Showcase November 2013

Things have been quite hectic lately. The last assignments had to be handed in, preparations were made for my final exhibition, exams are coming up and finally I am starting an internship very soon. In these times I question how far I can push my stress levels. The only thing my mind is filled with is what still needs to be done or arranged and how I will possibly fit it all into my oh so busy schedule. 

But then again, is it just me who stresses? Some people seem to cope with so much work and just wing it somehow. They just do the things they feel are necessary and all seems to be working out fine. I will need to learn that!

But this post has a different purpose because as mentioned above my as well as my fellow students' final exhibition is coming up. Here the details:

Hope to see you there!

Edward Weston

Having to shoot in the style of someone is sometimes a little difficult. This time it was Edward Weston. Telling stories and triggering emotions by photographing objects such as peppers or shells is the key to his still life pieces.

The image here is my interpretation of his work as part of an assignment.


Title: The Mourning Sister

By Karolina Rupp Photography

NSPA Manifesto

What is happening around you? What are you doing? Where are you going? What is the meaning of life? 

Who are you? 

It is important to remember these questions and to attempt answering them throughout your life.

Guidelines to a manifesto that tries to free you and make you aware of or and become one with 

natural phenomenon.

Nutrition:

Be aware what you eat. Don't eat processed goods. They contain things that are harmful to you. And you might not even no why. Just remember, don't eat what you can't pronounce. Make sure you source organic produce and meats that are free range at the least, as we are not here to harm or make animals suffer but to embrace their presence. They are helping us out to survive. We should thank them for that. 

The Self:

Be strong and open minded. Embrace what you see. You were given to everyone and everyone was given to you. Some people might be 'bad' or 'good' but essentially you need to decide what that means to you. Start thinking and then do. But don't forget to do. The aim is to be a content human being, not by comfort but by exploration and the seeking of knowledge to in the end form your own opinion and reflect inward to finally understand yourself and most importantly like yourself while still staying humble. This is difficult, but doable. 

Production:

What are you doing with your life? What is your calling? Your aim? The aim is to make good art. To create something meaningful and unique, even that uniqueness is rare and is not a must. The most important thing is to express something that makes you feel fulfilled and that has no other purpose than to make others think or happy. Don't work for money. Money is needed but humans give it too much value. You as the human are the key, not what you have in your hands. If you create good art, you won't need to worry about survival, as you are fulfilling yourself and everything else will come. Don't believe, create. 

Aim:

The aim of this way of life is to live an inspired and curious life, similarly to the view of a child. Stay excited as everything will eventually come together and you will finally be able to say: 'I understand'. What this will be and how you will get there is your choice but if you practice self reflection and are open to creative and interesting thoughts and stimuli, you will hopefully arrive at the place of content sooner than later. Content in the end refers to becoming one with your surroundings, which includes mother nature as well as the unanswered world we don't understand, reaching from consciousness to spiritual phenomena. 

NSPA, being nutrition, self, production and aim becomes the motto: 

NOTHING SEEMS PARTICULARLY ABSTRACT

Foresting

Today's excursion:

By Karolina Rupp Photography

By Karolina Rupp Photography

And to end this post:

"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." - Banksy (original variation by Finley Peter Dunne)

Start Playing

Traveling around without a digital camera is quite a strange experience which lead me to use a small point and click belonging to my mom. This camera has quite interesting auto functions I experimented with. Here some examples straight out of camera:

By Karolina Rupp Photography

By Karolina Rupp Photography

I found that sometimes it's a good thing to look away from your normal routine within the field or equipment and let go. I was surprised by the results obtained with a camera I would normally regard as... lets say a toy. But that might be the key... cut the seriousness and play again!

New Perspectives

Recently a friend and I went to Hartbeestpoort Dam visiting a dairy farm. We decided to take some shots to keep shooting and try some new things. Here an image I like:

By Karolina Rupp Photography

I think in this life one needs to find things that make you see why you are alive. This can be as simple as a beach holiday to putting a complex idea into practice. Once you know what you must do or experience, things become easier and better. 

