Figure 1. Phil Hill (December, 2019)Image taken of Darcie wearing a hat knitted by her aunt, to say thanks.
As I was preparing for Informing contexts, I wrote an essay on a particular type of vernacular image that I was creating around the Christmas period. It was also useful to start the process of applying my readings and thinking about photography. You can view that version of the essay here.
I decided to re-visit and reflect on this piece of writing now that we are half way through this module and I have a better understanding of some of the concepts and discussions.
It was also useful to revisit during this week’s delivery for ‘A sea of Images,’ taking into account elements of the vernacular, and the ubiquity of images.
Abstract
‘What started as an image taken to say thank you became a question about the continuing proliferation of images and family mythology. Sharing images online transforms the image into a type of currency that seeks to provide validation for both authors and readers, this perpetuates the visual language of established societal norms through placation, morals and covert colonisation as a subtle blackmail. This is a subtle ebb which we are all complicit and must intentionally reconsider and reengage with the way we use images. Where futurity is concerned, it should begin in the unlearning and relearning of visual culture.’
Figure 1. Phil Hill (March, 2020) Mark from Elim Foodbank
I have made a recent connection to the food bank over the road from my house. In order to create some images, I have also been volunteering to build relationships with some of the people that attend. I have also handed out some compact point and shoot cameras for some of them to photograph and collaborate with, in a similar way to Anthony Luvera’s approach with his assisted self-portrait series and something that I have mentioned in my post on Martin Parr (Fig. 2). Once I have collected in and processed these images, I will create a full reflection.
Figure 2. Phil Hill (February, 2020) Reflection on Martin Parr and Patrick Waterhouse
I created a number of portraits of Mark (Fig. 1), who is a food bank volunteer for nineteen years and also uses the service for himself. Primarily, I wanted to add some portraiture as part of my work I progress portfolio looking at my own community. My technical approach to shooting portraits, has always been to have the camera set to the continuous mode in order to shoot a few frames side-by-side, which was to ensure that I gain a focussed image of my subject. This is a hangover from my freelance practice, where it was crucial that the shot is in focus. This approach creates a number of ‘similars’ that have little variation shot to shot, from which I select the most focussed image (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Phil Hill (March, 2020) Unused Portrait of Mark from Elim foodbank.
Figure 4. Phil Hill (February, 2020)Evidence experiment shootFigure 5. Phil Hill (February, 2020) Retouching layer from ‘Moth Trap’
To further explore that here, I have decided to overlay the series of images that I shot of Mark, to consider the idea that in some ways could be more representative of him than a single frame ever could (Fig. 6). That said, the result creates an image where much is lost in the actuality of the subject, even though it is still an indexical trace of Mark, the subject, being present for the photograph. The subtle variants, as exampled in Figure 2, show that Mark was not completely stationary between the shots and there is movement and slight shifts in facial expression. This nuanced series of images shows more of the subjects individual trait and allows them to be more represented in the image. However, it could also be argued that Mark movements are as a result of my direction and not a naturalistic expression of him as a person either.
Figure 6. Phil Hill (March, 2020) Overlaid images of Mark.
Figure 7. Phil Hill (March, 2020) De-saturated overlaid images of Mark.
I was interested in Uta Barth’s challenge to the reader in
the way that she is asking us to consider looking, and the way that we can
derive meaning from the image, Barth states “One
goes out into the world and points it [the camera] something of beauty, something
of importance, a spectacle of some sort” (Barth, 2012) and goes on to note
that the subject and meaning can be interpreted as being the same (2012). Barth’s response to
this is to remove the reader’s attention on the subject and create an all-encompassing
experiential sense of ‘looking.’ John Berger asserted much the same in his use
of the term, ‘sight:’ “The explanation, never quite fits the sight” (Berger, 2008, p. 7) where the image of
the actual is perhaps too much of an explanation, or a kind of overarching
exposition; we are confronted by the assumed meaning of the image because it is
presented in its naturalistic format, depicted by the lens.
Figure 8. Uta Barth (1994) Ground #42
Through Barth’s work, emphasis is placed on readers, and reading, Barth actively encourages those to become aware of their reading (Barth, 2012). Barth’s work is about perception, but still indexical. When I photograph a portrait, I almost always set of to photograph with a shallow depth of field to throw the background out of focus, which creates a separation of the subject and the environment. It is this reason that I shoot my images with the continuous mode set. When I look at Barth’s work (Fig. 8), it is almost as if the image was composed to have a person present but has left the scene, leaving the camera to capture the remains. Where I feel this applies to my own work is how Barth’s approach is her visual perception that seems to segue with the concept of social abstraction, or how we disregard the unnecessary details from our lives. For example, the food that we eat is presented packaged and ready – we do not need to understand to process of how this packed item came to be.
At this stage, I want this to be purely an experimentation
where I can explore ideas, potentially one that I might come back to at a later
date. Currently, this is not something that fits my intent photographing my local
community. I have created a naturalistic approach to the shoot so far, the
overlaid image, feel out of place and potentially an obvious interpretation of
the ideas that I am discussing. It has been useful to explore it however, and I
will aim to subtly introduce elements of this into my narrative.
