Exercise—Masquerade

Nikki S. Lee (Kye-Chang, South Korea; 1970– )

Born and BFA in Photography at Chung-Ang College of the Arts, University of Korea, 1993; moved to NYC for MFA and stayed. New York University, New York, 1997–99; Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, 1994–96.
Works in both photography and film. Interest in notions of identity, particularly identity that is dynamic and negotiated through relationships.
Performance art.
Projects series (1997–2001) on sub-cultures, including yuppies, swing dancers, drag queens, hip hop fans, and senior citizens recorded with a point-and-shoot camera, wielded by a member of the selected group or a passerby.
Parts series (2002–2005), in which she appears in ‘candid’ snapshots with only parts visible of a male from a failed relationship.
Directed 2006 film, “A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee,” in which played two fictional versions of herself.
Lee’s work makes me think of what might happen if Cindy Sherman got out of the studio and interacted with people. There is just as much reliance on costume, but less so on makeup and prosthetics. But Sherman relies on creating an artificial world whose artifice is often obvious, while Lee works to fit in with the an existing group or context and draws on her resemblance to them for effect. If she is interested in confronting the viewer, she goes about it in a much subtler way.

Trish Morrissey (Dublin, Ireland; 1967– )

Combines performance and self-portraiture with photography and film.
Uses archives to explore class, family relationships, body and gesture, gender and role-play, power and control and what it means to be human.
Trish Morrissey: a certain slant of light at Francesca Maffeo Gallery in June 2018. Thirteen photographs and two films of archive material gathered about the last two female residents of Hestercombe House, a stately home and gardens in Somerset, England.
Solo publications: Seven Years (2004) and Front (2009).
Featured in The Photograph as Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton; Vitamin Ph, Survey of International Contemporary Photography; Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography, by Susan Bright; Photography and Ireland by Justin Carville, and Making It Up: Photographic Fictions by Marta Weiss.

Tracey Moffatt (Brisbane, Australia; 1960– )

BA in visual communications from the Queensland College of Art, 1982. Honorary doctorate, 2004.
Uses text, collage, and set design to explore childhood trauma, Aboriginal people, and popular Australian culture.
Series Up in the Sky (1997) portrays violence in an outback town. “There is a storyline, but there isn’t a traditional beginning, middle, and end.”
Over 100 solo exhibitions.
Represented Australia in the 2017 Venice Biennale with My Horizon.
Works held in the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Reflection

I don’t know that Lee’s work is necessarily voyeuristic or exploitative. It seems as though she introduces herself as an artist to her new groups and spends quite a bit of time with them. The whole exercise could be read as both a comment on her own identity as well as that of the group: the group has established a set of codes by which they can show belonging and identify one another (a social construction); and Lee, by adopting their identity and being accepted by the group indicates just how malleable her own identity can be (another social construction).

As for Morrissey’s request, it might depend upon my frame of mind at the moment and how she presented herself / her project. I do not usually enjoy having my picture taken, but I might go along with it for a laugh or for the novelty. And given that I take more and more pictures of strangers myself—sometimes with, sometimes without their permission—I feel that I have less and less right to deny them the same access to me. It would be hypocritical of me, so I am gradually agreeing to lower my guard. I also recognize that we live in a surveillance society and the idea that we have a veto over the capture of our image is largely an illusion. We are being imaged all the time, for all sorts of purposes, so a snap for a random photographer or tourist seems relatively benign.

References

Museum of Contemporary Photography (s.d.) At: https://www.mocp.org/detail.php?t=objects&type=browse&f=maker&s=Lee%2C+Nikki+S.&record=1 (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Nikki S. Lee (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/nikki-s-lee (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Nikki S. Lee | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/nikki-s-lee/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Nikki S. Lee | National Museum of Women in the Arts (s.d.) At: https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/nikki-s-lee (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/tracey-moffatt (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/tracey-moffatt/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt | MCA Australia (s.d.) At: https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/artists/tracey-moffatt/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt :: The Collection :: Art Gallery NSW (s.d.) At: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/moffatt-tracey/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt – Under the Sign of Scorpio, 2005 – Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (s.d.) At: https://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/releases/2005/07/10/94/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey (s.d.) At: https://www.trishmorrissey.com/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey | LensCulture (s.d.) At: https://www.lensculture.com/trish-morrissey (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey | photoparley (s.d.) At: https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/trish-morrissey/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey — Francesca Maffeo Gallery (s.d.) At: https://www.francescamaffeogallery.com/trish-morrissey (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey Photographer | Biography & Information | wotfoto.com (s.d.) At: https://wotfoto.com/photographers/trish-morrissey (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Visit—Japanese photography

