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 He gave the example of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s series of pictures of outdated industrial constructions which record a disappearing time, rescuing them from “proper corruption”.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

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/

Part 4 Reading Photographs, Project 1, Exercise 1

1. Look carefully at Erwitt’s image and write some notes about how the subject matter is placed within the frame.

The big dog’s right leg and the woman’s right leg are very roughly on thirds as are the ankles, measured from the bottom of the image. The small dog’s face is as far from the right hand edge as is the the big dog’s left leg from the left hand edge. The space at the bottom of the picture matches the space from the top of the picture to the hem of the coat.

2. The image is structured with vertical lines. They are, from left to right, the blurred tree in the background, two big dog’s legs, two human legs, the small dog’s lead and a vague frame shape on the right. There are also horizontal lines. Our eye constructs a line along the toes, another, more vague, at about the height of the small dog and another at the hem of the coat. All the elements in focus are in the same plane. The depth of filed is quite narrow. There are foreground and background planes which are blurred out but which locate the main elements in the pictorial space.

3. The image says, “I saw an amusing incongruity. This is a good joke, isn’t it!”

4. The structure of the image isolates the main elements and, as we naturally read from left to right, we come across the joke after seeing the long legs first. After a moment we are amused by the size of the small dog, then by its expression with its Marty Feldman eyes and, lastly, by its hat and knitted coat. The joke continues beyond the photograph. What sort of owner gives her small dog such a hat and a little coat fastened at the neck with a neat bow and tassels? And then we imagine how they do not keep in step as they walk on and how their legs must move in a complicated rhythm. If the movement translated into music we would hear the bass notes of the big dog, the quick and vital melody of the small dog and the strings of the woman holding the piece together.

The picture was originally intended as an advert for boots but Erwitt’s sense of humour and skill in seeing a joke and presenting it perfectly in this picture is a common thread in his work. This image, for example, (Brazil, Buzios, 1990) shows the same sense of mischief.

We see two pairs of hairy legs among a crowd of smooth and hairless ones. There is the same sense of incongruity, the same arrangement of planes, the same very rough division of thirds, and the same low vantage point.

Notes on The Elu[va]sive Portrait: mimicry, Masquerade and Camouflage by Ayelet Zohar

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0002.102?view=text;rgn=main

“The ‘truth’ of the photographic portrait becomes both elusive and evasive, as the portrait image itself becomes an object of inquiry, rather than a piece of information.”

For example, womanliness or manliness can be “assumed and worn as a mask … much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not stolen goods.”

Gregory Crewdson. Research Point

1. Do you think there is more to this work than aesthetic beauty?

Physical beauty, the beauty of a well formed idea, mathematical beauty, natural beauty and aesthetic beauty all have features in common. Each celebrates a kind of form which fits the way we perceive things and resonates with us to make us notice it as something beyond the ordinary.

Crewdson’s images are beautiful because they arrest the eye and make us look harder at what he presents to us. The colours, the lighting and the positioning of various elements make a harmonious whole but this is not all. The images are more than an abstract construction  of colours, lights and shapes. Each element has meaning. In this image the sky is light but casts very little illumination on the scene. The main light area is in the distance and offers very little information besides giving great depth all the way to the vanishing point. The shops are anodyne and offer no narrative of their own. They become impersonal features of the environment. The car with a passenger and an open door contains the whole narrative while leaving the story wide open to any number of interpretations. This is like a scene from a dream. We know something is going on but we can only guess at what. We are allowed to let our minds drift and make up the story for ourselves and that is the beauty of this picture.

2. Do you think Crewdson succeeds in making his work ‘psychological’?

There is a psychological element in his work.We don’t just wonder what is going on in his pictures but we also wonder about the state of mind of his characters. What is the woman in the passenger seat thinking? Where has the driver gone? How long will she wait before moving? What decisions will she have to make? Where will she go from here? Is she frightened or passive?

3. What is your main goal when making pictures? Do you think there’s anything wrong with making beauty your main goal? Why and why not?

My main goal is to make a picture that is enjoyable to look at. Sometimes this means just making a record of something I’ve seen like this trace left by a bird that flew into my window.
Sometimes it means trying to make something beautiful, like this picture of frost on a windscreen.

And sometimes it means preserving a memory as in this image of M at her computer.
There’s nothing wrong with making beauty the main goal except when making a picture of something intrinsically ugly like the aftermath of an accident or a bombing. The narrative of the picture must match the context. Form and function must be coherent if the image is to mean anything. Reportage does not have to be beautiful.

Hokusai and Jeff Wall–A Sudden Gust of Wind

Hokusai’s scene is sparse, formal and full of movement. There is nothing extraneous. This is the real world pared down to basics. We feel as well as see the wind. The papers take our eye across the scene while the road and the dark hill just off centre draw our attention further into the depth of the scene giving it a three dimensional feel. There is no verbal connection between the leaves of the tree (ha) and the leaves of paper (kami) in Japanese, the connection is purely visual.

Wall’s image is meant to be viewed as a backlit transparency. This adds vibrancy and vigour to the scene. It is also very big at three metres wide so that the viewer is drawn right into the scene. His image stands on its own without reference to Hokusai but when the two are seen together they interact. The temptation is to see the print on the same scale at Wall’s image. The constructed reality of Wall’s picture makes the same point as Hokusai. Both want us to feel the wind and to be intimately involved in the event. Both involve us in an experience of the human condition.

The Rhine II 1999 Andreas Gursky

On 12 February 2017 this photograph was sold for £7 million. (1)

“Gursky’s photograph is a detached comment on the sublime connotations of Romanticism. Equally, the figurative content of the picture serves to gently parody the sublime connotations of Abstract Expressionism.” (2) It bears comparison with Andreas Richter’s painting.

“September is so subtle that I almost passed it without realising its content. Beyond the traces of scraped back paint which hang on the surface arresting the eye, it isn’t immediately obvious that these are the twin towers standing against the blue sky the moment the second aeroplane hit. There is no dramatic explosion, just grey smoke billowing from the grey building as it dissolves into abstraction. It is an astonishing painting. For me, quietly highlighted within its amalgamation of ideas and processes, is the essence of Richter’s practice.

The scene, based on one of the western world’s most provocative photographs has been rendered in a gentle and straightforward manner.  It is suppressed almost completely however, from the bold and rapid erasure of a paint scraper.  Neither a spectacle nor an illustration, it seems to hang in the balance between the formal qualities of process-based abstraction and the formidable implications of its source image. The immense tension between icon and anti-icon, wrapped up with the most tenuous handling gives the painting a potency which I can only imagine a master could conceive. Not only this, but locked within this beautiful work is an array of nuances and effects which only paint can deliver; this parting once again spurred the question whether I was indeed in the presence of work by the world’s greatest living painter.” (3)

 

(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8884829/Why-is-Andreas-Gurskys-Rhine-II-the-most-expensive-photograph.html

(2) http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gursky-the-rhine-ii-p78372

(3) Simon Bayliss https://thepaintingimperative.com/archive/issue-2/gerhard-richter-the-soft-machine/

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

Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida

MESSAGE	CODE
signifier	signified
denoting	connoting
photograph	caption
obvious	symbolic
natural/uncoded	culturally coded
a record	interprets/transforms
studium	punctum