Category Archives: Positions and Practice

21 03 21 Reflections on Audiences and Institutions

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The Social Photo

The rise in the proliferation of social media channels has undoubtedly changed the dynamics of the photograph and its use in society. Whereas previously photography might broadly have been categorised into the well-known “professional” channels of documentary, portraiture, fine art; and “amateur” ones of family album, holiday snapshot and keepsake, there is now a whole new stream of consciousness in the form of social media photographs, epitomised by the selfie. But what makes this last, new category, stand out is that the it is no longer the photo per se which is the central player – photography has emerged as a means of communication as never before. As Nathan Jurgenson says in “The Social Photo”, “photography has gone from being a medium for the collection of important memories to an interface for visual communication”1, and “….there is a fast-evolving literacy in the circulation of images as communication”2.

In my mind this transformation of photography into a means of mass communication is generally to be welcomed, particularly when Jurgenson goes on to say that “social photography excels in the everydayness of ordinary communication which is anything but trivial”3. If history records the late 20th century and early 21st century as the dominance of image over writing, so be it; no doubt trends will change again, but the visual record will be stunning and something for sociologists to pour over for years to come. That is not to say that it is all god though. I suspect that many people’s lives will be haunted by the proliferation of images that they have either taken of themselves or that have been taken by others, and which are all but impossible to delete permanently. The dreadful use of images of (mainly) women for blackmail or revenge is awful, and there are many examples in the press where risqué images taken years before have come back to plague people’s lives in job interviews, new relationships public life.

There is no denying that the use of the social image is more now than just the publication of an “image” – it is a whole process of story-telling in often minute and intimate detail, the replacement of the written diary. And whether this comes to be seen as a process of documentation of heightened nostalgia, or overt narcissism, it cannot be denied that it has created an enriched cultural landscape.

“The social photo’s central cultural importance is the degree to which the image’s frame, the media object itself, has dissolved away, leaving behind the substance of life and experience.”4

But perhaps people should also bear in mind Susan Sontag’s words of warning in “On Photography”, which Jurgenson also quotes:

“There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed”5.

Audiences and Institutions

I think that most photographer’s dream of having their work exhibited at some stage. Again, social media platforms have made this infinitely easier now, with the proliferation of on-line media outlets such as Flickr, Facebook, Instagram and websites generally, all with the ubiquitous capacity to provide instant gratification or depression through likes, and comments.

But whilst these are mass, on-line outlets, I still prefer the physicality of a gallery or studio and being to present photographs in the form they were intended, and appropriately sized and exhibited, particularly where this leads to interaction with the public audience directly. Whilst I have produced many photograph albums either for family or friends, I still enjoy the experience of walking around a gallery being able to take time to contemplate the works on display. And having opened a studio myself now, it’s a privilege to be able to show my own work and enter into a dialogue with the public.

And I’ve sold many photographs in the is way as well now – which is always a gratifying conclusion – to know that someone else has enjoyed a work enough to want to buy it and display it themselves. But does this make me a professional photographer? I think that if you make your living as a photographer then that is as good a definition of a professional photographer as any, but I’m also pretty sure that I haven’t sold enough yet to say that it is my living.

I think that Grayson Perry’s observation in “Playing to the Gallery” is perhaps more apt though: “Validation from your peers is a lovely accolade to have”6. But there is more than a touch of irony in his comment here, and he is undoubtedly more sincere when he says that “..perhaps the greatest accolade you can give a work of art is to say that it is of ‘museum quality’7.

And short of opening my own museum, perhaps that the goal that I should aspire to, and coming not long after the curated show, the book launch and the retrospective. Now, where’s my camera….!

Notes

  1. Jurgenson, N. (2020) The Social Photograph. London New York: Verso. pp13.
  2. Ibid pp15.
  3. Ibid pp16.
  4. Ibid pp25
  5. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography. London: Penguin Books, pp14.
  6. Perry, G. (2016) Playing to the Gallery. UK, US and others: Penguin Books, pp25.
  7. Ibid, pp29.

21 03 15 Reflections on Words and Pictures

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In his August 2010 Article in The Guardian, the writer Sean O’Hagan quotes the following from Robert Adams:

“For photographers, the ideal book of photographs would contain just pictures – no text at all” photographer Robert Adams once wrote. He went on to admit that he “once worked through more than a hundred drafts of a four-paragraph statement for a catalogue, all to find something that would just keep out of the way of the pictures“.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/aug/04/writing-about-photography-robert-adams

This view of “words” generally “getting in the way”, generally sums up my own view of words used in the context of photographs. But there are definitely exceptions as well, where the words can and do add an important function.

