On watching Henry Wessel at the Tate

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-henry-wessel

Incidents No. 8

Henry Wessel says in this short video, “There is the world and then there is the photograph. A photograph is not the world. It’s a completely different thing.”

The world moves and changes constantly. The light changes form moment to moment. Wessel’s bus moves on to pass people by. He captures a fleeting moment with no interaction between him and his subject. He is not so much looking at the world to see what it contains as looking at the photograph he has taken to see what that contains. There is a tension between his act of looking and the thing he is looking at. This tension derives from

• the appearance of the photograph, its studium
• the experience of the viewer, its interpretation
• the viewer’s imagination

These three form an event which shapes the meaning of the photograph. Emma Lewis, commenting on Incidents 2012, says it is as if his commonplace scenes are “isolated moments in a grander narrative”(1)

An extreme example of this kind of tension is seen in billboards produced by lenticular printing where the height of the viewer changes the appearance of the image.(2)

Even though the viewer might see an image snapped almost at random (3), the image is still carefully composed. The woman is framed in a space shaped by the Golden Mean. Her face is on a traditional third.

 

(1) http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/henry-wessel-0

(2) https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-smartest-street-billboard-ad-you-ever-seen-Or-you-look-liked-a-lot/answer/Kate-Madenwell

“This billboard used lenticular printing to show two different images depending on the height of the person reading it.

A great example of extremely powerful and clever advertising. It makes us literally see from a child’s perceptive that “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it”.”

(3) The photograph measures only 1536x1015mm

On Reading Singular Images–Essays on Remarkable Photographs. ed. Sophie Howarth

Assignment 4 asks students to write an essay of 1000 words on an image of their choice. I looked at how other writers commented on photographs in the series of essays edited by Sophie Howarth. I was interested in the form and structure of their essays.

Julia Margaret Cameron – Iago, Study from an Italian 1867 by Roger Hargreaves

The plan

1. Introduction, the image in an exhibition
2. History and original context, including the artist’s intention
3. Technical details, e.g. kind of camera, close up
4. How the image was received
5. The style of the image, e.g. soft focus
6. Comments on reproducibility
7. How the image appears in the world, e.g catalogue, book, museum, exhibition.

Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Dust Breeding 1920 by David Campany

The Plan

1. How he came across the image
2. History of how the image came to be taken
3. Comments on how the image was introduced to the world
4. Indexicality of the image
5. The image in a literary context, e.g. a quote on dust from The Wasteland 1922
6. Similar images
7. How the image has been used
8. The various symbols in the image in pairs, e.g. rough and smooth,random and designed, accidental and planned
9. Subsequent history of the image in new contexts
10. Two functions of a photograph, an art form in itself and a way of documenting art forms
11. Conclusion “Where photography was once the medium of moments, it now appears as a deliberating, forensic medium of traces.”

Diane Arbus, A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. 1966 by Liz Jobey

The Plan

1. Introduction and keynote. “The fictions we make about photographs are as unreliable as they are unavoidable.”
2. Emotional response to the image in forma of a description of what the image contains
3. Comments on how the photographer interpreted the image
4. A factual description of the image
5. The effect of the image on the photographer’s career
6. Connections between the image and the photographers personal history
7. “The gap between intention and effect”
8. The deliberate intentions of the photographer
9. The subsequent history of the image

Martin Parr, Jubilee Street Party, Elland, Yorkshire 1977 by Val Williams

1. Introduction to the photographer
2. Influences
3. Documentary style and intention
4. Description of what the image suggests
5. Subsequent history of the image
6. The effect of different contexts in which the image appeared.

