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A street photographer born in Harrow, North West London, in 1974, Matt Stuart has been shooting on the street with Leica cameras since 1996. Matt has been part of numerous solo & group exhibitions and was included in "Street Photography Now" published by Thames & Hudson in 2010. He is a member of the international street photography collective, iN-PUBLIC. His exhibition "Pedestrians" is part of Leica Camera's Photography Unplugged events at Photomonth, where he will also be conducting a workshop and portfolio reviews. His exhibition runs October 23 - October 27 and you can RSVP for a private viewing here.
Q: Your exhibition is "Pedestrians" and the images are classic street photography. What appeals to you about capturing the "everyday moments" on the street?
A: Nothing is ever the same on the street, the people and the places are constantly changing. Consequently there are millions of exciting permutations, whatever time of the day I decide to walk out with my camera.
Q: From your photos, it seems that you have a keen sense of humour and also a feeling for the absurd juxtapositions of everyday life. Would you agree with this and if so, why is humour an important element in your images, and what do you think they express about life in general?
A: I think my photographs reflect my personality. If I was a greengrocer, I think I would be a humorous one. I do like to remind myself not to take things too seriously, but I'm fascinated with how strange and unusual life can be. I love that old G.K. Chesterton quote "Humour can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle."
Q: What is your approach to photography?
A: I try to go out every day with as naive an attitude as I can muster, without preconceptions, in the hope that I keep myself open to any situation as it presents itself.
Q: What camera equipment do you use for your street photography and why?
A: I use a Leica MP with a 35 mm 1.4 Summilux lens. I've been using Leica rangefinders for almost twenty years now. They are quick, quiet, simple, robust and if I remember to keep my elbows in, they make me almost invisible.
Q: How does your exhibit "Pedestrians" fit with Leica Camera's Photography Unplugged? How did you select the images included in the exhibit?
A: My photographs are spontaneous, un-manipulated, and honestly observed, they fit happily into an exhibition of everyday photography.
Q: What do you hope, if anything, the viewer takes away from looking at these images?
A: I hope they come away feeling intrigued, amused and inspired to take their own photographs.

Q: Do you have a favorite shot from this exhibition? If so, which one and why?
A: I like the shot of the headless man with the umbrella, because when I took the photo I didn't see the shadowed head. I like it when I get more than I expected.
Q: Are there any other photographers that inspire you?
A: I like photographers who push boundaries and on occasions come up with images you have never seen before. Off the top of my head, Christophe Agou, Jeff Mermelstein, Joel Meyerowitz, Trent Parke and Alex Webb all tick this box.
Q: You're instructing a Masterclass on October 26 at the Photography Unplugged pop up studio. What can participants expect to learn during the class? How can people register or learn more?
A: I would expect to teach them to achieve the confidence necessary to shoot great photographs. There are still places available, you can register here.

Q: In the description of the Masterclass, it says you'll share some do's and don'ts of street photography. Can you share a couple of tips just for our blog readers who aren't in London for your class?
A: It took me 10 years to realize it was a good idea to shoot at 1/500 th of a second. Great street photographs don't come every day. Consequently you have to be very dogged, you might go for months without a really good shot. However, when it arrives you and everyone else are amazed by what you have found - and that's a lovely feeling.
Q: You'll also be conducting portfolio reviews. What are some specific things you look for when reviewing a portfolio?
A: Strong start, strong finish.
Q: Do you have any tips for someone who is looking to put together a portfolio?
A: People don't want to read the same sentence fifty times.
Q: You're also a member of In-Public. How has being a member of this collective helped or benefited your work?
A: I've received lots of constructive criticism from photographers that I respect. It has given me exposure, confidence and self-assurance.
Q: Is there anything else that you'd like the reader of the Leica Camera Blog to know?
A: I'm working on a book of my photographs that will definitely be published in 2015.
Thank you for your time, Matt!
- Leica Internet Team
See the full lineup of Leica Camera's Photography Unplugged events at Photomonth here. Connect with Matt on his website, Twitter and Facebook.

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A street photographer born in Harrow, North West London, in 1974, Matt Stuart has been shooting on the street with Leica cameras since 1996. Matt has been part of numerous solo & group exhibitions and was included in "Street Photography Now" published by Thames & Hudson in 2010.

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It isn't news that the millions of easy-to-use cameras made over the last hundred years and the great social hunger for images - what is photography if not a name for propulsive image consumerism? - have licensed a vast and wanton accumulation of pictures of everyday life as a defining aspect of what we call our modernity. It also isn't news that in the foil of that wanton accumulation are skilled observers who consistently yield large quantities of insightful pictures from lived experience, both as amateurs and professionals.

A much smaller number of photographers resist accumulation outright, using photo-technology to make rarities as against the prolix whole. A very small number embrace both proliferation and rarity as ways of knowing the world through photography, and excel at both. The career of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004, shown at left), whose retrospective at the High Museum of Art runs through May 29, exemplifies the irresolutions that attend a vast output containing a great many images of singular power, all in witness to one of the most volatile eras in human history.

Cartier-Bresson's career is more or less divisible into two periods (or three if we count the drawings to which he dedicated himself for the last 30 years of his life, which are not included in the exhibition): before World War II, when visual play shaped the equivalent of poetic truth, and after it, when he folded visual play into a larger seriousness, namely a deep knowledge of his own historical epoch and its defining events. His observational practice is virtuosic throughout and, in contrast to the preoccupation among many artists today, not marked by an anxiety over repetition of one's strengths, or self-reinvention.

Cartier-Bresson's observational practice goes by the name "the decisive moment," after the English-language title of his seminal 1952 book, "Images à la Sauvette" - a deliberately ambiguous French expression connoting a nimble, slightly renegade and vaguely illicit way of doing things, colloquially used to describe selling items on the street. A more faithful English translation of the title might have been "Images on the Sly."

On one level, "the decisive moment" describes what might be called right timing, the particular success that stems from a picture having been plucked at just the right instant from a flow of instants and other possible pictures. That time should be so conceived owes in no small measure to what photographs made with fast shutters allow us to see, inasmuch as the idea of an ongoing stream of moments runs counter to a philosophical distinction reaching back to antiquity between time as a singular movement or force, a kind of flowing river (to paraphrase Heraclitus), and time as an array of isolated events, a kind of vast rainfall or "a swirl of atoms in the void," as Democritus imagined.

In the late 1920s, when Cartier-Bresson began to teach himself photography, the investigation of what time looks like had opened onto a new era with the development of professional 35mm cameras, in particular the Leica - Cartier-Bresson's camera of choice from 1931 onward - offering a fast shutter in a small body, excellent optics and great fluidity of operation. The camera's keen responsiveness made the interpretation of incomplete action as much a part of photographic practice as the judicious severance of space associated with framing, and the active or passive organization of temporal and spatial fragments known coarsely as composition.

In the hands of a young and mischievous observer like Cartier-Bresson, the Leica allowed for a distinctly spontaneous type of visual exploration. The result - not only for Cartier-Bresson but for Martin Munkácsi, André Kertész, Erich Salomon, Walker Evans and many other early adopters - was a fresh visuality in which planning and improvisation, intention and chance are united if not altogether fused problems.

As important as the camera was in enabling a new form of thinking about images, Cartier-Bresson's articulation of the ways that photographs can seem to abduct time and capture events was less a technological discovery than a narrative one. In this sense, the decisive moment is essentially the marriage of climax and contingency in the still image, when the whole array of the picture's elements all fall into captivating alignment: its shapes and lines describe a geometric harmony, its activity has reached a peak or a turn, and the photographer's unfolding consciousness of a situation seems wholly in sync with the subject unfolding.

Many of Cartier-Bresson's early and most famous pictures, made between 1931 and 1934 and collected in the opening gallery of the exhibit, spill over with caprice, joy and rebellion, their alignments offered as potent encounters with the unexpected in pedestrian locations. We find ourselves, for example, in Valencia, Spain, where a child is going through a small ecstasy: head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth parted, arms splayed, he dwells in what seems an inner vastness that is connected - or more mysteriously, caused - by the light touch of his fingers to a graphic field of scratches and abrasions, as if from a universe of searching left by unseen hands. Of course we know also that this is play and not merely rapture (would that we knew mere rapture), and that the marks describe not some cosmic phasm but a dilapidated wall, tightly framed to create a hyper-stage lacking both depth and ground. Key to the picture is the continuous displacement between its explicable and inexplicable elements, the photographer having created a strangely neutralized zone for a charged event.

Or to take another picture from this period (at left), Cartier-Bresson locates us in Madrid in 1933, in a plaza some distance from a mysterious wall. I know of no better reading of this picture than the one by Arthur Danto in a 1987 piece in The Nation magazine, written in connection with that year's Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work":

"The wall is punctuated by windows of various sizes, small in proportion to the wall itself, and seemingly distributed randomly across its surface; it is impossible to infer the internal architecture of the building from the evidence of these openings. Indeed, the wall looks like a rampart of some sort, its original purpose subverted by squatters on the other side who punched holes here and there, opening the flat expanse that is the foreground of the picture.

