Author: mark516450

Assignment 3 – Further research

I have now had feedback from my tutor on the submission for this assignment and will do a separate post on our discussion later. In the meantime I have followed up his recommendation for a further artist to look at whose work is relevant to the approach that I took for this project.

Chloe Dewe Mathes produced a series of images made at the places where during the First World War soldiers were executed for cowardice (still after a century a deeply controversial subject). In each case the locations are now quite ordinary, banal even, giving little if any hint of what happened there a hundred years ago. These are photographs of landscapes as memory devices but without knowing the context a viewer would be hard put to it to know what memory has been inscribed and recorded in that specific place.

This is something that I have been exploring with my work though this is much more significant and moving set of images.

To take just one example:

The other suggestion relates to the post I wrote about landscapes as memory devices using the book Shimagatari as an example (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2020/03/08/landscape-as-a-memory-device-shimagatari-book-further-thoughts-on-assignment-3/). My tutor has recommended the film The Naked Island, which is set on a small, remote Japanese island. It is available on YouTube and I now just need to find a quiet hour and a half to watch it.

http://www.chloedewemathews.com/shot-at-dawn/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=watGzwZ6S-c&has_verified=1

Keeper of the Hearth – Book

The latest photographic offering in the Guardian from the estimable Sean O’Hagan is about a new project, and related book, responding to Roland Barthes’s iconic book Camera Lucida.

At the heart of Camera Lucida, although it only makes an “appearance” about half way through the book, is a photograph of the author’s mother at the age of five. The irony is of course that the photograph itself does not actually appear at all; we only have Barthes’s description of it. (The book might, given that absence, perhaps have had an alternative title of Camera Vacua, the Empty Room, which opens up the pun – for which I can only apologise but nevertheless cannot resist – based on the modern, English, meaning of “camera” of the Empty Camera.)

What this recent project and its resulting book do is try to fill that gap, with various artists, writers, and others, presenting found or created images that in a way refer back to the photograph of Barthes’s mother and stand in for it. I have not seen a copy of the book, which is called Keeper of the Hearth after the French meaning of his mother’s name, Henriette, but will almost inevitably do so in due course, not least because it perhaps goes some way towards answering, or at least considering, one of the abiding questions about Camera Lucida: did the photograph actually exist?

I am aware that some critics, in particular have argued that it did not. I have not looked into any of those arguments, and have no firm view of my own one way or another, but it is certainly an interesting one, that I have thought about, and that does seem to me to have important implications for for issues about the “truth” and reliability of photographs. This is of course something that interested me throughout my time studying with OCA.

A number of possibilities occur to me. One is of course that the photograph did indeed exist. Why then does it not appear if it was such a pivotal image? Perhaps simply because it represented such a personal memory for Barthes that he did not want to share (all) of it? Was he making a point about the unreliability as a memory device? Was it a jeu d’esprit in the style of Lawrence Sterne in Tristram Shandy with his refusal to picture Widow Wadman, leading to the infamous blank page [147] and the exhortation to “Paint her to your own mind”? I cannot quite see Barthes being this frivolous but it is an idea that appeals to me.

Along this line of thought, and with parallels to this new project, in 2018 The Lawrence Sterne Trust (run from the actual Shandy Hall by the resourceful, entertaining, and hospitable, Patrick Wildgust) ran a project with 147 artists, writers, actors, assorted celebrities, to produce their own images or texts representing their own personal imaginings of the Widow. Great fun but also seriously thought provoking, as this new book will no doubt be.

Or, getting back to the point, did it not exist? Was it just a McGuffin, a useful mechanism for making his broader point?

In any event, even if it had appeared in the book would we have been able to trust it? In the absence of any corroborating context would we have been able to know whether it was genuine or not? But is that not largely the point, whether the photograph existed or not, and whether or not it was included in the book? This very much makes me think of various of the books by WG Sebald (whom O’Hagan mentions) that include photographs. There reliability, their veracity, is always open to question, which in turn adds to the lingering doubts about the precise status of some of his works: are they fact or fiction?

