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| Allan Taylor, Never Knowingly Under-Exposed |
Whenever I talk about the subject or my research interests, people say to me, "So you're a photographer then?" or expect me to answer really technical questions about their DSLR camera that I probably couldn't hope to understand in a month of Sundays.
Nonetheless, getting to grips with photography and photographic techniques has inevitably become a part of this project. Yesterday, I went into the studio for the first time as a kind of 'trial by fire' – as my friend Steve Millar would say to me, "There's a lot to be said for just 'doing' things." So, with zero knowledge of lighting, light meters, shutter speeds and exposure times, I decided to step into one of University College Falmouth's smallest photo studios and have a go. At least, I thought, I would have some test shots to work with.
These things I either find are completely, pant-wettingly atrocious, or you just pick up the knack and go for it. In all honesty, it took me an hour to set up the lights (2 Elinchrom lights on stands with camera) and rearrange all the equipment in the studio so I could shoot against a white wall. I had grand ideas of tethering the camera to my Mac and having a whole wireless set up, but this quickly dissipated when I realised that the flash-to-shutter speed was a bit botched when I set up the Skyport system. I have a feeling this has to do with the flash going off before the shutter had closed, and so I used a combination of house lights and the flash sensors on the lights to boost what was essentially a pretty flat space. Plus the wall is a bit more 'off-white' than the infinity coves in the other studios.
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| Photo set up 15/11/12 – Studio 6, University College Falmouth |
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Fig 2 Photo set up 15/11/12 – Studio 6, University College Falmouth
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So far, so good. Nothing's broken and I had a half-decent set up, so I just leapt in. Leaping became quite a theme, as I decided that the first action I should try and capture was jumping, as jumping is a bit of a wild card – you can never completely capture it. I also decided that for ease and for simplicity of trajectory, I should work in threes: beginning, middle, end. The idea was to create a composite shot that showed some kind of narrative or documented an action from start to finish. Starting was easy, it was just crouching down and clicking the remote:
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| Beginning to jump |
It soon became apparent, though, that the middle action – or when the gesture is 'in flux' – is one of the most difficult to capture, and this reminded me of the 'liveness' arguments. It is this unknown action, or change, or when the piece is thrown out of chaos (or perhaps even into order) by an action that is in motion and can't be posed or frozen. Perhaps it is this action that makes it the most interesting:
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| Free-falling |
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| Free-falling 2 |
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Free-falling 3
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I tried for about an hour and a half to 'perfect' this mid section, but a combination of factors made it a frustrating experience: the delay between pressing the remote and the camera shutter actually shutting, switching it to timer and having to time the jump so that it caught me midway rather than at the beginning or the end and trying a variety of shutter speeds and aperture sizes which, to be honest, just increased the amount of blurry shots on output. I can't tell how many I deleted. I kept many more that weren't even worthy. Also, because of the size of the studio, you'll also notice my head is clipped in many of these, but I decided these were far from final and to press on. After 90 minutes of documenting, I remarked on the hilarity of my expression in each of these photos – I looked so uncertain and expectant rather than expressing the 'jubilation' of jumping up in the air and for that reason, even though I was rising in the photos, it actually looks like I'm falling or levitating unsteadily. This in itself makes for an interesting study in the uncertainty and fear of the 'mid point' and represents, to me, a point between success and failure, beginning and end, certainty and uncertainity.
Though many were deleted, it occurred to me that some distance between the movement and the image makes you reconsider the initial motivations of the movement and so the image is re-contextualised.
Surprisingly, the 'finish' of the jump wasn't as difficult. In fact, it was rather enjoyable. I think because we only jump when we're happy or excited, the physical action elicited a feeling of joy inside me and because – by now – I had gotten used to the timing of the camera, I could successfully predict the flash point. You'll see below that the jump became something else entirely – it was like a victory dance for having reached the pinnacle of the action:
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| Victory dance |
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| Victory dance 2 |
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Victory dance 3
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It occurred to me that both of these latter actions would not only make sense as a composite shot showing start, middle finish, but as a triptych on their own, showing the impossibility of capturing the instantaneous, the uncertainty of levitation, or the joy of being suspended in air momentarily – joyous and victorious at having 'completed' the gesture.
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| The Joy of Being Eternally Suspended |
As an aside, it's worth saying that a lot of these shots were under-exposed and so I made a note to learn more about aperture, shutter speeds and lighting in order to make the next studio session more successful. However, I did think some of these issues could be rectified in post-production later.
However, one of the strongest stills came from an image where something is addressed to the viewer. And perhaps because the 'performance' is not contained within the photo, but directed out towards the viewer, that a relationship occurs.
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What's So Funny?
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This particular image didn't feel 'right' as a threesome. When I squeezed a figure in the middle, it lessened the dramatic contrast between the laughing and the anger. What I think is effective about this image is that it conflicts the viewer: on the left hand side, there is a kind of humorous empathy – the figure is in fits of laughter and we want to share the joke and the pleasure of laughing. On the right hand side we are being reprimanded for finding it humorous. Though it is clearly the same person, brining them together makes it feel as though they are completely different. In fact, the image is not a progression of action, but instead a continuous never-changing conflict. The viewer feels as though they are being accused of something, perhaps that they should feel guilty for finding this somehow ridiculous or funny. One is warmed by the laughter and confused by the emergence of the anger, which seems to be unwarranted.
It is because the anger is addressed back out towards the viewer that the image becomes dangerous. The laughter feels as though it could occur within its own space, but the aggression has direction and provides the impact that bridges the subject-audience relationship (perhaps providing the punctum and facilitating the studium of the image).
In studio practice, it's very easy to perform then re-perform the actions over and over again until they are 'perfect'. However, there are also a lot of happy accidents and perhaps there is a gem in here relating it back to liveness, and peformance's own quality of producing these so-called mistakes that on second viewing sometimes become an integral part of the piece.
I looked at this session very much like a rehearsal. Things were done again and again and again until they were just right... The only difference is there was an audience member – the camera. And because it could show you instantly what had just happened, perhaps it is also the most severe critic of performance.
I want to continue my investigation into the instantaneous, liveness and the camera through analogue methods. Because with a 35mm camera we can't instantly see what we have just taken, the happy accidents become even more permanent, and perhaps these 'abject' photographs have an insight into the moment that can't be revoked once it has been exposed to the film.
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