Two in one makes three




No, I am not redefining arithmetic.'Two in one makes three' means I am merging two separate posts which I wrote this weekend for my deviantArt journal into one post here. But of course as I do that, I cant help adding, so that what we have is a third, distinct post.

I had the privilege of shooting with Charles yesterday at Mariann Fercsik studio. She is a young photographer with immense talent who opened the studio with the idea of providing young artists with a space to be creative.

Charles and I used the studio yesterday afternoon. Charles approached me via Art Limited - models if you are not on it get there quick, plenty of classy photographers there!
I love Mariann's work, have a look for yourself.
I particularly love the series taken in Hungary, but this woman oozes talent and can make any place look beautiful and anyone look interesting. She only shoots film and her favourite camera is a Hasselblad. Watch out for her, I am sure we will hear more about her.


The shoot with Charles was great fun. I was cheeky and took along my camera with the idea of using it during breaks. I was not sure how Charles would react, but I need not have worried. He welcomed the idea, was interested in my 'baby' and was incredibly generous, insisting I should use one of his films for my portraits. He had brought along his digital camera, his Mamiya and a large format Walker I absolutely adored. And he used them all.





I used to do this quite a lot even before I took up photography, always was very inquisitive, but now I am the kind of model who bombards the photographer with questions on photographic technique. Not everyone's cup of tea, I freely admit. Some like it, some put up with it, some hate it. Charles liked it. He was amazing, I truly enjoyed the shoot. When we moved on to using my camera - I wanted to do self portraits, which I had never tried with this camera, though I did self portraits twice already at DG's studio, with his digital Canon - I still remember the abrasive comment my effort received "Most photographers are interested in other people but self centred and narcissistic as you are you take up photography to take pictures of yourself" I guess this person would never appreciate Cindy Sherman's work!

I realised, after setting the camera up on a tripod, that I did not have a self timer - why did I think I had it? I was convinced my camera had that facility. Nor did I have a cable release. So I had two options: give up or ask Charles to act as my assistant, stand in for me as I focused, then move over and press the shutter release button - without doing anything to the settings - while I posed. He was wonderful and did it! I have not developed the film yet, I hope to do so tomorrow. My first self portrait shot was funny and I cant wait to see it. I had been modelling until then for Charles as I usually do, with confidence and panache. Then as we switched to my camera, after everything was in place, I said to Charles "Now", meaning he could press the shutter release, and as I said so I went very stiff, a flashback on when my father used to take photos of the family and we were all in our places "being photographed" or when in school the photographer came round and took pictures of the class - I still have those photos, all of us positioned by height, with the taller girls at the back, all looking exactly the same, wide eyed, no smiles, and very, very uncomfortable.

 



We both laughed at that - I am a model, I am used to the camera, but at that moment I slipped into a different persona altogether.


Then as we packed up after finishing the shoot, Mariann burst in and we lingered on to look at her amazing work. As I got ready to leave, she took a cable release from a bag and gave it to me, a small gift to encourage me to continue to take self portraits. I certainly will continue, narcissistic though it may be. Who knows by the time I am seventy I might be as good and as famous as Cindy.


My second dA journal was about a photographic exhibition I chanced on, which is about to close (30th November). Bill Wyman, better known as a Stones band member, has been taking photographs since the 1960s and is well versed in the art and craft of photography.

The exhibition, his first in London, shows a mixture of early work, with images of fellow Stones and other famous rockers and later work , which focuses on nature, with lots of macro images, beautiful and tender.


You can view the photos online, though the watermark somewhat detracts from them, so if you are not in London, and cant make it to the gallery you can still take a peep.
It seems that many musicians take up photography as a hobby, some with greater success than others. By success here I simply mean that some are better than others at mastering the technique, though in some cases it does bring further success, as in 'further limelight'.
Bryan Ferry for example is currently being celebrated as a photographer, with his stunning images of Kate Moss, who he has declared 'an icon of our times, on a par with Marylin' being exhibited at the Michael Kohn Gallery in LA. Ferry does have a personal history with supermodels. Once upon a time it was Jerry Hall who posed for him - he always did dabble in photography and the visual arts, having done a degree in fine arts before founding Roxy Music. Ferry and Hall were an item for a while but she soon dumped him for Mick Jagger, in a notorious split which angered Brian so much he allegedly refused to return Jerry her things for some two years and never spoke to her again. Some people are better at forgiving than others.
So, everyone is/can be a photographer - including me - but not everyone is a famous photographer, nor is everyone famous and a photographer...


(All photos taken by Charles Fennell and modelled by Alex B)

Comments

  1. What lovely pictures here, Alex! Is that a theorbo in the first one? It looks larger and has more strings than the average lute...

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  2. Dear Alex

    Thank you so much for your kind words about Saturday. It was a real privilege to work with you.

    I'll answer Jochanaan's question first. It's a 12 course baroque lute, not a theorbo. It was made by a very talented maker called David van Edwards; I bought it second hand just under 10 years ago.

    This style of lute was popular in England and northern Europe at the end of the 17th century. You can find examples of similar instruments in paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries, often played by women. The body is in fact based on an older design from about 1600. Many of the best lutes were modified at the end of the seventeenth century to add more strings. There's a passage quite early on in Pepys' diary where he talks about having his lute modified in this way.

    "Renaissance" lutes (from about 1520 to 1620) tended to have between 6 and 8 pairs of strings, tuned in a manner very similar to that used in a modern guitar (just tune the guitar's third string down by a semitone to play renaissance lute music). A theorbo was a lute with a very long additional set of bass strings, much louder than the conventional instrument, and normally used to accompany singers and other instrumentalists. They tend to be about 6 feet long. My budget won't stretch to one, and in any case I couldn't get one in the car. By the late 17th century the tuning conventions changed, and a baroque lute has the top six strings tuned in a D minor chord and then a number of bass strings which you re-tune depending on what key the music is in. You use your thumb to play the bass strings, and your first three fingers to play the melody. Your little finger stays fixed on the soundboard (you can see the mark from years of this treatment in the photo) so that you know how far to make your thumb jump from string to string. Classical guitarists regard this technique as barbarous; rock guitarists do it all the time.

    The women who played these instruments must have put in an incredible amount of practice. I've got average sized hands, I've been playing for years, and some of the stretches are still very tough. Anyone with smaller hands would need to have done far more work than me to be able to play it well. Many of the best pieces survive in manuscripts written by or for women (Jane Pickering, Mary Burwell etc) and they contain very challenging music.

    So, on to self-portraits. I am appalled that anyone would describe your approach as narcissistic. The individual in question can't have spent much time looking at your portfolio Certainly self-portraits on film are much more difficult, because you don't have the same degree of control. You can't move the camera a fraction of an inch, or look at the lights and ask the model to move her head very slightly. If the technical obstacles can be overcome (and actually I think the two of us did a fairly good job as beginners) then there's something quite unique about the image created by a person who has the skill needed to pose for the camera. It really is that person as he or she chooses to be portrayed, and it captures something quite different from a portrait based on another's vision.

    Thanks again for a great day.

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