Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Draft of my 500-1000 word statement for profesional practice

23/10/09

Jesse Simons

Stage 4 BFA Photography

I began this investigation with a trip to the wild and untouched Fiordland national park, and a simple digital photograph of Mitre Peak. Upon my return home I was looking through images and the one of Mitre Peak caught my attention, I was sure I had seen it before. Searching the Internet I realised I had seen this image many times over. A similar experience was documented by Don Lillo in his novel White Noise when he visited the most photographed barn in America. “No one sees the Barn…..we’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura”[1] I began to explore the distribution and proliferation of images in the digital age, and our desire to capture images of iconic places.

The final body of work is looking at images of iconic places. Places we see in on television, in magazines, websites, movies, and blogs. Places like Times Square, The Eiffel Tower, The Berlin Wall, and places closer to home like Milford Sound, the Moeraki Boulders, the Dunedin Train Station. I have recreated tourist icons, travelling only via the internet and other people's photographs, using search engines and low-resolution thumbnails

I search these iconic places on the Internet, gathering repetitions of each image thumbnail, and layering them on top of one and other and arranging them in such a way that they are still recognizable. Because of the small thumbnails I am using there is a similar effect to Thomas Ruf’s Jpegs series in which he explores the distribution and reception of images in the digital age. He locates online jpegs and enlarges them until the pixels emerge in a chessboard pattern of near abstraction[2]. From a distance you can make out in my work what each image is depicting, but as you get closer to the image it fractures and breaks up into a digital mess of pixels.

The journey of these images is an important part of my questioning the shift in how we experience the world and our ever increasing dependence on technologies and consequent disconnection with things natural. “My view of the world was a photographic view, like I believe it is for everybody, no?’ sculptor Giacometti stated over 40 years ago. ‘One never sees things, one always sees them through a screen”[3] My work explores the distribution and proliferation of images in the digital age and it may disturb our complacent sense of individuality within travelling experiences.

The effect of fragments and constant layering creates a painterly aspect. This work engages in a history of classical landscape painting and the notion of the Sublime, inspiring beauty and awe. Like a writer in the 17th century would take the Grand Tour of the Swiss Alps, or a painter in the 19th century would paint the majestic Mitre Peak, The Sublime is still sought after, but experienced in a different way, flattened in rectangular shape and put through a screen. My work however has come back out of the screen and into the physical world.




[1] Fred Ritchin. After Photography. W.W Norton & Company, Inc. 2009. Page 22

[2] Bennett Simpson. Museum of Contemporary Art. http://www.aperture.org/books/books-featured/jpegs.html. 04/11/09

[3] Fred Ritchin. After Photography. W.W Norton & Company, Inc. 2009. Page 21

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Site Preps

Been thinking through some site space issues with Viet (whos also exhibiting in the life drawing room) We need to make sure the space doesn't eat up our work (it's massive) so we have been talking about getting rid of some of it.....make a wall or attatch a sheet along the side, this would also cancel out uglt things like the sink, the stairs, and all the crap in our space.

Hire Pool - Went in to see what they had and they've got some big silky drop wall things for marquees. $10per metre per event, which would turn out to be heaps, we could probably haggle and get a deal from them.
Maybe another option would be make a wall. This would be a bit of a mission and would require building.

Another thing we checked out was the Vinyl lettering. We went to 'Auto Art' in South D. They said we have to bring in a file - PDF Jpeg or whatever with what we want, colour, font, size. And it should cost no more than $50.

Friday, October 16, 2009

http://www.3news.co.nz/Are-digital-cameras-eroding-our-memories/tabid/368/articleID/125800/cat/100/Default.aspx Heres an interesting feature on tv3 News about photography and issues that new technologies are bringing up. Worth a look.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

screens, screens, screens

http://remixtheory.net/?p=391

Interview with Idris Khan

http://photoslaves.com/?p=483 I found this interview with Idris Khan which is interesting and shows his ideas and thought processes. It definitly relates to my current work and I think I need to look into his work in more depth. Interesting to hear what he has to say about the importance of time in his work.

http://photoslaves.com/ cool website with articles about contemporary art photographers, exhibitions etc.



Sunday, September 6, 2009

In Google we trust: Our new faith. Stuff.co.nz

Millions of words have been written and broadcast about the rise of religion around the world, but rarely included in the discourse is the most powerful new spiritual force of them all.

For hundreds of millions of people there is a new portal to understanding, a gateway to the world, a tree of knowledge, a believers' bible. The legion of believers grows with every hour. They believe in Google.

The word suggests infinite power. It is derived from a mathematical term, googol, which means 1 to the power of 100. The two visionaries who founded the company called Google chose the name to signify their dream of harnessing the immensity of information flowing through cyberspace. They have succeeded. This year Google will process more than 180 billion requests for information. It has become the world's most powerful information company. It has a market capitalisation of $173 billion. And it sprang to life just 11 years ago, in September 1998.