As Roger Ballen said:

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist.

Clutter or no clutter?

Sometimes it feels like my head is cluttered. Sometimes this is good and other times it is bad clutter. Sometimes you have the need to tidy up and other times you love living in a little bit of a mess. The key is though that everything needs to come together in the end as a whole to have meaning. Even if the meaning is the cluttered. I think...

This image above was taken at a psychiatric hospital in Gauteng, South Africa. It reminds me of the clutter I was referring to above. At the same time though it somehow makes me see a 'mentally unstable' person who must be experiencing more clutter in his/ her mind?! Or maybe quite the opposite? Maybe the 'sane' humans are the confused ones? How would you know?

Thrown Together

Take photographs from the past, for example your ancestors and reinvent them. Not re-shooting them but working with them to create something new. What an inspiration. 

Writing and writing pages over pages every morning is the key but only referring to things you hear and learn does not justify this post. It needs to be personal. 

Here a thought on individualism.  

In today's world we are taught that being unique is a great thing and that it will take you far in life. Unfortunately there a certain guidelines that we follow that supposedly make us more unique if compared to others who coincidentally also follow those same suggestions. This of course is a hypocrisy in itself which I tried to address. By using lace consisting of a rose pattern and a real rose from a rose plant, I would like to demonstrate that being unique or an individual is not as easy but at the same time effortless. It is the idea that others might be able to see you or your problems more clearly than you do or can as you are occupied with understanding the chaos of stimuli coming together between your ears. Thus breaking out of the norm can be either confirmed or disregarded depending who looks at it, you or someone else. What I mean here is that I might see myself as unique and as an individual but you see quite the opposite and fit me neatly into a box. It is this grouping of people that contributes to the limits we encounter in regards to conquering the fear of life. This idea is a way to allow the thought of individualism and its possibility to grow out of a person, flowering like a rose to create a beautiful and unique being, which still belongs. 

Order

I find myself sitting in my study, and all around me are papers, books, notes, pens, paint brushes, magazines, cables, envelopes, rulers, and boxes with strange stuff in. They are not neatly tucked away, but are scattered all around, on my desk and on the floor, even the printer became a surface handy to place stuff on. Sometimes I find this mess, as some would call it, quite liberating because everything is accessible immediately. But days like today I just wish I had an hour or two to just clean everything. The funny part is that I theoretically have an hour but that time is already planned for something else. What I'm trying to say is that normally we look for opportunities like these to escape from the actual things we need to complete. I believe the word is procrastination. But I am now experiencing quite the opposite, so does that mean the stuff that I actually have to do in that hour today is a form of procrastination in the context of cleaning my study?

Today I'm going to create a photogram, and I'm quite curious how it will be. And what the final result will look like. Theme for today: Take the old and make it new.

Stop Motion

This Stop Motion Animation was a recent project of mine. I am myself not 100% sure what it says, but I know that it expresses what I want it to.

I suggest you watch it in a larger size to get the intended impact.

Vintage Action

I browsed around and found some stunning actions for Photoshop that create an old vintage look similar to pictures taken years ago. I played around with some and they are in fact amazing.

Here and example of my favourite action:
Image taken by me (Karolina Rupp Photography)

Unedited Image

After Vintage Action

This should indicate that it is in fact incredibly easy to improve an image "just like that". You need no skill of colour nor of editing software. It's just automatic. I guess what makes me feel a little better about using these actions is that I understand what they do. This doesn't make it better but in fact just quicker. Welcome to the 21st century. 

If you are interested in this action I applied above just use the comment function below to let me know and I'll gladly share it.

