Assignment 1 Response to tutor’s comments

The tutor’s notes were very helpful and constructive giving me a clear way forward.

1. I should have been clearer in what I was trying to achieve by contrasting the ‘ideal’ with the ‘real’, what the tourist might record and what a photographer concerned with a less idealised set of images might record. As it turned out I found it difficult to separate the ‘ideal’ from the ‘real’.

2. I need to explore different viewpoints – above, below, face on, from the side, close up, from a distance. I should use colour and mono more creatively.

3. I should use contact sheets as a way of illustrating a thought process. They should have notes showing what I was trying to capture.

Assignment 1 Evaluation

The story is a journey as a tourist around the eastern Adriatic. Out of the hundreds of possible images I chose these few. I rejected pairs like this taken in Malta …

 

(insufficient connection between the images)

and this …

 

(the fish farm doesn’t say enough about the castle on the point)

and this …

 

(neither image is interesting enough though I did enjoy the contrast between the girl in costume and the dozing man, ideal (from the tourist point of view) and ugly in the same frame).

One set of images, the, for want of a better word, ugly set, is just as representative of what was there as the other set. In fact there was more ugly than pretty and a documentary showing the degeneration of ancient cities would be quite feasible while one showing only the commercial side would not show even half the truth. Both would be convincing because both are available to the camera. I looked for the truth and found only images that could be interpreted according to some kind of stereotype or preconceived notion of what makes a good tourist photograph.

All the images are taken from ‘real life’, though I would have like to have taken more pictures of people as I did for Project 3  but the guided tours left me pressed for time and always accompanied by a crowd. (https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/category/coursework/part-1-the-photograph-as-document/project-3-reportage-part-1-the-photograph-as-document/)

Ignoring the ideas suggested in the brief is risky. The brief assumes scenarios whereas I chose scenes. My set is less immediate and personal but I believe still shows essential ‘truths’.

Images are well exposed and processed. Looking back, I would have preferred to use a much wider aperture to separate the girl selling almonds from her background. The focus in pair #3 of the boy sitting on the pile is perhaps too soft.

I rely on the footnotes to demonstrate research and knowledge.

Assignment 1 Two Sides of the Story

Brief
Create at least two sets of photographs telling different versions of the same story. Make both sets equally convincing so that it’s impossible to tell which version of the images is ‘true’.

Interpretation
The intention behind these images is simply to show what was there. This is an unrealistic intention. The act of selecting a scene, managing the colour, removing lens aberrations, deciding on a frame and so on, means that the images do not show either what the camera saw nor what was there. The images are constructs in the same way as every sight before our eyes is interpreted by age, experience, expectation, physical constraints and conceptual language, in fact, all the elements that make legerdemain more or less successful. Compare these two hotel rooms, for example. Which is the ideal, and which the real?

With these thoughts in mind I moved on to look for contrasts between ideal images and less than ideal images. An ideal image would be well composed and conform to what the imagination might see when presented with the real place.

Once Photoshop is involved, however, images are no longer indexical. Their direct physical relationship to the object, their ‘reality’, has been broken.[i] Of course both images in these pairs are ‘real’. The girl was there and so was the camera. But she was aware of the camera and posed for it: she is not relaxed, she is, in Susan Sontag’s terms, a victim, more or less willing but trapped and presented in a special role for tourists.[ii]  Or maybe she was complicit in creating the image in the same way as a studio model. She knew she was the subject and the background detail was as irrelevant to her as it was to the photographer. It is impossible to tell whether, again in Sontag’s terms, she is ‘looted’, ‘preserved’, denounced’ or ‘consecrated’[iii] by the act of being photographed. There was no time, or common language, or even, at the time, the inclination to discuss such issues with the girl. That’s not what tourists are expected to do. Meyerowitz faced the same existential problem.[iv] Other scenes compare the tourist record with what is seen by turning round or by widening the field of view.

I made these pairs of images.

1.

 

Two views of the same alley in Diocletian’s Palace in Split.

2.

A window in the Rialto compared with a window in the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

3.

In Venice.

4.

Luxury and ‘real’ life in Malta.

5.

Market in Dubrovnik.

6.

The Rialto in Venice.

7.

Venetian canal.

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[i] This is why, in the interests of honesty, National Geographic, for example, asks photojournalists to submit RAW files. See http://petapixel.com/2016/07/04/nat-geo-says-committed-honest-photos-era-photoshop/

[ii] in Bull, S, (2009) Photography. Abingdon: Routledge

[iii] in La Grange, A, (2005) Basic Critical Theory for Photographers. Oxford: Focal Press

[iv] http://erikimphotography.com/blog/2014/01/22/12-lessons-joel-meyerowitz-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/