Assignment 3

29/10/18

The brief:

To keep a diary for at least 2 weeks and then interpret it into a photographic project, using your own experience to explore your identity in some way, either directly or indirectly.

I have attempted to keep a diary many times over the years and have never been very successful in keeping it up for any length of time. I lose track, forget to do it for a few days and then struggle to restart. I have tried keeping short notes, writing long screeds, taking a photo a day and posting it online in the various social media sites, writing (bad) poetry. All with no real degree of success. Two weeks seemed manageable, and it was – just. I used a combination of notes on what had actually happened that day, thoughts that they gave rise to and an image, either taken on the day or sometime recently to make a page a day diary. In the end I actually quite enjoyed it.

Thoughts:

When I went back over it I realised that most of what I do is very repetitive and banal. Yes, I went shopping. Yes, I went to work. Yes, I read and pottered in the garden. Most of my days were spent circling around the same activities in the same place, living room, study, garden, kitchen, office. The place defined what I did. I sit and read in the living room. I do my photo work in my study. I sit and relax in the garden. I sit and eat in the kitchen. I sit and do paperwork in the office at work. The common theme is sitting. No one else sits in my places, or only very rarely. I am sitting at my study desk to write this. I just took a break sitting on the couch in the living room. I don’t need to be in the picture to describe what I am doing. The place tells me the activity and brings back memories. The chairs describe my life.

Research:

It has been said that all art is autobiographical in nature. Certainly, all art and literature says as least as much about the author as about the subject. Fellini said ‘“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography” and “Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me” when talking about his films (Fellini, 1965).  Autobiographical photography can be produced in a variety of ways and does not always need to involve direct self-portraiture. The work of Nigel Shrafran is a good example of this as is that of Sophie Calle in Take Care of Yourself. (Calle, 2007)

https://scottishzoecontextandnarrative.wordpress.com/2018/10/20/self-absented-portraiture/

https://scottishzoecontextandnarrative.wordpress.com/tag/sophie-calle/

While thinking about indirect self-portraiture I read this article about photographing items recovered from a devastating forest fire, which also uses small items to describe a life, in this case, a part of a life history that has now been destroyed.  They are very personal and poignant. The remnants of jewellery, parts of a burnt doll, the blades from a food mixer. They clearly tell a story of a home and family and the things that made up that home, now gone. (Smithson,2018)

http://lenscratch.com/2018/10/norma-i-quintana-forage-from-fire/

Another photographer whose work is often considered to be mainly autobiographical is Masahisa Fukase. His work is wide-ranging, and on the surface about Japan and the people and culture there, however he himself relates it to taking images that talk about himself. For one series of images about his cat Sasuke he says “I didn’t want to capture the most beautiful cats in the world, but rather their charm with my lens while being reflected in their pupils. One might accurately say that this collection is really a ‘self-portrait’ for which I adopted the form of Sakuke and Momoe”  and also “I photographed ravens for ten years, at the end of which I realised that the raven was indeed me” (Fukase, Kosuga &Baker, 2018). The positive and negative sides of his personality, dark and light, play and despair.

Practice:

I took a series of pictures of the 5 areas at home and work where I spend most time. I did not tidy them up in advance. I did try some images where I had ‘organised the scene’ but these did not show the daily life that really happens, and I am not a naturally tidy person.

 

I picked a series of 5 images that I felt were most representative of my life. Certainly my family would be able to immediately identify what I would have been doing at any of these points.

I considered various ways of showing them:

• Monochrome versus colour

  

  

  
  
• Stand alone images versus shown with titles – handwritten or typed

  

  

  
  
• Paired with handwritten sections taken out of my two weeks of diary entries.

Final Choice:

I decided that simple was the best option, and to use a colour image with a handwritten title.

References

Calle, S. (2007). Sophie Calle – Take care of yourself. Arles: Actes Sud.

Fellini, F. (1965). The Atlantic.

Fukase, M., Kosuga, T. and Baker, S. (2018). Masahisa Fukase. Paris: Editions Xavier Barral, p.148.

Smithson, A. (2018). Norma I. Quintana: Forage From Fire. [online] LENSCRATCH. Available at: http://lenscratch.com/2018/10/norma-i-quintana-forage-from-fire/ [Accessed 30 Oct. 2018].

Appendices:

Two week diary reduced size

added as a PDF so available as a download

Contact sheets:

 

 

Self-absented portraiture

20/10/18

Nigel Shafran (born 1964) started out as a fashion photographer but has moved sideways into taking series of images about everyday things such as very informal images of his partner, together with details of their lives in Ruthbook, a series of images on the London Underground of people on escalators in Paddington Escalators to Washing Up, with images of the kitchen draining board piled with the (clean) detritus of the day’s meals. In an interview for BJP he says” it’s there in front of you, you’ve just got to see it” (Smith, 2018). The images of the kitchen are a form of self-portraiture, or at least a way of talking about his life. They combine the genre of still life with family information to give a history of a small and essential part of his life.  It makes me wonder who does the cooking in the family? Who does the washing up? The images have been taken by a man of a piece of work that is traditionally a female role, although less so now. Would the information about the roles in the family alter how you read the images? It would change the import from a person taking photographs of their own role in life to one of a person taking images of their home. The former is more personal, a self-image rather than an image of your surroundings.

