A1—Discussion with tutor

I had a good discussion with my tutor following submission of Assignment 1. Although he will send me a written summary of his feedback, I am doing this write-up based on the notes I took during our chat. Robert’s comments about the assignment were positive and I found them both encouraging and an opportunity for further reflection.

I mentioned that I had changed my original vision for the assignment, which was to have two images of each scene, one with frozen people and the other where the length of exposure meant that traces of people disappeared entirely. I did try this, but I decided that I wanted to leave a trace of movement similar to the way that Alexey Titarenko had done with his series. The reason I did this was not to follow Titarenko, but to avoid confusing viewers who would see every second image with a background and no people at all. I was concerned that this would be “too conceptual” and Robert replied that being conceptual is not a problem in a course like this! To my mind, “too conceptual” means that I would have to explain to viewers what they were looking at, because it would not be at all obvious from the images. I suppose that some of my reaction is because I do not want to produce images that are so conceptually “heavy” they require lengthy written explanations. This is the case for two reasons: 1) if I wanted a description of a concept, I would use words rather than images; and 2) I think I would be embarrassed to produce work that was so precious or clever that it could not be understood without an arty accompanying text. I don’t see me moving from that position in the near future, but I am now better aware of my own discomfort.

All the same, Robert’s view was that my series was conceptually coherent and that I had successfully achieved the concept visually and elegantly.

A couple of minor points on the images themselves, the first pointed out by me and the second by Robert:

the white balance was difficult to correct between the diptychs, but I managed to get close enough in every pair except the ones showing the Millennium Bridge and St. Paul’s (I may have another crack at this before assessment).
the two images showing the casino in Leicester Square are slightly out of register (this will be easier to resolve and I will definitely fix it before assessment).

A more important point, however, was the fact that my series shows a side of the city that most Londoners do not frequent: tourist London. This was not my intent: I had merely wanted to be in places where I was guaranteed a steady pedestrian flow without a tripod slowing commuters down on their way to or from work. The unintended consequence, however, was that the places I chose were all tourist haunts—so the cumulative effect is a series that could very well be ‘read’ as a comment on tourists or tourism, rather than more neutrally on the camera’s exposure of our perception of time and the artificiality of the photographic record. In other words, I wound up ‘saying’ visually more than I meant to. I saw Robert’s point immediately and will make a point of paying more attention to this aspect of my work in future.

The final point we discussed was my use of the term ‘reality.’ I had used it to describe the way that people commonly act as though a photograph gives them some direct experience of the world around them (a “phenomenological” approach; Smith, 2018). I realize that I left my understanding of the term unspoken and will go back to my A1 text to rework it slightly before I submit it for assessment.

All in all, a very positive tutorial and some new points for me to reflect on as I continue developing my approach to building visual narratives.

Reference

Smith, D.W. (2018) ‘Phenomenology’ In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. At: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/ (Accessed on 23 July 2019)

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)

A1—Reflection

Demonstration of technical and visual skills

I am, for the most part, happy with the results I achieved for A1. I think that there is still room for improvement in the composition of some of the images, however. My main concern was that there would be enough pedestrian traffic in the frame to provide the desired blurring effect during the time the shutter was open. Next time, I will also pay more attention to the background of the images.
Even with a 10-stop filter, I found that exposure times could be shorter than what I was after, depending upon how bright the sun was. A uniform set of overcast days would have been ideal. I could have had much longer exposure times at night, obviously, but I did not want the assignment to become a ‘night photography’ exercise where ambient lights and colours might distract from the desired effect on the pedestrians.
The 10-stop filter also created some challenges around the white balance of the RAW images. Although the filter was not cheap and was fairly neutral in terms of colour cast, it was not perfect. I matched the colour balances of the individual long- and short-exposures as best I could, but it is not perfect. If I use this technique again, there are probably a few things I could do: post-produce the final images in black and white (perhaps this is why Titarenko opted for monochrome); take more time with colour balancing in my editing software; and/or do additional test shots of each scene with a grey card to help ensure accurate colour rendition.

Quality of outcome

I had a good idea of the effect that I wanted to achieve before I began shooting and, for the most part, achieved it.
I am happy with my conceptual approach and believe that I have expressed it effectively, both visually and in my documentation on the blog.
If I print these images for display, I think I might do so as a more obvious set of diptychs: not just side-by-side as a series of images with similar backgrounds, but as a set of diptychs with two pictures printed on a single sheet of photographic paper.

Demonstration of creativity

It is always tricky to speak of one’s own demonstration of creativity, but I think that I brought a slightly new twist to the brief of ‘two sides of the story.’ From my scan of other OCA student blogs, it appears that many achieve their ‘two sides’ by changing the camera’s viewpoint or by altering the subject matter from frame to frame. I decided to play with the dimension of time without altering the viewpoint or subject matter and I think it has been effective.
If it is any indication of my satisfaction with the results—not complete satisfaction, but pleased enough—I think that I would like to return to this approach again where appropriate for later work, whether for the OCA or for myself. I wouldn’t simply repeat what I have done here, but try to improve my technique (see above) and push the concepts further. There is still more for me to do with the effects of time and our perceptions of it.

Context

As I discussed with my tutor when I began CAN, I already had a rough idea of the approach I wanted to take with A1. My research, particularly of Titarenko’s work helped to focus the visual approach to my work: I could see that limiting the exposures to a few seconds created more interesting images than my original idea of having people disappear entirely through extremely long exposures. I did try this for some of my earlier attempts and thought that the results were a bit boring and could possibly confuse viewers (“Were people really there, or are you playing games with us?”).
The discussions by Rutherford and Campany were also helpful to me in terms of better communicating the original concept I had in mind and setting it within an ongoing discourse about the ‘reliability’ of still photographic images and their impact upon our perception of time and truth.

