Reflections on the Writing & Reading About Photography Section

I’ve now completed the first main section of the course, entitled Writing about Photography (though it does also include a section called Reading About Photography).  As I’ve indicated elsewhere in these notes, I already do a fair amount of both reading and writing about photography & photographers.  For that reason, the study in this section has been more about providing some structure and embellishment to what I’m already doing rather than sending me off in a new direction.

The notes ask that we reflect on how our studying in this section might impact on our photographic practice.  I do feel that it has helped to hone the skills.  It’s always useful to go through a structured process such as this, and I also enjoyed reading the ‘Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images’ book by Terry Barrett, published by McGraw Hill.  This is the Fifth Edition of this American book (which says something in itself) and was published earlier this year.  I have read it through once and referred back to one or two sections again; and I think that it is a helpful read in relation to all aspects of the background study for the OCA Photography courses.  To read a structured study of how those criticising photographs approach what they do is definitely helpful when subsequently reading those critique – as well as helping us to structure our own.

Writing about one’s photography, in the broadest sense, is part of the development of a practice in many practical ways.  Whether writing captions, artists statements, proposals, or whatever, the skills of communicating ideas and concepts clearly, understanding the reader so as to write for one’s audience, appreciating how one’s work relates to others, all are important.  I’ve also benefited from some very simple practical tips, too.  Summarising each paragraph of a complex article in a single sentence, for example; it is obvious, but it isn’t something I’ve tended to do with academic writing in the past, but it worked well in pulling together the argument in the Berger essay – I shall use it again.

Speaking of the Berger essay, ‘Understanding a Photograph’, I think I got quite a lot out of that exercise, but partly because it linked into something else I’d read recently.  It makes me reflect on the joys and frustrations of reading about photography.  The ‘story’ went something like this – I read the Berger article & did the various exercises; it led me to go back to an article I’d read in Hotshoe magazine, A. D. Coleman’s ‘Letter from New York’ column, which in the March/April edition was entitled ‘John Berger goes to the dogs’; reading Cloeman’s comments about Berger’s writing and comparing them to my own led me to reflect on differences of approach – those like Berger, and perhaps Sontag & Barthes, with what I might refer to as philosophical discourse, on the one hand, and Fried, Coleman etc, with a more analytical approach; unsure whether my thinking was valid, I remembered some reference to the prevalence if literary-based writers (Barthes being one of those referred to) on photography theory over the more practice-based; that came, I think, from a book entitled ‘Photography Theory’, edited by James Elkins, and off I go to try and find the reference; etc etc.

At one level, it’s a delight to recognise that there is so much to read and learn.  At another, there is never enough time to follow everything through.  Patience is the answer, I guess, keep reading, keep reflecting, wait patiently for the occasional penny to drop!

Writing about Photography - Research and analyse exercise

I have already completed the exercises in volving writing about some of my own images and this exercise asks me to research & analyse one image – my choice from four provided in the course notes.  I’m going to go with this one.

Robert Frank ‘London Street 1951’

(From Victoria & Albert Museum website http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/5020)

Here's what I've written:

Even without its helpful and specific title, one could make a fair shot at identifying time and place for this image.  The two vehicles and the little girl’s mackintosh would probably place it in the middle part of the 20^th century; and the housing would suggest UK, with London as a good bet.  Actually, though, a little bit of Internet research leads me to put a question mark against the exact location.  I came across a print of this image, on sale through Christies here, going under the title London (Belsize Crescent) 1951-52.  Looking at a current Google Streetview image of Belsize Crescent, one might question the accuracy of that title and wonder whether Belsize Terrace looks a better match.

Not that it matters, of course, other than as a small illustration of how an image develops a life of its own and easily loses contact with notions of truth and reality.  It doesn’t take too much further digging around to discover that there is, probably, a story around the creation of the image.  It is in a sequence of at least three photographs taken by Frank at this location in the winter of 1951-52.  There are diptych prints around of two images, one a front view of the hearse and the other a different version of the girl running, in which she is closer to the hearse – see below.

So, we might imagine Frank, walking the streets of London on that damp foggy winter’s day, during his visit to London, from Paris, in late 1951to early 1952, documenting the contrasts of the city – bankers in bowlers on the one hand and workers on the other - collecting images, some of which would eventually form part of his ‘Black White & Things’ book produced in 1952, and which would later form part of the ‘London & Wales’ book or the ‘Storylines’ exhibition more than fifty years later.  He sees potential in the hearse, empty, open, absurdly waiting unattended for who or what; and then the little girl appears, running down the pavement – from the rain, from Frank, from the hearse, who knows – but he has time to take (at least) two images of her from the back before she runs round the corner that seems to lie to her left in the original image from the course notes.  That may or may not be the ‘truth’; and the image now has the kind of iconic status that puts its reading and interpretation into the public domain of multiple readings where the ‘reality’ of what actually took place ceases to have meaning or relevance.

