A5—Additional context

It has taken me some to return to A5 since completing CAN, in part because of the mental distancing that occurs once a final assignment is submitted for a course, and in part because of my workplace involvement in Canada’s response to the COVID-19 virus over the last several weeks. Reasons and excuses aside, though, it is time to return to my tutor’s suggestions for further analysis around the artists that I have referenced for A5, as well as the role of the “mirror as a recurring element in reflexive practices.”

Ilse Bing and 1930s concerns with the nature of vision and photography itself

  • Photographer (Frankfurt, 1899–NYC, 1998)
  • University of Frankfurt, 1920, to study mathematics, but moved to Vienna to study art history. Began doctoral program studying architecture in 1924 and photographed buildings for her dissertation, which she did not submit. In 1929, moved to Paris to work with Florence Henri and other Modernists. Henri took similar self-portrait with mirrors — link to Bing’s work?
  • Worked in photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and fashion (Le Monde IllustréHarper’s Bazaar, Vogue).
  • Modernism, Surrealism, New Vision. Experimented with perspectives, unconventional cropping, use of natural light, geometries; pioneered a type of solarisation independently of Man Ray.
  • Early adopter of Leica in Paris, “Queen of the Leica” (Sougez).
  • Work was included in the first modern photography exhibition held at the Louvre, 1936.
  • Traveled to New York City,  “Photography 1839–1937” at MoMA. Fled France to NYC, June 1941.
  • Style evolved in NYC: harder forms, clear lines. Experimented with colour in the 1950s, then gave up photography. Renewed interest in her work from mid-1970s to the early 1990s.
  • Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1931 reveals the mechanics of the artifice that lies behind the image, like a magician showing how a trick works.
  • “The above self-portrait of the photographer and her camera – taken in 1931 and currently on display as part of the Barnes Foundation’s exhibition of French photography from 1890 to 1950, titled Live and Life Will Give You Pictures – is one of Bing’s most famous works, and a key icon of modernist photography. It is a compositionally complex image that shows Bing capturing herself in a mirror with another mirror (possibly the opposite side arm) angled so as to reflect her and her beloved Leica in profile. It demonstrates a broad range of tactile tones and textures, from the deep-black, slightly bobbled fabric of Bing’s jacket, to the oversized, rippling silver button on its sleeve, to the sheeny curtain, with its deep folds, glistening behind her. The objects on the desk in front of her – a sheet of paper, an electric cord and what looks like a box of matches – interrupt the formality of the set-up and point to the image-maker’s interest in the banal details of urban living. The double presence of the artist at work, and the intentness of her gaze, serves to highlight the newfound independence that women were enjoying at the time, while the prominent inclusion of the camera symbolises the burgeoning technical revolution of the period and the fresh opportunity for creative expression it enabled” (AnOther, 2016).
  • “I didn’t choose photography; it chose me,” she reflected in later life. “I didn’t know it at the time. An artist doesn’t think first and then do it, he [sic] is driven. Now over 50 years later, I can look back and explain it. In a way, it was the trend of the time; it was the time when you started to see differently… And the camera, that was, in a way, the beginning of the mechanical device penetrating into the field of art” (AnOther, 2016).

Tracey Moffatt

  • Lens-based artist: photography, video (Brisbane, 1960–)
  • White father, Aboriginal mother. Fostered out at 3 years of age; grew up as the eldest of three daughters in a white family and often left to look after her foster sisters.
  • Degree in visual communications, Queensland College of Art, 1982. Honorary doctorate, 2004.
  • Work often focuses on cultural and social views of Australian Aboriginal people.
  • Short film Nice Coloured Girls, 1987: 16-minute story of three young Aboriginal women contrasted with historical oppression of Indigenous women by white men.
  • Something more, 1989: series of six Cibachrome and three black-and-white prints; narrative of a young woman looking for more out of life than violent rural upbringing.
  • Film, Night Cries, 1989/1990: inspired by 1955 Australian film Jedda; about an Aboriginal women forced to care for her aging white mother.
  • Series through the 1990s on themes of sexuality, history, representation, race and violence.
  • Work in 2000s on fame and celebrity.
  • Represented Australia (first Indigenous artist to do so) at Venice Biennale 2017 with solo exhibition “My Horizon” consisting of videos, The White Ghosts Sailed In and Vigil, and two series of photographs, Body Remembers and PassageColonialism and imperialism in Australia and impacts on indigenous population.

