Thinking about Photographing the Unseen. 25-11-16

I looked at Germaine Krull’s pictures of vegetables in a Berlin market and general detritus taken in Les Halles. You can almost smell the rubbish as you admire the neat stacks of cauliflowers.

I tried this image of fish on a stall in the Rialto to suggest a certain smell.

I felt these were perhaps still too literal. I wanted to suggest something even more intangible as I did with my old school scarf.

I put the camera in the back of a cupboard empty but for one tin of beans. I turned off image stabilisation and set the timer. I triggered the shutter remotely. I raised the ISO to 2200 to get some gritty grain into the image. I edited the image into a square format to mimic the shape of the cupboard. I restricted the image to two elements only, the tin and the hand, choosing to focus on the hand. I was trying to evoke the time when we were young and poor and inflation was raging at 15%; every halfpenny mattered and we were often down to our last tin of beans.

The image is not really successful in that it’s not at all clear that the tin is in a cupboard or that it is the last one. The focus on the hand is not sharp enough and the grain just looks like a mistake. I will have to think again.

 

 

 

26-11-16

Maybe this will work better. I’ve kept the square format. Black and white is more austere than colour.

In the end, though, images of the unseen will depend heavily on being anchored by some text.

Photographing the Unseen. Some thoughts on reading Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image

Unseen may mean …

• seen in a very personal way, e.g. patterns in clouds
• not normally seen e.g. the view from inside a washing machine as it’s being filled
• never seen before e.g. a new photograph
• a meaning unseen by all except me e.g. the 134 label on my school scarf
• unseen because internal, like dreams or an internal dialogue
• unseen as noise is unseen
• the passage of time
• the spirit of a place, its numen, e.g. this image by Paul Caponigro
  Templehiei-sankyto. Japan
• etc.

If a photograph, a visual medium, tries to communicate something unseen the question asked by Roland Barthes comes into play, “How does meaning get into the image?” Since “the image is weak in respect of meaning” its meaning is either rudimentary or, as Barthes says, ineffably rich. Ineffability is the point. An image is either worth any number of words or none at all.

1. Meaning can get into an image through a caption which may be divided into language (e.g. English or French), which has a significance of its own, and through connotation, that is, what is understood in that language.
2. The meaning of an image is, unlike a words in a language, unordered, neither grammatical of syntactical.
3. Different elements of an image build up a significance through their contiguity.
4. An image has both a literal and symbolic meaning. Literal through simple description and symbolic through its connection or relationship with other images in its cultural environment. E.g. Brandt’s models may be naked women but their shoes show them to be nudes and not just naked people.
5. Just as the sound of a word rarely has an analogous connection to its meaning, so a symbol has no necessary connection to its own proper meaning, e.g. red for stop, green for go.
6. Language offers a choice of meanings. The same words or formulas may be used in anger, ironically, humourously and so on. Similarly images can offer a choice, perhaps a potentially unlimited choice – Barthes’ “ineffable richness”.
7. An image may suggest a meaning or a narrative without direct imitation of the events, scenes or characters of the implied story, i.e. a diagetical relationship.
8. An image has no intrinsic, built in meaning. It merely points to a meaning, e.g. a map scale points to things in the world experienced on the ground, a portrait points to a particular face.
9. An image is a code but it is not defined in the same way as words in a language. It is open ended and awaiting definition, an anchor point.
   Frost on the window
10. The simplest code of a photograph says there was something in front of the lens, something, in Barthes’ words, “having been there”.
11. Symbols are overlaid with considerations of aesthetics, efficiency, immediacy, convention, habitude, and ubiquity.
12. Symbols can surprise and their meaning may not be appreciated immediately.
13. The rhetoric of an image relies on its immediacy and use. E.g. an image of a lighthouse speaks immediately to the mind and the eye. We know what it is and what it is for. A photograph taken by an electron microscope does not speak in this way but achieves its purpose in the end. Wolfgang Tillman’s Mental Picture #97 is an example of this kind of ‘slow burn’.

Project 3 Exercise

Which project resonated most with me?

The ‘witness’ that affected me most was Jodie Taylor’s Memories of Childhood. This kind of nostalgia is difficult for me. I went to a boarding school at the age of thirteen and the intensity of that experience has wiped out most memories of childhood before that age. I am missing from photos in the family album and have little shared experience with my brothers and sisters. I suppose I am envious of her experience. This image may go some way to explain if it is anchored to my explanation.

