lasting problem that produces a permanent error.

These photographs very much depict my 'post-apocalyptic wasteland', which I find really quite shocking, as we all have these notions of man's effect on the world and what will become of us due to our waste and global warming, but few people put serious thought to it. Even less people acknowledge or know of the extent of this damage, myself being one them found Hugo's work staggering in terms of the damage we have done already.

People shrug and adopt an 'out of sight out of mind' attitude towards this kind of thing, and many people that are proactive about these wastelands would focus on helping these people, stuck in these dumps.

Part of this commission requires our photographs to be taken locally, at first this seems rather belittling or irrelevant compared to the wastelands elsewhere in the world, but these wastelands are made because of where we are, our local areas.

Thinking locally of what effects Medway, what Medway generates, my first thoughts are drawn to the River Medway, as it has long been dubbed by locals as 'the river Mudway'.



Sebastiao Salgado


"Inside Kuwait was the sense of being in this huge theatre the size of the planet, with these oil wells burning all around. Sometimes you would go two or three days without any sunlight getting through the vast clouds of black smoke, then suddenly the sky would open."

Sebastiao Salgado did a series of photographs, mainly following some Canadian firefighters in Kuwait in 1991 just as the Gulf War ended. He followed these fire fighters in their plight against damaged and leaking oil wells all across Kuwait, many of which had been ignited.

This was an incredibly dangerous venture for both Salgado and all the fire fighters working there, as so much as a single spark from any tools would ignite them all. Salgado himself became completely immersed in the stories of these fire fighters struggling, he followed them very closely for many days.

Looking at the entire chain of events that led to these wells becoming damaged and spilling oil all across Kuwait, it could not have more relevance to looking at 'waste' and mankind's effect on the earth.
As Kuwait was invaded by Hussein in 1990, and became a war zone between Iraq and the United States. After it's seven month long occupation came to an end, the Iraqi forces set ablaze to around 773 oil wells during their retreat, creating an environmental catastrophe.

It is a devastating example of mankinds effects on the planet, and the waste we create, in every sense of the word.

This was Salgado's favourite shot he took in his time out there. It is of two workers attempting to cap a well, they are completely covered in oil which makes them appear statuesque in the light.
The dehumanisation of this piece is what I find most striking, as these men are completely submerged in the environmental chaos in which they are battling, they become part of the landscape, through this oil that smothers everything.
The idea to use the oil as a metaphor came to me looking at this photograph, as it has consumed these men into the chaos, it is a poignant symbol for our effects as a species on the environment.

Riverside

I followed a footpath along the river Medway to experiment with what I could find along it relating to this idea of waste. With how far back the tide retreats the first thing I noticed was the endless 'sludge' along the coast, where the shallow river reveals what people chuck into it. I framed with horizon looking down at this sludge coast, and tried to create something that looked similar to the endless shiny black scenes from Sebastio Salgado's work, and make the river look like an endless see of oil and filth.
As much as I like the aesthetics of this, upon reflection, it is not the idea I have stuck in my mind for this, and I would rather attempt to create this idea of destruction as a result of mankind's actions, as a pose to simply a visual metaphor.

More than rubbish there appeared to be a lot of abandoned boats, I particularly liked this one as it had deteriorated to such an extent that appeared more like skeletal remains that an old boat.
I got as close as I could hopping along rocks for this shot, I framed it with a factory in the background to try a comment on industrialisation and pollution, but once I looked at the photo I also decided to crop it and blow it up to see what just the skeletal boat would look like. It is a concept I quite like as it unifies the mechanical with the organic with this skeletal like quality. It shows a decomposition with our creations, and unifies it with nature as well, much like Pieter Hugo's computer keyboard shot.

I kept jumping down as close to the river's edge, or rather the edge of the sludge wasteland, to see what rubbish I could find. At first I liked the colours standing out with the green fence and the red gift bow, as they stood out as unnatural amongst the rocks and moss.

I decided to experiment more with the abandoned boats, using larger scale landscape shots. I wanted to use this murky sludge landscaped and the abandoned boats to shift the look of the river Medway, into this original idea of the 'post-apocalyptic'. What the land will look like after our destruction.
If I were to continue this idea I would like to get as accurate horizon lines as possible across all three so that they may be displayed in a row, all fairly matching up to depict a pan shot of a barren landscape.

As much as I liked these photos of the waste landscape, it did not feel as though it was enough. They were simply shots alongside Riverside park, and as much as I tried to push contrasts and to catch the tide when it was as far out as possible, this idea of the waste landscape was not coming across how I wanted, as I would return when the tide was in, and it was a completely different and more pleasant landscape, and I did not want to falsify or force these landscapes, I wanted to find an actual example of our impact.

A word has kept coming up in this project for my idea, which is abandonment, it is an idea I really want to focus on, however these boats do not show it with as much impact as I would like, but they do strike me with the word 'abandonment'.

As I walked up and down Riverside I saw glimpses of an old smashed in building behind a fence and some bushes, with the letters M R S in rusted iron on the building side. After spotting this building each time I went looking down the river I started to think of the idea of the abandoned building.

The building is man's stamp on the natural world, they are the signs of our nesting grounds, our hives. If these buildings go without human contact for a while nature begins to take over again in many ways. The place rusts and decays and the absence of human presence is visually incredibly striking and clear.

Eugene Richards

Eugene Richards spent some time photographing in Corinth, North Dakota. Corinth is a town that once had roughly 300 people residing there, that over time became a ghost town, it was abandoned by almost all it's residents and the buildings left behind, vacant.
Eugene Richards describes his abandoned as more spiritual than churches. The above photograph was taken in 2006, in temperatures 30 degrees below 0.
Richards later found the owner of this bed, was the mother of a Maureen Wisdahl, Maureen is one of the only remaining residents of Corinth with her husband. Richards found that her mother died in this bed which made it all the more spiritual to Richards.

This documentary style photography captures vacancy in this room, a simply plain bed, next to a broken window with snow spilling onto it. It is very simplistic, with the bare minimum in view, but from the obvious abandonment we begin to wonder who's bed was this? What kind of person where they? what role in their life did this room play?

This is another image from Eugene Richards' "The Blue Room", it looks at the instability of this in-between of man and nature over his travels through rural America. The dead animal acting in an incredibly harsh contrast to the abandoned house in its colour and texture, however the two are one and the same, in that both have died and been abandoned by the world to rot.

Alexander Apostol


Alexander Apostol made a series called 'Skeleton Coast' on the island of Margarita. By the late 80's the island soared in tourism in Venezuela, it developed a real estate boom alongside this in hotels and leisure centres. During the early 90's however it suffered an economic crash, which resulted in many of these structures being abandoned mid construction along the beaches.

These images gives a tremendous sense of both loss, and loss of life to these buildings. As a pose to buildings built, abandoned and left to rot, these where abandoned mid construction, leaving only their skeletal structures behind, as if it is a skeleton. This creates an incredible contrast of emotion towards this image, as it is only a skeleton left, it is quite a dead subject and empty, however in appearing like a literal skeleton, we do not see a depressed rotting outer shell to the building, and we can imagine it's original 'skin' and how it's skin looked when it was alive. However remembering that these buildings never where alive, it creates a brilliant complexity to this image and how we interpret the buildings, as they, at a glance, could even look mid construction, as if the area was still in it's boom period creating a facade over the real depressions the island actually feels.

Manit Sriwanichpoom

These are from Sriwanichpoom's series, Dream Interruptus (2000) his statement on the series was:
'Dream: of upgrading the nation's status to a NIC - Newly Industrialised Country. Not through hard work but stock market and real estate speculation.
Not towards democratic maturity but all for concrete development. Highrises shoot up reaching for the sky. Circa 1985-1997
Interruptus: The bubble burst in 1997. Money from nothing, goes back to nothing. Not enough left even to finish the skyscrapers.
The city's full of graveyards, half-finished buildings hulking in their own shadow; empty shells and ruins left from a global economic war.'
These skeletal half finished skyscrapers serve as a reminder of the negative effects of globalisation in Thailand, particularly Sriwanichpoom's quote of "money from nothing, goes back to nothing", which could not be a more poignant statement about the modern economy and the state we are in now as a world.
These pictures are of a very high contrast to the point where parts are consumed in blackness. This extreme tonal range outlines the skeletal frame very harshly, and we are forced to see these as negative, dark almost monolithic structures.

