Assignment Two – Considering Options

Over the two weeks since I last posted on the topic of Assignment Two, I have made some limited progress on that original concept; given some serious thought to a second idea; and then, just a few days ago, come up with a third option that will, I think, prove to be the one I take forward for submission.

Starting off with the original concept, I did produce another version that repositioned the bars and arranged them in a way that resembled a window.

I continue to see possibilities in this approach, but there are issues that would need to be addressed – I think – to give it a quality look.  The sea isn’t right.  It should shimmer to give a sense of the Mediterranean heat.  That involves using an image where the sun is more or less directly opposite the camera and reasonably high in the sky.  I experimented at a local reservoir when out for a walk.

One thought would be to drop something like this into the bottom of the version above, but because the water isn’t actually stretching away to the horizon, it would never look right.  I could find an opportunity to create an image at the seaside.  On the face of it, that is a relatively straightforward approach; but it would need to be suitably sunny day with a coastline facing South into the sun – not impossible by any means, but would take a bit of planning and isn’t going to happen quickly.  I could use a stock photo, as Eileen suggested in a comment on my earlier post.  I even bounced that idea off my tutor & he agreed that it would, in these circumstances, be a legitimate approach.  Looking at several contemporary book covers confirms that this is the most common solution for designers.  So, that option remains – though it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in the context of a photography degree.

I also feel that, to work effectively, I would probably need to use a more appropriate face.  I even had a look around to see if there is a local photographic model agency – but since my options for the assignment have now broadened, I don’t think I’ll need to pursue that any further.  In essence, this first concept is a good one, which I could work with, but which is going to take quite a bit more time and organisation to bring about in a properly professional format i.e. something better than this basic ‘sketch’ version.

I have also been mulling over a second contemporary option.  This partly came about from thinking about who actually buys copies of The Outsider.  Because it is a ‘classic’ novel, not many people, if any, are going to pick it up and make an impulse purchase.  In fact, students of literature are likely to be the most frequent purchasers.  So I began to wonder how the novel could be presented in a 21^st century context.  Working on the idea that technology might be a driver for alienation in today’s world (the equivalent of Camus’ bright light an heat) and linking it to Meursault’s behaviour at his mother’s funeral (or at least society’s interpretation of his behaviour), I came up with this.  A row of people, dressed in black, are facing a coffin on a dais, with their backs to the camera.  The person on the right is turned to one side and is sending or reading a text message on a mobile phone.  I’m guessing that would be just the kind of thing a 21^st century Meursault might do, and that it could easily be misunderstood by those around him.  Then my other contemporary twist on the story would be to make that person a young woman!

This concept appeals to me a lot – but it has the very obvious downside that it is even more difficult to set up than the first option.  Getting access to a coffin and four or five people who were willing to dress up in black and able to make themselves available for such a shoot – well, could be done, but likely to take some time.  I think, if I were a professional photographer working with a designer on a genuine assignment, I’d be quite keen to pursue this one.  As a Level Two distance learner working on my own, I’m less inclined!

Actually, reaching that conclusion made me reflect on my whole motivation for doing what I’m doing.  Am I just backing off from these two ideas because it’s too much trouble & does that throw into question my commitment in how I approach my studies. Or, on the other hand, as a part-time, mature, ‘2^nd level’ distance learner, is my second assignment important enough to start putting other people to a lot of trouble, as would be necessary for the second option.  And anyway, if my instincts are to create in isolation, should I be pursuing concepts that fit with that approach.  Or is that just a convenient ‘get-out’?  And, were I to make that extra effort, would I discover that I can work in more challenging and demanding ways and ultimately get more out of it?  They’re worthwhile questions.

Either fortunately, or because I started thinking that way, I have now come up with option three, which I think has the potential to deliver a sound result, fit with my ‘need’ for something that is under my control, and hopefully show off my photographic capabilities as well.  It is a relatively simple conceptualisation of the notion of ‘the outsider’ in a form that I can create in a sort of ‘table-top’ scale, but which might also reflect some other specific aspects of the novel.  I’m working on how to execute it – the ‘props’; the scale; the ‘set-up’; the lens; the lighting etc – but I won’t go into further detail yet.  Stay tuned!