My old school scarf is full of meaning for me. 134 was my number at school and my name was often ‘One Three Four Whittle, stand up please!’ It carries memories of homesickness, isolation, loss, fear, wariness, self reliance, and survival. I have kept the scarf because it is warm but mostly because it is a reminder that I came through to begin a useful and successful life full of experience that is my own and not imposed. 55 years of nightmares are nothing compared to the joy of everyday life. Sometimes a scarf is only a scarf.

How do I feel about the loss of authorial control?

My written work has been published for the last 15 years and I am well used to the idea that once work is out in the wild the author disappears. The work has to stand on its own two feet and make its own way. It has an independent life of its own and, in Barthe’s words, the Author is dead. However, the Author can watch the progress of his child and do something about the education and preparation of his other children. The Author may be dead to the Reader but his creations are still alive to him and shaping his future actions.

Project 2, Exercise

I’ve settled on The Sick Rose by William Blake

The Sick Rose

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

This poem evokes feelings of bleakness, tiredness, regret, guilt, shame, anger and stress. I struggled with expressing these feelings in pictures for quite some time as this blog shows. The key, I found was in Stephen Bull’s ‘Photography’, especially chapter 4.(1) I also looked carefully at Anne Turyn’s ‘Illustrated Memories’ (1983-1995). This is a fictional autobiography, an illustration of nostalgia. Her pictures evoke fragments of memory, sometimes blurred or half-remembered. (2) This led me to make these images.

The secret is out.

The horror at being discovered.

Incontrovertible evidence of guilt.

Going back through my archive I would like to include these images.

The casual destruction of Naples. The poem sums up my feelings about this picture. Naples has been corrupted and become a joyless place.

The Enigma Machine. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park were effectively the worm that found out the Enigma’s bed of crimson joy and destroyed it.

 

(1) Bull, S, (2009) Photography. Abingdon: Routledge

(2) http://anneturyn.com/illustrated-memories–1983-1995/label-_-Illustrated-Memories-box-label_a/

Thinking about Project 2, Exercise 16-11-16

Thinking of the Sick Rose I tried out this image of a box revealing a key. On the plus side it’s a good well exposed and focused image. On the minus side it’s too literal and doesn’t really express a feeling.

Thinking about Project 2, Exercise. 15-11-16

I’ve come down to a choice of two poems.

The Sick Rose

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

This strikes me as being a very self-sufficient poem. Blake’s verse gives us everything we need to understand the allegory and its psychology. The tension between words like ‘sick’ and ‘rose’, ‘invisible’ and ‘worm’, ‘crimson’ and ‘joy’, ‘dark’ and ‘love’, ‘life’ and ‘destroy’, forces the meaning beyond the surface into sexual anxiety and guilt. Something that should have been lovely has been vitiated and effectively invalidated by the loss of secrecy.

I’m thinking of images of broken things, partly open doors, rotten fruit, a messy bed (maybe), left over food, torn photographs, faded old photos.

The Rose that Grew from Concrete

Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong
it learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.

Tupac Shakur

This is a poem of hope, of triumph over adversity. The concrete is hard, unmalleable, unchanging and permanent. It is designed to resist change yet it is altered by a fault big enough for a seed to be introduced. The poet says this proves nature’s law is wrong. Which law of nature is wrong, not just mistaken, but wrong, the opposite of right?Is it the law that says the natural state of concrete is to be hard and barren and perhaps forbidding, or is it the law that says roses belong in gardens and soft soil? Is Nature the one that cared, defying the man made nature of the uncaring concrete?

I’m thinking of images of bare ground, weeds growing in unexpected places, crutches, walking sticks, wheel chairs, packets of pills, bottles of medicine.

Thinking about Project 2 Exercise 12-11-2016

I’ve been thinking about Project 2 Exercise and been reading a lot of poetry. At first I was looking at poems which prompted a visual response. I think this was a mistake. I began instead to look for poems with strong concepts that appealed to my imagination. My choice has come down to these six.

1. He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats

2. The Sick Rose

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

3. The Clod and the Pebble

‘Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.’

So sung a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

‘Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.’

William Blake

4. Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

5. The Rose that Grew from Concrete

Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong
it learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.