The portrait of Mark (Fig. 1) fits really well into how this
is starting to develop from my other shoots and portraits that I have been
creating (See Posts), although I am still keen to allow this to continue
developing in the same way Todd Hido approaches his ‘Paper Movies’ (Hido,
2014, p. 114)
and discusses the need for ambiguity for the reader’s own narrative (p. 28).
As I have written previously, I am also interested in the way Snyder and Allen
discuss the index (Snyder & Allen, 1975, p. 159) and how I am
interpreting this as representation being a consensus of opinion as opposed to
a whole truth encompassing the many nuances of individual personality. In
essence, for my current work in progress at least, I want my images to be based
in the actual as John Berger terms (Berger, 2013, p. 8), and all of my work created so far has
been looking at these actualities and the dominant reading of this work should
also follow this.
We did not have subscriptions to National Geographic in my
house growing up, however I vividly remember going to the dentist who had piles
of the magazine and I would be in awe of how cinematic the world looked. It was
these pages that inspired me to want to travel the world and photograph.
Figure 1. Phil Hill & Helen Warrick (March, 2013) National Geographic Traveller.
It is worth noting that National Geographic Traveller is
primarily about showing beautiful destinations that you might go on holiday as
opposed to what its parent publication supposedly stands for. National
Geographic Traveller operates and runs features in a similar way to how Conde
Nast, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, and Lonely Planet also publish travel
features. One of the key differences is that it comes with the branding
associated with National Geographic, including its distinctive yellow border.
As Grundberg Stated “the photographs found in the National
Geographic represent the apotheosis of the picturesque” (Grundberg, 1988), and it is through Traveller magazine
that it takes this to the most extreme. National Geographic have recently acknowledged
a past built on exploitation (Goldberg, 2018) yet still create an
aesthetic that undermines the moral high ground that they seek to occupy. For
Traveller magazine, they completely ignore this moral standing and only print
images of exotic locations to sell holidays. If National Geographic is
aesthetics for supposed cultural importance (Lutz & Collins, 1991, p. 134); National Geographic
Traveller is purely aesthetics for the sake of exoticism. My assignment for
example, was to illustrate an article on Bali, Indonesia that was created off
the back of a press junket paid for by the Indonesian tourist board, a common
practice in travel editorial but not what you would expect in its parent. When
picking up Traveller magazine, the reader looks at that yellow border and
distinctive brand logo and would naturally associate this spin-off with all of
the mythology that National Geographic is synonymous for. In many ways, franchises
and spin-off publications that utilise the coded branding of National
Geographic are everything that is wrong with National Geographic.
I am completely complicit in this. I shot the assignment and
took the money. Reflecting on this for my oral presentation in Positions and Practice,
I questioned my moral and ethical position and how I would photograph the most
aesthetically pleasing image whilst also witnessing all of the challenges and
the poverty that happened around me. Since then I was listening to Hannah
Starkey discuss the challenges of gaze (Starkey, 2019), who equated a rise
in male gaze was in part to do with the last recession, creating a culture of
lazy advertising. Starkey was talking about the commodification of women,
however where this relates to National Geographic and Traveller magazine is how
we also commodified the land; sex and exoticism sells. As a freelancer in my
twenties around the same time, it was exciting to be paid to travel and
photograph as ignorant as I was to the impact that my images have.
Now that this position has been challenged, I hope to move forward in a more engaging way and not occupy the view of the photographer as Ariella Azoulay described as “a male figure roaming around the world and pointing his camera at objects, places, people, and events, as if the world was made for him. He can vanish from people’s worlds in the same way that he appeared in them” (Azoulay, 2016, p. 2).
To test that here, I have selected a recent portrait that I created at the food bank over the road from my home. It might be worth noting that I also spent the afternoon helping out with the aim of gaining the trust of the people that I wanted to photograph (Fig. 2)
Figure 2. Phil Hill (March, 2020) Mark at Elim Foodbank
Bibliography
Azoulay, A., 2016.
Photography Consists of Collaboration: Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, and
Ariella Azoulay. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 01
01, 31(1 91), p. 2.
Goldberg, S., 2018. For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It. [Online] Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/ [Accessed 21 10 2019].
Grundberg, A., 1988. PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; A Quintessentially American View of the World. [Online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/18/arts/photography-view-a-quintessentially-american-view-of-the-world.html [Accessed 4 March 2020].
Hill, P., 2020. Mark from Elim foodbank. [Photo].
Lutz, C. & Collins, J., 1991. The Photograp as an
Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic. Visual
Anthropology Review, 7(1), pp. 134 -148.
Starkey, H., 2019. A Small Voice: Conversations
with Photographers. Episode 102 – Hannah Starkey [Interview] (3 April
2019).
Warwick, H. & Hill, P., 2013. Free Spirit. National
Geographic Traveller (UK), 01 03, pp. 92 – 101.