"Land Matters"

I have just finished reading Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity by Liz Wells.  It has taken a while.  She is rarely an easy read and it has been heavy going in places – sometimes dry and uninspiring, to be truthful. But, the first read of a book such as this is often about familiarisation – with what is there and where it is – so that one knows what to consult it about and where to go for the information.  It is good to see a contemporary theory book on Landscape.  It brings the genre right up to date (well almost – she says that the manuscript was completed in 2007) and so gives an excellent point of reference through which to link contemporary landscape practice with cultural thinking.  I have just re-read her personal comments in the Preface and it made me recognise that, through all the (often dry) surveying of modern landscape photography, the book does retain some sense of the personal interest and enthusiasm, which is good to see.

It opens with a general introduction on the landscape genre – history, context, theory, cultural links with painting.  This will certainly be a good chapter to re-read, at some stage, for its theoretical and contextual overview.  She follows with four lengthy chapters that are, essentially, surveys of landscape practice in North America, Britain and Scandinavia (and the Baltic, actually, to be accurate).   A great deal of ground is covered with many examples – some of these will be worthy of follow-up, particularly the last of these sections, covering Northern Europe.  The photographers she discusses there, from Scandinavia and the Baltic States, are, almost without exception, unknown to me before; and she links the landscape photography of the region with national identity, which was also interesting alongside the current BBC TV Series on The Vikings.  It’s probably fair to say that, despite the historical and cultural contribution that we inherit from the very North of the European mainland, we don’t always pay it the attention it deserves.

In the final chapter, she pulls it all together under the heading ‘Sense of Location’.  It’s a chapter that is “... concerned with the inter-relation of image and memory.”  I feel that the sense of the personal comes back strongly here.  Yes, the work is learned and academic; yes, she is writing in a theoretical context; but I also get the sense of landscape photography happening in a highly personal sphere that relates to the individual’s (photographer and viewer) own space, emotions, senses, memory, etc – even some sense of her own personal response.

I’m glad I’ve got this book and have read it; I will be going back into it on a regular basis, I’m sure – for both resource and inspiration.  It is an academic book, and so it does require effort to read and study, but that is no bad thing.  And there are rewards for the effort, in terms of understanding and enlightenment.

Assignment Two – Exploring the idea

Taking forward the idea that I discussed at the end of my last post, I initially sketched it out on paper.  I cannot draw!  Repeat – I cannot draw!  So, whilst that exercise might have helped me clarify things a little bit in my own mind, it certainly wouldn’t have successfully communicated anything to anyone else!  I stuck the drawing into a rough notebook that I keep, so somewhere down the line, an assessor will see it.  Heaven forbid!

In pursuit of something more meaningful and useful, I have subsequently had a go at mocking something up in Photoshop, using existing images.  This was the first effort.  It’s the full wrap-round cover, front, spine and back.

This incorporates the sea and the ‘looking’.  I printed it on plain paper and wrapped it round my paperback version of the book and, amazingly, it didn’t look too bad.  The colours work OK, I think, with the rather warm skin tones in the forehead being reminiscent of sand or sun.  In a final version, I would want to have the sun reflecting off the sea, too; so there would need to be a specific image made at a seaside location, when the sun is at its height.  I would also want to incorporate some other elements from the book – but not too many, I feel, having now produced this initial ‘sketch’.  Too much information is likely to confuse the outcome.  Immediate thoughts included – perspiration on the brow, to add to the sense of heat; maybe a barred window, alluding to Meursault’s imprisonment and looking through the window at the sky; possible flies, which do crop up at least once in the book.

I’d need to find a location for the barred window & can’t immediately think of one, but to test the idea for my ‘sketch’, I created an image through some railings.  That led to the following version.

I tried to do something clever with vignetting, which didn’t quite work, but the principle is there.  Fired up with enthusiasm, I have then had a shot at creating the ‘perspiration’.  Working with an assistant, a bowl of water, and a lot of trial and error (though little actual perspiration!), I got to this.

I’m not sure this version of the ‘bars’ works as well as the previous – perhaps the square crop in the previous is more indicative of a small prison window?  I wonder whether it would work best to spread the bars across more of the image, too – something else to explore. Getting the perspiration right is going to be a tough one, too – but could be done.  No flies, unfortunately, and that might be a step too far.

I’m posting these experiments to my learning log as an alternative to drawing out the idea.  I feel more comfortable manipulating and experimenting in Photoshop than I do trying to sketch out my thoughts.  But – creating something real and visual is essential.  It’s all very well having ideas in the mind but they need to be visualised.  Taking that approach one step further, this is what my experimental version would look like as a front cover.

