Tag: Essay

A4—Reflection

Demonstration of technical and visual skills

  • The category of “visual skills” does not apply in the usual way for this assignment because I did not have to create any imagery. The category does apply, however, in the sense of applying those skills in looking carefully at an image created by someone else. I will give my comments on how successfully I did that in the “Quality of outcome” sub-section.
  • The other technical skills employed for this assignment were connected with my writing ability. I am confident that my writing is clear and cogent, and does not suffer from too many basic faults.

Quality of outcome

  • I am quite pleased with the outcome of the assignment in a number of respects. The first of these is that I gave myself the time to spend just looking at Strand’s image and to explore it fully. Wall Street, 1915 is a picture that has stayed in my mind for many years and I have never really articulated to myself, much less anyone else, why it had such a hold in my imagination. It was a kind of gift for me to be able to give it sustained attention and help to answer my own question: why do I care about this picture?
  • I was not interested in putting together a collection of views and insights lifted from other interpreters, but wanted to do the close work of doing my own interpretive work. I think I have achieved that.

Demonstration of creativity

  • I made an effort to delve into some of the intertextuality that Wall Street, 1915 suggested to me. The first of these was Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis, so it was exciting to me to find out that Strand himself had returned to the scene of his still image to give it a place in his own film, Manhatta.
  • I also used my imagination in looking at the walkers and thinking about what their postures, attitudes and clothing might suggest. I did the same with the bold lines of the shadows, buildings and sidewalks.
  • Can I be sure that my views and interpretations are accurate? Of course not. What would the standard be and which view would trump—the studium of Strand (Barthes’ Operator), my own assessment and punctum, or someone else’s? But did I enjoy the activity and writing the reflective essay? Absolutely.

Context

  • The context for the essay is a course on photographic Context and Narrative, and the assignment has taught me something about both aspects of the title. I have seen how Wall Street, 1915 found its context in a number of places and I can appreciate that it would have been apprehended differently in each of them—on the wall of Stieglitz’s New York gallery, in the pages of Camera Work with other early examples of Modernist photography, as a few seconds of homage in a movie, and in collections and retrospectives of Strand’s work over the last 100 years.
  • I have tried to tease out some of the more striking aspects of the photograph’s narrative by entering the little world inside its frame and seeing how the various elements work together to make a coherent and powerful visual story.
  • Just as important for me has been the chance to consider my own context as a viewer / interpreter and to have the chance to apply new tools that help me to understand and articulate my own response to a famous image that has stuck with me for years.

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)