Preparing for Assignment 3

After keeping a diary for a fortnight, I took a series of pictures of me at my desk. But …
this is not my desk and this is not the room I write in. This is set dressing. I laid out some books on the table and posed with a remote trigger on a three second delay. The camera has sensors front and back for the remote: even so, the three second delay is only just enough. I used a tripod and set the camera at f16, ISO160 and let the exposure look after itself. I shot in DNG RAW and developed the image in Photoshop using the Auto button and then dehazing slightly to improve contrast.

Does this image contain any truth?  I do use all these books but the one my pen is poised over is a holiday diary and sketchbook written in 1992. The book by my left hand is my Context and Narrative notebook. The atlas in the second picture is completely irrelevant. It just fills a space on the table.  I do use a wide selection of reference books and I do write about things other than Context and Narrative. Is this picture biographical? Yes, if only because the things in it cover a period of time and represent an ongoing activity that tells the viewer something about what I do and how I go about doing it. My actual desk is not nearly so interesting. There is no homely fire by my desk, only a window that looks out into a yard where the cars are parked. Florence, our elderly neighbour in the building opposite can see me at work and I can check that she is OK.

This diary entry goes with these images.

Images versus text in autobiography. Preparing for Assignment 3

Question:- is an autobiographer’s presentation of themselves analogous to a photograph? If so, how? If not, why not?

An autobiography takes moments of time (even though the moments may have significant duration) and presents them as representative of a life. A photograph, perhaps a series of photographs, attempts to do the same thing. The difference is that an autobiography cannot work unless it has some kind of narrative. Proust doesn’t just give us a series of flashbacks but gives a consistent narrative in which flashbacks achieve relevance. His madeleine does not sit isolated on a plate: it is connected. A photographic narrative has to be inferred whereas an autobiographer presents the narrative up front. Photographs by themselves have no protection when released into the wild but text knows better how to look after itself.

Both written narrative and photographs are unwitting witnesses to a kind of truth. Both are selective. We learn something about the author when we see what they select, and how they present that selection. Mark Twain, for example, does not tell the whole truth. He constructs what he wants to be the truth about himself. (1) A photograph is similarly economical with the truth. What seems to be the unassailable truth about a moment in time is, in fact, as Barthes said, “weak in respect of meaning”. (2) It is only a fleeting moment which must be anchored somehow to fix its import. Take this picture for example.

(3)
The meaning of this image would be enhanced (limited?) by knowing something about the subject and the location. Without that, stories about prisons, isolation, boredom and so on could easily be invented.

Perhaps a photographic book could approach autobiography more closely. The images, choice, juxtaposition, colour and format all show the same control as autobiography. They are generally self-published, it seems, and do not have the benefit of an editor. But where the images dominate, leaving text in their wake, they are as cryptic as the image above and less explicitly autobiographical.

In the past it was not uncommon for people to carry a notebook and to make sketches. Text predominated. I have notebooks with sketches going back forty years. In fact there are very few sketches but a lot of text saying where we were and what we did. Now I take hundreds of photographs, snapshots, and keep them as an aide memoire. Anything autobiographical now would be based on the photos, an invented narrative created as a commentary on the images or prompted by them rather than vice versa. Even if that were not the case there is a danger of it being perceived as such – image trumps text.

“Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the story.” André Malraux. Lazarus (4)

 

(1) Orvell, M. Biography. Vol 21, Number 3, Summer 1998

(2) The Death of the Author in Barthes, R, (1977). Image-Music-Text. London. Fontana Press .

(3) Mine. The reading man. Athens Museum smoking area.

(4) Malraux, A, (1974) Lazarus. Paris. Gallimard

On reading Picturing Ourselves, Photography and Autobiography. Linda Haverty Rugg (1)

She begins by asking “What (or how) do photographs mean in the context of autobiography?” She says, “photographs … simply supply a visual metaphor for the divided and multiple … self.” Also, photographs as physical evidence re-anchor the subject in the physical world.” (But see my comments on Duane Michals (2))

She talks about the “double awareness” of the autobiographer  – awareness of the “autobiographical self as decentred, multiple, fragmented and divided against itself in the act of observing and being” and the self that is constructing the autobiography. Photographs are used to support both these views.

She compares the loss of control inherent in being photographed and that inherent i8n being published.

I’ve been preparing for Assignment 3 by keeping a diary for the last fortnight. A daily diary doesn’t involve much in the way of remembering. This is not Proust’s “life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it” (3), nor is it Barthes’ memory being jolted by a photograph of his mother. (4) It is more purposeful than that. I have always at the back of my mind that this diary is an exercise for an assignment. I plan ahead with the idea that there will eventually be photographs as a result. In my last assignment the mask slipped when I came out of character illustrating my images for ‘Photographing the Unseen’ with text. The memory and the passage of time were the things ‘unseen’. Referring to the process was a mistake in that piece of work.

For this self-absented portrait for Assignment 3 the process is as informative as the text and the accompanying photographs. The process reveals the thought, interpretation, and the attempt to control the outcome in the same way as Linda Haverty Rugg says Mark Twain and August Strindberg tried so hard to maintain control. Like them, and unlike Proust, I am reluctant to reveal too much when too much will prod the demons that lurk in memory. Even for Art, let alone for an assignment, I will not give these frightful things houseroom, let alone invite them in for a cup of tea.

(1) http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/731472.html

(2) https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2016/11/10/duane-michals-this-photograph-is-my-proof/

(3) Benjamin, W, (trans 1968) Illuminations. New York, Schocken Books. The Image of Proust

(4) Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida. London. Vintage Books. chapter 25

Project 3. Self-absented portraiture Exercise 1

Nigel Shafran. Washing Up

I had not noticed the gender bias of this section of the course. It did not occur to me that being male or female would be the or a main feature of the way someone expresses themselves. Of course gender is important but it seems to me that the artist’s message is not of necessity defined by it. Is there an assumption in the way Safran’s work is presented that washing up is women’s work? Surely not.

I can’t see how gender might contribute to the creation of an image. Would Trish Morrissey have been able to take her Front series if she’d been a man. Probably, though the way she would have pitched the idea might have been different.

When Shafran leaves people out of his images he leaves us to infer what his life is like and who he might be just from looking at his immediate environment. He allows us to see his surroundings as he does. He invites us to share what is around him and, more importantly, the way he sees it. After a while, though, it becomes clear that each image is a carefully composed and lit still life. Shafran, like so many others who take self-portraits, is hiding in plain sight.