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'A year ago Italy entered a lookdown. Today I see the images taken forcibly closed in the house. I was trying to transfer my feelings into photography. Looking at them I recognize my mood at the time, the tension, the disbelief of what I was experiencing.'

REFLECTION:
Looking through this series you immediately understand the intentions, a dark blurred almost dream state. This 'disbelief' he talks about definitely comes across. What I mostly like about this series is that a lot of images are slights distorted, whether they took the image whilst moving something in front of the lens or maybe droplets of liquid on the lens, I really enjoy the effect it gives - makes you wonder in some of the images what they are taking a picture of. In the bottom left image I have a feeling it may be bokeh that is creating that dream like effect but nonetheless I really like looking at it. Taking from this I definitely want to play around with distortion maybe of still life for another shoot if possible.

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A year ago Italy entered a lookdown. Today I see the images taken forcibly closed in the house. I was trying to transfer my feelings into photography. Looking at them I recognize my mood at the time, the tension, the disbelief of what I was experiencing.

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A year ago Italy entered a lookdown. Today I see the images taken forcibly closed in the house. I was trying to transfer my feelings into photography. Looking at them I recognize my mood at the time, the tension, the disbelief of what I was experiencing. {{ readMoreButton }}

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'I always wanted to share the amazing talent of what happens behind the scenes. These are pictures from my phone, from a Mother’s perspective, watching her daughter grow as a model. Nothing better then seeing artistic people collaborate on a vision and the excitement they get from achieving a great image. It’s a beautiful process.'

REFLECTION:
When you take the back seat and see everything that happens on the set of a shoot you really get to see the hard work that goes on. Danelle talking about observing the collaboration of people's vision and the lengths that people on set go to, to get the perfect shot. Personally understanding the experience and what goes on in the minds of those working on a set, always thinking of what else is there to do. This would be an interesting concept to work on when looking at the brief, thinking subjectivity, objectivity and power - especially in circumstances like these we see how power dynamics really play out with those behind the camera - directing models and capturing those moments. This brings up ideas of consent in the world of photography.

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Inspired by Danelle Cole and their series from behind the scenes, as I was supposed to be assisting on a shoot I thought I'd take photos of behind the scenes too. Especially in this industry and amongst the public, what is in front of the camera is given a lot more merit than those who make it happen behind the camera, whether that be lighting, directing, mua, styling - there are so many things at work for one image to be taken. In some images we can see things like wires, lighting rods, ladders, tripods - things that are usually hidden but add up in production - the 'imperfections' if you will. Out of all the photos the one I like the most was the one with the photographer and directors back towards the camera whilst we see the model at a lower angle - I think it frames what I was trying to get from these photos. The idea that those behind the camera remain anonymous but are in authority when it comes to creating the final product, they are the creators and directors of this, the puppet masters if you will. I think for our brief it's going to be hard to get more photos like this as I'm not always on set, but I'll keep in mind the idea of anonymity and levels when it comes to the portrayal of power - the dominant and the subordinate.

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I always wanted to share the amazing talent of what happens behind the scenes. These are pictures from my phone, from a Mother's perspective, watching her daughter grow as a model. Nothing better then seeing artistic people collaborate on a vision and the excitement they get from achieving a great image. It's a beautiful process.

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I always wanted to share the amazing talent of what happens behind the scenes. These are pictures from my phone, from a Mother's perspective, watching her daughter grow as a model. Nothing better then seeing artistic people collaborate on a vision and the excitement they get from achieving a great image.

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After seeing the works of Saskia Wesseling and Alana Perino I was inspired to maybe thinking about my way of forming simple things around my house. In these shots I think I was really wanting to play with the idea of proximity, the image with leaves for example, is a really small plant but when I placed my phone under it I realised that I could play with the perception of it's size. Taking multiple photos from under the plant, I ended up choosing this as my final image because I really like the way the light peers through the gaps in the leaves - it gives off the image of a scene where someone's rummaging through trees to get to their location, your having to push past these leaves to get to 'the light'.
In the image with the planks of dismembered woods and crate - I really just liked the multiple lines paralleling themselves and the different textures: raw edges and wooden plugs, rigid metal crate.
The next image of the bottom of a vase: I wanted to focus on whats not appreciated when it comes to a vase of flowers. In this I was experimenting with the cropping of the image, trying to draw focus to the bottom of the stems.
Image with door hinge: I really enjoy the composition of this image because again we have parallel lines - leading lines - again we're seeing textures and patterns from the ridges to screws.
What I'm taking from this series of experimentation is really the idea that I shouldn't be afraid to go up close - changing the perception of someone/something, and giving a twist to simple things we all have around our homes.

