People and Place: January 2013

Sunday 27 January 2013

The Photograph as Contemporary Art: chapter 6

Moments in History

The chapter looks at how photography bears witness to the ways of life and events of the world.

In war photography, in particular, the emphasis has been on arriving after the decisive moment. An example is Sophie Ristelhueber, who has photographed the after effects of conflicts from Lebanon to Azerbaijan. ONce again, one has to query the significance of the imagery and the message that the photographer has tried to get over to her audience. Do images of war relics on a battlefield carry any special significance?

Paul Seawright was commissioned by Imperial War Museum to take images of the Afghanistan conflict. His image Valley is almost a copy of one of Fenton's images of Crimea War.

Deadpan photography is used often when artists photograph the human side of conflicts - the human side of the consequent disruption. Example is Fazal Sheikh's work in refugee camps. Uses black and white photography with extensive narrative to record the abuses against refugees.

Moving on from war, Cotton describes work of those who have access to disadvantaged communities, such as the work of Broomberg and Chanarin in penal systems. Deirdre O'Callaghan stayed in men's hostel in London for some time before photographing the residents and talking to them about their life histories.

Dinu Li cleverly photographed the personal effects of Chinese immigrants, not being able to photograph the individuals themselves.

Social documentary photography has taken many forms. An interesting variant is Paul Graham's work American Night in which the majority of the images are bleached out photographs of black Americans.

Martin Parr has used some unusual formats. Cotton uses his Common Sense to demonstrate the style. In this set, Parr takes multiple images of everyday items in beach resorts.

By complete contrast to this, Delahaye has commenced a long term project History, for which he takes panoramic images. Effective.

A sub genre of documentary photography is to show a reality that is distinct from the generally held preconceptions. Example is Mannikko's work looking at Finnish rural culture, based around Oulu.

Similar with Ballen's work in South Africa. He stages his subjects, more in the style of monochromatic art.

Mikhailov has photographed Ukraine in several guises as engineer photographer, photojournalist, and in contemporary art. In Case History one can legitimately ask whether the photography is voyeuristic rather than empathetic, although one cannot really tell when one stops and the other starts.

The Photograph as Contemporary Art: chapter 5

Intimate Life

In intimate photography, "the technical shortcomings of domestic non-art photography are employed as a language through which private experience is communicated to the viewer." Not sure I really believe that this is as deliberate as Cotton suggests; more likely that the technical quality of many of the images is questionable, and this argument is used as something of a justification.

Nan Goldin is most well-known intimate life photographer. She was a drug addict, had a traumatic childhood (her sister committed suicide at 18 when Goldin was 11), and had a destructive sexual relationship that together give her work authenticity.

Araki has taken thousands of sexually explicit images, publishing over 200 books.

Larry Clark was also part of the genre of photography as representation of sexually free society.

Fashion photography led to a spin-offs in art photography, notably Jurgen Teller's work, such as his images of go-see models.

Casual photography became vogue in 1990s with work such as Richard Billingham's photographic record of his chaotic and dysfunctional home life.

Other photographers have focussed on sequential family life, such as Annelies Strba, Ruth Erdt, and Elinor Carucci. Tina Barney and Larry Sultan have taken images of their rather better off families, Sultan with a mixture of posed and casual observations.

Like Tina Barney, Mitch Epstein took images of family life that "blend..photographically distant perspective with a subject that is intimately known." This is probably the key to successful images of family in an artistic sense: to use the knowledge the photographer has of his or her subjects to portray their characteristics, yet appear objective.

Saturday 26 January 2013

Podcast

Photography is a rapidly moving discipline; this applies not only to camera technology and software but also to the means of training and information.

One reminder of this came when I listened to my first ever podcast. I have had an iPad for a while but never thought of using it for podcasts until my wife suggested doing so after she had downloaded several poetry related podcasts. I have watched YouTube videos of camera techniques but now can subscribe to photography podcasts.

I do not drive as much as I used to but do drive regularly from home near Bristol to Brighton to watch Brighton and Hove Albion. It is a five hour round trip so the idea of being able to download some interesting audio shows and listen to them whilst on the motorway was a no brainer of an idea. Why had I not thought of this before?

I chose to listen to a 45 minute podcast: http://improvephotography.com/feed/podcast. It was entertaining and covered a range of topics from suggestions about which is best printing firm to whether fast lenses have had their day, to the usefulness of grad filters.

One comment in response to a contributor who asked whether she should upgrade her camera equipment struck a chord: "think about the millions of images you CAN take, not the few that you cannot". That is surely a great mantra.

