Doctorate in Fine Art and MA in Photography Critical Research Journal
Tag: LO3
Critical Contextualization of Practice. Apply a critical awareness of the diversity of contemporary photographic practice to the development of your own work, and inform your practice through historical, philosophical, ethical and economic contextualization.
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.
‘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).
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]
If we accept the proposition that the meaning is created in the reading of the text/image (a key premise of semiotics and phenomenology) then it is not tenable to think of a photograph as lying. As Richard Rorty, like Peirce grounded in American pragmatism, but with a dusting of late Wittgenstein and continental philosophy, states:
‘Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of humans—cannot.’ (1989: 5)
Of course, photographers can construct images with the intention of deceiving, and others can use images for purposes for which they were not intended. This aspect of human agency relates not to epistemology (what counts as truth) but to ethics.
The disqualification of Jose Luis Rodriguez from the 2009 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award is grounded not in the artifice of the image but in the (knowing or unknowing) breaking of the (tacit or explicit) rules of the game: it is not that the photograph lies, but that the photographer transgresses in depicting a trained rather than wild animal.
If the making of meaning lies ultimately with the reader, then the maker will seek more effective modes of transmission (if they have a message to convey, or an intention to realise). And photography will constantly thwart the desire for a neutral relay (as all modes of communication must, but the disappointment in photography’s failure is amplified by the anticipation of indexicality). Construction can act as a means to enhance the possibility of the achievement of intention. Jeff Wall’s reconstruction of a fleeting observation in ‘Mimic’ amplifies a passing racist gesture.
Jeff Wall, Mimic, 1982.
Peter Kennard, through the use of montage (the most overt form of construction, maybe), sees himself as ‘researching reality’ which ‘involves ripping photographs out of their context to bring the perpetrators of war and poverty slap bang into the same space as their victims’ (Kennard in Read and Simmons, p.vii), thus challenging the viewer in their meaning making.
Peter Kennard, Prevent Street Crime, 1983.
These, and the constructions featured in the presentation, create scenarios designed to enhance the engagement of the viewer through a variety of means (for instance, incongruity within the image, resonance and dissonance, the evocation of the uncanny, the exploration of the imaginary). They are fictions in that any two dimensional rendering of the world at a moment of time in a particular material or digital form is a fiction, with variation in the strength, quality and integrity of intention, awaiting reanimation through the engagement of the viewer.
In my own image making I tend to seek incongruity, in the ironic juxtaposition of the natural and the human, for instance.
Or rendering settings in unfamiliar or incongruous modes (the coal port as romantic seascape).
Or through the juxtaposition of images in grids, triptychs or other configurations. All constructions and fictions of sorts; small steps on the way to enhancing the potential of the images to focus and amplify meaning through the engagement of the reader, with a long way to go.
References
Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Read, M. & Simmons, S. 2016. Photographers and Research: The role of research in contemporary photographic practice. London: Routledge.
Andrew Brown (2019): Chicken / Taxidermy, Grant Museum of Zoology / 28.01.2017-15.02.2018
‘The poverty of photographic criticism is
well known. It stands out against the richness of photographic
production and invention, the widespread use and enjoyment of
photographs, and even the popularity of photography as a hobby. To end
this poverty we do not need more philosophizing about photographs and
reality, or yet another (this time definitive) definition of
“photographic seeing,” or yet another distillation of photography’s
essence or nature. The tools for making sense of photographs lie at
hand, and we can invent more if and when we really need them’. (Snyder
and Allen, 1975: 169).
I’m certainly in sympathy with the conclusions drawn by Snyder and Allen. In scrutinising what might be considered distinctive about the analysis of photographic images, they argue that there are questions that can be asked of any photographic image that are specifically photographic (relating, for instance, to the technicalities of the production of the image) and generic (questions that can be asked of any artifact, for instance relating to its use within a specific context, or its aesthetic qualities). In the concluding paragraph, above, they shift the responsibility, or at least the locus, for analysis away from the other disciplines and practices which happen take photography as an object, and place it within the field of photography itself.
Coming to photography, as an academic field, from another field
(sociology), I’ve been surprised that intellectual canon is dominated by
texts produced by people with little enthusiasm for or affiliation to
photography. The highly personal nature of Barthes’ (1981) Camera Lucida,
and the consequently idiosyncratic and backward looking choice of
photographic work, obscures the greater contribution that, for instance,
his semiotic concept of myth (Barthes, 2009; first published in French
in 1957) might make to analysis. Sontag (1977; 2003), similarly, takes
photography as an (arbitrary) instance of cultural practice, and
produces an analytic account which, it could be argued, sits outside,
and is sceptical of, photographic practice (which is wide-ranging,
complex and evolving). Derrida, who has also written specifically about
photographs and photography (eg. Derrida, 2010) exemplifies the issue.
‘It is true that only words interest me.
It is true, for reasons that have to do in part with my own history and
archaeology, that my investment in language is stronger, older, and
gives me more enjoyment than my investment in the plastic, visual, or
spatial arts’. (1990 interview with Peter Brunette and David Wills,
quoted by Gerhard Richter in Derrida, 2010: xvi).
Like Barthes, and Sontag, and others who have come to constitute the, somewhat masochistic, canon of photographic cultural theory and analysis, Derrida’s principal interests, and affiliations, lie elsewhere. And hence, their analytic engagement with photography is opportunistic and partial, and lacks commitment to the development of a strong, conceptually sophisticated, field of photographic theory and analysis. This lies at the heart of the ‘poverty of photographic criticism’ identified by Snyder and Allen, and their claim that we should invest less time in agonising over questions of ‘photographs and reality’, and desist from taking up the concerns of, for instance, philosophers for whom photography is an apposite example deployed in pursuit of a broader set of questions and interests. Rather, we should celebrate the complexity of photographic practice and collaboratively draw on the wealth of cross-disciplinary theory and empirical research, not just that which names photography as an object, to push forward our understanding of photography and enrich and advance our practice (as Mick has done by drawing on the organisational learning theory of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (for instance, Argyris, 1993; Argyris and Schön, 1996), in his CRJ post on for this activity). This enables us to take greater control of photographic discourse, form inter-disciplinary partnerships, respond to challenges and opportunities presented from within and outside the field and develop more constructive and dynamic relationship between theory and practice (praxis).
