FMP - final - Contacting galleries

From the very start of my education at Falmouth, I knew that I want to have an exhibition - the reasons ranging from wanting to be like the "famous" photographers to having my work showcased. At first, it didn't look like a hard thing to do - you have a collection of images, have them printed out and find a place to showcase them. 

The reality, however, proved to be way different from that. Problem one was caused by the actual images. When I started studying at Falmouth, I had an exact idea of what I want to showcase - and that was my travel images I took throughout these two years while I was pursuing my MA. I have some really interesting and appealing image in my archive which, however, proved to be "inconsistent" and not connected to one another enough to form a "coherent body of work" as my favourite phrase of each and every WIP brief goes. I love those images and I will certainly have an exhibition of them alone BUT not for Falmouth, it seems. 

One of the images I love deemed "banal" by my tutors. It may be banal, I don't deny that, since it is a simple sunrise at the sea BUT to me it is really important (and one of the rare occasions when I managed to capture a sunrise). 

Hence, I needed to compile a whole new lot of images for my FMP - mainly because I am not entirely pleased with the ones I did for the previous modules. In each WIP there are a few images I really love but there are also the others which are not that good (or not that appealing) and I would not want to have printed and showcased as samples of my work outside the Falmouth grading system. 

Besides, for an exhibition to be successful in Bulgaria, it has to somewhat comply to the Bulgarian standards of what is beautiful. I have mentioned it countless times here in the CRJ that what British people think is beautiful is deemed "plain" and "uninteresting" in Eastern Europe - this may be an overgeneralization but it is really close to the truth. 

So at the beginning of the FMP module I needed something that would be novel, interesting ans challenging to me to shoot, interesting for the viewer and above all "a coherent body of work". That is how I came up with the re-photography idea. 

The task seemed quite easy at first glance, but after a few attempts to do things right, it dawned on me that things will not go as quick as I would like them to do so. That led to problem two - how to find a gallery. 

There are quite a lot of galleries in Sofia - both big and small - but the main problem with that is that most of the they are over-occupied since practically anyone in Bulgaria would love to have their work showcased in the capital. I understand that, it is quite logical, but it makes life (and professional career) of photographers born and living in the capital a struggle. 

There are a few famous and good galleries in Sofia that everyone who's anyone uses. Problem with them was with the money. As much as I wanted to have my work showcased there, there was the rent case since almost all of those galleries wanted quite the high rent due to high demand of that exhibition space. Plus, getting that prime spot requires not only money but the right connections, which I, at 27. didn't exactly have. Some colleagues advised me to check dates in advance as I may be able to showcase free of charge, in between the big paid exhibitions. However, the amount of time it took me to create the final images and the "exhibition season" (most photographers in Bulgaria, for some reason I don't understand, have their exhibitions opened in spring) prevented me from doing so. Had I agreed, I would have had only three days of exhibition and I thought that this is too little for all that effort I took. 

The galleries that were OK with a longer period of showcasing my work, wanted a rent I was a bit reluctant to pay (after all, this is my first exhibition and I don't really have a huge budget for it, at least not as huge as I would love to). 

Project information - twin YouTube channels

When I started studying at Falmouth, I already had a YouTube channel - this one: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMW6zs91Ov6p6gp0ibKpW0g

My personal photo channel where I upload all my Culture Crossroads and educational videos - address on the link above

Hence when I had to upload my first video presentation I was not exactly willing to display it on the channel I posted my other videos. Somehow that academic idea did not go well with my idea to have another channel for the academic videos only. I guess it is a bit late to clarify this BUT the Culture Crossroads videos do NOT go to the Falmouth YouTube channel (where the WIP videos and the Oral presentation videos are uploaded). 

My academic YouTube channel is almost empty because of the twin channels. I wanted to have only the Falmouth stuff in there and not to have my subscribers listen to my lame presentations, honestly speaking. 

The academic channel is available on this link: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk1JQ9oobLg74FWGO6hjajQ

The two channels have different cover pages too, to keep them looking separate: 

My academic YouTube channel with all the Falmouth videos. 

