Experiments (i)

At my tutors suggestion I’ve started to experiment with presenting my images. Luckily he understood my fascination with the layers of history beneath my feet and didn’t appear to think that i was barking mad talking about quilts and photography in the same breath.

An obvious starting point for experiments with layers is Photoshop and as a first pass I’ve come up with this image:

To be honest I swing backwards and forwards on this. Does it say what I want? Maybe that’s a clue. I was quite pleased to start with but worry it may be a bit hackneyed. If anyone reads this I’d be happy for feedback either way.

I’m also working on some physical layering – these aren’t that hot as images go but they show the preps for a large image which I’m preparing using a variety of overlays and inserts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Emperor’s New Clothes

I’m distressed to discover that the notes ask me to consider whether a couple of artworks they have discussed, which have developed from accidental events, are a case of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.

I find the phrase unhelpful at best. In my experience it is normally used as a form of inverted intellectual snobbery by those who don’t wish to consider anything outside of their own narrow frame of reference. It attempts to set the user into an intellectually superior position, where they can clearly see the truth that the deluded other has missed, and so avoids any requirement on the users part to actually engage with the artwork/artist in question. With a few limited exceptions (including that in the original fable) it should be consigned to the same intellectually bankrupt dustbin as ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”

The notes ask us to consider  examples of critics with polarised views…but this seems to me a different issue. My experience of critics is that irrespective of their view they have tried to engage with the artwork. That is, after all, their job. Having done that, they are perfectly entitled to consider a work vapid and explain why they think that  – writing it off as the Emperor’s New Clothes without justification strikes me as poor criticism.

So…with that off my chest…we are asked to consider artists who have used  technical mistakes to further their work.

To mind mind there are three possibilities here:

1. accidents that look interesting – the internet abounds with examples of these but I don’t plan to consider them further. They aren’t art – they’re simply pretty accidents. A more serious example would be Capa’s Normandy Beach photos that were damaged in processing. While the damage actually increased their impact, no attempt was made to replicate it or explore the idea further.
2. accidents that inspire a line of artistic thought – Graham’s American nights series fits into this category. Graham overexposed an image accidentally, and this triggered a series of ideas that became an artistic concept. This has a long artistic history as a process – Da Vinci is reputed to have said: ‘If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.’ (cited in Turner, 2011) and more recently Bacon has expressed a similar idea: “All painting is an accident.  But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.” (cited in Askey-Adams, 2015) 
3. accidents that are manufactured for their artistic impact – it is arguable that these are genuine accidents, but it is certainly the case that the outcomes are unpredictable. A photographic example of this would be Moriyama’s Farewell Photography (The Guardian, 2015) and I feel much abstract expressionism would also fit into this category.

In the latter two cases the accidents are integral to the concept…without the accident there would be no artwork. In this sense it is little different from a sculptor using the accident of the grain in the wood to enhance or develop a sculpture – and I doubt anyone would suggest that was cheating.

To quote a paraphrase of Schopenauer: “Discovery is seeing what everyone else sees but thinking what no one else has thought.”  (cited in Quote Investigator, 2015) The creative process, and therefore the genesis of the artwork, is in the thoughts of the artist.

References

Askey-Adams, S., 2015. The Gift of Happy Accidents in Painting | Sharing my Painted Journey. Available at: https://sandyaskeyadams.com/blog/91475/the-gift-of-happy-accidents-in-painting [Accessed March 18, 2017].

The Guardian, 2015. Snatched from the fire: the photos Daido Moriyama rescued from ruin – in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/nov/12/daido-moriyama-fire-flames-farewell-photography-paris-photo-2015 [Accessed March 18, 2017].

Quote Investigator, 2015. Research Is to See What Everybody Else Has Seen and Think What Nobody Has Thought | Quote Investigator. Available at: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/04/seen/ [Accessed March 18, 2017].

Turner, C., 2011. The deliberate accident in art | Tate. Tate Etc: 21. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/deliberate-accident-art [Accessed March 18, 2017].

Being Frank

Frank is a photo project developed by Alec Soth. It is based on a found photo album containing images made on a trip to Japan in the 50s by an unknown photographer. Soth shared some of the images on his blog/website and sought contributions in the form of user submitted stories to go with the photos.

I find this quite interesting as an artistic idea…it feeds directly into ideas about the death of the author, and as an artistic concept using ready–mades, its genesis can probably be traced back to Duchamp and his urinal. Unlike Duchamp’s urinal however this is a serious work, interogating, as it does, the way we all interpret visual clues in accordance with our own personal baggage.

There is an ethical dimension to consider as well. This is not just our personal baggage. It is, almost literally, someone elses. Do we have the right to repurpose someone elses memories for the sake of art? Especially if that person, through death, or simple ignorance of the activity, is unable to give consent…informed or otherwise.

My initial reaction is that we do…subject to the simple proviso that we are not defaming the individual concerned. If I understand correctly there is no legal protection for the reputation of the dead, but that does not mean we should abandon any sense of ethics when dealing with the materials they leave behind.

