User:MathildeNai/First draft chapter 1
Chapter 1: Background
In my previous work, before joining Piet Zwart Institute, I started experimenting with creating photographs that emulated film stills. My goal was to create cinematic scenes that would make my audience wonder about the characters and the stories behind them, however I found that they lacked the narrative depth that I was trying to create in my work and thus I joined Lens Based media.
[Examples] (For now all the examples are still in my project proposal.)
As I had no prior experience with looking at my work in deeper layers and with a critical eye, I had a hard time dissecting what I thought could improve my work. These are very stylised images with a lot of thought put into the location, model and fashion beforehand but what makes an image more than a pretty picture?
Analog photos
I was very set in my ways and so in my first year of Lens Based I abandoned my usual method of working and went in an entirely different direction of shooting. I took up analog photography and started shooting anything but people. This decision came from my inability to let go of any perceived perfection that I tried creating in my work — which is what made my work so risk free and boring — because I only had 36 photos on my film and I couldn’t immediately see how the photo turned out and thus I couldn’t get stuck in that loop of snapping the same picture 60 times. This helped me adopt a way of shooting that was more experimental/spontaneous in composition especially. I found that my pervious works composition was incredibly safe; it showed everything and left nothing to the imagination of the audience.
Analog images have a very nostalgic and spontaneous feeling and having them developed and analysing them helped me get a better understanding of what made them have this aesthetic and how I could better recreate them.
[Examples]
Cinema/TV styles
As my goal is to create cinematic stills, I also took to these works as my source of inspiration.
“In the Mood for Love" by Wong Kar Wai (2000) for example is a Chinese movie shot on film with a moody and dark feeling. “Sideways” by Alexander Payne (2004) is another movie shot on film but with a much happier and summery aesthetic. “Minari” by Lee Isaac Chung (2021) is a movie that is digitally filmed and yet has that same nostalgic feeling to it the movie as the movies mentioned before. Why? “Atlanta” a series created by Donald Glover (2016-now) is a digital series that recreates the analog style with a digital camera. “My Neighbour Totoro” (1988) and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989) by Hayao Miyazaki are anime that perfectly capture the ‘slice of life’ and beauty of everyday life feeling.
While all of these works have vastly different aesthetics and stories, to me they all have one effect on me as an audience and that is a nostalgia, wether it is a sad one from In the Mood for Love or a calm and relaxing one like in Sideways.
[examples]
I have experimented with recreating the moody aesthetic of In the Mood for Love and while I do have a connection to this style; I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want my work to be dark because life isn’t dark and moody all the time.
Philosophy
While style and composition are important, another thing that I have vastly thought about in my first year of Lens Based is the philosophy of my work which is naturally closely related to the philosophy of my life.
A style or movement of art that I have always been fascinated by is the “Slice of Life” type works. Slice of life artworks are naturalistic recreations of real life, often showing mundane and uninteresting experiences.
The reason this interests me is because I have closely connected it to “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle (1997) in which he describes that the ‘now’ is the time we as humans are the happiest and that it is the most important time to be in. It is about mindfulness and the beauty of the now and being aware of our surroundings physically.
Slice of life to me relates to this because in a way it also shows a ‘now’ that we have to be aware of no matter how mundane, uninteresting or maybe downright unpleasant it is to be here in the present.
At the same time Slice of life photographs can have a nostalgic effect on me as an audience which is something I am also interested in exploring.
Narrative and experiments
One direction my experimenting took me in was the recreation of memories. In which I wanted to create the nostalgic experience by creating photographs — pasted from my proposal: [The photographs will be intimate compositions of details that fix in the memory, arranged in ways to create a narrative that conveys emotion. In this experiment I have taken several images and rearranged them to give them a narrative like above]