experimenting with slow shutter speeds

I reduced my shutter speed to capture a 30second exposure every 10 minutes. I then layered these images on top of each other to create a ghostly effect which reveals some information about sleeping patterns.

more portraits

I have taken a lot more portraits to increase my choice when it comes to selecting my final 6, mainly because I want to gather a variation of expressions. Also I am aware that I will have to think carefully about the pairing of the images in order to portray a strong message which shows a link to the theme.

500 word critique - Natasha Caruana

Elizabeth Chandler
University Of Salford
BA(HONS) Photography - Level 5
International Markets And Contexts
Review/critique and reasoning behind my selection of Natasha Caruana

Born in 1983 Caruana is a practicing artist, lecturer of photography and founding director of the London based studioSTRIKE artists studios. She graduated from an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in 2008 and is currently a lecturer of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey.
Caruana’s own art practice is grounded in research, drawing from archives, the Internet and personal narratives. Her series ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Married Man’ documents love and life of the everyday. Caruana’s works have been exhibited in various group shows, such as Invisible Adversaries, alongside Francesco Goya and John Constable and The Fool at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary of Art, Sunderland. Previous group and solo exhibitions have been in The United States, Poland, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Her work is held in the collections of the British Library, Woman’s Library in the UK and the Laguna Art Museum and The Kinsey Institute in the United States.
In Natasha Caruana’s projects I feel a strong sense of a woman scorned by love an betrayal. Her three main projects available to us are titled;
‘Portraits of the other women’
‘Married men’
Fairytale for sale’
A photographer not afraid to use her camera to confront difficult subjects, her projects present an immense suggestion of love, trust, loneliness and betrayal. On one level her work can be seen as a typology of adulterers, but that only scratches the surface. Deeper meanings to be discovered in her work expose a complex investigation into the boundaries of trust, deception and betrayal. The perfect endless cycle. Everyday humans experience a mixture of emotions. I feel human emotion is the epitome of a true endless cycle and it exists in each and everyone of us.
Caruana’s work is created combining found images, snapshots and staged pictures. Her projects come together to compromise four bodies of work all dealing with similar issues.
The work is challenging, both from a content point of view and some of the methods used to obtain the material. There are questions of an ethical nature surrounding much of her work, however I think this contributes to my love of her work.

Fairytale for Sale consists of a collection of photographs taken from online adverts of brides wearing now redundant wedding dresses. The faces of the brides have been scratched out or obscured, and the dresses, symbols of an idealised view of western life, are reduced to commodities. Each one is on sale, though the reasons why vary, from divorce to a simple desire to de-clutter.

The Other Woman is a more conventional photographic project and was made back in 2005. The pictures portray women who have experienced affairs with married men and was inspired by a personal experience.
"The work was made in 2005, before I realised the power of the internet as a research tool. I placed adverts in Time Out, local classified newspaper sections and shop windows.
With the knowledge of Natasha Caruana’s background and stories of her having become ‘the other woman’, you could read the work as a lashing out from a woman betrayed. Or assume the project to be a personal healing outlet. When reading an interview with Natasha online I came across the following statement which juxtaposes such ideas;
“I didn't use it to move on. But through the course of the project I did end up doing so. I was interested in how I suddenly was given a label and wanted to explore how other women felt. Every story is different but society uses the same wording - mistress, bunny boiler, home wrecker etc."
Her other series ‘The Married Men’ is the photographic part of her work which depict some of the 80 dates Natasha went on with married men, each one organised through dating websites. The identities of the men are not revealed, and the photographs captured clandestinely. This uses a different photographic technique, adhering to the snapshot aesthetic. The images are often matched to audio recorded surreptitiously during the dates. The work questions the motives of the men, but more interestingly for me, it also questions Caruanas motives. In the series The Marrried Men, there are unanswerable questions of morals. The man is cheating on their partner, and Natasha is Cheating them. Do the two wrongs cancel each other out? Another interesting layer of the endless cycle.
I find her work is both challenging and engaging, though I have no doubt some people will feel it crossed the boundaries of what is acceptable. From what I can gather through reading of countless interviews with Natasha, this is an ethical issue that was not disregarded.

dreams

Symbols are the language of dreams. A symbol can invoke a feeling or an idea and often has a much more profound and deeper meaning than any one word can convey. At the same time, these symbols can leave you confused and wondering what that dream was all about.

