Today was a nice day and for me a very multi layered day so this post may be a long one.
All the Photography Students from across the years got together which was lovely, I had a chance to speak to other students who have been through years one, two and now venturing into year three. I had some great tips and bits of advice from the other students and the main one that stood out was make sure you get to every lesson. I had already seen some of their work at the open evening so it was nice to chat to them one-to-one about the work they had shared that night.
We all spent the day in Bradford visiting the Impressions Gallery and the Media Museum.
The day started with a talk and look round the Mandy Barker exhibition at Bradford Impressions Gallery. The gallery is an impressive gallery space that opened in 1972 and specifically caters for Photographers and was one of the first specialist photography Galleries in the country and to this day as their web site explains still supports ground breaking photographers who challenge and change photography such as photographer Mandy Barker's work we were there to see. To put a simple explanation about what the gallery is and does, their website puts it simply as:- Impressions Gallery is a charity that helps people understand the world through photography.
Even thought the gallery is a charity, regular talks and workshops are hosted and most are free to attend. To my delight we were also informed that they would happily critique our portfolios which is a fantastic thing to know that there is a space where you can get guidance on your portfolio and what better place than a gallery to do that. I have a feeling I will be coming back again and again to this place and who knows one day I may even have an exhibition of my own there. Although the book store will be my road to bankruptcy as it is one of the best in the country for photography books and literature, so for that alone I will be back.
Mandy Barker is certainly one who has helped spearhead and is an original pioneer of the current plastic revolution using her images. The title of her exhibition Our Plastic Oceans depicts her vision of the plastic pollution in our oceans.
Mandy is an international award-winning photographer and through her work with plastic waste has produced some stunning and thought provoking images.
Some of which seen above I took my inspiration from for today's photos that I took. The images above consists of plastic in various forms but through her experimentation and accidental findings Mandy created images that had a black circle framing the images that have a distorted almost smoky look to them.
These images where my favourite images of the day for a number of reasons, firstly they show there are no rules in photography. Mandy created something quite beautiful and thought-provoking with the technique that she used and similar to the way my photos turned out today, Mandy embraced the creativity she found in the accidental technique, taking inspiration herself from others she had encountered in this particular instance scientists she had worked with and been inspired by.
For me that accidental technique came in the form of working with a full frame camera but having a cropped lens attached to my body. I embraced the vignetting that results from that, normally I would crop the vignetting away but today I decided to work with the vignetting and see what I came home with, and I am pleased with the results.
I remembered something that David Bailey had said in one of his interviews and that was to copy other people was to improve your own photography, never be afraid to copy others style as you can never copy anyone else it will always have your own spin on it, and remembering those words gave me a green light to go full force and embrace inspiration from others and today that has paid off I feel.
Mandy also used a layering technique that I am eager to try out. Where she laid plastic on black velvet and took multiple photos and ended up with striking multi layered images.
Image stacking and layering is something that I have seen others do, and I am keen to 'have a go' once I get access to the photoshop software, the results can be quite striking as can be seen in Mandy Barkers images.
Something else that caught my eye while at the gallery was Mandy's planning notes, something that I have never been very good at but her planning notes were interesting and more like story boards, they are art in themselves.
Mandy in her creativity not only produced photographic images for the display she also used footballs. We were told that she put out a request for footballs from all around the world, she was lucky enough to acquire over 200 balls from that request so Mandy decided to use some balls in her exhibition.
In addition to the balls was a large wall mural of each country on the Earth which depicts the most plastic polluted paces on our planet, and shamefully Tameside was declared one of the worst.
And if you couldn't get any more Mandy also had a virtual reality experience, named ‘Ripple: the unintended life of plastics in the sea’. Which was very much a fun way to look at plastic pollution and certainly is a lot of fun which takes you on a 360 journey with plastic waste.
According to Mandy's website is a collaboration with Stanford University through the launch of the virtual reality
experience. ‘Ripple: the unintended life of plastics in the sea’.
Stanford’s Communication Programme in Journalism worked with her using 4
images to represent how ubiquitous plastic has now become part of our
world . The experience allows recovered plastic to be viewed alongside
music and information, to encourage the viewer to become involved in an
extraordinary way, and in a way that perhaps a 2-dimensional image is
not able to do'.
You can clearly tell that Mandy is passionate about Plastic Waste and with her use of Multi Stacking, Virtual reality and experimental photography she has captured the essence of her passion and invokes interest in pollution in our seas. Mandy makes you want to know more she makes you see plastic pollution in a way that you have never seen plastic pollution before, she has turned something that is ugly and not something you would necessarily want to acknowledge into something quite beautiful and something that you want to look at and find more about.
Where else would you want to look at plastic rubbish polluting our oceans.
Much like the specimen draws you are literally opening the draws and being faced with plastic pollution that has been discarded and never a second thought about that plastic waste is given, but the drawers were quite symbolic for me in that they told a story of what her exhibition was trying to achieve, Mandy certainly opened up drawers and layers to the plastic pollution to me in ways that no one else ever has.
She made me look very closely at plastic pollution and I find that quite profound, her work really does, in an abstract kind of way make you look very closely at plastic pollution, she uncovers plastic pollution layer by layer much like her stacking technique, she peels back the raw cold emotion of plastic pollution and really starts to make you care...
I could go on about this exhibition as the small space that it occupied told such a massive story, not just about the marine plastic pollution but also Mandy Barker herself and the photography and artistic techniques she used in creating this exhibition.
I have been to many exhibitions in my time and the twins and I spend a lot of time in galleries and museums, but today was different, I looked at the exhibition space in a different way and it felt like a light bulb had been turned on, today I really looked at what was in front of me in a multi layered way.
To move on to the Media Museum, we took a break at lunchtime so I took an opportunity to take photos of the beautiful space outside the building that has a very inviting water feature and an imposing church , the sky was blue so who was I to pass up on this opportunity to have a play around in keeping with my theme that I had adopted inspired by Mandy Barker.
The second half of the day we moved onto the Media Museum and my battery died on my camera so there are no more photos, lesson learned, make sure I carry an extra battery. I could share my phone photos but I will pass as my creativity had died along with my battery so to end this post I will sum up with saying it has been a very informative, inspiring and very interesting day and I look forwards to many more of the same...
