Although this exercise did not call for anything more than making a mock-up and producing a pdf, I nevertheless went ahead and had a couple of books printed up to see how they would look.  Blurb have been falling over themselves to offer substantial discounts so I thought I might as well go ahead.  One book is the one of which I made the mock-up for the exercise, a development of the work for Assignment 3.  The other is a development and expansion of a project that I did for one of the Assignments for I&P.

Both are fairly slight, using no more than the standard layout of twenty pages.  For Assignment 3 I have kept the layout of images only on the right-hand page.  For the other, I effectively doubled the number of images that formed the final set for the earlier project and put one on each facing page.  In both cases I went for image wrapped hardcovers, rather than dust jackets, and premium matte paper.  The end results look and feel reassuringly professional, if a little spartan.  If I have any issue with them it is the colour balance on a few pictures from the old project is a little off, compared with the original prints. That said, unless you were to compare them with those prints I doubt you realise that they are slightly different.  They certainly do not look “wrong” in their own right.  I guess some slight differences like this are probably inevitable.

And here is a short video showing the printed version of Assignment 3:

For this exercise I have taken a very unscientific approach and have not drawn on a very wide assortment of artists.  Nevertheless, there are a couple of things that have been particularly striking.

The first is how few of the artists I have looked at – all are ones whose work I like and a number of them are represented on my book-shelves – have any form of statement at all.  To take just a few examples, Rinko Kawauchi, Matthew Genitempo, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nick Waplington, do not say anything.  I would also have included Alec Soth but he is already mentioned in the course material:  his rather laconic description of himself does not really come across to me as a “statement” at all, beyond, I am a photographer and what I do is make photographs.  In many ways that is actually the sort of statement to which I would aspire.

Elina Brotherus does not have what I would necessarily call an artist’s statement but her biography, on her website, I suppose serves the purpose in so far as it identifies the shifting strands within her work as it has developed over time.  Rinko Kawauchi does, it seems to me, despite the strictures of the course material, let her work speak for itself, and has in effect left it to others to write her statement for her.  As Charlotte Cotton put it in Aperture, “She shapes subtle, elegiac narratives without the aid of interpretive or endorsing text, leaving the reader nonetheless fully nourished by the extent of exquisite and intriguing sights to be found on this earth”.  An elegant argument against the need for an artist’s statement at all!

A few statements that I did find all seem to me to add to the argument against the need for a statement in so far as they are simply not very well written.  It is horrible to single out anyone but a couple stand out.  Shane Taylor is a street photographer whose work I find subtle and intriguing.  His statement includes the following:  “His street photography explores classic, humanistic themes, drawing inspiration from classic street photography of the 1950s and 60’s.”  My problems with this include the repetition of the word “classic”, the wooliness of “humanistic themes” – just what is that supposed to mean? –  the misuse of the apostrophe at the end of the sentence and the inconsistent ways of referring to the two decades.  A lot of people do not seem to know how to use an apostrophe properly, indeed do not know what it is really for and what its purpose is, and this is a classic – to reuse an already over-used word – example. 

Another, and this came as something of a surprise given that he is also an academic, is Donovan Wylie, again for the repetition of a key word:  “Utilizing a combination of conceptual and typological approaches, Wylie’s work integrates the conceptual architecture of power, containment and war”.

In neither case is my appreciation or understanding of their work enhanced by such language.

The one statement that I do really like, not least because it addresses one of the problems of language, appeared in the first issue of Provoke:  “We now live in a world in which words have lost their material foundations, have become detached from reality and wander in space.  Faced with this, what we photographers can do, indeed, must do, is capture with our own eyes those fragments of reality which are utterly impossible to capture with existing words, and actively keep creating materials to confront those words and thought.  This was the instigation behind PROVOKE, and the reason we chose, admittedly a little self-consciously, the sub-title “Provocative Materials for Thought”.”  Another anti-manifesto argument.  Why should we tie a visual medium, one that is as airy as light itself, down with leaden words of clay?