Google inspires awe, which is one reason why the Church of Google has appeared on the internet. The site (founded in 2006 by a young Canadian, Matt MacPherson) posits this argument: ''We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google's divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of 'God.' ''

The Church of Google offers what it calls nine proofs:

1. Google is the closest thing to an omniscient (all-knowing) entity in existence.

2. Google is everywhere at once (omnipresent).

3. Google answers prayers. (''As an example, you can quickly find information on alternative cancer treatments, or new and innovative medical discoveries, and generally anything that resembles a typical prayer.'')

4. Google is potentially immortal.

5. Google is infinite. (The internet can theoretically grow forever.)

6. Google remembers all.

7. Google can do no evil. (Google's corporate philosophy is ''do no evil''.)

8. Google is believed. (The term ''Google'' is searched for more than the terms ''God'', ''Jesus'', ''Allah'', ''Buddha'', ''Christianity'' and ''Islam'' combined.)

9. Evidence of Google's existence is abundant. No faith is required.

Beyond this elegant spoof, and the serious philosophical argument it makes in favour of atheism, the entire Google phenomenon takes us down the slippery path of artificial intelligence, a direction computer science appears to be heading. Every day, the vast Google machine of 500,000 computer servers processes about 500 million queries. So many people are using Google that it is becoming akin to the collective brain of western society.

So let's continue this story in a church - the Christ Lutheran Church, in St Paul, Minnesota, on June 20 this year, where my favourite-ever video clip was created and later posted on YouTube, the most popular video-sharing site in the world (and owned, of course, by Google).

It was the marriage of Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz, both 28, both American graduate students. The hilarious, heart-warming video of the bridal party dancing down the aisle was meant for friends and family. Then it was posted on YouTube.

Two months later, it is now legendary. Known as ''JK Wedding Entrance Dance'', it has been viewed more than 23 million times. So far. It has spawned a video spoof (''Jill and Kevin's Divorce''), video spin-offs, and an official Jill and Kevin website: ''We would never have expected this response to our wedding entrance in a million years.''

So what makes this video so special? Why and how would a group of unknowns prompt a global response? Answer: the wisdom of crowds.

The entire viral process, where something of great quality and humanity is able to find a global audience despite humble origins, is vindicated by a fascinating book, The Wisdom of Crowds, written in 2002 by James Surowiecki, the economics correspondent of The New Yorker.

He argues that large groups hold a collective wisdom. They are always smarter than individual experts at solving problems, or even anticipating the future. His thesis is counter-intuitive, because it has always been assumed that crowds gravitate towards the mean, the mediocre middle.

No, says Surowiecki, who studied popular culture, psychology, mass marketing, artificial intelligence, military history, game theory and even ant biology in preparing the book. ''If you have a factual question, the best way to get a consistently good answer is to ask a group. They are also surprisingly good at solving problems.

''Experts, no matter how smart, only have limited amounts of information. They also have biases. It's very rare that one person can know more than a large group of people.''

Not that large groups need to agree, or are necessarily wise. ''The wisdom of crowds isn't about consensus,'' he says. ''You can't find collective wisdom via compromise. The best group decisions come from lots of independent individual decisions.''

Which brings us back to Google. It has been able to harness the wisdom of crowds, the collective effort of many people acting independently of each other, on a scale never seen before.

Because of Google, our species' capacity and need for co-operation is evolving into a new and higher phrase of social organisation. We appear to be becoming more like a giant ant colony, a multitude of individuals with a collective brain, and a single wellspring, a super-entity which evokes power, action and belief. It has a name. We call it Google.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/2840272/In-Google-we-trust-our-new-faith

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Typologies



We had a lecture on photographic Typologies today which reminded me of a few artists who are doing work relevant to mine.

Bernd and Hilli Becher - I have already put a link to their work on this blog


Thomas Struth - JPEGs - large format photos which are really pixelated and as you get closer to them you lose all definition.



Jason Salavon - Playboy centrefolds. This is a series of works where he has taken centrefolds of every issue of playboy magazine of each decade (60's, 70's, 80's, 90's) and layered them digitally and using some kind of mathematical sequence which results in a faint abstract image that you can barely makeout. He is commenting on the digital media and the set formalities of photography.




From 'Playboy Centrefolds' series

City (westward)

Hiroshi Sugimoto - Seascapes

from Sugimoto's 'Seascapes' series.

http://shpcontemporary.com/Sugimoto?gclid=CN3J6Y-Au5wCFRBbagodDny0mw



Sze Tsung Leong


Tuesday, August 18, 2009

"Site" Space


The time has come to find out spaces for site! We need to write down our 3 first choices for spaces. Heres a map of the art school with my possible spaces

Stereoscopes

Some notes and a picture from out resent technical seminar visit to the Otago Settlers Museum.

Aaron Hobson - Cinemascapes




Awesome images with a strong cinematic quality. Interesting that Aaron Hobson is the model in his photographs. http://www.aaronhobson.com/ Hobson featured in the 2008 Juxtapoz Magazine photography issue which is an epic mag and very influential. /www.juztapoz.com

'a decisive moment'
'Subterranean encounter'
Not overly related to my work but I really like the images.
'

Technical stuff

I am in the process of experimenting with a range of technical processes to help me on my way with my project. The 3D idea I'd like to play with somehow. If I could somehow create the effect of a work that you can look at and experience and feel as though you don't have to experience (whats in the image) in real life. Creating a comment on the way things are changing with technology, travel and comodification.

