Seek and ye shall find

Thoughts on photography as Art, reflections on reading so far.

I read "The Photograph" by Clarke soon after I received the course materials, I already had (and have now re-read) "The Photograph As Contemporary Art" by Cotton and "The Genius of Photography" by Badger having watched the television series and now re-reading again.

There are a number of things that strike me, firstly the likelihood that the same photograph will turn up in each book to illustrate a point. This concerns me a little in that whilst the image itself may have significant relevance to the chapter or genre being discussed, it would benefit the reader/researcher to have more variety to consider, otherwise the genre may tend to be considered a little narrow. This tends to suggest that more work needs to be done (by me) to investigate some of the photographers, to try and put some context to the text, in as much as it relates to what the authors is trying to relay vis a vis the photographers work and intention. There is a tendency to look at individual images and think that could be a "jumping-off" point for my own work. The seemingly straightforward compositions, especially of the still life work - which may or may not be atheistically pleasing - could quite readily be "cloned" and used to make similar images, in appearance at least. I suspect that when I have looked at more examples of the artists work it will help me put their work into perspective.

Clarke's book was less pleasing to read as it contained, for me at any rate, a number of contradictions which I have covered in previous entries - War and Peace and Confused already and I felt more at ease with Cotton's book. Both books, together with the Badger publication looked at how some modern photographers looked at, as Cotton described "Intimate Life". The photographs seem to be taken at the periphery of life (albeit intimate studies) and whilst I agree that they are "intimate" shots, I am a little concerned that it is the viewers prurience that is being pandered to. I saw an exhibition of Corinne Day's work (or it might have been photography that included Day and another's documentary of Day)  at the Photographer's Gallery some years ago which did detail the excruciating process she went through with the brain tumour. I can appreciate the bravery of the decision to record it, as there was no guaranty that there would be positive conclusion to the process. It was moving, I did feel shock and awe, but I came away thinking that it was the the image that shocked, rather than the emotive force that fed the creative process in its creation; much in the same way that Weegee's images shocked New Yorkers in the middle of the last century. Could it be that both of these photographer's contribution to the medium is as recordists of the society at the time? However Richard Billingham and Nan Goldin have both earned significant reputations as photographers almost by happenstance. Both recorded life as it happened around them, Billingham to gain material for his painting course and Goldin to record her life and that of her close friends - much in the same way that Facebook users do today. Both of these photographers work again seem to pander to the prurient and both photographers work have been legitimised by their having studied in either "Liberal Arts" in Goldin's case and "Fine art" in Bilingham's case. I will add that I have seen an exhibition of Billingham's work as well and again I was moved and shocked by the imagery, but much in the same way as for Day's work. I am also concerned that to research it more may inure the viewer to the "shock value" that must surely be at the core of the work; I can only assume that Billingham found himself looking for "more" intimate images of his family once the project gained momentum. This all needs more thought and research.

I did notice a similarity in a number of the "still life's" in that the subject - or object - found itself at the centre of the image, this was especially true in Cotton's chapter 4, "Something and Nothing". I struggle to believe this is a contrivance of the photographer to emulate a naive photographer's approach. For example Fischli and Weiss's Quiet Afternoon p114, Wentworth's Kings Cross, London, p119, Evan's "New Scent" p115, Shafran's "Sewing Kit" p115 amongst a lot of others and even Wall's "Diagonal Composition" p131 has the object (probably a piece of kitchen appliance) noticeable by it's absence at the centre of the image. I'm wondering why this all is.

All the books had something to say about portraiture which I found exciting, illuminating and challenging. I believe that portraiture should say something about both the artist and the subject - and it probably does in every image, even if it is nonchalance. I think that portraiture opens windows on both parties in a way that is difficult to do on other genre's in photographic art. When a photographer asks someone to sit, or is commissioned to portray someone in a portrait there are all sorts of emotions at play that cannot be involved in a landscape, still life or street photography. Two people, generally staring at each other, one decoupled through a lens the other naked in full view of that same lens. The emotions are probably amplified on a square law basis. The finest movement from either party will amplify the connection, or disconnection between the artist and sitter. I have taken a lot of portraits and intend to carry on doing so and I fully expect this course to inform my approach to portraiture.

