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.

A visit to Paul McCartney’s childhood home, 20 Forthlin Road

Seeing Mike McCartney’s beautiful black and white photographs of Paul McCartney and John Lennon hung over the places where the pictures were actually taken brought the house alive. It is not a museum but the place where people lived until recently. The photographs, very strictly copyrighted, populate the rooms. Each photograph is close up enough to show the character and activity of the subject while giving just enough background to place them in life.

There are no photographs at Mendips, the house where John Lennon was brought up. Our guide gave us an insight into the class consciousness that shaped his upbringing as his Aunt Mimi struggled to maintain her position in society.

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.

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[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

Not only in England? Non-conformist ‘documentary’ photography either side of the Iron Curtain. A talk by Simon Ward (Durham University) to follow up on the Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones exhibition at Bowes Museum

Dr Simon Ward is known for his book, 2016 Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin: Framing the Asynchronous City 1957-2012, Amsterdam University

Abstract

As sites of turbulence and transformation, cities are machines for forgetting. And yet archiving and exhibiting the presence of the past remains a key cultural, political and economic activity in many urban environments. This book takes the example of Berlin over the past four decades to chart how the memory culture of the city has responded to the challenges and transformations thrown up by the changing political, social and economic organization of the built environment. The book focuses on the visual culture of the city (architecture, memorials, photography and film). It argues that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in a contemporary ‘overexposed’ city, whose spatial and temporal boundaries have long since disintegrated. (1)

Martin Parr documented the disappearing world of a small Christian community in Weardale in County Durham. Tony Ray-Jones’ project covered a wider geographical area but with a similar intention. Whereas their images are often informal even when they are carefully composed, the images shown by Dr Ward are evidence of a much more controlled environment.

The talk began with Andre Bazin’s assertion in What is cinema? (2)

At first sight this seems naïve as if the camera has captured something completely objective. In the same book he talks about photography “completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part.”

Dr Ward moved from Bazin’s perception to say that photography is both social and not, political and not. The unwitting testimony of photographs cannot be denied. Sometimes this testimony is completely purposeful. He gave the example of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s series of pictures of outdated industrial constructions which record a disappearing time, rescuing them from “proper corruption”. Their images mummify features of the industrial landscape without comment. Viewers can take note of the dates of the images and draw their own conclusions. Their images are the opposite of what Edward Steichen showed in ‘The Family of Man’. Rudolf Holtappel in East Germany also recorded the industrial landscape but his images, (3) said Dr Ward, would be anathema to the Bechers.

Thomas Klaber’s images of heroic workers also capture an age which was rapidly disappearing. Painting and the other fine arts were strictly controlled in the GDR but photography was given a free pass provided it showed the dignity, courage of the workers.

Dr Ward mentioned Berhard Beiler (whom I haven’t found on the internet yet) who wanted t “the photographer to discard the truth of reality for the sake of personal petty bourgeois emotionality translated into photographic hieroglyphics.”

[My thoughts at this point – the picture of women clearing rubble after the bombing of Berlin typifies the myth of the cheerful worker.

In fact very few women took part in this activity and visitors from other parts of Germany were appalled that they did this kind of work. (4)]

Gerhard Kiesling’s images of heroic workers are typical of the romantic propaganda applied to the dignity of work. I found this image.

Gerhard Kiesling
In the «Martin-Hoop» mine, 1200 meters beneath the surface. Zwikau, Germany (DDR), 1952. (5)

Dr Ward compared this kind of image to Auguste Sander’s series showing what ordinary German people looked like just before the outbreak of WWII.

Other photographers, Christian Borchert, for example, while still in favour of this tenor in GDR photography, was still critical. His editor apparently told him, ‘We’re not interested in what you feel; we’re interested in what our readers feel’, I.e. what the GDR wanted readers to feel. His images often show a serious family. (6)

Later, like this one from 1983, families are allowed to have fun. (7)

Now there is an element of ‘Ostalgie’ in East German photography. “The last several years have witnessed the birth and boom of a nostalgia industry in the former East Germany that has entailed the recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life.”(8) Thomas Klaber’s images begin to have much more in common with Martin Parr’s and Tony Ray-Jones’ work.

What can you do when you feel that your country is vanishing except to record it quickly and hope that people will see and understand the mummified image of a time and place.