Yves Medam

Yves Medam's photographs show an interesting way to create a 3d effect in photographs. He uses a similar technique to the style of taking panoramic photographs and stitching them so that you can still see the separate photos. They are taken in public places i.e the Eiffel Tower, with people all around. He joins them all up so that you can see a sort of narrative in the photographs with movement and 3 dimensional warped perspectives. http://www.yvesmedam.com/. I want to try a similar thing with Iconic places in Dunedin like the famous Train Station.


Recherche personnelle
Cathédrale Notre Dame (Paris)





Recherche personnelle
Musée du Louvre (Paris)


Monday, August 17, 2009

ReCap

Its been ages since I updated my 4th year 'work' blogs, I have been blogging on my more personal blog however, showing some of my rescent winter adventures. Influence wise I have been looking at a bunch of photographers: http://www.chrisorwig.com/ http://www.royarden.com/ to name a few and looking into the more comercial side of photography, magazines and various publications trying to figure out what direction I want to take after I graduate this year.

I have a good selection of fresh photos from a snowboarding trip that I am in the process of getting out there to magazines, websites etc. to see if they are interested in publishing any. Before my latest snowboarding trip to Temple Basin with 9 friends I purchased an infrared flash slave trigger set with 2 receivers so I can now take photos and place flashes where ever I want (within 30 metres). Its alot of fun I tried it on a few snowboarding jumps, heres a preview of what can be acheived:

This is a photo of Phil Dominick and with assistaince from Riley Elliott (holding the flash) I stood back from the jump and took the photo at about 1/30 of a second to get some of the mountains in the background. I like this photo because it has 3 different light sources: 1) the flash pointing at the snowboarder. 2) the light coming out of the Hut to the left 3) the last remaining natural light from beyond the mountains in the distance. It isn't exactly a huge knarly jump but it is styley and unique. I think another flash to the right of Phil would have made it a bit better, and a tripod would have helped, it was quite a rushed shot.




This was my first attempt with the flash on a low light day where I wanted to bring out the skiier (Mark Von Roy) from the background. It worked well but I definitly should have had the flash more hidden maybe behind the saw horse. Its all part of the learning.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Banksy


On a completely unrelated note, Banksys new 'Banksy vs Bristol Museum' exhibition is amazing!!! This is the next level of Art installations. 3 floors of goodness and still he remains annonymous!!!!!
CHECK IT OUT

microsoft photo-synth

Just heard about this today from Alex. Its crazy what they are doing with photography and the Internet these days. This program constructs 3D space from lots of still images. Basically you give it images of the same place from slightly different angles and it puts them together in a 3D space. They are public so people can tag their own pictures into the image. Iconic tourist areas will be popular synths ao I am wondering if I could give it a go.
They have already constructed places from images collected from google of the Notre Dame Church. http://photosynth.net/

Also learned today that you can travel the world underwater on google-earth, crazy


I think where I'm heading in my work this year is towards using these new technological gimicky things as tools for my development. I have the concept now I need to use these things and get real technical. The work I'm presenting I enjoy and I think it says what I want and makes sense but it is not quite up to it technically and that is what I need to work on.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Appropriating and Recontextualizing Google Image Search Results

This is an interesting article also about Barak Obama image appropriation and using images off google in art.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/mayaescobar by Maya Escobar

Image Appropriation


I found this interesting article about image appropriation which talks about this controversial image of Barak Obama. Shepard Fairey made it into the famous 'Hope' poster but he then got in a bit of trouble as he allegedly did not correctly acknowledge the photographer. Full article here It also has work by Walker Evans who is renouned for his image appropriation

Sunday, June 14, 2009

My attempt at a typology


Using ideas influenced by Martin Parr's work. I have taken pictures of the normal and mundane, to give them new light. They are photos of Dunedin Garages and I have used the typology technique to display them together.

