Response to tutor’s feedback on Assignment 5

My tutor has been unfailingly helpful and positive. She has made several suggestions to improve the assignment.

1. Include contact sheets.
2. “select a single image from several practitioners and analyse the elements in that image that represent the idea or technique that has been of influence”
3. Say something about why image 4 is cropped differently from the rest.
4. Create “a separate blog page/post with just your final assessment photos in order to give a cleaner viewing impression of your finished images.”

1. Contact sheets.

2. “select a single image from several practitioners and analyse the elements in that image that represent the idea or technique that has been of influence”

I like the way the gaze stares outside the frame to suggest that there is much more going on that we cannot see. I wanted the gaze to be an important part of each image.

3. Say something about why image 4 is cropped differently from the rest.

I wanted this to be something like a continuity still but forgot to say so. It doesn’t really work anyway. It should be in the same format as the rest.

More on Assignment 5

After making these pictures for Assignment 5, Stills From A Lost Horror Film, I had a lot of images of facial expressions left over.

I decided the idea could be pushed much further. After seeing the huge images displayed by Rodney Graham and others I thought I would like to make an image at least 3 feet by 4 and fill it with my facial expressions apart from the bottom right hand corner where my face would be in a jar. I want a wooden frame round the whole picture to react with the frames of the individual images and then the frame within a frame of the face in the jar. I also want the various faces to seem to interact with one another in some way perhaps as they respond to their immediate context making a kind of internal narrative. I want the whole to say something about a character being encapsulated and hidden in plain sight behind the barrier of how people present themselves to the world. I mocked up this image.

or perhaps this.

or even a diptych: one frame of faces, the other the face in the jar.

And then I thought about the sometimes arbitrary nature of moods. Perhaps one could construct a narrative based on the throw of dice like these. The range of expression is trapped by the six sided convention of the die just as the face was trapped in a bottle earlier but here fate can play its part.

 

The game is to act out the mood that goes with the expression or, if several dice are thrown, to create a story to explain the connection between the various expressions.

Preparation for Assignment 5

Brief.

Construct a series of images elaborating on a theme.

Write a 300 word introduction.

Describe the process.

The Process – Part 1

I began putting a few ideas together[1] beginning with an attempt at expressing an idea of enigmatic dislocation which would imply some kind of narrative. I took this picture.

The figure and its situation are enigmatic. The light coming from the various doorways was easy to control. I waited for the right time of day and used curtains to moderate the light. I tried other locations but felt I did not have sufficient control over the environment or the resources necessary to create a set. I put this idea on the back burner.

My next thought was to follow Cindy Sherman’s and Cheryl Dunye’s examples to make an Untitled Film Still. I had also enjoyed Marcel Broodthaer’s images of a head in a glass vessel. I made a number of images of my face with different expressions, looking in different directions and so on so that the head in the bottle would seem to have some connection with its surroundings. This is one of them. I used light from a window controlled with curtains.

This was the set up.

I was not satisfied with this image. There was insufficient context to suggest more than a very short narrative. I felt I needed more in order to tell a story. I also needed more control over the light. I would come back to this idea.

Next, as I was thinking about inspiration for this assignment, I hit upon the idea of taking inspiration literally. I would go to church and take a picture of a person praying. I would take the picture from behind with a flash giving the figure an over exposed rim light. I tried this out but the practical difficulties of controlling the ambient light and the short range of the wireless flash trigger left me very dissatisfied with the result.

I went back to the head in the bottle idea. I thought I would emulate Cindy Sherman’s picture of herself in the kitchen, Untitled Film Still #3[2], and start the series by cooking something up. The camera was on a tripod and triggered by the remote in my left hand with a 3 second delay. I used a slight flash to fill in and reduce the contrast between light and shadow. This was promising, I thought, but didn’t suggest the mystery of what was to follow.

I decided to make a story of the head in the bottle from a magical beginning to a mundane acceptance. I set up a dark scenario illuminated by a candle against a black background and made this series of three which I called ‘The Grimoire’, ‘The Spell’, and ‘Success’.

1. The Grimoire

I was happy with the invisible writing on the left hand page showing up well but not happy with the pale line dissecting the scene. 2. The Spell

Again, there is a problem with the pale line. I tried painting it out in Photoshop but the line in the glass holding the candle was too complicated to replace.

