Degas at the Royal Academy

Within the excellent new exhibition, Degas and the Ballet, at the Royal Academy there is a wall describing the way a series of his interiors were directly affected by the new photographic technique of panoramic photography. He painted and drew these interior views at the same size and format as the popular photographic views (approx 50cm x 20cm). It seems he may have liked the inherent action of movement in viewing these, as one scans from side to side. The distortion apparent in such photography is also somewhat assimilated in his art, another method to flatten and abstract the space, perspective loses any strict rules. In addition there is his play on 'photographic' composition - large areas of floor, truncated figures, strange edges and the apparent invisibility of the artist - that 'moment'.

While he was fascinated by the latest photographic techniques and experimented himself, his own paintings and pastels could not have been rendered photographically, neither the exposure nor the movement nor the depth of field nor the angles of view could have been achieved with cameras of that period. Cameras became metaphors for the experience of sight. What the show makes clear is that he was an artist who explored how we see.

Dean Pike - Tactile Interiors

Dean Pike, a London based architect is exhibiting at the Royal Academy and has kindly sent us some information on one of his ongoing projects:

"I was interested in designing a building that had an uncanny property while remaining a recognisable social and tectonic reality.

I took the theme of ‘the pocket’ and elaborated it physically and spatially. My analysis of Westminster showed a world of lobbies, tea-rooms and spaces within spaces creating an interior labyrinth for intrigue and negotiation; an antidote to the banal correlation between democracy and transparency.

I started the process by designing a single pocket; drawing and making this at 1:1. This was a response to a poem about the relationship between memory and forgetfulness. Pockets are like miniature stores for memories. The vast quantity of overlapping pockets creates confusion and disorientation. This idea led to the design of a shirt constructed entirely from pockets - like the feathers of a bird. It became the spatial idea for a building interior - the tactile qualities of pocket interiors offer comfort and luxury - like an Adolfo Loos interior.

I began exploring the idea of a building without an exterior. To make this work I concentrated on making large models of interiority only; an ensemble of fragments that collectively portrayed the interior sequence of rooms and spaces. They became like masks that could be experienced internally.

The large scale wrappings of Christo & Jeane Claude were particularly inspiring - the elegance of the way spaces are draped and technical challenges of working with fabric to create large fabric enclosures -how to join material, different stitch types, folds and pleats for stiffening etc....

The eventual program was for a council for Camden Market. Council buildings are interesting because of their internal spatial density. Rooms that lead into rooms, that lead up to other rooms. Corridors were omitted, with rooms adding to the overall depth of secrecy. Using the language and structure of the existing market, a camouflaged environment of leather draperies is created where the politics of market trade and Camden interweave.

Darkness became important and enhanced aspects of secrecy. Beneath tough outer casings of leather, are a world of soft frills and folds, as layer upon layer is tailored into walls and space."

Dean Pike RIBA


There is an interesting challenge in representing a series of interiors that could only, it seems, be experienced individually and sequentially, the views become sliced and abstracted and float apart into a vacuum of darkness. There is something of the theatre to the mood a sense of anticipation.

Asier Gogortza

Asier Gogortza has made pinhole cameras of military bunkers and made visual again their connections with their landscapes. Drawing on the researches of Paul Virilio and related to the work of Abelardo Morell his images transform these interior spaces by seeming to both flatten them to an image and open them to a landscape. Even more than Morell's spaces these views quite literally formed the buildings into instruments to view and control. With thanks to Asier for the information and photographs.

How did you choose which bunkers to use?

There are thousends of bunkers around all Europe, so i have a lot of "cameras" to choose from. I have visited a lot of locations and I chose depending on the landscape around the bunker and the interior architecture of the bunker.

Did you create your pinhole in positions where there had been windows or other openings?

Yes, the window is the place where i put the little hole, so the landscape you see from inside the window is the landscape that will be projected on the wall of the bunker.

Are the views of landscape therefore representative of certain historical points of views? Of certain soldiers at specific historical times?

