Exercise—Three case studies

I enjoyed reading through the accounts of the three student works and viewing the images that accompanied them.

Question 1: I appreciated the thoughtful approach of all three photographers, but I found it more difficult to connect with Peter Mansell’s project. I have not been around illness or disability very much, so it is hard for me to get past imagining the situation that prompted the work. I admire Mansell for turning his world into a subject for documentary and artistic exploration. I don’t know how well I would fare under similar circumstances. I was taken with his point about how the project had given him a degree of emotional release—I found it very personal and poignant.

It was easier for me to enter into the worlds of Dewald Botha and Jodie Taylor because I could relate more easily to the issues that prompted them to begin their projects. Both are dealing with the intersections of identity and place, Botha as an outsider in place and Taylor as an insider in place, but from another time. Perhaps their reliance on metaphor and concept are easier for me to navigate and manage than the hard reality of Mansell’s world bound by disability and institutional health care.

Question 2: I don’t think I have any particular difficulty with the loss of authorial control: I accept it. In my academic work years ago I studied the history of interpretation of ancient texts and am accustomed to the idea that different readers bring different lenses to the same works for many different reasons. It is not a new idea to me at all. Much of my work life, too, has consisted of providing advice and being used to the fact that it may or may not be accepted, in part or in whole. I have a degree of control over how I shape and communicate my advice, but I cannot know how it might ultimately be received or used. In some cases—although not always!—this can lead to more interesting and richer discussions as others are able to bring new perspectives that I had not considered.

When it comes to the images I make, I don’t know that I have ever been very precious about how other people viewed them or projected onto them. At the same time, I admit that I have found it more difficult when people have reacted to them but not been able (or willing?) to offer a reason why. I’m happy to discuss and disagree, but I do find it annoying when an exchange is just a dead end.

People will read things as they will. As I come to care more about the images I produce it may be that my loss of control and the ‘misunderstandings’ of others may bother more than it currently does—it is easy to hold lightly those things in which we are not very invested. We’ll see how I do as I continue through the course and the program…

References

Peter Mansell Imagery (s.d.) At: http://paralysed.weebly.com/ (Accessed on 5 September 2019)

Photography and Nostalgia (2013) At: https://www.oca.ac.uk/weareoca/archived/photography-and-nostalgia/ (Accessed on 5 September 2019)

Ring Road (s.d.) At: https://www.dewaldbotha.net/ring-road.html (Accessed on 5 September 2019)

Exercise—Poem

For this exercise I have chosen to look at the poem, “I Own a House” by Mary Oliver (2010).

A couple of things strike me about the poem: its contemplative mood, and the way that it speaks of the tension between a sense of rootedness and a desire for freedom. The poem is a quiet meditation that places the domestic and the wild together.

I’m planning to interpret the poem with a limited number of photographs, in keeping with the understated approach that Oliver has taken with her words. The poem is not long, but manages to speak meaningfully. Given the that the poem has two ‘movements,’ I may restrict myself to just two photographs and let them play off each other. Before I begin, I’m thinking that I should make the images with some subtlety, particularly in the colour palette and in the intensity of the lighting. The idea is not to overwhelm the reader/viewer, but to invite contemplation.

Reference

Oliver, M. (2010) Swan: poems and prose poems. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.

Selecting a subject

This little section of Part 2 seems to have been dropped into the course without a necessary connection to what comes before it, but it raises a helpful point all the same. Part of the challenge of working through the material in the exercises and assignments is to use them to further work that is interesting to me, rather than just to fulfill the requirements for an academic program. It is not as if we will meet all the briefs for CAN simply as test pieces and then, once we have completed the OCA program, break out of the mould and begin making work for ourselves.

I suspect that some students do this more naturally than others. I see a range of approaches in the online fora and in the Hangouts: some students feel compelled to follow the brief to the letter, while others have a greater sense of freedom—or perhaps an inner need—to express something that is innate to them. For the second group, the personal work comes first and the exercise or assignment is adjusted to fit it.

