Photography: research and writing for Undergraduates

Joseph Nicephore Niepce created the first transmission of an image onto a fixed medium (copper plate) using a camera obscura and a chemical which reacted to light and dark.
  • choose images
    1. explore museum collections
    2.  exhibition catalogues
    3. photography books  on the 4th floor of the library (shelfmarks 770 – 779)
    4.   image databases
    5. something special out of our collection of artists’ books and older books. We picked out these 5 remarkable photography books for you or choose another one from the hundreds of exceptional works available.
  • your emotional responses are valid, important aspects of learning about art “those items which I notice shape my mind– without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” (William James 1890)
    • practice embodied engagements to nurture a connection to the art
      1. what are the first words or sounds which come to mind?
      2. what is your soundtrack for this photograph
      3. if you follow the lines of composition what movement would you dance (go ahead and dance in the library you have permission)
      4. can you imagine a ‘before’ and ‘after’ story
      5. pick a detail and draw it for a closer look at an aspect of the photograph
      6. For an A-Z list of emotions across cultures please see Book of Human Emotions at St. Peters House Library a sampling of which are online thanks to the Guardian.
  • describe the image
    1. Lines, these define visual forms
    2. Shape and space; mechanical perspective is the geometric system of compositional lines giving an appearance of three-dimensional space
    3. Light and dark; relative levels of lightness or darkness of an area are its ‘value’
    4. Colour; tints and shades
    5. Texture
    6. Design — rhythm and repetition; balance; proportion; scale; unity and variety
  • identify the image
    1. what’s the title of the work
    2. who’s the photographer — if it’s anonymous are there any identifying factors which might indicate who the photographer was
    3. why and for whom was the photo taken
    4. how was it taken — are the subjects arranged or spontaneous; is something significant left out of the frame
    5. how was the photograph presented
  • ask yourself questions about the image and pen several possible answers; your hypothesis is a “tentative answer to an interesting research question.”
  • do the research

World Read Aloud Day 2017

http://www.josefcabeyart.com/

It’s World Read Aloud Day!

We trill with happiness when you read to us.Tell us what you’re reading by reading it to us. We like to read to you too. Here are a couple of our picks –

Hannah reading The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
https://mediastream.brighton.ac.uk/Play/7346

Josef reading Basquiat the unknown notebooks

Fiona reading John Cooper Clarke’s I wanna be yours

Robin reading from his book Ninja Dinosaurs vs Pirate Robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSnPyvYN6qE&feature=youtu.be

Lisa reading from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Lisa reading from short story collection Don’t Bet on the Prince; Petronella by Jay Williams

A Quick Guide to Aspire Reading Lists for Students.

What is Aspire?

Aspire is the university’s online reading list system. Over the last academic year, staff at SPH have been working hard to make Aspire lists for every reading list we’ve received from academic members of staff.

Aspire uses data from the library catalogue so you can easily see where the library books you need are located and if they are available. If material on your reading list is available online, we can add a link to it from the list, making it very easy for you to access items you need.

As more Aspire lists are being created and used, we’ve had more enquiries about how to use Aspire from students, so this is a very brief introduction to Aspire and how to use it if you’re unfamiliar with it.

Finding Your Reading List on Aspire

It’s possible that your tutor has sent you a link to the Aspire list for your module, or posted it on studentcentral so you will be able to access it directly. However, you can als visit the Brighton Aspire website:

https://brighton.rl.talis.com/index.html

and search directly using the name of your module or it’s module code, like so:

TOP TIP: Aspire doesn’t deal very well with ampersands, so if you’re looking up a module that has one in the title and no results are being returned, try removing it and replacing it with ‘and’ instead.

You can also find your reading list on Student central, via the Reading Lists Link on the module pages:

And you can see if a book is on a reading list when you’re looking at a book on the Library Catalogue, as there will be a link to the reading list on the catalogue record like this:

Understanding Your Reading List

We base the structure of the list on the reading list provided by your tutor.  Some lists contain course information as well as the readings. The ‘contents’ button at the top of the list is a useful way to find the part of the list you need to use quickly:

Books

Aspire allows us to link directly to the catalogue records for books that are on your reading lists. So when you click the title you’ll be shown the bibliographic details of the book, the list and section of the list it appears on, the shelfmark of the book so you can find it, and the availability of the book:

Material that is available online

If material is available online and is on your reading list, for example an online journal article, an ebook or a webpage, you’ll see this button:

and clicking it will take you through to the resource directly.

