As a final touch to the Vanitas project, I made a rostrum video project which I have now uploaded on to Youtube. You can see all of my Video work on Youtube under the Hullympian, please feel free to comment.

In Conclusion

Well in conclusion, what can I say about the idea of Vanitas?

I personally believe that the idea of vanitas as a specific art form is more then likely a practice of the fine arts rather then photography. (..not to say that photography is not fine art...) As an area of photography in particular, I think that there are better ways of portraying matters of life and death or related issues then making a study of still life in the studio. That is in essence the advantages of being a photographer.

As a photographer, instead of spending hours in the studio creating a composition it is possible to get out into the world and create works that show the reality of the human condition as experienced every day. And the real world is surely the ultimate expression of life and death.

(Eddie Adams picture of the execution of a viet cong suspect )

Photographic images of real life will always more enlightening with regards to life and death then any painting or studio images could ever be... Robert Capa's famous image of the dying soldier in the spanish civil war, The work of Weegee in the 1930's, News reports of the vietam war, the falling man from 911. Even the mobile phone video of Sadam Hussain being hanged.

So what my conclusion is regarding Vanitas, is that as an art form I think it is of its time. In the 17th century oil on canvas was the digital camera of the day, so vanitas developed as a genre to express views and feelings of life and death as suited to that media. But as an idea the meaning of vanitas in art, what ever the medium is, will live on.

As photographers we have an excellent medium in which to express these ideas by showing the real world of life and death.

I would like to revisit this again, especially the environmental themes... but not in the 17th century style.

Final Shoot.

So after the disappointment of my second shoot, I needed another plan of action. I still wanted to look at environmental issues, but needed a different approach. In the end I decided to look at the human impact on our environment at a more personal and local level. I went out with a couple of carrier bags and collected litter and rubbish that was just lying about.

I found bottles, cans, crisp packets, a pile of rubble, and an old umbrella. I did draw the line at picking up used nappies of which I spotted three of.

The idea of the picture was to create a landscape made of refuse and rubbish while the image of the earth floated in the sky.

I set the scene up on the floor on a black sheet I had, using an old cardboard box to give some elevation. Again, I used my video lights, so I could see the lighting as I was setting up the shot.

(...A quick shot of how I set my scene up on the floor of my studio space...)

In addition to my pile of rubbish, I used some of the leaves, fallen fruit and dead flowers again.. And also a couple of weeds I pulled and some Ivy.

I also used some torn pages out of the atlas and burned the edges to represent damage to the planet, and once again used the cut out of earth in the background.

Lighting was a bit difficult, as there were many shadows from the objects in the scene and in the end I ended up having the key light above and in front, and to light the planet I used a little hand held torch so that I didn't create any light spill on to the background.

Once I was happy, it was just a question of a few minor compositional adjustments, and getting the right exposure which was 1 second at ISO400 f/16

I did use slight camera movements to help with the depth of the scene, a slight front tilt forward and a little twist to the left as you look at the image.

(...My final image after some slight level correction in post production...)

Overall I think I have achieved an interesting result, and have met my personal goal of highlighting ecological issues. I will always look upon this image as a compromise, due to the poor results of my second shoot. Once again, this may be something I will come back to at a later date, however I may develop this idea and consider trying something similar on location.

Second Shoot

So for my second shoot I wanted to take the principles of vanitas and try to apply them to present day issues. The issue I chose to look at was climate change and the environment.
For this shoot I wanted to highlight the melting ice caps and rising sea levels, so it is for this shoot that I wanted to use my frozen skulls.
I purchased an out of date world atlas for £1.50 from a charity shop and cut out a few of the maps and things to use in the shoot.
I wanted to show the ice skull melting and dripping into water with the maps showing under the water and a picture view of the earth in the black sky.
I suspended the skull using a bent wire hook and fishing wire. and used some double sided tape to stick the picture of planet earth to the black backdrop.
The difficulty I had was getting the Ice skulls to hang correctly, whilst at the same time to get it to stay still long enough to get a reasonable exposure as every time I tried to adjust anything it kept swinging.
Unfortunately I was unable to get the picture before the hole in the skull I was using to hang it melted through and it fell.. I tried various other shots but i was not very happy with the results.
Next I used the second smaller skull that I made but I had the same problems again so in the end I abandoned the idea of the frozen skulls.

(....This is the best shot from my first frozen skull. I had to really burn in the background in order to make this work. It was just after this that it fell and broke.)

