I had been avoiding Alec Soth, as I very much like his work and also very familiar with it visually. However, It was mentioned to me that my work has some similarities (albeit i’d argue tenuous), so I decided that it might be good to look at Soth for this task, which has turned out to be a revelation to how I am approaching my own practice. The interview that I am using is a conversation that Soth had with American Suburb X (Soth in ASX, 2015).
I found his discussion about the work ‘Songbook’ (Fig. 2) particularly interesting as Soth quickly moves into the way he created this work aesthetically, utilising black and white images with direct flash, which he is mimicking the look of press photography of the 1950s. This is something that resonated with me immediately as I have been writing about a documentary aesthetic, which has been driven by the look of this style of photography from the earliest FSA imagery and also how the look of press photographers, such as Weegee, who Soth also referenced in this interview, which was a nice validation for a post I did earlier in the module (Fig 3). Soth states “the work is referencing another time,” which is how we look at the period of the post war era as a sense of wonder, and how people have a deeply romanticised version of the past. From here Soth also makes reference to community and how there is a sense of loss of it, yet it has never really gone away. I had also been looking at a recent publication by Eli Durst, called ‘The Community’ in which he also creates images using this aesthetic, and seems to also reference another time. I have been discussing this aesthetic in relation to my own work, which is colour, however I don’t think that I have been able to truly resolve the reason why I have not created my work in black and white despite choosing to reference and research a range of black and white photography until listening to this interview. I believe that my work exists on the spectrum of the documentary aesthetic, however unlike Soth and Durst, my project is based on the present, so to use Soth’s conscious referencing to a romanticised past would be confusing and my use of colour makes sense in this context.
Soth also referred to a range of his works, which might be aesthetically different but are connected to each other and that every project that he creates is what Soth termed “Stuff that happens in America” but they are also about himself and some of the work is more inward looking than others. I have been struggling to resolve my project in terms of the editing of my work in progress portfolio, owing to a range of disparate imagery. My intention is to look at my connection to community, or lack thereof, which also makes my project a kind of autobiography in where I fit in. It has been useful to re-examine Alec Soth in relation to my own work. I think that in terms of how he resolves the autobiographical elements of his images could prove useful in the editing of my own WIPP.
Another interesting question posed to Soth was regarding his association with Magnum Photos, in what interviewer Brad Feuerhelm termed “the slippery position of being an artist and working with Magnum,” however after all our examination of National Geographic a few weeks ago, the statement of the ‘Magnum Artist’ feels like an oxymoron when considering how we perceive Magnum as a collective of documentary photographers. However, Soth states that Magnum has been misunderstood as being a news agency and confused by some its founding photographers who were closely linked to war photography, citing Robert Capa and Heri Cartier Bresson as “surrealists who exist in the real world,” and I wonder wether this statement sums up what I am aiming to say about this documentary aesthetic, which gives off the assumed authority of veracity but are aesthetic constructions in the same way National Geographic utilises similar tropes in the pursuit of empirical authority and arguments that have been put to the work of Sabastiao Salgado that we looked at a couple of weeks ago.
Bibliography
Durst, E., 2019. The Community. [Online] Available at: http://www.elidurst.com/the-community [Accessed 30 March 2020].
Soth, A., 2014. Songbook. 1 ed. London: Mack.
Soth, A., 2015. Brad Feuerhelm of ASX in conversation with Alec Soth [Interview] (4 November 2015)
I am continuing to consider the ways in which to disseminate
my work, which is a continuation of the discussion I had in my post ‘Are you
Drowning Yet?’ and also in my post ‘Hunters and Farmers’
Simon Norfolk’s critique of the photo book is a valid response
to a sometimes esoteric world of photography, however there are photographers
who are able to both create a work in the form of a beautifully presented book
whilst at the same time disseminating that work with a broader audience, or at
least with the people that helped to create the work.
