Charlotte Sometimes

I’ve finally got around to working on the images from Empire for my own portfolio. I set out with the goal of producing cinematic imagery and I’m generally heavily inspired by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (creators of Grindhouse amongst others). I love their grainy, imperfect look that they employ, the washed out colours of old film and the awkward framing.

jazzylittledrops:

So this video started going around my facebook today, with about a dozen of my female friends sharing the link with comments like, and “Everyone needs to see this”, and “All girls should watch this,” and “This made me cry.” And I’m not trying to shame those girls! I definitely understand why they would do so. And I don’t want to be a killjoy. But as I clicked the link and started watching the video, I started to feel a slight sense of discomfort. I couldn’t put my finger on why that was, exactly, but it continued throughout the whole thing. After watching the video several more times, I have some thoughts… 

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I don’t go in for re-blogs too often, but this one is kind of important.

So, there is much planning is in the works for my Empire 2 adventure. We’re going to be better organised this time and get SO MANY character portraits shot. Of everyone, if everyone can work with us (and hopefully they will). That’s got to be in the region of 1000+ portraits over the course of the long weekend, which is a challenge for everyone. I can’t help wondering what they’d all look like put together as a year book. Bloody fabulous I reckon.

And I’m keeping a diary of as many player events going on that I can find out about. People have really run with this one and the photography team have been getting all kinds of invites to things that players are organising. It’s rather exciting really and it excites me that the players want us to be involved in their game.

I’ve been batting about ideas for projects too and I’m also getting quite excited about these as well. For a long time I’ve not been very enthusiastic about my personal photography work, I sort of hit a wall with it and just burnt out. But I’ve been searching for a project to get my teeth into for a while and I think this might be it. I’m curious about photographing the game and writing an essay to go alongside the selected images (I’m also a wannabe art historian) and then producing it into some kind of book. It seems like an interesting project and things seem to be coming together in my head (including a chapter entitled ‘The Pale Horse’, which I reckon will be rather good).

So there was something else I wanted to share, and that’s a test shot I took for the character portraits. It’s my Dad, and I’ve never photographed my Dad before. And I realised that I should photograph him more. I never photograph the people that are close to me and I probably should. And you know what? I’m really pleased with it as a simple portrait.

So the first Empire event came and went. I went, I took photos, I got exceedingly cold and I managed to avoid most of the mud (four season leather boots - if you don’t have them you’re nucking futs). Things were learnt, mistakes were made.

Before the event I was apprehensive. Most of the photos available on the net from LRP events are from compact cameras that people have shot mid event. They’re a record of their memories and rarely intended to be anything more. It’s hard to get an idea from this kind of imagery what you should expect as someone with a more ‘serious’ interest in photography. I’ll be honest, I was expecting to shoot nothing that rated much better than ‘mediocre’ as the conditions are far from ideal. Wintery, scrubby woodland. Dull winter light. No ability to coordinate anyone. Basically, a photographers nightmare.

However I decided to embrace the challenge and I’m glad I did! The main photo sets are available on my Facebook page:

Saturday - http://on.fb.me/10OTfRR
Sunday - http://on.fb.me/11d7FuJ
Monday - http://on.fb.me/14dLA4f

But I’d like to include in this post some of my selects, which I’ll add at the bottom. I even got out at shot right into the evening which was challenging, but a couple of my favourite shots have come from that time of day! I just love all the atmospheric grain, I know that lots of people try to avoid it… but…

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was the feedback I’ve had from the people at the event. I never expected to be embraced so completely by so many people at an event and hobby I know nothing about! I think in less than a week I’ve had over 500 comments and ‘likes’ on my pictures. Put it this way, I had so many that I had to turn off the alerts on my Facebook Pages app because it drained my iPhone battery. It’s totally overwhelming!

I’ve been invited for dinner at several camps at the next event too, which is just heartwarming in so many ways. I’m going to try and arrange something, but if you’ve invited me and I don’t make it I’m truly sorry. Next event is promising to be busier than the last one for me so I might not make it around to see you (although I will happily accept deliveries of vegetarian yummies to my seat in GOD, and of course, flat white coffees from Applebys are a fantastic token of appreciation). I jest about the gifts of course, the PD team kept me well fed last time.

But it’s the messages that I’ve got that are the most wonderful. I’m up to at least a dozen strangers that have messaged me to thank me. Saying things that vary from ‘I’ve never had a good photograph taken of me before’ to ‘these are the best LRP photos I’ve seen’. I even got reblogged here! And truly, this is the reason that I do photography.

