Analogue Photography Outing; The Door

This shoot is of a door from the salvage yard at Whitby. I conceived the idea originally to say something about the environment. That it is not us our selves, but the environment that shapes and defines us.

In the end the pictures said something about the passage of time, how we can go from one place to the next and close the door on the past as if it was never there.

I used a model for this shoot where originally, when I conceived the idea for shooting a door, I was only going to shoot an inanimate object, the door itself, as my main subject.

This formed part of the process as originally I had intended to work fully independent of anybody else.

It was very important to get a door with a frame attached to it. I was lucky. I set out to get one like that because I wanted to say something about how the environment shapes us, and if we change the environment, we change ourselves, I wanted to take the inside, out, to demonstrate this point.

These are multiple exposures shot on Ilford HP 400 black & White film, developed and printed with chemicals onto silver gelatine paper.

The old fashioned way is softer, you are not staring at hard edged pixels but the infinite analog production of film photography, although these images obviously are digital scans I wanted to use an analogue medium that reflected the infinite story of time.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ikuo1/albums/72157652005729809

Door

Vicky going through The Door

Door Time Travel

Vicky through The Door

Cyber-tron Dress Future

Remote Control Dress by Hussein Chalayan

"Remote Control"

Designer: Hussein Chalayan (British, born Cyprus, 1970)

Date: spring/summer 2000, edition 2005

Culture: British

Medium: a,c) fiberglass, metal; b) cotton, synthetic

Dimensions: Length at CB (a): 37 in. (94 cm)
Length at CB (b): 22 in. (55.9 cm)
Height (c): 9 1/2 in. (24.1 cm)

Credit Line: Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2006

Accession Number: 2006.251a–c

Description

Hussein Chalayan's collections are an articulation of his immediate conceptual and philosophical preoccupations as well as his fascination with materials and techniques as they might be applied to his métier. Chalayan is an artist whose extraordinary intellectual rigor is supported by an equally vigorous pursuit of perfected technique. Engaged by issues of gender, politics, science, nature, and history, Chalayan informs his presentations with designs that are often less apparel than sculpture. Typically, he presents iconic dress forms as actors, as in his meditation and commentary on the burkha, transforming what is ordinarily a commercial presentation into a performance piece or installation art.

This dress is an edition of one that was first shown in Chalayan's spring/summer 2000 collection. Like the original, it is made of a composite material created from fiberglass and resin cast in a specially designed mold. Also like the original, it has side and rear flaps that open to reveal a mass of frothy pink tulle. While these flaps are operated manually in this model, in the original they were operated mechanically by remote control. The prototype was itself a permutation of two earlier models in which Chalayan explored ideas about the relationship between nature, culture, and technology. Chalayan's description of all three models as "monuments"—that is to say, "monuments to ideas"—is as much a comment about his process as his practice of design.