Needs more work, but it could be suitably eye-catching – the stare!

Assignment Two – some research & thinking

Assignment Two asks me to design a book jacket – front, spine and back, for a work of fiction selected from a list of titles in the notes.  I have chosen ‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus.  It’s a book that I (along with several million other people) originally read in my twenties, alongside his ‘Myth of Sisyphus’ essay.  The philosophy of the absurd has stayed with me ever since.  It’s a short book, but I’ve re-read it twice to make up for that (really!).  Since I already knew it quite well, I was fully aware, when I made this choice, that it might not be an easy one to represent in a cover.  The research that I’ve done certainly confirms that!  I’ll come back to the challenge and possible solutions, but to summarise, the philosophy that ‘life has no higher meaning and so man’s strivings are absurd’ (something of a simplification but not far off) doesn’t necessarily have easy visual connotations – except, perhaps, Sisyphus rolling his stone.

One piece of research was to find some examples of the way that it has been represented on covers before.  The book was first published, as “L’Etranger”, in 1942, so there were likely to be a few to go at.  I went onto the Book Cover Archive and Amazon (UK, France, USA, Germany, Italy), where I found 16 different versions, which are illustrated here:

 



 

I have to say that I don’t find any of them especially inspiring; confirming my concerns that this book is not an easy one to deal with.  There are, natuarlly, several lone figures, with the ‘folio’ French edition showing a sillhouetted male figure against abrightly lit background is the most ‘obvious’;  but this one, in truth, doesn’t bear any relation that I can see to the novel itself.  I quite like the German ‘Der Fremde’ version, for its simplicity and because the bright light and heat that the photo implies, are recurring themes in the book and the suited figure with his umbrella could well be attending Meursault’s mother’s funeral.  The Italian version does ‘place’ quite well – the novel is set in Algiers – but I have no idea what is going on in the version with a man sitting on a desk talking to two other characters!

Some further Internet research revealed that, in late 2010, The Folio Society chose ‘The Outsider’ for its inaugural illustration competition.  Their News Article from August 2011 says, of The Outsider’s main character, Meursault:

“It is his failure to show remorse, perhaps, more than his crime, that condemns him.  Expressing this alienation visually is a challenge.”  [My emphasis]

Reading that confirmed, again, my sense that this is not an easy book to deal with visually.  The problem, I guess, is precisely its philosophical connotations.  One is drawn into trying to present concepts such as alienation (though it is debateable to what extent that is actually a theme in the book) and the absurdity of human existence.  The winner of the Folio Society’s competition, Matthew Richardson, at least had the relative luxury of a series of illustrations as opposed to a single cover image.  The Book was published this year and won a V&A award.  The illustrations are shown in full on Matthew Richardson's website. The use of collage, the feel of ‘the time’ (shades of mid-twentieth century surrealism), and the selection of colours achieve an effective combination of ordinariness and strangeness, all at once – absurdity!

Of course, researching what other people have done with this challenge is all very well, but this needs to be my illustration.  I have also accessed the Spark Notes information about The Stranger (the books title in the USA).  It has helpful summaries of the main themes – the irrationality of the universe; the meaninglessness of human life; the importance of the physical world – and motifs – decay & death; watching and observation.  As I’ve already observed, these are not simple ideas to convey in a single cover, but at least this provides useful definitions of the concepts with which I’m dealing.

I have, also, been thinking about possible approaches for the cover.  My thoughts have included:

·         Finding a specific scene from the book and illustrating it – this has its merits and is an approach often taken, of course.  In fact, one of the sample covers above does exactly that, with a line drawing of the actual ‘shooting’ scene.  One of the merits is that, having chosen the scene, the way forward from there is neatly focused – set up the scene, find the props, find the model(s), and so on.  It is potentially quite a bit of work, but it is focused.  The downsides are a) choosing a scene (the one above makes it look like a crime novel!) and b) the tendency to over-simplify what is a complex, if short, novel.

·         I have given some thought to the idea of bringing the story into the present day, maybe even bringing it close to ‘home’.  Two particular versions of this approach might be:

§  A contemporary take, exploring what might characterise a Meursault-like individual in the early 21^st century; for example, rather than the ideas of ‘sun, heat and bright light’ that seem to contribute to Meursault’s alienation in 1940s Algiers, what about ‘Technology’ as the alienating force?  I can see possibilities in this one – though I’d need to be confident that such a contemporary approach was valid.

