Energiafoto: 2008

Thursday 22 May 2008

Final five...?

Monday 12 May 2008

Wednesday 7 May 2008

Tuesday 6 May 2008

At this stage I realized that my intentions and ideas in connection with my project are very ductile, and since I don't want to fall into the same mistake again by talking too much about my project prior that I would even really understand it, I would like to ask everyone to forget, what I have said about my project in order to avoid confusion.

What is sure about my project is: that it is about my family, but I do not want to go into a deeper explanation at this point. Comments are welcome, but please do not haul me up for what I have said about my project before. Thank you.

Monday 28 April 2008

To do list:

Buy b&w Ilford 100 ISO film and b&w dark room paper.

Develop the first two films. => Contact sheet + test prints

I used a Mamiya RZ 67 camera for my project during the weekend. This is my favorite camera so far, because I can use it as a painter would use his brush.
Unfortunately this camera is not available anymore at the Photo store, which forces me to use another camera in the followings. This other camera is going to be a Bronica SQA 6x6 with the only available 80 mm lens. I am not sure about the quality of the images this camera is going to produce (=> "Photography[...] is not dependent on an image maker." Susan Sontag: On Photography, p158), but I consider this incident as a good opportunity to try something new...

I am going to use only B&W film in this project (opposed to the previous three projects) and make the final prints in the dark room.

My project: Family and Susan Sontag: On Photography

I have had many thoughts about my family lately. Until now I thought that only parents have hard times when becoming separated from their children, but not the children themselves, who actually move out from home. I say children, because I am an ever-child.
However since leaving home, I realized that I miss out a lot of things that are happening with my family day by day. The good stuff. So I decided to spend a little more time at home and document their existence in a way only I can see them, driven by the love that binds us together absolutely no matter what.
My aim is to document their existence through the eyes of a loving daughter and sister. To capture their humanity and my love for them reflected upon their face and in their eyes.

Photography is many things: life and death, present and past, immortality and mortality...

"Photography is the inventory of mortality[...]Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people." (Susan Sontag: On Photography, p70, 7th print, 1978, New York)

"...a photograph, being a mechanically reproduced object, could not have genuine presence." (See previous reference, p139)

"...it [photography] is not dependent on an image maker." (S. p. r., p158)

On the quotations:
1. Originally I wanted to make my family immortal through the images I was going to take of them. (The word "immortal" might sound too sublime, but a picture of a person is in fact a proof of one's -present or past- existence and is able to make one immortal regardless if one is already dead.)
2. I want to transmit the pulsing life through this series, so that the viewer could almost feel the breathing of the photographed ones or could expect them to reach out from the canvas at any time.
3. The content of this series inevitably depends on the image maker, being me, accepting at the same time Sontag's theory about photography being independent from the image maker.