Taking a slightly different tack, it was illuminating to go back to Sasha Wolf’s book.  Rather than speaking in terms of any sense of manifesto or statement, each of the artists that she interviewed simply talks about how they approach their work rather than trying to categorise and anatomise it.  This is an approach I find much more enlightening.

My inclination, it should by now be clear, is to steer clear of artist’s statements and their potentially limiting, or just plain embarrassing, nature.  Nevertheless, for the purposes of this exercise if nothing else, I am going to make an attempt.  The link referred to in the course material appears to be bad and as there is no indication of what the article referred to is, I have done a bit of hunting in the UCA on-line library and found a couple of articles that are helpful.  I have not gone through the exercises outlined in Goodwin’s article but have at least thought about this sort of approach.  Conor Risch’s piece is perhaps more immediately helpful and practical.  What I get from these, if nothing else, is that I should keep things simple, so here goes:

“My current work is concerned with the role landscape can play as a place that contains and records memory. I am also interested in how human relationships with the landscape affect that memorial function and can give places particular meanings and significance beyond being merely a geographical location.”

I think I still do not like it!

Cotton, C, (2004).  Rinko Kawauchi Utatane.  Aperture No. 177

Goodwin, A, (1999).  Writing an Artist’s Statement.  Ceramics Monthly, May 1999, Vol. 45, Issue 5.

Nakahira, T, Okada, T, Takahashi, Y, Taki, K, (1968). Provoke No. 1. Tokyo: Nitesha

Risch, C, (2017).  Conquering the dreaded artist statement:  expert advice for writing about your photography.  Photo District News, Vol. 37, Issue 8.

Wolf, S, (ed), (2019).  PhotoWork:  Forty Photographers on Process and Practice.  New York:  Aperture

http://www.donovanwyliestudio.com

www.shanetaylor.net

Just a brief note on this.  Whilst I understand that Sharon Boothroyd really liked this online exhibition, I am afraid I just do not get it.  I agree there are plenty of fine, striking individual images, but I find it hard to see, at least on a first viewing, what is driving the structure and sequencing, what made it so good as a slideshow.  

I think Boothroyd sums things up nicely when in comparison she praises the Sally Mann shows.  The ability to stop, go back, linger, establish connections between individual works, makes all the difference.   When viewing a physical exhibition I usually have a fairly quick go round first to get a sense of the structure of the show and what is to be seen, then go back and forth, across the grain and flow of the show, the better to appreciate what is there and make my own sense of what the artist or curator has chosen to show.  I do not reject the idea that a particular flow has been purposefully set up to display the work in a particular light, and to a particular end or purpose, but I like to make my own connections, form my own views and conclusions as well.  Needless to say, this also enables me to filter out stuff that does not interest or engage me, or that I simply do not like.

The slideshow based online exhibition simply does not give that sort of opportunity.  It has something of the feel of one of those blockbuster art exhibitions where you effectively join a long queue that snakes around the gallery, everyone seeing the same things in the same order and without the opportunity to spend time with any individual work.  That is something that I hate and is one of the reasons I rarely go to such exhibitions anymore.  I had a similar sort of experience on a brief visit to Auschwitz a few years ago and simply could not stand the sense of being shepherded, herded indeed, around the museum exhibits without any choice of what was to be seen and in what order.  Needless to say, I pretty quickly broke ranks!

https://vimeo.com/49855891

https://www.oca.ac.uk/weareoca/photography/online-exhibitions/

This section of the course material has got me thinking in wider terms about how I look at photographs and to reflect on photobooks as physical items, artefacts in their own right.  This not only ties in, to an extent, with the essay that I have written for Assignment 4, but is also relevant to what I am thinking about for the physical presentation of the sequence of images I made for Assignment 2, and also how I might approach Assignment 5.

