the shed of electrofried

Sunday 3 March 2024

lessons with kate - tish murtha

a daughter speaks

In an interview on 'Wombat', a French arts web-site, Emma Murtha sums up perfectly the life of a fantastic but largely unrecognised female photographer. Click here to read it.

Tish, Emma's mother died in poverty. During the 1970s she took pictures in Elswick, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, right next door to where my future wife was growing up.

A few weeks ago we watched 'Tish', the film Emma made about her mother. We remembered so much of that time and place and yet sadly we knew nothing of Tish's existence. It was almost as if her life had been air-brushed out of the history of photography.

the mother's work

Tish's style was unapologetic. She shot what she wanted and refused to compromise. In a man, those single-minded qualities would be applauded, but not for a woman. Once more implicit discrimination rules.

Tish's photos are magic. Shot in the back streets of a bombed-out, yet vibrant, area of Newcastle they are jam-packed with mucky kids enjoying freedom in the open air. It could never happen these days.

Tish captured the moment. Her black and white pictures were shot in the environment and bursting with energy. These were her people and this was her tribe.

the challenge

This week's challenge was to take photographs on the theme of 'trust your intuition' in the style of Tish Murtha.

what did I do?

I focused on identifying the right 'tribe' to photograph. After a couple of 'trial and errors' I took my camera to Villa Park.

My son and I are long-time season-ticket holders. We're well known to everyone around us and our fellow supporters are used to me taking action pictures when Villa score. This is, I'm delighted to say, an increasingly regular occurrence under the stewardship of Head Coach, Unai Emery.

I chose to take black and white photographs in camera. I find this much better than shooting in colour then converting the pictures once I'm back home. It helps me avoid distractions and concentrate instead on spotting different tones in the image.

The photographs were taken without flash using a high ISO setting and a relatively wide aperture.

These are the two photos I chose to show to the group. I titled them 'the agony and the ecstasy', which is pretty much the lot of the average football supporter.

Here's some more photos I took that afternoon...

what did I learn?

Be brave. Never look away...

Sunday 18 February 2024

lessons with kate - nan goldin

do men and women see in different ways?

It's an age-old question and I'm sure we do. However, there's also a great range, diversity and mix on so many, many levels. We are, after all, only human and as always we need to look beyond the stereotype.

Click on this link for a fascinating research article by Mohammed Sattari and Sadegh Mousavi on the subject.

this week's photographer

This week Kate introduces us to the work of Nan Goldin. Born in 1953 she had a very troubled childhood. Her older sister, Barbara, committed suicide when Nan was just eleven.

Nan wrote about this in her best known book, 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency'...

'This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control. By the time she was eighteen, she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C. It was an act of immense will.'

Nan Goldin ©

Nan left home aged thirteen. She began her photographic journey three years later when a staff member of the community she was part of at the time gave her a camera.

Much of Nan's work features the LGBTQ community and she had a particular affection for drag queens. She also documented the nascent post-punk music scene and its hard-core drug culture, rooted primarily in New York's Bowery neighbourhood.

Nan's photography is characterised by a snapshot aesthetic, full of vivid colour and casual poses.

But behind the brash surface lies a much deeper, empathetic truth. These are Nan's people, this is Nan's tribe.

the challenge

This week's challenge was to take photographs in Nan's style on the theme of, 'keep your curiosity alive'.

Here's four pictures from my shoot.

what did I do?

The technical bits - upping the saturation levels, choosing an appropriate film effect and searching out a colourful neon-lit environment.

The creative bit - a quick-fire identification of patterns likely to produce the results I was after. I saw four connected elements immediately.

The first was my tribe - photographers, of course. The lady pictured in the shots is Dawn, a fellow member of Kate Green's photography group. The second was Dawn's note-book lying on the floor beside her chair. The image on the back cover suited exactly what I had in mind.

The next element was some neon-lighting which I knew I could find just down the corridor in the bar area of the MAC. I wanted to create a Bladerunner-type atmosphere.

The fourth and final element was the signage on display, in particular the illuminated sign above the entrance to the cinema.

what did I learn?

I adore the creative process. The ideas fill me, I see rather than I look.

There are connections in absolutely everything around us. They are not random. If we take time and stop looking for them we can see them.

Thursday 15 February 2024

lessons with kate - miho kajioka

the brutal truth

I detest discrimination in all its many hydra-headed forms. I believe in celebrating difference, not using it as a weapon to divide.

Whilst explicit sexism has become just a little less common these days the more insidious danger lies in the implicit. Click on this link to find out more about discrimination in photography - it remains the brutal truth.

this week's photographer

Week 2 and Kate Green introduces us to the work of Miho Kajioka, a very talented young Japanese photographer now living in San Fransisco. Her work is ethereal, calming and fragile. She uses empty space in and around an object to define it.

