Photography At David Rhys Enterprises Ltd
About Photography At David Rhys Enterprises Ltd
David Norfolk ARPS, works for David Rhys Enterprises Ltd, Reg. No. 4103069 in UK He sells photographs of the surreal and of alternative realities (including images made with an InfraRed sensitive sensor).
Photography At David Rhys Enterprises Ltd Description
This page is about my photography (I do have other commercial interests).
I first became seriously interested in photography around 1978 at University in Australia. One of my friends lent me his camera - and I rapidly invested in a 2nd-hand Olympus OM1 and some lenses. I became a keen camera club member but even at this stage I rebelled against the prevalent idea that "art" photography had to be monochrome - I found the most interesting images were in colour, in glossy fashion magazines and TV adverts. I went on a colour darkroom course, which taught me how to control contrast in Cibachrome prints with lith masks - and, therefore, how to manipulate colour images in surreal ways. The roots of my current "alternative reality" pictures were laid 30 years ago, well before I discovered Photoshop; and, even now, I try to produce images as much as possible "in camera" - using, for example, fisheye lenses and sensors that are sensitive to infrared light.
I came back to England and gave up serious photography to work on computers in banking for about a decade. I dropped photography partly because the world was awash with images and I didn't see much point in adding to the chaos; also, I didn't know anyone to share non-representational art with anyway - and then a camera club judge told me that a colour print of a manufactured image (all sandwiched lith masks and food dye) was "very clever natural lighting". . . .
I returned to photography when I discovered digital cameras, Flickr and the Royal Photographic Society. I like working in Lightroom (it feels more like a darkroom workflow than Photoshop does), as this means that the limiting factor for my images is now my imagination, rather than the physical limitations of film and the time needed to deal with them in the "wet darkroom".
Flickr and Facebook give me feedback on experimental images from a worldwide community with a huge range of photographic and artistic experiences. Getting my LRPS and ARPS distinctions from the Royal Photographic Society gives me feedback from photographers I know in person and trust - hopefully, they help me avoid mere self-indulgence.
I'm becoming profoundly uninterested in photographic records of pretty things (although I'm still interested in capturing ephemera such as graffiti, stage performances and flowers - and take the odd landscape to keep my eye in).
So, what is my personal photographic vision (other visions are available, of course)? Well, I like to explore alternative realities (where "reality" is what we think we see in front of our eyes when we look at the "real world"), the "neverwhere" in the title I chose for a public exhibition I mounted (see http://www. blurb. co. uk /my /book /detail /3047558). I'm fascinated by the idea that surreal images exist "somewhere" in front of the camera lens (I'll take out extraneous stuff and highlight parts of the image or tonal range but I won't usually add things). So, they're not purely imaginary (as a painting might be), they are patterns of real-world light that people can see "anywhere" - if they're prepared to.
Humans don't see reality through a camera, they see it through a fuzzy-logic extension of the human brain - literally, as the retina is specialised brain-matter. Which means that I can use the camera to create alternative realities for the viewer - if the viewer contributes some imagination and effort.
Reviews
A sign of the times: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/13/ cern_microsoft/ It is an example of why vendor lockin can be bad for you - and Cloud lockin (Adobe, perhaps?) can be as bad as any 1980s mainframe lockin.
There are opensource (OSS) alternatives to most proprietary tools (even Lightroom: https://www.darktable.org/). What one loses, sometimes, with OSS, is the commercial attention to the user interface and user experience. In return, you may get real innovation and even the chance to talk to its developers...
Good use of projection technology
In the 21st century, we are starting to notice how much male art was perhaps created by women. In literature, Collette is an obvious case: Evens, E. (2019) Who was the real Colette? Available at: https://www.historyextra.com/…/colette- film-history-keira-…/ (Accessed: Jun 02. 2019).
Another is my favourite Surrealist photographer, Lee Miller. How much of Man Ray's photographic innovation was down to Miller? See: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2019) Man Ray and Lee Miller,... excerpts from a conversation with Julian Cox. Available at: https://www.famsf.org/…/man-ray-and-lee -miller-excerpts-con… (Accessed: Jun 02, 2019). She certainly claimed to have re-invented the Sabattier effect (known since 1862 - Wikipedia (2019) Sabattier Effect. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabattier_e ffect (Accessed: Jun 02, 2019). - and also called Solarisation; however, one is technically exposure to light during development, the other gross overexposure) before Man Ray.