Clémentine
Schneidermann
I have been following the work of Schneidermann since the start
of this module, after having the work recommended to me at the end of the last
one. I really connect with the aesthetic of her work, especially ‘I Called her
Lisa Marie’ (Fig. 1), which contrasts Elvis fans of South Wales with images
from Elvis’s home in Memphis and really creates the idea of community formed
through a connection to the culture and music of Elvis Presley and blends
portraiture with environmental imagery, that Schneidermann says “help to breath
between each portrait” (Rosenberg, 2016).
Her commitment to working with communities as well as within
them is something that also resonates with me as I look to work closer with my
own community. For example, her project ‘It’s Called Ffasiwn’ is a collaboration
between Schneidermann, stylist Charlotte James, and the youth clubs of the
South Wales Valleys (Fig. 2), which is referred to as a “fashion-cum-documentary-cum-participatory community project that
challenges the static way the region has been portrayed by the media through
celebrating the creativity of its younger inhabitants” (Wright, 2019). The work seeks to work in
collaboration with the people who live in the South Wales Valley region, one of
the most deprived areas in the UK in order to change the perception of how the
area is represented through images of deprivation left after the decline of the
coal industry in the 1980s.
Although the series is primarily a fashion work, I find the
tools of collaboration a positive way of re-framing the way a culture can be
depicted, which is a kind of decolonisation of the poverty that we
automatically attribute to these areas. The project has been exhibited at the
Martin Parr foundation, which has been set up to focus on work created in the British
Isles, something that I feel my work could aspire to. My own work is
fundamentally about British community and would sit quite comfortable in this
space (Fig. 3). Schneidermann has produced photobooks as part of her work,
however for ‘It’s Called Ffsiwn’ a magazine was produced and was also shared in
the local newspaper to share the work with the community. In this way the work
becomes more inclusive of the people who helped inspire it.
Additionally, for Schneidermann there is also a secondary
market for this work, creating opportunity for wider dissemination.
Schneidermann also completes commissions for publications such as Vogue Italia
(Fig. 4), and continues to utilise the aesthetic of her documentary and
collaborative work by staging many of these shoots within the Welsh Valleys
where she is based. This supports the discussion that I had regarding
publishers such as Hoxton Mini Press who also work in this way in order to
create a larger audience for the work and by extension making then work more
attractive to these publishers to put out into the market place.
If there was to be a critique to this approach however, it
would be in the potential gaze of this kind of imagery; taking advantage of the
people depicted in the images (Fig. 5). However, I don’t believe that this is
Schneidermann intention, who does not operate in the way that traditional
documentary photographers have done in the past; As Sontag points out “The photographer is supertourist an
extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of
their exotic doings” (Sontag, 1979, p. 42). Schneidermann
is not a tourist in the Welsh Valley, she also lives with the community and
works with them to create this photography, and continues to do so.
Considering the
secondary market for my work
Now that my project has evolved to include reaction to the current Coronavirus pandemic, it does present an opportunity to disseminate the work in an editorial setting. For example, BBC has already started to create reflections on how the UK has changed as a result of the virus, and illustrating this with stock imagery edited to present a before and after view of how life has changed (Fig. 6). In the weeks during the pandemic there will be inevitably be a range of content produced to help illustrate and understand what is happening and my work would fit very well in this. Especially as my intent is to look at the connections within community and society at large.
Another example could be through a publication, such a Huck magazine, creates themed issues (Fig. 7) for content that could feasibly produce an issue on the impact and outcomes of the pandemic. Huck’s editor Andrea Kurland suggests that in this context it is the story that they are able to put together is just as important as the visuals when considering commissioning a piece of work “start thinking about what that editor would need to turn that into a feature” (Kurland & Creativehub, 2020). It would be good start thinking how my work can exist in these kinds of contexts as they have established audiences and built on the basis that if it is published there must be an inherent quality to the work and worth seeing. However, there is the issue of compromise to consider when pursuing publication in this kind of media. Both of the examples that I have given will have their own editorial guidelines with regard to the kind of work that they publish, and this could also exist in a particular political standpoint (although less so for the BBC), which could have a fundamental impact in the way that my work is read, potentially compromising the intent and dominant reading of my work. An important consideration that could have implications on how I am able to create work in the future.
