Mariam Mandour

Assignment 6:

The Establishing shot

For my photo Essay, I am considering documenting the lives of people who live on Qorsaya Island. Qorsaya Island is a Nile Island situated in the Cairo metropolitan area along the western Nile bank, close to Dahab Island and south of Roda Island. This Island is the home to generations of farmers and fishermen, and it is mostly grass and agricultural land. To go there, you have to use the river ferry, and there is no car transportation there; there is only donkeys, bicycle, or by foot. 

I want to document how they live and what there is to see there. I want others to see what it is like to live on an Island next to the river. 

This idea interests me and, hopefully, others because it is very different from what we usually see, especially for people who live in Cairo. The people who live there on Qorsaya Island have a contrasting life to us people for lives in Cairo. 

I know that in my photo essay, I want to document it from the start; the river ferry that I will have to take to go there. Portraits of kids that live on the Island, the farmers, the grass and agriculture land, and even the trash in the Nile. 

Photo 1 link: https://www.lensculture.com/explore/award-winners/portrait-awards-2023?modal=johannes-schembs-the-winner-of-portrait-awards-2023

Photo 2 link: https://cairostudentphotography.weebly.com/uploads/6/8/3/7/68370099/dsc-0566.jpg

For this part, I chose a photo by the photographer Johannes Schembs and an image by the student Alia Abou Ahmed; both are photos from a photo series.

I chose these pictures because visually both are very similar, but after understanding them and reading about them, they are very different. Starting off, they are both under the same photography genre, which is portrait. Both of them are created in a very creative and unique way. 

When I first saw these pictures, I thought they used the same technique, and after my research, I was right. They both used the double exposure tool. They overlaid two pictures together. For Johannes Schembs, he overlaid two pictures of two sisters together to make one picture. If you look closer, you can actually see that there are two people in the photo and not one. We can detect that because of the different clothe and because one of the sisters has a nose piercing and the other does not. As for Alia Abou Ahmed, she overlaid two pictures of herself, one wearing a mask and the other she doesn’t. 

I think Schembs's usage of this technique was mainly to use the old process of collodion wet plate photography, but as for Abou Ahmed, it had a meaning. 

Abou Ahmed used this technique to express the feeling of anxiety. She used herself because she feels anxious in stressful situations, and so she wanted to share with others how anxiety feels for her. 

So, mainly they both used the same technique, photography genre, but for very different reasons; each had his own message or purpose. However, they are very creative, unique and visually appealing. 

If there anything I would have done differently or improve is: 

How and why the picture I chose is an influential in photographic history:

The photo I choose to recreate is a photograph by Garry Winogrand. The picture itself does not have a name, but it was taken in New York in the year 1968 and was printed in 1981. It is a 33 x 22 cm photograph. 

This photograph is considered influential in photographic history because of Garry Winogrand’s concept. The background behind this picture is what genuinely matters; looking at the picture, we only see a woman walking. After researching the photographer, I found out that this picture is one of the 85 pictures included in his series “Women are Beautiful” that were taken from the year 1960 to the year 1975. via his portraits of females who serve as a symbol of women’s empowerment and new positions in the world, he was able to record the social change of females in the 1960s and 1970s like no other artist. (Bunyan, 2022)

Garry Winogrand also influenced photography today because, somehow, his photographs presented a new style, which we now call street photography. In his pictures, he shows the real world without any touch-ups or ideas added; he photographs what he sees. (Bunyan, 2022)

He had a way of taking people’s pictures. He did not create a scene where the images or the subjects would look good; he intruded on their space to make it more real. We could somehow see that in his picture from the subject’s face and reaction; we could see how shocked they were. (The Art Story, 2017)

Photo 1: Rule of Thirds

Photo 2: Negative Space

Photo 3: Shape

Photo 4: Color

Photo 5: Texture

Photo 6: Frame in Frame

Photo 7: Light

Photo 8: Close up

Photo 8: Medium Shot

Photo 8: Full Shot

Reflection:

How can composition transform an object?

Photo 2, Negative Space

Photo 5, Color

Photo 6, Frame in frame

Photo 7, Light

Photo 8, Close up

Photo 8, Medium Shot

The image I choose for Icon is by the photographer Noureddiine Air Mouden, and it is called “All things that have meaning, Own the short age.” When I saw the picture I found that it is different, it is not what I was used to see which made me attracted to it. I do not usually see bouquet of flowers in picture but I do found it a lot in paintings, and that is why I think this photograph is iconic. The flowers and how it is used is what makes this photo different. The pictures in this picture looks a lot like the flowers in the painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir “Bouquet of Roses”.

Why the photograph reminds me of this painting is because of the colors, the orange-ash color that is presented in both art works. After I researched the photograph I found out that this style of photograph is very known and I found similar photographs using the same technique. 

For Myth, I chose a photo of the photographer Matthew Abbott; the photograph was for National Geographic and Panos Pictures. It is called Saving Forests with Fire. When I first saw the picture, I thought nothing other than that a family was moving away from a fire. I wanted to know and understand better about the picture, so when I noticed the title of this picture, Saving forests with fire, I was confused. How can someone save something by starting a fire, especially knowing about the incident in the Australian forest and the fire that happened? After reading the story behind this picture, I learned that over thousands of years, Indigenous Australians routinely burnt territory deliberately to preserve their habitat. Cool burning is a technique where flames burn only the vegetation and clear out the accumulation of fuel that fuels larger fires. As a result, during the drier, hot season of the year, this customary burning help to avert more extensive, more devastating fires. Why I think it is a myth? I think it is a myth because when a person that has no knowledge about the cool burning tradition that the Indigenous Australians have, they would instantly think that the fire is happening in the forest, and that is why the families are leaving. It is a myth because, in reality, starting a fire in the forest is a good thing to avoid a much bigger fire and that the families we see in the picture helped start this fire hence the woods they have. You would not know that from seeing the picture; you would only know such information when reading about the concept. In other words, this image shows the moment but not the reality. 

For representation, I choose a picture by the Egyptian Photographer Mennatallah Khaled.  When I first saw the picture, the first thing that got to me was the use of color. This photo is beautiful to the eye, but when I read the description I loved it even more. The artist decided to present an important topic that is hard to discuss in Egypt because of how people view mental illness; in Egypt the society see people with mental illness as a weak people when in reality it is a lot more than that. Through her work, she raises awareness about her condition: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This photograph shows a girl and her shadow in different light colors. Still, if we look closely and research the photographer's background, we then can see that these different shadow colors present the distinct personality that the subject has. Each color represent a different symptom for the subject. She examines and reveals the worries, emotions, and dreams of people with borderline personality disorder. What I also love about this picture is the use of negative space, she choose to only focus of the subject face and the colored faces. I think that is because all our mental illness happen because of our brains, how it function. After researching I found that it is now shadows but she projected a picture behind the girl to show as mentioned before the different symptoms of the mental illness BPD. I love her artistic choices, and I loved how she used the Background picture.

Photo 7-> 55mm: (SS-> 1/500) (A-> F11)

Photo 7-> 35mm: (SS-> 1/500) (A-> F11)

Photo 6-> Sunlight: (SS-> 1/1000) (A-> F8)

Photo 5-> Level: (SS-> 1/250) (A-> F11)

Photo 5-> Above: (SS-> 1/500) (A-> F8)