You see I love taking pictures. And I love photography. But more than anything I just want there there to be more great pictures in the world. We live in a sea of image mediocrity, and while that has a certain intellectual value to the history of art, everyone deserves to have great pictures of themselves on a social level.

So here we are, some of my favourite moments from the weekend. (There’s quite a few, I promise they’re all worth it.)

I know this is the totally shitty bit of the post. You see, I do this LRP photography for fun. But being a freelance photographer, journalist and student I’m pretty bloody skint most of the time. If you liked my pictures (perhaps you used them as your Facebook profile picture, or you sent them to your Nan in New Zealand) then I’d really appreciate it if you would consider contributing a couple of Barbarian Notes to the kit maintenance and petrol fund. Unfortunately every photograph I take of you guys adds wear and tear to my cameras and lenses and over time it does add up. But every little helps, and if by some miracle I make millions from this little appeal I’ll donate it to help endangered LRPers in dire need or something. <3

An invitation to photograph at a LRP event. (That’s Live-action Role Playing to those of you, like me, that are not in the know on this one). ‘Awesome’ I thought, ‘a chance to shoot some epic cinematic scenes’. I love cinematic. Especially lo-fi Tarantino style cinematic so it sounds right up my street.

And then came the other bit of the invitation. ‘You’ll have to be in costume’.

Um, ok. This shouldn’t be too hard, should it? I mean I had a tailor and a seamstress in the family and my other grandmother taught me to sew as a child. I even got a place at the London College of Fashion on their tailoring course when I was 18, so I must have some mad skillz tucked away somewhere. It’s a long time though since I worked with the Nomadic Players as their technical director, both lighting them dressing them all in costume, and to be honest to fit with the Nomads tradition, most of that was always a last minute bodge on a serious budget anyway.

So I have been watching classics and epics and last week I even had a Lord of The Rings marathon while I consumed inhuman amounts of pizza and fizzy drinks in bed (what’s an unemployed girl to do?), I’m recalling pleasant memories of Sharpe and all the excellent camera work that always goes with these series.

But of course, I can’t direct people who are in character. A thought that didn’t really dawn on me until a day or two ago. There’s no ‘could you just step to the left, into the light a little?’ while someone is roleplaying, I’m going to have to go with what I’ve got on the fly.

I mean I’m taking my lights and I’m hoping I’ll find some eager bodies to shoot something interesting with in the mornings before time in, but other than that, I’ve got to kind of hope that the people with the awesome costumes are all congregating in one place and roleplaying in the right light to make great shots. This is so far out of my comfort zone that I can’t even SEE the zone anymore. You see, I like glamour. I like finding a hot model, I like getting him into position, then spending half an hour playing with a light to make him look as wonderful as possible. I don’t really DO off the cuff shooting.

Oh and the costume? I look like a hobbit. I challenge anyone who is as short as me to wear a cloak and not look like a hobbit. However I do have rather cool boots that are a Vivienne Westwood ripoff. Who said that Medieval chicks can’t be stylish? Of course the other problem is that when searching for costuming inspiration is that most women who LRP seem to be based in hot places, where the objective is to show as much skin and be as much of a sexy tavern wench as possible. That’s not going to happen. It’s going to be -3 this Easter weekend, there will be no flesh on show other than my eyes.

I mean literally, I’ve taken some Arabic clothing as inspiration here. I figure I don’t have to be from one of the lands that are represented in the game (in fact I’d rather prefer it if people didn’t mistake me for one of their own and actually talk to me, expecting me to roleplay back), so I’m a bit of a ‘foreign foreigner’ as the games designer puts it. Under my extremely heavy and thick woollen riding cloak (it’s actually based on a Roman riding cloak design - so shoot me) I’m wearing a Hijab inspired headdress (picked up from those long travels on the spice route equivilent, of course) mostly to keep me warm. I’m theorising that anything covering my head, mouth and nose is a bonus in these times, but alternatively I can just wear it as a face covering in the style of a Ranger. And hareem trousers. Oh thank the Lord for hareem trousers - you can hide a whole load of lycra base layers under those. But I’m topping it with an English inspired peasants padded jerkin. It’s not quite finished yet, but for the summer events when I actually remove my warm cloak, it’s going to have corsetry detailing built in to the back, as would be fitting for a seriously cool female rogue (but I really couldn’t find time to insert around 50 eyelets by hand over the last two days). I’m sure someone will take a picture of me this weekend, although the more I think about it, the more bizarre and unfitting my outfit sounds. I’ve just sort of gone ‘I WANT TO MAKE COOL SHIT’ and not thought about it too much more.