§  Another somewhat ‘off-the-wall’ idea is the set the novel in Yorkshire – again, perhaps, in the 21^st century.  I do recognise that I’m partly motivated by finding an approach that is conveniently manageable for me, personally, but I also quite like the idea of thinking through such an adaptation.

·         Going back to the themes and motifs is still, perhaps, the most likely, and one of Matthew Richardson’s illustrations has set me thinking.  I could work around the theme of ‘the importance of the physical world’ and combine that with the motif of ‘watching and observation’.  I’m thinking of an eye, maybe a pair of eyes, with one wrapping round the spine and onto the back.  I can see this linking with the idea of the eyes as the window of the mind, a way into Meursault’s thoughts.  Then I’m wondering about layered images (faintly visible through the eye) of some of the stronger physical scenes or elements in the novel – the beach; sun and heat; looking at the sky – and maybe some beads of sweat running down a forehead above the eye(s).  The eye(s) is/are in the lower half of the cover; there is a suggestion of a forehead above, fading away into a single colour (the bright sunlight, maybe), across which the title and author appear.

This as far as I should take things at the moment, I reckon.  I have read the book a couple of times in the last few weeks, and made some notes of scenes/ideas from that.  I need to let these things wash over me, perhaps play around with one or two of the ideas above – but I’m making some progress, I think.

Photography Workshop – Leeds

This is a tricky one – there is so much I could say!  Two days spent with 19 other OCA Photography students; 2 OCA tutors; and 2 external speakers – how could it be anything other than a positive and uplifting experience?  It was – a great weekend.  And we’re eternally grateful to Penny & Eileen for organising it.  I don’t, in this post, intend to try and summarise the whole event but, as befits a Learning Log, attempt to reflect on the things that I take away from it.

Three days spent with fellow students is invaluable to a distance learner.  Forums are fine; but to look peers in the face and exchange views & ideas in a manner where there is a genuine chance to read the body language, hear the inferences, respond to the signals – that is what we all miss out on, most of the time.  This was a diverse group in many senses – experience, age, gender, background, and so on – which makes for a rich experience; but the common purpose and the mutual understanding & support were plain to see and greatly to be valued.  Two days of face-to-face contact with tutors was of immense value too – and the interaction between them and the group developed positively as the weekend progressed, I thought.  Yet, all these are generic gains from such an event.  I’m keen to step beyond that and look for personal development points.

There were two external speakers - Mishka Henner and Peter Rudge from duckrabbit .  Full marks to Peter for a highly professional and enthusiastically presented session on the concept and creation of the photofilm, which was, I know, inspirational for many of my fellow students.  But it was Mishka, the artist, the ‘photographer without a camera’, who captivated me, personally. Why?

There is a conviction about him, a solidity that inspires, almost through understatement.  He seemed to give of himself, without actually giving anything away.  He was (I think) open, honest, uncompromising, yet engaged, listening, and responsive.  He is (I’d say) dedicated, thorough, determined and highly focused, yet personable, amusing and communicative.  Sounds like I’m giving him a character reference!!!  His work is fascinating, original and, yes, inspiring – but I find myself reflecting on him, as a person.

I suppose I’ve reacted in a similar when listening to other artists - Dinu Li at the Cornerhouse Manchester, J H Engstrom at the NMM.  I find myself wanting to understand them as people; wanting to analyse them and get under the skin of their creativity.  And, fundamentally of course, understand how I might develop my own creativity.  That has to come from within me, I know, but I’m interested, very interested, in how other people have got there.

Which brings me to Jesse Alexander’s  presentation of his MA project, Threshold Zone . I’m into tricky territory again!!  Jesse is my tutor and will read this – but I’m reflecting on his experience of creativity and how it might inform my own!  Well, anticipating that one of my conclusions is likely to be that you step boldly on towards your goal – here I go.

I took something in particular from this session, something about being prepared to take the uncomfortable and uncertain step.  Jesse’s work involved photographing underground spaces; and the Threshold Zone refers specifically (if I’ve understood) to the space between the entrance and the point at which there is perpetual darkness.  In one context, he described his own reticence to move further until he, effectively, stepped into the darkness and created the image of the space from which he had stepped ... or at least that’s how I interpreted it.