And that is of course a point that I keep coming back to, that photographs in and of themselves are not necessarily “the truth”.

https://www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk/shop-item.php?id=155

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/apr/15/photographic-mystery-roland-barthes-mother-odette-england-keeper-of-the-hearth

Toshio Shibata: Gas Stations – Book

A short note on a little book that I have just acquired by the Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata. By “little” I mean little! Just 150mm by 210mm and containing only seven images, this is work that Shibata did in the 1980s and is, as the title suggests, a collection of black and white photos of Japanese gas stations. Taken at night (I am guessing, on a large format camera) they are starkly contrasted and have a sense of stillness and a gem-like quality that it seems to me you can really only get with film.

One of the things that attracted me to this work is the way, as with the likes of Eiji Ohashi and his vending machine pictures, such a mundane subject can be elevated to a higher aesthetic plane and how beauty can be found in a human intervention in the landscape that would not otherwise warrant a second glance (unless of course you need petrol for your car).

This sort of subject matter had of course already been explored in the 1960s by Ed Ruscha and his Twenty-Six Gas Stations and similar sites appear in the work of others (Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places come to mind in particular). I think though that this more pared down, concise work has more impact. Certainly it appeals to me more strongly.

It is one of those odd coincidences that this book comes along just as I have been thinking about possible subjects for Assignment 5. One possibility that I had already been considering would be to photograph sites around my village, including our own petrol station (along with, for example, certain shops, the cricket club, local school, train station, and so on), with an absence of people, possibly also at night. If nothing else it would give me an excuse to try film again, on a large format camera. My only hesitation at the moment is that with the current virus lock-down being out and about without a particularly compelling reason might attract unwanted attention. Let us wait and see what happens over the coming weeks before any decisions are made.

Shibata, T, (2020). Gas Stations. Manchester: Nazraeli Press

The Darkroom Awaits!

A bit of a day off today from routine course-work. Since the lock-down started, even in our sparsely populated part of the world, mundane tasks such as the weekly shop have become rather more demanding enterprises – at least today it was no more than a half hour queue to get into our local Waitrose and I was able to get almost all of what we need.

As a reward to myself (after a couple of hours sorting out the veg garden as well as walking the dog) I finally got my darkroom sorted out! Having failed miserably to buy a suitable table from IKEA (nothing suitable in stock or only deliverable at too high a cost) I have improvised with an old cupboard shelf and two stacks of wine rack as pedestals. Just the right height and big enough to accommodate an old tripod that my wife bought years ago to use with a video camera (the old compact VHS type for anyone who remembers) in the absence of a proper copy stand. (I have an Intrepid 4×5 which converts into a developer/enlarger with a back mounted light source and timer unit.)

Otherwise, to my surprise, making sure the room in my undercroft that I am going to use light-safe proved to be easier than anticipated. So all done! All I need now is a power extension cable to serve the enlarger light source unit, timer, and safe-light (the power sockets down there are just that bit too far away from the work area), which will not be difficult to get. Developing trays, chemicals, paper, and all the other bits-and-bobs, are ready. There is unfortunately no running water but a couple of plastic jerrycans will suffice.

So, at last, the next step is actually to print some of my own work. That might sound pretty mundane but in these days of digital dominance that is, for me, a pretty important thing.

Exercise 4.3: A subjective voice

This strikes me as one of those exercises that could generate a different answer on a different day. I suspect that my personal response to landscape is variable and multifaceted so that it is difficult to pin down just one answer, with so few words. Nevertheless there are two points that are currently of particular concern to me.

One is something that I have touched on a number of times in the past and that is the closing off of the countryside. Here I am very much moved by Fay Godwin’s work. This is a far from straightforward issue in so far as property rights have to be respected but my main concern is that too much of the country is closed off by such property rights that are not appropriate (that are themselves the result of “appropriation” in the past. The mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932 made a major difference but in England, unlike in Scotland, there is no “right to roam”.

Paradoxical as it might seem, one of my other current concerns is the over-use and commodification of parts of the landscape. People must have access but that access carries with it disadvantages: traffic, yet more car parks, litter, overcrowding, environmental degradation. Bits of, for example, the Pennine Way and Lake District hills have suffered badly from erosion cause by the tramping of so many boots. Bits of Hadrian’s Wall (in my back yard, so to speak) have been badly damaged by too much foot traffic and have had to be closed, even if only temporarily. Ben Nevis can feel like a busy high street in good weather as so many people disgorge from their busses and cars (particularly at times when the Three Peaks Challenge is in full swing). That is why I no longer go to these places (apart from the Wall if we have interested visitors staying) and prefer instead to frequent to quieter, the local, the otherwise unvisited, the hidden places so if nothing else I can try to avoid being a part of a wider problem.

