Day 19, critical, contextual essay thingy.

Day19.com

I have recently bought a photography zine from Jeremy & Claire Weiss which are Day19.com
I will attempt to write a review of sorts. I need to improve my contextual and contempory analysing and writing skills, since I didn't do so brilliantly at it last year at university.

First off, for those of you who haven't seen there work I will do a little background. I found there work about 3 years ago and have been checking there work out reguarly, I was really interested by there work because I felt it was really honest and featured a lot of people that you could tell were their friends because they captured that relationship really subtly. Even their proffessional client portrait work seemed relaxed, informal and honest. They noticed and picked on lots of interesting details that made me think more about capturing and picking up on small details more, not just in photography but my graphics work as well.
Below are some of my favourite photographs of theirs. Not all of them because I'd run out of space. They work in digital and film, Polaroid I think, I will have to ask them.

I don't know who this person is (might be a musician) but I really liked it because it was presenting something different, not synonimus to popular culture and mainstream ideals.


Jack black, most people know that face. It showed his humour and essentric side. Also the truck in the background sort of made me think that it couples with him as a person. I could go all pretentious now and throw in big words but I don't feel the need. What I love about photographs and art is that you can interpatate your own feelings from it and I have done that on this photograph.

This was one of the first photographs that I came across of theirs. This made me think of a mine field and an instruction to dance over it. Signs tell us so many things and instruct us on rules and code of conduct, very rarely signs are telling you more layed back or fun things.



This goes back to what I said about portraits being less formal and more relaxed. You see more elements of them as people coming out on the photograph. Also like one of my tutors at university, he likes what photography gives back to you and that is all the numbers and shapes and textures you find in film and Polaroids. It adds a bit of rawness to a portrait, breaks down the traditional format.


I picked these two for the compisitions and the small details.

This photograph made me laugh a lot. I think its the moustache that did it for me. It captured the moment, memories are important to me and I saw this photograph and it made me think about if this was a photograph of me i would put it in my journal because it would sum up that day better than words could.

One thing that I found was really great when I found their website was their links. They have a really strong community for them selves in California. The guy above is Aaron Farley, another great photographer that I really like and then I found out about jeremy's and aaron's radio show GTFU which I really enjoyed listening too, because they just got drunk with a bunch of mates in bands and played any music they could get hold of. They make me laugh and help me wake up on Tuesday mornings because due to the crappy time difference the show is on really early in the morning, where as I can't drink beer when I'm listening to them I drink lots of coffee. Then I found out about bands from them that I like and never heard of before like Giant Drag that I went to see when they played in Sheffield in England and Brother reade and little wolverines I like too. Also I found a link on their website about Blake e Marquis and I love his designs and his typography work which is my main passion. His use of colours and unique visual language informed my own work. So all from searching the web in my lunch break back when I was in college led to finding out about lots of great artists, photographers, designers, musicians and more. I know I live in england and I should be influenced by what is around me but now due to the web, the world has become smaller and it is easier to be inspired by other things in the world that you would have to travel to, to get at. which is hard when you haven't got much money.

This is the kind of portrait shots I would like to take, focusing on subtle elements of people, controlling focus lengths, cropping and thinking about composition more.

This photograph is in because it made me laugh when I first saw it, pure and simple.


I love this photograph because it was when they came to England. This is just a typical shot of back gardens of houses. If you scroll down in my posts you will see a photograph I took out of my window at my parents house and you will see a similar set up. However as people from another country you have a tendency to photograph all the landmarks of the capital or big cities, which is fine but doesn't give an accurate portrail of a country. This simple, honest photograph captures what England is more about that a landscape photograph of the gerkin in London or the London eye and the house of commons etc. We are more of a working class society now a days. The economy is stronger and more oppurtunites for jobs have made the working class better off. I am working class and my family is and my parents have had similar jobs all their lives and we are much better off now than back in the 80's. Also if you look back in history in the Victorian times we were much more of a middle class society, the lower classes were forgotten about. Well things are still bad now, we still have poverty in this country, just now we have an intense media that doesn't report on it so much.

Well I digressed a lot there, sorry.


This was the zine I bought from them. If your live in England, the exchange rate is good so buy one, it isn't much and it's really good. I am a bit nerdy and picked up on the little details. I liked the paper stock they used, it had a nice grain to it and the pictures sat really well on the paper. I a guessing it was a laser printer they used, very good quality. The front photograph was great and summed up the theme of the zine really well. I love the stitched binding and the cover photograph stitched really neatly. Very high quality zine and the photographs were a great collection of summer photographs and as a person who has never been to America I found it captured a really fresh and fun essence of American life and culture. One we see little of in the news and films anymore. It's all wars, debt, terrorism, power struggles, spin etc and it is a shame because we see all that spewing from the papers and the TV and it doesn't show that there is more going on there that if you look a little harder you will find. Like I did.

I know no body reads this thing but thank you if have read it all and got this far anyway. This blog and this post is really for my own benefit but I hope if anyone does see this post that you will enjoy Jeremy & Claire weiss's photography as much as I do and find out more about art and music an all that stuff.



This last photograph is my own, haha. I love my art box, I always have it with me when I go to university and it is becoming a piece of art it's self. I stick everything onto it that I find or stickers that people give me like the DAY19 sticker I got with the zine. It has pride of place on top of my art box.