Although I have to produce the physical book for this assignment (I am currently awaiting some book binding materials and tools that will be helpful) I have been giving more thought to how I deal with the map that is to go on the reverse of the photos.
The original intention was to make this up from an Ordnance Survey map. While working on the dimensions of the book (I am intending the images to be A5) it quickly became apparent that this is not going to work. The problem is largely one of scale. The ratio of the physical length of the series of photos to their height is 17:1. Looking at the map though the ratio from the start point to the end is more like 17:3; the distance between the start and finish points, a straight line from west to east, is about 17 miles but the distance between the southernmost point on the route, the start point at Stocksfield, and the northernmost point, Clara Vale roughly half way between Wylam and Blaydon, is three miles. The numbers simply do not fit the format of the book! I have looked at a number of other possibilities but none of them work particularly well. One is simply to distort the map to straighten out the train line. This just looks odd. Another is to make a sort of mosaic made up of twelve panels that each show a section of the line and fit the 17:1 ratio. This though looks very disjointed and does not give a sense of the continuous journey.
I have therefore been looking at a more schematic approach and have been confirmed in my thoughts that this should be better by looking again at the two books I have mentioned in connection with Exercise 5.5. I have been thinking along the lines of train network and route maps (think the London Underground map) that do not contain any reliable geographical information but merely show which station is followed by which when travelling along the line. Northern Railway, our local train company, have a very simple, purely linear, schematic map showing the stations along the line. This I think can form the basis for the book’s map, but to make it more interesting, and tie it more closely to the geographical realities of the journey, I intend to include, at the appropriate points in relation to the stations, some of the places of interest along the way, that are either referred to in the photographs, or are otherwise of local significance. Not least it needs to give an indication of the river and of the bridges over it. I am currently playing around with a few ideas but at the moment I think this is going to have to be hand drawn, at least for the purposes of this initial mock-up. Depending on how well that comes out, it might of course be necessary to come up with something more refined if the book was ever to be produced as something more than an experiment. More on this anon.
Molitor, C, (2015). Sonorama. Listening to the view from the train. Axminster: Uniformbooks
Stenger, S, (2014). Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland. Newcastle: AV Festival
Last night while cooking dinner, and listening to Mozart sonatas for piano and violin, (not so irrelevant perhaps, as it meant that I was not actively thinking about this coursework) I had some more thoughts about the book project for Assignment 2 and the slideshow experiment for this exercise. In particular there came to mind two books that I had not thought out before in connection with any of this work but that are in fact helpful to what I am doing now, Molitor (2015) and Stenger (2014).
Neither of these involve photography but they do have linked visual and audio elements. Claudia Molitor’s work, which can still be experienced on her website cited below, is an audio representation of a journey by train from London to Margate, the sounds, songs, music, and words, representing places along the way, accompanying a schematic, hand-drawn map of the journey. Susan Stenger’s work was an installation based around a geological cross-sectional map of the coast of Northumberland, from the mouth of the Tyne to the Tweed at Berwick, made in 1839 by Nicholas Wood, some 12.5 metres long. The map was accompanied by a soundtrack, mostly made up of fragments of folk tunes associated with places along the route, lasting about an hour. The idea was that you walked along the map, listening to the fragments at the relevant points along the way.
These two works set off an idea for developing the work I did for Assignment 2 as a possible alternative to the book. When I originally did that work, I did not think that a slideshow would work well, particularly with the limited set that will form the book. I also did not have a good grasp on creating a slideshow. Now that I have done a couple of experiments for this exercise, and having played around a bit more with Lightroom, which has proved easier than I thought, notwithstanding a couple of false starts, I think that something could be done. To work properly though it needs to be much more substantial and include many more of the shots that I took along the route. Indeed, I have for now settled on about 108, making a slideshow that lasts almost 12 minutes. In an ideal world I think it would be interesting to make the slideshow last as long as the journey itself, about 25 minutes, to make a much more immersive experience. I have posted this initial trial set on Vimeo.
