BRAINSTORM-ORDER AND DISORDER:
TOM MCLELLAN-
Tom McLellen is an artist that takes apart various objects. He organises all of the pieces of the taken apart object, and takes a photograph. He then disorganises the pieces into more of a mess. This is good for our topic title as its related to order and disorder.
This is a small bicycle type thing. it has been taken appart, including all screws and bolts taken out. It has then been arranged in an orderly maner, this compliments the 'order' part of the project.
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The same parts have been used again in this contrasting picture to show the 'disorder' part of the theme by un-organising the pieces again.
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MY RESPONSE-
For my response, I have used the same technique as this artist and taken apart some objects. I have taken apart a phone I found lying around my house and arranged the pieces into an order. I then arranged them into an un-orderly fashion and rephotographed for the order and disorder contrast. I also took an old video player and took it apart and used the same organising, then un-organising technique for the same effect.
This is the phone taken apart and organised.
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These are the same pieces, but unorganized.
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These are the video player. I used no flash on the pictures on the left and flash on the picture on the right. I took apart this old video player using a screwdriver at first, but it became difficult to separate many different pieces so I used a hammer to pull and smash out different parts, still trying not to break it. This was more interesting for me compared to the taking apart of the old mobile phone as there were more components to it, which made the pictures look more organised and disorganized in the end.
In these two images, I experimented with taking the color out. I like the way this looks on the chrome in the picture even with the flash from the light above used. I did this because of the fact the object used is an old video player that is no longer used, the black and white symbolizes the age of it.
Developing this idea...
MY PLANS:
I would like to add people into my order and disorder for more of a dramatic effect. I feel this will be more dramatic as placing real life people into strange scenes of order and/or disorder could be more interesting than simple objects. I have plans to take a photograph that looks fairly simple and organised, and contrast it with something scene as disorderly or 'confused'. One idea I have is to have someone playing guitar with simple things around, then in the contrasting picture to have the same person but holding a smashed guitar and everything around more 'confused'.
JEF VAN DEN HOUTE-
This artist takes photographs of symmetrical, interesting buildings. He takes the photographs at interesting angles which give different patterns and effects. There is a section of his photography that I really like, where he puts his photographs into black and white. This section is called 'Architecture mono'. I could respond to this artist by taking pictures in my local area, and looking for interesting architectural buildings to find patterns and/or symmetry.
This picture has the most pattern out of the photos in this set. I like this one because it shows the entire picture that is rather complicated funneling out all into one, simple point.
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This photograph is nice because you can really see the scale of the buildings in the picture against eachother, and its as if they are being made to be together with the join in the middle.
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The interesting angle of this photograph confuses the eye as to what it is. I like this picture as it has taken something that everybody knows what it is such as a building, and taken the angle to an extreme to confuse what it may be. The shapes in this picture reflect this artists strong stylized theme of symmetry and pattern.
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MY FIRST RESPONSE:
I had difficulty with these pictures, as I often found that when I saw somewhere I would like to photograph, there were trees, cars and people in the way. Also, the artist I was trying to respond to used the chrome looking black and white. I used this style but as I took pictures of fairly old buildings, instead of looking futuristic it gave them the effect of even older. I will try this again, but look specifically for glassy, futuristic looking buildings and possibly go earlier when no people are around.
For this gif, I took about 6 or 7 pictures of Anete while she moved her head and i put them into a gif on photoshop. Because she was moving fast the pictures came out blurred which adds an effect of disorder as you cant see her clearly due to blurriness and also fast movement.
I went to Trafalgar square as it is quite busy and full of people, and I put my camera on a tripod to keep it still. I took lots of photos and put them into a gif. This gif has lots of movement and shows are disorder, but in an everyday place which has the contrast of order and disorder.
This gif is similar to the one above but gets a little closer to someone who is standing fairly still throughout most of the gif, which shows more of a contrast between the movement.
This gif was taken on the A4O6 motorway. I thought this was a good place as all the cars are going highspeed and there arnt many stops for traffic which was a problem i was having before. In this gif as well as the cars you can see a man walking next to the road, and movement around the car park. This adds to the disorderedness of the gif as there is constant movement everywhere and no stopping.
I liked the look of the cars when I was making these gifs so i decided to try again, but at night. This made the gif blurred with the lights from the cars which adds to the disorder of it.
