Yihan HongHistory of PhotographyNov.14th

My History of Photography

I was very interested in Hans Bellmer’s work, “Les Jeux de la Poupee.”

These photos are hand-colored black-and-white photograph of doll sculpture,

which are really subversive, erotic, sadistic and fetishistic. This series of works

are presented with a sense of torturing and abusing, and the appearance of the

dolls are kind of nightmarish and preposterous that, “reveals a far less realistic

depiction of the female form”1, but at the same time contains a secret sexualizing

representation. In my opinion, dolls are very innocent or more like a reminder of

childhood. But the dolls in Hans Bellmer’s works, are more like the twisted

beauty of mystery, nightmare or dark fairy tale, which really reminds me of the

temptation and desire between men and young females that the novel Lolita, by

Vladamir Nabokov depicts, which happens and appears on young female bodies.

These works are the symbols of rebellious not only that time period, symbols of

rebelliousness of the present as well. It is a perfect example of surrealism, for

twisting and separating females’ bodies. Female bodies are considered as the

origin of sin, temptation since the Holy Bible, with the symbol of snake

expressing sex as a negative, evil and degraded theme. With these kinds of

metaphor, Les Jeux de la Poupee seems to be more of a risk or a rebellion since

female bodies are considered the origin of sin, according to the holy bible; also to

the “opposite side”, which shows some guilty pleasures and desires of humans’

hearts. The shape and the concepts inside these works inspire me a lot. The

1 Les jeux de la poupee (The Games of the Doll), Hans Bellmer, Phillips, https://www.phillips.com/detail/HANS-BELLMER/NY040213/179.

twisted shape of females really excites me. In my work before, thinking about

surrealism and composing same idea into photography and drawing at the same

time, I created this picture of segregated female body for my Drawing and

Imagination class, and I really hope to practice more with the inspiration Hans

Bellmer brought me in the future.

Les jeux de la

poupée ,Hans Bellmer, 1949, hand-colored gelatin silver prints.

My work for Drawing and

Imagination, 2016, Adobe Illustration.

I am very interested in with Charles Marvile’s work Tearing down the

Avenue of the Opera. In this work, he depicted the destroy process of old French

buildings and neighborhoods. He showed the process of people building, and

then destroying. In my opinion, art is just like this process, and my body of work

is also created by destroying the objects or ideas I have made, and in turn, they

are reborn. His work makes me wonder: would the development of capturing

moment increase or decrease if people destroyed more of their work? Or with

these pictures, will people take their disappearance not as seriously since all the

things could be kept through technology? To me, people are naturally and easily

attracted to the symbol of destruction and back-to-life. Destroying could also be

seen as an action of authority, and power of taking, which just like death itself.

Being inspired by Charles Marvile’s works, I also tried to make my prints of

black-white photos with the idea of destroying and reborn from ruining. For my

works, I tried to cut the film to break the usual geometric lines of the

architectures, and baked them on fire to create those special curly waves and

crispy bubble textures. I enjoy being my own imaginary god, changing the whole

reality while using a scissor to cut out or to fire my films. When I change my

action of naturally capture the things I see into “destroying” the films I shot, the

destruction suddenly turns into a kinds of rebuild, or even reborn. The

structures are no more rational and unchanged, but adding more “interference”

and scars, which helps me to build up more layers into the photos.

Charles

Marville, Percement de L’avenue de L’Opéra, 1877.

My work inspired by Marvile,

2016.

I am interested in Grete Stern’s Sueños, which is a series of

photomontages portraying women’s dreams. This series was created because of

an Argentine women’s magazine Idilio in 1948, which introduced a weekly

column called “Psychoanalysis Will Help You.” Each week, one dream was

illustrated with a photomontage, which showed unconscious fears and desires of

its predominantly female readership into clever, compelling images2. Dreams is a

symbol and theme that surrealists love to portray throughout the years, but in

her work, she mainly focus on women’s dreams, which lost a lot of extremes

compared to the usual surrealism works. Her works has a deeper expression and

collection of these dreams, without aggressive appearance, but still shows out

the confusion, privacy, the desires from these dreams. Many of my own works

are inspired by my dreams. To me, dreams imply chaos, with hidden logical

2 Sueño No. 1: "Articulos eléctricos para el hogar", The Metropolitan Museum, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/301888.

clues. To emphasize the deeper meanings of dreams, is like a confusing puzzle,

and the easiest way to explain or share it is to recreate those. From the process

of recreation, it might also be a process looking for myself and understanding

myself.

Grete Stern, Sueño No. 1: "Articulos eléctricos

para el hogar", 1950.

I really love the way when DeCarava said, “A photograph is a photograph,

a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on

words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being.”