This thinking is there as part of how I view the concept of landscape and its unavoidable connections with people. It is that relationship which is already affecting the landscape work that I do and is, I am sure, going to have a significant impact on what work I decide to explore in the future.

Personal identities and multiculturalism

This feels a slightly odd mixture of materials to consider and as a result I suspect my comments and thoughts below are similarly going to be a bit of a mixed bag.

Ingrid Pollard’s work is interesting – I do not think I have come across it before – but I have to confess that as an ageing white male it does not really speak to me. I simply do not share her experiences so I can only imagine (which is by no means the same thing as understanding, let alone experiencing) how she might have felt in the countryside. I can see that there is a popular perception that the Black experience is an urban one and in all of my years of tramping about I have to say that I have not been conscious of seeing many people of colour. Particularly in areas of the countryside close to urban areas where there are significant Asian ethnic minority populations, as Simon Roberts goes on to point out in his blog post, it has not been uncommon in my limited experience to see people out and about and apparently at ease in the countryside. I am intrigued by this apparent different between different communities and wonder why it is there. Roberts unfortunately does not really address this, so perhaps it is a bit of a puzzle for him.

My own experience of this is perhaps a bit distorted by where I live. It is some years since I regularly went walking in some of our more famous bits of countryside: the Peaks, Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, and so on. I now live in a largely rural county (not the largest by any means but quite big and with the lowest population density in England) and just by stepping out of my village I am in the country. Not grand nor dramatic but countryside nevertheless, and quiet. The BAME population locally is very small. The nearest significant population, mostly of people originally from South Asia, is in Newcastle and by most standards is still quite small. Rarely do I see them out and about. Perhaps that is because it is such a small, rural population around here and they do not feel comfortable? I do not know but it is striking. To put things in a bit more perspective though if you go to our own “big hills”, the Cheviots which are in many ways equivalent to the Lake District hills, in some places it is possible to go all day and not see a soul, of any ethnicity!

On a different point, I did listen to the Tate audio programme. I have to say that audio is not really a very successful medium alone for discussing visual arts. Without being able to see the works under discussion I found it difficult properly to take on board the points being made and so did not find that I got much out of this. I also have to say that I found the quality of the sound a bit patchy so that it was sometimes hard to follow properly what was being said; and no, that was not just because I am a bit deaf in one ear!

The other audio piece, which I thought did work rather better, possibly because I am more familiar with her work, the episode of Desert Island Discs featuring Fay Godwin, was entertaining but I did not really think I got much if anything new about her work. I think I got much more from the material that we looked at earlier in this module, not least the old Melvin Bragg documentary. Not particularly revelatory but at least mildly diverting. My serious point here though is that I did not feel the move from Pollard’s work, with its ethnic social implications, to Godwin’s more political work, was entirely comfortable.

The same might be said about the foot and mouth disease work of John Darwell and Clive Landon. This is certainly political work with much in common with Godwin but I am far from sure how it fits with the issues of personal identity. So far as this work is concerned, unfortunately I could not find much of Landon’s work online so drawing comparisons with Darwell’s is difficult. The sense I get though is that Landon’s is much more visceral, disturbing. Darwell’s actually reminds me of some of how it felt at the time living within rural communities that were affected by the disease: a strange sense of unreality and physical distance – large parts of the county were closed off and people were distanced from places affected. I remember road blocks and barriers, road diversions, disinfection points where the car was sprayed with chemicals, ominous clouds of smoke in the distance. Where I live is only a few miles from a farm that was at least the epicentre of the outbreak of disease locally and one of the earliest nationally that was affected. Local folk-lore still has it that DEFRA (or whether the government department was called back then, it is constantly changing) were buying up timber (you could not get the likes of old railway sleepers for garden landscaping for love nor money) for weeks before the outbreak eventually went public for the ubiquitous pyres once the slaughter started. It is strange but as I write this – it was a very bad time for the local agricultural community and I have not though about it for years – I can recall the smell of disinfectant and bonfire, a not very pleasant note on which to stop for now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00947zh

http://johndarwell.com/index.php?r=image/default/category&alias=dark-days

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/conversation-pieces-ingrid-pollard-on-landscape

http://we-english.co.uk/blog/2009/01/16/contested-countryside/

Daido Moriyama

A brief note on an article that appeared in the Guardian earlier this week. I have been meaning to get a short post up since it appeared but have been hampered by a lousy internet connection.

