JOURNEYS

1. Project Brief In my independent study for Unit 3, I would like to work further on the theme of journeys and the effect of music in determining atmosphere. This theme will serve as a continuation and development of units 1 and 2. Unit 1, the Abbey Road project raised the theme of journey through image and album art. Abbey Road EP is a personal journey of the Beatles across Abbey Road, an analogy for their growing success and fame. The main focus of the theme will be the personal journeys we all make in our life, from simple journeys to school or home to more profound changes in our life or the lives of others. Through lens based media including film and photography, I hope to capture people in their own environment, making their own personal journeys. I hope to relate this theme to earlier AS units, in particular the animation Cool’s Giant Adventure, which I hope to finish. In addition, I aspire to document a train journey into London using film and photography. The major influence behind this idea came from the moving image work of Four Tet, in particular the video ‘She Move’s She’; a film of a train journey into Tokyo to music composed by the artist. Through this video I want to show the snippets of people’s lives that we are invited to watch for just a few seconds before moving on. I have always been fascinated by the mystery of a train journey. Who are the people having breakfast as you pull past their kitchen window? Who is the lady reading the paper in her lounge? What is her name? These questions buzz around my head but perhaps need not be answered. Without an explanation our imaginations can run free. The figures in their houses can be anyone we choose them to be. Staying with the theme of train journeys I hope to expand the idea of people in the wide world, each on their personal journeys but each one overlapping with the journey of others, like ants in a nest. This particular thought is how I envisage London – as a huge ant nest, a machine that is driven by the people inside it. Working on this strand I hope to also create some final images inspired by the videos. I will contextualise these images to other photographers, drawing parallels between my own work and the photographic work of other artists. Influences to my work include Joel Meyerovitz, who captures people milling about in the hectic streets of New York, drawn together by the busyness of the city until they are touching. With his lens, Meyerovitz creates very intimate images, photographs that invite the viewer to linger. The more the viewer lingers on each image, the more elements become apparent. JOURNEYS Photography: Unit 3 Jack Lynn, U6 Peter

2. Henri Cartier Personal Shaftsbury Avenue (behind the Adelphi Theatre) Responses Bresson Born in Chanteloup-en-Brie on August 22nd 1908, Henri Cartier Bresson was born into a rich French family. His father was a successful textile manufacturer, Cartier Bresson thread being the staple of most French sewing machines. As a matter of course Henri was expected to continue the family business, a prospect he was appalled at. He took a vivid interest in photography from an early age, spending most of his childhood at the lens of his box brownie. His photographs show the World through the eyes of an excited child experimenting with a new toy. It is this feeling of childish excitement, present in all of Henri’s early images, that sets his photography apart from others. Considered by some as the father of modern photojournalism, Henri also helped develop the street style photography that would influence later generations of photographers. Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Paris “There was a plank fence around some repairs behind the Gare Saint-Lazare train station. I happened to be peeking through a gap in the fence with my camera at the moment the man jumped.” Henri Cartier Bresson Downtown, New York, USA, 1947 Shaftsbury Avenue, London, 2007

3. Jacques Henri Lartigue ‘Gerard Willemetz and Dani’ c.1926. Gelatin silver print This image contains such vivid excitement. The king of the castle is leaping for joy (or to impress a younger audience) Completely free in his surroundings the child is like a bird leaping into the clouds from a ledge. This freedom, both in space and life, gives great texture to Lartigues photographs, describing his expression of nostalgic childhood through the lens. Like many others from privileged backgrounds Jacques Henri-Lartigue studied painting and fine art at the Academie Julian in Paris, but his true brilliance shone through the medium of photography. Lartigue captured the society he inhabited with an unerring eye that focused on the small events of life: walking in the rain, boarding a car, saying farewell; people on journeys. He was fascinated by moment, in particular the possibility of freezing motion in a photograph. In many ways Lartigue can be seen as a chronicler for society. Through photography Jacques Henri Lartigue may have designed images to recall that Belle Epoque which appeared to have all but been destroyed in the 1914-1918 war. Capturing a moment: Grand Prix des Automobil-Club de France

