On my tutor’s suggestion I have reformatted and edited the pdf of the booklet submitted for this assignment. I have made the text boxes all have the same margins. All begin in the same place on the page. The text has been changed to Calibri, 14pt. The change in voice for the museum pictures has been removed so that the tone of the text is consistent throughout the series. Each picture now fills its page.
These are jpegs of the pdf pages.
Links to the pdf files.
When I read the assignment brief I decided to tackle what seemed to me to be the more difficult of the two options. Using props would, I thought, tempt me into being too literal and I had already been there when trying to interpret poetry photographically. For example, my first thought when responding to Blake’s Sick Rose was this.
I felt I needed to find more depth and the idea of anchoring an image with text began to take hold. This set up some new hurdles to overcome.
I looked at Duane Michals’ ‘This photograph is my proof’ to see how text and image could work together and analysed it. I wrote this in my journal.
“Is Duane Michals’ photograph actual proof? Perhaps, but the image is posed. The camera is on a tripod, or held by an assistant or triggered remotely or with a timer. If it’s on a timer I can imagine the flurry of activity to get into position before the shutter fires. How many attempts were there before this successful shot? If the shutter was fired remotely, how much care was taken to hide the cable release before assuming the position. If there was an assistant involved then the impression of intimacy takes on a false note.
The text anchors a meaning to the image that would not otherwise be there. Without the text, the way the couple are facing into the shadow might be significant. The smile on the man’s face and half smile on the woman’s may be a reaction to being photographed as easily as to being in an intimate moment. The classic triangle of the composition and the strong diagonal of the woman’s back emphasised by the dark headboard leads to his smile and makes him rather than her the subject of the image.
There is a game being played here. The author invites the viewer to take part. ‘It did happen. She did love me. Look see for yourself!’”
The next image that struck me (one with an immediate punctum, not Barthes’ wound, more a poke to say , ‘I’m here. Look at me!’) was Fox Talbot’s ‘A Meditation on a Broomstick’. Fox Talbot wrote, “A casual gleam of sunshine, or a shadow thrown across the path, a time-withered oak, or a moss covered stone may awaken a train of thoughts and feelings and picturesque imaginings.” (1) The idea of awakening a train of thought led me into Assignment 2.
After looking at Anne Turyn’s ‘Illustrated Memories (1983-95) a fictional biography’ (2) and seeing how her pictures evoke half-remembered things I realised the need for a more formal input. I read Roland Barthes ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ and wrote this: https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/photographing-the-unseen-some-thoughts-on-reading-roland-barthes-rhetoric-of-the-image/
I was ready to make a list of at least seven ideas.
My list didn’t immediately inspire me so I began to look further https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2016/11/25/thinking-about-photographing-the-unseen-25-11-16/
Now I had so many ideas churning about that I felt the need to ask my tutor for advice. I sent her this: https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/thinking-about-photographing-the-unseen-05-12-16/
Her reply directed me to look at Hockney’s ‘Joiners’, and Sophie Calle’s work, and to dig further into Barthes’ Camera Lucida. I bought a copy. His Proustian analysis of photography made me less afraid of a very personal response. The conclusion to Barthes’ book set me free to be irrational, a difficult thing for one whose first love in Philosophy was Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. He says he realised “that there was a sort of link (or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know.” Barthes concludes, “Photography can be [mad or tame]: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits …; mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time.” (3) Reading about Sophie Calle set me free to be very personal/Proustian on my own account and to explore the use of text much further.
I decided to evoke the nostalgia of time passing. Each picture is about remembering. I chose images which would allow some kind of narrative from childhood to the present day. My old school scarf was bought in 1962 when I went away to a boarding school. My nightmares about that time are still very vivid. I left the image in colour to give it a louder voice than a black and white treatment. A close up of the label was enough to evoke a powerful memory in me. The stone that turned out to have a fossil inside evokes a magical moment. I chose to include two pictures, one of a crack in the stone and one of the stone revealing its secret. These images are monochrome to concentrate the attention on the object without distraction and also to suggest a past, pre-colour, event. The scan of a picture my mother took when I was three years old evokes a much more pleasant memory than the scarf. It was also a magical moment, my first understanding of being photographed. The photograph of the lady sitting in front of the chart and the small skeleton was taken in a rediscovered roof space of a church. It is an image of the past and rediscovery. Is it a memento mori or a carpe diem? The picture of Louise was taken at the same time and, like the images of the stone, is the second part of a single memory. The last image, is to round off the series making a bookend with the scarf. I decided to keep it monochrome. The original colours are intense and to mute them would draw attention to the treatment. I prefer the simplicity of the monochrome image.
(1) cit. in Jeffrey, I, (2011) How to Read a Photograph. London. Thames and Hudson
(3) Barthes, R. trans Howard, R, (2000) Camera Lucida. London. Vintage Classics
“The photograph is a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination” Roland Barthes
“New researchers believe these unreal experiences provide a glimpse into the way our brains stitch together our perception of reality.” New Scientist 2-11-2016
“You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.” Andre Kertesz
“Our minds jump across time propelling us backwards.” Rachel Smith, OCA Tutor
With these thoughts and the example of Sophie Calle in mind I have put these images and commentary together. Ideally they would be printed in a photo book with text on the left hand page and the images on the right.