Seasons of Creativity

After a rather restful time away, I realised that the posts on here either support my frustrations of being lost and uninspired or the breakthrough moments of enlightenment. This blog is missing the in between stages of how creativity is developed and explored again after a phase of blankness and how it feels when it flows out of you faster and faster just after a high of inspiration. I will try from now on to include these seasons of inspiration and creativity. Then analyse the pattern, and try to change it again to something that can possibly increase it. Or maybe not, maybe it will just be interesting to see. 

Writing this I realise a slight decrease in excitement over the last couple of days but with a good chance of recovery. Is creativity as unpredictable as the weather?

Today's shoot

A new time has come. A time of fine art photography that is expressive. Finding a style of shooting is really difficult as you want to avoid copying others but still find inspiration in work you find relevant. I guess that's the curse of a student. This year though I feel like I'm coming a little closer to my creative expression executed in the way of 'me'. How else would I define that inner pattern that is overlaid onto every image?

This image below is from today's shoot. It doesn't have a title yet. It deals with not wanting to realise that one is boxed in, but also the feeling of a possibility of escape.

By Karolina Rupp Photography

Olivier Culmann

"He travels the globe to take photos of people watching TV. Culmann’s mind-numbing portraits show each person transfixed by the telly, sometimes bearing hilariously dazed expressions. Taken out of context, you would think the images were a detailed study of worldwide ennui and existential angst. Culmann didn’t take snaps of his subjects until he was sure they had forgotten he was there."

All images and text from here.

Good Old Film

How many times have I opened the back of a film camera that already had film in it? Countless times and I thought I've learned from every one of these experiences... but obviously I didn't. I did it again today. That feeling is indescribable. It is a mix between stupidity, self-hatred, disappointment but also it questions your ability to be able to ever learn, in fact the trust in yourself thing is a little shaky for a moment. The good thing about it? At least I still shoot film and have not given up on it! And probably never will. Maybe it is exactly because of these risks and the uncertainty of film that keeps me coming back to it over and over again. It is just not that easy if compared to a digital system. I'm not saying I'm against digital cameras, what I'm saying is that don't shoot hundreds and thousands of jpg's or RAW's, keep it within limitations. If I give myself between twenty and thirty images that I can shoot for a specific brief, I end up with better images as I spend more time on them and compose them more carefully than if I would just be shooting away and later have to go through hundreds of files finding 'the one'. This works for me, it might not for you.

Maybe I should buy red tape and every time I load a camera with film tape it closed. Or should I feel that feeling over and over again? It might stop eventually? But am I really willing to loose so many images? No.

Here an image I took on a 35mm Rollei Redbird. Unedited.

By Karolina Rupp Photography

A thought. A metathought.

It amazes me how many people are on this planet. How all of them somehow make it happen. Make themselves happen, even if it is just surviving. I am thinking of all the people in so many different countries and landscapes and cityscapes somehow all living together intertwined. But one thought about this whole idea bothers me. Who does the world belong to? One would say 'It belongs to the people'? But frankly, it does not. If it would, I could visit any place on this planet tomorrow without having to get a visa etc. But this is not what I mean, what I am in fact referring to is the idea of does this world not actually belong to our minds? Because yes we can see bodies walking and talking but without a mind there would be none of the latter. Say we agree. This earth is cramped with minds, thus with thoughts and all these thoughts if they would be floating around freely could be seen as the collective consciousness. So imagine you have to give this bubble of thoughts a name that actually does not refer to what it is seen as (collective consciousness) but to what it means, to what the mother-thought is all about?! I believe it is tricky. Obviously. But the thought made from the collection of thoughts I would call 'The Metathought' for the purpose of this blog. Imagine you would be able to access this metathought and throw it around like a ball, swim in it, burn a part to see how it heals itself again and cut it in half to be able to say that you were the one who experienced half of it. 

I wonder if your thoughts are still part of it if you're the one playing with it? 

This is it. A random thought for today.