I have included some examples taken of some volunteers sitters. These photographs were taken over a series os sittings where I have tried to convey, through the image, a sense of what the sitter is without being affected by the process of sitting. I am convinced I have not fully succeeded in as much as there is still residual artifice in all the portraits despite having each having sat for me a few times and all being very well known to me - good friends. The brief for the sessions that these images came from was for the sitter to turn up in everyday, comfortable clothes, not made up in any way, to be as natural as possible. One of the ladies spent some time in order to be "presentable" whilst the other did pretty much as I asked. Both males did exactly as I asked. I tried to have the sitters express bland, emotionless expressions to convey the "naturalness" of themselves, one of the ladies had no problem with this and it was so for the males. I have included one shot where the sitter has her eyes closed, I asked both the ladies to pose this way as I expected it to present a layer of emotion, trust in me as the photographer and only one lady was able to pose readily in this way.

I will try and get back to this project with either these models or some others to see how my thought processes develop. Maybe my lighting was too dramatic? Maybe I should use colour more?

War & Peace

Gathering my thoughts as I trawl through Clarke's  "The Photograph" I am more than slightly concerned that he is missing some history, and I hope, through the unavailability of resource. The essay of Landscape compares, quite rightly the convergence of the painter's traditional view of the landscape which informs the early photographer, such as Fenton. Fenton's view is of a bucolic diorama with as Clarke denotes "no evidence of work in a Fenton photograph." The Fenton viewfinder was ever thus; he attempted to turn the Crimea landscape into a boy's own adventure; admittedly he was constrained by exposure time, but his view of the English landscape seem to me to be entirely informed by his sense of the prevailing social strata he was born into. Fenton carried that same viewfinder to the Crimea and his many staged photographs, admittedly constricted by the length of the exposure, were all imbued with a sense of pre Baden Powell scouting jamboree.Typical of the "first "official" war photographer" - Susan Sontag, Looking at War, The New Yorker December 2, 2002 shows Colonel Hallewell, recumbent on the field with his servant pouring wine for him. No sense of battle fatigue here, no sense of the atrocity of war present under the black cloak of composition. Market forces almost certainly meant that Fenton didn't need to bother with any record of suffering, after all Prince Albert was his patron for his Crimea jaunt.

John Thomson did photograph the London streets in the Dickensian period, but didn't he see the deprivation? There are almost no references to the levels of squalor experienced by the vast majority of its inhabitants - even the socially privileged had to endure the sights and sounds of the guttersnipes.

The Temperance Sweep, John Thomson,1876/7, Bridgeman Education

Thomson has an idealised scene "The Temperance Sweep" of a "reformed chimney sweep" that has a boy looking wistfully away - as if to say "the sweep will continue on the wagon just until I'm needed at the next house to fill my lungs with soot". Thomson may have moved around the city, but his Woodburytypes never really recorded, in much the same way that Fenton never really recorded, life, at least as the masses saw life. Photography in the Victorian English tradition was for the higher social classes, there was no recognition needed to convey this misery to the masses, they couldn't afford it anyway. Dickens may have written Bleak House and his other masterpiece Hard Times, but were there no pictures?

However Thomson never struck lucky in the way that Fenton did. Fenton who never had the ability, even if ever the motivation, to capture the horror of war. Unlike Tolstoy who had witnessed at first hand the battles not that far away in Sebastopol and described them in his "Sketches from Sebastopol" and used them later as source material when he described, in epic detail, the Battles of Austerlitz and Borodino in War and Peace - probably not surpassed in the description of the utter futility and waste of war. Tolstoy, who was on the opposing side as Prince Albert's viewfinder Mr Fenton, would have recognised immediately Fenton's contested masterpiece "The valley of the shadow of death". A haunting image of a gently rolling piece of scrub land littered with cannon balls, some say this was taken twice by Fenton, once prior to the balls being placed there (no doubt by Fenton's servant).

The Valley of Death, after the charge of the Light Brigade, Roger Fenton, 1855, Bridgeman Education

Never mind, it says in that one image more than all the other photographs he took put together and multiplied by the words written by Tolstoy in War and Peace. The cannon balls roll to a mass collection in a ditch and sporadically across the dirt track in the centre of the picture like so many skulls; the track leading out of the image as fast as it can go, by the shortest route and not a speck of redemption in the blank sky. The balls redolent of the skulls in Pol Pots Killing Fields, of the Tutsi massacres and of so many conflicts since and to come.