Scanned Readings

Sometimes, especially in the case of key readings for modules, we make scans of chapters or extracts from texts and make them available online. You can also access these by clicking the ‘online resource’ button.

TOP TIP: If we have print and electronic versions of a book, entries for both versions will appear on your Aspire list, the electronic version will feature the online resource button.

Keeping Up With Your Aspire Lists

You can use your studentcentral ID to log in to Aspire, and this will enable you to save any lists for modules you’re studying to the ‘my lists’ tab on your profile.

The ‘my lists’ tab on Aspire.

 

This way you won’t have to bother searching for the list each time you use Aspire, and all your lists are gathered in one place.

This button appears above every Aspire list. Click it to add to your lists.

 

Need Help Using Aspire? Just Ask Us!

This is a very brief guide to Aspire. If you have any questions or are having trouble accessing material via Aspire, please contact us via email AskSPH@Brighton.ac.uk or phone 01273 643220 or feel free to drop in when the help desk is open and a Librarian will be on call to assist you.

RefME is changing!

From 28th of February 2017 RefME will become Cite This For Me. This means a number of changes for existing users.

You can find more information about these changes here and here.

If you need help transferring your references out of RefME, or if you have any questions about the changes, please don’t hesitate to contact the librarian team at St Peters House Library:

You can:

Email us: askSPH@brighton.ac.uk

Tweet: @SPHLibrary

Facebook: University of Brighton Library. St Peters House @SPHlibrary

Or, pop in and ask for the on call librarian.

Login Off Campus for Subscribed-to Content

Good work, you’re online and up late looking for peer-reviewed, authoritative information.

And then you encounter a pop up window asking you to log in for access. Maybe looks something like this:

screenshot of authentication screen

UofB login via Shibboleth screenshot of pop up asking you to log in

It might also say “UK Access Management Federation” or “UK Higher Education log in”.

Following the links from one of those will prompt you to choose ‘University of Brighton’ from a drop down menu, and then request your University of Brighton Username and password.  If we subscribe to the resources, you should be given access. Sometimes you *have to* enter the database by going through our online library. and enter the article title, or the name of the journal/magazine etc in the search box.

Lots, but not all, of our subscribed-to content can be found through the OneSearch interface of the online library (which looks like this)

On that same page, have a shufti around our Resources A-Z section, which lists resources and databases by name so you can browse each one. You also go directly into BOB if you want radio programmes (in several languages even!), films, and television.

Top tip though, is if you have found a citation of a chapter, a journal article, or a newspaper article and you want to see if you can access the full text – simply head over to our Library Catalogue webpages and enter the name of the book, or name of the journal/newspaper and hit Search.  If the University subscribes to it then you can follow the links to the content and you’ll be prompted to log in.  This is the most direct way to get to the full text off-campus, instead of searching Google for the article (although you might find it that way too).

Please remember to ask the staff at St Peters House Library if you get stuck trying to access online information when off-campus, as we can advise by email, or on the phone so please get in touch as it’s what we’re here for.

AskSPH@Brighton.ac.uk or call us on 01273 643220

Exhibition catalogues and Annuals on standing order at SPH Library

An important part of any library collection that supports art and design are Exhibition Catalogues and Annual publications. These publications showcase work that is notable in the field, record bodies of work of and critical texts about artists and designers, and can act as snapshots of the art and design worlds at certain moments in time.

In order to not miss any important publications from selected galleries and publishers, we have set up standing orders with our supplier Arts Bibliographic, who send us copies of any publications from these places when they are released. If you’re interested in seeing what institutions/publishers  we hold standing orders with, there’s now an Aspire list that contains that information, and you can take a look here. 