So, how do I read it?  The dark shape of the hearse’s body dominates the frame, contrasting sharply with the almost white, almost washed out sky, into which the background buildings seem to fade completely.  The diagonal lines, formed by the converging perspective of street, terrace, pavement and vehicle, all lead, more or less, to the figure of the little girl, as she runs, silhouetted against the wet pavement that is rendered almost white as it reflects the sky and mist.  The open rear door of the hearse frames a street cleaner, who stands beside his hand-cart, apparently watching from the other side of the street. A lorry is just visible, parked further down the street, and there could be another figure, standing by it or crossing the road.  It is a dull, damp, wet scene – funereal, one might say.  Whatever time of day, there can have been very little light and Frank must have been using a sensitive film to have captured the girl in motion as he has – hence the grainy nature of the print, which adds to the sombre feel of the image.

It is the juxtapositions that pose questions, prompt thoughts and reflections, and ultimately, I suggest, lead to the longevity if the image.  Although it was created and has been presented alongside images that contrast different strata of British society in the early fifties, this particular image is class-less.  Its ‘signs’ are about life in general – unlike, say, the comparisons between Frank’s images of London bankers and Welsh miners, all taken around the same time.  In this photograph, Frank has created a surreal scene out of the absurd accidents and incidents of ordinary life.  Death, represented by the hearse and the ‘grim reaper’ character across the road, awaits all of us – even this little girl who runs innocently away from our view.  It’s hard not to read the image in this way.  Some years later, Jack Kerouac, in his introduction to Frank’s groundbreaking book ‘The Americans’, said that Frank “... sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film ...”.  That book, and the ‘road trips’ that led to its influential sequence of images, was still some years away when the photographer, just 27 in 1951 and recently a father, took this little series of shots on a London street.  But this particular composition seems to fulfil that poetic notion – innocent and insignificant, apparently, yet provocative and unsettling.

I would suggest that it is a photograph ‘of its time’ in more ways than one.  Its power and its poetry stem, partly, from the association with and connotation of ‘truth’ that a grainy, black and white print possesses.  In the introduction to Frank’s book ‘London/Wales’, in which this image appears more than fifty years after it was taken, he is quoted as saying ‘... London was black, white and grey ...”.  The scene must, of course, have existed on colour, albeit muted in this light, but we read the ‘truth’ as this black and white.  In an interview with Sean O’Hagan in the Observer in 2004, Frank says “The kind of photography I did is gone.” And “There are too many pictures now.”  It is difficult to imagine a colour photograph of a similar scene in a London street today having the same poetic power.  And to recreate the scene, in grainy black and white would not be the ‘truth’, perhaps?  The photographic image’s slippery relationship with truth and reality is well illustrated here, as its ability to rival poetry in addressing some of the essences of human life, or death.

Some notes about what I’ve done for this exercise:

I could, maybe should, have done more ‘book’ research in putting together this analysis.  I’ve done quite a bit on the Internet, but finding evidence of ‘learned’ pieces on the subject hasn’t been easy.  I do have Frank’s ‘The Americans’, and can also pick up references to him and his work in other general photographic publications.  I know that this images appeared in ‘London/Wales’ and in the ‘Storylines’ exhibition at about the same time (c2003-4), but I’m still not sure where, if anywhere, it was published closer to the time it was made.  In the past, I have often gone out and bought the books I wanted to consult, and might have done so had this been an assignment, but I think I need to try and find access to a sizeable library to support my future studies.



Photographers Gallery – ‘Oil’, Edward Burtynsky

At the newly re-opened Photographers Gallery, the first major exhibition is 'Oil' by Canadian photographer, Edward Burtynsky.  I visited last week.  The exhibition presents some of Burtynsky’s images in a series that goes back more than ten years, and which explores much of the vast scope and influence of ‘Oil’ in today’s world – its extraction, refinement, use, ‘end’.  Indeed, the images on display are arranged, broadly, around these ‘stages’ of oil. In practice, I personally felt more comfortable reading them as a whole, as a complex but cohesive piece of work rather than as chapters in a narrative.

Burtynsky has said that he creates images that are open to multiple readings, and it’s important to bear in mind when looking at this body of work.  They are detailed, deep, often complicated images, presented on a considerable scale (even if Sophy Ricket in Hotshoe does describe them as “... surprisingly diminutive ...”, almost making it sound like a put-down), which explore a subject whose scope and impact across the globe and throughout our lives would be impossible to document in totality. The work does, most definitely have a political dimension, but Burtynsky seems to be more concerned that we ask ourselves questions about our own use of oil in so many aspects of our sophisticated and highly developed lives than that we prepare our placards and get out onto the streets.  Indeed he almost seems prepared to celebrate, with us, the wonder of what man has achieved with oil, whilst at the same time undermining our wonder as we are drawn into the detail of his wonderful images and see the waste, destruction and, very occasionally, human misery.