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The Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase is best known for his celebrated photobook (1986), a work in which he projected his sense of isolation and sadness, arising from his 1976 divorce, onto the figures of ravens. More than thirty years have passed since the publication of , and it is still lauded as one of the most monumental achievements of Japanese photography. But in 1992, Fukase suffered a traumatic brain injury that brought an end to all of his creative endeavors; it also resulted in the greater part of his photographic works, excepting Ravens, falling into oblivion for the next twenty-five years. Considerable scope remains for reassessing what Fukase was trying to accomplish in the course of his forty-year-long career as a photographer. Two works made over long stretches of his life, Family (1971-89) and Memories of Father (1971-87), are essential for any understanding of his photographic art.

Fukase, who died in 2012, left a large and varied body of work, both personal and ludic. He was born in the small town of Bifuka, in the Nakagawa district of Hokkaido, the eldest son of a family that ran a provincial photography studio, which had been in operation since his grandfather's time. His father, Sukezo, had hoped that Fukase would take over the family business, and made his son help with the processing of prints from the tender age of six. In one recollection, Fukase notes that "the grudge" he harbored toward photography had its beginnings around this time, suggesting an ambivalence about his first encounter with photography and the way his life seemed to have been decided for him. In 1952, at age eighteen, Fukase left home in order to get formal training, entering the photography department of the College of Art at Nihon University, in Tokyo. After graduation, he stayed on in Tokyo and took a job as a commercial photographer-not, in the end, going back to run the family business. While working at this position, Fukase threw himself into improving his photographic expression, and gradually started making a name as a conceptual photographer, getting his works published in magazines like Camera Mainichi and Asahi Camera.

In 1964, he married Yoko Wanibe. The autobiographical photographs he took of his domestic life with her have often been compared to Japanese I novels, with their self-revealing, confessional tone; his images were, in fact, the cause of continual friction between husband and wife. Wanibe stated, in 1973, that "in the ten years we lived together, he really only looked at me through the lens of the camera, and the photographs that he took of me were unmistakably depictions of himself." As Fukase himself noted: "In the end, a kind of paradoxical situation came about in which we seemed to be together only for the sake of my photographs. This by no means made for marital bliss."

In 1971, suffering considerable existential torment, Fukase began making periodic journeys back home to Hokkaido, after a long absence. In the locale of his native village-the very starting point for his whole being-Fukase started to explore the source of the creative energy that poured endlessly out of him, the compulsion to obsessively take photographs of the people he loved-even to the point of hurting them. The photographs he made over this roughly twenty-year period include the ones seen in Family and Memories of Father, both published in book form in 1991. Family is essentially an album of commemorative family portraits, all taken inside the family's studio on anniversaries. Memories of Father is a collection of photographs, taken over a decade and a half, of his father, following Sukezo's life and death through to cremation, interspersed with shots of the family's daily life.

Having in the 1960s turned his personal life with his wife into art, Fukase now took up the most ordinary, mundane, and everyday format: the family album. Yet in Family, he includes a number of nude and seminude women, photographed in the 1970s, who have nothing whatsoever to do with his family. He seems to be inviting the viewer to enjoy a kind of joke-at the same time perhaps performing a type of self-parody, underlining how he is the failed, degenerate, third-generation son. In 1985, after a blank of ten years or so, once again his father appears in the photographs, by now markedly older. Fukase understood, as he himself wrote, that "every member of the family whose inverted image I capture on the film inside my camera will die. The camera catches them, and in that instant it is a recording instrument of death." He elaborated on this idea: "Time passes inexorably, and death comes to us all. It comes to old people, to young people, to children, to me. For me, everything is a commemorative photograph, to be eventually stuck in a battered old photo-album."

For Fukase, a photograph was not something to record the successful moments of a life fully lived: rather, it was to record the time spent until the unavoidable day of death eventually provides a fitting end point. Fukase was surely well aware from early on that Memories of Father would be brought to a final full stop by Sukezo's death. He saw photography as a macabre art, one that allows the viewer to exist, in some sense, unbound by the progression of time.