Nan Goldin, The Hug, New York City 1980 by Darsie Alexander

1. Keynote as introduction: “Human intimacy may be among the most difficult subjects to capture photographically, but for Nan Goldin it is the only subject.”
2. How the image was presented, as a print, as a series of projected images, and in a book
3. Comments on the image as stable and ephemeral depending on its presentation
4. The structure of the image and its symbolism, e.g. the shadow on the left
5. The photographer’s insertion of herself into the image by using flash
6. Parallel poses – the woman and how we imagine the photographer to have been posed when taking the picture
7. The woman as both object of desire and main protagonist
8. The subsequent use of the image

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aegean Sea, Pilíon 1990 by Dominic Willsdon

1. Description of the image and comparison with others in the photographer’s oeuvre
2. The importance of the title in understanding the image
3. The unseen context of the image
4. Intention – a language without names
5. Comparison of intent with the intentions of other artists e.g. Caspar David Friedrich
6. Differences e.g. non-dramatic where Ansel Adams is very dramatic
7. No events, saying nothing about the value of a place
8. Conclusion: “it inoculates us against everything about Romantic art that is no longer meaningful.”

Thomas Struth. San Zaccaria, Venice 1995 by Sophie Howorth

1. Description of the image in detail
2. How the photograph was made, the kind of camera etc.
3. Speculation on why the photographer chose this image out of the 60 on the same subject
4. Technique in service of the photographer’s intention
5. Comments on the photographer’s intentions and mind-set
6. Speculation on how the image will be received in future
7. Documentary elements in the image
8. The image in a literary context – quotes from Philip Larkin

Jeff Wall. A view from an apartment 2004-5 by Sheen Wagstaff

1. Personal experience of being on the set of this constructed image
2. The photographer’s intention – pictorialism and realism
3. Description of the image, the importance of its size as evinced by the almost life-sized woman in the image
4. How the image was made
5. The photographer’s intention
6. Influences
7. The photographer’s intentions overall

A Visit to Bowes Museum 8 March 2017

http://www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk/

There was an exhibition of black and white photographs by Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones curated by Martin Parr. We immediately noticed the huge difference between the actual prints which are energetic and powerful and the altogether greyer images seen on the computer screen.

Martin Parr’s ‘Only in England’ series is in a documentary style, respectful of his subjects and closely observed. Where there is humour he doesn’t ridicule or even suggest that we ‘look-at-the-funny-man’. The people in his pictures have names. It is important that they are not anonymous.This is Tom Greenwood, for example, cleaning his window. We might wonder whether he is wearing a suit and a hat because he is being photographed but he looks so at home in his formal attire that we suspect that this is his actual character. His odd way of working is not odd at all when you realise that if he placed the step ladder on the pavement he would be able to reach even less of the window he’s cleaning.

Only in England is about British culture and mores in the seventies but it also says something about the human condition, about living in a small community and just getting on with your own way of life. His subjects are not eccentric. They are normal people doing everyday things and finding everyday solutions to everyday problems. However, there is something melancholy about the series too. Even though at my age I recognise so much of the way of life depicted here I can see that so much of it has passed. The Chapel at Crimsworth Dean is a private house now.

Tony Ray-Jones took a series of pictures of seaside scenes and English customs. There is often a surreal element in his images. People exist in their own bubble regardless of the world around them. He cuts people off at the edges of his pictures as if to suggest that there is much more to be seen but this, his subject, is what he wants to draw your attention to. Its as if he could have pointed his camera anywhere and found something similar. “He showed the British a picture of themselves at which they could laugh, but also appreciate. It was somewhat lacking in political edge, but it was a vision that contained a degree of truth.”(1)

 

(1) Badger,G. (2014) The Genius of Photography. Quadrille Publishing Ltd.

Assignment 4 First thoughts

Write an essay of 1000 words on an image of your choice.

I took this picture with an old 135mm lens on a Pentax K110 DSLR. I focused on the baby’s eye.

The pose is a classic mother and child. The viewer’s attention is drawn to the baby’s eye. This is the only plane of the picture which is in sharp focus. The depth of field is very narrow indeed so that he mother’s face is in very soft focus and the baby’s face is sharp enough to see the veins beneath the skin. The baby’s face is well lit while the mother’s face recedes into shadow. The eye moves from the light area at the top left into the shade at the bottom right resting on the catch light in the baby’s eye on the way.

