Part Four – Experimentation: Still life

Research.

Part Four encourages you to use the genre of still life as a laboratory for visual experimentation. Digital imagery offers photographers immense control over the image, making it easy to layer, juxtapose and combine different pictures or objects.
In Part Four, you’ll learn how to:

• arrange everyday objects to create a constructed ‘scene’
  • use a range of methods for combining images
  • gain control over every aspect of the picture
  • emulate key visual qualities in other photographers’ work.

  Everyday life throws up many unlikely juxtapositions and symbols. Look up Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Quiet Afternoon series and have a look at their amusing video ‘The Way Things Go’ on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrRC3pfLnE

  Also look at Peter Fraser’s close shots of found phenomena at http://www.peterfraser.net. These photographers either create or find salient and amusing new meanings in everyday objects. The visual description of their images is not what the work is ‘about’, but the effect of a juxtaposition, arrangement or phenomenon.

 

Peter Fischli, Davis Weiss

I watched the video on Youtube “The way things go” but have to say initially I wasn’t really sure about the “juxtapositions and symbols”.
The video was about a series of every day or mundane type objects an initial action of lighting a fuse wire which is restraining a tyre causes the tyre to roll and this then causes a further series of actions and reactions.
The juxtaposition appears to be the action and hence reaction of one object against another, the film seems to symbolise how freedom is given once objects are freed from their intended purpose.

After doing some further research I found that although the film appears to a be single continuous series of actions and reactions it is not as it seems.  This is a quote from  https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/32552

Peter Fraser
I looked at the Peter Fraser project Everyday Icons.

I must have spent more than half of one hour flicking through the images trying to understand what the work was about.  In the course notes it says it is about the juxtaposition, arrangement or phenomenon and unfortunately I really didn’t get this at all, however, I do recognise art is subjective and it will mean different things to different people.
I did enjoy some of the arrangements, also colours and lighting and there was also a little irony in Dark Lane which require a flash for illumination.

To try to gather more information understand better this collection I went to https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fraser-wells-no-1-from-everyday-icons-p81071 here are a couple of quotes from the page.

“Historian and curator David Chandler has described the Everyday Icons series as epitomising Fraser’s practice and his fundamental belief ‘that looking intently in this way at very ordinary things, seeing them as plainly as they are, can become in itself freighted with an unexpected longing, and can conjure an image that is, in turn, the measure of something both achingly real and strangely ethereal, and stubbornly unforgettable’ (David Chandler, in Tate St Ives 2013, p.46).”

“two plastic buckets sit next to each other on a schoolroom floor. Both are blue, one lighter in colour than the other. Shot against the dark floor, the buckets appear to hover in a void, their colour, shape and form combining to transform them from banal, everyday objects into something more iconic.”

The last quote relates to this picture.

Iconic? Not for me unfortunately.  The colours are nice, the shapes pleasing but personally I don’t find this an iconic image.

References

http://www.peterfraser.net/projects/everyday-icons-1986/

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fraser-wells-no-1-from-everyday-icons-p81071