My own theoretical roots lie in the post-structuralism of Foucault, De Certeau and Derrida, the sociology of Bernstein and Bourdieu, and the socio-cognitive theory of Vygotsky and Luria. In addressing the development of my own photographic practice in this programme, my thinking has taken a more materialist turn, mirrored in an interest in the use of photography by multi-disciplinary artists, such as Cornelia Parker and Danny Treacy.
Parker explores the qualities of materials in the making of images,
and reflects the breadth of interests, vision and experimental
orientation (embracing theory, empirical investigation and serendipity)
of the pioneers of photography, such as Fox Talbot.
Cornelia Parker, Premeditated Act of Violence (2015). Polymer photogravure etching.
Cornelia Parker, Jug Full of Ice (2015). Polymer photogravure etching.
Treacy describes himself as an ‘artist working with photography, incorporating elements of sculpture, performance and exploration’. His image making encompasses urban anthropology and the making of artifacts with found objects and materials. He emphasises the process of creation of art works, which convey a strong sense of entanglement in the world (rather than any attempt to represent). He explores marginal urban places, similar to the settings I explored in the first module.
Danny Treacy, from Those series.
Danny Treacy, from Clearings series.
Both explore the ‘peculiar’ nature, or affordances, of photographic
image making. I’m hoping, over the course of the module, to extend my
own practice in this direction.
References
Argyris, C. 1993. On Organizational Learning. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. 1996. Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method and Practice. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Barthes, R. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. London: Vintage.
Barthes, R. 2009. Mythologies. Translated by A. Lavers. Revised edition. London: Vintage.
Derrida, J. 2010. Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. Edited with an Introduction by Gerhard Richter. Translated by Jeff Fort. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Sontag, S. 1977. On Photography. London: Penguin Books.
Sontag, S. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.
Snyder, J. and Allen, N. W. 1975. ‘Photography, Vision, and Representation’, Critical Inquiry. 2(1): 143–169.
Over the past week I have continued to develop relationships and links relating to my proposed FMP. The Thames Ward Community Partnership summit on Thursday provided the opportunity to make images to feed into the work of the group and to make contacts with community groups for project related work (eg. JustMap, Creekmouth Preservation Society, Shed Life and the New View Arts Project). My images were used in the visual presentation that ran during the evening. I also attended further Object Lesson sessions, including some work on writing about objects at the Grant Museum.
The webinar with Michelle helped me to think through how, over the course of this module, I might link these two strands of my work. In the exploration of the relationship between individuals and groups and changes that are taking place in their communities through regeneration, objects clearly have a part to play (both in exploring experiences and aspirations with participants, and in making images, and making artefacts from/for the images).
Karen Knorr, The Order of Things (Academies Series 1994-2005).
Karen Knorr’s Academies series (1994-2005) covers very similar settings to the university galleries and museums. She explores the dominance of the western aesthetic, whereas my interest is more in the roots of the collections in eugenics and colonialism, and the attempts to moderate (or even atone for) this through public engagement (for instance, in the use of the collections in social prescribing and other well-being related initiatives). One possibility would be to attempt to bring these different interests into the same visual space.
Karen Knorr, Love at First Sight, Palazinna Cinese, 2017.
Knorr does this through digital manipulation in her most recent work (for instance, in the image above from the Metamorphosis series), though has in the past, as in the Academies series, used taxidermy (noting the effect that photographs appear to bring these animals to life, as Sugimoto observes in his waxwork and diorama series). The lighting of these settings is clearly key, and I want to look at the lighting used in 19th Century painting, from the period in which the museums were founded (Tom Hunter has explored painterly lighting schema, referencing Friedrich’s window motif through the use of the window as the principal source for lighting an interior, in his Persons Unknown series in Hackney).
Tom Hunter, A Glass of Wine, 1997 (Persons Unknown series).
This would form a link with the Riverside work through the issue of regeneration, place, identity and well-being. I want also to ‘reverse’ or mirror the settings, and make related images on the estate, reinforcing the link through objects, materiality and touch. This clearly relates to the material turn in photography discussed in relation to Squiers’ exhibition this week, and to my intention to work more with prints, not just digital images.
I’ve also been exploring Cornelia Parker’s use of photography, making a further link to materiality, but also to precariousness and experiment. I’ll post more about this and other artists, such as Danny Treacy, who work with both photographic images and artefacts, over the coming weeks.
Reading Bourdieu is tough at the best of times, not just because of the (deliberate) obscurity of the language and conceptual density, but also the severity and sharpness of the sociological focus. In looking specifically at photography, Bourdieu and colleagues treat it as a set of arbitrary practices which contribute in some way, as do all other social and cultural practices, to the production and reproduction of social relations (through the creation and reinforcement of distinctions along lines of social class, gender, occupation, ethnicity, status and so on). Anyone with a commitment (professional, recreational, artistic, emotional) to photography is going to find this kind of sociological dissection pretty uncomfortable, which might, at least in part, explain why Bourdieu’s (1990: first published in French in 1965) book ‘Photography: A Middle-brow Art’ is so rarely cited in analytical writing on photography (the title hardly helps, of course). Barthes, without naming the work, distances his approach, and interests in photography, from that of Bourdieu in the following way:
‘Each time I would read something about Photography, I would think of some photograph I loved, and this made me furious. Myself, I saw only the referent, the desired object, the beloved body; but an importunate voice (the voice of knowledge, of scientia) then adjured me, in a severe tone: “Get back to Photography. What you are seeing here and what makes you suffer belongs to the category ‘Amateur Photographs,’ dealt with by a team of sociologists; nothing but the trace of a social protocol of integration, intended to reassert the Family, etc.” Yet I persisted; another, louder voice urged me to dismiss such sociological commentary; looking at certain photographs, I wanted to be a primitive, without culture. So I went on, not daring to reduce the world’s countless photographs, any more than to extend several of mine to Photography: in short, I found myself at an impasse and, so to speak, “scientifically” alone and disarmed’. (Barthes, 1981: 7)
Bourdieu’s extensive empirical investigation of the use of photography (including surveys and interviews relating to everyday, amateur, artistic and professional uses of photography), carried out in the 1960s, might seem dated (with the growth of digital technology, and particularly the pervasive the use of phones to make photographs and disseminate images through social media). Much is made of camera ownership, which now seems to have a very different social and cultural significance. This is not the place, or time, to delve deep into this work, but there are a couple of points raised by Bourdieu and colleagues (who include Luc Boltanski, brother of photographic artist, Christian Boltanski) that warrant some attention in relation to my own project and trajectory.
