fuzion magazine issue 5

PORTFOLIOSMichael TaylorEllie DaviesPierre PellegriniDennis Cordell

Gary Auerbach

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FEATURESThree Point Four

COVER STORYBastian Kalous

Spr ing/Summer 2012

FUZION

Analog One2012

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Analog vol 1 2012 cal l for entriesAnalog is an annual publication that aims to re-establish analog photogra-phy within the photography community. Photographers at any level,from anywhere in the world,can submit a portfol io of 10 images for possible in-clusion. Check the Publications page for more information.

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I ssue 5 Spr ing/Summer 2012

DedicationI would like to dedicate this issue to my students. You have helped me gain a better understanding of what teaching is and should be! As we forge ahead together, tearing up the rulebook, rejoicing in your successes, you embody everything I would want from a cohort of stu-dents, success, determination, dedication and individual-ity. You amaze me, challenge me, you crave and desire knowledge. Your passion to learn is challenging, but in rising to that challenge you remind me of a promise I made to myself many years ago, to give back something I myself received at your age. One of the most influential people in my life was my first photography teacher, if I can be as patient, engaging, encouraging, passionate and demanding as my own teacher then I will have suc-ceeded.I hope I lived up to your expectations.

Feature Writers and BloggersAre you a writer looking to have your work featured?Are you interested in being a feature writer or blogger? If so then contact the editor as we are looking for writers and bloggers to submit either photography articles, book reviews, regular feature blogs and interviws/reviews.

Submission’sIf you would like to submitt a your work for publication you can either send it direct to the editor

ArticlesIf you have an upcoming exhibition or publication that you would like us to feature then send us the details.

ContributorsBastian KalousMichael TaylorEllie DaviesPierre PellegriniThree Point FourDennis CordellGary Auerbach

ArticlesGabriel Van Ingen

Spring/Summer issue 2012

Editors note

As well as publishing this magazine and working as a professional photographer I am also a pho-tography lecturer. Editing this magazine gives me the opportunity to showcase the work of of my own students. As we approach the end of the academic year in the UK photography students will be preparing for their final year exhibitions. If you are a University or a group of students who would like to feature your final year work in this magazine then get in touch. For now I bring you the work of my own 1st year photography students who are preparing for their first major exhibition, celebrating their first year of tuition.

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CONTENTS

Bastian KalousThe symbiosus of nature and polaroid

Michael Taylor Photography is light architecture

Ellie DaviesDwellings

Pierre PellegriniPhase One P20+ landsapes

Three Point FourStudent focus

Dennis Cordell

Gary AuerbachNight for day

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Front Cover - Bast ian Kalous

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Bast ian Kalous

I started photographing about 3 years ago. My first camera was one these plastic Polaroid instant cameras. Back then it was all about taking Polaroid pictures and it still is. What I’m trying to do is to capture some impressions about the nature I live in. The fascination of taking pictures of nature is the perfection of imperfect spots or places. The objects I mostly find are crooked, rough, dead…simply natural. This is what I feel what matches perfectly to this imper-fect expired Polaroids. The films are going their own way, bringing their own mood and creating an impressive scen-ery. It’s a symbiosus between nature and Polaroid. Like they are having a baby. This is what I love about the me-dium I am working with. Hopefully Mother Nature lasts longer than my expired Polaroid stock.

www.polanoid.net/bast iank

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www.polanoid.net/bast iank

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www.michael taylorphoto.com

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Michael Taylor is a full time photographer currently living/working in Belfast. He was born in a small market town near the beautiful North coast of Antrim. Al-though working as a location/people photographer for twenty years, he continues to explore personal work. He has exhibited work in Dublin, London and Mel-bourne. In the Lumen series of projects the topic of investigation is light itself. It is a lifetime project in which various aspects of light are explored in separate bodies of work. My aim is to let light reveal itself.

Wave is the third body of work in the Lumen series. There is abstraction with a human presence. Images of light waves in water, glass, air and materials were pro-jected onto the model. Film and analogue projection techniques were used; there was no digital manipulation in Photoshop.

MICHAEL TAYLOr

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Images were captured using a Phase One system with minor embel-lishment in Capture One. Although the initial images are colour I also manually transform each picture into the purity and beauty of black and white.

regarding equipment, I use everything from self-built pinhole cam-eras to advanced digital systems. Black and white paper and film negatives have intrinsic qualities that I will always love. Digital allows great feedback, control, organization and productivity. Both are powerful media requiring craft skills when used correctly. Combin-ing the power of digital with the beauty and hand-crafted element of Classical Photography is a great way forward. For example, my two current aims are to learn more about digital masking/montage and also to learn the gravure process.

