A4: Project 1: The Language of Photography

Exercise
Before you read any further, look carefully at Erwitt’s image and write some notes about how the subject matter is placed within the frame. How has Erwitt structured this image? What do you think the image is ‘saying’? How does the structure contribute to this meaning?

Erwitt, one of Magnums founding photographers, was a master of the decisive moment in street photography. He apparently did not plan his images but just reacted to what he saw on the street (1). Believing this,  it is hard to understand how he managed to capture the above image. He must have noticed the juxtaposition of the dogs, humans and little dogs legs. Then he got down at the level of the small dog to make him the ‘star’ of the composition. The dog is really comical with the hat and so insignificantly small compared to the other dog that I take to be a Great Dane and their owner. The little dogs expression is a little scared and maybe suspicious. He is unused to being the centre attraction of any image because of his sister – The Great Dane. This is what makes the image amusing.

What is the image saying?

The image is composed of three distinct sections as illustrated below.

The image  follows the rule of thirds almost perfectly. The main point of interest, the little dog, is placed in the third vertical quadrant on the right. The image is also divided into thirds from front to back hroitontally. In the foreground we have the pavement. The main components of the image are placed in the middle and the fading background is to the rear.

In addition  the image can be further divided according to the Phi recangle

The little dogs face is exactly centered where the lines cross. This makes it a very strong point in the image giving the little dog the ‘star’ role.

There are other details which make the image well balanced. The dog’s lead on the right is balanced by the tree in the background on the left. the big dogs legs on the left are balanced by the archway to the background on the right. This pulls the image together both horizontally and vertically.

Until I had to look in depth at the image for this exercise I had never noticed some of these details. I always wondered where the rest of the Great Dane’s body was. Looking in detail I found a small part of her body in the top left corner. I asked myself would that be cropped out if the image was created today leaving the image more sterile. I also noticed that the Great Dane was female. Did Erwitt want to highlight this too? The male is tiny and the female is enormous… Maybe but we will never know.

Having done this analysis I asked myself “Do I like the image”. I have to admit my opinion has not changed. I have always found this image a visual challenge…… It is all those parallel lines……

1. 14 Lessons Elliott Erwitt Has Taught Me About Street Photography. 2016. 14 Lessons Elliott Erwitt Has Taught Me About Street Photography. [ONLINE] Available at: http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2013/09/23/14-lessons-elliott-erwitt-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/. [Accessed 31 March 2016].

“Ways of Seeing” by John Berger

I do not think, even with a million words, I could write a review of John Berger’s book “Ways of Seeing, which would be as informative or as amusing as Austin Kleon’s mind map of the book’s contents.

I bought a hard copy of the book because I was travelling and thought I could read it en route. But when I returned I watched all four episodes of the original BBC presentations which I found even better than the book (2,3,4,5). I found the typeface annoying and the images in the book unclear so the YouTube of the programmes was a more pleasing way to illuminate the book’s contents.

In the TV presentations Berger looks straight into the camera as he discusses the earliest European oil painting. These works of art were exclusively commissioned for and by  rich. They exuded wealth both in their content, framing and where they hung. The content showed the rich and their possessions. The paintings were about the present. The possessors wanted to show, the world, their wealth.

When landscape became introduced into oil painting it often showed property owners in their landscape. It continued to be about the wealthy and their possessions. The poor could never aspire to ownership of any of these objects.

Berger points out that everything changed with the invention of the camera. The paintings could be reproduced and became more universally available. The camera could zoom in and out. it could isolate parts of the images which could then be used in different circumstances and loose their contact with and meaning within the original painting. We too can have a reproduction of any work of art on our pin board. Art became accessible to us all..

To protect the ‘art world’ art and to prolong the mystique around oil painting,  critics and experts emerged with a language of their own. But some of the originals became extremely valuable because they were the original and the rich were prepared to pay to possess them. They had a commercial value and became commodities to be traded. We became in awe of these paintings. A whole language developed around art and art criticism and we almost forgot to look at the paintings.

Berger maintains children see more clearly than many adults. He gathered a group of children to examine a painting. Their brutally honest ‘normal’ language managed to see what many adult observers had missed, the ambiguity of the sex of one of the persons represented in the painting. We, because of our education and learning, are programmed to experience art in a certain way. We loose the spontaneity of just looking and loving or hating.

Berger then discusses the position of women in painting and advertising which I felt was somewhat misplaced in the sequence of essays. I realise the essays can be read in any order but I still felt this essay did not fit in and would have been better as a separate book. It is oviously a subject very important to Berger.