So, if you would like to see how is my project going and what kind of videos I post, the first channel (which actually has subscribers) is the one you're looking for. 

FMP - lecturing on my work - an account of Foto Forum Fest 2018

Teaching, they say, is a calling. A calling I don't have (tried teaching, don't have the nerves for it, frankly speaking). Lecturing, however, is quite another matter and I've always been willing to stand up in front of a crowd and have a chat. Love talking, that is. 

In June 2018 there was this opportunity to lecture the student photography club of Sofia University. Well, that failed (since very few people actually came) but I turned the presentation of the '12 myths about photography' into a wonderful 12-video series for my YouTube channel which worked really well. 

Here is a link to the full album with the videos. That was a wonderful series and at the time, when I wanted to lecture the students, I had a backup plan in case they are much more into photography than I thought. Hence I had another presentation entitled 'stories behind the lens - the field work in travel photography'. It was an amazing idea and I loved compiling the presentation BUT never really got to use it.

Until I got an email from the organisers of Foto Forum Fest that they needed lecturers. And I was delighted to participate. Photo Forum (or Foto Forum as it is spelled in English) is the biggest and most prestigious Bulgarian photography website. It is something similar to the guild of photographers (even though there is none in Bulgaria, yet) and being a member of the community is a sign of prestige. I've been with them ever since 2013 but only recently (in 2016, that is) started attending their meetings. 

Foto Forum Fest is the annual gathering of Bulgarian photographers. People come from all over the country to be part of this event - which is usually one week long always held at a different location each year. The organisers provide cheap accommodation and half-board as well as a photo studio with all the equipment one could wish for, a printing center to test the newest printers and two models to get creative. Apart from that, there are lectures and workshops for those who would like to learn from the best of the best. 

You can test cameras and lenses and have a chat with people in the field. The evenings are usually party time but overall it is an amazing experience and when asked if I would like to be a lecturer, I was totally into it.

My lecture was scheduled for noon, just before the lunch break and me being not one of the most famous photographers (alongside which I was to present) I thought that very few people would actually turn up. However, there were a lot of people willing to hear my funny stories - and how else would my stories be since I started talking about what you should and what you shouldn't do on location and what weird things had happened to me, as well as the story behind each shot I was showing.  

We had a lot of fun then - later people saying to the organisers that I had been funny and interesting (or so they told me).

Me lecturing - that image used to stand for that you take pictures till the end and never give up since you have no idea when the most amazing shot will appear. 

Judging from the faces of the people in that pic, I must have said something funny then...

 This lecture led me to another idea - to turn that presentation in another video series, this time about the things a travel photographer should and should not do on location. These, however, will be out in the summer since I need some time to compile them.

FMP - project development - narrowing down scope (when your initial project is too broad)

One of the easiest and hardest things to do at Falmouth, was to write that 'project proposal' that had to go with the application documents. At the time, I thought that 'projects' are for the famous photographers tom work on and didn't have a clue on how to create something on my own.

So I sat down and started thinking what I am good at and that is how I realised that I had been working on a project ever since 2015. That was the thing later to be named Culture Crossroads. It was an amazing idea and I started the MA full of enthusiasm that towards 2019 I would have a complete amazing travel photography project that would not only help me grow as a professional BUT also help spread the word of how amazing the Balkan peninsula is. 

Hence, in the first module I handed in a really diverse portfolio (and as the tutors said, totally lacking coherence) . I wanted to show everything immediately BUT that MA taught me otherwise. To create what was deemed 'coherent portfolio', I needed to focus on one aspect. The problem in the whole idea was that my project was meant to be diverse as the Balkans have more than one facet. So I went for the middle ground and decided that each module onwards, I will be focusing on one of the six categories of my project which I created to bring some order to the chaos of the whole thing. Here they are:

- Remember the Past – historical sites

- Experience the Present – food, street photography

- Be Part of Culture – holidays, customs and historical reenactments

- See Nature – landscapes

- Admire Architecture - architecture, obviously 

- Feel Religion - places of worship

Throughout the previous modules, I tried to focus on a particular aspect of my project, realizing that I cannot submit a coherent portfolio of only 20 images that would be able to cover all six categories. 