Piero Fornasetti

  • Artist, engraver, decorator, industrial designer (Milan, 1913–1988)
  • Expelled from Milan’s Brera Art Academy. Later expelled from Italy and developed as an artist in Switzerland.
  • Known for motifs such as sun, moon, playing cards, animals, and other Surrealist imagery. Recurring face of opera singer Lina Cavalieri, including a series of 350 individual plates.
  • Most pieces in black and white, total number over 10,000.
  • Unlike many modernists, focused on surface enrichment rather than form, covering the surfaces with surreal hand-painted images.

Elina Brotherus – Artist and Model Reflected in a Mirror

  • Photographer, videographer (Helsinki, 1972–)
  • Early work on universal experiences, presence and absence of love.
  • Series “The New Painting” (2000-05), relation of photography to art history. “Model Studies” (2002-08) and “Artist and her model” (2005-2011), human figure within a landscape, and gaze of artist on model. “12 ans après” (2011-2012) and “Annonciation” (2009-2013) autobiographical.
  • Series “12 ans après” makes frequent use of mirror images in self-portraits which seem to serve as a metaphor for reflecting on one’s own life as the artist returns to a residence in which she had lived for a while. The mirror also makes explicit, visually, that the artist is playing a double-role as both the viewer and the viewed. It looks to me that there is a ‘knowingness’ about it, as if she invites others to view her as she views herself. Her use of a visible cable release in a number of the images also makes explicit the artifice involved in taking the self-portrait: I know what I’m doing, I’m showing you what I’m doing and now we both know that we know. There is apparently no mask, and that is the artifice.

Diego Velázquez – Las Meninas (1656).

  • Painter (Seville, 1599–Madrid, 1660)
  • Leading artist in court of King Philip IV during Spanish Golden Age. Scenes of historical and cultural significance, portraits of Spanish royal family and commoners, including Las Meninas (1656). Model for 19th century realist and impressionist painters. Reinterpreted by numerous modrn painters.
  • Interesting that the painting should have been named for the ladies in waiting rather than the princess, and that a dwarf and the painter should appear so prominently when the king and queen are relegated to the background: “the mirror in the background, with its reflection of the king and queen, was the artist’s clever way of revealing what is on the front of the large canvas on which he is working” (Jacobs, 2015). Is the image about roles and their reversal? Is it a benign image of a royal household or something else?
  • Playing with perspective, location and status? Truly a constructed image. “Fact is turned into fiction,” Brown writes. The work is “purely a product of the painter’s imagination.” (Jonathan Brown, 1986 in Lesser, 2018).
  • “But the debate as to what the mirror was intended to show had at least the effect of drawing attention to the monarchs’ likely presence in the room, whether as models or as spectators. And this in turn helped promote an idea that would give the painting an especial relevance to the modern age: that the monarchs, if they really are in the artist’s studio, would be occupying the same position as we ourselves do in viewing the work. This was a notion that opened up a whole new range of interpretative possibilities. It marked a turning point in the appreciation of Las Meninas. A moment when an icon of realism was transformed into what the contemporary British artist Mark Wallinger has called the first “self-conscious” work of modern art. A moment when a painting that captures so astonishingly the surface of life became as well a profound meditation on the relationship between life and art” (Jacobs, 2015). Multiple planes and reflections/vantage points.
  • “The fascinating painting places viewers in the position of the king and queen. This interesting twist makes whoever is looking at the painting both a spectator and a participant” (The History and Mystery of ‘Las Meninas’ by Diego Velázquez, 2019).
  • Foucault: |In appearance, this locus is a simple one; a matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us. A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross.” […] “But, inversely, the painter’s gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable, or rather in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles infinity. And here the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture exercises its second function: stubbornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established.” […] “Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing? The painter is observing a place which, from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity.” […] “We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lustreless back. The other side of a psyche.” […] “But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation – of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject – which is the same – has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.”