"The array of square windows conveys the sense of meaning, much in the way in which, though the analogy is forced and anachronistic, the holes in a punch card imply that with the right device the card could yield a piece of information. Or the squares dance across the surface as if in a ready-made counterpart to [Piet Mondrian's] 'Broadway Boogie-Woogie.' Or the tiny squares look like the square notes in Gregorian notation, as if someone had composed a chant in the medium of windows. I have often wondered what the building was and whether it still stands, and though only an eye driven by certain beliefs and attitudes could have been sensitive to its overtones, it could have been the motif of a still photograph made by a heavy camera, requiring a tripod. But at the bottom of the picture is the crowd of men and boys - I count fourteen - whose bodies are sheared off, in many cases, by the bottom edge of the picture, so that we are conscious, mainly, of the rhythm of their heads, which echoes the rhythm of the windows, like the accompaniment, in another clef, of treble harmonies. Or it is like two voices in an intricate fugue of heads and windows. Or it is as if the heads and windows were different forms of the same thing, or metaphors for one another - and in at least two cases one has to look carefully to see whether a certain dark shape is head or window. Yet this is not some formal exercise; the heads and windows are too insistently in resonance with one another for us not to seek a meaning our rational self denies can be there. The image is clotted with magical possibilities, and it seems to force an opening into the mind of the artist if not the mind of the world - one can barely tear oneself away from the riddles it poses. The entire exhibition is a set of traps for the interpretive resources of the eye, but Madrid 1933 has the power of a great musical questioning."

Following the by now standard photo-historical account, the High exhibition links the complexity of these early pictures - their volatile combinations of declaration and furtiveness, élan and reticence - to Cartier-Bresson's known interest in surrealism. To some extent the connection is fair: when I began teaching myself to photograph seriously some 25 years ago, Cartier-Bresson's pictures showed me that the choice to live in seeing (as I put it to myself at the time) is a choice to question and penetrate through the commonplace. Yet to ascribe this photographer's early efforts to surrealism strikes me as limited, inasmuch as he was less occupied with asserting countervailing realities beneath or within appearances than with the poetic implications of displacement ( dépaysement) in a distinctly shared reality.

As a young artist, he quickly grasped that the act of removing things from their context and putting them into unexpected relations is not incidental but fundamental to photographic imagination and - as he would spend the better part of his career investigating in his journalism - what we call knowledge by way of photographs. He understood as well as any photographer ever has that photography is a non-literal art with an extraordinary capacity to ventriloquize the literal, an indirect art masked in directness, a circumstantial art of contingent truths passing as necessary truths and vice versa.

The greater part of "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century" is dedicated to negotiating the photographer's work following World War II, and it is organized schematically according to broad themes using pictures from the 1940s through the 1980s: Old Worlds (East, West, France), New Worlds (USA, USSR), Portraits, Beauty, Encounters and Gatherings, as well as discrete projects on Dessau, Germany (1945), China's "Great Leap Forward" (1958) and the Banker's Trust Company of New York (1960). The show closes with a coda that samples each of these themes.

In a nutshell, the exhibition's thesis is that Cartier-Bresson set down the rules of two games with one key discovery, his journalism expanding the relevance of the decisive moment beyond the province of art alone, in effect proving that the poetics of photographic experiment also formed a poetics of visual non-fiction. What changes is the addition of one more task to the already demanding problem of creating a halted synchrony of timing, framing and composition from a moving world (whose success is precisely not to negate movement but to confirm and elaborate it), namely the task of choosing a socially significant event and communicating it at the peak of its significance. Cartier-Bresson's own formulation of the decisive moment thus joins reportorial and aesthetic acuities: "To photograph is the simultaneous recognition of the significance of an event and the rigorous organization of forms that convey it properly."

The show includes a great many superlative examples of just such simultaneous recognition, albeit with some surprising omissions. Most notable of these is the omission of Cartier-Bresson's 1950 photograph from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, in which he addresses hunger in newly independent India. The historical background for the picture is the devastating impact of British colonial rule on the availability of food in India: between 1770 and 1947 India suffered 40 famines, which claimed an estimated 60 million lives, including the Bengal famine of 1943-44, which killed approximately 4 million.

Cartier-Bresson's photograph (at left) comes at the issue in an unusual way. Against what I imagine many photographers would do in this situation, he does not place the woman and child in the middle of the frame, but instead organizes a loop of associations set along its borders: the fingers of the woman's cradling hand rhyme with the prominent rib cage of the child, which in turn rhymes with the shadows of the palm fronds on the dry ground, which then rhymes with the spokes of the wagon wheel, bringing the eye back to the woman's fingers.

The picture is replete with religious and political symbolism particular to India. The wheel is an ancient Hindu symbol for the cosmology of reincarnation (known in Sanskrit as samasara-chakra, or the wheel of suffering), and at the same time is a symbol of the modern Indian state, appearing in the center of its flag. The hand recalls the various ritual hand gestures ( mudras) that are understood as seals of authenticity of Indian religious practices, but also recalls the open palm with closed fingers, symbol of the Indian National Congress, which led the country to independence and remains its institutional party to this day.

The picture registers grinding suffering as a spiritual recurrence and also a political exigency, the legacy of harsh colonial rule and an urgent political problem for which the dominant party - whose open palm with closed fingers has been literally turned over and pried open in the picture - offers little succor. With remarkable economy and precision, the picture spins out facts and inferences that by turns focus and strew attention to the concrete actuality of hunger as experienced in the newly postcolonial context.

In many ways this picture models what is broadly true about Cartier-Bresson's postwar work: against the sense of excision that characterized his work from the 1930s - what MOMA curator Peter Galassi in his fine catalogue essay terms a "ripping [of images] from the fabric of the world" - now we encounter characters given meaning and purpose by an encompassing and explanatory social whole. The arch severance of time and place at the heart of "the decisive moment" no longer reads as severance, but the opposite: again and again we encounter what seem like self-complete worlds revealed with a subtle and dynamic clarity, worlds that are robust, rewarding to look at, plausibly entire.

The resulting images are elegant, refined and, above all, humanistic. They reassure, even when the news they contain may be bad. In this show, seeing decades of impeccably wrought pictures issued in disciplined streams makes clear that this pervasive elegance was for Cartier-Bresson a form of journalistic disinterest, a respectably professional method of "covering" any state of affairs anywhere.

But this very professionalism raises a host of questions about Cartier-Bresson's contribution and legacy as a journalist. The exhibition's thematic groupings make clear that he understood himself as a reporter in an expansive sense. Very much concerned with the material facts of the world, he also understood his historical moment as a fulcrum between tradition and modernity, and constantly interpreted new worlds in the context of old ones, and old ones as venerable but also vulnerable. In this sense, he was not a newsman so much as an astute traveler through human and newsworthy events.

There is also a palpable romanticism in his sensitivity and sentimentality in his empathy - not a flamboyant romanticism, but an oddly impartial one that tends to mute the distinctness of his extraordinary range of subjects. More than this, with very few exceptions, his oeuvre contains little conflict and almost no violence, though he produced perhaps the most sustained global account of the most violent century in human history of any photographer of his generation.

What are we to make of this bias? Does Cartier-Bresson's commitment to a harmony of forms - of a world in dynamic flux but always in balance, in which grace courses through and around suffering and ultimately redeems it - does this commitment amount to virtuous journalism or amoral journalism or naive journalism, and just what is the difference anyway? Does his hopefulness unwittingly shelter dissimulation and lies? What happens if we look at his output without the prepossessing assurance that artistic mastery underwrites the pictures' interpretive claims?

One case in point is his work in the immediate aftermath of the war, in the second section of the High exhibition, "After the War, End of an Era." Just after war broke out in 1939, Cartier-Bresson joined the cinematographic unit of the Third French Army, where he filmed training exercises and the movement of troops along the Maginot Line. In June 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and remained a prisoner of war in Germany for almost three years, doing hard labor in a variety of jobs. After two unsuccessful tries, he escaped in the spring of 1943 and returned to France. He photographed the liberation of Paris in August 1944, and in September he managed to obtain authorization from the French Cinema Board to make a documentary in the spring of 1945 on the return of French prisoners and deportees, with funds provided by the U.S. Office of War Information. U.S. Army cameramen handled the filming, leaving Cartier-Bresson free to photograph. "Le Retour" ("The Return") premiered on the opening night of Cartier-Bresson's solo exhibition at MOMA in 1947 - an exhibition originally planned to commemorate his life's work following rumors that he had been killed in the war.

He made what turned out to be his most important pictures of liberation and its aftermath in Dessau, Germany, in April 1945. The city had been home to Junkers Aircraft, which built a substantial part of the Nazi air fleet, and to a camp for Jewish slave labor. The aftermath of genocide was not Cartier-Bresson's concern, but rather the tribulations of displaced civilians. This exhibition shows a very small number of his Dessau images, treating his well-known photograph of a woman confronting an accused informer (above) as emblematic of the whole. (Many more Dessau images appear in the volume "Scrap Book: Photographs 1932-1946," which I consider the best book of Cartier-Bresson's work.)

