Creative Process in Photograpjy

I find these just really conceptual and interesting and what he's actually doing here is obviously it's his kind of trademark of already blowing the photo blurring the photo and what one of the things he does by blurring the photo is you know he uses a hustel blood but it's you know one of the older ones that has the movements on it so it's kind of like a large format camera but it shoots medium and so you know actually throwing the standards so the focal plane shifts and so you start to get that kind of weird it's cooler than what the lens baby actually does but it's that kind of effect but what he's actually doing here is taking the film and you know scratching it uh getting it filthy treating it with chemicals to try to break it down and the result here I love this one is what appears to be a hawk or something sitting on this chair you have a hard time seeing what this is and this is what he's showing you as a representation of kind of what he's personally dealing with uh with some of these eyesight issues that he's having um I think not only these like just incredibly intelligent images uh made by obviously one of the greatest photographers that our generation is seeing right now but you know what a Wonder ful way to kind of I guess on one hand therapeutically deal with this but also to communicate it and you know having problems with your own Vision uh being able to scratch up a negative and start to destroy it and these are printable you know I mean because everything is being altered on the negative side here's another one that probably looks like it has some chemicals mixed with scratching in it that's started to pull this out anyway

I absolutely love his work and adore it and I think that's one of the things that scares me sometimes is when you're trying to do something that's different and you look too much at work which is what we've been doing so that's why I tend to lean more towards general image searches um because the quality will be lower I'll get the idea I need and I'm not worried about something I I want to copy

so that's kind of where we are uh you know in terms of this process right now is I'm I'm kind of formulating what I want to do then the next step for me on this is and I'm going to do these this Friday is I need to do some test portraits and I want to try a couple different scenarios and see how they're going to work um because I have a larger volume of people that I'm photographing and this is a body of work and not just one print um I think it's important to kind of come up with the test of the kind of the look I want to go so at least I've reduced um the number of parameters that I have as I'm starting to introduce more work into the equation in more pieces U there's a uniformity these are going to work together as a set so once I figure out kind of the technique that I'm going to use and the look that I want then I'll know what I'm doing I can still improvise from within that but I think that'll help greatly is to kind of have that figured out

um moving forward as we get into this so anyway we'll report back uh in a week or two or you know when I have something to report and uh this is just the concept phase the next thing we had to do is do the test shots we got to actually shoot the portraits then we're going to have to develop some film I am going to do this on film because I want to do dark room imprints on this I want everything to be as handmade as possible and I want to be black and white and I kind of know those things already so we'll go through the whole uh processing uh printing process and actually do the framing and the hanging and I'll show you how that works when we get there

so this is going to take a while to do but this is part one I will put a playlist of this together so you guys if you're coming in late you can see all these videos all together and and we'll keep them there for posterity

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody this is Ted Forbes and welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography and today isn't just another episode it is a special episode and this is episode number 200 and it kind of blows my mind that we've gotten this far um that's a lot of episodes and actually there have been more videos than that when you consider like some of the midweek stuff that we do photo 3s the Q&A stuff uh even going back to masterclass live and some of those things the number is actually more between 250 and 300 I really don't know what it is off hand uh but anyway it's a lot of videos and I suppose fireworks should be going off right now or something like that but I don't have those and um you know anyway I want to thank you guys because without you I would not have a show um I recently quit my day job as most of you know to do this show full-time and I'm very excited and happy about that and uh I thank you guys for giving me that opportunity um just a couple things that are coming up that you can expect to see uh I'm going to do a lot of changes on the show we're going to try and get better at it we're going to try and do it more often um so far I've hesitated to do too much at one time on that uh because I don't want to create a situ ation that's not sustainable or it's not right for the show so I'm introducing things slowly as we go and behind the scenes I've been working on um you know expanding this with Partnerships and and other things that would allow us to do more with the show um two things that are coming up that I want to go ahead and tell you about um that are really cool is first off we have um I will be in New York in September and I will be there for an event on the 15th I would love to do a Meetup U we've done meetups in New York before and I think that would be really cool to do so uh stay tuned and I will have more information on that as it becomes available the second thing I want to talk about is Atlanta now we did an episode a few weeks ago on wi Bullock and uh wi is an amazing photographer and we've had a lot of success with that a lot of people said that they really enjoyed his work uh and I had a few emails from people reminding me that there's a show at the High Museum in Atlanta going on right now and uh a lot of things happened uh when Bullock's daughter actually saw the episode and she sent me a really nice email we talked about that a little bit and she invited me to come to Atlanta now unfortunately um having left my job recently uh and you know we're starting a new business here I have to be careful with expenses and I made a comment about that on