What is the message of this photograph? The photograph distances itself from the two actual people. They are not monochrome. They move. This image catches a fraction of a second and says nothing about what happened before or after the picture was taken. The message doesn’t come from the reality, the there-was-something-in-front-of-the-lens. It comes from the way the image has been manipulated. The mother fades out of focus. She retreats, metaphorically, and the new generation takes her place. The picture takes some element of meaning from all the other mother and child images available to us but it has become stereotypical. It cannot be iconic because it is parasitic for its meaning on the whole gamut of similar images. Such a picture needs more than simple representation to acquire meaning. It needs some context to generate a frisson of emotion that will make it worth a second look. It lacks a punctum, the thing that pricks the imagination and brings you back time and again. Compare it with Dorothea Lange’s picture of Florence Owens Thompson.

Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ is a photographic paradigm. It is related to the Madonna and Child meme of classical painting but it lives in the context of social photography where its influence is far greater than any painting. If there is a language of photography this image defines the photographic ‘word’ for such a scene. Its use transcends what it represents and the more it is used the more powerful its message becomes. This image changed and changes the way we look at the world. The look in the Migrant Mother’s eyes is haunted and haunting. That is the punctum of this image and the justification for its inclusion in the Farm Security Administration Collection. That said, it is still a surprise when a photograph turns out not to be ephemeral like my picture. That has become part of the legend of an unremarkable middle class family and has no significance outside that tiny context.

Part 4 Reading Photographs, Project 1, Exercise 1

1. Look carefully at Erwitt’s image and write some notes about how the subject matter is placed within the frame.

The big dog’s right leg and the woman’s right leg are very roughly on thirds as are the ankles, measured from the bottom of the image. The small dog’s face is as far from the right hand edge as is the the big dog’s left leg from the left hand edge. The space at the bottom of the picture matches the space from the top of the picture to the hem of the coat.

2. The image is structured with vertical lines. They are, from left to right, the blurred tree in the background, two big dog’s legs, two human legs, the small dog’s lead and a vague frame shape on the right. There are also horizontal lines. Our eye constructs a line along the toes, another, more vague, at about the height of the small dog and another at the hem of the coat. All the elements in focus are in the same plane. The depth of filed is quite narrow. There are foreground and background planes which are blurred out but which locate the main elements in the pictorial space.

3. The image says, “I saw an amusing incongruity. This is a good joke, isn’t it!”

4. The structure of the image isolates the main elements and, as we naturally read from left to right, we come across the joke after seeing the long legs first. After a moment we are amused by the size of the small dog, then by its expression with its Marty Feldman eyes and, lastly, by its hat and knitted coat. The joke continues beyond the photograph. What sort of owner gives her small dog such a hat and a little coat fastened at the neck with a neat bow and tassels? And then we imagine how they do not keep in step as they walk on and how their legs must move in a complicated rhythm. If the movement translated into music we would hear the bass notes of the big dog, the quick and vital melody of the small dog and the strings of the woman holding the piece together.

The picture was originally intended as an advert for boots but Erwitt’s sense of humour and skill in seeing a joke and presenting it perfectly in this picture is a common thread in his work. This image, for example, (Brazil, Buzios, 1990) shows the same sense of mischief.

We see two pairs of hairy legs among a crowd of smooth and hairless ones. There is the same sense of incongruity, the same arrangement of planes, the same very rough division of thirds, and the same low vantage point.

Notes on The Elu[va]sive Portrait: mimicry, Masquerade and Camouflage by Ayelet Zohar

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0002.102?view=text;rgn=main

“The ‘truth’ of the photographic portrait becomes both elusive and evasive, as the portrait image itself becomes an object of inquiry, rather than a piece of information.”

For example, womanliness or manliness can be “assumed and worn as a mask … much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not stolen goods.”

Assignment 3 Reworked

Introduction

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. 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. 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, take this image made by Francesca Woodman.