Miho's photographs have a timeless quality to them, enhanced by the thoughtful use of black and white tones or muted colours.

Not only are the images beautiful, the way they are presented brings a painterly quality to them too. Milo places her subjects in long or wide frames to emphasise the negative space to be found within. She applies origami folds, she uses silver-tone and she stains her pictures with tea.

Her images transcend photography and enter a place where everything is art and art is everything.

the challenge

This week's challenge is to produce two images applying what we've learned about Miho's work. The theme is 'connect to your inner child'.

Here's what I came up with.

what did I do?

The technical bits first. I used a Fuji medium-format camera for its super resolution and image quality. The ISO setting was high and the aperture wide - I was shooting in virtual darkness.

After taking each shot I reviewed the image on the camera's back-screen and used both exposure compensation and film effect to create different images.

Back home I tweaked highlights and shadows, cropped the pictures slightly and applied a vignette and a silver-tone to create a dream-like quality to the images.

Creatively, my focus on connecting to the inner child centred on the mystery and magic of seeing the world in the dark.

As a very small child I remember my parents bundling me and my younger brother into the back seat of the car and driving in the dark in the vain hope he would cease his incessant bawling. I marvelled as the headlights lit up a world which looked so very different in the day.

The choice of a tree to photograph was deliberate. It reminded me of when I was four or five with a hunger to read everything I could lay my hands on. I found Enid Blyton's 'Faraway Tree' stories on our local library and they became a safe sanctuary of my own where I could visit and dream.

what did I learn?

The act of stopping after each shot to check the results on the camera screen made me slow down. It created a natural, gentle-paced rhythm which enabled to think (whether consciously or unconsciously) on a much deeper level.

I'm also intrigued by the way Miho presents her images. In the next few weeks I hope to investigate how I may shape my images using physical means rather than software.

Friday 9 February 2024

lessons with kate - ruth bernhard

about this series

As many visitors to my blog will know I am a member of a photographic group at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham. Our expert tutor is Kate Green. I've been part of the group for many years now and Kate's cheeky, insightful and challenging lessons have helped me find and hone my own style. I owe so much to her encouragement, affirmation and guidance.

This term I want to take you behind the scenes as Kate leads us through a series of lessons which focus on women in photography, a much ignored subject.

gender discrimination in photography is rife

Here's just one example taken from an excellent on-line article by Lucy Buchholz in last February's edition of 'March 8'...

'When searching for top professional photographers, research from Wallflower Studios found that search results for terms such as ‘Best photography Instagram accounts’ and ‘Best photographers’ features 216 photographers on the first page of results, only 61 of which were women in the US and just 46 for UK results. For the US, women were represented 28% of the time; in the UK, the results were even lower at 17%.'

Lucy Buchholz ©

this week's photographer

The scene is set as Kate starts her first lesson by introducing us to the work of Ruth Bernhard.

Ruth was an indomitable force. Born in 1905 in Berlin she moved to America in 1927 to join her father. She lived in the States to the ripe old age of a hundred and one. A woman of passion she had several lesbian affairs before eventually settling down in her sixties with a Price Rice, a black US Airforce Colonel ten years her junior.

Ruth left a body of work, almost exclusively in black and white, which is absolutely stunning. She is best known for two things.

The first was her nude photography, usually featuring the female form. This reached a pinnacle with the publication of 'The Eternal Body' - a book which now finds pride of place in my collection after my dear wife bought me a copy to celebrate my reaching State Retirement Age!

The second was Ruth's still-life work, which placed particular emphasis on curved forms and vulva-like imagery.

We looked at some of Ruth's photography then Kate set us a challenge to to take pictures based on the theme, 'Never get used to anything'.

Here's what I came up with...

what did I do?

I stared at a pair of boots on the floor. My boots. Dr. Marten's. I didn't look for anything in particular, instead I wanted to see. I let the images come to me.

In a little while light and shade, contrast, shapes and form began to emerge. At that point I got out my camera and chose the settings. A reasonable, but not unduly high ISO suitable for low light, a one stop down adjustment on the exposure compensation and a wide aperture to blur the background.

I kept checking each frame as I shot to see what worked, what didn't and what else I might need to see.

what did I learn?

The more I stared the more I saw.

The webbing on the side of each boot formed a bridge of light, the signature white stitching suggested something sealed within, the curves of the boot holes became handcuffs, the labels in each boot took on the form of skeletal teeth as two ghostly faces emerged from the gloom.

And then, the last shot. A warm erotic abstract which I think best reflected what the work of Ruth Bernhard was all about.

I learned to sit still and not rush, to blur my eyes not sharpen them so a fresh reality could emerge.

I learned to play not strive. And to my mind that is a very, very good thing indeed.