Another reading, though, and one that I found myself exploring, both in the gallery and subsequently, relates to the formal qualities and the relationship of these pictures to others, going back to Romantic painters and taking in the New Topographics and other contemporary fine art photographers along the way.  Compare 'Shipbreaking No 13' with this from Joel Meyerowitz and this from Caspar David Friedrich (and influence that Burtynsky acknowledges).  Like Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, and others, he uses the large format camera to step back (quite some distance in many cases, up in a crane – like Struth photographing Notre Dame in a film seen at the Whitechapel Gallery – or up in a plane) and capture scale, light, colour, perspective and detail, in the manner of the sublime landscape.

Moving specifically to the formal qualities; the prints – very high quality chromogenic colour – are large (in my opinion anyway, Sophy), highly detailed, and much sharper in that detail that some of the big exhibition prints I’ve seen.  That matters for Burtynsky’s work (perhaps for others, too, if the scale is going to work). His ‘VW Lot No 1’ depicts, from a typically elevated viewpoint, what must be thousands of Volkswagen cars, arranged in neat rows, and disappearing into the distance out of the top of the frame, presumably awaiting delivery.  As a viewer, one can step back with Burtynsky’s camera, and wonder st the scale; be intrigued by the abstract pattern; reflect on the industry behind their manufacture; and be troubled (in context) by the oil they will consume.  But one is also (or this ‘one’ at least) drawn into the vast frame to look at the detail and the way in which each individual car is sharply defined.  Then, one can admire Burtynsky’s skill and professionalism; recognise his attention to detail; compare him to the painter who carefully craft each brushstroke; but also, perhaps, consider that each of those vehicles will be delivered to someone like ourselves.  We all, in our protected little environments (and the inside of an automobile on a highway is the epitome of that aspect of the modern world) contribute to the whole.  The ‘big picture’ is the sum of its parts.

Comparable in its intense detail, is 'Densified Oil Filters No 1', in which used and compacted oil filters fill the frame in their hundreds.  The scale is different but the effect is similar.  Firstly the viewer is caught by the size of the print, the ‘texture’ that makes it look like an abstract oil painting (Pollock?) even though the surface is, of course, flat; and the ‘what is it’ question, which (as with the VWs) draws one into the detail, where we ‘get the message’.  Filling the big frame and letting the waste filters ‘flow’ out of its edges adds to the sense that this particular oil outcome may go on forever.  The same principle of intense abstract detail is present in 'Oxford Tyre Pile No 4'; this time with a huge pile of waste tyres, but with a compositional difference.  Just off centre frame is a ‘void’ reminiscent of a deep canyon and echoing the deep earthworks that appear elsewhere in Burtynsky’s images.  A similar centre-frame breaking of the detail occurs in 'Highway No 5', where two highways and the intricate intersection at their meeting, carve through the seemingly endless sprawl of Los Angeles suburbs, laid out across the frame in an image shot from an aircraft.  Are the rows and rows, streets and streets of buildings being compared to the tyres, the oil filters, the VWs?  It’s tempting to think so.  And once again, we can step back and wonder at man’s industry; stare, appalled, at the sprawl across the landscape; admire Burtynsky’s professional and creative skills in envisioning and then constructing this immense view; and admire the beautiful quality of the final print on the gallery wall.  All seem to be valid readings.

I also found myself, again, reflecting on process – creative process.  How does Burtynsky get to these final prints that I’m studying?  From a notion to this result; how does that happen?  There are numerous interviews and video clips on his website, in some of which he discusses process.  I havn’t had the time to look into it all in detail but, as well as reaffirming that this is a project that has already been ongoing for more than ten years, he describes how he approaches particular site that he is to photograph – the research; the numerous visits; the taking of many preparatory shots; the identification of what he then wants to produce and how he will go about it; and so on.  As with my visit to the Roger Ballen exhibition some weeks ago, I begin to appreciate the dedication, attention to detail, professionalism etc in the creative process.  Here are two very different artists; totally different images and aesthetics; Ballen looking inward and creating his own black and white images; Burtynsky looking outward and documenting the world, in colour.  Yet in comparing the artistic and creative processes associated with each and the quality of the end result in these two exhibitions, the same basic quality of dedication and professionalism is clear.

In conclusion, this exhibition demonstrates how a dedicated and skilled fine art photographer can use beauty, scale, colour, perspective and detail to present fantastic quality and hugely impressive images that both singly and in total engage the viewer and invite detailed reading.  And then, it offers multi-dimensional possibilities for the reader – see the exquisite formal qualities, as I did, and read them in the context of fine art genres; or read the environmental messages about man taking from the earth and from the landscape; or look at the historical context, the documenting of man’s industrial history and development.  Enjoyable – and it makes you think!