3. Success

I was happy with this image.

I realised that every frame had to have the same colour palette and treatment in order to make the images look as if they all came from the same film. 4.

5.

6.

The general plan looks good. Now I have to reshoot making small corrections to composition and background and perhaps replan the whole project.

Research/Influences

· Cheryl Dunye’s collaboration with Zoe Leonard to make the fictional ‘The Fae Richard’s Photo Archive’. “Since it wasn’t happening I invented it,” says Dunye.[3]

· Alexia Sinclair’s carefully constructed sets and controlled colour palette.[4]

· Paolo Ventura’s insertion of himself into his short stories.[5]

· The facial expressions in Lydia Panas’ ‘The Mark of Abel’[6] as in this example.

· The anxiety in Clare Strand’s ‘Gone Astray Portraits’[7]

· Marcel Broodthaer’s face in a bottle[8]

I wanted there to be an interaction between the face and its environment.

· Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills[9] I was particularly struck by the way she uses eyes to look out of the picture to suggest that there is much more going on outside the frame. These examples are typical.

· Gregory Crewdson’s haunting strangeness[10]

· Rodney Graham’s sense of humour[11]

· Stiffs, Skulls and Skeletons: Images of the Darker Side of Life. Paul Moakley,Olivier Laurent[12]

The Process – Part 2

I decided to reshoot the series to try to make the story more mysterious and more consistent at the same time.

I decided to make the images monochrome and to use a different book as the Grimoire. The text in the original image, which I chose for the invisible writing on the left hand page, is Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The text, which can be read in image three, is inappropriate. I chose a Coptic Dictionary to stand in for the magic book. The only English words that can be made out (‘who separates’, ‘God’s sword’, ‘from heaven’, ‘star’, ‘sun’, ‘like snakes’, ‘shine forth, glow’) seem appropriate to the magical theme. The candle is the only light source and it controls the lighting.

Stills From A Lost Horror Film

4 The Grimoire

5 The Face Begins to Appear as the Spell Begins to Work

6 It’s Alive and Responding to Its Environment

The Process – Part 2

8 The Face Realises Its Predicament as a Previous Creation Looks On

Reflection and Evaluation

The open ended nature of this assignment made the task more difficult for me than it should have been but once I had a plan it became much easier.

I enjoyed surfing through the various artists listed on page 7. One passage from Roland Barthes’ The Third Meaning[13] stuck in my mind and shaped my decision to make the Face in a Bottle series. He says,
“… the obtuse meaning appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analytically, it has something derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reason; it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of carnival.”

The idea of carnival and triviality guided me away from my original ideas of the enigmatic figure placed oddly at the end of a long corridor and away from trying to take a carefully (but failed) posed person at prayer. I thought it would be easier to make this series of faces in a bottle. In the end it was much harder to control the lighting and the settings. I made more than 120 images in order to make these few for the assignment.

Is the series successful?

I tested a couple of the images on Facebook to see what response they would get. People were positive and enjoyed the macabre fun. My aim of being on “the side of carnival” was achieved.

I made a mess of the last picture in the series in that it is not in the same format as the others. Unfortunately a computer glitch means that I can’t get back to the original to fix that.

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[1] https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/51505801/posts/1427040581

[2] https://imageobjecttext.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/cindy-sherman-untitled-film-still-3.jpg

[3] http://www.archivesandcreativepractice.com/zoe-leonard-cheryl-dunye/

[4] https://alexiasinclair.com/

[5] http://paoloventura.com/?p=298

[6] http://www.lydiapanas.com/themarkofabel/

[7] http://www.clarestrand.co.uk/works/?id=100

[8] https://staging.artsy.net/show/museum-of-modern-art-marcel-broodthaers-a-retrospective

[9] http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sherman-untitled-film-still-48-p11518

[10] http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/gregory-crewson/

[11] http://www.balticmill.com/whats-on/exhibitions/rodney-graham

[12] http://time.com/3812666/halloween-skull-skeleton-death-burns-archive/

[13] Barthes, R, (1977) Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana Press

Assignment 4 Revisited

The tutor’s comments were precise, to the point and encouraging.

