Formulating an Abstract + some Advice

Questions to help formulate an abstract:

• What am I doing?
• Why am I doing it?
• How am I doing it?
• What do I hope to find?
• What will the significance be?

What am I doing?
I am taking pictures of Galt.
The object of study can be the subject of study - architecture.

Why am I doing it?
I wish "Why not?" could count as an answer....
I am doing it because I want to take beautiful photographs. I want to explore the city and document it, find places that are poignant, unexpected (or expected), have something to say, or sit quietly in the background. I want to record history. There are a lot of "I want"s in this paragraph.. the simple answer really is, "Because I want to."

How am I doing it?
I am using a 35mm Pentax and a 120mm Mamiya, black and white film (100 speed) and developing the images in the darkroom myself. I wander around the town, trying to explore different areas and document them. I return to places I believe have character that perhaps I haven't been able to capture yet or places I would like to visit in various lighting conditions. There is no set way in how I explore the town. It's a bit of a meandering wander - I end up where I end up.

*In the last couple days as I have been posting negatives and other images on this blog, I have realized just how much time I have been, am now and will be devoting the actual enlargement of these negatives in the darkroom. Having gone through about 30 photographs in a matter of hours, touched up quickly, fixed scratches - it really made me look hard as to why I have decided to physically and manually (and painstakingly) develop my images. For now, my answer is - for the craft. It really is about the priviledge of being so closely involved with the images - of spending hours in a dark room perfecting each corner of a photo until it all comes together to form the final print.

What do I hope to find?
I'm not sure if there is anything in particular that I am looking for. I think the idea is more about bringing together a cohesive image or depiction of the town - by seeing photo after photo, I hope to take viewers on a walk through the town, follow in my footsteps and see (through my eyes) what I have seen.

What will the significance be?
This is the question I am having the most trouble with. In the grand scheme of things, this is not a redesign for the better of a city core.... or research into social housing and making the lives of people better. It is art for art's sake, as well as, being about the town. It is about presenting Galt to a greater audience and in a different light than perhaps it has been perceived in the past (see the last quote at the bottom of the post).

Advice
At my Mx reviews last fall, there were a couple quotes by the professors, during my crit and the one previous to it, which I wrote down. I can't remember who it was that said what, but some I remembered, so I credited.

About progress...
"become OBSESSED" Geoff
"Don't be good. Everything/everyone is a subject" Don to me
"Project the project forward - don't be meek. 'Here's my MASSIVE idea'"

About the outcome...
"What do I want the result to look like?" (work backwords)
"Who's work do you most wish your work could be like?"
"Which project do you most desire yours looked like right now?"
"This isn't your last project, it's your first project." Geoff

About titles...
"'Adaptive reuse' is a healthy meal. 'Wallowing in shit' is a feast!'" (Don)
"Think of a name you could put in italics"

My favourite quote was from Geoff, and it really hit home in terms of what I want to achieve:
"Tell the town what it has not seen of itself."

Why Photography?

From M3...

tex·ture [teks-cher]
noun, verb, -tured, -tur·ing.

–noun
1. the visual and especially tactile quality of a surface: rough texture.
2. an essential or characteristic quality; essence.
3. the quality given, as to a musical or literary work, by the combination or interrelation of parts or elements.

In photography, texture plays a vital role to the quality and composition of the image, just as pattern, light and tone do. And though it is obvious as to how photography helps capture the physical texture of materials, it may be less obvious as to how it captures texture as history.

I chose photography because of the inherent characteristic of a photograph as an index, a trace of the past. It is proof to the existence of something. Photography I believe is appropriate when studying the history of Galt, from its inception until the present time. The photograph allows me to capture solitary instants within the flux of time that when brought together provide the viewer with an aspect of time.

Quotes

I have had these quotes written down since the beginning of M3 and they still ring true to my opinion of photography, its benefits, limits and relationships to architecture. The explanations of the quotes are not very eloquent - they were just a way for me try to explain (to myself) what it was the quotes meant to me.
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on photography as event

“Even so, photography offers the possibility to freeze aspects of reality of architecture and light that might vanish when contemplated in the flesh. It is also true that through photographs fiction is greater, although reality might be more surprising.”

- Elias Torres

"Although the event is always something that takes place in a global disorder devoid of meaning, this happy moment - at times accidental, at times the result of a willing intellect - constitutes an outstanding instant in a constant flux, a harmonious, polyphonic chord in a situation of permanent transition.”