The podcast also mentioned a website - Pixoto - where you can post images for others to comment and vote on. This could be very useful to get some feedback on potential competition and assignment images and one I shall use in the future.

Another photographic venture I am determined to investigate is uploading images for stock photography. The podcast refers to istock, but there are others. The presenters mention setting up models but not so sure that this is necessary.

The podcast has helped me focus on what to do now that P&P is complete. I shall continue with OCA (more of this in conclusion) but take a break to focus on some more technical issues and stock photography. Notwithstanding the above comment, I do feel a need to update my camera body, partly because I would like to take moving images as well as stills, and I would really like to have high ISO
settings.

The next practical course I would like to do is Landscapes. Partly with that in mind, I viewed a YouTube video on photographical tips, including the use of filters. I will experiment with these myself before commencing the course.

Sunday 20 January 2013

Assignment 5

People and place on assignment

The aim of this assignment is to set out a basic brief for a commission. The notes are clear that professional photography differs from amateur photography in that it is "performed to order" rather than requiring any greater degree of "competence or special skill or technical quality". What we seek are images that fulfil a brief. We have looked at the notion of narrative during this course, and the consequent relationship of images and words, and this assignment is an extension of the key concept of narrative: images that illustrate a message, only this time it is prescribed to a professional brief.

The choice of subject is personal, so I have selected a real example of how my images are being used in a professional way: for use in Poetry Space, an online poetry publishing business owned and run by my wife. I am grateful to her, the company and the authors mentioned for their assistance and permission to publish the extracts, poems and covers. This Assignment has been a long term project; I have steadily worked on material for inclusion for several months, adapting and including material as my learning has developed. I have used examples that demonstrate particular emphasis on people and/or place.

Images are used in the business in three main ways:

to provide a dynamic gallery on the website;
to illustrate particular poems; and
to provide book covers

The brief therefore is to take images that are appropriate for the particular use: this is to a degree an artistic choice so we discuss what sort of image will work in each case. It is important to recognise that this is a two way process; sometimes an image will complement a poem or an extract, on occasion there is the opportunity to provide an image for a given poem or book title. This is demonstrated by the following examples.

Note that the images cannot always be presented on this blog as well as they appear on the source as we are demonstrating here the use of the images, and therefore as they have been adapted for the website or for publishing, and copied from the source. It may well be worth reviewing the Poetry Space website in order to see in a live environment.

Dynamic gallery

The website has a series of images with quotes from contributing poets as a moving banner. These are three examples:

The first image was taken during a downpour in Kiev - the chair was actually used by a self appointed taxi organiser who abandoned his post once the rain came. The image was taken because it evoked exactly the sort of sentiment enunciated by Philip Lyons: a feeling of desolation, something is missing.

The positioning of the figure in the second image (taken in the tunnel on Bristol-Bath cycle track) is key to matching the words in the extract from Azadeh Kallili's poem. She is actually walking towards the photographer, but this is indistinct - she could be walking away or stationary. But the beauty of this conjunction is the ambiguity in the quote. Does the the word "face" mean literally look towards the sun or is it used colloquially in the sense that "I do not want to go out in the sun today". There is ambiguity in the words and in the image.

This image also demonstrates a technical point: that the positioning of images on the website requires images in 2:1 dimensions rather than the typical 3:2 or 4:3 from a SLR. Consequently the image has had to be cropped at the bottom so the words can be placed on a clearly visible part. In isolation the image would look wrong but in context it seems not to matter simply because the addition of the words has effectively created a new image.

The third example is less ambiguous but the words and the image of Westonbirt Arboretum fit perfectly - the sunlight through the trees with the autumn colours adding vibrance and interest and an inviting space in the middle foreground for the meeting suggested by the extract from Philip Lyons' poem.

This selection provides examples of how words and images can enrich one another, a concept explored further with images and complete poems.

Illustration of poems

This image of the sled beneath an oak tree on Cock Road Ridge in Kingswood is used to complement Moira Andrew's poem:

First Snow of Winter

We wake to a world bewitched,
a black and white negative
of itself. Hunchback gardens
crouch beneath a gun-grey sky
like a flock of gulls
huddled shoulder to shoulder
on some salty shoreline.

Feathered trees thrust out bare branches,
wide as wings,
across the bleak horizon.
Blackbirds balance on the
snow-sheathed fence, their
beaks ripping bright holes
in the colourless morning.