“Hanran: 20th-Century Japanese Photography” opened recently at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibit was curated by the Yokohoma Museum of Art and features works by 28 photographers from the early 1930s to the 1990s.

I went to the members’ pre-screening of the exhibit to beat the crowds and so was able to take my time going over the images on display. It was something of an education for me because I have been more familiar with contemporary Japanese photographers (Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama) than those of the previous century. According to the promotional text for Hanran, the works in the exhibit break with the Pictorialism of early Japanese photography and begin with “the avant-garde Shinko Shashin (New Photography) of the 1930s”.

Many of the photographs, both pre- and post-WWII, struck me as being close in subject matter and approach to the images produced in the West at that time. Modernity was in full swing and there is a preoccupation with mechanization, news magazines, fashion and advertising. The photographs produced during the War itself are a departure to much of that, however, and the exhibit devotes a fair bit of space to early propaganda, documentation of the Tokyo it raids and then the horrific aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not until much later that the are-bure-boke (grainy, blurry, out of focus) school of photos start to appear.

And this is more of what I had been hoping to see. For me, much of the exhibit looked a lot like the photography with which Western audiences are familiar. Few of the pictures told me anything new or exposed me to a different way of thinking. If anything, I wondered if much of the photography could be read as a desire in early 20th-century Japan to emulate the West, but this might say more about my ignorance of Japanese history and culture.

All told, I was ready to learn more about the are-bure-boke approach, but that is my problem and not the fault of the curators.

My first exhibit

A bistro in my town held an open “call for artists” last fall and I decided to take along a selection of images that I had made for EYV, along with some others that I was pleased with. I had never done anything like this before, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect or how best to present my work. In the end I took along one large canvas print (24″ x 36″) and a selection of 12″ x 18″ prints in a borrowed portfolio case.

It seemed to me that many of the people who brought their work to the call had done this before and a number appeared to be well-established, if their work and preparation were anything to go by. Nevertheless, the little review committee (the bistro owner and her artist friend) liked the colour and humour in my work and left me with the impression that I had a chance of being selected. A few weeks later I received an e-mail asking if I would display my photographs in the bistro for six weeks in fall 2019.

Well before the exhibit, I made a to-do list of tasks and questions that I wanted to cover well in advance:

Do a comparison of canvas prints for price/quality
Do I need to look at alternate prints?
Short explanatory text for each image
Look into changing my e-mail address and using my domain name
Have cards printed with contact info, etc.
Prepare a distribution list to get the word out (my Facebook, wife’s FB, Instagram, Twitter, colleagues, church, local English theatre group, networks of friends and family)
Create an event on Facebook
Reminders at intervals leading up to the exhibit
Create a title for the exhibit (thematic?)
Any lessons learned from OCA people re: exhibiting work?

Two months before the opening day I created two Facebook ‘event’ invitations (one ‘private’ to directly invite friends and family; one ‘public’ that could be shared more broadly) to encourage people to come. I also used Twitter and Instagram to help drive online traffic toward the public Facebook event page.

One of the three large canvases. Also used on the Facebook invitation and small promotional posters.

The bistro provided me with diagrams outlining the two rooms where I could exhibit, along with the maximum dimensions that each wall space could accommodate. Since there were two rooms and space for 11 of my photographs, I decided to give the exhibit the theme of “Night and Day,” knowing that I could use one room for ‘night’ and the other for ‘day.’ This worked well and viewers seemed to understand the division easily.

Diagrams provided by the bistro to outline placement and maximum dimensions of works.