A1—Two Sides of the Story

Most people who give the issue more than a moment’s thought realize that a two-dimensional image does not give us direct access to three-dimensional “reality.” But since a camera contains a light-sensitive surface that is exposed for a specified period, the artifice of an image extends to include a fourth dimension: an often unquestioned perception of time. A camera is a time machine, after all.

A photographer may just have two fundamental controls: “where I stand and when I press the button” (Hurn and Jay, 1997: 25). But although David Hurn is probably being facetious about how simple image-making is, he might have usefully added that another part of the subjectivity the photographer brings to the image is how long to press the button.

We have become very used to photographs freezing time faster than sight allows, but the camera is just as capable of creating exposures that are much longer than what the eye can register. Japanese photographer Hirhoshi Sugimoto has explored this with his series of long-exposures in movie theatres to the point of information overload: his photographic record shows screens that are grossly over-exposed and therefore blank. And Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows series on St. Petersburg uses long exposures to capture the blurred movement of people in a dreary black-and-white cityscape (Titarenko and Tchmyreva, 2001). While Titarenko’s shutter is open, crowds leave vapour trails and begin to fade.

David Campany suggests that still images not only prompt our memories but shape how we understand the phenomenon of memory itself: “In popular consciousness (as opposed to popular unconsciousness) the still image continues to be thought of as being more memorable than those that move” (Campany, 2003).

None of the images I have prepared for this assignment is any less “true” than the photographs of frozen motion that we have become used to. In fact, both pictures in each set are artificial and neither reproduces what our eyes see. Both are ‘still’ images, but one is less still and hints at how quickly perception and memory fade.

We have simply become used to the photographic convention of stillness. But it is just one side of the story.

References

Campany, D. “Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problems of ‘Late Photography’’’ (2003) At: https://davidcampany.com/safety-in-numbness/ (Accessed on 14 July 2019)

Hurn, D. and Jay, B. (1997) On being a photographer: a practical guide. Portland, Oregon: Lenswork Publishing.

Theaters — Hiroshi Sugimoto (s.d.) At: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-7 (Accessed on 14 July 2019)

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

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.

A1—Two sides of the story: initial idea

When I started thinking about a set of images aiming to “explore the convincing nature of documentary, even though what the viewer thinks they see may not in fact be true,” I remembered David Hurn’s statement that the photographer has “two fundamental controls: where I stand and when I press the button” (Hurn and Jay, 2001: 26).

It seemed to me that most people automatically think of these two controls when considering the ‘truthfulness’ of photography: what is the viewer not seeing because of the photographer’s selection of viewpoint and what was missed because the photographer selected to freeze one instant rather than another? If we think of it, any photographic tool works by exposing a light-sensitive sensor to a certain quantity of light for a certain quantity of time. In other words, there are other dimensions of photography that have an impact on the documentary nature of the image produced, and one of these is time.

We have become used to photographs freezing imagery and I think that we take this characteristic as one of photography’s chief gifts: letting us see things that happen too quickly for the eye to register properly and preserving them for us to examine at our leisure. But how often do we remember that a photograph can also let us see things that take place over such a long period that the eye cannot register them?

Aren’t long exposures just as true—or false—a representation of reality as short exposures? What I’d like to do then, is to create a series of images of the same scenes shot at different shutter speeds, with each version having an equal claim to being ‘true.’

I am aware that Alexey Titarenko has produced a number of series of street photography images using long exposures, so I will make a point of researching his work.

Reference

Alexey Titarenko. At: http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/

Hurn, D. and Jay, B. (2001) On being a photographer: a practical guide. LensWork Pub.

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].

Exercise—The real and the digital

As Liz Wells (2009) notes in her brief discussion of the real and the digital, “the manipulation of images is nothing new and […] photographs have been changed, touched-up or distorted since the earliest days.” This is correct. What has changed with the overwhelming prevalence and easy access of digital technologies is that it is no longer possible to accept that photographic images (still or video) are direct representations of reality. In other words, we cannot simply assume that a photograph bears an indexical relationship—”a physical or causal relationship between the signifier (i.e., the photograph) and the signified (i.e., what the photograph depicts)”—to its content (Hall, 2007, 16).

In the past, photographs generally had their start with an image of an object that existed, while realistic images now can be partially or entirely fabricated without the need of any photographic input.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to advance this thought as far as Jean Baudrillard has, to the point of asserting that everything is constructed. It will be difficult for us as a species to completely abandon confidence in our perception of the world around us, particularly when that perception plays such an important role in keeping us safe and generally serves us well.

I think we are more likely to continue on the path where we find ourselves now: we will accept as fact those things that confirm our existing biases and label anything dissonant as ‘fake news.’ My concern is that we will be both radically skeptical and naively vulnerable at the same time, making us easy prey for large-scale manipulation.

Reference

Hall, S. (2007) This means this, this means that: a user’s guide to semiotics. Laurence King Pub.

Wells, L. (2009) Photography A Critical Introduction. Taylor & Francis.

Exercise—Composite image

Creating a composite image is fairly new territory for me and I don’t use Photoshop for editing images. Fortunately, there are free alternatives available online and I found that Paint.NET would do the job for this exercise.

My first attempt at a composite is not perfect, but I will likely return to this type of image and improve my technique. My separation of the Trudeau image from its background is not perfect and I can see that trying to improve the colour balance between the component images would help to create the illusion of a single photograph.