The aim of Informing Contexts is to support the development of your visually and critically informed image making, to enable you to produce a body of work with a specific intent, context and function.
Themes of the module
- Making photographs
- Looking at photographs
- Evaluating photographs
Making photographs
“I was overcome by an ‘ontological’ desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself’ by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images” (Barthes, 1980: 3)
Read:
The Photographer’s Eye (John Szarkowski) – written with photographer in mind
The Nature of Photographs (Stephen Shore) – concerned with the photograph itself
What is a Photograph? (Carol Squires) – explores range of creative experimentation in photography since 70s. What could photography be?
https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/what-is-a-photograph
The Photographer’s Eye
5 properties or characteristics of photography
- The thing itself
- The detail
- The frame
- Time
- The vantage point
His advice to get started on something which you might be interested in – more you work, more interesting it becomes. Can’t solve artistic problems in your head.
“Is there anything peculiarly ‘photographic’ about photography – something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures?” (Snyder & Allen, 1975: 143)
“What is true of photographs is true of the world seen photographically” (Sontag 1977: 79)
Can photographs invent new worlds and new realities? How important is the context in which we view photographs? How willing are we to suspend our disbelief and when and where do we do it?
“Photography appears to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously” (Lister, 2013: 5)
Week 1 seminar: what is a photograph?
Topic 1: Photography the shapeshifter
American Surfaces show – take pictures that felt like they weren’t burdened with visual conventions – that felt like seeing. When you write its slightly different to how you speak – wanted to get to that point for the photographs of speaking. To get to the experience of seeing – what it looked like.
In Uncommon Places, started using large format. Relying on descriptive power of the camera – creating a small world.
Moments of heightened awareness – what does that look like?
Filling pictures with tension.
Perceptions of land – landscapes in Montanna.
Experience of seeing with conscious attention – photography can do that.
To consider:
What do I feel is the nature of the photographic image today, and what characteristics are most relevant to my own vision of a world according to photographs.
Topic 1: John Szarkowski (1966) The Photographer’s Eye
John Szarkowski was Director of MoMa. Book based on 1964 exhibition of the same name. ‘This book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and why they look that way’ (Szarkowski, 1966: 6)
Photograph has become almost invisible – what exactly makes a photograph?
5 characteristics (see above).
Process based on selection.
The thing itself – ‘A photograph evokes the tangible presence of reality’ (Szarkowski 1966: 12) – deals with the actual.
The detail – ‘The photographer was tied to the facts of things, and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth’ (Szarkowski, 1966: 8) – can only capture fragments of reality. Could be read as symbols. The trivial – never ‘seen’ before? Sontag says ‘to photograph is to confer importance..’ (Sontag, 1977: 28)
The frame – picture was ‘selected’. Photos have edges – forced to make selections. We know and doubt simultaneously. Don’t experience the world through frames, unlike photographs.
Time – ‘…no such thing as an instantaneous photograph….time is always the present’ (Szarkowski, 1966: 10). Are we aware of time while it’s passing?
Vantage point – ‘…and yet it is photography that has taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point’ (Szarkowski, 1966: 10). What about its obscurity? Can show us a new world. So much effort goes into concealing, making things not visible (security etc)
Topic 2: Joel Snyder & Neil Walsh Allen (1975)
Is there anything peculiarly ‘photographic’ about photography – something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures?” (Snyder & Allen, 1975: 143)
We explore the supposedly realist nature of photographic representation, and in particular, why we might have a tendency to perceive photographs as an unmediated visual truth, or at the very least as some sort of physical trace of the world around us. This belief appears to be unique to photography, as opposed to other forms of representation.
Here, you are encouraged to think about the importance (or not) of the indexical ‘trace’ and the balance between subjective construction / objective recording in your own photographic practice.
The icon and the index
“No painting or drawing, no matter how naturalistic, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does,” John Berger (2009: 54)
Topic 3: Photographic Fictions
“I do see [my work] as inter-related projects, although maybe different sides of the same coin. They have different moods and atmospheres, but to me, they’re related in different ways, maybe psychological ways” (Crewdson in Galerie Templon, 2020).
We consider more deliberate strategies of staging and directing or performing fictional scenes, as opposed to representing a world that is supposedly ‘out there’ to be merely passively recorded. Here, you are encouraged to consider what / how / why you make visual / aesthetic choices to construct your images.
Definition of constructed photograph by Smith & Lefley
“To construct means to build or make by putting together various parts. A constructed photograph is one that is formed by bringing together discrete elements to create a final picture” (Smith & Lefley, 2016: 113)
‘The question is not what reality is, but what modes of representing it are
available’ (KOHLER, 1995: 8)
We consider Jeff Wall’s (2015) division of photographers into two camps: hunters and farmers: The hunter tracks down and captures images, while the farmer cultivates them over time (Wall (2015) in Cotton, 2018: 49). There are certainly synergies here with John Szarkowski’s (1978) discussion of photographs acting as mirrors and windows on the world.
To critically inform our discussion, we consider if such approaches really need to be viewed in such strictly dichotomous terms. Is there more of a continuum between the two? Are all photographs constructions? And if we accept this, how important is the context in which we consume them? What is the role of the viewer in a reading of these photographic / constructed facts and fictions?
Topic 5 – Gazing at Photographs
To gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze
(Schroeder, 1998: 208)
Scopophilia – the love of looking
‘The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia (pleasure in looking)’
(Mulvey (1975) in Hall & Evans, 2003: 381)
Anna Malagrida (2002) from Interiors
Arne Svenson (2012) from The Neighbours
Shikuka Yokomizo (1999) from Dear Stranger
‘The extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the idea of voyeuristic separation…to give the spectator the illusion of looking in on a private world’
(Mulvey (1975) in Hall & Evans, 2003: 382)
Merry Alpern (1994) from Dirty Windows
‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed’
(Sontag, 1977: 4)
Leigh Ledare (2013) from Pretend You’re Actually Alive
‘Every day the urge goes stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of it’s likeness, it’s reproduction’ (Benjamin, 1936: 23)
Jon Rafman (2009-2017) from Nine Eyes of Google Street View
‘Men act and women appear’ (Berger, 1972: 47)
‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves’ (Berger, 1972: 47)
‘The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus, she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight’ (Berger, 1972: 47)
Topic 7: A Sea of Images
Theme 3: Evaluating Photographs
Barthes describes the punctum as a ‘sting, a cut, a hole’ – this reference to ‘a cut’ resonates with the work I am currently doing; making cuts into archive images of me when I was a baby and toddler and my mother and other members of my family. Also referenced as a ‘prick’ or ‘wound’.
Exhibition – Punctum. Reflections on Photography. Salzburger Kunstverein.
Interview with Séamus Kealy, curator. More information here:
http://vernissage.tv/2014/08/01/punctum-reflections-on-photography-salzburger-kunstverein/
And
https://www.frieze.com/article/punctum – review of the exhibition which other than pointing out a couple of interesting inclusions, ends with a rather brutal sign off, describing the exhibition as ‘insipid’.