Fundamental to the work is the assertion that photographic practice is ‘an index and an instrument of integration’ (p.19). Bourdieu documents and dissects the use of photography within the family, including ceremonial uses and as part of the circuit of gifts in the form of images, for instance in weddings, in reinforcing a sense of collective life and an integrated family group. This places the ‘enthusiast’, the person with an intrinsic interest in photography, outside ‘normal’ practice. For Bourdieu, in their interest in photography per se (as an aesthetic and/or technical practice), these ‘devotees’ and ‘fanatics’ (p.44) break with the norms of family photography, and are thus more weakly integrated, or even alienated, from the family. It is both an expression and a reinforcement of weak integration; it is also, from the analysis of Bourdieu’s empirical data, clearly gendered (there is a much higher proportion of male enthusiasts). This is clearly worth revisiting, in the light of both changing technology and associated social practices, and a renewed interest in family photography as a form of artistic practice (see, for instance, Howarth and McLaren, 2016). My interest here, though, will be confined to the personal and biographic, stemming from reflection on an event from my childhood prompted by reading this work. As I have indicated previously (for instance, in my oral presentations) my emotional attachment to, and active engagement with, photography stems from my early work as a child model, and the time spent in and around photographic studios. My godfather, Ray Harwood, was one of two assistants who worked with Cecil Beaton, including the Coronation photographs in 1953.
Ray Harwood (right) and John Drysdale, reminisce about assisting Beaton. Times photographer, David Bebber
Whilst there is a clear class division between artist and technician, this work enabled Ray to go on to work for Conde Nast as a photographer and to set up his own studio. In domestically difficult circumstances, photography for me came to signify the possibility of another life, beyond the family (as did sport, cycling, music and academic achievement). With easy access to film, and using the family Kodak camera (and a kit which included a Diana plastic camera, which I bought with the proceeds from my paper-rounds), I started to take photographs at the age of 10 and learnt to process and print my own work. At the age of 11, a couple of years before my father, thankfully, left home, I part-exchanged the Kodak, without his knowledge, for a camera which allowed greater control of aperture, shutter speed and focus. I still have the camera (a Halina 35X, made in Hong Kong, a copy of the Japanese Ranger 35), though I have never deliberately held on to it or taken care of it, and have never thought (until now) about taking photographs with it. It sits of a shelf by my desk with a number of random books and objects.
Empire Made: my Halina 35X
I cannot remember how he responded (it would have been physical), nor even if he ever found out (I figure that by that time, he didn’t really care). I have never thought to look at when family photographs ceased. There are certainly none from the point at which he left home (my mother, though she had worked for two professional photographers, had no active interest in taking photographs, though has always enjoyed, until she effectively lost her sight through macular degeneration, and valued images), but I figure that photography (certainly as an integrative family activity) stopped a long time before this. I don’t have any of my own photographs from this period. Certainly, my interest in photography at this time is indicative of my own alienation from the family, and desire to spend as much of my time as possible outside the home. The point here is that, whatever the wider value of Bourdieu’s analysis (in its own right and as part of a greater corpus of sociological theory and research), it has raised a number of questions, and ways of thinking about events and experiences, relating to my own biography and trajectory. Selling the family camera, something that I had not thought about until reading Bourdieu’s work this week, probably had far greater significance than I had ever imagined. Working on the significance of objects and object analysis with the UCL BASc students gives me the opportunity to think further about this, perhaps taking the camera as my object (our lecture next week is on the psycho-social significance of objects, which is apposite).
UCL BASc Object Lessons group at the Grant Museum of Zoology, 01.02.19
There are three other thoughts for exploration, two of which are made in footnotes to a chapter on photographic art by Chamboredon (pp. 129-149). Firstly, in comparing the process of production of painting and photography (with the former images requiring time and concerted effort, whether trained or not, whilst the latter can be created instantaneously), he notes that there has not been (and perhaps, could never be, given these differences in production processes) a ‘naive’ photographic artist, in the sense that Rousseau (Le Douanier) was a naive (that is untrained and unsocialised) painter (note 19, p. 201). This, though, is precisely what Anne Geene and Arjan de Nooy have produced in the (imaginary) Universal Photographer, in that they have taken historical segments of everyday (naive) image making, and inserted them into photographic art discourse. There is, of course, through instagram and other social media, now a parallel world of naive art photographers, with instagram ‘image-making stars’ created through the operation of a set of alternative (popular) criteria (or, rather, multiple sets of criteria, which act to produce a differentiated field of ‘stars’). I’ve written a couple of thousand words exploring this further, but will keep that for another day.
The second (note 5, p.201) is the question of the extent to which it is the disappearance of traditional crafts (as common modes of production, in the face of automation and mechanisation) that has facilitated the transformation of craft techniques into artistic media (for instance, pottery, weaving, ironwork). This casts an interesting light on the analogue and material turn in photographic art, and on the possibilities of the development of photographic art in the face of evermore sophisticated everyday image making (and distributing) technology, and AI applications. In other words, the increasing marginalisation of the knowledge, skills and processes of photographic practice creates an increased potential for the development of photographic art. Photography, as a specialised practice, is not superseded, but displaced, and the historical development through successive technological advances is temporally compressed into a repository of resources for contemporary practice (evident in, for instance, the revisiting of Fox Talbot’s techniques by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Naoya Hatakeyama and Cornelia Parker, amongst many others).