The poem evokes mental images of the scenes described, and an image of snow landscape - in particular the "thrust out bare branches" of the poem - hopefully adds to that. It is not easy to take interesting images of snowscapes because of the lack of colour; in this one the sled adds interest while not dominating.

Cardboard City

Come visit my castle the next time you’re in the city?

Look, see. It’s not like the others, filth and mess.

They don’t fold up papers, conserve for other days

Living for the moment, whereas I think ahead

I’ve even made a window; it opens inwards and out

With that homely touch, I put a frill up.

I’ve got thick mattresses in all the bedrooms,

Lined with today’s newspapers, if you open up the window

With the light of the moon, you can read in bed.

A kitchen, with a basin for the sink

Of course I only use royal china, milk just two days out of date!

When the hard long day is over, of kerbs, park benches

Searching through bins, I get caught up in that evening rush.

I imagine the walls made out of granite, the roof slate

With chimneys keeping each room away from the damp

Gatehouse with its keeper, looking after my estate

So don’t forget, come to the city within a city,

Everything is manmade; you’ll see some amazing sites

You see I use to be an engineer.

The link between image and words is subtle here, the crushed can symbolizes a life that has been changed beyond recognition, as well as being a tangible sign of life on the streets.

Susan Jane Sims was so inspired by the image of a solitary balloon stuck below the roof of Cabot Circus shopping centre that she wrote the following poem:

Windows Of My Mind

When you died

I thought you'd float

beyond the blue

and though the pull
is strong

you never quite
slip from view.

You're there,

pressed against

the windows of my mind

Here the poet has added personalized feeling to what is almost an abstract image; I am intrigued by her focus on the balloon only, she makes no observation of the geometry of the roof, yet photographically this is as important as the balloon. In image terms, the solitary point of the balloon contrasts with the geometrical pattern; they balance each other. The poet has focussed on the balloon only, thereby adding a different dimension for the reader.

Book covers

A few images of mine have been used for books of poems published by Poetry Space.

(The image has had a black border applied for appearance on Amazon bookstore)

Philip Lyons' book is a collection of poetry written over several years; the title was the author's own - the publisher and I sought to illustrate with a simple image. This image (taken in Hyde Park) of a person engrossed in an activity that we can only conjecture at seemed to work well.

(The image has had a black border applied for appearance on Amazon bookstore)

The concept for the cover of Words that Signify, an anthology of poems entered for a competition run by Poetry Space, arose from a street theatre experience that I saw, where the artist was drawing blind:

My view was that the image of the artist writing or drawing blind was not quite right for a book of poetry but the concept could be adapted to work better with the book title, consequently we have a thoughtful and intense expression from the chalk author, who has written two words on a brick wall. Are they random? What do they signify? These are the sorts of questions the image is trying to evoke as part of the cover.

(The image has had a black border applied for appearance on Amazon bookstore)

When asked to illustrate Through a Child's Eyes I suggested that we avoid a stereotypical WW2 type image - the 1940 sepia image of a boy and girl disembarking from a train in the middle of the English countryside, for example. It seemed appropriate to use a modern image and this image of a boy looking down from the John Hancock Center in Chicago works well.

The image as taken (above) was not suitable for a book cover - the title would be too easily lost in the background and the focus needed to be on the boy only, not on the object of his scrutiny. Consequently I used a high key black and white conversion in Silver Efex Pro2, thus almost eliminating the background, leaving just sufficient that we can see the boy is not a carefully selected and cut profile from another image. On a practical point, the conversion left sufficient white space for the title and author. The author herself was delighted by the image, immediately seeing the significance of it clearly being contemporary and multi cultural. It is important that our reflections of history acknowledge the view of today's audience and how it looks at the words of the past.

Conclusion

I have presented nine (the brief is between eight and twelve) of my images as used by Poetry Space. It is not only gratifying to see one's work being used in this way, but also it has challenged me to think about what works artistically for the audience and the client. It is photography in context - images being used to illustrate, and hopefully enhance, other people's work. Furthermore, we can see how the words enhance some of the images; the phrase on the tunnel image is a personal favourite, and I also particularly like the symbiosis of Words Of My Mind and the image of the balloon.

The Assignment has been a pleasure to do; the culmination of the course and a personal collection of images in practice. I have gained most from the People and Place module in my understanding of context and narrative. TAOP is concerned mainly about the technical aspects of single image photography; in this module we have begun to move towards photography serving a purpose, whether that be an artistic narrative or, as in this Assignment, a more commercial emphasis.

Appendix

Originals of images used in the assignment with technical data: