George Morris Photography

These are the images I have selected for my final piece. I don’t believe context is needed but it can be found within my other posts.

The personal relationship with this project is something I wanted to show within my photos, and is something that I’d rather not apply much context to, as I feel as though the context should be noted within the image, and should be at least partly clear from the outside without much background information. With this in mind over the Easter Break many personal events happened for me, and I took the opportunity to capture what I feel best represents where I am in relation to home right now in some of the images I took…

These two images show both entrances to my newest ‘home’ and by that I mean my newest bedroom (as I now live within a loft conversion). The entrance/exit contrast is well-represented within the warm tones of the left image, and the cold tones of the right one. This is something I made prominent within Photoshop, to distinguish the two and make the staircase seem extra daunting in abundance to the low angle within the second photograph. Both images are clear, though the second seems to lose focus depth (again most likely due to my equipment) however this matches the reasoning behind the image.

The warm tones represent safety here, as my new bedroom features a calming space for me, and somewhere that I could relax amidst other things happening. Although the main colours featured within this photo are grey, cream and white, I believe the over-exposure from the window creates a warm glow which illuminates what would otherwise be cold textures within the room. I deliberately left the space untidy, to support the idea that the space had been lived in, as this was an important thing to show for me.

An extension of the previous image, recently I’ve found myself trying to escape the real world in this new environment by sitting and gazing outside of the large window within my room. I wanted to capture the tone and feeling of how it felt to feel so close to the sky whilst remaining indoors, and I feel as though the low angle of this shot is a good representation of that. I also like the soft and intricate texture of the beanbag within the foreground, and how the shape of the window is not centered and slight skewed diagonally within.

I like to think that the message behind this image is clear already. The exposure of the sunlight in the bottom left corner nicely radiates and dampens throughout the rest of the image as it dissipates into the red blue. The large wires across the structure of the bridge also build the structure of the photo and I like how the actual bridge itself isn’t shown, only the towering design that remains so large is rises up out of the photograph. The ‘Talk to Us’ message amidst the day-to-day signs is missable, and I that’s the whole point to this one. The saturation of the colours is a little bit much within the image, but it’s this attention grabbing (especially within the signs) that I wanted.

This is the first of a series of images I took to depict the broken nature of my new home, as within the garden the fence features a large gap in which various pets often walk through. The melancholic image of the lone chair is one I stole from an old teacher of mine, as I liked how the neighbours seemed to position the furniture perfectly within the gap of the fence. The horizontal nature of the photo was crafted to imitate the direction of the fence, whilst the lack of colour appeals to the melancholy image of the chair.

The black mold within my new kitchen sums up many things. The deterioration of a household, for one along with the attempt to fix things (the cloth shoved inside the gaping hole within the side of the house). The fading colours and murky shadows across everything match the photo itself, even the ground isn’t straight as it veers upwards towards the left. The simplicity of capturing this is what I think I like the most, as the complex pattern of the mold oozes together into a shapeless collage of disgust.

An extension of the previous photo. By making the image black and white I have isolated the tainted cleanliness within ‘the stained white of the plug fuse’ as it becomes corrupted by the mold and eaten until it gives into the black. The lack of colour highlights the tones of the effect damp has had on the wall, and creates a gritty, murky sight – a just representation of this new…’home’.

| Other Photographs that seem too Traditional |

Lincoln – A ‘New Home’. Although some of the depth from Steep Hill is nice there’s no real emotional connection to this one.

Another image of my new bedroom that carries the warm tones of the others, however I felt like this seemed too much like a standard photograph, as if I was just trying to show someone my bedroom.

Another part of the ‘Broken Home’ montage, although I like the idea (a fire alarm dangling precariously from a hole in the ceiling – the abandonment of safety) I feel as though the image is too dark and too blurry and unfortunately I was unable to take it again.

Whilst visiting Ashford I attempted to capture the silhouette of my previous home against a sunset sky. Although the sky proved to provide an interesting colour palette the silhouette of the house sadly didn’t work as well.

Probably the photos that make me the saddest, two of my best friends who are no longer a part of my life. However, I was advised that pets do not make interesting photographs.

Whilst visiting my second home in Welling, Kent I stopped by an old lake where I used to play as a child and witnessed an elderly man staring among the water. After an hour of just sitting there, I asked him if I could take this image and he kindly agreed. Although I like the image the idea of ‘home’ is loosely linked to this one, I like to think that the subject in question feels most at home in this location, which is why the location takes up the majority of the image.

Another image of the lake I spent much time at when I was younger. Although this looks edited it is in fact not in any way, as I had applied the wrong settings to my camera and this is how the image came out during sunset. The postcard image gives across a warm feeling of nostalgia for me and is something I really like.

The idea of home took me back to some of my earliest memories. I’ve always been obsessed with films and television and would often spend the majority of my day sat in front of the box watching something until it was time for bed. In a sense, I spent more time with the people on screen than I did with my actual family – this created a strange void for me within the real world when I was young, and for my first five years alive I was told that I would do nothing except sit in front of the television and watch a double bill of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ and Pixar’s ‘Toy Story’ on video again and again until we had to buy new copies because I had worn the others out. As I grew older, I was eventually forced into the ‘real world’ more but I always kept the same sensibilities, no matter how strange it sounds I feel more at home with people on the screen than people in real life a lot of the time.

