Week 10 Lectures
Critical Writing. Catarina Fontoura
Hello and welcome to this short lecture, which is an introduction to Critical Writing.
This may be a term that you’ve heard before or something that is completely new to you. Either way,
I want to take the time to start by saying that this is not something to be worried about or being slightly scared of.
Hopefully this lecture
will really simplify things and show you that anybody can do a bit of critical writing and start doing it. So what is critical writing?
In short, critical writing is an evaluation of information from multiple sources, so more than 1 or 2, to develop a point of view. And I have this picture there, which is from The Sweet Feminist on Instagram,
and just to show you that anything can be critical writing, even the icing on a cake can be critical writing, and in this case, The Sweet Feminist has got multiple sources that she’s working on that she exposes on her Instagram sort of photograph descriptions, including resources to educate people and then make her argument in icing form, if that makes sense, but that is critical writing.
Critical writing is inherently different from descriptive writing, where you’re describing what something looks like, to reflective writing, where you are looking back and thinking back about something, and it’s different to creative writing, where you are using your imagination to suppose things.
However good critical writing does encompass all of these forms of writing into 1 piece of text, using multiple sources to create a point of view, but using imagination, reflection, and description to achieve this. So in this presentation, I want to give you a very simple recipe to create your critical writing piece of text, and you might have a brief to do a piece of text of a specific length or it could be that as you are working throughout the course you have essays or reports to write.
So this applies to all of those things, even though it’ll probably get complex-ified every time you do it.
This is very simple-, this is a very simple recipe for beginners, for someone who’s just starting out with critical writing, is perhaps a little bit unsure, and doesn’t know quite where to start. So the place to start is the library. When you are asked to do a piece of critical writing, even if that critical writing
is about your own work, always begin in the library’s website and search engine. If you haven’t attended the library induction, please go and watch the recording now before you continue, because it’s really helpful to understand the rest of this lecture.
So imagine-, I’m going to use this just a imagined scenario, that I’m doing a small piece of critical writing on feminism. So I go on the library search engine in the website and I type ‘feminism’ really to try and understand what feminism is before I relate it to photography, because my interest is how feminism is, for example, being shown through contemporary photography.
I come up-, the-, 1 of the first thing that comes up in my search is this Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. Now I know that Routledge as an editor and a publisher is a really good, reliable source so I go and look at the introduction. Often in these sort of textbooks, or even a book about photography or an edited collection, introductions are really like the juicy bit where you get all the different ideas and summary of things and they’re really useful to actually get to know if you-,
if you are interested in the rest of the book.
So I go in to the introduction and I find a definition of feminism, and a definition is a really key thing for
A piece of critical writing, especially when you’re trying to overlap concepts or juxtapose concepts, for example, feminism and photography.
I really do need to tell the readers what feminism is or what I do understand as feminism. So I do that, I now have a definition, and you can see it here, I’ve just screenshot it from the website. Then I go back to the library website and I now put the 2 words together on the search engine, feminism and photography. And one of the first thing that comes up is-, is this magazine article about the girlgaze,
and I’m really-, I mean, I just-, I-, I just really interested in those 2 words together and I’m curious, so I just click it.
So it’s really a lot of following my instinct of ‘I’m interested in that, I want to see what that is.’
So I clicked that link. So I click on that link and I figured out that’s actually quite a lot there that interests me and that I think will be valuable when talking about photography because obviously the gaze has a lot to do with photography and film and I start making notes, I start underlying things, that’s a really good way to study and to understand a piece of text, it helps you think through what you’re reading.
So I start underlying some references there, Laura Mulvey, as-… is a seminal writer in th-, in this. John Berger also being a seminal writer on this. So it gives-, it’s already giving me clues on what to look next
if I wanted to keep investigating this topic further. And so-, also at the end it-, it sort of talks a little bit about intersectional feminism with race and class, how it intersects with those social issues, so that’s something that really interests me,
I make a note of that. Then I take this concept of the female gaze and I go to the British Journal of Photography, which is somewhere that I always go when I’m researching a lecture or a piece of text to share with my students or-, or a paper, a research paper, so I go into their website and I type in the search for ‘Female Gaze’ and I find out that there is actually a special issue of the British Journal of Photography just dedicated to the Female Gaze:
Do women see things differently to men? And I’m really curious about this idea so I browsed the issue
a little bit to see what is there and I find the work of lots of photographers that I enjoy, but also this one that I wasn’t aware, so it’s a new source of information to me, which is the photographer Endia Beal,
in this project, what-… Am I What You’re Looking For? which is about black women’s experience of office life and interviewing for sort of office jobs and professional jobs and what she does is that she takes this makeshift studio with a printed on background, a quite deadpan image of an office,
she brings it to you women’s spaces and living rooms and takes portraits, some studio portraits of them
in their environment.
I find this work really, really interested, and it sort of connects with that intersectional feminism aspect
that I had read in that article, so I keep it as 1 of my chosen sources.
I also go on YouTube, YouTube is a really valuable resource as well when used correctly.
So here I have an artist and I know that artists often give sort of artist talks or interviews when they have exhibitions in museums, so I just type the artist’s name on the YouTube search engine and I come up with this lecture that Endia Beal gave at one of her museum exhibitions, and this lecture is really valuable so I take it as 1 of my sources as well.
I watch a little bit, I make notes to see what Endia Beal has to say about her work, her intention, her aim, I suppose, behind or message behind putting, you know, in this-, in this very creative way, putting black women into the office space via these sort of backdrops and studio photographs.
So I take that as a source. In that same BGP issue of female gaze there was the work of Laia Abril
who has worked on a quite long term project with different chapters on misogyny and hatred against women and gender based violence, and I think this is a really key aspect of the way I understand female identity, so I keep it with me. I then get to see through that-… through that issue that she has a book with Dewi Lewis, who is an incredible photographic publisher, so I go and have a look at that, and this work is on abortion and women’s experience of abortion.
It’s a very respectful, ethical project that she works with people that have experience of being criminalised for their reproductive choices. I also go to 1000 Words website, by our very own module leader Tim Clark, to see if there’s anything about Laia Abril, so I just put Laia Abril in the search
engine there. And-, and-, yes, there is-, there is a-, a review, a book review, from one of her chapters of the project, so I keep that as chosen sources and I read through and I make a few notes.
This doesn’t take me very long, so I’m using my instinct as well to go along and see what do I want to keep, what I don’t want to keep?
There’s no right or wrong answers, but there should be some sort of rationale like why am I choosing these things? Just a very brief sort of thoughtful process of why am I keeping certain things and discarding others?
I already have quite a few sources at this point, but I then go to one of my favourite sort of academic
journals of photography called Photographies by Taylor & Francis, to have a look if they have anything
about the female experience or feminism and photography, and I find this article on motherhood,
motherhood reimagined. And it’s all about motherhood as the experience of some people who identify as female, and this is a key aspect of how I understand my experience as a female identifying creative and photographers so I take that with me as well and find out about the beautiful work of Naomi Wood that focuses on the experience-, the day to day expense of motherhood and of babyhood and the fourth trimester, you know, the trimester after having a baby.
And I really love this sort of documentary approach, but quite playful, very experimental approach to motherhood, but I also really like the words that are shared there in this-, in this article, and she says ‘Memories, routines, expectations, to do list items prevent me from accessing the distance I need to see motherhood and make it visible, its essence.’
You know, communicating the struggles of being a mother and being a creative person at the same time, which, you know, for any of-, any of you that might have tried, is extremely challenging, but also, you know, very rewarding. And it reminds me of something that I saw on Instagram, which is the Eye Mama project that was made-, so when-, it was an Instagram sort of participatory project on social media that became a book and an exhibition and that collates all these different artists that have made work about motherhood and parenthood and babyhood and having children and sort of domestic labour and-, into their arts practice.
So I was like, ‘Oh, I really want these 2 things to be part of my critical writing piece because this is a key-, a key thing in my own life and experience as well. And so now, after all this research, I stop a moment to see what I’ve collected and I’ve got my main ingredients. I’ve got 1 definition of feminism,
I have a minimum of 3 visual projects or visual examples or sources, I have 3-, a minimum of 3
critical sources, and I’ve got 4 there, and I’ve got-, all I need now is 3 units of time.
And the reason why I’ve put there 3 units of time is because it takes different people, different amounts of time to create a piece of writing, even the same person on different days will need 3 different units of time to produce a bit of writing. And there’s no writer way-, no right or wrong way of going about it.
So here’s my method slash instructions for putting the critical cake together now that I have got my ingredients. The first thing is to observe what my sources have in common or how are they different?
Make notes about that, but make notes about what they reveal about the subject that you’re writing about. So make notes about how your sources-, what are your sources saying about, in this case,
feminism and photography?
What are they saying about it? I make notes about that. Go back to your ingredients and choose
any relevant quotes, like little bits of-, like the juicy bits of ideas that you want to take with you to your own writing.
Go back to your ingredients and choose any images that feel-, you feel like interact best with your quotes and with your ideas. And this is a very instinctual project-, process, pardon me, of like, what are the images that I most enjoy?
What are the ones that speak most to me in regards to this theme or topic that I’m addressing? Make connections between visual and written ingredients. That is really key.
Like just put a quote together with an image that haven’t interacted yet and see what they have to say
to each other. Then let it prove for a while. It’s really important to just actually rest once you’ve done a bit of writing, rest, go and have a cup of tea, toast, go for a walk, maybe go to work, come back or play with your kids, come back to it the next day to really find out what it is that… You know, to have a bit of distance and reflect upon what you’ve written so far.
And then when you come back, put it all together and watch it rise into a delicious critical cake.
So this is about like the refining, just maybe adding a few things, maybe making some final connections
and you-, and you have it. And this applies to like a 200 word little bit of text that only focuses on 1 critical writing and 1 image, or it focuses on-, or it could be used for a dissertation for like a longer piece of writing.
So it’s a really useful recipe, especially if you’re feeling a bit unsure about it and have worries about research, the big word of research and the big word of, you know, big words of critical writing.
So just to give you a bit of a flavour
of my critical connections that I’ve made with all those ingredients I put together,
and that you’ve watched me put together. So I’ve learned that there is such a thing
as a female gaze and that it counteracts something that John Berger and Laura Mulvey called the male gaze, which is an historical thing too.
I have learned that there are women photographers from diverse backgrounds that are making work
about their own lived experiences, and I’ve learned that feminism must be intersectional with
especially-, especially racial issues, and that it must amplify the voices of women from the global majority.
I have chosen to write about work from 3 distinct areas, and I sort of identify them afterwards,
which was professional / work lives, violence against women, and motherhood. Those are the 3 different themes that I chose to make-, you know, create writing about. And I’ve concluded that representation of these female experiences matter and how women are seen in society and in photography can really help advance the agenda and the… yeah, the social agenda of feminism.
And here are just some further critical writing tips for you. First one is, if it’s worth including,
it may be worth telling the reader why you including it, but it might not come to you until later,
until you’re putting it everything together, and sometimes it might not make any difference at all, it might not be relevant. But-, so for example, in terms of the motherhood aspect of things like, it may be useful to my-, to my reader to make-, to get them to understand why that is important to me,
because I have a lived experience of that.
Explain what you understand by quotes. So when you include a little quote, explain the reader what you yourself understand by tha-, what that quote is saying and link it with an image if it’s relevant. I think that’s really important, such a simple tip and it makes a huge difference.
Next compare materials. If you don’t know what to do, just put 2 things side by side and compare them.
Really draw on the idea side of things, on the meaning of things. And the last one is you might be able at the end to have some sort of line of argument, like a point of view, what’s my point of view after I’ve done all of this?
However, you might not get there, and that’s fine. This is something that you really learn how to do over a longer period of time, you’re only in the first year. So if you don’t know what the argument is
or what you’re trying to say, what-, what your point of view, that’s okay.
All that’s important that you’ve worked through a variety of sources to start developing that point of view. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t quite gotten that yet. Or it could be that through conversation
with your tutors and your peers, you start to understand what is my point of view about this?
What do I think about this? So I just wanted to reassure you that you’re doing great and that this is a tricky things for some people that takes time to develop. Please don’t be terrified of it, we’ll be here to support you along the way, and hopefully this critical cake recipe step by step will help you be less afraid of it and just jump in.
There is a lot less right or wrong that you may think and your opinion and your voice matters, so I hope that you use this way of writing alongside with imaginative writing, with reflective writing, and with descriptive writing to let us know who you are as a person, to let the world know who you are as a person through your photographic practice as well, but with words that go alongside it.
This is really important.
So I hope you’ve enjoyed this lecture and that it was useful and I’m-, I’m sure I’ll see you soon.
Goodbye.
Juliana Kisumu Lecture. PLACE
Place.
Lecture 1
We’re thinking about Place, and places, and sites for histories and cultures, and when I think about this, I think mainly about how Place can be a range of different things, it can be in relation to the position that you are in, it can be in relation to places in which you wis-, wish to be, but in whatever way 1 can consider it, it always comes with any place you’ll come and have some kind of history and relation to,
but least, as it pertains to photography, in relation to what connection the artist has to that place.
And so the photographers we’ll be discussing today, will be artists who made images that often were directly connected to passions and interests that they personally had. When I think about this, I think the perfect quote and 1 of the-, 1 of the-, one of my favourite artists being Luigi Ghirri, and in a publication that was released, he is quoted as saying, ‘The daily encounter with reality, the fictions,
the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusionary… to the point at which we might merge with them… The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able to find, distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.’
And so when making the work that we make, and when moving forward with wanting to connect yourself or make what-, based on connection or feeling we have, about the location that you were in.
Oftentimes you find it in the landscape, right? So even that-, just that last part of duality of man,
is in the image of man, right?
How-, how we see ourselves and be ourselves as a society, or how different cultures see themselves or view themselves amongst each other, is really deeply connected to the images and the-, and the documentations that are made, at least in relation to photography, of them.
Which is why I will-, I will never miss the opportunity to reiterate the importance of, again, as makers of images we are responsible, and how we always and constantly thinking about making work that has true reflection, in this instance, of the place that we’re in, the documentation of-, of time.
So as I already mentioned, Luigi Ghirri is someone who spent their entire career making images, as-, making images, and recordings, and documentations based on his own personal interest of architecture. And the work exists in, through advertisements and postcards, him wanting to almost think of-, of these places, he-, he’s quoted as saying as-, as maps.
These are maps of the places that he has been, specifically the images mainly being made within his home region of-, of Emilia-Romagna, Italy, that being-, that is the subject matter of most of his work.
He existed and lived, before being a photographer, as a land surveyor, where he-, he was also then required to produce landscapes, and so it was a very easy way for him to, kind of, transfer into the documentation of the-, the making or the work in the way that he did.
And so, again, just thinking about how the work around us can be a great-, or so the world around us can be a great way to, kind of, reflect on our passions and-, and use them to explore our own personal interests.
That move from land surveyor to photographer was-, is very natural, and so you can see in the way he-, he documents the work that-, that mindset still-, still exists within him, and wanting to create-, wanting to create a documentation or-, or an archive, like many of the artists that we will discuss today or-, or think about today, he also very similarly wanted to tap into this, the-, ‘this is a place that I know that I’m connecting to, and this is an archive of-, of those existence.’
Another artist Lorenzo Vitturi, his project Dalston Autonomy specifically was based on him moving to an area in south-east London, where he was new, wanted to get to know the area and so he would go into-, to Dalston market every day and collect objects.
Objects being, kind of, food, you know, rubbish he found on the ground, or items from, kind of, market stalls, he would also document the people he interacted with, collaborating often with members of the community in a bid to-, to show and present what his gaze or his eye on Dalston was, as someone who was new to the area.
His approach very much was, ‘I want to document this area that I’m familiar with and fond with, and I want to-, it to be a reflection of the culture that existed within the space.’ In most of the images, you don’t see the-, the actual details of the faces of the people he’s documented, and that-, it goes both ways, 1 can interpret that as almost, in some ways, an eraser of-, of the members of that community,
especially due to the fact that the majority of the members of that community are of minority ethnic background, and already there exists a constant erasure of people who-, who are-, who have been offered and people who have had their documentation happen, gotten them not having names, you know?
The names of who the people in those images are not documented and the, you know, they’re almost treated as-, as objects, as tools for the artist’s, kind of, disposal. On the other hand, creating the anonymity of it all, removes us maybe from the personhood in order for the artist, in-, in order for Vitturi himself, to, kind of, get the-, make-, keep focus on his own experimentation with things like colour and shape, as we can see here.
I believe that, that in-, in both instances his approach was and is in a similar way to Ghirri, to, kind of, maintain this relationship with this place that he’s, again, known and document it. Though in a different way, but still documentation was something that remains important to him, or will remain important to him for this project.
Dorothea Lange is someone, an American photographer, very well known for-, as a-, as a photographer and a photojournalist. The Depression era images, most note-arily, has been something that has followed Lange throughout her career as an identifier for a great-, a great series of image-, images and a great way to think about time, as it pertains to photography.
So wanting to document time and make a stamp in, this is-, this is what is happening in this place or this place, in this instance being America, America going through an era of-, of high poverty and, you know, no-, no work, post-, post war, post, kind of, no 1 knowing what was happening and throughout the-, these images that she took during this era, you can see it consistently, that is a reflection of-, of the time, the place, the sight of what the depression era has done and created to America, to the people in America.
I think that when considering Place, you have to also consider time, and if-, if you, kind of, look around you and look at the state of the world, look at-, look at maybe what’s happening in your-, your own communities or, you know, neighbourhoods, I think you then begin to find things that become relevant,
thinking about, ‘okay, in order for me to begin and-, and begin the process of making, what are the things that maybe haven’t been documented enough?
What are the things that are, kind-, kind of, happening now and-, and need to be reflected?’ I think of-, of a very famous quote by Nina-, Nina Simone, in that, you know, ‘An artist’s job is to reflect the times’,
and almost insinuating that, you know, that the music we listen to, you know, the images that we consume of now, maybe-, may some-, maybe some of it in-, in 10, 20, 50 years time may not be relevant, but some of it will be-, will, kind of, give us an idea of what was happening in-, in 2020s.
So when thinking about our own practices, thinking about, okay, what are the-, what are the happenings that are close to us, that are, maybe, even more so affecting us, that we can also step forward and-, and begin to document in a-, a similar way, because they become-, they become useful tools, again, thinking about the work, especially work that-, that thinks about Place, as-,as archival, arch-, archival work is important.
Another example is to is-, is the work by Vanley Burke, who mov-, immigrated who migrated from Birmingham in the 1960s, during the Windrush era, to-, to Birmingham, UK has-, has still lives there, still-, still lives to this day, is still making images to this day, but much of his work was a reflection of-, of the climate, the racial ten-, the racial tensions, the racism, xenophobia at the time that existed, much of his work is regarded now as, you know, very pivotal in understanding, again, the-, not only the time, but also the journey of what is now considered to be Black British culture, as-, as we are now only beginning to, kind of, find the language for-, for what that means.
And so, you know, the-, the archive, which Vanley Burke himself has also called-, he calls and considers his work very much to be an archive, it then begins to inform the work that-, that is happening now.
And so, within these images you see-, you see Place as a reflection of the past, but also the dangers of what it could potentially be in the present. And then in the more joyful-, in the more joyful way you see some of the early beginnings of-, of this culture that is forming and that has formed and that-, that is currently being maintained and-, and growing and expanding.
Martin Parr is someone too, who very well-, well known for-, for reflecting a specific culture in a specific time and cap-, and-, and capturing that-, that time and place in a way that, you know, now when we look back, we still see that, yes, this is what many will regard as, like, British culture.
Some controversy sometimes around, when in discussion about the images, right around there being this consistency around him documenting solely those, sort of maybe, low economic backgrounds, and potentially exploiting them in the making of the images.
And then the argument to be had is that, these images still-, are-. hold important-, are important for understanding what 1 would call-, call British culture in-, in the ways in which, in order to-, to move forward and have a-, a good understanding for where we are today, we need to understand, kind of, where those things are, kind of, formed and the formulation of the thing, and I would say that not much has-, not much has changed when looking at this image in that it is-, it still-, still gives the essence of, ‘yeah, this is-, this is a hot summer’s day in Brighton, this is-, this is exactly what it feels like.
Just, you know, hot day, jump in the water, grab some ice cream, a bag of chips,’ you know, almost kind of wanting to…As for me, when-, when looking at these images, almost wanting to, kind of, go back to-, to the summer and-, and have that experience again. And so it-, it can be complicated and can be tricky-, tricky when thinking about the context behind some images that are-, are made.
And, you know, at all times, we-, we must question the hands that went into making it and be-, and believe in always questioning the personal relationships that these artists have with the people who are being documented, especially when we’re speaking about particular communities from-, from some specific backgrounds, what is the thing that draws us into it? And what makes the topic, and-, and the people, and the subject matter so interesting? Again, then-, again, the curiosity that exists within the images is always-, is always relevant, and at all times, good or bad, must be-, must be questioned.
Lecture 2
Armet Francis, in a very similar way to Vanley Burke, documented for over 40 years, the-, up-, up and coming Black and British culture, but this time within the-, within London, and southeast London, southwest London, Brixton, places where many Black people at the time, had been conservatives, would come about.
He was very passionate too, about capturing Black joy, celebration, but also things such as the 1981 (New) Cross fires, so a lot of his work exists too, as a documentation, of what the politic-, political climate at the time.
He-… his documentation of the voyage, the-, the Windrush voyage to proved to be quite-, quite pivotal for how we begin to understand the import-, what Place means to diasporic communities, communities that have certain migrations between what can be regarded as the Black triangle, the-, the diaspora that exists-, the African diaspora that exist within the Americas, the-, the Europe countries,and as well as Africa itself.
And when you think about how displacement to the people who are-, are continuously moving, what does Place, and what does culture, and what does community mean to people who-, who have fam-, familial history or maybe their own personal experiences, direct experience of that-, that mass migration, that mass movement, what does that look like to?
Another photographer who employs very, kind of, thinking about Place, and thinking about masses of people, where masses of people gather, in places that could be cons-, significant. Andreas Gursky, who’s-, who is very well known for images or-, and documentations of people, kind of, gathered in-, in these places, with these very large scale prints and large scale scenes.
The ways in which they create images that are very personal, but impersonal somehow, kind of, the patterns that exist that show us that this is not just an individual existence, right? But this is very community based, this is very collective, and it’s not just 1-, it’s not just 1 person’s experience, but the experience of many.
And I think when-, when considering your works and thinking about how you begin to move in making, thinking about work from-, from a personal place oftentimes leads us into, ‘oh, actually, maybe this isn’t just-, just my experience alone’, and I think Andreas Gursky is someone who-, who perfectly melds the 2 in.
These are very culturally specific sites, you know, stock exchange, for example, being significant to those who-, who work-, who work in stock exchange, you know, this is where they go every morning at 5am, 6am. And-, and other spaces of work and often times the places of uniform, I find Gursky tends to, kind of, move into his places in like, factories or where like, there are many people doing a-, a single job and that in itself is also a reflection of-, of the culture of that space, right?
In that the work and the uniform of it all, and the similarity of it all is integral, and important, and significant to those people, and those individuals. Something slightly different, but more of an installation piece, is Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, the-, the sugar things (A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby) is-, is what the piece is called.
Very highly contested, it in itself and the location, the significance around this piece really lies in-, in location of-, of where this piece exists and the location being within this old sugar factory, in this place in-, in New York, in Williamsburg, and it is understood to be a highly gentrified place, it was once a place where, kind of, artists existed, and it was important to-, to the blue collar workers of the area in-, in, kind of, 60s, 70s, 80s.
And now it’s kind of evolved into this very, kind of, all those who haven’t been-, been removed, not able to exist there, and so the Kara wanted to do was create a-, a mammy caricature, a very racial-, a very racialised, almost a-, almost a play on-, on this cari-ture-, caricature for the sake of wanting to-, to make a point of, you know, still feeling after all of this time, as though 1 is being observed in a very sexual degrading way, very, very over sensualised, very controversial in its approach.
I think though, that this-, this piece, the location of the piece, the conversation around the piece, all, kind of, inform the subject of what-, when making work, thinking about the intentionality behind, ‘okay, so what am I trying to say? And what maybe is also it’s sentiment for me, or-, or me as the maker, What am I trying to say and-, and what do I wish to achieve?’
And I think in the significance of the place to-, to Walker, as the artist, wanting and-, wanting and also knowing that those who would come in to-, to observe the work would be of a certain demographic, because of the location it now is in,
Also moved to-, to prove her point of, again, this continuous objectifica-, objectification of-, of the black woman’s body, because the conversation around it, especially during the opening of the show, was that you had people posing. And if you do decide to look over into this project, what you will find is on-, on the behind, it is a, kind of, fully naked character where people can, kind of like, walk around it, posing in-, in what some have considered to be very inappropriate, considering the subject matter.
But again, it’s-, it’s the gaze, it’s-, it’s all very-, it’s all- it can be all very controversial, but the-, the point still, in my-, my eyes, is that the point the artist was making, has-, was proven in that regardless of what happens and even the context in which providing-, provided, and even with the assumed respect that 1 would-, would have to have for-, for the topic at hand, you’re still going to have instances of those who do come-, come across the work may-, may potentially still degrade it, still-, still disrespect it. I think, that when thinking about your work and thinking about, ‘okay, where-, where am I and what is in the significance of the place in which I’m shooting, and setting up or documenting?
And what is the history of-, of the environment? And does that history-, does that history, kind of, support-, support my, you know, approach or does it actually negate it and-, and maybe doesn’t-, doesn’t have anything or doesn’t add to it in any way? And is there a way that I can maybe think about the space in a way that supports the project at hand.
Taryn Simon is an artist that I find very-, have always found very interesting in her approach to photography in-, in particular the series the (An) American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, and so in this project, she creates a-, a series of images where she is wishing to go into all these varied places, and pick and collect things that maybe people don’t really understand what’s happening or, you know, the image may look at 1 thing, but what is actually happening in something else. And what I love is the descriptors that often have happened next to the images, when you see them in-, in the curated shows.
So, for example, this image, the little description next to it, so some of it anyway, says ‘The patient in this photograph is 21 years old,she is of Palestine descent-, Palestinian descent, excuse me, and living in the United States. In order to adhere to cultural and familial expectations regarding her virginity and marriage, she underwent hymenoplasty.’
And so that is the-, so hymenoplasty being the thing that, kind of, puts your hymen back in place, and so, again, her-, her wanting to document the things that happen in-, in private or the things that are supposed to be hidden, and maybe looking upon the thing you-, you are not supposed to know what’s happening, you know, these-, these sites in these places that these things are happening are all done in secret, in a state of privacy or they’re rooms that you wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to enter, right? You don’t-, you know, if you are not he person having surgery, you do not enter the surgical room.
And that is what I find so interesting about-, about Place in this context too, you know, what are the places that your audience may-, may potentially never have the opportunity to-, to walk to? And what is the thing that maybe you can show us differently?
What are the places that-, that if I-, If I wanted to approach it or-, or if-, if I didn’t have access to the space through you, what are the places tha-, yeah, what places that exist that I couldn’t have access to? And what can you show me that I may have never may-, maybe had a chance to see without you? So another example is, is this, this-, these shots, where-, well, this is the descriptor, some of the descriptor
‘So all items in the photograph were seized from the baggage of the passengers arriving in the US at-, at JFK terminal 4 from abroad, over 4-, abroad for an over 48 hour period. JFK handles the highest number of international arrivals into the United Nation’s (State’s) airports and processes tons and tons of waste every day.’
So, you know, when you-, if, you know, if you’ve been through the airport and they asked, do you have anything to declare, and sometimes they find things, contraband, right? In front of these bags, and so oftentimes it’s food, oftentimes it’s-, it’s a lot of food that cannot enter-, enter either the UK, the US, or whatever country it may be, and so the food gets seized and taken.
So as-, as some of the-, some of the things that are here are African yams, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, bush meat, curry leaves, orange peals, fresh eggs, kola nuts, mango, okra, passion fruit, pig nose, pig mouth, pork, raw poultry, chicken, southern American pig heads, southern American tree tomatoes, unidentified, xyz. So there’s-, there’s a lot of stuff happening, but again, back to my earlier point of, the-, the process of, kind of, allowing us access to these things of-, of I-, in any given day you want, is not permitted to enter these spaces.
So I-, so I do say, you know, do check out the rest of the series, and-, and the rest of the work from, you know, all the artists too, I think with a lot of it, it, kind of, gives us insight into thinking about Place in-, in all these different contexts.
I think too, another thing about, with Taryn Simon, is what she says-, or how she sort permission was-, was through letter writing, and 1 of the most-, one of her favourite letters was the letter she she got from Disney in-, because all of these places in the series that she went to, she-, she sought permission through letters, and oftentimes it got written back, and was, you know, permitted to enter, but 1 of the places, one of the major places that rejected her letter, was Disney saying-, saying something along the lines of them not wanting to, kind of, ruin the magic, essentially.
So, again, thinking about, okay, you know, what-, what are the things that like, we remain curious about? And what are some things that we could begin to, kind of, tap into, to show another side of-, of this, kind of, imaginary boundary?
So… as-, as we’ve gone over already, thinking about our daily lives and he things that affect us in our lives in a similar way to-, to some of these photographers, what is sig-,what is the significance of the place in which we’re thinking about documenting? How our identity, landscape, and place-, how do, as you say, how do identity, landscapes, and place coincide together for yourselves?
What are local sites that are of interest to you? And how do the images reflect your present? How do they-, yeah, how-, how do they exist in a way that speaks to this idea of you being an artist that reflects your times?
Because I think, even if, you know, if go through the images that-, that exist to us now as an archive, at the time of their documentation, they were relevant to-, to the time, you know, the-, photographers that valued work, were documenting what was around him and they exist now for us as images that, what of a-, of a time and place, of a specific culture. I think about, again, Taryn Simon, and that, you know, these things that happen in-, in people’s daily lives, but they are-, they are hidden, right?
In-, as per the title of the project, these-, these things that are happening, are behind these closed doors, and so, are there things that maybe, you-, yourselves can gain access to? Maybe in your own homes, maybe in your own places within your own communities. Of course, seeking permission.
I think permission is always something at all times to-, to remember, especially when place is concerned, because some places are off limits and some places do need-, do need like, literal written certification before 1 can access. So-, so, with permission, what are some things that we can be proff-ord to-, privy to, in your lives?
And then lastly, of course, just to-, to round off beginning with self and thinking about, how fo-, for yourselves, you’ve got an identity and your landscape, exist as an already place of-, or already a site of history, and so how can you tap into that? So yeah, all-, all things to-, to think about.
But yeah, thank you for listening and, as always, happy making. I look forward to seeing-, to seeing what-, what you come up with.
Transcript (Place)
Lecture by Rashi Rajguru
Introduction
Hello everyone, I hope you’re all well, comfortable and ready for today’s lecture. The title for the
lecture is: Place – a Site for Histories, Cultures and Futures. There’s so much to unpack from
a theme like this, and there are elements of this lecture that will apply to different forms and
approaches of photography, whether you are interested in experimental photography,
conceptual image-making, commercial photography or any other form. Examples shown will
range from sculpture to photography to video to video games to large-scale installations, which
can be considered as its own medium. Today, we’re going to be looking at how a Place can be
presented to convey hidden histories, growing cultures and potential futures, and how us
image-makers can work with a Place to produce images that hold their own specific narrative
and also be part of a wider storytelling, because ultimately, a place is both a container for
stories, and also just one part of many other larger stories that it is connected to. This
networked connection between places is something that we can really utilise as artists and
creatives to make our images much richer and provide more hooks for connection.
Here is a quick overview of what we will cover in this lecture:
First, we will start by looking at “Place” and breaking down our idea of it. We’ll start by defining
some of the most essential ideas of what a place is, and then try to disrupt that with other ideas
of what a place can be.
In this particular lecture, it becomes apparent that it is really our understanding of “Place” which
determines the bedrock from with our potential photographic subjects can emerge, so it’s
important to think about what we personally consider as place, and try to open this up as much
as possible, to allow ourselves to be as creative as possible in our image-making.
After this, we’ll talk about relativity and the multiverse of human experience, how this aspect of
reality influences our idea of Place, and why this is important to think about while we are
exploring a place.
From here, we’ll start to look at examples of how some artists and creatives have used Place as
a way to situate and contextualise their subject matters. Sometimes, this is done in a more literal
way, sometimes in a way that is much more abstract, and of course, everything in between.
Finally, I will shift from these examples into some direct suggestions for how you can move
forward in your practice and try different ways of approaching Place within your images.
Some quick housekeeping: in case you don’t know, there are English subtitles available for this
lecture, and a transcript should be available to you also if you prefer to read rather than watch. If
not, please contact me and I can send it over. There are timecodes in the transcript for every
time I directly reference an image, so you should be able to find the relevant point in the video a
little easier, but there are also other additional images I put in for added peripheral context and
to encourage associative thinking, so I recommend having a look at the video if you are able to.
I also have a “Notes” document for this lecture, where I provide links to some of the theorists
and ideas mentioned, in case you would like to delve deeper into some of the concepts in your
own time.
What is Place? (4:10)
Alright! So: what is a place? There are different ways to consider what a place is. Perhaps, we
can start from one position and then build up our understanding.
You could say that place = a space or region, with some form of limitation, that contains some
things in it.
So then, in this quick example, you have a basic space, of some walls and a floor. This is our
space. It also has a limit, right? This space only exists up until the edge of the floor, or the end
of the walls. After that, the space does not exist. This is its limitation, this border. And finally, we
can most likely agree that it does have the capacity to contain or present something. For
example, we now have a bunch of mushrooms that exist in this space.
Now, this space very quickly turns into a place that now has different potential narratives
connected to it – how has any organic life grown in this place? How long has it been there? If
this is here, then what else could be close by, outside the borders of this place, and outside the
frame of this image? As we approach this room, observe it and decide to question it, this space
turns into a place and becomes entangled with some form of unknown history, while also
suggesting a potential future.
