Cultural Research

When you hear the gentle jingle of the ice cream van coming down your street and you start to salivate, do you ever wonder how this unique form of selling evolved? Over 5,000 ice cream van operators, ‘mobilers’ as they are known in the trade, operate in the UK today. A new van will often cost £20,000 - £30,000 and between them they sell over £100 million worth of ice cream a year.

Ice cream has always been a commodity which has lent itself to be sold at point of consumption simply because it cannot be carried along with you - you have to eat it shortly after you buy it. Ice cream became widely available in the UK at the end of the nineteenth century and it was sold from push carts and horse drawn wagons. As motorised vehicles became available they too were used for ice cream sales, but not in any major way until after the Second World War.

Fazal Sheikhs Work -

Artist Research - Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Ilahi Sheikh was born in 1965 in New York City. Since graduating from Princeton University in 1987, he has worked with displaced communities across East Africa, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Cuba and India.


For more than a decade, Fazal Sheikh has been meticulously documenting marginalized communities: refugees in Africa, immigrants crossing the Mexican border, women resigned to second-class status in India. Sheikh, 41, the New York-born child of a Kenyan father and white American mother, considers himself an "artist-activist"; he uses portraiture to personalize large social issues.

Sheikh focuses on specific injustices that are rarely in the public eye. The radiated warmth in his photographs, the sense of import communicated about the lives of his subjects, and his dedication to bringing attention to those who are deeply marginalized has been an inspiration to me. While his subjects could easily be called victims, Sheikh chooses to photograph them in a manner that accentuates the dignity of their lives, leading the viewer to see that these are people, as he puts it, "not unlike you and me." He carefully avoids the easy visual vocabulary of victimization: no protruding bellies, no flies on tear-streaked cheeks, no bloody garments or casually placed weapons of war. Instead, he plainly illustrates one honest moment after another with subjects whose lack of pretense and openness demands the respect of the viewer.

Richard Avedons
PORTRAITS OF POWER
September 13, 2008 - January 25, 2009

Editorial Review

Who's Who, Redefined
Photographer Turned a Clinical Eye on the Powerful

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 15, 2008

Richard Avedon photographed celebrities: presidents and generals, great artists and heads of industry. And he photographed nonentities: no-name soldiers and protesters and secretaries. What makes him one of the greatest portraitists of the 20th century is that, when he's at his very best, you can't tell which is which. Forget the old idea that portraiture's about revealing what a sitter has done, or some kind of "deeper self." Avedon goes even deeper than that, down to the banal personhood that we all share. He reveals his sitters as being simply there , and real. He gives them a compelling authenticity, even if he never claims to reveal the "authentic" them.

Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power includes approximately 250 photographs from the 1950s through the artist’s death in 2004, displayed chronologically and grouped within Avedon’s specific editorial projects. The exhibition includes many rarely-seen and some never-before-exhibited or published photographs. A major catalogue, published by Steidl, accompanies the exhibition.

Artist Research - Richard Avedon - Portraits

Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8x10. His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. Avedon would at times provoke reactions from his portrait subjects by guiding them into uncomfortable areas of discussion or asking them psychologically probing questions. Through these means he would produce images revealing aspects of his subject's character and personality that were not typically captured by others.

Portraits Although avedon first earned his reputation as a fashion photographer, his greatest achievement has been his reinvention of the genre of photographic portraiture. his ability to express the essence of his subject. avedon’s pictures continue to bring us a closer, more intimate view of the great and the famous. the portraits are often well lit and in front of white backdrops, with no props or extraneous details to distract from their person - from the essential specificity of face, gaze, dress, and gesture. when printed, the images regularly contain the dark outline of the film in which the image was framed.