The book concludes with a discussion on ubiquitous publicity. The message is that “you can have it all if you buy this or that”. Unlike the oil painting the promise is for the future. Utopia will be ours tomorrow. Very often reproductions of oil paintings or the compositions used  in them are re-used in publicity. We are receiving the ‘message’ consciously or subconsciously that we can now possess whatever we want. All we need is the means to purchase but therin lies the rub. In the programme Berger shows the women in a factory working n the Yardley’s production line where fragrances were being filled into bottles. These women were unlikely to be able to achieve the dreams offered in most advertisements in 1972, when the programme was made. Berger believed that this publicity bombardment blunts our awareness of the real state of things in the world.

I believe the situation has deteriorated even further since Berger wrote this book. The rich have got richer and the poor, poorer. Wars and unrest are ravaging our world. Meanwhile the flood of publicity continues to offer us Utopia tomorrow…..

 

 

1. WAYS OF SEEING BY JOHN BERGER. 2016. WAYS OF SEEING BY JOHN BERGER. [ONLINE] Available at: http://austinkleon.com/2008/10/19/ways-of-seeing-by-john-berger/. [Accessed 15 March 2016]
2. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972) – YouTube. 2016. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972) – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk. [Accessed 15 March 2016].
3. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 2 (1972) – YouTube. 2016. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 2 (1972) – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1GI8mNU5Sg. [Accessed 15 March 2016].
4. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 3 (1972) – YouTube. 2016. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 3 (1972) – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7wi8jd7aC4. [Accessed 15 March 2016].
5. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 4 (1972) – YouTube. 2016. John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 4 (1972) – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY. [Accessed 15 March 2016].

 

 

Project 3: Self-absented portraiture

I started with the work of  Maria Kapajeva who is an Estonian immigrant into the UK. She left Estonia because she felt pressured to become a wife and mother. She wished to pursue her photography so she left a well paid job as an economist to go to the UK and study photography at The University of the Creative Arts.

Her work is very feminist orientated and very often concerned with marriage. In her project Interiors (1) she researched Russian web sites where women were looking for European male partners for marriage. Although the women were trying to present themselves as ‘different’ they all posed in similar domestic interiors. Kapajeva worked on these images to create her project.She created another intriguing project using images of Russian women woven into quilted cushions.

Her Indian project involved educated women that she photographed in B&W with reflections in mirrors. She then hand painted, as is done in many Indian portraits, the image leaving the reflection in B&W. This work was entitled Marry Me.

I cannot say the Washing Up series by Nigel Safran inspires me. In an interview with Charlotte Cotton he explains  he uses subjects which are close by (3). As with Washing up I find his Dad’s Office very mundane. I am trying to find the self portraiture in these images. Compared to Kapajeva, who claims to have learned something additional about herself (2) in each of her projects, I cannot see the link with Safran’s self and his chosen subjects. The notes say, Shafran gives us an intimate insight into his daily routines and family life, but I do not see anything which could identify either him or his lifestyle. The objects on the draining board could be from anyone’s house. Maybe this is his point that he is a very ordinary man? Kapajeva’s work is concerned with feminism, stereotyping of women and expected roles for women. She understood where her chosen subjects are coming from and the personal identification is evident. Calle’s work, Take Care of Yourself, which I have reviewed here, is very strongly about herself. We understand exactly what she is about. Her work is like a performance of a personal diary.

I cannot say I was surprised that the Washing Up images were taken by a man. Either sex could and might have created these images. Sometimes the gender of the photographer does contribute to the creation of an image. I do not think either Calle or Kakajeva’s work could have been created by a male. These photographers are working from very personal experiences which could only have been experienced by a woman.

I am at a loss to see what the Washing Up series achieves by the exclusion of people other than the exclusion of a woman makes them less stereotyped. Women are mainly connected with the practice of domestic chores in the kitchen. The fact that there is no one in the image leaves the possibility open that the task could have been performed by wither a man or a woman.