Now, this example is very reductive – I would argue that in reality, even just four walls and a floor
is very much already a place, full of potential futures and submerged histories which can be
found merely through the types of materials that the walls and floor are made of, and what
condition they are in – but regardless, the main idea here is that ultimately we as image-makers
decide to turn a space into a place by deciding that there connections and relationships that can
be made with it, which we then present to our viewers.
So, while we now have our basic, essential idea of what a place is, we can start to
expand.
Firstly, a place can be at any scale.
A place can be a room, shop, mountain, cities, countries, microclimates, biomes, etc. Even star
systems and galaxies. Researcher Lisa Messeri has explored how scientists who study
astronomy and deep space use certain language and visual imagery to help them depict objects
and areas within space as places, encouraging humans to build relationships with these huge
rocks and gas bodies floating in space, to care about them and become more invested in the
scientists’ research.
The Hubble Space Telescope, a large optical telescope which has been orbiting the Earth
since 1990 taking images of various galaxies and stars, is responsible for many of the
astonishing astronomy images that you see floating around the internet and saved as people’s
screen backgrounds. The imaging team at Hubble have worked extremely hard to cherry pick
specific images from the telescope’s massive archive which they feel can best entice the public
to care about these very real parts of our universe, using certain aesthetics to maximise the
impact of their images, while also aiming to keep the images scientifically accurate and valid. A
very fine line!
However, humans are complex. In 2017, Hubble’s own research showed that at times, viewers
think that the extreme sharpness and high-resolution of their images of galaxies and colliding
stars makes them too good to be true – viewers become suspicious of their validity and accuse
them of being fake.
This is just one example of humans’ difficult relationship with images and photography – how
can we ever create an image of a Place which we feel is an accurate, true representation of the
subject matter, and also something that the viewer can engage with, believe and find relatable in
some way?
Place is Relative (10:26)
Well, things really start to open up when you consider that a place, and our experience of that
place, is always relative.
If we physically visit a place, our experience is determined by a myriad of factors – the weather,
how we are moving through the space, our eyesight and vision, any events which occur during
that experience, personal associations you may have to different objects or materials that you
encounter etc. All these factors lead to every individual having a very different, relative
experience of the same place.
When we collectively watch the same video online, from our respective screens, our individual
experiences are completely different depending on the quality setting of the video, the colour
balance of our screen, the cleanliness of our screens and monitors (which we’re all a little more
aware of now with this black screen!), whether we are wearing headphones or playing the
sound out loud, and if we are playing it out loud, then whether there are any other sounds in our
environment competing with the video.
This relativity, baked into human experience, is also very prevalent in photography.
Even if we just focus on the mechanics of photography, it allows places to be
documented and recorded in countless different ways – using different shutter speeds,
iso, flash, natural light, different angles and perspectives – this multitudinous aspect of
photography matches the relative nature of human experience.
Even our idea of a physical Place can be incredibly different to someone else’s. In reality, places
are in constant flux, changing shape, mass and size on a molecular level all the time.
Sometimes, a place squeezes to generate a new part of itself, whether we can notice it or not.
In general day-to-day life and conversation, our opinions of a Place are constantly colliding,
creating bonds and friction which can further shift our memories and emotional relationships to
that Place.
Finally, a Place does not need to be physical at all. A place can be mental, it can exist outside of
our physical universe entirely. We might have physical objects which provide a connection to a
mental place, but ultimately it only exists in our minds and memories. These mental places can
be shared by groups of people – for example, in table-top games like Dungeons & Dragons or
Pathfinder, people come together and play a game by creating characters that then interact with
an imaginary world that exists only in their minds. The players are openly building a narrative
together based on how their imaginary characters perform in this shared mental place. Each
player at the table will most likely have a wildly different mental image of the places that they
visit and the other characters that they meet in the game, however all the players have enough
communal understanding of this imaginary place that they are able to move through this mental
place together and play the game successfully.
So, now that we’ve tried to open up, unravel and complicate our ideas around Place and what a
place can be, let’s look at what a place can hold and present to us, and how photographers,
artists and image-makers can approach these places and depict them in their own way to
unearth these relative connections.
Place as a Site for Histories (14:08)
A place, along with everything that it contains and holds, can become a natural archive for the
histories that have played out within its space over time. This can be very literal, through
something like geological formations. Scientists use tree rings and sedimentary layers to
discern temperature changes over the ages, and have recently concluded that temperature
rises in the last few months were the highest that have occurred in the last 100,000 years. While
this shows a direct history of the planet’s climate, it also indirectly shows an archive of human
intervention. A relative reading of a place can give us additional insights beyond the surface.
In art, this can be explored within a Place in thought-provoking ways when time becomes a
factor in the production and concept of the work.
One example is Pierre Huyghe’s (15:11) Timekeeper. The artist goes into an exhibition space
and uses an orbital sander to sand down the wall to reveal previous layers of paint underneath.
His technique is not random – you’ll notice that he sands the wall in a very particular way,
creating concentric circles that produce a thickness and thinness that feels similar to the tree
rings we saw earlier. Through this seemingly simple gesture, Huyghe creates a direct visual
timeline of the place he is in, which, when seen alongside the dates of each wall painting, a
viewer can also approach with their own relative experience of those years and their knowledge
of events which have occurred during these timeframes.
Nancy Holt, (16:04) one of the leading figures of land art, produced a permanent sculptural
work in 1973-76 called Sun Tunnels, which can be visited in the Great River Basin in Utah,
USA. The work consists of 4 concrete tunnels, which are positioned precisely so that they
perfectly frame the sun during the winter and summer solstice. Holt carved holes into the
tunnels so that when sunlight passed through them during each day, they would emulate
certain star constellations. This work, which is fundamentally tied to its geographical location
and place, presents to us a cosmic history through light, time and movement.
When you think about a place, there may already be a single, iconic image which represents
that place for you, and for many others too. It may be the most readily available image when
you search online for that place, and it may also depict the leading histories that are associated
with the place in question.
But there might be large gaps or issues in the type of history that these images represent. Artist
and researchers Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexia Achiellos (17:19) are both
interested in attempting to fill a gap within the photographic archives that were built by Western,
colonial archeologists when they visited Cyprus between 1878 – 1960 CE and dug to excavate
artefacts and objects of history that could be brought back to Western Europe. These
archeologists relied heavily on the knowledge of the local excavation workers and labourers,
however there are very few images depicting these workers. These two artists found that the
only images of workers that exist at all were a few staged, group photographs of workers in
which they are all smiling. As these are the only images of this group of people, they
dangerously become the only representation ever, and without knowing the context of the
subject in these images, this can erase important knowledge about power relations and the
conditions experienced behind the image.
The artists decided to attempt to fill in the representational gaps by using an AI image
generation tool which they developed themselves to produce an artificial version of the missing
images. The artist duo knows that these images are still not a perfect solution – some of the
databanks used in their research still contain those staged historic photos of the real excavation
workers, or contain other stock photos that are not catalogued accurately, meaning that the AI
images are made from source images that the AI believes represent a Cypriot person when they
in fact do not at all. This is a hang-up from the inherent racism baked into some Western image
databases.
(see notes for a link to an article on ImageNet, a major internet database which artist
Trevor Paglen and researcher Kate Crawford showed its cataloguing to be inherently
racist and sexist) (a complexity which mirrors relationships between colonialism and the
use of photography to catalogue and contain – if this is of interest, see Eduardo Glissant
in the notes for more also)
This project, The Archive of Unnamed Workers, might be very technical and full of specialist
knowledge, but the core idea can be easily thought about – that there is always the opportunity
to look at something which is already documented and represented, and attempt to find your
own representations within or around it.
Place as a Host for Cultures (19:55)
There is a history of photography documenting places as a way to dissect and catalogue the
things within them – this is sadly deeply tied to the historical colonial use of the photographic
camera.
This history of photography can be approached and reckoned with in many ways, such as the
approach we just saw with the Archive of Unnamed Workers. Image-makers can also respond
by blurring the lines of these historical catalogues, by depicting and representing the multitudes
of human experience by what is currently happening around them now, using aspects of
documentary photography, narrative and constructed events which many believe can better
represent cultures than how they have been documented up until this point.
Culture can be spoken about on a large scale, but it is possible and perhaps more generative to
think about culture in a local and relative sense, and how we can represent this using place as
the backdrop or point of departure.
Rene Matić (20:48) – recently commissioned by the Martin Parr Foundation to create a series of
images on any subject of their choice, as long as there was a connection to the city Brighton,
where the foundation is based. Matić decided to document a longtime friend who was native to
Brighton, the artist and performer Travis Alabanza. Matić used the prescribed Place as a point
of departure from which they produced a series of intimate portraits and images which explore
the life of a subject who is known for their contributions to discourse on trans and black
identities.
Culture can also be deeply explored even within the preconceived confines of a room. Paul
Mpagi Sepuya’s (21:42) portraiture, usually taken in a studio space, is a great example of
exploring perspective to produce a visually striking image that also engages in questions about
self-representation, queerness, intimacy, knowledge of oneself and the world. Using what is
usually a closed-off intimate space, being the artist’s studio, and turning it inside out and adding
multiple perspectives.
Another photographer, Carrie Mae Weems has a well-known body of work in which each image
frames the same kitchen table and coned ceiling light, illuminating situations and events that
occur at this kitchen table, supposedly late at night. This series provides a small look into the
local, intimate culture that this room is a host for.
Images can also show us culture by zooming out and taking the viewer outside of the original
frame, and encouraging them to look towards the side. Xiaopeng Yuan’s (22:44) series
Campaign Child is a straightforward but very valuable example of looking away from the main
event and seeing what is in the periphery. While developing as an artist, Yuan found himself
routinely commissioned by Chinese kidswear brands to photograph white Western models and
American settings within his native Shanghai. Using this controlled context as his departure point,
Yuan began to create surreal images with his collaborators. Yuan asks us to consider what is
existing outside the frame and forge links across disparate scenes, where each photograph bounces
off the other to create uncanny new contexts.
Mohamed Bourouissa (23:39) has produced a celebrated body of work, Périphérique, in which
he uses his friends to construct events and re-enactments in places that they have spent time
together in their part of Paris. Many of the more constructed images are Bourouissa’s
commentary on the political and social tensions between his communities and the authorities,
while also directly referencing history of art, in particular Romanticism – comparisons have been
made with paintings by Delacroix, such as Liberty Leading the People and The Death of
Sardanapalus, while an equal comparison has been made to American photographer Jeff Wall,
such as his image here The Destroyed Room. Bourouissa is a great example of a photographer
embedding staged events into a place to provide a direct commentary on the experience and
conditions of the cultures involved.
Jean Claude Nsabimana (25:08), based between Burundi and Cape Town. Much of his recent
work focuses primarily on raising awareness of e-waste. Nsabimana takes waste objects from
his local environment and sculpts them into wearable objects which he then photographs in this
more commercial style. While there is a clear message here, those who follow the
photographer’s work and learn more about him will discover that he threads a narrative across
his bodies of work – these images contain characters, which at times represent himself through
reconstructions of very particular memories of events in his personal life. His body of work
weaves between past, present and even future as his representations of current conditions also
naturally create a speculation for the future.
Now this next example is a real de-tour, but I would really like to show you an example of how
culture (in relation to a place) can be explored in a different way. Image-making is not limited to
the act of taking a picture – you can produce images by looking at existing images, found
images, pulling them together and placing them in a particular order or arrangement to produce
a new, larger image, or a narrative which threads them all together. One example of this is Mike
Mandel and Larry Sultan’s (26:02) Evidence series from 1977. These two photographers
looked through archives held by governments and public institutions, and selected images
where the photographer and image-makers were aiming to convey a truth. This was their simple
narrative thread. And what they ended up with was this quite powerful series of images that are
uncanny, unexplained, many pointing towards something that’s happen outside of the frame,
many of them, when you really look at them, almost become comic when you consider that
there are trying to capture their subject’s most true or correct essence (another example of the
seemingly impossible task to do this, as we mentioned previously with the Hubble Space
Telescope).
Even though the subjects differ so greatly between each photograph, and they are not originally
connected in any way, by pulling them in and bringing them together, the photographers Mandel
and Sultan are making a commentary of a form of culture, on a particular scale, and in a way
that is thought-provoking, with a confident tone but in a way that also leaves things up to
interpretation.
Place as a Root for Futures (28:02)
So we’ve looked at a variety of ways that individuals have used a Place as a starting point to
then explore histories and cultures – so what if we apply this to future? Well, I think it can be
really fruitful to first consider that the future is built into all photographs, by default. Each frozen
image, even a commercial studio still life shot, communicates various potential futures if you
look for it. Some artists choose to step up to the future and question it, proposing new versions
of it. Here are a few examples:
Felicity Hammond (28:40) is an artist who usually creates very large scale installations of
collages combining found images from glossy real estate brochures with her own photographs.
Her images are reminiscent of a apocalyptic historic image, but they never reveal the locations
of the places they show or how they relate. Instead, the collages reflect the increasing
homogenization of big cities, and the real consequence of economic depravity and instability.
These glossy images of 3D renders of buildings will also contain piles of car tyres and mounds
of rubbish, unfinished roads and neglected construction sites. This work is poignant in how it
uses a lot of the visual language used by real estate agents and property developers – glossy,
futuristic cities that are still focused on human happiness and satisfaction.
Hammond is also a good example on how you can treat photographic images as sculptures and
let them interact with an exhibition space as such.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (29:56) – a Black British trans artist, who mostly works in the
medium of video games and participatory art, amongst other mediums. One of their more known
works is the Black Trans Archive, in which the viewer, or user, is invited to play a game to
access this archive. However, the artist does not hold back on drawing the line on the user’s
experience. When asked, if the player declares that they are cis-gendered, they end up having a
different experience of the game, and are given less access to the archive. The artist states that
this is a Pro Black Pro Trans space, it is made for those communities, and not for everybody
else to pillage as history has shown us to do so.
While this work focuses on an archive and accessing histories, it just as strongly raises
questions about the future, and what type of world could exist if there were more spaces which
centred Trans communities.
The artist’s current 12 month residency at Studio Voltaire is focussed on developing work which,
when the residency is finished, are to then be given to the Trans community to help provide
channels for communication and support – spaces which for many either do not exist or are out
of reach within their localities.
Josefa Ntjam (31:33) is another artist who created both print and sculptural works which
provide a speculative future. In a joint exhibition, Brathwaite Shirley and Ntjam came together to
produce this twin lensed view of the future, with both bodies of work supporting each other, in a
way just mere through existing together, which leads to an incredibly rich experience from the
viewer that can have a lasting effect. If this type of work interests you, then I’d highly
recommend looking into Ntjam.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (32:05) – much of her work references fiction, but this large
participatory installation, Pynchon Park, also speculates a future or alternative scenario where
aliens have brought humans together in a large, but sealed space in which they can observe
them while they eat, rest and play. The artist used the design of the exhibition space to create
these two levels, where the caged humans are below, and other humans can stand above and
observe, supposedly with the aliens.
As a human experiencing the work and participating in the space, you are most likely enjoying
surface level interactions you have with other visitors, or the opportunity to rest and watch the
sun moving along the screen on the wall. And due to the nature of the work, while you are in
enjoyment, you are also part of the storytelling, you become part of the narrative.
Suggestions (33:17)
So, we’ve taken a long meander through many different approaches to art and image-making,
which use Place as a means to convey a story about a history, culture or future. These artists
have all used place as a way to contextualise their subject matter, kept it as a starting
parameter, or a departure point for their exploration, or have used place for the literal confines of
their work, and dug further into the place to find stories within it.
Now, how do we take some of these thoughts and considerations and apply them to places that
we want to document, reference, reveal, unveil? Here are some suggestions:
● Find signals, artefacts, marks, references, etc. that are embedded into the place
somewhere
Guest Lecture Cemre Yesil Gonenli. ‘A Site for Histories, Cultures, and Futures.’
Hello, everyone.
This is Cemre Yesil Gönenli
from Turkey, Istanbul.
And today we’re going to talk about the topic, ‘A Site for Histories, Cultures, and Futures.’ We’ll talk about my work Hayal & Hakikat: A Handbook of Forgiveness and A Handbook of Punishment, which is a book you can see here. So basically, it talks about history in order to speak about today’s world. I think by nature photographic medium involves a lot of elements that relate to history, culture and also future.
So I think when you’re making a body of photographic work, I think it’s very important to decide how are you going to build that narrative by using those elements that relates to history and culture in order to make your point through your photography, however you are commenting on history or culture and also on the future.
So I will tell you today
the story of Hayal & Hakikat, how it came into being, and how I tried to use those historical and cultural elements in order to make my own point. So welcome to this presentation and I hope you’ll find things that relates to your practice as well.
In 2018, Salt Beyoğlu, which is a very important arts institution in Istanbul, collaborated with 1 of the university’s, Kadir Has University, for a long term research and archive project. It was about an encyclopaedia titled The Encyclopedia of Istanbul, which was written by Reşad Ekrem Koçu who is an historian and a novelist who lived in between 1905 and 1975.
So these 2 institutions collaborated on gathering all the research material and the printed issues of the encyclopaedia in order to start an online database for thousands of documents that’s related to this body of work that Reşad Ekrem Koçu made. In addition, they also organised side events, talks, workshops, about The Encyclopaedia of Istanbul. [Unknown Name], which is another very important organisation focusing on photography, organised a photography workshop in collaboration with Salt Beyoğlu.
They invited 3 artists both to produce a body of work departing from the Encyclopaedia and also lead a workshop for other participants. And very, very luckily I was one of them and we had about-, roughly about a month to complete and submit the work. So in such a limited time, I had to scan, I think around 173 booklets, Of course, there was no chance to read it all.
So what was very, very stunning about this work that although it’s an encyclopaedia, it doesn’t function like an encyclopaedia at all because it is written in the very subjective account, like, you know, normally in an encyclopaedia you want to find an information, you go to your-, you know, to your letter and you find it, whereas here the-, you know, the entries were super subjective, almost like a book rather than an encyclopaedia, although it is defined as an encyclopaedia. So he speaks about various things, people he met, like real people,and also some fictional characters, and I think at 1 stage you as a reader, don’t know what is real, what is documentation, and what is fiction. So I guess it’s a mixture of all.
And the hierarchy of importance is also very interesting as well. Like, for example, I remember 1 of the entries, Çocuk, in Turkish means child, was for pages like, you know, he just wrote about, you know, the concept of child in relation to the city for a really, really long time. And so what I did, I went for the word photography after scanning all these booklets, and photography in Turkey is written with F, with the letter F, and this word was in that very, very latest booklet that was published. And it was funny to see that over the course of 30 years he was able to came from letter A to letter F. And we know that this encyclopaedia meant a lot to him, that, you know, he even sold his house to be able to self-publish some of the issues.
So this was encyclopaedia was a real treasure, let’s say. And coming back to the entry of photography, I was stunned by an information that he writes under this entry.
After giving some information on the history of photography and the photographic studios back then in Istanbul, he mentions that Abdul Hamid II, who was the 34th Sultan of Ottoman Empire, wanted to plan an amnesty to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his crown. So he ordered convicts to be photographed and that he would choose who to free by looking at their portraits. So this was like super impressive for me, and it just made me so excited and curious
The moment I read this information, I knew that I was going to chase them. I didn’t know if they still exist or not, but I got super excited. And without knowing if these photographs still exist or not, I decided to chase them, and luckily they did! So I find myself in the-, in the rare items library of Istanbul University, which kept the Yıldız Palace photographic archive and I found these portraits of men posed for the Sultan’s photographer.
There was something going on with the hands of prisoners and that you would see that prisoners are posing in a very unnatural way. Nobody would pose in such a way that the hands would be so central and exposed, you know, in the centre of the image. And I always had this interest on photographs of hands for some reason. So this question haunted me, why did these hands get so much importance in these images?
I went back home with this question in my mind and the scans of the photos in a hard drive. Then I got involved with historical research and luckily I found an historian that was called [Unknown Name] who was an expert on Abdul Hamid II. She enlightened me and solved the mystery about the hands.
So she told me that he has been moved by a pseudoscientific information, so not genuine at all, that he had, which was like any criminal with a thumb joint longer than the index finger joint is inclined to murder. So the Sultan was judging both their faces and hands in his decision to set these prisoners free. In addition to the collection that focus on the prisoners hands, I found the other side of the prisoners images in the same archive, which was really, really stunning.
They were chained prisoners who had been life sentence and had no chance to be ever free again. So for me, there was suddenly a great contrast in between forgiveness and punishment to be found in a closer look at their hands and legs, in their body language, and in the way they were photographed.
So of course in the original photographs, you have their faces, but I decided to crop the heads off the prisoners when I wanted to use this archive and create a new body of work.
And in a way, although this gesture of cropping was something as if I’m killing them with a guillotine, I think it was actually a gesture to save them, almost like not to rerecord them as criminals, discarding their crimes, whatever they were, I think I just wanted to give them almost like a second chance in life or perhaps give them back their freedom. So this is where I want to pick up on the political realm of the work which relates to, you know, that side of history. I think we as a generation, we are heartbroken after what happened in Gezi Park in 2013.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with what happened there in the park, but basically the government wanted to demolish the park and wanted to make a shopping mall and the demonstrations got quite big and for the first time in recent history, a lot of people with different backgrounds came together just to save trees. Obviously, after what happened they’re losing a lot of people, a lot of injuries, a lot of harassments. I think they just lost the kind of protesting and streets for this country. It just felt like you’re punching a ghost really.
I approached the archive with some sort of empathy as if the prisoners were people I knew. I related with them somehow, perhaps even wanted to save them, and I guess this has to do with the current political climate in Turkey. During the making of this work, a friend of mine, which was not a close friend, was arrested. He was teaching with the same university as I was, and he was a director of an NGO.
I knew that he was a good man, a precious teacher in the university, a father of 2 girls, so he was one of us, really. And of course, he wasn’t the only one, a lot of bright intellectual people artists, journalists, minority politicians, were physically or mentally were put in jail. And also a lot of them had to emigrate in order to not to end up in prison.
But the will for change and freedom, of course, stays, and in a way, this book became a silent protest for me. And to my understanding, it had to do with building a bridge in between the past and current political realm in the context of control, the absurdity that’s laid in the Sultan’s way of forgiving or punishing people resonated a lot with what’s going on in today’s Turkey.
So I wouldn’t say it is less absurd or unfair how people are legally accused today when you compare it with how Abdul Hamid II was giving freedom by looking at their hands. So I saw a similarity in between those prisoners and people who find themselves in a similar situation today.
So there was some sort of coincidental freedom that raises out of how governments and authorities want to have an endless and brutal control of the society that they’re supposed to take care of. So, again, coming back to this idea of cropping the heads of these prisoners as an artist was perhaps my way of controlling them metaphorically in order to save them from a more brutal control system.
That’s the reason why the book starts with a dedication page that follows: “This book is dedicated to bright people who are arbitrarily convicted or had to depart from this beautiful land in these difficult times that Turkey is going through.” Now, I also want to reflect a little bit about the making of the book. I had such a limited time to complete this commissioned body of work.
So during these 3 weeks, 1 night I woke up from the badge, folded papers to come up with an idea of using a zig zag bound, sorted in the first book I give a free space to the reader without any textual information. Let them go through the images without knowing who they are and why they are posing.
So I was looking for a way to make a visual clash in between Hayal & Hakikat, which translates as a dream and in fact within a book structure and I had to find a way to hide the text in the actual story. So the first dummy was just photocopies. The main reason for me to produce this work as a book was to send it to this friend who was in jail. The dummy I made was 40 copies signed and numbered, and the number 1 was sent to this friend in prison.
And now I want to talk a little bit about this kind of the design process and the design elements I used in the book.
So obviously we had this golden and kind of precious look that was embedded in the-, the design language, let’s say, which obviously came from this idea of palace and-, and-, and this historical Ottoman Empire context. So this was a way to bring that cultural and historical aesthetic into the work as a design idea.
And after the dummy was completed I wanted to test the book in, in an international audience setting, and I took a couple of dummy copies to the oral photography festival, and we had a table there with my bookshop and, and basically I tried to test how people were engaging. The reaction I got from the audience in the book market was very promising and it really got me excited because it was a local story, but I just saw that it was actually communicating with people from everywhere around the world.
And a publisher approached me and said
that, you know, she was quite interested in this work, which was a very good publisher from England, Gost Books, and that really, really made me happy because, you know, that was another sign that this work could communicate with a wider audience.
And what was also very interesting to see for me was, for example, there was-, there was a documentary series in Turkey which focussed on contemporary photography in Turkey, and I was in 1 of the episodes and we spent almost 2 days shooting about this work, Hayal & Hakikat, and in the end it was censored. So all of the other works I talked about was a part of the documentary, but Hayal & Hakikat was censored because it was actually criticising the current government. Whereas on the right side you see me working with a British publisher in the process. So in a way I just realised that there is a very wide audience of this work around the world, but it was kind of censored in my hometown.
Also some other things that really excited me was that the dummy was, for example, reviewed by Sabrina Mandanici in Collectors Daily, and that was also something that got me quite moved. And then we started the publication process. So basically we were very happy with the design and how the book was structured, but since the dummy I made was paperback, we wanted to go for something that looked a little bit more precious, let’s say. So…
So obviously, because of this kind of classical narrative and historical and cultural design aspect, I wanted to go for something super classic
which was a fabric cover. And when I was thinking about which colour
to choose for the fabric, for the fabric cover, first I wanted to go with Navy Blue out of its context to this official document.
And then I told it-, firstly, it didn’t make a nice match with the black and white photographs and also I just thought the green as a-, as a colour, it is more hopeful and it is also a bit more related with Islamic culture, which is of course a big part of the current government. And then I got into a bit of research about, you know, which kind of other books use this combination of gold and green?
And that was also an interesting outcome that most of the books that use this design elements of green and gold as-, as a part of the book, it was mostly to do with, you know, it’s like holy books or books that focussed on spells, magic, witches. So in a way it had to do with another level of reality, let’s say. And that also got me quite moved.
And I just thought, since I’m trying to make a book that questions Hayal & Hakikat, reals and facts, it just made a lot of sense so I went for the colour green. And then we started the printing process and it was going to be a co-published book by my own publishing company, FiL Books, and this British publisher called Gost Books.
And here you see us working on the wet proofs of the work, which was of course very exciting for me. And we did the printing in Turkey with the printer that I always work with and the result was really amazing and really-, really made me happy. Also, the publisher was very, very content about how they turned out. The great thing about producing a work in a photo book format is that it could carry it everywhere.
I was really able to travel with the book, travel for the book, and it felt so good to just see how people engage with the work through something I carried in my hands and through something people could just like hold in their heads.
When I travelled with the book, you know, to book fairs, to photography festivals, and when I sell the book, I also taught a little bit about how I signed the book and then I went for this kind of classical stamp. And the reason for that was the fact that most of the Ottoman Empire sultans had their own kind of stamp with their-, that they would approve a law, for example. So in that way it was my way of kind of, you know, commenting on the history.
The work was exhibited with different contexts, for example, very luckily I was able to exhibit the work in this great museum in Istanbul called Sabancı Museum, and for the installation I wanted to use life size prints so that I really create some sort of an empathy for the-, for the viewers. So when you’re in front of the images, it’s the size of an average man, so when you’re in front of them, it feels like you’re looking at yourself. I used different materials for the Hayal side and the Hakikat side.
In the Hayal side you see fine art prints framed without glasses, whereas on the Hakikat side where you see the chained prisoner sentenced to death, I used Diasec prints, and since they are quite dark, you have a lot of reflection on them. So it also kind of reinforces this idea of empathy for the viewer and also in this installation light was always an important element for me. On the Hakikat side side, I used bulbs that are looking up for it whereas on the Hakikat side, I used bulbs that are hanging from the ceiling.
So in a way I wanted to create this clash, this kind of reverse narrative in these 2 neighbour walls. And basically the bulb as a choice had to do again with the government because the logo of the current political party that runs the country over the course of 20 years is a bulb.
And of course this is a very subtle meaning that’s not a lot of people would get, but also the bulb as an object, it’s always a, you know, an image that kind of triggers to the idea of idea. So the freedom of speech. So I also wanted to use that context in the exhibitions. I also want to speak a little bit about how the work resolved for me through 1 single image. So when I was going through the archive, I found this image which was just like so brutal, I was just so stunned and had goosebumps when I first saw this image.
For me, it just raised a lot of questions. It was a photograph that was filled with questions, and each time I look at it, even today, new questions arise. And I thought that brutality should be a part of the book and it should evoke similar questions for the readers of this book.
And beside, from all the social and political aspects that connects with history, histories, culture, and again, futures, in my head, I was having some troubles to forgive someone in my personal life. This dialogue that was hidden under this photograph came along during a conversation I had with my husband when we were talking about someone I was willing to forgive but wasn’t able to do so.
Making this work made me think a lot about forgiveness and punishment in an abstract way too, and that little text piece opens up to a personal account of forgiveness and punishment for me, or perhaps serving as a little note to myself.
And this brutal group photograph always had a space in the centre of the work, so it was always a bit separated from these 2 walls because in a way it was an intersection of dream and facts and I wanted the viewer to look at the other prints from distance and big and then come closer to this brutal crazy image and really be with that photograph alone and to have a more intimate conversation with that sad, horrible situation.
When I think about what to take away from the book, I guess what I want is to invite the readers to give a second chance to those prisoners to, help me in my way of setting them free and perhaps learn to forgive, if possible. The exhibition in Copenhagen Festival was planned in a container, so I wanted to use this kind of closeness.
So I used 2 different cages in the exhibition space, in the middle of the exhibition space, and in one of them was almost like a living room where the viewer could read the book and also look at that photograph, that brutal photograph, through the bars. And then the second one was a bookshop actually, where I sat down and sold the books afterwards.
The work was also exhibited in an open air photography festival in Spain, Getxophoto Festival, and their we exhibited the work on the surface of the building. And there, for example, I use the windows for the Hayal part, so the prisoner hands, whereas on the lower side, on the-, on the bricks, I used the Hakikat side.
And in a way I wanted to make-, I wanted to create a meaning as if the-, the prisoners that are waiting to be forgived are looking from inside to us. They are looking from inside to outside. Whereas the ones that I have no chance to be free again, they’re freed and they’re outside already. And it’s for a festival in Poland I again wanted to make a little play with the element of window.
I put this brutal image by the window, so that again I give a little space for the viewer to sit down and look at the book. While you’re sitting on the chair, you look outside and almost like meditate a little bit about what does it mean to be inside and outside?
The exposure of the work, especially you know, things like the book winning the PHotoESPAŃA for the best photography book or being shortlisted and d’Arles and Paris Photo and all the exhibitions I made, the overall experience was a real fulfilment for me.
I really felt understood and although I did a work basing on an archive, so a historical body of work, I think the success of the work was the fact that it was talking about today’s world, doesn’t matter where you’re coming from, but in a way this injustice or this kind of bug in-, in justice systems in many of the countries around the world was common and in a way people really wanted a change, and I guess through this work they were able to think a bit further about these concepts of forgiveness and punishment for societies and individuals. Thank you very much for listening to me and I hope you were able to get something that connected with you.
Thank you very much. Bye bye.
Week 9
Lectures
Jesse Alexander
Lecture 1
Hello. My name is Jesse Alexander and I am a lecturer here at Falmouth University. I’m a photographer and a writer, and I’m very passionate about the land and place.
And there are a couple of things about the representation of the land that kind of get on my goat a little bit. So I’m going to share with you today a number of slides that really talk about 2 quite key theme in relation to the representation of place, which is the sublime and the picturesque, which are probably phrases you’ve heard before, but we’re going to take a bit of a dive into those phrases, see how they interlink, how they’re very different, well, we’ll think about how they relate to sort of everyday culture actually, but also how photographers and artists have used these ideas, played with them, subverted them, and maybe that’ll give you some ideas for how to sort of rethink how you represent your environment.
So, firstly, landscape pictures are all around us. They are on packaging, they can be quite cheesy, they are in aspirational kind of adverts, they’re also used to encourage ideas of escape and wellbeing.
They can be used to market oneself, these are all pictures that come from an online dating app. They can be used to inspire and motivate us and they can also be kind of used to soothe us.
You might find landscape pictures in a dentist’s waiting room or at a hotel, in an unfamiliar place, or a hospital.
These are actually 2 pictures taken from nuclear bunkers by David Moore in his project The Last Things, and I really like the idea that, you know, the world leaders, when perhaps everybody above has been destroyed in an apocalyptic bomb or something, I really like the fact that they will be soothed by these sort of post-impressionist lovely landscape paintings or prints secure in their bunkers.
But, landscape as a genre is very common amongst photographers of all kinds, really, from kind of amateurs to professionals. And photographers are kind of quite guilty, I think, of repeating, you know, derivative images sometimes and kind of re-… you know, recycling these-, these sort of very tried and tested tropes of-, of pictures with kind of very similar sorts of compositions, sometimes very saturated colours, very sort of dramatic monochrome skies, for instance.
Also kind of photographers can be very bad at kind of repeating of view points and returning to the very sort of tried and tested subjects for landscapes.
So I guess, you know, we are-, we are surrounded by landscape pictures, people like hanging them in their homes as well, and people like kind of sharing pictures of places that they’ve been to as well, maybe as sort of trophies of where they’ve been to.
And, loosely speaking, a lot of landscape pictures fall into 1 of 2 categories, which is picturesque or sublime, and often those are some sort of an overlap between those, those 2 as well.
But I guess the point is often we are looking at romanticised ideas of the land in these kinds of representations, and we’ll look at some of the problems of that romanticisation I guess.
So, firstly, let’s have a little deep dive into the picturesque. If I sort of ask you to think about an image that you might describe as picturesque, maybe something like this comes to mind, it’s a kind of a pretty generic painting by Claude Lorrain, who was quite celebrated in his time for his particular sort of pastel-, pastel tones in his oil paintings. Representation of a very kind of simple, idyllic life, usually kind of just a few people in the scene. They aren’t anybody specific.