Bibliography
Huck Magazine,
2018. Teen Activism. Huck Magazine, 15 May.
Kelly, J., Getty & Alamy, 2020. Coronavirus: The month everything changed. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-52066956 [Accessed 31 March 2020].
Kurland, A. & Creativehub, 2020. How to Show
Your Work. London: Printspace Studios.
Rosenberg, D., 2016. Elvis Presley’s Biggest Fans. [Online] Available at: https://slate.com/culture/2016/01/elvis-presley-fans-around-the-world-photographed-by-clementine-schneidermann.html [Accessed 31 March 2020].
Schneidermann, C., 2018. I Called Her Lisa Marie. [Online] Available at: https://www.clementineschneider.com/i-called-her-lisa-marie/cz93s22tomb7f4jbr8radnwqtgxpal [Accessed 31 March 2020].
Schneidermann, C., 2019. For Vogue Italia. [Art]
(Vogue Italia).
Schneidermann, C., 2019. Gucci x Vogue Italia. [Art]
(Vogue Italia).
Schneidermann, C., 2019. It’s Called Ffasiwn is a collaboration with Charlotte James & youth clubs. [Online] Available at: https://www.clementineschneider.com/ffasiwn-1/lwqc0f3qqhdc4s3fznz34vv6tavez7 [Accessed 31 March 2020].
Schneidermann, C., 2019. It’s Called Ffasywn’. Bristol:
s.n.
Sontag, S., 1979. On Photography. London:
Penguin.
Wright, S., 2019. It’s Called Ffasiwn. [Online] Available at: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/clementine-schneidermann-it-s-called-ffasiwn [Accessed 31 March 2020].
Since the need to be inside, there has been a shift in the
way that I have to approach my work.
I had been exploring the idea of the documentary aesthetic after reading John Tagg’s discussion on the subject: “that a photograph can come to stand as evidence, for example, rests not on a natural or existential fact, but on a social, semiotic process” (Tagg, 1988, p. 4). Here Tagg notes that the photographic image as ‘truth’ has become a learned part of our culture, it is a mythology that is underpinned by early documentary photography and the semiotic process being referred to is tied closely to how the images were black and white, such as the FSA photography of the 1930s, of which Tagg notes: “The ‘truth’ of these individual photographs may be said to be a function of several intersecting discourses” (p. 173), where even these early images are not part of some empirical fact but a tool for state and media bias, where Susan Sontag also acknowledges this by stating: “The FSA project, conceived as ‘a pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems’ was unabashedly propagandistic” (Sontag, 1979, p. 62).
Since the start of the module, I have come back to the FSA project multiple times, especially when considering the idea of truth and representation. For example, when photographing my home as ‘Evidence’ to highlight the differences in the imagery and rhetoric of how an estate agent portrays our home, for the sake of our land lady (Fig. 1), and taking this a bit further by utilising the idea of the ‘killed’ image that Roy Stryker applied when rejecting images (Fig. 2). I had also begun to collaborate with others in my community by providing them with a camera and black and white film to create photograph of their own interpretation of community. My thought process behind this experiment, that the images of my collaborators would hold more ‘truth’ in black and white and play with the authenticity of the narrative, and the idea of fractured community and connective decline by placing these more ‘authentic’ images next to my own study of the community (Fig. 3). However, I think that this part of the work definitely needs more development and I have decided to shelve the idea during the lockdown period as I am unable to effectively work in collaboration and properly direct this part of the project. I am however still asking people to collaborate and create work whilst in isolation and may come back to the idea once we have returned to normality.
