Research Into Poverty

Research Into Poverty

Poverty in western countries is trivial compared to eastern countries, that is why people often ignore the poverty in western countries but this should not be ignored due to our affluence. No one should be homeless, under housed or go through intense hunger if we can help it.

I plan to make the public aware of the poverty in our country and show the huge contrast between the poor and the rich, and make people think ‘how can I let this happen?’.

However, it is a debatable topic as this is a country full of many possibilities that are handed to us from such a young age so how can society allow poverty, so a plausible reason is that it’s there decision to be homeless or be in any other unfortunate circumstance, so why should we help?

Conversely, there are many reasons why people are in these situations and I want the public to know. Poverty can be caused by factors such as mental illness; people who are mentally ill usually avoid social support. They are unable to work and unable to make good decisions which usually leads to them being homeless. Poverty and homelessness can be also caused by drug and alcohol dependency and family breakdown amoungst other circumstances. 

However, the UK government is trying to decrease the poverty in the UK, in 2012 they published ‘Social justice: transforming lives’ It explains the government’s plans for giving individuals and families facing multiple disadvantages the support and tools they need to turn their lives around.

Their strategies include actions to:

·         help troubled families turn their lives around

·         Improve mental health

·         reduce child poverty and make sure that children are properly supported so that they complete their education

·         make work pay, and help people to find and stay in work

The government now oppose that poverty is the result of low family income, but rather it be other circumstances individual's face. They are now not just tackling the issue of low family income but also factors suggested  up top. 

There are also organisations, photographers and people who do try to decrease the rate of poverty as well as offer their support. An organisation that is trying to decrease the poverty in the UK is the charity Oxfam, Oxfam ‘has a vision of everyone in the UK having enough to live on, and of all men, women and children being treated with respect and dignity no matter how much money they have.’

The Photographers that have caught my eye who are trying to tackle poverty are Lucas Oleniuk and Benjamin Rondel. 

Lucas Oleniuk is a 31 year old Photographer who covered a wide range of environmental issues, one of his works focused on child poverty in Canada. He not only let the audience be aware of the issues faced in Canada but the public were given the names of his muses and their circumstances, this is brilliant as the audience can feel empathy for the muses and see that they are more than just muses.

Kaitlynn and her sister Ellen were two arresting faces in Oleniuk’s exhibit. They are part of a large rural family in Ontario. Two of six children in the family, their parents find it a challenge to put food on the table.

Benjamin Rondel is a free-lance photographer; he specializes in location and travel photography. He worked on the same project as Oleniuk, on child poverty in Canada.

Here the image displays two little brothers Ian and Duncan feeding a colossal woolly sheep (in comparison to them) in their field. Just like Oleniuk’s image it is in black and white, the black and white creates a sense of desolation which works well as the overall idea is to let the audience be aware of the poverty in Canada and struggles as well as evoke a sense of emotion for the audience. The vastness and empty background implies to the audience the children have been forsaken from society and government which creates a feeling of pity for the audience which will make them offer help.

The story behind the image: Ian and Duncan are learning about farming in tough times. Their father John built his home himself about 100 km from Saskatoon. He decided to live off the land and raise sheep. Now, John is considering switching from sheep to pigs and chickens - maybe even crops - he doesn't know yet. In the meantime, he does a bit of farming with his brother and hopes for rain and a better year next year. 

Their work can be found on: http://www.photosensitive.com/projects.php?id=8 

Mood board

Different Applications of Photography (past and contemporary)

  Different Applications Of Photography

Advertising

Using photographic images to advertise help to promote the product, it encourages, persuades, or manipulates an audience. The photographs are often used in advertising agencies to market a product. Photos that are used in advertisements are often manipulated (also called photoshopping or—before the rise of Photoshop software—airbrushing). In the 1820's the first permanent photograph was taken and interest in photography first began to get more popular. However, all though this is one photgraphs were used it wasn't for advertising purposes. In the twentieth century people becme aware of advertising photography because of an improvement in technology which meant the photos could be done quicker at a higher quality. 

Past

An example of a past photographic image used in advertisement, is an 1890s advertising poster for the drink Coca-Cola showing a woman in fancy clothes (partially vaguely influenced by 16th- and17th-century styles) drinking Coke.

