User:Paula Winkler/Paula's Project Proposal II

Working title: procrastination - clouds from my desk

What do you want to make?

I am currently working on a systematic collection of photographs I make of clouds, outside my studio window in Berlin and Rotterdam. The working title is procrastination - clouds from my desk (or A Cloud Journal). The images show nothing more than different variations of sky with clouds at different times of the day. They are dominated by their reduced but intense color palette that includes different kinds of blue, orange/red and grey. I keep the pictures in portrait format to create a greater sense of depths and a wider range of color gradients -especially the evening sky comprises more nuances. While in some photographs you can recognize a sky with clouds, in others you are moving towards a sense of abstraction. Some images include a swarm of birds or a far away trace of a plane. None of the images show buildings or a skyline that would place them in a distinct urban environment, it feels as if they could have been taken anywhere. Each image is at the same time unique and universal. I'm aiming at a substantial amount of images, let's say 365 - one of each day of the year, to evoke a feeling of endlessness and repetition. Even though I work with composition and colors in each individual image carefully, they will unfold their impact within their quantity. I'm not quite sure yet what kind of dramaturgy I'm aiming at. I will have to find out if I prefer a certain time of the day with its specific brightness and colors or if I want a narrative that carries the spectator through different times of the day. The appropriate form of display will have to be determined when the collection is big enough to do an extensive edit. I can image presenting the images in a self-published photobook (maybe with an accompanying lightbox or print on the wall) but it could also turn out the best way to present the work would be as prints on the wall, forming an abstract image from far and breaking into individual images coming closer.

Why do you want to make it?

My goal is to take the spectator on an internal journey and evoke a contemplative state of mind that unfolds between looking at the images and the direction of thought I'm giving the spectator by referring to the concept of procrastination in the title of the work. I take my own experience with procrastination as a starting point for this work. This ambivalent emotional state originates when I sit at my desk trying to come up with something meaningful, with an anxious, wandering mind. I record the images that I see day to day when I sit at my desk. And I offer them to others, inviting them to let their mind drift away as well. As much as this is a work about not creating work, it’s also more than that. Looking at clouds has a deeply contemplative if not spiritual dimension to me. It instantly evokes thoughts about time, scale, disintegration, transformation, significance, deficiency and the absolute inability to even slightly grasp our existence. It makes me feel insignificant and important at the same time which provokes a deep sense of connection to the world as an entity. In the same way as looking at clouds makes me reflect on my place in the world it also makes me think about photography and the intense wish to stop time to be able to look at this specific arrangement of vanishing colors and textures for as long as I wish to do so. Knowing that this exact formation of clouds will never be there again and I might have been the only one who sees it, creates the melancholic urge to record it, to hold on to it. I can relate to the thoughts of Roland Barthes when he writes I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now? Of course, more than other arts, Photography offers an immediate presence to the world a co-presence; but this presence is not only of a political order (…), it is also of a metaphysical order. (…) It is this kind of question that Photography raises for me: questions which derive from a „stupid“ or simple metaphysics (it is the answers which are complicated): probably the true metaphysics.

Time table & How do you plan to make it

I am photographing new images almost every day and I immediately print them out as sketches to build up a collection that I can quickly look at. I make notes of the date and time each image has been recorded.

On Mondays I will sit down and go through all images recorded during the week. I will then make a selection of images that I will send away to get them printed nicely on different types of paper. I will make sure that I include different atmospheres and I will also try black and white prints.

Relation to former practice

I have a project based practice. For each work I determine a tight framework in which I operate in a serial way. For my former work worldpeace the framework for example was: 1. Find images of ecstatic beauty queens online 2. Zoom in on their faces 3. Eliminate traces of beauty contests such as jewellery. The current framework is 1. Take images of clouds from my desk

Relation to larger context

Ed Rusha - 26 Gasoline Stations

Joel Meyerowitz - New Color Photography

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Photography and the Narrative

Limits of Representation