Contextual Research

Abstraction again

| Phil Hill

Marianne Hirsch makes a number of interesting observations on personal connection to the family album, which allows me to make a start on this project. Hirsch is looking at an image of her mother and grandmother, finding it challenging to really study it, owing to her connection to the people in it: “Perhaps it is the familial look itself that makes it difficult to read this picture which will not reveal any identifiable truth” (1997, p. 104). Although I don’t think that Hirsch believes that there is an objective truth that can be found within the image as she is quick to remind us that:

“Photographs are exciting and helpful because of their ambiguity, because of the reading they demand, because they do no transparently offer a single truth”

(p. 75)

Hirsch is suggesting that the task of ‘reading’ is made all the more challenging because of the emotional connection to the photograph. This of course is something that I need to seriously consider too, working with my own family archive of images that I have seen many times before and also some of the existing stories that accompany them. Hirsch does offer some insight into this, as when referring to Cindy Sherman use of titles, she notes:

“They refuse to participate in the narrative frameworks with which we are comfortable and instead insist on existing in the space of their production”

(p. 111)
Figure 1: Cindy Sherman (1981) Untitled Film Still #34
Figure 2: Unknown (1970s) Accidental panorama – film wind error

Sherman creates ambiguity by removing any sort of descriptive title for her images, which creates opportunity for audiences to create their own meaning (fig: 1), and whilst I was going through my own family’s archive of images, I have found a series of what would be perceived as ‘mistakes’ – those images that did not make it into the album (Fig: 2). However, although there are plenty of technical errors omitted from the ‘edit,’ there are plenty of images in the album that would still be considered the same: exposure, cropping etc. Not that I am particularly interested in the judging of technical qualities of images in terms of why they make it into a photo album, it does highlight the importance of the content of some images over others. Again, Hirsch offers a reasoning behind this as well:

“Family albums include those images on which family members can agree and which tell a shared story. Pictures that diverge from then communal narrative tend to be discarded as ‘bad’ or ‘unrepresentative’”

(p. 107)
Figure 3: Unknown (1960s) Manual Intervention photograph from family archive.

That said, one of the reasons for my interest in my own archive are the so called ‘manual intervention photographs’ (Maucci, 2020), which Interrupt this shared narrative even further (Fig: 3). It is what is not being shown that becomes even more intriguing than what is readily consumable within then fading albums. This is much like the ‘Winter Garden’ image of Roland Barthes’ mother described by Barthes in Camera Lucida (1993) but never ever seen, and may never have existed at all – perhaps used by Barthes as a tool to show the pervasiveness of the image to supplant memory (Photoworks, 2013). Hirsch uses this as an example to make a point about family secrets, which I feel is incredibly valid (even if the Barthes’ Winter Garden Image never existed):

“Barthes refusal to show us his mother’s picture, are designed to keep family’s secrets and protect it from public scrutiny”

(1997, p. 107)

It shows us that what we don’t see is just as important to those presenting the images as for those reading the images.

There is a real interest in what we choose to exclude. This has appeared in my research before, even from Barthes’ when speaking about the way that we live together within our communities but also very much separately. Barthes’ here perhaps offers a reasoning behind why my own family chose to keep ‘manual intervention photographs’ within the album, knowing that this would lead to further questions: “What’s excluded is included, but retains its status as excluded. It’s the contradictory status of the pariah: rejected and integrated, integrated as a reject” (2012, p. 81). As I am in the early stages of my investigation into my family archive, I have yet to closely look at the reasons why the ‘manual intervention images’ exist. I am interested in the images that have not made the edit but still remain in the print envelopes, so have chosen to focus on these first.

Twin Check
Figure 4: Parrallax Photographic (2021) Twin Check Label for photo processing.
Figure 5: Unknown (1970s) Twin Stamp Label over image.

There have been quite a few images in the archive that are obscured by the label that the processing lab would have attached prior to the film going through the machines (Fig: 4). Interestingly, some of the numbers from what is known as a ‘Twin Check’ label have ingrained themselves onto the first, or last images of the roll of film (Fig:5). I am drawn to these images, they instantly remind me of Hirsch’s comment of Sherman’s image titles – merely referring to the means in which these images are produced. The labels are a direct link to this production. They also provide a direct link to how the production is linked to ideas of memory, Twin check labels are a way of matching up the processed film to the owner of it once it has been processed. Here I have a visual means of highlighting the way that the family album is a poor keeper of memories. I am moving towards this more and more as a way of exploring my core themes. Abstraction and obscure images provide the ambiguity to remove my own personal connections (albeit no fully), and allow multiple readings of them, which is important if I am to construct my own narrative as the project develops.

