Stephen Gill Field work (Out-side School)

Even thought I took these photos quite a while ago, I am still very interested with this subject and thought it was relevant for this project. 

While I was away on holiday in France walking around the small towns over there, I noticed something that I had not before. Everywhere I looked, I could see that all of the man made structure's, buildings, windows, and signs were made out of all the same shapes, and it got me thinking about the reason of why that is, and it is because if they were any other shape, it would look strange and different in almost all of the photos. And then that got me thinking about why if you make something such as a painting, building or mostly anything with uneven shapes it instantly becomes abstract but in some cases that can make what ever your making look even better. Because at the end of the day, its all about making the thing look good and be appealing to the eye. So finally, all of the photos that I took and have put into this page, I took them because of the common shapes there made from, and try to imagine the photo but instead of those shapes replace them with abstract and uneven shapes.

Stephen Gill Field work (In School)

For the Stephen Gill field work for in school, I wanted to take photos of peoples diary's. I wanted to do diary's because I was thinking about it, and most of the time if you look at someones books and see how they treat them can a lot of the time reflect on what they are like as a person. For example, if someone always kept there diary's up to scratch and nice and clean then they would probably be a very organised person and were the type of people who didn't say much, and if someones diary was quite messy with lots of paper and doodles on it, then that person would probably be quite scruffy and bit less organised. But what I did find was that all the people who had diary's with a lot of colorful doodles and things that they had stuck in, there normally quite a bubbly and friendly character. 

Although I did do everything that I wanted to do, because it is still quite close to the beginning of the year, most of the ones that i did take photographs of were still quite clean and in a descent state because the people owning them hadn't had the time to scribble in them or decorate them.

Sohpie Calle Project

From inspiration from one of Sophie Calle's pieces of work called 'The Shadow', I decided to go out around where I live and take photos of places that have some type of personal meaning to me alone. 



This was the first place I learnt to ride my bike
with out stabilises. 



This was my pre-school.

This was my Primary school.

This is one of the many trees that me and my friends
liked to clime when walking home from primary school
but would almost always with someone getting very wet and muddy. 

This was some random in closed wooded area that we found and called 'The Den'.
There was always a rumor that there was a homeless person living there, but we never found anything.

This was the first place that i caught my own fish with my Grand-dad. 

My Grand parents house was quite an important place for me during primary
 school  and the first couple of year at secondary school because
my parents both work full times so me and my younger sister would have
to go there after school and they would give us tea and we would stay there until
my parents got off work.

Me and my sister always loved going to there house though because they would
always know just how to treat us by taking us to places like McDonald
and then beach and by giving us lots of sweets, ice cream and  biscuit as seen here was the 'biscuit jar'.

Even though we still do like to visit them, because we have both started secondary school,
 me and my sister don't see  as much of them as we did when we saw them nearly ever day,
 so now all of my Grans cupboards are still filled with biscuits and loads of toppings that we would like
 to put on our ice creams, normally a bit too much.

This is the church that my Grandparents go to and we would go help out at
when ever it was a teacher training day and we were with them,
but we would always go to get a drink and something nice to eat when we went there with them.

This is one of my most favorite places to go after school because they did really nice
hot chocolates, it was right next to the beach, and just around the corner from my school and my Grandparents
house so it was always really easy to get to. 

This is the tennis club that i did when i was younger for about 2 years.

This is the newsagent that me and my friends go to almost every weekend
to buy a ton of sweets.

And this was the first places that i got proper told of and shouted at
for skateboarding there.

In a way this could also be linked and inspired by Stephen Gill as well because i was taking photos of just ordinary things and places, but because that place has a much bigger meaning to me, it makes the photo have a lot more value.

This is a video of a guy that i like to watch on YouTube and he has gone back to his hometown and has done a very similar thing to what i was doing here as well.

Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill was born in Bristol in 1971. He was introduced to photography at a very early age by his dad and was interested in photographing in birds, animals and music.He is now living in Hackney, London, and does very fieldwork art, he had won over 20 awards to do with photography, and has done just under 40 exhibition exhibited with his work.

Off Ground

Most of his work is very quite in the way that you can imagine him, for example,  just going out at the end of a big event and just be that one man taking random and plain photos, and that is what he does in a project called 'Off Ground' where he went out after the riot and photographed piece of rubble and brick individually, so he was not getting lots of people involved helping him going out to do this very big piece of art, instead he did it alone and just collected the bits of brick and then took photos of them on a black and white back round one by on

This is an example of one of the bricks that he took a photographed.

This work is could be look on to be very boring, just taking photographs of some bricks, but it makes it much more interesting, and gives a lot more value when it has something to do with such a big event in London and that changes the way that you could look on it. I feel really interested in this type of quite and solo work because he is portraying this event just in a very different way and using in inanimate object to tell the story.

Covered or Removed

Another project he did was also very simple, but had a lot of meaning just portrayed in a different way was called 'Covered or Removed' and the title is almost like a rhetorical question. His idea was that because of where he lived was in London, there was a lot of graffiti and the council would have sent people to go out and paint over the graffiti to try and get rid of it and remove it, but then he started to think about are we really removing it, or just doing more graffiti over the original graffiti.