My influences are wide-ranging. In addition to hundreds of art and photograph books I enjoy reading science in general, cosmology, theology, philosophy and poetry. I love painting especially that of the renaissance, Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist schools. The lighting in art films and theatre are also influences.The work of light artists fascinates me. For example, James Turrell creates magical environments in which the qualities and properties of light are replicated and enhanced in front of the viewer. This is revela-tory. My aim is to mediate the properties of light via photography.

Abstraction was always natural for me, so I love photographers with abstract visions of the world such as : Moholy-Nagy, Minor White, Man ray, Alexander rodchenko, Frederick Sommer, Paul Strand, Brett Weston, Aaron Siskind, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tokihiro Sato, Todd Hido and Alvin Langdon Coburn (Vortographs).

The greatest influence is the inexhaustible reality of light around us. We just have to look deeper.

To create the work I initially imagine and sketch, then plan shoots (email/phone, collect props, organize lights, costumes etc), take the photographs then follow with minimal post production. In paral-lel, I am continually recording light patterns that feed back into the creative process.I always follow the light where it leads and select/decide as the pho-tographic session evolves and also later during image selection and post production.

Photography is essentially image making, i.e., using your imagina-tion: you must mentally visualize (or have a clear direction) prior to planning, setting lights, using a camera, post production, exhibiting. Happy accidents happen but you choose how to follow these gifts of grace based on personal vision. Computers or chemistry are simply vehicles to express what is in your imagination.

Style just happens during the process of following your own path and interests. The selections an artist makes determine that unique path-way and thus style emerges. To base a style on a technique (analogue

or digital) is dangerous as technology and materials pass so quickly: instead, the image is paramount.

There are always universals and particulars: for example, there is the vast arena of light and the specific area you choose to investigate. There is history and personality: no-one can see/interpret this light in exactly the same way that you can.

Every artist in some way wants to reveal the invisible

CreditsModel: Katy Cee; Assistance: François Boutemy at Simulacra Studios, London.Light images were photographed throughout Northern Ireland and Southern France.

http://www.michaeltaylorphoto.comhttp://www.saatchionline.com/profile/[email protected]

www.michael taylorphoto.com

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The Dwellings series explores the artist’s changing relationship to built structures within the forest landscape, developing on previous work to examine the notion that we use landscape to find a sense of our own identity. Landscape can be seen as a cultural construct, obscured by layers of meaning that reflect our own cultural preoccupations and anxieties. Can we learn about ourselves by considering how we have come to see and make landscapes, as a result of our material needs, and the way this has shaped our relationships with the land?

Ellie Davies

www.elliedavies.co.uk

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The woodland Dwellings are made using a variety of traditional and improvised building techniques and created from materials gathered from the forest floor. Once completed, the structures function as signifiers of a creative process in which the artist inscribes and places herself temporarily and non-invasively within the forest landscape. These nest-like structures, reminiscent of the fairytale hovel, are a form of mark-making and explore the process of building in order to provide shelter, sanctuary, seclusion, and play.

The creation of each Dwelling illicits a childhood pleasure in build-ing and making. The process ties the artist to the structure with a familiarity derived from being its creator, and brings with it a sense of ownership and territory; but this relationship is short-lived.

After a period of time each structure is revisited and photographed. The Dwellings take on their own personal identity, presence and potential, becoming inexplicably transformed into something inde-pendent from the creator, perhaps lonely, sometimes melancholy, and alien to the maker. Each has existed in the woods over a prolonged

period of time, evading destruction, remaining in wait, possibly used by others. While some still seem newly made, others have begun to disintegrate and loose their form and function, the delineation between the structure and the woodland beginning to blur.

Any sense of ownership ceases to exist when construction of the Dwelling is completed; it then becomes part of the forest, and an en-tity in its own right. During the period of absence it is transformed into a shrine or totem of a past activity, and in doing so takes on a subtly threatening otherness in its vacancy; a persona that is both disturbing and intriguing to its creator.

[email protected]

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Pierre Pel legr in iPierre Pellegrini is an award photographer from Switzerland specialized in long exposure fine art photography. His artistic sense boosts the creation of extraordinary compositions of great depth and clarity engaging the viewer emotionally into timeless stories. In an interview with him we discussed his style, influences and technique.