Tupac Shakur

6. Shadows

“All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide
like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;
but a hidden star can still be smiling
at night’s black spell on darkness, beguiling”

Munia Khan

Each poem contains a sense of bleakness … “But I, being poor, have only my dreams”.
”his dark secret love does thy life destroy”, “builds a hell in heaven’s despite”, “the lone and level sands”, “no one else ever cared”, “night’s black spell”.

Each one contains a sensual image … “you tread on my dreams”, “thy bed of crimson joy”, “trodden with the cattle’s feet”, “the hand that mocked them”, “it learned to walk without having feet”, “a hidden star can still be smiling”.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven is a poem about poetry … “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths”, as is The Rose that Grew from Concrete.

Each one contains powerful visual images but I want my photographs to respond to the concepts rather than taking a literal approach. At the moment I can imagine images for The Sick Rose and the Rose that Grew from Concrete without using a picture of a rose or concrete. These images from my archive spring to mind but I will make new images for this exercise when I make my final choice of poem.

I made this image of a Kindle and glasses to concentrate on the idea of poems being read and then considered. The Kindle stands in for the act of reading and the glasses for the time after reading. The blue cast is to suggest something artificial and contrived. It distances my feelings from those I read into the poems. The poets’ thoughts are not mine. I don’t want these authors, in Roland Barthe’s terms, to be dead. I don’t want to impose myself on their thoughts but to try to see and understand what they saw and thought.

kindle-and-glasses contact sheet

Duane Michals This photograph is my proof

Is Duane Michals’ photograph actually a proof of anything?

The text anchors a meaning to the image that would not otherwise be there. Without the text the way the couple are facing into the shadow might be significant. The smile on the man’s face and half smile on the woman’s may be a reaction to being photographed as easily as to being caught in an intimate moment. the classic triangle of the composition and the strong diagonal of the woman’s back lead the eye to his smile and make him the subject of the photograph rather than her.

Perhaps the text suggests some kind of proof, but the image is posed. Maybe the camera is on a tripod, triggered remotely or on a timer. If it’s on a timer I can imagine the flurry of activity to get into position before the shutter fires. How many attempts were there before this successful shot? If the shutter was fired remotely, how much care was taken to hide the cable release before assuming the position. Or maybe the shot was taken by a third person. If this was the case, the impression intimacy takes on a false note. There is a game being played. The author protests too much – “It did happen. She did love me. Look see for yourself!”

Gentlemen by Karen Knorr

The link in the course material is dead. This link is better
www.karenknorr.com/photography/gentlemen/

“I wanted to make work that used humour to explore attitudes prevalent amongst the English establishment in the 1980’s.”

I’m not sure that these attitudes were “prevalent” . Some of them surely did exist in the 80’s but perhaps this from Cosmopolitan, July 1922, is closer to the mark. The text from Cosmopolitan could just as easily be used for Karen Knorr’s image and vice versa.

Whereas Kay Lynn Deveney gives us an intimate image of a man’s real life experience, Karen Knorr gives us a tongue in cheek of an outdated stereotype. The images could have come straight from a Brooks Brothers catalogue.

The Day to Day Life of Alfred Hastings by Kay Lynn Deveney

The link in the course material is dead. This link is better
https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/kaylynn-deveney/

 

“KLD: I am interested in projects that disrupt the stereotypical documentary approach. It was important with this work that Bert be a co-author rather than a “subject”. Bert wrote his captions without interference from me, and in this way his voice was factored into the story and encountered at the same time the images were being viewed.”

 

I thought this was an exciting project. It is an intimate collaboration which goes a step further than Briony Campbell’s The Dad Project. (1) Alfred plays a much more active part in creating a record of what it is like to be him and what it is like to know him. KLD says, “I have a vision of Bert and he has another vision of himself and every viewer brings an additional perspective.” There are more dimensions to Alfred’s life than there are to Briony Campbell’s father’s whose life is dominated by his slow death.

KLD retained control over which images to publish and I wonder how much input Alfred had in this process. She says, “I made the final book edit on my own and based it on the strength of the pairing (of picture and caption).”

The decision to keep the size of the images controlled by the actual size of Alfred’s handwriting was a constraint that in the end prevented some images being printed in a large format. This was useful. No one image dominates but all together create a rounded and seemingly balanced record of a man’s life.

(1) (https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/category/coursework/part-2-narrative/project-1-telling-a-story/)