Bearing in mind the work of Molitor and Stenger, what the slideshow needs is a soundtrack to accompany it. Realistically I do not think this is easily achievable now, for the purposes of this exercise, and would be quite a major project in its own right, not least if the whole piece was to last the equivalent time of the train trip. There are also issues with regard to licensing, and presumably royalties, for some of the music that would be useful in a project such as this. Nevertheless, here are some ideas for music and sounds that might work:
The start of Richard Rodney Bennett’s theme music for “Murder on the Orient Express”
Extracts from Arthur Honegger’s “Pacific 231”
The sound of migrating geese for the ponds at Merryshield
“Rocket Man” for Wylam where George Stephenson’s cottage is (an unforgivable but irresistible pun)
The sound of golfers for Ryton golf course
“Blaydon Races” (for Blaydon, obviously!)
The sound of cash registers from Pink Floyd’s “Money” (Dark Side of the Moon) for the Metro Centre
Iron foundry/heavy industrial noises for the Armstrong works at Scotswood
Pons Aelius “Fire under the Bridge”
Lindisfarne “Fog on the Tyne”
I am sure there are plenty of other sounds and tunes that could also be incorporated, particularly folk tunes that have specific local connections, but it is going to take quite a lot more work to identify them and bring them together. For now, just let this be a mental exercise.
Molitor, C, (2015). Sonorama. Listening to the view from the train. Axminster: Uniformbooks
Stenger, S, (2014). Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland. Newcastle: AV Festival
I am a little out of sequence again, but I have jumped ahead to this exercise as it fits with some work that I have been playing around with recently in connection with Assignment 1. When I completed that assignment my primary mode of presentation was simply a sequence of still images. I did though speculate about the possibility of transforming then into a slideshow, not realising at the time that this is something that we would be coming to later. At the time I was not at all sure how I would be able to achieve this, but I have subsequently worked out how to do it, without special software. I do now have the latest version of Lightroom, and I see that there is a slideshow function within it. I have yet to master it so for the time being I have used the very simple function within iPhoto on my Mac, converting the resulting files into .m4v and .mov to enable them to play on any platform.
As I speculated when working on Assignment 1, in order for a slideshow of this sequence to work well, with a good transition from image to image, I have had to do a bit more editing of the final set I put together at the time. I have had to flip a couple of the images to make sure that there is greater consistency in the direction in which the clouds eventually clear. I have also added a couple of extra images, that did not form part of the original set, to make the dissolve smoother. Ideally, I would have liked to add a couple more but unfortunately there are not enough suitable images amongst the experimental shots to make this possible.
Initially I was not sure about using an audio track, not least because there is not much choice within iPhoto. I have though now had a look at the Free Music Archive website and found a track that is suitable – a manipulated field recording of temple bells and singing bowls, which are appropriate to the Buddhist ideas that underpin the work I made. For the sake of comparison, I have uploaded to my new Vimeo account (apart from this exercise I am not sure how much I am going to use this!) two versions, one with, and one without, sound. My feeling at this stage though is that the version with sound works better. Visually I am also quite pleased with this: the sense of transition that I was looking for in this work is much stronger with the slideshow than a simple sequence of still images.
Apart from the work on the soundtrack, I had essentially finished the editing of the slideshow before I read any of this part of the course material. To that extent I have not been influenced by any of the suggested examples, nor indeed much helped by them. Most of the cited links appear to be bad so I could not access the recommended materials in any event. Some I could not look at properly as I have a problem with running Flashplayer on my computer (why, is a mystery, as it is brand new and running the latest version of Mac OS, but Flashplayer will simply not load and run). A couple of the photo-stories in Foto8 were interesting but not particularly helpful: they are dealing with the use of slideshows in a documentary setting, without a particular narrative, whereas my work for Assignment 1 was predicated on specific start and end points, with a progression between them. In any event I have my doubts about the suitability of slideshows for such documentary work. I think it works with Chris Leslie’s piece where the still images stand in for video. The soundtrack also gives it a sense of structure and progression. For some of the work on Foto8 though it felt more like a mechanical means of moving from one image to the next, doing away with the need to press the “next” button that did not really add a sense of storytelling, at least in a linear sense. I would much rather have moved through the images at my own pace, lingering, going back where necessary.