This picture was originally in colour as show in the pictures before, I changed it on photoshop into black and white and adjusted the levels of the image. The old fashioned black and white style refers back to the artist that i had a response to earlier, Jef Van Den Houte, who does his photographs in this same style. i have chosen to photograph this bulding as it is half way through being bulldosed down, and i thought this showed a nice orderly building in 'disorder' with bits falling off and random wires.
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I found this artist. Gareth Hacking, who also did some demolition photogrphy. I thought this picture and mine on the left related because they both show the full picture of the building and not close up to one section like the others. This one shows one side of the building not broken, and one side smashed, a lot like my picture does. This has a nice contrast of the order and disorder.
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This picture I took at a sideways angle, this was to add a feel for the large, supposedly sturdy building tipping over in an dis-orderly fashion as it is half broken up in a derelict state. I also chose to take this picture into black and white to add the effect of old and broken down. This picture had not much colour in it anyway, so i felt if it wasnt in black and white it would be no point in colour as there is nothing strong about the colours, so it has more effect in black and white.
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The same artist, Gareth Hacking also did this photograph. This one i thought was quite similar to one I took myself as it is a closer up picture where you can see all the bits of the building hanging out. This makes it look like the other half of the building has simply been ripped off in a disordered way. My picture also has the aspect of a falling over building adding to the disordered state, but in this artists photo its closer up showing more detail in the broken bits, which I really like. I like being able to see the wires, tangled up, almost reverting back to the organic of vines tangled together.
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This photo I chose to keep in colour as the sun was setting which created a nice half silhouette to it. The angle it was taken where the digger is strait and the building is tilted creates an effect again of the large building being unstable and disorderly as its falling. The bits of building hanging off it also add to the freshly brokenness of it.
This picture was my favourite out of the shoot I did over the weekend as a developing strand. The angle of the digger was taken as it was facing the other way, and the sunset is towards the left. This personified the digger as if it was looking at the sunset. There is nothing much else in the picture apart from the wreckage of what it has dug up, which makes it look lonely compared to the negative space in the background. The wide negative space also makes the digger look a whole lot smaller which I like in the image as it creates again the sense of technical loneliness.
On the same building, I zoomed into this aspect of the broken window as i thought it showed its derelict state and the disorder of it as the window is smashed and now how it is meant to be. I liked this picture as it lacked colour in it. This added the effect of simplicity and all one toned, sort of dull. This relates to the order and disorder state as the building is simple and ordered but also it is broken which shows the disorder.
In this photo I chose to only showcase the more broken building alone. On the right it shows more wreckage that looks like it could be going on a lot more so it shows that it may never end. This photo is from a two point perspective, so you can see the broken window side of the building and also see the ordered or once ordered left side that is now breaking. It shows the contrast of order and disorder quite well i think.
These pictures were taking at a metal recycling plant. I thought it worked well with disorder, not quite in the same way that the broken building relates but more because in the pictures the machines are sorting out the disordered metal and it all looks a mess.
In this picture you can see a mess of metal, and broken things that you cant really identify what they may have been before. The colours are all rusty orange and silver, this shows how some of the things, or metal, are worn away and not in good use anymore. This all together adds to the disorderedness of the picture. The colours in the picture that I like so much, rich orangy-browns, is something that the artist frank I. reiter also explores in depth. His photography mostly consists of photos of metals that have begun to rust and produce incredible colours.
I chose these three pictures from Frank I. Reiter's photography collection as they are all quite different but have in common the autumnal orangy brown colours in them which relates to the picture I took above. These three pictures are a more close up approach than what i have done but I feel for the topic of 'disorder' mine relates more because as well as having the lovely colours it looks like a disordered mess.
With a lot of these pictures, I put together a short gif of the machine picking up and sorting the matal. I thought this was nice because it showed the messy disorderedness of the recycling plant but also has the aspect of something trying to order it by sorting it, so it creates the order and disorder.
I started experimenting with putting my model in different places that could be described as disorderly, like lying upside down on a staircase, or sitting on a fancy chair at a bus stop in socks. First I tried at the busstop then i put her in the chair at the bottom but decided the chair not actually being on the stairs looked slightly detatched from the picture and not what I wanted so I just put her upside down on the stairs.
