An Abandoned Building

I found this place randomly while out on a drive with a friend. It's the best thing I've found for a long time and an ironic return to previous thoughts of urban exploration.  I both attempted to document the place and take defocused photographs to see if they could be used within this project. The defocused images weren't actually working too well here. I think this is mainly because it's such an interesting sight that focus needs to be maintained in order to truly appreciate the place. We couldn't actually get inside the main building as the only route in would've been crawling through a small gap in one of the windows. The gap was well above waist height and was a cut hole in the wire across the windows, which meant rough rusty metal, and as we were not prepared for this kind of thing, it would've been asking for injury and probably a tetanus shot. In a strange way, not being able to enter the main building actually adds to the mystery for me, and the structure in itself, the fortunate light quality on a freezing day, the electrical boxes in the out buildings and the questionable presence of all those plastic bottles of... petrol? was plenty enough to be getting on with. I think this place has huge potential, I'm just not quite sure what it is yet.

Seaside

Took a trip to the seaside - thought unfocused images there might be pretty sweet. Turned out they weren't. I was hoping the colour range of the seaside would work well, but although I still think some of these images are quite nice, they're lacking in depth. Some of the figures are working because they're barely more than black outlines, but overall I don't feel this is going anywhere.

However, an interesting point that's occurring as I write this blog, is the scale of the images - now I've just made them smaller to save space, they actually look more effective. This is an important thing to take on board. I am in the frame of mind that you can't just shrink an image until it looks good, that would be ridiculous, but more the point that the scale of an image really does affect its reading.

This image however, (below,)  is working more than the others, regardless of its scale. This is probably because it has a strong defining feature which stands out from the background. Perhaps the key to this kind of work is that it can be very simply but then has to be a complete abstraction - to the point it's barely recognisable - or have a defining feature to give it an 'edge'.

A Physical Split

This is the physical attempt at splitting the images. I chose to use the market sequence as this has received relatively good feedback, and I wanted to see whether the repetition of the structures might provide good opportunity to play around with the order of the images;

I roughly mounted them to make them more concrete and provide more of a realistic impression of how they could work. I also tried using one of the unfocused night images that was working quite nicely on the projected version.

However, I'm not sure they're as successful made physically as they were projected. I think they may have been relying on the ephemeral nature of the projector as well as the different levels of focus that was unavoidable using different levels. Obviously this could be achieved digitally, but then I think it may feel fake.

Projections

Time to have a better look. It's important now to keep half a mind on how to present the work when it complete. I tried playing with a projector, initially to simply gain a perspective on things such as scale and how the images actually function off the screen in an in depth manner without having to print out vast quantities of every image at differing scales. An obvious problem with this is that by projecting them, they still don't physically exist and therefore maintain an ephemeral quality. However, the ephemeral nature of a projected image is actually quite effective paired with the nature of the images themselves.

I had some trouble finding both a smooth wall and a dark room at the same time - it was always one or the other so I used a piece of A2 mount board to project the images onto. I feel for the nature of the work this was pushing the smaller end of the scale. These images were working best as big as I could get them.

I also tried splitting up the projected image so it appears on different levels and, because they're all projected from the same source and the projector is set at the same focus, the different levels of the image then have different scales and levels of focus within themselves. This is a really interesting effect. I was working small scale because I was making the levels out of paper I had lying around (it was an impromtu experiment) but somehow I don't feel this would work larger. The nature of the levels creates a certain intricacy within the work that the smaller scale then encourages the viewer to engage with. It also further removes the work from its photographic nature and each section begins to take on an almost painterly quality, and the light, shapes and colours of each constituent part become ever more important. This work definitely has some potential. I would also like to try print out the images and mounting them on different levels to see if it works physically or if the projection is an essential part of the work.

Night Time (again)

I thought another round of experimenting with night shots was in order, as last time I couldn't work out quite where I was going wrong.
I clearly still haven't mastered unfocused night photography, but through experimenting with similar compositions at differing levels of focus I am starting to think that the more defocused images seem to be more successful. Some of the images with a higher level of focus have a frustrating appearance to them - like forgetting to wear your glasses.

Some of the images are again appearing incredibly abstract, where its not always possible to discern what the image is actually of. I like this quality but it isn't what I want to focus on in my work.