At the moment I do not envisage that any form of slideshow would be suitable for the work that I have in mind for Assignment 5.
“The living language of our time is urban.” Sir Michael Tippett, Songs for Dov
Humans and landscape are inextricably linked. People have helped form the environment within which they live and have in turn been formed by it. This is nothing new, as Schama points out (1996, at page 7):
“Objectively, of course, the various ecosystems that sustain life on the planet proceed independently of human agency, just as they operated before the hectic ascendancy of Homo sapiens. But it is also true that it is difficult to think of a single such natural system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. Nor is this simply the work of the industrial centuries. It has been happening since the days of ancient Mesopotamia. It is coeval with writing, with the entirety of our social existence. And it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.”
With that background in mind, the question that I want to address here is whether the photographing of people in an urban environment, street photography, can itself be regarded as a form of landscape photography; whether the picturing of the human elements of a city can tell us anything about that urban environment without the direct depiction of the built environment itself. I also want to challenge the idea of genres and different disciplines within photography and argue for a greater sense of fluidity and overlap. As in many walks of life and human activity there is a tendency to categorise and draw distinctions. Photography seems particularly prone to this. There are photographers working in landscape, on the streets, in documentary and photojournalism, portraiture, and so on, and these are often presented as distinct disciplines. It is striking though that, for example, many of the photographers interviewed in Wolf (2019) resist such categorisation, reject the ideas of genre and style, and adopt a much more inclusive approach.
In this context what I have in mind is an idea of “street photography” as a form of visual psychogeography rather than a depiction of an identifiable physical, built environment. More than just the photographing of people within a particular environment, but also elements of the physical environment that would not necessarily of themselves be enough to identify with any certainty the particular location at which the photograph was taken, the signs and symbols of human presence and agency, that are encountered on the street.
From earliest times people have been a feature of landscape painting. They have been used to give a sense of scale, to make a political point about ownership of the land, to tell a story about the land. As time has gone on people have become increasingly urbanised. Fewer people inhabit some bucolic ideal but live instead among structures of concrete, glass, and steel. In the early days of photography these urban environments themselves became the subject of “landscape” photography. The built environment was itself the subject and people were again often used in a similar way to the painterly conventions, for example in early work of Stieglitz and Strand.
Alfred Stieglitz. Flatiron Building. 1903Paul Strand. Wall Street. 1915
With the advent of more compact, portable cameras the focus shifted more to the people themselves rather than the places they lived. Humanity, with all its quirks and foibles, became the subject of the urban photograph rather than the city itself. The emphasis shifted from the topographical to the anthropological.
I certainly do not think that all approaches to street photography tell us much, if anything, about the urban environment. “Weegee” does not give us much sense of place as he created his “tabloid” dramas.
Arthur Fellig. Harry Maxwell Shot in Car. 1936
Nor do two of the greatest American street photographers, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand.
Lee Friedlander. New York City. 1963 (?)Garry Winogrand. American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas. 1964
What they do give is a sense of urban, specifically American, society, but not necessarily of the place. Their work is more to do with the ‘social landscape’, as became the subject of a number of influential exhibitions in the 1960s (Warner Marien, 2014, p348 ff) and was subsequently taken further by the likes of Lisette Model and Diane Arbus. More recently there have been characters such as Bill Cunningham, more concerned with fashion and style than anything else, and Bruce Gilden with his (for my taste, rather aggressive and intrusive) flash-in-your-face approach to picturing ordinary people on the streets.
Bruce Gilden. New York City. (Date?)
In the birthplace of photography as a medium, and urban photography as a particular approach, Paris, I again do not really find any artists who have caught the physical environment of the city through the photography of its inhabitants: Eugene Atget’s work is more purely topographical and people are largely absent; André Kertész was more interested in Surrealism; Brassai with the social landscape; Cartier-Bresson with the so-called decisive moment.
