Essay Image - Newpaper.

I decided that i wanted to create a photomontage piece for one of my images. Because of the themes in my essay i thought it would be interesting to make a piece of work that blended aspects of two of the tpyes of media that i had looked at in my essay. I went with a cover of the times as i felt this was a well respected and well known paper that was read by the upper classes, these are typically the people that demonised the skinhead youth's. I took an image from Watsons book "Skins and Punks" (2008) which showed a large group of skinheads gathered together and used this to create an article which talked about how the skinheads had done something good for the community rather than something that was overall detrimental to it. I decided to link this to the film pride as they were events that had occurred at around the same time and this meant that i could give the article some background context rather than it coming out of nowhere. David Gauntlett was quoted to say "Identities are not given but constructed and negotiated" (Pickavance. N. 2015. 128.) it is the media that has the opportunity to construct an identity for a group of people and i wanted to explore the idea of the media creating a positive identity for the skinhead youth's rather than a negative one.  

 

Feminism Lecture image.

For this image i thought about the feminism lecture we had on the gaze and the media. This got me looking further into the ideas behind feminism and i began reading into rape culture. This is the idea that may people seem to believe it is the woman's fault if she is raped or attacked by a man. The way people view the situation at the moment seems to try and blame women for where they are or what they are wearing, teaching women how not to get raped rather than teaching young men the fundamental reasons why this is wrong. This has lead to many women feeling unsafe walking home at night, a metro article i looked at quoted a study carried out by itv1 on the streets of London saying that "More than half of british women (56%)" were "afraid to walk alone at night in their own neighbourhoods." (http://metro.co.uk/2008/01/28/many-afraid-to-walk-alone-at-night-87199/) I wanted to look at this in the image and so used a location of a run down and dilapidated street with a female model alone looking out into a dark area of the image. I used a camera mounted flash gun at night to create a bright light in the foreground which faded off into a shadow at the edge of the image creating a sense of unease, i set the model to the right hand third of the image to give a large area that was empty, this was to make the model look more alone in the frame. 

Second Essay Image.

Because I used found images for my first essay image i thought it was important to shoot another, i wanted to make some photographic content to go along with my essay and so chose a shot which tied together some of the key elements talked about in my essay, how the skinheads embraced a style of the working class man but took some aspects from the west indian culture including reggae music. I have tried to represent this using the Dr. Martins boots and braces in front of the reggae vinyl. To quote Hebdige “Elements taken directly from the West Indian community (and more particularly from the rude boy subculture of the black delinquent young.)”  (Hebdige, D. 1979. 55.) I felt that by adding the reggae influence to what would have been a standard photograph of the boots and braces helped try and reinforce points made in my essay about how the original skinhead subculture was accepting of both races.  

 

Identity Image - Alter Ego.

For my alter ego post I wanted to come up with a person that was totally different from myself and i happen to own a full tracksuit so I thought that football hooligan would be an interesting take, it allowed me to take the photograph outside in a run down estate setting which some of the streets in hyde park are perfect for. I took this image with the camera on a tripod inside my house and me stood in the yard behind the back door, using the self timer it took multiple attempts to take this image but i'm quite pleased with it overall. I looked into some football hooligan films for inspiration "The Firm." (2009) and The Football Factory (2004) of how to take the image, i look at a couple of films

as i felt moving image would be the best way to see various locations, dress and poses. I went with a pair of trainers, a full tracksuit and a cap as this was something i saw i lot of the actors in the films wearing. I went with the classic arms up pose as is seen most of the time just before these groups clash for a fight. After shooting this image i desaturated it slighty and added some grain to up the slightly gritty cold feel that i felt the image needed. 

Theory into practice.

During writing my essay i began to look at how skinheads were represented in the media but also by members of their groups who were photographers. In my work i looked into how the media seemed to demonise the skinhead youth's to an extent whereas the work made by their own seemed to glorify the better parts of the subculture. I thought it would be interesting to create a photomontage using found images with the concept of a newspaper article that glorified the skinheads in the same way documentary photographers did. I wanted to come up with something that was relevant to the time and so thought of the film pride which is a true story ending in the welsh miners association helping to pass a gay rights bill, I decided to link this to a group of skinheads being involved with a charity event as I thought this was something that would show them in a positive and accepting light. By re-appropriating a photograph of a group of skinheads sitting on a set of steps shot by Weston, these skins look to be having fun and enjoying themselves rather than doing anything which could be viewed too negatively. This image is then used along side a supporting headline and a small body of text explaining the basics of what's happening. I have left most of the copy as printers Latin as i didn't feel it appropriate for me to write a whole article which was fiction. I have also included a still from the film pride, made black and white, for context. 

