My Work – Page 2 – ROCHELE YSABEL

Pinhole Journey

My group consists of me, Nadia, Vincent and Yinfeng. There was a lot of confusion at the start regarding how to make the camera, as well as how this whole thing really work. A couple of failed attempts and weeks of frustrations, we managed to make our prints out of this magic camera obscura!

Our first pinhole camera turned out pretty bad. We thought of being creative and making round images with the Starbucks cup lid hence we set out to purchase a bunch of materials and spray paint for the transparent Starbucks plastic cup – to the best of our knowledge, we believed the paint will cover up well…. WELL NOT QUITE. We ended up getting so many light leaks because the paint just couldn’t stick and it peeled after awhile when we tried to spray more on top of the existing paint. And what we did in the end was to wrap our “camera” with black tapes. It looks so ugly but it finally did the job – there was no light leaks since then.

However, we encountered more issues. The images didn’t come out what we thought it would look like. All we could see was abstract art, different kind of beauty but we WANTED real images like how every other groups did.

Therefore, we ditched our Starbucks cup and went for an old-fashioned box.

Like everyone else, we started taking photos of our beautiful school and then venturing into portraits. We kept our exposure timings between one to two and a half minutes. I think we all love the portraits the most as it is so unbelievable that such a simple camera made from a box could produce our faces. Even though the details aren’t perfect, but we are recognisable! (And that’s probably what matters) Also, I was making the positives past 10 at night and I have to admit that was quite a scary experience to witness the results. We used fibre glossy photo papers for the portraits to achieve better contrast.

Overall it was a truly fun experience to be able to travel back in time, using simple tools to create images that surprises us all the time!

Duane Michals; Jim Goldberg || Final Paper

The Spirit Leaves The Body

So It Goes…

Pictorialism || Group Presentation

The exquisite exactness of which photography is uniquely capable is missing. Due to the soft-focus approach, we couldn’t tell if she has wrinkles, we can see that she is wearing rings but we couldn’t identify them like how we can in a perfect photograph. Hence Mrs Jameson’s force of spirit is rendered in tones rather than in details.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s credo is clearly represented in the photograph, titled Prayer. Her out-of-focus treatment of a child in a posture of prayer in intended to transcend the real – the absence of detail moves the subject into the realm of the ideal. We are not looking at the subject but the pictorial manifestation of prayer itself.

The explosive growth in amateur photography that followed these technical developments led to the so-called Secessionist movement. Central to it was the Pictorialists’ belief that personal expression is the purpose of photography rather than a literal depiction of the world. One of the key figures in this movement is Alfred Stieglitz, who founded the Photo-Secession Group and also the quarterly publication – Camera Work.

In this photo, The Street – Design for Poster 1896, Stieglitz transformed an ordinary street scene into a beautiful thing, with atmosphere taking precedence over detail and description. The seemingly casualness of this photograph however, is carefully staged with a precise arrangement of pictorial elements in the frame to enhance our appreciation of the scene.

In The Terminal 1893, the emphasis is on man and his horses, dealing with the cold weather. The snow gave a romantic quality to the image. What Stieglitz commented about this photograph is – “A driver I saw tenderly caring for his steaming car horses in a snow-covered street came to symbolize for me my own growing awareness that unless what we do is born of sacred feeling, there can be no fulfilment in life.”

Stieglitz was a complex man. He devoted his life to a fight for the recognition of photography as a fine art, and for much of his life he came to consider photography as “an entire philosophy and way of life – a religion. Stieglitz wrote in 1913: “It will be thirty years that I have been in harness trying to give photography, the idea of photography its place… of course back of this so-called “Photographic Fight” of mine there is something bigger than appears on the surface of things.”

Pictorialism’s reign as the dominant approach to art photography was relatively short-lived. In the final issue of Camera Work in June 1917, Stieglitz devoted all the illustrations to Paul Strand, an American photographer and filmmaker.

In this photo titled Wall Street 1916, Strand photographed the recently completed monolithic structure belonging to JP Morgan that symbolized the power of big business. Strand wrote about this photograph – “I was aware for instance of those big, black windows of the Morgan building, these enormous black shapes.. I also was fascinated by all these little people walking by these great big sinister, almost threatening shapes.. those black, repetitive rectangular shapes.. sort of blind shapes, because you can’t see in, with people going by. I tried to pull that all together.” This photo constituted a powerful abstract expression of Strand’s personal emotional response to his observed oppression by Wall Street institutions.