Standing in the street between a densely packed, glowering crowd of townspeople and the provisional military authority seated at a plain wooden table, the accusing woman bares her teeth in scorn, her shoulders and arms thrown back, her gaze intense, while the accused woman looks down with slightly bowed head, partly steeled to the event and partly dazed. The seated authority figure is impassive, fingering his pen, while the crowd is riveted. Made at what could be called the dramatic peak of the event, it is a highly ambiguous picture, without a dénouement. A cameraman standing next to Cartier-Bresson filmed the same scene, which appears in "Le Retour" as a passing incident, without anything like the suspense of the still image.

The film reveals that the accusing woman in the next instant strikes the accused, and a series of photographs that Cartier-Bresson made just afterward - not shown in the film or the current exhibition - reveals that the accused woman was paraded down the street and publicly whipped by the accusing woman, with others whipped and beaten by yet other accusers.

By itself, the iconic image suggests a controlled and limited confrontation mediated by a controlling authority (behind whom the photographer has positioned himself), when the situation was in fact quite volatile and predominantly about vigilante justice. Or to put it differently, we are looking at citizens negotiating the categories of victim, bystander and perpetrator in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi regime's defeat - a process that still continues in Germany and across Europe. By isolating and publicly punishing particular collaborators, the crowd effectively proclaims its own lack of guilt: sins have been transferred to an individual, who like the ancient scapegoat is driven into the wilderness.

Even with a laborious effort at reconstruction, however, the whole situation in Dessau simply isn't clear, and I venture that this is because Cartier-Bresson as a journalist didn't prioritize a searching analysis of conflict. The exhibition bears out several other instances.

Cartier-Bresson missed the main events of the historic 1947 partition of India, which uprooted more than 12 million people and resulted in the deaths of a million in acts of extraordinary barbarity. Only passingly interested in the displacements on the subcontinent, he made two short visits to the largest Indian refugee camp, at Kurukshetra north of Delhi, which held some 300,000 people, where he made a single, remarkable photograph of men at calisthenics (included in the exhibition) that does not address anything like the scope of the humanitarian crisis. By accident, Cartier-Bresson was in Delhi when Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, and produced a trenchant account of the aftermath (only partly represented in the exhibition), but one that concentrates on the unity of the Indian people in grief rather than on the religious and political schisms that led to the murder.

Likewise in 1958, Cartier-Bresson traveled to China to photograph the "Great Leap Forward." Escorted and admittedly limited by the authorities, he produced a set of pictures astutely seen and rich in the textures of events, but deeply misleading. Seduced by the pageantry of government-sponsored spectacle on the one hand and the poetry of everyday life on the other, he made little sustained investigation of industrialization and rural collectivization, much less the many problems attending the initiative - food rationing, the forcing of peasants into agricultural collectives, vast (and failed) backyard steel production, the casualties involved in new irrigation construction, low crop yields as a result of untested agricultural practices, food deprivation and mass starvation, the forced export of scarce grain supplies, political repression and punishment for failure to meet production quotas, forced labor, natural disasters and much else.

Altogether, as many as 45 million people are estimated to have died in the "Great Leap," but Cartier-Bresson's pictures suggest no such devastation. Indeed, they bear more than a passing resemblance to official Chinese government motivational posters - turning Life magazine, which published a 20-page spread of Cartier-Bresson's photos in January 1959, into an unwitting organ of Communist propaganda, even as the magazine thought it was seeing through the propaganda and as Cartier-Bresson apparently considered himself a non-aligned figure in the Cold War, humanizing the demonized Eastern other of the West's political consciousness.

A further example of the equivocations in Cartier-Bresson's journalism is his handling of the May 1968 protests in Paris. He chose to leave the country that month to attend an opening of his new work at MOMA, much of it distinctly saccharine imagery about France. He returned to Paris in June at the tail end of the demonstrations - represented here in a single cogent image of the protests - but attempted nothing like sustained investigation of what was immediately understood as a defining moment in postwar Europe.

All of this is not to say that Cartier-Bresson's journalism entirely lacks bite. Many of his images of American life in the 1950s have a wry edge to them, as for example his photo of a New York television studio that is, if anything, more sarcastic than a similar image by Robert Frank in "The Americans." Similarly, his pictures of the Banker's Trust Company offer a subtly captious view of American corporate culture, rife with conformity and loneliness.

Altogether, the High exhibition shows that the dialectic of Cartier-Bresson's life's work ruptures normative distinctions between art and journalism. Artistic sophistication is both the seed for and the kernel within his visual reporting; visual history as he offers it is not so clearly distinguished from visual literature; and in both cases, photographs embroil us in a chain of ratifications that is also the source of error.

Wrestling with Cartier-Bresson's work in the introduction to the 1982 French-language "Photo Poche" volume on the photographer, Jean Claire writes:

"The circumstantial photograph, the document, the machine-like shot never places us before anything other than a sense of 'something once occurred,' the feeling of a loss or of a trick played on us, whereas the photograph of 'the photographer' instead slips into us a sense of 'something is continuing to happen' mixed with a sense of 'what keeps happening in the picture is what it was' as it morphs into 'that really is what it was!' - and all of this, for a moment, spreads through us a feeling close to the relief and satisfaction given by the work of art."

And after the moment of satisfaction passes? It seems that the decisive moment as a method works not just on the level of manifestation but also of implication, and that Cartier-Bresson's pictures expose things they do not exactly set out to show. The clear and insistent elegance we behold is not elegance alone and not for its own sake, but a mysterious rhyme for the vast suffering and opaque lessons of the modern century.
I wish to thank Dr. Jeff Fort of the University of California-Davis for his valuable assistance with the nuances of the French texts I consulted.

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Review: "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century," a major retrospective at High Museum - ARTS ATL

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It isn't news that the millions of easy-to-use cameras made over the last hundred years and the great social hunger for images - what is photography if not a name for propulsive image consumerism? - have licensed a vast and wanton accumulation of pictures of everyday life as a defining aspect of what we call our modernity.

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Diane Arbus was everywhere in New York between 1956 and 1962. On the streets and in Central Park, on the subway, in movie theatres and diners, on Coney Island and in New Jersey homes, in grim apartments, in revue dressing rooms, at the circus and in the morgue. With her 35mm camera and her eye, her ability to confront, cajole and to seduce, her talent was as much one of gaining trust - or at least something more than tacit refusal - from her subjects.

Diane Arbus, In the Beginning focuses on these first eight years of her work as an independent photographer, following over a decade in the fashion photography business, where she and her husband Allan Arbus worked together, he as photographer, she as stylist and art director. The exhibition, which has travelled to the Hayward from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is filled with strange encounters, not least with ordinary people. Just as German photographer August Sander never reduced his subjects to their roles (some of them appear to have managed that without any outside help), so life spills out of Arbus's images.

Life spills out of them ... Boy stepping off the curb, NYC 1957-58, by Diane Arbus. Photograph: The Estate of Diane Arbus

More than provoking mere curiosity, Arbus teases our imaginations. Looking at her images we invent backstories and narratives we can never be sure of. She makes us stop and look, just as she did. The Santa Claus on the street, his beard awry, stock-still and somehow tragic as a woman passes by. The woman pausing on the sidewalk, the old couple on the park bench. What went through Arbus's mind about their lives? What went through theirs as they paused for her? We can't know. Everyone has a story to tell but we don't hear it, though she makes us know it is there.

Arbus makes everyone exceptional, even if she only met them for as long as it took to take a picture. The stern, impatient woman in white fur with a cigarette, one hand on her hip, haloed by festive Christmas lights. Miss Makrina, a Russian midget, mopping her kitchen floor, looking up and smiling broadly. A young man with a greasy paper bag on Coney Island, kids stepping on and off the kerb. The boy under the low-slung lights in the pool hall, the woman on the street with her eyes closed, daylight examining her face. Even as they tumble, each image makes me stop, then makes me want to go both backwards and forwards, searching for something I'm not sure of. The upper galleries of the Hayward are a forest of pillars, with images hung on their broader faces, one on either side. Weaving between them, we also weave our stories of an imaginary mid-century New York. Each step is a surprise.

Arbus seemed to arrive almost fully formed as a photographer, after a few private lessons with Lisette Model, an Austrian émigré photographer who had studied music under Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and painting in Paris under the tutelage of André Lhote (who numbered Henri Cartier-Bresson among his other students). Although maintaining a friendship with Model for the rest of her life, Arbus quickly found her own way.

More subtle and strange than we imagine ... Lady on a bus, NYC 1957 by Diane Arbus. Photograph: The Estate of Diane Arbus

As much as anything else, it was as if she had been waiting to give herself permission to begin. Arbus's images, and her approach, have over the past half century insinuated themselves into our mental landscape. We know her best as the photographer of the stooping giant in the living room, the spooky, identical twin sisters in their matching outfits, drag queens (referred to, quaintly, as "female impersonators"), the grimacing kid with the rictus grin and the toy hand grenade; the boy in the straw boater with the pro-Vietnam war badges, but there was a great deal more to her, more subtlety, more strangeness than these.

