Exercise—The archive

Does their presence on a gallery wall give these images an elevated status?

Yes, certainly. An artist has selected the images, built a show around them, displayed them in a gallery and invited others to view them—this imbues the photographs with significance. The fact that people were willing to attend the show and buy the works demonstrates that what once had little or no value, has now gained in value.

Where does their meaning derive from?

The meaning of the photographs derives from a number of sources, but the gallery presentation may be the most important. The new context for the images changes the way that they will be viewed: they will be seen as a collection (although they did not originally belong together); they will have status because someone else has granted it (artist, gallery, media reports, other viewers); and they will be seen as art rather than simple, personal photographs (the mere act of hanging on a wall will go a long way to attracting the ‘art’ label).

When they are sold (again on eBay, via auction direct from the gallery) is their value increased by the fact that they’re now ‘art’?

I would expect that the photographs will gain appreciably in value (both artistic and monetary). They may have sold for a pound or two before—or not at all—but their new notoriety and ‘art’ status gives them a cachet that will raise their prices.
I would also expect that the competitive nature of human beings in an auction will further increase the selling price of the photographs. Few people knew or cared about them when they were first offered up on eBay, but the potential market has increased in size and no one likes to feel that they have lost an opportunity to a rival bidder. The aggressive behaviour of bidders I have witnessed in eBay auctions often inflates the cost of buying even ordinary items. And these are no longer ordinary items.

Reference

Question for Seller – Nicky Bird (s.d.) At: http://nickybird.com/projects/question-for-seller/ (Accessed 28/01/2020).

Research point—Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (Brooklyn, 1962– )

B.A. from SUNY, 1985; M.F.A. from Yale, 1988.
Professor Adjunct in Graduate Photography at Yale School of Art.
Represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York and White Cube in London.
Elaborately staged scenes in small town American. Cinematic, extensive support crew for staging and lighting.
“In all my pictures what I am ultimately interested in is that moment of transcendence or transportation, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world. Despite my compulsion to create this still world, it always meets up against the impossibility of doing so. So, I like the collision between this need for order and perfection and how it collides with a sense of the impossible. I like where possibility and impossibly meet.” (Gregory Crewdson (2016))
Influences include movies Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe, also Edward Hopper, Diane Arbus.
Retrospective of work from 1985–2005 shown in Europe from 2005–08. Skowhegan Medal for Photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship and the Aaron Siskind Fellowship.

Responses

There is certainly more to Crewdson’s work than aesthetic beauty, although it undeniably has that. The coldness of the images and the unsettling scenes they portray have an uncanniness to them—they seem more real than real. The attention to detail, flawless lighting and calculated impact on the viewer reveal suggest that the artist is not simply drawing on aesthetic categories, but using the everyday to produce a particular effect or experience.
The work certainly seems ‘psychological’ to me, in that it is designed to produce an unease and questioning in the mind of the viewer. There is a distinct sense of foreboding, the same kind one feels when watching a thriller—what ‘it’ is has not yet happened, but it is about to and the psychological tension is palpable. It verges on the physical, as if the viewer was about to experience the events directly. If anything, many of these images are like Nordic Noirs in a single frame.
My main goal when making pictures has not at all been to create an elaborate world of my imagination, but to respond to things that I find visually appealing (in a broad sense: light, line, colour, form, mood…). My studies with the OCA have been leading me to question this approach, however, as I see the opportunity to make images in an entirely new way—more deliberate and purposeful, rather than just responsive. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with making beauty one’s main goal—we could certainly use more beauty in the world—but I think that aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics can become divorced from other important commitments like truth or justice. Beauty itself can be fickle and concentration on it can lead us down some very strange paths, like self-indulgence, an unhealthy preoccupation with certain kinds of beauty or deliberately ignoring the non-beautiful.
I don’t think it is necessary to set “elaborate direction”against “subtlety and nuance” in photography, any more than it is necessary to set pure fantasy against documentary or biography in any other art form, such as cinema. There is a place to appreciate all of them and the different responses they call forth, while keeping in mind that they are all, to some extent, fabrications.

References

Gregory Crewdson (2016) At: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson (2018) At: https://gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/ (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/ (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson – 84 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Gregory Crewdson – Bio | The Broad (s.d.) At: https://www.thebroad.org/art/gregory-crewdson (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Photographers in Focus: Gregory Crewdson (s.d.) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpIRm5BsXeE (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Silverman, R. (2016) Alone, in a Crowd, With Gregory Crewdson. At: https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/alone-in-a-crowd-with-gregory-crewdson/ (Accessed 27/01/2020).

Research—Setting the scene

Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946– )

MA art history from UBC, 1970. Postgraduate research at the Courtauld Institute in London from 1970–73.
Draws on elements from other art forms—including painting, cinema, and literature—in an approach he calls “cinematography.” Large scale constructions and montages. Conceptualism.
Frequently displays work as backlit color transparencies, similar to street advertising, but has more recently worked with b/w printing and inkjet colour.
Early work sometimes evoked other artworks: “The Destroyed Room (1978) explores themes of violence and eroticism inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s monumental painting The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), while Picture for Women (1979) recalls Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) and brings the implications of that famous painting into the context of the cultural politics of the late 1970s.”
“Near documentary” work made in collaboration with non-professional models who appear in them.

Jeff Wall (2018) At: https://gagosian.com/artists/jeff-wall/ (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Jeff Wall (2020) In: Wikipedia. At: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeff_Wall&oldid=934463406 (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Jeff Wall Photography, Bio, Ideas (s.d.) At: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/wall-jeff/ (Accessed 26/01/2020). Tate (s.d.)