Strand’s response to Wall Street appealed to Stieglitz. Stieglitz felt that Strand photographs are those related to life in its fullest aspect, which intimately related to the spirit of 291.

Strand’s photographic street portraits are uncompromising and brutally direct. The photographs were taken with camera rigged with a false lens to distract attention, ensure the subject did not know they were being photographed, these images often came out raw and able to capture moments in the lives of those who are struggling to survive. Strand pushed the boundaries of photographic portraiture beyond traditional portraiture of the time. Instead of portraying them as outcasts, Strand managed to depict them as people who struggle but retain dignity.

This photograph shares the straightforward look and feel of Italian Neo-Realist films, which dramatized the lives of regular characters through frank naturalism. Structured around portraits of villagers identified simply by their role in the community, it is a profound expression of photographer’s relationship to everyday life.

The directness that had so impressed Stieglitz which he thought that it was the very essence of photography. Stieglitz’s support for the photography of Paul Strand crystallized the new approach to the medium, and the change could also be seen in his own photographs. Stieglitz took a number of photographs from the back window at 291 which he described as “straight photography”. This image focuses on a snow-covered tree after a storm with the clarity of the patterns of light and dark.

His work became more introspective as years went by – a way for him to overcome tragic events in his life. This photo titled Apples and Gable of the Farm, in Rain was taken during the summer when Stieglitz’s mother was dying. The rain or the apples were viewed as symbolic teardrops as Stieglitz had difficulties expressing his grief and instead poured himself into his work, where he used significant physical objects in his immediate environment to express an emotional state. The same goes to the photo titled The Dying Chestnut Tree.

Stieglitz’s series of cloud photographs, which he called Equivalents, were made in a similar spirit. The cloud pictures were unmanipulated portraits of the sky that functioned as analogues of Stieglitz’s emotional experience at the moment he snapped the shutter.

A thought for everyone to ponder about.. What makes the difference between an artistic photograph and a REAL photograph? Is it manipulation? Today we inhabit a world still in need of beauty and truth and still perplexed by the complex relationships between art and the real that photography embodies. Digital technologies further help to blur the lines. Edward Steichen once said that every photograph is fake from start to finish and a purely unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible.The minute we pick up our camera, compose our picture, control the time exposure, it isn’t real anymore. A quote by Stieglitz – “in photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality”. Just like Edward Weston’s pepper, the intensity of the photographed object being enlarged to reveal invisible details of structure and surface surpasses our unaided vision of the real thing.

Hope you enjoyed our presentation or learnt something from it! 🙂

– Rochele, Sabrina & Emma.

In the STYLE of Eadweard Muybridge || Mid-Term

I was intrigued by the question “Do all four legs of the horse leave the ground when the horse moves quickly?”, which is also the reason why Muybridge was then imprinted in my mind. It’s mind-blowing to realize that such an uncomplicated question could directly or indirectly impacted the art scene or even the role of human perception.

I particularly love how there’s a deeper meaning behind Muybridge’s panorama series. It wasn’t just a snap-and-go kind of thing. The vantage point (California Street Hill) was carefully selected. It was an ideological point of view, providing a commanding vista over the burgeoning metropolis, the distant hills and suburbs, and the busy port bristling with the masts of sailing ships. The panoptic view of the city offered a voyeuristic experience of life at the crest of California Street Hill for the common people, but at the same time, a reaffirmation of the wealthy’s’ domination.

Below is the Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill:

I chose to work on the rendition of Eadweard Muybridge’s panoramic vision because that’s the one I feel most connected with in my daily pursuit when it comes to photography work – cityscapes. Obviously I couldn’t get hold of mammoth plates or 40-inch telephoto lens like how Muybridge composed his series of panoramas, hence, I captured the view in parts and stitched them up altogether in Photoshop!

Had some minor issues with colour difference and also parts that just won’t connect properly but the results look pretty alright! Not to forget the fact that they are NOT taken via the iPhone panorama feature!!!

With the help of Photoshop, I managed to give them a vintage look^

Besides, I have also tried the Sky Shade, which Muybridge filed a patent after realising the medium’s limitation in capturing the perfect exposure. He exposed his film separately for the sky and the subject below in order to gain the definition between land and sky.

Muybridge’s Sky Shade:

Below are the two shots I took. The sky looks less defined (left) but the greenery has more details in it. On the other hand, the clouds are clearer in the darker photo (right)

Masking tool helps to create a more refined image which captures all the details for both the sky and land!

Final result:

4D II | The Library Final

Group members: Rochele & Ling Ern

Project Title: What we SEA in You?