One attribution I thought was fairly safe was The Fountain by R Mutt. Apparently not as safe as I thought: Abrams, L. (2019) Duchamp Probably Didn't Make the "Fountain" Urinal—A Look at the Dada Woman Who Likely Authored the First Readymade. Available at: https://www.artspace.com/…/duchamp-prob ably-didnt-make-the-… (Accessed: Jun 02, 2019).
Duchamp suggested it himself. In a letter to his sister Suzanne in 1917, Duchamp wrote that “one of my women friends [perhaps Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German poet, artist, and artist’s model], using a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, submitted a porcelain urinal [to the Society of Independents show as a sculpture.”
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If you find Lightroom 6 a bit limiting, but don't want to continually send money to Adobe, there is an alternative.
I give you Darktable (https://www.darktable.org/), opensource nondestructive photo editing software, now ported to Windows. It is very promising, IMO, but not quite there yet, for me anyway. Still, it's a way forward, and it is quite like Lightroom, although its authors do seem a tad dogmatic.
See https://digital-photography-school.com/da rktable-vs-lightr…/ and
... https://expertphotography.com/lightroom-v s-darktable/
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Judith and friends, in front of my contribution to the Drawing Rooms
In a discussion about Design Thinking, we moved on to architecture, where design thinking came from: https://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/…/ what-is-design-th…/If
So, there is also "antipattern thinking" - how can things go wrong, and if they do, how does one drag them back on course?
If architecture is "machines for living in" (see Le Corbusier https://99percentinvisible.org/…/machin es-living-le-cobusi…/) a symptom of the antipattern is that architectural photographs tend n...ot to show people, or (if they do) show blurred people....
Architecture is sometimes about designing machines to look good in architectural journals, rather than machines to live in. Are there analogies in IT systems design?
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Mick's blog on our environmental aesthetics conversation is at: https://www.yatesweb.com/environmental-ae sthetics/
Thanks to Mick Yastes for this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entri…/envir onmental-aesthetics/…
I think it relates quite strongly to Jin and I's local project. And, harmony with nature provides an "objective" basis for judging aesthetics, I think....
I'm taking part in an interesting discussion with Mick Yates, doing an MA in Photography at Falmouth, around issues such as this: https://www.yatesweb.com/landscape/…
One issue, I think, is that aesthetics, the sublime beauty etc have technical meanings different to their general ones - Mick can say "As I read the basis of aesthetics as a philosophical issue, beauty is but one aspect. Oxford is being sloppy in its definition"
The conversation starts here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/PhotoBath /permalink/2577197862507249/
Met at the Drawing Rooms exhibition - https://www.facebook.com/thedrawingroomsb ath/ - where some of my work is on show....
This is someone I met today at the opening of the Phantom Limits show: https://www.facebook.com/jakesheppardspai ntings/. Excellent work!
I'm in an arts exhibition opening Weds (The Drawing Rooms, Beau Nash House, Union Passage, Bath, BA1 1RD).
Weds 22nd May at 19:00
One thing that disturbs me with "photography-as-a-hobby" is its use to confer or confirm social status. So, I sometimes feel that ownership of the latest iPhone, the most recent DSLR, a large-format printer that hoi polloi couldn't give house-room to, is more to do with demonstrating status than much to with image quality or artistic quality. No, the latest iPhone probably doesn't take better pictures than a battered old Canon DSLR (although it does de-skill taking them), but... it certainly enhancres one's reputation in some circles.
Some of the ideas around this are explored by Pierre Bourdieu and associates in Bourdieu, P. (1990) Photography, a middle-brow art. 1st edn. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu mentions that "ownership of a camera is closely related to income, which seems to allow us to consider cameras as pieces of equipment comparable to cars or televisions and to see the ownership of such a commodity as nothing but the index of a standard of living". This seems to be true even today, when ownership of a camera (phone) is ubiquitous, as testified by the queues to purchase the latest iPhone before anyone has used it for real.