A movie usher in his cap, long coat and braid, hovering behind the rope in the cramped foyer. The raking seats of a 42ndStreet movie theatre, with the smoke-filled cone of light gouging the darkness. Arbus shot the images on the screen too: a closeup of a couple kissing (from the movie Baby Doll), a still from a Mighty Mouse cartoon, with a moustachioed cowboy, his sombrero full of arrows. A woman screaming, blood all over her hands. Sometimes there is a macabre humour at play. A headstone at the absurdly named Bide-a-Wee cemetery in Wantagh, NY has the single word Killer on the stone. Maybe it is a pet cemetery. Knowing would spoil the fun. The title doesn't say. Sometimes Arbus's titles are as redolent as any Tom Waits song - The Madman from Massachusetts in an Empty Bar, NYC; Hezekiah Trambles, "The Jungle Creep", on stage at Hubert's Museum - or like something from Scott Fitzgerald - Miss Marian Seymour Dancing with Baron Theo Von Roth at the Grand Opera Ball.

Sometimes a little more background would be useful. Arbus's drag performers, backstage, putting on lipstick, sitting around, are mostly members of the Jewel Box Revue, a troupe of "25 Men and a Girl" that successfully toured the country, to mostly straight audiences, for three decades from 1939 onwards. The one girl was a black lesbian drag king.

There is so much here. Fake rocks on wheeled pallets at Disneyland in California. A wax museum axe murderer at Coney Island, a girl on the street in New York, looking up. The quotidian and the extraordinary collide, again and again. The original exhibition is augmented at the Hayward by a number of later, mostly better-known square-format images, shot between 1962 and 1970 and first printed as an edition, A Box of Ten Photographs, in 1970. The following year Arbus, who suffered severe bouts of depression (she was probably bipolar) killed herself. The world goes on, teeming with stories and individuals, people stepping on and off the kerb.

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Diane Arbus: In the Beginning review - a genius who made every picture a story

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Diane Arbus was everywhere in New York between 1956 and 1962. On the streets and in Central Park, on the subway, in movie theatres and diners, on Coney Island and in New Jersey homes, in grim apartments, in revue dressing rooms, at the circus and in the morgue.

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"A challenged world is an alert world" is how International Women's Day introduced its 2021 theme: choose to challenge. This powerful call to action is a reminder that only by actively challenging bias and celebrating women's achievements can gender parity be achieved.

Here, we look back at brands that have used their influence to educate, inspire, empower, and ultimately lay the foundations for a more equal society.

Barbie and Dove challenge stereotypical representations

2019 UK research surfaced that representations of female bodies in advertising caused nearly a quarter of women to feel ashamed about the way they looked. Meanwhile, in the US, personal care brand Dove found that 70% of women didn't see themselves represented in the media. Stereotypical representations of women in advertising have been proven to limit them in all areas of life - from the professional to the personal. Through Mindshare, Dove partnered stock image website Getty Images and Girlgaze, a global community of female and non-binary creatives, to launch Project #ShowUs and effect systemic change.

Through Girlgaze, it recruited more than 300 photographers and produced over 5,000 images. Then, it made this collection of authentic, diverse female representations - inclusive of female-identifying and non-binary individuals - available to media and advertisers on Getty. Since the launch of Project #ShowUs, 1,300 companies across more than 40 countries have downloaded over 15,000 images from the library. As a result, Getty was inspired to increase women in its workforce by 35%, and Girlgaze was able to create a global jobs platform ensuring gender parity.

In 2018, toy brand Barbie started to make its doll range more diverse and representative of real women's careers and ambitions. Global campaign Imagine the Possibilities marked the shift to a new commitment to empower young girls and saw the introduction of Petite, Curvy and Tall Barbies. Building on this purpose, in 2019 Barbie continued to challenge stereotypes with the Dream Gap Project Fund, which raised money for organisations invested in girl empowerment. It created two new lines of dolls - one representing women role models from all over the world, the other celebrating careers in areas that are still underrepresented by women - and donated $1 from each doll sold to its partner organisations.

Launched to coincide with Barbie's 60th anniversary, the campaign, led by BBDO San Francisco, raised $250,000 in donations.

SCB and ŠKODA challenge inequality

As Dove found, limited representation leads to limited opportunities. In the UAE, Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) took head-on one of the most crippling limitations faced by women: the pay gap. In particular, SCB focused on the art world, where women artists are paid 47.6% less than their male counterparts. The bank launched an exhibition which featured the work of 19 female artists, but with each canvas 47.6% incomplete to make the magnitude of the pay gap impossible to ignore.

The campaign, through TBWA\RAAD, generated $1.4m in media coverage. The exhibition attracted 100,000 visitors, of which 7,500 signed a pledge for the gender pay gap to end.

Back in 2018, ŠKODA UK had shown its commitment to gender equality through #ThisIsOurTime. Built on a partnership with female cycling team Donnons des Elles au Vélo J-1, the campaign aimed to provoke conversations about the absence of a female Tour the France. For the initiative's second year, the auto brand partnered sports app Strava to launch a virtual challenge that encouraged the public to cycle the Tour de France course alongside the women's team. The work of Ogilvy UK, the cycle for gender equality attracted 24,000 cyclists worldwide.

Harvey Nichols and L'Oréal Paris celebrate women's achievements

In 1912, UK department store Harvey Nichols found itself at the very centre of the suffragette movement as its London store's windows were smashed by protesters. When, over a century later, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan urged department stores to create a window display to commemorate women's rights history for the 2018 Fashion Week, Harvey Nichols jumped at the chance. In a bid to celebrate the suffragettes' movement and its victories, it invited women to smash its flagship store's windows on the eve of Fashion Week, in the presence of national TV crews, social media influencers and photographers. Influential women's rights personalities took part, with none other than activist Emmeline Pankhurst's great-granddaughter symbolically delivering the first blow.

Led by Fanclub PR and TBWA London, the initiative generated 75 pieces of media coverage and was reported on by the country's most influential outlets. Building on its heritage, Harvey Nichols continues to support the cause of gender equality through a partnership with Smart Works, a charity helping women access clothing and training to enter the workplace.

Beauty brand L'Oréal Paris focused on an often overlooked kind of bias: gender-based ageism. In keeping with its belief that every woman is 'worth it', the brand set out to celebrate women over 50, who suffer from lack of representation in the media. Partnering with fashion magazine Vogue, L'Oréal created The Non-Issue: a special edition made by and for women over 50. The magazine celebrated the talent and achievements of remarkable women, from L'Oréal brand ambassadors such as Jane Fonda and Helen Mirren, to war correspondent Christiane Amanpour and comedian Jennifer Saunders.

The campaign, through McCann London and Paris, organically reached 3.9 million people offline and 19 million online. Its impact on the fashion industry lived on, with Vogue continuing to feature over-50 women on its covers.

Fuelling the virtuous cycle

Representation is at the root of gender bias: if it's lacking, it leads to a lack of opportunities, if it's stereotypical, it limits all aspects of women's life. By understanding this, these brands decided to turn the tide, using equal representation to challenge bias and turn the vicious cycle into a virtuous one.

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Brands that chose to challenge: advertising's role in the fight for gender parity | WARC

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"A challenged world is an alert world" is how International Women's Day introduced its 2021 theme: choose to challenge. This powerful call to action is a reminder that only by actively challenging bias and celebrating women's achievements can gender parity be achieved.

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Sexist ads were widespread in the '70s, at the same time feminists were championing the women's liberation movement and lobbying for women's equal rights.

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They must have been mad men: The horrendously sexist vintage ads you won't believe were ever made

Volkswagen, Drummond sweaters and Kellogg's all feature in collection

The men grope their wives, tread on them and blow smoke in their faces

One ad for a postage meter asks: 'Is it always illegal to kill a woman?'

If you look back wistfully at the Sixties and wish you were there, perhaps it's worth refreshing your memory.

These outrageous adverts were the norm - with men blowing smoke in their wives' faces, stepping on their heads and groping them while they clean the house.

Everything from Volkswagen cars to Kellogg's cereals used a little everyday sexism to brighten up their brands in a time when political correctness wasn't even dreamed up.

In fact, the phrase 'politically correct' only gained its current meaning in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

That meant these advertisers felt free to be as offensive as they liked - depicting women being spanked and babies telling their mothers to smoke Marlboro cigarettes.

And the spirit of TV hit Mad Men is alive and well in one poster for Van Heusen ties, which shows a wife on her knees delivering breakfast with the bold claim: 'Show her it's a man's world'.

Some of the adverts are simply funny, like the Gillette razor so safe it's pictured being used by a baby.

But others would now be downright irresponsible: 'For a better start in life, start Cola earlier!'

The advert for Volkswagen boasts of the firm's hard-wearing cars, beginning simply: 'Women are soft and gentle, but they hit things'.