Location: ADM Library

The objective of this installation is to increase the level of interaction between people and people as well as with the space around.

It’s interesting to see people engage with your work and how they interpret things compared to what you originally had in mind. For instance, I created the “sea card”, merely as a background image for people to write stuffs on it. However, I discovered that people made use of that image as literally “background”, where they create art on it. There are people who make use of the tiny rectangular box at the bottom to answer our question too.

Apart from that, a strategic location for site-specific installation is really important, for example, placing our work at the side of the table near the aisle could have different effects compared to placing it at the middle or far right. This is because the side near the aisle increases the chance of getting noticed when people walk to the study area.

The main struggle that we faced in this project was during the conceptual stage when we couldn’t get our heads around what this project needs and our proposed ideas were just OFF – not feasible. We kinda tried too hard in finding solutions to improve the library experience that we didn’t put much thoughts on the creative elements. Through this project, I have a better understanding of how an installation work in the public space. There are a lot of things to be taken into consideration; details which we never would have thought of such as the scale of your work and its location, the way you place the items to make them look like a family, materials used etc. Put yourself in the shoes of the user or ask for feedbacks help you discover specific issues and get a clearer view. It ain’t an easy task but it is such a cool experience when it accomplished what you set out to achieve.

All in all, the past few months were good. We get to explore different types of work and think a little deeper. Thank you Prof. Michael for all the guidance!

For now, I can safely say that installation is fun (tiring at the same time) and I will continue to explore! But this time I would like to play with media work.

Improvement to be made:

User experience is crucial – some of the slits are not deep enough for people to place their cards easily.

Links to previous posts:

4D II | The Library Process

Group members: Rochele & Ling Ern

It’s time to develop our prototype!

We decided to work with foam that we found in 3D studio. We sketched the shape that we want – “M” because it provides more space to make the slit.

Working with such a huge foam was never easy. Due to the lack of skills, we literally broke the wire four times. Thanks to the people in the 3D studio for all the help (we were so so sorry!!)

aaaaaand WE MADE IT! Looks pretty alright tho.

Also, we used the leftover foam to make our stamps!

Moving on to papers, which we cut and paste onto 100 pieces of vanguard sheets.

Draft #1: Due to the colourful vanguard sheets, we decided to print our installation title on white papers for users to write messages or create their own artwork.

Draft #2: After sitting on it for awhile, we find it boring to have a white background. Therefore, we proceed to use own photos as background image.

Photos taken in Lorne, Victoria (2016) ^

When you left with too much acrylic paint and you thought to yourself..why not using it on this large foam? This 4D project starting to feel like a combination of 2D, 3D, FD work.

Oh wellz.

Off to set this up in the library!

Creating the sign for the installation –

However, it was lacking something. So I tweaked it and added a step-by-step guide at the side.

ALL SET //

Rochele Lim Shu Xian

Zine: Neighbourhood Explorer

This project aims to explore experimental formats and present information collected from research in a visually engaging manner. I made this zine with the idea that photos can tell their own stories. Therefore, the photos in the zine were carefully sourced in order to bring out the vintage, old-school vibe of a place.

Rochele Lim Shu Xian

Que Sera, Sera – What Will Be, Will Be

This project aims to express your future jobs using a minimum of two letters of your name in the form of typographic portrait. Literal and abstract images are used to form the letters with minimal supporting imagery.

2D II | Zine Final

We have come to the end of our Foundation 2D journey. And I have to say this zine project is by far the best – the fact that we get to go out and explore ?! It’s almost like giving you a day off from all the assignments but at the same time you ARE DOING the assignment.

Ok I think you get what I mean.

Before heading to my assigned neighbourhood, I knew what I wanted my zine to be — definitely a photo-centric zine for sure. But after a two-day exploration, I was left with SO MANY photos that I had no idea where they should go to. And I started to wonder why do we only get a 8pp zine? Little did I know, 8pp is a huge challenge.

Since we are so used to using social media these days, writing captions are just a random task we do on a daily basis – YES CAPTIONS; that’s where my idea came from. I decided to focus on some of the more interesting photos and caption them. So I started naming each of them but they didn’t really make sense after awhile when I imagined putting them together. Hence, I figured.. maybe I should group the photos according to their area, colours, texture etc and from there I could create a narrative. This made the whole thing a lot more easier.

Here is the final product, which I printed on grainy, off-white paper to maintain the nostalgic feels.