Barthes makes the point even more strongly that words can be downright damaging when accompanying photographs:

“…the text constitutes a parasitic message designed to connote the [photographic] image, to “quicken” it with one or more second-order signifieds. In other words, and this is an important historical reversal, the image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image”.     The Photographic Message in BARTHES, 1977: 25.

Generally I am not a fan of captions or even titles for works, other than possibly a reference to location and date taken, if this makes sense in the context. I normally prefer the photograph to speak for itself and to allow the viewer to find their own way into the photograph and explore meanings for him/herself.

But in the right context, I’m not sure that the relationship between words and image should necessarily be a “parasitic” one, with very negative overtones.  Naming images can be a fraught task, and it’s not surprising that many images end up as “untitled” which has become a cliched label in itself now. But there is no doubt that a well-chosen title does add to the meaning of an image – and provides context, which can be important, just as a biography of a photographer provides overall insight into the photographer’s work, and an introductory narrative to a body of work helps to explain the photographer’s motives. It’s a matter of balance and careful location of the words, so that they provide insight, but don’t distract.

In looking at photographs for this post, I came across the work of UK artist David Shrigley – ‘Stop It’, David Shrigley OBE, 2007 | Tate (Links to an external site.), and www.davidshrigley.com. (Links to an external site.)

He seems to deliberately use captions in an ironic and playful way, such as the following example. To me this is either a perfect illustration of Barthes parasitic relationship, or an ironic take on it, or perhaps both.

My favorite example of an image incorporating text explicitly though, is one below by the Finnish Artist, Elina Brotherus. She was living and working in Paris at the time, struggling to learn the language, and feeling isolated.  This is a playful reflection on that language learning process.

Interestingly, Eugene Ionesco (“Theatre of the Absurd”) wrote a play called “The Bald Primadonna” (1950) made up entirely of words and quotes from an English language learning book – it was his first play and was a critique of the failure of communication and language in many situations. 

Elina Brotherus Le Nez de Monsieur Cheval (1999). From: Cotton, C. (2009) the photograph as contemporary art. London, Thames and Hudson. pp164.

In the same article quoted at the beginning of this post by Sean O’Hagan, he later quotes the following by Stephen Shore in his “artist statement” for his first book “Uncommon Places”, published in 1982.

“As I wade a stream, I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water, my attention is riveted to it. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes, I strike. Then, the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still. Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration, and delicacy.”

As well as being a beautiful piece of prose that captures the essence of the photographic process, it seems to me that this is a good illustration of why words can be important in photography, explaining the process, but not necessarily impinging on the later images themselves.

For me, an image is definitely “worth a thousand words”, but sometimes some well-chosen words can and do provide support and clarity. It would also be worth looking in the future at the opposite case where there are words and no images despite being a book about photography, such as Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”.

21 03 13 Thomas Joshua Cooper

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I have been looking this week at the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper. Although born in California in 1946, Cooper has lived for many years in Scotland and is the founding head of Photography at the Glasgow School of Art. The website www.inglebygallery.com (from which the images below are taken) describes Cooper as “…a traveller, a nomadic artist whose extraordinary photographs are made in series at significant points around the globe, most often at its extremities”. Cooper produces his work using an antique wooden field camera from 1898 and printed by himself as selenium toned silver gelatin prints, only ever producing one image from the negative. His photographic process is to choose a site on a map, research it and then track it down. For example, his 1989 project called An Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity was inspired by Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world.

The resulting photographs have a very contemplative, surreal quality. But these are not traditional landscape images presenting a panorama of particular location; they have an almost abstract, intimate quality, revealing the essence of the location.

EAST-MOST – LOOKING TOWARDS SCOTLAND – THE NORTH CHANNEL AND THE IRISH SEA – BURR POINT, THE ARDS PENINSULA – COUNTY DOWN, NORTHERN IRELAND – THE EAST-MOST POINT OF IRELAND, 2013

I particularly like the work from the 2014 exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh entitled “Scattered Waters: Sources, Streams, Rivers”. This is a collection of photographs of rivers and streams in Scotland and again the mood is serene and contemplative. I like the idea that the viewer is left to contemplate the scene in their own time – there is nothing hurried about these images either in the way that they have been photographed or in how they are presented to the viewer. There is a timeless quality about them.

Evening -The River Dee
Portarch, Banchory, Kincardineshire, Scotland, 1997/2014

This is an approach to landscape photography that I would like to explore in my own work – moving away from the picturesque, or even sublime, and focussing on essence of the natural world at that moment in time and at that specific location.

