Critical Research Journal PHO702

Hunters and Farmers

| Phil Hill

I am not sure that I completely subscribe to the ‘Hunters’ and ‘Farmers’ analogy from Jeff Wall (Wall in Horne, 2012). If all images are constructions, which I do believe, then this is surely a spectrum in which all photographies fall and even within the distinct extremities of the continuum, even the hunters subjectively construct the reality of the actual (Berger, 2013, p.8) , which is based on the real world.

As such, I do not feel wholey comfortable subscribing completely to either title, however, I believe that my work is rooted in this actuality. I do not consciously or emphatically try to deceive with my work, however this is not to assume that what I do is not a construct with every decision that I make creating a version of reality, although naturalistic in its appearance & indexical in its traces, I am starting to appreciate that representation can only be a part of the whole narrative, an informed – if you will – overall opinion of what I am trying to say. If I was to consider which end of the spectrum that my work falls, it would inevitably be on the side of the hunter as I tend to look for the photographs that I want to create in the actual, my work is less about the gradual constructions and more about the constructed actualities. On the face of it, my practice does little to tend to my images over time, however perhaps this ‘tending’ could be through the development of personal style and aesthetics in the way that I approach my image making, it is easier to suspend disbelief when viewing my images because they are based in the real world.

As I reflect on this, I realise that my work on this end of the continuum is still rooted within my own comfort zones of how I take pictures, which is founded on my commercial practice as an editorial photographer. During the presentations, we have been continually asked to consider the importance of the reality of the image to determine meaning (Cosgrove, 2020) so moving forward, it would be good for me to play with this notion and create some work that consciously moves further toward the ‘Farmer’ end of the spectrum.

With this in mind, I am thinking of returning to two areas that I identified in some earlier research, the term idiorrhythmic came up when reading a text by Barthes and the reference to how we can live our separate lives but co-exist within societies and communities, Barthes considers this view non-paradoxical and considers that for a proper Utopian community to function there would be a removal of identifying information to distance ourselves from ‘spaces of Manipulation’ (Barthes, 2012, p.101). I wonder if the people that I am aiming to include in my look at the local community need to be ‘real,’ or could this be part of a constructed reality that plays with this notion of the spaces of manipulation and links to why I chose community as an area of interest for my photography and my fractured sense of connection to the place that I live.

Figure 1. Desert Places by Robert Frost (1936).

Another related area to Barthes notion of living together and apart is through the metaphor of the desert which Barthes uses in his text and also unpacked in the analytical paper of his work ‘Roland Barthes, the individual and the Community’ (Stene-Johansen, et al., 2018), from here links can be made to this kind of monoclastic living balancing isolation and attachment (2018, p.16). Robert Frost’s poem ‘Desert Places’ (Fig. 1) is also referenced here and an area that I wish to explore (Frost, 1936, p.44).

How are my images consumed?

My work has always sat in the printed media category, in that for the majority of my commercial life I have worked as an editorial photographer primarily for the airline publication sector, with other magazines and newspaper imagery too. So far, I have treated the work that I have produced for the MA as a kind of extended editorial shoot with the intention of displaying it in printed media, or its online equivalent. For example, after the last module, I produced a postcard series of the project to be distributed to a range of magazine and online editors (Fig. 2&3) with some interest in the work and a few shares on social media platforms. As is the way with publishing lead times, timing has been an issue for some of the publications that I sent my work, citing that my images of the carnival needed to be published to coincide with the next carnival season in the autumn. My intention here is to follow up in the spring to see if the work can be published later in the year.

Figure 2. Phil Hill (November, 2019) Postcard Series created to market ‘The Wessex Grand Prix’
Figure 3. Phil Hill (November, 2019) Postcard cover and graphic for ‘Wessex Grand Prix’

The topicality of the project lets it sit comfortably in this editorial category and would be considered professionally as an interesting look at British culture in the southwest region of the UK. The context of any kind of publication would omit much of the intentions that I set out in the creation to the work, in terms of the fractured sense of community that inspired to look again at the Carnival culture.

I have been testing the limit of this view through the submission of the work to dummy book awards, such as the Mack First Book Award (Fig. 4). At this stage, I am not sure whether my work sits comfortably within this category. 

Figure 4. Phil Hill (November, 2019) Wessex Grand Prix Book Dummy cover

Reflecting  on my decision to create a postcard series was primarily from a marketing perspective. In our digital image world, I wanted to let my project stand out from the plethora of emailed submissions that these editors would inevitably receive. Viewing images in an online gallery form can be very linear, as you are bound by the sequence and flow of the gallery in which they are presented with the knowledge that the job of the photo editor is to produce a narrative that fits with the intent and the editorial guidelines of the publication, this could be considered quite limiting to the potential of publication. This presents a slight irony in that the postcard mailer, which traditionally was a primary way of marketing for photographers, allows me to stand out. Presenting my work in a tangible medium also allows it to be laid out in full and viewed in a way that may work better within the context of the editor that I send the work. 

