Assignment 3. Planning

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First attempt

Neal Rantoul (1), late of Northwestern University, Boston, identifies “a disturbing trend in photography.” He comments on how, in the past, photographs were presented without much, if any, commentary. He says, “please give me less (sic) words and better pictures! I find the story, the text, mostly boring and condescending, telling me how to look at the photographs rather than letting the photographs do the talking.”(2)

This is all very well if the commentary merely describes the image and the process which produced it but, and this is a big but, when faced with Elina Brotherus, Sophie Calle, Nigel Shafran or Gillian Wearing, it is important that the images are anchored to a context. While it might be obvious to the educated eye what Francesca Woodman, for example, was trying to communicate, the eye does need to be educated. For example, John White’s commentary on her pictures adds nothing to the images except by giving the viewer a new pair of glasses through which to view them. (3) The commentary, whether by the photographers themselves or by a curator, invites the viewer to join in, to share the photographer’s experience and to gain some insight into the human condition as experienced by someone else. Because it is true, as any anthropologist could tell us, that the observer changes the thing observed, It is still important to the point of necessity, for the thing observed to be given some context. The commentary may be boring, condescending and effectively patronising, but that’s a question of quality, not necessity.

The assignment asked me to keep a diary for two weeks with photographs. This is a page from that diary.

Our daily routine is just that, a routine. It contains meals, several trips to the cinema each week (we have unlimited tickets), church attendance, and writing. It’s not very interesting.

Second Attempt

I’ll keep most of the introduction above but reorganise the material to give it more presence.

What is a diary?

• an aide memoire
• a private record of thoughts and events
• a catalogue of events
• a series of observations which may be related to particular days
• a commonplace book – random notes

What is a diary for?

• to be an aide memoire so that in case of necessity you can say where you were and what you were doing on any day
• to be a place to work out ideas, a test bed
• to be an attempt to preserve oneself – to control how you appear to the world should the occasion arise
• to ‘prove’ that I existed
• to foretell the future – this is the day snowdrops first appear or swallows will arrive this week
• to answer the question, ‘what did I think about x then?’

Topics that prompt photographs to comment on derived from the diary

• Fear of the empty page
• The posed picture versus reality
• Alle Tassen Im Schrank?
• My messy life
• Things I do every day
• Memories, welcome and unwelcome
• My books
• What I buy
• What I waste
• Growing old
• What makes me angry
• Abstract ideas
• Medicine
• Mood
• Places
• My own image

I will pick out elements from the diary to make pictures on several of these topics.

(1) http://nealrantoul.com/about

(2) https://petapixel.com/2016/05/31/opinion-disturbing-trend-photography/

(3) http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/woodman-untitled-ar00358

Third attempt

I kept the diary for two weeks without thinking too much about the images that it might produce. At the end of two weeks I decided to rewrite the diary and include pictures. After all, the diary is a construct to fulfil a part of this course and it had to be capable of being interpreted photographically. I felt free to make the construction quite purposeful. To this end I made a list of fifteen or so topics that a diary might cover. One day might be entitled ‘Memories’, for example, and I would tilt the diary entry in that direction. Another day would be called ‘Unwelcome memories and my thoughts that day would tend in that direction. Another day would concentrate on ‘Anger’, another on ‘Clutter’, another on ‘What I do’ and so on.

For example, the entry called ‘Memories’ begins with a picture of a blank page and my pencil. That is where I was when I stared the diary. Later in the day, while I was still telling the truth in my diary, I went to Sainsbury’s, and a photo of that went in to show I was there. In the entry call ‘Anger’ I made a picture of myself looking rather dyspeptic with the laptop’s camera. ‘Clutter’ shows my actual desk, while ‘What I do’ shows my workspace as I would like it to be.

The diary became less of a daily record and more of a consideration of ‘Where I am at this stage of my life’. So I’m making a set of images to try to illustrate that. The title of the diary has changed from the pretentious ‘Two weeks in a life/a life in two weeks’ to ‘Hiding in plain sight – a diary’ to a simple ‘I am here, now’.

Preparing for Assignment 3

After keeping a diary for a fortnight, I took a series of pictures of me at my desk. But …
this is not my desk and this is not the room I write in. This is set dressing. I laid out some books on the table and posed with a remote trigger on a three second delay. The camera has sensors front and back for the remote: even so, the three second delay is only just enough. I used a tripod and set the camera at f16, ISO160 and let the exposure look after itself. I shot in DNG RAW and developed the image in Photoshop using the Auto button and then dehazing slightly to improve contrast.