4. Keith Arnatt • Examines transition through the medium of photography. • Takes traditional subject matter (such as a still life) and presents it in a very contemporary way. Elements of the Dutch masters and Vermeer are exhibited in the image below both in the colour scheme and textures employed by Arnatt. Rich browns and greens, vermillion and ochre hark to the work of the Flemish baroque painters whilst the plastic sheet distorts texture, creating a post-modern pastiche of a still life. Untitled from the series Pictures from a RubbishTip, 1988 - 1989

5. ‘Still life with Facon de Venise wineglass and cheese’ Jan Van Kessel Arnatts images echo traditional still life but use the discarded and decaying Rich earthy, organic colours mixed with pigment – ochre reds and gold.

6. The image above is my personal response to ‘object from a rubbish tip’ by Keith Arnatt. In the frame a dirty doll lies discarded below the platform at London Bridge railway station. The vulnerability of a baby, apparently dead, cold and unmoving in such an everyday environment of constant change and transition serves to create a very emotionally jarring image. Arnatts image of a doll he found at a rubbish tip is both attractive and deeply haunting. The feet and toes of the child are given the greatest emphasis by the artists choice of f-stop setting and the use of macro. At first each individual toe looks endearing - the viewer can envisage playing ‘this little piggy’. Such endearment quickly turns sour as the viewer looks deeper into the photograph. The baby is naked and vulnerable, held in an uncomfortable position by a strange finger-like object. An object which is holding the baby as though up to the light at an auction. Instead of being sold to the highest bidder the baby is rejected, thrown back upon the rubbish tip, back into the bin.

7. Four Tet - 'She Moves She' ‘She Moves She’ is a collection of video clips strung together to form a visual journey through Tokyo. Footage is shot by the artist from the window of a train. The soundtrack to ‘She Moves She’ is an Electro (genre of music) track by D.J. Kieran Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet), both the artist and musician behind the piece. Its inextricability to the film is such that clips jolt in time to the beats and changes in the music. The chosen genre of the soundtrack can be seen to symbolise modern Japan with its ultra high-tech industries, whilst the use of archaic instruments in the soundtrack integrates elements of Japanese culture and tradition into the piece, describing Japan’s bond between technological advancement and the roots of its culture. For the majority of the video, Four Tet has mirrored the view from the train window along the horizon line, creating symmetry between land and sky and emphasising the cultural importance of these two elements in Japanese life. Mechanical sounds randomly interject the music and with these interjections the mirror effect alternates on and off, distorting the train into some great machine, with whirling motors and sounds which toggle between loud crashes and mechanical hums. Whilst the mirror effect adds a surreal quality, its lack suddenly renders the video less abstract and more documentary. When the effect is brought back, the viewer engages once more in the synthesis between music and action. To contribute to the surreal atmosphere of the film, in which a normal train journey has been transformed into something extraordinarily weird and wonderful, Four Tet has increased saturation and levels of contrasts. Grey concrete and black tarmac are rendered wild technicolour shades whilst the sky is a featureless blank expanse, perhaps the canvas upon which the colours are painted.

8. Robert Frank Storylines Robert Frank made numerous trips to London during the 1950s and lived in the city with his family during the winter of 1951-1952. Whilst living in London Frank captured through the medium of photography the social divides which were part of the system in the capital. His unerring eye seems most drawn to the two extremes of the English class system. Bankers walk on the pavements whilst the coalmen, street musicians and ragged children flounder in the ruins of the blitz. The image opposite discusses such division. A coalman struggles with his load while a preoccupied city gent strolls past oblivious; representatives of two parallel worlds, crushed together, each failing to acknowledge the other world exists. The atmospheric conditions of London city play an important role in the quality of the photographs. The cloaking, thick fog fascinated Robert Frank and the images taken place emphasis on the muting of the sharp contrasts of black and white into an all-enveloping murky haze. Bankers dressed in long coats and jackets slice through the murky miasma as figures locked into their own thoughts; the fog providing a further metaphor for the palpable isolation of these lone walkers from their surroundings.