Eli Durst
Eli Durst’s work ‘The Community’ (Durst, 2019) focusses on the community space and through this he seeks to explore American society and how people come together within these spaces. Durst writes of the work “A quintessentially American space that is simultaneously completely mundane and generic, but also deeply charged psychologically as a point of ideological production” (Durst, 2019) and many of the images create a topology of religious iconography (Fig. 4), not least because many of the space that Durst photographs are church basements. Durst creates these images in black and white and with direct flash, and although Durst comments “I quickly realised I was less interested in a documentary-style project and I became more interested in trying to capture strange, ambiguous moments in which one activity can bleed into another” (Angelos, 2019), his conscious application of these techniques, which are a departure from previous work (Fig. 5), creates a sense of the learned documentary aesthetic, in a similar way to the work of Weegee used them (Fig. 6) historically and also blend into the learned knowledge of how a documentary photograph is expected to look. Where I disagree with how Durst seems to disassociate from the documentary aesthetic, his exploration of the subject really starts to consider the mythology of American culture through these spaces and links very well to the writing of Robert Putnam, who discussed the decline of social capital through traditional sources, such as religion, citing a study by Wade Clarke Roof and William McKinney: “Large numbers of young well-educated, middle-class youth … defected from the churches in the late sixties and the seventies … Some joined new religious movements, others sought personal enlightenment through various spiritual therapies and disciplines, but most simply ‘dropped out’ of organised religion all together” (Putnam, 2000, p. 73). Yet the need to congregate continues, and Durst is starting to answer the question of what is replacing religion in these people’s lives, noting “Many need a secular sense of purpose or identity” (Durst, 2019).
Evolution
I have found it useful to test how my own practice uses the documentary aesthetic and see where I sit on this continuum. Commercially at least, my work sits in the editorial genre, which utilises an inherent documentary aesthetic in the way that the images are primarily used to illustrate writing and provide a visual actuality of the event that has been described in the text; as Barthes’ states: “Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (Barthes, 1977, p. 26). In this space, writing informs the reading of an image to create the meaning for it. So my work is already tied to the notion of photographic ‘truth,’ in what both Barthes is stating and also how Tagg refers to the “naturalistic and the universal being particularly forceful because of photography’s privileged status of the actuality of the events it represents” (Tagg, 1988, p. 160). Understanding this is already present in my work, I don’t feel I need to resort to using black and white as this could become to overt and superfluous to my intent, however my awareness of this has become more of a conscious decision. I also intend to utilise text in my work in progress portfolio to provide additional meaning and reading of my narrative.
Into the domestic
environment
Continuing to develop on the themes identified since the lock down and looking at the work of Clare Gallagher and Rinko Kawauchi, I have spent some time exploring my domestic environment and seeing how I can apply this to my project that looks at community. I have created a mixture of images to test some ideas, some looking at my family, which are my community now (Fig. 7), and then considering my intent, which in part was that of the connective decline within community I started to look at the windows in my home.
Windows
The window is the view to the outside world (Fig. 8). Outside is where the community lives. Yet, we are now confined to exist in the inner space of our homes. So if I am not able to go out and photograph the community, then I can aim to photograph my tenuous connection to it; the window. The windows in my home have become an overlooked chore (which actually creates a link to the work of Clare Galagher’s investigation of domestic load), the windows have become incredibly dirty as the result of a busy family life, career, and the distraction of finding a new house to live in after being told that we needed to move out. Now with the lockdown, all we have to connect us to the outside world is through these dirty windows. This supports the intention of my work on multiple levels. Metaphorically, the window is a barrier to the outside, which has become hostile to all of us. The obscured glass creates a view of the existential anxiety and there is the unknown of when we might be able to re-engage socially and with the community once again and it was Rinko Kawauchi who puts this into some context “I believe quietness, fragility and anxiety are included in beauty” (Kawauchi, 2016), creating a series of terms in which to explore the concept of community within the home a remotely.
I have chosen to put the focus onto the glass and the dust and dirt on it (Fig. 9). As a result, the subject beyond the glass in the environment and the street outside of the home are thrown out of focus to heighten the obscured view. This is inspired by Uta Barth’s use of focus to force the reader into a state of investigation and ‘experiential’ looking, who says “I wanted to challenge that by removing the central subject and to look at and think about the background, which ascribes meaning to the subject in an almost subliminal way” (Barth, 2012). There is an expectation that when I photograph a window, that I should photograph what is beyond the window, whereas the window as a barrier is what needed to be highlighted here; I am inside looking out with nothing else to do but investigate the minute details of the domestic.