Bibliography

Barthes, R., 1993. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage.

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

Hirsch, M., 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. 2012 Reissue ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Maucci, Q., 2020. London College of Communication: Family Narratives & Working With Archives. London: London College of Communication.

Photoworks, 2013. The Great Unknown. [Online]Available at: https://photoworks.org.uk/great-unknown/ [Accessed 07 February 2021].

Starting point

| Phil Hill

What happens in the absence of memory, or if the memory is born from a one sided narrative?

This will be the start of my investigation.

Figure 1: Unknown (1960 – 1989) Family album images

As any family would, I have an archive of images in albums. These were never really displayed around the house I grew up in. If you are to visit my parents now, there are not that many images present. Even within the archive, there are no images from after the mid-nineties. There are practical reasons for this. My dad’s old Russian film camera broke about this time and he could not afford to replace it with newer digital technology. However, even where there are images present, those images of extended family ceased. This was around the time that my parents effectively stopped communicating with them – I don’t know why. There are a number of images within the albums that have been cut as well, suggesting of some kind of family rift that I was too young to understand and never really questioned when reaching adulthood (Fig: 1). Now that I have a family of my own, I am becoming interested in why this has happened and if there are inherent traits that exist as a result.

Objects are an important way of understanding a culture in the absence of first-hand deposition. And this creates a link to my exploration of the photograph as an object in previous modules. What I find intriguing about images that have been cut is the willingness to keep the object that has been so noticeably ‘edited,’ creating a new object of intrigue. The cut print in fact creates more questions about the image where I might have merely flipped past otherwise and is the very reason why I am wanting to investigate it here.  Erik Kessels acknowledges this in his series ‘My Family’, where he notes:

“So we opt for self-censorship, hoping that excluding “bad” images will somehow cause the memories themselves to evaporate. This saddens me, because reflecting on an unpleasant occurrence can give you insight and broaden your perspective. I want images that reflect life in its complexity. Sure, that sounds like a mighty demand, and likely impossible, but let’s give it a go.”

(Kessels, 2016)
Figure 2: F. Kislov (1937) Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolai Yezhov walking along the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal, in April, 1937
Figure 3: F. Kislov (1937) Nikolai Yezhov has been removed from the original image.

Kessels refers to the forms of propaganda that exists within the family album (Clark, 2013) and this feels confirmed within my own, where persons have been removed. There of course is a precedent in the removal of undesirables from photographs. Hannah Adrendt discussed the vulnerability of truth (Gessen, 2018), referring to the way that Trotsky had been removed from the official soviet record (Fig: 2 & 3), is there much of a difference between this and my own families removal of ‘undesireables?’ Roland Barthes contextualises this within the idea of community, noting the paradox of exclusion within it: “Perhaps there’s no such thing as a community without an integrated reject” (2012: 81) as if it is important to maintain awareness of what we reject to confirm our positioning. This is potentially the reasoning behind keeping a cut image within the album (Fig: 4) to show that control can be exacted over the undesirable, and to be reminded that they can be removed in some form.

Figure 5: Erik Kessels (2020) ‘Collection of photographs where ‘unwanted’ people got removed from. Instagram post.
Figure 6: Erik Kessels (2020) ‘Collection of photographs where ‘unwanted’ people got removed from. Instagram post.

Kessels also recently shared a series of vernacular images (Kessels, 2020), noticeable in the way that they have been cut (Fig: 5). There appears to be images in this set, which are similar to the ones that I have within my family’s archive. However, there are others in Kessels post (Fig: 6) that might be something else. It was noted during my first peer to peer session that this might in fact be due to someone cutting a print to place that part of the image into a locket, and suggests that there is a positive outcome from the editing of a print.

During the last module, I started to use constructed narratives more openly and applied traditional story telling structure to my sequencing. Within my family archive the narrative is more political through censorship. This is something that I am really keen to explore here and also utilise. My aim will be to construct a new narrative in the absence of one, or as an alternative to the ‘official’ one that has be told to me through the years. In effect, this is a question that exists in all family archive (an indeed photography) – they are deeply constructed, political and steeped in presenting a propagandised view of the family.

Bibliography

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

Clark, T., 2013. The Vanishing Art of the Family Photo Album. [Online]
Available at: https://time.com/3801986/the-vanishing-art-of-the-family-photo-album/
[Accessed 29 January 2020].