How do I look at photographs?  Inevitably most have to be viewed on-line.  The sheer range of material that needs to be looked at for the purposes of the course work means that this is the only practical approach available, in the absence of an accessible, local, public or institutional library with a significant holding of photographic work.  The Side gallery in Newcastle has an impressive archive but is of course presently closed and in any event is not somewhere that I would be able to go on a sufficiently regular basis.

Physical exhibitions are similarly limited.  Whilst I have been over the last few years to as many local shows as I could, mostly at the Side, they have been few in number, and are now non-existent.

Then there is my own library.   This is fairly substantial as a whole (though not comparable with that owned by one of my favourite writers about reading and the ownership of books, Alberto Manguel, whose library is made up of 35,000 or so volumes!) with a photography section that is growing steadily.  Obviously, there are plenty of books that have been acquired on the basis of the OCA reading lists.  Many though are photobooks – monographs and exhibition catalogues – that have been bought purely out of personal interests and tastes.  It is these that I find the most satisfying to use:  being something of a Luddite I still prefer the physical feel, the heft, the weight, the smell, of physical books.  I find I engage with them more deeply, not least because I get to know them over a longer period and at a more leisurely pace than the internet encourages.  It is these books, few of which appear on any of the reading lists, though some of which are from time to time referred to within the course material, that tend to influence and inform my own work more profoundly, even when not necessarily obviously directly relevant to a particular assignment or exercise.  There are limits imposed by cost (I shudder to think how much I have paid over time for this modest collection; quite a lot of photobooks today are pretty expensive) and space.  This though is the medium that gives me the greatest satisfaction.

Letting my eyes roam across the shelves in my study, which is where all of the photography books in the house live, I am struck by the range of publishers.  There are a few under the imprint of some of the big guns in the art publishing world, such as Prestel, Thames & Hudson, Phaidon, but the majority are by much smaller, independent, specialist publishers.  Judging from the number of new photobooks coming out on a regular basis this is an area of publishing that seems to be, if not necessarily thriving, at least surviving.  I am also struck by the number of books that are self-published or put out by tiny presses, most of which are really nice physical artefacts in their own right, and really interesting photographic work.

The next thing that strikes me is the range of bindings and physical presentation.  Most, although varying considerably in size, proportions, and layout, are in conventional book form, either hardback, or soft.  Those that really stand out are mostly, at least in my collection, East Asian, specifically Japanese, books – either by Japanese, Chinese or Korean, artists, or published by Japanese companies.  There are pamphlets that are little more than folder paper, elaborately stitched bindings, boxes (some elaborate in their own right) containing multiple elements, loose sheets, concertina folds, you name it.  Perhaps the most impressive “book” that I have seen was produced by Goliga in Tokyo in very limited numbers of work by Rinko Kawauchi that takes the form of a traditional Japanese scroll in a bespoke wooden box:  absolutely beautiful but also, as a result, rather expensive and with very few copies still available.  How I wish … dream on!

The relevance of these musings to work for this course is that, as I have written in connection with Assignment 2, I have been thinking of submitting that sequence of images in book form, as a concertina, rather than a conventional book.  This is something that I have been working on of late, now that I have a decent printer of my own, enabling me to experiment with different possible prints that might work in the form of such a book.  What in particular this process has prompted is a rethink of the outcome of the assignment itself.  Specifically, because of the physical constraints imposed by such a book format, I have had to rethink how I approach the map element that is to go on the reverse of the photographs.  This is turning into an interesting case of the format to an extent dictating content.  I will write more on this in due course.

Coming back to the course material, the William Klein interview I found very interesting because of my focus on his work in the essay for Assignment 4.  (The link in the material is no longer working but it was not too difficult to find it on the current Tate website and a new link is cited below.)  Unfortunately, the section in which Klein’s assistant talks about an early maquette of his New York book is frustratingly short and does not actually say anything about how and why the book is arranged and laid out as it is.  This is a shame because in my opinion the layout is one of the things that helps make this book so successful, as a photobook in its own right but also as an unorthodox “landscape” of New York, as I argue in the essay.  I would dearly have liked to hear more about the process that the book went through to reach its final state.  This book is an interesting example of the argument made by Marshall McLuhan that “the medium is the message”.