Simon Norfolk

Simon Norfolk claims his work documents an international "military sublime". His photographs depict half-collapsed buildings, cinemas, and abandoned urban ruins, in places including Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He looks at mostly the distant landscapes of modern warfare but also the sterile, climate- controlled rooms of military command centres, and the giant supercomputers that simulate nuclear warheads.
He struggles to identify how we war, and the need to fight war, as many of the spaces we occupy and the technology we use are created by military conflict.
The colours he gets from his photographs are quite warm, and contain a sense of light within this, they are at the dawn and dusk of something of grand scale, which is reflected by the grand landscapes he shows.

Matthews Equestrian Centre


The building I spotted along riverside was called Matthews Equestrian Centre, it used to be an international horse riding grounds built in the early 80s by a local business man and 70s wrestling champion Tony Rocco. The centre was named after Tony Rocco's son Matthew, who apparently died at a very young age of Leukaemia, however exact details are hard to find. It hosted around half dozen major international horse riding championships, however Medway council did not, at the time, approve of this centre. There where concerns about the full planning permission, as apparently it had been built without any to begin with, and also a main concern from the council was the lack of a decent access road to such a centre that was to play host to such large events. Eventually the centre ran out of money pursuing the full permission and it was abandoned in 1986, Tony Rocco refused to pay  for it to be demolished himself, and the council never bothered either, ironically in the early 90s the access road was built anyway for other purposes and the centre would have been potentially a success.
Much later in 2009 a pair of 14 year olds broke into the centre and set a fire to the place, destroying a main section of the centre and collapsing that portions roof.

To this day the place remains abandoned and forgotten about.

These are some preliminary digital shots I took up exploring the Equestrian centre.

These couple of outside shots show the desolate old equestrian centre, the thirds shot is a little closer in, there the roof collapsed in one of it's adjoining buildings.
I did not have a clear idea of how to present this building yet, or even if I would, so I merely explored and 'snapped' if something intrigued me. The first thing I wanted to document in this building was the 'overgrown', where it had been abandoned for so long that plants began consuming it. All of the plants however, where dead, many not naturally growing, but cut, destroyed and dumped over it when trees had been trimmed on neighbouring properties, so the entire building looked dead.

I did a full walk around the buildings perimeter on this visit, to see what I presume was a secondary entrance to the main reception, as these walkways extended from the adjacent field. I photographed it for the element of the 'dead', as again the walkways where blocked with cut down and destroyed trees, and so all was cut short, and dead.

I climbed a fence to reach the main doors where the horses would enter and exit the main complex and go into, what I assume, was the performance fields.
I wanted to capture these cement blocks that barred the entrance, with their rough spray paint of 'Danger Keep Out'. It intrigued me as to what was inside this dead building, as these barricades make me think of horror films, particularly zombie horrors, where people accidently uncover some horrible creature.

Inside the place looked like a massive hangar, as it was an inside showroom as well, it had become a massive hangar, for dirt floor and decay.

The walls where covered in graffiti, from youths breaking in and exploring the place. It had lost it's value and its purpose, it was dead and decayed, with the walls marred and painted over.

After a tutorial I was advised that I had gotten lost in my location, and had forgotten my projects intent and message, which was very true in my photos.
I looked at the graffiti and colour within this 'hangar' and merely documented those as I did not expect to find them there, I forgot my intent in my aesthetics.

Donovan Wylie


In his series titled 'Maze' Donovan Wylie looked at the Maze Prison in Belfast, when it was decommissioned in 2003. It was a prison where Paramilitary prisoners of both sides of Ireland's conflict where incarcerated in 'the Maze'. They where sorted into H Blocks, depending on their affiliation. It is the prison where Blanket and Dirty Protests of the late 1970s and the 1981 Hunger Strikes took place.

Donovan Wylie describes how he interpreted the place photographically in saying:
"The trick of the project was to try to understand the psychology of it. The building is a hybrid between a civilian prison and a military prison, but the whole thing is a machine and every part of it is a component and it all works together. Once you understand it as a machine, you can desconstruct it as a machine, photographically. Then you fully understadn the shape of it, why it doesn't have any steps, why there are so many layers to it, why it is so uniform."

Looking at his photographs there is something incredibly uniform about them. He uses very overcast natural lighting, along with very desaturated film to create these soul less and dead images. He photographs the decommissioned prison, and what it is now perfectly, it is simply 'empty'. He also, as he states, very much looks at his photographic method for this as uniform and mechanical, for the type of prison that dehumanises it's prisoners, and runs like a well oiled military machine, he keeps he subtly changes his framing method and angle to suit which part of the 'machine' he focuses on.
Particularly looking at the fences, and the beds in the bedrooms, I notice these individual objects the most, and think of their original use and purpose, I imagine what they where like when this place was used, and it reinforces this dead emptiness throughout the series.

The Commission: "The Portrait Issue"

As a research task for the day we have been asked to compare three separate portraits and analyse their intent.
Beginning first with Scottish photographer Finlay MacKay, and his portrait of David Weir.

This piece was dubbed 'Changing Pace' and is part of his 'Road to 2012' series, which he has been commissioned to create by the national portrait gallery.
MacKay's style is very different to what we see in most contemporary photography, as he comes from a fine art photography background, he uses incredibly complex lighting set ups, to push the boundaries of his photograph until it no longer looks like a photograph, and more like a fine art painting.
In a short video of his 'Road to 2012' commission (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S6vxUxtLqE) he explains how he began using one or two lights in his photographs, and then eventually made his lighting more and more complex until he was using more like 30 lights per shot.

Looking at his other works such as his Lavazza Calender commission we can see his fine art backgrounds and how it influences his photographic style, as he rejects the normal conventions of photographic lighting and set ups. It is almost as though his mind delves into a fantasy realm, where in he is painting a scene before him, and that is translated into photography for us.

The entire scene for 'Changing Pace' is an unusual piece to glance at, as you recognise it as a photograph, and not only a photograph but one taken outside in the natural environment, however the lighting and framing he uses converts this into being also a highly constructed piece. Each item in shot is perfectly lit and focused, be it the shadow, the path, the man, or the tree, his meticulous lighting set ups make it appear as though he has individually cut out each element of this photograph separately and pasted them together.

Ulrich Gebert's work is also very carefully considered and constructed, yet they are of a natural landscape, unconstructed setting.
Looking at this portrait 'Freischneider, Gebert looks at the relation between man and nature, specifically us and agriculture. He explores how man tackles a natural unbound element of agriculture, scything it down into something else. His work highlights a confrontation, a culprit-victim relation between man and nature, as nature becomes an item of conceptual order, meticulousness and correct and incorrect design.
His portrait here portrays man as almost a 'juggernaught' like character, facing agriculture fully armoured and equipped. We can see similarities in the construction of angle and lighting between Gebert and MacKay's work in that they are not studio based, however the lighting used creates a highly unnatural, but perfectly outlined image, bringing out light and colours in a natural scene into an unnatural way. Also much like MacKay's athletes, the body posture and expression is in perfect form, where as MacKay's models being athletes automatically present themselves in perfect form and posture in a sport, Gebert uses the man's visor to reinforce his facial expression to create an overpowering stern expression, highlight the angles of his face in a meticulous detail.

Toby Glanville is quite contrasting in style to both Gebert and MacKay in terms of his photographic technique and style, though he again works outside of a studio basis, looking at more natural everyday scenes.
Glanville works however with a far subtler style, as a pose to the extreme unnaturally perfected lighting in MacKay and Gebert's work.
Glanville looks at workers, often in the food industry, and captures their personality through their profession.