Contemporary

An example of a contemporary photographic image used in an advertising poster is an image of Beyoncé to advertise the fizzy drink Pepsi. Beyoncé is wearing tight shorts, a blazer and high stilettos. The audience can see the market agencies has used Beyoncé’s best asset her bum to advertise the product seen by the side shot taken. The advertising market agencies have evolved as they now know what the audience are interested in, seen by the use of sex appeal and using a famous celebrity to advertise their product.

Promotional photography

Promotional photography is the use of photography to publicise, advertise or promote an artists, band, Night club, album etc.

Past

An old use of photography to advertise a wrestling championship is one used on a poster. The type of photography used is a black and white image of the wrestlers’ heads that is placed near their names. The photography is very simplistic compared to a modern wrestling championship poster that has a lot of colour, editing and graphics.

Contemporary

A modern day photograph used to promote an artist is a poster of Beyoncé to advertise her album. The audience can immediately see the photograph has been edited, through the artificial lighting.

Fashion Photography

Fashion photography is a genre of photography devoted to displaying clothing and other fashion items. Fashion photography is most often conducted for advertisements or fashion magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, or Elle. Over time, fashion photography has developed its own beauty in which the clothes and fashions are enhanced by the presence of exotic locations or accessories.

Contemporary

This is a modern day fashion photograph displayed in a vogue magazine. Here they have added accessories, like a necklace to the outfit and they have placed the model in a pool. This is all very artistic and therefore suitable for vogue.

Past

This fashion photography is taken in the 1900s and less simplistic to the other image. It is taken in front of a plain wall, the model is just sitting on a chair but like the other image she is wearing a necklace.

Photojournalism

Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography (e.g., documentary photography, social documentary photography, street photography or celebrity photography) by complying with a rigid ethical framework which demands that the work is both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms. Photojournalists create pictures that contribute to the news media.

The first photo is in black and white, a man’s arm, which has a demonic tattoo, is in front of the lens, the photo is rough area. The other photo is in colour and is a picture of a car crash. Both images vary but still inform the audience and tell a story.

Portraiture

Portraiture is a likeness of a person, especially of the face, as a painting, drawing, or photograph: a gallery of family portraits.

The first portraiture is a modern day portrait which is used on a advertising poster and on the right is a 19^th century portrait which is displayed in a gallery. The modern portrait is clearly taken by a camera however; the other portrait is a painting because in those time there was no cameras.

High Street studio work photography

Street photography is an art photography that features the human condition within public places and does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. The subject of the photograph might be absent of people and can be object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.

Past
Past 
Bibliography

This is street work photography taken in 1889, there is no natural colour within the image as it was taken using an old Kodak camera of those times. A long shot is used to capture everything in its element.

Contemporary

This is also high street studio photography, however the location is in doors, shot in a studio and there is a child. This is set up as this is done for a family album. The colour in the image is natural as unlike the other image this is taken in the modern day. Also the concept has also changed of high street studio work photography as now images are taken in the studio.

Architectural

Architectural photography is the photographing of buildings and similar structures that are both aesthetically pleasing and accurate representations of their subjects. Architectural photographers are usually skilled in the use of specialized techniques and equipment.

Past

This is an early architectural style photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot, taken in 1845.

Contemporary 

As building designs changed and broke with traditional forms, architectural photography also evolved. During the early-to-mid-20th century, architectural photography became more creative as photographers used diagonal lines and bold shadows in their compositions, and experimented with other techniques.

In this image, exterior architectural photography is used; it usually takes advantage of available daylight, or if performed at night, uses ambient light from adjacent street lights, landscape lights, exterior building lights, moonlight and even twilight present in the sky in all but the darkest situations.

Clinical photographers

Clinical photographers provide essential professional and cost-effective photographic and graphic services for use in patient care, medical education and research. This will be used in specialist techniques,for example in ophthalmic imaging; they will use fluoresce in angiography (which is used to delineate retinal blood vessels) and the production of images for treatment planning in craniofacial surgery and surgical audit.Clinical photographers provide valuable aids in early diagnosis or for confirming the effective treatment of disease. Illustration has been an important feature of medical documentation since the time of Vesalius and thus has a long history. However, the first application of photography to medicine appears in 1840, when Alfred Donné of Paris photographed sections of bones, teeth, and red blood cells using an instrument called the microscope-daguerreotype. The range of equipment employed in medical photography will vary with the application and the institution. The standard setup includes the popular 35 mm single lens reflex (SLR) film camera with a comprehensive range of lenses, lighting equipment, and accessories or digital equivalents. The digital cameras may be of the same make as the film cameras to ensure the ability to share all the various accessories, especially lenses.

