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.
Chris Whittle 