It's interesting because the more you look at Stephen Gill's work, you realise that he has a very different, but very clever way of thinking, and showing what he wants to photograph and I like the way that he is quite suttle in what and the way he goes out and photographs the ordinary, and makes it interesting.

Bill Boards

Bill Boards is a range of photographs that are of bill boards, but not the way you think it would be photographed. Stephen goes out and take photos of the back of the bill boards, not the front where most     people would look and the information that the board would be presenting is. 

When doing this, what he is doing is taking everyday things just on the side of streets, but looking at them in a different views, not the way we are meant to see them. It also gives it another view in the sense that the front is made to look good and attractive to the eye, whilst the back is much more boring and dull with just some metal and planks of wood to hold it up, even though it is just as important as the front because that is what supports it and structures the whole board.

Outside In

This was a very interesting project because Stephen Gill is taking, for example, the visual element of texture to a whole new level by actually putting a 3D object inside the photo. What he did was go to Brighton with an old fashioned box camera and pick up things from where ever he was and put them in the actual box of the camera so that when he took the photo of where he got the objects they would get in the way of the light coming into the photo and appear as if the objects where just placed on top of the photo. 

                                                                                                                                                   

           

You can tell that this is one of Stephen Gill's ways of thinking, because he isn't just taking a photo of the people and things around Briton, but the simple things that he found around on the floor. It also gives quite a quirky feel to it because you know that what ever is in the camera shouldn't be in there, but then it also gives it demotions and texture.

A Series of Disappointments

This was where he went to a betting parlor and took out the betting slips of people who had lost, screwed up and thrown in the bin in either anger, frustration, or disappointment.

Looking at the differences between the ways that they have been discarded, you could possibly tell a lot from just the way that they took there emotions out of this little bit of paper. For example, the simple once that have been screwed into a ball would have probably been out of anger because it is just a quick way to get rid of it, bet the ones that are a little more creative and you can tell that it has taken someone some time to do so might have been more to do with the disappointment of things because maybe the only reasons that they are betting in the first place was because they don't have anything else to do and now that they have just lost and wasted how ever much money, they would be a bit startled and now don't have anything to do again.

Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle is a French artist who is very destined in her work because she seems to do art work around other peoples privet life, and has got her self in to quite so trouble doing so. After she left school, she spent seven years of traveling, and after returned to Paris and started her work about the city people and there life's. This is where most of the imspuration from her current work comes from, and what she mostly bases her work around.

Take Care of Yourself 

One of her most famous project is called 'Take Care Of Your Self' and it was about how Sophie's boyfriend dumps her by email and she takes the email and sends it to 107 different professional women and used the email in there job to use in her exhibition, for example; she sent it to be made into a cross word, it was shot by a marks- women, turned into a dance, acted out by an actress, and evaluated by a judge. The project was called 'Take Care Of Your Self' because that is how her boyfriend ended the email.

Crossword

Dance

I seem to really like this type of art because the whole thing is to do with an actually  life event, and then sending the message to people and them involving it with there work and then putting all of what they did to it back into one exhibition. I think the reason that she did this is because she works around peoples life but this one is involving not just her own life, but over hundred other women's life as well, and she might have been trying to get back at her ex as well.

The Blind

Another big project that she did was called 'The Blind', and this was where she got 22 blind people and asked them what they thought the definition of beauty was, and then went to photograph what they say and then put what the blind people actually said. One of them said, on the Musee Rodin, there is a sculpture of a naked women, and this person knew what the women looked like because she had used her hands to make a picture in her mind. She said, 'In the Rodin Museum, there is a naked women with very erotic breasts and a terrific ass. She is sweet, she is beautiful.'

I also like this project because it's interesting to think about what blind people think is ugly, or colorful, and if they have an imagination, and it makes you think about how lucky you are to be able to see something that is quite ordinary and everyday, but someone who has never seen it would think that it was the definition of something because it must be that good.

The Shadow

Sophie also did something called 'The Shadow' and this was where she paid someone to follow her around for a day so that she could go to memorable places privately to her, and the investigator take photos of her in that place and then he would document about what he thought of the place. For example, she went to the park where she had her first kiss and that would have been a special place to her, but for in investigator, it was just an ordinary park, and it's not that the park is important to Sophie, it's the meaning and what happened there.

I like the idea of this because, there could be two people looking, and at the same place, but it could be more important to one person than the other, and that is because of personal experience, and i like how that can change something for only you personally.

The Hotel

She also did a project where she got a job as a chambermaid at a French hotel and took photos of the peoples in the hotels posietions, there luggage, the bed before it had been made, any other objects that they had left in the room, and other day to day objects that could possibly tell what the people who were staying in the room where like. It took her just under two years to complete and finalize the whole thing, " For the Hotel I spent one year to find the hotel i would use, I spent three month going thought the text and writing it, three month going through the photographs and one day deciding on what size and frame i would use."