And one for Drummond sweaters proclaims: 'Indoors women are useful - even pleasant. On a mountain they are something of a drag'.

The vintage pieces look shockingly out of date now, but they will be far from the last adverts to be deemed sexist.

Last year an advert for Renault cars was banned in Britain for having a little too much 'va va voom' - in other words, multiple close-ups on the breasts and bottoms of burlesque dancers.

And a U.S. commercial for hair removal product Veet prompted outrage earlier this month by suggesting women were manly if they chose to keep their body hair.

Women do not have the monopoly on being offended, however.

A Samsung TV advert last year infuriated some customers who claimed its depiction of lazy, hairy 'slobs' was unfair to the world's men.

The controversy was a lesson in there being no such thing as bad publicity, however - as despite being slammed as 'feminist porn' it got more than 10million hits on YouTube.

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Horrendously sexist vintage ads you won't believe were made

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Volkswagen, Drummond sweaters and Kellogg's all feature in collection The men grope their wives, tread on them and blow smoke in their faces One ad for a postage meter asks: 'Is it always illegal to kill a woman?' If you look back wistfully at the Sixties and wish you were there, perhaps it's worth refreshing your memory.

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Sexist advertising rarely flies these days, although it definitely still happens (cue Audi's 2017 ad that suggested finding a wife was just like buying a car. It's all property! Which men own!). Yes, that occurred in 2017 - well after 'feminist' had become a household term - even if some people still think of it as a "bad word".

But when these flagrant displays of sexism do occur today, you can be sure that people will- thankfully! - speak out about it. Throughout time, though, many ads geared toward women or femme-presenting people have utilized straight-up shaming techniques to sell products.

It's been said before, but it's worth repeating: Many advertisements, devised by huge, money-hungry corporations, are designed to "manipulate our deepest fears and insecurities to make us part with our cash," says . And they're not wrong. The worst part? It's been going on since, well, forever.

According to Cynthia Petrovic, an artist and collector of vintage advertisements, all the older adds geared toward women were crafted to make them feel bad about something - usually their physical appearance.

She says, "The most common premise is that a woman does not want to offend a man. These ads speculate about whether your husband is going to walk out on you because you're not using a feminine hygiene product or your scalp smells when you're dancing or you have undie odor."

Today we deal with "woke ads" (which perhaps aren't really woke at all) or ads that are sorely lacking in diversity - but vintage advertisements take the cake.

Says Petrovic, "I noticed a fever pitch building up during the 1930s. By the late '30s, the advertisers were on a roll. You open up any of these magazines now, and you burst out laughing. But during World War II, I would say about 80 percent of those ads that manipulate you, the ones that say you stink or you're not socially acceptable on some level, vanished."

Maybe someone somewhere decided to figure out that shaming your customers isn't the best idea? Just an idea.

Retro ads were not just sexist AF, they lacked total diversity.

Whether it came down to blaming women for their husband's walking out or telling women that they're not skinny enough, vintage ads were brutal - cruel, sexist, and mind-numbingly inaccurate.

Not to mention the fact that most of the ads are geared toward white women. So let's look at some of the worst offenders out there, from about 1880-the 1960s.

Seeking high glamour? Try the "toilet" mask....

...because that sounds totally alluring.

The "toilet mask" is one of the most ridiculous names we've ever heard - but it's not as absurd as the way it actually works. The toilet mask, which purifies the complexion (who knows, right?) is strapped to the head like a face glove a.k.a. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Hard pass on the toilet face glove.

More "toilet" beauty...but this time, it's for nuns!

Because even nuns need to feel about how they smell, apparently.

This isn't a "makeup" ad per se, but this 1880s "Nicer nun" ad targets nuns who want to smell like "toilet soap, soap, and perfume." All of which sounds weirdly...not super holy? We're not sure what the difference between "toilet soap" and "soap" means but we're not entirely sure we want to find out, either.

If men want a "natural look"...

Then give it to them. Because who cares what a woman wants?

In this creeptastic ad for Seventeen Cosmetics, we see the dauntingly absurd effects of patriarchal culture: Men approving the kind of looks they seek in a woman. This ad, which grossly advertises a "young" look, tells women to wear "natural" makeup. Because men like it better. Sigh.

Be "his" pinup girl...

...with this sexist face powder.

Nothing screams sexy like an ad that tells you to wear face powder so that a man can call you "his' pinup girl. Obviously, pinup girls are glamorous - many of them representing sexual and aesthetic autonomy - but this ad represents anything but.

Sadly, this ad's technique is like everything else: It sells you products to make you seem desirable...to men.

One more story about a man...

...and why you should buy four of Elizabeth Arden's lipstick shades.

Today, this ad might seem downright vulgar, but to our mothers or grandmother's this was par for the course. Imagine being inundated with messaging that tells you your red lipstick is what brings all the boys to the yard?

This ad goes right for it, with a length tome about a guy finding himself 'fascinated' with a woman because the " sensitive understatement " that is her lipstick.

Don't let your beauty "dim"...

or else he won't like you anymore.

When you're chilling out, lounging outside in the sun or wind, talking to the judgemental AF menfolk, the LAST thing you want is for your beauty to "dim." Oh, the horror!

To prevent that tragedy from happening, this ad posits that women use Manon Lescaut's face powder, which helps ascertain that no man will walk out on you because of your ugly skin.

Want to measure all your flaws?

Simply slip this murder device onto your skull.

Lord knows only a man could have created such a horrifying " hellraiser nightmare " contraption. You can thank Max Factor for bringing this Frankenstein's monster to life - and forcing women to wear it on their heads, all to find out how imperfect they are.

So that "corrective" makeup can be applied "promptly."

Beige racism.

Not only were these ads sexist, but they were also racist!

Take a look at this: This 1960s ad sings the praises of "beige" face makeup as if it's a brilliant new idea that beauty technicians came up with.

Hint: "Beige" is an actual, natural skin-tone (huge shocker, we know!) - not some invented color used to make white women feel better. PS: It isn't cool to glamorize or fetishize someone's natural skin color.

Gee, men sure hate smelly hair...

So you'd better fix that, pronto.

In this ridiculous ad for "Gee, your hair smells terrific," this lady hits the man jackpot when her That '70s Show-looking boyfriend smells her hair - and APPROVES!

This ad is pretty ridiculous if we say so ourselves - precisely because it suggests you'll find love if your hair smells good. Yet another way of saying, "You're only good enough if you buy our products."

Single and lonely?

You're probably wearing too much makeup!

According to this ad, if you're wearing "conspicuous makeup," Dick just might not like you (and yes, we fully agree that there's a major double entendre here).

The thing is, all of these vintage ads tell to different things - and they're not very inconspicuous about it: They want you to wear more makeup OR less makeup, all in an effort to get a man.

What do your lips say about you?

Are they good enough to keep a man?

In this bizarre "lip tester" ad, women are told what sort of person they are - according to the lip imprint they make on a napkin.

Of course, no ad would be complete without men on standby, waiting to point out their failures or accomplishments as human beings! Also, take a peek at Hamburger lips, which says that 'this girl usually looks something like a meatball.' Oh, the levels of horror.

Do men hate the sight of you?

Try this "yeast."

While this magical boob-growing yeast isn't exactly a type of makeup, it is sold a physical 'enhancement' product, so we're gonna count it.

What's so blatantly cruel about this ad is that it not only insults a woman's totally normal body type, it's built on the idea that you have to change if men "hate the sight of you." Damn. And we thought these were simpler times...

Are men not kissing you anymore?

Try this lipstick that magically changes everything.

If a man says things like "your lipstick is too red and smeary," you should probably kick that guy out of your house. But in 1950s America, this sort of statement was totally normalized - at least by (presumably male) advertising agencies.

In this ad, a woman solves her man problem by switching her lipstick - and, well, sigh.

Pink is for girls.

So buy this pink product! ...Ugh.

How many of you were told growing up that pink was "just for girls?" Yeah, us too.

Not only does this statement fully disregard any guy or non-binary person who happens to like pink - because it's an amazing color! - it forces girls into one box, as if we are one entity, incapable of individual thought.

Also, pink was considered the " boy color " in the early 20th century, so what gives?

But there's so much more to the sexism beyond makeup, like lingerie that is supposed to help you marry a millionnaire.

Or ads that straight-up violently attack the woman's body, calling it "too fat."

Women have fought a long battle against patriarchal standards and shaming advertising, and the war hasn't ended yet.

At least it's gotten a little, tiny bit better.

But if there's one thing we can take away from this mess, it's that no man deserves you if they don't like your hair (and the way it smells) or your lips (no matter their color or shape). Here are even more offensive vintage ads that will make you want to keep fighting the good fight.

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Vintage Makeup Ads That Were Beyond Sexist

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Sexist advertising rarely flies these days, although it definitely still happens (cue Audi's 2017 ad that suggested finding a wife was just like buying a car. It's all property! Which men own!). Yes, that occurred in 2017 - well after 'feminist' had become a household term - even if some people still think of it as a "bad word".