So an image of real value from the Crimea, yet nothing of our own back yard, it will be left to Mr Gradgrind and his ilk to provide that portrait

Confused already

I have had the thought for some time that photography can be constructed in much the same way as painting; it can be a purely visual representation of a something, a person, a place. Both mediums can offer the same level of representation. The painter decides what to include and photographer has to decide what to leave out - an oversimplification but that's what I had generally thought. Additionally either medium can create a deeper level of image, through the use of metaphor, allegory, illusion, allusion or some other visual device, an artist can convey a thought, a message, a philosophy, a politic. Both mediums have been used to convey all sorts of messages since their inception, clearly painting for much longer, the period leading up to the enlightenment was much more straightforward (inasmuch as I know about the medium) than after, but nevertheless, if we consider the 20th century where the level of sophistication of the artists operating in either field was roughly equal, certainly by the second half of the century, then the visual language used was a common currency. At least that was what I thought.
I started to read Clarke's "The Photograph" earlier today and I got very confused about some of what he was saying. In the first essay p23 he states.."We can never enter a photograph's 'depth'. Roland Barthes rightly complained about the frustration involved in the misplaced assumption that the closer we look at a photograph, the more we see." I take this to mean that Clark is agreeing with Barthes that, as he states earlier in the paragraph, it is "flat" it is dimensionless, that we can only .."look over it and across it. We can never enter a photograph's depth". And yet over the page p24 Clark starts to deconstruct Olivia Parker's photograph "Bosc"and spends a paragraph and a half reading the image. Indeed the second paragraph starts with "But this is also an image about photographic meaning, an essay on the capacity of the photograph to both reveal and conceal its meanings..." Unless Clark is able to see all of this in an instant, to collate these hidden meanings and receive its conveyed messages in the moment that he "look(s) over it and across it" then either there is a large contradiction or, more likely I am unable to see the logic in his essay. I shall read on and hopefully all will be revealed - or maybe I will forget about this (I doubt it somehow).

In chapter 2 Clark discuss's Diane Arbus' "Identical Twins. Clark conjects that there is a tension derived from the inception of photography, the daguerrotype, that "underscore the idea of a photograph as a literal record. Each twin is a reflection of the other. But "identical" infers 'identity', and the portrayal of a self limited to the surface presence of a single entity." Clark then goes on to talk about how the viewer can then only look at the differences in the subjects apparent in the photograph, like a "spot the difference" party game. I would add that he also goes to talk about how "..establish(s), both literally and symbolically, the basis of reading the image". But I said I would leave that until it resolves itself.
The issue surely for the Arbus photograph is as Clark (I think quite rightly) states in his first essay p24 p25. that "Finally, and perhaps most significantly, a photograph fixes a moment in time." I think I had come to this conclusion in my "Truth" blog entry July previously. Clark goes on to quote Damisch saying the photograph '...it does so only in so far as it isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum".
Well, if Arbus had called the picture sisters, or two girls in similar dress, then no tension, as Clark describes, would arise. We, according to Clark have taken direction from Arbus, in this case they are identical sisters, but we have ignored his own declaration that a photograph is a "moment in time". A different title, in Clark's conjecture, would no longer deliver a seminal work of art, but another shot that stays in the drawer as the tension derived from the title would not have us look to "ring" all the differences between the sisters.
But I don't think so; in my semi literate vocabulary I would state that we would know that in that moment of time all things can shape a face, eyes shutting or opening would effect the appearance demonstrably, one or other having a cold, or an itchy nose at the point of shutter release. The camera lies incessantly, it is Walter Mitty, it doesn't know its doing it, it can't control itself - it doesn't control itself. The artist presses the shutter.
The photograph can be read, as I think Clark means to say; but as with any work of fiction, any picture however fabricated there maybe many interpretations, but only one truth and that is the one Arbus wanted to deliver, what Parker wanted to convey.
I also know that I need to develop my vocabulary and hopefully I'll catch Clark up before he confuses me completely again.