Project: Writing descriptively

“You probably think of your photography as essentially a practical or technical activity.”  So reads the first sentence introducing this project in the course notes.  Actually, I don’t!  And I don’t tend to describe my photography “... in the form of technical notes ...” or “... become absorbed in the particular technical problem ...” that is facing me.  So, from my own perspective, I have to question the premise behind the exercise!

Having read a fair amount of serious photography criticism over the last few years I think that I have moved on from that technical focus.  To be fair, though, looking at the title of the project made me reflect on some of the descriptive aspects of the critics that I have come across.  One in particular certainly opened my eyes to the effectiveness of a descriptive approach when looking at photography.  That was Michael Fried who’s Why Photography Matter as Art as Never Before (Yale University Press 2008) I read a couple of years ago.  It was a tough read at the time, and I certainly didn’t ‘get’ all the theoretical references to the likes of Heidegger, but Fried’s descriptive approach to analysing images did make an impression; and it helped me fully appreciate the work of Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Luc Delahaye, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and others about whom he writes extensively in the book.

More recently, I have read Criticising Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images by Terry Barrett (McGraw Hill 2012).  Chapter Two is entitled ‘Describing Photographs: What Do I See?’, and in it, Barrett says, “The starting point is not crucial, but accurate description is an essential part of holding defensible critical positions.” (Page 18).  He compares various critics’ approach to descriptive writing – making particular use of three pieces of writing about Avedon’s ‘In the American West’; and discusses description of Subject Matter, Form, Medium and Style.  Although it isn’t particularly referring to description, I like the quote from John Szarkowski, in which he says, more or less, that the simplicity of photography arises from the fact that it is very easy to make a picture, but its ‘staggering complexity’ lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been just as easy (from ‘Looking at Photographs’).  I do feel the need to express some surprise that in this latest new edition of the book, published this year, his section on describing the Medium lists the kind of information that might be included without any reference at all to digital media!  I was pleased, though, that he selects one writer as a particularly ‘careful describer’ of what he sees – Michael Fried – and includes a typical piece from him, looking at one of Mitch Epstein’s ‘Power’ series.  Barrett stresses the importance of keeping descriptive writing relevant to the writer’s interpretation – not description for its own sake.  But, importantly, he stresses that “... descriptions are rarely value-free.” (Page 40) and that “Description is not a prelude to criticism; description is criticism.” (Page 41).

The project is about doing a piece of descriptive writing on one of one’s own photographs.  Based on the ‘premise’ mentioned above, the aim is, I assume, to encourage one to move away from purely technical and practical issues and to describe more openly and extensively.  I havn’t done the exercise but, instead, have gone back to some pieces of descriptive writing that I have done before, in connection with assignments on previous modules.  I read the Fried book when I was completing the Landscape module, and I think it led me to get a bit carried away with the descriptive approach at times.  I found this example:

The ‘technical’ aspect is kept to a minimum and that hefty second paragraph makes up a detailed description of what is, on the face of it, a relatively unspectacular woodland scene.  It does read as though it might have been written by Michael Fried!  Barrett observes that Fried is very concerned with Form, and my own description definitely focuses that way in the second paragraph.  I think it falls over a bit on the ‘relevancy’ criterion, though.  I was more concerned with a thorough description than with the final paragraph, where I get into the purpose and ‘meaning’ of my image.

This is a piece written more recently, about an image for a People & Place assignment:

Interestingly, I’ve gone for very little actual description.  There is very little technical information either.  The writing covers context – of both the ‘place’ that is being depicted and the assignment itself – and process – the ‘how I went about it’ and ‘why’.  Does that represent progress in my writing about my own images?  I’m not entirely sure – the first, as I said, sometimes lacks relevance, but the second maybe lacks the form-based description of Fried.  It may also reflect a differing approach to the assignments – the first being part of a conceptual series called ‘Stone’, whereas the second is for an assignment based around the notion of an article for a ‘serious’ travel magazine.  The difference if worthy of note, whatever its origins.

So, I have chosen not to do the actual exercise titled ‘Writing descriptively’ but the re-examination of my own writing from previous modules has been useful, as has the reading of Barrett and the reminder of Fried’s descriptive style.  Writing about photographs interests me, as does reading about it, so I approach the rest of this section of the module with a degree of enthusiasm.

Assignment One – feedback & thoughts

I’ve had some positive feedback from my tutor on the first assignment this week, plus some pointers for improvements.  The key comments that pleased me were:

·         I seem to have successfully conveyed the atmosphere of the place.

·         My shot of the pig farm is seen as particularly strong (which sounds like a piece of irony in itself!); composed in a traditional landscape style; feels deliberately ironic; like a landscape painting or a photograph in a pictorial style.  That’s good; I want to present the ordinary and mundane in a manner that makes the viewer sit up and take notice & I quite like the notion of the ‘sublime’ pig farm.

·         My blog seems to be working well.

·         And my images are close to his own interests – which pleases me because it makes me confident that they will be viewed in an interested but critical fashion.

There are of course some further suggestions for improvement and development.

