project evaluation

Exploring Photographic Practice - Emulation of Tom Hunters work

Self evaluation report.

Elizabeth Chandler (BA (HONS) Photography – level 4)

Upon completion of this assignment I would like to summarise with a self evaluation report.

I aim to evaluate this project in terms of the work I have produced, it’s relevance to the brief, how successful my photographs are, the development of new skills and what I have learnt. 

In addition I will discuss my productivity throughout; including time keeping and organisation, as well as talking about things I would improve given the chance to repeat this assignment.

My blog and visual diary have been pivotal in the development of this assignment as many forms of research were conducted, the blogs in particular were an essential tool in recording and storing all the information, with the ability to go back, re-use and review as frequently as necessary. 

A lot of the information i gathered was based on the photographer i was emulating (Tom Hunter)

so my visual diary has developed as a comprehensive research folder containing lots of information on Hunter, his work and processes, all of which was essential in the production of my own images.

In terms of my productivity throughout this assignment, this could be improved, although my attendance and time keeping wasn’t an issue my personal objectives could have been better arranged as to provide more structure and in turn more time on the assignment. Learning to juggle the work load for the multiple assignments we work on at once is something i can improve.

As much of my emulation process involved in depth research of potentially appropriate paintings and headlines, the build up to taking the photos was the most time consuming. The positive side of this lengthy process was that when going out to take the photographs i was really organized and had a clear image in my head of how i wanted the photographs to look, from my models clothing to locations and props.

Throughout this assignment there were presentations as a form of group feedback on a weekly basis, this was something i found very useful, not only in developing my own work and presentation skills but also in improving my analytical skills in order to provide fellow students with valuable feedback and ideas on how to improve their projects.

I visited the Manchester art gallery on two occasions during this assignment, this was extremely useful in developing my understanding of the paintings and movements. when it came to researching for my final images using Mancunian painters the gallery was also very helpful in providing information on painters from Manchester and reliable sources where i could find more.

I also used telephone directories and the internet to find the painters i used to inspire the composition of my final photographs.

The headlines i used were all crime related and sourced from the Manchester Evening News website, i went through the archive of stories online selecting the ones which were appropriate and could potentially be used in conjunction with the paintings. 

My final images are a successful emulation of the work of Tom Hunter. My project is similar enough to be recognised in the same process. The themes of crime in Hunters series - living in hell and other stories, reoccur in my project, as does the locality and social relevance.

Despite this, my photographs remain personal to me and influenced by my own creativity and interpretation of Hunters process.

Given the opportunity to repeat this assignment, i would ideally discover the significance of the Pre-Raphaelites in Hunters work, as to realise i could replace this element for paintings more appropriate to myself, thus having more time to spend on planning my final images.

In addition, upon reviewing my photographs i think more appropriate locations could have been selected, and despite paying attention to details in the paintings which i incorporated 

in my photographs. I could have spent more time selecting clothing which mimics the styles and colours in the paintings.

final presentation

here are the slides from my final presentation, this includes my final images as well as previous attempts, the presentation demonstrates my journey through this assignment.

....

After much research i have found examples of paintings used by Hunter which don't belong to the Pre-Raphaelite or the European art movements.
I can now look into Mancunian painters and use these in conjunction with headlines from the Manchester evening news to stage my photo's - this will make the emulation stand apart from Hunters, and make the assignment more personal to me.

Early Renaissance and main representatives

Early Renaissance (Early 1400s)    Renaissance marks the period of European history at the close of the Middle Ages and the rise of the Modern world. It represents a cultural rebirth from the 14th through the middle of the 17th centuries. Early Renaissance, mostly in Italy, bridges the art period during the fifteenth century, between the Middle Ages and the High Renaissance in Italy. It is generally known that Renaissance matured in Northen Europe later, in 16th century.    The term renaissance means rebirth and is used to mark an era of broad cultural achievement as a result of renewed interest in the classical art and ideas of Ancient Greece and Rome. The main idea of rebirth lies at the belief that through the study of the intellectual and artistic treasures of the Greco-Roman antiquity, inspired by Humanism, can be reached the artistic greatness, wisdom and enlightenment.    The rediscovery of classical world radically altered the art of painting. By the year 1500, the Renaissance revived ancient forms and content. The spiritual content of painting changed - subjects from Roman history and mythology were borrowed. Devotional art of Christian orientation became classically humanized. Classical artistic principles, including harmonious proportion, realistic expression, and rational postures were emulated.    During this artistic period two regions of Western Europe were particularly active: Flanders and Italy. Most of the Early Renaissance works in northern Europe were produced between 1420 and 1550.

