Part 5 - Exercise 2

Illustration - Evidence of action

The exercise here is to capture images which convey an action or event by showing it's consequences or end state. In effect the image then contains within it a story, it shows that something has happened - as opposed to just capturing a scene or an object.

Eaten (1)

Eaten (2)

Winner

The above are examples of recording an explicit and direct event. Illustration often involves using less direct and thereby imaginative means to represent more abstract concepts.

Examples used in advertising are:

1. Piggy bank - empty or overflowing to represent poverty or wealth
2. A pile of paperwork or letters to represent being overwhelmed by things
3. The "open road" to represent freedom from constraints or responsibility
4. Blackboards to represent learning
5. Dice to represent chance or taking risks

David Bradford - Drive by Shootings

I bought a book in a great second hand book shop while I was in New York. I think I'd heard of the photographer before, but I'm not sure - David Bradford works as a New York Taxi Driver, but intertwines this with being a photographer. He photographs from his car as he's driving round New York (hand held, without looking through the viewfinder), this provides an interesting take on Street Photography, particularly as parts of the car are often included in the images. The use of frames within frames reminds me of Lee Friedlander's work - particularly the series of photographs taken from a car,.....

However, it's the combination of working life and taking photographs that I also find inspirational, the act of finding the aesthetic and poetic in the every day and capturing this as he sees it - not seeing the act of photography as separate to the act of living life.

Luca Zanier

The BJP December 2013 issue focuses on their favourite people and projects of 2013. One of my preferred ones was Luca Zanier's "Corridor's of Power". The series consists of more than 30 photographs of the interiors of buildings of significant international political importance - the places where important political decisions are made.

The pictures are precisely composed and grand in scale, I'm guessing the pictures are taken on a large format camera. It reminds me of the work of Candida Hofer (particularly her work in Libraries), and other exponents from the Dusseldorf School. It's the graphical nature of the work which intrigues me, along with the sense of scale which is somehow difficult to sizein real terms. The pictures are also vibrant in terms of colour and have a polished sheen to them which is quite futuristic in tone - they look a bit like the control rooms of Bond villains.

Jason Evans

Jason Evans features in Aperture 210, specifically a series of work he's completed where he taken a series of multilayered photographs in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. His technique is to shoot a roll of 35mm film in a given city and then return to the same city at a later date and reshoot on the same roll of film - without any recollection of what image is already stored on the part of the film he is overlaying. This obviously leaves a lot to chance in terms of the outcome, but the results are quite wonderful.

This is a different kind of street photography which moves completely away from the idea of the "decisive moment" because he has limited control over the actual resulting image.

For me, this displays an inspirational amount of confidence and a genuine love of photography and the variance which is at it's heart. Personally, I would find it difficult not to feel frustrated when I processed an image to find that the overlay didn't work, but would have done had the original layer been from the previous image - etc etc etc. That's arguably because I don't have the confidence to follow my convictions - that something will work out eventually. And that I don't love the act of taking photographs enough to allow things to take their own time, but keep committed to the process. Something for me to reflect on.

Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles - Charlotte Cotton

I bought a couple of copies Aperture when I visited their offices in May (think I've written about that before). I was attracted to Issue 210 as it was focussed on looking at the state of photography today. I was particularly interested in an article by Charlotte Cotton - "Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles". Cotton wrote one of the books which I've read and commented on previously in this blog - "The photograph as contemporary art". The article looks at how photography has moved on since she finished the book in 2004.

Unsurprisingly she sees that the main drive for difference has been the increasingly dominant presence of digitalisation within photography - capture, postproduction, display, printing, distribution etc. Early within the article she states:

"Watching these developments, I've oscillated between feeling we are on the cusp of seeing unimaginably brilliant., liberated and different iterations of photographic ideas in a wholesale digital world and being worried that we may be marking the end of a once-central visual medium that is now being put out to a niche pasture."

She then goes on to explain how it is the publishing mechanism (publishing houses, museums, commercial galleries and art schools), which she is concerned about. The article then focuses on these aspects as opposed to the actual photography. Which is odd, because to me, that's the danger of contemporary photography - the photographs seem to be playing second fiddle not only to the process, but worse still, considerations of presentation and distribution (Surely this can very simply be summed up as "style over substance"). And Cotton seems to be capitulating this by concentrating on the distribution rather than the work being distributed.

To make matters worse, the article is written in a dense, academic prose and self referential style which I found convoluted, hard work and deeply uninformative.

So on the whole, quite a disappointing and depressing article....

There are some interesting points though.

"Our attitudes to authorship, shifted massively by our common use of the Internet, confuse our understanding of where photography will fit in the cultural landscape of the future. Anyone interested in high-art photography (where authorship is king, where influences are conventionally hidden, and where reusing existing imagery is consciously acknowledged as appropriation) sees this intellectual-property amnesia  of the age of the "digital native" as a problem, at least on the level of terminology. All photographic imagery circulating on the Internet is the raw material for millions of "unique" stories of (educators hold your breath), self expression."

"Photography's materials(straddling analog and digital technologies) have never been more readily understood by artists or audiences as a series of conscious choices."

RayKo - The Best from Photographers with Plastic Cameras and Film

Every year Rayko hold a competition for photographs taken with basic plastic cameras (https://www.lensculture.com/articles/rayko-the-best-from-photographers-with-plastic-cameras-and-film). The entries have an unsurprisingly low-fi feel which brings a consistent appeal to the entries. The photographer would have had to leave a lot to chance, unsure of what the resulting photograph would be and unable to apply changes in the processing stage - this is clearly part of the appeal. It gives the photographs a magical and fundamental quality, an originality which would be lacking if we knew that the work was digitally manipulated.

I've been attracted to the idea of doing some "lomo" photography for a while, but worried that it was too gimmicky and the seeming offer of high integrity was itself false. However, this work inspires me that it would be worth taking a more lo-fi approach and leaving part of the outcome to chance.

Martin Bogren

I've seen Bogren's series "Tractor Boys" previously, possibly in British Journal of Photography, I was intrigued but I didn't comment in the blog because I just put the work into the category of reportage which didn't really interest me. However, I now see the work in a different light and I'm more aware of why I find the work intriguing (https://www.lensculture.com/articles/martin-bogren-tractor-boys).

The subject matter is that of young men in Sweden who spend their time racing their cars against each other. However, the work has more drama and character than would normally be found in documentary photography. The photographer is adding an additional layer of artistic interpretation here and it is in the combination of the interest of the subject and how this is used and built upon by the artist that the unique character of these photographs is derived.

There is a narrative here, which at least in part is derived by the contrast (juxtaposition), of the raw and macho nature of the subject and the sensitive and poetic nature of the resulting photographs.