Typologies


Martin Parr


http://www.martinparr.com/index1.html

My Theory Essay



Tourism, the Sublime and authentic reproducibility.
[a]
By Jesse Simons





Stage 4.Theory. Otago Polytechnic School of Fine Art 15.06.09

Since the beginning of humanity we have been on the move. Over time there have been needs to move for all kinds of reasons and in the present day more people than ever roaming the world. European voyages in the 18th and 19th century were setting out to discover, explore, and take hold of countries that were relatively untouched. New Zealand was one of these countries. In 1839 ‘The New Zealand Company’ was formed. This was a company which promoted emigrating from England to New Zealand. The images they used to promote New Zealand were some of the first depictions of New Zealand that were seen in Europe. Today New Zealand has a substantial tourism industry and is widely promoted visually on the Internet, in magazines and in tourist guides. New Zealand has a reputation for being a pure place with beautiful scenery. The image of New Zealand is familiar to people all around the World. In recent times we have seen immense technological innovations making travel easy, care-free, cheap and comfortable. We can now experience parts of the world that were once not even thought of. Because of these advances in technology and things like transportation there has been a shift in how we experience, see and perceive the world. Theorist Daniel Boorstin talks about the packaging of tourism and argues that the tourism boom since the Second World War has taken away the excitement of “travel” which is authentic, and replaced it with in-authentic tourism. Talking about the authenticity in tourism also relates to various types of tourism photography and the way images are captured. Relationships can also be made of Walter Benjamin’s theories about the authenticity of reproducible images. Another theory which has seen a big shift due to tourism in New Zealand is the notion of The Sublime and what the once heroic explorers experienced has been turned into commodity and is now being consumed in large quantities. Places can now be experienced online, trips can be quickly arranged and images can be captured instantly. ‘Almost all facets of life are accelerating. This is particularly evident in the tourism industry, where consumers want maximum pleasure in minimum time.’[1] Digital photography and the Internet have both considerably changed tourism and now almost everyone can find out about places, arrange trips and experience on line and in real life. There is now such a need to capture images of personal experiences in different places around the world. That demand has been met by digital photography and the Internet which makes distribution and sharing of images so quick and easy.

New Zealand being a young country as it is, is known to throughout the World as a beautiful scenic place to visit, and has been a popular tourist destination for a considerable amount of time. There are many places within the country that offer a unique, easily accessible part of our land to look at and experience. In the 19th century the Europeans voyaged across treacherous seas for months to find this relatively untouched land, explore it, and settle here. They drew pictures and took photos of the land, the animals and the people which inhibited it, and would return to their countries to show their people this exciting new place maybe even promote it publicly to get people to immigrate or make money off the vast amounts of natural resources. The race was on to be the first country to colonise New Zealand.Edward Gibbon Wakefield from London was the founder of The New Zealand Company, which was started in 1839. The aim of this company was to get people to emigrate from England to New Zealand, to start a new life and establish a new country. Wakefield envisaged the creating of “little Englands’ all over the World – each having the refinements and the social and economic structure of the Mother Country, but being free from its evils. The New Zealand Company was intended to turn this vision into reality in one particular country – New Zealand[2] Around this period was the first time images and depictions of New Zealand were being seen in other parts of the World. People were getting their first impressions of Aotearoa. Artists were commissioned to do paintings, drawings and take photos of scenes for the use of advertising and promoting. A lot of the first depictions that English citizens would have seen of New Zealand would have been propaganda images from The New Zealand Company promoting the good things and reasons to emigrate. They depicted scenes of New Zealand’s landscapes and also the lifestyle and business opportunities. [b]
An example of this is a work by Charles Heaphy ‘Thorndon flat and part of the City of Wellington, 1841’Heaphy's water colour emphasises the settled and orderly nature of the new town. The painting was sent to London to be reproduced as a lithograph, and used by the New Zealand Company in its publicity campaign to promote Wellington and encourage emigration.[3] Heaphy and other Artists did many works of this nature and New Zealand’s image internationally was established.

Today New Zealand’s image is widely promoted in many different ways. Tourism in New Zealand is one of the most money making industries and it is easy for an international tourist to find out what ever they want to know about this country. For example youcould type ‘explore New Zealand’ into your web browser and experience New Zealand online, through the portal of a computer screen. The Website http://www.newzealand.com/ would be the present day version of ‘The New Zealand Company’. It is promoting businesses to work with New Zealand, people to move here to live or to study and it is predominantly promoting tourism. This website contains all the key elements that Countries use to promote themselves to tourists. You can look at hundreds of photos, watch videos, and learn about the all of the good places to go all in a night sat down in front of your computer. You could also experience New Zealand online by going into Google Earth and seeing the whole country from above, or even by walking through the streets of towns and cities. Alternatively if you wanted to actually experience New Zealand you could type in ‘new zealand package deal’ and book a real life adventure. You could be in New Zealand within days of booking and then you could be taken to these amazing places that you have seen online, in books and on Lord of the Rings. But how authentic would this so called ‘real adventure’ be? Would you have time to fully take in the places in which you visit or would it be moderated by the tight trip schedule and the fact that everything has been done and decided for you? Theorist Daniel Boorstin exclaims; ‘Travel adventure today thus inevitably acquires a factitious, make-believe, unreal quality. And only the dull travel experience seems genuine. Both for the few adventuring travelers who stillexist and for the larger numbers of travelers-turned-tourists, voyaging becomes a pseudo-event.’ Boorstin talks about the packaging of tourism and argues that the tourism boom since the Second World War has taken away the excitement of “travel” which is authentic, and replaced it with in-authentic tourism. The cause of this is the rise of consumer culture, technological innovation and that utopian ideal of wanting to go somewhere exotic in your leisure time. It is to do with the advances that made travel cheap, safe, and available to the masses; the market which promotes the quest for new experiences.