(....This is the best of the images using my second frozen skull, but still not good enough...)

I did try some compositions using the ordinary skulls as well, including some experiments in using 3 skulls and the planet which were interesting, but not what I was looking for...

(...Here is one of the images using the 3 skulls that I did...)

I did get some interesting results using a cd sleeve on which I drew a crude skull with a black marker. I then held that in front of my light source to cast a skull like shadow over my cut out earth and then had a dead flower in front of it as well..

(...I did like the idea of this image, but I didn't feel that it was just quite good enough,

especially the skull shadow could have been better...)

After 4 hours I gave up and decided to start again..

In conclusion for this shoot I do think the actual idea of the ice skulls was good. In practice, it was handling the ice that proved difficult. Some of the other Ideas I came up with were also worth exploring at a later date..

I do think that one day I will come back to this but having learned some valuable lessons...

Modern Vanitas

Vanitas - Scott Fraser 2003

Vanitas in the modern era is not as popularly understood as it was 300 years ago. I think this is probably due to our modern day understanding of mortality. Living in the 17th century you hand an average life expectancy of around 40 years, and more then a 50% chance of dying in childhood compared to today.

In fine art vanitas still remains a very much practised art form in it's traditional sense. Although some of the symbolism has changed to reflect the modern era.

What has been interesting is trying to see if vanitas in meaning or in spirit has crossed over into other areas of popular modern culture or media.

In other areas of art and media references can be found that give the same message as both vanitas and momento morte going back to the same time as the original painters were working, especially in literature.

Shakespeare makes references in many of his plays that point towards fragility of life and existence.

There are two famous passages in Hamlet:-

First of all there is Hamlet's Soliloquy.. ''To be or not to be, that is the question''

In which Hamlet considers his whole existence and contemplates suicide.

And then later on there is the famous scene in which Hamlet finds the grave of his father's old court jester of whom he has such fond memories and delivers another famous quote:-

''Alas poor Yoric, I knew him well....''

(American actor Eric Booth playing Hamlet c1870)

There are other writers that have looked at the same themes in their works and touched upon the delicate balance of life and death.. Charles Dickens perhaps in 'A Christmas Carol' and other works, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula and several of the works of Edgar Alan Poe all touch on life, death and mortality to varying degrees.

Later on still, HG Wells uses his early science fiction works to look at the frailty and vulnerability of human life, and humanity as a whole which is then later reinterpreted for the radio, specifically the Mercury Radio Theatre Company production of ''War of the Worlds'' panics the American public into believing there is an actual Martian invasion in progress by performing in the style of a news broadcast.

By this time though I feel the influence of modern living should be looked at again. Infant mortality in the early 2oth century is considerably less then 200 years before, and life expectancy was 20 years more. I believe this has changed how life and death influenced artists and their works. While life is still precious, it is a lot less fragile then it was. And while death was still inevitable, it was lot farther away then it used to be.

This I feel influenced the art and culture of this time into looking at the quality of life rather then the fragility of it. Orson Wells went on to make 'Citizen Kane', a film loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. The film depicts the life story of a Charles Forster Kane, who from his death bed whispers his final word of 'Rosebud' (perhaps symbolic?).

This film specifically sets out to tell it's audience that the accumulation of wealth and power does not equal happiness. Kane dies alone and unhappy, dropping a snow globe (again, is this symbolic, could it be representative of a skull?) and whispering the name of his favourite toy form his childhood..

Another area in which the themes and influences of vanitas have been used in modern times is in modernist anti-war propaganda.

drypoint etching, by Otto Dix titled Stormtroopers advancing under gas attack.

Particularly in this area, the work of John Heartfield and other Dadaist who through AIG magazine attacked Hitler and the NAZI regime by using vanitas themes and symbolism to fortell the coming war.

Hitler the superman by John Heartfield 1932

These types of images and methods have been used successfully later on by other artist for similar purposes, particularly in areas regarding Nuclear proliferation and the cold war.

Defend to Death by Peter Kennard - 1982

Protect and Survive by Peter Kennard - 1981

Even in the commercial world every now and again, the themes of vanitas crop up.. Oliviero Toscani famously developed his campaign under the banner of 'The United Colours of Beneton'.

His initial campaign which played on the use of the word 'colour' using it in its racial context started reasonably low key, but in order to create more impact he switched to using stronger and stronger image, eventually using vanitas symbolism and looking at life and death.