André Kertész. Meudon. 1928Brassaï. Paris by Night. 1933 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Behind Gare Saint-Lazare. 1932
It is perhaps surprising that this is arguable given that the street photographer might be regarded as the photographic equivalent of the flaneur and so immersed in the human/urban environment. It is though my impression that unlike the literary flâneur, particularly the more contemporary psychogeographers, the photographic flâneur does not generally create a photographic equivalent depiction of the city through images of its people alone. As Florian Ebner discusses in his article “Urban Characters, Imaginary Cities” in Eskilden (2008, p186 ff) and as Sontag argued (1979, pages 54 to 58) the photographic flâneur is more concerned with peering into the world outside his or her bourgeois milieu, a particularly socially-downward view (arguably a patronising one as a result) and the camera “makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own” (page 57). Sontag’s views are not uncontroversial and accepted universally uncritically, despite the iconic status of her book (I personally have difficulty with many of her pronouncements on the medium). She did of course later revise her own views (2004). I do nevertheless feel there is a kernel of justification for what she says here and that it is a valid charge that can be laid at the door of some street photography; it simply does not always give us any real sense of the environment through which the photographer moves. One passage is particularly apt and worth quoting at some length, despite its hyperbole, (page 55):
“Gazing on other people’s reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends social class interests, as if its perspective is universal. In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept at the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world “picturesque”. … The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations – an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer “apprehends”, as a detective apprehends a criminal.”
The true irony, I suppose, is succinctly identified by Ebner (at page 192), that despite these indictments, “it is due to photography’s compulsion to collect in an apparently indifferent manner that it has provided the very bedrock of our visual memory of the city”.
Before moving on to my main point I must add a note here about the photographic examples that I am including below. In my view it is extremely difficult to identify one single example of the work of each of the artists I am about to discuss that adequately illustrates the argument. In each case it seems to me that it is the larger body of work, the whole book, or in Moriyama’s case his entire oeuvre, that is significant and that, I would argue, supports my position. Each image that follows is therefore little more than an isolated example of each photographers’ “bigger picture”.
Despite the foregoing I do believe that there are some strands within the broad church of street photography that can be included within the wrapper of landscape photography. Walker Evans (always a good starting point) could perhaps be said to have sown some seeds with his American Photographs (2012), though I see this as work that overall is still more firmly rooted in the topographic.
Parked Car, Small Town Main Street. 1932
The real catalyst is perhaps Robert Frank’s “The Americans”, to my mind the first work to produce a psychogeographic picture of a nation as a whole (rather than a specific urban environment).
Rodeo – New York City. 1955/6
It strikes me that one significant element of Frank’s view, and depiction of then contemporary America, is that Frank was a “foreigner”, in so far as he was born in Switzerland, so was able, to an extent, to bring an outsider’s eye to the nation. To what extent this is a really a significant factor is a debate for elsewhere but perhaps it is more than coincidental that it is something that he shared to an extent with my next example, William Klein.
Klein’s book (2016) is one of the very few that I have come across that seem to me to show that street photography can approach the picturing of a physical landscape without depicting its topography in a literal, conventional “landscape photography” way. His approach is various, eclectic, sometimes apparently chaotic. The editing and arrangement of the images across the physical pages of the book are unconventional and often visually jarring. It sometimes reminds me of the “jump-cut” approach to editing used by French Nouvelle Vague film directors, particularly the sequence in Jean-Luc Goddard’s “A bout de souffle” in which Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg drive around central Paris: the editing flits about from place to place in a non-linear manner but nevertheless conveys a sense of Paris itself. In Klein’s work we see people, snatches of places and locations, rarely, but not without exception, easily identifiable, signs, adverts, all sorts of symbols of an idea of the city. Occasionally it falls into Sontag’s flâneur trap, wallowing in the seedier sides of life, but nevertheless the cumulative effect is to give an impression of the city as a physical, geographical, place. In his article included in the 2016 ‘Books on Books’ edition of the book, Max Kozloff comments (unhelpfully, the pages of the commentary section of the book are not numbered):
“The experience of paging through New York comes to seem almost one of being on the run, of stumbling over obstacles, ending in visual fatigue. The big city often does that to its denizens, bombards them with feckless montage.”