Acquiring the ability to interpret your dreams is a powerful tool. In analyzing your dreams, you can learn about your deep secrets and hidden feelings. Remember that no one is a better expert at interpreting your dreams than yourself.  

To guide you with your dreams interpretations, we have interpreted over 5600 keywords and symbols and over 20000 different meanings in our ever expanding dream dictionary. These meanings are in no way, the final say in what YOUR dream  means, but hopefully it will inspire you to explore and offer a suggestive starting point for understanding your own dreams. There is no "one dream interpretation fits all." 

Every detail, even the most minute element in your dream is important and must be considered when analyzing your dreams. Each symbol represents a feeling, a mood, a memory or something from your unconscious. Look closely at the characters, animals, objects, places, emotions, and even color and numbers that are depicted in your dreams. Even the most trivial symbol can be significant. This dictionary, along with your own personal experiences, memories and circumstances, will serve to guide you through a meaningful and personalized interpretation. With practice, you can gain an understanding of the cryptic messages your dreams are trying to tell you.

"While approximately 80 percent of all dreams are in color, there are a small percentage of people who claim to only dream in black and white. In studies where dreamers have been awakened and asked to select colors from a chart that match those in their dreams, soft pastel colors are those most frequently chosen."

this has helped me limit my choice when it comes to editing as the pastel colour edits are even more appropriate than when i made this choice simply on the basis that they looked more dream like.
 (http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/tp/facts-about-dreams.htm)

couples sleeping

German photographer Paul Schneggenburger takes pictures of couples sleeping together throughout the night, and the results are both intimate and eery.

"What happens to lovers while they are sleeping?" Schneggenburger wonders in his artist statement. "Is it a sleeping just next to each other, each on his own, or is there a sharing of certain places or emotions? Is it a nocturnal lovers’ dance, maybe a kind of unaware performed tenderness, or does one turn the back on each other?"

Each picture from "The Sleep of the Beloved" series was shot as black and white, long-time exposures taken over the course of six hours. The room with the bed was in the artist's live-in studio — Schneggenburger would turn on the self-constructed "timer" of the camera and leave while the couples slept.

The project began as his thesis work at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2010, but has since become a long-term project that anyone can take part in

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/time-lapse-pictures-of-couples-sleeping-2013-2?op=1#ixzz2MK6CBWzX

These images have really inspired me to reduce my shutter speed to experiment with some images which could link with emotions such as anxiety and stress ect

"Where Children Sleep" - Photo project 

James Mollison

BIOGRAPHY
James Mollison was born in Kenya in 1973 and grew up in England. After studying Art and Design at Oxford Brookes University, and later film and photography at Newport School of Art and Design, he moved to Italy to work at Benetton’s creative lab, Fabrica. His work has been widely published throughout the world including by Colors, The New York Times Magazine, the Guardian magazine, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and Le Monde. His latest book Disciples was published in October 2008 following its’ first exhibition at Hasted Hunt Gallery in New York. In 2007 he published The Memory of Pablo Escobar- the extraordinary story of ‘the richest and most violent gangster in history’ told by hundreds of photographs gathered by Mollison. It was the original follow-up to his work on the great apes – widely seen as an exhibition including at the Natural History Museum, London, and in the book James and Other Apes (Chris Boot, 2004). Mollison lives in Venice with his wife.

Where Children Sleep - stories of diverse children around the world, told through portraits and pictures of their bedrooms. When Fabrica asked me to come up with an idea for engaging with children's rights, I found myself thinking about my bedroom: how significant it was during my childhood, and how it reflected what I had and who I was. It occurred to me that a way to address some of the complex situations and social issues affecting children would be to look at the bedrooms of children in all kinds of different circumstances. From the start, I didn't want it just to be about 'needy children' in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations. It seemed to make sense to photograph the children themselves, too, but separately from their bedrooms, using a neutral background. My thinking was that the bedroom pictures would be inscribed with the children's material and cultural circumstances ' the details that inevitably mark people apart from each other ' while the children themselves would appear in the set of portraits as individuals, as equals ' just as children. This selection of diptych's from 56 in the book (Chris Boot November 2010). The book is written and presented for an audience of 9-13 year olds ' intended to interest and engage children in the details of the lives of other children around the world, and the social issues affecting them, while also being a serious photographic essay for an adult audience.

(http://www.socialphy.com/posts/art/981/Equot_Where-Children-SleepEquot_---Photo-project---James-Mol.html)

 see more (http://www.visualnews.com/2011/03/04/where-children-sleep-a-diverse-world-of-homes/)