G.-B. Duchanne de Boulogne, Synoptic plate 4 from Le Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine. 1862, 

 In the upper row and the lower two rows, patients with different expressions on either side of their faces

Contemporary 

This is a modern day image, here practising clinical photographers have a gear in their mouths and they are practicing to take images of their mouths.

Illustration

An illustration is a visualization or a depiction made by an artist, such as a drawing, sketch, painting, photograph, or other kind of image of things seen, remembered or imagined, using a graphical representation. Printing is the current process for reproducing illustrations, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. 

Contemporary

This is an illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith, made in the 19^th century. This illustration is used in a children's book to decorate a story of textual information by providing a visual representation of something described in the text. This illustration was carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing.

Past

Illustration Great Egret by John James Audubon.

The Chinese Sumi-E can be attributed to this technique, incorporating the use of paints and dyes. Navigational maps have been produced using this technique in the 14-15th century.

Fine art

From its very origins, photography can be the mechanical, scientific tool of the camera and the natural desire to use it for the creation of beautiful images. Essentially, the term fine art photography is used to refer work created with such a desire in mind, to articulate an impression, a feeling about, or relationship with the world.

Past

Alfred Stieglitz's photograph The Steerage(1907) was an early work of artistic modernism, and considered by many historians to be the most important photograph ever made.Stieglitz was notable for introducing fine art photography into museum collections. The photograph The Steerage is displayed in the metropolitan museum.

Contemporary

As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer's art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books usually have high production values, a short print run, and their limited market means they are almost never reprinted.

In addition to the "digital movement" towards manipulation, filtering, and or resolution changes, some fine artists deliberately seek a "naturalistic," including "natural lighting" as a value in it.

Documentary photography

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to story significant and historical events. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or educational pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually straight photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people.

Past

The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided motivation for the next era of documentary photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century. This period decisively shifted documentary from the past and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises. The refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low cost mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis.

This documentary photography showed people and still does how a minority of people lived in New York in 1890. This is displayed in his books, most notably How the Other Half Lives of 1890 and once in a gallery.

Contemporary

Nicholas Nixon extensively documented issues surrounded by American life.

Since the late 1990s, an increased interest in documentary photography and its longer term view can be observed.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/documentary_photography

http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/healthcare-science/careers-in-healthcare-science/careers-in-c

Research into Photographers

ARTISTS 

David Hockney

David Hockney born on the 9th July 1937; is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. 

Work 

He is an important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s; he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. Hockney admired the likes of Picasso, Dufy, Matisse, and Fragonard. He tried to utilize their techniques in his "impressionistic" photographs which later lead to paintings. Hockney developed the ability to take an ordinary scene and develop it through photographs and paint into something incredibly pleasing to view. 

Hockney has recreated his painting, the space shows how we see time. 

Nicholas Kennedy Sitton

 A San Francisco-based photographer Nicholas Kennedy Sitton is a master of photo manipulation, taking images of typical urban structures, and then twisting them to create something that is at once beautiful and almost impossible to recognize.

Twisted architectural photography

Documentary Photography

Documentary Photography

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to story significant and historical events. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or educational pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually straight photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people.

Overtime people have developed ways to make an image last longer. Such as, Photogravure which is an intaglio printmaking or photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is coated with a light-sensitive gelatine tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio print that can reproduce the detail and continuous tones of a photograph. Another method is halftone, halftone is a reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery with dots, varying either in size, in shape or in spacing.

The refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low cost mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines, and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis. Riis was a New York police-beat reporter who had been converted to urban social reform ideas by his contact with medical and public-health officials, some of whom were amateur photographers. Riis used these acquaintances at first to gather photographs, but eventually took up the camera himself. His books, most notably How the Other Half Lives of 1890 and The Children of the Slums of 1892, used those photographs, but increasingly he also employed visual materials from a wide variety of sources, including police "mug shots" and photojournalistic images.

