From landscape photography to scale model building

At the moment, and as part of my master’s degree in photography, I’m working on a project around places and memories. How memories are perceived, preserved, and fabricated.

Ten participants in this art project have supplied me with a location to which they hold memories. I will photograph the place and then re-imagine that location as if it were a scenography in a stage play. As such exploring the fabrication of memories.

I’ll dive in at the deep end and build miniature set models that I will in turn re-photograph. Further on - these miniature and landscape photos will be combined with portraits of the person holding the memory. Forming a whole, hopefully helping me to reflect upon the subjectivity of memories.

The project will take the form of an exhibition and ‘zine published early November. I will document and share the process through YouTube and other social media. If you find that kind of thing interesting and you’d like to lay your hands on a copy of the zine, and even attend the exhibition, you can engage through Patreon. Until August 31st there’s a limited number of Founding member spots available.

In this video I’ll take you through the process of shooting, being a novice at model building, and sharing the images made this far.

V is the daughter of two friends that I’ve known for about thirty years. When I asked if she wanted to take part in the project she immediately decided that her location would be based around her late grandparents’ summer house where she had spent every summer since birth. She pointed me to this jetty on the outer coastline.

 My university tutor has repeatedly told me to keep it simple. That’s not a very strong asset of mine. Cas Holman (in the Abstract Netflix series) stated that “Easy is boring”. I know that “easy” and “simple” are not necessarily synonymous, but yeah… My creativity thrives on the permiter of what I know and can do.

The idea to make set models wouldn’t have to translate literally to exactly that, since the end goal is the photograph. But here I am tinkering with a stage solution that has a revolving jetty and a connected archipelago (aar-kuh-peh-luh-gow) island.

I made a sketch in Blender from which I also pulled the modeled rocks for 3D printing.

I quite enjoyed the process of transmediating the actual scene through the two-dimensional photograph, through the “virtual” three dimensions of Blender, and then finally adding the aspect of scale when constructing the miniature.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve watched sooo many YouTube tutorials on model building, diorama construction, and woodworking in general. It’s impressive how many talented people are out there.

The main thing I’m taking away is that wood glue and water mixed in different proportions can be used for almost anything; Glue (of course), Sealer, Varnish, Chewing gum… Highly versatile.

If you’re very observant (which I do trust you are), you can see that the land piece holding the rocks and the jetty is not the foam board I cut out earlier. That didn’t hold its shape very well when I painted it and added some surface texture. The solution is this laminated piece of balsa wood.

Going back to the “keep it simple”-part… This assembly would have been so much easier if it didn’t involve moving parts. But. Again. “Easy is boring”.

So that’s one part of one participant’s memory. Nine more locations are in the works. If you wanna keep up with the work I’m doing around photography, art, and research - stick around this YouTube channel, keep an eye on my Instagram and maybe join the crew over at Patreon.

Talk to you soon!

Hej då, kompis!