I had been concerned to keep to the word limit in this assignment so I cut it down a lot from what I wrote originally. The tutor picked out a few faults which I have tried to address. My original had no spelling mistakes – I blame Microsoft for thinking it knows better.

Guerrillero Heroico

In September 1968 I became a student at a university in Paris where I would join in the struggle against some of the forces that made being a student in a newly idealistic community very difficult. General de Gaulle had arbitrarily ended all student grants leaving many students penniless and having to give up their studies. It was the best of times and the worst of times. We all learned how to deal with the effects of tear gas. Every student room, squat and drinking den had an image of Che Guevara on its walls. It was less than a year since he had been executed on the 9^th October 1967 in a village in Bolivia.

Alberto (Korda) Diaz Gutiérrez, a fashion photographer, had become the photographer of the Cuban revolution in 1959. He took this picture with a Leica M2 with a 90mm lens at a funeral on 5^th March 1960.[I] He shot two frames, this one and one in portrait format, before Che moved away. He cropped the image to this, which became the iconic image. Korda gave a copy to an Italian publisher, G. Feltrinelli. It then appeared, uncredited, in Paris Match in August 1967. Then an Irish artist, Jim Fitzpatrick, made a colour poster. When Che was executed there were demonstrations and protests and Feltrinelli sold posters to protesters. The image had not been copyrighted and began to be used anywhere and everywhere. Andy Warhol made this in 1968, a comment on the ubiquity of the image.

Korda’s image is monochrome, taken from a low angle so that the subject’s gaze appears to be slightly upwards, unfocused and out of the frame. The image is quite grainy and the sky is burnt out. The skin tones are preserved with a range of greys from the lightest on Che’s forehead to full black in his hair. His shoulders face slightly to the right of the image while his head is turned slightly to the left making an interesting contraposto composition. The light comes from the left but there is detail in the shadows on the right – Rembrandt lighting. The whole frame is tilted out of the vertical, an element corrected in the final crop. The figure on the left and the palm leaves on the right are also cropped out of the final image. This could easily be something out of Cindy Sherman’s play book – a film still. This leads us to expect or imagine more of the scene. The title, Guerrillero Heroico, directs the viewer’s attention to the myth which surrounds the image.

The appearance of the image cannot escape being seen through the experience of the viewer. We are used to seeing heroic images from Churchill to Ghandi. Pictures of Mussolini often fit the same mould. Our experience of photographs which have an element of hero worship lead us to expect that this is the way heroes are presented. The ubiquity of the image colours the way the original is seen in every way to the extent that for many it is impossible to identify the original as the original. “By don’t of their reproducibility, photographs have a tendency to become unhinged from their original context and to reappear in unexpected and often incongruous places.”[ii]

This image of Che has become particularly unhinged. It has been translated from its original medium to almost anything that will take a printed image, from shoes to T-shirts, posters to tatoos. “It is plausible,” said Walter Benjamin, “that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original”.[iii] He was talking about translating from one language to another but the point works for any translation from one form of communication to another. In the case of this image of Che Guevara the context, and narrative power of the original has been almost entirely lost. Translation is the process of moving a thing from one place to another, reburying a saint’s body, for example. Che’s image has been reburied times beyond number and each time it has altered its significance. The Che posted on the student wall is not the same as the Che printed on a pair of shoes. One is a statement of a political belief, the other is trivial beyond belief. One affirms the importance of the image, the other denies it any importance. Its uses range from high art to banausic. The image is reburied in many unmarked graves.

There is a physical connection between the photograph and the object in front of the lens which it reproduces. This indexicality of the image is weakened when the image appears as a screen print, a miniature, a huge billboard, a flag, or a print on a bikini. The size and situation become part of the connotation just as a shout connotes something different from a whisper. The medium is the message as Marshall McCluhan proclaimed in 1964. The thing signified by the image, heroicism, respect, revolutionary fervour or simple fascination with a graphic shape, is in a state of flux. The love evident in Korda’s original is not love now, according to Shakespeare’s dictum, as it alters where it alteration finds.[iv] Barthes’ punctum, the sense of shock as the narrative content of the image is interrupted, lies outside the image itself and is relocated to its many uses. Advertisers took advantage of this power to shock. Replacing Che’s hat badge with the Mercedes symbol, for example, was an misappropriation of the image which was rightly condemned in court but that horse had already bolted. The lack of copyright means that asking for an ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.