His characterisation is very subtle, but in their posture, and facial expression we see a glimpse of exposure, and vulnerability from each person, and shot in the natural lighting conditions of their profession, they become perfectly characterised, and suddenly the audience could not imagine them as anything other than what they are being presented as.

Looking over the three photographers, we see variations and similarities in their methods and techniques, but all adapt their own preferred photographic style, to enhance and characterise their subjects perfectly, so that every aspect of their given models profession is reflected within the photograph.

Fashion: Constructed Image

This current project is called, Fashion: Constructed Image. It is a group project that aims to further our understanding of the nature of photography, how a photograph is taken, and both the why and how a photograph might be constructed.

As stated at the beginning of our brief, fashion photograph has a varied and misunderstood reputation. It is not a simple method of creating a consumer driven mass-media narrative. It may simply be a fairly shallow narrative that is merely a pursuit in capturing a form of beauty, it may also be a deeply complex narrative, that tells a meaningful story through an intricate control of symbolism. It is an adaptable photographic style, that crosses over into the territories of all other styles of photography, it uses them, it is influenced by them. The same applies to politics, individual experience, and art forms, it draws in many styles and many influences.

As a group we must be assigned various roles, and also potentially draft in other specialists for other roles, such as costume design, make up, etc.

Mood Boards


Beginning this project we decided our theme would begin with films, and then we would specialise from there.
We broke off individually sourcing images of different types for things like lighting inspiration, character ideas, etc.
The idea behind this was to gain a large resource of visual inspiration, but also to figure each group members preferred style or current approach to this project.

Looking through our mood boards, we at first tried to think of ways  to condense these varying styles into one, and we agreed we wished for something unusual about it, which made us start looking into areas like surrealism. This began us on a motif of a journey of items and styles going throughout the photograph, however we realised that this would make a very cluttered image, to the point where it would lose it's meaning. We instead starting thinking with the word duality in mind, so that we could combine more than one visual style. After a tutorial session however the meaning of this word duality, has shifted in our mindset to be something more than a literal visual duality, and maybe something more, something subtler, and questioning.

Gregory Crewdson

As a group we where recommended in a tutorial session to look into the works of Gregory Crudeson, particularly his series 'Twilight'.

Crudeson uses incredibly elaborate set productions that are much closer to Film sets that a photographers. He shoots only at twilight as he describes it as 'the witching hour' as Crudeson states he is not interested in the before, the after, the resolution, he merely wishes to capture the unresolved stated in between, a still that shows the transition of before becoming then and after.

He uses twilight lighting crossed with strong artificial lights, (street lights, house lights) which he exaggerates with his choices of backdrop, to create a strong and eerie lighting, neither natural nor entirely fake.

His main influences in lighting and style are strongly taken from, Edward Hopper, Ray Bradbury, The Twilight  Zone, Stephen Spielburg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and David Lynch.

A particularly large influence in Crewdson's work is David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet', as Crewdson states he was struck by the film and its dystopian world beneath the suburban America town. 

Crewdson very much captures the uneasy feeling of 'Blue Velvet'  and the tension Lynch creates within it is mirrored in Crewdson's work.

Dark City

Continuing this idea of a duality in our project, I began thinking of films that had similar themes, particularly those with an unusual visual style that we could take inspiration from, which immediately made me think of Alex Proyas' 'Dark City' (1998).

This film has an incredibly unique visual style and atmosphere to it; a neo-noir with an almost comic-esque twist. 

As a brief plot outline:

The film begins with our protagonist, John Murdoch, awakening in a bath tub, in a hotel room, with amnesia. He receives an ominous phone call from Dr. Daniel Schreber, who simply tells him something went wrong, and to run as men are after him. During this call Murdoch sees a murdered hooker on his bedroom floor, in a matter that is ritualistic. He is chased by mysterious pale faced men through and out of the hotel, these men vanish without a trace. Hunted by both the police and the mystery men, Murdoch struggles to remember who is, haunted by the possibility that he was a murderer. When night should end, instead the city stops, and every citizen falls asleep, except Murdoch, who sees the city reshaped and redesigned before his eyes by a mysterious power, peoples lives and memories are swapped, wiped and rewritten. The clock reverts back to the beginning of night and the city is sparked to life once again.....

The fact that every night people's lives and memories are swapped  was a concept I really wanted to look further into for influence on our constructed image. The questioning of self identity and the value we place on what we own and achieve, as it is easily wiped and reconstructed within this film.

The visual style is also incredibly striking in this film, it is very much a post-modern influenced neo-noir setting. It takes the visual concepts of the classic film noir, and infuses it with elements of contemporary comic-art, looking at the visual styles of the 'Sin City' comic series, or more predominant influence from the 'Gotham City'  of the Batman comics. Proyas utilizes both darkness and smoke, much like 'Blade Runner', to obscure the city you see, everything also has an odd green tint to it, bringing unsettling elements of horror, so that the scenes you are not quite real, not quite there. Even the architecture of the city has an ambiguity to it, and an element of dualtiy, as the shops and cafe's are very American, but the architecture is a blend of predominantly European architecture and then only some elements of American. The idea behind this visual style is to create a complete ambiguity and suspense of reality, as the streets are very real, yet they not quite there, every street looks different, yet the same. Visually it presents a complete psychological maze, it is a metaphor of the psychological experiment of the rats' maze, there is even a scene of this experiment in Dr. Schreber's office that highlights this metaphor.

Visually this film is far more noir in it's lighting set up than I would like our constructed image to appear, however the elements of horror through subtleties like the green tinted lighting through the viewer off guard a little, and that is a concept I would like to implement into our final image. Also the physical construction of the set is quite inspiring, as they have carefully and subtly made the city a complete maze of  ambiguity through splicing architecture, which is a concept worth exploring in our methods of set building.

The last element I have taken from this film, that I think poignantly summarises all of its plot and concept, and reflects our own project's intent, is the theme of 'Plato's Cave'. 

The Allegory of Plato's Cave

'The Allegory of the Cave' is part of the Greek philosopher Plato's work, 'The Republic'.

It is used to highlight our human nature towards education, looking at the very foundations of what we perceive is real and why.

It is a hypothetical dialogue, that describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows.

According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners ever get to viewing reality, as they have only ever known these shadows. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

This concept means that what we take for granted as reality, may merely be a shadow of reality, an illusion.

Plato poses the question, imagine a cave inhabited by these prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood, not only their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at  a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners the enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads, things that resemble men or animals. The prisoners watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are merely shadows. There are also echoes of sound off the walls from the noise the walkway produces.

The prisoners would perceive the shadows to be real things, and the echoes to be their real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard.

The allegory goes on to suggest what would happen if one prisoner was released from the cave, how he would react, and what would he do once he returned to the cave after experiencing reality? This themes are very much reflected in the plot line of 'Dark City' and also 'The Matrix', however for our constructed image, I would like merely to highlight the concept of this cave, and it's prisoners in our project.

To take a modern concept, for instance the middle class 'American Dream' and present it in relativity to 'Plato's Cave', to show the other side, the reality casting the shadow of reality.

Rear Window 

Looking closer at the idea of the 'American Dream' and the other side to that concept or life style, I am now looking towards Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'.

As a brief plot outline, 'Rear Window', features James Stewart playing a photographer called L.B. Jeffries. He is confined to his apartment and bound to a wheel chair while he recuperates from a broken leg. His rear window looks out onto a courtyard and many other apartments, and being confined to a chair, Jeffries spends his time observing his neighbours. There a many individual characters as his neighbours that he observes throughout the film, including: a ballet dancer dubbed "Miss Torso", a lonely woman dubbed "Miss Lonely heart", a songwriter, several married couples (2 newly weds, an elderly content couple, and a middle aged soured couple).

Jeffries is awoken by a storm in the night and witnesses a jewelry salesmen (married to a bedridden wife) making repeated trips with a large case in the night, the next day he sees him cleaning saws and knives, and tying up large suitcases. Jeff brings his wealthy socialite girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) over to observe with him, after some time they suspect the salesmen has murdered his wife, and their own investigation ensues.