Of course this surely all goes to pot when you consider that for most of the weekend I’m going to have a 400mm, shiny white lens hanging off my neck. So however much effort I make, there’s only so much you can do about the fact that you’re a photographer attending a roleplaying event. Unless I roleplay an artist from faraway lands who makes pictures with a magical black box. I hope everyone has a good imagination…

I like this. I like making things and I like taking pictures. It seems to fit together well. And so far, I’m enjoying that. But I may change my mind after four days sleeping in a tent below freezing.

I love nothing more than a good bit of quizzing and self diagnosis on the internet. So this post is to be taken entirely with a huge pinch of salt. ;-)

Typology has always appealed to me. I love nothing more than putting things in boxes, moving the boxes around, taking everything out and then putting everything back into the boxes in a different way. Finding relationships in things is one of the reasons I love art history, the endless ways of categorising things is just utterly compelling. Picking things apart and working out why they fit in certain categories is somewhat sadly something that can take me occupied for hours.

Carl Jung also appeared to be a bit obsessed with sticking things into boxes. Or rather he was obsessed with sticking personalities into boxes. And I find his logical thinking on personalities fascinating. After much reading and analysing, I have self diagnosed myself as INTJ. Not the most unusual personality type, but certainly one of the most awkward which suits me down to the ground. So with that in mind, here’s what you need to know about me with respect to my personality type.

• I am logical. I think things through rationally before I do something. I look at things from different points of view. I think about what could happen for each option I could take. If I have made a decision you can be sure that I have considered everything.
• I am confident in my abilities. Many people mistake this for arrogance. I know what I am good at and I play to those strengths. It isn’t arrogance it’s a high level of awareness of how ‘good’ I am in relation to others. If I tell you that I can do something, then I know that I can. If I am a little unsure about something, I will do my best to manage your expectations and set myself up to exceed them.
• I can seem insensitive. I guess I am really. Emotions seem quite trivial to me. They don’t have a rational explanation so I struggle with them. I often don’t realise if someone is trying to tell me something unless they actually come out and tell me. Even then I’m a bit of an emotional retard so if you’re looking for sympathy or support I’m often not the best person unless you’re in my inner circle. Which leads me to…
• I don’t have many friends. However I don’t see this as a problem. I would prefer to surround myself with a couple of very close friends who really understand me than a wider circle of people that I struggle with. However the upside is that if you make it into my inner circle then you’re unlikely to ever leave. And I don’t need much maintenance, if you don’t talk to me for a few months I won’t be upset or offended and I’ll pick up right we left off.
• But I can cut you out. Just like that. I have no issues with severing friendships that are bad for me. Once I realise that they are a negative influence in my life, they are gone. But I will spend an awful lot of time analysing that decision both before and after, it will be constantly on my mind for a very long time.
• I value intelligence. I believe I am a reasonably intelligent person. My friends are all of at least the same level of intelligence to me. People who aren’t as intelligent as me will bore me. I need people to understand the abstract way that I think and it will irritate me if I have to keep stopping to let someone catch up. Back to the arrogance thing here.
• My humour has less moisture than the Sahara. (I shamelessly stole that from Si - you see, I’m not adverse to utilising other peoples better ideas!) If you don’t understand what I’m saying, I’m most likely insulting you because I don’t think you can keep up.
• I always believe I am right. Because I am almost all of the time. And I am usually right because I spend time coming to my conclusion. However if you can prove that I am wrong I will willingly accept it. But prove it to me logically.

If you’re working with me on a project or are working with me in some other way, there’s a few things you should know in addition to the above.