At this point I think I am probably somewhere between the two poles: still concerned to respond well to the brief, but not content to meet it mechanically as a pure exercise or ‘sampler.’ I’d like to continue to move toward a greater sense of self-directed work, though, and will do what I can to feed that approach. I think that I could do that through more sustained reflection, openness to a wide range of input and the willingness to follow up on impulses without worrying too much about ‘getting it right.’

Onward.

Research point—Relay

Sophie Calle — Take Care of Yourself

The title of Calle’s work is taken from the last line of a breakup e-mail she received from her partner. Calle sent the text of the e-mail to 107 women in different lines of work and asked for their perspectives on the message. The responses, along with images made by the artist, were used as an installation.
The sheer variety of the responses points out the role of the reader in interpreting text and creating meaning, a key point in postmodernist literary theory.
Although Calle’s images appear alongside the responses she received, their number means that no one of them holds a place of privilege in determining the meaning of the text of the e-mail: “By circulating the letter to women of all ages, artistic and otherwise, Calle transforms the breakup into a survey of interpretation” (Fisher, 2009).
In addition, the responses of the 107 and the images made by Calle were produced independently and could be ‘read’ in multiple combinations, so each adds a potential layer of meaning without being definitive: neither the images nor the texts limit or determine the others’ meaning. Instead, texts and images can play off one another and provide additional, potential layers of meaning. The reader/viewer has a range of insights and interpretations to draw on.
What is interesting about the many interpretations offered by Calle’s collaborators is that they are based entirely upon a single text. As a postmodern work, the exhibit turns back on itself in that, although there are 107 interpretations, many of the interpreters seem to believe they are commenting on the behaviour of a man whom they know only through an e-mail. They are commenting in a ‘real’ way on a man who is, essentially, a reconstruction or a fiction based on almost no evidence at all. This leads to “[…] a dossier in text, photography and video [that] pours scorn on the boyfriend while lavishing Calle with sympathy” (Sophie Calle, ‘Take Care of Yourself, s.d.).
After cataloguing the number of interpretations and the forms they take, a number of reviewers acknowledge enjoying how a “persistent sense of female camaraderie is also achieved through the sheer entertainment value there is in seeing 107 women more or less humiliate a man” (Jankowicz, 2017). Again, it is perhaps less a man who is humiliated than the idea of a man, maybe a certain type of man or perhaps all men.
I agree that “[…] Calle’s work translates the broader feminine experience into a formalized world of possibilities. The ‘answers’ are less important than the forms of engagement and investigation, the invitation to construct meaning” (Fisher, 2009). But, for me, that construction of meaning affects not only interpretation of the text of the e-mail message, but also of the situation and actors who may (or may not!) have given rise to it as well as the interpreters themselves.

Sophy Rickett — Objects in the Field

Rickett’s installation comprises a set of prints of negatives taken through a telescope, accompanied by a brief text in several parts.
The images have been separated from their original scientific purpose, not only through time (they are now obsolete and were never of the best technical quality), but also through the way they are displayed. Instead of providing the prints with the usual type of tagging and metadata that accompany scientific observation, the photographs have been been produced and displayed according to visual or artistic criteria: some have been coloured and placed in sets, while others have been ordered by size in a sequence.
The parts of the accompanying text appear to be in roughly chronological order although they do not form a coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. Instead, each has some connection with vision or sight—an eye exam that reveals the need for glasses, a view from an aircraft and a short meditation on the night sky, a discussion with an astronomer (seemingly the one who made the exposures that were reworked for the installation), a glimpse from a train of an interaction between two children.
The text and the images play off each other in that they all represent momentary or partial views and the difficulties that we have with vision, either because our sight is poor or limited, our perception is only partial, or because we do not have enough time to observe fully. In this way the text that accompanies the images does not explain them, but provides them with added dimensions of meaning: not interpretations, but suggestions for further interpretive possibilities.
The title of the work—Objects in the Field—might also be a play on words in that it touches upon a field of vision or sight (eyes or the span of sky taken in by a telescopic), the apparent objectivity of the things we see, and the scientific activity of collecting objects for observation in field work (Sophy Rickett, 2013).
The work also plays on setting different ways of seeing beside each other: scientific observation (telescope and optometry), as part of human experience, and as an artistic vision of drawing out the tensions between these different ways of seeing. Rickett alludes to some of these tensions herself in an interview: “It looks at my attempts to find ways of aligning our very different practices, as well as my work as an artist with his as a scientist. But in the most part I fail. So the work came to be about a kind of symbiosis on the one hand, but on the other there is a real tension, a sense of us resisting one another. The material in the middle stays the same, but it’s kind of contested, fought over.”