The meaning of style - Dick Hebdige.

By 1996 the Mod movement had begun to break down and and various new movements were formed, the skinhead movement was born out of a group of "hard mods" who gave up on the fancy style of dress of the original mods and swapped acid rock for ska and reggae. Phil Cohen (1972) described the skinheads as "Kind of caricature of the model worker." The skinhead culture fused ideals from a working class British background and from West Indian immigrants. An "Acute sense of territory, its tough exteriors, its dour machismo" (Hebdige, D. 1979. 55.) is what Hebdige describes the skinhead movement as, dour machismo is the idea that the skinhead had a severe appearance and had a strong and aggressive masculine pride.  

The ideas the skinheads took from the West Indian "Rudeboys" is often thought to be solely based around reggae music but this isnt generally true. The skins also took items of dress including the crombie hat, they took ways of speaking and slang terms from reggae records and from West Indians in the community. Many of the ideals that had been lost in working British communities were found again by the skinheads through adopting aspects of the West Indian community. 

Adam Murray Talk.

Murray opened the talk by showing us his body of work "Preston is my Paris." A photocopied black and white zine of documentary photography from in and around Preston. This zine ran for 15 full issues and although i wasn't a fan of all the photographs used in some of the editions I liked the idea of consistently putting out physical work in the form of a zine. Murray stressed how this was an easy thing to do for a low cost and was something that he thought really helped photographers progress. Another good point that Murray made was to make the most of your locality, photograph what's around you on a daily basis as these are the things that you know the best. 

Murray talked about various other works he had made, one of them was a sightseeing tour around his local area based on photography in each disused space. I liked the idea of this originally as it made use of disused spaces to show work, this is something that interests me anyway as i think that the reappropriation of space within densely populated areas for artistic purposes is something that needs to happen more with the amount of unused shops on high streets across the country. When talking about this tour Murray mentioned that a lot of the works were torn down before even the first day of the tour, he then said that he didnt mind this as he "didn't think you have to put work up for it to be a show." This is something that personally i disagree with, although the point of the tour may have been to get people to these disused spaces and it did fulfil this if no work was present then they didn't go to an art show. 

Extracts from the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

The text opens with Walter Benjamin talking about how in the past their were only a small number of works that could be reproduced on masse. The greeks were only able to reproduce bronzes and coins as these could be stamped, all other works were one offs and original. As times moved on and technology began to improve printing became more and more common, lithography was invented and this meant that people could provide illustrations of everyday life on masse. Lithography was around for a while until photography came about, the invention of photography meant that an artist didn't need the same skills with their hands to accurately reproduce an image. This type of artwork was more about the art of looking through the lens, because we can see things happening a lot faster than we could draw them speeches could now be captured and recorded. The invention of moving image and sound as a film was the final step that meant people could regularly see reproductions of artworks. By being able to accurately reproduce a piece of work over and over again it didn't matter which piece was the original and because of this the authenticity of the artwork became diluted. Over time film was also accepted into being as a type of artwork and along with photography changed the perception of artwork overall. Art was now accessible for everyone but this of course had repercussions for more traditional types of artwork. 

The Violence of the image.

"The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice through out the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary- making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable." - (Sontag: 77: 21)

In this statement Stontag discusses how that due to the mass amount of photography showcasing some type of horror which we are now subject to viewing on a regular basis we have become desensitised to these images. This statement holds some truth when we look at images of violence and war, many of the images we see in the media nowadays would not have been published 50 years ago. 

If we look at these two front pages from the sun newspaper, a well known paper which sold nearly two million copies last year, the difference time has made on what it's acceptable to print has changed drastically. A newspaper from the second world war, a time at which violent acts were being committed all around the world every day on a mass scale has only a long distance photograph of a boat sinking, reasonably violent yes but by no means anywhere near the horrific scale of some of the images taken at the time. The cover of the same newspaper from the day after the 7/7 bombings in London depicts a much more shocking image, a survivor of the bombings clearly badly injured. It would make sense to assume that by this standard over time the public have become desensitised over time to a point at which it is now acceptable to print images of atrocity across various well known modern media outlets.

Alter ego post.