The plot of the film is not so much as relevant to our project, but the setting and characterisations in it are. The neighbours all reflect aspects of the two main characters Jeff and Lisa, Thorwald (the salesmen) and his wife are a mirror of Jeff and Lisa, Thorwald looks after his invalid wife just as Lisa looks after Jeff bound to his wheel chair. The arguments between Thorwald and his wife reflect the conflict between Jeff and Lisa as Jeff is afraid to be tied down. Miss Lonely Heart leads a frustrating life, alone no matter what she tries, the same applies to the song writer and his work, they reflect the frustrations between Jeff and Lisa, and the futility they feel in each others stubbornness. Miss Torso the dancer, seems to live a carefree partying lifestyle, she is in perfect shape, desirable and frequently has parties with many men other, however there is no love in any of this, showing an emptiness within this lifestyle, much like Lisa's lifestyle being a top end model.

Jeff also mirrors both the audience, and a view of our society, as there is a symbolic reference between Jeff and the other side of the window, as it mimics the relation of the audience to the screen. Jeff representing the audience, becomes obsessed with the screen, where a collection of storylines are played out. It is a notion that we are a race of 'Peeping Toms', applying to both the cinema and real life. 

This notion that we are obsessed with other worlds, other stories, and become obsessed to extremes with the lives and stories of others reflects our idea of the 'problem' with the American dream, as we spend so much time obsessed with what to get next, the next story, what does he have? that we ignore ourselves, and our own lives become a hollow existence of merely watching others.

Visually from this film, the character of Miss Lonely Heart, strongly resembles our visual intent.

Her apartment is very well presented, and set up like an American home, and she takes care of herself and her appearance, puts in all the effort to set up the romantic dinner table, she creates the picturesque scene of the happy couple, young and in love, but she is becoming old, and when she sits at her finely set dining table, she dines alone, and then cries.

This scenes really reflects visually the visual concept we wish to tell this dark side of the American dream through.

In terms of casting I would like to explore the styles of miss lonely hearts and Lisa, looking at different stereotypes of the women of this era, miss lonely hearts being the poorer character, that aspires to this high life is  a good example of our ideas of this striving for a consumerists perfection. Lisa being in the upper class, she is the embodiment of the American dream, but she is still empty, as it means nothing to her without the man she loves, reflecting our ideas of the meaninglessness of the American dream.

'Miss Lonely Hearts'

Lisa (Grace Kelly)

I wish to look at different types of female characters from this era, and find which aspects of the American dream they aspire for, and where this dream fails them? Look predominantly at their clothing and hairstyles.

This sketch looks at more your typical middle class house wife of the American dream, constantly cleaning and cooking to hold up the household appearance. Image sourced from Salvador Dewald's character mood board.

Again this sketch looks at the 1950's house wife character, but I wanted to look at a younger character idea that also inspires a bit more feminine dominance and sexuality, so I looked at the house wife look that inspires a lot of modern day 'pin-up girl' looks.












Final Idea Proposal

For our constructed image we decided that we wanted to look at the element of duality. We started with this idea so that we could construct a more complex narrative to portray interlaced binary opposites. This lead us to construct our narrative around the ‘American Dream’.

The concept of showing this idea of a duality to the American Dream, is to use the stereotypical signifiers of the ‘perfect American lifestyle’ but our narrative would subtly also portray the extreme ‘dark side’ to this concept of ‘American Perfection’.

The visual focus of this shoot will be tailored predominately to the 1950’s America. We made this choice as the high point of the American Dream and it’s most iconic propaganda campaigns are post world war 2, starting in the late 40’s and 50’s.

Our set build will be of the typical 1950’s family dining room, as the dining room is the heart of the family life, it is where the family meet every day, to share their home cooked meal and bond together.

Looking at the concept of ‘Blue Velvet’, there is the idea that behind the white picket fence, past the perfect mowed lawn, there exists an incredibly dark, and twisted life that is hidden from the world behind this mask of consumerism.

Our narrative will look at the American mother, as the mother is the one that keeps the house clean in perfect order, and prepares the meal to hold the family together. Our American mother however will be replaced by a lonely woman gone insane and delusional through her obsession with the ‘American Dream’, desperately attempting to pursue this. She has set up the full family dining room ready for dinner, but she has no family. She has masked herself and life in the products of the American Dream to the extent where even her skin and posture will appear fake, and constructed, to show a loss of the human side to this consumerists’ dream.

Looking at other films like ‘American Beauty’, ‘The Truman Show’ and ‘Fight Club, we wish to take their concepts of obsession with possessions, with the material objects, and in this action the possessions consume the consumer, and they lose sight of meaning in their self identity until they are no longer human.

We will move away from the concepts of photographer’s like Gregory Crewdson and take elements of the lighting concepts of Finaly Mckay, where everything is lit meticulously to eliminate all shadows, making the person appear plastic.




Casting


In terms of casting a model, obviously we have been looking at using a 1950's styled house wife. In terms of our model's age it was decided to look for someone in their mid 20's; couples married a lot younger in the 1950's however we do not want a model looking too young for a contemporary piece. Equally we did not want a model older than 30 ideally as the older our model looks would create more sympathy for her, as the piece would depict more a lonely woman that has possibly been divorced or what have you, as a pose to our intent of a person obsessed and empty.
A pin-up style model would work best for us as that would generally fit both our age bracket but also our general visual style, as the pin-up model is very much based on a 'retro' 1950's styling.

In our group Luke was given the role of model casting, and has been searching through agencies such as model mayhem. He recently contacted Bettina Scarlett who has agreed to model for us, and preliminary test shoots for styling, hair and make up etc have been scheduled.

Prop Sourcing


As we are constructing the 'perfect American Home' our set build, it is rather simplistic in terms of construction, however we will have to pay meticulous attention to all the smaller prop details to make this American Dining room iconic for both the 1950's and for the concept of the 'Dream Home'.

To begin with we thought in basic terms, what first comes to mind when we think of the perfect American dining room? And we began searching through charity shops taking quick snap photos on our phones of items we thought would fit or be of use.

We looked at different sets of plates and cups deciding on which would suit our constructed set best. Looking at the ones we found, we agreed that the whiter and more simplistic the design the better, as American crockery seems to be less patterned.

Through looking at household items we decided that some form of vase and flower arrangement would also be a good idea, to give it more of a constructed 'showroom' feel.

As an idea we spotted some old trophies, and took a quick photo as an idea. As typically a well connected family would display things like trophies their children have one, especially the stereotype of your 'All American Family'. As our subject has no family it could potentially further emphasise her delusion, but it is an unsure idea as it may cloud our overall photographic discourse.

The set of crystal glasses is also quite an iconic aspect of the American dining room, particularly this style. They are at family dining table be it for wine or merely water, they signify the aspirations to wealth and success.

The same elegant crystal dining set idea we began looking at salad bowls or fruit bowls that would keep in with the aspirations of glamour.

 Again we had this same idea of a lot of glass and crystal for fragility and glamour, and we spotted a clock with a glass body that may be in keeping with this theme.

 We were unsure of the cake stand as it was something traditionally used more in the 1950's but it is not necessarily a dinner table item and more of a greeting room item.

 In keeping with the idea of aspirations of glamour we felt a candle holder or candles of some kind where quite important for their ambience.