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Exploring Gender Roles in Vintage Advertising

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A look back at the portrayal of women and men as homemakers and breadwinners in cinema advertising from the 1940s.

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Edit B&W photos of industrial buildings

Put these (not on backgrounds) into your Weebly after the hans Malm section

Print onto the coloured backgrounds you prepared. They may need to be de-saturated!

Select images for your final piece

Print and put onto blocks

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Tesla, Meta, Metaverse, Food, Illustration, Architecture, 3D, PANTONE

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Circular books with plywood cover

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Album covers
Instagram site

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Set of images - Architecture

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Two heads looking at each other. Re-photographed and framed. Window mount.

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Layered images. Acetate image of nature infront of the photograph in nature

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Embroidered photographs. Possibly kept in hoops?

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Slides in box frames
with projections or a video of your images and your grandads edited together with music

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Crucifix with draped/distressed images

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Fabric images (touch)

Look at website 'Contrado'

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Wooden blocks?

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Series of A3 framed images.

NEED BLACK FRAMES

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Wooden book and frames

Print some of your images onto brown paper as a lead up to your final book

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Series of books. Completed.

Page with writing, framed to go with them

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sew on fabric around the rim in a circle

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photos on a leaf
book?

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To Solve Such An Equation - The Learned Pig

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Finish Amy Friend

Evaluate work

Final piece research

remove grain from blue pics

edit further the natural light ones

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Steve Rosenfield- what i be?
Nail varnish transfer

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like this but 150x150mm on each image with black card border

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like this but 150x150mm on each image with black card border

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maybe a caption for each image of what i was doing while this image is being taken

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Final piece could also work on sheer and frayed fabric.

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I could make like a photo box maybe? Then everything is hidden away on the inside.

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COMPLETE A FULL DRAFT OF YOUR RELATED STUDY

Complete 3 seperate shoots - to develop three sections of your Weebly

Use the annotation guidance sheet to go through your Weebly and add in as much information as you can.

Try and find research that shows the type of work you want to develop towards a final piece.

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. Simon Buckley shoot this thursday

. Chip Litherland images, go into town on monday and take a new collection, capture the accidental rothco

. More Nick Strangelove, refine! Photograph onto air drying clay for development

. Potentially spray paint on top of keegan Gibbs, depends on stock of cans in town

. Upload related study onto the weebly

. Take more images for Bahaus and move whole section to the top of weebly

. Refine experimentation for Andrew g fisher

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DO RELATED STUDY

EVALUATE SHOOTS BY TAKING MORE PHOTOS

TAKE MORE ROPE SHOOTS

- GO BACK TO TESCO CAR PARK
- GO TO TRAFFORD CENTRE UNDERGROUND CAR PARK

PUT TAPE AROUND BUS STOPS, EMPTY CAR PARK SPACES

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Upload studio images

Upload related study on weebly

justify all text

Looking out within

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upload studio shoots
justify text
Looking out within

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- Liz brizzi photoshoot similar to heinecken factory - for hans malm experiment as well
- sort out related study
- make liz brizzi photos either monochrome or brown
- final piece moodboard
- research artists/photographers related to Liz Brizzi -> collage artists as well

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Do more nature photoshoot RESEARCH FOR IDEAS/FILTERS/ look at the portrait photography board

Explore with physical experimentation for artist 5

related study

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Shoot linked to shadows - Aisling Edwards - black and white

Shoot at Japanese Garden

Gather research in relation to theme

Related Study - add research eg. quotes, interviews, video links

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Complete more annotation on images and artist research

Upload related study to weebly

Add music to moving edits

Possible shoot??

Presentation idea - band instagram

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https://elephant.art/how-i-was-seduced-by-the-cinematic-glamour-of-guy-bourdins-photography-16112021/

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Images like Woman With A Portrait of John Travolta pulled writer Abbey Bender into an over-the-top world of style and fashion

This Artwork Changed My Life is a fortnightly series of personal essays that share the stories of life-changing encounters with art.
I was fixated on glamour long before I had the words to describe it. As a child, I'd spend countless hours drawing girls in riotously colourful outfits. I'd pore over fashion magazines and make collages, anxiously awaiting a time when I'd be an elegant woman with a fabulous wardrobe. By high school, my tiny bedroom was overrun with sketchbooks and my walls were covered with magazine pages depicting well-dressed models and actresses.

The women in these images, made-up and confidently seductive, inevitably appeared to be living their best lives, very much in contrast to me, an angsty teen who had no idea how to properly apply eye makeup, let alone flirt.

I was paging through an issue of Allure magazine when I first encountered the jaw-droppingly decadent fashion photography of Guy Bourdin. A selection of his extremely 1970s images, including Woman with Portrait of John Travolta, were used to illustrate an article whose subject I've long since forgotten. Bourdin's arresting photograph, however, immediately lodged itself into my psyche.

On the surface, it's a sexy image: a gorgeous model thrust back over a couch, her legs spread, and one of her garter straps visible. On the fuchsia-carpeted ground sits a framed black-and-white headshot of John Travolta, who was then at his pretty-boy peak. The tableau is both simple and over-the-top, and the more you look at it, the weirder it gets.

The erotic reverie of the shot is simultaneously unnatural (there's no way that model's position is comfortable) and elemental (the Travolta image perversely suggests teenybopper fantasy). The colours are downright sumptuous. The model wears a vivid green satin dress tied with a red sash that complements her shiny red heels. It all felt like the height of a nostalgic glamour that I badly wanted to experience as a lonesome high schooler in the aughts.

Bourdin's career started in the 1950s, but he's most associated with the photographs he took in the 1970s. Primarily working in the commercial space, his best-known work appeared in French Vogue and ads for footwear designer Charles Jourdan. The image that caught my attention was originally used in one of these ads, and while the model's richly coloured slingbacks with gold-tipped heels are undeniably chic, they're hardly the centrepiece.

The intersection of art and commerce reached its zenith in Bourdin's imagery. This photograph, which stood powerfully on its own in the decades since it was taken in 1979, was worlds away from the pandering, faux-relatable yet increasingly celebrity-filled media landscape of the 2000s.

In In Between, a coffee table book of Bourdin's work, Shelly Verthime writes that his photographs create "a dream-like universe, where in between mysterious landscapes and luxurious settings, the viewer is poised on the border of the sublime and the surreal." When I first discovered Bourdin's surrealism, social media was just taking off. I felt self-conscious about presenting myself online, and though I loved fashion, I was eternally conflicted about dressing seductively. Bourdin's photographs were so unlike this world, so heavily stylised and cinematic in their attention to detail, that I couldn't help but be drawn in.

In the decade-plus since first seeing the image, I've written a lot about the sleazy yet stylish, femme fatale-driven world of erotic thrillers, a favourite cinematic genre. When I look at this picture, I see an erotic thriller in miniature.

Bourdin's aesthetic sits alongside contemporary 1970s photographers like Helmut Newton and Chris von Wangenheim and brings to mind the pouting cover girls of Roxy Music records and campy movies like The Eyes of Laura Mars. It's easy to level accusations of sexism against Bourdin and the bombastic 'Me Decade' imagery he represents but to do so does his wild creativity and mastery of mise-en-scène a disservice.

As a teen, I gravitated toward images of womanhood that felt dynamic in a way that I myself did not. In an essay in In Between that compares Bourdin's work to Alfred Hitchcock and Lewis Carroll, Charlie Scheips writes that the artist "created an art of vivid narrative fantasy suggesting that which had either just happened or was about to happen." As a teacher's daughter at a private school who had few friends and fewer romantic prospects, this narrative fantasy thrilled me. I felt like little was happening to me or about to happen.

Though I lived in New York City, my world felt small: I was creative but perhaps not as outwardly adventurous or worldly as one might expect a native New Yorker to be. I was drawn to how the image perfectly embodied both glamour and trash, largely because it felt like escapism.

The subject of Woman with Portrait of John Travolta didn't look like a helpless victim of the dreaded "male gaze" to me. Rather, she appeared self-assured in a divinely opulent way I hoped to one day channel. Was she waiting for a man to join her, or did one just leave? It didn't matter. She had her John Travolta headshot and an outfit that paired beautifully with her makeup and the mysterious setting. What more did she need?

Today, there's obviously more awareness around sexism in cultural imagery. However, while that awareness is valuable, there's also a strange tension in how art is expected to avoid provocation, yet women on social media are also expected to constantly be photographing themselves and proclaiming themselves hot as a form of easy empowerment.

There's little mystery in today's visual culture. Everything is digital and obvious, and too often moralistic. Bourdin's work may be edgy but its appeal isn't rooted solely in sex. His imagery creates a lurid world that's both inviting and haunting, what Scheips calls a "nostalgic, elegiac embrace of the innocence of youth (or the not so innocent)."