However, the end of the MA got closer and what I needed to do was write an FMP proposal. The main problem was that by that time I had already realised that the grand project I had in mind will be nowhere near completion. Traveling costs money, even traveling within the country for a day can cost a lot, depending on where you want to go and what you want to do. It also takes time an planning. I have had cases when I need to visit a place three times to get the shot I wanted. 

Popularisation of the project, especially if your budget goes from limited to non-existent and you need to do everything yourself can also be a problem, not to mention the incredible variety of places and things one would like to see, capture and write about. having talked to some colleagues about their ongoing projects taught me that the way I view mine is wrong. This is not a coursework or an MA thesis with a fixed deadline and length. On the contrary - it requires tremendous amount of time and effort to be completed (or even kept afloat - here I have in mind even something as simple as social media presence). Not to mention that I wanted to have videos, images and text and each of those three requires some time. 

So, at the start of the FMP module I was already aware that Culture Crossroads may have started as a project proposal for Falmouth but it would be years before it draws to completion (and meets the ambitious goals I had in the beginning - goals that I am stubborn enough to keep pursuing till I reach them). Unfortunately, I had to admit that my tutors were right - you cannot have a coherent portfolio, covering 6 or even 3 different aspects of the project and have only 20 images to stand for it. Things do not go that way. 

That much at least I understood for two years at Falmouth. If you want your images to tell a coherent story, they should have something in common - like the sentences in an essay. 

Hence, for my FMP, I decided to go local since Culture Crossroads proved to be a tremendous amount of work and time, which will not end after the end of the MA. 

Given the time of the year that comes around – winter – that meant I had to go really local and have 24/7 access to it. This is how I came with the project ‘Sofia - Between the Lions and the Eagles - echoes of a lost city’. More about it - in a follow-up post. 

Critical contextualization of my WIP - looking for style part 2 - food for thought in food photography

To create images of food I needed some inspiration about how interesting images of food are actually made which meant that I had to keep researching. This time, again, I was referred to people I should check out. The names were two and the books these people created did captivate my attention and gave me food for thought when it came to contemporary food photography (pun intended). 

The first one was the book Feast for the Eyes The Story of Food in Photography by Susan Bright. It is a collection of some amazing and really creative attempts to get out of the box and depict food in something other than just a white plate and a tabletop. The book is mostly about the history of contemporary food photography and features a lot of artists with their iconic and thought-provoking images. 

As it is with any collection, some images 'speak' more than others so I went for the more conventional styled images of the lot. I had to work with screenshots of the book's pages since it is unavailable online and it would take more than a month to reach Bulgaria (if someone doesn't steal it in the process) so there was no point in ordering it at this stage. 

Irving Penn's images (the image below - fig.1) were the first one that caught my eye exactly because they had something distinct that my images of food lacked - a signature style. He deconstructs the usual food and shows it in a quite unimaginable way. The first image that caught my eye was the one on the left - the deconstructed image of a salad with all its ingredients laid side by side but without mixing them into the dish we usually consume. This technique is really catchy so I totally intend to try it out on some of the Bulgarian dishes, just to see what happens. 

When I had to research his work, it turned out that I am already familiar with it, even though I had no idea about that (and I by no means consider myself an expert in contemporary photography artists). There is something about Penn's style that definitely makes me look twice and think what is actually on the image. 

The depiction of the classic combination of soft cheese and pears is not only novel as a kind of presentation but also looks quite tasty. I love his uncluttered presentation that draws the viewer's attention to the food in the picture and the simple and unornamented cutlery that does not look set up. After all, in real life most people use simple cutlery without any ornaments on it and eat in plain white plates and bowls. 

Fig 1 - Irving Penn's images in the Book:
Salad ingredients, New York, 1987
Ripe Cheese, New York, 1991

Some of his images even show food as something totally different from what we are used to seeing - like this deconstruction of French cuisine (fig. 2 below) - with its signature ingredients - frog legs, snails and I don't really know what the rest is, maybe an oyster (but that's something I've never seen in real life so it's just a guess). French cuisine is considered refined and the top of the top - when I look at this picture, however, I see the animals behind the dishes and it is a bit (in the case with this particular image - even a lot) gross. 

