A2—Approach and contact sheets

After deciding to change direction and pursue the idea of “photographing the unseen” of history of one line of my family, I also decided to take the few items that have come into my possession as artifacts. To do this, I consulted a range of materials that outline some of the technical considerations necessary to photograph items accurately as part of a scientific or historical record. The video produced by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association Victoria ( Online Museum Training – Photographing Collection Items. [s.d.]) was particularly useful and contained a lot of practical advice.

The main technical considerations I took away were the following:

Use a neutral background. I opted for a white background rather than black because some of the objects were already quite dark and I did not want to obscure any details in shade.
Ensure even lighting around the object. Rather than using artificial light, I used a light tent with natural daylight.
Show the object from more than one angle and highlight any important details. I did this for each object and made additional exposures for inscriptions inside books and for objects kept within cases.
Include a scale to provide a way to understand the size of the object. I used a drafting scale that is marked in 1 cm increments.
Provide a brief descriptive text or label for the photographed object.

The contact sheet of the unprocessed images I took for Assignment 2 is available as a downloadable PDF at the link below:

can-a2-contact-sheet Download

References

hsscarchaeology (2015) Photographing Artifacts. At: https://hsscarchaeology.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/photographing-artifacts/ (Accessed on 21 September 2019)

Karin (2011) Museums Nova Scotia: Photographing Artifacts – the good, the bad, and the ugly. At: http://passagemuseums.blogspot.com/2011/02/photographing-artifacts-good-bad-and.html (Accessed on 21 September 2019)

Online Museum Training – Photographing Collection Items. (s.d.) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUgG7HEpvyo (Accessed on 21 September 2019)

Pezzati, A. (2002) Adventures in Photography: Expeditions of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Philadelphia, UNITED STATES: University Museum Publications. At: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucreative-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3441604 (Accessed on 21 September 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—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.

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

Research point—Documentary and art

Paul Seawright’s Sectarian Murder series challenges the boundaries between documentary and art by deliberately blurring them. The locations of crime scenes he depicts are abstracted in several ways: time has passed since the events in question; there is no discernible evidence of a crime in the frame; we are told that the accompanying text has been redacted to remove any reference to the religion of the people involved; and the images have been framed and lit in a way that makes them visually interesting and appealing (rather than being strictly ‘descriptive’ as one might expect from a photojournalistic approach). Ultimately, there is no way of knowing if Seawright has shot a location associated with the crimes described in the accompanying texts or if he has fabricated a scene.

The core of Seawright’s argument is that the construction of meaning is not done by the artist but by the viewer and that the distinction between art and journalism is how quickly a piece “gives up its meaning.” I think this is true to a degree—in that there is no way to predict how a reader or viewer might understand the text or object in front of them—but it suggests a greater distance between the artist and the work than is actually the case. Given that Seawright has chosen a particular light, angle of view, framing and explanatory text, it seems a bit disingenuous for him to absolve himself of guiding the viewer toward meaning. The viewer is still free to come up with his or her own appreciation of the work, but the artist has already pointed the viewer in a particular direction. The range of possible understandings is not wide open but has been somewhat restricted.

If we accept the starting point of this course—narrative is what happens within the frame and context is everything outside it—then we must also see that there is an interaction between the two. Defining a piece of documentary photography as art immediately alters the context of the photograph and will influence how its narrative is read by the viewer.

References

(2018) Catalyst: Paul Seawright. At: https://vimeo.com/76940827

Sectarian Murder. At: http://www.paulseawright.com/sectarian

Martha Rosler on documentary photography

Quotations, questions and thoughts

Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.

A large part of Rosler’s argument is that documentary does not aim so much to change the structures responsible for the world around us, but that it is designed to comfort viewers and confirm that there is no reason to act.

Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)

Does documentary distance the real world and make it safe for us by pulling its teeth?

But which political battles have been fought and won by someone for someone else?

Does documentary really lead to meaningful change? Do the creators and consumers of documentary fool themselves into thinking that they are able to effect the “right” change or any change at all?

It is easy to understand why what has ceased to be news becomes testimonial to the bearer of the news. Documentary testifies finally, to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of
physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble.

Rosler goes on to name a Who’s Who of well-known “documentarian stars” to make a very sharp point: the focus of documentary is not the photographic subject but the photographer, whatever narrative is offered to the viewer.

An early –1940s, perhaps–Kodak movie book tells North American travelers, such as the Rodman C. Pells of San Francisco, pictured in the act of photographing a Tahitian, how to film natives so that they seem unconscious of the camera.

Documentary photography is not just subject to portraying a particular embedded viewpoint but is, at times, subject to manipulation to better make a point or achieve a desired effect.

…topicality drops away as epochs fade, and the aesthetic aspect is, if anything, enhanced by the loss of specific reference.

With the passage of time (and the reception of the images as art?), the specific content of documentary becomes less and less relevant. Whatever the original justification might have been (social benefit? newsworthiness?), the documentary subject becomes a free-floating object.

An analysis which reveals social institutions as serving one class by legitimating and enforcing its domination while hiding behind the false mantle of even-handed universality necessitates an attack on the monolithic cultural myth of objectivity (transparency, unmediatedness), which implicates not only photography but all journalistic and reportorial objectivity used by mainstream media to claim ownership of all truth.

This comes back to Rosler’s argument that documentary does not seriously challenge the established social order but actually helps to prop it up—the subjects are not us and we can make judgements about them from a distance and a superior height.

[A] new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy (almost an affection(for the imperfections and the frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value(no less precious for being irrational. . . . What they hold in common is the belief that the commonplace is really worth looking at, and the courage to look at it with a minimum of theorizing. [quoting John Szarkowski]

Rosler has no time for Szarkowski’s misty-eyed view of the documentarians of the 60s and 70s. Instead, she sees in them an aloofness toward their subjects that produces images of spectacle and people as unwitting circus performers. This doesn’t seem to be any better than the moralizing of the previous generation of photographers and the result is the same in Rosler’s estimation: the established social order can sleep safe.

But the common acceptance of the idea that documentary precedes, supplants, transcends, or cures full, substantive social activism is an indicator that we do not yet have a real documentary.

Perhaps Rosler develops this thought somewhere else, but I found it a frustrating end to her article. We are aware of the contempt that she had for documentary photography until the 1980s, but what does she think “a real documentary” would look like? Her closing sentence implies that something of the kind is possible, but how would it avoid all of the pitfalls of what had gone before? Who would practise it? Would there be an audience for it?

This last point is something that I have wondered about as I have looked at the work of environmental (e.g. Burtynsky), conflict (e.g. McCullin) and journalistic (e.g. McCurry) photographers: if the images they show us are not aesthetically or emotionally compelling, will we want to look at them for long? And if we don’t want to look at their images, what would any of these photographers achieve? (Apart from recognition and money, of course.)

I found Rosler’s essay more complex than it needed to be, but important. Her questions and accusations have to be faced if we are to be honest about the nature of society and the motivations of individuals. People with any degree of standing or power have an interest in preserving the status quo, and more of us belong in that camp than would like to admit it. In some ways, her writing reminds me of the response I had to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing—Berger is gentler, but there is a persistent, useful Marxist social critique lying behind his observations and I suspect that the same philosophical strain lies behind Martha Rosler’s work.

I wonder, though, if Rosler’s argument was just too bleak. Having offered a withering critique of documentary, does she leave us with anywhere to go?

Reference

Berger, John (ed.) (1990) Ways of seeing: based on the BBC television series with John Berger. (Repr) London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

Rosler, Martha (1993) ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography’ In: Bolton, Richard (ed.) The contest of meaning: critical histories of photography. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.