·         The series explores different strands and perhaps I could have focused more specifically on one.  Actually, in many ways, this series is more focused than the last time I put together a series on the local environs.  I have followed highly specific themes in the past e.g. ‘Stone’ for one of the Landscape assignments.  Essentially, the message is not to compromise my own interests for the sake of the brief, which is good, and consistent with what has been coming across from OCA.

·         The feeling is that some of my shots of stonework don’t add much to the series – though a recognition that I have used detail shots to provide some rhythm to the narrative.  It’s actually hard to make any images around here without stonework; it dominates, and that’s why it is so prevalent in my series.  He refers to the feeling of claustrophobia, and that is linked to this theme as well.  I can see how it might feel ‘over done’ but I also know how stone and stone walls dominate this landscape, whatever the scale.  My own tendency to focus on it is, I guess, a kind of emotional reaction; and there is also, perhaps, some metaphorical link I could make ... if I could just find it!!  Perhaps my response to this point, and to the previous one about focus, should be to photograph even more stonework ... push it ... explore it ... obsess with it ... and see what I discover ... about myself??  (Get ready, readers, to be bored out of your tree with stone! Stoned, even?)

·         The last shot in the series (the layers of stone walls), interestingly, is ‘pretty and has a decorative quality but lacks critical edge’.  That is a particularly interesting reaction.  I quite liked that shot and didn’t find it pretty; shot in an attractive light, perhaps, but for me, it said hard and gritty, a metaphor for the layers of history that are laid across the land around here ... and it also felt like a kind of barrier, a stop, a dead end for the narrative.  I don’t mind that it came across differently to him; we put our images out there and viewers will read them as they will; but the very different reading of this one is certainly interesting.

There were a few other useful suggestions about, for example, incorporating a ‘contact sheet’ of all images from a shoot into this blog; and perhaps taking another look at this collection to make a more personal selection (back to the focus and concentration on a theme).

He also encourages the use of a tripod, which I did quite a lot when completing the Landscape module and, latterly, for portraits in People & Place.  I think I quite enjoyed the freedom of handheld on this assignment.  The key point being made here, I recognise, is that I shot quite a lot in relatively poor light & ISO100, which has meant that several of the original images were somewhat underexposed.  I’ve been able to process them OK (Oh yes, one more positive there ... ‘processing seems to be fine’, which is a great relief.  I’m getting there.); but getting a more ‘accurate’ initial exposure with the tripod is perhaps preferable.  That said, I think I’ve felt more personally involved, if that makes sense, wandering the local lanes, unencumbered with too much equipment.

So – encouraged by the feedback; have noted some points for further thought; now time to move on.

Assignment One Submission

I have completed the shooting, processing and notes for Assignment One and submitted them to my tutor today.  The following includes extracts from the notes submitted plus a few other comments and the selection submitted.

The images have been created over a two month period from 25^th February 2012 to 24^th April 2012.  All are taken within approximately ten minutes walk of my home, in keeping with the assignment title ‘Your own neighbourhood’.  The outings have all taken place between around 10am and 17.30pm, and I have deliberately worked in varying light – dull/overcast and brighter sunlight – though in the latter case I have not worked in the middle part of the day when contrasts can be very harsh

I’ve done the submission a shared Dropbox folder, the first time I’ve used that approach (seems appropriate for this course!).  I’ve also gone a bit overboard on the submissions, I suspect, uploading TIFFS and High Quality JPEGS.  I shot over a hundres images in total, at about 40 different ‘locations’; but from that I pulled out 35 images for a ‘long-list’.  In line with earlier comments on here about this assignment,  I have tried to allow the personal, emotional reaction to motivate my original creation of images and to inform the selection of these 35 ‘best’ outcomes.  There is some variety of style in the 35 – again, a deliberate attempt to not restrict myself.

However, when making the final selection from the 35, I have sought to achieve greater consistency, and several images didn’t make it for that reason.  There are some obvious themes, such as the stone and the moss; but also, perhaps, ideas about history, brokenness, makeshift, decay, man & nature.  I think some images might be reminiscent of the landscape work of Jem Southam, which has always interested me, but they also relate to the George Shaw’s paintings that I discussed earlier. There is a deliberate order to the images, based loosely on three ideas – a degree of narrative progression; a degree of light progression (not entirely consistent, but present nonetheless); and an element of rhythm in the orientation (portrait/landscape).

I decided against the use of text.  First and foremost, I didn’t feel comfortable with the quality of the words that I had come up with in the earlier post on here – a bit too much like greetings cards, as I said at the time.  With a lot more work and thought, the idea could work, but it seems excessive to pursue it further on this assignment, so I have worked with a more straightforward photographic sequence.  Here are the images.