Without the whole flavour of refinement and the aura of French gourmet, these ingredients look like animals normal people would never think of eating (unless there is a famine). 

Fig 2 - Irving Penn -  “Eat This!,” Vogue, May 1989

When it comes to deconstruction, Penn's work is probably one of the most interesting to see since it had been created to intimidate and attract the eye, yet provoke some reflection on the things people saw. Working for Vogue, maybe that was his way of creating something novel out of a mundane and highly exploited subject (such as food). I must admit, it definitely works and inspires. 

As far as I know, no one in Bulgaria has tried out his approach to things and many of the Bulgarian dishes can be broken down to some basic ingredients that could be photographed in a similar manner, at least for the sake of showing what exactly goes into the dish. The plain white background is a bit dull to my taste but it can easily be changed into something else. 

Penn inspires me to experiment - if he could do this back in the 1970s, I think I can do something too in the 21st century. However, he was not the only one that I was referred to. 

The book Real Food by Martin Parr was also pointed out to me as showing the very opposite trend. While Parr tends to totally take food out of context - in many of his images he even refuses to present it cooked, Parr did the total opposite and entrench food within its cultural, historical and human context, showing meals just after someone has had a bite or at street stalls across the world. It is indeed 'real' food - not the polished compositions of food stylists or the detached and almost laboratory images Penn created for Vogue but a real-life bite that the viewer would like to have. 

Some of his images even have some documentary qualities - capturing candid moments (fig. 3 and fig.4 below). This type of approach - showing the unaltered reality of food and food consumption - is no doubt a good idea as many of Parr's images are definitely mouth-watering as the viewer just feels into that eater's place and can almost smell the delicious flavours. 

Fig. 3 - Martin Parr - GB. Scotland. Largs. Nardini's Cafe. 1999.

Fig. 4 - Martin Parr - GB. England. Cambridge. 2005.

Some images, like the one above, are quite funny and naturalistic but they do attract attention too. However, Parr's style is maybe too documentary and realistic for my taste. As much as I would like to go out in the streets and photograph people eating, that would be much more related to the human element of food consumption than to the food itself. Most of his images have that 'human element' - either a hand in the frame, or the food has already been eaten/ bitten into. 

I would like to focus much more on the recipes than on humans that eat them for the time being since I aim at presenting the common cuisine of the Balkans to people who have no idea (or very little idea) of what I have in mind, whereas Penn and Parr worked with much more familiar ingredients and recipes. 

Hence in my WIP, I need to find a balance between the documentary, the deconstructed and the highly styled and well-composed still life cook bookshots. 

Sources

https://www.pushinsky.com/store/just-not-kosher/

https://aperture.org/shop/feast-for-the-eyes/

https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/irving-penn-archive-food-photos

https://atelierdyakova.com/The-Story-of-Food#.W2mnPr8VTIU

http://uk.phaidon.com/store/photography/real-food-9780714871035/

https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Package/2K1HRG6S7S7S

List of figures:

Figure 1 – Penn, Irving - published in Feast for the Eyes The Story of Food in Photography by Susan Bright

Salad ingredients, New York, 1987
Ripe Cheese, New York, 1991
Available at: https://atelierdyakova.com/The-Story-of-Food#.W2mnPr8VTIU
[accessed 08 August  2018]

Figure 2 – Penn, Irving - “Eat This!,” Vogue, May 1989
Available at: https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/irving-penn-archive-food-photos
[accessed 08 August  2018]

Figure 3 – Parr, Martin - GB. Scotland. Largs. Nardini's Cafe. 1999.
Available at: https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Package/2K1HRG6S7S7S
[accessed 08 August  2018]

Figure 4 – Parr, Martin - GB. England. Cambridge. 2005.
Available at: https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Package/2K1HRG6S7S7S
[accessed 08 August  2018]

Project development - Balkan food - the gastronomical crossroads of Eastern Europe

Choosing food photography and integrating it into my project meant that I will be photographing something different from spaghetti and French fries. The good news was that the Balkans are maybe one of the richest places in terms of local cuisine. 

