I recently watched Twin Peaks for inspiration for my photographs, this eery, unearthly, fantastic world that Laura lives in is a wonderfully captured corrupt utopia. 
It shows that this innocent character loved by many has a truly dark side, in fact while we are shown this different disposition we seem to love more. Dead she transcends in our love and admiration for the character.  

In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, we are shown more into the girls life, in doing this we  lose appeal for her, it is this unattainable creature that were attracted to. Having her as a living, breathing character takes away her essence. 

Dreamlike imagery is a key theme throughout David Lynch's work, its a surrealist mash up of ideas. He relies on the surrealist way of using the subconscious and imagination to provide the visual drive. This is something that I feel is extremely important within my work, for I use the abstracted disjointed images to provide stimulus for my viewers. 
Also another key theme is the use of light, a theme that is incredibly strong within my own work. 

The idea of Ellipsis is a narrative device and a basic idea in film editing. It concerns the leaving out of  selection of story which is either concealed for a narrative purpose or taken out so that the audience that participate with the telling of the story. 

Aristotle writes this quote about Tragedy, but I believe it still applies here:

“The structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole” (Poetics 8)

In my photos this idea of Ellipsis is really important to me,  the sense of space and wonder. I need the audience to interpret what they can, for without the audience my photos would be deemed meaningless. All photography needs a viewer, all art needs a viewer. 

Update: This is the set up I have eventually decided to use, I like the difference between the color and the black and white image. In the final print the left lampshade image has been edited to make the colors a little more vibrant. Just like the high contrast colors found in Anna Gaskells work. 

Final ideas for my Degree show.

Male Dominance Theory

The female identity is different according to each culture and custom, but many cultures are based on a past where men wield more patriarchal power than women, or like in the UK woman are beginning to come forth but their is still an underling current even today. 

The assumption is that men are exceedingly more dominant then woman, that they are the hierarchy of the human world. 

Men should act powerful whilst woman should act like submissive creatures, these general roles are based on norms, this starts at birth being influenced by four major agents, upbringing, mass media, peer groups and education. These are based on typical stereotypes, which we overgeneralize our attitudes, and behavior patterns to create these, just like actors within a theater.

 Femininity: “Femininity stands for a society in which social gender roles overlap: Both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life”

Masculinity: “Masculinity stands for a society in which social gender roles are clearly distinct: Men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success; women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life.

Hofstede (2001), Culture’s Consequences, 2nd ed. p 297.

I want to reverse the rules and subvert the focus from the man and bring the woman into the forth-front.

Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance, Goldberg Steven. 

Junge Archetypes

Carl Jung believed that the psyche was constructed of three main components, The Ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The Archetypes are the behaviors and personalities of a person, within a person. He believed that the archetypes exist within the collective unconscious, they're innate, universal and heredity.There are many of these Archetypes but I only want to focus on the following three.   

• Animus
• Anima 
• The Shadow

"The anima is a personification of all feminine tendencies in a man's psyche ..."; thus, the animus is the personification of all masculine tendencies in a woman.”  Within my photographs the Anima has control of the light and the Animus is manifest in my work through the female form and curved shape. 

The shadow is an archetype that consists of life and sex natures, this archetype is often described as the darker side of being, representing wildness, chaos and the unknown, represented with the literal shadow and foreboding subject matter.

When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30

Jan Smaga

                                                                       

(dog), 2007

c-print, 180 x 225 cm

Jan Smaga works with combining classical photography techniques with computer editing.  "Recreation of three dimensional architectural space onto a two dimensional image"

Although this is a different technique to me, I find the overall image incredibly interesting. These woman superimposed all over this mans body. threatening to obscure his identity. The title 'Dog' belittles the man and makes him seem no little then a sexual toy, displaying his submission to the woman littered over his back as he kneels waiting for his command. 

You could say that by displaying the female forms in such a provocative manner that it was still objectifying the woman regardless of placement, maybe it is a statement of media in general today. Nevertheless they could be saying, although you try and objectify us we as woman swarm and we are strong.