In this context I feel the album is different from the Sophie Calle images taken in hotel rooms which I discussed previously. The Calle images were of objects still very much associated with the live individual – they were , to my mind, stolen. The album, by contrast is lost – whether by accident or design – and the link with the original owner is broken.

Soth, A, The Frank Album « Little Brown Mushroom. Available at: http://www.littlebrownmushroom.com/blog/the-frank-album/ [Accessed March 18, 2017].

Quilts!!

The course notes are currently majoring on chance, which is a coincidence as I found something really relevant to my project at a quilting exhibition at Rheged last weekend (Anon, 2017).

The exhibition itself featured a range of quilted artworks by local, national and international quilters, in a wide range of styles from fairly traditional quilts to artworks which’simply’ use quilting as their medium..

One work which particularly caught my eye was ‘Then and Now’ by Hungarian  artist Eszter Bornemisza. (Bornemisza, 2017)

The work, a triptych, is completed in her characteristic palette of rusty browns, sands and gold and consists of layers of newspapers, text and hand sketches collaged using quilting techniques onto fabric sheets. For those with an interest in the techniques, there are closeups of this and other works on her website.

There are snippets of maps overlaid on other maps and the whole represents the development over time of her home town of Budapest.

According to the catalog of her work I bought on the day she sees her work as a sort of inverse archaeology (my words not hers). Where an archaeologist uncovers layers to reveal the passage of time, she adds layers to express similar ideas.

In the context of the layers of history beneath my feet when I’m standing on an old blast furnace site , straight photography suddenly seems very one-dimensional and I wonder about the potential for layering images either virtually, in book form, or actually, by cutting and sticking.

Something to discuss with my tutor after I eventually submit my next assignment.

Anon, 2017, New Quilting – Rheged. Available at: https://www.rheged.com/event/new-quilting/ [Accessed March 12, 2017].

Bornemisza, E., 2017. Than and Now | bornemisza.com. Available at: http://www.bornemisza.com/thanandnow [Accessed March 12, 2017].

Chance – is it a fine thing?

The supporting notes for Section 3 of BoW start with a discussion of chance in photography, in the context of abandoning yourself to the process…of not starting off with the end too firmly in mind.

In a fairly widely known video clip,  Tim Minchin (Minchin 2013) says:

“…you should be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye.”

I have a fairly large measure of sympathy with this assessment. It’s clearly important to have an eye on the big picture, but equally important to allow yourself the freedom to react to the things that are happening around you.

Once again I find the notes unhelpfully people/documentary centric, concentrating as they do on interactions between people and the photogrpaher. As an example to encourage us to think about chance they cite the work of Sophie Calle – especially Please Follow Me, The Hotel and Take Care of Yourself. Clearly, Calle has started these projects with the end in mind – the images she takes of/information she receives from the various random pole in these works are clearly chance in that she had no control ovber what they did..although she clearly has control over what she captured/published.

In what seems like a side issue we are asked if we think her work was deceitful or intrusive. the answer seems pretty self evident..it is yes to both. It is clearly intrusive to secretly photograph people and then publish those images – whether this is good or bad is another issue altogether and depends on our perceptions of the degree of privacy we expect and the frequency and nature of the intrusion. If I were buying some potatoes I doubt I would care about being photographed – if I were engaged in a secret affair I might well feel differently.

Pretending to be a chamber made while actually being a ‘working artist’ is clearly a deceit. If they had been my possessions being photographed in my hotel room I would have been a little bit more than annoyed – irrespective of the fact that my ‘hotel possessions’ consist of little more than clothing and photography magazines. Even if she subsequently sought permission to publish it appears to me that such activities simply add weight to the cries for privacy laws which would make art, and especially photography, more difficult for everyone.

That said, there are chance encounters that I might use if they fitted the overall concept of what i was trying to achieve. For example, snatches of conversations I’ve had while out photographing, quotes from unrelated texts that strike a chord with the work, ideas from other artworks – ultimately I think inspiration is a matter of chance, of encountering material that your brain connects to your project in a way that sometimes only you immediately understand.

Minchin, T, 2013. Tim Minchin · Occasional Address. Available at: http://www.timminchin.com/2013/09/25/occasional-address/ [Accessed March 12, 2017].

Another Water – Roni Horn

The original ‘Another water’ was a series of large images of the surface of the Thames supported by footnoted text, with the numerical references to the footnotes dotted over the surface of the images. The version I own is a book of the same, with the footnotes included, but no numbering visible on the images themselves.

By combining ambiguous images with text which includes quotations, news items and Horn’s own thought and commentaries the whole becomes a meditation on our relationship with water and rivers in general. I also found it invoked thoughts about what had driven the several suicide victims it mentioned to their fate, and to wonder what they may have been like as individuals and why they had chosen the Thames (some had travelled significant distances) for their final desperate act.

Setting that to one side though, for this review it is the physical structure which interests me the most. The images are printed full bleed on the top 90% of each double page spread with the footnotes in the remaining white strip at the bottom of each spread. There are also around 6 spreads which appear to contain summary police or coroner’s reports on victims recovered from the river.

