Falmouth F2F Workshops

Really useful to get to know the facilities at the Institute of Photography, and to figure out how to make best use of what’s on offer when I visit again in the future to work on my FMP. The workshop helped to build skills in particular areas:

(i) Medium format digital. Got to know the Capture One software (similar in most respects to Lightroom) and work with the Mamiya/Leaf system in tethered mode. It would be good to hire a medium format system for the Object Lessons work in the UCL Museums, Collections and Galleries

(ii) Studio lighting. Great afternoon with Matt Jessop and fellow student Len Williamson. I have done a studio lighting course before. This gave me the opportunity to experiment with lighting and get immediate feedback by making images tethered to Lightroom (again, a new experience for me). See headshots below. My own work is in the field, but it was useful to be able to play around in a ‘controlled environment’, and this will certainly help me in the lighting design for the Object Lessons work, and for the portraits for the urban regeneration project.

(iii) Machine processing. I shoot on film from time to time. Good to learn to use the machines. However, as I think through my major project, I think there are environmental issues to consider in using film (particularly given that parts of Barking marshes are heavily polluted by the chemical plants that used to be there (and this is increasingly of concern as the use of the surrounding land switches from industry to housing).

(iv) Film scanning. As for machine processing, good to be able to use the Hasselblad scanners, particularly for my large format negatives.

(v) Preparing for print. A refresh rather than something new. Useful for getting to know the print service at Falmouth, and how to produce files specifically for that. Also helpful in thinking about file naming of outputs for web and print (which is pretty random for me at the moment). Will follow up advice on colour management at theprintspace.co.uk and tutorials on software at lynda.com

Together this made a fairly coherent package. I certainly feel more confident in planning to spend some time at the IoP in the future, and its good to get to know the academic and technical staff, and to work alongside fellow MA students.

Ideology and Photography (Week 6 Reflection)

The independent reflection task for this week asks us to consider whether our practice may or may not be seen as adhering to a specific ideology. In the creative process, ideology will influence both the production of our work (through the intent that informs the work, and the conceptual frameworks that underpin this) and its interpretation (through the systems of ideas that inform our audience in their reading and the contexts within which they encounter our images). The means by which our work is circulated and reaches an audience (via social media, or the gallery system, for instance) is also shaped by ideology. For instance, we produce and distribute our work in a period that is politically and economically grounded in neo-liberalism and increasingly subject to the push and pull of popularism, which will influence the nature of the means of distribution and the value attributed to the work in different contexts and by different groups and communities. Whilst recognition that production, consumption and circulation of photographic images is ideologically infused is necessary, we can adopt a critical or oppositional position in our work. In doing so, it is important to be clear that this will involve contestation: we need to have a sense of what we stand for and what we stand against, and the consequences of this. My own work seeks to create or provoke different ways of thinking about social and environmental phenomena. It is inherently critical of both current practices in urban regeneration (adopting the view, as expressed by Jane Jacobs, 1961, that ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody’) and some forms of contemporary theory and discourse in the arts (through, for instance, critical engagement with the idea of the anthropocene (see Demos, 2017), and the influence of object oriented ontology, (see, for instance, Harman, 2010, and critical commentary by Lemke, 2017.) How this impacts on the reception and reading of this work depends on the form of the audience and the context of engagement. Whilst the work is theoretically informed, and positioned, engagement with theory is not a prerequisite for reading and understanding the work. The work is intended to be accessible to anyone interested in issues relating to community involvement in urban regeneration and those interested in contemporary arts. The ensuing dialogue, in turn, leads to further development of the work.

Power relations are inherent in all levels of the work, from initial engagement with communities through to the circulation of the work, as is the commitment to ethical practice. I will expand on this, and how my practice relates to other practice and theory in the visual arts, in subsequent discussion of the development of my project and my work in progress portfolio, which will focus on the more political aspects of the regeneration project and more experimental form of photography.

References

Demos, T. J. 2017. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Harman, G. 2010. Towards speculative realism: Essays and lectures. Winchester: Zero Books.

Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.