Social Changes in 1950's America


Before the 1950s there had been around 20years of economic stagnation, there was both the depression and two world wars. Lifestyles and social attitudes where used to adapting to harsh situations and making ends meet. When the second world war ended however, America's veteran's returned and everyone was finally ready to enjoy life.
There were many issues that rose up with this, for instance when all the soldiers returned home to their wives or girlfriends they wished to settle down and start their families, creating a huge housing crisis.
This began 'suburban America', as there where not enough apartments for everyone in the city, also many wanted to settle down to something quieter. There was a G.I. bill for cheap mortgages for veterans, and people began expanding communities on the edges of the cities. The first ever 'mass production' method for houses was implemented so that all classes could move quickly to their suburban communities.
A big part of the suburban development socially, was a striving need for community and comfort, beginning things like cocktail parties and regular backyard barbecues in order to be 'neighbourly' and reach out to one another.
As people moved further from the city centre for a quiet place to live, their jobs remained in the city, which created another economical boom and social change, the car.
Public transport was not often and reliable enough for people to commute, so companies, like General Motors, began producing around 8 million new cars a year during the 1950s.
With the car on the increase and being so popular, it became a status symbol, with the designs and styles changing rapidly, people where encouraged to buy new cars every couple of years, for one to keep their soaring economy going and also to keep up appearances, everyone was expected to keep up to date with latest style.
Within these new houses, the American family structure developed and evolved from the pre-war years. Known as the "nuclear family", these families were insular and mobile, but gender-specific roles were a large part of the 1950's.
The gender roles of the 1950's where under a lot of tension, as they where very much the archaic stereotypical notions of what each sex should be doing. This caused tensions as, during World War 2, women had cast off their ages old role as the housekeeper and mother, and taken the jobs of the men who were off at war in order to keep society going. After the war was over, and the men returned home, women hit a setback in their social roles. As soon as the men returned from war 2 million women lost their jobs in the 2 years after the war ended. They returned to the kitchen, while men returned to the workforce. Women were expected to simply be good mothers and wives for the men who rested from war, this was also partly due to the economic boom America had going, as families could live happily off the one income, the man's.
This began the consumer society, women where told to be homemaers, advertisers and companies began noticing that the woman made many purchasing decisions for the family home because of this role. Adverts began popping up everywhere of a woman happily turning on her new stove, or happily loading her new dryer. Magazine articles and television shows attempted to tell women that they needed these products if they wanted to be truly happy. This reinforced the notion that a woman's place was in her home, and that her job was to create the perfect family life.

Women had no outlet to express their feelings for women who were unhappy with this ideal, and struggling to accept this setback in their gender's role in society. There were no women's groups that promoted the working woman, there was a general feeling of discontent in society among many women, that wasn't properly addressed until 1963 with Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, which was the first book to properly address this issue, although this book was written in the 1950's it wasn't published until 1963.

Test shoot 1

This was a lighting diagram for our test shoot day. The plan was designed by Salvador Dewald, and various models and hair stylists organised by Luke Charles came in for the test shoot. I was there to help set up the studio, unfortunately I could stay no longer than that on the day due to work commitments.
The idea of the lighting set-up is to eliminate all shadows, so that the model gains an almost plastic like quality in their skin tones.
The set up, for the test shoot featured a blue backdrop in place of our set, each side of the backdrop where 2 softboxes aimed directly at the model, only slightly looking down on them. There where 2 black pollyboards either side of the model to control the light both from the softboxes, and to prevent the light from the umbrellas spilling onto the backdrop, as the umbrellas where aimed at the model. There was a lantern attached to a boom arm to go over the set and aim down to highlight the models hair, and a beauty dish aimed in front and directly at them from the front.
The soft boxes and lantern where set to F5.6, the 2 umbrellas to F8 and the beauty dish was set to F11.

The lighting was changed slightly to adapt to each model, and the beauty dish was eventually found to be too powerful, so it was swapped for a snoot. These are a few results of the various models that had been arranged by Luke Charles to come in and be photographed.

We presented these photographs along with a few shots where we tested different lenses in mock set-up of our dining room in order to gain a bit more perspective.
We where advised after our tutorial that we needed to push and have more extensive casting and detailed designs and colours for our exact fashion and set build.
Our main criticisms where that our project may become too conceptual and up as simply a pastiche to a 1950's dining room. In response to this we are pulling the fashion back into play and we will begin to look at contemporary designs and ways to link the fashion into our 1950's theme.

The Nuclear Family


For our set build, we agreed on the dining room, as it is the heart of the family life, and our model is striving for this family connection, although she does not have one of her own.
At first we discussed ideas of having family portraits in the background of American presidents and their families, but having our models face cut up and roughly placed over the wife's face. This was to be an indicator of her obsession and delusion, however after some group discussion we agreed that this was too subtle, and not effective enough, and that we would need more. This began discussions of having the nuclear family displayed.

These are photographs of nuclear families constructed for the American nuclear bomb tests in the 1950's.
They are essentially life size doll houses, built with the purpose of being destroyed. We decided to take this concept of the life size doll house and apply to ours, as this is essentially our driving narrative. We discussed the possibilities of having these mannequins set up as her family, and to even have our model go as far as prepare food for them.
We need to do a second mock set up of our set build however, and using the Hasselblad camera so that we can experiment with different lenses and use ourselves in place of the mannequins in order to take careful consideration as to whether or not their presence would be effective in framing, as there is the risk that they would be obscured visually and they would simply clutter the photographic discourse, or if they would do the opposite extreme and make our piece too literal and self explanatory.

The Physical Set Build


Now to look at our physical dining room and what it will contain and how it must be styled. As rough bullet pointers we want included in our set:

• A dining table- fully laid out with table cloth and dinner for 4
• 4 dining table chairs.
• A lamp, probably floor to head height
• Drawers or a cabinet of some kind
• A window (curtains drawn)
• A clock 
• Possible portraits

Looking at a couple of dining rooms from the 1950's the last two images seem contain the best iconic style we wish to capture to show that era. It is also important that we do not go too lavish with the dining room as we do not want to show the upper class, life of luxury image as such, it will be important to keep things a bit more humble to give off more of a simple family life.

Looking into colours of the 1950's they often went for bright exuberant colour schemes. 

"Red, white and black is the sprightly colour scheme of this postwar informal living room."

"Colour opens the door" proclaims Benjamin Moore consumer brochure from 1954. A sprightly black red and grey colour scheme puts this room in the distinctively modern camp as do the vertical blinds. The television set is a relatively new item. The black-and-white check of the sofa upholstery is picked up in wallpaper or possibly fabric lining the open shelves of the wall unit.

Taken from Benjamin Moore architects and designers 1954 home design pamphlet. 

For more on colour schemes I found a blog diary of a house makeover in Austin Texas, and whilst going through colour schemes and designs the owner found an old 1950s colour scheme pamphlet that we can hopefully use for our colour choices.

Physical Set Build Mock Ups -


For our set build we needed a much better physical idea of what the set would be or include, as we had sourced a lot of images for a rough idea but in terms of physical construction I mocked up a basic 3D set model.

It was quite important that this was done reflecting upon as, as soon as we looked at this 3D mock up of the set, everyone turned to each other and said its way too simple.
I began to think of ways to make the set more complex in simple ways, with the intent essentially of making our set space more believable as home.
I decided the best way to tackle this was to involve the ideas of 'portals' to other spaces, to give a more grounded idea of the set and it's location.

After looking at this set model it was agreed we would need a door, and we would construct this corridor, to hint that there is more of the home than the viewer can see. The next thing that was said was looking at the walls, we decided on a window that would be placed on the left hand wall to add another portal and to make sure we did not have a shot of just plain walls.

Lighting and Composition


Salvador of our group was placed in charge of our lighting set up, and he immediately thought of Miles Aldridge and Jill Greenberg, for their very perfect and plastic lighting techniques, as they convert their models so that they no longer look completely human, they become quite porcelain and doll like, which conceptually fit perfectly with our idea of the downsides to the American Dream.

Miles Aldridge

The last image by Miles Aldridge really influenced our desires for the set's lighting as we knew we wanted the model to look incredibly plastic and porcelain, however looking at the harsh shadows across the set in this last image, we realised that it would really add to the image to have similar contrasting lighting across our set, and that it would make particularly good use of the shapes and shadows of the window and the table.

Jill Greenberg

This lighting method would really bring out our concept given the correct casting, and would create quite an unnerving and a more complex image.

