Coursework

Considering the Construction

| Phil Hill

This week has been a kind of revolution to the way that I have been approaching my project so far. I have been very hung up on the notion that my intent requires me to be photographing without construction or forms of manipulation, because that would result in some sort of ‘breaking the rules.’ However, further reading into the topics of constructed realities has led me to the writing of William J Mitchell, who also presents a direct challenge to this photographic purity and suggests a feeling of being cheated by these kinds of images (Mitchell, 2001, p. 218). This is in part born out of my commercial practice that I should, as Mitchell states: “The transaction of valid reporting, stating, or asserting (Like other speech acts and analogous nonverbal or partially verbal act of communication) is defined by constructive rules” (p. 218). These rules are essentially part of the learned knowledge of the world that we have come to expect, and of course much of this learned knowledge suggests to us that photography is a truth.

Figure 1. Brian Walski (2003) Photographer Brian Walski was sacked by the LA Times for editing the top two images together to create the third

Digital imagery has been found wanting in terms of our ability to suspend our disbelief (Fig. 1), yet we still subscribe to it as a reality, merely because it is based in the actual (Berger, 2013, p. 8). Analogue photography is no more a bearer of truth however, and has been susceptible to forgery throughout its history. For example, the removal of dissidents from the image of Lenin speaking at a podium (Fig. 2 & 3). This brings me back to the reflection on the Panorama work that I have written about previously (View Post). The use of analogue technique is completely based on our learned understanding of how we perceive the power of photography and its ability to show ‘truth’ and ‘Evidence’ and the re-photographed images onto film heightened the constructed reality of these images, where John Tagg notes that “the existence of a photograph is no guarantee of a pre-photographic existence” (Tagg, 1988, p. 2) these images should not be considered in anyway evidential, even though the production of that episode was doing everything within its power to make us believe so.

Figure 2.
Grigori Petrovich Goldstein (1920) Vladimir Lenin speaking in Moscow to Red Army soldiers departing for the Polish front, in 1920. Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, behind, are on the steps to the right
Figure 3.
Grigori Petrovich Goldstein (1920) Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev have been airbrushed out of an image of the same scene

All photography is a construction, that has been established in the past couple of weeks, how does this have an impact on how I view my images, and moving onto my intent?

I have been very precious in how I have been approaching my project so far, identifying myself as closer to the ‘Hunter’ end of the constructed continuum. I recognise however, that this is indeed a continuum and accept that my work is constructed in a variety of ways. I have felt as though I needed to represent the actual (2013, p. 8) within my work, however have considered that as part of my look at the community is to explore my own sense of it being fractured, that this shouldn’t matter as potentially the combination of gradual constructions together with my existing constructed actualities, which I wrote about in my ‘Hunters and Farmers’ Post’ (Wall in Horne, 2012).

Figure 4. Chris Dorley-Brown (2018) Image from ‘The Corners’ by Chris Dorley-Brown

Previously to starting the MA I was drawn to the approach of Chris Dorley Brown’s series ‘The Corners’ (Dorley Brown, 2018) and his uneasy view of everyday scenes in London (Fig. 4). As you view these images, they are based in the real world, an actuality, and indexical of how people pass through the streets of London which have been referred to as an update of the work that photographer David Granick did in the city between 1960 and 1980 (Dyer, 2018). Of this work though, Dyer also discusses the stillness of the image:

“But there’s a tranced stillness about them: a feeling of being in some kind of fugue state”

(2018)
Figure 5. Chris Dorley-Brown (2018) How the images are constructed. Spread from ‘The Corners’

Here Dyer is referring to how we read these images as much as the subjects within them. On closer inspection, the images are a complete construction, which is admitted to in the back of the publication of the images (Fig. 5), made up of a series of multiple exposures, typically 18 to 21 images, and then stitched together, with the resulting composition showing up to an hour (2018).

Dyer’s assessment of the work is that it creates a form of nostalgia, a longing for the past that links this work with the images of Granick, which Chris Dorley Brown also edited into a book. Dyer also notes:

‘Dorley-Brown manipulates his scenes not to manufacture drama or to bunch people into near-collisions but to create a “truthful” picture that “must match the memory of a moment that never occurred.”photographic’

(2018)

This I feel, lives in the learned knowledge of the world that, although the memory that is being referred to is not a real one, it could be an imagined sense of a place that Dorley-Brown is representing here.

