Chapbook: Timed Writing Exercise : Under safe wings : Chapter 1.

 Chapter 1: The birth of an angel.

It was a beautiful sunny day, April 21, when a little black-haired baby was born in Arnhem Hospital.

- Is it a girl or a boy?  - asked the impatient family waiting outside the delivery room. 

- Doctor, it`s not important. Please tell me is it healthy? How is my wife? - Stefan asked.

- Mr. Stefan, come inside, the girls are safe and sound, you can say hello to them - replied the doctor.

- A girl !!! - everyone cried with joy. 

Two days nearly passed and the girl still had no name. Hanna and Stefan very much wanted the parents to help them to choose the name. The girl was the only long-awaited granddaughter, so they wanted to make her name special. Just as special was the little one. The time has come for Hanna and the girl to live hospital. Stefan picks up his two loves from the hospital. Hanna`s parents were already waiting impatiently at home. They left all their responsibilities to be with them, helping and supporting them as much as possible. Hanna`s dad is a photographer so it was no problem for him to take a longer vacation, while mum worked part-time in a library, it was more of a hobby for her. Since Hanna`s brother was born, which was 25 years ago, Tess did not work, She always did what she liked and take care of the house. When Hanna`s brother went to study in Switzerland, their parents moved to a smaller house in Giethoorn village in the province of Overijssel. They left the house in which they lived before for their first grandson or granddaughter. Hanna, Stefan, and the baby entered the house. From the very, they were greeted by Tess - Hanna`s mother, and Tim - Hanna`s father who never moved without his camera and took pictures from the very entrance. 

Creative Writing Project :Generating Ideas

 I will spend the next two weeks developing my own chapbook. Chapbooks were small booklets, cheap to make and to buy. They provided simple reading matter and were commonplace across the country from the 17th to the 19th century. They were often charming little books but they were also flimsy, and although they might have been treasured by readers, they have mostly proved ephemeral having been thumbed, pocketed, and passed from hand to hand, and down the generations. Their readership would have been largely among the poor, and among children of the middle class.

Chapbooks on display at the Growing Up with Books exhibition on display at the Museum of Childhood

My first idea was to write a story about a girl who lost her grandfather. After death, the grandfather appeared as a ghost in the girl's life.

The second story that came to my mind is A terrible tragedy in one of the great cities of the USA. A girl suffering from leukemia decides to kill everyone who stands in her way. She starts at a school where all the kids make fun of her.

There are a few other stories in my head, but I think I'll focus on the first one, write a story and come up with some poems.

Creative Writing Exercise One

Love 

 It was a beautiful spring day when Laura got her first camera. Even as a little girl, she liked to look at old photographs with her grandparents, she would sit by the fireplace with a pot of chocolate. In winter, their beloved grandfather died and Laura and her parents moved to a small village where their grandmother lived. The girl didn't really know what had happened. She went to her grandfather's room and decided to wait for him there. Days passed and Grandpa still didn't come back, until one day Laura heard noises coming from the huge wardrobe my parents had recently bought at a flea market. For her age, she was very brave, she went to the wardrobe and opened it. It turned out to be empty. She sat on the bed and started going through the photos she had taken recently. And she heard something again, now it was a voice saying her name. Is it grandpa's voice?- she thought. He's back, great. She looked back into the closet. It was empty. Where is Grandpa? - she thought, probably hiding somewhere else. She started screaming: Grandpa, Grandpa, don't hide. And suddenly she heard: I'm not hiding, I'm here behind you. There's just one little thing you can't see me, you can only hear me. In fact, there's something else you can't say about it, I'm only here for you. I miss you so much and I know you miss me too.

Creating a New Gallery & Presenting Work on Website

The first step I took was to create a subpage where my gallery will appear.

Using the left-hand menu tab, I click on 'add page'. After that, I drag the page under my portfolio and click the three dots in the bottom left, which will result in a drop-down menu under my portfolio. Here is have added a new page called ‘Cityscape`.

Then from the gallery I chose Pro Galleries and Collage.

 

Now I click on the gallery and added photos, each previously put on a white background and added a title using Photoshop.

The next thing was the introduction so that the viewer knew what my gallery was about. I clicked the Add button in the menu on the left and added a text box.

Finally, I added my new gallery to the main Gallery Page using add element and selecting the button.

Here is my finished gallery, which you can see on my website.

Michael Wolf Tokyo compression

Michael Wolf is a German artist and photographer living in Hong Kong and Paris, whose work documents life in big cities.