And on Klein’s approach:
“Not people within an urbanscape, not architecture with signs of life, but the whole populated setting, far or close, draws his regard.”
Klein himself, as reported by Jeffrey Ladd in his accompanying article on the making of the book, had said from the outset that “he wanted to photograph New York in a “new way””. Not just the people, not just the physical nature and appearance of the city, but something much more. In a way the book becomes a pictorial analog of the physical experience of the city and being within its environment.
William Klein. Life is Good & Good for You in New York. 1956
As with Robert Frank, was it significant that Klein effectively photographed the city from the perspective of an outsider having spent the preceding years living in Paris? This recurring question, which is unanswerable here, actually leads me to another example, this time in Japan. (Another question that this investigation has thrown up is why so much street photography has focused on New York? It is no coincidence that all of the examples that I have cited so far have been photographers who have worked in New York City. The only other city that seems to have attracted a similar amount of attention is Tokyo. What is the attraction, what do they have in common given that they are physically such different cities?) The one particular photographer than comes to mind here is Daido Moriyama. His hometown is Osaka, in my own experience a very different city topographically and in terms of “atmosphere” from Tokyo.
Whilst I am not personally well acquainted with Shinjuku (I spent more time in Shiba and more ‘genteel’ areas such as Asakusa and Ginza) I nevertheless find his obsessive photographs give a real sense of this rather shabby, seedy, somewhat disreputable area as a recognisable environment. He is not immune from the charge levelled at the voyeuristic flâneur of luxuriating in the more louche sides of city life – to quote from his 2016 book (again, the pages are unnumbered):
“… I still see Shinjuku as the great backwater, a formidable den of iniquity. The countless other neighbourhoods that make up the huge metropolis of Tokyo sped through the gradual changes of the fifty-plus years since the end of the war and, before our own eyes, have now been reduced to white, hygienic, sterile landscapes … but Shinjuku is still there in its primary colors, a living, writhing monster.”
“No matter in what city of what country I happen to find myself, the outside world I observe as I wander the streets presents me with the exciting or the erotic; my eyes roam freely over these sights and I release the shutter whenever I feel the urges of eternal desire or temptation.”
Daido Moriyama
Nevertheless, although Moriyama is not a perfect example, my impression is that there is plenty of work within his vast and sprawling oeuvre that can be taken as supporting an argument that certain aspects of and approaches to street photography are capable of conveying a sense of the built environment without simply and directly depicting its buildings.
So, what conclusions do I reach from this admittedly brief and somewhat superficial survey, how would I now answer my question? The conclusion that I reach is somewhat equivocal. Much street photography does not seem to me offer an affirmative answer to my question; from much I do not get any real sense of the street as a place. On the other hand, certain approaches to street photography can indeed amount to or encompass what might otherwise be seen conventionally as landscape photography and transcend, or transgress, ideas of genre and style. A related question, that is also perhaps beyond the practical scope of this essay, is why that should be the case? My tentative view at this stage is that a significant element might simply be the intention of the photographers; what are they looking for in their work on the city streets: is it sensationalism, squalor, serendipity, or a sense of the landscape as something that reflects the symbiotic relationship between the human and the physical environment?
I give the last word to Mario Carnicelli (another outsider, an Italian photographer who worked in America briefly between 1967 and 1973), quoted in Hotshoe (2019, pages 26-27), who sums up a possible positive answer to my question:
“The element of human beings – people – in the street. We are simply creating a theatrical fifth, a giant stage. The street represents a microcosm of the life, rhythms, feelings of common people. Street photography is a typically “local” universal because it is relatable to other places where people live, even in complete diversity of language, history and traditions. Photographs of faces, and gestures of inhabitants of a certain place, provide anthropological, and geographical, social and humanistic interest, as well as a catalogue of memories in rapidly changing times.”
