In this post, I am showing my ideal customer for Uncertain Times. My film as it will be a more obscure rather arty affair is a little more difficult to capture an ideal customer so I wanted to create someone who collects art and is interested in more conceptual works. I therefore created the character below as my Ideal Customer. Click on the link and you should be able to view the published version on Venngage.
Daido Moriyama is a Japanese Photographer who photographs the streets of Japan, he captures the darkness and underbelly of society which is why I was interested in looking at his work in relation to my own project Uncertain Times, 'Daidō Moriyama is a master in transforming the mundane into the remarkable.' (The Independent Photographer, 2021). Moriyama started working as a photographer in the aftermath of the Second World War and like Lee Miller's images there is a darkness and horror that is underlying the shadow of such great destruction and death that is a presence in the images that he creates. Moriyama's street black and white, low key street images have an uncanny quality. These high contrast images were created using a small compact Ricoh camera. It has been argued that Moriyama has rejected technical precision in favour of the subject; 'the artist captures a diaristic experience of wandering city streets. “The city has everything: comedy, tragedy, eulogy, eroticism,” he has remarked. “It is the ideal setting, the place where people’s desires are interwoven. It has remained and will always remain my natural element.”'(Artnet, 2023). This idea of life in all its forms being shot, captured immortalised is what is important in these images, and considering the times we are in now, if I look at the city streets in Leicester there is a tragic and grimy quality to life as it descends through depression, poverty, madness, mental illness, drugs and alcohol as numbing agents to a world that has become very challenging to live in.
Below in this image, at the forefront is a half-naked man creating a strange gesture with his hand, it is uncertain what this might mean, is he waving? Placing his hand to God? He displays his palm upwards, but to what purpose? His face is covered, so that the eye of the camera does not see? Or because he does not want the world to see his face? The street behind him looks wet from rain and it looks cold, yet he only wears a pair of small shorts, he looks slightly undernourished and the man strangely squatting behind him, is he drinking from a bowl? - he also is not dressed and looks undernourished. The street is dirty and the woman in the image standing in the doorway on the other side is wearing a shabby dress over a tight fitting vest that again displays bones and malnutrition. her sharp face set off by a hat with a flower. Is she a prostitute or a cleaner or maid? The leading line stretching down the street reveals more people in a further doorway, what are they doing there? Behind the man's head, there seems to be children and people waiting, maybe it is a bus stop of some kind. The light in the image seems to be coming from an overcast sky and this uncanny scene does not seem to make much sense in the frame. The lightness of the men's skin against the blackness of the street create a balance of light and dark.
Moriyama was anti-establishment and his images in the 1960s and early 70s were of the street, prostitutes, gangsters, the homeless, the disenchanted, the forgotten, Tokyo Cowboy states; '[Moriyama] Snapping photos seemingly at random and exposing them hastily, he would churn out oddly cropped shots of Tokyo’s pedestrians, gangsters and prostitutes. This chaotic process added to the raw feeling in his work and provided a truly organic insight into Tokyo’s backstreets.' (tokyo cowboy, n.d.) I do want to try to capture the raw feeling of the images shown here but also I wanted to also capture the kind of euphoria and mild hysteria people feel before the end and that is why I wanted to include the dancing, I definitely want this in the final film.
Jumping forward Moriyama created these strange dancing images for a fashion collection. In both images the leading line follows the street into the distance, the built up city surrounds the subject. She/he stands alone in the street creating the same angular dancing shape. 'The figures often seem to be in a state of struggle, so that the backdrop enacts a complicated embrace – home, but the kind of home that thrusts the subject into a state of tension and even distress' (Katie Kitamaura, 2023).Both look downwards in a passive acceptance of the camera but not engaging directly in contact with the world. The white/black high contrast works well with the fashion this is advertising and again as the street image above the white of the flesh contrasts heavily with the blackness of the street. Although these images are taken around 60 years apart and the method, camera and the street are different, there is a feeling that I am in the same streets with the same weather, the same feeling.
I wanted to collect some stock footage for my final film of Uncertain Times so I began by collecting some explosions from both Pixabay and Pexels
As I am creating my own Art Photography/Performance website I will look at two photographers websites whose work I admire; Katy Grannan & Corrine Day. Here I am analysing the website itself, and how the work of the artists is displayed and how easy and functional the website is for the user. This website research will assist me in understanding how to create my own website so I will consider the overall design, colours, and typography, navigation, usability/user-friendliness, links and mobile view.
I will begin with the Katy Grannan Website. I will begin the homepage design, the homepage here although looks interesting and is well laid out in a grid format with a landscape header, it has the artists name however it does not state what kind of artist she is or that in fact she is a photographer and filmmaker. When I click into the film at the top - it just states 'trailer for film' but there is no introduction and I do not know what this is about. I click into he other boxes and there are just a single image and do not lead anywhere just state and event or exhibition. This is very disappointing as I cannot directly from the homepage click into her work.
I then checked the mobile phone website and this was pretty much the same except the homepage just scrolls through the grid squares. The black page are the same but some of these have not been adjusted for the phone view so do not fit on the page properly.
