Photography

“Non-Places” – Book Jacket Design

One of the Graphic Design projects at college was to design a cover for a book by Marc Augé titled “Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity”. Marc Augé coined the phrase “non-place” to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places”. Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket”

First thing we had to do the day we were set this project was to go around Banbury for few hours and take as many photographs of Non-Places as possible. Since I had never heard the term ‘Non-Place’ before and so never paid any attention to any “Places?” like that, I was a bit worried that I wont be able to find anything interesting to photograph but luckily I was wrong..very very wrong! After few hours of wandering around Banbury I had a set of almost 200 photographs of Non-Places! And looking for them can definitely be classified as an adventure! I’m not going to post all of them because (that would take ages!) they are not all that great but just so you can get an idea of what I found, just a few examples!

Unfortunately, I don’t have a digital copy of my development work for this project..well, I probably do but I can’t find it at the moment (what a surprise!) so below you can find my final Book Cover Design which I really hope you like, and I promise to update this post as soon as I will find my development! So, thank you for reading and please look forward to my next post!

About Photograms…and new Oxford Brookes Building!

Today I went to Oxford to meet Nari, my Korean friend and teacher. We spent few hours studying Korean in The John Henry Brookes Building which I really love because its modern, spacious and provides a great study environment. Every time I go there I’m more and more excited about joining Brookes next month! You can watch the video below and you will know exactly what I mean!

But anyway, since I didn’t have much time today and looking through my older posts I realized that I never posted any pictures of my final photograms that I created (or chose) for our photograms project, I decided that this is a perfect opportunity to do it because they are there..in the folder just waiting for me to upload them..and they don’t need that much explaining either. So I just hope you like them and are looking forward my next post!

Amsterdam

After a very long time of not posting anything as I was very busy writing an essay about Tradition and Originality as well as writing my personal statement which I think was even more difficult..and obviously applying for universities and preparing my portfolio I have finally decided that its time to catch up and start running this blog properly.

I think writing about our recent overseas trip to Amsterdam is a perfect way to start! The trip unfortunately was only 5 days long but it was enough to visit quite a few truly amazing museums and Galleries. It is really difficult for me to decide which place was my favourite but for now I’ll just say that I absolutely loved Vincent Van Gogh Museum. Firstly becasue I’m really interested in Japanese culture and seeing Japanese art influencing western Art and someone like Vincent Van Gogh is very fascinating. Secondly, I actually wrote about some of his works that were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints in my personal study which I was writing while I was at Sixth Form, and now I had an opportunity to see them in real life which was just amazing.

The picture on the left is an original print by Hiroshige and the one on the right is Flowering Plumtree (after Hiroshige) (1887) by Vincent Van Gogh. In his copy he changed the colour a little bit and added borders filled with calligraphic characters he borrowed from other prints. Later on I will write some more posts about all the different places we visited and about our exciting ‘Bike seat cover’ project but for now some photographs of Amsterdam.

Photograms

Photography project that we started last weeks was one of my favourite projects so far. We were creating a series of our own photograms which are photographic images created by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material for example photographic paper and then exposing it to light…which means we were creating photographic images without using a camera. because we were using light-sensitive paper we also had to work in the dark room what made everything even more exciting. Below I included a selection of photograms I created during this (unfortunately only) 2 days project. Enjoy!:)

First week session: