Danielle Arundel
Danielle Arundel is a photographer that records things that have been left behind or abandoned. These particular photos I have chosen to look at are from her project called 'Site 3', which was originally built to house 4000 people for up to three months in the case of a nuclear attack during the war. It was abandoned in the late 1990s, and was officially declassified in 2004. Everything in the building, and the building itself, still remains untouched and unused.
This photo shows an abandoned chess set that has been left in mid - game. It is clear that the chess set is aged as the pieces have layers of dust on them, and dirt has formed on some of the pieces. The photo is very simple with a plain colour scheme of green for the background along with the red chair, the white table in the foreground, and the black and white/brown chess pieces. I like the way that the chess set has been left in mid game, as it really shows the sense of abandonment that Arundel wanted to capture. The game had been abandoned before it was over - to me, this implies some sort of emergency occurred, or an important event had taken place that required the chess players to leave in a hurry, and to never return. The fact that the chess pieces were left out on the board implies that the chess players assumed that they were coming back to finish the game, but they never did. I feel like if the people knew they would be leaving for good, they would have spent the time to finish the game to take time to spend their last moments in the building with fellow friends.
In all of the photos from this project of Arundel's, the photos have objects which have been left in such a way that implies that the people living there were expecting to return - or maybe that is just my personal opinion. This photo has been taken with a very narrow aperture which resulted in a very shallow depth of field. The background and foreground are both very blurry, and the middle parts of the picture are sharp and focused. The white bishop and the black bishop are both in clear focus as they were Arundel's main focus for the photo. A high shutter speed was used in order to capture the sharp image. It seems that a slightly higher ISO has been used due to the slight graininess of the photo - though I think this makes the photo look good as it makes the photo look a little older, and the photo has an old subject. It was Arundel's aim to capture a sense of abandonment in her photos, and I felt that she captured this well. Skills/techniques/ideas to reuse? - Idea of abandoned objects/places - Very narrow aperture to create a very blurred picture with only a small amount of the photo in focus - Use of black and white/landscape photography? - Big contrasts - in this case, in colours (the deep red teapot contrasting with the white cups) |