In Praise of Shadows
When researching the work of Clare Gallagher I was pointed
to an essay she cited (O’Hagan, 2020) by Junichiro
Tanzinaki called ‘In Praise of Shadows’ (Tanizaki, 2001), which has become
quite inspirational in the investigation of my domestic world. In it he goes to
great length in describing the minutia of the many intricacies of the domestic
environment: “The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single
telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in the corner of the hallway” (p. 5)
and it is in the intricacy and detail where Tanizki finds this beauty. Where I
feel this truly applies to how I am approaching the image of the window is in
the way that Tanzinaki views dust and grime within the home: “On the contrary,
we begin to enjoy it only when the lustre has worn off, when it has begun to
take on a dark, smoky patina” (p. 18). So then, the window
takes on this level of beauty as the built up layers of dust on the outside
surface reflect the light in an aesthetically pleasing way, feeding into my
idea that the window is the barrier and the metaphor of our isolation; what
Kawauchi says of anxiety creating beauty.
Bibliography
Angelos, A., 2019. Eli Durst captures the strange and unified goings-on in an American church basement. [Online] Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/eli-durst-the-community-photography-301019 [Accessed 30 March 2020].
Durst, E., 2018. Pinnacle Reality. [Online] Available at: http://www.elidurst.com/pinnacle-realty [Accessed 30 March 2020].
Durst, E., 2019. The Community. [Online] Available at: http://www.elidurst.com/the-community [Accessed 30 March 2020].
Durst, E., 2019. The Community by Eli Durst [Interview]
(18 December 2019).
Felig, A. ‘., 1960. Lost his Horse. [Art].
Hill, P., 2020. Darcie colouring during the daily briefing. [ Photo ].
Hill, P., 2020. Evidence experiment. [ Photo ].
Hill, P., 2020. Kitchen Window. [ Photo ].
Hill, P., 2020. Living room window. [ Photo ].
Hill, P., 2020. Mark, volunteer and patron of Elim foodbank for 19 years. [Photo].
Hill, P., 2020. Rear Window view. [ Photo ].
Kawauchi, R., 2016. In and Out [Interview] 2016.
O’Hagan, S., 2020. ‘Even dust can be interesting’: the woman who photographs housework. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/05/even-dust-can-be-interesting-clare-gallagher-photographs-housework [Accessed 3 March 2020].
Petrucci, J. & Hill, P., 2020. concrete road bridge support. [Photo].
Putnam, R., 2000. Bowling Alone. 1 ed. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Russell, L., 1937. Untitled photo, possibly related
to: Mr. Tronson, farmer near Wheelock, North Dakota. [Art] (Library of
Congress).
Sontag, S., 1979. On Photography. London:
Penguin.
Tagg, J., 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays
on Photographies and Histories. 1st paperback ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Tanizaki, J., 2001. In Praise of Shadows. London:
Vintage.
My project’s focus was on the idiorrhythmic way
that we live together and also separate lives within our communities; feeling
removed from them (Stene-Johansen, et al., 2018, p. 1). The work was also
partly autobiographical – This is to consider the subjective & objective
aspects of how I also connect and fit in. I live in Watford but have never felt
truly connected to it, from a generational sense of impermanence, liminality,
and transience, which is linked to job security and the rental trap. Watford is
the ideal place to explore this; not quite London, yet within the border of the
M25, it is a well-known commuter town into central London, a form of transient
existence is ingrained in the spaces.
My project aimed to explore this by engaging, collaborating and photographing the groups, communities, and people that live around me (Fig. 1). My focus was on engaging with people and allowing them the space to tell their own stories. However, with the measures put in place to tackle the Coronavirus Pandemic, it is becoming increasingly clear that our communities are contracting to within our own 4 walls of the home. This puts a spotlight on a socially abstract society, exacerbated by individualism, which is driven by stockpiling, profiteering and hysteria. We are, as a society unconcerned with the details of how it needs to function and our individual impact on others, especially the vulnerable, as we start disassociate our everyday connection to only think for ourselves. Barthes’ iddiorrythms also consider how we as a society impose the rectangle as the most basic form of control, referring to us as the “Civilisation of the Rectangle” (Barthes, 2012, p. 114), it is a shape that does not exist in nature and we forge our societies around this concept; Our homes for example are a collection of rectangle cuboid spaces in which we occupy.