a show well a gentleman by the name of Brandon py stepped up to the plate uh this is a gentleman who lives in Australia and he has actually made it possible with funding for me to go do this so I will be coming to Atlanta and this will be in October and I will have more of an announcement when this is coming up um I'm plan on doing interviews with definitely W's daughter Barbara wi is deceased so um it would be really neat to hear some stories about growing up with such an amazing photographer and Barbara is extremely awesome as well so I think that would be really cool to do some interviews with her um and then also I want to try and get Brett Abbott who is the curator of Photography at the High Museum to do an interview as well so hopefully we'll have some newer stuff we haven't done a lot of interview stuff ever on the show really and so I think those would be really cool to have on here uh particularly as we're talking about for photographers that a lot of us enjoy um so anyway so that is coming up we'll do a Meetup as well in Atlanta and a big shout out and special thanks everybody needs to thank Brandon Pyers because he's an awesome guy and uh he has made it possible financially for this to happen so I'm really excited about that and uh Brandon I'm humbled and thank you so much for uh for funding this so those are some things that are coming up now let's get on to episode 200 today uh for this episode and I told you um a couple shows ago that I'm changing gears here and one of the things that I want to do is I want to do a creative process type thing this has been another very requested topic for the show is taking everybody through the entire process start to finish from conceptualization to hanging a print essentially of a body of work or or a piece that I could actually do that you guys could see that whole process on so I'm going to start to share that with you today now right now it's conceptional in nature and the what I'm doing this for is I have mentioned that the building that I do the show in every week my stud studio is in uh this is an old Cotton gen it turns 100 this year and uh it's really cool we have a great community in the building it's very artistic community and a couple people have stepped up and they want to do an art show to commemorate this and they are combining this with some local history stuff and we're going to talk about the history of the building and have a big party and a show that stays up for a couple months with a closing party and it's going to be a lot of fun and I obviously want to participa in this um you know as I've mentioned the last couple years having a day job and balancing that and doing this is a photography show have been difficult and one of the things that's definitely suffered is I haven't been shooting a lot of photos myself and I start feeling like a little charlatan after a while because you know here I am with a photography show and I'm how can I even call myself a photographer I'm not doing any work so this is a big project for me to turn that around this is something I'm going to document on here um and show you guys how I go through that entire process and we'll see what it comes out as as the end so I'm obviously heaping a lot of pressure on myself here but I think it'll be fun so right now we're in the conceptual stage of this and I've been trying to think think of what I want to do and there's a ton of space so I could do big work I can do small work and I think what I've arrived at here conceptually is I want um to do something that ties in with the building now one of the things that I love about the building where my studio is is I mentioned the community aspect of it before there's a lot of wonderful people that live here and a lot of them that are very good friends that I've come to know over the years I've been in this building for 10 years so um that is one of the things I want to start with and so I had envisioned doing a series of portraits um I think one of the things that's going to be difficult is getting uh trying to make that complete in other words if I if I set out to shoot portraits of everyone in the building that may or may not happen because October is going to be kind of the deadline here so we need to get cranking before then um so anyway so that is is is part of the thing so we'll get as many people as we can and I'm going to do individual portraits so this will be displayed as a group the other thing I want to do is I want to tie this in somehow historically to the building and the fact that we're dealing with something that's 100 years old and and I've lived here one tenth of that time which is really weird to think about uh and a lot of these other people have too and where we fall within that lineage now I'm going to kind of start speaking artistically and and I hope this doesn't sound too weird because it's not completely materialized in my mind but what I want to do is I want to try to introduce um some kind of balance between abstraction and reality in doing these portraits and I don't know exactly how I'm going to execute that yet I have some reference material that I have that I've kind of found as inspiration and we're going to switch over to the computer in a second we'll look at that but really what I wanted to start dealing with is how can I do these as portraits where there's a layer of abstraction involved but they're still obvious as portraits and the people they are and so I don't have a title for this series yet um I don't know roughly how many works I'll have when it all said and done I'm going to aim for like 20ish um I think there's over 60 residents in the building it's not huge but um uh we'll see how many we can get if I can get 20 I'd be really happy um and we're going to talk about how we organize this and what the next step is and how we we go along and we'll check in on this every couple weeks um as part of the show to see how this is going um so anyway so the reason I want to introduce that layer of abstraction in there and why that's important um to do with a portrait is not just to be weird um there really is a reason behind it what I want to do is I want to artistically kind of show that that the building is made up of of the residents who live here and that's that Community is the aspect of it but it's part of a bigger picture and it's part of a lineage and we don't represent that entire 100 years so that's why I want to abstract it just a little bit so you know maybe it it it's not so personal as like you know you see someone's image and you know exactly who that is and it's a