While it isn’t expected to have a blog for Contextual Studies, I continue to find it useful to cross-reference between the two and thus will continue to post items on this blog when I think it relevant to my Body of Work. This post is, therefore, an overview of my first assignment for Contextual Studies. It was submitted and feedback received just prior to my second assignment for Body of Work.
Land Values
My Body of Work has developed from a position of wanting to investigate the changing ways in which we engage with and value Land[1]. I refer to this as Land Values. As this work has progressed I have moved away from a third person reflection of society’s changing values, towards a first-person auto-biographical reflection of my changing relationships with Land, society, and personal associations.
Project 1: Lost
The first of my three projects, currently titled Lost, is based on a walk around my old estate to repeat a journey I once took with my father when I was about seven years old. Linking this experience to the fragility of memory and the unreliability of the photograph to represent the truth raises questions about what this series of photographs is capable of representing? Upon further reflection, I suppose that I am looking for understanding; reminding myself of how I engaged with Land when I was a child, how I fitted into the working/benefits class society I grew up in, and what happened to my father’s changing sense of reality on that day of our walk all those years ago?
At first glance, the sample photographs in Figure 1 below represent a collection of images of different parts of a Local Authority housing estate, which don’t appear to communicate any further significance or respond to my search for understanding. To achieve this, I will need to decide how much I want to explicitly refer to these intentions and how much I should allow the viewer the freedom of their own perception.
Figure 1: Project Lost sample images
Barthes, in his essay on ‘The Death of the Author’; (Barthes 1977), proclaims that once the author (photographer) presents their work to others then they lose all authority and control over it; which immediately transcends to the reader (viewer) who becomes the guardian of how it is considered and interpreted. As I come to appreciate the complexities of this relationship I begin to feel a little disconcerted at this loss of control, but something I am beginning to understand and appreciate. How I communicate with my intended audience will therefore need to become an important consideration as I develop this project
Barthes further essay on the language of photography (Barthes, 1999) explains how signs and signifiers create the language from which the photographer communicates with the viewer. The photograph then becomes less about the objects within and more about what they communicate. In order to test this proposition I decided to ask my partner to write down what she reflected upon when viewing the following two images in Figures 2 & 3 (her prior knowledge was restricted to knowing that these images were taken from the estate I grew up in), and then compared this with the personal significance they have for me i.e. the reason for their inclusion in the project.
Figure 2: Project Lost – the shop
| Language of the Photograph | Personal Significance |
|
It is where the journey I took with my father & brother started. I was sent to this shop to buy a couple of fishing nets for a trip to the park.The bushes seemed bigger then and were a place I could make dens or play hide and seek. |
Figure 3: Project Lost – the junction
| Language of the Photograph | Personal Significance |
|
This is the point in our journey where my Dad turned to both of us and told us to stop following him as we weren’t his kids! That’s when, as a 7 year old, I knew something was wrong. We still followed. |
This short exercise demonstrates the richness of interpretation and appreciation that a single viewer can bring to the interpretation of these images. What it also demonstrates, however, is that there is still some disconnection between the personal significance I want to portray in the project and a viewer’s potential ability to appreciate this.
A further dimension to the question of what a photograph represents is when the image is of something that I know not to be part of the reality I am attempting to present but is a representation of someone else’s reality. An example of what I am trying to explain is presented in set of photographs in Figure 4 below:
Figure 4: Project Lost – home?
The image on the left was our home yet the one on the right is a house that my father thought was his home when we were on our walk. Which one represents the truth?
Also, if, at the time we were standing outside the house on the right, I had shown my father the photograph on the left would his perception of which was home have changed? The modernist belief that the photograph represents the truth was probably a common understanding in the mid 1970′s, hence, would the photograph have been all-convincing to him, or, would his misinterpretation of reality have crossed over to his interpretation of the photograph? I will never entirely have answers to such questions but by considering them it is helping me to better understand my father’s difficulties all those years ago.
Project 2: Found
In this second project I move on to reflect upon my current thoughts and relationships with Land, society and current relationships. I have used my developing understanding, formed from a more educated, middle-class appreciation of the intrinsic value for Land, as the basis for this investigation. The project is less intense than the first but it is important in forming a comparative foil to it.