Roland Barthes believed that “a specific photograph … is never distinguished from its referent”[v] Could this image of Che Guevara be an exception? Has it become a meaningless graphic? Is it an interesting monochrome shape of a face whose striking quality is so separate from the original that it can exist without the viewer having any knowledge of the significance of the subject? Matthew Diffee’s cartoon[vi] would suggest that Barthes was right. What has happened though is that the “spell of the personality”[vii] has become the spell of the image.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since the heady days of 1968 when I was an idealistic twenty year old who thought that we students could and would change the world. The revolution did not happen. Daniel Cohn-Bendit whom I heard speak in 1969 became an MEP. We all grew up and learned to live in the world as it is. This image, for all its various uses and misuses, remains as a reminder of the way we used to be.

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[I] http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2013/06/06/the-extraordinary-story-behind-the-iconic-image-of-che-guevara

[ii] Howarth, S. (2005) Singular Images. London, Tate Publishing

[iii] Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, ed.Hannah Arendt. New York. Schocken Books

[iv] Shakespeare. Sonnet 116

[v] Barthes, R. Camera Lucida (1981) trans Farrar, Straus and Giroux. London. Vintage Books

[vi] New Yorker. 2^nd February 2004

[vii] Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, ed.Hannah Arendt. New York. Schocken Books

Assignment 4. Reflection and Evaluation

How I came to choose the iconic image of Che Guevara

My first reaction to this assignment was to look at adverts such as the one in New Scientist which I analysed in terms of its signifiers and what I thought they signified.[I] I felt this approach would not allow me to explore in the same way as a more ‘artistic’ image might. I had to look further.

I considered Ruth Orkin’s picture of An American Girl in Italy which I have seen in restaurants and hotels here and there as decorative art across Europe. It is not just the fifteen or so men in that picture who ogle the girl but conversations in hotel bars often mirror what is going on in the image. The contrast between the innocence of the young girls having an adventure in Italy and the ideological arguments about the image would offer many opportunities to fulfil the brief of this assignment, but I found it difficult to resist the temptation to have a full on rant despite what Ninalee Craig, the girl in the picture, says about it now 66 years later.[ii]

I visited an exhibition of images by Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle in Co. Durham[iii]. I was very impressed by their pictures but, thinking in terms of this assignment, their pictures did not seem to me to offer much scope for talking about ‘what happened next’. I also needed to see how other people wrote about photographs. I was lucky enough to get a second hand copy of Sophie Howarth’s book, Singular Images. I read this making notes on the ‘how’ of what her contributors wrote as well as on the ‘what’. One sentence struck me in particular. She wrote, “By don’t of their reproducibility, photographs have a tendency to become unhinged from their original context and to reappear in unexpected and often incongruous places.”[iv] While this was certainly true of An American Girl in Italy I began to think about the image of Che Guevara and his image appeared in strange places.

The exhibition at Bowes Museum included a short film on how the photographs came to be made. Saying how a picture is made draws attention to the process and directs the viewer to see it in a particular way. Giving it a date, for example, invites consideration of a historical context. It was very noticeable in the case of Martin Parr that what we see is affected by how we see and by the character of the observer. It made me think about seeing things from a cultural, personal and educational background. (I see a rat and think dystopia. Nelson’s midshipmen looked at rats and saw food.)

The weakness of images in respect of meaning[v] allows all manner of speculation about what an image can mean. Barthes talks about the “obtuse” meaning which “appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analytically it has something derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reasoning; it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of carnival.”[vi] My thoughts began to focus on images that have been used and misused and began to centre on Korda’s image of Che Guevara and Ruth Orkin’s American Girl both of which would illustrate Barthe’s thought.

I was looking for an image which would allow the kind of essay plan and personal response shown by Sophie Howarth’s contributors. The image also had to be amenable to mention/discussion of translation, interpretation, connotation, sign, signifier, signified, punctum and stadium. These are easier to discuss in relation to images by Gregory Crewdson, for example, than to images by Hiroshi Sugimoto. I was conscious of the assignment tail wagging the dog of how I reacted to various images but after my last not particularly successful assignment I wanted an image that would allow me to tick all the boxes.