Regardless of what the meaning behind this image is, I find it incredibly strong.

Objectification of Woman

http://www.bustle.com/articles/22050-why-is-objectification-bad-the-sneaky-way-womens-bodies-are-cropped-to-pieces


 Dismemberment is a gruesome brand of objectification, and it preserves the idea that women are just the sum of their body parts. Of course, this isn't a new thing — women have been objectified on canvas for centuries. (In the early 1860s, Manet’s Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass were the first female nudes to create a fracas merely because his naked subjects dared to bare their faces; squarely meeting the male gaze.)The Gaze has been a subject of much debate, it has also been used in feminist and Freudian contexts. Woman have been programmed to be acutely aware of the Gaze, since woman have been subjugated and treated as property throughout History. 

http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/58-Casa-de-Campo.html

Antonio M. Xoubanova
Casa de Campo

“Someone was here, somebody did this. Stuff happens here.”

Casa de Campo is a photographic fable rooted firmly in the realities of Madrid’s largest public park. Casa de Campo sprawls, five times the size of Central Park, to the west of Madrid. Between 2008 and 2012 Antonio M. Xoubanova wandered the paths of this urban woodland examining the people, animals and objects he saw as if he was on uncommon ground. Inadvertently he found himself transforming a given reality into narrative fiction.

Designed as an ancient fairy tale, the book is made up of five chapters referring respectively to love, death, fleeting moments, symbols and a lack of direction. It examines both the symbolic and the oneiric through the gathering together of people, animals, animate and inanimate beings within this single space. In his text Luis Lopez posits that for any researcher, archaeologist, intruder or anthropologist their findings will always be the same: someone was here, somebody did this. Stuff happens here.

These traces are what drew Xoubanova back into Casa de Campo over the years.

His work is very different to mine, however I feel showing the image as a actual narrative incredibly interesting. He has replaced the words with photographs. a literal representation of the written word and the idea that an image is worth more then a 1000 words. 

Roe Ethridge

 When an image is freed of its caption, it becomes a different object and has new terms of use. For me, it’s like it might have failed in relation to all this other stuff, so this commissioned image gets designated: "Don’t throw it away, but just forget about it." And then two years later it’s like, "What was the problem with it? I really like this one now." But I would say today that I’m just much busier because it’s going good, and I’ve sort of embraced a lot more. I did a pinup story for a German magazine, which was essentially an excuse to photograph this studio, this building – which may or may not get torn down in a month – but to do it retro with pretty girls in bikinis or whatever.

CAN ARTIST WHITNEY HUBBS MAKE THE ORDINARY MEANINGFUL?

At first glance, her subject matter seems quite ordinary. But as time passes, the elements of light and dark begin to draw the viewer deeper into her composition. The sexual undercurrent that permeates her work is especially evident in Untitled (Horse), which is beautiful, yet ever so slightly uncomfortable to linger on.

Hubbs prefers her viewers to come to their own conclusions about her work. Her understated approach allows a certain openness. “I’m just going to keep taking pictures and see what happens,” continues Hubbs, “I give myself over to my intuition and what’s in front of me, so I don’t have a set plan.”

SUSANNAH TANTEMSAPYA FEBRUARY 4, 2013

Ron Jude

Alpine Star

Based on a sequence of pictures culled from the back-issues of a small town newspaper, Alpine Star by Ron Jude engages with the fictions of our collective memory. We find at work something far stranger than the standard assault on a photographic “code” that has undermined most discussion of the subject. This is not just another deconstruction of photography as if it were a kind of conceptual problem to be solved and explicated, but rather an irrational poetics of the archive. Jude has fashioned an uncanny anti-narrative, its precise structure defined by a tension native to photography itself. The result is more than just the sum of its parts – he achieves, in this minimal way, a very satisfying and provocative ambiguity.