From our very first casting and lighting tests, we had the fortune of a 3rd year Photography student at our university, Tine, agree to model for us, and she was a great model for our initial concept of the 1950s housewife, however as we decided to go for the more porcelain mannequin like model she agreed to stay as a back up model for us.

More set and lighting Tests


As we where going with flash lighting and not continuous we needed to have as many tests as possible to make sure we had the correct lens on the Hasselblad camera, and that the flash lighting not only worked with the model but also the set.

Last Pitch


We had one last tutorial which was our official pitch, where we had to justify all of our lighting choices, our concept etc. But we also had to say what studio space we wanted and justify that as well, so the polly board sets we constructed previously where so important that we had done them because it meant we could physically measure the set space, and cover lighting practicalities around our set and the studio we had to build it in.

A rough floor plan, with measurements.

For the the final pitch, I constructed a powerpoint presentation, which was essentially a condensed selection of all of my blog images showing our visual references and tests followed by the floor plan, and this slideshow was accompanied by a scripted pitch that I wrote and printed off 6 copies that as a group we sat down with and highlighted who would say what etc.

Pitch:

The narrative behind our fashion constructed image will be to look at the dark side to the concept of the American Dream. Highlighting the dehumanization of our model through her obsession with obtaining and creating the consumer aspect of this American Dream but forgetting the human element.

This concept grew from looking at films such as Blue Velvet, American Beauty and the photographic works of Gregory Crewdson. These sources all looked at the theme of behind closed doors, the idea that there can be a manufactured exterior to mask a flawed interior. As they all address this within the suburban America, we decided to tailor our setting to the 1956 America as this is the high point where the American Dream began.

We chose the dining room for our set build, as the dining room is seen as the ‘heart of the family’; it is where every day the family come together to share a meal and bond over their daily activities etc. So it is a room in the home where both the human element is strongest but also the families strength is best represented.

As apposed to simply showing a dining room, we looked into what was the best representation of this perfect family and lifestyle. Eventually we came to the Nuclear Families created for Nuclear weapons testing. We looked at the set ups they chose for typical family settings and stereotypes to better understand the foundations of this concept.

Our narrative will be enhanced and enforced through our choices in an exterior setting and the interior lighting. Taking the setting of these nuclear families and houses, e.g. the desert and wasteland, and using it as a setting for our own ‘Nuclear housewife’.

We made mock set ups,  using polly boards and basic tables and chairs to get a better feel for our set. After careful consideration we decided to reject the idea of having a full family in shot. After looking at a few test shots using both the single house wife, and shots with whole families, we realized that multiple models began crowding the frame, and much of our narrative was lost. We decided to have a dining room set up with places at the table set for a full family, but have only the single house wife shown.

We talked about using objects to show hints of other potential family members, through things like a train set left on the floor, or a mans blazer over a chair, but not having these family figures present to reinforce the delusion and loneliness of our model.

Through this mock set up we decided to use an 80mm lens for our H1D as it created a human eye field of view whilst allowing a good amount of concentration to be devoted to our model.

The photographic discourse will also be reinforced through this exterior portal of the wasteland and the desolate just outside of this perfect dining room.

This will push the boundaries of the harshness of the American Dream and reflect the harshness of the nuclear family, as they created these ‘perfect homes and perfect families, for the sole purpose of destroying them. So we wished to reflect upon this concept of built in obscelence that began in the 1950s, showing the futility of the throw away society.

To emphasise this consumerists ‘perfect’ we decided to look at the stlyes of Miles Aldridge and Jill Greenberg, focusing on making the skin tone almost porcelain or plastic to really push this materialistic perfection within our model.

With our external wasteland setting, we are looking at the lighting techniques of Gregory Crewdson and Miles Aldridge (Dining table shot) For a contrasting type of harsh lighting the stretches through each ‘portal’ present on set to hint at something just out of shot that isn’t right. E.g. harsh lights behind both a window, and slightly open door, to cast a shadow from each portal encroaching onto our set where the model is present.

As it best suits our narrative the fashion of this piece will very much cater to the 1950s in both the outfit of the model and the interior design of the set.

We have chosen a colour palette to work from (show printout). We chose these colours as they come directly from a 1950s home decorating pamphlet, but they are also colours that will compliment the overall mood of this piece. The colours of the 1950s very much clashed, and where all very vivid, saturated and bright. This is because it was a post war decade where everyone was desperate for happiness and life to be reflected everywhere as the war was now over. We have chosen to stick to colours that derive more from greens and blues, so that we can use these highly saturated and icon 1950s colours, but blue and green are also the symbolic colours for melancholy and envy, inkeeping with our photographic discourse.

The rest of the dining room will constructed in details,  such as cutlery and crockery, which we have prop sourced throughout various charity shops, and where we have not a final collection of props we have found more than enough examples of the props we need to begin sourcing down and buying.

The dress of our model, will be sticking to a main colour of green, and will keep to this ‘house dress style’ (show dress, on Lukes blog). This is a dress style, along with similar dress and fashion styles that has had a growing popularity within contemporary high street fashion. With leading retailers such as H&M, Urban Outfitters, and Rokit, continuing to sell this idea of ‘the retro style’ there has been a huge return to fashion styles from both the 50s and 60s.

We will keep to this dress style in order to contemporize our model within her traditional 1950s setting, drawing more focus to her and provoke questioning as to her character.

For our model we have chosen Tine from 3rd year photography to be our starting model. After a casting and lighting test, we found Tine had the right figure, hair and facial expressions for our narrative, and she has agreed to model for our shoot. We are still sourcing with companies such as models1, premiere and select in order to try and source a professional model to work with. Tine has been informed that we are still searching, and is happy to commit any way in case we are unable to find a professional model.

As we are working with a single model we need to be sure that her posture will also reinforce our photographic discourse in order to provoke our narrative. We will utilize a posture known as the  chiasmus: XYYX the rigid symmetry of which is echoed, with variations, by the angles of her legs.

We are keeping our set’s scale to the polly board mock up, with walls roughly 2.5m high and the sets width as being 3.85m by 3.6m, because our lighting will demand a boom arm to be used, we would ideally need studio 1 so that the ceiling will be high enough to allow the boom to reach over the set walls.

Health and Safety

I had two main roles in the group, which was health and safety, and post production. Due to being in charge of the health and safety forms and side of this project I felt it incredibly important to be as involved as possible in the physical construction of the set. Below is a copy of the Health and Safety form filled in for our set build.

Risk Assessment for Student Work

Location: Rochester *(Delete as appropriate)
Programme/Course Leader:  Caroline Scott	Course:  Photography	Telephone:
Lecturer: (where appropriate): Jonathon Simms	Room Number:	Telephone:
Technician (where appropriate): Colin Jackson	Room Number:	Telephone:
Student (or Group): Group 11	Telephone: 07531385583

Validity of assessment (tick box):     day        1 week         month         term         year

 other (please specify):
Assessment date:	Start of work date:  08/05/2010	Review date:	End date: 12/05/2012

