A dream project–17th January 2017

Last night I had a dream. In this dream I took the number of days of my life so far and divided it by a period, eg. 14 days, then I took a portrait at that shutter speed. Pictures of babies could be blurred. A picture of me now would show no movement at all. I am 24884 days old so I’d need a shutter speed of 1777 of a second. This time next year it would be 1803 of a second. My newest grandson’s picture would be taken at a 14 of a second. I would ask people for their birthdays and calculate their shutter speeds. The results would generally hide the process. Each image would contain a secret known only to the sitter and me. Perhaps if I kept the same aperture and ISO all the time babies would be very overexposed, perhaps even invisible, in a flash of light while older people would become progressively darker until they disappear.

Two Portraits

Photographing the Unseen. Analysis and Reflection

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.

1. things seen in a very personal way, e.g faces in patterns, shapes in clouds
2. things not normally seen, e.g. the view from inside a washing machine as it’s being filled
3. things never seen before, e.g. a new image
4. a label on a scarf whose meaning is hidden from all but me
5. dreams
6. noise
7. a state of mind
8. an internal dialogue

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

(2) www.anneturyn.com

(3) Barthes, R. trans Howard, R, (2000) Camera Lucida. London. Vintage Classics

Thinking about photographing the unseen 05-12-16

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

Thinking about Photographing the Unseen. 25-11-16

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.

Photographing the Unseen. Some thoughts on reading Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image

Unseen may mean …

• seen in a very personal way, e.g. patterns in clouds
• not normally seen e.g. the view from inside a washing machine as it’s being filled
• never seen before e.g. a new photograph
• a meaning unseen by all except me e.g. the 134 label on my school scarf
• unseen because internal, like dreams or an internal dialogue
• unseen as noise is unseen
• the passage of time
• the spirit of a place, its numen, e.g. this image by Paul Caponigro
  Templehiei-sankyto. Japan
• etc.

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.

1. Meaning can get into an image through a caption which may be divided into language (e.g. English or French), which has a significance of its own, and through connotation, that is, what is understood in that language.
2. The meaning of an image is, unlike a words in a language, unordered, neither grammatical of syntactical.
3. Different elements of an image build up a significance through their contiguity.
4. An image has both a literal and symbolic meaning. Literal through simple description and symbolic through its connection or relationship with other images in its cultural environment. E.g. Brandt’s models may be naked women but their shoes show them to be nudes and not just naked people.
5. Just as the sound of a word rarely has an analogous connection to its meaning, so a symbol has no necessary connection to its own proper meaning, e.g. red for stop, green for go.
6. Language offers a choice of meanings. The same words or formulas may be used in anger, ironically, humourously and so on. Similarly images can offer a choice, perhaps a potentially unlimited choice – Barthes’ “ineffable richness”.
7. An image may suggest a meaning or a narrative without direct imitation of the events, scenes or characters of the implied story, i.e. a diagetical relationship.
8. An image has no intrinsic, built in meaning. It merely points to a meaning, e.g. a map scale points to things in the world experienced on the ground, a portrait points to a particular face.
9. An image is a code but it is not defined in the same way as words in a language. It is open ended and awaiting definition, an anchor point.
   Frost on the window
10. The simplest code of a photograph says there was something in front of the lens, something, in Barthes’ words, “having been there”.
11. Symbols are overlaid with considerations of aesthetics, efficiency, immediacy, convention, habitude, and ubiquity.
12. Symbols can surprise and their meaning may not be appreciated immediately.
13. The rhetoric of an image relies on its immediacy and use. E.g. an image of a lighthouse speaks immediately to the mind and the eye. We know what it is and what it is for. A photograph taken by an electron microscope does not speak in this way but achieves its purpose in the end. Wolfgang Tillman’s Mental Picture #97 is an example of this kind of ‘slow burn’.

Thinking about Project 2, Exercise 16-11-16

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.

Thinking about Project 2, Exercise. 15-11-16

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.

Thinking about Project 2 Exercise 12-11-2016

I’ve been thinking about Project 2 Exercise and been reading a lot of poetry. At first I was looking at poems which prompted a visual response. I think this was a mistake. I began instead to look for poems with strong concepts that appealed to my imagination. My choice has come down to these six.

