Story Telling Book Work

I looked through my book as soon as i was handed it and found a page in which a note with some information was stuck in between two random pages, i began wondering whether it was purposely put on that exact page, whether it was on a page with some meaning to the person who put it here or whether it was a totally random occurrence with no meaning. With this in mind I thought it would be an interesting place to start so i photographed the exact placement of where i found it making sure the detail was crisp and clean.

 

After taking the photograph i wanted I then decided to mess around with the shutter speed and try merge some what the book gives details of in one picture. I set the shutter speed to 5 seconds (making sure it was dark) and started by turning the page onto a page of interest to me and then closing the book all together. I found on my first attempt that it did not show enough of the book being closed so i attempted it again making sure to leave the camera on the hardback of the book for a longer time. It took me three attempts to get the photograph i wanted with the main problems being motion blur, the picture being too light and the picture not containing enough of each of the three segments but in the end I'm happy with the final result.
                        Attempt 1.

Attempt 2.

Finished product.

 I wanted to take the most crisp, well lighted and clean photo i could showing almost all the details of the parts of the book as I could i one photo so i opened the book to a random page and borrowed another book to put behind it. I thought the photo turned out very well as there is a high contrast of colour between the white and the black with the black being very smooth, shadow creating and partially light reflectant. I thought blur at the start of the page looked good and smoothly became more focus as it reached the hardback.

My main inspiration throughout the experiments were Cara Barer's book photos in which the book is very well lit but the rest is relatively dark. She also makes sure that most all of the book is very sharp, crisp and well in focus which is did for most of the pictures up until the last one in which I experimented with depth of field to show a sense of distance in the photo.

Story Telling Brainstorm

    This project is based on story telling and how the way stories are told have changed over the years and generations. Story telling has been around since cavemen days, the reason we know this is due to the discoveries of real drawings back from the cavemen times. Here is an example; at the turn of the 20th century, some French children made an incredible find in the Pyrenees Mountains - drawings of extinct animals in caves. The 35,000-year-old paintings on the walls of the Lascaux Caves are our earliest recorded evidence of storytelling, and since Lascaux we've found dozens of other examples. In class we were told some examples of what to research which included cavemen drawings and the Egyptians invention on frontalism. Personally I found the Nazi book burning to be the most interesting example which was given. This is because I always have found World War 2 to be interesting and the pictures seem very eerie and almost satanic. 

The earliest forms of storytelling were thought to have been primarily oral combined with gestures and expressions. In addition to being part of religious ritual, rock art may have served as a form of storytelling for many ancient cultures. The Australian Aboriginal people painted symbols from stories on cave walls as a means of helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was then told using a combination of oral narrative, music, rock art and dance. People have used the carved trunks of living trees and ephemeral media (such as sand and leaves) to record stories in pictures or with writing. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status for example with this tattoo it is very random and should mean something different to every eye which beholds it.

With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media, stories were recorded, transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas and other textiles, recorded on film, and stored electronically in digital form. Oral stories continue to be committed to memory and passed from generation to generation, despite the increasing popularity of written and televised media in much of the world.

Ofcourse over the years certain ideas from stories have been stolen or changed and the more a story is told, the more the reader changes it therefore making the story change all together so people hear different versions. An example of different versions and copies of original work is that of the character "Athelia" by shakespear

Artist Research

In order of me gaining the inspiration for my work in the future I did some artist research into artists who I think portray storytelling very well through their photos.

Cara Barer

Cara Barer is an amazing photographer who tends to use books in order to tell a story through her photographs. I think it is very effective how all focus is on the book, through the book being well lit and the background being pitch black, and the way it has been manipulated and ripped apart is a different thing we usually don't see, usually a book is very straight and closed up whereas in this, we can tell there is more then meets the eye, personally my view is that the pages of the book look like they're trying to escape the confines of the hard back, I also believe they look like the birds eye view of a stump of a tree. 

Tom Allen

Tom Allen is another photographer who shows story telling through books but in a very different way to Cara Barer. In fact, the only thing that is relatively the same between their work is the fact the books are both well lit and the background is dark. The main change in my eyes is that Tom actually add things to the book whereas Cara just sticks with the book and adds nothing. A few of the main contrasts for me are that Cara Barer's photos seem to all be very sharp with no sign of blur whereas in Tom's pictures he uses blur on his characters which are further away in order to show the view the depth of feel and also to leave some mystery into who the character behind the front of the book is, it also makes it look a lot more realistic.