Suitably short on words, this shows a brief but nicely representative selection of his work. It is amazing that he is now in his eighties but still goes out with his camera every day. The flow of images in his self-published Record seems unquenchable, though I must say that now I am beginning to find the volume of stuff that he publishes a bit overwhelming and I have given up trying to keep on top of his output!

He nevertheless remains one of my favourite photographers (funny how now so many of them seem to be Japanese!). Perhaps paradoxically though I do not think of him as an active influence on my own work (unlike, for example, Rinko Kawauchi who has affected some of what I have produced, though admittedly not much of that I have made for the OCA courses) and have never felt much of an urge to emulate his approach or style, or at least not yet.

Here is a copy of the article:

Harsh, blurred and brilliant: the great Daidō Moriyama – in pictures

The faceless city … a modern high-rise.

He is one of Japan’s most renowned photographers, a giant of the Provoke movement whose compelling images take a disturbing view of city life and the chaos of existence

All photographs © Daidō Moriyama

Tue 31 Mar 2020 07.00 BST

Daidō Moriyama emerged from the influential Provoke movement, which began as a magazine in 1968 aiming to ‘free photography from subservience to the language of words’.

His bold, uncompromising style put Japanese photography on the international stage

Moriyama acquired an early reputation as a provocative street photographer. These images are from Daidō Moriyama: A Diary due to open at Foto Colectania Foundation, Barcelona, on 12 March but now postponed.

The photographs due to be seen in this show were drawn from nearly 50 years of work. Moriyama’s images resist chronological reading or thematic division

Reproduction is important to Moriyama. He sometimes took photographs of his photographs, which he would then photograph again

Moriyama continues to work every day, photographing his neighbourhood in Tokyo, but also travelling to America and Europe. His style is simple: stop, take a photo, move on

His work is often abstract but he also creates decadent still lifes out of banal objects, giving them an almost fetishistic quality

His work has been reproduced on coffee mugs, skateboards and T-shirts, reflecting his desire that these images should have a life beyond the exhibition space

Moriyama has influenced generations of photographers around the world

The photographer, who is 81, won the prestigious Hasselblad award in 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/mar/31/photography-daido-moriyama-in-pictures

Exercise 4.2: The British landscape during World War II

This article concentrates on thinking about, and the use of ideas of, landscape as used during the Second World War but I think the points actually go deeper, are much older, and are fundamental to enduring ideas of “Britishness”.

One irony that the article touches on is that these ideas of landscape are very much rooted in England, and Englishness, but have come to stand for Britain and Britishness as a whole, at least in some circles. Our idealised landscapes are nearly all English, particularly southern English. At best some of the ideal images will come from, for example, the Lake District, but most of the rest of the nation does not get much of a look-in. There might be the odd view from the South-west, particularly if related to that great “British” myth of King Arthur, or a suitably picturesque, but rugged and wild – sublime even? – view from the Scottish Highlands, but little from anywhere else. It is ironic that this is essentially a bucolic, rural myth, whereas the majority of the population live in cities, a disjunction all the more striking in the south given the huge proportion of the population that lives in London alone.

The key theme, particularly in relation to the war years, is how viewing the landscape has been, and still is, very much rooted in the past. Sometimes an imagined, even mythical past (King Arthur again), but nevertheless an idea of the past as something different from, and better than, the present but that helps to define the present. What is more, and this is an idea that from my admittedly jaundiced and sceptical 21^stcentury view I struggle with personally, the landscape was seen to go as far as defining, or at least helping to define, a quintessentially English way of life.

One idea I find particularly interesting in the article is the way, during the war, the landscape was closed off, not only to outsiders (the hiding of place names, road signs, and so on), but also to the inhabitants of these islands behind barbed wire fences and other physical defences, so that in a way the landscape was put away for safe-keeping for the duration. The image that came to my mind while reading this piece was of the works of art that were taken from public galleries and stored in quarries and mines in remote areas out of harms way. It is as if the landscape had been packed up and hidden in a cave.