KayLynn Deveney — The Day-to-Day Life of Alfred Hastings

Deveney’s project consists of 83 photographs and 77 handwritten captions by by her subject, Albert Hastings, along with some of Mr. Hasting’s poems, drawings and family photos.
The photographer presents the work as something that started as a documentary project and then evolved into a collaboration: “Early in this project Bert shared some intriguing thoughts and comments with me concerning my photographs of him. […] To better understand his feelings about being photographed and his reactions to my photographs, I asked Bert to caption small prints I kept in a pocket-sized notebook” (The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings, s.d.).
The combination of images and hand-written texts is a selection of moments observed in Mr. Hastings’ daily life. Many of his comments are just descriptive (“Bringing my scones from the oven”) while others are more interpretive and seem to give us a personal insight (“Could this be a presumptive picture of my futuristic soul regarding a past world and friends?” or “I’m not talking to a ghost / I’m opening the curtains”). Other comments allude directly to the planned nature of the joint project (“Feeding pigeons, net curtain in the way. We were quietly getting birds accustomed to camera”).
The combination of image and text is interesting in that gives the impression that the final product is not entirely within the photographer’s hands. Mr. Hastings’ comments do give the viewer a sense of access to his thoughts—rather than to Deveney’s—but they do tend to direct interpretation and help to conceal somewhat the fact that this is the photographer’s edited project. But it’s an appealing mix.

Karen Knorr — Gentlemen

Knorr’s series of 26 images and texts “photographed in English gentlemen’s clubs in Saint James’ in central London consider the patriarchal values of the English upper middle classes with text constructed out of speeches of parliament and news” ( Gentlemen, s.d.).
The result is a series of black and white images shot in square format with the brief texts run underneath in centre-justified lines displayed like poetry. The square monochrome images help to underline how staid and rigid the old boys network is. The texts—often incongruous or relating to the images only in a broadly thematic way—are often comical. The effect is to show up the patriarchal establishment as outmoded and ridiculous, without ever saying so directly. As satire and protest, it works.
The juxtaposition of images and texts from different sources requires the viewer to work to make sense of what appears in the frame. Deriving the meaning is like a puzzle to be chewed on and arrived at slowly—or perhaps not at all. I suppose that some viewers could look at the series and come away with the impression that the it is artistic nonsense or an attempt to be ‘clever.’ It’s hard to know what the original viewers made of the work although, perhaps, those who visit galleries were presumed to be culturally sophisticated enough to grasp the photographer’s leanings. Humour can be a very effective tool for satire or for putting forth ideas that are not welcome but there is always a risk of misunderstanding, particularly when the humour is sly or depends on inside knowledge.
I plan to spend more time with this work and with Knorr’s other series. I appreciate her approach to composition and the humour in her work and would like to learn more from her.

References

Calle, S. (2007) Sophie Calle: Take Care of Yourself. (Nov Har/Dv edition) Arles, France: Dis Voir/Actes Sud.

Chrisafis, A. (2007) ‘Interview: Sophie Calle’ In: The Guardian 15 June 2007 [online] At: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.art (Accessed on 26 August 2019)

Fisher, C. (2009) Sophie Calle: Take Care of Yourself. At: https://brooklynrail.org/2009/06/artseen/take-care-of-yourself (Accessed on 26 August 2019)

Gentlemen (s.d.) At: https://karenknorr.com/photography/gentlemen/ (Accessed on 31 August 2019)

Jankowicz, M. (2017) “Take Care of Yourself”: Sophie Calle’s French Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennial. At: https://medium.com/@miajankowicz/take-care-of-yourself-sophie-calles-french-pavilion-at-the-2007-venice-biennial-a1a31f8df54a (Accessed on 26 August 2019)