Overall, I am pleased with the outcome and satisfied that it does represent a personal but interesting and accurate reflection on the immediate neighbourhood in which I live.  Of course, if I had set out to document the character of the area in its broadest sense, then it would have been a different set of images, with more people and events, for example; but I see stone, dilapidation, history, ruggedness, absurdity, survival, adaptation, and that is what I have tried to represent.  Man is present in every one of these images, even though there isn’t a single person actually shown.

I still have plenty to learn from the technical point of view and some images might benefit from further processing and/or may have been done better at capture.  Perhaps fifteen is a lot of images to submit and I should have edited further.  I did, actually, but came back to the fifteen that seemed to tell a more thorough story. So, generally, a satisfactory outcome but there is scope for criticism in the detail.

Roger Ballen

It’s been hard to escape Roger Ballen over the last few weeks – an OCA study visit publicised on WeAreOCA provoked some initial discussion; a posting in the OCA Flickr group led to even more; then an article in British Journal of Photography; and a fellow OCA student attending his masterclass and reporting on the experience in her blog.

It is all connected with the major exhibition of his work at the Manchester Art Gallery, of course - Shadow Land: Photographs 1983-2011.  I didn’t previously know much about him or his work; and my initial reaction to the images as they have appeared in the press and on the internet recently has not been particularly positive.  But it has, as I say, been hard to escape them and they have crept into my consciousness to such an extent that I felt I had to go and look at them.  I visited the exhibition last weekend.  Still the images don’t feel to speak directly to me; I don’t see something in them or about them that engages me – yet, I havn’t been able to let them go either.

Interesting to observe other people’s reaction – most people feel a very definite sense of repulsion at some of the work, yet most people can’t look away either.  They are uncomfortable and challenging images.  I could try to analyse why – the dirt, perhaps; the disturbing subject matter of his early more documentary work; the surreal and bizarre scenes in his more recent work; and so on.  I have felt compelled to read more about him, and I could summarise that here in my learning log/blog – the fact that he is essentially a formalist; that the work explores his own mind; that his work also finds inspiration in the natural world; and so on.  I could write about his life – son of someone who worked for Magnum; direct contact with Kertesz, Cartier Bresson etc.

However, what I have found myself exploring and what I want to write about here, is the process of making art.  Ballen’s images are both beautiful – their crafting and their presentation – and repelling; but how do they come about?  What process does he go through that results in the bizarre outcomes in Asylum?  And how can his way of working help and inform my own?

Ballen is almost exactly the same age as me.  Our lives couldn’t have been much more different but we all tend, I think, to feel an affinity with those whose experiential span is a close match to our own.  He has been a ‘photographer’ for fifty years, but says that he didn’t really sell a picture until he was fifty years old.  So, here is the first important message to extract from his creative process.  Ballen’s art is something that he does because he wants to, not because he seeks to make money from it. He is dedicated to it, and has been throughout his life, even though he has a career as a geologist.

Alongside dedication we might put the word discipline.  Those words often run together and they apply to Ballen.  He works on his art in the afternoon, he says, in this interview; does admin and geology work in the morning and then turns to his art between about 12.30 and 5pm.  Even when he was a full time geologist, he would spend dedicated time on his photography.  So Ballen makes regular time for his art and practises it in a manner comparable to any ‘job’.  He may talk about his work in metaphors – mining the interior of his mind and bringing the results back to the surface for all to see – but the professional craft of bringing it into being is a carefully disciplined process.

That same interview contained the answer to another question that had been in my mind when looking at his current work.  How does he actually go about creating the scenes that he photographs? Walter Guadagnini, in an Aperture article that is featured on Ballen’s own site here, says “... now the obsessive filling-up of that ... space ... gives prominence to the presence of the author’s interventions during the preparatory stage.”  I found myself also concerned to understand that.  He doesn’t sketch out the scene beforehand, it seems, but puts the objects together physically in the space.  So I think of him going to his ‘studio’ (we’ll call it that, though I have no information to that effect) after lunch; moving into his creative space; bringing together objects, animals, people (sometimes, but less often these days); building a ‘set’ or a ‘still life’; working on the lighting (he uses flash); setting up his camera; looking at the set up (which does sometimes include live birds and animals); and waiting for the moment to open the shutter.  In other words – to state the obvious – he is a photographer, working with subject, light, camera etc like the rest of us.  The lighting, the textures, the composition, the framing, the quality of the prints in the exhibition, and so on – it is, I think, the quality of his craft that compels us as much as anything in his work.  Ballen is a craftsman using well honed and practised photographic skills to present his art.  No great surprise in that, of course, but it is a simple and powerful message for those of us still exploring how we too can express ourselves through photography.

And my fourth and final thought in this context is that Ballen found a voice and has continued to speak through it.  The exhibition expresses superbly the creative journey that he has made over the last 30 years or so.  The work he produces now is so very different from the early images of remote rural townships, and yet the voice is so very familiar.  He comments himself, in the interview, that he worked with the same type of people, as he went from documenting to directing, that many of the items – wires etc – that he uses now were present in his early works.  The textures of walls and fabrics; the presence of dirt; the animals – all are present in the township images.  The stunning tones of grey in his images – they demonstrate the craft again, but also provide an essential and consistent undertone to his creative voice as well.