The article makes much of the way the presentation of the landscape as something that had to be preserved, that was worth fighting for, almost indeed why the war was being fought (which I think is a rather reductive view but I can see why that message might have been put across at the time), served to unite the different classes and groups within society who had, notably during the inter-war years, but in fact going back far, far longer, been at odds over land use and ownership. I am not sure that these conflicts have in fact yet been resolved, or indeed ever will be, and with the war past are as alive today as ever before.

The other major point that the article brings out is the sense of the nation as a fortress. This was of course nothing new and probably goes back as far what one might regard as the birth of a distinct, single, united nation of England (deliberately leaving out for now Scotland, Wales, pre Act of Union, and Ireland) after the last successful European invasion in 1066. The idea of the “fortress” island promoted during the war at the very least leads me to think of John of Gaunt’s “scepter’d isle’’ speech in Shakespeare’s King Richard II (Act II, Sc. i, lines 43 – 49):

“This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war;

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands;”

A bit ironic today in light of the coronavirus! Whilst this myth of “England” has been alive and well of late in the context of Brexit it is not much help, let alone protection, in the face of Covid-19, which shows up the myth for what it is.

Assignment 3: Reflection on Assessment Criteria

One might be forgiven for thinking that by this stage in the degree course I would have properly got my head around exactly what is required when reflecting on the assessment criteria when submitting an assignment. Notwithstanding, it is still something that I struggle with. The difficulty that I continue to have is that although I understand the criteria I find it hard, if not impossible, to form a proper objective view, not on whether the criteria have been met, but how well. My blind-spot, no doubt, but I also cannot help thinking that it would be useful if the course actually included some practical guidance in this regard.

Subject to that, I am reasonably content that I tick most, if not all, of the relevant boxes (pace, how well) and I do not think, on reflection, that I would approach this assignment differently if starting afresh.

One area that does still trouble me somewhat is the development of a personal voice. Clearly a work in progress but I do think there are certain elements that are coming together, particularly so far as conceptualisation is concerned. I do not feel I have yet developed anything that might be described as a distinctive “look”. I try though not to let this worry me too much. At the moment I feel that there is, over the course to date as a whole, such a diversity of subject matter, exercises and projects that they invite a variety of approaches and experiments and it is from this process of exploration, trial and error, that a more personal vision will develop in time.

Assignment 3 – Final Set

As outlined in earlier posts I have decided for this assignment to focus on the idea of spaces becoming specific places, with some sense of significance, as a result of human intervention. To explore this idea I have concentrated on a series of public benches at various locations around the village where I live. Some of these are specifically memorial benches, commemorating particular individuals, or historical events (for example, the First and Second World Wars, the Silver Jubilee of 1977). Others are simply benches, presumably installed by the local Parish council, that do not have any obvious memorial function.

Some of the memorial benches carry public, easily understood memories. For others the memories are more personal, known to only a select group of people, and not apparent to others.

All have in common, with one exception, that it is not clear what direct connection there is between the memory and the site, or why it might have been chosen. The one exception (fourth in the sequence) states explicitly that the dedicatee had a fondness for that particular location.

One other thing they have in common is that the sites do not even have anything that might be described as a picturesque view. The “view” directly opposite is of little more than a hedge, or an otherwise featureless or characterless space. Most are sited in locations that are otherwise attractive. But that attractiveness is not apparent from the view directly in front of the bench. Only one (the fifth) offers a more expansive view, looking across the valley opposite. Even this is limited: the view is of the road, a stone wall, and then sky. The valley vista is not actually visible from the bench. Tellingly, there is another bench on the far side of the road, just out of shot to the left, that does have an expansive view. (Because of its location it was not practical to photograph it as well.)

As if to emphasise the lack of intrinsic significance of these locations, I only rarely see anyone sitting on a few of these benches. Some I have never ever seen being used at all.

The images have been arranged into diptychs help root the benches in their locations. The addition of coordinates reflects the fact anywhere can become a “place” by the simple act of specifying its geographical coordinates, turning it into somewhere that is locatable using, for example, GPS, or a map. The sequence is simply determined by the position of each site on a clockwise loop from my house.

In terms of physical presentation, having settled on a typological approach, rather than a linear arrangement I feel that a block layout, in a manner similar to the some of the Bechers’s, and Anton Kuster’s Blue Skies project, would have greater visual impact. For this to work properly though I feel that a considerably larger number of images would be needed than the assignment brief calls for.