cute picture of them smiling or something like that that's not what I'm interested in what I want to do is I want to show uh the personality in the image but I also want to reduce that by layer of abstraction in it and so I know this is a little weird right now and I think this is best if I will break over and I'll show you some images that I've been looking at and how um it's not definite how I plan to execute these yet I'm going to do some test photos first um but what I have in mind so let's go on over to the computer and let's have a look so I want to share with you guys where I am right now and I'm just going to be upfront right now that this is very crude this is very early in this thought process still but that that's the whole ideas that I'm sharing this process with you and this is what people have asked to see and I think this is sometimes the hardest part uh it is for me anyway uh when you're creating work is you know getting started when you're dealing with conceptual um you know Photography in this case and so just in some of the research that I'm done I want to share a few things with you for whatever reason um you know certain things just come to mind and I really don't know why but one of my favorite artists uh of the 20th century is in 21st century now is geard RoR who's the famous German painter um what I admire the most about geard is not only is he extremely good uh but he is extremely good in about three distinctive styles of of painting um he does these color abstracts he does these paintings where actually he's pulling paint across the canvas and I he just does these am amazing pieces but in an interview um that I saw at one time and I don't remember where with with RoR he was talking about his relationship with photography uh particularly his early work and he was always saying what impressed him and why he went towards photography as an inspiration um and here I'm doing this backwards with RoR but but he drew photography as an inspiration because photography was one of the few mediums that um could show reality but had a depth of field to it and so there was this sense of things being in Focus or out of focus and traditionally historically with paintings uh particularly Past Masters kinds of things everything is always in Focus which is not how our eye sees things and not how a camera certainly sees things but anyway there was a series of prints that RoR did and this is uh one called Betty which is this is actually a painting of his daughter uh that looks identical to a photograph and you know one of the things that rtor was able to do was to adapt into a painting style um those out of focus areas when you get right up on top of this you can see that it is indeed a painting but you know from a distance that that's not how it looks there was also a series of candles that he did and I mean these are just beautiful um you know again same thing drawing something that is out of focus the blur of the glow of the light uh where you see the fire on top of the candle uh but in particular there was one piece uh by RoR that you know I've always found inspiring that's always stuck with me when I first saw it years ago and this is a portrait that he did of Mao and what's interesting to me is you know and the version I saw believe was a print but um once again this is completely out of focus it looks like the lens was just knocked out of focus and it looks like a photograph this is a really unusual style to see somebody paint in with this type of I'm going to call it realism because it looks real compared to what we know as being a blurry photograph and you know what amazes me even more than that is that you know the first time I saw this I knew it was ma it's not in Focus but there's still something that our brains interpret when we go into abstracts that remind us of certain things and and in this case I think it's very blatant that you know even though it's abstract it's out of focus we can still see that this is smile and there's something identifiable about just when you reduce it down to shapes and shadows and Contours um that you still make something recognizable and so that's kind of what I'm carrying over and these are past experiences and observations that I've made and they're just personal but you know the work I found inspiring and so right now I know I want to do portraits I know I want them to be abstract and so the other thing I've been doing is kind of going through and just looking online um and you know as dumb as Googling blurry photos and doing an image search to see what comes up and again you start to see how we play with abstraction with things that are blurry or out of focus and you know what also is impressive to me and obviously this is just basic photography stuff but there's certain images like you know not a great image but this girl with the apple and this is just a random Google search of course you see all the book art which is ridiculous but when you have a mixture of something that is abstract and not like the Apple's in Focus the girl is out of focus or even more interesting is this fence down here with a possible cityscape behind it or something of that nature um where you start to combine those elements and and this is what photography obviously does very easily the hard part is trying to figure out what I want to do with it that I have not seen before or that is pushing me into a new Direction um and you know I'm just doing image searches on these just to see really different types of abstract uh another technique I've considered and I I would like to do but probably will abandon because I'm going to do many photos in a short amount of time and this is a timec consuming process but if you've ever seen somebody that does pinhole portraits obviously pinhole being a very tight aperture and what you're going to get is a soft focus but in addition to that you're going to get an actual blur when people move inevitably during the 5 minutes that they're standing there 10 minutes that it takes to take the photo sometimes longer some of these photos um you know may be 40 minute exposures and it gets really progressively very difficult to do with that and if I were just doing a couple images or a oneoff or something like that this might be something to consider but it is a great look to it um and again this is just a Google image search and I just put in pinhole portraits to see what comes up um the other thing I did is I went back through uh over the years that I've been on flicker um particularly the early days CU I think I was in such a hunt mode at that time