 

John Baldessari

Knosing

The need to be creative is a wonderful one, but if you feel uninspired it is terrible. Sinful in fact if that is what you strive for. You start questioning things around you. An experiment one can do which fascinates me is the following: Close your one eye and look at your nose. It is in your sight from the top till the bottom but you can't see it in its full form or shape. Does that mean that your nose is only half a nose? Yes sure look at it with both your eye, squint, and you will realise that it is blurred and exists even less as a shape as it is not as defined. The point I'm trying to make is that your face grows out of your head, out of your mind, so if you interact with someone face to face does that mean there is only one face in the conversation or two? You are only able to see the one you are looking at, not your own. Also, within that interaction, don't you feel you are in the space between you and the person? You are throwing words at the other persons face which only start existing within the space between you and her/ him and then the other person takes them in.. or not. Your mind seems to thus not exist in your head but in the space just in front of you, hovering there, ready to interact and explore. Tough it carries a wall either to the left or the right (depending which eye you close) of your vision. Therefore we know that our nose can be observed from either side and that it is big, forming a little arrow pointing us in a direction. Let's call it the nosal compass of our mind. As someone pointed out, people are counted or seen as noses, for example 'there are ten noses in the room' or as one would say in the German language 'zwei Euro pro Nase' which translates to 'two Euro per nose(person)'. Does this mean that the reason we count or see noses is the fact that it is the closest thing to our mind (physically) that we ourselves can observe and thus we being there becomes real? 

Being led by our noses, exploring the world around us being aware of the nose in the corner of our eye creates a very different experience of our reality as it makes us perceive it out of a third party perspective. How wonderful! This allows us to observe the observed behind the shield of our physical being which is protecting our mind, for now. 

The conclusion here, what does facing yourself mean?!

Is choice good?

This is a very interesting talk by Barry Schwartz! It questions the idea of choice.

The Three Corners of Reality

By Karolina Rupp Photography

There are three layers to our mind, the good, the bad and the grey areas in between that influence our understanding of things and our reality. We can't escape them, they are part of us inherently.

This photograph, taken on 120 film with a medium format camera, explores exactly that concept of being caught within our own realities and that everything is subjective essentially. We are fixed in that position, and still are trying to think outside of the box and explore even more profound topics just to realise over and over again that the moment a new thought is explored it becomes a cliché. We never stop discovering things but once found, place them neatly into one of the three corners of reality. It is the restlessness of blindly searching for answers to everyday questions that freezes us in time until the hunt is over, for now, and the collection of thoughts and ideas within the mind has been expanded once again. This process continues throughout life and only ends with death, this library we carefully construct through everyday living, that helps us to survive and cope with the reality we are living (in). To draw the concept closer to the photograph, it is necessary to explain the visual elements within this image. 

Firstly, a woman is portrayed a little blurry in the just off-center of the composition with the sleeves of her jersey rolled up, ready to run and explore. Behind her head three different types of walls meet, which represent the three corners of reality by having different shades of grey as one of their properties. These walls hold her within the composition and thus shows her being stuck and caught in her own reality. On the left a door can be recognised which demonstrates the human need to escape and think differently every now and then, but also to show that it is not used (it is closed) for a reason. On the right towards the back of the composition of this photograph random objects can be seen. These show that not everything is explored within our thoughts but at the same time if you would move closer you would know what these objects are, which reinforces the concept of the cliché as mentioned above.The setting was chosen as it is a familiar structure, our reality we live in. The fear of knowing what is out there and the subjective interpretation of the latter is shown through the closed eyes of the woman. Also having to fight your way through this reality, but doing so with closed eyes (eyes are closed towards ideas and things of others because they can only be subjectively perceived and thus become one own's thoughts and ideas) plays a role within this composition. In addition, the woman is a little unsure of her position within this/ her reality which is another reason her eyes are shut as she is essentially hiding away. Through that feature, the viewer of this photograph has the ability to judge and see but the subject decides to not perceive being observed in order to protect herself, like many do within this reality.

This photograph of mine will be exhibited at the end of the year. Watch this space for more details.