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| Child Peeing with Mother & Landscape, from Mother & Child#4, Ukraine/IZOLYATSIA © Richard Ansett 2011 |
Monday, 21 October 2013
Image_2308
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
The Sport of Art
Image Bather #5, from the series Bathers, UKR/IZOLYATSIA, 2011 has been awarded a 1st prize at Grand Prix de la Decouverte '13 International Fine Art Photography Award and acquired by Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF) for its permanent collection.
'Winning' as an artistic concept is a sort of anathema, in fact any acknowledgement of 'success' can potentially undermine our previously unsung achievements. Following this thought to its inevitable conclusion, the concept of tangible, material success could be seen as a little self-defeating. This might be why we empathise with the humble acceptance speech at awards rather than the hysterical, weeping gratitude of Halle Berry or the testosterone fuelled self-aggrandisement of James Cameron .
Entering competitions or juried awards does rather set us up for a fall; we choose to enter, select the work we wish to be judged (self editing is very hard) and seek the affirmation of strangers. Every year when I go to collect my 'unselected' prints from the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in London, I share the experience with other lost souls, a little crushed, defensive and bitter from this cruel rejection. "How could the jury not feel the same way about my work as I do?" Its baffling. The way I explain it to my fellow sufferers is that it is only the child in us that feels rejected. I feel that participating in the competition process and even to show work at all as adults, is to seek to replace that comforting feeling of unconditional maternal praise from childhood. The rejection therefore is like drawing a pretty picture for your mother when you were 6 years old and she says, " no that's not good enough" and hands it back to you, rather than putting it on the fridge.
The point is we should not try to please or 'win', like we try to win a race. Trying to pre-empt the feelings of the jury just to be selected, leads to us entering images or worse, creating images, that may not represent our true natures. More importantly it leads to an aesthetic monotony of work for consideration and we become complicit in a lack of progress.
A couple of years ago, I entered an image for the wrong reasons; it was selected for the portrait awards at the National Portrait Gallery, London and I had a very difficult private view. Consequentially, there was a picture I didn't actually like, hanging in the NPG for 3 months seen by thousands of people.
Werner Herzog said, "I'm not out to win prizes - that's for dogs and horses."
When we were children my sister used to think she was a horse; at our school sports day she was entered into a race around the field...she cantered the whole way round and came last and we all had to wait, quite a long time, until she finished to a polite ripple of applause. I come from a family of high achievers.
I do not fully understand the mechanisms that led me to create or rather choose to record Bather #5 (I declared this in the statement submitted with the work). I feel we become the photographer that chooses one moment from another and this changes as we evolve in the same way that we interpret the world regardless (without a camera); entirely infected by our life experience. Ambivalence and ambiguity are the image's strength and weakness and I don't pretend to be fully in control of the forces that led to its creation. I feel I can talk about it as if it does not belong to me.
Honesty is still harder to communicate with digital work that records the present in the present, film and the power of nostalgia still possess the high ground. This image is unadulterated, un-retouched, the technical profile is un-altered from the moment of capture and it is full frame with no cropping; I am attempting to communicate some authenticity in this way, silently.
It felt like a risk to take this image and a risk to enter it for scrutiny; my expectations were non-existent of its acceptance, which was a motivation for its entry. I am very pleased to be attending the award ceremony and exhibition launch in Paris from the 6th and 7th November at Salon de la Photographie.
Many thanks and gratitude to the Grand Prix team and jury for their consideration and especially BNF for the honour of being included in their collection.
Monday, 14 October 2013
Grayson Perry
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| Detail of door outline |
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| Detail of wire |
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| Grayson Perry, Image_0236, Tate Modern, London © Richard Ansett 2013 |
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| Grayson Perry, Image_0345, Tate Modern, London 2013 |
Thursday, 3 October 2013
Monday, 23 September 2013
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
Schrödinger’s Cat
The
technical foundation for my works in series is the unpicking of the notion of ‘immediate nostalgia’(as defined by Susan Sontag in On Photography). They are not intended
to be filmic although some are clearly de-constructions of an event
between two fixed points. The most accurate comparison is a contact sheet of the Eadweard Muybridge
collotypes, removed from his Zoopraxiscope. These images viewed from a contemporary perspective can now be interpreted beyond their original scientific context; they are a philosophical observance of interruptions in the timeline. In this sense, work in series is an acknowledgement of multiple alternatives
that lead up to and go beyond the notion of a single 'defining moment.'
A couple of examples, shot in the same week;
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| Eadweard Muybridge |
A couple of examples, shot in the same week;
Boy Shaving his Head is traditionally
Zoopraxiscopic. The timeline is discussed with
‘frames’ leading up to, during and after the ‘cutting’. Allegorically this series explores
a notion of relative absence and the removal of and damage to, self. Existence
is threatened by our own action. The ‘self-shaving’ is a re-enacted, private subjugation and acknowledgment of homogeny in our despair; a ritual humiliation asserted in
the tradition of concentration camps and mental asylum.
'Trees Marked for Felling' is repetitive and this series views the timeline from a different frame of reference (the camera as observer is moving); allegorically it explores a recurring personal theme of emotional progress. Although we are ‘marked' (both from birth, as a genetic predisposition or from the scarring of a traumatic event) each is a separate, unique universe responding to a shared societal experience. The yellow markings are a device that declares a pre-determined future, whilst archiving a previous existence. It is the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat, that an object can both exist and not exist in the same moment.
Schrödinger's thought experiment goes further in discussing that the observance of something changes its very nature. As observers we are altering the molecules of the immediate universe in our view, like a Werner Herzog documentary; the very force of his artistic personality shaping the landscape to fit his unique vision. A more obvious example is this record of an execution staged for an audience. The film (see link below image) captures the timeline like the Muybridge collotypes leading up to and after the famous defining moment captured by Eddie Adams.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrsw6m9UOY
The difference between us and Schrödinger is that we are observing the cat in the box and we must accept the inevitable affect our presence has on any moment.
'Trees Marked for Felling' is repetitive and this series views the timeline from a different frame of reference (the camera as observer is moving); allegorically it explores a recurring personal theme of emotional progress. Although we are ‘marked' (both from birth, as a genetic predisposition or from the scarring of a traumatic event) each is a separate, unique universe responding to a shared societal experience. The yellow markings are a device that declares a pre-determined future, whilst archiving a previous existence. It is the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat, that an object can both exist and not exist in the same moment.
Schrödinger's thought experiment goes further in discussing that the observance of something changes its very nature. As observers we are altering the molecules of the immediate universe in our view, like a Werner Herzog documentary; the very force of his artistic personality shaping the landscape to fit his unique vision. A more obvious example is this record of an execution staged for an audience. The film (see link below image) captures the timeline like the Muybridge collotypes leading up to and after the famous defining moment captured by Eddie Adams.
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| Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla, 1968 © Eddie Adams |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrsw6m9UOY
The difference between us and Schrödinger is that we are observing the cat in the box and we must accept the inevitable affect our presence has on any moment.
Friday, 30 August 2013
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