089-picture me

089-picture me, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

As indicated by the number of the tltle, this one was done for the fuggers group of the day - recreating a painting. We chose Adam and Eve by Tamara Lempicka, a copy of which by a local artist hangs above our bed, the latter pushed out of the way for this shot.

Of course, our recreation has a few changes - my arthritus did not allow me to bend enough, and Ania is not ready to allow her students to see too much as most of them are from places east of Poland and often from cultures too steeped in sexless, human-less traditional Christian upbringings, the basis of the former Soviet states.

The apple is somethign that Ania eats every day, she has always loved them and is quite happy they are part of the diet she has been on for the past six months to lose weight. As part of this diet is an hour's exercise three times a week, something that has done wonders for her circulation, a great boon for a frequent flyer and train taker.

077-No Ghetto

077-No Ghetto, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today's group was set up by an English couple who emigrated to Australia, and then decided they did not want to lose their 'Englishness' - and decided to take pictures of themselves drinking tea in different places.

This desire to retain one's nationality-ness is the worst thing imagineable to me - it reduces you to an icon, you are no longer a real person. As an icon you are prime target material for those people who create stereotypes, making life hell for anyone who just wants to get on with their life in a country different from the one they were born in. I mean, if you want to retain your nationality-ness, why bother moving elsewhere?

Having lived in my present country for eleven years, people still cannot accept me as being a valid member of the community - any discussion about anything important and you notice that people start associating you with your 'nationality', and the real 'you' no longer exists. So, everyone around you can complain about the state of the nation, you cannot - wot the fuck? I am married to a national of this country, so either I get treated as an icon here, or she gets treated as an icon of this nation there.

So, our view is - drink your tea because you enjoy it, but don't do it to maintain your nationality-ness because you are just reinforcing the difficulties of other, innocent people.

073: Cracks in the Paving...

Cracks in the Paving..., originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Nightmare

Many children learn to fear the cracks in the paving, and the dark horrors that live down there. Of course, no one takes it seriously, but what if you could slip down...

Today I kept it simple, or did I? Today is my late shift day, which means that I get home tired and have little time or inspiration for my images - a good time, then, to work on my craft. A lot of craft is honing the reflexes - being able to make repeatable movements such as being able to form all the letters clearly when you write. I experimented here with the colour tools to see how much information there really was buried in the original similar shades of grey of the paving, and trying to produce convincing shadows.

The reference to a childhood dear made this image quite different to the gothic-adult horror images produced by many other fuggers, and yet it is the remnant of the childhood fears that often form the basis for our fears in later life. Life in Poland often leaves me feeling insubstantial, unable to dent other peoples behaviours they learnt in childhood and to which they desperately hold onto even though it is slowly destroying them.

072: Playing for my baby!

Playing for my baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Music and Sugar

This shot is more important for me than my other, more humorous or naughty ones, the doing of something that makes Ania happy, the continual reaffirming of our love.

I have noticed that many people producing series of what they call self-portraits are really producing self-images. What do I mean? Well, a self image uses only that person as the image, supported by a series of props - objects found or purchased with the intent on producing an image of how that person imagines him or herself.

A self portrait, on the other hand, attempts to show how that person really is, and because the emphasis is less on using props to support this vision of self, the use real objects, real dreams and real people.

Meet up with a bunch of self-imagers and you may make the mistake of believing you have joined a group of single people. meet a group of self-portraiters and you can see who is single and who is in a relationship. Reality, of course is much more complex than this, and there is nothing wrong with either form of production - but it is something worth bearing in mind when you interact with people producing what they call self-portraits.

I can see that my preference is mainly for self-portraiture, and as a consequence I aim to show my life and dreams in my images, even if any one particular image shows a situation I have never directly expereienced.

When I view work by self-imagers I am left wandering what is it that they are leaving out, what is not being shown. These images are often high-craft and popular, but they are also empty of real emotion, perhaps because they are only ghost images of a real person and their life?

059: Travels in a Suitcase

Travels in a Suitcase, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Half Dressed Tuesdays

The suitcase exists to help take us on our travels, but for most of the time it simply gathers dust and stores things that we probably do not really need. I like to relive past journeys and plan new ones, and what better companion on these memory and dream trips!

Dreams are something that most of us have, often having the same or very similar ones throughout our lives. Daydreams, though, are an important way of accessing our mind's treasures, but too many people either believe daydreaming is a waste of time, or know not how they can make them a reality.

Oh, and half dressed tuesday? Don't you remember that sixties series "Man in a Suitcase"? Perhaps not :)

058: Me Man

Me Man, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

My Pet Peeves.

Well, with such a challenge, where should one start? To be honest, the most long-running thing I get annoyed about is the way people assume that because they see you as a man/English/white/etc. that you must fit whatever mold they have in their heads. Great, it saves them from thinking, from treating one as a human. Eventually, these classes they assign become more important than the people themselves, and from there it is a short walk to there being blood on the floor.