They would generally be just a cow herder in this instance, or a shepherd or some-, some sort of farm person. Often some animals and also what we’ve got here are some ruins, and we’ll just come back to that in, you know, in a little sec. And also using the word landscape within the actual title of the piece as well.
My own kind of real upbringing with the picturesque was through and the work of John Constable. This is some placemats that I used to eat my meals off of sometimes at my grandparents and I know that other people of similar generations will be familiar
with-, with this particular set actually of Constable painting placemats. But I literally grew up with this and, you know, it wasn’t till kind of quite a lot-, quite like later that I, that I kind of grew to kind of understand a bit more about about John Constable.
His painting The Haywain is hanging in the National Gallery in London. It’s sort of one of the most famous images of the English countryside, note specifically English, not British, and, and it was painted from some sketches and some-, and his memory and his-, and his own-, actually, his own idealised view of his- from his childhood. So I kind of like the connection between my childhood and Constable’s childhood as well.
But, okay, maybe the sky is a little bit broodier than-, than in Claude Lorrain’s painting, but actually, you know, it’s a sunny-, you can tell it’s the middle of the summer, the water is quite low, ther-, all the sort of foliage is out off in the distance and the sort of middle, up the frame on the right, there are some farm workers.
But actually at the time that Constable was painting this, there was actually quite a lot of discontent in the Suffolk landscape amongst sort of farming communities. But Constable didn’t want to represent that, he wanted to represent this idyllic childhood idea of his In his painting.
And I guess kind of learning that I began to feel kind of quite cross really with Constable for I suppose promoting, yeah, this kind of unrealistic idea of the countryside, and spending a lot of the time in the countryside myself and kind of having something of an awareness really of some of the-, the conflicts and the challenges that the kind of rural experience gives.
I personally have kind of grown to really kind of have an interest in work and projects that, that challenge ideas of-, sort of received ideas of the kind of rural experience.
And I guess somebody who I have a kind of a particular-, you know, a particular aversion to is the Reverend William Gilpin. And he is really instrumental in-, in terms of-, of bringing us
this idea of the picturesque. Gilpin wrote some travel guides
for experiencing-, experiencing England and also the sort of Welsh English border, and what Gilpin really encouraged was travel for the pure pleasure of consuming views, basically, consuming places.
So his guides would really talk about specific villages and points and they would say very little
about the actual history or the culture of particular villages and places, but he would point out some good places to see nice views, basically.
He also illustrated this with his own kind of drawings and promoted a very formulaic way of looking at the land, basically, and consuming it. But kind of importantly, he did really coin this phrase the picturesque and he really promoted travel for the sake of a kind of visual consumption and kind of making, I guess, real connections between travel and kind of visual representations of it.
So when we might be posting photographs from a, you know, a holiday or a weekend away, for instance, on Instagram or sending a postcard to somebody, really actually that-, that kind of extends right the way back to William Gilpin’s promotion of-, of travel for visual pleasure basically.
So this is actually Chepstow Castle. So just kind of along the river. Why work where Gilpin and would have walked and and again kind of it’s it’s a similar idea with the Lorraine painting a similar sort of past the towns and things and we have a very soft framed view with the trees and the foliage around the sides.
These are the sorts of things Gilpin was talking about in his in his guides.
And and again, we have some some ruins on the other side of the River Wye here Chepstow Chepstow Castle
Gilpin’s ideas and the picturesque and also have a not really specifically direct link but certainly an important link to ideas that would become received in the future, such as the creation of-, of kind of national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, things that we kind of see-,
seem quite normal now and very sort of celebrated specific-, specific parts of the land that are celebrated for their kind of aesthetic beauty or as sites of sort of special scientific interest.
And… In this body of work by Keith Arnatt, he sort of again explores that area of-, of the border between England and Wales, the River Wye, as well as some other places, but kind of taking, I guess, kind of an ironic look at the idea of beauty and the AONB, area of outstanding natural beauty that this area is sort of classified as, showing us a fairly kind of rundown, dilapidated cottage here right next to the River Wye. Kind of quite a lot of people in 1 way or another have
tried to sort of turn this idea of the picturesque on its head, and particularly picturesque painting, in his exhibition in 2005 where he actually allowed rats to take over his exhibition space.
Banksy intervened on quite lots of paintings. It’s kind of really an attack I guess, on the history of painting as much as history of landscape painting, although landscapes did feature
quite a lot in that crude oils show. But in this, this is just 1 example of a number of paintings
where he intervened onto the canvas to try and kind of, yeah, turn the-, the kind of the rural idyll
as promoted through landscape painting on its head with these sort of CCTV cameras.
But you can see other examples from the series online, and I’d urge you to take a look. But really 25 years earlier, this kind of approach was being done by Peter Kennard, and certainly when I first saw this-, this image, this intervention onto an image that I knew very, very well, I found it quite very, very provoking indeed.
And so around that sort of time, the sort of campaign for nuclear disarmament, which Kennard was very much attached to, other people were also exploring other elements of the English landscape, particularly because… This piece was made in response to
the US placing cruise missiles around the outskirts of London, and specifically Greenham
Greenham Common, sorry! Where John Kippin also made quite a lot of work.
So using a similar visual language to some of those paintings, such as, you know, quite rich colours, photographing at the beginning of the day or towards the end of the day where light is kind of quite intense and the colours are most vivid…
Kippin shows us Greenham Common, where the US base was stationed. And other people have kind of looked specifically at Constable, thinking about Paul Rees in his body of work Constable Country, which kind of explores the Heritag-, heritage industry and thinking about how paintings
have really become part of the kind of heritage of a country and really part of its national identity.
But, that… kind of touches on ideas around ownership as well. Who-, who does the land really belong to? A painting like Constable’s is-, is supposed to really conjure up an idea of a kind of Englishness and a sort of a nationalism almost.
So-, so actually, you know, what does it mean if-, if actually you don’t kind of quite fit into, you know, if your ideas don’t don’t kind of fit with those more generic ones around a particular place?
And also like actual ownership, it’s actually hasn’t been hugely long in this countrys-, in Britain’s history that women have been able to inherit land for instance So in Joe Spence and Terry Dennett’s series, the land features quite prominently in Re-modelling Photo History. Not exclusively, but Spence uses her body in the landscape to really talk about and how women have often been excluded from the land or have been kind of used as muses,
I’m thinking particularly of the kind of nude female figures, in the landscape basically, in order to sort and conjure up ideas around sort of harmon and-, and kind of Mother Natureand the sort of ideas of this kind of softness, I guess, of-, of-, of nature and-, and the female. Back to sort of ownership again,
Fay Godwin, very celebrated English landscape photographer, her book Our Forbidden Land, really looked at the inaccessibility of the landscape and this-, this is kind of-, her ideas are still
being sort of carried out now with the right to roam movement and there is a kind of a long history of-, of trespass protests, not just in the UK but of course in many other countries.
But rules differ massively from country to country and within the United Kingdom as well.
So Fay Godwin was sort of very, very active within the Ramblers Association calling for more access to the-, the countryside for walkers and for people to just, you know, enjoy the-, enjoy the country, really. Somebody who I’m-, you know, a body of work quite who I-, who I-, that I really enjoy very much and kind of come back to and actually was-, was very moving when I first came across it I guess as a teenager was Ingrid Pollard’s work. And she kind of draws us specifically to the Lake district and the poetry of Wordsworth.
So again, kind of a poet who who is very closely linked to the picturesque with ideas around kind of nature and beauty and the experience of being in the land. And Wordsworth being kind of, I guess, like Constable, as-, as a national treasure, if you like.
And, and Ingrid Pollard speaks about the black experience or a black experience in the English
countryside of actually not feeling like she is allowed to be there or welcome to be there. And also talks about the relationship between the English landscape and imperialism and of course many of the owners profiting greatly through imperialism, through exploitation of trade and in some instances slavery as well. So a hugely important body of work made in the late-, in the late 1980s, a hugely important piece. This is all-, this was all made in… With black and white-, black and white analogue photography, of course, and hand tinted as well, to kind of refer to things like postcards that were, were hand tinted and also other industries such as the ceramics industry,
which was kind of very, you know, rooted in that part of-, part of England that would have involved, you know, probably women and painting lots of ceramics too.
So those are a few bodies of work that I think relate to the picturesque specifically. By all means,
have a little break now and think about some of these bodies of work, looking into them in a little bit more, a little bit more depth, and maybe think about like where you’ve seen landscape pictures today or in the last couple of days, what kind of different surfaces and context have you encountered them in and kind of what do you think their purpose has been?
And, you know, why were they kind of used? Why have they been put there? And what are they trying to do?
Lecture 2
Okay. So next, I’d like to talk to you about the sublime. It’s a slightly trickier term, I think, than the picturesque, and it’s also a kind of quite a-, quite a badly misused word. And hopefully after this session now, you will have a kind of-, a kind
of a richer understanding of-, of this idea and, I dunno’, maybe you’ll start to correct people
when they-, when they say, oh, this-, this cheesecake is just sublime’, for instance. There are kind of lots of spin offs to the sublime.
We’re not going to look at any of these really specifically, well we will be teaching touching on a few, but needless to say, you know, it’s a huge area. But if you are interested in some of the
things that we’re going to look at now, then it is-, it is worth really kind of taking a deeper dive into this, you really will find that it informs your practice very, very well.
So… just sort of in summary, though, I think where the picturesque has kind of traditionally dealt with kind of comfort, restful-ness, and kind of… a kind of an easy enjoyment, the sublime is concerned with a kind of a different
kind of pleasure. It’s really the pleasure that’s derived from terror, or from-, from kind of, you know, being… being uncomfortable. Back to painting again, this is by Philip James de Loutherbourg who was actually a set-, a set painter and, yeah, a very interesting
character, actually. And I think this painting is a really good-, a really good kind of illustration and a really good starting point for the sublime.
If we just have a closer look about-, at the kind of key figures here, comparing it to, you know, the Constable’s painting or Lorrain’s painting of kind of people sort of gently lolling about in a fairly carefree way, we’ve got sort of some very different responses here. We’ve got the guy on the far left who’s just sort of, you know, outstretched sort of disbelief and pretty stunned, I think, pretty immobile from this avalanche that’s kind of hurtling towards him. The dog down over to the right of him is sort of on all fours, kind of prone, it’s maybe not sure whether it should be running for its life or is sort of similarly kind of catatonic, like the guy with the stick in the red-,
the red shirt there. There is a guy on the far right who seems to be praying and this sort of act of sort of desperation, sort of praying to be saved. And the only person really who’s got any sense here is I think-, I think-, she looks like a woman who is actually trying to get out of the way of the avalanche. But I think they give kind of quite a nice sense of the sort of range of emotions that the sublime is-, sort of attempts to conjure up, really.
So what we’re dealing here with-, with the sublime is representations of these kinds of emotions, of kind of terror, of being in awe, and being sort of frightened, and being just kind of, yeah, incredibly impressed, in awe I suppose, for want of a better word. And kind of mountains really are kind of one of your-, your kind of classic tropes of the sublime. An ongoing body of work that I find quite interesting is by Henry Iddon, who has been making this work for quite some time now and his pictures aren’t kind of generally that sublime.
They depict subjects that are typically sublime, like mountains, and talks about the kind of the genuine dangers of mountain environments in the United Kingdom, and his photographs-,they are generally fairly-, fairly quiet, fairly straight pictures without kind of too much-, too much kind of technical intervention, are accompanied with news clips, basically extract from the news.
So they kind of take us to real sites where kind of genuine-, you know, genuine tragedies have taken place in-, in kind of wilderness environments. But back to-, to-, to Loutherbourg again, he’s probably best known for this paintaing here, Coalbrookdale by Night, and it’s a… It’s kind of thought of as-, as a kind of a really defining image of the industrial revolution.
And-, and, of course, you know, in a-, we ar-, we’re living in a world that is-, that is-, has been getting hotter since-, since this kind of activity was kind of kicking off really. So, the sort of marked contrast between the kind of the dark valley and this kind of inferno really from-, from the furnaces, even we’ve got the moon over on the right hand side, and it’s possibly a full moon, but it’s kind of completely dwarfed by this, the kind of scale of this industry here right in the centre of the composition.
Quite interestingly… you know, people often talk-, make some sort of distinction between kind of natural landscapes, if you like, and manmade-, manmade landscapes. You know, personally, I don’t really see any-, any real distinction between the 2 kinds of things, really, particularly when it comes to sort of talking about a genre.
And-, and actually, if you kind of overlay these 2 paintings, they are kind of remarkably similar, it’s almost like, you know, he had the same basis for the-, for the kind of the canvas and then was sort of adding-, you know, adding the sort of-, the detail on top of it. But in-, but in painting, you know, this kinds of-, of-, of-, you know, natural disasters and destruction is-, is sort of really… has been kind of the key subject, you know, the sort of fire and brimstone Old Testament kind of stuff is, you know, is really the kind of staple of the sublime.
And really like the legacy we have for that in popular culture is, you know, the sort of disaster movie in, you know, in cinema that-, you know, we-, we-, we love to consume, you know, and it makes-, you know, it gets lots and lots of people through the box office to-, to kind of sit for a-, you know, a couple of hours and-, and kind of be terrified really, either by, you know, massive apocalyptic things or the experience of the vastness and kind of… Yeah. Scale and-, and feeling kind of dwarfed. That’s really kind of what the sublime is about, this sort of scale.
It was really-, you know, it has been spoken about, written about,you know, quite extensively by kind other-, other kind of writers like Kant and Goethe and other people, but Edmund Burke is probably the most associated with kind of defining the difference between beauty and-, and the sublime. And I didn’t really use the word beauty, thinking about-, talking about the picturesque, but kind of I think that’s probably what we are-, we are kind of talking about when it comes to the picturesque as well.
It’s a very thorny subject, of course, beauty, so I’d rather not get too far into it. But again, if you are looking to learn a bit more about this-, this idea of the sublime, then this is a really good-, this is a really good place to start.
In photography, you know, we will tend to associate landscape photography with somebody like Ansel Adams and, and some of his-, his kind of great pictures from-, from North America, and they’ve-, they’ve-, they’ve been incredibly pervasive and-, and-, you know, really responsible I think for defining what, you know, great-, great landscape photography is supposed to be basically.
But I think often you, know, when you are-, when you are kind of representing the sublime, you know, it can often get kind of lost by kind of just photographing the clouds and the weather, basically. And sometimes the actual foreground, the land that’s being represented or spoken about, is, you know, is quite dwarfed by the elements.
That may be the photographer’s intention, of course. But we often think about sublime in relation to the elements A very kind of famous view, of course from-, from Yosemite is-, is a real kind of destination for a lot of photographers. And Corrine Vionnet in her series Photo Opportunities, she takes views from social media from places like Flickr and overlay-, overlays these views thousands of times to give this very sort of blurry impressionistic, painterly perhaps,
view of these kind of famous landmarks, the Matterhorn in Switzerland
being another kind of key one of hers.
But… as I mentioned, you know, mountains are, if you like, your sort of classic subject
matter for-, for the sublime, and if you’re interested in literature, then probably one of the kind of most well known-… most well known kind of representations of the sublime in literature is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and there are some really fantastic written passages describing-, describing the landscape that are really kind of worth looking at if, if your interested in-, in representations of mountains. But there is also a kind of a quieter
side to the sublime as well. This is-, this is an image by Roger Fenton from-, from the Crimean
He was-, this was sort of one of the first wars that were photographed and because of using a large format camera, a field camera with sort of wet plates, that and kind of quite long exposure times, it wasn’t really possible to photograph the action of the war, if you like. So his photographs tended to be of the camps, of the soldiers, actually often of kind of quite
mutilated soldiers as well that weren’t published, and the aftermath of battle. So this is quite a famous image of his. There are two versions of it actually, one with cannonballs on the road
and one with them moved off the road, which kind of cause-, cause-, has caused quite a lot of intrigue for people who are interested in-, in, you know, ideas around the manipulation of photographs.
I kind of don’t think that’s all that exciting but it’s a-, I think this is a kind of a very-… The kind of stillness of the picture, the quietness of it and the absence of figures, you kind of-, you, I think, probably read these as cannonballs. But yeah, he-, he titled it as we see the Valley of the Shadow of Death in relation to Tennyson’s poem and-, yeah, it’s kind of become something of a-, of a-, of a kind of a trope of this sort of slower, if you like, cooler approach to landscape photography. An image that was kind of quite seared in my memory was by Paul Seawright, who went to Afghanistan after the-, after the war in-, he left in 2002 and made-, made this work for the Imperial War Museum. So these sort of ordnances in a kind of very similar terrain, photographed in colour, yet with these very kind of muted hues as is kind of typical of that-, that kind of topography, very kind of similar resonances with-, with that. And I think, you know, being in a-, being in a-, in a-, in an age where we are so exposed to images, you know, fast action images and moving images and also kind of high action still photographs, there is something kind of eerie
about the kind of quietness and the stillness of these kinds of pictures, I think. There’s a suggested reading of David Campany’s essay, quite a famous essay, written from around this time called Safety in Numbness, which is well worth looking at and kind of critiques this approach. But this sort of aftermath kind of photography was kind of quite-, quite popular,
I guess sort of 20-, 20 years ago, really. Sophie Ristelhueber’s images from after the first Gulf War as well being-, you know, being of kind of particular note. And, you know, really and with people like Robert Polidori photographs, kind of the environmental kind of catastrophes
started really to sort of replace sort of aftermath of kind of warfare kind of-, kind of pictures.
There is a kind of a, I guess, it’s a slightly kind of more brooding, if you like, image because
of the kind of the darker sky here, but, you know, the looking at these images of ruins and wrecks
and the kind of the aftermath of something, we can see the kind of water levels that’s crept up this-, this car here and subsided and this sort of visual echoes with the, you know, with the wooden-, the slatted panelling on the architecture is… that this sort of idea of ruins again, kind of aping back to those earlier sort of picturesque and-, and kind of classic sublime tropes in painting. Robert Polidori has also photographed around Chernobyl, as have of course many other people, and it is a kind of a tourist destination, this sort of dark tourism and this idea of kind of going on holiday to visit places where catastrophes have happened, you know, has become quite popular. So you can visit Chernobyl now if you like, if-, if that is a holiday destination for you. And it’s a particular place that’s-, that’s kind of creeped into culture elsewhere.
So these are some screengrabs from-, from a particular level in Call of Duty Modern Warfare, and-, if-, again, if this-, if this is kind of-, of interest to you, a film that really looks at the idea of a space that’s kind of in recovery of some kind of awful events that’s happened, the idea of a zone that’s kind of excluded and a narrative that’s kind of very ambiguous and intriguing, and if you also like kind of slowness and you’re quite-, you’re quite happy to watch a film that’s very many hours long, then do have a look at Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which is a great piece of cinema, but also I think relates visually to some of the-, some of the sort of visual approaches that we’ve seen here already. I mentioned kind of vastness and scale and sort of feeling overwhelmed, sometimes that is in in the subjects themselves, but I think Eric Kessels touches on this with his 24 Hours of Flikr installations where he supposedly prints out 24 hours
worth of photographs uploaded to Flickr, but-, and printed out and put into gallery installations. These aren’t actually a whole pile of photographs, they are sort of photographs stuck on to a kind of a frame, a mesh, but nevertheless, I think the installation are really impressive to see and they kind of touch on other ideas of the sublime, this particularly the digital sublime that you might have spotted on the slide earlier. So it’s not just really necessarily just about place, but place is important to it, particularly environmental kind of work.
So Burtynsky’s photographs are often connected to the sublime. He works on a big scale with, you know, big plate cameras, 10/8 inch-, 10 by 8 inch plate cameras capturing sort of a huge amount of detail. And many people like Paul Seawright, we looked at earlier also working on large format, which allows very large, very highly detailed prints to be installed in-, in-, in exhibitions.
And I think that’s the scale of the prints and the clarity of the prints, the sharpness, the detail in the subjects is also kind of part of the experience of-, of the sublime. And… So yeah, Burtynsky’s sort of long term projects around kind of human-, human planetary systems and consumption and kind of raw materials, his-, his projects are kind of classic sublime content, if you like.
But also kind of dipping-, dipping back into the-, the sublime-ness of the colossal quantities of digital information that is stored-, stored around the world, Mishka Henner has made lots of bodies of work from the comfort of his own home, exploring the world through Google Earth and Google Street View and so on, as have other people, but his views, stitching together aerial satellite imagery, do, I think, give kind of quite a different view of-, of-, of the land, but in this one he’s sort of particularly concerned with the quite terrifyingly ordered geometric patterns that-, that kind of make up fields in these sort of meat production areas of North America, and importantly the ensuing pollution that’s-, that’s sort of results from these kinds of intensive agricultural systems.
And just lastly, a more recent body of work thinking-, thinking about, you know, the digital and kind of embracing other technologies, these are some images from a campaign by the World Wildlife Foundation to kind of imagine these dystopian futures, imagining what happens if we don’t reach the sort of 1.-… 1.5 degree limit to kind of climate warming, imagining what it will be like without meeting those targets and also kind of imagining, you know, futures-, better futures like we have on the bottom right-, right here, but using AI to literally paint those kinds of pictures, borrowing from the sublime and the picturesque palette if you like, and kind of bringing-, bringing all of that together. And just kind of in relation, though, to environmentalism, which I think is-, is-, is an important element of the sublime today,
Shuster notes that “The sublime plays a distinct role in making environments and environmental change visible, but it also conceals a certain visibility not born of the breathtaking, such as the peculiarity of detail in Burtynsky’s work or the visually dull greying of everything by coal soot. Furthermore, the sublime is breathlessness at a distance that stays distant, and thus involves an uneasy relationship with forms of hands-on environmentalist activism.”
That was written 10 years ago, but it’s still very relevant, I think, and kind of speaks of some of the dangers of this breathtaking imagery that can be quite kind of stupefying and actually doesn’t really provoke-, provoke kind of a sense that change is possible and is feasible. And so I wonder what you make of that idea in relation perhaps to these pictures.
So just in summary, really what we’ve been looking at her is romanticism and the picturesque and the sublime being 2 different approaches, but often with some overlap between the 2 of them. We should also be reminded that the picturesque and sublime are different ways of containing an experience, really, an experience for the viewer. It’s unlikely that you will kind of talk about the-, an experience of the sublime when actually something genuinely awful might happen to you, for instance.
So it is-,it is a kind of a cultural term, if you like, and they are both kind of in the-, in the service, if you like, of pleasure for the viewer. There’s also a little bit of extra reading for you here, and I hope that’s been of some interest to you and to your practice.
Guest Lecture – Cemre Yesil Cemre Yesil: Pietra
Cemre Yeşil Gönenli
Hello, everyone.
This is Cemre Yeşil Gönenli from Turkey.
I’m a photographer
and in this short video, I’ll be
talking about the photography practice rooted in place through a collaborative work
that I did with an Italian artist.
And… Yeah, I’ll be mostly talking
about how we conceptualise the work always by sticking with the concept of place.
I think in today’s world, in this Instagram era,
photography or photography practice rooted in place
has almost nothing to do about depicting a place because, you know, it’s very easy to get any kind of visual information or visual data online,
whether you go to Google
Images, Google Maps, Google Street View, or-, or you just go to a location in Instagram.
So you get to see a lot of data about a lot of information about what that place really looks like. But I guess for a photographer When a photographer creates a study of location, and also it’s people obviously, I think they bring it
not only there to their own perspective, of course, but also I think we have to get influenced a lot around, you know, about the stories that kind of took place in that space or the subjects that you’re working with in that place.
So, you know, all these sorts of additional concepts
that really actually help us to perceive a location.
And it is also, I think, very important to say that photography is almost automatically spatial, so you’re always kind of, you know, you’re always in a space, you’re always in a location, you’re always-, the-, the-, the place you’re working inside is always a part of the work, you know, whether you define it like that or not. So I think what is really important when you’re talking about photography practice rooted in place is really about the-, the-, the effort to-, to kind of reflect your own perspective, your own experience, your own observations about the place into the work. And, you know, this-, these reflections are in a way just to form the-, the contextualisation of your work. So I think when you contextualise the work through your own experiences about the place, then I think it’s a matter of questioning what is it that that you’re going to photograph in this place to-, to-, to kind of, you know, to bring out that context that you want to highlight, that you want
to give a shape to your work.
And also when it’s a matter of place, I think it’s very important to be self-aware about your own curiosities, like what is it that you want to explore about that place through photography?Because in a way, photography, the camera is just like a great tool, almost like a free ticket that would give you access to explore things in an unfamiliar space, as if, you know, once you have a camera, you have a very good purpose or a reason to-, to just, you know, dive into something, to-, to explore something that you wouldn’t do otherwise if you-, if you don’t have a camera.
So I think, you know, being aware of this fact is also very important when you are working in a place that-, that is perhaps you’re not too familiar with. So, you know, so-, so you automatically have some questions raised in your head that you could kind of bring into your work not only let them stay in your mind, but actually, you know, ask questions while you’re photographing and also inviting the viewer to to think together with you about those questions.
So, you know, when you go to a place,
I always find it useful to just like draft
a couple of questions that I am curious about. So it almost like acts almost like a guide line for me to, you know, to-, to decide what am I going to photograph rather than just remotely taking photographs of everything I see.
And today I will be talking about a body of work called Piet[r]à that I did in collaboration with an Italian artist, Alice Caracciolo, and this collaborative work stems from a legendary story from Castro in South Italy.
The region of Puglia commissioned me and Alice to make a photographic work inspired by a legendary story that was titled The Turk’s Wife and I’m going to tell you about that today.
So this work was a commissioned work, so we were already given a framework to work with, we were given certain stories, certain legendary stories, and we were supposed to pick one of those stories, and we-, we went for the Turkish wife. And I will tell you about the story now.
And, you know, the title of the work is Piet[r]à, but it also has a secondary name that is called Güzel İstanbul, which is in Turkish, and it translates as beautiful Istanbul, and you will know why when I tell you more. The Turk’s used to regularly occupy
the coast of Salento and one of the most targeted places was Castro.
During one of the incursions, they stole a precious statue of Madonna, which was assigned to one of the Turkish commanders who later gave the statue of his wife as a gift. Even though his wife was Muslim, she kept the statue as a beautiful object with an artistic value.
The wife was pregnant and she was in a lot of pain. In spite of the prayers, the woman wasn’t able to give birth. The wife had a slave, a woman from Castro who had been kidnapped and became a servant in Constantinople. The slave felt sorry about her mistress, and then she suggested sending the statue back to its former country in order to hope for a miracle. The husband was convinced and he ordered to put the statue on a ship and send it back to where it belonged.
Without anyone guiding it, the ship arrived from Constantinople to Castro overnight. When fishermen saw it and recognised the statue, they spread the word to all of the citizens. They rang the bell with such great joy and they all gathered around the ship.
Finally, the statue was brought to its former cathedral where it’s still regarded with such great respect. However, nobody knows what happened to the Turkish wife.
So having told you the myth that we departed from, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the process. So this myth was actually filled with elements around water, about femininity, about womanhood, and most importantly about the-, this kind of movement of a stone that when a statue is carried to another place
and then everything is resolved. So in a way, for you really focus on the kind of, you know, important elements that-, that were mentioned in this-, in this myth that really gave us a, you know, conceptual frameworks for us to work with.
So by focusing on this visual embodiment of stones, with this work we we tried to explore whether photography might reveal any further connections and rationales in between the elements and issues that had been subject to such a myth, such as the sea, the statue, ship, femininity, womanhood, motherhood, and with this work, we try to embrace the souls within the stones through photography.
And the statue you just saw in this presentation is actually not the statue that is mentioned in the story, of course, but it was another statue that I was obsessed with, but because of this displacement, I just suddenly connected to this statue in Istanbul with this myth.
And that it also, because we were 2 artists that were working in, you know, that are living in other cities, different cities, it also made a great connection in that we-, the 2 countries, in the-, in between 2 different places actually, that was always rooted in place, the statues that were, you know, strongly attached to places. So that was very important for us.
So through this legend, we made a photographic expedition to earth, to the land of Castro in particular, through stones, we photographically tried to question the relation between stones and souls while trying to shed a light on the history of certain stones that are taken away from human site and touched, such as the towers that Italians built by the water to protect from the Ottoman invasions, and also this poor statue that weighs 7 tons titled Güzel Istanbul that was made in 1975, which only lived in its original location for 7 days because this beautiful statue of this naked woman made by this sculptor Gürdal Duyar was removed because the government back then told it didn’t represent the Turkish woman since it was naked, and then the statue became homeless.
So now that you have seen the photographs
and also became familiar with this myth and these 2 sculptures that were, you know, that were subject to our work, I wanted to make a little bit of reflection about the process, also working as a duo, artists working as a couple who didn’t know each other, which was of course, something challenging, but in a very good way and in a very educate-ive way, I must say, because, you know, we first met online and that we just started to meditate about possibilities, about ideas. After meeting online and talking about the possibilities, at 1 stage I went to Italy and we worked together on this-, on this work.
And I must say, you know, it has been stimulating to be able to compare ourselves about 600 years from the facts on social and religious and political issues that concerned our history, our roots. And it was also very interesting to-, to analyse this kind of social anthropological aspect of the legend we have chosen.
And there were, of course, some difficul-, difficulties because in a way, you know, we had to depart from this legendary story and something we had to finish and it was intangible. Another difficulty, of course, you know, we didn’t know each other and we had to work together.
But in a way, you know, this was just like an initial concern, but once we met and once we kind of discussed the possibilities, we were, you know, we just found ourselves on the same page, which was, of course, very important because I think we know-, we knew what we were looking for and what we wanted to achieve. So that was quite important for the development of the work and in the end it-, we turned the work into a little publication, in a book, which was this. And I will also talk a little bit about the design of it now perhaps.
So basically in the cover we use this kind of like laser cut because we wanted to kind of reflect either way as a shape to this, again, to this kind of material of stone, which was quite, you know, important for the work, of course. And we used a-, this was… wet, unfrotunately!
But yeah, we used a very organic paper, I’ll show you the photographs as well, but it’s kind of yellowish. It’s like you-, when you look closely in the paper, you would almost see little particles as if there are little stones in the paper. So that was-, that was a choice, of course.
And also, you know, this historical research was, of course, very important for the work and this kind of newspaper inserts became a part of the book because they, you know, of course, it’s in Turkish, but in a way, it tells you the story about what happened to this poor, poor statue.
So in a way, for us, it was a way to confront this myth and-, and the actual, you know, the actual stories that kind of connected with this concepts in a way.
So, yeah, this was like a, you know, we did it in a small number, a small edition, and it was perceived quite well. Luckily, it was shortlisted in Photo London, in the-, in the book competition. So yeah, this was a book.
And in the end, of course, here you have more photographs, then you can see in the work page or the screenshots-, the screen recording I showed you. But also in the end you would see a text and also the questions, some questions that that we listed when we were, you know, kind of meditating around this work that we wanted to open up and share with the-, with the viewer that always had to do again with the idea of-, of place.
So coming back to this concept of place, like, you know, photography practice rooted in place,
I think in Piet[r]à, in this work, what interested us in the development of the work was not the mere representation of a place that is, you know, witness to a story nor in another way in a scientific documentary report, but from the beginning we decided to work on symbolic elements of this story within different places.
So the stone in the and it’s symbolic meaning, but also the mystical and religious and above all on what, you know, involves it’s movement from one place to another. And I think in a way, photography in Piet[r]à kind of always moved inbetween a metaphorical interpretation of some elements from the legend and the reality of those places and our experiences in those places and the historical aspects that has linked our lands, these 2 different lands.
And I think in a way, this-, this kind of mixed narrative, this mixture of different layers also helped us to show the work in different places that, you know, of course, we showed the work in Turkey and also in Italy, but I think in a way, since we really simplified the work through very simple, you know, 2 very simple ideas and objects that are almost universal it helped the work to be, you know, to be engaged by different audiences in different countries, especially when we exhibited the work in different countries. I think that was that was very visible for us that, you know, the work really communicated with people from different places that had nothing to do with Turkey or-, or Italy.
So I think what I’m trying to say here, because doesn’t necessarily mean you have to, you know, kind of depict that place in a, you know, in a blunt way. It’s-, it’s really about… perhaps kind of transforming that place in your own way so that people, like your viewers, when they see your work, they don’t only gets, you know, get a sense of that place, really, but they kind of visit-, they make a visit to your experience of that space.
Finally, I also want to speak a little bit about the importance of-, of texts and how we use texts in this work, both in the exhibitions and also as a part of the book. for us, it had an important role to, you know, to bring in this context of place, because otherwise, you know, these photographs could be taken anywhere and… and it was the texts that really spoke about this historical aspect, about the places. And also in the title, we had this little world-, word play.
In Italian Piet[r]a means stone, and since the ‘r, the letter ’r’ is embraced, that’s when you take it out it reads as Pietá, which was of course a, you know, this very famous sculpture by Michaelangelo, but also as a word, it means compassion or pity, and this sculpture obviously represents. the Sorrowful Mary contemplating the dead body of her son, Jesus, which she holds in her lap. If you look at the word compassion, it literally means to suffer together.
And in a way it is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering. And I guess this kind of you know, secondary meaning behind the title was not something that everybody, like, every viewer could immediately understand, but it was like a subtle context that some viewers perhaps hopefully could get.
And in a way, this secondary context of compassion that comes out of this reference to the sculpture titled Pietá had to do with our compassion, especially these sculptures that were or the stones that were hidden from human sight and touch. Thank you very much for listening,
and I hope I was able to help you with your understanding about photographic practice
rooted in place.
Have a lovely time. Bye.
Toby Woollen
Graduate Guest Lecture – Toby Woollen Toby Woollen
Hello!
it feels weird having to record this without speaking to anyone. I was going to say, how are you doing? I hope you’re all doing well anyway.
My name is Toby, I am-… I graduated last year
and I’m going to be talking about my relationship with place and my wo-, and work-, and my work and work and my relationship to place.