Back before the invention of airplanes, travelers who voyaged from Europe to New Zealand would have needed to put in a considerable amount of time, planning and effort to do so, and they would have been very motivated. The months spent on boats involved big risks and dangerous factors like storms and disease would make it an adventure that would have been much more enduring, not for the faint-hearted, and a more authentic experience. They would have been more exposed to the elements, more in touch with nature, and more engaging with it. Traveling to New Zealand by boat would have been particularly challenging because of the isolation of this land in the middle of the South Pacific. But that would have made the thought of it that much more exciting, to travel to a far away land in the middle of the Ocean.

Today that excitement exists but in a different way. For an exciting adventure one could travel to New Zealand on a Luxury Cruise liner with two swimming pools, a gym, three bars and five restaurants. It would have been booked from a travel agency or online and everything would be organized and done for them, trouble-free and risk free. This changes the experience considerably and reiterates the shift in the idea of ‘the traveler’ to ‘the tourist’ “Now, when one risks so little and experiences so little on the voyage, the experience of having been there somehow becomes emptier and more trivial. When getting there was more troublesome, being there was more vivid. When getting there is ‘fun’ arriving there somehow seems not to be arriving at any place”[4]


New Zealand is renowned internationally for its scenic beauty and this image draws thousands of visitors every year. The New Zealand tourism industry is built on this all-natural image. The main slogan on http://www.newzealand.com/ is ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ This modern way we travel and the want to explore and experience nature can be related to the 18th Century notion of the ‘sublime’. The sublime is an abstract quality in which the dominant feature is the presence or idea of transcendental immensity or greatness; power, heroism or vastness in space or time. The sublime inspires awe and reverence, or possibly fear. It refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
[c]
17th and 18th century writers used ‘The Sublime’ to describe aspects of nature like the mountains of the Swiss Alps when they were doing the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. ‘The first explorers and then the colonialists encountered vast new landscape, on a larger scale than ever before. The notion of the ‘sublime’ now that they had carried with them now had enough space to expand horizontally.’[5] Captain James Cook experienced the Sublime when he voyaged around the World and discovered new places. Now the sublime can be experienced by a large portion of the population but there is a new way to experience this notion and it is now greatly accelerated and is experienced in a different way. The landscape is being consumed; cultures have become global consumer items. The Sublime is now seen quickly, in large groups, and captured easily. These factors detract from the notions of the awe and heroism that The Sublime is all about. ‘Ecotourism and adventure tourism in New Zealand are practices that (re)activate the sublime’ The participants, descendants of grand tourists viewing the ‘sublime’ landscape no longer meander, but accelerate through an increasingly compressed and hyperinscribed space. [6] The passive viewing of nature has evolved to kinetic experiences within this sped-up aspect. Technological advances like digital photography and video cameras inspire and promote these new forms of visitor consumption of this kinesthetically enhanced landscape.

A lot has changed in the way of travel and accessibility.Because of things like passenger airplanes, cruise liners and new communication technologies like the Internet, the World has become ‘smaller’ and the ease of seeing different places and enriching ones perception of the World can be accessed by the masses. Because of the way we travel the traveler is more than ever isolated from the landscape in which he seeks to experience. Air travel has insulated the experience. Flying from one continent to another takes only a matter of hours and is experienced from a portal thousands of feet above the land and even the clouds. You get little or no experience of the land in which you are passing. “Nothing to see but the weather; since we had no weather, nothing to see at all. I had flown not through space but through time…the airplane robbed me of the landscape. The tourist gets there without the experience of having gone.“[7]

The speed in which we experience things has changed considerably. A Japanese tourist’s experience of New Zealand could be arriving in Queenstown in the morning, getting on a bus that will take them to Milford, doing a four hour boat trip, getting back on the bus and heading back to Queenstown airport. Besides the fact that its not enough time to take in the aura a place, they will probably be so tired that they will sleep through most of the journey. Its not only tourism where this new speedy experience exists. In Cinema the early films in the 19th century were a lot longer and a lot less eventful. To actually be at the Cinema would have been part of the experience. Today you see Hollywood films that are action packed, from beginning to end, and if they are not, people won’t watch them. This is all part of today’s consumerist society and our need to consume and take in as much as we possibly can.

Another thing to note about the speed in which we do things is the accelerating access to the landscape. There are more ways to get places quickly, and the market is flooded with companies that make the experience faster, more efficient, and trouble free. People are wanting to see more, to experience different places. Everything is sped up, from getting to the destination, to capturing an image of it. Almost all facets of life are accelerating and this is particularly evident in the tourism industry, where consumers want maximum pleasure in minimum time.[8] ‘Tourism heralds postmodernism; it is a product of the rise of consumer culture, leisure and technological innovation.’[9] Also technologies like digital photography have enabled people to quickly and easily capture a representation of a place, which can be later reflected on. Think of early photographers who would have spent hours setting up a their gear and getting the shot. Before that, the painters would have taken even longer, thus soaking up the aura of the place and experiencing more of the energy that a place creates. Digital technology has dramatically sped up the way images are gathered.