(1) https://www.dur.ac.uk/mlac/german/staff/display/?mode=pdetail&id=12393&sid=12393&pdetail=105474

(2) http://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/640193/mod_resource/content/2/bazin-andre-what-is-cinema-volume-1-kg.pdf

(3) Rudolf Holtappel, Oberhausen, Essener Strasse, 1960. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/342344009152343787/

(4) http://www.dw.com/en/dismantling-the-german-myth-of-tr%C3%BCmmerfrauen/a-18083725

(5) http://howtoseewithoutacamera.tumblr.com/post/41013649065/by-gerhard-kiesling-in-the-martin-hoop-mine

(6) http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/familienportraets-vom-ddr-fotografen-christian-borchert-fotostrecke-107645.html

(7) http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/familienportraets-vom-ddr-fotografen-christian-borchert-fotostrecke-107645-7.html

(8) Daphne Berdahl http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.1999.9981598

Background reading for Assignment 5–Making It Up

1. Alexia Sinclair

Alexia Sinclair is an Australian artist photographer who creates historical and allegorical tableaux in great detail. Her work is heavily influenced by fashion photography. Every detail, from the smallest to the most obvious is constructed and under her complete control. This image is typical of her work.

The difference between classical painting and photography is slight. Rather than arranging paint on a surface, all the arranging happens in the studio and then the image is recorded. Each image has a narrative element.

2. Kirsty Mitchell

Kirsty Mitchell worked as a senior designer for a fashion label. Her photography shows the same attention to detail as Alexia Sinclair. This is typical of her work. There is a narrative here but the viewer is invited to invent the story for themselves.

 

 

 

3. Lydia Panas

Lydia Panas also takes control over what is in her images. They are much less detailed than Sinclair’s or Mitchell’s work but they seem to me to have a more immediate meaning. In her series ‘The Mark of Abel’ she shows teenage children expressing all their confusion, dissatisfaction and potential.

 

 

 

 

 

4. Clare Strands

Clare Strands collected images in scrapbooks from an early age. (1) “Strand remarks, ‘I have always hated snakes but when I found an image of one I would cut it out and stick it into my scrapbook then hide it away. It strikes me as rather perverse to collect what I despise.’”

Strands gives away her control over the images she has collected by using press captions in automated ‘poetry’ generators to create her own captions. The contrast between the women’s control over the snakes and her control over the process of collecting and presenting creates a dynamic narrative.

Her series ‘Gone Astray’ exerts greater control over the subject matter. “Gone Astray Portraits borrows from the 19th century street portrait convention of using painted murals as backgrounds to photograph city dwellers. Each sitter is carefully styled and propped to assume an urban generic type, on close examination each subject shows signs of wear, from ripped tights to bandaged wrists. The title of the series is taken from a Charles Dickens text, Gone Astray 1853 which is an account of a young child lost in the City of London. A story filled of references to anxiety and vulnerability and to people leading double lives.” (2)

5. Paolo Ventura

Paolo Ventura places figures against painted backgrounds to construct images like this reference to the Holocaust. The Jew disappears from the urban landscape.

Other series are more playful.

(1) http://clarestrand.tumblr.com/post/159576155826/snake-by-clare-strand

(2) http://clarestrand.co.uk/works/?id=100

Save

A visit to the Rodney Graham ‘That’s Not Me’ Exhibition at The Sage, Gateshead

The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition is a huge backlit diptych of the artist as lighthouse keeper.

This is stunningly beautiful. The colours are rich and vibrant. Every element of the construction is carefully considered even down to the buttons on the jacket on the back of a chair. The picture in the book the man is reading is possibly the inspiration for the whole scene. The lighting is ambiguous. Shadows come from the bare bulb in the ceiling but none into the room from the standard lamp and the light from the viewer’s position has no source but the viewers themselves. The colour palette is subdued so that the red lettering on the bucket by the sink does not stand out as red often does. One false note – the steam from the kettle is obviously smoke but who cares. The picture invites the viewer in and the size of the image makes that possible. It is about 6 feet tall. Does the fact that it’s a diptych make a difference? The two images could be stitched together if they were treated digitally but very close inspection shows that these images come from film. The grain is very fine and random unlike a digital image. This is a perfect introduction to the rest of the exhibition.

I looked at this picture, read the comic, and then suddenly realised that the hands belong to two different people. There was a short video which I later found on YouTube (1) that explains this and the date of the comic paper. The comic is not at all accidental. The militarism and casual violence of the cartoons references the original inspiration, a piece from a film in which our comic heroes in an unnamed fascist country are in bed behind a newspaper with only their hands showing. We only realise they are in bed together and that the hands belong to two different people when the maid walks in. The title of the page on the left of the picture is ‘Our Boarding House’ and that’s what it is.