—Darren Campion
The Incoherent Light

Emmett 

Originally photographed by Ron Jude in central Idaho in the early 1980s and forgotten for nearly three decades, the images in emmett range from hazy scenes of a summertime drag race, midnight horror films on a TV set, and a Nordic-looking teenager who appears as a specter from his past. Reconsidered here as a “new” body of work, these early photographic efforts—vernacular in tone, lacking in irony or pretense, enhanced by cheap filters and telephoto lenses—now resonate with unexpected menace and melancholy, building on Jude’s fundamental interest in exposing “the folly of rational thought” through fragmentary photographic narratives.

Related conceptually and residing thematically between two previous bodies of work, Alpine Star and Other Nature, emmett explores our desire to give structure and assign meaning to our memories, and our inability
to ever fully know or understand ourselves through self-reflection. As Jude brings coherence to his own
unintended “series” of emotionally charged pictures, the everyday notion of the past collides with the more
philosophical and improbable idea of The Past, creating a tension between our sentimental engagement
with photographs, and the nagging sense that it’s all just an illusion. Through nuanced editing and a
purposeful exploitation of his own photographic mistakes, Jude fleshes out and finesses this tension into
 something palpable—an aesthetic inspired by equal parts Motörhead and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Nausea

Nausea—taken from the title of Sartre’s book— is a remarkable body of photographs using the interiors
 of schools to explore what Jude calls ‘psychic oppression’. Using a highly original visual language,
this first show of Jude’s work in Britain includes some of the most intriguing images to emerge
from America in recent years.…Jude appears to be returning to the scene of a crime—peering
through windows, doorways, and iron grilles into deserted rooms and corridors. Avoiding sentimentality,
 Jude trains his camera on the mundane, recalling the banality of humdrum life.Jude’s photographs
have an affinity with William Eggleston’s most vital work. In place of obvious pictorial
devices he employs radical framing and narrow focus. With an immaculate eye for colour,
he invests, each scene with a tension and unease that brings to mind the films of David Lynch.

—David Chandler, Senior Curator
The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 1992

People may say that Ron Judes images may be boring, or too simple, I however find his simplicity very beautiful. Little snatches of what we see in everyday life that we may take for granted, things that we may see but store away far in our mind never thinking about it again. I find this approach incredibly refreshing for I like to find beauty within the simple. I was worried that my photographs may seem too plan however seeing these I realize that I should stick with that I persevere to be beauty. 

I have been researching different way to show my work for the degree show, I have decided i'd quite like to show my work in either three or four's. Based on this idea I have spent the time making collages to see what photos would most fit what I am trying to portray. Here is just a few.

A Catch Up Blog

Theory

Ellipsis (Narrative device) 

Sex theory and feminism - have reversed the roles and portrayed man as object

The subversion of the hegemony of male dominance in western society 

Carl Jung's archetypes -  focusing on archetypes that we find in fairy tales or other film and literature, Focusing on his Anima, Animus and The Shadow archetypes.

The Gaze

Interpretation

Primary interpretation – what I want you to see and what narrative I want you to construct

Secondary – what the audience interpret. 

Main Artists

Cindy Sherman.

Anna Gaskell

                                                           Jane Burton                                                                  

These are a few of my favorite images that I have taken in the last couple of days. I have edited them in a way to make the color pop out, vibrant reds, oranges and gold symbolizing lust and power.This time I do not have a literal human being involved, Instead  I have just used artifacts, furs, lamps. jewels etc. A abstract representation of the struggle of power between the male animus and the female anima. 

These images are a little different from what I have tried before, as we can see literal flesh is involved, during my photo-shoots I have tried to stay clear from nakedness, wanting to portray domination, strength and power through as little "literal representation" as possible, believing that by showing the female form in such a sexualised way I will be going against my idea. However I like how these have turned out; I have shown just enough, but not too much. the audience will still have to wonder what is happening within these images. I don't think they are as strong as the images that I have used before, nevertheless I thought I would include them regardless and let people make their own mind up about them. 

Jane Burton

The Other Side

Avaliable Light

I Did It For You