Putting these thoughts together I chose to write abut the iconic image of Che Guevara taken by Alberto (Korda) Diaz Gutiérrez in 1960. Following the examples of plans derived from Sophie Howarth’s contributors I made this plan:

· How I came across the image

· How this image came to be taken

· The image itself

· How the image has been received

I was very conscious of the 1000 word limit and had to be very selective. I chose not to include a comparison with this image, for example, a copy of which hangs in the Bowes Museum. I could have commented on the heavenward gaze, the contraposto and how Che’s image expresses heroic nobility while this, despite being so similar, expresses distress. I could have said more about the symbolism in the Che image, his beret and single star, his beard and unruly hair and compared it with the rich symbolism of the El Greco.

I might also have compared the portrait style with these, also by Korda which show the same angle of the shoulders and turn of the head.

Evaluation

The criteria derived from the brief are:

· Is the photograph well known?

· Has the context of the photograph been well researched?

· Are there comments on the intentions of the photographer?

· Does the essay say why the photograph was taken?

· Is there a personal opinion about what the image means to the writer?

· Does the essay show an awareness of the technical terms mentioned in the assignment brief?

· Does the essay follow thought associations and other related images?

· Does the essay show an awareness of the wider context of the image?

· Does the essay use its sources sensibly and accurately?

I have taken care to show that each of these criteria has been met within the word limit.

I enjoyed researching this image and was very pleased to be able to get a copy of Sophie Howarth’s book. My work on Assignment 3 was confused. I enjoyed being much more rigorous about this one.

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[I] https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/part-4-reading-photographs-project-2-reading-pictures/

[ii] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/30/europe/tbt-ruth-orkin-american-girl-in-italy/index.html

[iii] http://www.bowesmuseum.org.uk

[iv] Howarth, S. (2005) Singular Images. London. Tate Publishing

[v] Barthes, R. trans Heath, S. (1977) Image, Music, Text. London, Fontana Press

[vi] ibid.

Assignment 4

Guerrillero Heroico

In September 1968 I became a student at a university in Paris where I would join in the struggle against some of the forces that made being a student in a newly idealistic community very difficult. General de Gaulle had arbitrarily ended all student grants leaving many students penniless and having to give up their studies. It was the best of times and the worst of times. We all learned how to deal with the effects of tear gas. Every student room, squat and drinking den had an image of Che Guevara on its walls. It was less than a year since he had been executed on the 9^th October 1967 in a village in Bolivia.

Alberto (Korda) Diaz Gutiérrez, a fashion photographer, had become the photographer of the Cuban revolution in 1959. He took this picture with a Leica M2 with a 90mm lens at a funeral on 5^th March 1960.[I] He shot two frames, this one and one in portrait format, before Che moved away. He cropped the image to this, which became the iconic image. Korda gave a copy to an Italian publisher, G. Feltrinelli. It then appeared, uncredited, in Paris Match in August 1967. Then an Irish artist, Jim Fitzpatrick, made a colour poster. When Che was executed there were demonstrations and protests and Feltrinelli sold posters to protesters. The image had not been copyrighted and began to be used anywhere and everywhere. Andy Warhol made this in 1968, a comment on the ubiquity of the image.

The image is monochrome, taken from a low angle so that the subject’s gaze appears to be slightly upwards, unfocused and out of the frame. The image is quite grainy and the sky is burnt out. The skin tones are preserved with a range of greys from the lightest on Che’s forehead to full black in his hair. His shoulders face slightly to the right of the image while his head is turned slightly to the left making an interesting contraposto composition. The light comes from the left but there is detail in the shadows on the right – Rembrandt lighting. The whole frame is tilted out of the vertical, an element corrected in the final crop. The figure on the left and the palm leaves on the right are also cropped out of the final image. The title, Guerrillero Heroico, directs the viewer’s attention to the myth which surrounds the image.

