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.

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

On watching Henry Wessel at the Tate

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-henry-wessel

Incidents No. 8

Henry Wessel says in this short video, “There is the world and then there is the photograph. A photograph is not the world. It’s a completely different thing.”

The world moves and changes constantly. The light changes form moment to moment. Wessel’s bus moves on to pass people by. He captures a fleeting moment with no interaction between him and his subject. He is not so much looking at the world to see what it contains as looking at the photograph he has taken to see what that contains. There is a tension between his act of looking and the thing he is looking at. This tension derives from

• the appearance of the photograph, its studium
• the experience of the viewer, its interpretation
• the viewer’s imagination

These three form an event which shapes the meaning of the photograph. Emma Lewis, commenting on Incidents 2012, says it is as if his commonplace scenes are “isolated moments in a grander narrative”(1)

An extreme example of this kind of tension is seen in billboards produced by lenticular printing where the height of the viewer changes the appearance of the image.(2)

Even though the viewer might see an image snapped almost at random (3), the image is still carefully composed. The woman is framed in a space shaped by the Golden Mean. Her face is on a traditional third.

 

(1) http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/henry-wessel-0

(2) https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-smartest-street-billboard-ad-you-ever-seen-Or-you-look-liked-a-lot/answer/Kate-Madenwell

“This billboard used lenticular printing to show two different images depending on the height of the person reading it.

A great example of extremely powerful and clever advertising. It makes us literally see from a child’s perceptive that “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it”.”

(3) The photograph measures only 1536x1015mm

On Reading Singular Images–Essays on Remarkable Photographs. ed. Sophie Howarth

Assignment 4 asks students to write an essay of 1000 words on an image of their choice. I looked at how other writers commented on photographs in the series of essays edited by Sophie Howarth. I was interested in the form and structure of their essays.

Julia Margaret Cameron – Iago, Study from an Italian 1867 by Roger Hargreaves

The plan

1. Introduction, the image in an exhibition
2. History and original context, including the artist’s intention
3. Technical details, e.g. kind of camera, close up
4. How the image was received
5. The style of the image, e.g. soft focus
6. Comments on reproducibility
7. How the image appears in the world, e.g catalogue, book, museum, exhibition.

Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Dust Breeding 1920 by David Campany

The Plan

1. How he came across the image
2. History of how the image came to be taken
3. Comments on how the image was introduced to the world
4. Indexicality of the image
5. The image in a literary context, e.g. a quote on dust from The Wasteland 1922
6. Similar images
7. How the image has been used
8. The various symbols in the image in pairs, e.g. rough and smooth,random and designed, accidental and planned
9. Subsequent history of the image in new contexts
10. Two functions of a photograph, an art form in itself and a way of documenting art forms
11. Conclusion “Where photography was once the medium of moments, it now appears as a deliberating, forensic medium of traces.”

Diane Arbus, A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. 1966 by Liz Jobey

The Plan

1. Introduction and keynote. “The fictions we make about photographs are as unreliable as they are unavoidable.”
2. Emotional response to the image in forma of a description of what the image contains
3. Comments on how the photographer interpreted the image
4. A factual description of the image
5. The effect of the image on the photographer’s career
6. Connections between the image and the photographers personal history
7. “The gap between intention and effect”
8. The deliberate intentions of the photographer
9. The subsequent history of the image

Martin Parr, Jubilee Street Party, Elland, Yorkshire 1977 by Val Williams

1. Introduction to the photographer
2. Influences
3. Documentary style and intention
4. Description of what the image suggests
5. Subsequent history of the image
6. The effect of different contexts in which the image appeared.

Nan Goldin, The Hug, New York City 1980 by Darsie Alexander

1. Keynote as introduction: “Human intimacy may be among the most difficult subjects to capture photographically, but for Nan Goldin it is the only subject.”
2. How the image was presented, as a print, as a series of projected images, and in a book
3. Comments on the image as stable and ephemeral depending on its presentation
4. The structure of the image and its symbolism, e.g. the shadow on the left
5. The photographer’s insertion of herself into the image by using flash
6. Parallel poses – the woman and how we imagine the photographer to have been posed when taking the picture
7. The woman as both object of desire and main protagonist
8. The subsequent use of the image

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aegean Sea, Pilíon 1990 by Dominic Willsdon

1. Description of the image and comparison with others in the photographer’s oeuvre
2. The importance of the title in understanding the image
3. The unseen context of the image
4. Intention – a language without names
5. Comparison of intent with the intentions of other artists e.g. Caspar David Friedrich
6. Differences e.g. non-dramatic where Ansel Adams is very dramatic
7. No events, saying nothing about the value of a place
8. Conclusion: “it inoculates us against everything about Romantic art that is no longer meaningful.”

