Postcards from home is a project that shows different photographers interpretation of home from different perspectives.In the different artists photos we see home being presented as family a place or even a person who they are not familiar with.Postcards from home can be used as a way to show that home is not always a place or a specific group of people it can be anything a photographer interprets it to be.
Larry Sultan:
Analysis of his video:
Within the video Sultan started to discover that he was coming across negative emotions with not being 100% comfortable with presenting the photographs of his parents and his home, he also felt bad for his parents and was worried he was invading their privacy and personal life.Sultan also started started to see that he did not have a positive relationship with his father throughout the course of his life and due to the life of work Sultan went down compared to his father there was no common interest in there relationship.Although things were revealed through photography as his exhibition brought him and his father together when they found something they could both relate to which had never happened before.Lastly photography can act as a performance due to it showing there ongoing relationship and the ups and downs of family life even with no context given and that is why i chose the threshold concept number 7- Photographs are not fixed in meaning; context is everything.
Sultan's work:
What’s important to me is that [photographs] have the appearance of being documents of what goes on. I like the illusion of veracity, that they look like life rather than movie stills. I don’t want them to look fabricated.
I think what moved me to be a photographer was that one could make images very different than other art forms—that were populist, that dealt with daily life, that dealt with our times…
Larry Sultan
Analysis of a photo:
Within this photograph from 'postcards from home' Sultan has captured the every day family life that his parents go through in there family home.In this photograh I can see a documented photo to show viewers his parents private life.The style and composition shows a elevated camera position so we are able to see the full view of his parents and there suroundingsand the orientaton being a landscape image.The style of photo Sultan has taken is informal action static taken with a normal angle of view.This photograph could not of been captured in the same circumstances as then it would not be documenting his parents real life which is what makes these sets of photographs so unique.The effectivness of the photograph varies as the meaning of the photo is intended however these sets of images might not be as impactful towards the younger generation who are still living at home with there parents and have not seen them drasticaly change over time.My preliminary observation of this photograph is that it is a realistic still life photo that documents Sulatn's parents in there life after years of him not having a good relationship with his father and i believe that he has done this very successfuly.I think that by Sultan documenting this photograph at such a random moment for example his parents doing household chores is shows the realism that Sulatn was looking to achieve when creating this set of images.
Photos from home:
Photos at school:
Delphine Carmona:
Delphine carmona is a artist and photographer from argentina who bases her photography around playing with shadows and different type of light and plays around with objects that show tasks we use in our everyday life.She photographs waking up and going to sleep and working with the differnt type of light and shadows that you will see at differnt points in the day whether that is sunrise,sunset or golden hour.
Within this photograph by Carmona we see a range of eye capturing colours such as red,blue and green with the adition of shadows in the background.As she is directly in the centre of the phot our eyes gets drawn to her first and use of bright eye capturing colours draw us to her even more.Then we see how the bright light comping through is on her left even though the light reflecting on her face is on the right and vise versa.The use of shadows and colours compliment each other and bring the photograph together.
My response:
Family photos:
Within these photographs my aim was to capture my family's activities rest time after they have had a day at school or work.I tried to capture these photos without them being planned or set up i just wanted to capture what my family does around the house whether this is watcting Tv,my sister practicing her piano,my dad making dinner or us sitting down together and spending family time with each other in the evenings.As i did not always want to capture a full face shot of my family i focused on taking pitchers of sertain body parts such as hands, sides of there face or just there body but doing this and still capturing what is going on in the background so we can see what they are doing.I also wanted these photos to be unfiltered and natural so you can see what really does on within my home when we are all there.
All of these photos represent what goes on in my home however there are certain photographs that i believe really capture what home feels like for me and i have picked out 5 out of my 30 photographs that really feel the most impacful for me.
Diptychs
Through the windows
Within these images i have focused on shadows, reflections,mirrors and silloets.By doing this i have captured moments mainly at night or at dusk where i have seen shadows ect. As it has begun to get dark earlier i struggled finding shadows and silloets during the day so i tried to find them whn i was out in the evening.These shadows and mirror reflections are from when i was out during the evening over the course of the week and of my frineds getting ready to go out.I wanted to incorperate mirror pitchures of my friends as these are the type of pitchures i enjoy taking of people the most.I struggled to find 36 moments where i could see shadows during the day especially as i am at school during the majority of daylight.
This photograph is the photo i think has worked most well in my series of images.This is due to the fact that you can see the shadows that have reflected onto the building that is being made with artifical light as it was night time so there was no natural light.Another reason i believe that this image is my favourite is because it stands out with there being no colour being used compared to the rest of the photos.
Olivia Arthur:
Olivia Arthur is a photographer from London who has created several exebitions that she presents in her gallery in East London,But one of her exebitions that has put her in the light is her Home Project which many photographs partaked in however not in a way that could only be unique to Olivia Arthur.Arthur's project was when she was 6 months pregnant with her second child so exhibited her pregnancy through her photos.The video below shares her story of her photos in greater detail from her pespective and explains her favourate photos and ones that didnt make the cut.
Arthur's work:
Within these photographs in the frame Arthur has mainly shown people who represent home to her throughout her pregnancy journey.We see her husband, daughter and herself as these would of been the people who supported her and been around her predominantly through her journey.All off the photographs are in black and white as this might of been how she wanted to show her pregnancy to anyone looking.Her journey might of not been easy and full of colour so by taking away the colour from the pitchers it leaves more up to interpretation from the viewers.Next in the photographs she begins the pitches from 6 months pregnant up until the baby being born.By Arthur doing this we are able to see her full journey and what she was doing when this project came out.Lastly by Arthur using her pregnancy journey it makes her unique to every other artist as no one would be having the same experiences as her.
Trip photos in town:
Editing and Sequencing
The photobook I chose for looking at editing and sequencing is Shiotani by Anders Edström. I chose this 750+ page book because of the simplicity of the photos, and the diptychs, the images flow well together. The photographs show every aspect of family life like the simple everyday tasks to more serious aspects of family like death. However, There are a lot of images, there are 750 pages and within these pages some of the images are repeated, or they are very similar. Some of the images look as though they have been taken. In one image within a house the images look as though they were taken moments apart, it tells a story, I can almost hear them talking. There are a few images where an elderly family member is ill in bed, the following sequence shows images of her slowly dying, some images are very similar but with subtle differences. The book reads like a short film where you can 'read' what is happening. I like the landscape images, I like the simplicity of the images and it shows an aspect of the life of his wife and the area that surrounds them. He shows a diptych of the landscape and one image as a portrait but they are similar in colour. The book documents the lifetime of Edström's wife and her family within the little village of Shiotani 20 miles away from the outskirts of Kyoto. Within the book it shows the visible highs and lows of his wife's life and how her and her family live there life through all of this.This book also shows every aspect of her life from scenery, clothes,family celebrations and even death. The last image is solitary and is so grey, this follows the sequence which moved from family life, to the decline of a family member to the landscape to a grey solitary image. This book has helped me think about how I want to present my work as a sequence. It has made me realise how you tell a story through photographs, and how not every image needs to look similar in order to complement each other and that if images are similar that is fine too because they could have subtle differences which give different perspectives of the same image.