Matthew J Williams: 2012

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

Scanned FP-100 image - Taken on Polaroid Automatic 100

Polaroid FAIL!!!

This is a scan of a Polaroid instantpicture, front & back, (PX 70 impossible project film to be precise!)... Itwas taken with my good old, trusty SX-70, however the film pack was one ofImpossible's earlier productions, (experimental film as Impossible themselveslike to call it)... Anyway to cut to the chase: the reason it ended up lookinglike this was because the pod at the bottom of the image (containing thechemicals for the development of the picture) failed to burst when beingejected through the rollers of my camera after the picture was taken, Thereforeno image was produced!

I know your probably thinking: Thatstill doesn't really fully explain why it ended up looking this surreal, wellwhen i realized the pod was faulty on the film, and therefore worthless foranything, I thought to myself, I'm not going to let it go to waste, especiallyafter paying good, hard-earned money for it. I'll make something out of it...so I got the image and squeezed the chemical pod at the bottom (like you dotoothpaste from its tube). It took a lot of pressure before it eventually burstat the bottom right corner. Some of the chemicals oozed into the image area (asit should, inside between the two layers of plastic), but the majority of thechemicals burst outside of the polaroid, which I decided to use as paint, todecorate & make a mess of the failed polaroid using my finger.

This, above, was my final result.

(Better than ending up in the trash I suppose!)

Thursday, 21 June 2012

Study Leave Project - Photo Stories

Duane Michals - Paradise Regained, 1968

Sequence of six gelatin silver prints

Below is a set of six photographs taken by the world famous American photographer, Duane Michals. The set of six individual images have been put into a photo-sequence to create a photographic narrative, illustrating the true authenticity of what us humans actually are, when we are striped from our false appearance that we apply to our every day lives to create a mockery of something that is in fact, inaccurate.

In the images, a young man sits with his hands lightly folded while a woman stands behind him. The room is spare and both are fully clothed. From one image to the next the two people in the frame, appear with fewer clothes, whilst at the same time small trees are emerging into the scene dotting around them. In the final image the trees have grown to surround the now fully unclothed couple. This is man in his true state, the original man, Michals believes, saying, "When we get rid of the hip clothes and the furniture and are taken out of our air conditioned cars we are essentially like Rousseau's savages."

My own Photo Story/Narrative – Obsession

Sequence of six digital black & white images

Below is a photo-sequence I have created myself, using Duane Michals work as a great influence & inspiration. I know it doesn’t have the same explanation and meaning behind it as Michals Paradise Regained, but it does however, mirror a certain similarity which is seen throughout the two sets of sequences. This is the matching character of something increasing in the images, and becoming large in quantity, whilst at the same time something in the frame has been sacrificed, becoming more and more scarce as the images go on. For example in Duane Michals Paradise Regained, the amount of trees increase & the subject’s cloths decrease. In my sequence, the number of cameras increase and the amount of money in my wallet decreases! The story actually pretty much reflects my own life, in which I have recently developed more & more of an obsession to collect cameras. The sequence starts off with an image of just one camera & a wallet full of money, and gradually, photo-by-photo, the quantity of cameras increases whilst the prominence of the wallet and the amount of money decreases in each frame. The final image shows a huge collection of cameras (which by the way isn’t my full collection) and sadly no money left in the wallet.