Photo Books, for example. I absolutely adore them and spend
many hours looking at my own small collection. However, I was interested to
listen to Simon Norfolk in a recent Small Voice Podcast (Norfolk, 2019), who said that he himself is done with
them. His reasoning for this is down to the audience of photobooks, which is
almost entirely that of other photographers, and a middle-class demographic of
photographers, which can be problematic for a number of reasons. When you
consider that many of these books have small print runs of around 150, and can
be exceptionally expensive, this can be limiting in the dissemination of the
work; for the socially concerned photographer, what you are actually doing is
creating esoteric works for other people like yourself which does not bring
issues to a wide and diverse audience.
Norfolk’s critique continued, and he also discussed the way
that some of the major awards operate to only reward those that are part of the
same cliques within the traditional photography world and this kind of
self-congratulatory feedback loop will ultimately harm the practice of
photography and its relevance.
Figure 1. Simon Norfolk (2020) Instagram Profile.
Interestingly, Norfolk cited Instagram as the space where
the most current photography is happening and has worked to increase his own audience
to around 150,000 followers (Fig. 1). Norfolk also discussed photographers such
as Joey L as potentially moving the medium forward in this sphere, yet wouldn’t
be considered by the traditional gallery system. Added to this, I also read
recently of the TikTok photographer Derek Harris with a 3.6 million fan base (Harris & TikTok, 2020). These two examples
are not who you might consider as legitimate photographic artists and social
media creates a homogenised view of photography (Fig. 2), yet they draw
audiences that clearly cannot be ignored, and to a great extent show that
photography still has a large audience, albeit a younger demographic than those
who might follow the Photographers Gallery; this could be considered a gateway
into other parts of the photographic world. The rise of these photographers is
surely a reaction by a generation that only consumes media via an online
platform and technologies potentially considering the way we consume imagery
archaic and obsolete.
Figure 2. Insta Repaet (2020) Image from @Insta_Repeat
Norfolk’s comments on Joel L were an interesting one
however, he stated that he did not really like his work, a statement of which I
tend to agree with owing to L’s highly exoticised gaze which is similar to the
discussion around the National Geographic gaze we are looking at this week.
However, Norfolk did have a great deal of respect for his ability to create an
audience, and L’s aesthetics and technical ability can’t be discounted wholly.
When I looked up Joey L’s Instagram however, he was actually using his most
recent posts to promote his own first photobook, ‘We Came from Fire’ (L, 2019). So, even with L’s
large online audience it seems he still places value on the tangible medium,
albeit with a much larger print run no doubt.
Continuing this point, Last week’s reading of Bright’s ‘Of
Mother Nature and Marlboro Men, I was struck by her discussion regarding Lisa
Lewenz’s ‘Three Mile Island Calendar’ (Bright, 1985) which consciously
presented the work using a highly mass produced format playing with the notion
of how these images would normally be viewed – primarily in a corporate report
setting. This kind of presentation has impact over how you might expect to see
a landscape image within its black borders and hung on white walls. To do
something similar in a contemporary form of mass production, which ultimately
would be using an online platform such as Instagram, the context could quickly
drain away (Sontag, 1979, p. 106) as the image gets
swallowed up by the countless others uploaded every second.
Where the photo book may hold more resonance with audiences outside of the photography world might be through publishers such as Hoxton Mini Press who will look for secondary markets for the books that they produce. For example, the book ‘One Day Young’ by Jenny Lewis (Lewis, 2015) is a beautiful series of portraits of mothers and their brand new babies, which was bought for me and my wife when my daughter was just born, and I have also seen it for sale in stores such as Oliver Bonas, creating an opportunity for those unaware of photography in the esoteric sense to access it. However, and I consider my editorial print background here, market forces shape the creation of photography for the masses and ultimately leads to its homogenisation, as broad appeal and aesthetics take the place of challenging work, which was certainly the kind of images that I shot for airline and travel magazines. There are advertisers and increasing market share to think about.
Bibliography
Anonymous & Instagram, 2020. Insta_Repeat Instagram Profile. [Online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/insta_repeat/ [Accessed 2 March 2020].
Bright, D., 1985. Of Mother Nature and Marlborough
Men. Exposure, 23(1), p. Online.
Harris, D. & TikTok, 2020. derrekharris TikTok Profiles. [Online] Available at: https://www.tiktok.com/@derrek.harris [Accessed 2 March 2020].
Lewis, J., 2015. One Day Young. 1 ed. London:
Hoxton Mini Press.
L, J., 2019. We Came From Fire. 1 ed. New York:
Powerhouse Books.
Norfolk, S., 2019. A Small Voice: Conversations
with Photographers [Interview] (12 June 2019).
Norfolk, S. & Instagram, 2020. SimonNorfolkStudio Instagram Profile. [Online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/simonnorfolkstudio/ [Accessed 2 March 2020].
Sontag, S., 1979. On Photography. London:
Penguin.
