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This was the final image I selected for the Interim show. It belonged to a wider series of images which are also shown on the Padlet but for the sake of keeping true to the ethos of the project and my developing ideas I kept only one image.

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THE OBJECTIVE OF ART IS TO SHOW THE BASIC HUMAN CONDITION. FEEL THE EMOTION OF A PIECE AND LET THAT SPEAK TO YOU. THE VIEWER AND THE PIECE SHOULD HAVE NO INTERMEDIARY. IF I SAY WHAT IT IS THEN THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO DISCOVER.

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I don't love this image but it satisfies the need of uncertainty that I also wish to convey.

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Yung Lean, Blue light

Super colourful and shitty camera quality, we ask ourselves what is going on

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ACCEPTANCE OF PAIN AND DEFEAT

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THE MESSAGE IS NEVER THE ANSWER

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STRIPPED BACK. RAW AND LEAVES LITTLE ROOM FOR THE REAL WORLD. MOVED AWAY FROM DOCUMENTARY STYLE SHOOT. THE IDEAS OF PAIN AND SUFFERING AND DISGUST NEED TO COME THROUGH.

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At the beginning of the process of thinking what I wanted to do for the show I wasn't 100% sure on what I wanted to do, but I did know what I didn't want to do.

My ethos surrounding photography as of late has been imbuing my work with as much mystery and nonsense as possible. I didn't want the message to be told, I don't want the message to be obvious but rather something that is secondary and is only translated through a vessel other than the image itself.

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This is probably some of her more accessible work, I put it here to show that the image doesn't have to be complicated to show the message that the artist wants to convey.

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This is perfect in my eyes. We know what is happening, it is easy to understand but it is nothing like the thousands of images we have seen of people in water. The typical family photo bathing in a lake or sea is completely distorted, bringing us back to those memories but to less clearer version of it.

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Julie Hrudova was born in Prague and works in Amsterdam. She was the first artist I came across when I was researching photographers that felt the same way I did about the medium. She states "Photography is often seen as a clarifying medium and I like to play with the unclarity of it". She has her own twist on street photography that really resonates with me, however I wish to bring this into staged and 'made' photography rather than 'discovered' photography.

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In his piece, 'When faith moves mountains' (2002) Alys' motto

was "Maximum effort minimum result". Alys got around 500 art students

from Lima, Peru to displace a dune by a few inches by shovelling sand. This work is a metaphor for latin Americas disproportional effort needed to change a little.

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Francis Alys shows here the ridiculousness of the effort needed to move a dune by four inches and although this may be an insignificant result it is still a monumental one. What really struck me was the motto of the project, maximal effort for minimal result, I believe this can be applied to oneself as well as larger structures. The materiality of sand is a great medium to express this.

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In the bible sand is often used as a symbol of heaviness and instability. This is an almost ancient symbol and metaphor for sand giving it some president in the cultural meaning's and associations one has with sand, because I want my images to be unclear but I also wan them to strike a chord and 'tickle' people it has to be somewhat rooted in reality.

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Mark Rothko was born in Latvia before moving with his family to the united states. Rothko found incredible critical and commercial success during his life time and his ethos surrounding his art is beautiful, “I am not an abstractionist… I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else.. .I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

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His paintings are nothing other than pure emotion, his use of colour and form is almost spiritual to look at, at least that's how I felt when I saw his work. This way of working was very re-assuring to me, it showed me that what I need in my images is t convey emotion so Rothko really helped in my conceptualisation of my photography but of course not as much on my aesthetic.

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The aesthetic is quite important in this piece of work, because I am working on the basis of mystery the work has to be somewhat muddy and obscure but still legible and this then needs to be combined with a mysterious subject.

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Yung Lean is a Swedish musician who has some great music videos, as I understand it he has a very big voice in terms of his music video output and decides all the visual elements he wants in his videos. He is also ntrigued by mystery to the point of nonsensical many times. his videos are often muddy and blurry, they have rich colours and textures and they often show something quite odd taking place like a door opening in the middle of a field or hanging upside down from a tree.

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Yung Lean, blue plastic.

Great colours, gruesome image, right up my alley.

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The use of colour and movement and texture of film is something I want to incorporate in my interim show image.