Avedon's photographs confront us with miners, unemployed
people, drifters, farmers, cowboys, and convicts, often at
life-size or over. most of those photographed try to give as
little of themselves away as possible. they appear to show
no feelings beyond scepticism and reserve. in the bar,
or at the rodeo, or wherever avedon has found them
they may have been emotionally involved, cheerful,
uninhibited, stressed or sad: but in front of his camera,
they appear totally inward.
there is barely a trace of the theatrical expressiveness or the
extravagant gestures that avedon elicits from the actors,
singers or writers who sit for him. these portraits are
expressive nevertheless. their hard physical labour, the
harshness of their everyday lives, their struggle for survival,
has etched their features and their souls as a river gouges
out a canyon. their faces become landscapes, and their bodies
territories, on which they carry their garments around with them.

The

Ice Cream Man

In the guise of a man selling ice cream, this mortal is

responsible for capturing demonic children.

To lure his prey, the ice cream man plays the devils chord

which is a series of notes that when sounded together

specifically attract demon kids like moths to a flame.

Once lured, the ice cream man then sucks the demon

youngsters inside the vehicle, where the children find them

selves on a magical playground and trapped in that world,

the young demons must face the nothing.

Simply one of the best first person accounts of why someone launches a very specific business. His story shows that while great enterprises emerge naturally from a certain person at a certain point in time, there’s always a certain random serendipity thrown in. He shows that a haven for great tech startups invariably spawns a small service business that is just as meaningful. He shows that all great businesses are woven into the social fabric of a place, and that they are ultimately not an impersonal business but a profitable enterprise built of people and stories.

I didn’t grow up dreaming that one day I’d run an ice cream store. I wanted to be a cowboy, and later an astronaut, but I come from a background of small business people. My mother’s family owned several funeral homes and my father owned a clothing company. It doesn’t seem like there would be many similarities between cowboys, astronauts, a funeral home, and an ice cream parlor, but you would be surprised.

Day after day, a woman comes in for a pint of strawberry ice cream and a pint of orange sorbet. Finally, she explains that her mother has cancer and her father is so upset that he can’t eat regular meals. Every few weeks there is the husband who comes in after his wife gives birth; the hospital food is awful and the new mother is wiped out and desperate for a hot fudge sundae. We used to have a regular, a young physicist, who came in alone almost every day and drank a nocciola frappe while he read the newspaper, He died at 35 and about seventy of his friends held a memorial service, after which they all walked over to the store to drink nocciola frappes in his honor.

Anyone can show up for an ice cream at Toscanini’s. Movie stars like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, of course, grew up not far from the store, but there are many other famous and creative people. Hundreds of Polaroid Company employees used to come in for ice cream after lunch before going back to their labs; occasionally Dr. Land himself would come in for a cone. Some of my employees were too young to know that Edwin Land had invented the filters for polarizing light that led to the instant camera. One of them once asked him if he worked for Polariod. Dr. Land was surprised but said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Groups of brilliant MIT students come every Wednesday night, dressed like small-town actors in a revival of Oklahoma. They are The Tech Squares, MIT’s square-dancing club. There are writers, academics, architects, photographers, musicians, film-makers. Once, a customer came up to me and whispered: “Do you know that every famous young physicist in the world is at the center table eating ice cream right now?” Occasionally the strangely dapper Ballroom Dancing team arrive, part Cary Grant and part Chow Yun Fat, with an awkward charm that does not entirely conceal years of extra homework. Anybody can show up and not everyone is immediately recognizable. One time, we tried to casually go about our business while trying to figure out whether the man who arrived with an entourage in saffron robes was the real Dalai Lama or just one of our many local lamas. (It was the real Dalai Lama, and he ordered a chocolate cone.)

So running an ice cream store is more often like being the host of a B & B, or the director of a day-care center, or sometimes, a cop in a Star Wars bar. Everyone is looking for connection, particularly in the sometimes harsh atmosphere of a large metropolitan area. If their car was towed, if the dog died, if the thesis was rejected, they should think that at least the person at the ice cream store was friendly and the Ginger Snap Molasses didn’t disappoint them.

We make ice cream. We’re not undertakers. It’s not a plywood ranch where you hand someone a two-by-four and say: “Good luck with the house!” I feel a bond with Paul Ruseesabagina, the hotel manager who succeeded in protecting hundreds of Tutsis in Rwanda. The world may be falling apart around him but he retains his civility and kindness. Have a cup of tea, he says, as soldiers are kicking down the doors. I hope you like it.

