Tag: Artifice

Research point—Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (Brooklyn, 1962– )

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

Responses

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research point—Relay

Sophie Calle — Take Care of Yourself

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

Sophy Rickett — Objects in the Field

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

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

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

Karen Knorr — Gentlemen

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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—Pickering’s Public Order

I found Sarah Pickering’s Public Order series of images fascinating—the initial unease passed quickly as I noticed that most of the buildings are made of cinder block and that the photographer makes it plain that they are facades. The resulting street scenes are standard “types” of a UK urban setting and reminiscent of movie back-lots. We can see that they are artificial, but we respond to them with recognition because the types are so familiar to us. It is as though we are both aware and unaware of the artifice at the same time—we know it is false but we are ready to play along.

I am not sure how to respond to the question of whether “Public Order [is] an effective use of documentary or is it misleading?” As I suggested above, I think the series straddles a line of deliberate ambiguity: the documentation of artifice. If pushed to answer, I suppose I would answer ‘yes’ to both parts of the question: the work is both an effective use of documentary and it is misleading.

The title of the series also hints at ambiguity and double-meaning: the mock town and the structures and forms of our public life have been created in an orderly way, and the environment provides a training ground for law enforcement for those times when public order has broken down and will be reestablished by force. Both an ordered public and public disorder hinted at within a few photographic frames.

Reference

Pickering, S. Public Order. At: https://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/Works/Pulic-Order/workpg-01.html

Cindy Sherman at the NPG

Images from Cindy Sherman’s “Society Portraits” (National Portrait Gallery, 28 June 2019)

The visit, led by OCA tutor Jayne Taylor, began with a brief overview of the Sherman retrospective by Giselle Torres from the National Portrait Gallery. While a good idea, the overview went over a lot of the material already covered in the suggested readings. This suggests two things: the reading/viewings may be sufficient on their own and, if there is to be a speaker, it might be helpful to let her know what has been provided to participants. (To be fair, speakers may already have a prepared text to work from and it may not be reasonable to ask them to customize it for groups.)

The exhibit covered a broad sweep of Sherman’s career, from the time of her student days in Buffalo to works of the last couple of years. The photographer has been dressing up since she was a child and has stayed true to her means of expression, even while evolving in her practice and picking up technical skill along the way. Her earliest works are in series of black and white photographs where the print size is uniformly small. Over time, Sherman moved to colour photography, and from analogue processes to digital, in progressively-larger print sizes. She has also taken on a movie/video production at different points, from brief stop-action animation using photographic cut-outs, to short videos, to a feature-length, low-budget horror movie (Sherman’s favourite film genre).

What struck me across the rooms of the exhibit was how consistent Sherman has been in her approach, even as her work has evolved and become more sophisticated. It seems to me that she has collected a set of types — or stereotypes — and she has used them to challenge viewers about the ambiguity of the images we see every day. The best, and most accessible, example of this is her “Untitled Film Stills” series that offers up familiar-looking images that could have been shot on a movie set. None of the photographs is drawn from a particular movie, however, so the sense of familiarity comes not from having seen the film but from being immersed in the visual language of many films. Without much effort or prompting, we imagine narratives about the women in the images because we have seen this visual language at play in countless films.

ItItSherman’s later series similarly draw on stock elements of a visual language or rhetoric, some of it quite familiar (centrefolds, cover girls, pornography, horror movies, clowns and medieval paintings) and some of it less so (her later work parodying wealthy patrons of fashion shows and society women). Much of this work is designed to subvert visual tropes that we have taken for granted in Western culture, particularly those that customarily reduce women to vulnerable victims or objects of desire. It is cleverly done, with its artifice lying in plain view: Sherman frequently leaves the camera’s cable release lying in the frame, or uses garish lighting and/or makeup, or does not attempt to hide the edges of the prosthesis that she is wearing.

I have to say that I have not always appreciated all of Sherman’s work and thought that she has perhaps more attention than was deserved. After this visit, however, I believe I have a better understanding of what she has been trying to accomplish and think she has done it masterfully.

I still have some questions, however:

  • Could it have been possible for a man to create a similar body of work with similar effect? Or was no male “Cindy Sherman” possible? (Or necessary?)
  • If much of Sherman’s work calls into question or confronts the “male gaze,” does any of it demonstrate a female gaze? Is that what some of her ‘society women’ portraits are meant to do, or is female concern over aging and social standing a response to male standards?
  • How effective is parody once you become part of the very class that you purport to parody? (I have the same question about comedians.) What does it mean when major corporations know you are attempting to subvert their worlds, but pay you to do it because they know they will make a profit anyway?
  • Is Cindy Sherman’s time up? Some students suggested as much during the post-visit discussion. Or is it more the case that superstars in the art world simply move into another sphere of recognition as brands and commodities?

References

HENITalks (2019) Hal Foster – Under the Gaze: The Art of Cindy Sherman. At: https://vimeo.com/266364876

National Portrait Gallery Press Release. https://www.npg.org.uk/assets/files/pdf/press/2018/CindySherman-Announcement.pdf

O’Hagan, S. (2019) Cindy Sherman: ‘I enjoy doing the really difficult things that people can’t buy’. At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jun/08/cindy-sherman-interview-exhibition-national-portrait-gallery

Sherman, C. and Goldsmith, D. (1993). “Cindy Sherman.” Aperture, (133), 34-43. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24471695

Sherman, C. et al. (2019) Cindy Sherman. National Portrait Gallery.

(2019) Cindy Sherman – Nobodys Here But Me (1994). At: https://vimeo.com/228996446