• I am an excellent strategist. It’s what makes me good at logistics. I can conceptually plan logistics on the fly without putting pen to paper. I can do this because I remember things. Remembering things means that I have a huge library to draw from and adapt to new situations. For my specialist subjects I have a near photographic memory (which is additionally a great trait for an art historian).
• I value competency. If I think you are incompetent, you won’t get the best out of me. Prove you can do your job and I will do mine. I have no respect for given authority, it must be earned.
• I detest routine. I see no point in doing repetitive tasks that can be automated. It’s why you’ll find endless folders of email templates stashed away on my computer. It’s also why I am reasonably fluent in seemingly irrelevant skills like formulating spreadsheets. I am inherently lazy in many respects and I will do anything in order to make my workflow easier.
• I don’t care if that’s how you’ve always done it. Seriously. Never tell me that. Ever. I might punch you. If there is a better way to do something, we will do it that way.
• If I’m not contributing ideas, it’s highly unlikely that I don’t have any. You see, if I don’t think you’re intelligent enough to reconsider your ideas if proven wrong, I just won’t bother telling you. If I’m talking, it’s because I respect you and I believe that you respect me. It’s when I shut up that you have to worry.
• I’m not into office gossip. Additionally, I loathe those who have got where they are because they are social butterflies. Skill and success are the language I understand. If I feel you’ve done the more civilised version of sleeping your way to the top, I will have zero respect for you.
• I love a challenge. Seriously. Go ahead. Come up with something you think that no one else can do and I’ll have a go. And I don’t like failing so I’ll probably do it pretty well.
• I have high standards. This sums me up in every part of my life. I hold myself to the highest standards and I expect others to hold themselves to my standards too. I will work extraordinarily hard if I need to in order to get things done to my own standards. It won’t be unusual for me to work many extra hours, but I’m unlikely to tell you that’s what I’ve done because I don’t want you to feel pressured into doing the same.
• I’m not very good at giving praise. Because I don’t need it myself.

It’s worth mentioning my weakness’, although I believe that many are positives.

• I value personal space. It’s why I have no desire to get back into a heavily committed relationship and I’m happy seeing people who see others. I want commitment, just not too much of it, you know?
• Everything always needs improving. I’m never happy. Never. I always have to try and make things better which can make things complicated.
• I don’t do emotions. Honestly, I’m really bad at them. And when I try to do them I pitch them at the wrong level, especially when I’m stressed. If I make some big emotional faux pas, it’s really not my fault. Please don’t cry on me, I am truly an emotional retard. But I do love to feel loved.

So yeah. That’s the quick guide to me. Although in true INTJ style I couldn’t be happy with just a quick guide and had to go into rather extreme amounts of detail.

I love pigeonholing shit.

“I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough… In fact, they show me how much I’ve lost.” - Nan Goldin

I think it’s utterly fascinating how Nan Goldin’s cutting edge style that was so revolutionary in the 1970’s has kept it’s edge and still feels so new and crisp now, 40 years later. To be honest, the only way of recognising that many of these are not modern images is the slightly dated consume and style of the characters within the scenes.

Goldin was arguably one of the biggest champions of the snapshot aesthetic within photography and had been one of the largest driving forces behind it’s rise to popularity. Neither a photographer or some might say even an artist, Goldin documented her friends and those that she spent time around. Almost the equivalent of a modern day social media addict, except film was her medium and her galleries were projections in clubs rather than Facebook.

Her images have a voyeuristic pleasure gained from examining strangers private lives. Susan Sontag said that in it’s voyeurism, photography levels all events to the same status. We usually see the images outside of their contextual framework which can lead to a disassociation from the subject matter, but Goldin originally showed her work with thematic structure revolving around subjects such as couples, gender roles and orientation. An early campaigner for sexual equality, if you will. Undoubtedly feminist although I’m not sure if she applied the label to herself.

But on a personal level what I enjoy about her work is the bravery that the images demonstrate and a desperate need to cling to memories. Almost a compulsive desire to document in case she forgot a detail. Sontag also said that photography is practiced by most not as an art, but as a way to reaffirm how we feel about those we have relationships with. The resulting images prove that the events happened and the people existed. This is demonstrated so clearly in Goldin’s work.

I was thinking today about what it means to be a photojournalist, but I should preface this blog post by saying I have very little experience in photojournalism myself. I have quite a few friends who call themselves photojournalists and who are often jetting off to exotic locations to document the plight of some underprivileged society. In fact I’m guilty of this myself, I’ve always said my photographic goal is to document a war zone (hence an application to be an RAF Photographer a few years ago). The pictures are always fascinating, but I wonder how much of that is because it is different to the images we are faced with ourselves in our day to day lives.