for what people were you I was just really interested in what people were doing with photography was different flicker was new it was amazing so I I went back through and I pulled up some of my favorites from early on uh you know the early days of flicker in the 2005 2006 range and I found some things that really stuck out to me and again this image is very abstract and what it is is it's it's just a very crude exposure on a paper negative so this is a possibility too again you're dealing with very low ISO but you're also dealing with low definition uh and there's a lot to be experimented with a concern of mine on this is is being able to control the consistency uh across different pictures but you know basically a paper negative easiest thing to do is to use a view camera to do this but you load paper into the negative holders instead of negatives so instead of film you're actually just going to take the picture right onto the paper to see what happens now will come out as negative uh I have some paper that will do positive but you know a possibility and I'm just exploring various ways you can create abstracts another great way um you know another image that I found that you know uses abstract because you're shooting through some kind of material or Texture that is somewhat opaque somewhat transparent so in this case you have what appears to be fogged up Windows or dirty windows at least uh and then you kind of get a grasp on what's behind it so another great way to to interpret abstraction uh what else we got another one that's just great this was uh I'm not real sure how Tom took these uh wonderful photographer these are aquarium photos it's probably uh just slow exposures um and you know you you end up getting a softer focus and a sense of motion blur out of these uh but really wonderful stuff again um mixing and this is way more conventional I think than what I want to do but I'm not sure we're just researching so uh you know a wonderful mix of what is real and what is not real you have an abstraction of the street scene because you can clearly see it's it's distorted by that texture in the glass not too much but uh and then the clarity of having the fish in front sorry I hit the microphone um so anyway some another couple things this is you know my friend miles um who I've known Forever on Flicker and great shot he did this is an older one but you know once again we have the the out of focused abstraction but we have these bubbles in the foreground so something like this that mixes and combines things so basically what I'm looking for here is I want to do portraits but I don't want to make them classic portraits uh I want a layer to kind of remove them a little bit from reality um that gives it a more historic feel to it maybe or at least a sense and this is really hard to describe right now but you know it's a good exercise to go through it um live with you guys um but you know I want a sense of removing something a little bit from reality so there's maybe um a little bit of nostalgia associated with it uh memory art that kind of thing where you know you're you're Conjuring up a little bit of subconscious when you look at these and this is you know some of you guys may be sitting here thinking well Gray's going to shoot some blury photos and and I don't know that that's what it is I'm just I'm I'm exploring abstraction and then I've got some ideas and I don't want to reveal too much right now but I'm going to try and do some test shots uh very soon here and we'll see kind of what we come up with and uh assuming that you know the test scenario what I want to make sure is it's something I can replicate at least 20 times uh easily in a very short amount of time couple weeks and uh then I think we're going to have a grip on we can do um another interesting thing too and I I just thought of this I didn't prepare this before I started rolling so forget it you guys love long episodes I know but if you look at some of the recent work that Keith Carter's been working on uh obviously I mentioned Keith a lot on the show he is one of my favorites and um Keith has had uh some medical issues with his own eyes and he has done a set of recent work that interprets this somewhat to an extent and I find these just really conceptual and interesting and what he's actually doing here is obviously it's his kind of trademark of already blowing the photo blurring the photo and what one of the things he does by blurring the photo is you know he uses a hustel blood but it's you know one of the older ones that has the movements on it so it's kind of like a large format camera but it shoots medium and so you know actually throwing the standards so the focal plane shifts and so you start to get that kind of weird it's cooler than what the lens baby actually does but it's that kind of effect but what he's actually doing here is taking the film and you know scratching it uh getting it filthy treating it with chemicals to try to break it down and the result here I love this one is what appears to be a hawk or something sitting on this chair you have a hard time seeing what this is and this is what he's showing you as a representation of kind of what he's personally dealing with uh with some of these eyesight issues that he's having um I think not only these like just incredibly intelligent images uh made by obviously one of the greatest photographers that our generation is seeing right now but you know what a Wonder Wonder ful way to kind of I guess on one hand therapeutically deal with this but also to communicate it and you know having problems with your own Vision uh being able to scratch up a negative and start to destroy it and these are printable you know I mean because everything is being altered on the negative side here's another one that probably looks like it has some chemicals mixed with scratching in it that's started to pull this out anyway and I the last thing in the world I'm going to do is rip off Keith Carter um I I absolutely love his work and adore it and I think that's one of the things that scares me sometimes is when you're trying to do something that's different and you look too much at work which is what we've been doing so that's why I tend to lean more towards general image searches um because the quality will be lower I'll get the idea I need and I'm not worried about something I I want to copy but um you know Keith is is one of the brilliant greats anyway that's where I am on all this research sorry this is going a little long but I just want to give you an overview of some of the thought process