The way people can capture images of foreign places has also taken a considerable swing due to new technologies. Digital photography has made taking large quantities of quality photos really easy for anyone to do. However the uniqueness of the photography being done in tourist areas is not something to question. Tourists are directed to the point that they should take a photo from. Walk along the path until you reach the viewing platform and then take a photo. As Julian Stallabrass commented on the nature of tourist photography:“Photographers are urged to get closer to their subjects, to use backgrounds that do not distract from the main point of interest, to use portrait-format images for portraits, and to place objects in the foreground of landscapes. In all this, there is a very curious tension between creativity and rule-making”[10] This takes away certain authenticity of the experience and the photo. Sure they are possibly taking these photos to show their friends and family back at home but it enhances the idea of the consumer driven industry of mass appeal. It has also taken the uniqueness from photography. This photo has been taken thousands of times, from the same point, of the same place. You are being told where to go and what to take a photo of. I recently visited Milford Sound where I stood on a platform and took a photo of Mitre Peak.
[d] For some reason I had an urge to take a picture. I had seen so many pictures of this peak and I wanted one of my own, It must have been subconsciously driven from the hundreds of images I already had of Mitre Peak in my mind that I simply had to do it. It’s not a particularly good photo, the light wasn’t amazing, maybe I took it so that I could prove to my friends that I had been there. When I returned home I typed ‘Mitre peak’ into Google images and approximately 46,500 results were found.
[e]
This I thought was astounding and shows the in-authenticity of the experience of today’s ‘travelers’ and of tourist photography. These iconic places are already in our mind, we know what they look like, but we still take the picture. They have been depicted in art works since the 19th century when new immigrants painted the sublime New Zealand landscapes. There are parallels between the reproducibility of the experience of the Tourist who walks out on to the platform and takes the snap-shot of Mitre Peak, and the person who sits at home on their computer and types in ‘Mitre Peak’ into Google. Both are experiencing something which has lost a sense of authenticity. As Walter Benjamin writes; ‘the work becomes authentic only after the first copy of it is produced. The reproductions are the aura, and ritual, far from being a point of origin, derives from the relationship between the original object and it’s socially constructed importance.’[11] He also goes on to say the reproducibility of art endangers the original’s aura. Mass existence detaches the authentic object from the sphere of tradition. What the invention of the Passenger Plane did in terms of accessing foreign places has been magnified significantly by what digital photography and the Internet have done.
Online travel is a new thing which is even less engaging and less authentic than that of the ‘tourist package deal’ travel experience. Less engaging in that the participant does not need to leave the comfort of his or her house, does not experience anything physical, has not moved at all, and probably hasn’t mentally engaged with the site of interest. By online travel I am talking about things like Google Earth and other sites where the computer screen is used as a portal to the world similar to the portal of an airplane, cruise ship or information centre. The portal of the computer screen can be interacted with however, like in Google maps you can virtually travel down a street in a country on the other side of the World. Or venture down the road without leaving your bedroom.
[f]
In some ways you have more control in your online travel than you would on a cruise ship or airplane. You can find out about specific places, see photographs, watch videos, and find out all you need to know about a foreign place so that you do not have to even go there to experience it. Of course the experience will be significantly different comparing the online experience to the real, but the ‘real’ is not always as real as one would think. Can you really experience a place when everything has been done for you? And the journey is as easy as hopping on a plane, and upon arriving getting on a bus which will then take you to your Hotel.

Another question in the authenticity of the tourist’s experience as well as the ease of its accessibility is the question of what is already known about a place via the mass media advertising and the flooded imagery of certain sites.There is so much advertising on the Internet and there are so many travel agents that often the decision is partially made by the marketing involved. Sight seeing items which can be easily guaranteed to tourists on arrival to a Country have certain merchandisable qualities and must be easily accessible to create a comfortable experience for the tourist. In a visual way they also must be set up in a way that it is possible to easily capture the moments.Like the hula dances in Hawaii which are staged for photographer-tourists, the widely appealing tourist attractions are appropriate to those specially made for tourist consumption.[12] The item of attraction must be easily photographed, plenty of daylight, and inoffensive, suitable for family viewing. In New Zealand this would be relevant to our nature and cultural tourism. These events tend to become bland and unsurprising reproductions of what the image-flooded tourist knew was there all the time. Places like Milford sound are seen so often that one would not be surprised to see it in real life. The tourist’s appetite for strangeness thus seems best satisfied when the pictures in his own mind are verified in a far away land.