The pictures in this set are the result of several years of work and experimentation in the field of long exposure photogra-phy. More than about techniques or the choice of the different subjects, the pictures allow me to tell you why I am attracted by this kind of photography. The applied technique requires dif-ferent rhythms in which the time factor becomes essential. You take yourself time for the composition; during the intervals be-tween one shot and the other you can live and relish the atmo-sphere of this particular moment, think about all kind of things and study the next framing. This is the origin of the title of this project “Pensieri nel tempo” (Thoughts within the time). A way to escape from reality and to show a world that cannot be seen with our eyes. A different world, much closer to my thoughts. Some people consider photography as an exact reproduction of reality. Through this technique, reality is partly transformed. It’s true that some elements are shown exactly the way they are, but is also true that others, in particular those who can change from one physical state to another like water or clouds, appear in a new dress, growing away from visual reality. Depending on the direction and the force of the wind or the change of light, the drawings we find in the pictures will never be the way we see them with our eyes or like we imagine them to be. The atmospheric conditions of that precise moment, transient and therefore unique, are transformed through photography into a magical and evocative phenomenon.

Almost as if the reality of the time was invisible to our eyes. And so we must learn to look with our heart, with our emotions. A different world, where the dynamism of the sky is emphasized by the contrast with the perpetual movement of the water, frozen and ironed like a silk dress. We all know that photogra-phy not only frames a certain part of space but also contains a thin slice of time. In this project, the passing of time is immortal-ized, conveyed and held in one single picture. Even for me, when I am relishing that moment and the camera is recording, the picture that arises is always an unexpected surprise. When you have some experience it’s possible to imagine how it will be, but you will never be able to foresee the final result. There are no precise rules since the variables can be unforeseeable. It’s rather gestures which one learns with the time.

Nature offers so many possibilities for compositions. The dif-ficult thing is to chose the composition which - among all - is new in an extraordinary way. An aesthetic and graphic research of nature, where everything seems to have found its right place, where the sense of order seems so well balanced and propor-

tioned that it becomes difficult to distinguish the boundary (if it exists) between human intervention and nature, responsible for itself. Like the choreography of a ballet or a musical composi-tion – everything seems in harmony and gives us a deep feeling of peace and quietness. Order and balance of nature mixed with imperfection and unpredictability of the record technique give us the gift of a picture that grows away from reality.

Sometimes, I can’t even explain myself which are the mecha-nisms that make me chose one subject rather than another. I feel that I have to stop to immortalize what my eyes see. By photographing, I try to give a particular importance to what I see. In a first moment, this is a very personal value, where the picture is the expression of what I feel. A kind of inner land-scape. A magical moment that I wish to hold in my memory and in my thoughts, but at the same time I want to share through the photography.

I love to photograph in solitude. I relish until the last instant these unique and magical moments. I want to give a voice to a silent picture. Make the picture itself talk about this silence, this quietness, is one of the aims of this project. I am not quite sure if it’s me who is looking for the subjects or if it’s the subjects themselves who are looking for me. Yet, whenever such an encounter happens, a picture arises, perfectly in harmony with myself and with my personality. A kind of balance, harmony, quietness ....

Pierre Pellegrinihttp://pierrepellegrini.portfolio.artlimited.net/

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http://pierrepellegrini.portfolio.artlimited.net/

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Pierre Pellegrinihttp://pierrepellegrini.portfolio.artlimited.net/

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For the second year running we follow the progress of a group of photog-raphy students as they prepare for their first major exhibition. In just a few months this group of emerging professional’s have achieved so much. From diverse cultural and social backgrounds, they have brought with them a gen-uine desire to learn the craft. Their determination and creativity has result-ed in the most successful year in the history of the course, their successes so far amount to three national competition winners and four published in national professional magazine and newspapers. I genuinely look foreword to seeing what they will achieve in their time with me over the two years of their course.

Gabriel Van Ingen - Photography Lecturer

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THrEE POINT FOUr“These people are like my second family. They’re actually the group of people I spend with 9 to 5 every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday each week. If it wasn’t for them, I definitely wouldn’t enjoy college as much. We are all very individual, yet we work re-ally well together. I’ve never been around such motivated and inspiring people up until starting the photography course at the media and journalism centre in Peterborough. As we’re all at college for one reason; our love for photography, we all listen to each other’s constructive criticism, share ideas and photographers, plan days out shoot-ing. We pretty much have our minds set to photography, which is just what I needed to keep pushing myself forward. I could just spend a whole day listening to everyone’s ideas and how they’ve interpreted our assignment briefs, I find it so interesting how just one brief can spark so many unique and brilliant ideas.”

