Insight to critical theory and photographers informing my emerging visual voice and photographic practice in April 2019.
08.04.19 > Informing contexts and photographic practice
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31.03.19 > Annotation #1 On using buildings as art-motif to awaken social conscience to societal injustice
As a basis for deepening the contextualisation of my photographic practice and extending the theoretical underpinning of my body of photographic work I’ve written an annotated reference of one of my previous essays. My emerging work-in-progress and evolving final major project on spatial representation in the digital age stem from, and are informed by, this essay.
Sutherland, G. (2017) Can images of buildings as art-motif awaken social conscience as a counterpoint to societal judgment? Final Degree Essay Submission for Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Photography, Interactive Design Institute – University of Hertfordshire, May 2017
Starting from historical enquiry into the role of architectural and urban photography in social reform and public conscience, the essay (in 6758 words) explores how social documentary, architectural and fine-art photography use buildings as art-motif to awaken social conscience to societal injustice.
The difference between the meaning of architecture and its cultural interpretation through the photographic medium is identified and the multiplicity of interpretation posited. An inherent societal pressure in architecture is examined, in particular through its propagation of cultural stereotypes and influence on collective memory.
The role of photography in social reform, questions on compassion fatigue and the resulting elevation of the genre to fine art photography in the 1930s are presented and mapped through to the end of the twentieth century at which time it is identified that the visual and photographic arts have ceased to consider art photography and documentary photography as having separate lines of development.
The path from Thomas Annan’s social reform photography, through Eugène Atget’s oeuvre, Walker Evans’ exhibition of Victorian houses, the Becher’s approach to evacuation of subjectivity, Thomas Struth’s objective depiction of cityscapes, through Marchand and Meffre’s depictions of ruin in the eraly 21st Century are explored through secondary sources, amongst which Arnold, Colomina, Haran, James, and Sliwinski.
The sources referenced place architecture and infrastructure within the context of theoretical and cultural considerations. Examples include the duality of messaging in Danny Lyon’s ’80 and 82 Beekman Street’ (Fig.1) and the mask of objectivity in the work of the Bechers (Fig.2).
Fig. 1 Danny Lyon, 1967. Beekman Street subbasement. [1967 negative, 2007 Gelatin Silver Print]
Fig. 4 Bernd and Hilla Becher, 1959 – 1973. Framework houses. [21 Gelatin Silver Prints. Each 16 1/4 x 12″ (41.2 x 30.5 cm)]
The essay posits that, as perhaps for all photographs, but particularly in the case of images of buildings and societal infrastructure, their interpretation is found on a continuum between visual fact and metaphor.
It is this continuum of interpretation that allows images of buildings as art-motif to act at once to awaken social conscience on societal injustice, as much as to propagate it through reinforcement of message. This closing argument supports the case for a broader visual literacy.
[499 words]
25.02.19 > In a way that is eternal
Cherry Blossom, its transient beauty embodied in the Japanese aesthetic, is correspondingly an important symbol in the country (The Art of Japan, 2017).
In the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear disaster in Fukushima, photographer Omori Katsumi travelled north from his residence in Urayasu towards the affected region. With his own residence in greater Tokyo not unaffected, although in the centre of the city the impact was felt to a much lesser extent, Omori felt driven – by a sense of compassion or complicity – to visit the disaster zone (The Japan Society, 2011; Fritsch 2018: 190). Along his route to Fukushima he documented the blossoming of the cherry trees.
Fig. 1 Katsumi Omori, 2011, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo [59cm x 39.5cm Chromogenic Print]
Omori’s documentary approach is as much frank and informal – and could be considered to emerge from new topographics – as it is subjective, opening a poetic dialogue that invites interpretation. That these images are in portrait format, in opposition to the convention for landscape photography, represents – according to Omori – ‘assertion’ in his documentary practice, with the inclusion of “some halation implying something people cannot actually see but probably exists: such as anxiety, possibly radiation or even wishes for the future” (The Japan Society, 2011).
In interviews on this series Omori regularly confirms his intention to photograph something that is invisible.
Fig. 2 Katsumi Omori, 2011, Iwaki-shi, Fukushima [59cm x 39.5cm Chromogenic Print]
Within his photographic practice, the freezing of time is one particular element of the medium that interests Omori (Fritsch 2018: 189).
Reflecting this interest in time, and prior to the series Everything happens for the first time, Omori’s 2007 photobook Cherryblossoms had already emanated from his fascination with the symbolically fleeting nature of the blossom. Asking the viewer to consider memory in another way, for that photobook he adopted the use of tungsten film to render the blossom in a bluish tint (Shashasha 2019). However, in Everything happens for the first time, Omori proposes a new approach to the documentary of an unfolding nuclear disaster and its invisible threat.
To critically investigate the interlinked visible and invisible, the series denies transparency (What is the subject matter? What is the meaning?) through the images unconventional form and depictions of the banal quotidian in modern day Japan.
In his critical analysis, Taro Nettleton, assistant professor of art history at the Temple University Japan Campus, considers that “through their opacity Omori’s images disrupt the call to nationalism and endurance, which the Japanese government has made its official response to the disasters”. As such he places Omori’s series as an ethico-political study into societal perspectives and positioning in Japan, otherwise a study into the state projected framework of protection, control, care and normalcy within Japan’s governing system after the Fukushima disaster (Nettleton 2018: 22-23).
Fig. 3 Katsumi Omori, 2011, Minami Soma-shi, Fukushima [59cm x 39.5cm Chromogenic Print]
By wearing this mask of opacity, Omori’s series directly challenges the opacity of the ruling hegemony, by reminding the viewer that when we look at the world we always look at it through multi-foiled filters. Those filters may be placed over our eyes by our own government.