9. Frank was drawn to Wales, in part after reading Richard Llewelyn’s novel ‘How green was my valley’, a starkly truthful account of the harsh lives of coal miners and the decline of a close-knit community, blighted by pollution, social division and company exploitation. His photographs of the coal miners are indeed stark but also beautiful. Faces, covered in black coal dust and grime, confess the hardship of work whilst the rigid perspective of the terraced houses describe monotony. The photographs taken by Frank show the lives of workers in Caerau, a mining village in Glamorgan in South Wales, in particular the daily life of Ben James (pictured in the foreground). Ben James, 53 had been working down the mines since he was 14. Similarly to Llewelyn, Robert Frank is witnessing the end of a way of life. James’ son was the first in the family not to work down the mines. Instead he studied Geology in Swansea.

10. Detroit was amongst the first cities visited by Robert Frank during his work on a photographic series entitled ‘The Americans’. Home of the Ford motor company, Detroit exhibited an archetypal America – big, brash and mechanised. At the heart of this stood the motor car, recognised by Frank as one of the most important symbols of American identity. From a technical aspect Fords River Rouge plant in Detroit was among the most highly mechanised and elaborate factories in the world. In fact the entire complex was self-contained. Raw iron was smelted on site, processed into steel which was shaped into engines, bumpers and body parts, which were then modelled into finished automobiles ready for sale. Such was the scale of the site that, in a letter to his wife, Frank wrote ‘… this one is God’s factory and if there is such a thing – I am sure that the devil gave him a helping hand…‘ Robert Frank spent two days documenting the inner-workings of the River Rouge complex. The images which resulted confess a hard, grimy, and oppressive working environment, overcrowded with machinery. The men themselves appear as slaves to their work. Weary and despairing and subjected to extreme heat and noise the workers are worn down by the ceaseless pace of the production line. Whilst in Detroit, Frank also documented the hustle-and-bustle of the city. The main focus behind the photos was the outside life of the worker. Images describe where River Rouge workers lived and where they tried to relax. As though to emphasise the fact that they can never escape from the factory, the favourite haunt for entertainment is the Drive-in, lined with row upon row of cars.

11. Before focusing on film-making, Robert Frank devoted himself to taking a final series of photographs, each taken out of the window of a bus in New York as it travelled along the catacomb of streets and avenues. He recollects that ‘When I selected the pictures and put them together I knew and I felt that I had come to the end of a chapter. And in it was the beginning of something new…’ Each image portrays, not just Franks journey but the journey of anyone who strays into the unerring scope of the lens. Photographs are snapped in passing, a chance arrangement of figures that linger for just a few moments in front of the camera before disappearing once more into the city as the bus moves on. In this way Robert Frank breaks the mould of traditional photographic style. Frank puts himself at the mercy of circumstances, abandoning overall control of the image.

12. Ernst Haas ‘London’ c.1951. Gelatin silver print Ernst Haas. Born Vienna (AUS), 1921. Died New York (USA), 1986 This image captures a moment in time. The journey of people from place to place; people on personal journeys. The mirrors on the shop wall all hang at different angles and as such some of the shoppers in PERFECT reappear in the panorama above. The man with the spectacles (which furthermore underline the concept of seeing) looks wary enough even to be a voyeur. The atmosphere of this reportage tantalizes the viewer by what it might mean. Are the subjects in the image intended to be, or even just observable as, ‘the people’ under surveillance, as if Ernst Haas – who had survived the war with great difficulty (being a Jew in Nazi occupied Austria) – was recalling an epoch in which existence was governed by constant supervision. The image describes Haas’ attraction to London in the 1950s as a bustling metropolitan with thriving street life and for the opportunities it created for reportage.

13. Martine Franck ‘Le Brusc, South of France’ c.1976. Positive and negative space dominate this striking image. The composition is meticulous as though Franck is employing the lens as a means of showing off the human body to its best advantage. Hidden beneath the image is a sub-text which begs potential disruption. The boy idly watches the woman who in turn idly observes the man. Architecturally the photograph seems out of place for the time it was taken (1976). The clean lines encapsulate the social vision and utopian aesthetics of the 1920s modernist designers. Whilst an intriguing image the viewer begins to wonder whether this leisure filled existence is intended or whether it is a manufactured entity. In this way Martine Franck serves to invoke an idea of a perfected world as a means of undermining its reassurances.