Does this image contain any truth?  I do use all these books but the one my pen is poised over is a holiday diary and sketchbook written in 1992. The book by my left hand is my Context and Narrative notebook. The atlas in the second picture is completely irrelevant. It just fills a space on the table.  I do use a wide selection of reference books and I do write about things other than Context and Narrative. Is this picture biographical? Yes, if only because the things in it cover a period of time and represent an ongoing activity that tells the viewer something about what I do and how I go about doing it. My actual desk is not nearly so interesting. There is no homely fire by my desk, only a window that looks out into a yard where the cars are parked. Florence, our elderly neighbour in the building opposite can see me at work and I can check that she is OK.

This diary entry goes with these images.

Images versus text in autobiography. Preparing for Assignment 3

Question:- is an autobiographer’s presentation of themselves analogous to a photograph? If so, how? If not, why not?

An autobiography takes moments of time (even though the moments may have significant duration) and presents them as representative of a life. A photograph, perhaps a series of photographs, attempts to do the same thing. The difference is that an autobiography cannot work unless it has some kind of narrative. Proust doesn’t just give us a series of flashbacks but gives a consistent narrative in which flashbacks achieve relevance. His madeleine does not sit isolated on a plate: it is connected. A photographic narrative has to be inferred whereas an autobiographer presents the narrative up front. Photographs by themselves have no protection when released into the wild but text knows better how to look after itself.

Both written narrative and photographs are unwitting witnesses to a kind of truth. Both are selective. We learn something about the author when we see what they select, and how they present that selection. Mark Twain, for example, does not tell the whole truth. He constructs what he wants to be the truth about himself. (1) A photograph is similarly economical with the truth. What seems to be the unassailable truth about a moment in time is, in fact, as Barthes said, “weak in respect of meaning”. (2) It is only a fleeting moment which must be anchored somehow to fix its import. Take this picture for example.

(3)
The meaning of this image would be enhanced (limited?) by knowing something about the subject and the location. Without that, stories about prisons, isolation, boredom and so on could easily be invented.

Perhaps a photographic book could approach autobiography more closely. The images, choice, juxtaposition, colour and format all show the same control as autobiography. They are generally self-published, it seems, and do not have the benefit of an editor. But where the images dominate, leaving text in their wake, they are as cryptic as the image above and less explicitly autobiographical.

In the past it was not uncommon for people to carry a notebook and to make sketches. Text predominated. I have notebooks with sketches going back forty years. In fact there are very few sketches but a lot of text saying where we were and what we did. Now I take hundreds of photographs, snapshots, and keep them as an aide memoire. Anything autobiographical now would be based on the photos, an invented narrative created as a commentary on the images or prompted by them rather than vice versa. Even if that were not the case there is a danger of it being perceived as such – image trumps text.

“Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the story.” André Malraux. Lazarus (4)

 

(1) Orvell, M. Biography. Vol 21, Number 3, Summer 1998

(2) The Death of the Author in Barthes, R, (1977). Image-Music-Text. London. Fontana Press .

(3) Mine. The reading man. Athens Museum smoking area.

(4) Malraux, A, (1974) Lazarus. Paris. Gallimard

A rewrite of Assignment 2 Photographing the Unseen

On my tutor’s suggestion I have reformatted and edited the pdf of the booklet submitted for this assignment. I have made the text boxes all have the same margins. All begin in the same place on the page. The text has been changed to Calibri, 14pt. The change in voice for the museum pictures has been removed so that the tone of the text is consistent throughout the series. Each picture now fills its page.

These are jpegs of the pdf pages.

Links to the pdf files.

the-unseen-cover

The Unseen

On reading Picturing Ourselves, Photography and Autobiography. Linda Haverty Rugg (1)

She begins by asking “What (or how) do photographs mean in the context of autobiography?” She says, “photographs … simply supply a visual metaphor for the divided and multiple … self.” Also, photographs as physical evidence re-anchor the subject in the physical world.” (But see my comments on Duane Michals (2))

She talks about the “double awareness” of the autobiographer  – awareness of the “autobiographical self as decentred, multiple, fragmented and divided against itself in the act of observing and being” and the self that is constructing the autobiography. Photographs are used to support both these views.