 

BST195307 Two Cats. Poster for the Exposition de l’oeuvre dessine et peint de T.A. Steinlen, 1894 (colour litho & w/c on paper, proof before letters) by Steinlen, Theophile Alexandre (1859-1923); sheet 59.1×48.7 cm; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; (add.info.: exhibition of drawings and paintings; Catalogue Raisonne: Bargiel and Zagrodzki 14 A2;); Bequest of W.G. Russell Allen; via Bridgeman Education.

Using SPH Special Collection material for teaching: Thinking about documentation with year 1 Fine Art Sculpture.

At St Peters House, we’re lucky to have many interesting and unusual items in our Special Collection, however due to their often rare/fragile nature, they’re kept in closed access conditions behind the issue desk and so are not as easily accessible as we’d sometimes like. Being able to use items from the special collection in teaching is great as it allows us to raise awareness of the collection amongst students and staff that use the library.

To this end, I worked with first year sculpture tutor Leah Capaldi to devise a session for her students using material in the special collection. As part of their end of year assessment, students are required to bring together documentation (e.g photographs, recordings, texts) all of the work they have produced over the course of the year. Documenting the work you make is an important part of your time at art school and a good skill to develop for your practice beyond it. Leah was keen to get them thinking about ways they could make their documentation more interesting than a simple portfolio, and thought that showing them some items from the special collections could give them some inspiration. The following material was shown to the students:

Ed Ruscha- Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Thirtyfour Parking Lots in LA

‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ by Ed Ruscha

Leah had mentioned that often students tended to see the modes of presentation they used (e.g. a book or a portfolio) as just the vehicle for displaying their documentation, and wanted to get them to think more about how the content and format could be more interlinked. In this respect I thought showing them the Ruscha books was useful. For the first edition of Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, Ruscha printed 400 copies of the book, and sold them in a wide range of places. The prints in the book could have had been large format, and hung on a gallery wall, and then reproduced in a lavish but expensive monograph at a later date, but instead Ruscha chose the book as an attempt to disseminate his work more widely. As such the format of the book becomes part of the work itself rather than just a mode of display.

Not Yet the Times

As an example of newsprint as a material that could be used for presentation.

2398 gr.: a book about food

This exhibition catalogue is housed in a takeaway container and was selected as a way of getting students to consider using existing packaging/packaging created for other purposes to house their documentation.

Franticham’s assembling box nr 28: visual poetry and Fluxus inspired works from 23 artists from 9 countries

 Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance

 John Dilnot: 1995 Books

Inside ‘Shattered Anatomies’

Using a form like a box also allows for wide range of documentation (including 3D objects) to be incorporated. The Shattered Anatomies box is of particular interest at it contains a varied range of documentation from artists who took part in the exhibition, and documents performance art, which can be hard to capture in more interesting ways. Dilnot’s box of books is also a good example of collecting a body of work together.

Josef Beuys: Multiples: Oeuvreverzeichnis sämtlicher multiplizierten Arbeiten: Objekte, Grafik, Postkarten, Schallplatten, Filme

Josef Beuys produced an incredibly varied range of work throughout his life, and I thought the way documentation of this was gathered in these two binders was a nice example.

Future Fantasteek Zines by Jackie Batey        

Leah said that often her students were concerned with the cost of producing documentation, so I thought it might be useful to show the students something that was created on a low budget to show that there are other less costly options open to them.

Mapping Knowledge- Les Bicknell

Fair Use Notes From Spam- Graham Parker

Marysa Dowling: Selected Projects             

These items were selected as they comprise of multi-volume works and this could be a useful format for students to think about using, as it could allow them to incorporate further documentation to the original documentation over time in a consistent format.

The Session

As part of the first year of the course, Leah runs ‘breakfast club’ sessions on Monday, which feature activities such as guest speakers, work in progress crits, film screenings. We decided this session would operate as one of these sessions, and so it functioned like a studio based crit, facilitated by Leah where students looked at the material and considered their own work and documentation in that context.  The following issues were discussed:

  • The form of the book as being more than just a way to display your work.
  • Using a form of documentation you can ‘grow’ and add to.
  • How to document time based image work (video, film, animation etc) in 2D.
  • Incorporating texts into documentation.
  • Documenting your work online compared to documenting your work in print.
  • How to find material in the special collections using the library catalogue.
  • Cost effective documentation.

