First I drew the stickers, then scanned them and enhanced in Photoshop for a better contrast. After that I got my hands on a self-adhesive A4 paper and printed out a couple of sheets. Worked with scissors and went into the city trying to find nice places for my ‘all-seeing-eye’.

Later on we will be doing digital photography and by then it would be interesting to apply graffiti to other types of art. For example mixing together photography and graffiti by setting up a projector directed on a wall and following the traces with spray paint, somewhat copying the image. Of course I’m fully aware that people have already done that in the past. Just a thought.

I’ve been walking the streets for quite a bit last year. Long enough to obtain the sense of urban architecture, that so called negative space, or the way I call it ‘elastic cityscape’. Placement of the imagery is usually crucial when you are trying out yourself in urban art. Your images need to be spotted. Then they undergo quick analysis from the side of the viewer/general audience. Without proper placement image won’t be powerful enough to raise questions. Keep that in mind.

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*’be the tool’ – slogan I invented for purposes of social and artistic awakening. It has subversive meaning and shouldn’t really be considered seriously. This visual sociology experiment is currently in hiatus but on-going as the imagery I created is still there. Stickers and stencils.

Normally we would say that someone is ‘a tool’ and it bears negative meaning. I changed that into ‘the tool’ and added the following context:

‘Mischief is the way not to go. It is the ultimate devourer of truth and understanding. Don’t try to fight the lies as they are hidden from you in many genuine ways. Don’t try to fight them with your fists, you will only get hurt, fined or jailed.

Fight them with visual imagery. This is the most effective way to disturb the mainstream we live in. In the world of technology, people no longer react to simple words. They react to images.

To raise awareness in the society about particular issues we need to use technology as well. We have to adapt to the environment to be able to aid it. Become the tool that thinks. Don’t be a tool in someone’s hands.’

Gregory Crewdson (born September 26th, 1962) is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighborhoods.

Crewdson was born in Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. As a teenager was part of a punk rock group called The Speedies that hit the New York scene referencing Preston North End in many of their songs. Their hit song “Let Me Take Your Foto” proved to be prophetic to what Crewdson would become later in life. In 2005, Hewlett Packard used the song in advertisments to promote its digital cameras.

In the mid 1980s Crewdson studied photography at SUNY Purchase near Port Chester, NY. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Cooper Union, Vassar College and Yale University where he has been on the faculty since 1993.

Crewdson is represented in New York at the Luhring Augustine Gallery and in London by the White Cube Gallery.

- source: Wikipedia.org

Links to follow:

1. Aperture Gallery – presentation of author’s photographs and details of his photo shoots. Intricate and worth checking out.
2. Hover Productions – official website of Gregory Crewdson and his production group. Up to date exhibition schedule.
3. Five in Focus – top five inspirational films for Gregory Crewdson photography. Blue Velvet on the 4th place!
4. ArtNet Catalogue – compilation of information about Gregory Crewdson and his photography.
5. White Cube Gallery – Gregory Crewdson representative in London, United Kingdom. Showing his early works as well.
6. Luhring Augustine Gallery – Gregory Crewdson representative in United States of America.
7. Gregory Crewdson $1 Million Photo Shoot – JPGMagazine article on a photo shoot. Very interesting.

Welcome to my research blog for 2nd year of Photographic and Electronic Media course at Grays School of Art, Scotland. I really did not see that coming but it finally did come at the moment of the biggest frustration and feeling of being completely overwhelmed by what is going on around me at the course.

Let’s start from the beginning. To tell the truth I have been struggling for an idea of an efficient research book for two years now. There were always many questions surrounding it. How to do it properly? How should it look like? Should it have sections, tabs, different sketchbooks or perhaps it should be a vast pile of stuff just thrown into a single notebook? All these questions have never been answered properly. Being thrown into a totally new environment year ago, we were supposed to come up with our own solution to such intensively burning problem.

Obviously some of us managed to do it just right and somehow I was one of these people but I was really not satisfied with the end result in form of a big pile of works literally thrown into one black box. That made me think through out the summer period about enhanced versions of data storing, research information gathering, work presentation and so on and so on.

So as the struggle has been continued into the second year of studies I was almost traumatized with the amount of ideas I could actually choose from. You see, it is sometimes better to have a limited choice because when you are facing way too many options, you can easily get lost or confused.

That’s why, after a year and a half of thinking, I’m establishing a blog called Th Hddn – a research site dedicated to PEM students individual development and database of information gathered during the whole year. This place will be eventually filled up with all kinds of research data so that my tutors will be able to observe the process of my development.

Why I decided to do my research in such a way?

• First of all, we live in a digital era. The easiest and the least labour-some method of creating a database is creating it in a virtual world, which is the Internet.
• Second of all, it is the easiest way to share it. Ultimately the tutors would like to look at our work so why not give them a single link instead of a huge pile of stuff to go through.
• Third of all, I’m an Internet person. Let me face my own preferences. It is totally true that I prefer to interact over the Internet, and to work in a virtual environment. I just got used to it over the years. Plenty of my DNA is floating somewhere in the cyberspace for sure.
• Fourth and the last of all, it is slowly becoming my way. I am starting to recognize the Internet as the way to express myself, a way to share my works, a system through which I can sell and earn money for what I do. It can be the way I develop my skills as well.

I am sure that I could come up with next four and many more reasons for establishing such blog but I don’t want to bore you. Just enjoy the content, be respectful, share it with the world and browse responsibly.