1. 
My old school scarf is full of meaning for me. 134 was my number at school and my name was often ‘One Three Four Whittle, stand up please!’ It carries memories of homesickness, isolation, loss, fear, wariness, self reliance, and survival. I have kept the scarf because it is warm but mostly because it is a reminder that I came through to begin a useful and successful life full of experience that is my own and not imposed. 55 years of nightmares are nothing compared to the joy of everyday life. Sometimes a scarf is only a scarf.
2.
Uncle Stephen came into the room and announced that he had something magical and wonderful to show us. Uncle Stephen was a great traveller and explorer. He was tall with ginger hair and a dashing moustache. His visits were always unexpected.
He took a rock from his pocket and we passed it between us. It was a rough sphere and apart from its being quite light we could see nothing odd about it.
”Now look!” said Uncle Stephen. He held the rock in the palm of his hand, took a coin with the other, and gave the rock a sharp tap. Nothing happened. Again a sharp tap. We looked closer. Another sharp tap and the rock split.
3. 
There, inside, was a fossil trilobite. He had known it was there, but how? We were very young and I felt I would have to live a long time to be where Uncle Stephen was.
I am much older now than he was then yet the mystery of the rock remains.
4.
My two older brothers sit behind me on cushion seats taken from a pram. I remember the picture being taken. My mother knelt in front of us holding her Box Brownie. I can still see her hair as she looked down at the camera.
She kept this tiny picture in her kitchen and I took it when we cleared her house when she died. In all we were seven boys and four girls but this was the picture she kept on display perhaps because it was never moved or perhaps to remind her of a time when her life was simple. Rationing was ending. They had just bought their own house – the one in the picture, the place where I was born in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. She was happy and we played pirates on those cushions on the sea of the kitchen lino.
5. 
This photograph and the one following were taken in the Old Operating Theatre in Southwark, opposite Guy’s Hospital. The room was discovered in the roof space of St. Thomas’ Church in 1956. The picture is not so much a ‘memento mori’ as a ‘carpe diem’. We are not dead. The hidden space is revealed and now has a different kind of existence. Lives go on.
6. 
And then Louise said,
“The other day upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wonder if he’s gone away.”
Our laughter gave away the distance between the days before anaesthetics and our taken-for-granted contemporary treatments.
7. 
My grandson and I recreated this scene. We are building a new mythology of our family, a new legend except that his tags, the objects that prick and fix his memories, are more often caught photographically. He has seen and even used the scarf but has no concept of the number 134. He has seen the rock but it is already open and most of the mystery has evaporated. He cannot identify with the image of me and my brothers. It is so obviously old and I have always looked as I do now. Skeletons belong in cartoons and anyway, you can see the nuts and bolts holding the bones together. “That’s not a real skeleton, is it?” The meaning of the picture of him on the stairs lies in the experiment while I hold on as time passes.
I’m thinking about trying to illustrate/suggest/evoke the passage of time. I want to explore Barthes’ ‘new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination’.(1) I looked at Hiroshi Sugimoto’s image of Cabot Street Cinema, Massachusetts, 1978 taken with an exposure of an hour and a half but it seems to me that without the power of the accompanying text the passage of time is not obvious and certainly not the first or even second thing you think of when looking at the picture.
These images show the lines I’m thinking along. I’ve chosen monochrome images to avoid the distraction of colour which would make some images seem more immediate than others.
I tried this to show a very old fashioned way of writing which would be rare today. Time and styles have moved on.
I don’t think it’s successful because the viewer has to read the text carefully and compare it with more modern expectations. It makes too many demands on the viewer. Its punctum is just too obscure.
I like this one. The torn teaching poster and the small skeleton fit nicely with the figure’s facial expression. The temporal gaps between the three elements are very clear. It pricks the perception and invites the viewer to look harder.
The contrast between the Knockout Fun Book 1952 and the philosophy texts show a progression of interests. It would have been better if the gap between 1952 and contemporary interests could be filled with a few more titles.
Here the passage of time is indicated by the two figures, one young and whose movement takes no effort, the other old and bowed by the weight of years.
The ephemeral footprints in the sand will soon disappear under the approaching tide.
I took one shot of a moving head. We rehearsed the movement until we were sure to get two more or less clear images with the eyes aligned to make an ambiguous image. This is a brief moment in time.
(1) Camera Lucida 115
I looked at Germaine Krull’s pictures of vegetables in a Berlin market and general detritus taken in Les Halles. You can almost smell the rubbish as you admire the neat stacks of cauliflowers.
I tried this image of fish on a stall in the Rialto to suggest a certain smell.
I felt these were perhaps still too literal. I wanted to suggest something even more intangible as I did with my old school scarf.