I just want to be me, not a dog that responds to the commands of the so-called leaders of society without question.

You will find that it is not the classifications of what you are that is important, you are not a set of classes, you are an adhesive body that you can stick classifications to, and change them if need be. Changing these classifications, these labels that one applies to oneself, or allows society to to, can be hard to change, but the process will never get easier unless you practice. That means putting yourself in new situations deliberately, not waiting for life's wiles to force you to change. No matter what you are or what you become, the essential you will remain, holding together with the force of life itself.

055: Superwife

Superwife, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Feeling Super.

Your partner has more to offer than you realise, they also have their own personality, something worth paying more attention too. Here Ania has an expression that I never asked for but which she has brought into the image. She is much stronger than she will admit, even to herself, especially in the environment of Poland where the social pressure is to keep saying how unable you are - until you eventually subconsciously believe it.

I wanted to create an image for her to show how much I respect her remarkable skill and power, and how much i am in awe of it. Interestingly enough, some of the composition was not conscious but my practised and acknowledged reliance on automatic input from whatever its source is within my brain.

051: Play With My Tiles, Baby!

Play With My Tiles, Baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

shatter, crash, destroy

I had very little time for this one as I had to go to bed early because the next day I was getting up very early. Real life is an important part of art, it can never be separate from it, art is part of the way we think, and the way we think is related to what we have to done and have done.

I had no time to break anything, and nothing really to hand I could break that had any relevance. However, I could do another form of breaking, breaking me up into the different parts I play in life, and showing them in the mixed-up, shattered way I seem to spend my life. I think it is also like a cry for help for someone to come along and help me sort it out.

050: Who is the fairest of them all?

Who is the fairest of them all?, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Spot the Difference / Diptych

Todays group themes were 'spot the difference' and 'diptych', but instead of the normal one image lacking things that appear in the other I decided to change what appeared in the image.

Two shots was all it took, other than the couple to make sure I was getting everything I needed in shot and that the lighting was OK. The editing was remarkably easy, although I experimented with a new-to-me function on Gimp to blend the images. I can tell by looking at the images which one I did first, so I must have improved :)

I pulled my sweatshirt tight to make it body-hugging, and so created the feminine image, while the shirt seemed to work quite well to produce a masculine image. Working with mirrors is hard, though, especially in the tight space of my hall cluttered with the step ladder I had used to mount my rather low tripod on to get the right height.

047: Flikr to Quit!

Flikr to Quit!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Fake News

Since I work with words, I though I would focus on the text content and write some fake news myself, relevant to the fugger challenge for today. Luckily I had a few minutes at work to hammer out an article, but you may have to look at it in large scale to read it.

In one of the comments to this picture, someone asked if this could be considered a photo or a screenshot, and my answer was that it was a photo with a very large border. In reality there is no difference between a photo and a screenshot, as long as you control the content. How many works of art have been created by stacking books, wrapping buildings or sticking cut out images from newspapers and magazines to form a collage? The question of whether you use a camera or the print screen function of one's computer to put those pixels together is immaterial.

040: Drinking the Sky

Drinking the Sky, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Sky


After a week in Manhattan we escaped for the day to visit Bear Mountain, and since we were taken there by car I still have no clear idea where it is, except somewhere near West Point, presumably on the Hudson River. There were so many photo opportunities, but little time as we did not want to bore our host.

I like the way that the clouds swoop down towards the right, the water bottle kind of following the line. This was not intentional, or at least not intentionally so. However, our brains absorb more information that we are consciously aware of, it mainly feeds us with information that it thinks we believe is important. Getting beyond this internal filter is important if you want to see what is really there rather than our subconscious mind's opinion. Art training often involves a lot of training in this area, but you can teach yourself by taking the time to think about why things are the way they are instead of accepting what other people would like you to believe.

039: Stripey Bottom

US Male, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

US Male.

US Mail meets English male. I played with the colours on me to help create contrast between the two essential parts of this image.

I was more concerned today in introducing Ania to creating photos, and enjoying New York - and enjoying Ania's company, which is the best of all. Our target today was bum, and I have little knowledge of how and where my bum looks best, it looks here as though I need to do some more exploration of this area of me, and perhaps ask Ania for more advice when buying trousers.

034: It's In The Mouth

Farewell Kiss, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today we jetted off to New York from here in Poland for a week. Hugo the ginger cat is a mischief, you never know what he will be doing or where he will be in thirty seconds time. "That was then, this is now," is his motto.

The symmetry in the original image was too good an opportunity to miss, but I partially concealed this by offsetting the image. Like using the things one finds around oneself as props, one should also use the potential one finds in the image - it is your image and your art after all.

