Jonny Graham

Hope Through Severance - Part 2

2012-01-26T22:43:00.000Z

(If you missed part one of this post, here you go!)

The fact I had failed my last shoot despite all the work that had gone into it didn't sink in until about a week through the recovery work to organise the reshoot. I'm optimistic by nature, but sometimes you get knocked down and I guess I was able to block that for a while. I started questioning wether or not I was wasting so much time on what is effectively just a photograph and I found when you reduce what you do down to what it is, when you take the what, how and why of photography and strip away the how and why you aren't left with much. The reality was this was just a photography assignment, that this was just a year 2, semester one project of a BA Hons Photography degree and there didn't seem to be much point. Though I forgot how I was doing this college assignment; how I was, if you look at it on it's most basic level, taking one of my most ambitious ideas I've ever had for a photograph and going for it. Something which, without the small nudge of genuine encouragement from a few people around me, I would have put aside as a ridiculous idea that, if at all, "I'll do when I'm 30. After a year long creative drought and after almost giving up on the course/medium altogether, I finally found something worth the effort, I found the adventure in it again.

And it wasn't just that that was pushing me to go for this, but also what I was trying to say with it. Why I was going this. Donovan (see Part One) talked about 'vision', that creative authenticity that he better put as 'your voice as an author of images'. This was the first time I had ever felt like I was making pictures that felt like my own, felt like they were about something that was important to me. This idea of potential and aspiration, or perhaps it should be 'potential in aspiration' is something important to me right now. It has been knocked down over and over as a childish pursuit of fantasy, a form of escapism but I still believe it isn't that. I never associated what I'm trying to do with 'childhood'. Certainly not when there's a £1500 production on the line.

I think that what some would mistake as childish escapism is much more of an inherent optimism. I believe that our inherent ability to create - to materialise the unmaterialised, to imagine is far too powerful to attach to childhood and nostalgically observe it from a distance as adults, often admiring at it’s intrinsic innocence; how naturally we made use of our creative abilities. I think it's wrong that we're expected to leave that behind as some sort of childish endeavour and then ironically find ourselves wondering at some 'brilliant' adults who employ their creativity fully as if they had some sort of miraculous gift. Not just in art but in everything; in business, in science, in design, in life. Creativity and imagination are one and the same bar one difference. To imagine is to be a dreamer, to allow yourself to think beyond your current circumstance. To do that involves a certain disconnection from reality but to be creative is to take all of that and actually do something about it. It's easy (relatively speaking) to be a dreamer with enough practise but to make that jump between zero and one as far as actually executing your ideas go is were your skill in taking what exists in your head and bringing it into reality comes in. Wether you are a artist, musician, designer, business man, teacher or whatever else, we all have a set of skills (we do) that we can make use of. I guess that's why I believe that sometimes lies and deception are required in visual art in order to tell the truth and that we have a choice, a choice wether to observe the world for all it is worth, or create something worth observing. Sometimes, perception is reality.

So I got up and hit back even harder. I bought back the lost gas, balloons and hardware and tried to pull together a new and bigger crew. But as reality would have it, the weather wasn't playing ball at all so I decided to start scouting for a new location. One that would be much more sheltered.

I know that in shooting somewhere different I would be compromising that idea of 'home' (at least to myself) in the image but I had the intention of turning this project into a series, were the balloons would travel through all the places I would consider fragments of home; the forests of the Mourne Mountains, my physical home, my hometown, Belfast city and wherever I may go after that.

So I figured it was best keeping Lough Shannagh's shoot for spring/summer time, when it wasn't basically a hurricane outside. The locations I was looking at would be for the second or third image in the series and even though it felt odd doing the second image first I think it was a smart decision.

However, even though I now had several backup locations the weather still wasn't playing ball, clocking winds upwards of 30mph most days, topping nearly 50pmh at worst. The deadline was only getting closer and as well as having even less crew this time, I made a decision when I finally got a weather window to shoot the balloon setup on the farm at home and composite. This was by no means an easy call and I battled with it for quite a while as I started to feel that I was compromising the concept but Paul Seawright made a good point the work I was trying to make during a class review- that "Nobody really cares about how exactly the image came about. You don't want people talking about how difficult it was to make the image and missing it's intention altogether. Make your work less about the practise and more about your voice."

All in all, the reshoot was a success! With a few last minute tweaks in the production plan, we saved a bunch of time and it all went much smoother than the first shoot did. You'll find the behind the scenes video below:

The location was shot a few days later and the final image was printed to 24"x30", dibond mounted with a subframe for the hand-in exhibition. Pretty happy with it considering the difficulties involved in trying to make this possible. For now, this series' future is pretty much entirely funding dependant as it costs quite a lot to make this kind of stuff happen. It was certainly one of the most demanding projects I've worked on to date but it's certainly not my last :)

Hope Through Severance - Part 1

2012-01-26T22:41:00.001Z

The past four months has been absolutely nuts. I'm half way through the second year of my BA Hons Photography degree and I'm still trying to get over how much has changed since the start of this semester, even just photographically/artistically speaking. It was only about 6 months ago that I started thinking about giving up on the course and potentially even the medium, thinking it was only about observation and documentation. However this semester I got the chance to open the taps on the kind of work I've been suppressing for the best part of a year.

