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. On the same day the images were recorded I am going through them to make a rough selection and a rough image correction. In order to handle this amount every few days I send the files off to have them developed on 13 x 19 cm photo paper. This way I can quickly access the images and look at them and even at many of them at the same time. For my selection I will make sure that I include different atmospheres. Also I will try out different kinds of paper and eventually different sizes. So far I have a collection of about 150 images, including some repetitive images. Once I have a selection of let’s say 500 pictures I will start combining them on the wall, trying out different papers and make a mock up photobook to find out what works. This should be sometime in February. The collection then can still grow but it would be nice to decide on a form by then.

Relation to former practice

My latest work worldpeace is also a collection of images that basically can increase further. Its impact unfolds through size and quantity of images. just as my current collection is a potentially endless one, it’s a matter of combination and presentation. In general you could say that 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 for example the framework 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 simple: Take images of clouds from my desk without any reference to the environment. Within all my work there is the notion of repetition.The framework is set and the motif varies. Whereas in my former work repetition was encouraging the spectator to compare, this time it is used to stress a psychological condition: procrastination.

Relation to larger context

Many artists have worked with a conceptual approach to photography. The one that comes to mind at first is Hiroshi Sugimoto. His work seascapes consists of 220 black and white images of the still ocean. All you see is a horizon between water and sky. It’s a meditation on time examined through repetition and constancy, the images are beautiful and transcendentally boring. In his book Cloud Studies, the book designer Helmut Völter engages with clouds and images of clouds, most of them taken by meteorologists out of scientific interest and pilots out of military interest. In the included essays he focuses on the special relationship between photography and clouds in the history of meteorology. In one of the essays I learnt that photography became the essential tool to study cloud formations which lay the ground for the important international cloud atlas. Before photography there was no tool to measure and compare clouds and cloud systems especially internationally. Marcel Beyer writes: Perhaps nephology as a whole is a project born of melancholy. (…) I can imagine any nephologist (…) in the hope of studying phenomena that no one but him would ever see, as clouds consist of sheer presence. A presence he wishes to share with other cloud observers, well aware that he is capable neither of capturing what he sees, holding on to it, rendering it into permanency, nor of developing a terminology, finding descriptive forms of whose precision he can be convinced, at least to the extent that each attempt to convey observations need not end as a selection on language itself.

In the end I know nothing about clouds, a bit about photography and a whole deal about procrastination.