Objects in the Field (s.d.) At: https://sophyrickett.com/objects-in-the-field-1 (Accessed on 26 August 2019)

Sophie Calle – Detachment, Death, and Dialogue (s.d.) At: https://zakdimitrov.com/sophie-calle/ (Accessed on 26 August 2019)

Sophie Calle, ‘Take Care of Yourself’ (s.d.) At: //www.timeout.com/newyork/art/sophie-calle-take-care-of-yourself (Accessed on 26 August 2019)

Sophy Rickett (2013) At: https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/sophy-rickett/ (Accessed on 27 August 2019)

Sophy Rickett. Objects in the Field (2014) At: https://wsimag.com/art/7404-sophy-rickett-objects-in-the-field (Accessed on 27 August 2019)

The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings (s.d.) At: https://kaylynndeveney.com/the-day-to-day-life-of-albert-hastings (Accessed on 31 August 2019)

Exercise—Image and text

Image 1

Anchoring caption: Spontaneous light show and dance party breaks out in Hong Kong’s city centre.

Relay caption: The following are the perspectives of five people who witnessed the events at the Yuen Long Mass Transit Railway on Saturday evening.

Original caption: Protesters use laser lights as they move back to Yuen Long Mass Transit Railway station after a protest in Hong Kong on July 27. (AFP/Getty Images) Original caption:

Image 2

Anchoring caption: Popular British Columbia tourist attraction prepares to launch new gondola ride in time for the 2019 ski season.

Relay caption: My heart leapt into my mouth as the gondola began its ascent.

Original caption: The 55-millimetre-wide cable supporting the Sea to Sky gondola came crashing down early Saturday morning.(Kirby Brown)

Readings—Barthes

In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes’ (1977) main point is that it is impossible to know who is speaking in a text: is it the writer? a persona the writer has adopted? a character created in the text? a reliable narrator? other? The “death of the author,” is not so much the literal death of the individual who wrote the piece, but the impossibility of knowing whose voice is being expressed. This stands counter to any interpretation of the text that relies on divining authorial voice or intent. Instead, Barthes asserts, meaning is created as a kind of performance between the text and the mind of the reader.

The most immediate implication of this is that since meaning depends upon the interaction of text and reader, no text has a final ‘correct’ meaning—what Barthes refers to as a ‘theological’ meaning or the “‘message’ of the Author-God.” Every text is capable of bearing as many meanings as there are readers. And Barthes means this to be just as sweeping a claim as it sounds: “literature […] liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.”

This approach to meaning implies that, as the author ‘dies,’ attention shifts sharply to the role of the reader as the co-creator of potential meanings.

“Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes and Sontag, 1989) begins with a discussion of how many commentators deny that imagery fits the category of a ‘language.’ The notion of a visual language is denied from both sides at once: by those who point out that images offer only a “rudimentary system” when compared with speech, and by those who see images as containing an “ineffable richness” of meaning.

To put these positions to the test, Barthes draws on advertising imagery because of its clear “intentionality.” He analyses the test image in terms of its textual content as well as in terms of the visual signs (signifiers and signifieds) that he finds in it. Barthes speaks of images as being ‘polysemous’—capable of many meanings—and identifies two key ways in which text and image may function together:

anchorage—the text interprets the image and aims to reduce its polysemy; or
relay—the text and the image work in a complementary way.

I wonder, though, if there is not a third way that text and image could affect one another: is it not possible that the image could serve as an anchor for text? Couldn’t a powerful image shape or limit the way its accompanying text would be interpreted? It seems to me that irony and sarcasm could run in both directions, telling the viewer that the accompanying text (or image) was unreliable and might be read opposite to the way that it might otherwise be understood.

Barthes ends the article with some brief ideas on what might constitute a ‘rhetoric of the image.’ Barthes suggests that the form of visual rhetoric might be similar to that of spoken rhetoric (drawing on the techniques and terminology of classical rhetoric), but that the content would need to differ. If there is indeed a visual rhetoric at work in images, whether with or without text, they would function as persuasive communications designed not to describe or portray a reality, but to shape one for the viewer. And if Barthes’ argument holds true for the world of advertising, it may be applicable beyond that world.