The third is an observation, pertinent to my own family history, made by Boltanski and Chamboredon in a chapter on professional photography (pp. 150-173; this presents a pretty bleak picture of photography as a profession, including reflection on the ‘uselessness’ of professional qualifications, pp. 152-3). Here they explore the professional aspirations and trajectories of photographers in relation to social class, and identify the means by which photography offers the potential of ‘upclassing’, particularly for working-class entrants (p.161). Interesting to apply this form of analysis to particular cases, for instance, in fashion photography in the 1960s (in relation to both social class and gender).
References
Barthes, R. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. London: Vintage.
Bourdieu, P. 1990. Photography: A Middle-brow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Howarth, S. and McLaren, S. 2016. Family Photography Now. London: Thames and Hudson.
Intent. I am doing the masters programme in order to learn, develop my photography, and start to build a more coherent, informed and engaging body of work. My initial interest was the visual exploration of the relationship between the natural and the human in marginal urban places, leading to two series of images: Newcastle Beach Ocean Pool and Roding Valley Park.
Newcastle Beach Ocean Pool, 2018
Roding Valley Park, 2018
Whilst doing this work over the course of the first module, I became increasingly interested in the impact of urban regeneration, and in particular understanding and facilitating community engagement and benefit from the rapid changes taking place in east London. This gave rise to three series of images focusing respectively on urban regeneration in Hackney Wick, Ilford and Barking.
Hackney Wick, 2018
Ilford, 2018
Barking, 2018
A related set of concerns also emerged, around the privatisation of land, social infrastructure, and restrictions on access to, and use of, spaces and places for the public. Research into the three artists for this activity, alongside image making around the Barking Riverside development, have given rise to a concern for more fundamental environmental issues relating to the impact of urban development, which will be the focus for my work for this module.
Choices. For my project, I have proposed three levels of image making: (i) images made by residents as a way of exploring their lived experience and aspirations; (ii) collaborative image making with resident and community groups for influence, advocacy and change; (iii) my own artistic response to the impact of urban regeneration and the possibility of positive change for residents and communities. Over the course of this module, I plan to advance all three aspects of my practice, but will focus particularly on third (my own artistic work) for this and subsequent activities. In this area I want to be able to continue to experiment with forms of image making and dissemination, and explore how this relates to other modes and media (text, sound, video, artefacts). In carrying out research on the three photographic artists chosen for this activity, I have raised questions about my own practice and considered areas for development: see my more detailed posts on Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fay Godwin and Naoya Hatakeyama.
Godwin’s work has most clearly influenced my own. Despite focusing on urban rather than rural settings, and working digitally in colour rather than in monochrome on film, my mode of working and forms of image are similar. I walk through and explore the landscape, and take photographs in the landscape rather than of the landscape. My images tend to concentrate on the meeting of the natural with traces of human activity, and have increasingly highlighted the privatisation of land and issues of access and surveillance.
Barking Riverside, 2018
Others have commented that these tend towards the deadpan aesthetic of the New Topographics. I want to explore my relationship with Godwin’s work further by making some images in the urban settings I am exploring using monochrome film and square format, to get an embodied sense of what is entailed in this way of working and how this impacts on the forms images produced. On the campaigning side, I am continuing to explore the increasing privatisation of urban spaces and the restrictions placed on public activities (including making photographs – Godwin became particularly concerned about the restrictions imposed on photographers by the National Trust, and what she saw as the increasing regulation and control of our heritage).
My engagement with Japanese photographers Sugimoto and Hatakeyama is more recent and developmental. In both cases, I have attempted to understand and position their work in relation to contemporary theory, for instance post-humanism, as well as understanding the theoretical, cultural and visual influences that have shaped their work (particularly interesting as Sugimoto trained and has worked mostly in the US and Hatakeyama trained and has worked mostly in Japan). Both address issues relating to time, history and the future. Hatakeyama’s work is most closely related to my own, and I am interested in developing the idea of excavation and the relationship between extraction and urban development, rising above and sinking below the landscape and projection into the construction of the future. Also, the question of the differences between stopping time (through the act of photographing) in the processes of destruction and construction (the photograph by necessity strips away any direct sense of temporal directionality in creation/destruction; in Hatakeyama’s work, each is dependent on the other). From an analysis of the work of both artists, I have much to learn about how to establish coherence within and between series of photographs, and ways of achieving conceptual clarity.
All three artists combine text and images, but in different ways. In all cases, text and image are not intended to explain or embellish each other, but to achieve different things (and therefore to supplement and enrich each other in the achievement of the objectives of the projects). Unsurprisingly, given earlier posts (here and here), none of these artists make any claim to storytelling or the construction of narratives. Godwin’s work was initially geographically organised, and latterly according to social and political themes relating to the land (disseminated predominantly in books). Sugimoto’s and Hatakeyama’s work is organised as distinct parallel and successive series, some open ended, which are disseminated predominantly through exhibitions and the gallery system, with some photobooks. Hatekeyama notes that his first solo exhibition looked like a group show, and has stated that creating a distinctive visual vocabulary is key objective in his practice.
Strengths and limitations. I have produced a number of images that I am happy with visually and technically (see examples and links to series above), and have explored different ways of presenting these, for instance as grids, in triptych form and as a sequence with text (see below).
‘Out of Sight’, photographs from the Roding Valley Park, grid arrangement in portfoliobox.
Stanislav’s Moscow, 2018
Each series has had a clear core theme, but the work to date has lacked a distinct conceptual basis, and therefore the growing body of work lacks coherence and a clear sense of visual, methodological or theoretical identity. Each of the three artists I have explored have achieved this sense of coherence and identity in different ways. Godwin works by walking through the rural landscape seeking images where signs of human activity are overlaid on the natural landscape creating a dialogue, and sometimes tension, between the natural and the human. This engagement with the landscape became increasingly political, and the organisation of images centred around themes like agribusiness, habitation, ownership and heritage. Each of the series produced by Sugimoto has a strong rationale, visual style and conceptual base (see earlier discussion). The series do not relate directly to each other (though all are produced with a large format camera and images are presented as large monochrome prints). Each series is related back to an evolving artistic vision, which includes work in other disciplines (for instance, architecture). In Hatakeyama’s work there is a clearer conceptual link between series, around the synergies and inter-dependencies of (destructive) extraction in rural areas and (constructive) urban development. This has been extended in his most recent work which focuses on the rebuilding of a city after natural disaster. In his writing, he is able to relate his work to current and antecedent movements in the visual arts, and chart the development of the work through his journals. Both Sugimoto and Hatakeyama are interested in the foundations of photography, and produce work that is related, in different ways, to the work of the pioneers of nineteenth century photography.