I love Anna Fox’s infamous Cockroach Diary. I love it from two points of view. Firstly when living in Africa cockroaches were part of our daily lives. These fellows were enormous, unlike the rather slim cousins which Anna Fox shows in this set of images. Each night shoes had to be placed uppers faced downwards to avoid the creatures entering the warm space your feet had recently vacated. In the morning you clapped the pair of Birkenstocks together to dislodge any roaches which might have managed to infiltrate them. The whole story of cockroaches became an obsession in our lives. Returning from work, if we were lucky enough to have electricity, my husband would strip down to underwear and lie on the floor, under the ceiling fan, but always with one eye open to watch for approaching cockroaches from along the corridor. Many cockroach discoveries made their way into our diaries of that time. Sadly I never thought of publishing these works of art… However I had already decided, for my present OCA diary, to copy the pages for the equivalent dates from the 1997 or 1998 diaries, the years we spent in Africa.

 

 

1. Maria Kapajeva | Los Interiores de la Madre Rusia. 2016. Maria Kapajeva | Los Interiores de la Madre Rusia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://cocteldemente.com/los-interiores-de-la-madre-rusia-maria-kapajeva/. [Accessed 03 March 2016].
2. Maria Kapajeva | photoparley. 2016. Maria Kapajeva | photoparley. [ONLINE] Available at: https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2014/05/13/maria-kapajeva/. [Accessed 03 March 2016]
3. Interview with Charlotte Cotton, edited photographs : Nigel Shafran. 2016. Interview with Charlotte Cotton, edited photographs : Nigel Shafran. [ONLINE] Available at: http://nigelshafran.com/interview-with-charlotte-cotton-edited-photographs/. [Accessed 03 March 2016].

Project 2 Masquerades: Exercise 2 Tracey Moffatt

Tracey Moffatt, a Scorpion, used self portraiture to create a series of forty images of women born under the sign of Scorpio. The images are not a serious attempt to ‘be’ the other person rather they are a playful look at some of the external characteristics of these celebrities. Indira Ghandi’s trademark large sunglasses, Catherine Denueve’s hair roll with upturned collar are what Moffatt chooses to accentuate.

She made a contact sheet (1) of each person and shows us these with the ‘chosen’ image ringed. She then places these images on ‘appropriate’ backgrounds, in Photoshop,  to create the final image. it is all about celebrity and pizzazz rather than serious representation.

These women have two things in common, they are born under the sign of Scorpio and they are celebrities. Grouping them under their birth sign is just a way of making a ‘set’. Moffatt says she never uses single images. Her work is about narrative. What these images are about is celebrity and how the media see and portrays these famous people.

Moffatt’s cinematic experience is evident in her series.

‘While her photographs and films engage with many of the social issues of the present era, land rights, immigration, mass-media, globalisation they also constantlv reference and re-imagine her own past as an Aboriginal, born in 1960 and brought up in a foster home in Brisbane. Her work…..explores both “high” and “low” sources

Paul Savage, Tracy Mofatt, City Gallery Wellington (2)

I find it difficult to work out what connections Moffatt is making between her own Aboriginal origins, her past and her upbringing and this group of Scorpian women. I find the idea of the work interesting and the execution superb.

 

1. Tracey Moffatt – Being – Under the Sign of Scorpio, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2005 – Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. 2016. Tracey Moffatt – Being – Under the Sign of Scorpio, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2005 – Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/26/Tracey_Moffatt/385/. [Accessed 29 February 2016].

2. . 2016. . [ONLINE] Available at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/edcanvas-uploads/37246/dropbox/1369396694/art%20insight_Narrative-Moffatt.pdf. [Accessed 29 February 2016].

Alain Laboile: la famille

This is the first European solo exhibition by this, self taught french, photographer. The theme of the exhibition,, as the name implies, is based on images of his large family. Laboile is a sculpture living in a rural setting south of Bordeaux, with his wife and six children. The images are very much in the style of Sally Mann. The children often pose with animals, both wild and pets. They seem very at ease in their surroundings. The composition of the images is beautiful drawing the viewer into the fun and games of this very relaxed family.

la famille: Alain Laboile

la famille: Alain Laboile

la famille: Alain Laboile

For me these black and white, simply framed images  are superior to those of Sally Mann. The love and rapport between the father and his children is palpable. The whole impression is of a family living a simple rural fun life. There are almost 100 images presented in this exhibition.

Most of Laboile’s photography is based round his family life in France.. He has also created some exceptional colour images as well as these B&W.

1. Works | Alain Laboile . 2016. Works | Alain Laboile . [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.laboile.com/works.html. [Accessed 27 February 2016].

