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AD6303 - Negotiated Practice Exhibitions
All images printed for exhibitions this academic year can be found individually on the 'Live Brief' page.
Interim Exhibition - December 12th 2019 (20%)
This exhibition forms part of my Negotiated Practice module for university. The brief for which can be found in the 'My Work' section of this site. For my interim exhibition in December 2019 I wanted to create something similar to my usual work which is primarily documentary but also one that threw back to some of my old portfolios where I looked at archival images for inspiration. I never have a plan of what kinds of images I am going to take, only how many rolls of film I aim to take. The choice between film and digital was easy this time around because the project was entirely in my hands and I always feel as though my film portfolios have got off the ground a lot sooner than my digital ones, mainly because I just enjoy film so much more but also that within maybe 1 week, you already have around 60+ physical images to work with. During the summer I acquired two more film cameras and began using colour film more so for the final year of my degree I aimed to experiment as much as possible before graduating. This gave me the idea and the running theme for this project which was experimentation with new processes and merging them with the old archival images in a cloud formation exhibition to try and marry the two together. Would you be able to tell the difference?
I created my first cloud formation based on just colour working images mixed with archival due to the nature of the project but soon changed my mind and included the black and white images too because although the project surrounds the ideas of exploration, the exhibition itself as one body of work is more about the mix of old and new. (Above - The first colour formation. Below - My final formation including my black and white working images).
Exhibition Statement
70 Years in the Making
Wall: 42 Inkjet Prints, 4 Digital Archival Prints, 30 Archival Darkroom Prints
Suitcase: 2 Postcards, 6 Inkjet Prints, 15 Archival Darkroom Prints
What my exhibition is trying to achieve is a sense of marrying together the old and new photographs from my family archive. This exhibition aims to explore the real difference between present-day documentary and archival photography. Are there any differences between them and can the two be brought together especially when using modern-day practices?
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I have been adding to this archive myself over the last 3 to 4 years but the majority of images in the archive are taken by my Taid (Grandad) who’s cameras I am now using myself. My primary way of shooting has always been black and white 35mm film and so now my degree is drawing to a close I thought that this would be the right time for me to experiment with different film types, medium format, colour, different chemical processes in the post-production stages and so on to expand my ways of working and knowledge of film practices.
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I have always loved these archival, vernacular images and the idea that they don’t really have any meaning to anyone else, but this for me is where the beauty lies as I am a documentary photographer first and foremost. I think that in certain cases of documentary photography you can look through 1000 images and only one will resonate with you, but you won’t be able to pin-point exactly why. One thing is almost certain, whatever it is that draws your attention, it won’t be what the photographer was aiming to capture. Similarly, these family photos have been taken because the people in them mean something to the photographer but if any of the images here capture your attention, it won’t be for the same reason.
These images are presented in a cloud formation to truly blend the old and the new, the suitcase being present to signify the real age of some images and where this project all started.
Degree Show Exhibition - June 2020 (AD6303 - 50%)
27.01.20 – Gallery Visit
During January the university saw the opening of a new gallery space in the Forum Shopping Centre which would host a variety of exhibitions of staff, student and alumni work. We took the opportunity during one of our Monday sessions to visit the space as it would also be home to our degree show exhibition. It gave us the opportunity to have a look at the space available for us to use and give an idea of the various kinds of hanging and framing methods people had used. We could scope out the methods and materials we thought worked best and were able to see what kinds of work others were creating, whether there was anything similar to our own themes and could we take some inspiration from it in terms of size, layout, and levels of viewer interaction. Various forms of work were displayed including 6x4’s using pegs and string, frames, sculptures, shelving for both photos and objects, display cases and even projections and videos. Many of the photographic displays were formed of images roughly 8x10 or smaller, with the exception of the occasional panoramic print.
23.03.20
Due to the unforeseen circumstances of Covid-19, the Degree Show Exhibition is likely to no longer go ahead in June. A new date for the exhibition may be confirmed at a later date, however, if this happens to not be the case, the university is working towards creating a virtual online gallery, in which case I will upload a link here. I will also be creating a space on this site for the individual images that would have been exhibited.
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08.04.20
The journal hand in will now be online in the form of a PowerPoint or PDF document along with our final images for the exhibition, also being digital of course. The 8th was the deadline for our degree show proposals too, in which we were told to write around 150 words for our exhibition catalog. The catalog will showcase one image of each students work alongside these 150 words, which will summarise our practice and our exhibition. It also requires a diagram of how we would have gone about creating our exhibition. For example, what kind of layout we would have gone for, what format and how many images we had planned to exhibit.
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Degree Show Proposal
Nostalgia is a feeling best evoked by photography. By family photos and archives of vernacular imagery.
This body of work aims to challenge the way we perceive the everyday documentary or vernacular photograph and the impression that the aged aesthetic of your family photographs can only be achieved naturally, over numerous decades. Throughout this project I have worked closely with early photography methods and experimented with various chemical processes, first used by people such as Anna Atkins and Man Ray, to prove that the limitations of film are non-existent, and that it is still an incredibly relevant process. The objective was to create images that induce feelings of nostalgia, due to an aesthetic that would suggest the images had come straight out of a 1950’s archive rather than having just been produced a couple of months ago.
The layout for the physical exhibition is as follows;
A grid of eight or nine, 8”x10” images, mounted on white card and hung in black frames.
Each image will be printed using either a different chemical process or a different layering/editing technique.
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Exhibition Statement - June 1st 2020
Final Statement - 417 Words
Bethany Williams
The Photograph Unclassifiable
1 Cyanotype, 1 Sun print, 2 Darkroom Prints, 1 Digital Cyanotype, 4 Inkjet Prints
“What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” - Barthes 1984, p.4
Nostalgia is a feeling best evoked by photography. Do you remember looking back at the photos your parents or grandparents took decades ago? Do you remember the grainy low quality of the photo, that index finger pushing its way into the corner of the image and the oh so quiet streets from a time before mass travel came into being? This exhibition aims to replicate that feeling you get when looking at those old images. It aims to challenge the way we perceive the everyday documentary or vernacular photograph and the impression that the aged aesthetic of your family photographs can only be achieved naturally, over numerous decades.
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To be able to create this exhibition, I have worked throughout the project with early photography methods and experimented with different chemical processes, first used by photographers such as Anna Atkins and Man Ray. The objective of this project was to create nine images that induce feelings of nostalgia by producing an aesthetic in each, to suggest they had been made decades ago. You could almost imagine these prints had come straight out of a 1950’s archive rather than having just been produced a couple of months ago in 2020. In some way, even the exhibition itself is an experiment, to see whether the viewer can tell the age of the images. In today’s society where high-quality cameras are readily available to everyone within our smartphones, this exhibition seeks to show that film photography can produce outcomes in a range just as extensive and brilliant. I want to prove that the limitations of film are non-existent.
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This exhibition comprises a catalogue of different methods of experimental photography: sun prints, cyanotypes, layering negatives, acetate negatives on pre-treated paper, double exposures, cross-processing film, digital cyanotypes, darkroom printing and coffee tinting. Each of these methods have been selected for a specific reason. Some can be described as the earliest forms of photography, some methods were first created by photographers that still inspire me today, others I have used purely because the method of experimentation forms part of an artistic process for me personally.
When physical experiments in film photography become the driving force behind a project, does the process then become the art, rather than the image?
Mockup of Physical Exhibition - June 4th 2020