Lemke, Thomas. 2017. Materialism Without Matter: The Recurrence of Subjectivism in Object-Oriented Ontology. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. 18: 133-152.

March 2019 Project Update

A quick catch up on where I am, in practical terms, with the various strands of my project.

1. Community engagement with urban regeneration

This is the focus of my research proposal for the FMP. Building networks, contacts and relationships is core to the development of the work. This is focusing on two areas.

(i) Barking and Dagenham.

I have been making images to feed into an image bank for the Thames Ward Community Project (TWCP). My images of the Barking Riverside development were used in a presentation at the recent TWCP summit (at which the CEO of the development company, the Bishop of Barking, a local headteacher, the leader of the residents association and the local councilor spoke). I took photographs of the event and have added these to the TWCP repository. This contributes to the component of the project concerned with collaborative creation of images for advocacy.

I am working with a local arts project (ShedLife), and have an exhibition of portraits and other images of the participants to accompany a showing of the film ‘A Northern Soul’ and Q&A with the filmmaker (Sean McAllister) at the project on 27th March. The project also involves supporting young adults who are documenting the process and working with participants’ photographs and their own image making, which contributes to the component of the project concerned with working with images to gain mutual insight into and understanding of the lifeworlds of the residents.

Through the project, I am now also in touch with the Barking Creekmouth Preservation Society, the Barking Heritage Group, Thames View Community Gardeners and residents on the Gascoigne Estate. The work in Barking has contributed to the development of all three levels of my project work, and provides lots of opportunities for development at the FMP stage. I also want to open up the use of the local authority archives at Valence House and the use of images in community mapping by JustMap.

(ii) Stratford Olympic Park.

In addition to being a member of the London Prosperity Board, I am now an invited member of the EAST Education Leadership Group. This gives me direct insight into and involvement with the development of initiatives on and around the Olympic Park. In relation to image making, I am putting this on hold for the moment. I’ll continue to form links and networks to keep open the option to carry out the final project in this area. Chairing discussions at the Creating Connections East meetings has helped me to form links with community groups across the four boroughs surrounding the Olympic Park. I’ve also met with people on the Carpenters Estate through the ESRC Displacement Project, and with people organising arts related aspects of the project (principally to ensure that there is no confusion between my own work on the estates and their work – I’ll write more about community arts initiatives related to research and to urban development in a later post).

2. Object Lessons

I’ve continued to attend the weekly lectures and take part in the workshops. The students are now working in groups to produce online exhibitions based around different kinds of objects. They will present these at an all-day workshop on 22nd March. I have spoken to the course team about making images with the students and their objects in the various collections participating in the programme. The major contribution to my work, however, has been the focus of the programme on objects, which fits with the more materialist turn in my own work, and interest in artists like Cornelia Parker, and writers such as Peter Stallybrass (for example, Stallybrass, 1998) concerned with memory and materiality (see, in particular, Freeman, Nienass & Daneill, 2016). The programme has focused on the narratives that can be created around objects, and the value of objects in well-being and therapy (Solway et al, 2017). There is also, however, a growing contemporary theoretical interest in the disruptive and obstructive function of objects, and our projection of agency into the material world, creating ‘uncanny objects’ with an apparent agency and insistence, and resistance, of their own.

I am thinking about ways of using the collections, for instance the zoological collection at the Grant Museum (created to provide ‘artifacts’ for teaching and research in the Nineteenth Century but fulfilling a very different function now) in exploring these issues, and the role played by the collections in the emergence of eugenics and other oppressive regimes of thought.

The ‘uncanny object’ in a later era is explored by Lisa Mullen (2019), in ‘Mid-century Gothic’.

‘Mid-Century Gothic defines a distinct post-war literary and cultural moment in Britain, lasting ten years from 1945-55. This was a decade haunted by the trauma of fascism and war, but equally uneasy about the new norms of peacetime and the resurgence of commodity culture. As old assumptions about the primacy of the human subject became increasingly uneasy, culture answered with gothic narratives that reflected two troubling qualities of the new objects of modernity: their uncannily autonomous agency, and their disquieting intimacy with the reified human body’.