This triptych is my favourite. The newspapers all date from the 1950s and the detail is such that much of it can be read.  As with the other images, the size and brightly lit cinematic quality invites the viewer in for a close up reading of the picture. It was fun to realise that I was looking and reading in almost the exact pose of the man, the artist himself, reading the paper behind the glass. I was doing the same thing, possibly for the same reason. As far as another visitor to the exhibition was concerned I could have been placing myself inside the picture in the same way as the woman walking by is inside the picture. I became a third character. The woman is placed very carefully next to an advert for a hat very similar to the one she is wearing. She is at once in the picture and in a picture inside the picture and so was I. Other faces in the newspapers also interact with the figures. The small image on the page here is no substitute for standing in front of the life sized original and becoming part of it.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsQIdllKlGg

Putting ideas together for Assignment 5

Assignment 5 is about constructing a stand alone image of my own choice or constructing a series elaborating on a theme. The piece should draw upon thoughts about various forms of narrative, using myself as subject matter, telling stories and reading images.

I have looked carefully and read about the work of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Hannah Starkey, Tom Hunter, Taryn Simon, Gregory Crewdson, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Nicky Bird, Zoe and Cheryl Dunye, Joan Fontcuberta, and Marcel Broodthaers.

My first thought was to make an image of an enigmatic figure at the end of a long corridor. The lighting would be controlled by noting the position of the sun at various times of day and by opening or shutting doors in the corridor. This is how it came out.

I was satisfied with the lighting coming from doors leading off the corridor and the light on the figure at the end. The two pictures on the wall at the left are distracting though and add nothing to the image.

 

Was the figure enigmatic enough to suggest a story? Maybe a more ghostly figure would work better. So I made this image. The distracting pictures on the left are lost in the crop but the edge of chair the ghost sits on seems too prominent. This image needs some more work in Photoshop to be successful.

 

 

 

I moved on to another idea. My tutor suggested that I read the fabricated interview with Joan Fontcuberta (1). I did and came up with the idea of constructing a kind of Harry Potter-ish image of magic gone wrong. I made this image.

However, on reading further, I found that Marcel Broodthaers had made similar images and that there are numerous recipes for this kind of thing on YouTube. I considered taking the bottle to the beach and taking a photograph of it from ground level with a blurred out figure in the background, between it and the sea, walking towards it – a different take on a message in a bottle.

This would fulfil the criteria of narrative, myself as subject matter, a suggestion of a story and an invitation to read something into the image. I may come back to this idea when I get to the beach.

I also thought of using the same bottle being held like this. to suggest some interaction with the bottle and perhaps explain the shocked look on the face in the bottle.

 

 

 

My next thought was not successful at all. I imagined a person praying in church. The picture would be quite dull except for a light shining into the person’s face. I would need a flash gun and a wireless trigger. I tried it out and everything went wrong.

• I forgot to turn off image stabilisation when using a tripod
• I did not judge the hyperfocal distance correctly so the figure is out of focus while the background is sharp
• the rechargeable batteries in the flash ran out very quickly
• the range of the wireless trigger is very limited

This was my best shot but I’d be ashamed to use it. I put it here only as an illustration of the concept.

 

 

(1) http://time.com/3807527/joan-fontcuberta-photography/

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.

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[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

Exercise 1 Reflection on ‘Question for Seller’ by Nicky Bird

Nicky Bird collected unwanted family photographs sold on e-bay to create an archive which she then sold on e-bay or at auction after being displayed on a gallery wall.

1. Does their presence on a gallery wall give these images an elevated status?

Yes. Just as the meaning of a word is its use the meaning of these photographs is defined by their use as art. If they are accepted as art then that is what they are. Their original context and purpose, whatever it might have been, has been lost even when the seller has been able to comment on the images they have sold. Their new context creates a new definition constructed by the artist’s planned intention. She has set out to create a particular response in an artistic environment. This in itself changes the status of the images. Whether art is more ‘elevated’ than any other kind of presentation is another question. Their monetary value has certainly risen.

2. Where does the meaning of the images in ‘Question for Seller’ come from?

Meaning is a function of use. When the images were used as private snaps their meaning could be a simple record – so and so looked like this in his uniform – or an aide memoire, a prompt to a particular emotion – I loved the person once – or whatever. The reasons the photographs were taken and kept, like the reasons they were discarded, are lost. Their present meaning derives from the artist’s express intentions. The viewer is invited to speculate and to see the images in ways that their originators never thought of.

3. When they are sold again, is their value increased by the fact that they are now ‘art’?

Art is famously what you can get away with but here the art lies in the selection and collection of the images in one place according to an artistic intention. The art lies in the abstract thought that produced the work so that individual images, like the paint on canvas, have little intrinsic value. The new value is created to extent that the artist is successful in making viewers think and appreciating the new thoughts she offers them.