3Those street photographers shoot mostly documentary photographs, but while

documenting the reality, DeCarava’s photos has a kind of narratives, a detailed

stories that we could see through the background, and the whole environment

while emphasizing the subjects. His series of Harlem gives me a feeling of real

and convincing. He was a painter, but he turned to photography in the mid

1940s, and that makes me wonder if it is his painter background makes him see

the world and compose the photos differently than the other photographers. His

work to me, is like an expression full of his personal thoughts, but with a classical

construction, and composed with a kind of “deeply empathic to the nuances and

3 Roy DeCarava, http://decarava.org/tribute.html.

subtleties contained within the human heart.”4 I remember when Ruth talked

about DeCarava in class, she pointed out some sentences from the Guggenheim

grant application, what DeCarava wants to shot is that “Not he famous and the

well know, but the unknown and the unnamed, thus revealing the roots from

which spring the greatness of all human beings.” I strongly agree with this

sentence. Even though portraitures are not the kind of photographs that I am

good at, but still when I think about portraitures, it is definitely about human

beings themselves and the lives they live. Portraits to me are always about how

to express the true color of the ones I want to shot. I want to show their true

selves, and their real lives. And I think that might be the future road that I want

to explore with portraitures.

4 Photography World bids Farewell to Master Photographer Roy DeCarava, Sherry Turner DeCarava, http://decarava.org/tribute.html.

DeCarava, Woman

Resting, Subway Entrance, 1952.

In my opinion, Sarah Moon is really a huge fan of classic Victorian era fan,

with all the signature blurriness, and texture that like coming out from a

painting. Her light set-ups and posing of her subjects, remind me of those old

Victorian photos, and Baroque decorations. But with those blurriness, she also

add some factors of surrealism and mystery, which make the whole work really

attractive, unique and different from the other fashion photographs. To me, it

might also be a good idea to make photos like paintings. Maybe make portrait

like Egon Scheile’s paintings, with those unique colors and shapes of bones and

muscle on the human bodies. But still, mixing two kinds of media together is

always interesting to me, just like Letha Wilson’s works.

Sarah Moon,

an advert for Bal a Versailles by Jean Desprez, Paris – at the hall of mirrors,

Versailles.

Letha Wilson’s work Headlands Concrete Bend, and Yosemite Concrete

Ripple Tondo excites me a lot. She is the kind of photographers who would like

to blur the lines between photography and other mediums, like sculptures. Her

artwork used photographic images, paints and concrete, which make the whole

piece more like a sculpture instead of a photograph. In her work, she used a kill

called emulsion transfer, which is a technique for transferring pictures onto a

practically any surface. The emulsion helps to keep the image with a dreamy, and

ghost-like transfer after rubbing away the photocopy itself, and that’s exactly

how she does with most of her work. With this process, I would really like to try

this way of making arts and transfer my images to different surface to create

such a dreamy atmosphere. I like her version of mountains and deserts, which is

really tough while adding detailed textures by materials and photos themselves.

The metaphor of building up natural landscape by using cement is also really

interesting to me. Her work of landscape looks different from the physical

reality, but more like a memory or a scene that appears to our mind of our life

and the world.

Yosemite

Concrete Ripple Tondo (Purple), 2016.

By the time 1930s, George Bataille introduced the idea of primitivism. It is

more like an aesthetic movement with a sensibility or cultural attitude that has

informed diverse aspects of Modern art. 5 To me, this idea is more like a wild or

unrefined statement of what art is, which is more classical and inspired the

“study of the evolution of human cognitive thought”. Through the review, Bataille

also mentioned the importance of “recognition”, which shows people learn

5 Primitivism, Guggenheim, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/movement/primitivism.

things and create things in a more realistic manner. With the recognition, the

difference between form and formless also appears in his review, which put the

whole art process into a more physiological area, discussing the whole system of

meaning and classification. To me, the idea of surrealism comes out during these

discussions. Surrealism is an idea born from reality, but change the form of real

life, and at the same time, keeping the original spirit of our true world.

To me, the world surrealism created might be the true world. The

relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness has been discussed for

hundreds of years from philosophers to painters, and photographers as well. I

see photographing as a process of unconsciousness, that I just took the pictures I

like and I don’t need to think about much. But when I think that process further, I

would realize when I am trying to compose a photograph, I am already

consciously making decisions. At the same time, dreams usually appears as

uncontrollable, sometimes even chaotic, but when we seek out the deeper

meanings hidden inside, our dreams would usually lead us to somewhere in our

lives and memories. Dreams are actually a new world that we rebuild

unconsciously, but with actual rules, lives and our thoughts, just like what

Sigmund Freud explained in his work The Interpretation of Dreams. The beauty

of surrealism to me is that, the world it created is not like the usual life we have

got used to, but more in a ridiculous way, almost like a paradox. But even though,

the photomontage is like a chaos, like something would happen in our nightmare

or dreamlands, I have to say that these works are still following the rules of

reality. It kept the spirit of real life, but express in a chaos, ridiculous ways with

some kinds of ironic and emotions.