Over the previous module I have produced a range of types of images, and, in particular, have wanted to develop a greater personal engagement, for instance through portraits.
Den Amstel, 2018
Whilst I have been satisfied by the images, I have found it difficult to integrate these with the major body of my work.
Plans. Over the course of this module I want to develop a stronger conceptual base for my image making, and be able to position my work more effectively in relation to other traditions and approaches. I am familiar with contemporary theory in the social sciences and humanities (and have, some years ago, taught social semiotics) but need to develop my knowledge in the visual arts. I am currently exploring Flusser’s work on photography (2011, 2000) and also his writing on the city (2005) and the notion of ‘home’, which relates closely to my interests (for instance, in addressing feelings and experiences of displacement in regeneration). I can build a theoretical and methodological bridge between different levels of image making in my project by drawing on Abbott’s (2007) critique of narrative and his argument for the development of a lyrical approach to social research, and Sinha and Back’s (2014) approach to engaging participants as co-creators in the research process (which includes the use of photography). At the heart of this is further cultivation of links with community groups and projects over the coming months to lay the foundations for my FMP, and a programme of image making which will feed into my work-in-progress portfolio. I have learnt from the previous module that, with a tight timescale, it is important to have a relatively narrow focus for the production of images for the module work-in-progress portfolio. For that reason, I plan to focus on the environmental, rather than the social, aspects of my project, and to take the opportunity to experiment with forms of image making and presentation whilst developing greater conceptual clarity and theoretical sophistication. I am also working on a project relating to physical and intellectual engagement with artifacts in museums, galleries and archives.
References
Abbott, A. 2007. ‘Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology’. Sociological Theory 25 (1): 67-99.
Flusser, V. 2011. The Gesture of Photographing. Translation and Introduction by Nancy Ann Roth. Journal of Visual Culture. SAGE Publications, 10(3): 279–293.
Flusser, V. 2005. ‘The City as Wave Trough in the Image Flood’, Critical Inquiry 31(2): 320–328.
Flusser, V. 2000. Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion.
Sinha, S. & Back, L. 2014. ‘Making methods sociable: dialogue, ethics and authorship in qualitative research’. Qualitative Research 14(4): 473–487.
Drabble, M. 2011. ‘Fay Godwin at the National Media Museum’. The Guardian. 8th January [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/08/margaret-drabble-fay-godwin [accessed 30.12.18].
Fowles, J. 1985. ‘Essay’. In F. Godwin, Land, London: Heinemann: ix-xx.
Godwin, F. 1985. Land. London: Heinemann.
Godwin, F. 1990. Our Forbidden Land. London: Jonathan Cape.
Godwin, F. & R. Ingrams. 1980. Romney Marsh and the Royal Military Canal. London: Wildwood House.
Jeffrey, I. 1985. ‘Introduction’. In F. Godwin, Land. London: Heinemann: xxiii-xxix.
Jeffrey, I. 2005. ‘Fay Godwin: Photographic chronicler of our changing natural world’. The Guardian. 31st May [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/may/31/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries [accessed 30.12.18].
National Media Museum, Bradford. 2011. Fay Godwin: Land Revisited. Exhibition. 15 October 2010 – 27 March 2011 [online]. Available at: https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/what-was-on/fay-godwin-land-revisited [accessed 30.12.18].
Sillitoe, A. & F. Godwin. 1983. The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye. London: Hutchinson.
South Bank Show. 1986. Fay Godwin. Season 10, Episode 6, 9th November [film]. Available at: https://youtu.be/4JE8I44Ak7o [accessed 30.12.18].
Fujii, Y. n.d. ‘Naoya Hatakeyama’. Ocula [online]. Available at: https://ocula.com/artists/naoya-hatakeyama [accessed 04/01/19].
Hatakeyama, N. 2018. ‘The Photographer and Architecture’. In Y. Nakamori, Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City. New York: Aperture:259-266.
Hutchison, R. 2015. ‘A Conversation with Photographer Naoya Hatakeyama’. Interview, 24th September 2010 at Taka Ishii Gallery, Kiyosumi, Tokyo [online]. Available at: http://robhutcharch.com/blog/2015/1/31/a-conversation-with-photographer-naoya-hatakeyama [accessed 04/01/19].
McLaren, S. & B. Formhals. 2014. Photographers’ Sketchbooks. London: Thames & Hudson: 118-125.
Nakamori, Y. 2018. Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City. New York: Aperture.
Searle, A. 2014. ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: art for the end of the world’. The Guardian, 16th May [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/16/hiroshi-sugimoto-aujordhui-palais-de-tokyo-paris-exhibition [accessed 30/12/18].
Molinari, L. 2015. ‘Space: timeless architecture’. In Hiroshi Sugimoto, Stop Time. Milan: Skira, 22-40.
Nakamura, Y. 2012. Memories of Origin: Hiroshi Sugimoto. [Film]. Available at: https://youtu.be/NhZJF4IPXcw [accessed 30.12.18].
Sugimoto, H. 2011. Becoming an Artist. Art21, Episode 141. [Film]. Available at: https://youtu.be/JCsbxVCdDtA [accessed 30.12.18].
Sugimoto,H. 2015. Stop Time. Milan: Skira.
Sugimoto, H. 2018a. Between Sea and Sky. Interviewed by Haruko Hoyle at Enoura Observatory in Odawara, Japan, June 2018. [Film]. Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Available at: https://youtu.be/JWh4t67e5GM [accessed 30.12.18].