Overall the experience of using this website was highly disappointing I wanted to look at galleries' of images and really explore the wok and instead there are just black pages with lists or singular images to promote something. There was essentially very little photography and I would not visit this site again.
The second website I looked at was Corrine Day Website. I will begin with the homepage which actually contains a biography/history as Day died young, starting off as a model and then becoming a photographer at the height of heroine chic. Day was close friends with her muses and this intimacy is reflected in her images.
The homepage here has a black background and white text it states simply her name and that she is a photographer and includes her images which make the page immediately more interesting and I want to see more. Scrolling down the page there is quite a of of information as this site is created by the Corrine Day Estate and in the footer there are different email contact addresses for enquires about her work. The copyright symbol is in the footer and there is a copyright statement and term of use link to protect the artists work.
The mobile view on the Corinne day site - the homepage has an image and Enter site and then goes to the home and the information shown above the images are quite small on the mobile and these could be bigger and the writing a little smaller as the writing does dominate the mobile homepage. The gallery pages work well as the images still pop up nicely with the information and when you tap they appear large on the screen. Each page's format has been adjusted well to the mobile screen, I would say perhaps except the homepage. Overall and enjoyable and pleasant experience and I would definitely visit again.
Comparing both sites, clearly the first site was disappointing - I think the homepage could have been interesting and I actually quite liked the grid design but clicking into each grid was disappointing whereas everything on Corrine Day's website when you clicked in there was more images and information and each image could be make full screen when clicking on it. Thinking about my own site I will consider having maybe more images on the homepage that can be clicked into and I will ensure all images enlarge to full screen and have correct title and good information. Both sites were consistent in dark background and clear text throughout in the same font so there was no confusion as to the site you are looking at. I feel that the consistency on my site is similar so i am happy with this aspect of the website. Social media was interesting on Grannan's I am not sure how much it added but I expect if you follow Grannan on Twitter or Instagram then it is interesting and informative. On Day's as there was not any I almost preferred this I could look at ethe work and just enjoy and did not feel any need to 'connect' or to 'share' - this has made me reconsider the inclusion of some of my own social media on my own site.
The mobile view on Day's site was much more interesting, worked better throughout and although I think the homepage could be improved there was a landing page with an image which was inviting. Grannan's did not work well and was not that interesting or engaging. Looking at these it did remind me how important it is to get the mobile view right and working properly and I will be focusing on this in UX testing after I have published.
This was a good experience as I have considered my own design ideas and my own site while viewing these and I will be exploring different ideas with my galleries to make them engaging and user friendly to ensure that my site visitors want to return!
I created a video in Clipchamp, this was a two-shot edit. The two pieces of film footage I acquired from Pexels and are copyright free. One was of a rose and the other a woman on a car. I used the red coloured theme to create Ruby Tuesday.
This was a practice and demonstration so it is a little rough and ready but it shows how a very simple edit can be effective.
In this post, I was just experimenting with footwear and looking at the anatomy of the knee-high boot and looking at color and texture using Photoshop.
As you can see I had a selection of sketched knee-high boots and I added colour by using the quick selection tool and adjusting using the add and minus functions in the top menu. I then changed the colour and used the paint bucket tool to add colour in sections. I also used filters and 'noise to create texture, I can experiment more to make this more subtle or more textured in my final collection. I also kept some white areas and tried to ensure that there was a reflection of the material and that the boot looked 3d. I studied the anatomy of the boot so that I could discuss this further in my research.
This was just a practice now I will begin working on my own designs and I will begin considering a colour palette and the structure, form and materials I will use on my designs.
In my project, I will create an EP of three pieces of avant-garde experimental music. To understand and to consider how I might do this I will begin by discussing the music of Erik Satie.
A piece I would like to share here is Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes) (1914) - this translates as 'Things seen to the right and to the left (without glasses)' which is a three-movement suite for violin and piano. (Please listen below) This piece again is simple, and minimal, and reworks the fugue and choral forms. The set of three he used often which reflected the Trinity and also Satie was working on the idea of music and The Golden Ratio.
This is a very small and inadequate introduction to Satie however I wanted to include this before I added my own experiment with music. I created this with Satie in mind and I was hoping for something simple and also, I am hoping with a little aural beauty. I created this on Ampedstudio which is a quite basic online music studio. I played with the various sounds available and placed them on the track timeline, as it was an experiment I was very much just sketching an idea in sound. Once I had layered the tracks I downloaded this and I opened this in Adobe Audition as I also wanted to work on this software to create my music this term.
Please find my two finished sample pieces here these are in G Minor and Eb Major
I want to expand on this sound continuing to work in G minor and considering further the form and structure of the piece.
References
Alper, M. (2023) Composer Erik Satie was so much weirder than you realize, Flypaper. Available at: https://flypaper.soundfly.com/discover/composer-erik-satie-was-weirder-than-you-realize/ (Accessed: 07 November 2023).
Rowat, R. (2019) Essential Erik Satie: 10 pieces you should know | CBC music read, CBCnews. Available at: https://www.cbc.ca/music/read/essential-erik-satie-10-pieces-you-should-know-1.5053020 (Accessed: 07 November 2023).
Encyclopædia Britannica (2023). Erik Satie, Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Erik-Satie (Accessed: 07 November 2023).