She compares the loss of control inherent in being photographed and that inherent i8n being published.

I’ve been preparing for Assignment 3 by keeping a diary for the last fortnight. A daily diary doesn’t involve much in the way of remembering. This is not Proust’s “life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it” (3), nor is it Barthes’ memory being jolted by a photograph of his mother. (4) It is more purposeful than that. I have always at the back of my mind that this diary is an exercise for an assignment. I plan ahead with the idea that there will eventually be photographs as a result. In my last assignment the mask slipped when I came out of character illustrating my images for ‘Photographing the Unseen’ with text. The memory and the passage of time were the things ‘unseen’. Referring to the process was a mistake in that piece of work.

For this self-absented portrait for Assignment 3 the process is as informative as the text and the accompanying photographs. The process reveals the thought, interpretation, and the attempt to control the outcome in the same way as Linda Haverty Rugg says Mark Twain and August Strindberg tried so hard to maintain control. Like them, and unlike Proust, I am reluctant to reveal too much when too much will prod the demons that lurk in memory. Even for Art, let alone for an assignment, I will not give these frightful things houseroom, let alone invite them in for a cup of tea.

(1) http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/731472.html

(2) https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2016/11/10/duane-michals-this-photograph-is-my-proof/

(3) Benjamin, W, (trans 1968) Illuminations. New York, Schocken Books. The Image of Proust

(4) Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London. Vintage Books. chapter 25

Tutor feedback on Assignment 2, Photographing the Unseen

Pro

• I engaged with the assignment in breadth and depth
• I followed through ideas to see where they would go
• I tried different techniques and subject matters before deciding on a final idea
• I asked for and followed advice
• I reflected on the images I made and how they worked to form a narrative
• My blog works

Cons

• I must take much more care over setting out the pdf version of the assignment – borders, typography, fitting the images on the page and so on
• I must be careful to speak with one voice and not break character halfway through the narrative
• Perhaps the pictures of the fossil are too similar. Could the reveal be made more obvious?

Make jpegs of the pdf pages to put into the blog.

Overall, very encouraging.

A dream project–17th January 2017

Last night I had a dream. In this dream I took the number of days of my life so far and divided it by a period, eg. 14 days, then I took a portrait at that shutter speed. Pictures of babies could be blurred. A picture of me now would show no movement at all. I am 24884 days old so I’d need a shutter speed of 1777 of a second. This time next year it would be 1803 of a second. My newest grandson’s picture would be taken at a 14 of a second. I would ask people for their birthdays and calculate their shutter speeds. The results would generally hide the process. Each image would contain a secret known only to the sitter and me. Perhaps if I kept the same aperture and ISO all the time babies would be very overexposed, perhaps even invisible, in a flash of light while older people would become progressively darker until they disappear.

Two Portraits

Project 3. Self-absented portraiture Exercise 1

Nigel Shafran. Washing Up

I had not noticed the gender bias of this section of the course. It did not occur to me that being male or female would be the or a main feature of the way someone expresses themselves. Of course gender is important but it seems to me that the artist’s message is not of necessity defined by it. Is there an assumption in the way Safran’s work is presented that washing up is women’s work? Surely not.

I can’t see how gender might contribute to the creation of an image. Would Trish Morrissey have been able to take her Front series if she’d been a man. Probably, though the way she would have pitched the idea might have been different.

When Shafran leaves people out of his images he leaves us to infer what his life is like and who he might be just from looking at his immediate environment. He allows us to see his surroundings as he does. He invites us to share what is around him and, more importantly, the way he sees it. After a while, though, it becomes clear that each image is a carefully composed and lit still life. Shafran, like so many others who take self-portraits, is hiding in plain sight.

Masquerades. Exercise 2

Recreate a childhood memory in a photograph.