This opens up new visual possibilities in exploring the relationship between the students and the objects they have studied.

This work has influenced all other aspects of my photographic work, and, in particular, treatment of images, in print form (and also, maybe, in materialised form on a smartphone screen), as material objects. In the other projects I am exploring this, and the form that my own ‘images’ will take, and how they will be circulated and encountered (for instance, made material as different kinds of prints, as books, as artifacts, in exhibition space and so on).

3. Digital Discrimination

This is a project looking at the relationship between location and quality of internet access, the uses that young people make of the internet and the manner in which advertising algorithms feed young people in different areas with different kinds of content. The project is running in Germany and the UK. I have been making images alongside colleagues who are collecting data through surveys, focus groups and mapping. Early days in terms of seeing where this might go visually. Recent interviews in Hull indicate that there might be potential in exploring the ‘layering’ of the located embodied lives of young adults and their virtual lives online (predominantly through their phones).

In relatively poor areas there appears to be a possible interaction between the decaying physical infrastructure (public transport, for instance) and an increasingly complex, and differentiated and disempowering, online world (with snapchat and instagram being used as the dominant means of communication, bringing commercial competition for users’ online attention, but in demographically differentiated ways, driven by algorithms that appear to have a locational component, as well as being shaped by usage).

References

Freeman, L. A., Nienass, B. and Daniell, R. 2016. ‘Memory | Materiality | Sensuality’, Memory Studies, 9(1): 3–12.

Mullen, L. 2019. Mid-century gothic: The uncanny objects of modernity in British literature and culture after the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Solway, R. et al. 2017. ‘Material objects and psychological theory : A conceptual literature review’, Arts & Health. Taylor & Francis, 8(1): 82–101.

Stallybrass, P. 1998. ‘Marx’s coat’, in P. Spyer (ed.), Border fetishisms: material objects in unstable spaces. London: Routledge. 187–207.

Juxtaposition of Images and Objects (Week 5 Reflection)

In my presentation for Positions and Practice, I expressed unease about street photography, both in relation to its mode of operation (the prowling, opportunistic, and at times invasive, hunter of images) and the forms of images produced (for instance, those which appear to denigrate or exploit the subject). Consequently, I have moved towards more collaborative forms of image making, but have remained pretty much on the hunter side of the hunter/farmer metaphor invoked earlier in the module. Over the past two weeks, however, in the development of the ‘art’ side of my photographic practice, I have explored constructed images, in particular through a process of multi-channel combining and mixing of images. The intent is to bring together, in a single frame, invocations of the past, present and future of a particular place, and to position human subjects in this hybrid re-imagined space.

The image above combines a photograph of people in a public place, mixed with an image of construction in the area (invoking the future) and a macro photograph of plants found in the mostly heavily developed and concreted space (invoking the past). In my own ‘looking’ I am attempting to identify resources that can be used in the construction of an image that explores the interaction of the past, present and an immanent future, and the relationship within this between the human, natural and built environment. In this way, the visual constitutes material in the production of an image through juxtaposition. Changes in the manner in which channels are mixed can have a marked effect of emphasis within the image, as can been seen in this alternative mix below.

This opens up the possibility of a short moving image that flips continuously from one to the other. It also influences how I shoot and edit, with both the structure and content being influenced by the use of the image in creating the multi-channel work. If I was selecting a single, standalone image from this particular setting, it would, I think, have been the image below, but this wouldn’t work in the creating the mix above (note: forthcoming post on the process and how this relates to intent and theory).

Edmund Clark, in his exhibition ‘In Place of Hate‘, arising from a 3 year study of HMP Grendon (Europe’s only wholly therapeutic prison, specialising in the rehabilitation of violent and sexually violent offenders), included pressed flowers found on the site, as a way of both highlighting the contrast (and resonances) between the harshness of human incarceration and the fragile (but resilient in its insistence to grow in the environment) natural world. My images seek a similar juxtaposition and play between contrasting elements, but within a single image. The process of multichannel mixing (described here), however, both renders each element less distinct, and attempts to convey a sense of the interaction between elements. In this work, I am neither simply hunter nor farmer (though the process entails elements of both), but rather designer, architect, collector, curator, alchemist, experimenter and more. The approach opens up the prospect of both the creation of new images for the purposes of mixing, and the incorporation of archival material, computer generated images and found images.