Thomas Struth. San Zaccaria, Venice 1995 by Sophie Howorth

1. Description of the image in detail
2. How the photograph was made, the kind of camera etc.
3. Speculation on why the photographer chose this image out of the 60 on the same subject
4. Technique in service of the photographer’s intention
5. Comments on the photographer’s intentions and mind-set
6. Speculation on how the image will be received in future
7. Documentary elements in the image
8. The image in a literary context – quotes from Philip Larkin

Jeff Wall. A view from an apartment 2004-5 by Sheen Wagstaff

1. Personal experience of being on the set of this constructed image
2. The photographer’s intention – pictorialism and realism
3. Description of the image, the importance of its size as evinced by the almost life-sized woman in the image
4. How the image was made
5. The photographer’s intention
6. Influences
7. The photographer’s intentions overall

A Visit to Bowes Museum 8 March 2017

http://www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk/

There was an exhibition of black and white photographs by Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones curated by Martin Parr. We immediately noticed the huge difference between the actual prints which are energetic and powerful and the altogether greyer images seen on the computer screen.

Martin Parr’s ‘Only in England’ series is in a documentary style, respectful of his subjects and closely observed. Where there is humour he doesn’t ridicule or even suggest that we ‘look-at-the-funny-man’. The people in his pictures have names. It is important that they are not anonymous.This is Tom Greenwood, for example, cleaning his window. We might wonder whether he is wearing a suit and a hat because he is being photographed but he looks so at home in his formal attire that we suspect that this is his actual character. His odd way of working is not odd at all when you realise that if he placed the step ladder on the pavement he would be able to reach even less of the window he’s cleaning.

Only in England is about British culture and mores in the seventies but it also says something about the human condition, about living in a small community and just getting on with your own way of life. His subjects are not eccentric. They are normal people doing everyday things and finding everyday solutions to everyday problems. However, there is something melancholy about the series too. Even though at my age I recognise so much of the way of life depicted here I can see that so much of it has passed. The Chapel at Crimsworth Dean is a private house now.

Tony Ray-Jones took a series of pictures of seaside scenes and English customs. There is often a surreal element in his images. People exist in their own bubble regardless of the world around them. He cuts people off at the edges of his pictures as if to suggest that there is much more to be seen but this, his subject, is what he wants to draw your attention to. Its as if he could have pointed his camera anywhere and found something similar. “He showed the British a picture of themselves at which they could laugh, but also appreciate. It was somewhat lacking in political edge, but it was a vision that contained a degree of truth.”(1)

 

(1) Badger,G. (2014) The Genius of Photography. Quadrille Publishing Ltd.

7th August. The decisive half minute

On reading Bull, S. (2010) Photography. p.86.

So, the average 75 year old American has had 3000 photos taken at an average of 1/100 of a second per image. This amounts to a life recorded in 30 seconds. Most of these images are artless, without artifice, innocent records. This is not much of a record. Fortunately the camera never tells the whole truth and lives are not so trivial. It’s fortunate too that photos are not the only record.

Creating a memory?

Creating a memory?

And fortunate that photography, like all other forms of graphic art, says far more than the surface image. It speaks of its time to its time and then to all the times that follow. Its meaning develops and evolves over time. A picture of Hitler in Paris has much more to say now than when it was taken. We are aware of history, the passage of time and the changing contexts in which the image must take its place. Our conceptual landscape is not fixed – it’s in a state of continuous flux. Just as there is no inevitability in history, there is none in the meaning of photographs.

The half minute is a snapshot that says, ‘Once upon a time, things looked like this and meant something to someone for a moment’. Other, perhaps more considered, images try to have a more universal application and take their place as art and, in the end, say more about the way we think, see, and feel about the world.

Pepper