Possibilities:-

1. The house I was born in. Huge ox eye daisies growing over the front wall. The rag and bone man’s horse eating the flowers with commentary.
   Picture of horse and cart at Beamish Open Air Museum perhaps. It’s not far from here.
2. Taking my younger brother to school on his first day. He is only 18 months younger than me.
   Picture of grandchild in school uniform – with commentary.
3. The smell and taste of my yellow table at my primary school in December 1952 during afternoon nap time.
   Yellow square – with commentary.
4. The first time I stood on top of a mountain – Barbon Fell September 1963.
   Picture taken from the top of Barbon Fell from my archive with – commentary.
5. Wearing my Dad’s broken watch to school and playing with it all to learn to tell the time.
   A broken watch if I can find one in the market.
6. Sitting quietly all day one Saturday and Reading The Swiss Family Robinson from cover to cover.
   An armchair
7. Playing with my penknife and carving bits of wood.
8. The first time I ate a banana.
9. The end of sweet rationing in 1953 and Mum giving each of us a caramel as we went out to school in the morning.
10. Watching my parents drive away leaving me at the boarding school for the first time, age 13. I’d had cider with my lunch and I was not entirely sober.

Final choice:

My old penknife.

I don’t know where this knife came from. Perhaps I saw it in a drawer and decided to adopt it. It is very sharp indeed. I don’t think my parents knew I had it or, if they did, they thought I was sensible enough to have it. I never cut myself with it.
Knives were strictly forbidden at my boarding school but I managed to keep this knife with me all the time I was there. Keeping such a thing secret was a victory over a system that I hated. At least in this one small case I was winning.
M says it represents some kind of craft work while I just think of it as messing about with a forbidden knife and getting one over on authority.

Masquerades. Exercise 1

1. Is there any sense in which Lee’s work could be considered voyeuristic or even exploitative? Is she commenting on her own identity, the group identity of the people she photographs or both?

The question of capturing one’s essence in a photograph was thoroughly explored in Italo Calvino’s short story ‘Adventures of a Photographer’ in 1958. His protagonist, Antonino, wanted to discover the essence of Bice, his model, and to capture it in a photograph. He wanted to see what were the traits that defined her true character. He used an antique box camera with a black cloth and ground glass screen. (Lee typically used a small snapshot film camera) He could find no answer to his question, “What drives you two girls to cut from the mobile continuum of your day these temporal slices, the thickness of a second?” (1) Even when she was naked and even when they became lovers he could not capture the essence of who she was. I think the clue lies in his question – temporal slices cut from the mobile continuum of time. He already knew that everything changes and that in the end he was on a wild goose chase. Lee’s images admit and rejoice in the impossibility of capturing the self in a photograph.

Her pictures show someone who is completely mutable and undefined yet whose character is revealed. She is confident, brave, adventurous, possibly opinionated. Of course this cannot be a complete picture. After all, if we are capable of surprising ourselves whom we assume to know inside out, how can we know another person. Lee explores “the fluidity of individual and group identities.” (2)

Assuming that Lee involves her people in the process and that they understand what she’s doing, she is not exploiting them. She is, however, inviting us to see and perhaps be involved in stereotyping the various groups – this is me as an x, this is me and a y. She presents herself as the opposite of naked.(3) When she does appear naked she is still in disguise, acting a part. Berger’s comment on nakedness only applies to a subset of nudes such as Brotherus’ and Woodman’s images of themselves (and I’m not very sure of that).

2. Would you agree to Morrissey’s request if you were a day on the beach with your family? if not, why not?

The women replaced by Morrissey in her pictures are asked to become the photographer as she takes on their identities. It sounds like fun if you’re up for it. The most important part of each image is unseen: it is the discussion and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. All that process is hidden from us. All we have is the consequence and the guess at how many people refused her request before she was successful. Are these families complete strangers to her, I wonder. Whatever, people agree to her becoming a kind of cuckoo in their nests.

I would be strongly tempted to go along with her project and then dine out on the experience.

3. In her series ‘Seven Years’ she is more herself but she shifts her age, her gender, her place in the family so much that she is continually in camouflage, hiding in plain sight. We see her and still wonder who she is at the same time. “Morrissey encourages us to read her photographs. August 8th 1982 is every family photograph that makes us cringe. It is the picture we did not want taken and that we most want to lose behind the sofa, but that appears at the most inopportune moments. If it is a poem its subject is adolescence and it perfectly epitomises the uncomfortable emergence of nascent sexuality.” (4) The more she reveals of herself the harder she is to see.

 

(1) http://beauty.gmu.edu/AVT459/AVT459-001/Calvino.pdf

(2) https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/nikki-s-lee

(3) “to be naked is to be without disguise” Berger, J, (2008) Ways of Seeing 2nd ed. London: Penguin Books

(4) Camilla Brown in  www.trishmorrissey.com/articles/essays/portfolio-2010.html