I could suggest, rightly or wrongly, that she was interpreting that passage in Calvino’s ‘The Adventures of a Photographer’ where he describes his model as he sees her in his camera: “It was one of those boxes whose rear wall was of glass, where the image is reflected as if already on the plate, ghostly, a bit milky, deprived of every link with space and time.” (3) Once the connection between Woodman in a glass box and Antonino Paraggi’s muse is explicit, the context has been enlarged and a new layer of meaning is added. Artificially varying elements of text is analogous “to artificially varying certain elements of a photograph to see if the variations of forms led to variations of meaning”. Barthes also points out that connotation “depends on the  reader’s ‘knowledge’ just as though it were a matter of a real language (langue) intelligible only if one has learned the signs.”(4) John White’s commentary on her pictures gives the viewer a different pair of glasses through which to view and make sense of them. (5) 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. The commentary may be boring, condescending and effectively patronising, but that’s a question of quality, not necessity.

The Process

I kept a 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 artificial. To this end I made a list of fifteen or so topics that a diary might cover.(6) 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 ‘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 started 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’. I have decided to include what I think of as ‘mood pictures’ to alongside the diary entries.

Contact sheets

 

 

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

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

(3) cit.in La Grange, A. (2005) Basic Critical Theory for Photographers. Oxford. Focal Press

(4) Barthes, R. (1977) The Photographic Message in Image Music Text, London, Fontana Press

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

(6) https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/assignment-3-planning/

 

The Images

1. The empty page – Memories

and waiting for the door to open. Inspiration may be behind that door.

“I drove M to the doctor’s and waited in the car park. I hate this waiting and not knowing what will happen next.” Trying to look into the future is always like this. The page may seem blank but, like the door and like waiting for something to happen, it is full of potential.

2. The posed picture – Hiding

“I write commentaries on liturgical texts which are published every week. I’m always more comfortable when I’ve found the first sentence which unlocks the rest.” Is this image too literal? Probably. But the image of me supposedly at my desk is posed. That is not where I work. It is what I would like to look like when I’m working. Both images are false and so is my diary. I cannot do introspection safely so I make it up. It is true that I write these commentaries, but not like this.

3. Where I actually do my work – Distraction

“I spent the morning writing.” Actually I spent the morning daydreaming and getting nowhere. I want the picture of my desk to have messy, clipped edges and to be on a slant to suggest something incomplete, a work in progress and an element of confusion but the screen shows I have no programs running. I am doing nothing but looking out of the window at the sky.

4. My library – Decluttering

“We have so many books that we don’t need any more. Why keep the full set of Terry Pratchett novels when they’re all on the Kindle?”  The truth is that is is difficult to the point of impossible to throw books, notes and CDs away.

5. Angry

“At the live streaming of the opera, the cinema switched the stream off and started the next program 10 minutes before the end. We missed Romeo and Juliet’s death scene.” We felt powerless and frustrated. There was nowhere for our emotion to go. We just had to get over it. Black and white suits the cold emotion.

6. Fear of the past

“I had a nightmare of being back at school.” It takes an effort every day to put the past back where it belongs and to live in the present. Here and now I often feel like this, twisting and turning and looking for peace of mind.

Technical and Visual Skills

I have been learning to use Photoshop more creatively, not just to get the colours and white balance as I want them to be but also to make adjustments/corrections for lens aberrations. I have tried to include elements in the frame purposefully so that, for example, in the image of my messy desk everything about the picture is messy. Edges are cut off. The jumble of wires is chaotic and so on.

Quality of Outcome

I’m not sure that the mood pictures really work. Do they illustrate the text or do they act in the same way as text as a commentary of the main picture? I think I need to work harder to tease out how one picture can comment on another.

Demonstration of Creativity

I have not told the whole truth in this diary exercise. Instead I have exaggerated my emotional state in an attempt to make the exercise reveal something that creates an image of myself that my psychiatrist would easily recognise.