If so, that raises questions for me:

When looking at a given image, what reality or realities does it create for the viewer/me?
How does the image try to persuade? To what end?
How effective is the persuasion for different viewers? For example, what role does culture play in the creation of the meaning? How do different viewers ‘read’ an image?
How might this apply to the images that I create?

References

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, music, text. Hill and Wang.

Barthes, R. and Sontag, S. (1989) Selected writings. Fontana.

Exercise—Telling a story

There are a number of important differences between Briony Campbell’s The Dad Project and W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor:

Campbell tells her story with a lengthy text written in the first person, Smith largely through photo captions in the third person (which may have been written by him or by an editor at LIFE).
Campbell appears in her own story as an actor, while Smith is unseen in his. There is perhaps an expectation, then, that Smith’s reporting is more objective, but this is not necessarily so. It is a convention that he is following, which also puts more attention on the solitary life of the doctor. Smith shows herself in the frame and her PDF takes the reader through her feelings, mental states and exchanges with her father. Rather than feeling like we are observing the doctor’s experiences like a fly-on-the-wall, we are given more intimate access to Campbell’s world and her father is an active participant in the image-making.
Smith shot his entire series on black and white film, as was customary for the time. It looks as though Campbell has probably shot her series in digital colour, likely on a full-frame or crop-sensor dSLR. Smith’s series looks, at once, older and more timeless. At the same time, there are clues in both series (clothing, hairstyles, furnishings) that point the viewer to the times the images were made.
Smith’s images were made for publication in a famous U.S. picture magazine while it is not clear that Campbell had thought about what she would do with her photographs after she completed them.
Campbell’s project seems to have been shot over a much longer period and is more traditionally a narrative: there is a beginning (her father becomes ill), a middle (his illness progresses) and an end (her father succumbs to his illness). She has created the project to help her cope with the reality of her father’s serious illness. Smith’s series has a much tighter feel, as though it was shot in just a few days (which is probably not accurate) and there is no sense of narrative development: instead, it is a slice of one man’s life. The selection of the images leads the viewer in a particular direction (compassion for a man who appears exhausted and selfless), but there is little sense of what Smith himself is getting out of the project—there is an implied distance between photographer and subject.
The time and the subject matter combined to make Campbell reflect on her priorities and on her practice as a photographer. Smith’s work is uniform and consistent, and there is no hint that his thinking and approach to photography might have changed over the life of the photo essay (although it is not impossible).
Smith’s images were printed in a glossy, high-circulation magazine as a work of photojournalism. Campbell’s images appear on her website, a selection became a small, bound book for submission for her master’s course work, and she also mounted exhibitions, one of which took place at London’s Photographer’s Gallery. Her edited photos were presented as art. The photographs also changed context when they were published as a photo essay in The Guardian Weekend Magazine, El Mundo, Die Zeit (where the translator took liberties with Campbell’s title and intent for her work) and later as a trade book.
I suppose that “an ending without an ending” means that, although Campbell’s father’s life came to an end, her relationship with him lives on in the project they completed together. It might also suggest that what she learned through the experience will continue to affect her relationship with other people and her work as a photographer. One important story has ended, but her life continues, affected by it.

References

Cosgrove, B. (2012) ‘W. Eugene Smith’s Landmark Portrait: ‘Country Doctor’’ In: Time 1 February 2012 [online] At: https://time.com/3456085/w-eugene-smiths-landmark-photo-essay-country-doctor/ (Accessed on 20 July 2019)

Country Doctor • W. Eugene Smith • Magnum Photos (2017) At: https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/society/w-eugene-smith-country-doctor/ (Accessed on 20 July 2019)

The_Dad_Project_Briony_Campbell.pdf (s.d.) (s.l.). At: http://www.brionycampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The_Dad_Project_Briony_Campbell.pdf (Accessed on 20 July 2019)