Jeff Wall – Picture for Women (1979). Plenty online, Campany for instance.

  • Photographer (Vancouver, 1946– )
  • Large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Helped define Vancouver School .
  • Experimented with conceptual art while undergraduate at UBC. Many transparencies are staged and refer to history of art and philosophical problems of representation. Compositions often allude to work of artists like Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet, or writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, Ralph Ellison.
  • Picture for Women is a 142.5 × 204.5 cm cibachrome transparency mounted on a lightbox. Along with The Destroyed Room, Wall considers Picture for Women to be his first success in challenging photographic tradition. According to Tate Modern, this success allows Wall to reference “both popular culture (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) and the sense of scale he admires in classical painting. As three-dimensional objects, the lightboxes take on a sculptural presence, impacting on the viewer’s physical sense of orientation in relationship to the work.”
  • “Some of Wall’s early pictures evoke the history of image making by overtly referring to 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. These two pictures are models of a thread in Wall’s work that the artist calls “blatant artifice”: pictures that foreground the theatricality of both their subject and their production” (Jeff Wall, 2018).
  • Picture for Women addresses the male gaze, a topic increasingly analyzed, debated, and often resisted within the art world in the years surrounding this picture’s creation and display. […] Since the viewer can clearly see the back of her body reflected in the mirror along with the face of a man facing her, the viewer is directly implicated in the scene by supposedly occupying the very space of the patron. Not only do we see the male gaze in action, we are also participating in it. Similarly, Wall’s photograph puts viewers in the center of the image by aiming the camera lens directly at us, highlighting our participation in the observation of the woman in the photograph while also witnessing Wall fix his male gaze upon her too. The viewers then also fall victim to the male gaze, as the photographer supposedly captures our image with the camera as well” (Jeff Wall Photography, Bio, Ideas, s.d.).
  • “For de Duve, Picture for Women dramatises and finds its own unique solution to photography’s split loyalty to Modernism. Pulled in opposite directions, photographic Modernism has a wish to be ‘true to itself’ by producing illusionistic space and a wish to negate this and bring the viewer up to its characteristically invisible surface. This split runs right through photography’s fraught artistic identity. It is there in everything from Pictorialist photography’s interest in ‘painterly’ print finishes (such as tactile, hand-brushed emulsions) to high Modernist photography’s exaggeration of the world’s textures in contrast to its own industrial smoothness (photography of the New Objectivity and the f64 group, for example). It registers in the countless images resulting from the medium’s compulsive desire to encounter mirrors and also in choices of subject matter that might serve to draw attention to the camera’s optical account of thing” (David Campany, 2007:16).
  • “The presence of the camera or a mirror in a photograph often suggests to the viewer the ‘cone of vision’, the means of spatial organisation which photography inherits from classical perspective. However, while an optical model of vision may provide us with an account of the appearance of an image, it cannot provide a model of response or interpretation, not least to Picture for Women. A diagrammatic theory of optics is quite unsuited for mapping the processes of the unconscious that are at play in the making of meaning, especially in the depiction of social/sexual subjects. The condensations and displacements of desire obey neither linear perspective nor optical logic. The cold, dead eye of geometry cannot account for desire, which comes to warp space and undo its coherence. While