In photography there are many different motives for capturing images. When talking about photography in tourism a lot of it is about the capturing of images of personal experience. The experience one has when exploring a foreign land. There is also representative photography, taking a photo of something that is about that specific thing. An example would be a close up image of a bird to examine that particular bird. There are mass amounts of imagery in marketing which promote a certain place or tourism item. These images would be seductive and attractive, to lure people in. The promotional brochures often display landscapes without people. Where people are present in these representations they are likely to be tourists rather than locals, inviting the potential traveller to put them selves in the picture.
[g] ‘Pristine nature is glossily presented as having empty space into which to escape.’[13] Travel brochures often contain enthusiastic escapist tones, and offer a memorable experience in nature as a compensation for the daily grind of the commercial urban world. If we look at artistic depictions of New Zealand in the 19th century, a lot of the same kind of sites and aspects of Nature are still being shown. There are big mountain scenes, waterfalls, gorges, and reflections on lakes. We can see that these same highly celebrated places became icons of cultural and national identity. The tourist postcard worked to valorise these Landscapes. Commercial travel brochures then subsumed these images.
When looking at different aspects of image making (representational, personal, promotional) historically you can see links to what I talked about earlier in early depictions and perceptions of New Zealand. There were representative images like works by Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was a Botanist on board Captain James Cook’s Endeavour and he did representational drawings and studies of native New Zealand birds and plants, and people. [h]
Promotional images like Charles Heaphy’s paintings of scenes in towns to be used for promoting the New Zealand Company’s colonisation efforts. And images of personal experience include paintings and photos of encounters and various experiences that early settlers and travellers had in New Zealand. These aspects of image making are still happening in photography in New Zealand but on a lot larger scales and on different levels due to various factors. One major change has been the invention of digital photography and its availability to almost anyone. In the early days of World Travel the people who were capturing images of places would have been mostly artists. Who ever wasn’t an artist with particular skill wouldn’t be able to create the same quality of images of personal experience or representation. The mechanicalisation of image making in photography and now digital photography has made it easy for the traveller to capture images.

Differentiating photos of personal experience and representation in tourism in New Zealand today can be quite difficult as the boundaries are often blurred, but there some factors to state. ‘Nature’ today is seen as a value so when you see tourist’s images of a natural phenomenon i.e the Geysers in Rotorua they are capturing the value of that part of nature. So it is representing the subject, not so much talking about personal experience. However looking at a tourist blog on the Internet containing images of Geysers in Rotorua in that context would be also about personal experience. Depending on the context an image could be either. With the Internet and things like blogs and social networking sites like facebook there is a more public view of personal experience. People can upload their photographs from their holiday in another country and show hundreds and potentially thousands of people images from their experience. In this case it is about the personal experience as it may have been more about representation if it was not put in the public context. In tourism it is another way for other people to find out about different places and see personal experiences that people have had. Digital photography has made this all possible and so easy for anyone to do. Like the images they capture, our cameras speak of a culture based on standardization and mass appeal.

New Zealand and its sublime landscape were once seen by only a brave few. These few experienced what not many others had. They brought back visual depictions of this land, and promoted it. Now landscape and adventure tourism in New Zealand is a major industry and the image of this country is known throughout the world. There has been a major shift in recent years in how we experience and view the world. Travelling around the world today has been made a lot easier and fewer risks are involved. Developments in technology and mass marketing have influenced this change and now everyone wants to travel and enrich one’s perception of the world. Digital photography and devices like video cameras have dramatically enhanced the flow of images and media seen around the world via the Internet. Now it is easy to find out what you want about a place and experience it in some way or another. Mass tourism is not as unique as it used to be and it has lost a sense of authenticity. This is partly due to the reproducibility and repetitive nature of the industry driven by the post modern consumer society. Images can be instantly captured and infinitely reproduced and sent around the world. This makes the perception of the world seem smaller as information can be accessed more easily. What the invention of the Passenger Plane did in terms of accessing foreign places has been magnified significantly by what digital photography and the Internet have done.

References:
Borstin, Daniel J. The Image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
Borstin, Daniel J. From Traveller to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel – Post modern discourses of displacement. Duke University Press, 1996.
Bell, Claudia and John Lyall. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
Coleman, Simon and Mike Crang. Tourism: Between place and performance. Published by Berghahn Books, 2002
Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics – Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Duke University Press, 2006.
Frow, John. Time & Commodity Culture – Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1997
Hunter, Don. Lines of Site. From Scope (art), 3, Nov 2008.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations, trans, Harry Zohn. New York Schocken. 1965.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. London, Macmillan, 1976.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909-14

Highfield, Camilla and Peter Smith. Pushing the Boundaries – Eleven Contemporary Artists in Aotearoa New Zealand. Gilt Edge Publishing, 2004.

Main, William and John. B Turner. New Zealand Photography from 1840 to the Present. Nga Whakaahua O Aotearoa. Mai I 1840 Ki Nainei. Photo Forum Inc, 1993.

Eggleton, David. Into the Light. A History of New Zealand Photography. Craig Potton Publishing, 2006.

Brownson, Ron. John Kinder's New Zealand By John Kinder. Auckland Art Gallery, Peter Shaw.Published by Random House New Zealand Ltd, 2004

Te Papa Online. The New Zealand Company http://tpo.tepapa.govt.nz/ViewTopicExhibitDetail.asp?TopicFileID=0x000a4d34&Language=English&dumbyparam=search cited 01/06/09
http://www.newzealand.com/ cited 13/06/09