The concept behind this project is one which I care a lot about. Basically it revolves around ideas of potential and aspiration. Some would call it 'dreaming' but I feel dreaming holds a different meaning from what I'm trying to do but more on that in part two. At the time I starting pulling this project together, back during the summer break 2011, I was thinking alot about how those ideas applied to me at the time. It seemed that as you grew up through childhood and adolescence you always had those layers of protection, whether it would be parents or high school teachers or other sort of role models, but at some point you'll hit a stage were, if you want to get to were you want to be you have to cut away from those and step out on your own. So that's were this theme of 'Hope Through Severance' came from and this is how my brain translated those ideas visually:

Now at the time of making that concept sketch it was summer, I had no deadlines or expectations and I spent some time and asked myself, "What would I do if money or time or anything else wasn't an issue? What would you make if nothing was holding you back?" and it was this kind of high production work with photography. Physically speaking the idea for this image kind of like a hot air balloon only with giant, 6ft diameter helium balloons used instead of the hot air setup, floating a person in a basket over a lough at 1300ft above sea level in the middle of the Mourne Mountains. The body of water I had in mind was Lough Shannagh, a beautiful landscape with a great view of Silent Valley Resevoir in the background and Carlingford Lough beyond that. The reason I was so specific with this location wasn't just out of a whim but from another question I asked myself. "So if you have to leave this behind [my hometown/Northern Ireland], what place would you feel the most loss for?" and it was this place. A couple of people have asked me why I didn't just use my actual, physical home as the location but I didn't feel the same sense of attatchment to it that I do with the Mourne Mountains. I guess they're a place that, for me, don't have any tainted experiences attatched. I'm up there amoung them quite frequently, the people at home would say I basically live in them but it they are beautiful.

I never intended on actually executing something as big as this, like I said I was only 'dreaming' during that summer, coming up with ideas that i could do in an ideal set of circumstances, being as ambitious as I could with what was in my head. However during one of our seminars with Donovan Whylie in uni he asked the class to stop, close our eyes (he does this a lot in classes :) ) and think about our work on its most basic level. He told us to write down our 3 most favourite photographers and an idea that you would love to do, a body of work we would dream of making. He wanted to do this to get a feel of were we're at with figuring out our 'vision' as he calls it, you can tell a lot by asking those two things. Though it was literally what I was doing just a month or two before during the summer. I had my answers already together in my little journal/my head. "Tim Walker, Gregory Crewdson and Knick Knight" and this "Hope Through Severance" idea. I never really thought I could use something like it for a uni project and it was sort of shelved under "I'll do that when I'm 30 and have lots of money etc. etc." He got a hold of my concept sketch at the end of class as everyone was leaving and proceeded to tear through my workings for the project to see if I was serious about it. I had done some scouting and some sums beforehand to see if it was actually possible to do it and it was, he saw that and before I knew it he had told me "You're doing this, now."

Skip forward 2 months of planning, logistics, finding suppliers crazy enough to give me a discount, working around many problems in the physics and design of the actual balloon/rig/basket setup and finding a crew willing to freeze their backsides off in the middle of the Mourne Mountains and I find myself on-location with £1.5k and months of preparation sitting, failing infront of me

There was a lot of uncertainty in this production, some things we couldn't plan for because we simply didn't know anyone who had done something like this before to tell us what problems to look out for. One of the main factors was wind. 25mph winds (at sea level) on the forecasts mean nothing to you until you have one of those balloons of that size up there going sideways. Not to mention the elevation that came up from Silent Valley Resevoir, cranking the winds further up towards probably 35-40mph gusts. Add to that a bunch of crew dropping out last minute and an unknown amount of forces from that wind that would have been acting on the airborne rig with the surface area of a gallion sail and it becomes uncertain whether we would have been able to control it/stop it dragging us into the aforementioned lough/stop it breaking free and venturing into CAA airspace and it gets to a point were you just have to try (and possibly fail) in order to learn. It was hard having to walk onto a shoot with those pretty crucial uncertainties as before you could always sit back and know you had everything perfected in your head. But I've learnt a lot from this and even though I lost a 5th of the budget and wasted a bunch of time to this failure and I by no means was giving up.

Go to Part Two.

BOUNDARIES

2011-12-25T23:53:00.002Z

Hey guys! I have a new project up on cargocollective called "Bounderies". It's different from my usual (I don't normally do narrative documentary) but it's on something that means a lot to me. A transition, some adventure and happiness. I walked into the project with just the intention of photographing a hobby but it unraveled in a way I wasn't anticipating :)

Let me know what you think, it was ally fun just to relax and go back to just taking simple photos again. A good reset :)