Edmund Clark, In Place of Hate, 2015-17.

The resulting images can be considered to be fictions of a sort, pulling together ‘untethered’ materials from elsewhere, and combining different ways of looking (and, therefore, different forms of gaze). The intent of the fiction, however, it to explore relationships in time and space, and thus the approach resonates with the idea of fiction as methods (see my discussion of the work of Francois Laruelle and the arts here). I am producing the work for an audience that wishes to explore ways in which the visual arts can be deployed, in conjunction with other approaches, to explore complex human and environmental issues. How the reader interprets the image depends very much on context, and the motivations and interest of the reader. As with all forms of image making, there is a need also to work to actively create an audience, and to seek appropriate outlets and contexts for the work. The images are clearly challenging to read (given the detail, the prints will need to be large), and the process in the early stages of development.

References

Edmund Clark, 2015-17, In Place of Hate. https://www.edmundclark.com/works/in-place-of-hate/#1 [accessed 04.03.19].

Laruelle, non-philosophy and the arts

I’ve noticed a significant interest in Laruelle’s work amongst cultural and arts theorists recently. The bookshop at the ICA, for instance, has a growing section of books on or by Laruelle. In this short post I want to consider what we might gain, as photographers, from engagement with Laruelle’s work. In doing this, my starting point is O’Sullivan’s (2017) paper, moving on to work by Laruelle (2013) and commentaries by Mackay (2012a; 2012b) and Brassier (2003). It should be noted that Laruelle’s work is famously difficult to read – Derrida complained that his work was impenetrable, but I think this arises from his objection to Laruelle’s refusal to play the conventional game of continental philosophy. Derrida is certainly as difficult to read for those outside the game.

From the start we should note that Laruelle has written specifically on photography (or rather on non-photography). I am not going to deal directly with this work here on two grounds; (i) as noted in earlier posts, the interest of philosophers in photography relates specifically to philosophical questions which are not, necessarily, of core interest to those developing theory in and of the field and practice of photography (in other words, we don’t have to take to heart, and welcome into our theoretical canon, everything that takes photography as its object, particularly in pursuing its own (field) interests); (ii) I am waiting for another reader to return the ‘non-photography’ book to the library. As Mackay (2012a) notes, photography as an idea was important to philosophers before we had the means to produce a photograph. This raises the question of the extent to which we should allow rumination on the idea of photography to dictate, or at least shape, how we think about the practice of photography.

Put in the simplest of terms (with apologies for any resulting symbolic violence), Laruelle sees philosophy as placing itself outside (more precisely, above) the real and makes a commitment (or decision) to produce accounts (understandings) of the real, with resonance, dissonance and disputation between competing, or at least co-existing, philosophical positions. Non-philosophy, or non-standard philosophy, in contrast is grounded in, and remains as an activity within, the real. It cannot produce critical accounts of alternative philosophical positions, as this would entail rising above the real to engage with alternative (philosophical) perspectives. It maintains, however, a relationship with philosophy (it is not anti-philosophy) in that it can use philosophical work as material in its own endeavours (though this will entail the projection, or descent, of philosophy into the real, through its incidences, and consequences, in practice, rather than through customary academic engagement). As a result, non-philosophy produces fictions in the world that are speculative and experimental in character, rather than proposing alternative explanations and interpretations of the world; a heuristic rather than a hermeneutic enterprise.

O’Sullivan (2017) explores six ‘applications’ (p.298) of non-philosophy to art practice. The first is diagrammatics, ‘the practice of decontextualisation, reorganisation, and general manipulation of philosophical material that have been untethered from their properly philosophical function or discourse’ (p.299). What can be done with these untethered materials, freed, for instance, from the need to represent or explain? The second is ‘art as a model’, in which art is conceived as offering, perhaps, a model for how such untethered materials might be deployed. The third is a proposal for a ‘non-art’, which refuses to (auto) position itself with regard to that which came before (and which, through its abstraction from activity, as risen above the real). The fourth is a proposal for ideological critique, offering, perhaps, and means to open up the coalition of contemporary art with neo-liberalism. The fifth is the prospect of performance fictions, where performance come from, and remains within, the world, without being about the world. The final application is the possibility of a fiction of the self, the production of a life lived otherwise, and the consequent question of the constitution of subjectivity. This fictioning entails not the dissolving of self, put the production of a more contingent self.

