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.

---

[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.

---

[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