List of Images:
a) Simons, Jesse. The Navigator, Doubtful Sound. 2009
b) Heaphy, Charles. Thorndon Flat and part of the city of Wellington. [April, 1841] http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=4383&l=mi sited 12/06/09
c) Caspar, David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817, Kunsthalle Hamburg. Romantic artists during the 19th century. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_032_High_Resolution.jpg
d) Simons, Jesse. Mitre Peak. April 2009.
e) Screenshot from Google image search ‘Mitre Peak’ http://images.google.co.nz/images?hl=en&um=1&sa=1&q=mitre+peak&aq=f&oq= cited 02/05/09
f) Google Maps street view of the Octagon, Dunedin. http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?hl=en&um=1&q=mitre%20peak&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il cited 13/06/09
g) Lake Matheson, South Island, New Zealand. http://www.newzealand.com/travel/sights-activities/scenic-highlights/lakes/lakes-home.cfm Photo Credit: Tourism New Zealand. Cited 13/06.09
h) Banks, Joseph. Knightia excelsa Rewa-rewa or New Zealand Honeysuckle New Zealand, 1968-71. From http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.htmlhttp://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.htmlhttp://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.htmlhttp://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.htmlgo to page:http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.htmlhttp://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.html cited 13/06/09
[1] Bell, Claudia. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002

[2]http://tpo.tepapa.govt.nz/ViewTopicExhibitDetail.asp?TopicFileID=0x000a4d34&Language=English&dumbyparam=search cited 01/06/09.
[3] http://www.natlib.govt.nz/collections/online-exhibitions/pipitea-thorndon/charles-heaphy-thorndon cited 01/06/09
[4] Daniel J. Boorstin. From Traveler to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
[5] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
[6] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
[7] Daniel J. Boorstin. From Traveler to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
[8] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
[9] Caren Kaplan. Questions of Travel – Post modern discourses of displacement. Duke University Press, 1996.

[10] Julian Stallabrass. “Sixty Billion Sunsets”. In Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture. London: Verso, 1996:20.
[11] Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations, trans, Harry Zohn. New York Schocken. 1965.
[12] Daniel J. Boorstin. From Traveler to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964

[13] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002




Sunday, June 7, 2009

Idris Khan


every...Bernd and Hilla Becher Gable sided Houses

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/idris_khan.htm
This series relates to the process of layering that I am doing. The building forms create an amazing effect of motion and blurriness. Very relevant to my work as they are also appropriated and he's looking at iconic cultural symbols.

John Wood


Quiet Protest is a series of photographic works by the noted mixed media artist and educator John Wood, spanning a period from the 1960s through the 1990s. Part of a larger retrospective at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, the "Quiet Protest" series explores political and social issues of the day through thoughtful photo montage pieces that exist in marked contrast to more traditional aggressive documentary photography. Rather than offering explanations or promoting solutions, Wood's manipulated photographs present contemplative routes into issues ranging from the Vietnam War to domestic gun violence to ecological concerns. As Wood wrote in 1970, "...maybe the time has come for creative photography to encompass the large problems without propaganda or journalism..."

Fiona Tan



 http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/shows/fiona_tan Tan’s art often portrays individuals and groups of different cultural, ethnic and social backgrounds and deals with themes such as identity, memory and the perception of cultural difference.

Richard Misrach




http://wecantpaint.com/log/?p=1605 This is the photographer I was talking about who has done the inverted, positive-negative prints of seascapes and scenes. This process can be linked to Gustav Le Gray who did a similar thing with black and white. Kind of interesting results but I don't know if it would work well with my work at the moment.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

link that emily found

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=85767714548&h=MFu2z&u=Gq4w-&ref=mf

This idea relates to my old/new dunedin photos that I have been layering and playing with.
more slash seconds, Aaron Hobson this time http://slashseconds.org/issues/003/002/articles/ahobson/index.php

link i stole off Alex's website

http://slashseconds.org/issues/002/002/articles/aweberg/index.php

Another artist commenting on the state of today's tourism culture

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Anne Noble's

Antarctica is a landscape that exists only in most peoples imagination, known from photographs and other re-presentations in Antarctic Centres around the world. Anne Noble began to investigate this general experience while waiting to depart for the ice. To fill in time, she visited the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch and started to photograph what she could find of Antarctica in Christchurch, thus beginning the project that took her as far afield as Scandinavia and Japan and which is now presented in this exhibition.

'The Polar Sea (Japan), 2003-04
Antarctica, Nagoya, Japan, 2003. 

Paradise Harbour, Antarctica, 2005

Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica, 2005.


This new work by Anne Noble interests me a lot and I think some of what she's talking about relates to what I'm wanting to do in my work. The whole tourism aspect and how we now see the world. We don't have to travel for weeks to get to far away countries. We can visit them in less than a day, or via the internet in less than a minute.

Thursday, May 7, 2009



Artists Impression on what the White Terrace may look like if it still existed.

More John Kinder.

View from Victoria (Waitangi) Bay of Islands, 1865

Ruahine (solfatura) Rotoiti circa 1865.



Whatapoho (geyser) with incrusted rock, Rotomahana 1865.
These Photos of Geothermal activity are now big tourist attractions and its intersting how Kinder has documented these places, almost anticipating the future populatity of them for people travelling the World.


The photos of the White and Pink Terraces are awesome because there are not many good quality images of them around. The terraces were once considered the 8th wonder of the World but were destroyed in a Volcanic Eruption in 1886. I wonder how they would look now if they were still intact.There would probably be a boardwalk right up to them and 100's of tourists snapping away vigarously.