Toon Teeken Photo books 1968-2015

The exhibition Toon Teeken Photobooks 1968-2015 & Recent Work is now on view in the Bonnefantenmuseum untill februari 28. Toon Teeken (1944 Heerlen – Maastricht) has been working on his photo books for over 45 years. The exhibition focusses on the photobooks as well as some recent paintings and some sketches from Teeken. (1)

I visited this exibition in Maastricht yesterday principally because I was interested in Teekan’s photo books which he has been keeping for 45 years. I really admire someone who has the tenacity to maintain work like this. The books proved to be a great insight into the progression of Teekan’s work. In the beginning (1968) they were normal family photo albums. With time they developed into something else entirely. They became works of art in themselves. Teekan cut out images and pieces of information from books and magazines and stuck these into his books alongside sketches for his new work and ideas he was developing. He cut out sections of each page allowing us to look forward and backward at work in the book.

Book cover 2012: Toon Teekan

Book cover Toon Teekan

 

These cut outs always involved very straight lines and clean cuts. In recent years Teekan has been working on representing language visually. He gives each colour a letter and develops a narrative on the canvas using colour lines. He explains in a video at the exhibition that his canvas is an image of an image in his head. There is always something going on below the images so very often his work has a lower part as well as the main theme.

In addition to the books some of Teekan’s latest works were on display. I was fascinating by his “Read my Lips” shown below

Read my lips: Toon Teekan

where he uses this narrative technique. He also expresses music visually. The other main theme in the exhibition were works on “the external brain“.

External Brain: Toon Teekan

Daido Moriyama

Moriyama is a Japanese photographer born in 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka. This exhibition at the Fondation Cartier is his second at the fondation. The first was twelve years ago. The first exhibition featured his B&W images of urban life in and around Toyko. He has focused on the areas of Japan which have been left behind in its rapid industrial development.

In the 1970s Moriyama began to experiment with colour photography but he converted these colour images to B&W before exhibiting them. However some of the images he thought looked better in colour and this recent exhibition consists of 86 coloured images in either portrait or landscape 111.5 x 149cm format.

Daido Moriyama. Tokyo Clor

Daido Moriyama Tokyo Color

The Fondation Cartier, designed by Jean Nouvel and built in 1984, is a center for contemporary art. Three of the four walls are glass so the building is flooded with light. On the obscure wall there is a room which is separated from the main exhibition hall where film and slide shows can be shown.

Fondation Cartier on a dreary day

In the main exhibition hall Moryiama’s images benefit from this explosion of light. Although the images show some fairly derelict areas of Shinjuku life, there is no sense of sadness or squalor. Rather the impression is one of fun and quirkiness. There are images of torn posters, parts of or whole people, found objects and pipework. Although I did feel the pipework worked better in black and white. The overall impression is of the accessibility of Moriyama’s art. It makes one want to rush out and create something similar.

Daido Moriyama Tokyo Color

In the projection room there is a series of black and white images which are a lot more somber. They depict unexplored areas of many cities that Moriyama has visited between July 2014 and March 2015. The slide show is presented in a very novel way. There are five screens. the images are projected on the two screens right and left of the main screen. The projection begins on the left and the images follow one another from left to right. The viewer is continually engaged in moving the head to follow the sequence. We are not told which images are of which city. There is a similarity in the sequence which could probably be captioned as “poverty with all its different faces” I found the experience of watching these images captivating as did, I believe, all those who were present. No one moved until they reached the point at which they had come in and it was a fairly lengthy projection since it contained images over a nine month period and at least one image from most days. The title of the projection is Dog and Mesh Tights which says everything about Moriyama.

Robert Mapplethorpe Exhibition

This exhibition was held at the Galerie Taddaeus Ropac, in the 3⁰ arr in Paris. It comes with an age and sensitivity warning… I was familiar, although not very familiar, with some of Mapplethorpe’s male nudes and I found them very beautiful I was unaware of any of the biographical details of Mapplethorpe’s life.

He was born in New York in 1946. He says of the area where he grew up “it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.” He created beautiful B&W images of both male and female nudes as well as flower still lives.

In the 1970’s he became increasingly interested in photographing New York’s S & M scene (1). This exhibition has several images from this period. I cannot put my own impression, of the the exhibition, any better than it is put in Mapplethorpe’s own site “the resulting photographs are shocking for their content and remarkable for their technical and formal mastery“. He himself was gay, dying of aids in 1989, so this must have given him special access to the world of S & M. He disagreed with the use of the word ‘shocking’ to describe his images but it is hard to agree with his preferred adjective ‘unexpected‘. I am not sure what would be unexpected in this underworld.