What a metaphor – presumably intentional – for the creative process.  Have the confidence and conviction (back to Mishka, there) to move forward, into the space that feels uncertain; be prepared to explore what feels uncomfortable; and something new, some better appreciation of who you are and where you’ve been emerges.

That even takes me back to Roger Ballen , the geologist/artist who compares his creativity to mining – making deeper and deeper visits to the depths of his own mind and coming back with new finds.

I can’t resolve these thoughts; and doing so is, by nature, a very personal thing ... not something I’m ready for at the moment.  But I never expected that two days in Leeds would take me off searching the dark corners of my own mind!!  And I only had one glass of wine throughout the whole weekend.  It must have been the water!  (Or the chips!)

Experiment with layouts

Alarmingly, it is almost a month since I posted anything into this blog!  That reflects a period of time when I’ve been preoccupied with some family activities and OCA Student Association work.  However, my course work has made a little bit of progress and here I want to write up the exercise that requires me to experiment with layouts.  The course notes supply a ‘mock-up’ comprising an image (represented in the notes by a grey, ‘portrait-oriented’ rectangle); a caption (beneath the ‘image’); a heading; and some text.  We’re asked to experiment with typefaces, italics, bold, etc, to produce three different versions of this layout.

Clearly, this exercise is kept deliberately vague in order to encourage me to explore and experiment in Photoshop, which I have done.  I deliberately went for a very simple approach first, just to get an initial feel for what I was doing.  I did decide to use an actual image, so that I had some sort of concept to work with, and this first version is, I would suggest, something like a somewhat unsophisticated journal for those with an ‘academic’ interest in telegraph poles.

This basic start raised some of the very basic questions of layout.

·         What crop of image is going to work on the page? Which leads to questions about margin size and so on.

·         When it comes to creating boxes for text, there are some basic issues about font size and its relationship to the text box, rest of page, and so on.  With caption, heading and text, there are three quite different functions to perform.

·         How much text will actually fit onto a page? How will the paragraphs be laid out?  What spacing?

As I’ve said, this first version is kept very simple just explore these basic issues and the outcome is decidedly unsophisticated.  The block paragraphs in a non-serif font (Arial) would actually be quite challenge to read.  As I was doing it, I had the feeling that this ‘simple’ font would be most effective, but it certainly isn’t.  Another basic issue – I didn’t ask for hyphenation, so the software has split up words across the lines.  It looks quite neat at first glance, but it would be almost impossible to read!

In the second version, I decided to pick up on some of these issues and to go for something more like a Fine Art journal.

There is much more white space around the image on the left, in line with common practice in such publications.  I’ve gone for a serif font (Georgia), which does work better, I think, although my use of italics (intended to give it a more ‘arty feel’) maybe pushes it too far.  Then I’ve gone with left-justification, double spacing between paragraphs, and hyphenation, all of which creates more of a flowing, poetic feel to it.  There is still maybe a bit too much text here, on the right hand page, for an art journal, but the layout does feel as though it has had a bit more thought than the first effort.

Which leads me to version three, where I have deliberately been rather more experimental.  This has been done with half an eye on the forthcoming book cover assignment.

I’m not entirely sure what sort of magazine this represents – might be a popular engineering journal or an environmental publication?  However, some of the significant developments from the first two versions include:

·         Using a photo bleed across the whole of the double page spread;

·         Use of eye-catching colours;

·         Two columns of text;

·         Much less text on the page – get the reader interested in the article first, then give them the detail on later pages;

·         White text on a dark background.

In assessing the three, one has to say that it’s horses for courses, as in so many situations.  The first, very simple version, would definitely not work in a popular magazine for the mass market – but telegraph pole enthusiasts might well be riveted, whatever the layout!  The third version shows what can be done, even with a limited level of knowledge and creativity, but there is real scope for getting it wrong – as with the excessive use of bright colours and the dangerous territory of white text on a dark background.  I know, from previous experience with printed recruitment advertisements, that this can go seriously wrong and produce unreadable copy.  I havn’t got the balance right between the two columns of text, either.  I get the feeling that Photoshop isn’t brilliant for setting out a lot of text – which is why there is specialist publishing and layout software around.  I don’t have the time to look at it in further detail, but I suspect that setting up your text/layout elsewhere and then bringing it into Photoshop as an image/file is probably possible and preferable.

It’s been a useful exercise, however, and should have set up the basics for me to do the book cover layout assignment, since that isn’t likely to involve much more text than is in my third version above.

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.