033: What Dreams May Come

Digital Well, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I was looking for an opportunity to play with the GIMP photoediting software, but perhaps the day before we fly to New York was not the best choice. Especially since my wife wanted some complex editng of her image as well. I gave the lion's share of my edit time to my wife, as I feel it is more important to encourage others than to indulge oneself, their responses give much better feedback than one's own.

Today I explained to my wife my concept that the first step to art is to understand oneself in one's work: if you cannot find yourself in your work, you are copying someone else's far too much or you have yet to discover yourself - whichever it is it will not help you to develop your own art. If you think about it, if an unmarked piece of art is discovered, experts can deduce who is likely to have painted it by recognising that artist's hand in the work.

Once you understand yourself well enough, you are ready for the next step - that of understanding how you relate to everything around you.

24: Silly Walks

Freedom with the Hiber Nation!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today the group really managed to confuse things, I think some of them have spent too much time in the sun. Luckily, my image happened to fit the finally chosen theme.

Religion is here again, and government, both organisations that have massive problems with public nudity and very little concern with violence on the roads and in social situations, especially here in Poland where religion is measured in how many arrive at church each week rather than the quality of belief.

Sleep is a place I can escape from the bigots.

17: Failed Photographers Club

Failed Photographers1, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Yesterday I had to reproduce an accident, today it was the work of a failed photographer. After much thinking around for ideas, I came up with this one. But how should I make it the work of a failed photographer while still being a good example of my own work?

I find that it can help not to try and control too many variables, and to be flexible to new ideas as the process, well, proceeds. For example, the shot of me fully dressed turned out to be out of focus, but rather than retake it I decided the focus - out-of-focus contrast between image elements added to the failure effect - as did the bedding in the background I would normally cropped off or otherwise made disappear.

I am tempted to reshoot the out-of-focus element, but I know that doing so would be a statement of craft rather than art, or the achievement of a different kind of art, depending on how I handle it.

16: Beautiful Mistakes

Swing Your Camera, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today's task was to produce a mistake, as if you were about to press the shutter and something changed the image to create a different kind of beauty. Fine if it happens, but how do you achieve accidentality within any particular 24 hour period?

Thinking about the camera, I realised that using the timer could help as you are less certain about when the shutter will operate, so if you play around in front of the camera you might eventually create a suitable image. Secondly, I remembered a group I found on Flikr that was about creating shots by throwing one's camera in the air.

Finally, I just held the camera in my hand, pointed it in roughly the right direction and pressed the shutter. I had to do this a few times in different locations before I came up with this one.

Other people used my suggested timer and throw techniques, which in a way puts an element of my art in their images, as it is my thought that directed them to produce their images. I think this area of idea creation needs further investigation.

14: !Flikr Notes

This image really shows up my lack of good lighting equipment, I have to rely on my normal apartment lighting and the flash. The task, though, was to create an image that people could attach notes to, and there was a suggestion that one could show the contents of one's wardrobe. There was also the restriction that I wanted to include something from yesterday's picture.

Rather than doing the obvious shot of content with me beside it as the owner, I wanted to ensure that I became a part of the picture. Too many of the pictures I hate are 'me standing in front of this building', 'me standing in front of...", so 'me standing in front of wardrobe' was obviously out, but 'me being part of the wardrobe process' in an uncomfortable way that reflects the problems of sharing wardrobe space with someone else having far more clothes, now that expresses something worthwhile.

The result also encompasses a common theme of many marriages I know where the wife treats the husband as a mere money-making, picture-hanging driving machine, otherwise an inconvenience who needs to be tidied away while they get on with having a life.

12: Mono Photography

After having a series of specific subject using any techniques, today was a specific technique but any subject. I toyed around with the idea of photographing myself on the company's grey gravel parking lot leaning against the wheel of my silver Citroen C1, but today we woke up rather early and decided to have a bowl of cereal before going back to bed. As Ania was finishing up, I headed for the bathroom and noticed the light on our bar and her sitting at the other end. Of course, the classic Cuban bar scene!

At half past five in the morning we were setting up for the shot, Ania using the floral dress as we thought it would show up well and be appropriate for the style, while I took my leather jacket and cap as an old whisky drinker. The camera I positioned to look down the length of the bar, with us far down it, although I had to zoom a bit to ensure there was enough apparent separation between us - but it was that low down on the bar shot combined with the Havana theme that decided the direction and the props.

6: What Mood Are You In?

I really need to get out and go somewhere, shuttling between work and home is no life if you are looking for inspiration. It is also a struggle trying to do the simplest things with a program you are as yet unsure about, such as Gimp, which would not let me draw a simple circle.

I started with a green background with just the facial parts, but then decided to dump the green and go for this cartoony image, reminiscent of the kind of drawings I have seen made by inmates of prisoner of war camps.