Assignment one. Beauty and the sublime.

Assignment One.

Beauty and the Sublime.

My original intention was to carry out this assignment in Malta but for reasons stated elsewhere in this blog this was not possible.

Living, as I do, close to the sea I based this Assignment on the seaside as it is now,  in winter, closed and empty.  I didn’t want just empty spaces and beaches devoid of people but to demonstrate the emptiness through that very English seaside feature; the beach hut.  

I varied my approach to demonstrate the various aspects covered from linear perspective to placing a single object in a frame and to having huts reduced to mere patterns.  

The single image in a scene has been a feature in painting and photography since the time landscape painting was recognised as a art form in its own right.  The difficulty was in finding a new way to interpret it.  For the first of these I had a look at Monk by the Beach by C. D. Friedrich.  In this the lone figure is but a small part of the whole, and although muted in tone dominates the scene.  This seemed a good place to start.  At Kingsdown stands a lone beach hut, that although at some time may have been white is now a gentle grey. On the day I took the picture the weather was grey and wet.  The scene has the emptiness and feeling of abandonment that I was aiming for but also the feeling of better times  to come given by the canoe.  The tones in this picture are  muted and and without strong contrasts but the feeling I wanted to get across comes through.

Also at Kingsdown are a line of huts.  I have isolated these three in an attempt to put them in context with the rather wild beach which in turn runs out at the white cliff to the left of shot. 

The next two replace two of my original images that I was not very happy with and my tutor said were weak.  The theme of the empty sea front has been kept.  
Dotted along the sea front at Bexhill-on-Sea are a number of old seaside shelters.  I recorded the following two images one evening. The street lights trailing out behind the first almost gives a sence of motion as it seems to hover in the darkness..  I used the the Diane Diedrich image, Classic American Diner, as my inspiration.

This is the second of the Bexhill shelters.  It shines like a jewel in the night.  I though about getting rid of the lamp-post but have left it in to give balance.

By the beach below Marine Parade Whitstable stands a lone lifeguards hut.  To make it stand out it is painted bright yellow.  I wanted to make this a very small but important item in  a large scene.  I photographed it from low down against the blue sky, and at waist height against the sea.  It wasn’t until I climbed back up the hill towards Marine Parade that I saw the image I wanted.  The small yellow argument balanced by the vastness of the blue sky.  The grass triangle at the bottom left acts as an anchor for the picture.  The path leads the eye from bottom right up to the hut where the groins and the sand bar turn the eye back to the right.  I chose a time when the sun was behind me and hidden behind a hill.  This gave even lighting under a blue sky.  In the summer this beach is packed but here is a feeling of peace and quiet.

While at Whitstable there is an area of beach huts I have photographed before.  I wanted in this picture to render the huts to an abstract shape where the overlapping, multicoloured huts formed a muddled singularity.  There is no single focal point but the various vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines lead one through the image.

This was also taken at Whitstable and has the huts in echelon tumbling down the slope towards the viewer.  There are a number of leads through the picture from the dark base and sloping roofs through to the  darkening colours as the huts recede.

Strengths and weaknesses?  The images I am most pleased with are the two featuring a single object and the abstract.  The rest I am less pleased with but within the limited frame of reference I set myself I am fairly happy with the overall result.