The appearance of the image cannot escape being seen through the experience of the viewer. The ubiquity of the image colours the way the original is seen in every way to the extent that for many it is impossible to identify the original as the original. “By don’t of their reproducibility, photographs have a tendency to become unhinged from their original context and to reappear in unexpected and often incongruous places.”[ii]

This image of Che has become particularly unhinged. It has been translated from its original medium to almost anything that will take a printed image, from shoes to T-shirts, posters to tatoos. “It is plausible,” said Walter Benjamin, “that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original”.[iii] In this case the context, and narrative power of the original has been almost entirely lost. Translation is the process of moving a thing from one place to another, reburying a saint’s body, for example. Che’s image has been reburied times beyond number and each time it has altered its significance. The Che posted on the student wall is not the same as the Che printed on a pair of shoes. One is a statement of a political belief, the other is trivial beyond belief. One affirms the importance of the image, the other denies it any importance. Its uses range from high art to banausic. The image is reburied in many unmarked graves.

There is a physical connection between the photograph and the object in front of the lens which it reproduces. This indexicality of the image is weakened when the image appears as a screen print, a miniature, a huge billboard, a flag, or a print on a bikini. The size and situation become part of the connotation just as a shout connotes something different from a whisper. The medium is the message as Marshall McCluhan proclaimed in 1964. The thing signified by the image, heroicism, respect, revolutionary fervour or simple fascination with a graphic shape, is in a state of flux. The love evident in Korda’s original is not love now as it alters where it alteration finds. Barthes’ punctum, the sense of shock as the narrative content of the image is interrupted, lies outside the image itself and is relocated to its many uses. Advertisers took advantage of this power to shock. Replacing Che’s hat badge with the Mercedes symbol, for example, was an misappropriation of the image which was rightly condemned in court but that horse had already bolted. The lack of copyright means that asking for an ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.

Roland Barthes believed that “a specific photograph … is never distinguished from its referent”[iv] Could this image of Che Guevara be an exception? Has it become a meaningless graphic? Is it an interesting monochrome shape of a face whose striking quality is so separate from the original that it can exist without the viewer having any knowledge of the significance of the subject? Matthew Diffee’s cartoon[v] would suggest that Barthes was right. What has happened though is that the “spell of the personality”[vi] has become the spell of the image.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since the heady days of 1968 when I was an idealistic twenty year old who thought that we students could and would change the world. The revolution did not happen. Daniel Cohn-Bendit whom I heard speak in 1969 became an MEP. We all grew up and learned to live in the world as it is. This image, for all its various uses and misuses, remains as a reminder of the way we used to be.

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[I] http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2013/06/06/the-extraordinary-story-behind-the-iconic-image-of-che-guevara

[ii] Howarth, S. (2005) Singular Images. London, Tate Publishing

[iii] Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, ed.Hannah Arendt. New York. Schocken Books

[iv] Barthes, R. Camera Lucida (1981) trans Farrar, Straus and Giroux. London. Vintage Books

[v] New Yorker. 2^nd February 2004

[vi] Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, ed.Hannah Arendt. New York. Schocken Books

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.

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.

Response to tutor’s comments on Assignment 3

Separate the mood pictures out and use them to comment on the other pictures

Looking back I think I became quite disorganised in my approach to Assignment 3. I’m not good at the introspection brought on by keeping a diary. I can manage holiday diaries but they’re just an account of where we were and what we did. They never mention feelings or memories. My tutor is very positive and supportive but the fact is I didn’t do very well. Here’s what I have to do to improve it.

1. Take more photos and include a contact sheet to explain my choices
2. Title all images with snippets of text from the diary. Reflect on how the titles affect the meaning of the image
3. Think carefully about the order of the images. Number the images to indicate the order. Order and reorder them and present them with various reasons for the various orders in the blog
4. Comment on the truth and reality of my shelves, my real workspace and my constructed workspace
5. Why are the mood pictures included?
6. Why is the ‘here and now’ picture included?
7. Separate the mood pictures out and use them to comment on the other pictures
8. Visit an exhibition or two
9. Read ‘Image Music Text’ by Roland Barthes and relate it to this assignment
10. When the Assignment is thoroughly reworked, present it as such for final assessment.

This image expresses my mood at this point. I have a long way to go and quite a lot of it seems to be uphill. This is a place called ‘The Struggle’ between Kirkstone and Ambleside in the Lake District.

Assignment 3. Planning

‘

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’.