Boudieu and his associates explore this class-based analysis in some detail and, unsurprisingly, decides that there are different motivations behind photography for different social groups For some, photography is about preserving memories and the joy of group celebrations; for others, about producing artworks; and, yes, for some it is just a means of demonstrating conspicuous consumption (foreign trips, expensive meals, great make-up, etc.) I'm not going to do him full justice here!
But this does have relevance to my choice of photographs for our MAVC Local Context project, I think. We are producing a photobook inspired by the sort of booklet one can find on Bath Spa's railway station, advertising the attractions of Bath. However, the photos show sides of Bath that seldom appear in the brochures: night scenes of new developments, the ubiquitous green and black rubbish bins (the dark side of a recycling culture, perhaps). Photos that I have been told were pointless Photoshop creations of a Bath that doesn't exist - until I showed people where they could stand and see them. Photos which, I think, make Bath seem a more interesting place to visit.
As Bourdieu also points out, photography performs a social integration function for the various social groups using it. I'm hoping that including more realistic photographs of "Bath as a Whole" in what is, to some degree, a "Guide to Bath", I can encourage integration around regeneration of a future Bath, celebrating its diversity, for the 21st century.
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https://www.tate.org.uk/…/cc-land-exhib ition-pierre-bonnard….
Bonnard Is a great painter, of course, and his use of colour is spectacular, but I want to think about the influence of photography on his work.
Usually, it seems to be discussed the other way round, and no doubt Bonnard’s paintings are salutary viewing for any photographer who thinks that art photography is pin sharp, f64 - and monochrome. There are plenty of framings in the Tate Modern exhibition that wouldn't... get past most camera club judges, subjects lost against the background, saturated colours, whatever...
But the influence of photography on painting is less often discussed although I seem to remember Degas has his frames cutting people sometimes, as they do in some photographs. A great fault in photography, less so in painting, apparently.
Anyway, my Tate Bonnard catalogue( op cit, Ritzi) has a whole chapter: A mobile vision, Bonnard’s diaries and photographs. His photographs are small (3.8x15.1 cm) and seem to be intended as snapshots, at a period when Baudelaire could say: “photography was the refuge for bad artists”.
Bonnard’s photographs were probably more of an inspiration - a diary - than for direct transcription. He seems to have used small portable cameras as sketchbooks or aides memoire rather than image sources. He liked painting from memory.
The question is, do his paintings have some of the “style” of photographs? I think they do. An abstraction of something in front of the artist, IMO, painted from memory and given a bit more “oomph” (to compensate for not being there), rather than a fantasy from the mind’s eye...
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I like Lightroom. I liked it even more before Adobe bought it, but Adobe has added useful functionality and Lightroom 6 does all I want (with an occasional excursion into PSE) except that Adobe broke its Map functionality.
I would continue with Lightroom Classic, except that Adobe insists on bundling it with 2 apps I don't want (Lightroom for Cloud and Photoshop) and 1TB of storage I don't want (I have cloud storage I don't use coming out of my ears with the Cloud apps I do ...use, I like Cloud and pay-per-use) and charging me £20 pm for it.
I am a full-time student. So Adobe makes even more apps I don't want available to me for £16 pm I still can't afford (especially as it shoots up as soon as I stop being a student). Where does Adobe find all these rich gullible students?
There must be a real opportunity for someone like Serif (Affinity) to come up with a photography-oriented product with the philosophy LR had when Pixmantec sold it, at a reasonable price - without cloud-based lock-in.
Last time I met lock-in like Adobe Cloud it was on 1980s-era mainframes!
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An example of professional "visual communication"...
Interesting that Trump's brain, on the coffee table, is yellow like his skin.....
Interesting analysis from Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-will-be-a-high -end-DSLR-camera-i…#
Eg, "the rest of it is software, AI and computational photography, using multiple fast shots. Which you can do with a mirrorless camera, not to much with a DSLR. I don’t see the exact same features moving from phone to mirrorless, anymore than the very simple computational functions in mirrorless and DSLRs for the last ten+ years moved directly into phones. But more of this kind of thing is coming, and DSLRs will be left behind. Or, like Pentax, you’ll get some of these features, but only with the mirror locked up and the back panel now your viewfinder."
"The hole in the ozone layer" is very much a visual communication story. There is no layer, nor any hole, but the message is real and important, and the visualisation of the science got the message over: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004f3m