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Eventually I settled on the concept of pain and acceptance of pain, and the strange outcome of happiness that can come from that. Often defeat and a downfall can become a good starting point to happiness and improvement but first the monumental journey of acceptance needs to begin. Like Alys explains much work, little result. This is an international experience that everyone goes through at some point. The work also had to have mystery though, partly to be able to co-exist with my other work but also because this process of pain and acceptance is not a comfortable and easy one. My image can't be too telling, you aren't meant to see that when you look at it, but that is what I think the image should represent, the anonymity and emotion in the images should be vague enough that each and everyone can interpret what they see in the image in their own way while being aware of how distraught the person in the image is.

The image should also feel like you shouldn't be seeing it, like it was found on an old camera. This makes it all the more uncomfortable when viewing.

I recognise that this project sounds like it has two different concepts but to me they add to each other. A representation of the acceptance of defeat and then mystery and a lack of understanding. The mystery is driven by emotion of disgust and this is the same thing that is at the very basis of defeat and acceptance.

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The film Suspiria (dir. Dario Argento) is a great visual source of inspiration. Often dark but saturated contrasted by ghastly murders results in an uncomfortable watch.

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Mandy (Dir. Panos Cosmatos) Again, crazy colours contrasted with a dark storyline.

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Mandy Dir. Panos Cosmatos

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Enter the void (Dir. Gaspar Noe)

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Throw away your books, rally in the streets (Dir. Shūji Terayama)

Darkness and saturated colour is such a wonderful combination.

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Inland empire (Dir. David Lynch)

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The Cinema references helped me a lot. Cinema has an innate sense oof story to it which gives each still more life in my opinion, the lighting is more dynamic and more movement is allowed and I try to apply this in my photogrphy.

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The lighting was quite a simple one.

One ArriLite 800W bounced off the ceiling and onto model

One profoto flash head with snoot hitting from stage right

one on camera flash

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For the Image I visited various carpet and vinyl laying shop until one would give me some cast off flooring I could use. I got a green one which was perfect, it kind of reminds me of a hospital floor.

I painted two panels in green, this in contrast with the harsh light made it look like an old video from a cam corder which added to the feeling of seeing an image which you shouldn't be seeing. Green is also quite a disturbing colour and easily makes one fee uneasey.

To make the image even more muddy I put a fabric over the lens to distort the image even more.

I wanted it to feel like a liminal space, neither here nor there.

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The dances she choreographs have elegant but dramatic movements which are beautiful. I looked at her dances when making the model pose, instructing them to simply move around and interact with the sand rather than shoot specific poses. This often leads to a more natural image with less stiffness, especially with an inexperienced model.

Movement is very important for my project because the idea of a moving image needs to come across in the stills.

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After a couple of weeks of thinking and nothing really coming to me I got a phone call from my father, he calls me regularly but don't alway pick up. This time that he called me his tone was tranquil and peaceful which hasn't always been the case. My faher batttled with addiction since he was my age but a year and a half ago he went to rehab and decided to change his life. Miguel moved to the countryside of Bilbao and now spends his days cutting wood, cooking and reading. I hadn't seen him since he got out of rehab so i wanted to go visit him with my camera and explore our relationship together.

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I've had the pleasure of working as Aidan Zamiri's assistant for the last year and a half (This image is from our first job together shooting for Burberry). Aidan introduced me to the 16mm format, and taught me how to use it. We began working together because we both shared a desire of dirtiness and crunch in our images, removed from the standardised fashion images that you see in magazines such as i-D.

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The Wild Boys 2017 Mandico Bertrand

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The Wild Boys 2017 Mandico Bertrand

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The Wild Boys 2017 Mandico Bertrand

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Mandico's film 'The Wild boys" was debuted at Cannes in 2017. The film brings arthouse to a new level and the cinematography is great. I'm particularly fond of the scenes of struggle, often in slow motion and in quick snippets. The composition and the lighting in this film is my main take away for my own project. The story follows a group of boys who rape a school teacher and as punishment they are sent to learn discipline with a dutch sailor who brings them to an island. On this island they slowly start becoming women in a painful. process. This radical transformation is ssort of coherent with my idea of documenting my fathers transformation into a new life style.

