This month I worked on derivatives from an idea I used last month of combining memorial benches and found historical images mostly all from collections I purchased online of old album images for which I have no context or historical detail. I wanted to look further at the idea of the memorial but outwith the graveyard setting and of the dead being shown beside their bench.  As I am using found photographs this seems to work well with my idea of trying to capture the essense of a person forgotten after death and how to re-imagine their memory using photography.

I also been working on a revision of my literature review and this month much more than previously it feels that my reading choices, research interests and my writing seems relevant and joined up with my creative efforts. I have been reviewing Barthes, Camera Lucida along with Batchen, Forget me Not and been reading Sontag, On Photography, Hirsch, Family Frames which, although concerned with Holocaust photographs, had interesting thoughts relevant to my work. I have just started reading Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations which has lots on album photographs.

I was giving thought this month to my choice of which old photograph to use and the feeling I was able to achieve when placing specific types of image next to a photograph of a bench. I rejected many attempts as these didn’t produce the feeling I wanted, or the resulting image seemed too busy and the mood was wrong.  From my own personal experience, photographs of children seemed to give a big emotional pull as if when I use such images, my work assumes that the child has died and been frozen in time. Of course, as I know nothing about these images, I might be very wide of the truth here but for my purposes this is the impact I am looking to create. As I have narrowed in on such examples, this brings into sharp relef the emotional side of this project for me.

In my first work two works this month, I wanted to show examples which show some of my thought process as I worked on these less successful pieces.

The first image I show a couple with a child in a pram set against backdrop of a playpark with a bench facing the park that I found online and which was taken in Porthcawl. I rejected this piece as I felt I  polluted the simplicity of my concept by producing an image which says, or tries to say, too much.

The playpark seemed to dominate the image and the transparent old photograph is too small which isn’t the feeling I was looking for. The link between a child in a pram and a playpark seems too obvious and blunt. I was also very unsure of the bright colours of the play equipment in the park.

My next attempt revisits this image of the pram but this time using a far simpler and more empty image showing a row of memorial benches. I am still not convinced by this image as focal point draws eye along the row of benches but the overall idea of this image  works better than with the playpark. The autumn leaf fall seems to fit well with the overall mood of this piece. The position of the transparent image over some grass gives the white of the woman’s clothes a green cast which am unsure of but this did make me wonder about colour casts and which backgrounds worked best if figures in my images were wearing light coloured clothing.

My next work this month once again uses a child but I have aimed for a far simpler image. This shows a child with a book looking back towards camera and positioned in the frame as if was leaning book on the seat of the bench. Once again there is a scattering of autumn leaves which seems to work alongside the worn wood of the bench. It feels to me that this image is more direct than my previous attempt with the pram. The child seen on it’s own speaks of loss on different levels whether as a child mourning a lost mother or  a child lost and looking back for a parent. This image, to my mind, has a chill to it.

 

 

My next trial piece in this series explores directly mixing the living with the dead. A group from an old photograph is shown arranged in front of a bench while a figure is sitting on the bench and a child plays next to the bench. I have made the group image transparent while the figure sitting on the bench are solid and have shadows. The shadows an important part of this image and it reminded me of vampire films where the dead cast no shadows. The park shows short well kept grass in the background yet the foreground strewn with leaves which to me seemed to mirror the visual ideas of permanence and of change and reminded me of well kept graveyards or ones containing graves which are damaged and overgrown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my next trial work I have again used quite a busy scene but feel that this is more successful that my image of playpark.  The memorial bench this time has a man sprawled out on it and in the background I show a cyclist and some people strolling past. This image has a very different feel than do some of my images. It has almost an at leisure feel. Even the transparent image shows several in the group smiling. These smiles are what bothers me about this image as I instictively feel the smiles do not sit well in my series although perhaps in this instance as a leisure scene the smiles work. Perhaps they are smiling at the man on their bench?

 

My final image moves away slightly from the memorial bench. I photographed some people on a bench in a musuem. Something about the museum being full of old objects made me think that the location could be the memorial and that there was no plaque on this seat didn’t matter. I used the clean modern interior as a well lit backdrop to emphasise the differences between the modern couple with feet up on a bench looking at their phones while the older couple look on,  dressed more formally with hats and their fashion coming from a different time. I have shown the older couple at a doorway and have tried to balance this  with an opening on the left showing a corridor stretching into the distance. This was a visual attempt to imply the passage of time. The image has a sense where the roles are reversed. The older couple who, despite their image being from a more distant past with almost a feeling of ghosts looking on, have a more dynamic feel while it is the modern couple who appear to be more static and frozen, held in place by them interacting with the virtual world.  This trial piece perhaps does not speak so much of death as some of my other work.

This been an interesting project looking at the juxtapositions between the past and the present, the dead and the living, the meanings of memory and remembrance as defined through use of memorial benches and giving old pictures new visual context and meaning. I wanted to share a very simple image I came across and captured of a child’s book forgotten and left lying on a bench getting soaked by the rain. In a very simple way, this sums up my project here.