The postcard and the book dummy that I have started to explore also marks a departure in the ways that my work can be consumed, albeit an esoteric one. Simon Norfolk, for example has remarked that the world of the Photo book has become a self-congratulatory loop, where photographers are celebrating other photographers belonging to the same clique, and the same can also be said of the gallery and award system (Norfolk, 2019). Any move into other ways that my images are distributed and consumed should consider the esoteric and have an awareness that any meaning that could be derived from it needs to be viewed by more than a small group of taste makers. 

Bibliography

Barthes, R., 2012. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of some Everyday Spaces. Translation ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

Berger, J., 2013. Understanding a Photograph. London: Penguin Classics.

Cosgrove, S., 2020. Week 2 Presentation: Is it Really Real?, s.l.: Falmouth.

Frost, R., 1936. A Further Range. Transcribed eBook ed. s.l.:Proofreaders Canada.

Hill, P., 2019. The Wessex Grand Prix. [Photography].

Horne, R., 2012. Holly Andres, ‘Farmer’ of Photographs. The Wall Street Journal, 3 February.

Norfolk, S., 2019. A Small Voice: Conversations with Photographers [Interview] (12 June 2019).

Stene-Johansen, K., Refsum, C. & Schimanski, 2018. Living Together: Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Further Questions of Representation

| Phil Hill

Questions of representation, authenticity, constructions and the photographic nature of photography makes me reflect on a freelance job that I did for an episode of BBC’ Panorama, titled ‘Inside Europe’s Terror Attacks (2016). Within the episode, a series of ‘most wanted’ mugshots are displayed and shown to be developed in a photographic darkroom before being hung up on a clothes line in a row.

Figure 1. Panorama (2016) Still from the darkroom segment of the ‘Inside Europe’s Terror Attacks’ episode

My role in this production was to turn a series of digital images into ones that could be processed in a darkroom and shown to appear inside a darkroom as the journalist narration happened. To do this, I re-photographed each of the images onto film and prepared a series of prints with the latent image ready for processing during the filming. Incidentally, it is also my hand in the film processing these images (Fig. 1).

The segment plays with our very notion of photography as evidence through our collective awareness and an intertextual referencing of primarily via film and TV (Fig. 2), of how a detective might use the darkroom to illuminate and support an investigation, that lightbulb moment that shows that you have found the smoking gun evidence that will close the case.

Figure 2. Funny Face (1957) Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in the darkroom

This episode of the Investigative documentary series really plays to the theatrics and performative nature of photography in showing the images in this way and the perceived authenticity that photographs have, it was heightened here to purposefully exaggerating the characteristics of the photograph and increase the veracity of the moment. This also plays into the notion of digital images being less authentic than those shot using film. The images that were supplied to me to re-photograph were all digital files that were printed digitally using an inkjet printer and then photograph using a copy stand onto 35mm film. Do the images now become more authentic now that they have become analogue? The supplied digital files were in some cases low resolution screen grabs, some of which were also from social media.

In terms of its construction, it seems to have increased the tension of the situation that a digital graphic may not have. Like a punctuated moment away from the expected news style digital visuals that you would expect to see through news gathering services and have become immune to. This feels somewhat real with a heightened sense of urgency that someone needs to catch the people depicted and that they are working hard to do so. It is a fiction, a construction for the sake of the documentary, especially when we consider that the methods on display are completely obsolete and the images would almost certainly be viewed through a computer screen and potentially never reach the point of a tangible print.  There is also the assumption that turning the images into black and white adds an inherent ‘truth’ to what we are viewing.

Bibliography

Funny Face. 1957. [Film] Directed by Stanley Donen. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Panorama: Inside Europe’s Terror Attacks. 2016. [Film] Directed by John O’Kane. UK: BBC Panorama.

PHO702: Shoot One.

| Phil Hill
Click on thumbnails to enlarge.
Contact Sheets: 25/01/20 & 01/02/20

Following the plan I created to go out and do my first shoot based on a psychogeography route of the postcode of my local area (See Shoot 1 Planning Post). It was an interesting shoot and I managed to create some photographs that would be worth editing together to determine how they work as sets. The weather was very overcast and not what I was hoping to shoot in terms of the lighting, so for the most part, I think that this shoot was a worthwhile fact finding mission to scout out some future locations and develop the work. From my plan, I did also want to start to consider ‘the ostracised’ (Dias, 2018) however feel that this may have been a bit ambitious for the first shoot and will continue to develop this area of enquiry as I feel it could have some significance. It was a useful reference to take the Roy Stryker Shooting script with me to consider some of the images that I was shooting. I will continue to use this as it is a way of creating a taxonomy of what makes up a community environment.