The Ice Cream Man

Ice Cream Man tells the tale of a bunch of kids in suburban America, friends Johnny Spodak (Justin Isfeld), Heather Langley (Anndi McAfee), Chris 'Tuna' Cassera (Jojo Adams) & Small Paul (Mikey LeBeau) are just your average group of adolescent mates who enjoy messing around, having a laugh & buying ice cream from the ice cream man (Clint Howard) who drives around in his ice cream van. However Gregory is a new ice cream man & there's something not right about him, maybe it's the fact that he had huge syringe's of green goo injected into his head when he was younger as part of his 'treatment' in Wishing Wells mental hospital? Maybe it's the fact he kills dogs & puts them though a food crusher? Maybe it's because he drives around with various body parts, eyeballs & combat knives in the back of his van? Or maybe it has something to do with the disturbing fact he makes his ice cream of people he kills? It's up to detectives Gifford (Jan-Michael Vincent) & Maldwyn (LeeMajors II) to try & discover what's happening to all the missing people...




Gregory Tudor(Clint Howard) asks his mommy, in a desperate , sad voice "Who will bring me ice cream mommy? Who's going to deliver the ice cream?" Hundreds of dollars were put into this great movie with an all-star cast of Clint Howard, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Steve Garvey shows he can do more than play baseball for the Dodgers.

Gregory Tudor seems like a pathetic, misunderstood, hard working man but when you find out he abducts and mangles little kids and neighborhood dogs,then mixes their parts into the a delicious hard-pack ice cream who serves them up with a great looking face.

WHAT IS A PORTRAIT?

A portrait is defined as a likeness of a person, especially of the person’s face. Simply that. But, the word in general use has deeper connotations. A photographic portrait is understood to be a good quality image that not only captures a person’s physical likeness on film or on a digital camera's sensor, but also something of the person’s character, generally in a manner that is attractive and pleasing to the subject.

CHARACTER REVELATION

A good portrait will contain at least one element that reveals the subject’s personality, attitude, unique mannerisms or any of the other features or traits that form the individual nature of the person. It will tell us something about the subject. You may have heard someone remark that a particular photographer “really captured” their father or child, for example, in a picture. They are referring in part to the image being a true physical likeness, but what they are really saying is that the image also reveals a significant, identifiable part of the subject’s character.

Project Brief

I am currently a second year Nottingham trent photography student studying in the practice of professional, critical and visual practice in photography.My work is greatly influenced by such photographers as Richard Avedon with his set on portraits being most inspirational aswell as influences from such painters like the late Picasso in which his abstract art gave a new view on todays art. From researching and looking at how other artists do their profession and see there outcomes such as Picasso and Avedon, it influences my photography to be more and more experimental.As now in my work i try to bring about a shock factor however keeping in mind the overall point im trying to get across/portray/sell. My work to this day is mainly targeted for a commercial audience whether this be put in magazines or on posters etc.
My Project for my second year show is based on documentary photography and i have chosen to represent through photos the life of my father whos profession is an ice cream vendor. My project name is 'The Ice Cream Man' and through my photos i want to represent the life behind the counter aswell as how he feels about his job as hes been doing it for a number of years. I will research facial expressions and how they are used to give a reaction and will try and portray different feelings through this as many a times a put on face is put on when serving a customer. This will mean my end photos will be mainly pointed towards the side of portraiture photography however i will try to keep in mind the audience i intend to make them for and for future ideas for the project such as producing and publicising a book maybe.
For the actual making of my final prints i intend to undertake my shots in digital and once taken maybe adjust them slightly using photoshop equipment. I will use external lighting and will have to travel back home to take my photos. I will experiment with my photographs to see numerous outcomes and how i could use them for commercial purposes and go about from that. The prints themselves i want in A4 however i will enlarge one to an A3 size for the main photo. I will represent these photos with lighting, music and maybe a movie to go along with it if i have enough times. The overall costs of this project will be mainly printing and other external costs for the gallery such as rent, lighting etc.