The project talks about the relationship of the bunker, like a human construction, and the landscape. This landscape is the target of the building, the bunker is made to shoot at this concrete landscape. Those war constructions they have something that attracts me, because they talk to us about another period of history. Now they are like monolithic sculptures, totally anachronistic in peace time, and they have been fighting only against time and nature.

It seems that often these war bunkers are reflections/creations of their landscape and environment, did you find new connections between the buildings and their landscapes?

Yes, for me it is interesting the conversation that develops between the bunker and the landscape. The bunkers are places from where you can look to the landscape without being seen, they are always in good locations with panoramic views. The objective of the bunker is to control and dominate all the territory, and finally appropriate the landscape. I think the final objective of all landscape photographers is the same.

On the other hand, its interesting to study how nature fights against the bunker, recognizing in it a strange element. You can see bunkers totally crooked in the beaches, or others totally covered by weeds in the mountain.

I have seen your careful working method on your stop motion animations on your flickr page, how did you prepare the bunkers to take these images? What sort of equipment and exposures did you use?

First of all I make the bunker dark. I use black plastic. Then i put the pinhole in the window and i go inside with the digital camera and the tripod. I shoot with very high sensitivities, 2.500 or 3200 ISO, because otherwise the exposure time would be very long and with digital cameras you have a lot of noise in that case.

Nadar and Nishizawa

Felix Nadar 1820-1910 - Interior of a balloon 1863. This was his own balloon, the largest ever made at the time with a two storey basket including sitting room, photographic room, wc and printing room. His flying exploits inspired his friend Jules Verne to write From the Earth to the Moon.

There is something of this in the views of Ryue Nishigawa and Rei Naito's Museo-N in Japan 2004-2010 which strives for..."a specific endless environment. Light should be the only physical element besides the art" It is intended to be a space without angles where it is never clear how large it is or what shape it is.

Previsualisation 2004


Photograph of finished building 2010

Josef Sudek - The window filter

Chair in Janacek's house 1948

1960

1972


Josef Sudek 1896-1976 a Czech photographer who found his subjects in his domestic surroundings and in particular in the material quality of light as it penetrated windows. The relationship between inside and outside, the gaze of a filtered window is explored in his long series on the Composer Janacek. He remained for most of his life around Prague and contributed to its somewhat melancholy and romantic character. Though much theory has been read into his window views, political, philosophical and psychological, there is a tension within them that seems to reflect a repressed ambition. A very different atmosphere to those somewhat similar viewpoints of Wyeth or Hopper. Despite having lost an arm in the first world war Sudek used a large format camera and preferred always to create contact prints rather than enlargements. Interesting link here to a combined study of the window pieces of Kertesz and Sudek.

Last year in Marienbad

In Manhattan Murder Mystery Woody Allen fondly remembers how he brought Diane Keaton to Last year in Marienbad on their first date. Not a great idea.

Still, a surreal and beautifully filmed point of view that captures fickle surfaces and reflections that mirror the ambiguous characters and the architecture. Part baroque, part cubist the film seems to question its own form by its insistent unreliability, the narrative is unclear, the spaces are inconsistent, the characters unnamed and perception dizzingly questioned. Influenced Kubrick, Antonioni and Bergman, so no surprise Woody Allen loved it then.

Last year in Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais 1961.

Patrick Hogan

Prayers
Mustard

Learning to eat

Behind the Garden Wall

Animal in the dark no. 3

Patrick Hogan is the winner of the Gallery of Photography Artist's award 2010. His series, Solitary, half mad deals with living alone in rural Tipperary. The relationship between internal modesty/poverty and external wonder gives a powerfully suggestive insight into a fading way of life.


ST - Having grown up myself in the Tipperary countryside I remember many echoes of your works atmospheres in the empty houses we would explore when we were young. I am interested in how views of interiors can be used to communicate or suggest meaning. Regarding your series Solitary, half mad, which I believe has a fictive aspect to it, did some of the interiors that you created have some personal resonance for you?

PH - When I began this project, I decided to move from the urban area where I had been living, to a small cottage in the Tipperary countryside. All of the interiors that I photographed were found around the area where I live but they have no direct relevance to me, other than to say that they were chosen and photographed with a degree of empathy.

