As I've already mentioned my contextual studies lecture this week was still based on Prince so I was really looking forward to learning and looking into some photographic artists that focus on the same sort of topic. There was a couple that I really liked that I have looked into in more detail:
Weegee
I was drawn to Weegee because of how weird and nosey he was, he was born in Austria but worked in America starting work for a newspaper in the States. He always wanted to be the first on the scene of any crime or accident so installed a police radio in his car and did actually manage to get to the scene before the police sometimes. He always wanted his images of the scene to be on the front of the newspapers the next morning so he set up a darkroom in the boot of his car so he could get everything processed ready for the next morning. He was a character that everyone talked about. We watched clips from Road to Perdition and Nightcrawler as these two clips highlighted Weegee's personality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGFLyA3u_rw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8kYDQan8bw
Sophie Calle - The Detective, 1981
I've seen this work from Sophie Calle before. It's all very weird when you hear the concept behind the images but is also very effective. She explores what it's like to be an observer and to be observed. She stalks and writes to create her work. When she writes about her work she writes down her findings with the detail of a police detective. She focuses her work on photography and film, performance and installation. Her work, The Detective was a very odd piece of work but very clever. She hired a private detective to follow her around and noted down that on that day she visited all the places in Paris which held some emotional significance to her.
For her next project she met a man called Henri B at a party. He told her he was moving to Venice, so Calle being Calle moved to Venice with him and followed his every move. This then turned into a book called Suite Vénitienne. She went to a lot of lengths in the attempt to follow Henri B. She phoned hundreds of hotels, visited the police station to find out where he was staying, she even found a woman who lived opposite him and persuaded her to let her photograph Henri B from her window. As well as the photographs she documents her eagle eye, noting and evaluating her emotions as she trails the mystery figure. "She fuses this reality with an element of the unreal – her own psychological projections and emotions which begin to build a fictional construct around her subject. What is most interesting about Calle’s approach is that she never meant for this to be art – what began as unconventional personal projects was picked up by an art world hungry for her stories."
http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/7349/sophie-calle-suite-venitienne
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