In 1987, Sukezo died, after having succumbed to pneumonia. On the night before the funeral, a heavy snowstorm covered the town of Bifuka in snow. Fukase gathered the whole family together, some dressed in their mourning clothes, and once again took a commemorative photograph. In the position his father used to occupy, he placed a photographic portrait of Sukezo, which Fukase had taken in 1974. The person in the photograph has a restrained smile, even though the occasion is now his own funeral. The suggestion seems to be that commemorative photographs have to be taken of all family events, and all commemorative photographs have to be marked by beaming smiles. Even though Sukezo himself is deceased, he has been brought back to life by that instrument of death, the camera. Now he is being photographed again-allowing him to stare out at the viewer, even though he exists only within a photograph-death canceling out death.

Two years later, in 1989, Fukase's brother divorced, and the brother's wife and their two children moved to Tokyo. Fukase's younger sister and her husband moved away to Sapporo. His mother took up residence in a nursing home for the elderly. What had begun in 1971 as a lighthearted parody of a family photo-album had gradually changed over the course of twenty years and met an entirely unexpected end: the family itself scattered to the winds, their photographic studio closed-the end of an era that had lasted eighty years.

In these works, Fukase uses the camera as a kind of pistol, puncturing the boundaries of time. The bullet moves at an extremely slow speed, seemingly almost motionless, eventually reaching its desired target. The dead body that lies on the ground is the corpse of the past. Fukase pulled the metaphorical trigger over and over again, first on his wife, then on his family. His shots pass through them all over a period of several decades. In effect, what we look at when we view Fukase's photography is a heap of the remains of the past, a grave marker composed of layers upon layers of images. The viewer gets an intimate sense of the disintegration of Fukase's father, of the photography studio, and of the entire family, but also becomes conscious of the strange, rather macabre ease with which the photographer invites us to go back and forth through time with these photographs, the only thing left to us now that he-the practitioner of this art-is also dead. In the same way that the reappearance of Sukezo in a photograph of his own funeral seems to negate the effect of death, the members of Fukase's family actual corpses of the past-come to life in these photographs and stare unflinchingly straight out at us.
Read more from Aperture, issue 233, "Family," or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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How Masahisa Fukase Reinvented the Family Album

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The renowned Japanese photographer transformed the ritual of the family portrait into a source of play-and a memento mori.

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' Masahisa Fukase (Hokkaido, 1934 – 2012) is considered one of the most radical and experimental photographers of the post-war generation in Japan. Fukase worked almost exclusively in series, some of which came about over the course of several decades. The works combine to form a remarkable visual biography of one of the most original photographers of his time. Fukase incorporated his own life experiences of loss, love, loneliness and depression into his work in a surprisingly playful manner. His images are personal and highly intimate: over the years, his wife Yoko, his dying father and his beloved cat Sasuke regularly featured in sometimes comical, at other times sombre visual narratives. Towards the end of this working life, the photographer increasingly turned the camera on himself. The vast number of performative self-portraits (precursors to today’s ubiquitous selfie) testifies to the singular, almost obsessive way that the artist related to his surroundings – and to himself.
Family (Kazoku) was released in 1991, and was Fukase’s last book. It begins with a photograph of the family studio and the following 31 images are family portraits made in the studio in chronological order.
Family is essentially an album of commemorative family portraits, all taken inside the family’s studio on anniversaries.'

REFLECTION:
In his Family series, Fukase is using purposefully posed photographs and playing around with traditional family portraits, playing around with traditional dynamics whilst also giving the viewers a window into his personal relations. The image above, with subject's backs, has us focusing on the silhouettes of each individual, as well as the levels they are each at. Realising what's recurring through a lot of my research is the idea of what is lacking, traditionally having photos focus on faces, but now turning the tables and the creation of the unknown.
I also enjoy that throughout a-lot of the photos there's a sense of collectiveness between all the individuals through their clothing, whether it be similar materials, tones (even though images are black and white), style. However, we can still see the individualistic differences, through facial expressions and body language.