That being said, this is my place. This is where I grew up. This is where I live. This is where my home is. And I would say that my home is everything in that circle, it’s not just my house. Very lucky to live in the countryside and to be able to say that all of that is my home. I grew up on a farm.
When I was younger, we farmed a lot of the land
in that circle. We don’t anymore. Quite recently, my family stopped farming, my side of the family stopped farming, which kind of is a preface
for all of the work that I make and have made.
Sort of having to re-evaluate the way that you look at land from-, from an agricultural perspective
into a perhaps artistic perspective. But I’ll talk about that more in a minute. This is from a series
called ‘still’ that I made in the second semester
of first year in the first lockdown when we were sent home. I, like everyone, wasn’t expecting to be sent home.
I didn’t really know that I could make work at home. Part of the reason that I went to Falmouth
is because firstly it was very far away and also
it’s a very arty place and I thought if I went there, maybe then I’ll be able to make art work, you know? Which is a funny thing to say, but that’s how I thought at the time I didn’t think there would be any chance of me being able to make art work when at home. So it was weird for me to have to think about art when at home, or making pictures,
being a photographer at home, a ‘photographer’.
This-. Sorry I just completely blanked there.
This was my project from second semester of
second year called ‘tiny paces’, and it was a kind of continuation from still it was more of like a revisiting of that project, or revisiting of…
self-portraiture, and how I could use self portraiture to explore the way that I fit into my place. Both-, both like literally, physically and also metaphorically, you know, how do I fit in here?
And that sort of where do I fit in was the thing
that kind of pushed this project along. I would take pictures of myself in places that meant a lot to me.
And this-, this project is when I really started to dig into what-, what the land means to me, what the land in that circle means to me and how I-, how I relate to that land. Just plopping myself in it and
seeing where I fit in and how and how I am in relation to things.
Do you know what I mean? So there was-, it was that, it was me going to places that were-, that had kind of strong memories from my childhood, revisiting places that I hadn’t been to since I was really small and things had changed in perspective,
like where I would have looked up I kind of looked straight ahead, that sort of thing, and there
were lots of kind of buried meanings for me personally, which I quite like. I don’t-, you know, I quite like that a lot of the meaning in this work
is just for me and isn’t for anyone else. And, you know, that’s fine.
I started to-, like I said, I was starting to think about land again and the agricultural perspective of land and…
What I mean-, what I mean by that is,
in my opinion, agriculture, farming
sees land as a commodity, you know, as something to be used, certainly in modern day farming. Not in all modern day farming, there are certain farming practices which-, which is like soil regenerative.
But a lot of it really is about how much can we take from the soil before we have to give back? How much can we take from the land before we have to give back?
And that perspective on land management is very new. It’s only sort of happened in the in the last… Coor, sort of 50 years, which is astonishing when you think about how long agriculture has been around. So yeah, it’s a little bit about that.
It’s a little bit about the way that we take, take, take, take, take, take, take from the land and that-, it’s not necessarily-, that isn’t the meaning behind this work, but it’s something that I’ve, when revisiting this work, have started to take away from it, you know?
And I’ve started to take away and take into new works because I really don’t like that view of land and it’s one of the reasons that I I don’t want to go into farming and I’m not going to is because it’s going that way more and more because of-, because of a lot of things, but money is the main thing. Anyway, let’s not get into that.
Basically the main kind of thing-, the main-, the strand that goes through my work is this idea of revisiting, revisiting places over and over and over and over and over again.
Or not, revisiting a place
that I haven’t been to in ages and seeing the way that-, the way that I am in that place after such a long time and the-, the new relationship that I can have with that place that I used to have when I was 10 and how things change, but not necessarily
revisiting a place physically, but also revisiting photographs. So… I’ll get back to that.
I wanted to use this quote in this work
because I just read the book and it was the first book that I kind of-, I picked up, read, and put down, which isn’t that impressive because it’s like 100 pages long, but for me it’s very impressive because I’m awful at reading. It’s called The Little Snake by A. L. Kennedy, go and read it, it is a brilliant book.
This is from-, from the book, obviously, but for me, it kind of summed up the way that I was looking at my space in this project, this idea of-, this idea of standing still, and when you stand still, the world-,
the world goes on forever, it goes on for infinity
because you’re not going anywhere. So, you know, like nothings-, nothing-, ev-, everything goes on forever. Whereas if you’re moving, if you’re moving really quickly, the world shortens, it gets smaller. So like slowing down lets things become bigger and gives you more space to breathe and understand things. So back to what I was saying before I got onto that tangent, revisiting work…
When I made this so this work I made in the first semester, second year, so I made this before I made tiny paces, but when I made it, it was in second lockdown, I’d just been sent home again and I was really annoyed and kind of angsty and like throwing my toys out of the pram and being really annoyed and just like, ‘Waahh!’ Anyway, I made this, like, as quite a reactionary thing.
I walked around the yard with this big old cupboard, I think it is, and propped it up against something, found 5 things, put them together, apart from in that one it’s 4, and…took a picture of it and then handed it in and that was that. And I didn’t think about it, I just did it because I really at that point couldn’t be asked, and that was that. But then I made tiny paces and I started to sort of re-evaluate my relationship with my home and my place.
And after I made tiny paces, I came back to these images and I started to think about them differently and I started to think about the fact that a place isn’t just the land,it’s not just the soil, but it’s also the things that are in it, in the same way that your home isn’t just the building, it’s all the things that are in the building as well.And those two things together make home, like a building with nothing in it isn’t a home, but loads of sh*t in a pile isn’t a home either.
It’s like those 2 things together make the home, in this-, and it’s the same way, you know? All of this stuff that is littered around the farmyard makes the farmyard with the farmyard. Does that make sense?
So that’s what I start to realise and I started to kind of come back and think about this project again from the slightly more calm perspective.
So yeah, again, revisiting is coming up and looking at it again and looking at it from a-, with fresh eyes, different perspective was very important, like… everything, every object in these still lives has a story. So in the one in the left, it’s kind of workshop centered, the blue rag you tear things off to… wipe off grease or whatever.
And then underneath that is part of a woodchipper and dad repurposed the wood chipper so that it would mulch up apples so he could make cider, and I remember him making a hell of a lot of cider and then not drinking any of it because it went bad I think! But yeah, so like everything has a story and everything is attached to a memory
and a lot of my work, I think I said before, like a lot of the meaning for me is… is for me, and it’s not necessarily for other people.
But I think what’s good about this work
is that it has all of that meaning for me but at the same time, the pictures are kind of nice. So like there’s a bit of a balance there.
But yeah, that was basically it, it’s like objects are just important as-, as the place itself and I started to realise that, but through revisiting. I love Keith Arnatt, he’s-, he’s-… Don’t swear. He’s brilliant, I love him, he’s fantastic, I think he’s probably my biggest influence.
He isn’t necessarily an artist that when you think of making work with place, I wouldn’t say he’s like the first one that comes to mind, but you might think of like Richard Long or someone like that. David Nash. Anyway, he’s a massive influence to me. I love his humour.
I like the way he takes really, really simple concepts, which you kind of take for granted and then stretches them out into quite complex projects or works of art.
For example, this, which is probably my favourite work, maybe ever, I don’t know, but definitely my favourite Keith Arnatt work, where he-, it’s called Is It Possible for me to do Nothing as my Contribution to This Exhibition? He-, it’s a bit of a mouthful, this is the work.
It’s all about whether it is actually possible
to do nothing for something if you have said that you would do nothing for it, because saying that you do nothing is an action and is therefore something. Yeah, go and find it and read it like 100 times. Yeah, I love it.
I think it’s great and I love him.
Anyway.
So this is now onto what I’m up to now, which is… It’s just like it’s a bit of a cluster… of stuff, like, I don’t really have a clear line of sight for doing stuff or for making work would be a better way of putting it. A lot of it is still to do with my like physical interaction with space and like my, like, anatomical interactions.
So the one on the left is a reed line, so it’s reeds wrapped around trees at head height, so that’s how high I’d be going along those trees.
That circle is if I like, it’s like drawing a circle with my arm. So it’s-, the radius is my arm’s length. And then I draw black lines on trees at my shoulder height.
So it’s sort of leaving a mark behind me
of where I’ve been but also how big I am, on beeches mostly because at the moment they’re my favourite tree. And also there’s a history of mark making on beeches and… I get-, like, sometimes it’s like confessing your love to someone on a beech, you’ll see like love and then T W love. S P.
Yeah. Anyway. Working with materials. I’m not going to go into massive detail because I still, I’m still thinking about this stuff. It’s quite fresh.
I’ve-, I’ve learnt that I, the work I like most that I’ve made, I’m not saying nes-, I’m not saying my best work, I’m saying the work that I enjoy looking at that is mine
the most is the work that makes sense, is the work that I make without really thinking sort of instinctively and then come back and think about it really intensively over a period of time and examine the reasons why I did it and… all the kind of hidden meanings and sort of extract as much out of that work as I can. I’m pretty sure it’s a Keith Arnatt quote, but I’ll see if I can find it.
It was in the sound archives of the British Library, so I don’t think I can access it any more. But he did-, he did an interview and in it
he said something along the lines of ‘There’s no way that you can see the whole image through the viewfinder of the camera when you take the picture. It’s only once you’ve developed and printed the picture that you can really start to see what is in it.’
And that-, that idea, that concept has been massively important to me in the way that I make work, not having to have fixed knowledge of what I-… what I’m going to do and
how it’s going to look when I’ve done it. Just, if I feel like doing something, doing something-, doing it, sorry. And thinking about it afterwards because that’s fine.
University, I have to say, is a bit tricky to do that, but you can just like churn through work, you can just make and make and make and make and make and then think about it later. I wouldn’t say-, don’t do that all the time, but sometimes it is good to know what you’re going to do. I have to say, in hindsight, sometimes it’s quite nice to be able to say to the tutor,
‘This is what I’m going to do.’ Rather then ‘I haven’t got a clue.’ I’m still using my body. I really like using my body as a measuring stick so that the viewer can see how big things are, and also using timed exp-, like not time exposure, but like timed shutter release, I can’t remember
what it’s actually called, in the camera, it’s very useful for me because then I get every picture as one second and I quite like being mathematical sometimes. If I’m taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures, I’ll be-, I’ll be quite mathematical and slow in the way that I set the camera up.
Yeah. I don’t really have time to get into that. This is the black line that was in the picture before, but just it. Yeah, it’s charcoal from trees found in the circle that we…
Basically this is a good work to show it in, if a tree fell down in a field, we’d have to chop it up and take it off the field otherwise you’re losing area, right?
So we chop th-, chop the wood up and if it was a good wood like ash or birch, something you can burn, oak, we’d-… log it and then burn in the wood burner over winter. So the tree has its use as a tree, falls down, then it has its use as wood, and then sometimes in the morning there’d be charcoal left if you’ve burned the wood wrong, there’ll be charcoal left in the burner which I would take, grind down and make work from, so there’s another use. And in this work, the charcoal falls off the glass and makes another work by making a black line on the floor.
So there’s-, there’s another use-, so there’s like this natural evolution of living, dying, and then living again and then dying and then living again. You know? This is quite a… What would you call it?
Like a literal way of looking at land,ma literal way of interacting with land, with soil, going into the 5 closest fields to my house and taking soil samples and putting them into a book. Yeah, I’m still-, again still thinking about these things. I don’t really have like big spiels. Again, coming back to the idea of place isn’t just the place, it’s also the things that are in it.
These were offcuts from-, from the workshop that were on the floor strewn around the bench. I took them, made them into still lives, took pictures of them, printed them out, took pictures of them again, cut them up, blaady bladdy blah, but was exploring and-, and kind of studying the ways that my place could be used in a very abstracted way. Anyway, that’s it. I’ve run out of time. I thought I’d leave it on this classic Keith Arnatt Portrait of the Arists as a Shadow of his Former Self.
It’s a good way of thinking about perspective I think. In a, again, in a literal way, it’s a good-, it’s another good way of summing up Keith Arnatt’s work I think, with this picture.
Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve got anything else to say, go out and revisit where you grew up if you’re there. If you’re not, when you go back there and you want to explore a place, go and explore it.
You know? Go back to the places that you have fond memories of in your head, revisit the place, then revisit the pictures you take and keep revisiting them. Don’t just put them in an album and forget about them. In fact, does anyone have albums anymore? I don’t know. Yeah, that-, that is basically it. I guess.
Don’t always bring your camera as well, that’s something I learnt at uni. You can just go and enjoy a place, it is possible, you don’t have to take a picture of it. The sunset, you can see it with your eyes. You know that. Anyway. Yeah. Sweet. Have fun!
See ya’ later.
Week 6
Catarina FOntoura Lecture 1
Photographers and artists using photography have told stories using objects. Can be personal stories, important, domestic, global, universal…photographers have used a range of approaches. Stories can be animated, stories, interesting, poignant, captivating, personal, therapeutic, relevant, doing that through inanimate objects, but stories should be animated.
Fist example Hilla and Bernd Becher, example Gravel Plants
Developed dead pan straight style, with repetition which became something through lots of examples and case studies on how photographers and artists using photography have told stories by using objects.
And sometimes these stories are very important stories, sometimes they are domestic stories, sometimes they personal stories, sometimes they’re global or even universal stories. Photographers have used a range of approaches to work with objects to tell stories, and this lecture is going to focus on that.
Storytelling with objects is really telling animated stories, interesting, captivating, relevant, poignant, or even personal therapeutic stories, doing that through inanimate objects. And this is the key is that even though you’re using inanimate objects, your stories should be animated. They have the potential to be animated.
And the first thing I wanted to bring is something from the history of photography that you might have heard of, which is the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher who worked from, from the 1960s onwards, they were a couple, and they developed this sort of very deadpan, straight style with repetition, which then became something that was attached in sort of a characteristic of conceptual photography. And by using this repetition in this grid like form, they started to tell stories about post-industrial Germany in lots of different ways.
And I wanted to bring this because this way that they have found, this structure
that they have found to tell stories with objects, sometimes buildings,
sometimes water tanks, sometimes all kinds of sort of industrial materials, is called ‘Typology’. And the typology, is the study of types, and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, often in a grid, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner.
To be fully understood, the images must be viewed as a complete series.
And this is something that has been used as a strategy, as a visual strategy, and a language even up to today. And I just wanted to also show you,
before I continue to give more examples of typologies in more contemporary, more recent years, I wanted to share with you this video of Hilla Becher talking through her work so that you have a basis of understanding of typologie as used in photography. And I hope this, you find it as interesting as I did.
[Hilla] The photographer’s world didn’t like our photography. They thought it would be either boring, old fashioned, and documentary only. We knew that and we accepted that and it wasn’t a problem. The first major subject for us, industrial plants in the Siegerland, because this area was the first, in Germany at least, to be abandoned. That was a good reason to photograph it before it’s gone. And Bernd grew up in this area, it was about losing his childhood, preserving his childhood.
I was very fascinated by industrial buildings as well. Slowly, we developed this idea to photograph them with a larger camera and very static. And since I had learned photography in a very old fashioned way, in the east of Germany, it was very satisfying to have this quality, you know, to have this fine grain and the beautiful grey.
There was all kinds of things like coal mines, blast furnaces, gas tanks, everything that had to do with steel industry and the big subjects of Water Towers, and that was the most fun. They were not built by famous architects, they just adapted to the situation. Typology was my idea.
I was collecting book illustrations that had to do with biology and typologies, so that was really an influence. We looked at some photos of cooling towers and we saw a certain pattern that repeats over and over again, but has little differences by subject, by function, by time sometimes, and by other criteria’s that have to do with static architecture, engineering and so on.
And we put them together and then it turned out. It was almost like making a movie, it really felt like a flipbook, and it was also a good way to get some order. The best for the typologies, the best structures are the ones that are symmetrical and they have a certain pattern, but we had to learn all this,
it wasn’t there from the beginning. We preferred very soft light. If the light was too harsh, we had to wait for a cloud or we had to wait for the winter or we had to wait for the dawn and the object has to be separated from the sky. We tried to get it as clear as possible, but it was all about understanding the subject.
I think that was very satisfying in a way, and we both had the same opinion about it. We didn’t want to change things around. We didn’t want to romanticise it,
we tried to be as close as possible to what the subject wants to be.
If somebody is interested in cockroaches or whatever, strange things, and to get to deeper and deeper as it gets more and more interesting, it’s about your own understanding and your own pleasure. If you start something you don’t know how far you get, and there are always times
that you almost give up, but we were 2, 2 people, and there was always one who said, ‘Come on…’
[Cat] I hope you enjoyed that video of Hilla Becher talking about their practice and collaboration and working together, and this leads really nicely into the work of William Arnold, one of our colleagues here at Falmouth University, he is one of the lecturers here, and one of the most recent typologies that I know of
at the time of recording of this lecture,which he worked on this summer, and this is called, this project is called The Final Call, and he collaborated with the People and Art Centre in Mull in Scotland to document each and every one of the islands phone boxes.
And he was really interested about how photographing these objects would tell histories of nostalgia, of communication, and of-, forms of communication that are slowly becoming redundant. So of 24 phone boxes, only four were fully functioning. So this project is really interesting because also it inter-, intersects within discipline, so there was a performative aspect to this, you can see there’s a grid, a typology of phone boxes in polaroid form, and every time a phone box was working, which was only four times, Will would go inside of the phone box and put it on Twitter ‘I’m at this phone box. It is working. Here’s the number. Give me a call.’ And he would wait for someone on Twitter to pick it up, and the people did call him on the phone box. So there’s an element of photographing the objects, but also interacting with the objects and then creating this typology. And of course, typologies are quite interesting because the way that they work, the repetition and the consistent way of photographing objects allows for you to sort of compare different objects, allows for a visual comparison of objects, but also it allows you to identify patterns and trends in that object formation,
the background, anything that is different there, and that allows for stories about these objects to be told as well, you know, some, some, there’s some different models of phone boxes, there are some that are in more-, more decay than others, some more used than other, some are in working order and some aren’t. So it’s really interesting how this typology also lends itself to that in a quite simple sort of deadpan kind of way. And following Will’s typology, I wanted to show you one of my favourite photographic
projects involving objects, which is also a typological project.
And the name of this project is Contraband by the Jewish-American photographer and artist Taryn Simon, and this project was done in 2010,
and it comprises of 1075 photographs taken at both the US Customs and Border Protection federal inspection site, which is like a compound, and at the US Postal Service mail facility. Both of those are at the JFK International Airport,
so all the things coming in that are, you know, contraband or classed as contraband.
And Taryn Simon got permission to be there and she was there for a whole week set up in these two sort of distant-, distinct offices attempting to document all the objects that came in as contraband that were being confiscated, detained or seized from passengers arriving at JFK, at JFK Airport or by express mail entering
the United States from abroad. And it’s such an interesting project
because it gives you, it does tell a very complex story of, of these objects that people want to bring to the US for lots of different reasons, some commercial, some spiritual or, or religious or even emotional and personal. But in a lot of ways it does speak of desire, it speaks of, you know, a lot of contraband of, of brands and objects for commercial fake, you know, fake, fake, fake objects for commercial sort of use for selling, and it is such an interesting project as a whole. As a whole, if really does provide that, that history of and that those stories which are both global if you think about it but also personal to those individuals. And this is-, it is really fascinating. And there’s this short-, couple of short clips of Taryn Simon talking about this project, which I wanted to share with you. [Taryn] in Contraband, before I started, I was imagining what I would end up documenting heroin and guns and all sorts of very evident threats and in the end, what it ended up being was a massive pile of counterfeit goods, and it was everybody chasing the same dream, this universal desire for the same brand, the same luxury item
and you just got this sense of a kind of flattening of desire.
[Cat] And as I was saying, one of my favourite things about this project
is that really captures those larger stories of, say, counterfeit goods making their way from abroad with extensive like criminal networks, even though it feels quite harmless to, to, you know, engage in this sort of counterfeits of Louis Vuitton or Chanel, but also, you know, within each an individual sort of package or item, there is a personal story there, there is, there is a motivation of someone to try and get that item or
that group of items into the country.
And that, that I found really fascinating, that network of stories, but also each individual story was quite powerful too. In both the exhibition and the book, you will see that these typologies of those, a thousand, over a thousand photographs are organised into groups establishing relationships between objects.
So it’s not just the history of and the stories of those individual objects, but then the relationship, the relationship between them, between the objects themselves.
And some of them are sortof quite obvious, as in food is grouped together, bullets are grouped together, cigarettes are grouped together. But then some of the relationships invite us to think about things in a sort of more oblique way and in a, in a different kind of way, which I really appreciate as well. You can research more about this project and watch the book video, the photo book video online, which I’ve posted in the references for this lecture.
The next typology I wanted to share with you is by the photographer Stephen Gill, a British photographer, and it’s called A Series of Disappointments and it was made in 2008. And what you see here are discarded betting slips that were found in bins or around bins in…In or around many of the betting shops in Hackney, in north east London. And the average number of betting shops in other London boroughs is about 23, in the London borough of Hackney, however, it’s 71 at the time of of publication. So at this point it felt like these betting shops were an issue to the borough, and it was, and were really stopping the borough from evolving and growing in a positive, in a positive way.
However, all of these, you know, folded or scrunched betting slips, I feel like there’s a gesture and there’s a story within this gesture that talks about that one disappointment of this person that is anonymous to us that we don’t know about.
So it’s a really interesting way to connect to people without really talking to people. But there’s almost a leftover of, of the stories of these people in this particular object.
This was a book as well, which you can which you can research-, you can research, and really does, you know, in each of these little papers began, if you think about it, as hope, but also, you know, there’s histories of addiction there as well.
And then what we see at the end is paper slips shaped by loss and defeat and disappointment and cast aside. And.. so these new almost like little tiny sculptures, paper sculptures, now have a state of mind as it says on Stephen Gill’s website, it says ‘Shaped by nervous tension and grief.’
And it speaks of social mobility, of desire or having a better life. and more financial security, but also of the difficulty in managing that through gambling and betting.
So, I mean, it’s a, it’s a very complex story that is social, it’s individual, each of them has an own individual story, but it’s also really interesting, yeah, social commentary.
So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this, this,
this project. I really, really appreciate this and the way that he’s done… he’s told this very complex story just through betting slips.
Catarina Fontoura Lecture 2
Lecture 2
The next project, and this is not a typology permse, is by Callum O’Keefe, a young photographer and is a really recent project called Antiques of the Future. And O’Keefe started working on this project because his own dad, who was an accountant, had an immaculate, impeccably kept Coca-Cola memorabilia and marketing collection that he kept in, in a spare room in their house. And this made Callum O’Keefe. really interested about the behaviour of people that keep these very serious and often very large collections dedicated to one specific theme or person or brand or film series. or whatever their special interest is, and it’s a really interesting way of portraying a social, you know, a human behaviour and portraying humans without actually portraying the bodies and faces of these particular humans.
So in a way it is a portrait of the collectors through the collected objects, and it speaks of accumulation,
it speaks of obsession as well, it speaks of a dedicationI suppose, to, to a subject, and in that, in that way it is a fun sort of quite joyful project. because we can see, you know,
the commitment and dedication. that these people have to their chosen special interest, their col-, their collection is focussed. around and I think is a fantastic, you know, short documentary project that spikes such curiosity in the viewer and, and really speaks of like of human behaviour and accumulation of, of objects.
And, yeah, I just really, really interested in this kind of approach which is quite, you know, there is, there is a visual language there of documentary photography, but at the same time. it is a simple visual language of photographing the objects and letting the, letting the sort of the interest in the collection. shine through without, without a lot of, a lot of photographic tropes, just, just photographing them straight on. And speaking of portraying people through objects,
I really wanted to bring this diptych by Jyoti Bhatt entitled Double Self Portrait, which I really enjoyed for a very long time because of its sort of religious. and sort of quite emotive connotations that this piece of work has. And what we have is sculpted handkerchief or textile tissue that feels like it’s, it’s floating and even the second picture is sort of upside down, so there’s a lack of… almost of direction and in that, in that portrait
because it is, it is, it is upside down. floating in, in a black void space. But we have the sense after a quick
examination that this is someone’s face that is moulding and sculpting the object, but it is not a face, it is an object moulded in a face.
And I think this is a beautiful, beautiful example of, of portraying someone through objects in such a creative and powerful way that really relates to, of course, the story of Jesus, but also the, the object as a relic
and as something to be worshipped and kept and conserved and venerated. But also it really ultimately points
to the ephemeral nature of life, of the fact that we won’t be here forever and that our life spans are limited in that way, in something that art inevitably wants to remind us of this through the history of art and through… through the history of photography as well. So I really love this piece. I find it so dark and powerful and emotive that I really wanted o bring it to show it to you when we’re talking about portraying people through objects.
And moving on from portraying people through objects, I really wanted to bring this Dalston Anatomy by Lorenzo Vitturi as an example of portraying place through objects. And this was a project that Vitturi has done in Dalston’s Market in London, and these objects and food sculptures that he has created but also other, other objects in the series try to convey this notion of space and of globalism within this very multicultural market. So this project, even though it is just. objects that are shown in a frame, is all about multiculturalism of this market and this area in London,
and also how the foods and the colours and the objects and the sculptures show that, show. that diversity, that vibrancy of, of cultural diversity in this part of London. So this is a beautiful example of how. something as abstract as food and colour and shape and, and lines in these beautiful sculptures. can talk about something so important as cultural diversity, and particularly in Britain, where colonial histories influence the way people relate to each other and still has impacts on today’s society.
So this is a beautiful project that I wanted to to bring in to show something visually quite different
because it is so colourful, so vibrant, almost has an in advertising aesthetic to it because of the, the richness of, of. and diversity of colours within the frame, but actually this diversity of colours. really represents and is a metaphor for the diversity of cultures in, in, in this, in this market in London.
Another project where colour plays. a key role is that of Theo Deproost, a project called Unfamiliar, it’s quite a recent project, and it’s a collaboration between the photographer and a medical doctor. and also the senior curator for the Royal College of Physicians in London, which is also a museum. So this project is a project that focuses. on historical objects in a museum setting in an archive, so it’s an archival project, and these images. honour these medical tools that were once life saving instruments. of medical doctors throughout history, it takes them out of their context that is now of a museum in an archive, transporting them as it, quoting from the website, “To a realm beyond any specific time period. A new undefined space for the viewer. to study and reinterpret to them.”
There’s almost like a science fiction. aesthetic to this project, which I am really interested in, but also it’s like a great art science collaboration. So this is where the physician’s curiosity and the photographer’s. creativity sort of come together. and they reinterprets the objects. within the collection. And there’s lots of projects that bring to life historical archives. Of course, there’s been a lot of objects. that were kept in museums and archives and personal collections. and public collections for the keeping of history. And this is a project that does do that, does reinterpret creatively a… an historical collection, and almost makes us question the purpose or the utility of some of those objects.
Some of them really don’t look like medical objects at all, and some of them do have that chemistry kind of connotation to them, especially the glass, but it’s a project. where context is also very much needed. If we know that the projects are medical in nature, we can almost like appreciate them in a different way. If we don’t know, if we don’t have that information, then we do enter another realm altogether and we are just lost in the world of dreams and fiction, which is not a bad thing, it’s just something that happens without that additional context.
Moving on to another type of sort of historical folklore collection, I wanted to introduce you the work of Edson Chagas, an Angolan photographer and artist who won the Venice Biennale Award last year, and I love his work, and this particular work, Tipo Passe, is all about objects, really. It is about these masks, these African masks are the protagonists of the work,mmeven though the images are constructed as portraits. And what Edson Chagas is doing here is using these masks that are often in personal collections, but some of them are historical, you know, crafted by different nations. in, in Angolan and surrounding countries to speak of this diversity of culture within his own African country. These objects have been decontextualised from their history and context. The sitters are dressed in normal contemporary clothes from street markets, complementing the colours and forms of the mask, so there’s a curation there involved in the process of creating these photographs with the clothing and the sitter. But these objects have,
within their culture, immense ritual. meaning and a very compelling presence. And, and they-, suddenly the, the viewers get suspended between worlds, between the world of contemporary… the contemporary
sitters that are behind the masks. and, and the world of the masks. And, and this, just a position of
two different worlds prompts the viewer to question the reality that they are perceiving. It’s a very, very powerful work and I hope that you can have a look at it in exhibition form, it was recently at a Tate in London as well.
So do conduct your own. independent research to know more about this work, which is so powerful. Edson Chagas had previously done a project, Found Not Taken, in the three cities that he found himself. living in, in Lisbon, Luanda in Ngala, and in Newport, South Wales, where we both studied.
And this project, put simply, is a project. about discarded objects in the street and he really speaks of the lifecycle of objects, unwanted objects or redundant objects, and where the street is the backdrop to that, to that, to their stories. So some of them are quite sad, sad photographs where the object is isolated in, in a, in a busy street environment.
But there’s also, you know, a lot of decay in these photographs, both in the backdrop but specifically in the object,
and some of the objects are still okay so they can still, still be reused and those are in the streets so that someone who needs them. can find them. So it’s really. about that cycle of objects, but it speaks of people because object that are used by people speak of people’s habits, speak of people’s societies and their lifestyles and their relationships between humans and contemporary objects. So I wanted to just show you this project as well, because I feel it relates really well with the masks, with Tipo Passe project, in that it reiterates Edson Chagas interest in objects as a storytelling medium.
And to finalise, I wanted to show these three projects in which context is really important. So what I mean by that is that information about the project influences how the readers are going to interpret and relate to the images in a way
that is very significant. This project by Teju Cole, Golden Apple of the Sun, which was published by MACK Books in 2022, and you can find. more information about this online. I’ll leave it in the references as well. It’s a project that
on a first encounter it appears to be about domestic life, it appears to be quiet, quite relaxing imperfect scenes of, of the kitchen, if that makes sense, but there is a bigger story behind this. So this project was done as a way for Teju Cole to cope, as he himself says, with the pressure and the anxiety of the Brexit vote. So this was done in the, in the weeks before the, the Brexit folk vote was to take place in the UK. And this changes the images completely, it is, it really twists as the whole thing around. But there is something really interesting happening in the composition of this image. There’s an openness that happens. There is definitely looking at the overlooked in domestic, in domestic life
and at the quotidian ,the everyday scenes of our life, the crockery, the pans, the fruit, in a very quiet, soft approach.
And I love this quote by the artist, and I’ll read it to you, “The commitment I have made is that nothing is moved to make a photograph. Nothing will be arranged to create a better picture, though the temptation to arrange things is very strong. What will be of interest is the operation of chance in this small space.”
And this is a quote about the process of the artist, which I thought was really valuableof how things are curated,
how can you move your lens around to create a better framing without changing the objects? So it’s almost like a game. I find it a very playful approach, which then makes sense with the original concept of the works which was to cope better with the anxiety and tension around the Brexit vote. So the photographer ends up making the whole project as a game in a very playful attitude towards photography with a lot of openness, of ‘If it’s not the best picture ever the best picture that it can be, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.’
And I really love that approach. And of course, this project really made me think about Rinko Kawauchi’s work and I think there’s nods to it as an influence and as the legacy of this kind of photograph. So this project Illuminance, which was done 20, about 20 years previously in the beginning of the 2000s, really speaks the sublime of the everyday experience in a very domestic kind of way, where again, crockery, plates, food, spoons are always present, but also certain glimpses of the outside in a very soft, almost like a very positive or if not positive, neutral light, which is very calming to, I suspect, both the viewer and the photographer. The next project I want to share with you has something of the domestic in it, although in a very different connotation. But again, context is everything with this project and the title does reveal some information about it. It’s called Refuge by the photographer, documentary photographer, Joanne Mullin.
It was quite recent as well, has been done in the last two or three years, and they are photographs of objects in women’s refuges in Northern Ireland. And these places end up being quite empty, quite solitary, there is definitely grief and sadness and emptiness, a lot of emptiness in the space, as I’ve said. But the objects are the focus, is, is the vehicle through which the story is told. Women are not approach to be photographed, but their circumstances and even their, you know, their grief and pain is photographed through the objects which I thought it was really interesting.
And to end, I wanted to share with you this amazing project by photographer Subach, which is just focus-, focuses on chairs and again is a project where context it really is everything. So this project is about the war, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, So the war in Ukraine and it focus on the movement of people, of displaced people, of refugees, war refugees, and mostly what we see are chairs and stools and blankets and evidence of this mobility So war and conflict are expressed through objects and I think this is such a fascinating project, but it really needs the context.
Without the information, without this information about the war and the invasion, the project will be completely different and it wouldn’t have the punch that it does in, in, in your body and, and the influence that it has in your brain. It does communicate the difficulty and, and extreme circumstances that these people are facing, but that, in that story of, of extremes, common, common, common objects are involved and that support that, that project, and this quote really speaks of that. Subach says, “All this time, I couldn’t photograph people.” “I did not want to, I did not dare to interfere in their already violated personal space, despite understanding the importance of documenting this history.” So instead, she turned her lens on the empty chairs 19:18 which people left their belongings on, imbuing them with gravitas while preserving their sense of humanity. “They seem to me like small islands in a sea. of people – places. to stop and relax for a minute.” “Thousands of people have passed. by these chairs. And I think the chairs” as she says, ‘are key objects in the understanding of this conflict.’ And I think it’s such a powerful thing. that ethically she chose not to photograph the people. The invasion already had violated these people so much that she wanted to take a step back and document this history in this incredibly historical, poignant, relevant moments through objects and in this case through chairs and stools and these blankets. in a very harsh background environment. And I think this is a great place to, to wrap up and to end our lecture with, with the, with the point that I want to make of objects are not just a secondary thing that appears in photographs,they can be the protagonists of the story and they can tell. incredibly important stories about humans. And of course they can tell stories about, about objects and their relationship. between the material world and, and the world of actions. But I hope that these projects inspired you, and I hope they influence the work. that you are now doing. for your guided projects.