For Assignment 5 I have already been thinking about producing a set of postcards.  For the “fine art” alternative a book might well be appropriate, or at least trying as an experiment if nothing more.  I already have some thoughts on this and it is encouraging to see that the OCA video about photobooks confirms some of those ideas.  The nature of Klein’s project meant that a “busy” layout was appropriate and adds much to the outcome.  For what I have in mind, something much more straightforward, minimal even, would be much more appropriate and effective.  I am nowhere near ready with that project yet so in the interim, for the purposes of exercise 5.3, I am going to have to use an existing set of images.  

As an aside with regard to Blurb, although I have not used them before I do have a book produced by them.  It was made by one of the artists who had a residency with VARC and is a visual diary of her year in the wilds of Northumberland.  The quality is pretty good and I do not recall it being particularly expensive when I bought it.

http://oca-student.com/node/66693

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/william-klein-11498/william-klein-pictures

So far, although I now have a copy of O’Doherty’s essay, I have only read McEvilley’s introduction for the purposes of this exercise.  When I have a moment I will read the full article but for now I have sufficient thoughts to be able to write something in response to this exercise.

The key point is that the modernist White Cube art gallery takes the work of art displayed within it out of time and space, cuts it off from the outside everyday world.  This in turn takes the work of art away from “ordinary” people, sets it apart, and makes it available only to a particular, “special”, self-selecting group, namely the art lovers who visit this sort of gallery.  The gallery, rooted in Platonic ideas of True Form, becomes a ritual place in its own right, itself a performance, a work of art.  As O’Doherty argues, this is nothing new and indeed goes back to the very earliest human art, Palaeolithic cave paintings.  (This does of course assume that the not uncommon pre-historical archaeological assumption that these ritual spaces accessible only to a chosen few is correct.  Certainly, in so far as it is possible to extrapolate, the example of the Pharaonic tombs suggests that this is at least plausible.)  This got me thinking a bit about why there has been this move towards the “exclusive” gallery space (I imagine their modernism might be off-putting for some, or might at least get in the way of some peoples’ connection with, and appreciation of, the art on display.  It has also sent me back to a point made by Benjamin (2008) whom I have just been rereading in connection with Exercise 5.2.

Right up until the industrial age – I know I am generalising more than just a bit here – art was displayed either in ritual spaces, such as churches, that were outside time and place, and the art itself was very much tied to the rituals and religious observance and belief, or in private spaces (domestic or ‘official’) accessible only by the wealthy and powerful, not the general populace.  Only in the industrial age is there much in the way of the public display of art, particularly of secular art not tied to religion.  Even then there was a sense of ritual not far removed from the idea of the White Cube.  Grand imposing buildings, with classical porticos, often referred to as “Temples to Art”, were the norm (just think of the National Gallery in London) cut off from the outside world: no windows looking onto the outside from the display galleries, lit from above.  Just visiting one of these spaces was a form of ritual:  one in honour of an almost religious belief in the power or Art.  Not perhaps as theatrical as entering a hushed, subtly lit, colourless box, but nevertheless still something of a performance.

This is where Benjamin comes in and his observations on the reproducibility of works of art.  Benjamin argued that works of art were never completely separated from a ritual function.  Mechanical reproduction changed that: (at pages 11-12)

“… being reproducible by technological means frees the work of art, for the time in history, from its existence as a parasite on ritual.”

I wonder, is the advent of the modernist white space an attempt to turn back the clock, to reconnect art with ritual and restore its value (cultural and monetary), and take control back into the hands of an elite?  (I am not going to attempt to answer that question for now, nor comment on whether I think it is a good or a bad thing.  Those are for another time and place.  For now it is merely an observation.)