Jeff Wall: room guide, room 6. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/jeff-wall/jeff-wall-room-guide/jeff-wall-room-guide-room-6 (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Lubow, A. (2007) ‘The Luminist’ In: The New York Times 25/02/2007 At: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Wall.t.html (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Hannah Starkey (Belfast, 1971– )

Studied photography and film at Napier University, Edinburgh (1992–1995) and photography at the Royal College of Art, London (1996–1997). Lives and works in London.
Works predominantly with women as subjects, actresses as well as people she meets on-site to develop scenes. Stark architecture and strong colour.
Says of her photographs that they are “explorations of everyday experiences and observations of inner city life from a female perspective.”
Works are frequently untitled and show freeze-framed crisis points: issues of class, race, gender, and identity. Intimate moments.

Hannah Starkey | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/hannah-starkey/ (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Hannah Starkey – Artists – Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (s.d.) At: http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/hannah-starkey/series-photography_4 (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Hannah Starkey – Artist’s Profile – The Saatchi Gallery (s.d.) At: https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/hannah_starkey.htm (Accessed 26/01/2020).

O’Hagan, S. (2018) ‘The photography of Hannah Starkey – in pictures’ In: The Guardian 08/12/2018 At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2018/dec/08/the-photography-of-hannah-starkey-in-pictures (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Tom Hunter (Bournemouth, 1965– )

Works in photography and film. Photographs often reference and reimagine classical paintings. First photographer to have a one-man show at the National Gallery, London.
Socially- and politically-motivated work.
“Painters inspire me most – Caravaggio, Vermeer – but I also like Dorothea Lange and Sally Mann.”
Series “Persons Unknown”: portraits of squatters in the abandoned Hackney warehouses. Won the Photographic Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 1998 for an image of a young woman with a baby beside her, reading a possession order, shot like a Vermeer painting.

Pulver, A. (2009) ‘Photographer Tom Hunter’s best shot’ In: The Guardian 04/11/2009 At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/nov/04/photography-tom-hunter-best-shot (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Tom Hunter – Artist (s.d.) At: http://www.tomhunter.org/ (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Tom Hunter – 29 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/tom-hunter (Accessed 26/01/2020). Tom Hunter – Artists – Yancey Richardson (s.d.) At: http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/tom-hunter (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Tom Hunter – Artist’s Profile – The Saatchi Gallery (s.d.) At: https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/tom_hunter.htm (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Unheralded Stories Series | Tom Hunter (s.d.) At: http://www.tomhunter.org/unheralded-stories-series/ (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Taryn Simon (NYC, 1975– )

Multidisciplinary artist in photography, text, sculpture, and performance. Work featured in the Venice Biennale (2015). Guggenheim Fellow, 2001.
Studied environmental sciences at Brown University but transferred to a degree in art-semiotics, while taking photography classes at Rhode Island School of Design. BA 1997. Visiting artist at Yale, Bard, Columbia, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design.
The Innocents (2003) — stories of individuals wrongly sentenced to death or life, then released and gained exoneration due to DNA evidence. Mistaken identity, questionable reliability of evidence.
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) — objects, sites, and spaces integral to America but not accessible to public (radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility; black bear hibernating; CIA art collection).
Heavy research and preparation for each project: “The majority of my work is about preparation. The act of taking photographs is actually a very small part of the process. I work with a small team, just my sister and one assistant.”

O’Hagan, S. (2011) ‘Taryn Simon: the woman in the picture’ In: The Observer 21/05/2011 At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/may/22/taryn-simon-tate-modern-interview (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Taryn Simon (s.d.) At: http://www.tarynsimon.com/ (Accessed 26/01/2020a).

Taryn Simon (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/taryn-simon (Accessed 26/01/2020b).

Taryn Simon – 107 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/taryn-simon (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (Hartford, 1951– )

Studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Then attended Yale, MFA Photography, 1979. Lives and works in NYC and teaches at Yale.
Mixes snapshots and staged compositions that are theatrical in nature. Carefully planned staging, documentary, cinema and advertising. Line between reality and artifice/fantasy blurred.
Accidental poses, unintended movements, insignificant facial expressions. Series, Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, A Storybook Life, and Lucky Thirteen, conceptual in nature.

DiCorcia, P.-L. (2001) Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Heads. Steidl Box Pacemacgill.

Kimmelman, M. (2001) Philip-Lorca diCorcia — ‘Heads’. At: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/14/arts/art-in-review-philip-lorca-dicorcia-heads.html

MoMA Learning. At: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/philip-lorca-dicorcia-head-10-2002

Philip-Lorca diCorcia | MoMA. At: https://www.moma.org/artists/7027

Philip-Lorca diCorcia | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/philip-lorca-dicorcia/ (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Philip-Lorca diCorcia – 46 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/philip-lorca-dicorcia (Accessed 26/01/2020).

Exercise—Setting the scene

What does this scene tell you about the main character?

He has money and influence and is widely known.
He is confident of his power and not afraid to show it.
Others want his attention and/or good favour.

How does it do this? List the ‘clues’.

He has an expensive car.
He has money and is willing to pay for extra services.
He has access to things that most people would have to wait for (doorman lets him in via a side entrance, ahead of the queue waiting outside a club).
He is proud of all this and wants the woman he is with to know it.
He is a regular at this club and knows the staff by name.
He is comfortable enough to take a walk uninvited and unescorted through the kitchen. No one objects.
He expects to get a table directly in front of the Copacabana’s stage and does so, ahead of others who are waiting.
The surrounding customers are anxious to greet him.
A table full of men send a complimentary bottle of wine to his table and raise their glasses to him in salute.
He says he works in construction, but his hands do not feel like those of a labourer.
He says he is a union delegate.

Reference

The Long Take: Goodfellas (s.d.) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJEEVtqXdK8 (Accessed 25/01/2020).