He described his own work as pornographic with which one would have to concur. He apparently took part in the sexual acts he was photographing and he engaged his models sexually (2). His models were mostly black males although he also photographed female bodybuilders.

There are a great number of images in this exhibition which border on the pornographic especially when one learns that he engaged the models sexually. However having said that they are magnificently executed and displayed.

Side by side with these images of male genitalia and homosexual acts there are beautiful still lives of flowers. My mind was so influenced by the male nudes that I could see sexual connotations in the flower images – I have no idea if this was intended.

Before coming out as gay he lived with Patti Smith who worked to support his photography and remained a close friend of his even after he came out.

 

1.The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation – Biography. 2016. The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation – Biography. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.mapplethorpe.org/biography/. [Accessed 15 February 2016].

Robert Mapplethorpe – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2016. Robert Mapplethorpe – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mapplethorpe. [Accessed 15 February 2016].

Andre Masson: De Marseille a L’ Exile Americain

13 November – 15 March 2016 Musee de Marseille CANTINI

Sometimes it is lonely visiting exhibitions without the company of other fellow students, but sometimes I am happy to be ‘out on a limb’ here in southern France. In fact yesterday I really wanted to see an exhibition of Street Art entitled BLAZE. I figured this might not meet with deep approval either by the college authorities or my fellow students. They all seem to visit very famous photographer’s exhibitions. I have a very special interest in Street Art and will host a solo exhibition in a cafe in West Cork, this Summer, Hence I wanted to see how others present an exhibition on the same subject. But in the nature of this subject ,when I arrived at M74 (Gallery), it was barred and bolted with no explanation as to why….

So I took the opportunity to visit the CANTINI museum where I knew there was an Andre Masson exhibition.

Masson was born in 1896 and lived to be 91 years old.  He was one of the surrealists of the nineteen twenties but changed his style many times. He pushed himself into extreme states to try to open up his subconscious, often working under the influence of drugs. His work was influenced by the terrible suffering he experienced during the Great War.

He fled, with the help of the American journalist Varian Fry,  to the USA in 1941 to avoid the Nazi occupation of France but returned in 1945. During his time in the US he was very influential in spreading the vision and ideas of surrealism.

Much of his work on display in the CANTINI is from this period in the US (click to view). It is packed with detail and needs to be studied closely in order to extract the information contained within. While at the same time there are portraits in pen or pencil which are beautiful in their explicit simplicity.

I loved his image Antilles (1943)

 

 

 

 

 

 

orador (la doloeur) 1944

I found many of his images troubling such as Orador, I felt sapped of energy after the viewing.

Review of Andres Serrano Exhibition

“Ansi soit-il” is a retrospective exhibition at the Collection Lambert, Musee d’Art Contemporin,  Avignon (20 December 2015 – 12 June 2016) of over 200 works by Andres Serrano. Serrano, born in 1950 in New York, is half Honduran and half Afro-Cuban. Yvon Lambert was an early supporter of Serrano’s work, the Lambert Collection includes more than 200 of his works. In 2011 Lambert gifted 560 works to the French state and these works are on view in Avignon.

In recent times Serrano’s work has often been controversial. He treats very hard hidden topics like images of dead people in the morgue but also he has a fascination with bodily fluids, including feces, semen, urine and female milk.

Red River #3 1989

There was a room dedicated to his feces images and another to his bodily fluids images. I cannot see the beauty in these images although I found them technically perfect. There were also several images from his series The History of Sex. These images are very explicit of both hetero- and homo-sexual acts. These  images have brought controversy both in France and in Sweden when they were displayed. Some of the images were destroyed by a group of vandals. Serrano feels this is, in itself, a political statement. Again I do not see the beauty in these images. They are brutally explicit which puts them, for me, into the realm of pornography.

 

On the other hand this retrospective contains many of Serranos early works which I found extraordinary. There was his early images of the Klu Klux Klan,

his images of religious personel and the Matisse Chapel images. These were extremely sensitively represented. The angles he chooses or the part of the person he chooses to include are always just right.

 

 

He did a series of portraits of Americans after 9/11 which jumped off the frame. There is also a series of portraits of La Comidie Francise, which are magic.

The wide scope of Serrano’s work is impressive. No matter what subject he works on he devotes the same amount of energy to technical perfection. I left the exhibition with my head spinning and my stomach churning so I would have to say this is an exhibition which one should visit and which you will not forget.