Del Norte Book /  by ellie berry

Last summer I walked 1,100km through France and Spain. 

Over the past few months I've made a small book of the photographs I made while away. Who knew that the walking would be the easy part! 

I spend several morning, afternoons, and evenings in college staring at different line-ups of similar sequences, trying to understand how exactly it is you make a book. Deciding on one image can take all day, and a week later that same picture is in the trash pile and there's a completely different and possibly better flow to the piece. 
I learnt that time away from your own work is very necessary. Some images that you love realistically are not the best for the piece. There is still one (and a half) photographs that I wish had made it into the book.

For the printing of the main book I worked with Ex Why Zed, a zine printers based in the UK. The information about InDesign and types of paper, folding, bleeds, etc. on their website is fantastic. It gave me the power to work through everything myself. Who knew an image changed so drastically when you convert it to CMYK? 

The wrapping around my book contains all the stamps I collected as part of the Camino pilgrimage. Finding a place that could print affordably onto tracing paper took some time but eventually I had a light-bulb moment - a blueprinting lab. 

The blue band holding the book and tracing paper wrap together is card I had cut and glued, with embossing from the thesis printing centre down the road. 

If you feel like buying one, go over here!

Here's a flick-though of the first few pages:

Film Stills Fun with The Screaming Skull /  by ellie berry

ellieberryfilmstill

A week and a bit ago, I had the pleasure of shooting some film stills for The Screaming Scull, a grad project for Film & TV at IADT. Shot as a live TV broadcast (one continuous take) the drama is based on a supposedly true ghost story from England at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fearing he is being haunted, a retired sailor calls on the help of his daughter, a detective's secretary, to solve the mystery. 

New Climbing Website! /  by ellie berry

Hello! 

For a while I've been feeling like this site is getting a little cluttered, and so I am super excited to say that this morning I built a separate sit for all 'Climbing and the Outdoors' photography I do. That's not to say a small bit won't still crop up on this side, but now everything is starting to feel a little less claustrophobic. 

I chose the name allezberry  originally as a twitter handle; because 'allez' means 'go', and is a very popular climbing phrase of encouragement in the climbing world. Also, it sounds a bit like 'ellie'. Now I use it for multiple platforms, and so I thought it fitting name for a new website.

This website isn't going anywhere. It's going to remain my 'personal' site, with all the non-climbing work I create on it. The only changes will be me finishing the spring clean so the place has a flow to it. 

So go flick through the galleries on the new site (click the image above) and tell me what you think! 

Visually Pleasing /  by ellie berry

Another blog of interesting things I have seen recently.
I find myself having evenings where half the art world seems to be connecting with me. It could possibly be related to the fact that I have started creating work again (the end of the thesis tunnel is visible), and just feel overly motivated. Whatever the case, I'm cool with it. 

Daisuke Yokota: Colour Photographs

"With this series, as Yokota explains, he “tried not to take pictures,” and instead sought to “draw out the physical aspect of film.” Yokota layered sheets of unused large format color film and applied unorthodox developing methods before scanning the results. Here, documentation is replaced with darkroom alchemy in order to show that the essence of photography rests not necessarily with the camera, but in film itself."

 Source.

Lars Mortensen - In Search of Habitat

"In Search of Habitat looks at the expansion of Indian cities. Like in other Asian countries, this expansion is quite rapid and disruptive, but what is more interesting is how ambiguous and contradictory it often proves to be. Unfinished building sites, a permanent insufficiency of infrastructures and the so-called ‘slum rehabilitation schemes’ – which are sometimes more harmful than useful – are just a few examples of the contradictions in the India’s development. So the series is about the country’s promise of modernity or, more precisely, the discrepancy between the promise and the reality.

The In Search of Habitat book offers two parallel narratives of this development: 45 photographs and an essay on urban planning and geography. Together they expand and inform one another, the essay explaining mechanisms the images cannot show, and vice versa. My ambition has been to capture a glimpse of what these emerging cities look like and how the so-called New India is actually materializing. But, of course, my work only shows an absolutely tiny bit of that reality."

Source.

INTERVIEW WITH PAINTER, CESAR BIOJO

"How did you get started doing what you do?
Painting for me has never been something I started at some point; it has always been a part of me. I have been painting ever since I was able to hold something in my hand. During my student years, I did all the wondering and experimentation that every student does, and should do. I went through a period where I swore I would never paint figurative again, since it was only a display of talent and the true form of “reality” (if it even exists) must be something abstract to the human brain. Later I had to swallow my words when I felt that in order to study human nature I had to use the body as a reference to address the subject. So I went back to figurative, but the result of it was the very thing I had sworn to avoid- a display of talent and nothing else. Being terribly frustrated with the result, I ran a spatula through the painting to start it over, and the result was a phantasmagorical image of a human being that was there, and at the same time wasn’t. I fell in love with the idea of creating a character to later destroy it leaving behind an evidence. I became addicted to the necessity of partially erasing my characters. I feel it is the most respectful, sensible, and accurate representation of human nature.

How would you describe your creative style?
I define my work as the compilation of controlled accidents and I would say it is highly influenced by impressionism, and abstract expressionism. Although my painting is about humans, I have discovered recently that the main characters of my work are not humans, per se, but the “accident” and “time” as concepts. Regarding my style, I would not really know how to describe it. I think the definition of a style is a bit creative incarceration.

What’s your inspiration?
Inspiration, I believe, is a concept a bit overrated in the artistic community. I will not deny it for everybody, but it does not exist for me. I like better the word “motivation.” There are images, splatters on the ground, ideas, the work of other painters, music, my studio, and many other things that will get me going. Motivation can come from any source, I have even gotten the need to paint from watching a pile of garbage, but again for me it is “motivation.” Inspiration is for amateurs, professionals show up to work, as Chuck Close kindly put it."

Unleashed Pleasures /  by ellie berry

How can we work towards an active, critical understanding of the prevailing conventions of representation, particularly those surrounding photography? The discourse that surrounds photography speaks paradoxically of discipline and freedom, of rigorous truths and unleashed pleasures. 

Allan Sekula - Opening lines to The Traffic in Photographs