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' “Pictures of Birds” is an ongoing series examining selfhood, family, and home. Longboat Key, a Floridian island of condos and snowbirds, became the strange backdrop of my parents’ fading health and their children’s mourning process. This project is a deeply personal investigation of the ancestral traumas and privileges that shaped my family’s values and my concept of self. In this study of a specific family in a specific circumstance I aspire to question the nature of whiteness, class, and inheritance.

During my visits to Longboat Key, I immerse myself in the fears and aspirations of people preoccupied with death. I am drawn to how posture and gesture reveal the psychological. I call attention to the arrangement of a retirement community landscaped to affirm health and wealth and attempt to show the ways that this façade is compromised by the ever-present nature of illness and mortality. I search for the entanglement of the mundane and strange in domesticity, trying to reveal how birthright is conditioned on pedigree by highlighting the physical and cultural tensions of a mixed family. I feel that my photographs are successful when the boundaries between abundance and scarcity, vitality and despair, acceptance and critique, become porous or indistinguishable.

The photographs, like the landscapes and rituals of upper middle class communities, are a hybrid of the naturally occurring and the staged. Some scenes are drawn from memories, both real and imagined. Many are collaborative reconstructions of exposed emotional states. Others are stolen in moments of confusion, usually followed with the subject’s suggestion, “Why don’t you take pictures of birds?”

In this project I embrace the reality that no matter where my camera is aimed, it is always looking inward at who I am, what I fear becoming, and how I want to be remembered. It is a bitterly affectionate attempt to find strength in the insecurities of heritage.'

REFLECTION:
My favourite type of photos tend to be diaristic photography and Perino definitely does that, capturing situations and the people around them - doing it through close-up framing and really honing into what is important to the photographer. These images specifically I love because of the way they are a small part of a bigger scene, focusing on the textures within the frame such as the plastic bag/wrapping, close-ups of hands, water, a folded blanket. A more abstract or maybe conceptual way of framing simple things amongst your environment. A good selection of these images seem to be quite sensory, you can imagine the way something feels or smells or sounds or moves.

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'Living a life in the shadow of the virus.

True appreciation of the little things in life

Missing living life to the max.

There is light coming through the darkness.

The darkness is still present in the light.'

REFLECTION:
In this series Wesseling shows their 'appreciation of the little things' by manipulating light and shadow, making things such as a candelabra, a mug etc. appear larger than life. Here we see the co-existence between the light and dark, shadows working with the light - complimenting each other on from very different scales. Especially now, where we're left to our own vices, Wesseling has used the things around them, silhouettes, shadows. Rather than focusing on the object itself has captured the essence and presence of it - as has Zhou HanShun - in a lot of my past work I haven't really experimented with shadows, sometimes even looking at them as unwanted elements, but here Wesseling has brought to the front what is usually put at the back (physically and conceptually). There's a sort of sense of calm when looking at these images, brings me to a moment of tranquility.

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'In Chinese Folk Culture, the 7th month in the Lunar Calendar is known as the “Hungry Ghost Month”. It is believed that during this period, the gates of hell are opened. A period when humans and spirits walk as one on earth. What was once dead is now amongst the living, what is living will someday be amongst the dead. Thus is the circle of life.

In the past, local communities in Singapore would set up staged performances in the form of Chinese opera or puppet shows to entertain the spirits, as well as for the local people. But in modern times, these traditional performances gave way to popular song and dance shows, “GeTai” (Ge means song, tai means stage).

The photographs presented here consists of street portraits of the people who gather at various stage performances “Getai”, during the Chinese “Hungry Ghost Month”.

Hand-held long exposures are used to create an exaggerated sense of movement and softness. The deliberate tight cropping of each photograph enables the grain of the negative to be much more pronounced, making the subjects look almost like ash and dust.'

REFLECTION:
Zhou's use of a slow shutter speed has allowed them to capture almost the spirit of their subjects, and further reading into Zhou's intentions of capturing 'ash and dust' we start to see a reflection of our own mortality. Instead of a defined, detailed subjects we see only the presence of them - more powerful than maybe capturing the photos at the 'correct' shutter speed. In the top right photo we really focus on the presence of the subjects face - or lack there of - because they've worn a dark coloured top the light bounces of their face - this photo is clearer than a lot of the others in the series, we can say that the subject lives amongst the midst of the dead and the living - a limbo. The others [top and bottom left] are a lot more blurrier, and we really get to see the grain more pronounced and defined rather than the subject itself - the particles are defined and not the collective. Overall, there is a sense of slow movement, of 'a dissolving' even though they are still images, this ghost that they are trying to convey is definitely coming across.