This photo was my favourite from these as you get enough of the stairs in the picture either side for some sort of symmetry and my subject down the center. I chose to put her upside down as it adds to the disordered part of the photo, something out of the norm. I asked my model to keep a strait face while doing this so it looked slightly more sinister as the setting was quite dark and grungy. I will experiment with this more, taking her into different places doing disorderly things (or normal things in the wrong places).
Even though I didn't like this idea of my model in the chair in front of the stairs as much as lying upside down on the stairs I still like how she is spotlighted almost in this picture contrasting with the background as she blocks the stairs. The chair i used also looks sort of regal which contrasts with the again, grungy background.
I liked this picture because its using an idea from the shoot before on the stairs of someone doing two normal things like sitting in a chair, and using a telephone and making it look a little strange as you would not bring a chair like that into a phone booth normally.
I liked this picture because it looks like shes' in her own world while things go on around her and she's just on a chair in the booth. You can see a man crossing a road and a car in the background which shows there is stuff going on outside. Also, because there were not that many people its actually quite quiet as if its in the middle of the night and people are all sleeping. I like this one more than the close up because the picture is more balanced in the way that you can see more and she isn't completely the whole picture like above.
Next I decided to carry on with the gif thread, so I encorperated the idea of two normal things looking strange together, like sitting on a fancy chair in the middle of the road. these two ordered, or normal things, together look strange and disordered. By keeping Anete as still as possible, I took lots of pictures at high shutter speed to get an effect of the cars going by quickly. This creates a feeling of more disorder as they are blurred, and also as time is passing quickly around her she is staying still.
I went back to the thread of typology when i was taking things apart, but instead of taking them apart this time I smashed them. I thought the outcome of this was not very good, but it gave me an idea to add a person in my image to incorporate the things I did previously with a person being in a strange place, or upside down or something like this, and the smashed objects for my final piece to put it all together.
For this shoot, I wanted my model to look like she was upside down on a chair, but not actually just upside down. So I laid her on the floor, and made her put her legs over a foot stool that I also laid on its side. She had to balance her legs and head up a bit to make it look like she was actually sitting on the chair. Unfortunately i could not get high enough above her to get the furniture and sometimes my own feet out of the image so I have photoshopped it in the final images for this shoot.
I photoshopped the objects in the background of both of these pictures like I explained before, and I brightened them up as they were slightly grey. I brightened them so they look crisper and so my model stands out in the middle more. I tried to create a contrast with the two images so they would work well together as a piece, so ones is flipped up and one down. The right side image is flipped upside down as it is the more disordered image of the two, as the guitar is broken and bits of it are in my models hair. The left side picture is supposed to be more ordered so the guitar is not broken and she is upright.
This photoshoot proved to be even harder than the previous one. the problems i had with this shoot was one. the chair being massive. This was a problem because it meant in order for me to get the whole person and chair, and space for the walls around I had to be very high up. I managed to get my hands on a free standing ladder which helped but i still couldn't get the angle i needed which meant I had to do more edditing than I would have liked. Another problem was that i had to have pillows to prop up my models hair in the photo to make it look like she was upside down, and in the other picture where her hair is down simply to make her look not strained. This meant that you could see the cushions in the picture and I had to edit them out. This was dificult as i had to get very close to the edge of her so I had to be careful when editing.
How I edited these on photoshop...
First,I rotated the image as I wanted her to look upside down.
Here, I have started to cover over the problem areas.
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Next, I selected the colour around the places I needed to re-touch over.
You can see here that most of the problems are covered up, just touching up with the reverse paintbrush where I may have gone onto my models hair.
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I used the paintbrush tool to cover over the objects that I didnt' want in the picture.
Here I used the levels to brighten up the picture so she is more spotlighted in it and the background is crisper
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The finished pictures...
This is my final piece. In these photos i tried to create a contrast between them so they would look good together, in one photo everything is supposedly 'ordered' but upside down, and in the other everything is supposed to be 'disordred' but it is the right way up. in doing this I tried to make the pictures not just one ordered and one disordered but a mix of both in each that become opposites. I will print these out large and keep them together as my final piece for 'order and disorder. I might also print out the guitar photos I did and pint those out, and put them all together as one piece as they have similar ideas.