Leaving that for now, a couple of observations on the course material itself on this section.  So far as commercial galleries are concerned, I rarely visit them these days, simply because apart from the odd trip to Edinburgh I no longer often go to wherever they might be found, and I can see that for some people they might be quite intimidating, that they might not feel they are the sort of place they can properly go.  Some of the cultivate an air of mystique, of exclusivity, of separateness from the general public.  Visiting one can therefore itself become a sort of ritual, an act and performance, in a way taking us back to Benjamin’s pre-reproducible age.

On the fashion for building modern galleries in old industrial structures, is this to a large extent a matter of these places being the only ones that are really big enough to function as a gallery (particularly a major one, such as Tate Modern), the lack of land otherwise to build on and the expense involved?  One observation in the course material in this regard that I would quibble with a bit is the suggestion that the industrial heritage is hard for them to entirely shake off.  Is this really the case?  Thinking again of Tate Modern, about the only part of it that really shows its heritage seems to me to be the Turbine Hall, although that has been comprehensively gutted, and its exterior.  Otherwise the rest of the gallery is a series of boxes slotted into the shell of the building that betray hardly anything of its past.  The same can be said of the Baltic.  The two long external walls are all that remain of the original structure.  Everything else was ripped out and again the inside offers no hints of the building’s past.  I actually think this is regrettable.  The problem with so many contemporary gallery spaces is that they do not show any quirks or idiosyncracies so that they all become almost homogenous, difficult to distinguish from each other, and frankly dull and bland.  Much more interesting for me are those that do still show some of their past, such as the Arnolfini, and the Side in Newcastle.  This latter, quite a small space and conforming to the norm of white box display areas, nevertheless bears signs of its past (I confess I do not know exactly what it was, store, workshop, or something else):  substantial exposed wooden ceiling beams, cast iron pillars, a slightly wonky and creaky bare wooden floor.  Much is of course to do with the work that is displayed in these disparate spaces but I certainly prefer the atmosphere in the smaller, more characterful spaces, and feel more comfortable there, and probably appreciate the works on display more, than in the bigger identikit modernist galleries.  (I am actually a fan of Modernism but I do fear it has become debased as a style and aesthetic through overuse, some of it unthinking, unoriginal, derivative.)  In this regard I very much agree with what the course material says about the nature of the space affecting the way the work on display is received and read.

Benjamin, W, (2008).  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.  London:  Penguin

O’Doherty, B, (1999) Inside the white cube: the ideology of the gallery space. Berkeley: University of California Press

I am taking this exercise slightly out of order, before reading about the White Cube, simply because I have been experimenting with printing of late, having just bought a new, professional standard Canon inkjet printer. For some time I have struggled with a fairly basic all-rounder Epson printer but it simply does not produce good quality prints. Colour balance can be problematic and ink delivery can sometimes be a bit streaky. Given what I have paid over the last couple of years to have prints made professionally for assessment purposes I reckon that although the new printer was expensive it will actually pay for itself in fairly short order, particularly as I am now likely to print more of my work routinely.

This exercise is also a bit odd in its timing as I have been through the process of preparing images for professional printing on various occasions before now, not least for the assessment of the last three modules. Nevertheless, I have gone through the motions of file preparation again as I have just added Lightroom to my computer and this is a useful opportunity to get to know how that program works.

1. Quotes

Much of the work that I have had printed has been in the region of A4 so for the purposes of this exercise I have checked the prices for 12×8 inches. The type of paper used does not seem to make a great deal of difference to the price, so I have chosen a lustre finish for C-types. For Inkjet comparison I have checked out prices for giclée and where there has been a choice I have opted for a fairly basic Fuji or equivalent paper, rather than a more fine art, and therefore more expensive, paper such as those produced by Hahnemühle (which I have used in the past for printing etchings).

The company that used to print for me, Lumejet, unfortunately stopped trading a while ago which is a real shame as I was very impressed with their quality. They were somewhat on the pricey side but I felt it was worth it as their product (a new form of silver halide print that they had developed) was excellent. In their stead for the last lot of printing that I needed I used Loxley, who also seem to be pretty good, so I have turned to them first. In rough terms their prices start at about £2.24 for C-type, and £7.29 for giclée.