Printing was a total disaster for me! It involved tears and more tears – camping outside different printing shops just because the one before didn’t give you the right size and colours. But overall I learnt something from all the obstacles I faced –

Try a different type of paper may help with the colour issues or give you better, unexpected result!
Always remember to state what you want CLEARLY to the printing staffs; mock-ups are highly recommended!!
Learn to reject them if it’s not printed correctly… *cries a river for all the $$ spent*

All in all, it was a great experience! Having the opportunity to learn and explore Indesign has sparked my interest in creating my own personal zines in this coming holidays. I realised that I took too many photos on a weekly basis and I have nowhere to store?? Maybe it’s time to put them into good use.. I had a lot of fun researching about zines and their layouts. I have to stress that researching layouts is an IMPORTANT step because it helps to direct you to a focal point when/if you are lost and it also gives you more ideas that will make your zine a little more interesting. Even though I really like some of the layouts, but they don’t really fit my current zine project theme and I look forward to incorporate those into my future zines. CANT WAIT to discover what’s next for me!

And let’s just pray that I have learnt my mistakes and the printing process will turn out smoothly next time.

This ONE year has been good to me. Thank You Prof. Shirley for all the guidance and my fellow classmates from both G8 and G1 for all the fun and support.

Links to previous posts –

2D II | Zine Process

It’s ZINE TIMEEEEE

Thanks to Indesign tutorial lesson (which helps ALOT) !

Okay so, just to recap. My idea for this zine is to let the photos tell the story. With that in mind, I began to filter a ton of photos taken from Sengkang and try to look for the ones that fit the abandoned, vintage vibe I’m going for.

Front Cover

The original photos I have taken are all too bright, with pure colours which didn’t fit the theme of my photo-centric zine. I wanted dull, more muted colours to suggest a sense of melancholy, hence I desaturated all my photos and adjusted the mid-tone contrast. And ta-daaa the whole mood changes!

Some variations I made for the front cover as below.

Cover #1: Decided to make the cover as simple as possible and the lonely slipper is exactly what I needed. Couldn’t really decide on the name of my zine so AWAY is what it is at the moment.

Cover #2: Moved the paragraph text to the bottom so that it doesn’t float and tried to play around with the letters “SENGKANG”, but after sitting on it for awhile, I feel like it’s hard to read, especially to people who don’t even know the existence of Sengkang.

Cover #3: Felt that the previous font was a tad too rigid, went for font shopping and settled on this – handwritten letters, a little cursive yet readable! Changed the font colour because black makes it looks like it is screaming at me..and way too cold (??) as well as professional. Also, moved the paragraph text again to the bottom left so that the page looks less crowded with that extra white space.

[FINAL] Cover #4: Added in some elements.. and finally it’s good to go!

IFC & PAGE 3

From top:

I started designing my layout by arranging the photos so that their colours fit well to one another on a plain white background. Felt that the visual hierarchy wasn’t strong enough, Prof Shirley suggested me to cut off the sky of the smallest photo. The photos look boring so I added a yellow colour box with about 30% opacity that cuts across the spread – to show connection between the two pages so that the photos don’t look like they are all individual entities.

Page 4 & Page 5

From top:

I did the same layout for this spread – a large photo at one page and reduces each photo size for the next page, to match the spread before this. To spice things up a little, I played with colour box again to give it a contrast and depth. Also I added the tiny cross patterns at the right bottom to make the whole spread looks slightly quirky.

Page 6 & IBC

From top:

Here comes the final spread. I figured I need to do something different from my previous two spreads and hence I placed my photos into two big circular shapes. Initially, I used two photos (with a slight variation; taken at different angles) in two circles and made them link in the middle (?). To complement this new look, I added another yellow circle as background shape on the next page. In addition, I broke the plant photo into fragments to match my broken stool.

But it was still lacking something.

The yellow circle didn’t look pleasing to my eyes. SO I switched it to triangles instead – in the text, I mentioned “looking back”, hence it might be appropriate to place a few triangles and form the “rewind” icon. I chose pink this time to match the colour of the stool so that the whole spread have a consistent colour scheme, rather than having a yellow shape that pops out itself. During consultation, Prof. Shirley experimented with me by placing only one photo in the two circles and scaled up the circular shapes to break the spread, leaving a breathing space on the top left corner. The visual flow was so much better right now. I am pretty satisfied with it!

Back Cover

Didn’t really pay much attention to the back cover throughout the Indesign journey. Having a large photo on my front cover, I thought of including a smaller one at the back and have a brief description of what my zine is all about. The white background was a little boring, hence i added in the polka dots pattern to give it a fun-nature! LOVING IT.

Draft #1:

Draft #2:

AAAAANNNND off to print!!!