Both the account of Laruelle’s work and O’Sullivan’s ‘applications’ to art practice above are, by necessity, excessively compressed. I hope, though, that there is sufficient to see resonances with themes explored elsewhere in the CRJ. For instance, the move towards a more speculative way of working, and the use of ‘untethered’ material (whether purposefully untethered or by happenstance, in the case of skeuomorphs, material metaphors, where past function is forgotten in the passage into the present as design). Also the call to generate critical commentary from within practices/fields, and to utilise ‘material’ from other fields in so doing, rather than taking on the concerns of, or being objectified by, discourses that have risen, or been positioned, above practice. And earlier posts on post-humanism. Finally, there is the question of the the tendency (or necessity, perhaps, in their ‘standard’ form) for organising discourses to place their agents in super-ordinate positions, above the general population (for example, where is Frances Galton placed in the bell curve, and where do the parenting practices of the middle classes sit in the professional discourse of childcare?).

References

Brassier, R. 2003. ‘Axiomatic heresy: the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle’. Radical Philosophy, 121: 24-35.

Laruelle, F. 2013. Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith. London: Bloomsbury.

Mackay, R. 2012a. ‘Response to Laruelle on Non-Photography’ Presentation at Goldsmiths College, London. Available at: http://readthis.wtf/writing/response-to-laruelle-on-non-photography/ [accessed 03.03.19]

Mackay, R. 2012b. ‘Art and the practice of non-philosophy’ Presentation at Pavilion, Leeds, June 2012. Available at: http://readthis.wtf/writing/art-and-the-practice-of-non-philosophy/ [accessed 03.03.19]

O’Sullivan, S. 2017. ‘Non-philosophy and art practice (or fiction as method)’. In J.K. Shaw and T. Reeves-Evison (eds) Fiction as Method. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Imaging Time: Understanding Photography as Time-based Media

The Photographers Gallery, London, 23rd February 2019

https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/talks-and-events/imaging-time-understanding-photography-time-based-media

‘Traditional notions of photography as frozen or captured moments have long since developed into narratives where the photograph acts as ‘a space of becoming’, in which meaning can be made and explored. Photography’s relationship with time has changed in the digital age, where images are increasingly vulnerable to temporal ambiguity through manipulation and retouching, whilst instantaneous production and distribution has also encouraged a resurgence and return to the use of analogue processes’.

A lot of ground covered in this session. I will just draw out points raised by the presenters that are relevant to the development of my own work, which is clearly grappling with how to address the complex interaction of different points in time.

Catherine Yass. Previous work has taken a positive and negative image of the same scene and overlaid these on a light box. Small differences in time (between exposures) are made visible in this process. She sees the process of overlaying as disrupting sense of space and position. More recent work has involved video from a drone moving around an object, and the slowing of the video to one eighth speed to force interpolation – producing images that have not existed (like the channel mixing composites, where interaction between layers producing images as fictions). She has also looped and manipulated the Harold Lloyd clock scene to play with notion of time and direction. Likewise, leaving 4×5 sheet film in the street to decay and displaying on a lightbox attempts to explore time and decay. Reference also made to Catherine’s work featured in the Wellcome exhibition Living with Buildings: Health and Architecture, which I need to revisit (see earlier post on this here).

Phoebe Boswell. Combines drawing with photography, dealing with questions of archive, memory and time. Layering of stories from different perspectives in the family. Interesting dual channel looped video of herself and her sister sorting through the same photographs. The work begins to create new histories through the layering of accounts. Interesting question about what effect drawing from pictures has on our sense of time and image.