Still taken from Weights by Kate Davis with permission from Stills Gallery, Edinburgh

Kate Davis in the exhibition Nudes Never Wear Glasses also used images of the kitchen together with washing up in the video Weight although in this case she was looking at the roles of women and how they have changed over the last 50 years and some of the images included people.  She has used a similar theme but in a very different way.  Here she is looking in from the outside, social commentary rather than autobiography.  For more on this exhibition see:

https://wordpress.com/post/scottishzoe.blog/1468

In an  interview for Brighton Photo Biennial 2016 Shafran talks about his work, how he mixes his personal work with his commercial work, the tension between the two and how he feels about his  photography “I’m a photographer and sometimes I work instinctively ….I just go do it, you don’t have to understand everything…..some things seem to be important and turn up quite often in my work….I just point a camera at stuff I find interesting…. You get yourself out the way and the subject is important…. the context of where the work is is important to me (about separating out his commercial work versus his ‘private’ work’)” In this interview Francis Hodgson describes Shafran’s private work as more “associated with writing than with photography, intimate but not necessarily autobiographical”.

https://photoworks.org.uk/watch-bpb16-nigel-shafran-conversation-francis-hodgson/#close-already

© Nigel Shafran from the series Washing Up

The images in the Washing Up series are almost banal, apparently random rather than posed (although I do wonder how much ‘tidying up’ went on before the image was taken). On the surface they are very different from traditional ‘still life’ images although they do have resonances with the work from the Dutch painters of the 17^th Century such as Pieter Claesz, although these often included food and objects that referenced time and death (skulls) and various precious objects (gold flagons and jewellery). These were almost always painted by men- although this may have more to do with the culture of the time rarely allowing artists to be female rather than any suggestion that men understood still life better than women. These images show a modern ‘take’ on life and what is important to us everyday.  Still life paintings in the 17^th Century were often painted to show off the wealth of the commissioning person, usually rich, often noble (or aspiring to be). They would have taken a long time to paint, and the paints themselves were expensive. They are filled with references to the lifestyle of that time, full of symbols and religious meaning. Shafran’s images are also full of reference to life as it is today, in this series the metal is tin or steel rather than gold. In an accompanying series on kitchen compost the issues about time and death that were so important to the 17^th Century artists are echoed.

Dutch School – 17th Century

Gender is inevitably going to make a difference to the type of images people produce although I suspect this is less so now than even 20 years ago. Even in the 21^st century there is a significant difference to how boys and girls are treated from an early age, however much parents try to minimise it. There is also some evidence that male and female brains are actually different, and certainly they have been subjected to different hormonal influences from early in development, even before birth. There is ongoing, and contentious, discussion about the male gaze versus the female gaze especially around females taking images of other women versus males taking similar images – for an extended discussion around this see Girl on Girl (Jansen, 2017) and also Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972) summarised in:

https://scottishzoecontextandnarrative.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/summary-ways-of-seeing-john-berger/

Men (and women) can take images of every possible genre (and topic within that genre) in photography. They may well produce different images that on close examination may be saying something different – but can you always tell the sex of the photographer simply by looking at the images without any prior knowledge of that person’s work? I would think that this is unlikely, however it is very plausible to think that once you know the gender you will read a different meaning into the image, and that this reading is likely to be further influenced by both your own gender, your sexuality and your previous experiences in life. There are also the large group of images that are clearly taken by a male, a female, a transsexual and so forth that are taken to illustrate a way of being, and that are considered as contentious enough (e.g. Mapplethorpe) when taken by someone involved in that life style but could be seen as exploitative when taken by another person.

Summary:

• Does it matter if an image is taken by a male or female? That will depend partly on the image (and whether it could be considered as exploitative) – but may well alter your reading of the image
• Are they valid ‘still life’ images? Clearly yes, and are not dissimilar in content to many other still life images made over the years
• Does the lack of people matter? It changes what you are seeing and the images become information about a lifestyle and the detritus that remains rather than a portrait – however they still tell a story, catch a moment in time, or rather a series of moments that explore daily life in the household, and when looked at alongside Shafran’s other series of very personal images such as Ruthbook fit together to become an autobiographical tale.

References

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing; a book made by John Berger [and other]. New York: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

Jansen, C. (2017). Girl on girl. London: Laurence King.

Shaffran, N. and Hodgson, F. (2016). Watch: BPB16 Nigel Shafran in conversation with Francis Hodgson | Photoworks. [online] Photoworks. Available at: https://photoworks.org.uk/watch-bpb16-nigel-shafran-conversation-francis-hodgson/#close-already [Accessed 18 Oct. 2018].

Smyth, D. (2018). Everyday beauty with Nigel Shafran. [online] British Journal of Photography. Available at: http://www.bjp-online.com/2018/05/shafraninterview/ [Accessed 17 Sep. 2018].