the cone of vision may suggest ‘the’ viewer as an idealized, impossible point in the rigorous geometry of a picture, it is frequently blind to matters of subjectivity and difference. Similarly the phrase ‘point of view’ in everyday day speech refers to values or opinions about things (‘What’s your point of view?’), while in photography it also refers to where you put the camera in relation to the subject. So it is tempting to draw a parallel between a photographer’s attitude to the world and the position from which they shoot it. There is always some kind of relation between the two but it cannot be formulated exactly. Much of the tension in Wall’s photograph flows from the staging of this split” (David Campany, 2007:18).
  • “Moreover it is not unrealistic to read Picture For Women as a visual illustration of the central tenet of what is perhaps the key essay of visual culture of the 1970s, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). Mulvey argued that “‘Woman”, connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness” in a visual culture organised by the unconscious of patriarchy’. Where the essay made an iconoclastic and political call for a practice that might shatter this existing order, Wall opted for an art that promised to bring out something of its character as a ‘moment of unease’ within a tightly organised picture. Indeed moments of unease came to dominate Wall’s depiction of people, particularly relations between men and women” (David Campany, 2007:21).
  • “A photograph automatically produces a double of the world, a naturalistic substitute. A photo that includes a mirror doubles the double. Moreover it promises a mastering knowledge of the whole phenomenon, for photographer and viewer. The mirror image is photography made ‘self-conscious’ in a very direct, if literal, way. In 1978, the year before Wall made Picture for Women, Craig Owens discussed photographs of mirrors as means of putting the medium en abyme. The presence of a mirror allows the image to reproduce at an internal level a fundamental quality of photography as a whole. He compared photographers’ strong attraction to mirrors to a young child’s compulsion to turn the sounds it hears into communication by repeating them (ma-ma, da-da). Repetition becomes a way to turn the arbitrary into the intentional and produce an imaginary control. There need not be a grasp of meaning at the level of content, merely a demonstration of the blind mechanism, rather like Echo in Greek mythology who is condemned to repeat the last words of sentences spoken to her. In a similar way, photographers will often seek out the camera’s own kinds of echoes in mirrors and reflections. Most point the camera at the mirror at an early stage in their exploration of the medium. It is more than just a coming to terms with the nature of the apparatus as a picturing device. While discovering what photography is for them, they attempt to confirm or recognise themselves as photographers. The two go together in a private moment of self-assertion, made public when the resulting image is fixed. As a rite of passage, it says: ‘I am curious about this’ or even ‘I am serious about this.’ (Owens alludes to Jacques Lacan’s ‘Mirror Phase’ through which the young child learns to identify with the imaginary wholeness of an ideal-ego, but the connection is not made explicit)” (David Campany, 2007:23).
  • “The third solution, which seems over time to be the favoured one, is to depict people facing away or partially away from the camera so that we are not forced to confront so headlong their artifice nor they ours as gallery-goers. The recent Catalogue Raisonne’ gives us the first opportunity to see Wall’s oeuvre in chronological order, and it is striking to note how his figures start off facing the camera and gradually turn away over the decades. In those early works, people and objects face the camera almost as unflinchingly as the ‘ideas’ that inform them. Increasingly the profile and the back of the head become prevalent. Wall’s imagery has grown quieter, less emphatic and, I would venture, more likeable than admirable” (David Campany, 2007:25).