Erica Scourti. Explored the development of her work and the role of photography as intermediary in development and projection of a sense of self, eg So Like You (2014). Proliferation of images undermines sense of uniqueness of experience (by constantly indexing experience with the experience of others). In Bodyscan (2014) used visual recognition algorithms in apps to explore body image. Raised the question of unseen images, and the effects of auto-tagging and categorisation in relation to digital maintenance and female labour. Also refer to more recent work (giving over online and off-line digital data on self to an author to develop a persona) described in ‘Fiction as Method’.

Discussion. Chaired by Lucy Reynolds. Importance of touch and the haptic in conveying a sense of time. Reference made to Eco’s notion of an open work, which allows the reader space to interpret (as opposed to a closed work) – this is important to the complex layered images I am producing at the moment. Question of displacement, as being out of place and out of time, discussed (and displacement is a key issue in urban regeneration, of course). This was related to ‘knowing your place’ in meritocratic and eugenic discourse (exemplified in an extreme and explicit form in Singapore, of course), which denies space to dream and imagine. Discussion also of the strategy (or tactic?) of breaking down images and (re)constructing and (re)membering. Reference made to Grace Weir’s (2019) two screen installation at the Institute of Physics, Time Tries All Things (a meditation on different conceptions of time). Also, briefly, to the physicality of the mobile phone, and how people hold and touch them (undermining the supposed virtuality of images), which resonates with recent work with young adults in Hull. Closing cautionary (and important for my work, which has to keep open multiple accounts and perspective) quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘beware of the single story’ (which also resonates with the unreliable narrator of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day).

Photographies and Audiences (Week 4 Reflection)

I have written earlier about the notion of ‘photographies’ rather than considering ‘photography’ as unified (or even unifiable) practice or discipline. Accordingly, I have divided my practice into a number of different domains of practice, each having its own intent, audience and means of dissemination/circulation (and outside this self-consciously photographic work, of course, use photography and photographic images in a variety of other activities). There are, however, a number of underlying concerns (about theory, practice and the nexus between these, for instance). Although I have described my project as having three levels of production and circulation of images/artifacts, there is no a priori hierarchy – these domains of practice (my own art, collaborative campaign image making, engagement with community image making) are just different contexts for the deployment of photographic image making (and therefore all contributing to my development as a photographer, and the development of my skills and understanding of the processes, practices, contexts and fields of photography).

Over the past week, I have made advances in all three domains (which I will describe in other posts). For the purpose of this reflection, I will focus on my own artistic practice. The aim of this work is to develop a distinctive means of exploring areas of material, social and cultural domains of human experience, for instance the impact of the process of urban regeneration on residents. The intent of the work is to examine the interaction between different interests in, experience of and aspirations for a particular place and the changes that take place over time. There is thus a need to bring time and place, and different subjective relationships to these dimensions, into the same space, through, for instance, juxtaposition within or between images and artifacts. To do this also entails a multi-modal approach. At this point in time, I am experimenting with images; ultimately these will be combined with sound, text, moving image, artifacts and other media in exhibition, installation and/or book form.

The principal audience for this work is others with a critical interest in arts-based practice and research and the contribution this can make to the critical understanding of human experience and engagement with the world. The audience would also include those who are interested more broadly in the issues I am exploring, or having overlapping interests from other disciplines and areas of practice. The audience would also include people directly involved in the contexts being explored (for instance, residents, developers, councillors, activists, in the case of urban regeneration), as well as those with a direct interest in the visual arts. At this point in time, I am engaging with people in a variety of communities in the evolution of the work.

For me, ambiguity is one of a number of strategies available in making images and juxtaposing them with other modes. If work is specifically aimed at examination of photography as a practice or field, I can see that ambiguity might be an intent in its own right. However, ambiguity without context is untethered from meaning: in making sense of the ambiguous image, the reader imposes their own context which, it might be argued, radically alienates the image from the maker. Ambiguity as a sole intent thus might give rise to a number of novel and engaging images, but ultimately will not provide the basis for an enduring and coherent body of work: that would require a broader conceptual base, and a corresponding (but not necessarily all encompassing) sense of direction.