One month before the event I bought eight 18″ x 24″ black frames and made new 13″ x 19″ prints (matted to a “12 x 18″ window). I also ordered a 24″ x 36” canvas print to go with the two large canvases I already had, bringing the number of works for display to 11. At the same time I made two smallish posters to hang at work, one on the glass wall outside my office and the other on the cork wall of the kitchenette. I wanted to use my workspace to promote the vernissage without overdoing it—and I wanted to be sure that the people who report to me felt welcome to attend but not compelled. During this time I also used a design my wife created to create business cards (both for people to take away and to affix prices next to the photographs) and to create a small poster for the exhibit area to outline my approach to the works on display. The design was clear and mirrored the key elements on my website.

The owner of the bistro is generous and offers the display space freely to selected local artists without asking for a percentage of any sales. She leaves transactions entirely to the artist and purchaser. It was also good of her to make snack food (chips/crisps and small plates of sausage, cheese and olives) during the opening.

With the help of my wife and the owner’s artist friend, we hung the exhibit in about two hours on the morning of the opening. The hanging system the bistro uses is simple, easy to use, adaptable and very strong: it consists of a length of wall-mounted, steel ‘rebar’ with a length of chain dropped from it. Art works are attached to the chain with ‘s’ hooks and then secured at the right height with plastic tie-wraps. Once the pieces are checked for placement and levelled, the two bottom corners of each frame are lightly attached to the wall using putty.

Placement of two photographs for display.

Leading up to the opening I had two contradictory fears: the first, that no one would come; and the second, that people would come. As the day got closer I found that I had two or three moments of real doubt that I should be doing this (who would want to come to see my photographs, never mind buy them?), but I forged on. I had promoted the event to a lot of people I know and I had made a commitment to the bistro owner. I knew that someone else had recently decided at the last moment not to exhibit their work and had no intention of doing the same.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Some 60 people attended the opening and a good proportion stayed to have drinks and order a meal at the bistro. I sold three pictures during the event and there is a chance that a fourth sale may be in the works. All told, I need to sell at least five photographs to cover my costs for printing and frames, so there is still a good chance that I will manage to do so (there are roughly four weeks left before I have to take down my pictures).

I am very pleased with my first foray into exhibiting and will do it again. The bistro was a low-risk way for me to get my feet wet and allowed me to bring friends, family, colleagues (and some people I don’t know at all) to a local place that means something to me. “Come for the photography and stay for the beer—or vice-versa,” may not be the usual marketing ploy for an exhibit, but it worked just fine for me. Now to sell the fourth and fifth prints…

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.

Hangout—11 August 2019

Just four of us today (AF, BH, CW and me), with CW signing in from a train.

We opened with a brief discussion of my request for resources on editing my work (not in the sense of post-processing, but the in sense of selecting which images to include in a set, and in what sequence). The assessors of my EYV submission suggested this as an area for improvement, so I was looking for some food for thought. AF’s suggestion was to pay attention to documenting my thought process; BH finds that setting images aside for a time gives him some critical distance; and CW finds that laying physical prints out on a table is very helpful. All good suggestions and I suspect that editing one’s own work is just one of those things you get better at by doing.

AF asked for feedback on a series of images for I&P A3. The images were of a spartan office with very few items pointing to its purpose. The consensus was that the series was effective and was more of a ‘mirror’ than a ‘window’ on the photographer.

BH presented some WiP for I&P A5 laid out as a book. There were comments on some of the specifics of the book (why one cover with B/W images when the rest of the book is in colour? reduce signs of ‘student’ work) and a longer discussion on whether the design of the book presented a coherent whole (heavy bold and blocky text seemed to work against the faded inscriptions of the headstones that are the focus of the work; consider reducing text and possibly making it more faded as the reader pages through the book). Heard again that projects are judged as a whole, so a book of photography has to work as a book, and not just as a collection of photographs.

World Press Photo 2019

The World Press Photo 2019 travelling exhibit is currently on show in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. I have had the chance to visit the exhibit a few times in previous years, but I found that I saw it with different eyes this year.