and kind of where I am at this point in time okay so that's kind of where we are uh you know in terms of this process right now is I'm I'm kind of formulating what I want to do then the next step for me on this is and I'm going to do these this Friday is I need to do some test portraits and I want to try a couple different scenarios and see how they're going to work um because I have a larger volume of people that I'm photographing and this is a body of work and not just one print um I think it's important to kind of come up with the test of the kind of the look I want to go so at least I've reduced um the number of parameters that I have as I'm starting to introduce more work into the equation in more pieces U there's a uniformity these are going to work together as a set so once I figure out kind of the technique that I'm going to use and the look that I want then I'll know what I'm doing I can still improvise from within that but I think that'll help greatly is to kind of have that figured out um moving forward as we get into this so anyway we'll report back uh in a week or two or you know when I have something to report and uh this is just the concept phase the next thing we had to do is do the test shots we got to actually shoot the portraits then we're going to have to develop some film I am going to do this on film because I want to do dark room imprints on this I want everything to be as handmade as possible and I want to be black and white and I kind of know those things already so we'll go through the whole uh processing uh printing process and actually do the framing and the hanging and I'll show you how that works when we get there so this is going to take a while to do but this is part one I will put a playlist of this together so you guys if you're coming in late you can see all these videos all together and and we'll keep them there for posterity so anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography and I'll see you guys next time laterhey everybody this is Ted Forbes and welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography and today isn't just another episode it is a special episode and this is episode number 200 and it kind of blows my mind that we've gotten this far um that's a lot of episodes and actually there have been more videos than that when you consider like some of the midweek stuff that we do photo 3s the Q&A stuff uh even going back to masterclass live and some of those things the number is actually more between 250 and 300 I really don't know what it is off hand uh but anyway it's a lot of videos and I suppose fireworks should be going off right now or something like that but I don't have those and um you know anyway I want to thank you guys because without you I would not have a show um I recently quit my day job as most of you know to do this show full-time and I'm very excited and happy about that and uh I thank you guys for giving me that opportunity um just a couple things that are coming up that you can expect to see uh I'm going to do a lot of changes on the show we're going to try and get better at it we're going to try and do it more often um so far I've hesitated to do too much at one time on that uh because I don't want to create a situ ation that's not sustainable or it's not right for the show so I'm introducing things slowly as we go and behind the scenes I've been working on um you know expanding this with Partnerships and and other things that would allow us to do more with the show um two things that are coming up that I want to go ahead and tell you about um that are really cool is first off we have um I will be in New York in September and I will be there for an event on the 15th I would love to do a Meetup U we've done meetups in New York before and I think that would be really cool to do so uh stay tuned and I will have more information on that as it becomes available the second thing I want to talk about is Atlanta now we did an episode a few weeks ago on wi Bullock and uh wi is an amazing photographer and we've had a lot of success with that a lot of people said that they really enjoyed his work uh and I had a few emails from people reminding me that there's a show at the High Museum in Atlanta going on right now and uh a lot of things happened uh when Bullock's daughter actually saw the episode and she sent me a really nice email we talked about that a little bit and she invited me to come to Atlanta now unfortunately um having left my job recently uh and you know we're starting a new business here I have to be careful with expenses and I made a comment about that on a show well a gentleman by the name of Brandon py stepped up to the plate uh this is a gentleman who lives in Australia and he has actually made it possible with funding for me to go do this so I will be coming to Atlanta and this will be in October and I will have more of an announcement when this is coming up um I'm plan on doing interviews with definitely W's daughter Barbara wi is deceased so um it would be really neat to hear some stories about growing up with such an amazing photographer and Barbara is extremely awesome as well so I think that would be really cool to do some interviews with her um and then also I want to try and get Brett Abbott who is the curator of Photography at the High Museum to do an interview as well so hopefully we'll have some newer stuff we haven't done a lot of interview stuff ever on the show really and so I think those would be really cool to have on here uh particularly as we're talking about for photographers that a lot of us enjoy um so anyway so that is coming up we'll do a Meetup as well in Atlanta and a big shout out and special thanks everybody needs to thank Brandon Pyers because he's an awesome guy and uh he has made it possible financially for this to happen so I'm really excited about that and uh Brandon I'm humbled and thank you so much for uh for funding this so those are some things that are coming up now let's get on to episode 200 today uh for this episode and I told you um a couple shows ago that I'm changing gears here and one of the things that I want to do is I want to do a creative process type thing this has been another very requested topic for the show is taking everybody through the entire process start to finish from conceptualization to hanging a print essentially of a body of work or or a piece that I could actually do that you guys could see that whole process on so I'm going to start to share that with you today now right now it's conceptional in nature and the what I'm doing this for is I have