Main Representatives Italian Painters : Masaccio Fra Angelico Sandro Botticelli Giovanni Bellini Domenico Veneziano Filippo Lippi Andrea del Castagno Piero di Cosimo Paolo Uccello Antonello da Massina Antonio Pisanello Andrea Mantegna Suca Signorelli Baldovinetti Piero della Francesca Masolino Andrea del Verrocchio Domenico Ghirlandaio Benozzo Gozzoli Carlo Crivelli Sebastiano Mainardi Italian Sculptors and Architects: Donatello Lorenzo Ghiberti Fillipo Brunelleschi Flemish Painters: Hieronymous Bosch Pieter Bruegel the Elder Jan van Eyck Pieter Aertsen Hubert van Eyck Robert Campin Joos van Cleve Petrus Christus Gerard David Hugo van der Goes Hans Memling Joachim Patinir Roger van der Weyden German Painters: Albrecht Altdorfer Albrecht Dürer Hans Baldung Lucas Cranach the Elder Lucas Cranach the Younger Matthias Grünewald Tilmann Riemenschneider Thomas Struth Limbourg brothers: Paul, Hermann and Jean

Renaissance

Renaissance

A French label given to an Italian cultural movement and to its repercussions elsewhere; also, on the assumption that chronological slices of human mass experience can usefully be described in terms of a dominant intellectual and creative manner, a historical period. For Italy the period is popularly accepted as running from the second generation of the 14th century to the second or third generation of the 16th century. Though there is something inherently ridiculous about describing a period of 250 years as one of rebirth, there is some justification for seeing a unity within it, if only in terms of the chronological self-awareness of contemporaries.

For Petrarch the challenge to understand and celebrate the achievements of ancient Rome led him to scorn the intervening centuries which had neglected them; he saw them as an age of intellectual sleep, of 'darkness', and his own as potentially one of light, of an energetic revival of interest in, and competition with, too long forgotten glories. Thanks to his fame not only as a scholar but also as a poet and a voluminous correspondent, this sense of living in an age of new possibilities was rapidly shared by others who worked within the intellectual framework which came to be known as Humanism. Perhaps the sense of living in a new mental atmosphere can be compared to the exhilaration that followed the realization that Marxist analysis could be used to look afresh at the significance of intellectual and creative, as well as political, life. The humanistic enthusiasm lasted so long, however, because its core of energy, the historical reality of antiquity, was so vast and potent, because it was uncontroversial (save when an assassin borrowed the aura of Brutus, or a paganizing faddist mocked Christianity), and because the scholarly excitement about the need to imitate the achievements of the Roman (and, increasingly, Greek) past was sustained by evidence from contemporary art and literature that it could be done. Even when the Wars of Italy had inflicted grievous humiliations on Italian pride, Vasari could still see a process of restored vigour in the arts, which had begun early in the 14th century, as only coming near its close with the death of Michelangelo in 1564.

Vasari's Lives became a textbook of European repute. It was his contention that he was describing what followed from the rinascita or rebirth of the arts that launched the word on its increasingly inclusive career. For long, however, it was a 'renaissance' of this or that, of arts, of scholarship, of letters. Not until the publication in 1855 of the volume in Jules Michelet's Histoire de France entitled 'La Renaissance' was the label attached to a period and all that happened in it; not until the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt's still seminal Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860 was it ineluctably identified in particular with Italy and more generally with a phase of human development thought to be markedly different in kind from what went before and what came after.

Thereafter, 'Renaissance' became a mercurial term: not just a label for a period or a movement but a concept, a concept redolent (in spite of Burckhardt's precautions) of Individualism, All-Roundness, even Amoralism; man had escaped from the medieval thought-dungeon, and the world (and its expanding physical and mental horizons) was his oyster; culture was linked to personality and behaviour; the Renaissance became both the scene and the work of Renaissance Man. To a northern European world (whence the alertest scholars and popularizers came), morally confined by Protestantism and social decorum, 'Renaissance' became a symbol of ways of conduct and thought that were either to be castigated (John Ruskin, whose The stones of Venice of 1851-53 had anticipated the art-morality connection) or envied (John Addington Symonds's avidly nostalgic Renaissance in Italy, 1875-86).

A term that had become so liable to subjective interpretation was bound to attract criticism. During this century it has been challenged chiefly on the following points. (1) There is no such thing as a self-sufficient historical period. Much that was characteristic of the Middle Ages flowed into and through the Renaissance. Much that was characteristic of the Renaissance flowed on until the age of experimental science, of industrialization, mobilized nationalism, and mass media. (2) Renaissance art and literature did not develop so consistently that they can be seen in one broad Vasarian sweep. There was an early, a 'high' and a late stage (all variously dated) in terms of artistic and literary aims and style. (3) There is not a true, let alone a uniform, congruence between, 'culture' and 'history' during the period; 'Renaissance' culture came late to Venice, later still to Genoa, both thriving centres of political and commercial activity. (4) To define a period in terms of a cultural élite is to divert attention unacceptably from the fortunes of the population as a whole.

Though thus challenged, mocked (the 'so-called Renaissance'), aped (the 'Carolingian' or 'Ottonian' renaissance, etc.) and genially debased ('the renaissance of the mini-skirt'), the term retains most of its glamour and much of its usefulness. It is surely not by chance that 'rebirth' rather than the 18th century and early 19th century 'revival' (of arts, letters, etc.) was the term chosen, because it applies to a society the resonance of a personal, spiritual and perhaps psychological aspiration: the new start, the previous record - with all its shabbiness - erased. It is for this additional, subjective reason a term to be used with caution. The challenges are to be accepted, however, gratefully, as having led to an enormous extension of knowledge and sensitivity.

(http://www.wga.hu/index1.html)

hunter also used European Renaissance Paintings

"Hunter became well known in the 1990s for photographs generally made in series, in which he used friends - often young and not mainstream, in compositions based on European Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite painting referring both to specific artists and narratives; and importantly striving to translate a sumptuous density of colour pigment on canvas into the photographic image."

(http://www.tomhunter.org/html/pp_27.htm)

others manchester painters bob mccelland and david price

bob mccelland

david price