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With this shoot I had far more control, using a studio set up, with a white background and three different light sources. In this shoot my main aim was to get still life images that weren't simply flat and formulaic. I tried to get up close, cropping out parts of my props, focusing on certain elements such as the handles or spout. Learning from my last shoot that the metal tea pot would cast a reflection, I dimmed my lighting so it wouldn't bounce back brightly and successfully achieved quite dynamic lighting with some of my shots. After looking through Umberto Verdoliva's work, I found a small crystal and thought that I could shoot through it to capture some more distorted, dream-like shots. Overall, I really like how this shoot turned out.

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Piecing everything together I found quite difficult for me. I wanted to carry some form of narrative when grouping photos, or create parallels between my still lives and posed/diaristic images. I think the narrative of a family dynamic definitely comes across, but I do think my third shoot should have maybe been more clearer in supporting that - because it was more diaristic, may be harder to connect the dots between those shots and those posed for. Overall, I think my final selection and curation is quite successful in portraying the theme subjectivity, objectivity and power. When it comes to photographing family it may be hard to be objective, and have a more subjective outlook, but within this project I really wanted to play around with traditional family dynamics - heavily patriarchally dominated. Where the term 'respect your elders' have been reverberated, I wanted to flip it on its head, that's where the power element comes in. I really enjoyed doing this project, although I did have difficulties along the way, nonetheless my final sequence came together well.

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Not having my subjects to carry on with my initial idea, I thought I'd take a more diaristic approach. Documenting my sister across a week, trying to capture her dynamic with me through her reaction to the camera - most of them being a hand held up to the camera. Throughout taking images, my main goal was to get direct address through eye contact, establishing a confidence/authority within her as an individual. As a lot of these photos were unplanned not all of them turned out well, some of them too blurry or not my subject in frame at all. For my next shoot I plan to do some form of still life, connecting from my last shoot.

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Shooting with my family was definitely a different dynamic, more difficult I would say especially shooting with my sister - she's younger and it was harder for her to stay in one position (still) for longer than a minute. Throughout the shoot I was using a lamp I would constantly move around to see how I could manipulate the shadows, trying to incorporate some of the textures in frame, from their shirts to the white curtain I used as the background. I wanted a playful tone from it and I think I achieved that, but I also think editing them black and white kind of added a serious tone to it. Like Fukase I definitely  wanted to portray a cohesion between my subjects, wanted them wearing all white having that repetition of the pendants. Shots where they had their backs turned towards the camera probably weren't as prominent as I'd thought at first, so I placed another light behind the curtain to create a sort of halo effect, differentiating between the white shirts and the white curtain. I think I definitely could have played around with some different backgrounds, maybe used a darker colour/tone, to see how the white shirts would bounce off that. I maybe could have also played around with shutter speed, a slower shutter speed capturing some blurriness in movement from my sister to maybe get a more playful tone. When using props like the metal tea pot I didn't take into consideration the reflection that would cast back to the camera - from the light source - so I may need to touch that up in post but overall I enjoyed the images.

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In response to theme

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Whilst taking photos at a slow shutter speed I realised that I had to be quick whilst spinning the mirror as a lot of my photos had a blurry hand in the left corner, so it really was trial and error until I got a photo without my hand and with the right motion of the mirror where there a was a blur captured. When using a fast shutter speed, the photo isn't that effective as the mirror is static and could have even been taken at any other shutter speed, it would've been more effective if I had taken a photo of something like a ball bouncing or maybe droplet of water from a tap, where you can capture a moment in air - using fast shutter speed more effectively.

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Because I am using my IPhone for this module I find it incredibly difficult to maximise the difference in depth, aperture isn't quite manageable when working from a digital phone that does all the work for you. When trying to achieve a narrow depth of field the image quality tend to worsen for some reason, but with the first image I think it came out well - as with phones the camera automatically tends to focus on what immediately behind the lens.With the last image you can really see how quality is significantly brought down when trying to get both plants out of focus.
However I am aware that when using an actual camera you have far much more control, and can get a lot of detail on a subject even when there's use of a narrow depth of field.