Figure 6. Phil Hill (February, 2020) Helen from shoot with a group of Litter Pickers
Figure 7. Phil Hill (February, 2020) Stephen from shoot with litter pickers

Presently, my work does not inhabit this constructed space, I have approached groups and sort to photograph them in a naturalistic way (Fig. 6 & 7). I have also look to photograph the environment in my local area in a similar naturalistic way. However, this as an approach intrigues me, and I am keen to potentially look at experimenting with this as an approach, albeit holistically. For example, part of my plan is to approach a variety of community groups, one of which could be an amateur dramatic group, what is to stop me casting them within the environment of my community to play a series of characters. I intend to propose this to a group and experiment with creating a series of constructed narratives. These characters could create a fictional memory in a similar way to how Dorley-Brown has constructed his images.

Bibliography

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

Dorley Brown, C., 2018. The Corners. 1 ed. London: Hoxton Mini Press.

Dyer, G., 2018. How to Photograph Eternity. The New York Times Magazine, 24 July, p. Online.

Goldshtein, G., 1920. Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev have been airbrushed out of an image of the same scene.. [Photo] (Tate).

Goldshtein, G., 1920. Vladimir Lenin speaking in Moscow to Red Army soldiers departing for the Polish front, in 1920. Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, behind, are on the steps to the right. [Photo] (Tate).

Hill, P., 2020. Helen from Harebreaks wood litter pickers. [Photo]

Hill, P., 2020. Stephen from Harebreaks wood litter pickers. [Photo]

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

Mitchell, W. J., 2001. The Recoonfigured Eye. First MIT Press Paperback ed. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Tagg, J., 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. 1st paperback ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Walski, B., 2003. Iraq. [Photo] (Los Angeles Times).

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.

Week 2: The Index and the Icon

| Phil Hill
Reflection

Everyone seems to want to defend their own reading and interpretation of an image that they have taken, especially their own images, and this includes me and my own images. It is interesting that through the forums this week I have noticed that many of the descriptions of the presented images do not necessarily translate to what I can see in the image. Although, what is being written of the image is indeed what the photographer believes that image to be about, or what did occur at the moment of when that image was captured, it is telling that with this text removed, the image would read differently to me.

Context and meaning are going to fall away from the image, especially over time (Sontag, 1979, p. 106), so it is important to realise that your work will inevitably be read in multiple ways. I do find this somewhat a challenging concept in the present as the temptation and habit of adding a certain amount of attributed information is ever present in the attempt to help others understand my work. I guess, that is the challenge for many practitioners, do we have the confidence to remove all of this attributed reading of our own photography to allow others carte blanche to make their own assumptions and interpretations.

Figure 1. Nadav Kander’s triangle (Kander, 2019).

Authenticity appears to me, bound by context, or at least a viewer’s understanding of context. Representation is bound by the subject’s understanding of the use of the image. Is it for authors to attribute either context, or use without the collaboration of the other two. This is a clear link to the triangle (Fig. 1) that Nadav Kander refers to (Kander, 2019), and the death of the author analysis by Roland Barthes (Barthes, 1977, pp. 142-149).

Where this applies to my own work, I think that I am quite interested in the notion of the photograph as a valuable index of truth (Snyder & Allen, 1975, p. 159). As I have commented in the previous forum, I think that when you consider the definition of representation, it is to take the broad consensus of ideas and opinions which I think is where the photograph can occupy and create authenticity. So it is not a complete evidential and based on all the facts, however there are traces of facts embedded in the image, perpetuated by the notion of its naturalistic appearance (1975, p. 144). This potentially, has more in common with ideology which assumes much about reality and certainly John Berger notes this by stating that photography can play an important role in ideological struggle, in reference to the way media use photography (Berger, 2013, p. 21).

For my work to move forward, I need to consider the indexical nature of my own photographs and perhaps construct images that use this as a means of communication. However, this is potentially something that will be more prevalent during the editing stage of the project.