Although the specifics of the images change from one year to the next, depending on where the latest trouble spots are in the world, I find that there is a sameness to the images, exhibit after exhibit. Conflict and violence occupy centre stage, as you’d expect from the world’s journalistic businesses—if it bleeds, it leads. The environment is also an area of photojournalistic attention as exploitation of the planet continues at a furious pace (one image of frogs dismembered alive for restaurants illustrates our appetite for destruction particularly well).

There are less shocking, but still dramatic, images every so often from the world of sport and there is the occasional human interest story about people with colourful costumes, interesting diets or religious practices that the media tend to depict as quaint, disturbing or both.

The difference for me this year had to do with the way I looked at the images: how they communicated as a body, rather than one by one.

The first thing I noticed is that there is still an audience for this type of photography. No matter how violent, graphic or disturbing we are fascinated by this type of photojournalism. I suppose that part of this feeds into the idea that we must document the happenings in our world, no matter how terrible they are. Or perhaps it is especially when terrible things happen that we must bear witness to them, although the witness has had little discernible success in keeping similar things from happening—how many times have we said “never again!”? Maybe the best we can hope for is that the perpetrators of this particular outrage might be brought to account, and the victims might receive some degree of recognition or vindication.

The next thing I noticed about the exhibit is that much of the coverage is of things that happen to vulnerable people in or from the developing world. Whether it is migrants to Germany turning to the sex trade just to live, a baby boom among former Colombian guerillas, or the plight of Mayan beekeepers, the collection suggests that bad things are going on among them, far away over there. Sure, Donald Trump shows up—by implication in a caravan of refugees heading to the U.S. border, or leading Emmanuel Macron by the hand—but most of the really bad stuff is happening somewhere else.

After recently reading Roland Barthes’ “Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes and Sontag, 1989), I was also struck by the power of the caption to “anchor” and constrain the interpretation of an image. The best example of this is the first image one sees when entering the exhibition, which is Brent Stirton‘s picture of an African woman at night, heavily camouflaged and carrying an assault weapon. Is she a guerilla? A jihadist? A government soldier? Is she attacking or is she preparing to defend? Where exactly is she? The image itself could be read in any of a dozen or more ways, but the caption ends the questioning and settles the matter (in a surprising way, for me):

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2019/37622/1/Brent-Stirton

Petronella Chigumbura (30), a member of an all-female anti-poaching unit called Akashinga, participates in stealth and concealment training in the Phundundu Wildlife Park, Zimbabwe.

I realized how often we simply we accept such captions as Gospel. But what if the caption writer gets it wrong, accidentally or by design? Is the caption a reliable guide? Has the photographer understood all the implications of his or her image, and the complexities of the context? The viewer has no way of knowing (but may accept or reject the authority of caption depending on how ‘reasonable’ or palatable it may sound).

Finally, one of the signs in the museum set me thinking about the role curation plays in an exhibition like this. The sign read, “The stories that matter.” We can take that statement at face value, but the obvious question is: to whom do they matter? Who decides? On what basis? This is certainly not a kick at the organizers of the World Press Photo Contest, but it is a reminder that we never see an unmediated or unselected image. We don’t have to cast aspersions on the motives of the people who choose images to remember that they do indeed have them. And so do we.

Reference

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

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.

A1—Alexey Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko (1962- , Leningrad)

Graduated with honours from the Department of Cinematic and Photographic Art at Leningrad’s Institute of Culture
Influenced by Russian avant-garde works of Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Dada art
Published series of collages, photomontages and superimposed negatives, Nomenklatura of Signs in 1988 as commentary on the Communist regime
During and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991–1992, produced several series using long exposure and intentional camera movement in street photography
City of Shadows urban landscapes reference Odessa Steps (also known as the Primorsky or Potemkin Stairs) scene from film The Battleship Potemkin.
Venice series between 2001 and 2008 references “Venice of the North,” Saint Petersburg.
Shoots film and does own darkroom work—bleaching and toning, solarisation, Sabattier effect.
2011 exhibition of 15 gelatin silver prints from Havana, Cuba series (2003-2006).
U.S. citizen since 2011 and lives in NYC.