The following images in Figure 5 are of the type that I am considering for this project:
Figure 5: Project Found – sample images
The language of these images is formed from the relationship between the selection of subjects which have obvious signs of their struggle for survival in their natural environment, and their aesthetically appealing composition chosen by the photographer. It is hoped that the visual qualities of these photographs will attract a general audience to them, before moving on to think more about what the photographer is trying to communicate – arguably a tactic similarly used by more well-known environmentalist photographers, such as Edward Burtynsky (http://www.edwardburtynsky.com).
I do have a concern with this project that, when compared with the Project: Lost, its more aesthetic style will appear more representational of the photographer’s style and thus become more difficult to be detached from its interpretation. On the one hand, it seems that the more a photograph is a representation of the photographer’s style the more this can detract from what it is meant to signify. On the other hand, it is my mature sensibility towards the intrinsic beauty of Land that I am trying to highlight. Edward Strauss raises a similar question in his paper on aesthetic and anaesthetic (Strauss, 2005): “Why can’t beauty be a call to action?”, and then supports this by proclaiming that “To represent is to aestheticize; that is, to transform”. In this instance, my choice to aestheticize Land’s struggle for survival identifies the strength (or otherwise) of my concern for Land and society’s impact upon it.
Project 3: Society
At the moment Project 3 is less developed but, as it stands, it does introduce an example of postmodernist appropriation. My approach is to blacken out certain items from a photograph in an attempt to change the perception of what it represents. The blackened out items are focussed on objects that we seem to be accepting as a normal part of modern society yet which are also obstructing us from properly engaging with Land in ways that we might once have done.
The process of removing these objects also creates a “presence through absence” as referred to by Crimp (Crimp, 1980) i.e. the blackened items in each photograph create a foreboding presence of the future implications that this represents
In the example in Figure 6 below, I have begun to remove the artificial grass and the fencing that creates a modern environment for a game of football. By blackening these items out I am questioning the benefit of these items and ask whether they obstruct our free engagement with Land.
Figure 6: Project: Society – example image
(note: the above image is a draft of the process I will follow if I decide to develop this further, which would most likely include carefully blackening out the fence and more of the artificial grass)
As I have been writing this, I have been wondering whether there is an opportunity to merge this idea into Project 1: Lost where I might blacken out items from my old estate that are now obstructing people from engaging with Land that I once engaged with. This appropriation would form a unique way of communicating with the viewer about what has become ‘lost’ from society and the foreboding implications of what this represents
An example of this idea is shown below where I have started to blacken out a fence surrounding playing fields I used to enjoy as a child:
Figure 6: Project: Society – 2nd example image
(note: in the assignment submission I had only blackened out 4 or 5 vertical stakes to illustrate the point)
Overall, I have found it important to understand the contemporary, postmodernist relationship between photographer and viewer, and the dichotomy between initial intentions and observed perceptions. I thus expect that the language of the photograph will be a serious consideration as I progress with each project. I have also touched upon the relationship between the photograph and reality, which will be a key feature to the project Lost when reflecting on the different perceptions between myself and my father. It will be interesting to see how all these thoughts help me to develop my Assignment 2 submission of the Body of Work.
Bibliography
Barthes, R., 1977. The Death of the Author. In: Image, Music, Text. s.l.:s.n.
Barthes, R., 1999. Rhetoric of the image. In: J. Evans & S. Hall, eds. Visual Culture: a reader. London: Sage Publications, pp. 33-40.
Brown, E., 2010. Land Ethics. New Church Perspective.
Crimp, D., 1980. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism. pp. 91-101.
Sandler, R., 2012. Intrinsic Value, Ecology, and Conservation. Nature Education Knowledge.
Strauss, D. L., 2005. The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic. In: D. L. Strauss, ed. Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics. 1st paperback ed. New York: Aperture Foundation, pp. 3-10.
Younkins, E. W., 2004. The Flawed Doctrine of Nature’s Intrinsic Value. Capitalism & Commerce.
[1] The term Land is intended to describe all natural things; such as earth, water, the natural environment, and all living things. It does, however, separate out humans from this definition.
Major Project 