Over the past week I have experimented with the overlaying of images, and in particular the exploration of multi-channel works. Although the aim has been to produce works in colour, some of the most satisfying images have been monochrome (working with monochrome images in three colour channels and then converting back into monochrome by de-saturating, or using a gradient map, at the final stage). The image below juxtaposes the built (fence) with the natural (macro plant images).

This image combines different scales of image taken in the same place (Stratford Station, from a train).

The form of the third monochrome image combines human forms in the built environment, with urban nature and a macro shot of a corroded surface.

In all cases the distinct and discontiguous (in time, space, scale, natural/human/constructed) are brought together in the same space, with the intent of produce an open text which invites interpretation. There are similarities, particularly the second image, with the work of Antony Cairns (who uses chemical not digital processes and has experimented with printing on aluminium plates and displaying images on Kindle screens).

In the colour work, I have explored the use of existing images. The following three images are formed by overlaying images from the triptychs produced in the first module.

The final image combines a developer produced image of the future, with an image of construction in progress and an image of the natural landscape that is in the process of being ‘over-written’.

A monochrome version of the same image opens up an exploration of the affordances of colour and monochrome images in this context.

More experiments to follow …

Multi-channel images

Over the past few months I have been struggling with a way to create images that capture the temporal dimension of urban regeneration, encapsulating in some way the past, present and future urban landscape, and place people within this. I have experimented with the juxtaposition of images in early work (using triptych and grid formats) but felt that this was too static a form for such a dynamic process. Following up the work featured in Carol Squier’s 2014 ‘What is a Photograph‘ ICP exhibition led me to the work of James Welling.

I was particularly interested in his Multichannel Works series, in which images are overlayed and manipulated. In his 2017 lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Welling gives insight into the motivation for and production of this series. In earlier work, he explored the use of colour filters with multiple black and white images to produce complex colour images. For a commission to photograph the MoMA sculpture garden, he worked with archival photos over which her layered his own photographs. He placed the archive image in the red channel, and his own images in the blue and green channels.

In this way he sought to echo the work of Warhol and Rauschenberg in their exploration of the screen print process. He was also inspired by Avedon’s psychedelic pictures of the Beatles and his Moondrops campaign for Revlon.

Richard Avedon, 1967, Beatles Posters .

Other influences included the colour solarisation process and the look of Agfacontour equidensity film, which was used for back cover of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. Subsequently he began to work with digital images and post-processing software. His initial images were architectural, but he later built on his background in contemporary dance to place dancers within particular built environments, including the Glass House (the focus of an earlier architectural study) and brutalist architecture.

Each composite image is produced from three black and white photographs. In post-processing software, each image is assigned to either the red, blue or green channel, and in some cases an equidensity gradient map is used. The three images used in the construction of the 2015 image 9472 from the Choreograph Series, are shown below, together with the final image.

James Welling, 2015, Choreograph Series, 9472.

The final print is produced on an inkjet printer, which Welling uses because it gives a print with texture and a sense of volume and surface, missing in chemical prints. His treatment of prints as artifacts resonates with my own work. Although the work is digitally produced, it gives me the opportunity to explore shooting on film in monochrome (which I can process at home), with the potential for very large prints by shooting on large format. Welling compares with process with the production of double/multiple exposure images in film (as practiced, for instance, by Harry Callaghan), with elements of surprise and improvisation in the production of the image, which also resonates with my artistic interests (in sound and writing as well as visually: the audio control of multi-channel video using Jitter in Max7 achieves similar effects).

The next step for me is to experiment, and get to know what kinds of images work best with this process. These images will include visualisations of developments, photographs of the areas as they are now, photographs of residents and archival material (which might include maps). Producing images that are aesthetically and compositionally strong and also comprehensible will be a challenge. The process itself, inspired by Welling’s work, is just a starting point, and I expect to develop the method and the workflow as I apply the approach to exploration of the context of urban regeneration.

This is my very first attempt, using a photograph of a discussion of self-publishing and post-capitalism at the ICA, a landscape and an experimental close-up.

ICA, The Freedoms of Self-publishing, 08.12.18

As Welling says, you have to know where to stop. Lots, as always, to learn.