I became aware of Alexey Titarenko’s work through an introduction to contemporary street photography (Howarth and McLaren, 2010) as well as through a series of videos I had seen online (Artist Series: Alexey Titarenko, 2016). I was captivated by the way he showed movement of people through the streets of Leningrad by means of the ghostly traces created by long exposure (Titarenko and Tchmyreva, 2001). It seemed to me that the indistinct layers of the figures suggested something about the transience of life, particularly when set against the unforgiving, hard lines of a city going through difficult times. The long exposure is a technique that Titarenko has continued to use effectively on other projects—most notably his series entitled “Time Standing Still” and “Venice” (Titarenko, s.d.)—along with other analogue, post-production methods (like solarisation and the Sabbatier effect) for heightening the surreal appearance of his photographs (Meyers, 2008).

The discussion in Rutherford (2014) of the photographic techniques used by Titarenko and others is helpful for demonstrating how their work demonstrates another, valid view of the ‘photographicness’ of works that show an altered reality or perspective. It is just as much—or perhaps more—a property of photography that it creates a reality more than it provides a true depiction of it. Because of this, Rutherford believes that it is always more correct to say that a picture is actively ‘made’ rather than passively ‘taken.’ In a brief reference to Titarenko’s images from City of Shadows, Rutherford (2014: 208) says that “the modus operandi of the medium has transformed the Things in Front of the Lens to produce results which are uniquely ‘photographic’.”

Most important for my thinking in preparation for Assignment 1, goes on to assert (2014: 210) that:

“… as a result of the ways in which the medium interprets, juxtaposes and renders the Things in Front of the Lens at that moment and from that perspective, photographs are capable of depicting scenes, events and moments that did not exist and could not have existed until brought into being by the act of photographing them.”

This is exactly where I wanted to go with the assignment—to look at how the very properties of the camera itself allow us to see two or more versions of the same scene (what Rutherford repeatedly calls the Things in Front of the Lens ), where every version has the same claim as any other to be a ‘faithful’ representation. And if they are all faithful and all different, perhaps none of them can be said to be truly faithful.

This combination of Titarenko’s photographic technique and Rutherford’s theoretical discussion will be useful for me as I develop and position my work for the assignment.

References

Alexey Titarenko (2019) In: Wikipedia. At: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexey_Titarenko&oldid=904212618 (Accessed on 13 July 2019)

Alexey Titarenko (s.d.) At: http://www.alexeytitarenko.com (Accessed on 13 July 2019)

Alexey Titarenko – 27 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/alexey-titarenko (Accessed on 13 July 2019)

Artist Series: Alexey Titarenko. (2016) Directed by The Art of Photography At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whoZ8SRgi2s (Accessed on 13 July 2019)

Galerie municipale du château d’eau and Dieuzaide, M. (2000) Alexei Titarenko: Toulouse, 21 juin-4 septembre 2000.

Howarth, S. and McLaren, S. (2010) Street photography now. London ; New York: Thames & Hudson.

Meyers, W. “Alexey Titarenko’s Venetian Style” (2008) In: The New York Sun (New York, NY) 24 April 2008 p.17. [online] At: https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A178223382/STND?u=ucca&sid=STND&xid=07ae77f9 (Accessed on 13 July 2019)

Rutherford (2014) ‘Photography as an act of collaboration’ In: Journal of Media Practice 15 (3) pp.206–227. [online] At: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682753.2014.1000043 (Accessed on 13 July 2019)

Titarenko, A. and Tchmyreva, I. (2001) City of shadows. St. Petersburg, Russia: APT Tema.

Other works by Alexey Titarenko

Nomenklatura of Signs (1985-1991) (s.d.) At: http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/nomenclatureofsigns (Accessed on 13 July 2019)

Titarenko, A. et al. (2003) Alexey Titarenko, photographs. New York? N. Alexander.

Titarenko, A. (2015) The city is a novel. Bologna: Damiani.

OCA Hangout—30 June 2019

Tutor Clive White and five OCA students (AF, KA, AS, HW and me)

The discussion on this particular hangout turned around the challenges two Level 3 Photography students are having with their Body of Work projects.