I am probably going to go back and take another look at the exhibition.  I remain unmoved by Ballen’s work, at the personal emotional level, but I am fascinated, even inspired, by the man and his creative process.  I don’t feel a great desire to look at his images, but I do feel there is a great deal that I can learn from them, and from the man himself.

Assignment One – update

This course and its blog have taken a bit of a back seat over the last few weeks because I have been working on my final assignment for People & Place.  That is progressing well, with the shooting due to be completed this week.  Things have not been entirely idle on the PwDP front, however.  I did have two or three sessions out and about with the camera a few weeks ago; and there are a few ‘contenders’ for the assignment submission.  I have also, in line with the approach on the People & Place assignment, been wondering whether text might have a role to play.  Don’t want to overdo that angle of course, but I have at least been playing with the notion that titles, with short individual supporting comments, might work for the ‘Your own neighbourhood’ theme.

I have tried to go along with my plans for a more personal representation of the neighbourhood in which I live, and here are one or two examples of what I had in mind.

The Dark Side

This is the dark side of the valley and sometimes, in winter, the sun can seem a long way off.

Absurdity

When the light is beautiful, it illuminates every

Dilemma

Which way to go – more sheep or more development?

Seeing something special

Colour, texture, rhythm, contrast - all around us, wherever we look

Uphill

Sometimes it feels like everywhere is uphill - either that or you're on the way down!

They’re just ideas and I may not use them, but I’m quite taking to this image/text combination.  I would need to be very careful not to end up with something resembling the cryptic greeting cards genre, and one or two of these may be heading that way, perhaps all of them!  However, it’s some food for thought and I’m partly logging it here to record some progress on the assignment.

RPS 154th International Print Exhibition – Study Visit, 9th March 2012

As an RPS member for 3 years, I have been aware of this annual competition but this is the first time I have had an opportunity to see the travelling exhibition that results each year. There were 120 images on show, chosen from just under 3000 entries – from all over the world, as the title suggests. I have to say, in honesty, that I approached the exhibition with some degree of scepticism, fearing, in short, that it might display more of the RPS’ tradition than a celebration of photography today. Having seen it, I think the scepticism was misplaced and, whilst that RPS tradition was present in no small numbers, the overall reality was an extremely wide range of images representing many photographic genres, both traditional and contemporary.

The images are here and the catalogue is downloadable as a pdf on that page.

The very wide diversity of images on display has a number of implications:

· It certainly makes for interesting comparisons.

· It confirms, maybe even celebrates, the diversity of the photographic practice. The RPS President in the intro to the catalogue says that it combines “contemporary cutting edge and more traditional work”. Just how cutting are the edges on display might be open to debate – but some are certainly edgy.

· It means that the hanging of the exhibition has its challenges. Where there was an attempt to put together themes, it was sometimes a little forced; and the 'hanger' can end up, with ‘odds and ends’, which certainly seemed to happen here on occasions. Going down the ‘random’ route has its merits, but it then challenges the viewer to cope with the variety that meets the eye on any particular occasion. All-in-all, the hanging of this exhibition didn’t trouble me a great deal – other than the very practical fact that some images were hung a bit high for those of average/short stature (and those of us looking through varifocal lenses)!

· This level of diversity in an open competition does mean that one is, on the whole, viewing individual images outside of their context and without any supporting information about the artist or their intention. Some are very obviously part of a series. One can always do more research afterwards, of course – see below – but it can make the ‘reading’ in the exhibition difficult and it certainly led to a large part of the discussion that took place during and after the visit.

One striking factor was the truly international nature of the exhibition with, in particular, many Asian photographers represented. This may partly reflect the international reputation of the RPS.

There was a lot of ‘over-processing’ (in my opinion), though it wasn’t as prominent or dominant as I had feared. It was no bad thing to be able to make direct comparisons between heavily HDR-ed landscapes/cityscapes and those images with more obvious ‘purpose’. I don’t recall any of the former generating discussion amongst the group!

With 120 images on display, it isn’t possible to include comment on all, or even very many of them. Indeed it isn’t even easy to spend much time looking at most of them whilst present. I am going to focus on a few that were the subject of significant discussion, and which I have subsequently followed up with further online research.

I’ll start with the striking images – there were two in the exhibition – from Tobias Slater Hunt’s Closer to God series. This is a classic example of how viewing just 1 or 2 images tells only a tiny fragment of the whole story. The distinctly unglamorous and deadpan portraits of two naked women, both with, seemingly, disfigured faces, will have caught the attention of everyone visiting the exhibition. Few will, one suspects, have taken the trouble to find out more, and many will have gone away unsure just what is going on. As soon as I went to research further, I realised that I had seen another image from this series –at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait exhibition, which I wrote about previously here. Having read Slater-Hunt’s statement, I admit that I am still not very clear. ‘Closer to God’ is itself part of a wider piece of work, linking to Dante’s Inferno and Renaissance paintings, whilst also reflecting the photographers own experience of living with chronic illness. The images are manipulated –and does that mean the ‘disfigurements’ are themselves not real? The question is still hanging in the air for me – but I don’t feel motivated to explore the complexity of the work any further. The images on display certainly provoke questions, but how far can those questions take the viewer without at least some of this background?