When I first saw the image, I was far more innocent than I wanted to be. I still often feel like I'm failing at femininity in various ways. I find the heightened style and sensual mystique of Woman with Portrait of John Travolta oddly comforting. It's like a time machine to an archetype of womanhood that's all the more appealing for being out of reach.
Abbey Bender is a New York-based archivist and writer covering film, fashion, girls, and various forms of nostalgia

Explore more life-changing encounters with art

EXPLORE NOW

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How I Was Seduced by the Cinematic Glamour of Guy Bourdin's Photography - ELEPHANT

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Images like Woman With A Portrait of John Travolta pulled writer Abbey Bender into an over-the-top world of style and fashion This Artwork Changed My Life is a fortnightly series of personal essays that share the stories of life-changing encounters with art. I was fixated on glamour long before I had the words to describe it.

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Two new shoots

Consider additional artist reference/example weebly

Annotations

Subheadings/explanation

Finish and upload Related Study

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shoot on man vs nature

could be anything man has made

research landscapes artists or photographers environmental issues also techniques

Related study with further research and improvements

reddish vale park- buildings in nature

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https://www.bagsoflove.co.uk/estore/design/1473?tid=ea41e2bb-50f7-4faa-9fcc-f33d439c3dfe

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Bags Of Love · Digital Fabric Printing · Fabrics · Fabric Printing

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sort out related study- positive and negative views from people and then my view

focus on experimenting further with one shoot before moving on

look at paintings

focus more on the bodies rather than the hands

final piece idea- transfer images onto satin/ stroke fabric

continue with crinkled crease idea- stitch into creases?

many photographs. - wet these and tear and push

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7/02/2022:

Lots of thorough Amy Friend responses

Get rid of chapel shoot? (Low exposure shoot with prayer mat)

14/02/2022

More into fabric (extension to green hijab shoot)

Re-visit Brian Ingram photoshoot

leaning against a decorative pillar - under exposure

RELATED STUDY ?!! - including conclusion, bibliography etc.

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- TAKE A SHOOT BASED ON BOYLE FAMILY AND LEWIS BALTZ
- EVALUATE ON THE ROPE SHOOTS BY GOING BACK AND TAKING SIMILAR IMAGES
- RETAKE THE ROAD SHOOTS BY USING BOYLE FAMILY

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In a gallery my images are projected with a slide between each which explains the previous photo and the story behind it.
or
I project my images onto objects of significance in the gallery.

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can link to my work because it captures still lifes of the human body and natural world like i capture how aging is natural for the body

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Originally from Hangzhou, China, visual artist Li Hui (previously featured here) began taking pictures as a hobby. She now works mostly in Shanghai, making ethereal, intimate portraits and still lifes of the human body and natural world.

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Week 1:

EXPERIMENT WITH LIGHTING AND CAMERA SETTINGS. ALSO EDITING TECHNIQUES IN PHOTOSHOP

Justify all text

Edit 1950's section

Find research the gives you ideas for location, lighting etc

Put Julia Fullerton Batten research in

Week 2:

Use some of your studio photographs (portraits & objects and respond to Linda Sterling?

Think about creating diptychs - studio portraits & domestic objects

- create images in response to julia fullerton batten

Week 3:

Look at underexposure and Ana Orowaska

Week 4:

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Week 1:

Crop into some of the moving images - so they are more close & replace the text in the centre - either black or a logo?

Take the colour out of bar portraits (manchester united?!)

Create a set of images of the drummer - slow shutter-speed & a burst of flash. Research slow sync flash and see if you camera does this. <Trying this tonight

Week 2:

Experiment with slow shutter-speed on stage

Research and experiment with moving image. Find research that capture the effect you want to achieve.

Week 3:
- Continue with animated edits
- Get music into animations
Week 4:
- Try and get another shoot
-

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Week 1:

Change Weebly layout back to how it was - it was lovely!

Organise all empty street scenes together and motorway ones together. Choose to include EITHER the colour ones or B&W ones

Find next research artist - complete and image an.alysis and a shoot for homework this weekend - Hans Christian schink/Lewis baltz. Move Lewis baltz work over into the personal Investigation

HOMEWORK: Take colour photos in response to Lewis baltz - behind shops, offices and supermarkets etc.

Week 2:

Week 3:
Week: 4

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loreto18

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Week 1:

Take pictures of slides

Delete Nicholas Dhervilliers section

'Group' objects you have photographed in the home

Crop images so they are all the same format in each section

Present your best images bigger & have supporting ones smaller underneath. Remove all from galleries

Re-organise

Week 2:

find letters or cards from grandma and grandad and layer the writing over the slides

Expand the images with whiter text. Delete the others?

Week 3:

RESEARCH!!!!

Week 4:

broken object projected on with old photos

Week 5:
-

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week 1

do diptychs, merge them together

week 2

experiment with the video he sent + the audios

do 3rd artist if with the projector (Abelardo Morell)

week 3

projector artist photoshoot

week 4

think about final project

do photoshoot for 5th artist + experimentation with physical photos (Angelo Bonini)

finish 4th artists work (Gleeson Paulino)

Add some warmth to the responses to artist 1 & replace the car one. . . ?

Remove the images with the white flowers

Project images of nature into the interiors

Re-arrange as noted on the printout

Research NATURE! :)

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Week 1
SEE NOTES ON WEEBLY

Go to the car-park at Home and take some birds eye view images - will convert to high contrast

Print contact sheets out so I can go through them

Print images onto paper/air drying clay

Week 2

Respond to research found on 'Urban' board

Shoot with Simon Buckley

Complete architectural basquiat photoshoot

Lines on first shoot andrew g fisher

Week 3

Week 4

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Week 1

Photograph the scrunched pictures

Week 2

Edit the scrunched pictures

Take pictures - try window light and silhouette. Also try using a 50mm lens on f1.8 to throw the background out of focus. Try under-expose? Edit the images by burning in and dodgind + add texture layer (like we did together)

Week 3

chapel photoshoot

edits uploaded - low exposure

Week 4

backlighting in the dark room with very low exposure showing just the outline of face

Week 5

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WEEK 1-
+development photoshoot-of Grandma
experiment with lighting, exposure
+ read over feedback for Related Study
WEEK 2-
+ Make adjustments to Related study
+ experiment with photoshoot from week 1 any improvements to make.
experiment
* different textured paper -prints onto poetry pages
* print on fabric
find poetry to do with youth- research on friday add on images.
WEEK 3-
+ development photoshoot for first ever photoshoot
+ experiment with lighting, backgrounds and different models.
* cut out images and collage them
+ Photoshoot Monday- hands, neck, close ups.
WEEK 4-
+ Research ideas for final project
+ create moodboard for this
+ experiment taking a few sample photographs
WEEK 5-
+ photoshoot for final project and any experimentation i have researched
+ positive and negative view points of artsist on related study, why i agree with artsists work.

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Week 1:

Try to do photoshoot mainly of industrial/old buildings, bridges or at least textured backgrounds (smooth, aged with slight roughness)

Week 2:

Research and aim to complete Liz Brizzi editing.

Research collage or photomontage that fits - pinterest urban board has some

Week 3: W

Experiment fronting on different papers e.g. translucent pattern paper, tea bags etc.

Photoshoot of Cheetham Hill / Town - Another industrial photoshoot

Week 4:

Research on final project (moodboard)

Try to do paint + collages for Hans Malm experiments

Week 5:

Experiments on final project

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WEEK 1

Cemetery

Try and find a bible you can bring in for the text?

WEEK 2
- more text on images edits
- begin to organise and layout weebly
WEEK 3
- clay. cemetery photos onto
- Shoot  - (if i have time: retake some of the objects photos) (printing onto / taking photos of bible pages. Making a book out of bible pages)
- cemetery Alys Tomlinson inspired
WEEK 4
-

(notes and ideas for future:
- print photos of churches / groves etc
- decayed photos. Diptychs
- rosary beads and crucifixes on top of images
- (Mari Mahr)
- (Stephan Gill)
- layer images of people onto images
- shadows
- press flowers. lie on top of photos & re-photograph)

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https://photoworks.org.uk/instagram-takeover-alys-tomlinson/

https://photoworks.org.uk/showcase-paccarik-orue/

https://photoworks.org.uk/brighton-photo-biennial-2018-showcase-nigel-swann/

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Instagram Takeover: Alys Tomlinson | Photoworks

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The week after winning the public prize of the New Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles, Alys Tomlinson shares her winning series over our Instagram account.

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Week 1-
Re-order your Weebly:

Beach

Regan shoot

Melancjolia + text

Poetry collages

Hospital Francesca woodman

Hospital & hand-written text

All work from this point should be b&W, dark, slow-shutter speed/layery & texty!

Look at Tamson's Weebly and complete one shoot before next week. Go into Vernon Mill & surrounding streets?! DO IT!!!!

Create a revised moodboard

Week 2- Handwriting on images, Cy Twombly, writing on a blackboard

Week 3-

Beach? Wallpaper, forest slow-shutter speed

Week 4-

Week 5-

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Week 1:

Research ideas for photoshoot on pinterest CREATE AN UPDATED MOOD BOARD. Need to decide if it is about subject or a 'feel' or technique led?

Try Ori Gersht reflecting the images?