21 03 06 Reflections on Interdisciplinary Practice

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I have always been interested in Art as well as photography, particularly the English landscape artists such as Turner and the Impressionist painters such as Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, and Pissaro. I am drawn by their use of paint and light to expose the richness of the colour and texture in the landscape itself.

J.M.W. Turner: “The Fighting Temeraire” 1839. The National Gallery
Vincent van Gogh: Field of Irises near Arles

I have also spent a lot of time studying the Surrealist movement: in Art, the work of Picasso and Dali for example, and in Photography the surrealistic work of Man Ray, Brassai, and Eugene Atget. I particularly like the early surrealistic work of Henri Bresson-Cartier, who said: “I owe an allegiance to Surrealism, because it taught me to let the photographic lens look into the rubble of the unconscious and of chance”.  Similarly, Andre Breton described Surrealism’s aim as being to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality”, or surreality.

Here, I’m fascinated by way that these artists all challenged the viewer to reject any comfortable sense of normality and confront a disturbing alternative version of reality, drawn from the subconscious.

Andre Breton described Surrealism’s aim as being to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality”, or surreality”1.

There is a similar challenge presented by the Theatre of the Absurd, which was heavily influenced by Existentialist philosophy – why am I here? what is the point of life? The typical protagonist of the Theatre of the Absurd is a loner, an isolated outsider and Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot (1952) by Samuel Beckett has two such typical characters in Vladimir and Estragon, who are tramps on the edges of society, having and needing each other, but never really able to communicate successfully with each other.

Music has had similar challengers, perhaps best illustrated by the Sex Pistols in the 70’s and within “classical” music, the “silent” music of John Cage – a severe rejection of traditional output with a radical, often anarchic alternative.

The key point in all of these artistic movements is the challenge against a comfortable and complacent acceptance of the status quo. Many photographers have done the same and continue to do so, such as the disruptive street photography of the Provoke Movement.

I am fully aware that much of my landscape photography is at the “picturesque” end of the photographic landscape spectrum and I do now want to explore moving away from this, particularly in my work for the MA.

William Gilpin (Observations on the River Wye 1770). (2005) London: Pallas Athene.
Philip James de Loutherbourg
Lake Scene, Evening 1792 (Tate Modern website http://www.tate.org.uk)

But I have no intrinsic problem still searching for the “sublime” in nature and trying to capture those moments in nature where its full force is unleashed, as I think these moments are for every generation to re-experience and re-interpret.

That said, I am starting to look more at the more contemporary concept of Edgelands2, and the tension that arises when nature and society collide, and how, if ever, that tension may be resolved. A good of example of the idea of Edgelands is in the work of Mark Power:

Power, M. 26 Different Endings, 2003-2006.  markpower.co.uk

Part of the project I will do over the next few weeks will be to look at the seafront at Felixstowe and to explore how it has been shaped to accommodate a wide range of human activity – container seaport, nature reserve, pier, promenade and sea defence – and to document the people whose daily lives interact and with this landscape.

Notes:

1.  Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme, various editions. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

2.  Alexander, J. (2020) Perspectives on Place: Theory and Practice in Landscape Photography. Oxon: Routledge. pp83-85.

21 02 20 Reflections on Collaboration and Authorship

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Collaboration

The collaborative exercise this week was a great opportunity to get to know better other people on the course and to get more of an insight into their practices and methodologies. Working as a team, myself, Ruta Saksensa and Mike Browne produced a short video on the field of vision of sheep. The purpose of the video was to illustrate that not all animals, including humans, have the same field of vision and that animals have adapted their vision capabilities to suit their needs. A shortened version of the video is reproduced below.

I have not really worked with others in photographic projects before so this was a new experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was exhilarating to share our different views and ideas and reach a consensus on the final shape of the project, and then to work together on different strands of the production to realise the finished video presentation.

SHEEP’S FIELD OF VIEW

By John Martyn, Michael Browne and Ruta Saksensa

We, humans, are used to see things from our perspective. But what about other species, what do other creatures see? Our group collaborated to produce an image that would represent a landscape from a sheep’s point of view.

The viewer sees a panorama that is typical for a sheep to see. Sheep are one of the pray species that have a peripheral vision of nearly 360 degrees. To be more precise, their vision is in between 270 and 320 degrees, while, in comparison, human vision is only about 155 degrees on average (Amelinckx 2017). When taking a closer look at a sheep’s pupils, it is possible to see that they have a horizontal pupil in comparison to a round pupil that humans have. The main reason why sheep and other pray animals need a wider field of view (a panoramic vision) is very simple – it is because they need to be aware of predator presence around them.