- Sarah Kathleen Page.

Follow the group as they prepare for their exhibition in June

http://three-point-four.blogspot.co.ukhttps://www.facebook.com/threepointfour

www.three-point-four.blogspot.co.uk

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Lisa Leverseidge


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Glenn Woolsey


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Emma Swain


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Nikki Hopkin


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Freya Armstrong


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Giorgio Esposito


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Sarah Kathleen Page


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Bells Hann


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Lloyd retzlaff


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Saskia Cole


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Chris Melnyk


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Klaudia Nowak

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“My camera is a less archival utensil and more of a Pandora’s box. When the shutter opens all the darkness in the box flies out into the world, but light enters and captures the “hope” of a good photograph”.

DENNIS COrDELL

Like many photographers, I was trained as a painter. I also did pottery. I do not consider myself to be an ex-painter or a potter of yore, but rather an artist currently focusing on photography. I bought a Nikon FM about thirty years ago to aid me in painting portraits. I would photograph my subject, then use a grid to transfer the image to canvas for painting. I soon realized that I liked doing photographic portraits more than painted portraits and eventually moved from the 35mm format of my Nikon to the 120 format of the Hasselblad. I also surrendered to the square format of the Hasselblad as opposed the rectangular format of 35mm. A camera lens is round and can perfectly contain the equilibrium of a square whereas a rectangle creates stress when part of the lens has its view “cropped” by one of the rectangle’s sides.

Although I occasionally do landscapes, my favorite subject matter, either in painting or in photography, has always been portraiture. I love the human face. I also prefer doing portraits of Buddhist monks and other spiritual contemplatives in Asia.

Such people aren’t concerned with whether their portraits are cosmetically appealing. For them, a photo of themselves is simply a memento to gloss a particular occasion. Westerners often ask for post-production “favors” such as bag, wrinkle, or chin removals. Buddhist monks know that wrinkles are just part of the impermanence of the phenomenon we call life. Future lives will bring more than enough facelifts. I have always considered Buddhism to be a cult of tranquility. Tranquility is a useful agent in photography. Many of my concerns about photography, and art in general, have developed from my interest in eastern mysti-cism and spirituality. The square format of the Hasselblad corre-sponds to the sense of harmony found in the Sanskrit postulate rta. rta is the natural cohesion that regulates and coordinates the operation of the universe and everything within it. rta signi-fies both “order” and “truth” and may be collectively referred to, in its ordinances, as dharma, and individually, in relation to those ordinances as karma. rta is the opposite of chaos.

I find it difficult to write about photography despite all the

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attention that has been given to critical theory, or Photo-Dis-course. Many photographers consider much of this discourse to be mere gibberish and would like to see critics boiled in a cis-tern of ink over a pyre of burning exegeses. Yet those like Michel Foucault inspired a philosophy that there is nothing more practi-cal than a good theory combined with the rise of new media technologies to bring divergent voices (and disciplines) together. These diverse influences, in many ways, broaden the discursive platform to include social, political, as well as artistic voices. There are coteries of Photographers, and there are cabals of Artists who use Photography. I tend to fall, more or less, into the latter camp as an artist who uses “lens-media.” In her copia verborum on the subject, Susan Sontag states that photography is predatory. I do not consider myself to be a sabertoothed paparazzo, stalking monks or other subjects. As a photographer, I am a gatherer, not a hunter.

For me, composing the portrait through my viewfinder is homologous with the Indian notion of darshan. Literally, darshan

implies “to see” or “sight.” But more specifically darshan is concerned with an event in consciousness that creates an inter-action between the seer and the seen. Thus darshan heightens consciousness. Another term is rasa, literally meaning “juice” or “essence.” rasa denotes an essential mental state dominated by a primary experience of the viewer by what is viewed. For me rasa is a vital component in photographic composition, similar to what roland Barthes has called the photograph’s noeme.