This image of a man dying of aids was used at the request of the family. The pose and serenity of the dying figure uses imagery from vanitas and momento morte.

These images of criminals awaiting execution on death row eventually resulted in Beneton sacking Toscani as they were two shocking for the American public to handle.

In modern popular culture I suppose the modern genre of Horror films is the most likely place to see references to both classical and contemporary theme

s of vanitas. Many of these films are based on the works of Poe, Shelly, and Stoker who originally wrote their stories 150 years before. Every now and then, however, a film does get made in another genre that shows such strong imagery that it would have to be considered as a vanitas piece.

Film Poster of the 1961 film ''The Pit and The Pendulum''

adapted from a story by Edgar Alan Poe

The Steven Spielberg WWII War film, ''Saving Private Ryan'' I think is such a piece because it shows such strong images and in such a way as to mimic the reality of it's time that it must be considered as influenced by vanitas or momento morte.

Scene from ''Saving Private Ryan''

In the end, I think that any art form either commercial or not that gets its audience to consider one's own mortality should be considered either as vanitas or at least influenced by it. I think that was what the original 17th century artists would want.

First Shoot

Having spoken to Mark in order to get some idea of the different contrasting pieces we have to produce, I decided to attempt my first shoot.

I had been into Queens Gardens with a couple of carrier bags and collected up some fallen leaves and some of the windfall crab apples from off the ground.

At home I set up my studio room, with my MPP large format on a tripod, using my adapter plate and canon 5D mk2.

The two main difficulties in using this set up are as follows.

1. While the full frame sensor is the same size as a HD10 the trouble is the crop factor. I have a standard 180mm lens with my mpp, which while that would be an excellent choice for shooting with 5x4 film, the crop factor of using 35mm frame is extreme to say the least. This means that in order to get a reasonable framing of the subject, I had to be as far back in my space as possible... which leads into the second problem...

2. Because I had to position myself so far back in order to frame my subject, I had to focus the camera close to it's infinity setting. (i.e. the lens and the camera sensor were very close together..) This then had an effect on how I was able to apply camera movements due to the fact that the closed up bellows restricted their flexibility.

Snap of how I set up my first vanitas shoot

Having taken this into account, I decided to initially try framing using the sliding camera plate. (using more then one 35mm exposure to create the frame). However I found that this restricted what I could do compositionally...

Next, I used a .25 wide angle adapter on the front of my lens to give a wider field of view. This did work, and i was able to arrange my set in order to create an attractive composition. and shot some exposures working on both positioning the light and the objects.

It was at this point that I felt my composition was lacking in something.. I was using candles, and i had one of my skulls. I felt that the piece needed another more narrative element to suggest some kind of motive for what i was doing...

I looked around the house, and found the prop gun I used from when I was in Calamity Jane at the New Theatre. I placed it into the composition, and immediately i felt it had given the piece a sense of tragic irony. I now looked at the piece and it seemed to say something about violent, perhaps that this was worthless death that was a waste.

The problem with this method was the wide angle adapter I was using was giving quite considerable colour aberrations so the quality of the images were sub standard. I then decided to move the camera to as far back as possible.. and also re-compose the subjects into a tighter group to make the frame.

So after some final slight adjustments to the lights, composition and exposure i settled on my final image composition.

(.....an image shot using the wide angle adapter)

Movements.

I used movements in the camera, at first of all I wanted to use a front tilt backwards in order to put the candles out of focus, but in the end decided to have a slight tilt forward towards the back of the scene in order to help with focusing the foreground.

I took several exposures and eventually settled on one that was taken at 1/6 sec at f/16 with an ISO of 3200.

Canon 5d mk2 set up on rear of MPP 5x4 camera.

Post Production was limited to adjusting levels and I cropped the image at the bottom to eliminate some dead space in the picture.

I think it has turned out relatively satisfactory, and in the end I feel I have produced a high quality image that fulfils the brief and shows a degree of creativity.

While I feel this image does represent a traditional vanitas piece, I think it also has another dimension. The gun not only balances up the composition, it makes the viewer ask questions as to both the meaning of the piece and the identity of the skull.

Ideas developing...

The ideas for my two Vanitas pictures are developing now.. I have successfully created a couple of frozen Ice Skulls which both look great...

Also I saw a friend out last night in a brilliant t-shirt that had a skull over a british flag.. I had an idea about trying to tackle the futility of war in one of my pieces.