One student reported feeling lost in his project and was concerned about its “lack of meaning.” He was encouraged to find something that engages him and trust that it will engage others (not advisable to try to create work or an entire project based on what we believe others will find interesting).

The other student had taken thousands of images for his project and was feeling a bit lost after not being able to “land on a thread.” He was encouraged to go back to the main theme of the project and perhaps to concentrate on a smaller number of images with visual interest—some that were less “deadpan.”

In sum, the bulk of the conversation had to do with managing a long-term project, both in terms of its scale as well as in how to maintain interest and motivation over the life of the project. It was helpful as a Level 1 student to be able to sit in on the discussion although, in my case, it might have been very useful to me as I was labouring through Assignment 5 of EYV. I will see if I can benefit from some of the insights about remaining focused and doing work that interests me, rather than others, as I continue through my program at OCA.

Reflection—documentary photography

Before beginning work on Part 1 of CAN, I suppose I had the idea that there were still distinct fields called ‘documentary photography,’ ‘photojournalism’ and ‘art photography.’

At the same time, I knew that there was some degree of blurring between the categories because of the attention paid to many Instagram accounts where individuals ‘document’ their lives in images that are presented as candid but clearly required a lot of work to set up. A similar approach appears in the work of photographers like Kevin Mullins, for example, who brands himself as a ‘documentary wedding photographer‘ and mentions that his approach goes under a number of names: “wedding photojournalism, documentary wedding photography and reportage wedding photography.” His approach is “completely candid” and all “about weaving the images together to tell the tale of your wedding day.” This results in photographs that are presented as a neutral and natural witness to an event while leaving nothing to chance and creating a narrative to please a paying client. No matter how unobtrusive Mullins is, however, everyone at the wedding will be aware that he has been hired to take pictures of them.

If blurring between categories happens because of the borrowing of techniques, another blurring happens when documentary photographs show up on gallery walls. One of the most obvious examples of this is in the work of Don McCullin, whose photojournalistic images of war zones and urban poverty entered the art world years ago. It is strange, then, to read that McCullin does not see himself as an artist:

I’m in a very funny place: I’m in an art gallery and yet I’m a photographer saying I don’t want to be an artist. The reason I’ve agreed to be involved, apart from the honour of it all, is that if I leave my photographs in yellow boxes in my house, no one will ever see the work I’ve done that condemns war, famine, starvation and tragedies. It’s a great opportunity to release the propaganda of all the evil things I’ve seen in the world, which are not humanly right. So that’s my justification in putting my work, as a photographer, in an art gallery. But I’m not an artist.
Don McCullin in Bond, J. (2019).

Similarly, McCullin rejects any description of his work as ‘iconic’ because “in a way it turns my photography into a kind of compositioned work that borders on the art world. But I like to keep photography really pure. I’m a bit prickly about this art stuff.”

Whatever McCullin’s views of his identity or the purity of his photography, three decades of representation by Hamiltons Gallery—whose clients include Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe—along with a retrospective exhibit at Tate Britain, would qualify anyone else as an artist.

Given the above, I would now see ‘documentary photography’ as an orientation to image-making that may exist in the mind of the photographer and communicated through the use of a particular set of visual conventions, but as a distinction which holds up less and less in practice. I think this is an issue both of ‘narrative’—as approaches and techniques to creating images are blurred within the photographic frame—and of ‘context,’ as photographic images created in one set of circumstances are regularly viewed in many different settings.

In short, the lines between documentary, reportage, photojournalism and art photography seem fluid to me and the terms themselves may no longer be very useful.

Reference

Bond, J. (2019) Don McCullin on why he is showing at Tate Britain even though he is ‘not an artist’. At: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/preview/tate-britain-celebrates-reluctant-artist-don-mccullin [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Don McCullin. (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/don-mccullin/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Don McCullin. (s.d.) At: https://www.hamiltonsgallery.com/artists/don-mccullin/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].

Wedding Photographer shooting across the UK and Europe. (s.d.) At: https://www.kevinmullinsphotography.co.uk/ [Accessed 7 July 2019].