I feel that photography has a melody but not a song. It is a story without diegesis…a fetish without an aura. A photo is a recep-tacle without utility, the dance without movement. A painting is hyperbole, whereas a photograph is litotes. Photography is the crown jewel of austere poverty. It is what the Japaneser poet Hakuin Ekaku has called “the sound of snow.” A photograph can be the answer to a koan that is not information but conscious-ness. There is an energy that flows between the photographer and the subject. This energy is the source of inspiration and has a classical association to the muse. This muse, or exuberance is

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known as prana or “life force” in Sanskrit, rlung in Tibetan, ch’I or qi in Chinese, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin, ruwach in Hebrew, and, perhaps the word “soul” in English. Sometimes it is necessary to be very patient for this vitality to arise. Often an external element such as the light and shadow on the subject is an inappropriate ebullience for the “breath” of the muse to arise, but when the “breath” proceeds, the camera photographs and the photographer and subject fuse to create an amalgama-tion of beauty. The subject is the echo of its creator. As the photographer Minor White said, “Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.”

I shoot film because it is easiest for me. I don’t like all the con-figurations and buttons necessary to operate a digital camera. A light meter involves enough computation. I don’t need an entire dashboard. Actually, I shoot “hybrid” in the sense that my analogue photos disappear into a digital binary code of postpro-duction to re-appear as an analogue mimesis. Likewise, I shoot in black and white…again because it is easy. I also like the abstrac-

tion that black and white creates on a paper’s surface. Similar to viewing the work of a painter like, say, Franz Kline or works by great calligraphers working in black ink, the viewer’s imagina-tion is called into play when it encounters black and white photography. The mind isn’t immediately told that what it “sees” is a “realistic” image or message. The mind first must interpret the tonality and contrast of the viewed subject in order to gain a meaning. The highlights and shadows of a black and white photograph are the warp and weft that create the “fabric” of the pictorial tapestry. The greater the range of tonality between black and white, the more pivotal, for me, is the image. A photo can never have too many shades of grey. Greys are the interme-diate tones that create the designs and textures woven into the photo.

I have always felt that using black and white film in my photos of India is a bit of western hegemony. The rajasthani photographer raghubir Singh notes that Indian photographers prefer color to convey what he felt is their sense of optimism. Singh notes that

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even when black and white is used, say in the films of Satyajit ray, it is a psychological metaphor for this optimism. How-ever, I find there is a wonderful minimalism to black and white photography that justifies and surpasses any contrition I discern about this monochromatic hegemon. It is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. A photograph is just an image on a piece of paper…it can be blown away in a gust of wind. It is minimal, even in color photos. It is limited by the duration of exposure, what John Szarkowski calls “a discrete parcel of time.” It defines brev-ity. It defies both optimism and the vicissitudes of pessimism. It silhouettes a moment…it is the kireji , caesura or the critical word of a visual Haiku...a machine made haiga.

The nineteenth century British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot referred to the camera as the “pencil of nature.” Nature nourishes. My camera is a less archival utensil and more of a Pandora’s box. When the shutter opens all the darkness in the box flies out into the world, but light enters and captures the “hope” of a good photograph.

www.denniscordell.zenfolio.com

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Night for Day

Gary AuerbachGary Auerbach’s photographs articulate a tension be-tween durability and transience. He combines photog-raphy, a short lifespan medium, and the photo engraving process, giving his work a life of 500 to 1000 years. Photo engraving, moreover, involves the intaglio hand-wiping of every print, giving a personal touch to the finished result. Concern for permanence, in an alienating instantaneous world, may result from his life experiences. A native New Yorker, he has lived in Arizona for years: the former epitomizes contemporary society’s fleeting character, while the latter’s landscape has all the mythic solidity of pre-modern times. regardless of its source, this thematic concern structures the medium and content of all his photographic images. He photographs with an 8x10 view camera at night, and prints in platinum and in gravure with etched photopolymer plates on rives BFC in the negative.

www.garyauerbach.com

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YOUr CHANCE TO TAKE PArT!HOW TO SUBMITT TO FUZION MAGAZINE

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Analog Vol 1 SubmissionWhen sending your digital files please prepare your images as 300dpi Tiff files, Mac compatible and at least 10x8 inches. Please ensure you label yor work and include an artist statement, bio and full contact details.Please ensure you make clear your intention for inclu-sion in the 2012 book.

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ANALOG VOL 1

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Workshops will include alternative and historical process’s as well as digital and studio.

Facilities include a fully equiped studio and darkroom including 5x4 enlagers, a selection of large and medium format cameras and full tethered digital shooting.

If you would like to be kept up to date with our workshop timetable then email us usin the contact form on our website.

Clear View Studio

Clear View Studio Photographic Workshops 2012

Fuzion Magazine is planning a series of photographic workshops in 2012 from its base at Clear View Studio in Nottingham UK.

fuzion magazine issue 5

Documents

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