Do conduct independent research. around some of these projects, the one that’s, that, the ones that speak to you the most and the ones that you feel compelled to, to pursue,
and I hope to see you soon.
Goodbye.
Mandy Baker Lecture
i’m mandy barker a photographic artist from leeds england and for the past 10 years i’ve only photographed marine plastic debris at first i photographed debris as i found it on the shore but people didn’t really engage with the images like i wanted them to people see rubbish everywhere at the side of the road people who fly tip and i realised that i had to do something more to try and attract people to look at the image so this is when i became very interested in the combination of text and image and what photography could communicate in this way
my work crosses different platforms and engages not only through photography but also through arts environmental platforms education and science Indefinite i work with scientists because i want to inform the audience with accurate and current information i wouldn’t want my work to be seen as art for art’s sake for me it has to do a job and that is to deliver a message of awareness i want my work to give science almost a visual voice indefinite was my first series of work and it focuses on 10 individual items of plastic that collectively form a timeline relating to the amount of time it takes each different plastic material to degrade in the ocean one to three years shows a plastic bag that on average is used for only 12 minutes before disposal afterwards if the bag gets into the sea it can cause entanglement or suffocation but ingestion is the main problem especially as sea turtles often mistake bags for jellyfish and squid since this series was created in 2010 scientists now estimate that a plastic bag can take 10 to 15 years to degrade in the sea in fact all plastic that’s ever been produced on the planet and less burnt is still here in some form whether it be in landfill as microplastics in the soil air or sea
Soup. Our second series is called soup and is a word scientists use to describe the mass accumulation of suspended plastic that exists in the world’s oceans the captions are given by listing them as ingredients of soup which
represent the possibility that all these parts could eventually be ingested by marine creatures turtle soup shows the result of a container spell of children’s bath toys 12 shippy containers fell overboard from the ship the evergreen ever laurel in 1992 28 000 bath toys enter the north pacific ocean the turtles in this image share toys that have existed in the sea for 16 years and were recovered off the west coast of alaska
soup refused shares plastic debris recovered from a beach on a greek island i saw that gertz were eating something on the shoreline and when i went down to have a look i realized it was plastic washed in from the sea i collected the plastic that had been attempted to be ingested by the goats and i could see the teeth marks on each piece i wanted to recreate in the composition what i had witnessed so i created a massive plastic in the foreground as if on the shore and then the smaller pieces in more space to give the effect of the plastic drifting back out to sea the soup images are created by first collecting the plastic from beaches and oceans sometimes for a specific object’s colour and some objects i’ve been collecting for the past 10 years and not yet used i use a black velvet background and scatter the tiny pieces randomly on this then do the same with medium-sized pieces the last few larger objects are sometimes placed to balance the composition these three images are then layered together i like the idea of the scattering arrangement of pieces because i feel it relates to how the pieces would be floating around in the sea
Where Am I Going
where am i going is an image i created after being awarded an environmental bursary from the royal photographic society in 2012. The bursary was to take part in a scientific expedition to cross the north pacific ocean from japan to hawaii sailing across the tsunami debris field after the thuku earthquake and japanese tsunami the previous year as i had no previous sailing experience or really any idea of the journey that awaited me i wanted to express this through an image of balloons when balloons are inflated that can float up to an altitude of five miles and when they burst they descend back down to earth and most of them end up in the sea i likened this to the unknown journey of my impending expedition following my expedition across the pacific i was invited to speak at a youth conference for plastic free seas an organisation based in hong kong during my time there i collected rubbish from the beaches on a scale i had never seen before one particular beach had rubbish as high as 12 feet i was inspired to make an image from single-use cigarette lighters
whilst i was there because i came across
one that had a dolphin printed on it and this made me think of the endangered species of pink dolphin that were declining in hong kong or harbour just in front of me i decided to base the composition on a pod of dolphins and to emphasize one in particular that also had a panda printed on it this was the emblem of china and it’s facing away from the rest of the group as if mother nature were turning her back on man’s inability to handle its own waste the penalty series was a different concept from my previous suit style work because i decided i wanted the public to be involved in helping me recover the objects to be photographed but also i wanted to try and raise awareness at the time of a major sporting event the fifa world cup 2014 i put out a call on social media to ask people to post me footballs they had found washed up from the sea and soon i started to get emails with photographs of people all around the world and the footballs they had found i had an email from a man on the west coast of scotland who found 48 balls then another email to say he’d found 128. eventually three weeks later he recovered 228 footballs for the project in total i received 769 footballs from 41 different islands and countries from 144 different beaches and by 89 members of the public footballs came from as far away as brazil singapore africa and one ball was recovered on the west coast of the united states after having traveled across the north pacific ocean after the tsunami in 2011. the name written in makapen on the football was traced back to its owner in osaka Beyond drifting beyond drifting in perfectly known animals is a project which is different from my earlier work the work is based on current scientific research that plankton are now eating microplastic particles in the marine environment the work followed a residency in kobe cork in ireland and is centered around the marine biologist john von thompson he studied plankton in the 1800s and made pioneering discoveries about the metamorphosis of the crab and also invented a plankton net which he gave to charles darwin on his voyages i presented the project in the form of an old battered antique science book because i wanted to trick the viewer into thinking they were looking at early
plankton samples when in fact they were
actually looking at plastic i also gave the plastic samples latin names and put the word plastic within the letters to make reference to the fact that now plankton have plastic within them and so do their names my contin is to make the public aware of facts concerning the detrimental effects of
marine plastic i hope by presenting them
in a visually accessible way will connect the issue to a wider audience and in some way help inspire change if photography has the power to encourage people to act to move them emotionally or at very least make them take notice then this must surely be a vital element to stimulate debate and ultimately change if i didn’t believe my work did any of these things then i wouldn’t have been
motivated to continue this single issue for over 10 years
PhotoBook Whistling for Owls
When reading photobooks, the written quotations which often accompany images, or the quote which is at the front of the book, often provide context and a sense of structure for the subsequent images to exist within. If I find the book interesting, I will research the origin of those words to assist me in appreciating the book.
The introductory words to Max Ferguson’s Whistling for Owls book are a part-quote taken from The Notebook Trilogy, written by Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf. The full quote is ” I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of it’s very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can’t – I don’t have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wished they happened’….. and the photo-book concludes with the final part of that quote.
It is a novel about an unspecified war, twin brothers growing up separately displaced from their family home and re-adjusting their reality in order to survive a distorted experience, and then later looking back to try to understand the journey and memories of childhood.
Further quotes from the novels include : “As soon as you begin to think, you can no longer love life”, “No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life “, and “You will forget. Life is like that. Everything goes in time. Memories blur, pain diminishes, I remember my wife as one remembers a bird or a flower.”
https://www.heavylit.com/reviews/thenotebooktrilogy
The Photo book : Whistling for Owls
Book Review 1000 Words
Max Ferguson Whistling for Owls Book review by Anneka French Max Ferguson’s debut publication, a contemplative study on paper, nature and the passage of time, transcends the physical limitations of its form to connect readers to their senses and memories, writes Anneka French. Glassine, a smooth, distinctively rustling, semi-translucent paper, is a material I remember from childhood. My father, a teacher with a weekend philatelic side-hustle, displayed stamps in albums on pages separated by glassine leaves, stamps tweezed into tiny glassine envelopes when he made a sale. I remember scrambling on my knees under tables collecting sequins shed from the hall’s ballroom competitions the night before. Multiple memories surface as I open Whistling for Owls, the debut photobook by
Max Ferguson and the first from his Oval Press.
Memory and the passing of time are two of the subjects at the heart of the publication, which contains within it a hand-folded triangle of glassine bound into its spine. The triangle is sandwiched between a photograph of three dead butterflies with their own glassine slips on the left-hand page and two transparent glass vases of dried flowers on the right, fitting because glassine is also used in entomological field specimen storage. Here, then, you might insert your own moth or marvel.Whistling for Owls is filled with small, daily records, although to describe them as simply quotidian would be reductive. Photographs of objects ranging from the domestic to the industrial feature in a mixture of colour and black-and-white. They are undeniably romantic and many objects are gently decaying or have stalled. We find photographs of daisies, foxgloves and tangled weeds; concrete slabs and chunks of stone; a cutlery drawer; rusty oil drums; a broken intercom and an assortment of portraits. There are pairs of objects – two towers of stacked tyres repeated twice in subtle variation; two tomatoes balanced on a checked cloth; two teacups cradled in newspaper as if they have just been unpacked – all rendered symbolic, even if their precise meaning is unclear. Pairings are noteworthy since Ferguson himself places emphasis on the book being formed from two parts. He describes it as “image and text; France and London; memoir and fiction; truth and lies,” telling us everything and nothing. Indeed, much of the book’s impact is derived from its ambiguity, as well as its striking beauty. Some of the strongest and most curious photographs are the portraits and other depictions of the human body that pepper the book, elevating the quieter still-life studies and cutting through some of the romanticism. These include an older man with grey hair caught out of focus in a hunched, turning movement; a sculptural-looking hand holding a cigarette; the lit underside of two inviting thighs; feet in plastic sliders. Again, we find photographs that echo one another in the close-up of a woman turned towards the right with eyes closed to the sun, followed a few pages later by another turned towards the left reclining on a sun lounger with her eyes closed too. Nearing the end of the book are more doubled images of bodies in repose, this time a woman in striped shirt with soft curls and bare legs preceded by a lumpy body in baggy clothing and boots with a dismembered hand – probably a scarecrow – though clever cropping initially disguises this. There is bliss, intimacy, violence.A loose, non-linear narrative unfolds through eighty-four pages, revealing photographs in ones, twos and threes which are at times accompanied by fragments of text. Ferguson controls the viewing experience by giving images space to breathe, slowing the reading of the work and enabling connections to be traced through its entirety. Photographs are printed full bleed or on differing parts of the page and the effect is as though the images within Whistling for Owls flicker in and out as beats with a sinuous rhythm. In one photograph, worn render on a wall exposes stones like teeth in a grimace; in others we find a verdant green cricket and a discarded apple core. We are presented with the flavour of fresh, plump tomatoes, placed pleasingly amid pages of hot, dry grass, stone, plastic and skin. The photographs operate on frequencies that overlap with tangible experiences of small pleasures while attention is drawn to the heavy weight of emotion in Ferguson’s pages.The text within Whistling for Owls is largely similar to the content of the photographs: paper, the weather, the passage of time. There are texts that introduce characters into the mix by way of the printer, the birdwatcher and the poet, giving rise to speculation about which portrait we might attach each of these labels too. The text is, in many instances, abstract and seemingly personal, with one page showing a sequence of apparently randomly spaced numbers, though pages are also given over to occasional descriptive lists. Narrative fragments are brief and yet full of possibility, as is the book’s title. The text is overtly poetic, dealing with feelings of desire and yearning. ‘The proximity of what you love makes you so lonely,’ reads the last line of a short passage set on the deck of a ferry. The feeling of loneliness connects with an earlier section describing coping with long months through therapeutic, repeated morning rituals. While most likely symptomatic of enforced periods of lockdown during the past two years, this sentiment remains implicit. Whistling for Owls is bound in bright orange cloth with dark green endpapers and a lime green ribbon. These choices serve to highlight Ferguson’s precise and minimal use of colour within the photographs, particularly in leaves, grasses, berries and warm, glowing light. A reader can follow their own path here, from the front to the back of the book or leaf through pages more casually, and all these journeys into the book are fruitful. Images and lines of text touch one another physically and metaphorically, lying stacked on top of each other when the book’s pages are closed or pulling apart as the book is opened. The photographs of Whistling for Owls are lifted by the insertion of the audible and textural, glassine fragment folded into three-dimensions, but the photographs are evocative and emotive in and of themselves. In the end, what is significant is the way that Ferguson offers images that frequently move beyond their own physical limitations as flat images by extending out to our senses and our memories. ♦ All images courtesy the artist and
Oval Press
© Max Ferguson
Max’s first book (published, 2022), from his new imprint . Oval Press is a story in two parts: image and text; France and London; memoir and fiction; truth and lies. The oblique photographs and sometimes-poetic texts bring together a loose narrative of love, loss and longing inspired mostly by literature.
www.Max-Ferguson.co.uk
“In the end, what is significant is the way that Ferguson offers images that frequently move beyond their own physical limitations as flat images by extending out to our senses and our memories.”
1000 Words Magazine
“The short texts punctuating the publication enhance its mystery. The prose is ambiguous and poetic, inciting us to develop a loose narrative of our own also inspired by the images.”
British Journal of Photography
“Not only does this invoke a poetic framing but evokes an unavoidable sadness too, blanketing the work in a cloud of longing. It is as if Ferguson has sat down at a piano to play something in a minor key, practising a few notes before starting in earnest.”
C4 Journal
“His images have beautiful melancholia, coupled with his pensive words and clever use of type throughout the work. I am astounded by his ability to use his voice and eye in such a masterful way.”
Nearest Truth
Week 7
Lecture 1
Hello, my name is Georgia Metaxas and I’m a visiting lecturer here at the online B.A. photography course at Falmouth University.
As you can probably hear, I hail from the southern side of the planet, originally from Melbourne, Australia, and I now live and work in London. I’ve worked at Falmouth as a sessional lecturer since 2020 and, as well as working in education, I also work in the museum sector. and I’m a practicing artist.
As my practice centres around portraiture, I’ve been invited to introduce the topic to you all. I will share some of my work in a moment, but first just to outline what we’ll be discussing. during this initial lecture. To begin with, we will be asking what is and can a portrait be?
How has photography played a part?
And what can portraits really tell us about the sitter, if anything at all?
In terms of my own work, I use photography to work through ideas and come to terms with the world around me. Fundamental to my practice is an interest in community, representation, and portraiture. I will expand briefly on my practice here, as there’s a lot to cover in this series of short lectures, but fundamentally my work is underpinned by a rigorous conceptual parameters that seek to question the way we often derive our understanding of identity through appearance.
Important to each series are the subjects and methodology of the work which often come from encounters in my personal and my professional life in an ongoing investigation of groups I’m connected to and that I work with and that are around me and therefore come in to sight in my work. My practice has for many years looked at and been fascinated in our inherent nature and slight obsession that we seem to have in embedding our likeness
into material form. I’ve often asked, why are we so captivated in our own image, and why are we so interested in remaining?
How, have, and do we do this? From the onset, my practice has questioned the veracity of using a photograph, more often than not a portrait, to encapsulate someone or something.
Constantly questioning how successful can this representation really be? An example of this series is a series I produced in 2006, A daily ritual with Helen Sullivan.
Helen was a participant in a 13 week photography workshop program that I facilitated at a drop in centre local to my home and studio in Melbourne.
At the time I’d been working for a major newspaper called The Age, and I was deeply questioning the conventions of portraiture and the ability of a photograph to, you know, albeit summarise one person’s entire being in one image, which was often what was expected of me.
So I invited Helen to stand for the camera every day for a week. Helen Sullivan is a writer and on a day to day basis she experiences mental health issues.
Repetition is a key coping mechanism, and on arriving at Helen’s home at 9 a.m. every day and only after what became our daily ritual, a cup of tea, a cigarette, a brief stroll around the garden, would Helen then touch the lavender bush and stand for a portrait. Each portrait was made precisely at 9:30 a.m. Our photoshoot was becoming a part of Helen’s daily morning ritual. Helen is framed in a classic portrait frame and engages with the viewer directly. The only day that Helen does not appear is on Monday, as she attends a writing group at St Mary’s House of Welcome. Helen contributed a poem to stand in for Monday’s portrait, which then appears in her place. On first glance, each image seems very similar, and on closer inspection the viewer comes to realise the complexity of Helen’s nature, and the poignancy of the series becomes apparent.
The series purposefully stretches time and illustrates previously uncharted territory for me, that of collaboration, as well as Helen’s daily and repetitive rituals being reflected in the series and need to control her image and sense of reality, representation, and portrayal is also illustrated and can be seen in Sellen’s-, Helen’s subtle interventions within the series itself. The work was presented life size, and I’ll show that to you in a minute, and Helen was invited to write her poem directly on the gallery wall.
This time base-, based series, as well as reflecting the human condition, questions representation as it relates to personal identity and to photography. The series ultimately aimed to test the boundaries of documentary purpose, as well as question popular notions attributed to portraiture, such as its alleged ability to capture the essence of a person as I mentioned before, and perhaps even their soul. I like to describe my practice as sitting within a documentary framework. However, the work I make constantly challenges my own perceptions and interests in the genre, and I enjoy exploring the tension found between my own artistic intent and what might be considered documentary purpose, and we will return to this notion at the end of the second series of lectures. So this is something I’ll pick back up on in the final of this mini lecture series. So to the crux of the lecture’s topic now, photographic portraiture punctuates our visual world, reflecting and highlighting the complexities of the medium simultaneously.
It is important to mention that this lecture is one version, or one proposed history in an attempt to unpack a very large topic. Also important to acknowledge is the fact that my viewpoint is culturally constructed and informed from a Western perspective. There are, and always will be, other ways of thinking about and understanding portraiture. It’s important to recognise that portraiture is very much a part of our everyday.
We can find portraits almost everywhere we look, and in each of these nooks and crannies they can be seen to serve a dual purpose from the functional and the utilitarian to the cultural and the ritualistic. Within the first few hours of being born, we’ve-, we’ve probably had our portrait taken, and portraits are taken to mark significant events throughout our life, such as birthdays, graduations and weddings. We all recognise the importance of these moments and are generally happy to comply with taking a moment to stand and look back at the camera individually or within a group with purpose and in the full knowledge that it’s for posterity. Or perhaps just because we want to be seen a place of high cultural value.
Portraiture is also used extensively in the world of advertising, cleverly applied to sell us products and news stories that we identify with… not that I’m suggesting that we all identify with Harry Styles. Portraiture straddles our private and public lives. For posterity, as a record, and as a commercial endeavour. In a functional sense, the duality of the portrait remains, an example of which is a driver’s license or a passport and the authoritarian classification of a mug shot. A bit more on this later, as I’d like to take a moment to look back to the origins of portraiture, in particular at the conventions associated to portraiture within painting, as this can help us to understand photography’s rather radical role within the topic.
And through discussing art history’s relationship to the portraiture, I hope to assist in shifting and re-energizing perspectives on such a significant act. One although as we just acknowledged, is entrenched in our everyday, the richness and depth of which cannot really be ignored. And as is common to all histories, there are, of course, various accounts of the first ever portrait, in painting and drawing and in photography itself.
But I personally am drawn to the story of a young Corinthian girl, Kora of Sicyon, who, according to the ancient Roman author Pliny, wanted to capture and preserve the memory of her lover and did so by tracing the outline of his shadow while he slept onto the wall, making a detailed drawing of his profile. This is a really lovely notion and has a nice connection to photography in terms of the silhouette.
However, the story continues with her father, a potter known as Butades, sometimes referred to as Dibutades, I believe, using the detailed drawing that Kora drew as Pliny himself describes, “filling up the lines with clay, formed a bust, and hardened it in the fire with the rest of his earthenware.” Thereby forming the first likeness, Dibutades is indebted to his daughter, Kora, for the invention.
What I really like about this story or fable, is that it describes, albeit a different time and place, the same intent that we now have when making a portrait. The same drive to remember and preserve. In this case, it was a line drawing, then formed onto clay, which was to hand. I wonder if Kora then popped her boyfriend’s clay profile on her bedside table, just as we would have done with a photograph not so long ago, and if her father would have picked up a camera instead of clay.
Contrary to the likelihood that the story of the Maid of Corinth is a myth, Fayum portraits are indeed the earliest surviving painted portraits. Known as mummy portraits, or Fayum mummy portraits, they are a type of naturalistic painted portrait on wooden board that are attached to mummies from Roman Egypt in the first and third centuries.
On viewing the alluring and real lifelike oddness of the Fayum portraits, John Berger asks what we would all like to know, and this is a quote: “Why then, do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why-, Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millennia of traditional European art which followed them?” “The Fayum portraits touch us, as if they’d been painted last month. Why? This is the riddle.” ‘The Fayum portraits were not destined for us’ Berger so eloquently goes on to say, ‘they were considered to be registrations of identity, not for or to be seen by the public, but there to grant the deceased access through confirmation or authorisation of their image into the underworld, these registrations acting as proof of who they were in real life, These depictions of the dead become highly charged images, interesting-, interestingly, and rather succinctly, bringing us neatly back to the utilitarian prospects of a portrait. However, in the case of the Fayum portraits, this time as a passport to cross the border into the underworld.’ Also of note is that many of the women depicted, of which there were a few, which is also of interest, but perhaps for another lecture, another time, adorned jewellery and can be seen in their Sunday best. It is likely that they are of a higher status or perhaps even aristocracy.
Or perhaps these portraits simply illustrate something apparent in painting and sculpture in general over the next however many thousands of years, I haven’t donethe maths, the-, these depictions as well as recording a likeness and a representation of aspects of people’s character, albeit a flattering portrayals of people who are afforded the opportunity to have themselves recorded as they saw fit. Jumping ahead to the birth of photography
in 1837, we see its’ arrival. It was initially impossible to capture a human due to the long exposures needed to make an image. Before too long, the industry of photography was dominated by portraiture. People wanted likenesses of themselves. The studio became the preferred site for making these likenesses: comfortable, intimate surroundings, soft, natural, complementary, light,
curtained backdrops and a number of symbolic props, for example, a plinth or a book, providing an opportunity for people to see themselves in a picture as they wished to be seen.
French photographer Nadar, formerly a caricaturist, became one of Paris’s most well-known photographers and portrait makers. Writers, politicians and many well-known people frequented his studio. However, it is this image or these images of Sarah Bernhardt that I would like
to bring to your attention as they are the first images of a well-known public society figure. the currency of the first celebrity image of which can still be felt today. This new and modern notion of an idealised epiction is reminiscent of the traditional values embedded in painted portraiture that we saw earlier. However, photography was far
less expensive and also more reproducible, it was reproducible. Photographic portraiture, therefore, becoming central to the development of photography as a commercial industry
with its ability to depict the masses, not just the elite, one by one.
The democracy of the image, as John Tagg coined, or the democratic notion of photography, which is now well established, if not ingrained in our understanding of photography,but in the late 1800s, this would have been an exciting, if not radical notion. The visual representations of people became useful tools for recognition, especially in cities
where populations were on the rise and keeping a record of who was where and at what time was beginning to get difficult. A system was needed and photographic portraits filled this brief and began to be used by organisations like the Police and Criminal and Legal administrative systems as useful means of identification, a record to categorise and to keep of people.
French police officer Alphonse Bertillon created a systematic-, created systematic uses of photography to document crime scenes and evidence. Photographing from above, as you can see in this image. For example, he also created and standardised an identification system based on physics, physical measurements and descriptors of the person, i.e hair and colour, including any unusual markings on the body,
for example, tattoos and scars, and this was known as Portrait Parlé, or a speaking portrait that describes many personal characteristics. These systematic measurements of recording, which were compiled on punch cards, were eventually replaced by fingerprinting. However, his inclusion of frontal and side view photographs of each person remains, and in what we recognise today as mug shots. This one here is actually of Alphonse Bertillon.
Mug shots alone failed to provide a reliable system of criminal identification in the 19th century. Some tried to find alternative uses of mugshot photography, one of the most pivotal examples of this was, and I use inverted commas, ‘science of-, the science of physiognomy.’ Physiognomy is the study of a person’s physical characteristic-, characteristics, especially of their face, to try and determine things about their personality. Widely discredited in the 20th century, however, during the 19th century it was still on the table as the mechanical abilities of the camera proffered a solution to those who were intent on tackling the phenomenon of criminality. They, in particular a fellow called Francis Galton, hoped that this study of faces could be used to pinpoint a criminal look, helping with the identification of criminals, perhaps even before they’d committed a crime.
Galton used official mug shots of certain types of criminals, compiling them into composite photographs in an attempt to reveal the look of criminality. His hope was that by combining faces, he would be able to identify facial features that indicate criminal tendencies
and arrive at an average deviant physiognomy. What is lesser known and is described to us by Philip Prodger in his book Face Time, which I’ll refer to several times throughout this lecture, is that Galton also commissioned portraits or used existing family portraits like this one, where everyone is on the same plane, having been photographed at the same time,
convenient specimens for Galton, who could then cut out the faces of each family member and-,and combine them to create what he believed to be familial offspring or what familial offspring might look like. What we see here, what we see here is that with the arrival of systematic imaging of criminals, it was not too long before it was extended to the general public.
Important for us to note is the significant shift of the balance of power in portraiture from the subject, i.e. the client, the commissioner, the patron of the budding ac-, or the budding actress to the maker and the photographer who is now ultimately taking photographic representation of the ‘delinquent’, in inverted commas, undeniably remains in popular culture
and persists as a visual code identifying certain characters as criminals in literature, comics, films and the tabloid news.
Hello, everyone.
0:07
I hope your good.
I am Cemre Yesil Gönenli, a photographer, a visual storyteller and a book maker from Istanbul, Turkey.
So today we’re going to talk about storytelling through portraiture, and I’ll be talking about the body of work
I did titled Double Portrait, which came out as a, as an exhibition and also as an artist book. So this project took me almost ten years, like nine and a half years to complete, and it-, it started as a Ph.D. research project, a practice based research project that I was doing in London College of Communication, but after five years of spending a lot of time, energy, money and everything, I decided to drop out. And in this ten years, it is-, it is very visible… you know, the work really changed because I also changed, and the look of the work changed, the, the energy of the work changed, the core of the work changed.
And the original title of the research project was The Photographic Embodiment of Maternal Embrace: How Might the Photographic Double Portrait Extend Throughmand Beyond the Mother -Adult Child Constellation?
So this was my research project title. So from this long academic title, the project’s title just changed into Double Portrait. So it involved a lot of transformation, a lot of change through the process. So in this presentation, actually, I will tell you two different stories. One is the story of the work or the stories I use in the work, and also my own story doing it, so more about the process and the decision making a crisis, let’s say.
But before I do this, I will just start talking about my departure points, which was there since the beginning, and which always stayed as the centre of this work for me. So when I started this project, I was very much obsessed with this photographic tradition from 19th century titled Hidden Mothers. So this 19th century photographic tradition is all about actually the lack of technology. So basically back then it was very challenging to, to photograph a baby because depending on the, on the material that was used, it was always long exposure. It was, of course, impossible to tell a baby to sit still during the exposure time, which might to vary in minutes.
So somebody had to hold the baby still during exposure time, but the photographer is very naively put a black clothes or sometimes a, you know, a blanket with patterns on the, on the mother who is holding the baby. For me, it was always the mother that was hidden under the piece of clothes, because for me, in a way, these images spoke more about the mother rather than the child. Because in a way, as someone who was in my late twenties, I was also questioning with, you know, my relationship with my mother, and for me, it really spoke about this great support
that you had always have… kind of, you know, almost like a black mountain behind you that supports you through your life. But, you know, when it’s the time and when you have to kind of, you know, stand up on your own feet as an adult,
suddenly you don’t get to have that support anymore. But I was very interested in questioning, where does this need go? Because you actually still have it. Like nothing changes.
What happens to us, you know, you know, to this comfort zone that you always had? So for me, this historical imagery was really about questioning this.
So in a way, these images that I started collecting also through, you know, through online sources, I bought prints, and I just kept looking at them, trying to figure out what they mean for me and how I can re-contextualize these images in my own photography. A double portrait I took of myself not quite fitting into my mother’s lap any longer, spoke to me of her absence rather than her presence. That photograph is an object seemed like a room that contained both my mother and myself. It pushed me out of the womb, allowed me to look at the others, to see myself better,only through photography. I hold her, she carries me. How does a person carry the body?
The posture? It is my mother who carries my body in this photograph. How does one carry the body in a photograph through holding and being held by another body? The maternal body. I handle her. She handles me.We understand the world only after handling it. This is a process of handling. Handling a future loss. The desire for the mother cannot be fulfilled.
Double Portrait is a manifestation of togetherness while paradoxically creating a space to think and cope with the mother’s absence. So the part you have seen so far is kind of this first chapter of the work, and it is purely inspired by this photographic tradition, hidden mother, which I just told you about.
And also in this part, as you probably noticed, the mothers are almost hidden. They’re not under a piece of cloth or anything, but their identities are kind of hidden. And this has to do also with the fact that I wantedto kind of approach the mother as a space rather than as people and I wanted to look at this concept of maternal space and, in a way, hidden mother tradition really gave me a good framework to create this conceptualisation of the work. And as you have seen, I also read apart from the book, and it is very important for me to say that this is not a photo book, it’s not only a photography work, it is also a text and photography book. this work as a, as a photo text work.So when it comes to the topic storytelling through portraiture, for this body of work, I must say that I’m not only telling a story through portraiture actually, but I’m also utilising text as a tool.
The portraiture is always in the centre of the story. I kind of, you know, there’s like a main thread of the work which always bases on… on portraiture, not only because I, you know, I was inspired by this photographic story, the hidden mother as a photographic tradition, hidden mother is, but also the way I re-interpreted or re-contextualized hidden mothers is actually transforming one portraiture story into another portraiture story. So this part of the work had to do with this approach of space, you know, looking at the mother as a space. And then in the second part of the book and the work, I am actually looking at the mother as time.
And there you would also see, you know, in the first part you will see very like staged, clean images, whereas in the second part of the of the work you would see a lot of portraiture from, you know, from my family. More like from the daily life rather than staged images. So there are portraits that-, that I didn’t stage at all, but they were mostly portraits I did as I just lived my daily life, really. So I think having these two different approaches within the same body of work, the one you just saw in the one I will show now, they are quite different approach, but they both use portraiture as a-, as a part of storytelling.
So I think it will now be good to see how they function differently, although they have, you know, text as a-, as a common narrative element. So now I will take you to this second chapter of the book, the second part of the book. “She was dying. The doctor entered the room, carefully lifted the blanket and looked at her feet. Covered them back. They were turning blue. Doctor said, it had started. I had no idea that death begins from our feet. I was sleepless. I laid on the hospital couch, by her bed. She was still alive, but we knew that she was going to be dead in a couple of hours. Time never felt that weird. I fell asleep. I think I dreamt about her death. I woke up in panic. Time felt even more weird. She was still alive. The crescendo of the oxygen detector’s signal became our music of desperation. While my mother was holding and kissing my grandmother’s feet or the very last time, as if she was saying good bye to the slowly dying parts of her mother’s body.
Everybody started shouting as is we didn’t know this was going to happen. I was probably silent. I don’t remember what I was doing. I only remember my mother. Was it even possible? Which one was more impossible? Could my mother not die? Could photography show the wound?Could you mourn for someone who is still alive?” So this moment, this sad story, me watching my mom losing her mother, was another triggering thing, another triggering moment for me to, to start this project. So in a way,there were two resources for me.
One was my interest in this photographic tradition called hidden mother’s, and then the second one was me watching my mom crying and falling apart when she was watching her mother die. And I guess this whole project had to do with almost like a refusal for a future loss because of-, out of my fear to lose my own mother one day. So in a way, this kind of, you know, this process, which took ten years, I guess was almost like a fake preparation for myself, for the death of my own mother, and luckily she’s alive. Now that you’re familiar with these two departure points that were there for me since the beginning, I want to tell you a little bit about the process, how everything kind of evolved in this ten years. And of course, I will start to reflect a little bit about my Ph.D. experience, which in the end didn’t work out. “This project explores the relationship between the adult child and the mother through the practice of double portraiture in photography. It asks how the photographic image might extend a maternal embrace beyond representation. Based on the research-by-practice model, the project reflects on the relationship between embrace and loss as well as it’s ties to the photographic absence and presence. Focusing on the visual, togetherness and referential reality of the mother and the adult child, it investigates how the photographic double portrait constructs this relationship. While doing that, it also questions the photographer’s role in this encounter.
In using the gesture of embracing as a visual search for togetherness, the project aims to create a new relation to maternal loss, to that unimaginable future time and the condition of losing a mother. By exploring the photographic double portraiture as both a practical and a theoretical understanding of handling a future loss and of preparing for the absence of the mother, the study investigates how the material photographic double portrait both holds and extends the spatial coexistence of the embracing pair in order to redefine double portraiture beyond the photographic presence of two sitters.
The threshold between the photographic absence and presence of the mother is used to rethink the role of maternal embrace in relation to an adult child. The photographic tradition of hidden mothers is used as a historical context for this rethinking about the photographic absence and presence of the maternal body. Psychoanalytic frameworks, and object relations in particular, are brought into play as a methodology for re-conceiving loss in relation to maternal and photographic as a maternal space.” So this was the abstract I submitted when I was going through my confirmation period in my Ph.D. and for a year I did everything I can until the day I presented in this classroom.
So I submitted my confirmation document with this abstract, and I also made a presentation on this wall, using this wall, with all the theoretical frameworks I used, and then in the end, I was given an extension. And at that moment I knew that this wasn’t the right place for me to be. So perhaps the nature of this work was actually un-academic because I was just going into a much more poetic and a much more personal narrative and the academic frameworks just made me feel suffocated. So although it was a very difficult decision, I knew that I had to cancel and drop out from my Ph.D., which I did, although I, you know, it was quite tearful. And then I didn’t look at the work for almost two years, perhaps one and a half.
And then I got pregnant with my first baby, and the-, the-, the moment my first son was born and the moment I started to photograph him,knew that it was time for me to go back to the work with a fresh mind. And it was very interesting because in a way I was going to continue a body of work that was not finished, but I didn’t know where to start.
So it was very challenging for me to find a path, to go back to the work and to find a way to create some sort of a storytelling through the old work I did and through the new work I was making. So I needed to find a balance in between what I did and what I wanted to do. But strangely, I figured out that there was a super nice continuation in the visual language that I was using. So what I did, with the help of pandemics, I went back to my big, big, big file of images and I just started, you know, going through everything I did and also the images I made after I became a mother.