Riis's documentary photography was passionately devoted to changing the inhumane conditions under which the poor lived in the rapidly expanding urban-industrial centers. His work succeeded in embedding photography in urban reform movements, notably the Social Gospel and Progressive movements. These two techniques photogravure and halftone has helped amateur photographers put a message across.

People are now using smaller cameras to capture moments in time. The small camera that allows that is an I-phone, it enables people to take pictures with hardly anyone noticing, and an advantage especially in the street photography that people are interested in. Photographers are using the iPhone for their professional work and winning awards for their work. Damon Winter of the New York Times won an award for his work in Afghanistan.

How the other half lived JUNE 19 2013

Riis also took early advantage of flash photography to steer his camera into the city's darkest corners -- tenements, dark alleys, sweatshops, opium dens, beer halls -- and emerged with photographs that helped shift public opinion on NYC's poverty and slums.

The image is clearly staged and is looked closely the audience can see one of the small boys smiling, but it does get its message across.

Bandit's Roost (1888) by Jacob Riis, from How the Other Half Lives. This image is Bandit's Roost at 59½ Mulberry Street, considered the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of New York City. A long shot is used to see the poverty and poor living conditions.

Two men appear to guard the alley entry. Hanging on the railing of the right-hand staircase is a third man who has assumed a casual, yet commanding, pose. Perhaps he is the gang leader. There is a women leaning out the windows, the young child in the right background, the three figures on the opposite porch. The houses are very close to another, the viewer can see the harsh conditions the individuals are living in. there is long lines of laundry stretch between the buildings to emphasis the poverty. 

Riis walks the beat in New York City behind his friend and fellow reformer, NYC Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt (1894—Illustration from Riis's autobiography).

Theodore Roosevelt introduced himself to Riis, offering to help his efforts somehow.

(sketch)

Goldberg is best known for his photographic books, multi-media exhibits and video installations, among them: Rich and Poor (1985), Nursing Home, Raised by Wolves (1995), Hospice, and Open See (2009). Goldberg photographs sub-cultures, creating photo collages, and including text with his photographs, often written by his subjects.

Goldberg is part of the social aims movement in photography, using a straightforward, cinéma vérité approach, based on a fundamentally narrative understanding of photography. Goldberg's empathy and the uniqueness of the subjects emerge in his works, "forming a context within which the viewer may integrate the unthinkable into the concept of self. Thus diffused, this terrifying other is restored as a universal." (Art Forum, Summer 1987).

An image from Jim Goldberg's Open See exhibition. includes this image of a Congolese refugee in 2008 French photographer wins £30,000 prize for UK photographer US photographer Jim Goldberg has won this year's Deutsche Borse photography prize for his exhibition Open See. Shown last year at the Photographers' Gallery in London, the exhibition documented the experiences of refugees and immigrants travelling from war-torn countries to make new lives in Europe. In the photograph the Congolese man is holding an old radio, his arms are across. The radio is held close to his chest to give of an impression this is one of the few possessions he owns. His wearing an apron with nothing underneath. He is melancholy; his head is down and his facial expressions are miserable. The camera is in focus of the Congolese man. An extreme midi shot is taken We can some sort of camp site behind with tents maybe due to the destruction of the homes.  Susan Sontag captured the essence of that faith in her monumental reverie.  On Photography when she wrote “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it."

"Raised by Wolves" Goldberg’s documents the lives of teenage runaways who live on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Recorded between 1987 and 1993, Jim Goldberg was on the California streets photographing and interviewing his adolescent subjects, their social workers and the police. They all lend a distinct dimension to the harrowing picture of American urban life, and the adversarial institutional culture surrounding it. A combination of photographs and video stills, found documents, and handwritten texts by the subjects themselves create a scrapbook of the stark and unsparing lives. At its heart, this book is a compassionate and moving study of adolescent life in America, of displaced and misunderstood youths. It reveals the myriad traps which are set by drugs, violence, and exploitation, and the ultimate longing for happiness. On the left hand side a long shot is used to capture the dangerous surroundings young people live in. The young boy seems to be taking a beer from a young girl. The fact that Goldberg captures this moment we see how these young people are made to grow  up fast and are expose to maladaptive behaviour. Even though the image seems to be staged the audience are aware of what is happening with  these young people. On the other side there is a image of image of two young people hugging .  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_photography