Finding Film Reviews

Image of results screen for search for film reviews about Star Wars

Film reviews can be a useful source of information, and recently one of the Librarians helped a student find reviews of the Star Wars films to aid his research.  He was particularly interested in how critics reviewed the special effects used in the films.

If you know the name of a film magazine then you can check the library catalogue directly and see if the magazine is available in the University of Brighton (UoB) libraries or if it is available full text online.   Two names suggested by the librarian were the academic journal ‘Screen‘ and the popular magazine ‘Sight and Sound‘.

A great starting point to finding film reviews is also to use ‘OneSearch‘ on the Online Library page, provided by the UoB. This searches across a huge range of magazines, academic journals, books, ebooks, book reviews and audiovisual sources.

Into the search box of OneSearch we entered “star wars” review

Putting the quotation marks around the phrase ‘star wars’ keeps those words next to each other in the results that are shown, so makes your search more focused.  Capitalisation isn’t necessary when searching.

There were a lot of results, but by then refining them to only show full text articles, and to just show results from magazines and journals, there were lots of results displayed that contained reviews of the films.  To be more focused, the name of any of the star wars films could be added, and we also added keywords: variations of ‘CGI’, ‘visual effects’, ‘special effects’ etc to try and focus the search more to the research the student was doing.

There is a website St Peters House Library subscribes to called Performing Arts Periodicals Database which contains the full text of the magazine ‘Sight and Sound’ going back to 1932, as well as hundreds of other journals/periodicals.  Here there were many film reviews for the Star Wars films which the student found very helpful.

Some useful titles for film research that UoB provides online access to include:

  • Sight and Sound
  • Screen
  • Science Fiction Film and Television
  • Journal of Popular Film and Television
  • Millimeter: The Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Production
  • Film Quarterly

The Librarian team can help with any research enquiry, just ask at the Library Helpdesk, call us or email us (AskSPH@brighton.ac.uk).

Finding stuff on 1970’s Fashion at St Peters House Library Brighton

Skirt and bustier by Norma Kamali, c.1974 © Christie’s Images;Bridgeman Education

 

Just looking for books? Have a look at the library catalogue here.

Also check the catalogue for Fashion related DVD’s. There might also be relevant AV recordings on the media streaming service Box of Broadcasts. See this post.

You will probably find loads of stuff in our Fashion print journals. They live on the 1st floor of the library.

As a starting point for more extensive research have a look at our Fashion & Textiles subject guide. All nicely put together resources specifically for your study and help with your research.

One of the great resources the University of Brighton subscribes to is the Vogue Archive. UoB students can access this on site or at home.

VADS. This is a useful resource of online images for visual arts including Fashion. See here.

We have also made a guide to university of Brighton subscribed databases for finding copyright cleared images.

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OK just who were the movers and shakers doing their Fashion thing in the 70’s anyway? Check below for a few of the big names whose books we hold on the shelves here at St Peters House.

Halston

Gucci

Yves Saint Laurent

Zhandra Rhodes

Diane von Furstenberg

Vivienne Westwood

Ossie Clarke

Laura Ashley

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Fancy seeing some real examples?

Locally Brighton museum has examples of 1970s fashion in it’s collection.

In London two places you might head for are the Victoria and Albert museum Fashion collections in South Kensington and Fashion & Textile museum in Bermondsey.

 

Hope that helps, and remember…….

Its a Fashion world out there and we all live in it!

Getting to know BoB (Box of Broadcasts)

Have you met BoB (Box of Broadcasts) yet? The media streaming service that gives you access to over 65 freeview television and radio channels. BoB allows you to:

  • Request up to 10 recordings per day from over 65 channels – including news channels such as Aljazeera, BBC News, BBC Parliament, CNN; and foreign language channels like BBC Wales Cymru, 2DF (aka ZDF); and ARTE.
  • View programmes from the ever-growing archive – currently at over 3 million programmes.  When searching the archive you are not just searching programme title but also the programme transcript, really opening up the content.
  • Manage your programmes by collecting them into playlists.  You can also create clips from programmes to extract relevant sections.

To get to know BoB better work your way through these video tutorials or contact your local library for further information.