Sugimoto, H. 2018b. Advice for the Young. Interviewed by Haruko Hoyle at Enoura Observatory in Odawara, Japan, June 2018. [Film]. Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Available at: https://youtu.be/TvO2WL-jGac [accessed 30.12.18].
There are a number of factors that led me to choose Hatakeyama as one of the three photographic artists for this exercise. One is a conversation with a colleague about ‘future heritage’ (those elements of the present or near future that are likely to constitute heritage in the future) and how we identify, represent, preserve and curate this. What of the present will be of value in the future? What do we need to know/imagine of the future to be able to assess this? What is the relationship between attribution of future value in the present and realisation of value in the future? A second factor is the nature of my projected FMP, which involves making images in the present in urban contexts that are undergoing change and development and which thus face an uncertain future (the projected image of which is dominated by CGI presentations produced by developers). The third factor is a shared interest in using images to investigate ‘the relationship between nature and contemporary residential environments’ (Fujii n.d.). Finally, on a visit to Aperture in New York, I came across the newly published Excavating the Future City, a survey of Hatakeyama’s work edited by Nakomori (2018). The title alone made it an essential read. I was also interested in his methods of working and his use of a journal (McLaren & Formhals 2014). In this exercise, I am taking the opportunity to become familiar with a body of work that is new to me, and to relate this to the development of my own practice as a photographer.
Nakamori (2018), setting the scene for a major career retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, gives a comprehensive account of the development of Hatakeyama’s work. This includes an analysis of the influence of western photography (predominantly American) and theory (predominantly European) on Japanese photography in the 1970’s and 80’s, when Hatakeyama was studying at Tsukuba University. There are distinct differences in western and Japanese conceptions of ‘landscape’. Hatakeyama, influenced by the New Topographics approach gaining attention in Japan at the time, sought to subvert the traditional Japanese association of landscape with national identity in his exploration of the relationship between the land and human activity. This is most marked when looking at the relationship between his photographic studies of lime quarrying around his home city of Rikuzentakata, and his work on urban development in Tokyo and Yokohama.
Naoya Hatakeyama, Blast (#05419), 1998.
A key characteristic of this work is the implied inter-relationship between the violence done to the rural landscape by extraction and rapid urban development in Japan. These become two intertwined processes.
Naoya Hatakeyama, Untitled (#52810), 1997.
He works at two levels in both settings, rising above the landscape and city in the Lime Hills and Untitled series, and excavating below the surface in the Blast and River series. Through this work he charts the subtle changes taking place over time in the city, whilst acknowledging the immanence of the future city in the processes of extraction and growth from that which exists below the surface in both rural and urban settings. In this sense, his work can be seen as ‘excavating the future’, with the camera as the instrument of extraction. This places Hatakeyama a substantial distance from the Japanese tradition of celebration of the landscape as an expression of national identity and spiritual unity. To a degree, his work can be seen as an environmental equivalent to the social and cultural subversion of the Provoke movement.
Naoya Hatakeyama, River Series (#004), 1993-4.
The tragedy of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami took Hatakeyama back to his hometown, which initiated a new era in his work. Over a period of 8 years (to date) he has has portrayed the rebuilding through human endeavour of a town almost completely destroyed, a body of work which he describes as a ‘biographical landscape’. This builds on his earlier work (though it is very different in terms of method and timescale) on the relationship between landscape (nature) and city (human) by tracing the lifecycle of a city regrowing out of devastation, in a way that transcends the particularities of this one specific place, and addresses more generally the topographic transformation of Japan, and associated global environmental questions about the relationship between the land and human activity. As Nakamori (2018) notes, this also marks a distinct shift in the position of Hatakeyama as an image maker, from a marked distance from the rural landscape and urban cityscape to one of intimate engagement with managing the present and imagining and shaping the future city.
Returning to a theme introduced in my discussion of Sugimoto’s work, this recent work by Hatakeyama, albeit in tragic circumstances, exemplifies the process of entanglement with the world, and the place that image making can play in making sense of this. The flow of extraction and urban development is interrupted and thus becomes open to analytic scrutiny. Instead of having to dig down beneath the land and the city, the city is opened up and we are forced to engage in its rebuilding in full awareness of its precariousness. The sense of hope and optimism is remarkable in a body of work (comprising, to date, of over 8000 images) arising from a catastrophic event, in which Hatakeyama’s family home was destroyed and in which his mother lost her life.
Naoya Hatakeyama, Takatachō-Morinomae , from the series Rikuzentakata, 2011
Whilst each of Hatakeyama’s series of photographs is tightly framed conceptually and methodologically, serendipity (see Bird series, in which the flight path of a small bird is traced through several frames from the Blast series) and experiment (see Slow Glass series in which he designed a large format camera specifically to explore photographing cityscapes through rain) also play a part.
Naoya Hatakeyama, Slow Glass (# 063), 2001.
He keeps a daily journal, which whilst not explicitly concerned with the development of his projects, charts the development of ideas, and acts as a resource on which to draw in the evolution of his work. The section on Hatakeyama in McLaren & Formhals (2014) Photographers’ Sketchbooks provides examples of the sketches and notes produced in the development of the camera for the Slow Glass series and about the logistics of one of the underground shoots, giving insight into his processes.
Further insight is given by Hatakeyama’s own writing on photography. In ‘The Photographer and Architecture’ he reflects on his current practice:
‘I walk. As usual, there are things in the field of vision before me. As I walk, they change in size and shape. Light and space, as sensation, not only exists before me, but also envelops me, moves me, and makes me happy. The, important faces and words suddenly come back to me from the past. I put my camera on a tripod, direct the lens towards a thing, and think, ” There are so many things in the world that cannot be photographed.” Yet, I release the shutter, because if I didn’t take a photograph, I would not have known this very fact. Photography is like a ship carrying light and space and heading toward the future.’ (Hatakeyama, 2018: 266).
