Title: Desolate Farmhouses

Description: This project is about the demise of farming in the west of Ireland through the ruins that are left behind when there is no family left to repurpose the land. This project is about the aftermath, the dilapidation, and the ruin of the farmhouse. It’s a typology of my surrounding area and a collection of abandoned houses, not precious enough to be maintained, too sentimental to be knocked.

Artists Statement: This project has become very personal to me from thinking about what these houses represent and how they come to be abandoned. With the help of my father travelling to these locations, I got a sense of the deceased people who used lived there. Many of the houses in my area my father knew of and had stories about the people who lived there. It also leads me to think about my own situation. In my father’s generation the farm used to be handed down to the older members of the family. A prized possession entrusted to the eldest in the family. In my generation the farm is now earmarked for the youngest in the family and seen more as burden than a prize. With farming seen as unprofitable business expect for large-scale farms and an industry supported by EU grants. Being the youngest in the family I feel like it’s my reasonability to maintain and respect the land in which I was raised.

In this project I wish to highlight the dying nature of farming, I wanted to shoot the houses as a distance because I wanted to place them in relation to the land. The personal nature of the project drove me to dedicate myself to finding new houses and create a narrative through photography. Which was my original goal when thinking of an idea. I have gone a long way but have come back to the original starting point with a finished body of work.

Tomorrow is going to be a really busy day. I still have to decide what is the  theoretical context behind the images. I’m planning to read extensively throughout tomorrow to come up with a compelling viewpoint to go with the images. Will be up early to post a few more topics but thought I’d share the images first!

I’ve been kinda struggling with the distance I’m stood back and also maintaining similar weather conditions. The final two images are old photos that I’ll need to rescan/reshoot.

While Ed Ruscha did the original Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, pictured below. There are many more artists who copied and put their own spin on the idea. I decided to use something that was abundant to me and that would cover a smaller geographical area for the sake of logistics.

Ed Ruscha - 

http://www.edruscha.com/

Eric Tabuchi 

http://www.erictabuchi.fr/index.php?/editions/twentysix-abandoned-gasoline-stations/

Jeff Brouws - 

http://www.jeffbrouws.com/series/main_tags.html

Why do I like these photos? 

There are a few things I like about this style and type of photography. The uniformity appeals to me, the notion that there are similar objects/structures that are seen and have an effect on people’s life but are different and not in the same location.

In photographing these locations you have to travel. I love traveling and I love finding new places that I’ve not seen before. Finding a new location that suits my project and results in a good photograph gives me a sense of achievement that is different from just seeing something spontaneously and taking a photograph. I’ve really enjoyed doing this project so far and I’ve rediscovered my love for landscape photography.

I really love this project by Alexander Gronsky. He situates himself on the outskirts of Moscow, in areas that are in between rural and urban. Gronsky divides the distinctions of Rural and Urban and creates a kinda no man’s land between the two. I found this idea really interesting and it was something I want to touch on in my project as well. I feel like I deal with this issue myself where I live because I feel like I don’t live far enough away to be considered rural but not near enough to cities/towns to be considered urban.

As well as this project, Gronsky has some amazing projects which I loved. One called ‘Endless Night’ focusing on the town of Mumansk behind the Arctic circle where each winter the night is 2 months long. It really lives up to it’s title of Endless Night and it features portraits as well as landscapes of the surrounding. I’d love to shoot somewhere like this one day, in a world alien to my own.

I came across Gal Harpaz when I was researching into the possibility of using panoramics in my project. While this wasn’t really feasible because I felt that I didn’t really have the subjects to shoot, I did like the idea and it will be something that I will maybe come back to in the future. Harpaz uses polaroids and merges them together to create this images. I found this was really interesting in the way that the images are bound together and the colours/aesthetic are really strong to me.

Here was one I tried just for the sake of it.

While it was interesting and informative to document the farm, and also go through all the land which include woods/stone quarry/sloping fields. It wasn’t really a project and there was a major split in the previous shoot I had done and the late shots.  I think it was just something I had to rule out, as the project interested me but I don’t think it was suitable for this current project.

My other idea was shooting the abandoned farmhouses in the style of Ed Ruscha and Twenty Six Gasoline Stations. I like the idea of cataloguing these farmhouses but I found it difficult to find the right framing/composition. I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to shoot until I had developed and scanned all of my work from the weekend. Here are some of the scans showing what I was trying out and also the final framing I was thinking about settling on.

(Apologies for bundling all the images together but wordpress wouldn’t let me make two galleries, but landscape = project that isn’t going to work. Buildings = Project I’ve settled on and the wide shot of the building is the style I’m going to shoot in.)

Questions (Things I need to figure out)

1. How do I want the viewer to feel when looking at the images?

2. Goal for my next shoot?

3. What is the aesthetic of the photos going to be? 

Tasks (Things I need to do)

1. Read up on Irish identity and Irish landscape

2. Read about Jackie Nickerson and her surrounding work

3. Research Simon Burch

4. Look up written pieces by Justin Carville, Luke Gibbons and Raymond Williams on landscape photography.

5. Research landscape photography/photographers.

6. Look over catalogue again to determine a better direction before going home to shoot Saturday.

I have scouted 6 locations now total, 4 of which I’m happy with. Ideally I’d like to find 8 locations I’m happy with, so if I want to go the topographical route, I wouldn’t have to repeat images of the same locations. The locations have been surprisingly easy to come by, although some of them are on roads not even on google maps. My parents have been a great help in identifying locations to look at, as well as supplementary information on each spot.

Here are some of the shots from Tuesday!