Whilst I knew this concept perhaps wouldn’t make the most interesting photograph, I wanted to include it within my project as it is very personal to me and is something I hold dear. I began to construct ideas, initially inspired by David Hockney’s Photomontage work, to create an image of myself using television stills, but it became clear that the idea was more of an art piece and wouldn’t represent my photography work. With this in mind I wanted to keep the idea of having multiple images on screen but dwindled them down to three. Two screens each representing the book-ends of my life so far, with myself in the middle caught between them.

One of the prime examples of my education from television was from The Simpsons episode ‘One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue fish’ in which Homer teaches his son Bart how to shave. Growing up watching The Simpsons I always remembered the scene, and when the time came for me to learn how to shame, I stuck on the DVD and used the knowledge the cartoon gave me, aftershave burn and all. The bond between father and son onscreen adds an element of irony to the image, as traditionally it’s someone’s actual father teaching them to shave, rather than an animated one – and the image above represents a nice summary of my relationship with that part of my family.

I ensured the screen was centered, and positioned the blinds in a way that cast a shadow across the unit holding the television as to not be a distraction from the subject of the photo. The shadows across the unit and handle of the unit highlighted a pristine and simple image, something I liked and when I made the image black and white within Photoshop I knew I wanted both the images to appear the same way – to signify how television never changes even when the things around them do.

For example here, this second image taken within my University bedroom offers up an interesting little juxtaposition to the first image. Again the there are shadows being cast and small personal items littered around the box itself but the content has changed too. This image highlights a recent show that has had a huge personal impact on me, NBC/Yahoo’s ‘Community’ which features a character who sees everything through a ‘meta lens’ which allows him to stay calm by imagining his life as a television show. The episode shown in the photo is the show’s finale, where Abed (the character onscreen) is shown to finally admit that TV is his only comfort because everything else ends, and that with television he never has to accept change. It’s an incredibly poignant moment for me, and is something very niche’ and worrying to share within the project but the idea of home shines so brightly for me within this image that I couldn’t not include it.

For the image of myself within the two screens I bought some black paper and arranged it against my bedroom wall, allowing myself a simple and non-distracting backing to my non-descriptive emotion. I then corrupted the image the same way I did with my memory photographs to create the illusion of a loose connection and the idea of technology – what this particular image is about. I then placed it as a slightly obscured backing to the two other images to create an interesting piece that I quite like, even though it’s relatively busy.

Inspired by Matthew Tischler’s work that I found within my research, I decided to explore the concept of memory within my ‘Home’ project. I liked the idea of the sharpness of the image disappearing to represent memory loss, and therefore decided to follow this concept but in a more digital way. by corrupting the .jpeg’s on my laptop and distorting the images using frame displacement and colour separations. I initially did this with the topography image I took in Ashford. The corruption looked dynamic and made the image stand out among the others that I took. With this in mind I wanted to show a slow deterioration amidst my memories, so whilst I was home I looked through old photos from my childhood, including many at a young age and in a variety of different homes.

 The second bunch of photos feature landscape shots of my home in Australia, where I spent two years of my life after moving away from England, it’s here where I wanted to start the corruption of memory, to signify the effect moving had on me emotionally. I inserted the images of Australia into notepad and began to edit the coding structure of the image to corrupt it. I only changed the coding slightly to alter it as I knew I wanted a set of four images showing different stages of my life. The final stage would then involve my current home and lifestyle at University. To represent this I purchased a disposable camera and took a set of photos with my friends at University, this way the physical copies of the photos would match that of the previous ones. After the pictures were then developed I took a blurred image of a collage of them together, and corrupted the photo in the same way as the Australia images.

 

When given the topic of ‘home’ for my final project, I began to contemplate where the destination of home would be for me, for example what kind of landscape would represent a homely and familiar environment for me. With this in mind I began to look into Topographic photographers such as Joe Deal and Frank Gohlke.

Frank Gohlke is an American Landscape Photographer who focuses mainly on sparse and minimal landscapes both man-made (such as empty car parks and highway lanes) and natural (such as charred forest floors and curves within the landscape). He often photographs the same locations at different periods of time, noting how the areas change within these periods in the wake of some sort of event or disaster. For example, a devastating tornado struck Gohlke’s home city of Wichita Falls in Texas in 1979, which damaged much of city’s buildings and left many homeless. Gohlke photographed the devastation and then returned to the same area a year later to see how the wreckage had been cleaned up, and how people within his home town had worked hard to create their own safe environment again.

For example, houses had been rebuilt and foliage had grown over the short period of time remarkably well, returning the city to the homely and inviting place that Gohlke remembered from his upbringing.

Joe Deal is an American photographer and topographer who mostly focused on how humanity changes natural landscapes. Much like Gohlke, most of his images are in black and white and represent a cynical view on the way landscape is changing in regards to humanity’s effect on it. One of Deal’s series of images focused on the coastlines of San Andreas, and how buildings and holiday resorts had tarnished the natural phenomena of land meeting the sea.

The way the two make their images very flat and industrial just by the spacial awareness and formatting of the buildings within them. It’s something that I wanted to try within my own images. That’s why over Easter, whilst visiting Ashford (my old hometown) I tried to create a topography photo similar to these. Within the town center,  I went to the highest point I could reach (the top floor of a car park) and began to take photos of the town center, eventually deciding to focus on the large block of flats among the town houses.

I tried to get the horizon straight in the photo, as I believe it matches the artists’ photos in creating a clinical feel whilst emphasising the difference in size between the block of flats and town houses. I then edited the image in photoshop by cropping it into a wider image and making the image monochrome to match Deal’s and Gohlke’s. As Ashford is where home meant for me for the last 10 years I feel the photo represents both a personal connection to me as well as showcasing a general image of the two different types of household – the block of flats and the town houses.