This is just a short look at one of the artists that has influenced my most recent project of putting my father back into the landscape, I have drawn from his work both visually and in the sense that I have looked into his reasonings and concepts behind his work and taken them on board to an extent.
Khan’s work aims to fuse both the abstract of a scene and the figurative, addressing narratives of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into a single moment; Often this is done by drawing from a diverse range of cultural sources (including literature, history, art, music, and religion) to create densely layered imagery. His own religion and personal experiences of source material often inform his work, coming from a Muslim background where his father was from Pakistan, and his mother who converted to Islam after meeting his father. He graduated in photography from the University of Derby in 2001 and he later studied for an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2004. Khan’s photographs or scans originate from secondary source material – for instance, every page of the Qur’an (something that was in fact suggested by his father, Khan being a non-practicing Muslim), every Beethoven sonata, every William Turner postcard from the Tate Britain. His work and process have been described as “experiments in compressed memories” and “ all-encompassing composites”. Kahn himself says about his work: “It is a challenge t not define my work as a photograph but using the medium of photography to create something that exists on the surface of the paper and not to be transported back to an isolated moment in time”. Khan’s visual layering also occurs in moving format as he has produced videos such as Last Few Piano Sonatas . . . after Franz Schubert, a three-channel video installation wherein he uses multiple camera angles to capture numerous performances of Schubert’s last sonatas, composed on his deathbed.
This was the first image of Khan’s work that I saw, and it’s a striking one at that. I had had small similarities in some of my darkroom work due to movement of masks or negatives when doing my series of exposures, and the outcomes of those are what led me to intentionally move these aspects when making certain prints, another method to add to my list of distortions. So when I came across Khan’s work I knew I had to research further and investigate his reasonings and intentions behind this layering. His work uses multiple images of the same subject, whereas mine mostly uses the same still slightly moved and adjusted to create a similar visual effect, but an entirely different feel once you’re aware of this difference. I have tried moving just the landscape, just the figures, and both of these elements to varying degrees of success. In Khan’s work I feel it adds a sense of time and observation to his images, and in my own a sense of movement albeit irregular and pained, much like my fathers own gait when walking; both emit a sense of errieness and obscurity to the print.
Above are some examples of my darkroom prints that included layering of figure silhouettes, and to the right are some examples of the layering of landscape stills. The effect of Khan’s work is much more concentrated due to his use of several images whereas mine is using only a few series of movements withing my work. More often than not in my work I have been using the same image or mask moved only slightly, whereas as previously stated each layer of Khan’s work is a separate and distinct image superimposed on top of one another. I have carried this theme of movement and distortion of an image into my photoshop based edits, as can be seen on the pages of this sketchbook that I talk in depth about them, and have in fact pushed it further than I had before discovering and being inspired by Khan’s work.
This is a still from one of 3 angles viewed in Khan’s piece Last Few Piano Sonatas . . . after Franz Schubert. This relates to my work insofar as much as I am projecting a moving image of my father over the stills I have chosen as final images. When looking at his video work I have taken note of the movement involved in the ghostly images of hands projected and taken it into account when working on my own video pieces. I feel Khan’s work here shows great understanding of the places these hands and fingers have traveled across the keys, and I want to make a similar feeling in my own work in relation to my father and where he and I wish he could travel.
Overall I feel I have taken a lot from Khan’s work, not only keeping in mind the techniques he has used to create such a pleasing visual effect, but in the concept and meaning driving these techniques too. Whilst our concepts and intentions may differ, the resulting effect can look similar in many ways yet evoke different emotions and feelings in the viewer, and at the end of the day this evocation of emotion and provocation of thought is something I want to be a part of all of my work, but especially within this projects boundaries; With this in mind I have made an effort to keep Khan’s work floating around my mind whilst editing my own photos in the hopes that I can draw from his work successfully.
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