Gessen, M., 2018. The Photo Book That Captured How the Soviet Regime Made the Truth Disappear. [Online] Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-photo-book-that-captured-how-the-soviet-regime-made-the-truth-disappear [Accessed 29 January 2020].

Kessels, E., 2016. My Family. [Online] Available at: https://www.erikkessels.com/my-family
[Accessed 29 January 2020].

Kessels, E., 2020. Erik Kessels instagram – Collection of photographs where ‘unwanted’ people got removed from. [Online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ0ecdShnVP/
[Accessed 28 January 2020].

Into the FMP

| Phil Hill

At the very start of the MA, I was intending to explore an idea of community. Initially, this was very much rooted in how I would approach image making commercially: seek an interesting group of people and photograph them. So I set out to photograph the carnival culture of Somerset – of my home town. This led to a quick realisation that I was in effect looking at part of myself. Somerset carnivals are a cultural feature of the region and primarily run and driven by the working class communities of them. For me, coming from one of these working class communities, it was just a part of something that I escaped as I moved away to pursue education and my career. I am from a working class background in a town, which at the time felt like a trap, with low aspirations from my friends and own family. It sounds like a cliché, but I was told many times that the pursuit of my photography was a nice hobby, and I ought to learn a trade. Instead, I used my photography and education to leave and actively worked to disassociate myself from my upbringing – I considered it to be embarrassing to admit that I came from such a background. A clear example of this is my accent has changed. I sound like any generic middle-class Home Counties English person. Compare this to my parents, and that of my brothers, who sound distinctly West Country. My accent has been learned in order to place myself in what Lysney Hanley refers to as the ‘Second Room’:

“The more time you spend in this second room, the way that you use words – the order you put them in, the number of clauses and qualifiers you include in a sentence, even the sounds of the words themselves – begins to change … It involves learning another language entirely, one which places at its centre the act of thinking, and thinking about doing things in the future as opposed to doing them right now.”

(2017: 38)

A large part of discovery throughout the modules has been this realisation that when I refer to things like community, connection and identity, I am effectively wanting to explore them for myself – the work is about me. Subsequent modules shifted focus onto the place that I live now, a place that I have never considered a connection that you might associate with home. Moving away from the place of my upbringing led to a long period of moving around, which created a feeling that I would move again. Watford was a place I moved to by accident and I never intended to stay. In the 7 years that I have lived here however, I met my wife and we have a 3 year old daughter born here. What other signals for being settled down would I need?! My work explored this through an investigation of then place, it centred on the idea of edgelands, which Watford is – between countryside and the expanse of London, but not either of these. A certain liminality exists here in not being one thing or another. This idea links quite well back to this notion of Hanley’s ‘rooms,’ for me I am no longer working class but I am not quite middle class either (only perhaps on paper).

The exploration of community within the town I live and linking to other concepts that bring in place and object have been really valuable for my work. Up to this point however, I do feel that it has been relatively surface in the way that I am presenting a view of community and avoiding the underlying reasons for wanting to explore it. Of course, it is good that the realisation is now, and reflects on the journey and evolution that my photography has undertaken. I have spent some time considering the underlying ideas that have driven my exploration to this point. Ferdinand Tonnies provides a concept of community Gemienschaft (community from close emotional bonds, such as family) and Gesselschaft (community as it is in civil society) (2001). My project has looked at the civil society aand should now progress onto the closer network and emotional connections formed through the idea of family.

The challenge here, and essentially what becomes the root of things, is how disparate my family actually is. Parts of my family have not seen each other for over 20 years or more. They are spread far and uncommunicative. This is at the root of my own personal journey of disconnect and also crossing a class divide. I feel that there is a comment to be made on the idea of family narratives and the way that we construct our history.

Ideas carrying forward
  • Liminality/Edgelands
  • Class – crossing class divides
  • Object orientated ontology
  • Photographs as objects
  • Narrative structures
  • Carmencita/Kodak Grant proposal
Bibliography

Key Ideas

| Phil Hill

I’ve written well over 35 blog posts for this module so felt it would be a good idea to signpost some key blog posts that underpin my ideas and research throughout Sustainable Prospects.

In the below link, I have created a contents page of all of the posts created for Sustainable Prospects that also includes notes to summarise content and highlight key themes of research and ideas:

PHO704 Contents

Assignments

PHO704 Oral Presentation
PHO704 WIPP