On being an angel...

"Woodman's pictures are not de-constructive, but constructive. She added layers of reflection and mimicry within the photograph to confound the transparent recording of the real. The images become psychological portraits of the identity of the body, rather than identifying physical portraits that reveal the psyche."

Hixon

Francesca Woodman has created only the small number of 500 photographs and she is considered to be one of the most influential photographers of our times. She was born in Denver in 1958 and studied at Rhode Island School of Design .Her first exhibition was in Britain and incorporated photos that she took when she was only 13 years old.

She developed an interest on the female body and on the three dimensional world and how people relate to space. She takes photos of herself and her body becomes a tool that enables her to explore the world. Her body is the self, the object and the subject. She is depicting her body becoming the wall, part of the floor or sealed behind a glass and blend with the objects that surround her. She explores human boundaries and specifically explores existence and disappearance, life and death. Her portraits were sensual, violent and certainly haunting. She is exploring passionately her gender and sexuality. In her photos she did not deconstruct reality rather incorporated different levels of reality. She is creating images were you can sense a dialog between herself and her body. She is using symbols and explores the transitory experience of space.

Her photographs are self portraits that definitely communicate her inner feelings through image dialogs. She is often nude in her portraits and alone. When she is not nude she is wearing vintage clothing something that she loved wearing. The setting of her photos is usually a large empty room, a cold dark place that has old furniture. She is a beautiful and gifted young woman that received brilliant critics concerning her work and started a prospering career at a young age.

However, at the age of 22 she threw herself out of the window from her flat in New York just after publishing her first book. She published only one work that was called “Some Disordered Interior Geometries”. Critics started discussing the suicidal signs that were depicted on her photos because her portraits had incorporated a psychological view of her existence. At the same time though, her photos were playful, experimental and sensual. What made Woodman an influential artist was not the way of her death rather than her life’s work. She became influential for her experimental and innovative perspective. She is an artist and a woman worth discovering.

Art:F.Woodman
for slideshow link

Abandonment

“The act of abandoning, or the state of being abandoned; total desertion; relinquishment.”

I have to explore the feeling of abandonment through photography. Abandonment is a feeling that we have all felt once in our lives. Maybe we have lost someone that we care about physically or metaphorically maybe we have felt abandoned by people or maybe we have acknowledged the existence of this feeling as we observe an abandoned house or an abandoned place.

The interesting thing is that when I heard about our new exploration in photography I felt a bit numb as I could not remember my self feeling completely and absolutely abandoned. I have felt in the past alone, left, lonely, but I am not sure if I have really felt the real meaning of the word abandoned.

I am a social creature, a person that needs others and wants to be needed. I have so much need of intimate contact that I value and honor friendship. Its important for me to be able to express my self my feelings close to people I love and have meaningful conversations as well as fun. I don’t know how to hide my feelings and rarely do things that pressure me. Thinking about it loneliness must be my greatest fear as for me it is important to share and live not alone but with.

There were times in my life where I have felt lonely, in my mind comes the time when I had to stay in England alone and all my friends were gone. I have also felt lonely metaphorically, alongside with people that we had nothing in common. I have felt heart-broken and left after a break up but I never believed that I was been abandoned. Maybe I am a positive person and the adversities can only make me a stronger or a more experienced person. Maybe it scares me to believe that I was abandoned and I just describe it as being left. Maybe I am too arrogant to believe that I was ever abandoned and maybe all of the above. Before I capture this feeling in my camera I need to search it within my self. It is easy to characterize something as being abandoned but its so damn difficult finding it within yourself.

(art by krecha)

The dreaming city...

I have to imagine of a dream city a place that would make me happy and create it in a photography dark room. This makes me feel a bit restricted because my dream city would definitely have a lot of color which is what our grey cities need.

A dream place would have parks where I could take long walks. I would go there alone and read a book or with my friends and play guitar. A dream city will have more animals that are not afraid to walk amongst people and beautiful lakes. A dream city would also care about the environment and try to develop recourses that depend on solar or wind energy. My city would not be covered by ugly block of flats and grey cement. My dream city would be able to breathe.

In a dream city my neighbors would feel less scared and they would go out more often. My dream city will have some lovely people that don’t turn their look away when you look at them; scared. They would also be more open-minded, more relaxed and they would not judge someone easily. They would not care about political parties but they would be political and environmentally aware. They would not be so scared to love and be loved and they would hug others more often. My dream city is an actual dreaming city because people have dreams that drive them to creativity and they rarely see these haunting nightmares. It is a city that is dreaming because it has a future and because people have a quality of life.

How should I create my dream city? I think I would start using my color pencils, some fairy dust and a lot of positivism. And I would need some habitants to live with me.

I will start right away…my dreaming city.

(art by bellalee)

The Last Potrait

I remember that last year we went to Thessalonica to a photography festival.
The gallery that is still carved in my memory was titled the Last Portrait. It was a series of real photographs depicting deceased people just before they were buried by their relatives. It was like a family portrait but the deceased was in the centre of the photograph sleeping in the coffin. This was happening until the midst of the 20th century around the world; even in Greece. The reason is that they wanted to keep the last photo of the person that died as a reminder that would comfort them as they would remember his face as it was when they last saw it

Now this sounds so macabre and strange. In the past that was therapeutic as the photo was comforting the relatives. But times were different as it was easier to accept the death of a loved one and they viewed death as a part of life. It was a transition and not the end. Now death is something that happens to others. People avoid going to funerals, they don’t see people dying next to them as now this happens inside the hospitals and after that a funeral service handles the rest. A photograph would be too macabre and we even throw sometimes the belongings of a deceased.
According to Ksanthakis “death creates a contradiction between the need of the society to let go of the deceased and the need to keep him alive”.

Today was the funeral of a fellow student in my photography class. My teacher phoned me to inform me of the funeral but I was in Santorini traveling back to Athens but could not make it on time.
I was shocked when I heard about his death and I felt numb. I did not know how to react as death scares me. He was 37 and died of a stroke. I did not know how to feel, I did not know how to act. I did not know him well, he was in one class ahead of me but every time we said hello and exchanged some words. He was a brilliant photographer and a person that always smiled. I was thinking how young he was to die and that I did not get the chance to get to know him. I felt sad and scared.

But what scares me most is whether we feel sad because a person dies or because we are reminded of our own fragility.

The world we live in....

Most of the times I am happy, positive and content but sometimes something reminds me in what a cruel world we live in and I feel like someone has punched me in the stomach.

One of these times was yesterday when we went with my photograpy class to view a photojournalist exhibition in Athens airport that has received an award. This exhibition made me question if this world that we live in is really a place where in the future I could raise children and made me realise that a lot of things happen around the globe that we remain unaware when we lock ourselves inside our little flats.

In the exhibition photojournalists have captured events that have occured in recent years and involve suffering provoked by man like war, violence, exploitation and natural disasters as well.
Horrors of mankind like the war in Iraq, the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo where four million people have died in 6 years, Sierra Leone where 50,000 people where killed in civil wars and child workers in Bangladesh.
The natural disasters were about the hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Kashmir and the Indonesian province of Aceh that was most affected by the tsunami.

Personally I could not have the strength to take photograhs of events like these (when I can see people sufferring near by all I want to do is help them) but I guess that without these photos people would not be reminded that there still so much poverty, violence and exploitation around the world even in 2006.

I could not post the photos as they are copyrighted but you can see all the exhibition from the following site:
http://www.worldpressphoto.nl


I often think that I live in a dream world because I have such a positive attitude and I smile a lot but sometimes
I wake up terrified.


(image by freckledfaced 29)