As I had been living alone and also working on this project alone for six months and on a very low budget, you could say that the overall series has absorbed a mood and a tone that I don't think would have emerged otherwise.

Initially, I was interested in the notion that romantic ideals of solitude and escapism are often more fantastical than reality will ultimately offer. Regarding meaning, I wanted to find a way to communicate this sense of tension between reality and fantasy. All of the interiors that I photographed were rooms where people lived or died alone. For the most part, everything was photographed as I found it. This was important. By paying particular attention to how these interiors were composed and lit, I could bring a sense of theatre to these very real situations. The sequencing of interior and exterior pictures and the significantly small number of pictures used in the final sequence, leaves enough space between the images to enable the viewer to form their own interpretation. In this sense, I think meaning is communicated by suggestion rather than direction, and relies on an element of elusiveness.

ST - In terms of point of view were you seeing the spaces through someone else's eyes?

PH - While I was researching this project, I found an unused and isolated house at the edge of a wood in the mountains near where I live. The house had been owned by a man who lived and died alone there only a short time before. Everything had been left untouched after his death. His bedroom remained as it was, as did the contents of all the other rooms. Looking at the poor conditions he had been living in, I became interested in the capacity we have as people to be alone and whether we're capable of long periods of isolation. I found myself returning to this house many times, often at night. I photographed interiors and also the woods around the house. I tried to see the place through his eyes, although this was done very much in a fictional capacity. At this point of the project however, I found that the original significance of the subject matter - that of isolation, had begun to shift from real to 'ideal' and a rather psychological landscape was emerging. Also, the final process of selecting pictures and constructing narrative was conducted very loosely with this person in mind.

ST - The interiors seem to reflect a life of exclusively solitary existence and both attract and repel through curiosity and food. Are these found spaces?

PH - Yes, all of the interiors are found spaces. Over the six months of the project, I met with and photographed people who live alone or in remote areas and also photographed the unused house as I mentioned. When I met people, I would usually begin with a portrait but soon found that the interiors seemed more interesting and were places that could hold more meaning than a portrait. In the end, none of the portraits were used.

The tension between attraction and repulsion that you mention was important throughout this project. Some of the interiors were photographed in what could be described as a forensic manner, like the bedroom, using a wide angle lens to include as much of the bed as possible and photographing it as I found it. On the other hand, by controlling the light and considering the camera view-point, the colour palette when printing and finally the framing, I could bring a somewhat seductive quality to these images. On closer inspection of course, we can see that in most cases, we are looking at scenes of neglect and often poverty. In this sense the visual language employed relies on a contradiction and I think meaning is communicated through this opposition.

ST - The claustrophobia of the interiors are relieved by the freshness of the exteriors was there some aspect of depicting a mental space? A life lived between the two?

PH - Yes, the forest scenes at night were used in sequence with the interiors to help construct a mental space, but in a visceral or imaginative sense. The sequence switches between exterior and interior to suggest both a physical connection between the two, and also a psychological sense of restriction and release. This movement between the two spaces also allowed me to experiment with the rhythm and pace of the overall narrative and I've used this as a platform to explore, in a fictional sense, the internal psychology of the character I had in mind.

Again, lighting was important when I photographed the exterior spaces. I used different techniques, often making use of long exposures, lights and sometimes torch light to bring a subtle sense of fantasy to these natural spaces.

Technical Info
I use a nikon DSLR and a Bronica medium format film camera depending on the situation. Colour film is Fugi Pro 400H 120 film for the Bronica or Ilford FP4 Black and White. I scan the negatives and use photoshop to adjust colours/levels etc. Other than basic colour correction, photoshop isn't used much.
If I shoot digitally, I will shoot in RAW format and use Nikon Capture NX to process if there are a lot of shadow areas, as there were in this series. I find it better for reproducing shadow details, or Aperture if the highlights are important.
The animals and some of the interiors were shot digitally. The exteriors use long exposures. The woods were 10 mins I think and the shed was 2 mins to get some movement in the trees behind. With the lighting I kind of experiment using handheld flash or a torch during the exposure. The interiors use mostly available light with a reflector, and sometimes a softbox.