Light is crucial to the way that I want my images to look. Moving forward, I aim to be more selective of the times that I will go out and shoot, weather permitting.

Now that we have had a couple of weeks of delivery of the modules, I am going to create more of a focus on the taxonomical patterns that my local community displays. The idea of the indexicality of what I am shooting is also something that I want to explore in a more intentional way. I am also considering the approach to the portraits within the work. I have had a fairly limited response from people I would like to involve in the project, so am considering an approach based on the week 3 constructions and will explore casting ‘actors’ to play a role in my look at my community which could form a strong link to this sense of a fractured community. Initially, I could approach this in a similar way to how Jack Latham shot subjects unrelated to the events of the Icelandic crime in his book ‘Sugar Paper Theories’ (2019).

References

Dias, D., 2018. The Ten Types of Human. 1st Paperback Edition ed. London: Windmill Books.

Latham, J., 2019. Sugar Paper Theories. 2nd Edition ed. London: Here Press.

Questions of Authenticity

| Phil Hill

I have been quite enthralled by the topic of representation and authenticity during this week’s discussion and webinars. I have been incredibly guilty in the past of considering that what I do is a pure form of truth telling and visual record of the facts, when in actual fact there is no such thing as a neutral image (Luvera, 2020). Authenticity appears to be assumed on the part of the reader merely because the photograph is able to reproduce in a naturalistic manner.

Figure 1. Phil Hill (2010) Dawn on Bamburi Beach, Mombasa, Kenya.

Unconsciously, I have always used the notion of representation in my own work. This was very prevalent during the time I was shooting for freelance for travel editorial publications. I would knowingly select and edit out the images that would not present a location in a positive light (Fig. 1), however unaware of the implications of representing an actuality (Berger, 2013, p. 8). As an example, I shot some images of Bamburi Beach in Mombasa, Kenya showing how beautiful the location was however neglecting to also photograph the immense poverty that was sometimes literally outside of my frame (Fig. 2). This has much to do with the context of how these images are consumed however, figure 2 for example was part of a set of images that were used to illustrate a story on illegal mining practices in parts of Kenya (Kivner.

As I discussed earlier for an experimentation into how I might portray community through creating a set of images that utilise a forensic approach due to the upcoming sale of my rented home by my land lady.

Figure 2. Phil Hill (2010) Illegal gold miner, Kenya. Image also uploaded to Alamy archive.

My initial plan for this experiment was to photograph all of the negative aspects of the house in which I live and are in a state of disrepair. These images would be in direct contrast to the attempt to gloss over the detrimental view of the house that the estate agents would ultimately take (See Post). I have just started to scan and edit these images to remove the dust that attached itself to the negative during the scanning process. A fairly standard practice for film images. However, this week have raised a number of questions:

Figure 2. Phil Hill (February, 2020) Scanned image from medium format negative that has been retouched. ‘Moth Trap’ from my evidence experiment.

In terms of authenticity, a film image is behold as containing more ‘truth’ over digital, which is perceived to be easily manipulated and has caused concern in this regard since its introduction (Cosgrove, 2020). However, the modern workflow process of scanning and digitising negatives creates an even more problematic version of this truth if we still consider it to have more veracity then a digital image. My first scanned image (Fig. 3) required quite a bit of ‘spotting,’ as a result the image that also contains quite a ‘busy’ layer of all of the retouching, healing brush that I used, which poses the question of how much of the original is left, and how much of this naturalistic reproduction can be consider an icon; how much of this image is now indexical.

Figure 3. Phil Hill (February, 2020) Retouching layer from ‘Moth Trap’

To highlight the difference, I have saved a version of the image that only shows the retouching layer against a white background (Fig. 4). This image feels indexical to me, that it is based on the things that existed in the real world but bears no real resemblance to it anymore. Any amount of editing and retouching could be considered in this way.

Bibliography

Berger, J., 2013. Understanding a Photograph. London: Penguin Classics.

Cosgrove, S., 2020. Week 2 Presentation: Is it Really Real?, s.l.: Falmouth.

Hill, P., 2010. Dawn on Bamburi Beach. Mombasa, Kenya. [Photo].

Hill, P., 2010. Illegal Gold Miner, Kenya. [Photo].

Hill, P., 2020. Moth Trap. [Photo].

Hill, P., 2020. Retouching Layer from ‘Moth Trap’. [Photo].

Kinver, M., 2013. Nations agree on legally binding mercury rules. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21078176 [Accessed 7 February 2020].

Luvera, A., 2020. Countercurrent Podcast: Anthony Luvera in conversation with Roger Kneebone [Interview] (13 January 2020).