And then I just locked myself in an empty space on empty walls and I just started to work with images. I was just trying to categorise them, to select my favourite ones, but I was also thinking a lot conceptually. Meanwhile, I started collecting clocks from the places I went to because I was questioning time in a different manner. And then I started to categorise images within these concepts that I was working around, like holding, handling, carrying, transformation, roles, the concept of void, embrace, touch, embodiment, clock’s dance, identity, so all sorts of things that I was actually interested in.
And then I also did a lot of mind maps to, you know, to put different images I made under different contexts. So I tried to kind of, you know, match the images I made with the concepts that I was dealing in my head. And then, you know, this went on and on for a really long time and then this concept of time also evolved into something interesting that I started to photograph my baby every night before, not before, actually after he was sleeping. So I was just like putting a flashlight on him when he was sleeping in the bed and it was just funny to see how he moves almost like a clock. And then in the end, I see this great separation betweenthe different chapters, which I define as, you know, looking at the mother as a space and time, so this suddenly became very clear to me, and it really gave me a great start to give a structure to my work. During the Ph.D. research project, this was one of the comments I got from one of my supervisors that I ‘was not writing like a researcher, but I was writing like an artist’, and this was… something that really stuck up with me because I never knew that I had to choose one. But this comment always stayed in my head and I kept questioning the reason why it has to be a Ph.D. work and why did I need that qualification?
Because obviously I didn’t want to choose, I wanted to be a teacher, like teach photography, but I also wanted to write as an artist. Language really changed. Originally I started as an academic research, so the language I used was very academic, but when I was, you know, redoing, rewriting the work, it-, it got into something much more poetic. But it was very hard for me to break this academic language because I was just used to read about my subject matter mostly through academic resources. And also I, you know, I kind of tried to train myself to learn how to write academically.
For me it was quite challenging to find a new voice to do the project. So I knew that I needed an outsider to help me with this and, and I started to work with my editor, Gonzalo Golpe, who is a great photographic editor, and he asked me a perfect question, which was like, ‘Who is your reader?’ You should always think about your reader. And then the very, very simple answer to that was it was my mother. So… what I did to rewrite in a way that my mother would understand or all the mothers would understand.
So in a way, I really tried to come up with a much more simplified language free from the academic voice. So I aimed to come up with a language that is very accessible for anyone really So after I knew who my reader was and who I wanted to address to with my text, I then started to match images with the text’s that I came up with. So in a way that really kind of helped me to come up with an outline of the work. So I started to name the chapters I would have in the book, and I started to put relevant images in relevant chapters, and I also kind of, you know, mix and match the images, the text under certain chapters.
Lecture 2
So perhaps that’s enough about the process, at least in the way I try to conceptualise the work. And now I want to talk a little bit about how I executed things. Firstly, for me, this work had to be an artist’s book.
It was the primal aim for me. So although I design books for myself or for other people, for this work I knew I had to work with a designer because I didn’t have enough distance to the work so I needed a design person involved for the book. And I worked again with a great designer, Marina Meyer, for the book… you know, we went through different proposals, but I also had quite a lot of ideas about what kind of a book I wanted. So, you know, the first take, for example, was that the book had to be a very tactile book. So, for example, here you see, so you have this embroidery here, so when you touch it you really feel it. And then also you wanted that when you hold the book, I mean, normally you hold the book like this, so we really like this play that, you know, your fingers, when you hold the book, kind of doubles with this image. So that was something we, we really wanted and I was very happy about.So this was one of the things I wanted to tell about the book.
And also design wise, you know, this, this first part of the book, which has this kind of, you know, maternal space part, the-, the one with the-, with the portraits and has just like a little bit of text here, and then you would see that this first part is actually printed on a, on a fluffy whiter paper, and when you’ve finished this parts and come to this second chapter, which, you know, this image is like a bridge there, you suddenly start to have page numbers, which kind of introduces us this concept of time in a way. So-, and then also the the paper-, you can’t see it here, but the paper changes so that the first part is much whiter, whereas here you suddenly have a paper with more texture and… and yeah. I was very lucky to find a beautiful space for this project, which was an historical gallery in Istanbul called Millî Reasürans Sanat Galerisi
In addition to the artist book, we also made another publication, an exhibition catalogue of this exhibition because for me it was very important to document how the work was exhibited in this place, and also for an exhibition I always find it a bit even sad that, you know, you, you put all this effort to make all these decisions about how to install the work, but once the exhibition is over, you know, there is, like, it just goes away. And also it was very important for me to have this beautiful text written by Ahu Antmen, an art historian from Turkey, the exhibition catalogue.
I think that was an amazing contribution in the way this work would be communicated in future for future audiences. So I think it’s very important to document how you exhibit the work and how you install the work since we have this kind of playroom in the exhibition space that is, you know, designed for kids that you even have a lower eye level with this kind of sticker print. I also made an empty page in the catalogue where you have the sticker set and, you know, in each catalogue you would have someone designing an empty bowl with these little stickers so they can come up with their own installation.
And obviously this exhibition had a lot of elements about installation, it wasn’t only printed photographs printed like, you know, hangs on the walls, but there were a lot of sculptural elements, a lot of installation pieces. So this catalogue really helped me to, you know, to find a way to highlight the importance of how I exhibited the work So I was very lucky to also exhibit the work in this amazing space and form and in this amazing festival, Verzasca Foto Festival, which we planned a bit different than the gallery exhibition. So this living exhibition was very performative. It was more like a performance piece that I started as the artist of the work, but then I really wanted the work to, you know, to be performed by the audience and also by the nature itself. Because it was an open air photography festival, you know, I was very okay with the rain, I even liked that it started to rain when I started the performance, when everything was super wet.
And it kind of showed me how universal the concepts I was working with through the way people, you know, engaged with my work, like, you know, someone just took a portrait of me and my mom to their house. I think the way the work continued to live in the mountains of the Alps was a part of my storytelling So in a way, I really tried to show you the way this work spread, you know, from the beginning till the end. For me, it was an amazing experience, which I learned a lot, and it’s really made me another person and I hope that being witness to the process of this work would be also useful for you to think further of how you want your story to be told. Thank you very much for listening to me, and-, and very nice to meet you. Bye bye.
Lecture 2
So far in this lecture, we have touched, albeit very briefly, on what a portrait might be in terms of its ubiquitous nature and contemporary culture and briefly looked at its origins in regards to painting and looked at how photography differs. We have acknowledged the role of the camera and are beginning to come to terms with the responsibility of the photographer. There is yet another aspect to take into consideration, which is that of the viewer, in particular the viewer’s desire to look referred to as the gaze.
This notion applies to the medium at large and is a humongous topic and in relation to photographic portraiture, as this is a significant area to reflect on, I will just take a moment to, to spend some time on it. When Victorians of Europe and America colonial-ised the rest of the world, they took their cameras and ideas of the standardised portrait with them. And I just wanted to mention that I’m intentionally not showing images in this section as I don’t feel it necessary to propagate certain stereotypes.
As Steven Bull mentions in his book on photography, and I quote, “The physionomic evidence provided by Galton and Bertillon photographs was used in the Victorian era to legitimise a hereditary superiority of certain groups of people such as the emerging middle classes and even the potential elimination of their inferiors.”
As photographers and portrait makers coming to terms with photography’s ability to objectify is important. We have a responsibility and an obligation to those that appear in our images, that are represented, as the act of taking can and does reflect the wider societal obligations, especially to those in the minority. It is crucial to understand the role that photography has played and can continue to play if we allow it. What we now know and understand in terms of the power dynamic relationship is something to be recognised and explored but not limit us as practitioners.” August Sanders’s people of the 20th century was made in a critical period of Germany’s history in the 1920s. And this work helps to counter this conversation. Sanders was a practitioner of-, of New Objectivity, which was an avant garde movement that arose in-, arose in Germany and was a reaction to pictorial-ism and expressionism and sought to depart from abstraction and the artifice and return to realism. People of the 20th century is comprised of over 600 portraits and was intended as a catalogue and record of German society. Sanders made straightforward, objective, formal portraits of people from every background and every walk of life for his encyclopaedic project that was a lifelong endeavour spanning over 40 years and was never completed. Nothing seemed to me… Oh, there’s a quote, sorry. I don’t want to say that out loud. Sanders was not interested in documenting a single social strata.
His aim was to characterise the German society at large by presenting people in different occupations, people of every type. He did make some categories, though: the farmer, the skilled tradesmen, the woman, classes and professions, the artists, the city, and the last people which indicated old age. Whilst the logic of some of his groupings within a 21st century perspective is somewhat fraught with some issues and definitely a sign of their times, People of the 20th century reflects the interconnectedness of community as it can be seen to embody all social classes. His, his portraits of bricklayers, pastry cooks, boxers, employ a typological, which, if you haven’t heard that term before, in a nutshell, means uniform, and I will be expanding on that at a later date.
But he employed a typological approach in theory, but in practice, the individualism of his subjects came through. Walter Benjamin comments that, and this is a quote: “Sanders’ work is more than a volume of photographs. It is a training manual.” Benjamin was spot on
and Sanders’ epic work, and the notion of new objectivity was hugely influential on photographers and still is. His influence can be seen in the work of significant makers such as Walker Evans. I’ve got some slides here, but not of all these practitioners, but some of them. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lang, and people like Lee Friedlander, Boris Mikhailov, Fazal Sheikh, Nicholas Nixon,
Michael Schmidt, and Rineke Dijkstram for example.
And many of these practitioners depict their subjects subjects with a frankness. Often a direct gaze is employed in an attempt to readdress the power dynamic. Some more successful than others, and all of which I would love to speak at great length.
However, as time does not permit, I encourage you to look at these practitioners after the lecture and I will now focus on the work of one contemporary practitioner, Thomas Ruff, as it takes us neatly back to the passport where this lecture began. In 1981, Thomas Ruff took a series of portraits of friends and family while studying at the renowned Dusseldorf School of Photography. And this is something I’ll also expand on in the next lecture.
In contrast to the attempts of generations of photographers who have striven to get under the surface of subjects, Ruff acknowledges the surface and believes that photographs can show no more than an outer likeness. It is clear from the placement of the citizens in the frame and there-, this is early work, but in the next slide, their mostly direct gaze at the camera that they are willing participants, and Ruff’s work is presented larger than life size. They’re absolutely massive colour, head, and shoulder portraits, and we see a homage to our utilitarian passport photograph, but on a grand scale.
In creating works such as this, Ruff asks us again to question who dictates our identity. Portraiture, as we are coming to recognise, highlights the very nature of photography in that it reveals the complexities, challenges, and rewards of making images, especially when we are partaking in someone else’s representation.
We have determined that a portrait is a representation of a person and that with this comes a responsibility and an awareness. This can be challenging for a number of reasons and as mentioned earlier, is something to be recognised and explored, but not limiting to us as practitioners. And during this initial lecture we have looked at the origins of the portrait, where we see portraits, how can they and do they present themselves? And remaining on ou-,in our line of inquiryis what can portraitsreally tell us about the sitter, if anything at all? A depiction is fluid and given its context and relationship to time, and this is something I would like to expand on in the next section of this introduction by asking what constitutes a portrait?
This is a question I find myself returning to in my own practice, and I will now focus on work made by practitioners that has continued to inform my practice in the hope that it will also inspire and assist you in developing yours. It’s fair to say that for most, a portrait is an attempt to represent a person as an individual. In fact, the Tate’s own definition follows a similar line. David Bate in his essay, Seeing Portraits, boils making a portrait down to five elements: The face, and this-, I’ve given a little reference here, this is Paul Strand’s work of his wife Rebecca. The pose, and I’ve used Rineke Dijkstra here. Clothing, and this is Thomas Struth. Location, Hannah Starkey.
Props, and this is Jonathan De Villiers. As we can see from these quick examples, we can easily find representations of these elements within the canon of photographic portraiture, and I again encourage you to spend some time outside of this presentation to look closer at the practitioners mentioned. Bate goes on to say, and I quote, “Different types of portraiture (which you might-, which we might call subgenres) vary with the emphasis they give to each of these components. Each element affect another in the overall potential for meaning. The use of these 5 elements and their combined relations in the picture are what organises the rhetoric of the portrait.”
Ad by rhetoric, if that’s a new term, he means visual language. Bate continues, “Combined with the various photographic codes of framing, angle of lens (long, medium wide) focus (shallow deep, deferential) lighting (soft, hard, direction and size of light source) and so on, all these codes, which pertain to photographic portraits, are ways of controlling the five key elements.” Granted, these are important aspects for us to consider as it is, we now know, important for us to consider and recognise the codes, what meanings can be projected and read in a portrait.
These elements and codes, however, are equal parts useful as they are restricting and they make me ask, ‘Well, how can we bring and express our own ideas to the mix in a new and innovative way?’ Returning to our-… the first half of our Tate description, “A portrait is a representation of a particular person.” central to the conversation that surrounds portraiture are people, but can portraits be of ubiquitous objects to? Is it not just as important to consider though what can a portrait be alongside who the portrait is of and what can a portrait do? For me, seeing and unpacking aspects that make up what a portrait can be is integral to making. The representation of someone, sure, but also something.
If we take a quick look at an ordinary bookshelf like I did at my local bookstore here in London, we see the shelf almost entirely dedicated to a portrait of Britain, reminiscent and no doubt influenced again by August Sanders and his work. We see the portrait of an entire country, its culture and community in a series of books.
And in a further-, in-, in a further attempt to define the undefinable, Hoxton Press presents us with portrait of humanity, not just a particular individual but individuals as a whole representing place and identity, human identity. This can and does perhaps release our depictions in whatever way, shape or form we see fit. Again, we can see depictionsfrom very early on in photography’s history.
In Edward Steichen’s Friends, Romans and Countrymen made in 1920, for example, we can see a field of viola’s perhaps suggesting a much larger conversation, pointing towards geopolitics as we extrapolate meaning from the title borrowed from Mark Anthony’s speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Over the course of 15 years, Alfred Stieglitz produced a series of images of poplar tree of this-, this is one, and which have been widely interpreted as self-portraits. Bernd and Hilla Becher, 2 German photographers and teachers who began working together in 1959, embarked on a visual taxonomy of function-, functional architecture in the post-industrial regions of Western Germany, the Netherlands, and eventually in the US. The silos, gasometer’s, winding towers, and the like, are photographed in an absolutely objective and uniform manner like laboratory specimens or a piece of sculpture, importantly, and purposefully distortions and variations of light and scale reduced, are reduced to a minimum. People are absent.
But could these not also be considered portraits? Here we have some of the water towers and some of the works as they are in situ in exhibition. Eugéne Atget is seen as a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernisation.
He photographed Paris for some 35 years in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, creating another encyclopaedic, idiosyncratic lived portrait of Paris as a city on the cusp of a modern era. A portrait, if I was to attempt to define one, is and can only ever be a rendition, as a portrait can and does take a number of forms. Portraits can be read, be understood and interpreted in countless ways. An aim of portraiture is to encapsulate someone or somethings identity. Contemporary artists using the medium of photography and the genre of portraiture is where we can see these social and cultural frameworks and conventions being challenged, where all of these things get blended, cut up, and reconfigured, quite literally when we see the work of Koike and Sauvin for example, this work illustrating how we can talk about all of the things that make up a portrait and create something new. I thought it timely to share and to finish this first lecture with some more of my own work. And this is a work in progress, and the trees that appear in this series are situated at the foot of the Arcadian Mountain Range in my mum’s village in Belarus, Greece, and are images that I very much consider to be portraits.
In 2017, I was told by an uncle that my family were the caretaker of a number of very old olive trees. Fondly, these trees have been named after women in my family for over several generations, and these olive trees have provided the impetus for a much larger body of work, which is currently in development, and it explores familial ties to the land and regeneration through a variety of interpretive processes. But here the photograph acts as a symbol. Olive trees are symbolic and are universally recognised as symbols of peace and friendship, as well as being rooted in ancient Greek mythology. And they provi-, I hope that they provide an entry point through the act of photography to the central themes of my practice portraiture, the representation of absence and the preservation of memory through photography, which are all integral elements explored in this work and in my work in general. The fluidity of the portrait, and as you can see in this quote by David Bate, in the ‘art of description’, invites us as artists to negotiate what our portraits can be, to engage with what the image is saying and doing, and not just by looking at the subject in the photograph, but also within the photograph itself. Can this relationship between the subject, photographer, and camera be extended to include collaboration? By slowing down, can we have a new, authentic and interesting dialogue? And how might we collaborate if we were to do so, for example, with our subjects and their depictions? The best…This is a quote from Prodger, “The best a portrait photographer can do is to triangulate on an elusive centre that is forever changing and endlessly out of reach.”
From. In the next lecture series, I will continue to look at portraiture through a deep dive into contemporary practitioners, self-portraiture, and expanded documentary as approaches to possibly photographing people beyond the portrait. And thank you very much for your listening.
Guest Lecturer. Lisha Zulkepli
Hi, my name is Lisha and I’m a single mother of 2 girls, aged 9 and 2. I’m a self-taught photographer, specialising in freelancing. I’m not a technical person. I don’t even know why I bought this camera versus another other than it was cheap and it does what I need it to do.
What I’m about to tell you here is my story and why it’s important to have your own story because knowing who you are and using your photography to tell it is what emotive photography is all about.To say that I have lived nine lives is an understatement.For six of those,I lived in England, and three more yearsI was in South Africa.I have an immense interest in culture, the anthropology of the people where I lived and serendipitously my own culture and traditions, or at least those that were taught to us being the children of diplomats in foreign countries.
We didn’t live through these experiences ourselves, but instead we lived through them through the experiences of our elders, our parents, and our friends parents. Getting second hand knowledge of anything can leave one feeling unfulfilled. I think that is where my journey of looking for my own path started. My philosophy is if you don’t try, the only thing you are losing is everything you truly believe in. You need to understand that art is a record of you and how you are you, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Creativity does not come naturally. It is strengthened with thoughts and starve them with actions.
It is human nature to get easily swayed by competition, letting ourselves, and especially our art, be subjected to societal approval, putting our own voice in the backseat. I wish I could say that the first time I held a camera was when I was a child. How I took skewed pictures of family members that were printed and saved over the years. That when I looked back at those pictures, when I was cleaning up my childhood items one day it awakened the dormant appreciation I had as a child of the magic of photography, but I can’t, because all that was not true for me.
I remember my father passing me his film camera. I do not even know what model it was. All I had to do was to press a button, he had already set everything up. He wanted me to take a picture of him on one of those wooden things you stick your head out of, and the rest of your body was whatever character painted on the wood and the theme of the place you were at. All I remember was him asking me how I had framed it after taking the picture. And when I told him, he told me what I did was wrong and that I had wasted a shot on his expensive film. I never wanted to touch a camera again after that.
My truth, my story is that I had had a crush on a friend who was a photographer, and I knew that if I bought a camera and asked him to teach me how to use it, I would be able to spend time with him guilt free. We went out at night to shoot buildings and lights. I learnt how to use a slow shutter for the first time in my life, but my love for cameras and photography did not seed the love I thought I had for my mentor. I was so bored. We spent weeks and weeks going around the city in his small car and I dreaded the moment when we would have to leave the car to set up our cameras.
And then one day he called to invite me to assist him on a wedding shoot he had been hired to do. It was the first time I got to take pictures of people and the emotions they were willing to share with me, and I was hooked. This is it. I wanted to shoot people, not buildings. I wanted to see through their eyes and feel what they felt, not look at another set of blinking lights hanging over trees and concrete. When I got married, I had other priorities in mind, as you do. Priorities that didn’t include hobbies and interests. So I put aside my camera to focus on wifely things. I was determined to make my husband happy with me. And then I got pregnant. When my daughter was born, I planned to take a picture every day.
Three weeks after she was born, there was a break in at our house, and the camera being the only valuable item we had then, was stolen. I was disappointed. I took pictures of my baby on my phone, and although I felt like it wasn’t enough, I didn’t do anything to get more. When she was three, I was at the peak of having depression, a leftover from the postpartum depression I was actually suffering from when she was born, but which I didn’t know I had and didn’t have diagnosed until then. Due to the depression, I would lose chunks of my memories because I wasn’t able to be present.
My mind was overwhelmed with things that had happened and worries about things that could happen, and there wasn’t space enough things that were happening in front of me. I got scared. I felt as if I was losing my baby’s childhood. So I bought a cheap camera and started documenting everything so I wouldn’t forget. I took pictures of my baby so I could see how much she’d grown, even when I couldn’t remember it all. I taught myself how to freelance. Freelancing advocated for me the reality of limitless creativity. It gave me the room to breathe, something I had forgotten to do along the way, and just enough room for me to still be in control. I realised then that the borders I had drawn for myself were unnecessary, that I had been mislabelling them this whole time and that they are actually what makes me me.
By accepting my past experiences, my culture and religion, my family’s history, instead of continuously denying them or be ashamed of them, especially in comparison to others, I was able to finally see that they were all a part of me. So I decided that I needed to understand myself better. I needed to know what made me upset, angry, sad or cheerful. I needed to know what triggers affected me. And I needed to know how to show these through my photos.
Our starting point needs to begin from our own starting points, our childhood. Unpack those memories that has been long since abandoned or are now doodled all over by the spiderwebs of your biological bodyguard. Your fears, your worries, experiences you had that made you nervous, words spoken to you that made you feel inferior or inadequate, these need to be unravelled first and foremost. Write them down. Remember them as you did, and then recondition your minds to change the outcomes of these memories.
Sit for 10 minutes a day recollecting one memory of which you were put in the situation where your body had to respond biologically with a fight or flight response. Then reimagine it as a situation whereby you are now fighting instead of fear. Fight to feel safe again. Once you are accustomed to this feeling of security, embrace it. Let your creativity flow without limit. Without somebody in your childhood or something that happened then dictate the height of your creativity barriers. Knock it all the way down.
Transformations and changes are meant to be cloudy and hazy and sticky and painful. Trust that you are unravelling the knots of untruths that your body has been carrying since childhood. Face the demons you have created and of which you have become friendly with over the course of your life thus far. Move forward from your comfort zone. Do not allow who you’ve been in the past hold you hostage in your present. Deal with the challenges that unlearning and relearning puts on you. Find your purpose.
Take control of your direction and go out and make intentional art. This place of observation, analysing, and rest puts your nervous system in a state of contentment because there is less stimulation and you become naturally grateful for what you have and are able to not confuse what you need with what you want. This neutral emotional state allows for a cleaner path to a creative mind and promotes A healthier mind is what self-care is really about.
Not a bubble bath with candles and soft music or a girls night out, or reading your favourite book curled up next to the fireplace. It is the ability of these acts and putting you in this neutral emotional state, then needing you to face your feelings and letting them out without suppressing your mental state with a distraction in the form of a treat for yourself, is what self-care really should be. It is only in a healthier state of mind are you able to accept yourself and love yourself and be comfortable with your flaws and be proud of who you really are, without hiding behind irrational excuses on why you are in a creative rut.
Dig to find and familiarise yourself with your own limitations, understand your own emotions, and learn how to react to them. I joined groups on Facebook and Instagram and committed to some of the challenges the community put out. I joined a self-portrait group that connected me to so many other mother photographers wanting to express their loneliness and sadness and anger and love and lost through their photography. I joined a surrealist photography group that helped me with expressing my dreams and nightmares. I made friends, online friends, all over the world, and when Facebook died, we stayed in touch. We made our own little groups for projects to do together, and other than exercising our creative minds, these projects also helped us become accountable. In some, we committed to weekly posts or biweekly, or even once a month. We catered to each other’s lack of time because we were all in the same boat. We were all mothers.
But we were also photographers, artists, creatives, and we knew we needed the projects as an outlet for who we are underneath that motherhood cloak. We did a project where we could send each other poems and we would take a picture interpreting the other’s poem for that week’s post. We did a project where we would take a picture or a 15 second video depicting our moments of calm for that month.
We would take ten pictures in a week each in our own homes, in a different part of the world, and we would collaborate on a diptych for the ones that matched. These little projects challenged my artistic mind. It opened up doors to techniques I had yet to master, techniques I didn’t know existed had I not been given this opportunity to explore, it gave me the opportunity also to practice. Those one picture a day 365 projects never appealed to me, though. It wasn’t that I thought I wouldn’t be able to commit to it, I just simply thought that after a while I’d get bored, and I was right. I didn’t want to be monotonous with my pictures, but I did want to develop my own style, and I knew that the habit of taking pictures would eventually get me there. I kept asking why. I think this was one of the most important thing I did in finding my style.
Find a moment to understand that you and everything you love and everything you hate reflects in your art. Discover a piece of your own history that you did not know about through talking to your elders or looking through old photos or touching that old piece of jewellery that has been passed down to you by your great great grandmother. When you look at that picture that speaks to you, what is it that draws you to it? Is it a piece of clothing your grandfather wore? Was it the background in which the photo was taken? Was it the event which prompted the photo to be taken in the first place? Was it the expressions in the photo? Question everything.
What are your family traditions? What rituals did you have that were unique from your best friend’s family growing up? What were your family’s holiday foods? What topics were sensitive during dinner time? How has your religion and culture defined the way you were brought up? Which parts of it did you absolutely loved and which parts of it did you absolutely hate? Why? Another interesting thing to discover while finding yourself again are your fears. Did you know that the fears you had as a child has been conditioned in you by inaction, or rather the action of choosing inaction as a form of protecting yourself? Again, as a child, oftentimes irrationally. So let’s say you are bad at committing to something, an experience you had when you were younger put you in a situation whereby you think commitment equals danger.
It might have meant a loss of a family member that you had promised something to, or it might have meant that you lost a beloved toy due to an obligation you were forced to make. Whatever the case, more often than not, it is usually an event whereby you were not being given the choice to decide rationally and this has conditioned your biology to believe that every commitment made shall lead to a loss of control. So, a photographer friend based in France started a project called 100 Days of Lumiere. I was intrigued by the prospect of finding light. I wanted to see if in finding light I could achieve and find darkness. I equated darkness, shadow play, the juxtaposition of light and no light to emotive photography. I needed to have a conversation with light to see if it had anything to say in me finding my photography style. So I joined the project and experimented.
It opened up a collection of new set of eyes that would collectively review and comment on my work. I took every word to heart. I wanted to see if I was heading in the right direction. I kept going until the 100 days was over, even on days, I didn’t feel like taking my camera out. I just kept telling myself, ‘42 days to go. 33 days to go. And then one day left.’ Photography is about creative expression. It’s about art. But like all other things in life, it is also about practice. You need to keep going, even when you suck. Actually, especially when you suck. Because knowing when you suck is also knowing what you want. Go the opposite way. Go the other way round. Hell, go upside down if that’s what it takes you to get there, but keep going.
You’ll find a period where you won’t even want to pick up your camera because you anticipate the sulkiness. Go do something else, but keep your creative mind on alert. Arrange the pencils in your drawer. Cook. Dance. Sing. Take a walk and observe. Write. Colour. Talk. Let your mind breathe. Give it space between wanting to be creative and wanting to do it right, and then go back to your camera and keep going. All those things you did during COVID, learning how to make bread, pottery, poetry, music, do them, and then go back to your camer. What you are ultimately doing here is enhancing your sensory language. Practice describing everything in your mind, using all of the five senses all the time by practising to observe.
Sit in a train, or have a cup of coffee at your favourite little corner shop and allow your ears to pull out the different layers of sounds you hear. Be mindful of what your skin is touching, how your arm feels when the air brushes it or how your chest feels against the scratchy wool of your top. What do you see when you close your eyes? What do you see when you close your eyes and have a sip of that coffee? What does your nose choose to smell at the moment? Did you catch a whiff of your detergent on your sleeve as you pulled your hair back a bit? The coffee, the sweet smelling cakes? Did you notice the tarty strawberry just by smell or the luscious chocolate coals or the musky perfume of somebody walking by? Write all of these down. Now turn them into details you would put in a photograph to allow the viewer to be there with you.
What do you add as a detail so the person looking at your photo feels what you felt? Hear what you heard? Find what it is that excites you. This will be your signature. For me, it is the whimsical aspect of a photo, how something real and tangible in front of you can be translated into a dream, making the viewer discover something new every time they look at it. It could be something as simple as a blur where you want it to be, or your colour palette and how you focus and pick up on these few colours in every shot. It could be that you are shooting through objects or faceless portraits.
It literally can be anything, absolutely anything that makes you feel content when you look at it. You particularly want this contentment to come from the satisfaction of being able to project a part of what makes you you, even the bad parts that you were still working on to improve upon. And so you are allowed to change what the signature is whenever you feel right and you are allowed to change your feelings towards them as well. Exercise your brain to include all your five senses in describing something at the beginning of each day. You can use it to affirm a future scene you wish would happen or even run through how you want your day to place itself.
Think about your favourite birthday celebration or another happy date in your life in minute detail. Once your brain gets into a consistent rhythm of seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling, everything, use it to realign your focus should you face that bombardment of negative thoughts that tend to appear without warning throughout your day. Stop to smell the roses, literally.
In the end, I was able to refine what I liked, even if what I liked didn’t beckon any positive reviews from my peers. And then when the next year came and the project restarted, I did it all over again, but this time no longer starting from zero. If I could leave you with one thought that I wish would linger on a bit longer than the rest it is this: “If everyone likes you, then you probably don’t”.
I think Owen Gonzalez said it best when he said “Once you are able to work within yourself and heal your wounds, and learn to love yourself for what you are, you will stop chasing the fickle, insubstantial and ultimately disappointing external validation that injured you in the first place (and that taught you to believe that you weren’t enough).” Have faith in your ideas, even if no one else believes in it. This shall come effortlessly to you once you start trusting that you are in control of your art, because your art is simply an extension of who you are.
Ask yourself, do you understand the concept of good enough? Who or what do you have to be good enough for? How much is enough? Stick to your own values and voice. They are valid. You are important. Your values and your voice is unique to you because of your upbringing, your culture, the traditions, your family, your history, your experiences, and there is no one else in the world who has the same, so why allow them to rearrange the patterns of your creative processes when you get or don’t get validation from them?
Whatever it is you are afraid to hear should someone important to you disapproves of you or your work is actually that person’s projection of his feelings for himself. Do not let that dampen you. Don’t be afraid to change things. You’ve changed. If it feels right, do it. Trust your own instincts. Be raw. Focus on what is important to you and treat yourself as you would a friend. Or better yet, a child. Speak kindly to yourself. Answer your own questions. You already know them. You already know the answers. Listen with your other senses. Be aware of your inner critic.
But keep reminding yourself that when that voice starts questioning your worth, that it is just a thought that you are in control of dispelling. Acknowledge and accept, but allow them to pass by. Stop allowing yourself to accept other people’s opinion of you or your work. Learn to accept that not everyone is going to like you or your work. Identify your support system. This could even be your photography heroes from school.
Avoid those who will fuel your self doubt and go to those who can give you a tiny nudge of reassurance when you need it. Celebrate your small wins. When COVID hit in 2020, I was quarantined with my then six year old and found that I was pregnant with my baby. The 100 days of Lumiere project for that year occupied us and it filled the documentation aspect that I had wanted in the beginning. At that point in time, we were also struggling with life with my now ex-husband, and photography became my only outlet for me to pour out my heavy feelings.
We were housebound except for doctor’s appointments, and life went on as normal as they could be. I knew that one day I’ll be able to tell my story, my children’s story, and I needed to know that I was there, l experiencing it all, observing it all, feeling it all, and that if my memory faded, I would need help from the pictures, these pictures I’d taken during this time. I was adamant about taking photos of my two girls together when the younger one arrived. I was desperate to record the good moments, and the bad. Anything. Everything. And photographing them became a means of mental survival. Then one day I received a notification for a message sent from Karni Arieli, the founder of Eye Mama project on Instagram. She asked for permission to repost one of the photos taken of my children on her platform. I said yes, and there started a beautiful friendship.
If there was only one thing I could say about Karni, is that she’s the epitome of empowered women empowering women. She’s a relentless force, a fierce voice, a hero. We spoke about the politics of photography, how child nudity and female nudity is given less freedom to be explored in the patriarchal world. How that gives photographers who are parents or who specialisein taking maternity photos, less space to study and experiment with their art. I was angry. She was angry. I’d wanted to show the pictures of my children, but my children were almost always naked, not only because it is hot here in Malaysia, but also because we didn’t have the means to keep them clothed.
Because we were housebound anyway, I allowed them to be naked when they felt like it, and I finally saw their freedom from being confined to buy clothes, to express their suffocation from everything else going on in their world then. That was how I saw it as a photographer. As a mother, I was worried about their safety, especially online. Karni and I held the same conversations over and over, and it felt as if we were shouting it out into oblivion. No one else heard us. It was a private conversation meant for public discussion. It led to other important meetin-, meetings of thoughts and ideas that eventually showed that we mother photographers was in need of more exposure.
We were in need of a platform to let our voices heard. We were in need of a safe space for us to blossom as artists. We were in need of the Eye Mama project. Through her project, I was given the opportunity to have my photos in galleries and online, as well as online publications including CNN, Creative Review, and most recently in the Eye Mama photo book she has made possible published by teNeues.
Within hundreds of thousands of applicants and only a few hundred selected, my photo was also included. I remember taking this photo on a particularly hot day for us. My oldest girl was crying because we hadn’t had anything to eat for three days. I was still breastfeeding the little one, so she was full, but didn’t have anything for the eldest one and had had to force her to sleep every time she moaned of hunger.
On that day she couldn’t ignore it anymore and refused to sleep. We couldn’t ask for help from anyone because no one chose to believe us over my ex husband. I told her that we can be our own heroes. We can be the one that saved ourselves. So she drew on her face her personal rendition of what a superhero looks like and stood next to her sister and told me to take a picture. She doesn’t understand it yet, but that day onwards, she has continued to save her sister and I over and over again. With that picture, I will always be able to remind myself of the day my six year old has had to grow up.
I am currently working on a personal photo book that I shall be self-publishing via Kickstarter. It explores the relationship of my two children within the confinements of a house we don’t call a home. It tells the story of two children being children, but at the same time haunted by their past traumas and present living conditions. It touches on their mental health, their emotional turmoils, their intimate cries of hopes and dreams. I wanted to give them a safe space so everyone can hear their voices, as well as the voices of all the little girls everywhere, forced to live a life they do not deserve. I urge you’ve learnt or are learning to do to do the same. Anyone can take a photo, but only you can tell your story.