Fundamentally, the intent of my project has not
changed, I’m still looking at my community. With the rise of how we as a
society are dealing with the virus, there is a heightened sense of existential
dread, which in a small way existed already for me and my family throughout
this module; from the sale of our rented home and the fractured sense of connection
to the community, which has only increased by the current crisis. This existential
dread and the community, now within my own home, is the way I could take my
project forward. My community has shrunk into Barthes’ civilisation of the
rectangle, in the form of my house.
To begin exploring new concepts in support of the new approach, I was inspired by Nick Waplington’s discussion on how he is utilising the concept of Plato’s allegory of the cave (Fig. 2), incorporating light and shadow from his studio whilst painting (Waplington, 2019). The allegory states that our senses govern our perception of our reality, and Sontag also uses the allegory in her argument on our consumption of images: “collecting images is collecting the world” (Sontag, 1979, p. 3), which can relate to how we will all rely on the media to provide us with the information and visual stimulus to make sense of the outside world, particularly prevalent at the moment. I also am interested in looking at how the outside world is projected onto my inside one; how this will impact my even smaller community of my wife, daughter and me.
Clare Gallagher
This is a subject explored by Clare Gallagher who has a particular focus on the internal workings of the home in her project ‘Domestic Drift’ (Gallagher, 2020). In this project Gallagher is looking at the domestic environment (Fig. 3) and creates a series of ‘quotidian still lifes’ which ‘are punctuated with tender portraits of her young sons at rest, at play and asleep.’ (O’Hagan, 2020), and is a comment on the everyday workload and under appreciated roles of family life that is primarily fronted by women in society. Gallagher posits “our economic system would simply not function without all this hidden, unpaid labour” (Gallagher in O’Hagan, 2020), which is very much related to some of the research that I have been looking at. However, I would not aim to position myself against Gallagher’s look at gender role intent, although this would surely play a part in the images that I make, should I refocus on my own family. Although we are a fairly balanced household, my wife is a key worker and will play a role continuing to support the community, which means that much of the domestic role will actually be taken up by myself for the foreseeable future. Therefore, the look at the domestic environment feels a natural evolution for my project as I react to the current situation, as will the wider community. There is also a tension to Gallagher’s project that translates easily into what is happening through social isolation and how the community is retreating, distant, and remaining within the home. Hence the existentialism and anxiety that exists in both Gallagher’s work and the reaction to the Coronavirus pandemic (Fig. 4).
Figure 4. Phil Hill (March, 2020) Experimenting with photographing within my home during the pandemic. [Click to enlarge]
Bibliography
Barthes, R., 2012.
How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of some Everyday Spaces. Translation
ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gallagher, 2012. From Domestic Drift. [Photo].
Gallagher, C., 2020. Domestic Drift. [Online] Available at: https://www.claregallagher.co.uk/domestic-drift [Accessed 20 March 2020].
Hill, P., 2020. Domestic experiment. [Photo].
Hill, P., 2020. Steve from the Watford Deaf Society and Cephas, caretaker at Beechfield School.. [Photo].
Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S. H., 2004. Aesthetics
and thne Philosophy of Art. 2 ed. Massachusetts: Blackwell.
O’Hagan, S., 2020. ‘Even dust can be interesting’: the woman who photographs housework. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/05/even-dust-can-be-interesting-clare-gallagher-photographs-housework [Accessed 3 March 2020].
Sontag, S., 1979. On Photography. London:
Penguin.
Stene-Johansen, K., Refsum, C. & Schimanski, 2018.
Living Together: Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community. Bielefeld:
Transcript Verlag.
Waplington, N., 2019. A Small Voice: Conversations
with Photographers. 118 – Nick Waplington [Interview] (27 November 2019).
Waplington, N., 2019. From Nick Waplington’s Instagram feed. [Online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8mXEq1nXA3/igshid=tqai269ddwb8 [Accessed 20 March 2020].