Part 3. Project 1. Putting Yourself in the picture. Exercise 1

2. Do you think there’s am element of narcissism or self-indulgence in focusing on your own identity in this way?

The typical signs of narcissism are an inflated sense of one’s own importance, a sense of entitlement, and vanity. I don’t think Woodman, Brotherus or Wearing display all of these traits though each displays enough of a hint of all three to warrant the accusation. I think Woodman believed she had something important to say, but it is not ‘Look at me!’ Brotherus similarly tells us about the human condition and not just about her condition. Wearing shows some sense of entitlement and perhaps vanity when she places herself in the same rank as Auguste Sanders. That seems to me to be for others to decide.

3. What’s the significance of Brotherus’ nakedness?

Brotherus lays her pain bare before us. When she’s not presenting her personal experience she’s placing herself in the tradition of art-history. She shows that there is not necessarily a discontinuity between painting and photography. They can both be about light, colour and the relation of objects in spaces.

4. Can such images work for an outsider without accompanying text?

The text, like the title or even simple attribution of a painting gives the viewer a way in. It claims a context for the work. When the author attaches words to an image he does not send the work alone and unprotected into the world. Even calling a work ‘Untitled’ makes you look at who the author was and this is sometimes enough. For example, this image by Tierney Gearon, is called ‘13 – Untitled’, which immediately places it in a context and gives the author some control over the way the work is perceived.

Text can make a huge difference but too much can turn an image into an illustration, unable to stand on its own two feet. For example, this picture of the doctor’s house on Spinalonga is not worth much by itself. Saying who it belonged to and relating it to Victoria Hislop’s book ‘The Island’ changes everything. Without the words the picture is stranded and devoid of meaning.

 

 

 

5. Do you think any of these artists are also addressing wider issues beyond the purely personal?

Some issues are more important than others. It is important for people to understand the issues around IVF treatment. It is important to see how people like Francesca Woodman can hide in plain sight. It is not so important but still informative in the world of art to push boundaries if only to discover where they are. For example, Tierney Gearon discovered one boundary and wrote this to describe the experience:

“I looked at my pictures today and tried to see the bad things in them that other people have seen. But I can’t. Some are describing them as pornographic, others are accusing me of exploiting my children’s innocence. I don’t understand how you can see anything but the purity of childhood. When the exhibition opened eight weeks ago, the Observer’s art critic, Laura Cumming, wrote that I had succeeded in capturing the way that a child would look at the world, almost as though I was a child myself. The exhibition got great press, and the whole experience has been positive – until last Thursday, when I went to the gallery to do an interview and found the police waiting for me. I was completely blown away. I even started joking around with the officers because I simply couldn’t believe it was happening. I don’t see sex in any of those prints, and if someone else reads that into them, then surely that is their issue, not mine.”(1)

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2001/mar/13/childprotection

Part 3. Project 1. Putting Yourself in the picture. Exercise 1.

How do these images make you feel?

Gillian Wearing

Wearing asks the question, ‘What role have our family histories played in who we are?’ which is another way of posing the nature or nurture question. She answers it by posing behind the masks of close relatives or people she admires.

It may be hubris or devastating honesty for her to pose behind a mask of August Sanders. Does she identify with a person who was banned by the Nazis and who took pictures of persecuted people?

She is saying something about her character and who she thinks is important in her life. She tells us that she wants to see the world through their eyes and in doing so reveals how she herself sees the world.

Part 3. Project 1. Putting Yourself into the Picture. Exercise 1

How do these images make you feel?

Sally Mann

I see too many naked children in these images. Having been a teacher for many years I have come across so many children whose lives have been damaged by abuse, who have been persuaded or bullied to post inappropriate images of themselves online or who have been exploited for their innocence. I particularly dislike the image of the child with a black eye. I thing Mann is lucky to avoid being treated like another Mapplethorpe. I think Mann understands the issue very well. She said, in an interview for the New York Times, “I’m responding with the only vocabulary I have to ordinary and extraordinary situations that I see around me. I have to slap my hands sometimes not to take certain pictures. But the more I look at the life of the children, the more enigmatic and fraught with danger and loss their lives become. That’s what taking any picture is about. At some point, you just weigh the risks.”(1)

 

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/the-disturbing-photography-of-sally-mann.html?_r=0

Part 3. Project 1. Putting Yourself into the Picture. Exercise 1

How do these images make you feel?