PHTO110 – Week 7 – Photographic Practice – Alice Poyzer
Hello. My name is Alice Poyzer.
I am a portrait photographer.
I specialise, and I use that term very loosely, in storytelling and documentary work within portrait photography. I have graduated university last year in 2022, and within the next 10 to 15 minutes, I’ll be talking about my work during university, my work now, and advice for first year. So during three years at university, I experimented a lot with what works and what didn’t, Using different cameras, different styles of photography. Flash. No flash. Creating both portraiture and landscape work. And through that experimentation I realised that the way in which I like shooting and the way in which I produce the strongest image I can is through making work that is quite intimate, quite close, quite poignant in the way it’s presented.
Of course, with it being storytelling related, there is a message behind my work and at university I created a body of work that focussed on photographing individuals in a kind of melancholic, thought provoking manner to represent how I felt at the time as being a autistic individual. Being autistic at times, not all the time because sometimes it’s great, but at other times it can be really, really hard. You can feel quite sensitive, quite lost, shut in at times, not being able to talk to anybody because, you know, they wont’ understand because they’re not going through it or you presume at least they’re not going through it. And I wanted to communicate this message to viewers looking at my images, because that was the only way I could. I had not been able to talk to people about it because they didn’t get it. But when they felt perhaps what I was feeling, there was a connection there and it was something that progressed and still today motivates me in the work I make.
Even if my work isn’t about autism and I’m just shooting a portrait for the sake of shooting a portrait, I shoot it in a way that has this tone of softness to it that I think has really become my style of photography. And that’s actually a piece of advice I would give, is this was something I was told in first years as well, and it may apply to you or may not, but become good at something in particular and become really good at that style, because when you become good at something particular, something niche, something that other people aren’t doing, you will be wanted because you can do that. So people in industry or people who want you to work for them will see that you can do that one thing really, really well, especially it’s a bonus if you enjoy doing that thing. For me, I really like the way I shoot because it’s quite a intimate process with me and the person I’m photographing and because I’ve honed in on that skill it’s got people to ask me to shoot in that way.
So I’m doing work that I love in the way that I love it, and I’m doing photography that I love. The project I did at university in my last year, even though it’s naturally run its course now, it’s inspired my project that I’m working on currently, which is in its very, very early days titled Falling on Deaf Ears. Most of the individuals in it are autistic, not everyone. The girl on the screen now is my best friend, and although she isn’t autistic or on the spectrum, she is relevant to the project because she was the only person or one of the very few first people that actually listened to me and heard me as an autistic person.
And that for me was such an important thing that I couldn’t not have her in the project. And there are others that I photographed, but I won’t be sharing that yet because it’s all early days and I want to keep it quite low key for now. So someone that was really, really prominent within my time at university looking at their work and being heavily inspired by their images was Alec Soth. For one, their images are just visually beautiful. The way in which Soth photographs his sitters in such a beautiful manner, in such a stunning way, whether that’s a close up portrait or he’s focussed on having the the individual within a landscape, they are just stunning for me, just incredibly inspiring.
And even if you don’t like Soth’s images, you can get a lot from how he shoots. which is something that he’s very recently started doing, in which he talks about some of his work. I would really suggest picking up a few of his videos, particularly when he talks about his most recent project, A Pound of Pictures, and the project itself is extremely helpful because it talks about the process of photography and just taking pictures sometimes for the sake of it. Something he said was that you should probably focus on shooting first and then let the story come to you. A lot of people put too much effort when they’re making storytelling work on having a message in sight, and that can make you have blinders on and not photograph things that might be important. So after mentioning my work at university, what I’m working on now, and who’s inspired me at university, it leads me on to talk about how you guys as first years can develop your work and become photographers that are happy with what they’re making. So particularly in storytelling, the first thing that is really important is being ethical within your practice.
For me, this goes without saying, but I’ll say anyway, because it is incredibly crucial, when you’re telling a story or there is a message behind your work, when you’re photographing someone, that sitter, that person you’re photographing, should know what the message is and how they’re going to be perceived because they will automatically be associated with whatever your project is about. Of course, there may be people that disagree and that’s completely fine. But for me, ethics plays a huge part in storytelling and documentary work.
The next thing, and probably equally as important, is less of a storytelling aspect, but more of just being a university student. And it would be, if you can, say yes to everything. I know sometimes you can’t afford it, and that’s completely fine, there were things that I couldn’t do because I couldn’t afford it, but the things I said yes to had a snowball effect. For example, I said yes to the end of year show. I then get spotted by someone, I then get represented by an agency. I then get to Sotheby’s, to auction work and a charity auction. And now I’m having something else I can’t mention because it’s secret, by doing one thing, it could potentially lead to many other things, which is exciting because as a student, there are so many opportunities that come to you.
And with you guys being online, it doesn’t necessarily limit that because you could say yes to anything and it still lead to something. For example, meeting someone in the street, you might meet someone else or meet someone else, vice versa, and there you have a huge body of work from that. And my last thing would be, if you can, go for walks. Going out is so important because it not only inspires you, but you don’t know what it will lead to. For me, I went for a walk when I was living in Cornwall, I found a dead seagull, as gross as it sounds, I immediately rang my best friend Emily, and we picked up the seagull and I took a portrait.
It’s a portrait that is really important to me because it’s my best friend with a dead seagull at the edge of a cliff. And if I hadn’t have gone on that walk, I wouldn’t have taken that portrait. So if you can, get out of the house, get out of the flat, go for a walk, see what takes your fancy, because anything and everything can be inspiration, especially within storytelling. Just before we run out of time, I’ll quickly say that taking breaks as a photographer, whether you’re doing storytelling, work, landscape work, whatever work you’re doing, is really, really important. For me, I had to take a break when I left university because I had to pay bills, I had to buy food, I had to focus on paying rent. I was in a place where my photography work couldn’t do that for me.
And I don’t want people to see a break as failure because it’s not. If we carried on shooting every day, we would be run down. It would-, we’d be burned out. So please welcome breaks, take them as a time to reflect on your work, but also time to develop yourself outside of your work. I think that’s about me done. I’d like to say thank you to Cat for inviting me to do this talk and thank you for the first years for listening. Normally at the end of the talk, I would say, ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ But as this is pre-recorded, I would simply say, ‘Here’s my email. If you want to give me a message about anything photography related, I’m more than happy to have that.’ Anyway, I hope this has been helpful and thank you for having me.
David Bate writings on Portraiture
From the Chapter ‘Seeing Portraits’ taken from ‘ The Key Concepts of Photography’,
2nd Edition, written by David Bate
If the photographic portrait is a shorthand description of a person, then
portraiture is more than “just a picture,” it is a place of work: a semiotic event
for social, psychological, and sexual identity. A portrait fixes our identity in
what is essentially an art of description. Whether it is in the public sphere, used
to certify our legal identity (passport mugshot), in our private life (snapshots,
formal studio portraits, etc.), or for another social purpose (anthropology, art,
social, political, legal, medical, institutional, etc.), the portrait aims to say:
“This is how you look.”
These visual descriptions of persons abound across all
kinds of institutions and practices: art, advertising, dating, family albums and
personal images, media (television, film, photo-journalism, WWW paparazzi
etc.), medical institutions, the military, the police, tourism, and so on. Indeed,
we find portraits almost everywhere we look. Universally abundant, their
proliferation is a direct result of the massive impact that photography has
had. Ever since it became possible for photographic images to be reproduced
all kinds of people have rushed to have their portraits made. These different
Photography uses constitute a large part of the history of photographic image production.
The modern panoply of portraiture is the direct consequence of that historical
development of photography, a history that shows how portrait photography
itself became a valued commodity within the nineteenth-century industrial
revolution.
Industrial Portraits
Commercial studio portraiture, driven by people wanting portraits of themselves, encouraged the development of studios initially in cities and then more widely. The demand was overwhelming and quickly stifled demand for traditionally painted portraits; photographic portraits were both cheaper and quicker to produce. As cameras and photographic processes became cheaper, so the demand further escalated, and demand for both advertising and fashion photographs became even more popular when electricity and studio lighting became available.
Occupying one location, with room to undertake photography and able to store all the equipment necessary for the making of photographs and a darkened room where the chemical processes could be managed, a studio became a primary location where clients could come to have their portrait taken. That opportunity facilitated a ‘revolution’ of sorts, and the procurement of a likeness became both a simple and quick process, and much more affordable than the processes it replaced.
Bate draws reference to John Tagg’s description of this development as a ‘democracy of the image’, where the opportunity to obtain a photographic likeness was ‘no longer a privilege’ but ‘a means of identification of the population’ more widely. Bate suggested the photographic portrait had evolved into what Tagg’s had described as ‘a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity’.
Bate also suggested that the ‘industrial portrait’ became ‘immersed in a complex visual system’ where people’s identities are delineated by ‘visual differences’.
Society Portraits
The development of photography had considerable ramifications for artists whose ‘conventions’ photography usurped. Bate suggests that Aaron Scharf in his book Art and Photography suggests that many painters began using photographs as a first step in their portrait painting processes, and this led to changes to how they posed their clients; this exchange affected both styles and new posing strategies were adopted in both art forms. Styles were successfully merged at times, and photographers developed poses which ‘idealised’ the subject to produce a portrait with the intention impressing family and friends over the longer term, and may even have encouraged other members of the family to purchase further ‘prints’. The merging of traditional and modern styles was particularly popular with the increasingly wealthy middle classes.
Bate suggested that French photographer Gaspard-Felix Tournachon Nadar met this particular demand, and people in this class bracket rushed to have their portraits taken. A less expensive option to cater for the not so wealthy clients was developed by Andre-Adolphe-Eugene Disderi’s creation of the ‘carte de visite’, which in effect was a portrait created on a card which fitted into the pocket and was easy to carry. Disderi’s camera captured several different images through different lenses, which could all be fitted onto one ‘plate’. This considerably reduced the costs and were popular with customers who chose that photographic process over Nadar’s, and other photographers using a single plate per photograph.
Bate suggested that that the images produced by the cheaper option revealed an aspiration by clients to achieve higher social status, and props such as books or a lavish backdrop suggested ambition. This was in contrast to the ‘up market’ ( Bate’s quotes ) solution which always attempted to illuminate personality features.
Bate draws reference finally in this section to Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, and that the cheaper studios provide a phenomenological experience of ‘punctum’, an attraction or liking for the images produced which cannot be put into words. Bate went on to explain Barthes’ experienced similar arresting experiences in photographs which he felt reminded him of his deceased mother, even though the photographs had no ascribable link. Barthes described these photographs as ‘gazing’ at him, and Bate linked this experience to Jacques Lacan’s description of a look from another person ( or which may derive from a photograph ) which seems to reference our identity, ‘but whose meaning we cannot exactly know’.
Bate continues to suggest that even in ordinary, every day portraits of people , even when the portraits are of people we do not know, there maybe something there we can somehow relate to, something we can accord with. He concludes this section by suggesting that anonymity can enhance that feeling of ‘punctum, or irrational association and ‘gaze’, ‘even where they have no explicit visual dignity’.
Phillip Prodger
Phillip Prodger is one of the leading curators of portrait photography in the world. Since 2014, he has been Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and in 2016, he put on the blockbuster show ”William Eggleston Portraits.”
We reached out to Prodger via email to discuss his thoughts on portraiture. He offered a wide-ranging spectrum of responses on the topic. Read on for more—
LC: In your lovely introductory essay to the William Eggleston Portraits catalogue, you write that portraiture “cannot reveal identity.” So often, we talk about the revealing power of a photograph, especially in a portrait of a famous person (a person we feel we know well). Can you say more about what you think a portrait can achieve, if not our “romantic” idea that it can evoke the soul of the sitter before our eyes?
PP: Identity is not a fixed thing, and no person is one-dimensional, so the idea that a single photograph can stand in for the totality of a person is a polite fiction at best. We would all like to think that there are aspects of our personalities which remain core to our being throughout our lives. Whether or not that’s true, people do undoubtedly fall into patterns of behavior and cultivate ways they want to be seen. Many photographers are good at zeroing in on a person’s distinctive characteristics, revealing traits that seem “true” to the subject. But this is not “identity” so much as it is “image.” It is the same formula whereby the tortured writer becomes heroic, the tireless nurse compassionate, or the evil villain dastardly. In the wrong hands, this kind of portraiture can feel empty and superficial.
Identity is constantly in flux. I was another person at university, as a baby, when I got married, and (God willing) I’ll be someone else as I grow older. You can think of this as the inevitable march of time—that we gather life’s baggage around us, just as decorator crabs stick things to their shells. But we’re also just messy, organic beings, full of contradictions, uncertainties, inner thoughts and outer projections. Who we are is indefinable and unmeasurable.
In this sense, taking a photograph of a person is like holding jelly in your hands. You can feel its weight, but where is its center?
It is widely accepted that a great photographer can push beyond all this to reveal something of a sitter’s inner self, as complex, evanescent and contorted as that may be. But there are reasons to be skeptical of this. Photography excels at splitting seconds, not surveying lifetimes. It is by nature mechanical and distant, not warm and knowing. On paper, it is the worst possible tool for portraiture. Yet there is something undeniably magnetic about photo portraiture that defies easy explanation. I often wonder whose identity is revealed to me in a portrait that speaks to me. Is it really the sitter, or is it something internal to me, that maps onto my memory in a powerful way? Maybe a fragment—a mere moment in time—is, after all, the best way to find connection with another person.
Eggleston, for one, rejects the idea that you can get to know his subjects by just looking at his pictures. And he’s absolutely right about that. But that’s not the same as saying they don’t have meaning.
LC: In the same essay, you discuss the importance of “pictus interruptus” in Eggleston’s work—the way his sequences build up rich, non-linear possibilities over a series of images. Because portraiture is so intimately tied to single images (going back to its roots in painting), the idea of a portrait “series” can be a bit intimidating. Any thoughts or advice on this matter for portrait-inclined photographers?
PP: For much of its history, photography has labored under preconceptions inherited from painting and other traditional media. One of the most ingrained of these is the belief that pictures should be self-contained: in other words, that they should tell a story. The story can be abstract or open-ended—it can even have a powerful relationship to other pictures—but on a conceptual level it is still a discrete packet of information conceived by the artist that can be “read.”
Even the most radical painters of the twentieth century could never quite shake this idea, and most photographers embraced it too. I don’t want to pick on Ansel Adams (whom I admire), but for me the perfect example of this is his famous Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite. You don’t need anything else to enjoy the picture. It is all there, like a beautiful piece of music. You can hang it in your office, or your home, without any other Ansel Adams pictures around, and be thrilled to have it. No one has to explain it. It succeeds on its own terms.
Increasingly, the language of photography has been changing, and artists have been exploring a whole other set of possibilities. Our culture swims in a soup of imagery, where photographs often just graze our consciousness, and pictures are detached from their original meaning, if they ever had one. The idea of a photograph as a self-contained system no longer makes a lot of sense. At the same time, the line between film, video and still photography is blurrier than ever, and motion capture is becoming increasingly routine. As a result, conventions that have been associated with cinema for the last 80+ years are becoming part of the vocabulary of still photographers.
Narratives no longer have to be complete to be meaningful. Photographic storytelling is more about networks, nodes, and webs than it is about concise statements. In this world, relationships between images become central. Viewers and artists alike are constantly constructing realities from images, wiring and rewiring like neural networks.
This is one reason that the photo book has made such a strong comeback in the 21st century. The book form gives photographers the opportunity to develop structure and impart meaning to seemingly disparate imagery, to create context where it has otherwise been stripped away. This, in turn, gives photographers license to explore whole new approaches to photography—where content isn’t obvious, and narrative is uncertain. Iconic photographs still get made, but most pictures no longer follow the old rules. Instead they are touchstones, provocations, gestures…their meaning, fluid.
LC: You work at the National Portrait Gallery in London, an institution with an extensive photography collection as well as portraits in the form of paintings, drawings, miniatures, prints, sculptures and more. Working alongside so many other media, what do you think is distinctive about photographic portraits amidst this wide array?
PP: On one level there is no difference; all the curators at the NPG deal with the same questions of representation and identity. Although the circumstances have changed over the centuries, the challenge of how (and why) to represent another human meaningfully is essentially constant.
There are two areas in which photography distinguishes itself from other media: verisimilitude (that is, the life-like representation of something), and the capacity to capture discrete slices of time. Verisimilitude is an important question unto itself, but perhaps not the biggest in portrait photography, since a meticulous painter or draftsperson can achieve something like photorealism given enough effort and skill. For me, the bigger question is the relationship to time.
In no other media are representations so fleeting and ephemeral by nature.
Combine verisimilitude and time, and you get something really interesting. If painting is an act of synthesis, then photography is an act of dissection. How amazing that we can by moved by things that are so transitory—and also so particular.
LC: You’ve worked on exhibitions that cover historical photographers (Charles Darwin; Man Ray) and living, contemporary photographers (William Eggleston). Can you talk about the pleasures and challenges of each?
PP: It is one of the privileges of my position to be able to work with some of the great artists of my time. Getting to know someone like William Eggleston changes you. He is a great intellect, his work is inspiring, and he has a unique way of moving through the world. But I don’t distinguish between famous and lesser-known artists. Young artists can be just as impressive as established artists, often more so. I try to learn from everyone.
I am equally passionate about historical research. History is full of puzzles, and I love trying to decode the thoughts of people I never met. Discovering what Darwin was thinking even when he never explained, piecing together the process that led Eadweard Muybridge to design his shutters a certain way—it brings those histories alive for me. The biggest challenge is to avoid personalizing things too much, to maintain critical distance, and it’s not always easy. When I found the letters Man Ray wrote to Lee Miller, for example, I cried. He loved her deeply, but she left him. The letters he wrote right afterwards sizzle with emotion. There is so much raw life in them, so much pain, anguish, desperation. I never met him, but reading those letters, it didn’t really matter.
LC: In the latter case, how does your interaction with an artist evolve from your initial encounter with their work, to a personal meeting, and then to the realization of an exhibition? How much is the artist involved in the creation and execution of the exhibition’s vision? For example, with Eggleston, I know you traveled to his home in Memphis and spoke with him at length. Can you describe his role in the exhibition’s final shape?
PP: This varies completely by artist. Some artists like to be involved in every aspect of an exhibition, controlling everything, including the width of their frames down to the millimeter. Others are happy to delegate a lot of the decisions about exhibition and display to the curator.
In the case of Bill [Eggleston], it was something else again. There came a point when I went to Memphis and explained what I wanted to do and why. He told me that my ideas made sense to him, and that was it. From that point forward, I had unfettered access to his archive, and he largely left selections and sequencing to me. He was always involved, and he always had useful information to share, but that element of trust never left. To be honest, it kept me awake at night. I didn’t want to let him down, and I was well aware of all the great curators who’ve worked with him over the years. People like John Szarkowski and Walter Hopps, or more recently, Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski. They are hard acts to follow.
LC: Besides major monographic exhibitions, the NPG also hosts the Taylor Wessing Prize each year. As discussed, portraiture can work in both series and as single images. While you delved into the power and challenges of series above, can you talk about the power of single images as captured in the Taylor Wessing exhibition—the pleasures of seeing 50+ works that cover different topics from around the world?
PP: It’s funny you should ask that, because two years ago we did make the decision to change the rules to admit sequences of photographs in addition to individual pictures. So now visitors to the exhibition see a mix of approaches, including stills and series.
But I take your point. Not just in the exhibition, but in judging, you confront pretty much every human feeling, and every dimension of experience. Birth, death, disease, love, joy, sadness, loss, violence…if it’s human, it’s there. And of course, it is an international prize, so we see what is happening around the world. It can be gut-wrenching, exhausting, and it’s not always pretty, nor should it be—that’s not what being human is all about.
And yet there is something incredibly uplifting about all that creative energy gathered from every corner of the world. It reminds me that the photography world is, in a very real sense, a community. And of course, along the way, we see some great pictures. I’ve seen a lot of photographs at this point in my career. But there is nothing like that chill down the back of your neck when you see something special.
LC: Finally, between Taylor Wessing and exhibitions like Eggleston’s, you’ve had the chance to meet and work with emerging, lesser-known artists alongside some of the biggest names in the field. Are there some common threads you have found when speaking with these especially talented portrait-makers? Any shared traits or passions that you think could be applicable for aspiring photographers?
PP: I had a professor at university who told me that everything a person can possibly photograph has been photographed before. As a student I was taken aback by her pessimism, and I’ve thought a lot about her words since. It seems to me now that actually the opposite is true—that nothing you photograph has ever been photographed before. Not all pictures are great, and certain compositions repeat, but they’re still unique, an extension of the distinct circumstances of the person who makes them.
It can be daunting to think about all the great photographers who have come before. But no one has cornered the market on understanding, and you couldn’t repeat the work of the past now if you wanted to. New times demand new perceptions and approaches.
If there’s one thread that binds all successful photographers, it is the drive to make meaning out of the things that move them. The next generation of great photographers is being born now, and I can’t wait to see what they do. Visually, and perhaps even conceptually, it won’t be the same as what came before. But their instincts, insight, and passion will be familiar.
—Phillip Prodger, interviewed by Alexander Strecker
Key Quotes from Prodger Interview for me
Identity is not a fixed thing, and no person is one-dimensional, so the idea that a single photograph can stand in for the totality of a person is a polite fiction at best.
Many photographers are good at zeroing in on a person’s distinctive characteristics, revealing traits that seem “true” to the subject. But this is not “identity” so much as it is “image.”
Identity is constantly in flux
taking a photograph of a person is like holding jelly in your hands. You can feel its weight, but where is its center
Photography excels at splitting seconds, not surveying lifetimes.
It is by nature mechanical and distant, not warm and knowing.
I often wonder whose identity is revealed to me in a portrait that speaks to me. Is it really the sitter, or is it something internal to me, that maps onto my memory in a powerful way?
The story can be abstract or open-ended—it can even have a powerful relationship to other pictures—but on a conceptual level it is still a discrete packet of information conceived by the artist that can be “read.”
Our culture swims in a soup of imagery, where photographs often just graze our consciousness, and pictures are detached from their original meaning, if they ever had one.
Narratives no longer have to be complete to be meaningful.
This is one reason that the photo book has made such a strong comeback in the 21st century. The book form gives photographers the opportunity to develop structure and impart meaning to seemingly disparate imagery, to create context where it has otherwise been stripped away.
Although the circumstances have changed over the centuries, the challenge of how (and why) to represent another human meaningfully is essentially constant.
If painting is an act of synthesis, then photography is an act of dissection.
two years ago we did make the decision to change the rules to admit sequences of photographs in addition to individual pictures.
It seems to me now that actually the opposite is true—that nothing you photograph has ever been photographed before.
Week 8
Georgia. Guest Lecture
Lecture 1
Of all the genres of photography, portraiture, as we have begun to realise, has to be the most charismatic and complex.
We all love a good portrait. They immediately grab our attention. I think there may be a couple of reasons for this. The subject in the portrait may be familiar, recognisable, or a likeness may be apparent, and as a result a portrait is something that we gravitate toward. Alongside this, those doing the looking, and by this I mean the photographer and the viewer, are perhaps hoping that something of a more personal nature will be revealed.
A triangle is formed between the sitter, the photographer, and the spectator. As discussed in our last lecture, on closer inspection the rituals between the 3 parties can become a complex play of power and performance. In the previous lecture, we also came to appreciate the abundance of the photographic portrait, recognising where and how we see
all of these depictions of ourselves.
I’ve titled this lecture Photographing people beyond the portrait. A set of ideas. To illustrate alternative methods when taking or tackling portraiture.
So within this lecture, I’ll be highlighting two very different but equally rich and interesting approaches, self-portraiture and expanded documentary. In self-portraiture, we see the maker taking full control. In this lecture we will look at practitioners who present themselves to us in their own images. We will be asking what can we see in a self-portrait? And how have practitioners explored this idea?
From this stems a discussion of theatricality and performance for the camera, initially by artists, but now by almost everyone engaged in the selfie phenomenon. In the second half of the presentation, we will look at 3 practitioners who have expanded their understanding of portraiture within documentary photography in particular. They have done this by engaging with archives and working with communities. For example, exploring how photographing people can move beyond the portrait and become a set of ideas.
It could be said that the subject in a portrait is making a bid for immortality as a photograph remains after the subject has gone. It could also be said that self-portraiture is the artist’s most personal form of expression and as it is the ultimate means of self-reflection, self-expression, and self-promotion. After all, a photographic portrait may be capable of immortalising, but it’s just as capable of creating a myth. We will now look at 3 practitioners and their work. Each of them have used the format of self portrait to help give us an overview of the topic.
The first artist I would like to mention and bring your attention to is Aboriginal Australian artist Christian Thompson, who deals with complex and at times difficult issues around the ideas of national identity fed by dark historical undercurrents. Thompson’s heritage lies with the Bidjara people of mid western Queensland. He works with photography and self-portraiture, but he also uses video, sculpture, performance and sound to explore themes of identity, race and Australia’s colonial history. Thompson was one of the first Aboriginal Australians to be admitted to the University of Oxford in 2010 and completed a doctorate in 2015. He is a research affiliate at the Pete-, he was a research affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the work that he produced whilst there in 2016 is now on permanent display in the Pitt Rivers, in the lower gallery, and includes work from two bodies of work that were produced in response to the collection from Australia.
One of the bodies of work is this one, We Bury Our Own,it’s an extensive series,this is two images,and the second one is the Museum of Others.
In the series Australian Graffiti, we see Thompson crowning himself with garlands of native flora, eucalyptus flowers, bottlebrush, kangaroo paw, and callistemon, his individual identity either generalised or subsumed by country, juxtaposed with his love for glamour and crime wear, black hoodies and, as a symbol of crime, Thompson frames two key aspects of the plight imposed upon Indigenous people in Australia: the appallingly high rates of incarceration and the destruction of sacred land. Thompson has spent a number of years in Europe away from Australia and as such can be seen to be constantly reiterating a connection to home and to his heritage, reframing of the ways that Aboriginality is represented, especially within the Australian landscape. through performance we can see the reinsertion of an Indigenous presence into history and Thompson raising the notion of a shared national identity, sharing knowledge through action, through self-portraiture.
The use of the self is not lost here. The performative element has become even more pronounced in more recent works, where Thompson can be seen and heard singing in his father’s Indigenous Australian language of Bidjara, of the Kunja Nation in central Queensland. The performance is called In Dead Tongue and I would like to share that with you now. Through performance and ritual, Thompson’s self-portraits aim to inform and invite us the viewer into his community on his terms.
We can’t really talk about self-portraiture without mentioning Cindy Shirman. Dressing up and standing before a camera is what artist Cindy Shirman loves to do. In her celebrated and very well known early works film stills made between 1977 and 1980, Shirman created over 100 publicity shots reminiscent of scenes or stills from old B-movies. She appears in every self-portrait as a general type, someone we seem to recognise all too well. These well-known tropes and expressions point to feminine agency, and in denying her own identity, Shirman also captures something of the times of the medium of photography and of portraiture as well.
This early work, which propelled her career into the art world, differs, and I’ll show you in a minute to her more recent work, in that Shirman no longer ventures into the streets to make her pictures. Exterior scenes are now made in the studio. She uses back projections, and every aspect is considered and constructed by Shirman, whoever she might be on any given day. She is her own director. She is her own camera person. Apparently, she doesn’t even have an assistant, just wigs and a mirror and a camera.
Shirman’s images command the viewer’s attention on her own terms as well. Shirman’s use of the self as constructed identity has remained a huge inspiration to photographers for her use of props and lighting, but ultimately her reflection on contemporary society. If we return to our Tate definition from previous lecture and we have a look at the second half of it, it states quite clearly that “A self-portrait is a portrait of the artist by the artist.” And unlike our previous position, the power or what the portrait says and to whom is now in the hands of the maker.
The performative mode of self-portraiture allows for the photographing of ‘people’, in inverted commas, in a broad sense, through role play, beyond the mode of representation of the other that fastens itself to the portrait, simultaneously challenging the notion of truth attributed to photography as a medium through role play, an integral part of photography since its inception. In a very grainy photograph from 1840, we can see a partially covered corpse propped up against a wall. Its decay is evident in the darkening skin of the face and hands. The body is that of Hippolyte Bayard, an early inventor of photographic processes and supposed drowned victim.
Written on the image is ‘Verso’ is a note to the viewer and I’ll just read that out loud for you, because it’s quite lovely. “The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has been shown to you, or the wonderful results of which you will soon see. As far as I know, this inventive and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with the perfection of his discovery.
The Academy, the King, and all those who have seen his pictures admired them as you do at this very moment, although he himself considers them still imperfect. This has brought him much honour but not a single sou.
The government, which has supported M. Daguerre more than is necessary, declared itself unable to do anything in M. Bayard, and the unhappy man threw himself into the water in despair. Oh, human fickleness! For a long time, artists, scientists, and the press took interest in him, but now that he has been lying in the morgue for days, no-one has recognized him or claimed him!
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk of something else so that your sense of smell is not upset, for as you’ve probably noticed, the face and hands have already started to decompose. H.B. 18 October, 1840. This note is signed by none other than the drowned man himself, making it clear that he is in fact not dead. Taking just one year after what-, what can be considered photography’s official starting date in 1839, Hippolyte Bayard staged the image in protest of the lack of recognition he had received for his contributions to the invention of the medium of photography, credit that went instead to the now famed inventor, Louis Daguerre. Much has been written about Bayard’s self-portrait, especially in regards to its fake nature. This staged suicide remains far more effective than a straightforward head and shoulders portrait would ever have been. Hippolyte’s claim to fame is acquired just in a different format than he had imagined. I, for one, never tire of the pure drama and the edge of humour in the image.
Self-portraits now mean selfies to most and the vast majority of digital photography is of portraits, portraits of people, portraits of food, and portraits of places. The arrival of the digital camera and its live screen has enabled each of us to be able to see ourselves and the poses that we undertake in context of where we might be.
Philip Prodger, in his book Face Time, brings our attention to this, and to a collision of digital worlds, profiles and platforms in discussing the self as meme. He uses an example of actress Dolly Parton’s meme challenge, which summarises the use of the portrait in a modern day multi-platform context rather perfectly I think. Here we have Dolly Parton in her LinkedIn profile, Dolly Parton Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder. And of course, all of them recognisable characters that she’s played in some of her movies.
Again, I encourage you to look into the work of practitioners who have used themselves in the frame for this rich and rather fun genre. Some starting points include Oskar, Gustav, Raylander, Francesca Woodman, Heather Agyepong, and Silvia Rossi, for example.
In the second part of this lecture series, I will be talking about expanded documentary photography. The digital age, and an acknowledgement of what has come before, has assisted in developing our understanding of the photographic portrait.
Photographers can be seen to have expanded their visual language and vocabulary to aid in describing the world around them with a wider brush. By slowing down the taking to accommodate the subject, allowing for a more considered level of engagement, encouraging exchange, reflection and response, all in the hope of a broader representation. This has been apparent in the field, especially in that of documentary photography for some time.
Lecture 2
Collaboration is a term that fits snugly but is used rather broadly within the context of expanded documentary portraiture and can take shape in various ways. None are more correct than the next or better or worse, but they just differ. You could be working with a person right through to handing over a camera and authorship in some cases, which we’ll see in a moment.
August Sanders again could be considered a precursor with his 40 year project, his dogged persistence to make a photographic portrait of Germany, no less. Parallels of which can be seen in Hiroh Kikai’s Asakusa portraits of which he documented his community over a number of years, over many years, revisiting the red wall of the local temple Sensō-ji.
His own repetitive, meditative, and philosophical interests and background inform his practice to a large degree in that he has made portraits in the same location, often of the same people, over and over again, distilling a notion into a small kernel of an idea and following it doggedly or in a dogged fashion, is a methodology, conscious or not, that I have also employed in my own work, and I thought I’d share a series-, a body of work of mine with you, it’s called The Mourners. The Mourners begins at home. Death, mourning, and remembrance were not foreign or taboo topics in my family home as my mother was widowed at the age of 37. She does not appear in the work, however, it could be said that the work is derived from her experience alongside my interests in depicting the act of donning black as a signifier of perpetual mourning and investigating its photographic connotations.
The Mourners is a series of 13 portraits documenting the modern remnant of this ritual. Those that appear in The Mournershave chosen to wear black every day for the rest of their lives, engaging in a personal and perpetual act whose symbolic and repetitious qualities resonate with other subjects that I have focussed on to date. Through considering this act, I aimed to address the symbolism addressed and attributed to the colour black and its inherent connection to photography, to memory, and to death.
I set parameters, which became a very important part of my methodology, and 4 questions were asked of each mourner: For whom are you in mourning? How long have you been in mourning for? Do you wear black every day? Do you intend to wear black forever? It was important to me that these portraits and the series were of women who at the time had intended to wear black every day for the rest of their lives. Perhaps this perpetual and ongoing act would somehow be relayed in the images. Existing backdrops of nursing home corridors, living rooms, and church halls were replaced by the controlled environment of a travelling studio.
The Mourners employs this framework in order to maintain consistency and allow for a repetitive series of actions to be engaged in by the photographer, myself, and the subject alike. The use of the frame, literally and figuratively, isolates the subject from their environment, it strips the elements back to a point where only the faintest trace of the sitters surroundings remains.
The portraits bring the viewer to the periphery of an ultimately private space. Deflecting the unflinching eye of the camera and of the viewer with an inverted gaze, those who sit for a portrait are absorbed by the void that is black, they are living mementos, vessels for mourning a dead husband’s legacy. Alternatively, they are a totem of power. Nevertheless, when a mourner comes into sight in these photographic portraits, she also disappears.