AMELINCKX, Andrew. 2017. 6 Fun Facts About Sheep You might Not Know. Modern Farmer Media 2021 [online]. Available from https://modernfarmer.com/2017/12/6-facts-sheep-might-not-know/ (Links to an external site.) [accessed 15 February 2021].

Ariella Azoulay describes in the article “Photography Consists of Collaboration”1how she, Susan Mieselas and Wendy Ewald came together to collaborate on a number of projects and in particular to research and present the different ways in which collaboration itself is undertaken.

She also describes how Ewald has worked on many photographic projects as part of her teaching, and the two way communication that has resulted from this between her and those she is teaching: “At the core of this project is an attempt to use the camera, the act and the event of photography, and the relations that they create in order to teach people to reposition themselves in relation to others in their community; to appreciate the value of one’s own experiences, culture, and dreams; and to recognize the value of sharing these things with others through photography”2.

It seems to me that in this duality is the essence of successful collaboration and it is something that I am looking to develop as well in my own Photographic Studio, by running projects which others can participate in, in order to create a firm, and hopefully lasting, dialogue between photographer and community.

As Azoulay goes on to say “..collaboration in photography cannot be limited to the question of how to engage others in the event of photography but must also ask how the photographer herself engages with act of photography”3.

Authorship

Briefly, I have no time for plagiarism and the blatant, unacknowledged copying of other people’s creative work.

That said, it’s hard to ignore completely the quip generally attributed to Pablo Picasso that “…good artists copy, great artists steal.” There is undoubtedly much to be gained from the sharing of ideas and the collaborative process, as long as it is acknowledged mutually where appropriate.

Notes

1 – Azoulay, A, Mieselas, S, Ewald, W. (2016) Photography Consists of Collaboration: Susan Mieselas, Wendy Ewald, and Ariella Azoulay. Camera Obscura 91, Volume 31, Number 1. © Camera Obscura. Published by Duke University Press.

2 – ibid, pp 190.

3 – ibid, pp 191.

21 02 13 Reflections of Reading Photographs

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This has been an interesting week for getting to grips with reading photographs, understanding what a photograph “is” versus what it “represents” and how a photographer has to encapsulate both aspects in their work. Various authors have expressed this in different ways and I’ve pulled highlighted two that, as starting points, resonate with me:

“The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seems so. It was the photographer’s problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choice in terms of the latter”.

Szarkowski, J. The Photographer’s Eye. (2018). 7th edn. New York: Museum of Modern Art. pp introduction.

“The Studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste”.  “…..a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity”… “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me is poignant to me”.

            Barthes, R. Camera Lucida. (2000). London: Vintage. Pp 26/27.

I particularly like Barthes idea of the Studium versus the Punctum and thedifferent levels of personal response to an image . The Studium is also described as the “historical” interest (ibid: 57) and the ,“field of cultural interest” (ibid: 94) – ie a cultural or intellectual response to an image – whereas the Punctum is more of an emotional reaction to the image, highly subjective, and closely bound to the viewer or “spectator”.

Elsewhere, Barthes also uses the terms “denotation” (what can be readily identified from an image) and “connotation” (the underlying message that is being conveyed by the image), which are both closely linked to the semiological terms of “signifier” and “signified”.

I had not really thought about photographs before in this way, but combining these ideas with the very detailed taxonomy which Paul Martin Lester sets out and discusses in his article “Visual Communication: images with messages (Visual Analysis) published by Wadsworth, I feel I have a much better framework with which to assess and understand photographs that I now come across.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the week though was the importance context in any analysis of an image. Viewing an image without any background knowledge or context is a dangerous and fruitless game that can lead to all sorts of mis-interpretations, as well as potentially missing out on a wealth of information that should rightly belong with the image. The importance of context is well illustrated by John A Walker in his introduction to “Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning” in The Camerawork Essays1, where he shows that an image can carry very different meanings depending on the context in which it is viewed or shown.  In addition, the photographer has to be mindful that the viewer comes to an image with “memories, knowledge [and] prejudices” and that there is therefore also a “mental set or context” to be taken into account. He sums it up in a quasi, but very apt, warning “Context is a troublesome determinant of meaning for artists because so often it lies outside their control”.

This week has made me particularly of two things.

One is the importance of really looking at a photographer’s body of work as a while and not just individual images, and reading what the photographer has said about their own work, and looking at the socio-cultural and historical events through which they worked, in order to really understand their work in as broad a context as possible.

The second is the importance of thinking hard about how my own images might be presented, and where (book, exhibition, as single images or a series) and to provide enough background information, if appropriate in the context, for the viewer to be able to access the images fully.

Evans, Jessica ed. (1997). The Camerawork Essays: Context and Meaning in Photography. London: Rivers Oram Press.