This got me wondering if an external photojournalist can really ever truly capture the story. By external I mean someone not from that culture, from a different country or way of life. You see I was looking at the work of Rula Halawani who was one of the first Palestinian photojournalists. She lived through the struggles that she documents herself. She has faced the uncertainty of her people first hand and she still lives in a time and place that every day faces unrest. Her images seem to have so much more depth than others from Westerners documenting the Palestinian struggles. They show a bleakness, a world of despair that isn’t present in the same way. Other photojournalists may have shot the same scenes, but they have been shot through Western eyes to be consumed by Western media. Halawani’s images just feel. That’s it, they feel. You can feel her reaching out through the images and dragging you through into the conflict. She said about her own work that it is ‘my own feelings merged with the feelings of my own people’.

‘Mur’ 2005, Rula Halawani

Which made me question really the whole idea behind photojournalism. It’s quite an outdated practice in many ways. It’s a bit of a hang over from the Nineteenth Century when cameras were first invented and well off gentlemen went out into the world to document exotic people and situations. Is that really so different to what happens now? I can’t help feeling that if photography was not so expensive then we would see so many more beautiful and emotional images emerging from where our photojournalists venture. Images would be created for consumption of the local people rather than for a a patron thousands of miles away. Images would begin to truly represent the situation rather than present an image of what we want to see.

I can’t help but wonder why so many photojournalists focus on spending so much time abroad when there is so much to be captured in our own country, even our own continent. Is it because it is not as fashionable to want to document your own culture here in the West? Perhaps it has almost become a status symbol to travel abroad to document those ‘less fortunate’ than ourselves. Perhaps we just do not want to look too closely at what is around us, just in case it scares us just a little too much.

One photojournalist that sticks out in my mind as particularly inspirational is the American food photographer Penny De Los Santos. She spend years documenting the Mexico-Texas borderlands. She documented their highs and lows and created a beautiful body of work from this. Over time she got access to more and more personal aspects of their lives. And you know what the best thing about it was? It was something that was close to her and her family. She didn’t have to travel half way around the world to shoot abject poverty in order to find the story. She looked virtually on her own doorstep. So it makes me curious as to how much of Western life is going undocumented because of our fascination with trophy hunting abroad. What would happen if for a year our photojournalists in the West turned their thoughts to home and we gave budding photographers in other cultures the means to shoot their own lives. I wonder how different the presented view of the world would be.

‘Texas-Mexico Borderlands’, Penny De Los Santos

So today I was accused of being a bit of a hypocrite. A new online magazine has been launched by someone on a forum I use with the content of ‘cars and girls’. Fair play, launching an online magazine and finding content for it can’t be the easiest thing in the world and must take up a fair amount of time. I have to admit I doubt I’d ever attempt a project like this because my design skills are simply not up to it.

The thing is, I object to this format. Cars and girls. Girls and cars. Apparently picked because the two ‘subjects’ go together. The way I see it though it’s just more encouragement for certain types of men to think about women in a material possession kind of way. By associating something which is a highly prized material possession (modified cars in this context) and showing naked chicks alongside on many of the pages it creates a link between the two. You’re saying to the impressionable “Hey you, buy this amazing car and you’ll get this chick as well”. It’s reducing a woman to a possession to be owned in the same way as a car and that isn’t a nice way to be thought of.

The justification for accusing me of being a hypocrite is that I shoot naked men and portray them as sexual objects. Well quite frankly I try to avoid portraying them as sexual objects and would be quite upset if any model thought that this is the way that I had portrayed them. But I wouldn’t ever make a connection between one of the guys that I’ve shot and a material possession. Because guys aren’t just a possession to have. They’re beautiful, if mysterious, creatures that I need in my life. I’d like to think I show them a little more respect than comparing them to a piece of metal that goes at speed.

Another aspect to this of course is the issue of how women are presented with their own gender. I’m not the only woman in the world into cars and motor sports. In fact there are quite a few female racing drivers out there now and personally I’ve known as many girls over the years with heavily modified cars as I have guys. I find it frustrating when I’m supposed to just accept naked glamour shots of women alongside my hobby. It’s as if it’s ok for men to be titillated along side their hobbies but women are told that that’s just the way it is because men are a bigger market. Well I’m sorry, but I think that’s rubbish. Perhaps if these magazines featured more of a gender balance (in the case of photography) or just no sexual images at all (in the case of cars) then more women would read their publications?

Fundamentally I don’t understand though with certain car magazines and websites why we need to have sexually stimulating images of women in them anyway. It seems like a macho pissing contest. He with the biggest car will get the girl with the biggest breasts or something. Don’t get me started on the scantily dressed women at race tracks - people keep asking why there are no top female racing drivers? Perhaps the answer is that we as a gender are put off by the whole sexist approach to the low level car and motor sport industry.