The footnotes themselves appear largely to be Horn’s own words, interspersed with references to and quotes from fiction, film, poetry and music. In recent months I’ve accumulated a small number of these and I feel sure there are more available without forcing it. Horn’s citation come from sources which are not always directly related to her subject matter e.g. references to sound in  Antonioni’s Blow-up reminding her of the sound of the river.

As an example of my own, with relevance to my own final submission I found the following in Steinhart’s ‘The Company of Wolves’:

What have we seen here? Tracks in the snow. Hieroglyphs of struggle. Tufts of hair. Crystals of blood. What is the nature of the beast that left them? What is the nature of the world inhabited by such a beast? What’s going on here?

Time to make some progress…after months of procrastination I can finally see a genuine way forward.

 

Photography Matters

Any short conference that sets out to “…map out areas for discussion in photography’s relationship to the everyday lived experience, visual culture, evolving technology, archiving and history, news media, education at all levels and public perception.” (Joanne, 2016) is setting itself a huge challenge, and inevitably going to be a series of deep dips into various aspects of the medium, and so it was with Photography Matters at CAST, Doncaster on 21 May 2016.

Three of the lectures were from artists who either expressed themselves, or supported their interests through portraiture in some shape or form.  Of these, two  shared the common aim of presenting/re-presenting a community to itself, Les Monaghan’s Desire project (Monaghan, ND) and Keith Roberts’ Hardman Portrait (hardmanportrait, 2016). Both deal with archives – one self generated, the other existing and open to interpretation. There was much to enjoy in both these lectures. However, of the two I felt more affinity with Roberts work, perhaps because it was free of the political polemic I sensed in some of  Monaghan’s lecture and which I have a tendency to bridle against. I’m not sure that filtering out “for their own good” the views of extremists when re-presenting a society to itself is entirely consistent with presenting a community to itself either. I’d happily concede though that it fits with the idea of fairness and not wishing to harm the subjects that Monaghan espoused – and the implication that at least some documentary photography does its subjects a disservice is one I’d wholeheartedly agree with.

By contrast, and perhaps because he is still trying to establish the precise value of the Hardman collection, I felt Roberts’ work to be cooler, more analytical and as a result more personally interesting to me. He also showed a couple of examples of images of the same individual taken several years apart. Discussion following the lecture highlighted that we were using the time gap in some way to inform our reading of the images – perhaps even to create a meaning – which seems a very relevant observation for my work.

I find intelligent comment on Dawn Woolley’s presentation difficult…anything which seeks to provide a “pathology of capitalism” is likely to raise my blood pressure, not least because it effectively sets out by telling you the answer, and then seeks to justify it, which feels entirely upside down to me. This is my failing, rather than hers, and there were aspects of her presentation which struck a chord..such as the use of false personas to sell products through social media. However the basic problem I have with any such analysis is that it starts from the basic premise that we are all unwitting tools of big bad business. It is by no means clear to me that this is either true..or fair…and may well do the subjects of the analysis a dis-service.

The afternoon session consisted of two presentations. The first, from Rachel Smith, (Smith , 2011) examined  the materiality of the photo, which raised a couple of questions for my own personal work:

• If I write on the surface, am I disrupting its transparency (probably yes) and what impact does that have on the reading?
• Should I include images of the archive material, or actually incorporate the originals? Does the materiality of the postcards etc enhance or distract from my meaning?

The final lecture of the day, Derek Trillo’s examination of alternative paradigms for architectural photography seemed to have the impact of time as a core theme. While the buildings themselves are essentially chronostatic they depend for their utility on a whole range of time dependent phenomena…people moving in and out, traffic moving past, variations in lighting during the day and night and seasonal variations in their surroundings, goods deliveries and so on. Incorporating these into representations of buildings opened quite a wide ranging discussion, including a brief one on whether this was a limitation of photography and that other media were better suited to such representations.

In running through a number of ways in which buildings can be represented, Trillo mentioned a work by Somekawa (Somekawa, 20112) which involved removing buildings from images and re-assembling them as groups elsewhere. While the latter part of this is interesting intellectually, the first part, cutting things out of the image, offers the thought that I might try that as a way of photographing the absent.

Summary

Overall I found this a thought provoking and worthwhile day. Some interesting ‘hooks’ to my own work, a chance to catch up with some old acquaintances and a chance to put a real face on some virtual friends and chat photography at a level it is difficult to do elsewhere.

References

hardmanportrait (2016) There then: Here now – home. Available at: http://hardmanportrait.format.com/2317785-home (Accessed: 22 May 2016).

Joanne (2016) Photography matters. Available at: http://weareoca.com/education/photography-matters/ (Accessed: 22 May 2016).

Monaghan, L, (no date), Les Monaghan: The desire project  Available at: http://lesmonaghan.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/the-desire-project.html (Accessed: 22 May 2016).

Smith, R. (2011). Rachel Smith. [Online]. Available at: http://rachelartsmith.blogspot.co.uk/p/home.html [Accessed: 22 May 2016].

Somekawa, A. (2012). Hyères 2012. [Online]. Available at: http://www.villanoailles-hyeres.com/hyeres2012/index_en.php?cat_id=4&id=19 [Accessed: 22 May 2016].