Throughout the centuries, cuisine was layered on the Balkans. First the Romans, then the barbarian tribes during the Great movement of peoples, then the crusaders, then the Ottoman turks. Combining this with the versatile climate on the Balkans - having a lot of sea and wide rivers providing for sea food and fish, mountains which can supply people with game and fresh meat (if they raise cattle), plains that would yield vegetables, fruit and grains and a lot of spices that naturally grow in the area, i can proudly say that the Balkans are one of the best places to have a treat. 

Mixing of the Mediterranean diet of the southern Balkan states and that of the ones further inland with the nomadic cuisine of the Ottoman turks led to a unique mix of flavours that cannot be tasted anywhere else. 

Co-existence for centuries led to another particularity - that most Balkan countires have similar recipes. Here is a quick example: 

The Bulgarian 'Shopska salata' which is a simple salad made out of cucumbers, tomatoes, white cheese, onion and peppers is not actually Bulgarian (here is a pic in case you don't remember how that looks like):

The recipe was invented in the mid 20th century when the national tourist operator, Balkanturist, had to come up with something with the coulours of the Bulgarian national flag and to make it easy to consume and remember. A quick research I had to do for my Cultural Studies BA showed that Shopska salata derives from two other Balkan salads - the Serbian salad and the Greek horiatiki that have the same ingredients. 

The recipe became so popular that some years ago it wa declared the most popular recipe in Europe. Still, even though it is famous as a Bulgarian dish, the recipe is much older and should rightly be deemed 'Balkan'. 

Same goes for other 'traditional Bulgarian dishes' such as the famous banitsa (another Bulgarian favourite): 

It is a traditional dish made of eggs and cheese wrapped in filo pastry. However, this thing has direct relatives in all Balkan countires - the Greek pita and the börek varieties that exists all over the Balkans are the most famous among them. The pic above shows a traditional Bulgarian breakfast on a Sunday morning - banitsa and ayran (another favorite basically yogurt, water and salt). 

So, speaking of recipes, I would rather go for Balkan recipes, not Bulgarian, since it takes a whole research to trace back the origin of each recipe. Still, there are a lot of tasty treats available so I had a wide variety to choose from. 

WIP development - how do you mimic the Dutch masters with artificial lighting and on a budget

Since I already had an idea of how to do my images - the first point was to mimic the Dutch masters - I decided to go for something easy and to try and do something I have never done before. The idea was to use a simple dish - in my case that was Shopska salad (quite a traditional dish on the Balkans, made out of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onion and a lot of white cheese) - and to try and create something that looks like a Dutch still life. 

The setting was created on the living room table since the living room is the darkest one at home. I planned to do something I have never done before - in my case try new style and composition AND use artificial lighting. I am much more used to working with natural light - when I had to take pics for Shutterstock, natural light was the only thing I used. However, the challenge set by Michelle involved me taking some kind of a risk so that I manage to push myself a bit. 

As a start, it turned out that working with artificial lighting may give you all the control but when you have no idea what you want to achieve (apart from some vague image in your head), things can get complicated. So it took me around an hour to figure out what I wanted to depict and a few more minutes to set up the whole thing.

The end result truly looked like nothing I have done before - new type of background (for years, I had been avoiding the dark backgrounds), new type of composition as I tried to mimic the Dutch still life type of compo and a whole new concept of how I should be doing my images. 

I chose the salad and the glass to show a typical farmer's dinner at the local tavern (hence the yellow liquid that is actually mint tea since we had no rakiya at home). Took me a lot of time to figure out how to do the lighting so that the glass is lit from above and I have some kind of tecture (first time working with that light). 

I tried a few angles, such as this one:

Even though I liked the end result, the whole thing looked so different from what I used to create, that it was a bit foreign to me. I did the challenge BUT somehow couldn't feel the image. What was worse, I still lacked some ideas on how to do the rest of the images. 

As my mother exclaimed when I showed her the images - they simply looked dull in some way. Well. the point was to challenge myself and so I did but the overall concept was completely eluding me.