Eskilden, U, (ed). (2008). Street & Studio. London: Tate Publishing
Evans, W, (2012). American Photographs. New York: The Museum of Modern Art
Frank, R, (2016). The Americans. Göttingen: Steidl
Klein, W, (2016). Life is Good & Good for You in New York. New York: Errata Editions
Moriyama, D, (2016). Daido Tokyo. Paris: FondationCartier pour l’art contemporain
My present intention is to develop some of the ideas explored in Assignment 3 about how spaces that are in themselves non-descript, not picturesque, are transformed into places of significance through human agency. In addition I want to explore how an additional layer of significance can be added to them by the simple act of photographing them. Specifically I have in mind various sites around the village, such as the petrol station, the cricket club, pharmacy, communal recycling bins, etc.
Background influences are very much the same as for Assignment 3, with perhaps particular emphasis on the work of Ed Ruscha and Toshio Shibata, Eiji Ohashi, and, in terms of presentation, Ingrid Pollard, as explained below.
The precise number of images is not yet clear. One consideration is that most of the sites I have in mind so far are along the main road that runs through the village. I need to assess each one first to ensure that I can photograph them safely without having to stand in the road! Subject to that, I currently have in mind eight to ten sites.
So far as presentation is concerned I have in mind two contrasting approaches that will both nevertheless make the same point. One, inspired by some of Ingrid Pollard’s work, is to produce a series of postcards, in similar style to those I bought for Exercise 3, using a digital camera and processing in Photoshop, with saturated colours and emblazoned with “Greetings from Stocksfield”; a somewhat ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach. The other is to take a more fine-art based approach, in the style of Anselm Adams and use black and white film (4×5) and a large format camera. Again, an ironic approach, raising the mundane to the level of art, possibly inviting a “gallery” exhibition to display them. Technically, this latter approach will involve some expense but as I already have film, paper for printing and darkroom equipment, that expense will be negligible. The “postcards” will need to be printed professionally (I cannot presently print in colour to a high enough standard) but as the prints will be fairly small I do not anticipate great expense.
One important practical consideration that needs to be borne in mind, and will have an effect on when this project might be carried out and how long it will take, is the effect of the current Covid-19 lock-down. So long as that remains in place there may well be physical constraints that hamper its execution. It will in any event have to approached sensitively to avoid too much unwelcome attention being drawn to it. With that in mind, I anticipate that the first stage will be to take a series of test shots to establish the best viewpoints and camera angles to keep setting-up time for the large format camera to a minimum. A further assessment of this will need to be made in due course.
A bit of a digression (but not much), possibly interesting for some doing this particular module, but here is a recommendation of a website that revels in the name of The Learned Pig. As they put it, “The Learned Pig is an online arts magazine that brings together multiple perspectives on relationships between the human and the non-human.” Personally I find it a source of stimulating thinking about our relationships with environment.
Something I have just picked up from their latest email newsletter is a reference to what sounds like a fascinating book that is directly relevant to what we are doing here, not least to the long term project of Assignment 6: “Recollecting Landscapes”, a photographic survey and record of the changing landscapes in Flanders over the last century. Obviously this is not a project that we can possibly emulate in the short term but the idea is nevertheless intriguing and inspiring.
I shall see if I can get a better look at the book.
Happily, good feedback from my tutor on this assignment. We also had a good discussion about Assignment 4, as a result of which I have decided to go ahead with my original proposal, though I think I have slightly revised and refined my ideas about exactly how the argument should develop.
The full report is below. I have though redacted out one paragraph that is not for general consumption:
“Overall Comments
As always, a detailed conversation which covered all aspects of the course.
In addition to the coursework and assignment, we discussed critical reflection*, identifying the photographer’s voice, your highly involved research and evidence of theory into practice and engagement with peers. *I will attach a pdf to the email.