- Ignasi de Sola-Morales

Though Sola-Morales is referring to an event and the architecture of an event, I find that this quote defines photography very accurately and, in a way, echos the idea behind Torres' quote. After all, a photograph is just a happy moment captured from a stream of constant flux and chaos. That instant is then transferred to a place of permanent transition where the instant will exist forever and never change.

on photography as trace/evidence

"As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify."

- Rosalind E. Krauss

The photograph is an index or referent of what existed at the moment that the photograph was taken. It is a footprint or trace left by the photographed object, event or person. Just because a photograph is an accurate trace, however, does not make it true. As Barthes says previously, it is simply proof that something existed.

on the limits of photography

“The decline of narrative painting in the past century has been ascribed in large part to the rise of photography, which “relieved” the painter of the necessity of story telling. This is curious, since photography has never been successful at narrative. It has in fact seldom attempted it… The heroic documentation of the American Civil War by the Brady group, and the incomparably larger photographic record of the Second World War, have this in common: neither explained, without extensive captioning, what was happening. The function of these pictures was not to make the story clear, it was to make it real.”

- John Szarkowski

A photograph without words or captions does not tell a story; it is only a glimpse into a moment, and without captions the explanation of that moment is not any clearer to us once we have seen the image. The photograph is only evidence that the moment occurred.

Negatives

About a month back or so I went to visit my sister in Toronto and took advantage of the OCAD digital lab to scan some negatives. I have adjusted the contrast on most of them, to give them a bit of pop... I don't think you'll have seen any of these in my other posts.

Though I've corrected some of the horizontals, there will, unavoidably be quite a few that look quite wonky (I apparently have issues taking straight photographs). And though I did take some time correcting contrast and scratches, I didn't want to spend too much time on something that, ultimately, doesn't help too much towards producing the actual thesis. I have also (regrettably) discovered what my stubborness for developing my own photos means.... hours and hours in the dark instead of a fraction of the time on a computer.

I also apologize for the barrage of photographs you've been exposed to in the last couple days. After this, I promise I'll be posting some more text. Some of these photos are pretty crap - just a heads up.

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Contact Sheets

Contact sheets! Because I have not even scratched the surface of enlarging all the photos I've taken, I thought I'd upload some of the more recent contact sheets I've made. There are a couple photos within them that might work... I'm not convinced by the majority of them though.

There are a couple contact sheets from quite a few months back, but I haven't really enlarged any of the photos off them, so I thought I'd include them in this post. The contacts sheets begin at the most recent.

I also isolated some photos that I might consider enlarging to see how they look. The file size of each contact sheet is about 5megs - so it might take a while to open the file. I kept them that size to allow for more convenient viewing of the photographs - otherwise they would have ended up incredibly small.

Note that order or size does not indicate any sort of hierarchy or preference.
Oh and don't mind the pen and marker scribbles all over the images.

I clearly have something with this school, maybe it's because it's all I see out of half the windows in my house.... this photo, though, is taken four floors up - I like this perspective.

I like how these look together.

I like the scale of this.

Left: I was trying to get the striations on the ground...
and I like the fishbowl look of the scene.
Right: I actually like the feeling the non-vertical lines provide in the image.

Southworks Antique Market - I think there is potential here.

Sort of plain, but I like the composition.

I don't think I managed to do what I wanted... the shapes of this shrubbery looked pretty interesting, but I'm not sure it works as a photograph.


Some photos around the bus station. Bottom right - I liked how the lamps were positioned to offset the steeples... I might have to try this one again. Bottom left: I like the gloss of the fresh coat of paint.

The house reminds me of cyclops without an eye.
I know, makes very little sense.

This is the second picture I have of the drawings in these windows (here is the other). There is something about them, but I'm having trouble capturing whatever it is I like about them.
Okay, this makes me laugh every time. I've known about the proximity of the townhouses to the warehouse, but I'd never seen it from this view. Incredible. I'd like to capture it from the other side as well.

Top two: the other side of the row houses on Harris.
Bottom left: the side and back of the Royal

Sneaking around peoples' backyards, front yards and driveways.

The quality looks like that of a photo taken a hundred years ago, but it's just b/c I had to lighten it up from the contact sheet quite a bit. It's the only night shot I have so far, but I think there is something here - I especially like the four lit windows (note to self: more night, dawn and dusk shots).

More houses.

These are different than any other photographs I have... so I'm not sure if they go or not. There is something very bizarre about them.. especially the top right. The bottom two might be too picturesqe or landscapey for this thesis.

I KEEP telling myself that I'm going to take more dusk, dawn and night shots and I have yet to do that. I did try to take some night shots and learned that my light meter goes a bit nutty when it's too dark, so I'll get a handheld.

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