Another image that provoked much discussion was Aaron Dempsey’s ‘The Dolls School’. A young girl, dressed in a white cotton nightdress, sits on one side of a double bed, looking, without expression, into the camera (i.e. directly at the viewer). The bedclothes are folded back and there are two pillows. The bedroom has an ‘old-fashioned’ look and there is an open fire burning in a fireplace beside the bed. Above the brass bed end hangs an image (could be painting or could be photo) showing a young girl ‘schooling’her dolls. There was discussion of the photographer’s intent, in what was clearly a carefully ‘staged’ image. Many felt that it hinted, quite powerfully, at child abuse, in one context or another. Further investigation reveals that Aaron Dempsey does indeed stage his (assumption here – regarding gender) images, and that this is from a sequence entitled ‘Dreams’. This series recreates female dreams, mainly fear-related, as recounted by the dreamer. This particular one is that of a six year old girl and can best be seen, with the rest, via Dempsey’s Facebook page, here. Dempsey’s work feels inspired by the likes of Gregory Crewdson. If my gender assumption is correct, the exploration of female dreams is interesting. Another useful observation, for me, would be to note the effectiveness of the use of text/caption when the images are presented on the Facebook page as opposed to the single, uncaptioned (though titled) image in the exhibition. As already discussed in a previous post here, I am certainly going to use text as part of the image presentation for my final assignment in People& Place.

The‘winner’ of the informal OCA Study Visit competition for best photo went to ‘Recess’by Feng Zhang, which I can’t reproduce here and nor can I find a link, other than to say that it is on page 70 of the catalogue. Two young girls are sleeping, presumably in a break from their schooling because they are lying on wooden tables with their heads resting on colourful ‘Western-style’ school bags. We are looking from directly above them, perhaps from a balcony, and can see the rough concrete floor beneath their tables, a worn and crumbling wall, plus various wooden stools around the tables. The stools and the tables are of old, heavy rough-hewn wood, in contrast to the girls’ more modern dress and their up-to-date school bags. The lighting is soft and natural, highlighting the two girls across the centre of the frame. The tones, the textures, the subtle colours, the soft lighting, and the quality of the print all made it an eye-catching image, but further looking raises questions about the intent – the contrast between the old and the new, the softness of the human forms with the hardness of the wood and concrete, the anomaly of sleeping in such rough hard surroundings, and so on. The angle of the shot – looking down on the scene, implies a captured moment, even if it is, in reality, a posed shot. The natural light and the gentleness with which the image has been processed lends it a realistic feel, whether or not it is in fact ‘real’.

Which I find to be in sharp contrast with another image much discussed on the visit – 'Goal' by Chan Kwok Hung. This is certainly a striking image, with young boys – Buddhist monks in training – playing football, seemingly on a hillside. The colours and the composition, not least the captured instance, absolutely grab the viewer’s attention. Striking as it may be, however, the image made me uncomfortable. The heavy processing, the unnaturalness of the light (the source of which is very hard to pin down), the perfection of the composition (such as the ball in the very centre of the image and exactly positioned between the two main protagonists in the football game) all made the image feel unreal. I found myself questioning its veracity and wondering whether it was, in fact, a manipulation. It may not be –but if that is the case, the photographer hasn’t done himself any favours, in my view, by presenting it in this ‘other-wordly’ style.

Another general reflection that has run through my mind after the event takes me back again to some previous thoughts on painting and photography. There were a few images in the exhibition with the ‘painterly’ feel about them – ‘Mist’ by Jialiang Luo and ‘Okavango Scene with Wild Dogs’ by John Cucksey being two (very different) such images that spring to mind. One could question the point of creating a photographic image that has the look of a painting. But then likewise, one could question the point of painters who paint in an ultra-real, ‘photographic’ style– Gerhard Richter being one highly respected example, and I discussed others in my blog after seeing the BP Portrait Prize exhibition last year. It’s certainly an interesting debating point and, at the very least, a challenging observation that artists from these two different mediums choose to work in this way. Are the photographers frustrated painters and/or the painters mocking the photographers? To my mind it is the intention and the outcome that matters, not a generic view of which is right/wrong/best/appropriate or whatever.

So, many thanks to Gareth, Jose, and Maggie (who I am tempted to refer to as Mary!) (a comment that will only be meaningful to those present!) for organising and attending another useful and interesting study visit; it has certainly provoked some useful reflection and learning for me.