References

International Center of Photography. 2014. What is a Photograph [exhibition]. Curator Carol Squiers. ICP, New York, 31.01.14 – 04.05.14. https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/what-is-a-photograph [accessed 18.02.19]

Welling, James. 2017. Pathological Color, Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 13.11.2017. https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/james-welling-pathological-color/ [accessed 18.02.19]

Constructions (Week 3 Reflection)

In my posts over past three weeks, I have analysed a number of constructed images. These include Karen Knorr’s incongruous insertion of artifacts and animals into formally rendered interiors (for instance, the Academies series), Tom Hunter’s Vermeer influenced interiors in Persons Unknown, Jeff Wall’s Mimic and Danny Treacey’s Those and Clearings Series (see earlier posts here and here for images discussed). I also considered construction in my preliminary discussion of work by Sugimoto (the Diorama and Waxworks series, for instance). The work with objects in museums and collections also has a constructed dimension, for instance in the presentation of material for pedagogic purposes, which takes objects out of the context of their use and places them in a (constructed) public space (as in the displays below made from microscope slides).

Microscope slide display, UCL Grant Museum of Zoology, 2019

Whilst I have considered how this work relates to my own practice, I have not produced any constructed images myself. So I am going to use the reflection at the end of Week 3 to think through how I might develop the use of constructed images in the development of my work, and specifically current and planned projects. Rather than create a mega-post here, I am going to create a succession of more focused posts in the Contextual Research and Project Development sections, and then link them back to a statement here later.

Week 3 Activity: False Indexes

It won’t be a surprise to anyone who has read my earlier posts that I’m going to rule out the achievement of objectivity (though not, necessarily, the seemingly enduring, constantly thwarted, human desire for objectivity/truth). All our knowledge of and engagement with the world is mediated (we know the world through our somewhat idiosyncratic, unreliable and partial senses (and our culturally coded interpretation of those sensations), and we convey and explore that knowledge and understanding through words, sounds, actions, images and other means, each of which adds its own texture to what we are attempting to (re)present. So the issue for me isn’t whether an image, for instance, is subjective or not, but rather how it is subjective, and to what effect. And, of course, as artists we can, and many do, use images to explore our own subjectivity. Through these explorations, and through dialogue, interaction and engagement with others, we construct and reconstruct what we take collectively to be true. As research by Dan Kahan and colleagues indicates (for instance, Kahan et al, 2017), it is curiosity not certain knowledge that enables us to remain open to other perspectives and remain open and dynamic in our interaction with others.

‘individuals who have an appetite to be surprised by scientific information—who find it pleasurable to discover that the world does not work as they expected—do not turn this feature of their personality off when they engage political information but rather indulge it in that setting as well, exposing themselves more readily to information that defies their expectations about facts on contested issues. The result is that these citizens, unlike their less curious counterparts, react more open mindedly and respond more uniformly across the political spectrum to the best available evidence’ (Kahan et al, 2017: 198).

The point in relation to the topic of this discussion is that, even in disciplines in which expectations of certain knowledge are high (science), the ability to accommodate uncertainty, the unresolved, the inexplicable and the open-ended (all issues that have been raised in relation to constructed images in photographic art) has positive effects. In the interests of getting this post done, I’ll explore relevant images and post these in the version in my CRJ as soon as I get time.

I think it goes without saying that, from this and previous posts, the context in which an image is circulated and read will influence how an image is interpreted, and will shape the particular interest that the reader has in the image. In my own work I am moving to use a variety of modes of (re)presentation and engagement, and the settings/contexts in which this work is presented is paramount.

I’m just reading George Szirtes’s (2019) The Photographer at Sixteen, which recontextualises family photographs in a narrative which moves from his mother’s death back through her life, creating complexes of meaning in their relationship to his text.

References

Kahan, D, Landrum, A., Carpenter, K., Helft, L. & Jamieson, K.H. 2017. ‘Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing’, Advances in Political Psychology, 38(1), 179-199.

George Szirtes, G. 2019. The Photographer at Sixteen. London: MacLehose Press.