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Eraserhead 1977 David Lynch

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Eraserhead 1977 David Lynch

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This actor is a little younger than my father but they both have the same intensity about them. Only after I shot my images did I watch the movie lost highway and this scene in particular really resembles some images I took. Quite a proud moment when you accidentally match in some way with creators that you admire.

(Lost Highway 1997 David Lynch)

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Lost Highway 1997 David Lynch

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I could write a whole padlet on Lynch's inspiration. I read his book 'Room to Dream' this year and it left a mark on me. Lynch is a big advocate for the 'big idea' and sticking to this idea, that is the most important thing and as long as you do that then you will get what you want. David's use of darkness is superb, his blacks are as black as can be and I need that as well for my final project.

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David Sims released a book of his photography consisting of images he shot for the skateboarding brand Supreme. This book and the images do such a great job in translating the brands identity into a visual medium. The images also have a mood and an attitude that i want to create, even though the message of our respective images is completely different, there is an overlap of naiveté and angst.

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SHOOTS THAT I HAVE DONE THIS LAST YEAR THAT HAVE DEVELOPED MY VISUAL STYLE

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SHOOTS THAT I HAVE DONE THIS LAST YEAR THAT HAVE DEVELOPED MY VISUAL STYLE

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I wanted to shoot on 16mm film. this is partly because I wanted the images to feel like movie stills, like stills from a video that doesn't exist. I also wanted to do this because after many discussions with my tutors about the meaning of my images I wanted to empathise a meaning by shooting a little bit of a short film with a narrative arc, meaning that the images have an inherent value as narrative images. My father is an actor who has worked with the likes of Almodovar and Bunuel so it is easy to get him into the right mood for a scene and shooting a video is more his forte as opposed to modelling for images.

Because film is so expensive to buy and develop I had to be very careful with what I shot. Each roll costs around £150 and it only produces two and a half minutes of footage but that being said, every second produces 24 images so when you look at it like that it comes out to 3240 images. I didn't shoot one frame at a time but this gave me a lot of variety and options to choose from. Shooting so careful kind of goes against my normal mode of shooting, I quite like shooting instinctively if I know that what I am shooting is working but for this trip I couldn't do that. because of tis i wrote a shot plan before i left to Spain.

I had two rolls of Kodak Vision 3 200T. Giving me 5 minutes total of film that I could shoot. The first roll that I shot I did here In London to test the Camera and see the effect my camera would have on the subjects that I used. The second was to be used in Spain.

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These references should be treated more like a mood board. The are a combination of poses I like, compositions and history that I like.

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In doing research on this idea of stills from a video that doesn't exit I came across the work of Cindy Sherman. Sherman in an important voice in the post-modernist art movement and her photographic works also work under the guise of being images stills from films that haven't been recorded. Her series 'Untitled Film Stills' focus on the female stereotype in Hollywood that she was raised with Her images, being stills they also have a certain uncanny nature about them. The viewer is made to guess what is going on beyond the frame but because it is only one still they will never know which adds additional mystery to the image.

(Untitled Film Still 4)

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Untitled Film Still 21

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Her later work in colour also makes us ask ourselves the same questions , who is this lady, why is she wet, where is she looking?

(Untitled 92)

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Sherman also notes that her work is all untitled because she doesn't want anything to come between the viewer and heir thoughts about the image, tis is an idea that I also really appreciate and is the reason there was no text for my image at the interim show.

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Aaron Siskind's usage of textures is masterful. Siskind leaves behind the usual form and thus has the power of suggestion to work with, as he himself explains, " I care only for people- I'm interested in only in human destiny. It just happens that I work symbolically- not directly with people as subjects". If I want to work with textures, which I am sure I will try to, then this will be a great referencing point. The subject is th message in his photographs not purely the subject itself but a vessel for something larger.

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For my first test I wanted to use a silicone mask that I have. It is actually a mould of the face of the contemporary artist Matthew Barney. Although I knew I this wasn't going to be in the final project it plays on some of the themes I am interested in such as claustrophobia. I went into it seeing how different camera angles and different lenses would affect the final outcome. I kept in mind Chaplins quote, “Life is a tragedy when seen in closeup, but a comedy in long-shot,”.

I made the background black and boxed in the model to achieve the darkest image possible, because I don't know the film developers I couldn't ask tem to develop it darker so I had to darken it slightly in photoshopp.