She hovers somewhere in between and affords us a constant reminder of death, a doubling up of death, that of the deceased husband that the mourner mourns and of the mourners own identity, which it could be argued has in effect been effaced. The mourners, clad in black mourning dress, inherit social and cultural connotations. These values and conventions associated with the widow figure can be found throughout literature, popular culture, mythology, and religion, along with a long tradition of representation in Western art. This depiction is complex and often ambiguous. The widow figure is pious and pitied. She defies any attempt of a single definition.
The series aims to encourage rumination on the complex nature of this depiction, these connections to identity, to representation, and to the photographic portrait. My intention was never to disclose the intimate story and details of each mourner’s lament. This was of great interest in the development and understanding of the ritual and of the subjects that had afforded me their time, personal reflections, and involvement, but that remains private. My methodology of strict parameter setting looked to ask the questions whose identity is being depicted? The widow figure, the mourner, or the mourned? And this is… an installation view from the Centre of Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in 2011.
There were 4 portraits in a small space, obviously with dark walls, and this is the small limited edition book that was produced to go alongside with the exhibition. Moving forward, I’d like us to look at 3 practitioners who can be seen to be engaging in and reflecting on a broader notion of portraiture, where practitioners can be seen to employ various methods to engage with photographing people beyond the portrait. This can take shape in several ways.
For example, working with archives, objects, various formats of text and community with varying degrees of collaborative and participatory practice and approaches. This can happen within one’s own community or outside of it, and we’ll be asking looking at practitioners and seeing how they’ve explored this idea. Hashem el Madani and Akram Zaatari in this project, in this remarkable project, we see a number of notable characteristics that point to photography, portraiture, and beyond.
Firstly, an archive produced by a single studio photographer that amounts to 500,000 images. Hashem el Madani opened his studio, Shehrazade in Saida, Lebanon in 1953, and for over 50 years he created hundreds of thousands of images of Saida’s residents, brides and grooms, wrestlers and babies, and Palestinian and Syrian resistance fighters in the 1970s, photographing 90% of his community. A sentiment that August Sanders would have approved of, a desire for totality are often found in the work of photographers whose practice has engaged with communities.
Within these images, we see an element of performance for the camera, Madani often asking his subjects to pose in a particular way. The special occasion that the event necessitated meant that props and non-conventional social norms were acted out in front of the camera, often inspired by films being ported to Lebanon at the time. As well as a record of the community, we see the record of a geographical region whose social mores were being radically altered during a time of war.
Enter Lebanese artist, curator, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, Akram Zaatari. In 1999, Za’atari Arab. Image Arab Image Foundation, an organisation dedicated to the preservation of images related to Arab culture, began working with Madani.
In an attempt to archive his immense archive of studio photography depicting the people of Shehrazade, their preservation and reinterpretation take on yet another level of significance, as Saida is Zaatari’s own hometown, and therefore his own community as well. He’s quoted as saying, “I see this project and my involvement in it as an almost archaeological approach to the understanding of what the studio means, what the collection means in relation to the city.” Zaatari refers to the works as objects of study and studio practices, emphasising the dual nature of these images as both examples of Madani’s photographic practice and the subjects of Zaatari’s ongoing research at the Arab Image Foundation.
Significantly, Zaatari encourages authorship to be questioned, Zaatari stating that ‘Each image has 2 authors and 2 dates. A repositioning of the images from one position in time to another. The context therefore changing with the involvement of another storyteller at a different time in history and a retelling of the narrative.’ Madani and Zaatari worked closely and collaboratively throughout the project. Madani, importantly open to and encouraging of this, reinterpreted motion of his original archive, 2 insiders from the community looking out and both rewriting history at different times through the use of photography.
This lecture has so far focussed on practitioners, including myself, who have explored community through their own personal connections in one way or another. Photographers looking at their own community, be it from the inside or out, but still connected and reflecting on their community.
In Dierdre O’ Callaghan’s series Hide that Can, we see a photographer documenting a community unknown and unconnected to her.
O’Callaghan spent 4 years photographing the men of Arlington House, a hostel in Camden, London. She says in her artist statement ‘Many of the residents are Irish and came over to London for work in the 1950s and 60’s. These photographs include trips to Ireland made possible by the Aisling Project. For many, it was the first time they had been home in 40 years.’
O’Callaghan’s work was published by Trolley Books in 2002 and is one of my favourite publications. It’s sensitive, engaged, and clever, and her method does not stray too far from conventional methods of documentary in some ways. She includes quotes from interviews, photographs of the objects that surround the men of Arlington House, as well as wide angle interiors, collected Post-it notes, and she covers events such as the all important trip back to Ireland. And she includes direct portraiture as well. It’s almost editorial in its approach, almost. The length of the project becomes apparent, O’Callaghan managing to inject humour amongst the seriousness of the situation that these men find themselves in, and that takes time.
When working within this field, an important question to ask is what’s in it for the community? And in this case it raised social awareness. It also humanised issues such as alcoholism, homelessness, and unemployment, that surrounded a particular community
This is an important body of work where we see the representation of the other in an empathetic and non-stereotypical way. With this work, the subjects are involved to some degree and are aware that the photograph is being taken. The community and subjects themselves may very well benefit from the interaction or the intervention, but they remain the source of the work produced and are not necessarily active. Is it Deirdre’s voice that we hear? Or that of the men of Arlington House?
Photographic projects involving communities can and do collaborate to varying degrees, and the next body of work that we’re going to have a look at, Amal Alhaag and Nadine Stijns, we can see what happened when the subjects become very active participants in the project and have a say in the way that their community is represented.
Amal Alhaag is an independent curator and Nadine Stijns is a photographer, and together they present us with yet another approach to photography and photographing people beyond the portrait. This is one of engagement, collaboration, and co-authorship. The Anarchist Citizenship was made in Somaliland, a self-declared autonomous state in the region of Somalia, and is an attempt to reframe negative stereotypes and media interpretations of the area related to piracy, terrorism, refugees, and drought.
Alhaag and Stijns invited and worked with local artists, youth groups, women’s groups, filmmakers, and architects from Somaliland to inform the project. Through a series of discussions and meetings to make the project, Somalilanders have defined their sense of citizenship as one through fashion, architecture, friendship, and culture. They’re the sort of headlines and definitions of the community brought to the project. This is not an entirely new idea, but what is interesting is that they purposefully shift the hierarchy inherent to photography of photography and subject, controller and controlled, by blurring the lines of authorship.
I’m going to read this quote out loud by Nadine.
‘Photography is often about focusing on the photographer, on themselves. They are the one, the king of whatever hangs on the wall, deciding each detail every step of the way. For us, it’s all about collaboration. Even if people know where Somaliland is, so little is known about it, and we want what is known to be rooted in the voices of the people who live there.’
Each image is therefore a collaboration with the depicted individuals where the individuals direct and style the image,
then they invite friends to get involved, each piece informs the next. It goes a step further in that an attempt to enable subjects to speak for themselves, they are given co-authorship and ownership of the image and can therefore
be involved in choosing how that image is used and is used to represent themselves and their community.
Alhaag and Stijns are the facilitators and they take a facilitating role and what motivates the project is a genuine interest in allowing people to speak for themselves through the medium of photography. There is a growing interest
in photographers sharing the space and dialogue of making images, enabling and encouraging people to play an active part in the art of making. Again, rupturing the hierarchy of control and striving not to speak on someone else’s behalf.
We see photographers facilitating, educating, collaborating, and handing the camera over to the subject and sometimes working together with the camera as well, but with the intent that the subjects are not just listened to,
but that their voices are heard and that they are in control, that the control is handed over. It helps to shape
the outcome as can be seen in the work of Anthony Luvera, who was one of the first slides at the beginning of this presentation, Clementine Schneider, Laia Abril, Sebastian Bruno, in an attempt to expand the boundaries of the medium, drawing attention to its formal and socio cultural context. The photographic portrait is only ever a set of ideas, and I hope this series of lectures has helped in you to unpack that notion and come to terms with portraiture’s history and alongside its contemporary contexts and considerations.
Thank you.
Juliana’s Lecture
Lecture 1
Okay.
I will be talking to you today about… Storytelling, storytelling particularly as it pertains to portrait and sharing with you a number of artists who, for most of my own practice, I have thought about and utilised and find to be very perfect examples of the different ways in which you can use portraiture as a means of sharing a narrative. Before we get into that, I want to talk about a quote that remains very influential to many who exist and work within the photographic industry,
Susan Sontag’s book called On Photography, which was published in 1977, exists as a collection of individual stories and essays surrounding the portrait, the photograph. Much of the book she speaks particularly about war photography and photographers who make images in conflict zones around the world. But what I found to be really powerful about the book is it talks in general to about the history of photography and the contemporary role it plays within society. So this quote in particular “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
Just as the camera is the sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
Now one can take this quite literally, but when I think about it,
when I consider this phrase I think about the-, the weight that we as photographers and artists have
as-, as makers of images. And when you do decide to work for other people and to create portraits, not just of other
people, but also of yourself, it’s important to consider the ways in which you are responsible for that image and how that image then is shared with the world and the spaces in which these images are shared and-, and considerations of who has control and who is… who is in position, who is the owner of said image?
And I am also a sore believer in this-, in this idea that actually, yes, you know, cameras and photographs have been used throughout history to think about communities of people and ostracise communities of people and paint them in a particular light in order to have certain laws that banished them from land, for example, or reflect in a way that
maybe it’s a small community in a more rural place in the world
and how the world view of those people come about.
So when you do go out into the world and make images, it’s important to think about the responsibility you have
of the people who are in front of your lens and the power that lies within your hands. And even then thinking too about, ‘okay, would I want myself to be affected in such a way?’
But if you haven’t already, I highly recommend this book On Photography by Susan Sontag. I think it’s a great avenue to allow yourself to begin thinking about the photographic image and understanding the history of what the image is to.
Carrie Mae Weems is a photographer who has mastered the portrait as-, as I would say, her most celebrated series being the Kitchen Table Series, where she documents herself with her family, her friends, almost her everyday life
around this one kitchen table with this this edder-, like this chandelier, the light kind of shining
down on this table and being one of the only light sources. It has been said that there was another light source that she uses for-, for some of the images. However, some of the images it has been-, so that she-, you know, you can tell because there is-, you can-, you can see some movement that happens in this what appears to be quite a low light condition.
This image,
I think, or these images or this series, is known mainly as a-, as a photo book, but within recent years has kind of gained a lot of notoriety of her just having had a retrospective of the Barbican that just closed quite recently.
And when I consider and think about how one can use ourselves in our images
to tell kind of stories and narratives, right?
Because it’s without even knowing much about who-, who Weems is or much about,
you know, her life, we can-, we can immediately kind of gather or gauge from the images that we see that actually this is-, these are very domesticated images, these images of these kind of like private, intimate moments that one may not be privy to, what appears to be kind of a conversation or kind of very romantic dinner that she’s having with her partner, where he’s kind of enjoying her food but she hasn’t yet touched her lobster, as of yet, because-, what I have interpreted it to be is her wanting to-, for him to enjoy the meal. Some have suggested that maybe was
kind of a slight nod to the idea of like… kind of tricking him or kind of having put something in the food,
but that’s another conversation!
And then the image here of her getting ready and what one has assumed to be her daughter mimicking her in the same way of like, you know, like mother like daughter, like mother like child, her daughter wanting also to be like her mother in wearing-, have the opportunity to also kind of wear make up like mommy does. So again these are all these things that one can gauge from this-, this life, this-, this-, the-, these simple 2 images, but the self-portrait is a very powerful tool in kind of allowing us into one’s life.
Another artist who’s very, very powerfully utilised the-, the self-portrait is Jo Spence. mJo Spence also for many years documented and was documenting herself utilising… the image to-, to think about photo-therapy. She believes photography to be a very powerful healing tool and documented many stages of her life. Most notable
was some of the last images she ever took during the time where she found out she had cancer of the breast
and her documentation of that process and again beginning to kind of look in and see and view and examine the changes that were happening to her body and wanting to kind of keep that-, that documation-, that documentation existing.
And so what we have in kind of more recent shows or creations of her work is almost like a journey into that process of, okay cool, you know, she-, she-, she hairs-, was-, was once this person who thought about it less and less from self
and then towards the latter of her career, it literally began-… began again-, began a place for what I would describe
as important or integral to-, to who she was and her survival and the importance that that in addition to photo-therapy. So-, and by photo-therapy of course what I mean is… we have kind of more talking therapies. She was using photography as a way to kind of document and speak almost like an art therapy. So, you know, where you kind of have more kind of drawing therapies, the camera for her bega-, was that tool she used to present her ideas and feelings.
So again when I think o-, when I think of Jo Spence, I think about the powerful ways in which she used photography
as a tool to express and examine the story of her life in a very deeply personal way,
Samuel Fosso, a very celebrated Cameroonian/Nigerian photographer, also used the self portrait to-, to create these very-, very hides-, highly stylised and fun documentations regards to more political climates. The image on the right example was a direct conversation to the relationship between China and-, and Africa and the hand in which China is currently playing in a lot of industrial and manufacturing-, manufacturers of-, of certain kind of like oil plantations
and-, and-, and building infrastructures happening in certain countries in West Africa in particular.
And-… And then in the series on the right all-, so it was thinking and considering the idea of self image and gender and
playing with-, almost playing dress up as one may describe, of thinking about himself
as a range of different characters.
And one thing that is very fun or really intriguing about Fosso’s work, at least something I’ve always been very drawn
to, is his ability to really cross those boundaries in regards to kind of gender and race to tell the stories and the nar-, or display narratives that he…is drawn to and feels passionate about. But also in regards to his own identity, in exploring his own identity through photo. And I believe he is an artist who does that very, very strongly. Cindy Sherman, again, another celebrated photographer who utilised the self portrait in a very similar way to-, to Samuel Fosso, used characterisations of individuals, existed and not, to-, to create portraits to kind of speak about kind of political issues.
Sometimes though with Sherman, a lot of it was-, was based on the idea of performance, performing these characters
for the camera and being excited about playing all these different people of all different kind of walks of life,
oftentimes dabbling into the extreme and the sometimes grotesque, exploring horrors of-, or the horrors
of what these characters are, but also using things like prosthetics and makeup and dress and costume
to-, to do-… Or to play [Unknown name] in things like performance art, so there are some videos-, difficult
to find, but some some video art where she plays some of these characters that she has.
But again, another artist who enjoys using the self portrait and the self-, the self to-, to-, to tap into a range of these things.
Richard Avedon is a photographer mainly known for his-, his fashion portraiture or portraits. But in his more personal work, he-, he found a way to really strongly kind of meld-, meld the two and meld them in the way you had very striking portrait. So-, so for example, the one on the left-, the one on the right, this image of a beekeeper in that he was which was taken in 1981, and what Avedon had done was he had put an ad in the newspaper, I forget the name of it,
wanting to photograph actually a model with bees all over them was the vision he had, and the beekeeper reached out to him and said, you know, ‘hey, we can you know, we can-, I’m happy to do it.’ And so they collaborated in making-, making this portrait happen. Avedon at the time, has-, was known to say things like, you know, well, a lot of the images that he did make were contrived, yet still he felt a very personal attachment to them, they still felt very real.
For example, this image on the right with Dovina which was taken in 1955, Dovina being a model who worked very much in high fashion, had grown up surrounded by elephants. I believe that one of her parents kind of looked after them in-, I don’t believe it was a circus, but they were involved with animals in that way somehow and so it became very natural for her to-, to be able to take an image like this. And so I think Avedan is a great example of someone who kind of merged… Who merged fashion with the portrait in a very powerful way, in a way that made it so… Th-, these kind of like these narratives or these stories that he once told, these-, what were connected directly to the people that he did document and at all times, because of their personal connection to the theme or the things he wished explore, it can be seen how easy and almost comfortable, I would say, the people who he photographed felt in them.
And throughout his practice, I would say he’s one of the few fashion photographers who very often was able to make it feel very natural and intimate in the way that a lot of photographers maybe around that same time were not able to.
And I think that’s a very special skill So, again, thinking about the portrait and thinking about even if-, if you think about fashion like this as ha-, you know, this would be high fashion thing, what are the ways in which we can create
some intimacy, too, in what’s happening in the images? Silvia Rossi. is a photographer who documented-, who documents self but also thinks about the family archive and her personal relations to what is happening. So in a similar way to Cindy Sherman or Samuel, where she’s playing characters, the character that she’s actually playing are family.
And so in the images from the series on the right, she’s-, she’s impersonating her parents, thinking about her parents
her-, her presence on the earth and before she was conceived, and their relationship to the land of them being immigrants and how she also fits into that.
So, again, you know, for yourselves, thinking about how, you know, archival intervention, you know, using your family archive or using-, or using maybe images of past or old to-, to begin new reflections on-, on your positioning to them. I think Silvia Rossi is someone who thinks about the portrait in the very powerful way and documents it in a way that again allows us to tap into that same-, that same mode of thinking that she’s having.
Lecture 2
Janna Ireland, again someone else who-, who utilises self portrait, but also within a-, in another way, also kind of dips more into the workings of using family and working family, that she involves her family in the images to.
The series The Love Seat and Milk and Honey both fit within her-… Within the conversation
she wishes to have in her work about, you know, her children being-, being mixed, half white, half black, and her-, her connection now to-, to the land of America, you know, America beingmwhere she’s from, was born and raised, and now she is married to someone who comes from a very wealthy background, but she doesn’t-, she has described herself as not always feeling like she belonged. And so what then does that look like for her when it becomes evident that, you know, one-, well one is kind of like dabbling or feeling almost like in between, and so a lot of her is photography centred around that. And she-, she, you know, she-, she has her partner in the images too, and she often at times has involved her children in the images. And so, you know, famil-, familial involvement in the images and what does that look like and…
So considering or thinking about, you know, if you do want to have your family involved, are you seeking their consent? And again, going back to the earlier point of control-, you know, how you as the image maker is controlling what is happening? Like, are you-, if you are wanting thinking about your family’s involvement. This-, does there also need to be a conversation or an understanding on their part in what exactly they’re becoming involved in.
Someone else who very famously utilised the idea of using family or having family involved is Richard Bellingham from the series Ray and Liz which was documented in 195-, 1995. It was-, these are his parents kind of-, kind of go-,going back to his childhood home and-, and documenting the daily life of his parents and what that almost like give you an example of what it was like for him to to grow up and live in this environment. Growing up on a council estate, growing up with parents who, at times, he felt weren’t always present for him. He shares that his father was an alcoholic and his mother a chain smoker.
And what-, how that began to-, like his documentation being almost like an evidence of a parcel, a thing that he wished to-, to-, to-, to evolve out of or move away from. And so as you can imagine, this is very-, this is very deep-, deeply personal. And for him, he has also described as a very deep-, deeply painful experience or thing to kind of discuss publicly. There’s also a film actually called Ray and Liz that came out in 2018 that is currently available on Amazon Prime to rent and watch, but that also gives context to the images that-, that happened, you know, again, in 1995, but still is this thing that he often revisits. So I do recommend if you are interested in his practice to-, to check out the film as it gives a really profound insight in the way in-, in-, in-, in-, in a depth level that one can’t necessarily get alone from the images. Nikki S. Lee. So again, someone who-, who-, who uses people and-, to-, to reflect on, on community.
What’s interesting about Nikk-,Nikki S. Leeis she almost is like a medley-, a medley for [Inaudible], she works with community but also involves herself. So it’s-, they almost work also as an addition to that, a self portraits in a lot of ways. And so when I think about Nikki S. Lee, her thing was to kind of get dressed up as-, as the-, the-, the groups or the cultures that she kind of described as. So on the-, on the left you have The Yupies Project, Yupie being New Yorkers, or new-, New Yorkers… Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s when New Yorkers who aren’t-, weren’t born in New York or New Yorkers who are just kind of like a just a general term for people who are from New York, but these guys who kind of go, you know, at the time would go into the city and they work certain jobs.
And then, of course, you had The Lesbian Project in 1997 where, again, she kind of found herself befriending and involving herself and taking images, performing lesbian. And so-, so oftentimes… Whe-, when thinking about someone like Nikki S. Lee, the composition of appropriation, of course, has to come into it, right? Where it’s like kind of involving yourself in the community and wanting to be part of the community in order for you to kind of reflect and present a certain thing. And the-, on the other hand of it to it,
it’s like involving yourself in to a means to kind of fully understand or grasp the reality of-, of the world that you are wishing to tap into.
As so I think when thinking about our own practices and thinking about, you know, again, the responsibility and also boundaries that you have and-, and also, you know, how far are you willing to go and what are the parameters you’re setting up in order to kind of make the images that you’re wanting to make? It-, It’s… Nikki S. Lee is a very-, is a very interesting one cause-, because another artist I think about that worked with community in the same kind of collaborative way is Yokomizo. They-, the Dear Strangers project is a project that I think about often, I think about how… It wa-, so essentially that the-, the aim of it was… Yokomizo wrote a letter and copied it several times and dropped it into the post boxes of several of his neighbours and those who wished-, so what he requested was, you know, if they were interested in having their image taken that they should stand at their windows at a certain time of day and just wait to have their photos taken.
And so those of course who wanted to participate did in those who didn’t, you know, didn’t.
What I find so powerful about these images is just the excitement or, you know, when I think about collaboration, I think this is the perfect example of it. I think about the… First, the confidence or bravery or, you know, the curiosity that these neighbours have of having no idea who this person is but just standing at the window and waiting for this mysterious person to kind of peek in at them, right? And, and just the-, the-, the sheer kind of amazement, because if I’m thinking about it from a personal place,I think I would just be too afraid to do something like that!
But I think looking at these images as a collection and kind of seeing the different personalities to them and the poses that are made, like I mean, like I mean, even the gu-, the guy on the phone and the you can tell that maybe he was kind of waiting there for a while and in the end, he just, you know, he just went there with the phone and was just kind of chilling and relaxing.
And even the-, the-, and then, for example, the woman as well, the image of the woman on the far left also kind of pulls me in to and I’m-, I’m curious about what’s happening with her, but also what’s happeningwith her home and and the curated style and the individuality of her background, right? I often say things like, you know, fool yourselves when documenting and photographing or making images, you know, thinking about your background and-, and what is happening behind the, the object or the-, or the person that you’re photographing, right? So the, the context that the background gives and in each background or each home, you know, or for each person you can tell or have some kind of insight to who they were as individuals.
Yokomizo also importantly returned back to the homesof each person who posed and gave them prints. And then he was able to-, I don’t-, I don’t believe he was able to meet all of them,but I know that he left prints in each of their post boxes so they had copies of the images he made. Which again, so thinking about yourselves and thinking about, you know, if you are asking people to-, to-, to sit and pose for yourselves, what collaborate-, like, is it collaborative? Do they give something in return once you’re able to-, to kind of create the narrative of the story that you wish to create? Like how are we constantly engaging and thinking about not just taking but also giving back, I think is something that is quite important. And so I think, yes,I think this-, for me, this-, this narrative or this kind of conversation about the importance of collaboration and-, and-, and-, and getting to know your neighbours, I think this is one of my favourite photographic series ever.
Deana Lawson, or Deena Lawson rather, is a photographer too who-, who… works with and collaborates with her neighbours or people with the public. Deena Lawson is-, is-, is an American photographer who is known or regarded as someone who kind of celebrates or whose images and portraits celebrate black life and form this idea of an important reflection on or important reflections on… on black people from all different kind of walks of life.
I think. Deana-, Deena Lawson is an interesting one because where these portraits may at times sometimes look as though they have been kind of caught, you know, off guard, or maybe just very candidly, they are actually all very stylised and there’s actually quite a big team that work with Deena in making these images come to life. A lot of them also are paid,I suppose, for her and the creation of the images and stylised and maybe given certain kind of clothes to wear and this-, there is these massive light set ups.
And so one-, one could say that, you know, the choices that are being made here and the kind of the-, the hand in which is being played, and also the idea of like, you know, if if these are people who are being paid, how much control do they have over their image in that instance? And what then happens for-, for those who maybe aren’t particularly wanting to have their images kind of created in that way or maybe not wanting to sit with that pose or wear that kind of an item, but they are being paid at the end of the day for-, the-, for the job. And so again, I think this you, know, it’s always important to consider things like that, you know, the exchanging of money and how that shifts agency, can shift agency and create a power imbalance when making, making work with people that who-, peak members of community who you want to document or take portraits of that. If we are thinking about the story, the question of who’s-, who story is it, then if, if they are being paid, right? If they are not being photographed in… you know, if I was looking at these images off cuff I would assume,you know, in the first instance that these weren’t images of-, of someone in their home, right?
But-, but with the context, the added context of well actually no, you know, for a lot of them it isn’t what-, what then is the intention-ality of the artist then? To have them documented in these particular environments in this way, and what-, what does that then say about the photographer What does that say about, you know, the conversation that-, that the work is being regarded in?I think it’s important at all times to-, to think about, regardless of whatever story you may have, right? For yourself or however you kind of walk into it wanting to tell the narrative you want to tell. When money’s being exchanged, it then-, it then has to become questionable And so-, and so question anything I guess is what I would say. And then in a similar fashion, 1 of the last artists I wanted to discuss was-, was Richard Renaldi, whose famous photographs from the touch is-, Touching Strangers series where he quite literally kind of walks down the street, announces 2 or more strangers to kind of come together and touch, touch each other in some kind of way sometimes, I mean, some of the images, it’ just kind of someone’s leaning on one shoulder, some of the images is, as you can see here, it’s lifting somebody up, holding just, you know, holding-, holding on the wrist. But in a very similar way to Lawson, what you have is, you know, it has been rumoured when the first instance it kind of appeared or would appear that the money-, no money has been exchanging and this is very natural, that it’s just asking people and seeing what they say. But actually, you know, some people are paid to, to participate whilst others aren’t.
The images I think become difficult. They were striking… It-, again a similar with Lawson in that like I’m immediately drawn to that, I might become immediately curious about them. Right? And this is-, this does still-, still existvery much as a story about, you know,people who maybe may not come across each other or may not notice each other passing out on the street, but now they are having these interactions.
And in many ways that is a beautiful thing. But again, wha-, at what point now if-, if these people being paid, is there potential for for-, for some people, some people to have been pressured into-, into doing and participating in the project? So again, responsibility. However, in both the cases of Lawson and Renaldi, the images remain very striking very-, the flo-, the flow of them and the workings of them as a series remain very powerful.
And so when I think about the portrait and it as a tool, a very powerful tool, for telling a story or sharing a story with the masses or with your audience, I think each of these artists throughout that I’ve shared have had their own very different approaches, but also really great techniques to think about and consider when-, when going forward and wanting to make your own. So… So yeah, you know, again, you know, things that you should consider, of course are, you know, what is a portrait in the first instance, right?
The portrait being an image that in a lot of examples I guess one can say is stylised, one can say is very intentional and I guess as always is-, is made, is created, it’s every nook and cranny is thought about. And again, same thing with the self-portrait in… I’m always going to be an advocate for using the self and the self being… self, as in physical self or the self just being interests and passions and-, and thoughts and ideas that-, that-, that you find to be-, you find yourself drawn to, I think is always an amazing place to start.
Archival intervention, again, you know, the family-, the family album, the family portraits, images of things made before your time or things made kind of that you’ve made 10, 10 years ago and using those to-, to be guidelines and guidelines or guides for newer images or newer stories, almost like the catalyst for the story in which you went to-, to tell of the portraits that you make.And again, background as context, so thinking about what-, what is happening outside of the person, with yourself or somewhere else, what is happening around and how can that also be part of the story or the narrative? And then what is the story? And that goes back to starting with self and working outward as opposed to working outward to come inward.
And once you-, and I think once you know the story, then you know what you’re trying to say. I think once-, and also even on that thinking about how it is or how it is that you can make itas personal as possible because that-, that is actually the key a lot of the times, for a lot of these artists, it began with their own curiosities, especially someone like Nikki S. Lee for example, where, you know, at first one can-, can think about it as her being curious about other people, but I think from a personality perspective and if you-, you know, if you do do further research into her and read some of the interviews she has participated in, you can see that she’s always had this-,this thirst for-, for wanting to kind of know people and get to know things and her curiosity about other people and about communities and other cultures. But in that first instance, it was that is who she is and that is what drives her and what moves her. So what are the things that move you? And that-, from that point it will become clearer for you, for yourselves and… In regards to what you’re trying to say. So yeah. Thank you very much for listening and happy making.
Emily Jane Scott Lecture 1
Hello, everyone.
My name’s Emily Jane Scott,
and I’m a photographer and museum curator from Whitby in North Yorkshire. I graduated from Falmouth’s B.A. Photography about a year ago, just over a year ago now, which is pretty terrifying, I can’t believe how quickly the time’s passed, but in this presentation, I’m going to tell you a bit about my curatorial and photographic practices. I’ll also share one of my main influences and share with you a couple of resources that I think are really good. So since graduating, I’ve worked a few different jobs. I got a job in Lidl Supermarket whilst also working a small amount of freelance photography jobs at the same time.
I ended up getting a freelance job at my local museum, which was photographing different objects for a special exhibition, including some 19th century human remains, which unfortunately I can’t show in this presentation. From this freelance job, I actually made a connection which led me to finding employment in a smaller museum,which is about half an hour away from where I live.
So the museum where I work is called The Staithes Story, it’s a social history museum which aims to tell the story of the former mining and fishing village of Staithes which is on the North Yorkshire coast Alongside many different objects and paintings, the collection includes somewhere in the region of 2000 photographs, all of which are un-catalogued. So they actually range in date from around the 1860s, some potentially a little bit earlier, to the present day. A lot of them are prints, like professionally made prints.
Others are photocopies of copies of photocopies of photographs. But it’s still very important that we treat the images with as much respect and conservation as we would a sort of professional print because you don’t always know what’s happened to the original image. Everything in the museum was collected by one Staithes resident over the course of his life.
In many ways, it’s quite a lonely job because I’m the only employee there, but the plus side is I get to learn everything, every sort of detail about the history of a really interesting place and put the curatorial skills that I learned in my degree to use. My photographic practice has definitely taught me how to self direct and initiate projects, which is a skill that I use every day in my curatorial job. The theme of curation also links to the theme of this mini lecture, which is portraiture and storytelling.
Because curation is all about storytelling, a museum is a collection of objects, images, and stories, and they all meshed together to build a picture of a place through time.By curating a collection, you’re basically just helping to bring that story forwards. So I’m working obviously with a huge archive of images from the Staithes community and trying to tell the story of that community in the museum.
As photographers we’re constantly learning new transferable skills and curation is definitely one that you can learn through editing your own work and also collaborating with others. Photography and curation have always gone hand in hand really, they’re both just modes of storytelling. Through selecting your images for a project or series, you’re automatically kind of curating them.
You could even argue that the process of taking each photograph is like a curation of reality because you’re sort of carving out-, carving out a story from the chaos of the world, which is a way I kind of think about photography in a way. The phrase…portrait of a place, it’s might sound a bit sort of cliche, but I think this is how my brain sort of works photographically. I’m now going to show some of my own work.
Lecture 2
All the previous images they were all from the collection at the museum where I work. And now these are my pictures. So I basically aim to show the emotional-, or portray the emotional kind of responses that I’ll have to a place through portraiture in combination with other-, other image making. [Noises in background] Something going on out there. I do apologise. For my graduate project which was titled Northern Gothic,I took portraits of familiar people from the area where I grew up on the North Yorkshire coast. Some other photography kind of buzzwords that I enjoy are radical noticing and everyday magic.
I suppose these ideas are quite important to my practice because they, they definitely inform my way of seeing when I’m framing each image, I’m almost looking to squeeze out the magic from the world around me by taking a second look at subjects which might otherwise go overlooked. I’ve tried to apply this concept to fashion photography, as I think it can be really interesting to combine the sort of the hunt for beauty, which is desirable when you’re trying to sell a garment or a product, combine that with what you would maybe consider more everyday people or locations.
I personally think that this juxtaposition can make for a more interesting image. Although her practice is quite different from mine, one of my key influences is Yan Wang Preston. Whilst her subjects are often kind of non-human, she…In her projects Forest and Mother River, she exposes how the environments in which we find ourselves can actually be really ripe with emotion and by shaping the identities of people perhaps both worthy and capable of being the subject of portraiture. Her images from the project Forest appear to me as intimate portraits of trees.
This made me think that portraiture is not just about photographing a person, but about focusing in on and capturing a point of kind of emotive intensity.Mother River-, her project, Mother River, is also a detailed portrait of another non-human subject, the Yangtze River, which Yan Wang Preston photographed very methodically from source to mouth. So she actually split it up into, I think it was a hundred kilometre sections and just literally went there and found what was there and photographed it. But the project’s also kind of a self-portrait of the artist because she explores her deep personal ties to the land and the naturalistic portrayals of the river, which have helped to shape her sense of identity.
This made me realise that sometimes a portrait of a person doesn’t need to picture that person to tell their story. So some resources that I would recommend: Museum Digital collections. I think the best ones are at the Met Museum, so their website, and the New York Public Library’s… Digital Collections, which I think its own separate website. And they both have public domain image collections as well.
These are basically online banks of just thousands of historical images, some more contemporary as well, which you can-, you can actually literally just copy them in some cases and use it in your own work because they’re public domain. So you can actually even use them for profit, shove it on a t-shirt and sell it! But they’re really interesting for inspiration and you can also have a go at being a curator, museum curator yourself by selecting images and combining them in different ways. And yeah, just using it for inspiration. And also, you should sign up for New Art City. They are an online art gallery based in San Francisco. I made my second-…
My second uni exhibition, so my second year project, I exhibited it with them and that was during the height of COVID so we were basically searching for different ways to get our work out there, and it ended up being a really amazing experience, to be honest. And if you-, when you sign up,
they’ll basically give you your own virtual 3D space so you can have a play around in that space displaying your own images, and yeah, and even host an event or a show there. As far as I’m aware, it’s still totally free, so yeah, why not give it a go? Thanks very much for listening. You can follow my work on Instagram,@emily.jane.scott, if you want. And yeah.
Thanks very much. Bye!