mentioned that the building that I do the show in every week my stud studio is in uh this is an old Cotton gen it turns 100 this year and uh it's really cool we have a great community in the building it's very artistic community and a couple people have stepped up and they want to do an art show to commemorate this and they are combining this with some local history stuff and we're going to talk about the history of the building and have a big party and a show that stays up for a couple months with a closing party and it's going to be a lot of fun and I obviously want to participa in this um you know as I've mentioned the last couple years having a day job and balancing that and doing this is a photography show have been difficult and one of the things that's definitely suffered is I haven't been shooting a lot of photos myself and I start feeling like a little charlatan after a while because you know here I am with a photography show and I'm how can I even call myself a photographer I'm not doing any work so this is a big project for me to turn that around this is something I'm going to document on here um and show you guys how I go through that entire process and we'll see what it comes out as as the end so I'm obviously heaping a lot of pressure on myself here but I think it'll be fun so right now we're in the conceptual stage of this and I've been trying to think think of what I want to do and there's a ton of space so I could do big work I can do small work and I think what I've arrived at here conceptually is I want um to do something that ties in with the building now one of the things that I love about the building where my studio is is I mentioned the community aspect of it before there's a lot of wonderful people that live here and a lot of them that are very good friends that I've come to know over the years I've been in this building for 10 years so um that is one of the things I want to start with and so I had envisioned doing a series of portraits um I think one of the things that's going to be difficult is getting uh trying to make that complete in other words if I if I set out to shoot portraits of everyone in the building that may or may not happen because October is going to be kind of the deadline here so we need to get cranking before then um so anyway so that is is is part of the thing so we'll get as many people as we can and I'm going to do individual portraits so this will be displayed as a group the other thing I want to do is I want to tie this in somehow historically to the building and the fact that we're dealing with something that's 100 years old and and I've lived here one tenth of that time which is really weird to think about uh and a lot of these other people have too and where we fall within that lineage now I'm going to kind of start speaking artistically and and I hope this doesn't sound too weird because it's not completely materialized in my mind but what I want to do is I want to try to introduce um some kind of balance between abstraction and reality in doing these portraits and I don't know exactly how I'm going to execute that yet I have some reference material that I have that I've kind of found as inspiration and we're going to switch over to the computer in a second we'll look at that but really what I wanted to start dealing with is how can I do these as portraits where there's a layer of abstraction involved but they're still obvious as portraits and the people they are and so I don't have a title for this series yet um I don't know roughly how many works I'll have when it all said and done I'm going to aim for like 20ish um I think there's over 60 residents in the building it's not huge but um uh we'll see how many we can get if I can get 20 I'd be really happy um and we're going to talk about how we organize this and what the next step is and how we we go along and we'll check in on this every couple weeks um as part of the show to see how this is going um so anyway so the reason I want to introduce that layer of abstraction in there and why that's important um to do with a portrait is not just to be weird um there really is a reason behind it what I want to do is I want to artistically kind of show that that the building is made up of of the residents who live here and that's that Community is the aspect of it but it's part of a bigger picture and it's part of a lineage and we don't represent that entire 100 years so that's why I want to abstract it just a little bit so you know maybe it it it's not so personal as like you know you see someone's image and you know exactly who that is and it's a cute picture of them smiling or something like that that's not what I'm interested in what I want to do is I want to show uh the personality in the image but I also want to reduce that by layer of abstraction in it and so I know this is a little weird right now and I think this is best if I will break over and I'll show you some images that I've been looking at and how um it's not definite how I plan to execute these yet I'm going to do some test photos first um but what I have in mind so let's go on over to the computer and let's have a look so I want to share with you guys where I am right now and I'm just going to be upfront right now that this is very crude this is very early in this thought process still but that that's the whole ideas that I'm sharing this process with you and this is what people have asked to see and I think this is sometimes the hardest part uh it is for me anyway uh when you're creating work is you know getting started when you're dealing with conceptual um you know Photography in this case and so just in some of the research that I'm done I want to share a few things with you for whatever reason um you know certain things just come to mind and I really don't know why but one of my favorite artists uh of the 20th century is in 21st century now is geard RoR who's the famous German painter um what I admire the most about geard is not only is he extremely good uh but he is extremely good in about three distinctive styles of of painting um he does these color abstracts he does these paintings where actually he's pulling paint across the canvas and I he just does these am amazing pieces but in an interview um that I saw at one time and I don't remember where with with RoR he was talking about his relationship with photography uh particularly his early work and he was always saying what impressed him and why he went towards photography as an inspiration um and here I'm doing this backwards with RoR but but he drew photography as an inspiration