Countercurrent Podcast

This week, I also listened to an episode of Countercurrent podcast featuring Anthony Luvera discussing his approach to socially engaged photography (Levera, 2020). The subject of representation came up during the discussion and the power balance that exists between the artist and the subject of their art. Traditionally, there have been a number of incidences throughout the history of photography where a particular group or culture has been photographed in a particular way and has led to tropes which has a knock on impact of effecting the way they are represented and even the conversation, political, and societal decisions are affected by these representations. Although not referred to in the podcast, this reminds me of the work that Patrick Waterhouse did when working with the Walpiri of the Northern Territory in Australia (Fig. 2), which was a way of considering, not only the colonial gaze, but also the way anthropological photography was used as a method of reducing the value of cultures other than the white European (Waterhouse, 2019). 

Figure 2. Patrick Waterhouse (2019) From the book ‘Restricted Images’ by Patrick Waterhouse and the Walpiri

Levera does not believe that the problematic photographic representation can easily be solved and that no photograph is neutral, however we can aim to redress the balance through collaborative practice (2020).

It was also noted that a tension exists between the artist and the subject when any kind of process of working together exists and when circulating this work to audiences.

Index and the Icon

How I use these within my own work has been useful to consider. I believe for the most part my photography uses the iconic, I photograph things that look like what they are supposed to, for the most part.

I consider how this has changed in the present short term (assuming that I continue to focus on the iconic in my work) from the commercial practice, where I would use elements such as photo-blur to get around such things as model releases for people on the street. This also had the added aesthetic quality of creating an atmosphere of a busy urban area. The work that I have been creating for the last module concentrates on what is in front of me, what exists in the real world. Context is a driver of how we can present the icon and the indexical, during the seminar the example of wedding photography was given in that the audience of this work expects to see a certain image of the posed groups. This reminds me of the work of commercial photographer John Keatley who has become well known for how he plays with the notion of the family portrait (Fig. 3), and has even taken it to the extreme of getting actors to pose in the images as him and his wife – although his children are the same (Keatley, 2018). This really plays with the icon and the indexical. Keatley us subverting the shared vocabulary of what we expect to see from a family portrait, an image of the family. However by removing himself from the image he has still created something that exists in the real world, the photograph is of something that exists, it is not a photograph of Keatley, even though he has titled it as such. Keatley has taken the image, could this be considered a trace? There is no truth to this image and the actors that are portraying the artist are arbitrary, however Keatley has had a tangible connection to the construction of the image.

Figure 3. John Keatley (2018) Keatley Family Portrait

A photograph is not nuanced in all things that are based in the real world the way that photography is portrayed, It cannot portray all of the subtle variety that exists, it is a blunt snapshot in time of something that existed – A fossil, which is indexical to the thing that existed. What this week has prompted me to look at more is how the environment of community which has now become my focus might be comprised of indexical elements that I could photograph as part of the work. What are the traces of the community that I am photographing over the wandering and photographing anything of interest. Having a clear intention for why I have photographed and included them within a final edit was always one of my aims

Bibliography

Barthes, R., 1977. Death of the Author. In: Image, Music, Text. New York: Fontana, pp. 142-149.

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

Kander, N., 2019. Prix Pictet: A Lens on Sustainability. Photography as Witness [Interview] (5 November 2019).

Keatley, J., 2018. Keatley Family 2018. [Online] Available at: https://www.keatleyphoto.com/portraits/keatley-family/ [Accessed 6 February 2020].

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

Snyder, J. & Allen, N. W., 1975. Photography, Vision, and Representation. Critical Enquiry, 2(1), pp. 143-169.

Sontag, S., 1979. On Photography. London: Penguin.

Waterhouse, P., 2019. Restricted Images by Patrick Waterhouse and the Walpiri. 1st ed. London: SPBH Editions.

Week One: Informing Contexts?

| Phil Hill

I connect with the selective nature of photography that Szarwaski discusses. My images for the last module were very much based in the selectiveness of the moments that I photographed and the images I ultimately selected for my gallery. This was to construct an image that was of my making as opposed to the staged poses that many of my subjects would automatically assume.

It is in the frame, that I also resonated with. I am conscious of many of the things that are allowed into the frame and what is not 

His reference to how photography has never been successful at narrative is interesting to me because I spent a good time last module aiming to develop an effective narrative of my work. This notion of photography and narrative is very much echoed by Lewis Bush however somewhat challenged by Todd Hido, albeit he does not necessarily start with a narrative in mind.

Mostly images seem to be about an exchange of validation or a kind of visual gratification that can never truly be fulfilled. The photographer takes an image for validation, the reader is validated in their interpretation of the image.