Reflecting on Hatakeyama’s practice in relation to the development of my own work, highlights a number of issues. Hatakeyama’s background and education in the arts, at a particular time in the cultural and economic development of Japan, enables him to position what he does both in relation to major artistic movements in the west and their recontextualisation at a particular point in time in Japan. His close relationship with architecture and the centrality of the theme of urban development makes his work fundamentally inter-disciplinary. This gives a complexity to his work. Though I share a number of these core interests, my background and context is very different, and I need to consider how I position what I do as a photographer in relation to these other aspects of my practice and expertise. Hatakeyama is able to achieve a high degree of consistency of image making and conceptual coherence in each of the series he has produced since completing his formal education in the arts, something that is lacking in my work. Whilst this is understandable in terms of maturity of practice, it is an important aspiration and requires development. Hatakeyama’s work is also impressive in the extent to which the successive series of photographs are distinct (in form and context) but related, marking out a clear (but not over-determined) trajectory. In an interview with architect Rob Hutchinson (published online in 2015, but the interview was conducted in 2010, before the Tōhoku earthquake) Hatakeyama explicitly explores the issue of consistency and coherence of artistic practice. In response to a question about the relationship of the Slow Glass series (which involved experimental development of a large format camera – see notebook extract above) and his other work, Hatakeyama says:
‘That is a very good question. Because that is a question of consistency of artistic practice. Viewers always expect a consistency of work from one artist. Some artists are repeating only one thing every day. Like Roman Opalka from France, he is just drawing the same number every day, and he makes a self portrait every day, for 45 years or so. It is so wonderful in a sense, but I am not the kind of artist of that type. My interest is having, or creating, my own vocabulary of photography, as many as possible. So from my young days, I was always trying to do that. In 2002, I made a one-man show in Germany. After the hanging of all of the works, to my eyes it looked like a group show, not a one-man show. I had many different works. So my impression was, “oh, this is a kind of group show!”. And I enjoyed that. So maybe I am trying to make my vocabulary richer. And maybe I was trying to write one poem, or one short story, with those vocabularies some day in the future, at the end of my life’ (Hatakeyama in Hutchinson 2015).
His most recent work, which is marked by a more intimate relationship with the environment, and community, following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, represents a new phase in his work, drawing on and extending this vocabulary.
Hatakeyama also presents his own writing alongside his images, and this is also explored in the interview with Hutchinson. Hatakeyama sees writing and photography as two distinct, but inter-dependent, modes of expression, with primacy placed on language. He states that:
‘words and images are different things, I know this. But they support each other. And if we don’t have words, we cannot see the world, we cannot even have the image’ (Hatakeyama in Hutchinson 2015).
The proposal for my project anticipates use of a range of media, including text. Exploration of the relationship between text and image is something that I intend to explore further over the course of this module.
References
Fujii, Y. n.d. ‘Naoya Hatakeyama’. Ocula [online]. Available at: https://ocula.com/artists/naoya-hatakeyama [accessed 04/01/19].
Hatakeyama, N. 2018. ‘The Photographer and Architecture’. In Y. Nakamori, Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City. New York: Aperture:259-266.
Hutchison, R. 2015. ‘A Conversation with Photographer Naoya Hatakeyama’. Interview, 24th September 2010 at Taka Ishii Gallery, Kiyosumi, Tokyo [online]. Available at: http://robhutcharch.com/blog/2015/1/31/a-conversation-with-photographer-naoya-hatakeyama [accessed 04/01/19].
McLaren, S. & B. Formhals. 2014. Photographers’ Sketchbooks. London: Thames & Hudson: 118-125.
Nakamori, Y. 2018. Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City. New York: Aperture.
There are a number of reasons for choosing Fay Godwin (1931-2005) as one of the three photographic artists in this exercise. I have a longstanding interest in her work, especially her photographs of Romney Marshes (Godwin & Ingrams 1980) and the Saxon Shore Way (Sillitoe & Godwin 1983), having grown up in East Kent.
Fay Godwin, Reculver Abbey, 1983.
Through this exercise, I want to both reassess her work in the light of subsequent shifts in photographic theory and practice, and broader political changes particularly in relation to the environment, and consider whether, and how, her work has influenced my own photographic practice. Godwin, like me, came to photography from another professional field (publishing in her case) and did not have any formal training in photography or the visual arts. In a 1983 interview, she stated that:
‘I don’t have an academic approach to photographs, and I’m not very interested in theory. I’m much more interested in working. The old question about whether photography is an art is a silly question. I’ve been called a Romantic photographer and I hate it. It sounds slushy and my work is not slushy. I’m a documentary photographer, my work is about reality, but that shouldn’t mean it can’t be creative.’ (quoted in Fowles 1985: xii)
The primary means of dissemination of her work has been in books produced collaboratively with writers. In this analysis of her work, however, I am going to focus particularly on two volumes which foreground her photographs, and where the text plays a supporting role: Land (Godwin 1985, based on an exhibition surveying her work and published as a book with an essay by John Fowles and introduction by Ian Jeffery) and Our Forbidden Land (Godwin 1990, for which Godwin provides her own substantial introduction and text alongside the photographs, with poems by other authors, and which highlights her activism around access to land in her role as President of the Ramblers Association). I have particular interest in the relationship between photography and writing, and also on the use of photography in social action and advocacy. Here, though, I want to reflect on how Godwin’s approach and photographic sensibility might be re-contextualised from predominantly rural to contemporary urban contexts, in which the ownership of and access to the land have become a particular concern. I also want to position the work in relation to contemporary debates about the relationship between art and environmental activism (see, for instance, Demos 2017)
Fay Godwin, Stones of Stenness, Orkney, 1985.
As Fowles (1985) points out, many of Godwin’s images play with time, juxtaposing the timeless landscape with present day (or earlier) evidence of human activity (buildings, infrastructure, artifacts, vehicles, detritus, but never people), but in layers or in proportions that convey or create tensions.
Fay Godwin, Large white cloud near Bilsington, Kent, 1985.