Elina Brotherus

“I’m talking about the fundamental questions of visual art; light, colour; composition; presenting space and volume; the relation between figures and space.” (1)

Model Study 5

The image presents a framed picture of a crouching nude seen in a mirror leaning against a wall. The mirror image is ‘aged’ by using an old mirror and an old frame. The photograph mimics a generic, traditional ‘old master’. The shutter release cable makes the image about photography. It avoids the irony of Duane Michals’ ‘This photograph is my proof’. This is an honest image.

 

Her honesty is evident too in Suites Française’s where she talks about the difficulties of learning a new language and how that makes the individual an incoherent outsider. “The process of art making is one way in which the artist herself makes sense of the world. ‘Taking photographs is,’ she says, ‘like naming things, a way of taking control of the world’. (2)

I remember the first time I went to Germany and could not understand anything. I could not order a simple meal. I was tongue tied and dumb. All power of speech and thought evaporated. I ended up pointing at a picture of an item – it turned out to be a pizza base scattered with onions. I ate it with a small sense of achievement.

Today I took these pictures to illustrate how that feeling of incomprehension and exclusion still persists. I cannot read this book.

Or this one.

Annunciation 14, 2012

The pain of Elina Brotherus’ failed IVF treatment is almost tangible in this picture. The shadowy figure of the man in the picture/mirror on the right and the dark doorway on the left emphasise her isolation of her involuntary childlessness. This is a painfully honest image.

 

(1) cit. in. Bright, S, (2011) Art Photography Now. London: Thames and Hudson

(2) Diana Yeh, Visiting Arts. http://culturebase.net/artist.php?735

Part 3. Project 1 Putting yourself in the picture. Exercise 1

1. How do these images (by Francesca Woodman, Elina Brotherus, and Gillian Wearing) make you feel?

Francesca Woodman (1958-81) Self Portraits

“it is difficult not to read Woodman’s many self-portraits – she produced over five hundred during her short lifetime – as alluding to a troubled state of mind.” (Bright, 2010, p25) (1)

Francesca Woodman’s enormous talent is obscured by our knowledge of her suicide. I look back from the suicide to try to find evidence of her troubled state of mind and, almost inevitably, find it. Trying, and failing, to ignore the suicide, what can I see in her pictures?

Woodman’s suicide would suggest that her mind was indeed troubled but if the images are allowed to stand by themselves independent of that fact the we can say, at best, that her images are disturbing. Anthony d’Offey, the curator of her exhibition at the Tate, says, “Everybody trusts photography. Everybody knows that photography tells the truth even if it’s a slightly different truth.”Her truth is different. “Her work seems to owe nothing to anyone else.”(2) She manages to hide in plain sight.

Here a precariously balanced door cuts Francesca Woodman in half. Her right foot is moving. Everything could change in an instant – or perhaps not. She would remain hidden even if the door were to fall.

 

 

 

In this image the man appears well defined. Parts of Woodman are clear but her face is blurred. We aren’t allowed to see her clearly. The blood? spatter on the wall is disturbing. What are these two people doing in this place? Why is the man wearing a lab coat? We could ask Calvino’s question about whether a naked person reveals more of their true self. She is revealing everything and hiding at the same time.

 

I have no doubt that Woodman is interpreting/illustrating Calvino’s ‘The Adventures of a Photographer’. (3)

“He made her sit in a big armchair, and stuck his head under the black cloth that came with 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.” Woodman gives us a version of what Antonino Paraggi saw with his head under the black cloth. She is both there and not there at the same time.

 

The world in which Francesca Woodman presented herself is unreal, desolate, isolated from normality. It is harsh and cold. She is surrounded by ruin and irrationality, all of which suggests that Bright was right in her analysis.

(1) This work by Bright is not mentioned in the course material bibliography and I’ve been unable to track it down.

(2) www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/artist-rooms-francesca-woodman

(3) cit. in. La Grange, A, (2005) Basic Critical Theory for Photographers. Oxford. Focal Press