Now then, I'm Gav, nice to meet you love. I'm a part time bricklayer and full time Leeds United fan. Left school at sixteen, tried college, no time for that. Now on the weekend, that's when I really enjoy myself. Every saturday I meet the lads in the bull about eleven, swift couple of bevvys, cheeky dab in the toilet and we're off to the match. Ninety minutes of the beautiful game... then a good half hour of knocking a solid seven bells of shit out of the other teams firm. I'm not the biggest lad like but I know how to have a good scrap, cut my hair short so them southern fairies cant grab it when you go to crack 'em one. Hooligans that's what they call us like, not on really when you think about six days of the week i wouldnt hurt a fly (unless theirs a midweek match of course.) What i get up to on a weekend isn't such a bother now i'm not living at home with me mam, moved in with the lads last month and its all going gravy. I mean my dad's not too chuffed, i work for him you see. Only went to work twice last week cause we had a couple of heavy ones but i've got to get my head down so I can buy myself a motor and drive us all to the games, lot easier to make a swift getaway when you dont have to jump on a train. Only been nicked myself once like but its getting harder and harder to find somewhere to have a good tear-up with all this cctv about. Big brother is watching you and all that bollocks. 


P.s, Helen none of this is true, i don't really like Leeds united and frankly I couldn't care less about football, I've never been arrested and i've never had a "cheeky dab" of anything. 

The Century of self.

We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised." - Edward Bernays

The documentary opens with a brief description of Freud's theories on primal forces hidden deep within the human mind. The first episode talks about Freud's nephew Edward Bernays and how he was the first to use Freud's theories to manipulate the masses into purchasing things that they don't need to satisfy their own selfish desires. After seeing the use of propaganda to sell the war to the masses Bernays returned to america and was determined to find a way during peace time, to do this Bernays began to look at the theories of his uncle. One of the first jobs Bernays was given was to find a way to sell cigarettes to women in a world in which they were only smoked by men, women didn't smoke at least not in public and this was something that the tobacco companies needed to change. Bernays managed to convince women to smoke by getting young rich women to carry cigarettes with them during a march, at the same time these women then took out of the cigarettes and dramatically lit them. Bernays had told the media that the suffragettes would be making a protest by smoking in public and came up with the headline "torches of freedom." The phrase meant that anyone that supported the suffragettes movement would have to agree with the women smoking in public. Bernays created the idea that if a woman smoked it made her more powerful and independent, obviously this is not true but it showed bernays that you could persuade people to buy things if you linked the product to their emotional desires and feelings. This was the start of the consumerism that we now know. 

Citizen Journalism - Michael Brown.

The piece of Citizen Journalism I have chosen to look at is the video of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, this video depicts the body of Michael Brown ( an unarmed black teenager) laying in the street after being shot multiple times by a police officer. This video along with other images taken by the public at the scene of the crime started a "see something, say something" campaign online with twitter users urging others to post images of police violence rather than ignoring it. The shooting of Michael Brown created a massive amount of civil unrest within the black community in Ferguson and the use of citizen Journalism have helped bring the attention of people all over the world to the way certain members of the community had been treated by law enforcement. 


Sources; 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvE-1qAs1W4 (Michael Brown shooting - explicit content.)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michael-brown-shooting-ten-things-we-know--or-know-better-now-the-ferguson-grand-jurys-work-is-over-9881046.html (Background on the circumstances of the shooting)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/16/fergusons-citizen-journalists-video (effects of the video) 

Gender Ad's. - The Gaze.

The Gaze on a basic level is the idea that men look and women are looked at and watch them selves being looked at. Men are the one's who act and women appear. The way women are portrayed and photographed in most advertising uses them as a tool to sell things, using their looks and bodies as in some way an incentive to buy.  

Three quarters of this Advert from http://www.genderads.comfor the "Little Fibber bra" is an image of a pear (often used as a description for a woman who has a body type which differs from the norm) this image is partially covered by the caption "This is no shape for a girl." This headline illustrates ideas that were brought up by Laura Mulvey in an interview on gender, gaze and technology in film culture. In the interview Mulvey talks about how the female gaze has become the same as the male gaze, because of their representation in the media women now see themselves as men do. She furthers this point by saying "a woman who welcomes an objectifying gaze may be simply conforming to norms established to benefit men." By using this headline this advert tells women that they should buy the product to make themselves look a certain way which conforms to a patriarchal society. They are being told upon first look at the advert that if they look a certain way then they are wrong and they should change that. 

The image of the woman in her bra and pants at the bottom of the image further illustrates this point, the way she is laid in a fairly sexualised pose on the floor at the bottom of the advert as if she is less important than everything else. She has what we are told, abet subversively, by this advert as the "normal" body type. She looks out from the page but not directly at the viewer, furthering the idea that she is there to be looked at.