In 2004 Wolf gained international recognition as a world-class art photographer with “Architecture of Density,” his highly acclaimed series of large-scale photographs of Hong Kong residential buildings. He won the first prize in the World Press Photo Award Competition in 2005 and 2010 and an honorable mention in 2011. In 2010, Wolf was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Photography Prize. Wolf’s photographs are held in numerous important permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The San Jose Museum of Art, in California; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, in Chicago; the Museum Folkwang, Essen and the German Museum for Architecture, Frankfurt.

 

Architecture of Density #119 (2009)

 

Architecture of Density (2009)

In 2014, Wolf told the BBC: "As a photojournalist, I was always aware of composition in my photographs, and one of the things I always liked doing was not letting the viewer be able to escape from the picture. So as soon as you have sky there, you look up and you can leave the picture in some form. "It's the same with the architecture. If you have the sky and the horizon, you know approximately how big it is, and there's no real illusion there. By cropping it like that, I'm not describing the building any more, I'm creating a metaphor."

Michael Wolf is known for capturing the hyper-density of the city of Hong Kong in his large-scale photographs of its high-rise architecture. In his series Tokyo Compression, Wolf centers on the subsurface crush of the Tokyo subway, in which thousands of commuters make their daily journeys between work and home.

Photographs from Tokyo Compression Three.

Michael Wolf/Peperoni Books, Berlin/Asia One Book, Hong Kong

"I spent more than 60 weekday mornings photographing passengers during their commute into Tokyo. All portraits were taken at one train station along the Odakyu line, during rush hour between 7.30 and 9 am. At intervals of 80 seconds, a train already packed to the absolute limit pulled into the station. People pushed their way into the compartments even more until the commuters were jammed like sardines in a can. Day in and day out, millions of commuters must endure this torture, as the only affordable housing is hours away outside of the city center. Is this a humane way to live?"

Wolf exploited the evocative potential of abstraction, cutting and reframing his images to better capture the subjects. The pictures from my point of view represent imprisonment and pressure on something. With the skin pressed against the window, perhaps a commuter's face, this image is partially blurred, partially obscured by condensation on the glass, or deliberately shielded from other surgical masks. Closed eyes and headphones reflect an internalized retreat from discomfort and overcrowding as if suspending time until the end of the journey, while some passengers close their eyes tightly in a gesture of resistance to being photographed. We know that he took these photos for sure without people's consent.

Reference

Tersigni, A. (2022) Landscape photography tips: Michael Wolf's 5 rules for Urban shots, FORMAT. Available at: https://www.format.com/magazine/resources/photography/michael-wolf-landscape-photography-tips (Accessed: February 1, 2023).

LensCulture, M.W.| (no date) Architecture of density - photographs Bymichael Wolf, LensCulture. Available at: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/michael-wolf-architecture-of-density (Accessed: February 1, 2023).

Michael Wolf photography (no date) MICHAEL WOLF PHOTOGRAPHY. Available at: https://photomichaelwolf.com/ (Accessed: January 31, 2023).

Home (no date) FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS. Available at: https://www.famousphotographers.net/michael-wolf?fbclid=IwAR1WMsf9_gmausHpCfB5LW6tPS3tFFlSL7W1RuC7R80_VnVqjr_HHbjdJnM (Accessed: January 31, 2023).

M97 gallery: Artists: Michael Wolf (no date) m97gallery. Available at: https://www.m97gallery.com/michael-wolf (Accessed: January 31, 2023).

Michael Wolf: The man who found beauty in megacities (2019) BBC News. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48076865 (Accessed: January 31, 2023).

Michael Wolf (no date) Prix Pictet. Available at: https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/space/michael-wolf (Accessed: January 27, 2023). 

Quality Control & Curation

 In the last class, we discussed "Quality Control and Curation." The lesson was conducted to help us better prepare our photos before adding them to our portfolio, as well as the definition of quality control and curation and how it is referred to in photography. We couldn't check the quality without selecting the photo. But first, what exactly is quality control in photography? Quality Control - This allows the photographer to adjust sharpness, contrast, brightness range, color balance, saturation, and other parameters without compromising picture quality. 

Now we can choose a minimum of 10 photos that we think will work well together. I spent some time on it. At first, I thought I'd be able to select all the black and white photos, but unfortunately the ones I liked so much don't do it justice in black and white. I chose a mix of colors and black. She created a new folder and moved my 13 photos so nothing would get mixed up later because some of my photos share a small detail. I opened photoshop because in it I will check the quality of the photos, as well as straighten and lighten or darken if necessary. I checked each of the photos, some I even had to lighten them a bit to make them look better. I went to the Image tab, then Adjustments, and selected Curves (see below). Now you can move the line up to make the image lighter and down to make it darker. We do it at our discretion. Below are two of the same photos, one original, the other after a small change.

