Still getting to grips with the 5×4, but here’s some more portraits:
Ali and friend, Players - Hackney Marshes, 31/01/10
Took a 5×4 field camera out to Hackney Marshes last Sunday, heres an image:
Gerry, Referee - Hackney Marshes, 24/01/10
Parts 1 & 2 of a quality 4 part series on BBC World Service, looking at the history of football in Africa. I found the political links particularly fascinating, lots of high profile African Nationalist figures gained experience in organizing/running football teams, so it’s no surprise that football would take center stage as African countries first started to gain independence. The stories of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghanaian Black Stars and Algeria’s FLN team, both formed in the late 50’s, are especially interesting. The Black Stars drew 3 – 3 with European champions Real Madrid (Franco’s team!) in 1960 and Algeria’s National football team existed before the Nation gained independence from France! Featuring some of the best players in France and acting as a key vehicle for spreading the message of Algeria’s plight. Click the “read the rest of this entry” (below Kwame) for links
Kwame Nkrumah on a Soviet postage stamp
Enter the darkness:
Roger Ballen: Lens Culture Conversations with Photographers from Jim Casper on Vimeo.
My first trip out to South Africa is booked for March 25th. I’ll be in Cape Town til the 5th, when Josh joins me, then we’ll be road tripping it North to Jo’Burg and flying back from there on the 19th. We’ve got two little projects planned, the first is a series of portraits of young footballers, taken as we travel from South to North. The format of these images will remain the same; posed on the halfway line of a football pitch, the idea being that the portraits also act as landscapes, and the landscape will change as we travel. Rineke Dijkstra’s beach portraits (below) are a big inspiration for this.
Rineke Dijkstra - Coney Island NY, USA, 1993
I let the blog slip towards the end of my last project, but I’m back on it now and ready to get some work done after a pretty lazy Christmas/New Year period (I ate more than you, trust me). The final point I took that project too was quite a chaotic wall based installation that was a portrait of my Dad through photographs and documentation, both personal archive stuff as well as official state documentation (passports, ID’s etc). It focused on and highlighted his life between South Africa and Britain and how this has shaped his identity. I had intended to bring this blog up to date with that project by somehow making a digital version of the installation, I didn’t do that but hopefully ill find the time at some point because I was quite happy with the work in the end, although there’s definitely room for much more development. I suppose that’s going to be true for any 10 week project. Anyway, the big news is that I managed to get my first 2 trips out to SA booked, one in March/April with my brother from another mother Josh and one solo trip in June for the World Cup. Big plans for both, post about the first trip coming later today!
Did another shoot with my dad last week, and for the most part the photographs are rubbish, but I do like two and ironically they are the only ones that didn’t go to plan. The lighting I set up didn’t fire, creating a silhouette. They were the only two moments that felt like something was happening without being forced, which is why the flash didn’t fire; I was reacting instinctively to a moment that felt right and the flash hadn’t had time to re-charge. I had been really stuck with this project, feeling like my time restriction was forcing me into a contrived reaction to the archive photographs, but after a good tutorial/crit I feel I’ve made a breakthrough…
Vincent standing at the bedroom window
A couple weeks ago I shot some portraits with Vincent, my dad, who was going to be one of my South Africans living in Britain. The portraits aren’t particularly interesting and were never intended to be the final product, just a starting point onto which I will layer ideas for the next shoot. The plan was to get the format for my portraits finalised with him, then start arranging shoots/interviews with my other subjects. Since then I’ve hit a bit of a wall mentally, which is why I haven’t posted these up already. My problem is basically the time constraints on this mini-project, so I had to decide to either make very simple portraits with lots of subjects or narrow down my subjects in order to play more with the portrait. I have now decided on the latter and have changed the project to focus simply on my immediate family, all of whom have differing relationships with both South Africa and Britain. These portraits will be a response to the Griqualand photographs I found at the National Archives. This blog is supposed to document the entirety of my process, so despite my not liking them, here are a few of the results of that initial shoot (apologies about the slightly off-key colours):
Vincent at the park
This set of photographs came out of a huge and ridiculously heavy book titled “NATAL”. They seem to document someone’s journey across Natal (or KwaZulu), although there’s no information about who that might be. What grabbed me was simply the craft involved, the prints in the book were of such high quality and the composition of some of them is awesome; there were certain photographs that reminded me of Joel Sternfeld. I had to make a massive on the spot edit because the book was so large that the scans cost about 6 times what I was expecting. Unfortunately, when the CD with the scans arrived, certain images I was sure I had chosen weren’t on it. There was one in particular that sticks in my memory: a landscape in a park or botanical gardens, with a small white boy standing awkwardly staring into the camera, it was very strange. Which was what i like about the images, clearly they don’t do much to break from typical colonialist photographs, but they had this strangeness to them. I don’t know if the selection I’ve ended up with here really gets that across though. Thoughts?
Click the images for large versions, the scans don’t really convey the initial impact of seeing the prints, but its important to see them in as much detail as possible.
"Field of Pineapples"
In any photographic portrait there is a degree of power and control wielded by both photographer and subject, in thinking about how to address/play with this balance in my own portraiture I have been looking at photographers whose work I admire. Adam Bromberg & Oliver Chanarin’s ‘Ghetto’, a book full of individual stories from 12 ‘modern ghettos’ (gated communities), addresses this balance in many different ways. Here’s some examples:
Self portrait by Mario, 60 - Rene Vallejo Psychiatric Hospital, Cuba