I put the camera in the back of a cupboard empty but for one tin of beans. I turned off image stabilisation and set the timer. I triggered the shutter remotely. I raised the ISO to 2200 to get some gritty grain into the image. I edited the image into a square format to mimic the shape of the cupboard. I restricted the image to two elements only, the tin and the hand, choosing to focus on the hand. I was trying to evoke the time when we were young and poor and inflation was raging at 15%; every halfpenny mattered and we were often down to our last tin of beans.
The image is not really successful in that it’s not at all clear that the tin is in a cupboard or that it is the last one. The focus on the hand is not sharp enough and the grain just looks like a mistake. I will have to think again.
26-11-16
Maybe this will work better. I’ve kept the square format. Black and white is more austere than colour.
In the end, though, images of the unseen will depend heavily on being anchored by some text.
Unseen may mean …
If a photograph, a visual medium, tries to communicate something unseen the question asked by Roland Barthes comes into play, “How does meaning get into the image?” Since “the image is weak in respect of meaning” its meaning is either rudimentary or, as Barthes says, ineffably rich. Ineffability is the point. An image is either worth any number of words or none at all.
Frost on the window
Which project resonated most with me?
The ‘witness’ that affected me most was Jodie Taylor’s Memories of Childhood. This kind of nostalgia is difficult for me. I went to a boarding school at the age of thirteen and the intensity of that experience has wiped out most memories of childhood before that age. I am missing from photos in the family album and have little shared experience with my brothers and sisters. I suppose I am envious of her experience. This image may go some way to explain if it is anchored to my explanation.
My old school scarf is full of meaning for me. 134 was my number at school and my name was often ‘One Three Four Whittle, stand up please!’ It carries memories of homesickness, isolation, loss, fear, wariness, self reliance, and survival. I have kept the scarf because it is warm but mostly because it is a reminder that I came through to begin a useful and successful life full of experience that is my own and not imposed. 55 years of nightmares are nothing compared to the joy of everyday life. Sometimes a scarf is only a scarf.
How do I feel about the loss of authorial control?
My written work has been published for the last 15 years and I am well used to the idea that once work is out in the wild the author disappears. The work has to stand on its own two feet and make its own way. It has an independent life of its own and, in Barthe’s words, the Author is dead. However, the Author can watch the progress of his child and do something about the education and preparation of his other children. The Author may be dead to the Reader but his creations are still alive to him and shaping his future actions.
I’ve settled on The Sick Rose by William Blake
The Sick Rose
O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
This poem evokes feelings of bleakness, tiredness, regret, guilt, shame, anger and stress. I struggled with expressing these feelings in pictures for quite some time as this blog shows. The key, I found was in Stephen Bull’s ‘Photography’, especially chapter 4.(1) I also looked carefully at Anne Turyn’s ‘Illustrated Memories’ (1983-1995). This is a fictional autobiography, an illustration of nostalgia. Her pictures evoke fragments of memory, sometimes blurred or half-remembered. (2) This led me to make these images.
The secret is out.
The horror at being discovered.
Incontrovertible evidence of guilt.
Going back through my archive I would like to include these images.
The casual destruction of Naples. The poem sums up my feelings about this picture. Naples has been corrupted and become a joyless place.
The Enigma Machine. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park were effectively the worm that found out the Enigma’s bed of crimson joy and destroyed it.
(1) Bull, S, (2009) Photography. Abingdon: Routledge
(2) http://anneturyn.com/illustrated-memories–1983-1995/label-_-Illustrated-Memories-box-label_a/
Thinking of the Sick Rose I tried out this image of a box revealing a key. On the plus side it’s a good well exposed and focused image. On the minus side it’s too literal and doesn’t really express a feeling.
I’ve come down to a choice of two poems.
The Sick Rose
O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
William Blake
This strikes me as being a very self-sufficient poem. Blake’s verse gives us everything we need to understand the allegory and its psychology. The tension between words like ‘sick’ and ‘rose’, ‘invisible’ and ‘worm’, ‘crimson’ and ‘joy’, ‘dark’ and ‘love’, ‘life’ and ‘destroy’, forces the meaning beyond the surface into sexual anxiety and guilt. Something that should have been lovely has been vitiated and effectively invalidated by the loss of secrecy.
I’m thinking of images of broken things, partly open doors, rotten fruit, a messy bed (maybe), left over food, torn photographs, faded old photos.
The Rose that Grew from Concrete
Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong
it learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.
Tupac Shakur
This is a poem of hope, of triumph over adversity. The concrete is hard, unmalleable, unchanging and permanent. It is designed to resist change yet it is altered by a fault big enough for a seed to be introduced. The poet says this proves nature’s law is wrong. Which law of nature is wrong, not just mistaken, but wrong, the opposite of right?Is it the law that says the natural state of concrete is to be hard and barren and perhaps forbidding, or is it the law that says roses belong in gardens and soft soil? Is Nature the one that cared, defying the man made nature of the uncaring concrete?
I’m thinking of images of bare ground, weeds growing in unexpected places, crutches, walking sticks, wheel chairs, packets of pills, bottles of medicine.
Chris Whittle 