1. Brief summary of work activity or project assessed	Construction of set to replicate 1950’s American dining room and adjoining corridor. Erection of partitions and wallpapering of partitions; placement of flash lighting equipment, placement of props, placement of cooked food. Photographing set with one model. Dismantling of set.
1.1 Exact location(s) of work/project
2. List hazards (Hazard = Something that has the potential to cause harm i.e. electricity, hazardous substances, work at height etc.)	Slipping/ tripping over cables. Manual lifting. Partitions falling over Improper use of tools and equipment Lack of instruction and training Not maintaining tidy set Hot surface on lights Unsafe storage or location of work in progress Cooked Food
3. Relevant University College or local procedures? (See website for full list, or reference local COSHH or risk assessments)	Health and safety General Health and safety Manual Health and safety Handbook
4. List who might be exposed to the hazards (e.g. staff, students, visitors, consider numbers at risk)	Operatives (Team 6: 6 students) Supervisors – 6 persons 1 Model
5. How might they be harmed? (type of injury or health problem that might result)	Back strain Burns Concussion Bruising Sprained or broken limbs Scratches Food poisoning from prop food
6. List control measures in place to reduce risks Your control measures should ultimately reduce the overall risk. Do not purely rely upon Personal Protective Equipment.	Please note: For photography or filming work – please seek relevant permissions. Further information can be obtained from your Course Leader. Hazard tape to demarcate safe and unsafe working areas. Use cable covers where needed and route cables in a safe manner Use of gloves for lighting equipment Cook food offsite, clearly outline food onset is to be untouched, and disposed of properly afterwards Team discussion and explanation of risks. Direct team to Health and Safety manual on website – ensure it has been read and understood Implement tidy and safe placement of equipment and materials Ensure team take refreshment breaks Ensure safe areas are laid out for set construction and correct technique employed in set construction. Wear goggles and face mask if cutting materials within studio Check location of first-aid trained staff, and procedures for accidents H&S rep to remind team of safe use of lights Team to work in pairs when erecting partitions Demarcate safe area for visitors. Ensure visitors understand and follow health and safety procedures. Explain emergency and first aid procedures to them.  Nominate team member with responsibility for visitors. Ensure proper footwear and clothing for team members. Keep work area tidy. Allow sufficient time for dismantling. Personal possessions to be kept in safe area.

7.1 How severe is any injury or health effect likely to be? Tick one box	Minor o 1	Moderate x 2	Major/Fatal o 3
7.2. How likely is exposure to the hazard? Tick one box	Likely o 1	Likely x 2	Very Likely o 3
7.3. Calculate the risk score by multiplying the 2 scores in Q7.1 & 7.2	Low o 1-2	Medium x 3-4	High o 6-9

8. Risk category (including supervision) tick box:

   HIGH          Work must not be started without consultation with the Programme/Course Leader, Lecturer, College Resources Team and Health and Safety Advisor. Direct supervision by one of the supervisors should take place.

x MEDIUM     Work must not be started without the advice and approval of those named below.

   LOW           Work may proceed because there are no significant risks and no special supervision is required. Approval required from those below.

9. Signatures:

Programme/Course Leader:	Date:
Lecturer (where appropriate):	Date:
Student(s):	Date:
Technician (where appropriate):	Date:
Estates Services Manager (where appropriate):	Date:
Health & Safety Advisor (where appropriate):	Date:

Additional controls measures required from any of the above signatures?

For Guidance only – this page does not need to be reproduced with each copy of the form.

1.     This form is intended for student work which poses additional risk to health and safety than that of routine activities.

2.     In relation to student projects/work, effective or adequate supervision does not necessarily (or perhaps even usually) mean constant attendance (i.e. direct supervision). Where attendance is necessary, this can be conducted by the supervisor or suitably qualified/experienced member of academic or technical staff.

3.   Signatures are required from the Estates Services Manager where the work/project impacts on the fixtures or fittings of the building, or the internal/external areas of the College, if in doubt, please seek approval.

4.   Assessments must be reviewed by the date specified on the form or immediately following an accident/unsafe incident occurring or change to original project specification.

5.   Use must be made of existing University College procedures. You may need to discuss such aspects with the Health and Safety Advisor.

6.   Completed forms must be kept (in a readily retrievable form) for the duration of the course on which the named person(s) is studying.

7.   The Head of College and Heads of Departments must be able to demonstrate compliance as part of The University College’s Audit procedure.

Set Development

A major change in our set after our last pitch was the discussion of utilising our set's 'portals' more and brining  the outside in with our set. As we wanted more of a metaphor with our nuclear home about the american dream, we began discussing sand in our set.

We talked about the town of Kolmannskupee. Which is a ghost town in Kolmanskop, in the desert of southern Namibia.

As we liked the idea of this house as a metaphor for the American 'throw-away' society and to further emphasise the dehumanising nature of the American Dream, we took the idea of our nuclear home which is built for the sole purpose of being destroyed, we decided to add an element of this destruction, from inspiration of the ghost town of Kolmannskupee.

1950s American Furniture

I emailed a few theatre and movie props hire companies describing our set build with some visual references from my blog attached for help finding furniture and they emailed back several dining chairs and tables they had. Unfortunately I emailed back several times requesting hire dates and quotes, but they did not get back to me in time. Their attached images however became great help in my own prop sourcing. 

After receiving these images I sourced a few more images from the internet looking at furniture, as we needed a dining table and chairs and a sideboard.

I made sure I went out on my motorbike at least twice a week and spent about 4 hours each time attempting to find suitable furniture, looking throughout charity shops all across Kent.

Fortunately Luke and Salvador managed to get a sideboard and a door for our corridor,from another group that where perfect for our set. As this just left the table and chairs we decided we would mask a regular table with a large white table cloth, and I managed to find a set of four chairs from the 1950's in a Demelza furniture charity shop.

The entire group sourced a variety of props for our, with things like whiskey tumblers, table cloths, flower vases etc. 

Luckily as well Joe Earley knew someone who collected 1950's decorations, magazines etc. and so we where able to borrow many of these and gain some actual authentic decorations, like a radio, wall decorations etc. that really pulled the authenticity of our set together.

The Dress

We all had a notion of what sort of dress we where looking for from our references, however the actual styling of the model was something we had not fully settled on yet. I spent much time looking at dresses taking camera phone snaps to show the group whilst I was out looking for furniture for the set.

We needed however to sit down and take a stronger approach to the fashion of this project. Luke had already made a start to the styling and thought of what we where going for, so myself and Luke met up at University and began looking though catwalk images and incredibly high end expensive dresses, and also trying to make a styling trail from the catwalk to the high streets. Salvador also took the same approach at home and we exchanged images to gain a better grasp of what we where going for.

These are the dresses myself and Luke sourced and we compiled them with the following catwalk images that Salvador sourced from the Honor 2012 spring collection catwalk.

Fortunately this project has been timed with a 1950's revival hitting the catwalks in 1950s fashion so we really have an opportunity to expand on the fashion of this shoot, and create a contemporary take on the 1950's style but also the 1950's concept.

We wanted to pick dresses similar to the catwalk images, and there where quite a few in high street retailers that reflected this style.

We also discussed expanding further still on the fashion of our dress, to see if we could find something incredibly extravagant, that mimicked a mushroom cloud in the way it is shaped, so that we have a literal metaphor within our models dress. 

After Salvador spent a long day looking through several theatre dress companies and experimenting with petticoats, we decided to keep our dress as simply a contemporary take on 1950s fashion. 

We made this choice for budget reasons essentially, as the sort of mushroom cloud like dress we where searching for would push the costs of the dress to prices as high as £9000 which was just not realistic for us.

Casting

The role of casting was very much on Luke and Salvador to organise, they had both arranged for us to have both a make up artist and hairstylist with  us on our shoot day for our models. The actual model however became a real trial, as although Tine kindly agreed to be our back up model, we still needed to push our casting for someone that suited our concept better.

Luke and Salvador contacted many agencies such as, UnionModel, Premier Model Management, Models 1, Lenis Model Agencie and we had the below models lined up as potentials for our shoot day. Unfortunately however we had everyone single option cancel on us at the last minute, and one after another we lost each model that was arranged to replace the previous.

As each of our models cancelled on us or took paid work over our shoot, we came very last minute with only our back up model. Eventually Luke and Salvador scouted UCA once more with the help of Jessica Mcgrady and Jessica Xavier from Atelier and they found a student Lara Mapley that suited what we where after.

The Set Build

Sadly, only a couple of days before the set build I was involved in a bad motorbike crash, and so I had suffered quite a bit of injury.

I pushed myself however and still managed to contribute to the set's construction, I stuck to roles like wallpaper pasting and painting and tried to avoid heavy lifting however, I did often suffer a lot of pain and frequent exhaustion that hindered me during the set construction.