Next I have checked DS Colour. Although I have not used them before I understand they have a good reputation. Their prices seem to start as low as £0.65 for a C-type (I have to say this does not seem to me to be quite right and maybe I have just got it wrong or misunderstood) and £6.99 for inkjet.

A company that I use for my film supplies, but which I have not used before for printing, is AG Photographic. C-types are about £3.86. They have also started offering inkjet prints but unfortunately the prices do not yet appear on their website.

Out of curiosity I have also looked at a local, Newcastle-based, printer, Max Spielman. C-types are about £2.50. They do not seem to do inkjet printing other than in poster form, which unfortunately they do seem to do as small as 12×8. Their smallest size, 16×12, comes in at about £11, which sounds about right compared with the other giclée costs mentioned above.

In practice, now that I have a good printer, I am more likely to make my own inkjet prints for the foreseeable future, unless I need something a bit more special. Costs per unit should be significantly less this way, mostly just being the cost of the paper. The inks are pretty expensive but depending on the number of prints that can be made before running out I do not expect the proportionate unit cost per print to be significant.

For my black and white film work I can now do all my own printing in the new darkroom in the traditional way.

2. File preparation

This is now fortunately pretty easy and straightforward. By way of example I have included a link below to Loxley’s file preparation guide, which is simplicity itself. This is greatly helped by the company handling colour management for you.

Nevertheless, as indicated above, notwithstanding that I have been through the process before I have gone through the exercise again to try to get the hang of Lightroom. Unfortunately though so far it has defeated me – I clearly need to spend more time learning how to use it (and to properly understand the difference between Lightroom Classic and the cloud-based Lightroom CC!). I have therefore for now simply redone it in the latest version of Photoshop, which is much more familiar having used older versions of it in the past.

This was originally a .dng file, now converted to .jpg, 300 dpi resolution, compression level 10, Adobe RGB colour profile.

3. Inkjet/photograph?

This is in a way a particularly significant question given that I have just bought a printer.

At the same time though I wonder whether it is still really relevant in today’s digital world.  I can certainly see the argument that only a traditional print (whether produced in a darkroom from a negative or digitally) on light sensitive paper is a “photograph”.  It is certainly supported by the dictionary definition of a photographic print.  I do though feel that this is an old-fashioned and unhelpful distinction today.  Not the least part of the problem that I have with the distinction is actually a point by Walter Benjamin back in 1936 (2008, at page 12):

“The reproduced work of art is to an ever-increasing extent the reproduction of a work of art designed for reproducibility.  From a photographic plate, for instance, many prints can be made; the question of the genuine print has no meaning.”

More than whether or not something is properly a “photograph”, it strikes me the issue is more one of the value to be placed on the physical artefact.  A print made by the photographer in person in the darkroom will have a certain value, that is, what someone is prepared to pay to acquire it.  The more prints the photographer makes, the less will be their value.  It seems to me that a photograph printed in a newspaper is still a photograph but it will be effectively worthless.  I see no reason why an inkjet print should be regarded in any different way.  If a photographer works digitally and uses a printer instead of light-sensitive paper why should that not also amount to a “photograph”?  Why should it, indeed, have any less value as an artefact?

The way I look at this is that so many photographs now do not actually have any tangible, physical existence.  They are little more than bits of information in an electronic realm.  They only become “photographs” when given physical form, by printing, for example.  That is not so different from an analog image.  It exists in the form of a negative but it is not until light is shone through that negative onto photo-paper that a physical “photograph” comes into being.  The photograph is something that is created by exposing a light-sensitive chemical or electrical cell to light.  How the physical photograph is then produced seems to me to be more a matter of process and that process should not in itself determine whether or not something can properly be called a “photograph”. 

Benjamin, W, (2008).  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.  London:  Penguin

https://www.loxleycolour.com/help/Preparation