because photography was one of the few mediums that um could show reality but had a depth of field to it and so there was this sense of things being in Focus or out of focus and traditionally historically with paintings uh particularly Past Masters kinds of things everything is always in Focus which is not how our eye sees things and not how a camera certainly sees things but anyway there was a series of prints that RoR did and this is uh one called Betty which is this is actually a painting of his daughter uh that looks identical to a photograph and you know one of the things that rtor was able to do was to adapt into a painting style um those out of focus areas when you get right up on top of this you can see that it is indeed a painting but you know from a distance that that's not how it looks there was also a series of candles that he did and I mean these are just beautiful um you know again same thing drawing something that is out of focus the blur of the glow of the light uh where you see the fire on top of the candle uh but in particular there was one piece uh by RoR that you know I've always found inspiring that's always stuck with me when I first saw it years ago and this is a portrait that he did of Mao and what's interesting to me is you know and the version I saw believe was a print but um once again this is completely out of focus it looks like the lens was just knocked out of focus and it looks like a photograph this is a really unusual style to see somebody paint in with this type of I'm going to call it realism because it looks real compared to what we know as being a blurry photograph and you know what amazes me even more than that is that you know the first time I saw this I knew it was ma it's not in Focus but there's still something that our brains interpret when we go into abstracts that remind us of certain things and and in this case I think it's very blatant that you know even though it's abstract it's out of focus we can still see that this is smile and there's something identifiable about just when you reduce it down to shapes and shadows and Contours um that you still make something recognizable and so that's kind of what I'm carrying over and these are past experiences and observations that I've made and they're just personal but you know the work I found inspiring and so right now I know I want to do portraits I know I want them to be abstract and so the other thing I've been doing is kind of going through and just looking online um and you know as dumb as Googling blurry photos and doing an image search to see what comes up and again you start to see how we play with abstraction with things that are blurry or out of focus and you know what also is impressive to me and obviously this is just basic photography stuff but there's certain images like you know not a great image but this girl with the apple and this is just a random Google search of course you see all the book art which is ridiculous but when you have a mixture of something that is abstract and not like the Apple's in Focus the girl is out of focus or even more interesting is this fence down here with a possible cityscape behind it or something of that nature um where you start to combine those elements and and this is what photography obviously does very easily the hard part is trying to figure out what I want to do with it that I have not seen before or that is pushing me into a new Direction um and you know I'm just doing image searches on these just to see really different types of abstract uh another technique I've considered and I I would like to do but probably will abandon because I'm going to do many photos in a short amount of time and this is a timec consuming process but if you've ever seen somebody that does pinhole portraits obviously pinhole being a very tight aperture and what you're going to get is a soft focus but in addition to that you're going to get an actual blur when people move inevitably during the 5 minutes that they're standing there 10 minutes that it takes to take the photo sometimes longer some of these photos um you know may be 40 minute exposures and it gets really progressively very difficult to do with that and if I were just doing a couple images or a oneoff or something like that this might be something to consider but it is a great look to it um and again this is just a Google image search and I just put in pinhole portraits to see what comes up um the other thing I did is I went back through uh over the years that I've been on flicker um particularly the early days CU I think I was in such a hunt mode at that time for what people were you I was just really interested in what people were doing with photography was different flicker was new it was amazing so I I went back through and I pulled up some of my favorites from early on uh you know the early days of flicker in the 2005 2006 range and I found some things that really stuck out to me and again this image is very abstract and what it is is it's it's just a very crude exposure on a paper negative so this is a possibility too again you're dealing with very low ISO but you're also dealing with low definition uh and there's a lot to be experimented with a concern of mine on this is is being able to control the consistency uh across different pictures but you know basically a paper negative easiest thing to do is to use a view camera to do this but you load paper into the negative holders instead of negatives so instead of film you're actually just going to take the picture right onto the paper to see what happens now will come out as negative uh I have some paper that will do positive but you know a possibility and I'm just exploring various ways you can create abstracts another great way um you know another image that I found that you know uses abstract because you're shooting through some kind of material or Texture that is somewhat opaque somewhat transparent so in this case you have what appears to be fogged up Windows or dirty windows at least uh and then you kind of get a grasp on what's behind it so another great way to to interpret abstraction uh what else we got another one that's just great this was uh I'm not real sure how Tom took these uh wonderful photographer these are aquarium photos it's probably uh just slow exposures um and you know you you end up getting a softer focus and a sense of motion blur out of these uh but really wonderful stuff again um mixing and this is way more conventional I think than what I want to do but I'm not sure we're just researching so uh you know a wonderful mix of what is real and