1. He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats

2. 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

3. The Clod and the Pebble

‘Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.’

So sung a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

‘Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.’

William Blake

4. Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

5. 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

6. Shadows

“All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide
like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;
but a hidden star can still be smiling
at night’s black spell on darkness, beguiling”

Munia Khan

Each poem contains a sense of bleakness … “But I, being poor, have only my dreams”.
”his dark secret love does thy life destroy”, “builds a hell in heaven’s despite”, “the lone and level sands”, “no one else ever cared”, “night’s black spell”.

Each one contains a sensual image … “you tread on my dreams”, “thy bed of crimson joy”, “trodden with the cattle’s feet”, “the hand that mocked them”, “it learned to walk without having feet”, “a hidden star can still be smiling”.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven is a poem about poetry … “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths”, as is The Rose that Grew from Concrete.

Each one contains powerful visual images but I want my photographs to respond to the concepts rather than taking a literal approach. At the moment I can imagine images for The Sick Rose and the Rose that Grew from Concrete without using a picture of a rose or concrete. These images from my archive spring to mind but I will make new images for this exercise when I make my final choice of poem.

I made this image of a Kindle and glasses to concentrate on the idea of poems being read and then considered. The Kindle stands in for the act of reading and the glasses for the time after reading. The blue cast is to suggest something artificial and contrived. It distances my feelings from those I read into the poems. The poets’ thoughts are not mine. I don’t want these authors, in Roland Barthe’s terms, to be dead. I don’t want to impose myself on their thoughts but to try to see and understand what they saw and thought.

kindle-and-glasses contact sheet

The differences between documentary, reportage, photojournalism and art photography

Documentary photographs need an accompanying text or commentary to provide a context. Narrative on its own is capable of telling what looks like the whole story: images illustrate the narrative. The immediacy of documentary photographs “depends largely on our awareness that the situation they describe is ongoing” (1)

Documentary photography seems to have the same aims as the BBC – to inform, educate and entertain. This is why it has traditionally concentrated on what is foreign, unusual or strange. Much of National Geographic’s output seems to belong in this category.

Documentary may also place the photographer at the centre of the story so that it becomes a form of reportage, especially when it is concerned to draw attention to a social or political situation. When this is the case, however, the written text takes precedence over the image perhaps especially when the text is provided by someone other than the photographer. For example see Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans (2)

“THAT CRAZY FEELING IN AMERICA when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in these tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film”

In reportage the text is paramount. The images attempt to show the truth behind the opinions expressed in the text. Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives is a prime example. He said of the New York slums, “The sights gripped my heart until I felt I must tell of them or burst” (3) This kind of reportage continues today. For example, see Nathan Meyer’s report on Cambodia. (4)

Photojournalism has largely been superseded by television.

Art photography is planned in advance to create particular effects. In the 1850s photographers like Julia-Margaret Cameron planned their images in the same way as painters planned theirs.

I Wait. Julia-Margaret Cameron

Other images achieve the status of art because of their rarity. Edward Steichen’s The Pond is such an image being bought and sold for large sums of money at art auction. Yet others achieve that status by being placed in an artistic environment, on the wall of a gallery for example, or in an art book. Some images, like this by Robert Adams

are simple records of places. While others, like this by Ed Ruscha

are intended as works of art. “In the case of Adams, it could be said that his work is ‘about’ gas stations, whereas, in the case of Ruscha, it is about the notion of objectivity, and is therefore part of an artistic discourse”. (5) In other words, the image is about whatever the author says it is about as long as they keep control over the environment the image appears in. The context proclaims the work as art and says that the author is an artist. Such images say more about the artist than about the world.

(1) Grundberg, A. (1999) Crisis of the Real (3rd ed.) Aperture.
(2) http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/01/theory-photographer-in-beat-hipster.html
(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACoIbokOcc
(4) http://reportage.co.uk/#/a-country-in-shadows
(5)  Badger, G. (2007) The Genius of Photography: How photography has changed our lives. London: Quadrille Publishing Ltd. 211

27th August

Adra, Andalusia. A place to stop and cool off before continuing on to Murcia.

Murcia. Hotel El Carmen