Original photo.

After.

The next stage I focus on was curating. To "curate" means choosing the photos you care about. Content curation is more than sharing. It is about finding the best content your audience wants so that they keep coming back to you. 

Hollywood history consultant Bobette Buster, in her book "How to Tell Your Story So the World Will Listen", uses the term "the story behind the story," which refers to the hidden, deeper narrative that holds everything together. It's a great metaphor for how to approach treatment. Good curating, like good storytelling, give your work a coherent vision or narrative that can entertain, inspire, educate, etc. This doesn't mean that curating has to be centered around a clear theme. Ideas can be loose, abstract, or full of meaning, and the beauty of visual art is that it allows us to convey these themes on an instinctive level.

Reading about curing, I came across a movie that I recommend to everyone. I'm attaching the video below.

In this one-hour talk, attendees will hear from leading curators, who will discuss their experience and methodology of working on diverse exhibition outcomes as part of PHOTO 2022, International Festival of Photography. Aimed at Secondary School and Tertiary students, the speakers will answer questions on how to start working as a curator.

Speakers include independent curator Shivanjali Lal, curator of 'A Bell Rings Across the Valley', a group exhibition of five artists from across South Asia and its Diaspora, at Footscray Community Arts. Pippa Milne, Senior Curator at Monash Gallery of Art, on curating a solo presentation 'Speak the wind' by Hoda Afshar. Cathy Pryor, Curator at The Jewish Museum, on curating 'HELMUT NEWTON: In Focus', an exhibition of an iconic international photographer, now deceased, and working with a major international collection. Brendan McCleary, PHOTO 2022 Associate Curator speaking about the PHOTO 2022 outdoor exhibition program.

I also read an interesting article which you can see here.

I think that the video and the website are very helpful, now I know if I need to focus on choosing the photos that I want to display on my website. I also think that it will help me also when in the future I want to open my small coffee shop with a gallery to find my potential recipients and clients.

Reference 

4 ways to curate an art or photography exhibition like a pro! (2022) theprintspace. Available at: https://www.theprintspace.co.uk/how-to-curate-an-exhibition-like-a-pro-4-ways-to-get-started/ (Accessed: January 26, 2023).

Curating photographs (2022) YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09vqrcPp8gY (Accessed: January 26, 2023). 

ShootDotEdit (2021) 7 strategies for Quicker Image curation, ShootDotEdit. ShootDotEdit. Available at: https://shootdotedit.com/blogs/news/7-strategies-for-quicker-image-curation?fbclid=IwAR1dHiXf_SQtITy1KQJKtv-w2KesU4XVSkq-UpPtsvl-vunrJkAGolbcOFE (Accessed: January 26, 2023). 

Urban Photography - Class Task and self study.

The last classes were again very interesting for me. Once again we went to make some photos, this time off-campus to focus on urban photography. Unfortunately, once again we only had an hour, I managed to take a few photos that will be useful in the next classes. I used different camera settings: changed the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO and played with colors. I loved the black and white photos. After a successful class, I returned home and decided to walk around my village to take more photos. I focus more on black and white photos. It was starting to get dark, so I went home, upload all the photos on my computer, and here is the result of my work, below. I choose two photos from each session and describe them. From these contact sheets in the next class, I will choose a minimum of 10 photos to create a portfolio on my website.

Canon EOS 700D 13mm f/4 1/4000sec ISO 200

I was tying my shoe and that's when I took this picture. I like it very much. I wanted to focus on time-white photos, but in this photo, it wouldn't have that effect.

Canon EOS 700D 13mm f/4 1/4000sec ISO 200

Bar on the corner has a great location, unfortunately, it was still closed at that time, and I wanted to take pictures from the inside. This photo is not bad, but I had visions of what this street looked like from the inside. I'll try to go back there.

 

Canon EOS 700D 18mm f/7.1 1/50sec ISO 400.

Old churches have a certain charm, when I noticed the turret from a distance, I immediately thought that I would go there to take a picture. The setting sun made my photo shine, it's a pity that I only cut off the top of the turret.

Canon EOS 700D 18mm f/5.6 1/13 ISO 400 EXP 1.3

A family business, you can rarely find such a shop these days. He's so lonely out there. I took both black and white and color photos. In my photo, I wanted to show such a photo from the old days, so I added black and white.