Photojournalist: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer “Recorders”

Posted by pireze on Dec 13, 2011 in Blog, Featured, Happenings | 0 comments

As mentioned before, I am a journalist by trade, and I write for a magazine here in Australia called Electronics News. It’s not a glamorous job, as it’s a business-to-business publication which caters to engineers and other professionals within the electronics industry. That said, it does have its perks (mainly travel) and when I do features or articles that require me to go to a location, I always bring my camera with me. In a way, I am also a photojournalist.

We got a call just recently from the MCA telling us about an upcoming art exhibition called “Recorders”, by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. The angle for our publication was the use of technology and electronics within his artworks, which are interactive.

So today I went to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art at The Rocks, with the intent of interviewing Lozano-Hemmer regarding this exhibition.

The Museum is still undergoing renovations, and the exhibition will only be shown in a section of space which has already been completed – the rest of the place is pretty much still a construction site.

As it were, since “Recorders” only opens on 16 December, the team was still hard at work putting up a number of the works. Since I wanted to publish the article before the opening date, it was imperative that I get a number of illustrative pictures at this point.

The first room I was led to was at a relatively quiet corner of the space, where the work “Microphones” had been set up. It’s an elliptical arrangement of vintage Shure microphones on stands, with each microphone illuminated by a small circle of light from above. The rest of the room was pretty much dark.

Rafael was running late, so I had the opportunity to set up my lighting and equipment to ensure that when he did arrive, I could very quickly take a photo after the interview. I adjusted my settings until the available light was at a sufficient level, then started adding my flashes.

First light stand at camera right, up high, gridded, full CTO gel to balance with the tungsten lights illuminating the microphones. Second flash as separation, located behind subject, gridded, full CTO gel. I tested the lighting on a second light stand with my light stand bag hanging on it.

By positioning my key light farther away from the subject, I enlarged the “spotlight” that the grid forms the light into, providing more illumination to the installation and the rest of the subject’s body. But gridding isn’t just for fun: it allows me to control where the light goes: for example, I didn’t want it splashing to the sides and filling the right hand side of the photo. I wanted to retain that dramatic spotlight look.

In the final setup, I decided to elevate the separation light on that second light stand so I didn’t have to have it pointing up and illuminating the ceiling too much.

I decided in my edit to use the first shot I did (of three: he was a short on time), which happened to have my separation light visible in the back. However, it’s not a dealbreaker and actually acts as a good balance to the brighter microphones at the front.

Other pictures I took while running around the exhibition space:

“Pulse Index”, a very visually striking space (even more so in person).

“Tape Recorders”, a new work for the Sydney version of the exhibition. It uses Kinect units on the ceiling to measure the amount of time each person spends standing in front of a particular tape measure. The tape measure in turn keeps extending while the person is standing there, until the tape crashes to the floor. It’s a transformation of the tape measure from an ordinary object which measures distance to one which measures time with increasing suspense.