Week 2:

Shoot on Reflections in the landscape

Experiment in Photoshop

Week 3:

Edit reflection images in photoshop

Week 4:

Shoot on Shadows - Aisling Edwards

Week 5:

Plan for Final Piece - Research ideas of experimentation

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https://photoworks.org.uk/makes-good-photograph-2/

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New Writing: James Hyman - What Makes a Good Photograph? | Photoworks

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Academic, gallerist and private collector, Dr. James Hyman discusses what makes a good photograph.

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https://photoworks.org.uk/showcase-giulia-parlato/

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The concept of Isola originated from an unresolved question I have been asking myself for the past three years; about home and the impossibility of finding one. The 'photographic act' has always been a way to isolate myself and feel at home within my images. This sort of inner dislocation I reach while I photograph brought me to the creation of a fictitious island, which almost became a symbolic dwelling. When I started to construct a critical thought around this project, I knew it had to be about Sicily, depicted as a surreal and arcane place and strongly linked to its myths. Throughout the development of my work, this partially changed and focusing on my origins became mostly a familiar and personal way of articulating a discourse on a more broad and complex concept.

My journey of twenty-five days through the mediterranean sea, started after a rereading of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Lighea and Homer's Odyssey, focusing particularly on Ulysses adventures across the south of Italy.

Even though all of those places were part of my childhood memories, I had the feeling I was looking at them, consciously, for the very first time.

In winter, the Sicilian landscape shifts from being a desirable tourist destination, to a deserted and silent scene.

The desolation of Sicily and the small islands which surround it made me focus on their idyllic appearance. Meditating on the primitive uses of the cave, which are extremely common throughout the island group, I thought of each cavern as a dwelling in its purest and simplest structure; a contained space, which is possible to enter and which recalls the ideal form of the shelter.

By exploring this territory, I was allured by the idea of enclosure in the shapes of igneous rocks and cliffs, encompassing the traveller and welcoming him or her to stay. The symbology of the cave, antechamber of a hidden world, is a central theme of my research. The cave here is seen as an intricate space, similar to the one of the human viscera, as well as a place where a reconnection with Mother Earth and our original state of humanity is possible.

Isola formed around the idea of narrating, like in a travel journal, a fictional voyage from an adventurer's perspective; from approaching an imaginary island to venturing into its core.
Celebrating the beauty of the classical forms, the nude figures in the landscape evoke a sense of a dreamlike dimension, in which the viewer is invited to immerse themselves. Concentrating the narrative more on their gestures, rather than their identity, my subjects are faceless islanders, accompanying foreigners through their visit. The explorer is only invited into Utopia for a finite amount of time and then pushed away by an external force. Just like Ulysses and Nausicaa in the island of the Phaeacians, the visiting is necessarily tied to a future departure.

The objects I have collected throughout the making of my work have been taken out of their original context and photographed individually against a simple black background. This enhances their evocative power and shifts the focus onto their symbolic value. As fragments of an ended voyage, the objects almost become 'organs' of the island itself, organic pieces that have been secretly removed from it.

Isola is not a specific place and it does not belong to a specific time. Impenetrable, it exists only in images.

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The concept of Isola originated from an unresolved question I have been asking myself for the past three years; about home and the impossibility of finding one. The 'photographic act' has always been a way to isolate myself and feel at home within my images.

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In 2007 Impressions Gallery opened its new purpose built venue in Bradford with Sharpe's Wood, an exhibition by Bradford born and bred Liza Dracup.

Liza is a landscape photographer whose work draws on British landscape and often on the distinctiveness of West Yorkshire's woods, rivers and most recently wildlife.

Ever since she can remember, Liza has been attracted to the mystery of the woods and fascinated by their perceived magical realism. Sharpe's Wood is a cherished place; a place where she used to play as a child. Liza used her intimate knowledge of 'her' wood to make a series of photographs that are capture the rhythm and pace of the night.

Shot only between the hours after sunset and before sunrise Sharpe's Wood is the very essence of photography - that is, time and light. It is this recording of light, and sometimes the lack of it, that defines the work.

We all have nyctalopia, or to give it its non-medical name - night blindness. Our eyes limited vision means we are ill equipped to see deep into the dark. Shadows are rendered sooty black, flat and one-dimensional. The camera
understands more than us. The camera becomes our looking glass. Dracup has made images from the night rendering what she calls "making the invisible visible".

We are not passive consumers of landscapes images. Our sense of our own memory is implicated in how we respond to the photographs in Sharpe's Wood. Consequently, the location of these woods is of secondary importance - these are any woods, anywhere. The photographs tap into the powerful psychological workings of age-old stories. These are the woods of Little Red Riding Hood...if you go down to the woods today you are in for a big surprise...we only have to consider how the low budget horror film The Blair Witch Project entered our collective psyche to know that this is the territory in which our imagination is unleashed.Yet, the photographs of Sharpe's Wood can also be described as beautiful.

Speaking of beauty has not been particularly popular or fashionable in recent discussions about photography. The concept of beauty can be problematic and heavily laden. Few of us believe in the notion of 'beauty in itself'. We
know to ask ourselves questions but that should not stop us, instead it helps us to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of Sharpe's Wood. We can see the intensity of what we cannot ordinarily see - the golden hues on the bark of the beech wood trees; the turquoise glows of the moonlight seeping into the edge of the photographs.

Since Impressions commissioned Sharpe's Wood Liza has gone on to make two new substantial bodies of work. Chasing the Gloaming (2011) was her response to the moonlit oil paintings by legendary Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw.

These photographs, taken at that point of fading light just after sunset and just before the dark, depict rivers, woodlands and the Yorkshire coast as ethereal and otherworldly places. For Re: Collections (2013) Liza worked with the quirky Natural Sciences Collection, housed by Bradford Museums and Galleries. Originally collected for their scientific value, Dracup worked with these taxidermy specimens to present studies that "questions our own personal relationship to British wildlife and its conservation."

Whilst, both of these projects are powerful, strong and alluring bodies of work, Sharpe's Wood is 'the one that got away'. For me, it is more than a document of the appearance of woods. These photographs locate us firmly within a twilight zone of psyche and memory. Here we must confront our fears. In my mind, the wolf is dead and we all live happily ever after.

Liza Dracup's work can be viewed on her website www.lizadracup.co.uk

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In 2007 Impressions Gallery opened its new purpose built venue in Bradford with Sharpe's Wood, an exhibition by Bradford born and bred Liza Dracup. Liza is a landscape photographer whose work draws on British landscape and often on the distinctiveness of West Yorkshire's woods, rivers and most recently wildlife.

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https://photoworks.org.uk/showcase-sirin-winge/

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Sirin Winge's series 'Iscoceles' focuses on the male body and the ways in which two-dimensional images can be considered sculptural.

With a focus on texture, line and form, bringing together opposite shapes, working with the organic shape of the human body, juxtaposed with the hard geometrical shapes of the wooden sculpture, the artist questions the idea of the two-dimensional photograph and the body as a sculpture.

Overview from the installation 'Iscoceles', © Sirin Winge

For the exhibition, the artist has erected wooden forms that surround photographs printed on large pieces of card.

Entitled Iscoceles, a name that refers to the triangular shapes in the work, the artist attempts to present the image as sculpture and question the form of photography.

Overview from the installation 'Iscoceles', © Sirin Winge

In addition to the details of a torso, pale and with a supine, delicate strength, a video where the sitter contorts in slow motion is projected onto two pieces of wood, one behind the other, splitting the image.

Taken as a whole, the work succinctly demonstrates the already well established gentle, erudite minimalism of the photographer and her combination of technical ability and theoretical thought.

Sirin Winge is a Norwegian artist currently based in Oslo. Her work explores the limits of the two dimensional image with a strong focus on the body and the sculptural.

She works with the female gaze and the young male in art.

Overview from the installation 'Iscoceles', © Sirin Winge
"My relationship with my photographic object, the desire to come back to the same object over and To see more of Sirin's work click here. To see previous showcase and how to apply, click here. over lies in the fascination of the male body - as a woman I desire it, as an artist obsessed with aesthetics I see perfection in it and take great inspiration from it. Most of my work is highly influenced by shapes, colours and materials. Aesthetics is often more important than concept. A big part of my practice is also in the fascination with the object I have chosen to photograph. I take great inspiration from my subjects, what they are, do and what they look like."

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Sirin Winge's series 'Iscoceles' focuses on the male body and the ways in which two-dimensional images can be considered sculptural. With a focus on texture, line and form, bringing together opposite shapes, working with the organic shape of the human body, juxtaposed with the hard geometrical shapes of the wooden sculpture, the artist questions the idea of the two-dimensional photograph and the body as a sculpture.

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week 4 25th jan to 30th
-nail polish tech on industrial pics
-annotate weebly more and to good standard

week 5 31st jan to 6th feb
-start thinking about final piece
-research different outcome for final
-choose favourite one

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Still but moving images (videos) with music in the background

Reflections

Still-life

Shadows

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photograph using envelopes - mystery

print picture + smear paint on paper