what is not real you have an abstraction of the street scene because you can clearly see it's it's distorted by that texture in the glass not too much but uh and then the clarity of having the fish in front sorry I hit the microphone um so anyway some another couple things this is you know my friend miles um who I've known Forever on Flicker and great shot he did this is an older one but you know once again we have the the out of focused abstraction but we have these bubbles in the foreground so something like this that mixes and combines things so basically what I'm looking for here is I want to do portraits but I don't want to make them classic portraits uh I want a layer to kind of remove them a little bit from reality um that gives it a more historic feel to it maybe or at least a sense and this is really hard to describe right now but you know it's a good exercise to go through it um live with you guys um but you know I want a sense of removing something a little bit from reality so there's maybe um a little bit of nostalgia associated with it uh memory art that kind of thing where you know you're you're Conjuring up a little bit of subconscious when you look at these and this is you know some of you guys may be sitting here thinking well Gray's going to shoot some blury photos and and I don't know that that's what it is I'm just I'm I'm exploring abstraction and then I've got some ideas and I don't want to reveal too much right now but I'm going to try and do some test shots uh very soon here and we'll see kind of what we come up with and uh assuming that you know the test scenario what I want to make sure is it's something I can replicate at least 20 times uh easily in a very short amount of time couple weeks and uh then I think we're going to have a grip on we can do um another interesting thing too and I I just thought of this I didn't prepare this before I started rolling so forget it you guys love long episodes I know but if you look at some of the recent work that Keith Carter's been working on uh obviously I mentioned Keith a lot on the show he is one of my favorites and um Keith has had uh some medical issues with his own eyes and he has done a set of recent work that interprets this somewhat to an extent and I find these just really conceptual and interesting and what he's actually doing here is obviously it's his kind of trademark of already blowing the photo blurring the photo and what one of the things he does by blurring the photo is you know he uses a hustel blood but it's you know one of the older ones that has the movements on it so it's kind of like a large format camera but it shoots medium and so you know actually throwing the standards so the focal plane shifts and so you start to get that kind of weird it's cooler than what the lens baby actually does but it's that kind of effect but what he's actually doing here is taking the film and you know scratching it uh getting it filthy treating it with chemicals to try to break it down and the result here I love this one is what appears to be a hawk or something sitting on this chair you have a hard time seeing what this is and this is what he's showing you as a representation of kind of what he's personally dealing with uh with some of these eyesight issues that he's having um I think not only these like just incredibly intelligent images uh made by obviously one of the greatest photographers that our generation is seeing right now but you know what a Wonder Wonder ful way to kind of I guess on one hand therapeutically deal with this but also to communicate it and you know having problems with your own Vision uh being able to scratch up a negative and start to destroy it and these are printable you know I mean because everything is being altered on the negative side here's another one that probably looks like it has some chemicals mixed with scratching in it that's started to pull this out anyway and I the last thing in the world I'm going to do is rip off Keith Carter um I I absolutely love his work and adore it and I think that's one of the things that scares me sometimes is when you're trying to do something that's different and you look too much at work which is what we've been doing so that's why I tend to lean more towards general image searches um because the quality will be lower I'll get the idea I need and I'm not worried about something I I want to copy but um you know Keith is is one of the brilliant greats anyway that's where I am on all this research sorry this is going a little long but I just want to give you an overview of some of the thought process and kind of where I am at this point in time okay so that's kind of where we are uh you know in terms of this process right now is I'm I'm kind of formulating what I want to do then the next step for me on this is and I'm going to do these this Friday is I need to do some test portraits and I want to try a couple different scenarios and see how they're going to work um because I have a larger volume of people that I'm photographing and this is a body of work and not just one print um I think it's important to kind of come up with the test of the kind of the look I want to go so at least I've reduced um the number of parameters that I have as I'm starting to introduce more work into the equation in more pieces U there's a uniformity these are going to work together as a set so once I figure out kind of the technique that I'm going to use and the look that I want then I'll know what I'm doing I can still improvise from within that but I think that'll help greatly is to kind of have that figured out um moving forward as we get into this so anyway we'll report back uh in a week or two or you know when I have something to report and uh this is just the concept phase the next thing we had to do is do the test shots we got to actually shoot the portraits then we're going to have to develop some film I am going to do this on film because I want to do dark room imprints on this I want everything to be as handmade as possible and I want to be black and white and I kind of know those things already so we'll go through the whole uh processing uh printing process and actually do the framing and the hanging and I'll show you how that works when we get there so this is going to take a while to do but this is part one I will put a playlist of this together so you guys if you're coming in late you can see all these videos all together and and we'll keep them there for posterity so anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography and I'll see you guys next time later\n"