Szarkowski, Mirrors and windows: American photography since 1960

  • “The prejudices and inclinations expressed by the pictures in this book suggest positions that are familiar from older disputes. In terms of the best photography of a half century ago, one might say that Alfred Stieglitz is the patron of the first half of this book and Eugene Atget of the second. In either case, what artist Gould want a more distinguished sponsor? The distance between them is to be measured not in terms of the relative force or originality of their work, but in terms of their conceptions of what a photograph is: is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?” (Szarkowski and Museum of Modern Art, 1978:25).

Helmut Newton – Self-Portrait with Wife and Models (1981).

  • Interesting that this image should be presented as a self-portrait when the image of the photographer seems almost incidental to everything else that is going on in the frame. Nevertheless, it is Newton who has set the scene and arranged all three of his models—a nude woman seen from behind but whose full-length image appears in a mirror, another woman whose legs appear in the frame as if by accident, and the photographer’s wife who sits facing the scene with an attitude of apparent boredom.
  • The title image appears as if it might have happened by chance, but the contact sheet shows clearly that Newton has worked the scene to get the effect he is after, with all of the models posed in just the right position, in right relation to one another and to the photographer himself.
  • Only Newton and his wife are fully dressed. Is this a statement of power? Of concealment? Age? All of the above? The choice of a trench coat could be linked with clichés of men either exposing themselves or engaging in seamy activities. Are both suggested here?
  • “Further, he becomes the object of the female gaze, as June observes him observing the naked woman. Newton has been, in essence, “caught looking.” In this image, June stands in for the symbolic as she employs the gaze. This could be a commentary on marriage, as a state and religious sanctioned institution and, thereby, device of the symbolic. Under the regulatory matrimonial gaze, Newton is caught and exposed. This is not to say that Jane is implicated in his subjection. This is, after all, a purposefully staged image – a performance of the gaze – in which she takes part. As Burgin notes, it is important to consider Newton’s trenchcoat as not only a symbol of voyeurism but also of exhibitionism. It is the stereotypical dress of the “flasher.” Burgin points out that “it is not normal for the photographer to expose himself” (McDowell, 2008:199).
  • Newton’s face is hidden as he focuses the camera, which might suggest that he uses the equipment to remain concealed. And he shoots from behind the model while exposing her front and back with the aid of a mirror. More concealment. His wife, facing him, sees all head-on, although she cannot see as much of the scene as the photographer—or the viewer—because of the relationship of the camera to the mirror. The combination of camera and mirror appear to reveal all, except for the appearance of the photographer himself.

References

AnOther (2016) Uncovering the Critical Influence of Photographer Ilse Bing. At: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/9266/uncovering-the-critical-influence-of-photographer-ilse-bing (Accessed 20/04/2020).

Artist and her model (2005-2011) (s.d.) At: http://www.elinabrotherus.com/artist-and-her-model (Accessed 21/04/2020).

David Campany (2007) ‘‘A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom’: Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women’ In: Oxford Art Journal 30 (1) pp.9–25. At: www.jstor.org/stable/4500042 (Accessed 03/05/2020).

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

Dryansky, L. and Houk, E. (2006) Ilse Bing: photography through the looking glass. (s.l.): H.N. Abrams.

Eckel, J. et al. (2018) Exploring the Selfie: Historical, Theoretical, and Analytical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography. (s.l.): Springer.

Elina Brotherus (s.d.) At: https://camaraoscura.net/portfolio/elina-brotherus/?lang=en (Accessed 21/04/2020).

Fornasetti (2020) In: Wikipedia. At: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fornasetti&oldid=938052978 (Accessed 21/04/2020).

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Lesser, C. (2018) Centuries Later, People Still Don’t Know What to Make of “Las Meninas”. At: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-centuries-people-las-meninas (Accessed 02/05/2020).

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A5—Initial thoughts

CAN has been an opportunity for me to take a fresh look at image-making and to explore themes that I have not touched before. It has been a bit of a surprise for me that identity has come to the fore, as it has in Assignments 2 and 4. Rather than turn to another broad theme at the end of CAN I am inclined to push myself with another aspect of the identity question.

Assignment 2 looked at the issue of family origins — most of us are interested in where we came from and founding myths can be very powerful. Assignment 3 touched on a closely-held fear that has dogged me since I was a teenager. Even Assignment 4, my reading of Paul Strand’s Wall Street, 1915, was an identity exploration of sorts: a chance to delve into the reasons why the photograph has captured my imagination for so long.

For Assignment 5, I have decided to touch on the issue of aging. I am at a point in my life where I have noticed that I am thinking about the next stage of my career and am finding that the attitudes of others around me are changing subtly. Some of it comes from personal interest while some of it appears to be rooted in stereotypical expectations or even forms of ageism.

I discussed a few possible approaches with my tutor during our last Zoom meeting and he was encouraging. He was also good enough to follow up with some examples from Hannah Starkey, Larry Sultan and Rembrandt that I can use for reference and/or guide points for research.

One of the key elements that I took away from my earlier CAN assignments and from my tutorials is the need to pay close attention to every element in the frame of a constructed image. Just as I labour over each aspect of an image I am reading, I need to give the same consideration to every piece of the image I am building: lighting, props, costumes/clothes, colours, foreground, background, gesture, expression, etc. I am essentially dressing a set for a one-frame play.