Richard Wentworth

'View of streets we never see'....

Richard Wentworth creates a series of photographs, based on the litter he finds placed down Caledonian Road in London. When researching this series I was completely inspired by the way a random object placed in an interesting way can change completely what the environment. Usually, litters seen as something disgusting and accidentle. Wentworth photographs the objects in a way that they are

interesting for the viewer and are the main focus rather than the environment.

'Here is a London you have never seen before, an aerial panorama that moves from the graceful arches of King's Cross Station (that elegant, under-appreciated classical gem) to the wasteland north of the terminal, where thundering cranes, derricks and earth-movers are carving out the new channel tunnel link - revealing, as they do so, a row of splendidly Dickensian warehouses, blackened hulks left over from the age of the railways that I, for one, never realised were there.' Richard Dorment - The Telegraph

Environment Idea.

I came up with my idea for The Environment project, simply by walking round the Chatham and Rochester area, trying to see if anything interested/inspired/annoyed me. Especially in the Chatham area, I noticed a lot of littering, especially the dumping of random items such as trolleys, sofa's and all sorts. I decided it would be interesting to maybe photograph objects in the environment, positioned in interesting ways.

I thought the concept of 'human intervention on the landscape' could be something to work on. To look at, and experiment how humans can change the way the environment is perceived without really noticing. I plan on photographing dumped items exactly how they were left, that way the idea of human intervention is evident.

I plan on doing some research on photographers that have taken photographs of litter or something similar to my idea, to maybe be further inspired and to gain more knowledge on how to plan my shoot.

Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer is a well known german artist who made life-size pubescent female dolls, he was considered a surrealist photographer. Bellmer's doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life, including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his works, Bellmer explicitly sexualized the doll as a young girl. The dolls incorporated the principle of "ball joint" , which was inspired by a pair of sixteenth-century articulated wooden dolls in the Kaiser Friedrich museum.

I found Bellmer's work extremely interesting and very relevant to my project. He experiments in ways to manipulate how a doll can be representing, by changing the composition and theme of the image the doll is seen as something more eerie and sexualised, something that cause alot of controversy in the time of his work. Bellmer created dolls with fragmented bodies that could be dismantled in different ways. His images usually portrayed death and decay, and more interestingly, abuse and longing. 


"The fetishising of body parts and fragmentation of the sexual form ignored the constraints of physical actuality. ...Bellmer's sense of taboo lay not in what convention condemned but what was hidden in the darkness of the psyche (where it is far from safe). Bellmer's psychological confrontation and violence may constitute a spiritual jolt that liberates from habit and known codings. He dragged terrible desires out of the darkness and into cognition so that we could assimilate the full reality of our passions and the content of evil in them. How else were we to transcend them (in whatever way we ought) if not by first knowing them?"

Shooting

Final Idea

After researching different artist, toys and stories. My final idea is using the objects: China doll, Bottle of Red wine and a glass. The three objects are to represent the child and the reason behind the abuse. I want to image to have an eerie haunting feel about it yet also for the viewer to feel sympathetic towards the doll. In order to create the theme of child abuse, I want the image to include the glass broken and the doll cracked and dirty, as if portraying the child. I want the background to be matte black, to create a dark effect and also so that the only focus is on the objects. During the shoot I will experiment with composition to try and find the best way for the doll to look child like and dependant on the bottle of wine, maybe leaning or laying on it. I want the broken glass to represent 'a broken home' and the china doll to represent 'the china doll of the family.'

China Dolls

Photography by Louise Daddona

I found this image of a china doll immediately very disturbing. The dead-pan expression on the dolls face is particularly moving as the massive crack down her face is clearly obvious. The clear pale texture of the doll in comparison to the matte black background is very effective as the doll is in complete focus and
the only thing the viewer is made to look at, making the image quite uncomfortable and full-on.

I think using a china doll is perfect sybolism of child abuse. The doll represents something very innocent and calming and when broken and taken out of context theres something very eerie and sad about the whole image.

Deeper research into the story behind my idea.

I decided to talk to my friend more about her personal experience, the more I knew about her childhood, the more I could put myself in her position and hopefully have a more believabe outcome. She spoke about how her mother used to abuse her due to alcohol and she'd had this sort of childhood every since she was born so never knew any different, it wasn't until she grew up she realised out wrong it was. Something intresting which she said was 'I was the china doll in my family....'
     This was the exact inspiration I needed without even asking her about my idea about toys, the term china doll, to her, meant that she was treated like a doll and not like a child. The china doll idea immediately inspired me with lots of ideas in which I could do further research into.