Godwin resisted being seen as a landscape photographer, preferring to be considered a documentary photographer. Her interest is not in the landscape per se (and thus, she has no interest in producing conventionally aestheticised landscape images: in a 1986 South Bank Show interview she states that she is ‘wary of the picturesque’), but rather in human engagement with, material impact on and use of the landscape. Ian Jeffery (1985) highlights the bringing together in the frame of the wild and the cultivated, and the antagonism and discordance, in Godwin’s work, between the land and the human, between the wilderness and habitation. Encompassing the formal arrangement of elements in the frame, the subtlety of symbolism and the careful sequencing of images, Jeffery demonstrates how the work presented in Land clearly goes beyond documentary into the domain of photographic art, drawing out resonances with other photographic artists such as Paul Strand and Walker Evans. The images are not immediately arresting, but do draw in the viewer and repay active engagement, with, as Jeffery notes (South Bank Show 1986), any romantic elements of the landscape (such as clouds and distant hills) offset by, often foregrounded, practical and everyday elements. Unlike Sugimoto’s work, discussed in an earlier post, there is no apparent underlying conceptual basis to discrete series of images in Godwin’s work (if the corpus is to be divided into series, then each would be geographically defined, rather than conceptually, with the exception of the later, environmentally focused work), there is a clear orientation to the landscape and visual sensibility, which constitute Godwin’s artistic vision. There is also what Fowles (1985) identifies as an emerging moral dimension to the work, though this might equally be described as a political dimension, which relates to private ownership, the abuse of the land by agribusiness and public use and access. This dimension is brought very clearly to the fore in Our Forbidden Land.
Fay Godwin, The Duke of Westminster’s Estate, Forest of Bowland, 1990.
Margaret Drabble (2011), reviewing the exhibition Land Revisited, describes Our Forbidden Land as ‘an impassioned attack on the destruction of the countryside’. The introductory essay extends far beyond the landscape as addressed in earlier work, and includes critical analysis of nuclear power, transport policy, the military, climate, housing, pollution and the use of pesticides. These themes are reprised in the text that accompanies the images, which themselves are more clearly focused on the human abuse of the land, and play a role in making this abuse visible. An overarching theme is the alienation, and exclusion, of the public from the land, whether it be by the military, agribusiness, corporate ownership or heritage industry.
Today these issues are of even greater concern, and with respect to the access to the land that is available to photographers wishing to explore these environmental and social questions, Drabble observes:
‘Since her death in 2005, photographers have been finding their access to both public and private land more and more problematic, more expensive, and legally restricted. In Our Forbidden Land she wrote about the dilemma of access to Stonehenge, a site mass marketed by English Heritage which charges substantial sums to everybody, from individual artists to wealthy advertising companies. She foresaw a time when “the only photographs we are likely to see of the inner circles of Stonehenge will be those approved by English Heritage, generally by their anonymous public relations photographers”. Our common land would be the copyright of others’.
In my own exploration of community engagement with urban regeneration, I have assumed that I will progress from photographing the changing environment to an exploration of the lived experience of residents and other stakeholders. Engagement with Godwin’s photography and writing, and commentaries on this (in particular, the essay by Fowles), has led me to reassess this, and to consider how I might develop my urban environment image making further. Questions of access are even more pronounced with concerns around terrorism leading to suspicion of photographers in urban areas, and the private ownership of land by developers, with sophisticated surveillance technology, placing severe restrictions on where photographs can be taken. In assessing my own work and planning for the development of my project, I also want to consider how my work, one part of which has explored the meeting of the built and natural environment in urban settings, and the traces of human activity that are left in urban edgelands, has been visually influenced by Godwin’s images, and how I might develop this in urban settings over the coming months.
Fay Godwin, Summerhouse Hill and Channel Tunnel works, 1990.
Whilst Godwin’s photography may not have a strong explicit conceptual basis, reinforced by her rejection of theory in preference to getting on with the work, her image making does have clear intent and is consistent and coherent in form. It can also be understood in relation to environmental art of the late twentieth century (for instance work by Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy) in that the photographs engage with being in the landscape rather than being representations of the landscape. They are the products of walking across the land and being part of the landscape, rather than standing apart from the landscape. The work can also be understood in relation to forms of contemporary environmental activist art explored by Demos (2017). Godwin collaborated with environmental groups in the production of images, for instance with the Council for the Protection of Rural England concerned about the affect on the environment around Dover of the dumping of spoil in the construction of the Channel Tunnel. She eschewed the gallery system, preferring to publish books, and produced images and texts that demonstrated an understanding of day to day life in rural areas, whilst being clear about corporate and government sponsored action that threatens the environment, from nuclear power through to the manner in which English Heritage and the National Trust “have copyrighted our heritage” (quoted in Jeffery 2005), exemplifying her distinctly anti-authoritarian position and commitment to a critical role for photography.
References
Demos, T.J. 2017. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Drabble, M. 2011. ‘Fay Godwin at the National Media Museum’. The Guardian. 8th January [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/08/margaret-drabble-fay-godwin [accessed 30.12.18].
Fowles, J. 1985. ‘Essay’. In F. Godwin, Land, London: Heinemann: ix-xx.
Godwin, F. 1985. Land. London: Heinemann.
Godwin, F. 1990. Our Forbidden Land. London: Jonathan Cape.
Godwin, F. & R. Ingrams. 1980. Romney Marsh and the Royal Military Canal. London: Wildwood House.
Jeffrey, I. 1985. ‘Introduction’. In F. Godwin, Land. London: Heinemann: xxiii-xxix.
Jeffrey, I. 2005. ‘Fay Godwin: Photographic chronicler of our changing natural world’. The Guardian. 31st May [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/may/31/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries [accessed 30.12.18].
National Media Museum, Bradford. 2011. Fay Godwin: Land Revisited. Exhibition. 15 October 2010 – 27 March 2011 [online]. Available at: https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/what-was-on/fay-godwin-land-revisited [accessed 30.12.18].
Sillitoe, A. & F. Godwin. 1983. The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye. London: Hutchinson.
South Bank Show. 1986. Fay Godwin. Season 10, Episode 6, 9th November [film]. Available at: https://youtu.be/4JE8I44Ak7o [accessed 30.12.18].