 We had a fairly smooth construction of our set overall. The day before the set began, myself Luke and Salvador met at my home with our laminate flooring, and painted it before our build week to save on time. We planned to base coat the flooring, then with a secondary coat and a graining tool, to create a wood grain, in order to make our laminate flooring look more like wood panels. This effect unfortunately did not pan out due to the floor being laminate the paint did not properly settle and we didn't have the right paint colours. When we transported the wood however to the set, the paint chipped and scratched off the wood in places, and this natural chipping effect gave the flooring a worn look that looked quite good so we decided to leave it with the chipped base coat we had given it.
Ollie had pre-made the window with his dad that was brought to the set, so luckily that simply needed to be slotted in place once we had erected, wallpapered and painted our walls.
I made several trips with Luke in his car during the set week to get extra supplies needed for our set and stuck to jobs that did not involve too much heavy lifting in an attempt to work through my injuries. Unfortunately it still pushed my limits too far as I had no recovery time from my crash, and so I was not able to stay as late or do as many jobs as I wanted to be able to do during the week.


We set up our lighting early in the week, and I had the idea to use a large white silk behind the window with a very powerful flash to white out our window. This was done for multiple reasons, as no backdrop for the window was organised so I came up with the idea of using the silk so that for one, we got a harsh powerful light to cast shadows with the table and window frame, which gave the impression of  a very powerful low sun, which complimented the setting for the nuclear town and the sand, but it also eliminated the need for trying to organise a last minute backdrop.
We followed a lighting plan Salvador worked out prior to the set build.

And as Tine our back up model was just upstairs we pulled her into the studio quickly a day early, and put her in a dress and petticoat I had bought from Rocket in Rochester, so that we could get a better look at the lighting and make some early adjustments.

From this test we knew a few changes we had to make to the lights, and we also decided to go free hand with the camera as a pose to mounting it on a Tripod. Luke who was camera master for the shoot day then experimented with multiple framing ideas and poses, while we reviewed them on the Mac computer.

In the end we had organised 2 models and multiple dresses for each, so we very much experimented on the day of the shoot.

A selection of our shots....

As ours was one of the last groups due for set build there was not much time for post production, and that being one of my roles I wanted to start as soon as possible. Unfortunately as much as we tried to organise the entire group to come in the Monday morning after the shoot, for unknown reasons, it was myself Luke and Salvador that came in to begin a final selection.
As this was such a time consuming task and we only had a few days for post production we narrowed the selection process down to a selection of shots of both models. We then narrowed this selection down further to a final image to begin post production.
Our choice of final image eventually boiled down to casting, as we only had the morning to work with our preferred model, Lara, we had a limited time to work with her, and sadly we did not get our lighting as close to what we wanted until we where shooting with our second model. This made it a very difficult decision however we chose our final image as the model worked so much better for our concept, there was a much greater sense of fragility and also this unnerving sense to her posture and how mannequin esque she appeared.
We began post production on our final choice on the Monday to get a head start, however we did not want to entirely make the call on the final image with just half the group, so on the following day when other group members where in, to show our final selection, and final image, and discuss why we chose and checked if any group members had major quarrels with the choice. Although this was rather brief and not with the group as whole as during the post production stage many of the group worked on other projects as priority, so any confirmations or choices had to be made informally.

This shot was chosen for it's framing, as we are at the best point of view to see the model as if you where a person entering the room. Compositionally the majority of the props where in shot and lined up with a camera angle that did not distort perspectives, particularly with the window and door frame. The model also has the best pose and expression in this shot, as she is sitting in a way that does not seem quite natural and appears very stiff, however it is not as literal as the shots of Tine sitting, that where very blunt in her posture about this character being hollow and doll like.
We had some corrections to do regarding skin imperfections, as she had to appear porcelain she had to have incredibly perfect skin for this, there where also some edges and bubbled parts of the wallpaper, and parts where the mesh underneath the sound mound was visible. These corrections where made by Salvador.
We then had to smooth out and airbrush her skin to push the lighting further, we also needed major colour corrections on her legs, and some minor colour corrections to her teeth and eyes, which I did. I also made general lighting adjustments throughout the set and subtle changes in colour saturation on the wall decorations, and magazines, so that they did not draw too much focus.

This was the final post production image that was printed:

Reviewing my Job Role

When this project first began I took the roles of Post Production, and Health and Safety, however as post production was obviously a role for a much later date, and Health and Safety, specifically, only required me to the necessary forms and risk assessments, I felt the need to be adaptable and involve myself to at last some level in every role.
Conceptually we discussed many many ideas at length at the beginning and it took us a good while to get a concept settled, as we all have very strong preferred styles, there was a level of confliction that arose from this, however we eventually found a concept we all agreed on. This did however take quite a bit of time to progress, and I believe that we all forgot the brief of the project a little, as our work method took time to organise to it.
I decided to be as proactive as possible to find myself job roles until it finally came to the post production stage. I took the physical construction of the set as a priority as it coincided with the Health Safety role I had been given, so I began immediately sourcing visual references and inspiration, and then began to try to pro actively design the set. Looking back however, I spent far too much focus on this, and where I had a clear plan and work method for the set itself, I forgot about the fashion of the project, which is something that seemed to happen with many of our group, as we knew we had to construct this set, we worried more about that than the model and styling, which as we discovered is far more crucial to begin early and get right.
We organised a variety of tests and mock ups that helped test our lighting and physical construction of the set, trying to combine the lighting of Jill Greenberg and Miles Aldridge, but construct a set and a similar eerie feeling like the work of Gregory Crewdson. We where on the whole well organised with sorting out these tests and visualising our conceptual approach, however as stated the styling was something addressed later.
Myself and Luke began research into our dress concept and model style, looking through various catwalk shoots and also actually going to the high streets and looking through contemporary fashion as much as possible so that we had a clear idea of both the set itself and the models style.
Salvador and Luke thankfully managed to organise a make up artist and hair stylist so that we could tailor our model as much as possible to the look we wanted, however the model itself became our biggest issue.
From a very early stage in both testing and our concept, we originally wanted to show a typical 1950's housewife, similar to that of the Truman show, when our concept was at this stage, we found a model, Tine, that perfectly suited this look. As we put more thought however to the style of our model we realised that a simple 1950s housewife would not clearly show our ideas of delusion and hollowness, and so we wanted to create this living mannequin to really make the photograph show our conceptual intent. This I think caused a lot of confliction amongst our group, as there was a sense of unwillingness to move away from our model Tine. As she agreed to be a backup model for us though we had piece of mind with our model at least.
Arranging this new potential model however, due to repeated misfortune, proved difficult, as we wanted to really push the project for a professional model, but many agencies proved unreliable, and we received many last minute cancellations from models for various reasons. Eventually part way through set construction, a second model was arranged, and myself, Luke and Salvador went out and bought a selection of dresses, and Joe Earley managed to source an original 1950's dress as well so that we had a large selection for both models.
Unfortunately I suffered a bad motorbike accident a mere couple of days before our set build week began, and therefore I was not able to contribute as much on the shoot day as I would have liked to, as I had no recovery time I pushed myself physically far too much in the set construction, leaving me in a lot of pain and exhaustion on the shoot day. Working quickly as our preferred model was there for only the morning, the rest of the group managed to get a great selection of shots to choose from.
The post production stage of this, came very close to other deadlines, and we had a very limited time of 5 days to complete it, therefore I wanted to start as soon as possible. For unknown reasons, the entire group could not make it for the Monday after the shoot, therefore myself Luke and Salvador narrowed down a final selection, and began some post production on a final image, however we did not progress too far in one day, as we where wary that the whole team was not present on this first day. On the following day, the whole team was due to meet and decide on a final image, however presumably due to many other deadlines due, this had to be made informally as when possible, but the final image was selected. Myself and Salvador worked on the post production and on the last day for printing we went over all changes with the group and we all made some choices in printing.
If this were to be done again, I would definitely want to pay more attention to the model and styling, as this was something I underestimated for it's impact on the project, I would also like to be more proactive in organising group discussion, and communication, to have a much better understanding of where everyone was with the project or what they wanted from it.