Roland Tiangco

This is an incredible repurposing of print media. Click here to check it out.

Test Images

Here are two scanned 4x5 negatives to get the gist of what I'm going for with this final project.

Personifying Space

After a week of studying the work of Julius Shulman, I'm thinking of shifting my focus for the final project. I've been shooting tons of 4x5 tests to practice Zone System-conscious exposures and development, and the usual subject matter consists of a room or space that I augment with light. Seeing Shulman's work really grabbed me and helped me realize that I really liked how light and space were creating their own meaning in my photos. I want to take the compositional stillness of Shulman photographs and fuse them with some kind of ephemeral light source to recontextualize them--I guess "narrative architectural photography" would be the term.

I'm not sure if I'm not making sense any more, but hopefully the pictures will speak for themselves once I shoot them. For now, here are two from Julius:

 

Weekend - Coma Summer

Three Years Out

In a strange fit of nostalgia, I decided to visit my old high school last weekend. I brought a Toyo field camera to document the experience. I hadn't been back since I graduated three years ago; that's just long enough to forget a lot of things, but being back in that environment reminded me of everything I encountered when I was there.

These images are an attempt to refamiliarize myself with my alma mater, but more specifically to isolate the places I frequented most on campus and capture them within a new frame of mind. All of these seem to give off an air of loneliness, and it isn't necessarily because there are no people in the photographs. The stillness of each image reflects a personal solitude that I employed throughout my high school years.

Wye Oak - For Prayer

Prints From Assignment #2 (Long Exposure)

Prints From Assignment #1 (Voyeurism)

Thoughts on Crewdson

In thinking of my final project, I inevitably end up on a narrative track. This comes from a background in film history and the idea that a single image, if properly executed, can elicit certain expectations and emotions while at the same time asking the viewer to participate in the image and to create meaning for his or herself. On a fundamental level, we don't need expository information to understand the human condition.

I find a lot of my inspiration in Gregory Crewdson's work because it fuses the narrative sentimentalities of cinema with the emotional stillness and subtlety of a single image. Crewdson just exhibited a new project, titled "Sanctuary," in which he photographed the backlots of the legendary Italian film studio Cinecitta in Rome. Federico Fellini, Roberto Rosellini, Sergio Leone and countless other legendary filmmakers utilized these spaces while making amazing films, and many of these sets still live on the Cinecitta grounds, deteriorating with no hope of reconstruction or maintenence. The series (or what I could see of it), which consists of empty set pieces and facades, juxtaposes the solitude of the abandoned spaces with the viewer's imagination of how many stories were created on those grounds in the past.

There is a feeling of grandeur that comes in fictionalizing real events for lack of hard evidence. Just like the layman's romantic perceptions of Hollywood as a factory of dreams, we tend to glorify the production of these great films just as much as the films themselves. In reality, making movies can be hard, unrelenting work; essentially unionized, blue collar manual labor--not unlike construction in certain aspects. For someone who has experience working in film or even understanding the workings of a film set, these pictures serve a secondary purpose. Each of the photos in "Sanctuary" displays a kind of emtpiness and deterioration, and because of this a few of the pictures replicate images of post-war Europe, as if they could be printed in a World War II history book. I find this particularly interesting because they almost suggest that the making of a movie is not unlike going into battle. I could be going out on a limb, but the idea of executing plans and strategies, gathering a team of, in many cases, strangers and bringing them together to achieve a goal through physical taxation and emotional strain seems very much akin to directing a film.

Regardless, Crewdson has an eye for spatial understanding, and it really shows in these works. These images conjure endless stories and histories about a time and place that I, personally, could not have experienced firsthand, and they also serve to remind us that nothing can escape the effects of time.

Here's a link to a handful shots from "Sanctuary:" http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-09-23_gregory-crewdson/#/images/1/

Cloudy with a Chance of Portraiture

Here are a few 120 shots from a roll of Kodak Portra VC 400. This was early morning on a really overcast day; the light was nice and soft.

I've noticed that shooting with the vivid color Portra stock under less contrasty conditions under softer sources makes things look more "natural" than the natural color Portra stock does.

Woods - Rain On

10 Photorealistic Painters

These are incredibly detailed pieces. Check out the set here.