Feedback on assignment
Over all a good response to the Assignment brief. The diptych arrangement worked well. We did though discuss other possible means of presentation. We agreed that given the relative lack of material other forms of presentation might well be difficult and unlikely to work well. That apart, could the work be presented in book form, as a slide -show, or in some other way? Does the format of landscape orientation work or could the images be arranged in some other way? The experiment with the black and white film in square format suggests that the letterbox format does indeed work and having the extra height in the pictures does not add anything. The letterbox format actually helps to emphasise the relative lack of (interesting) view from the vantage point of each bench.
We also discussed my reflection on the work and the difficulties of forming an objective view of how well it meets the assessment criteria. Some further guidance from OCA on how this might be might be done more practically and consistently. Subject to that, my response addressing the issue of development of a personal voice was a wholly satisfactory one.
Coursework
I am continuing to engage well with the course material.
Research
I am drawing on a wide range of sources and influences, literary and visual, and synthesizing it well, posting a lot of material on my learning log.
Learning Log
You have gone so far as to recommend to some of your other students that they might usefully read some of the material on my learning log.
Suggested reading/viewing
Picking up a reference in one of my learning log posts to the book Shimagatari by Yasuhiro Ogawa, you recommended having a look at the Japanese film The Naked Island, about life on a small, remote island. (Having checked, it does appear to be on You Tube and I will follow this up.)
You also recommended, by way of further research on the ideas explored in Assignment 3, the work of Chloe Dewe Matthews, in particular her series Shot at Dawn.
Pointers for the next assignment / assessment
We discussed at some length my ideas for the critical review that forms Assignment 4, taking the subject of street photography as a possible means of exploring the idea of landscape phototgraphy. We agreed that this opens up lots of possible avenues for exploration that it will not be possible to investigate fully, or indeed at all, within the confines of the set word limit: for example, what is it that makes New York City more attractive to and productive for practitioners of street photography than so many other cities? What is it about the form and physical structure that makes a difference, compared with, say, Paris or London? How might thinking about the nature and creation of architectural space be brought in? What about ideas about design of architecture for people? As a result your recommendation is that the review perhaps be treated more as an abstract, opening up possible ideas and themes for further enquiry in due course. It might also be useful to look at the work of OCA tutor Clive White and even to reach out to him.”
Continuing to indulge my interest in and fascination with Japanese photography I have just picked up a couple of books by Koji Onaka. I have been particularly struck by how similar thematic threads are running through the work of a number of artists whose work I have been looking at of late that are relevant to some of the issues addressed in this course.
These two books have something in common with Ogawa (2014) in so far as they are exploring parts of Japan, islands and smaller towns, away from the metropolitan centres, exploring a sense of memory of and in these places, memorialising them as they were, while they now change and are in danger of losing their original character. Onaka though takes the idea of the memory device a bit further.
Although put together quite recently both of these books are made up of photographs taken in the 1980s and 90s. They are, in a way, little memory capsules of Onaka’s time visiting and photographing these places. There are two points though that I find particularly interesting. In the earlier of the two books Onaka writes:
“I have plenty of negatives, which I’ve already forgotten, in which situation I shoot the films. So it was up to me to label them as old pictures, nonetheless, I somehow knew that it doesn’t matter when and where I took them and why I took those pictures.”
As photographs are generally unreliable so far as “truth” is concerned, so too are they unreliable as memory devices. The photographer’s memories, embedded in the images, are no longer accessible even to the person who made them.
The other point, which reinforces this last observation, comes from the more recent book. Onaka did not edit this set of images but left it to someone else. His editor has chosen and sequenced this set in such a way that they can be read as telling particular story, as Onaka puts it, of adolescent first love, a story that he says he could not have produced himself. The original memories have again become inaccessible and in their place has grown a new “memory” that is in fact entirely fictional. Nevertheless, there it now is, embedded in specific places at specific times. Or has the editor taken her own memories, from different places and times, and overlaid them on Onaka’s memories, obscuring their origins?
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.
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.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 