Omori’s fascination with the freezing of the annual regenerative power of nature, which takes place on the human scale represented by the Cherry Blossoms in Everything happens for the first time, becomes overtly more intense through the tension arising from comparison with generational timescales of the half-life of radioactive material such as the isotopes of iodine-131, cesium-134 and cesium-137 released in the Fukushima disaster. This juxtaposition is strengthened by the aesthetic beauty of the soft-pink haletic effect created by an otherwise ‘innocent’ translucent toy. On a personal level for the photographer, the hazy images appear to resonate with Omori’s own memory of the first days following the disaster, where he recalls how his “neighbourhood was covered with dust, turning everything a hazy white” and how he could barely hang on to the sensation that his body belonged to him (Omori n.d.).
In Everything happens for the first time the end result is a poignant dialogue on mankind’s futile attempts to control, and exploit, the power of nature, an effort evident in the Japanese cultural psyche, in particular in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, combined with an ethico-political statement on the approach of the state at the time of the Fukushima disaster.
Sources
Fritsch, L. (2018) Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-29287-7
Nettleton, T. (2018) Photographing the Invisible: Katsumi Omori’s Everything happens for the first time, Afterimage, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 22-25.
Omori, K. (n.d.) Everything Happens for the First Time (Subete wa hajimete okoru). [Online] Available at https://www.lensculture.com/articles/katsumi-omori-everything-happens-for-the-first-time [Accessed 26 November 2018]
Opezzo, I. (2014) Paris Photo Interviews for La Stampa. [Online] Available at http://ireneopezzo.com/paris-photo-interviews/ [Accessed 2 February 2019]
Shashasha (2019) Cherryblossoms. [Online] Available at https://www.shashasha.co/en/book/cherryblossoms [Accessed 4 February 2019]
The Japan Society (2011) Everything happens for the first time Katsumi Omori. [Online] Available at https://www.japansociety.org.uk/20062/everything-happens-for-the-first-time-katsumi-omori/ [Accessed 2 February 2019]
14.02.19 > Becoming Other
As I work towards a photography project that invites dialogue on the datasphere as an alternative space of existence, I plan to travel to Tokyo to explore the visualization of digital connectivity in one of the most densely constructed and populated megacities on the planet. My starting point is to tentatively explore Japanese culture, art and photography, and how they have been informed both domestically and by external cultures.
Japan and its culture remain an intrigue for Western Society. In the first of a three part series addressing art and aesthetics in Japanese culture (The Art of Japanese Life: Nature, 2017) the embodiment of the religious beliefs of Shintoism and Buddhism within the Japanese aesthetic are explored by art historian, and fellow at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge, Dr. James Fox (University of Cambridge, 2019).
Reflecting on the role of nature within these two religions, Fox considers that every aspect of life in Japan is driven by aesthetics. Even if Shintoism itself has not produced a legacy of art such as that emanating from the Christian religions of the West, the essence of the religion is so firmly embedded in the Japanese aesthetic that it pervades Japanese art.
The world of Shintoism is inhabited by the Kami, spirits – both good and bad – that live in everything organic and inorganic, or as Fox states, “for Shinto, the world is endlessly animated by the divine” (The Art of Japanese Life: Nature, 2017).
This concept of eternal existence is extended in Buddhism by the belief in incarnation whether as the living or inanimate, and parallels with these ancient religions can be found in contemporary philosophical studies, such as in Felix Guattari’s unfinished concept of ecosophy which would allow for a rethinking of the nature of being. A dissolution of self by becoming-other is at the heart of Guattarian (and Deleuzian) ecosophy, in opposition to an expansion of self through identification (Tinnel 2012: 359).
Just as the Japanese accept that life pervades everything, in whatever form, it is at today’s juncture of the ecological crisis and the pervasiveness of digital media associated with the information age, that a Guattarian thinking could point towards alternative domains or “transversal eco-humanities, which would be rhizomatically rooted in autopoiesis and becoming-other” (idem: 357), but “without assigning humans, nature or culture a fixed role or place in the production of subjectivity” (idem: 362). In questioning this, is Tinnel’s extension of the unfinished theory of ecosophy suggesting the possibility of existence in other form? Digital form? And how could such alternative digital spaces be visualized when we look at them through the filter of the human condition? Further, if we enter a digital space which exists only in the information age, do we become less human?
This bridge between religion and philosophy within the context of ecosophical – as opposed to ecocritical – thinking is at the heart of my visual exploration of otherness. The dominant physical infrastructure and prevalent, but juxtaposing, digital connectivity in Japan offer an avenue for photographic exploration of otherness outside of the Western media filter.
Returning then to the Japanese aesthetic, an exploration of the universal divine animation in Japanese photography would have to take as its starting point the development of the Japanese aesthetic, in particular the Japanese culture of visualization. With ‘The Splashed Ink Landscape’ (1495), Sesshū Tōyō expressed an abstraction of nature some 300-400 years before the advent of abstraction of landscape art in the west, whilst consideration of the Japanese reading of art from right to left will reveal to the uninitiated western eye insights into the semiotics of the imagery. In reading Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanugawa from right to left (Fig. 1, also know as Under the Wave off Kanagawa, Rijksmuseum n.d.), the western interpretation of the immensity of nature’s energy is revealed in Japanese culture as the immensity of life’s challenges (The Art of Japanese Life: Nature, 2017).
Fig. 1 Katsushika Hokusai, 1829-1833. Under the Wave off Kanagawa [25.4 cm x 37.5 cm, colour woodcut print on paper] (Rijksmuseum, Acquisition 1956)
It is the duality of this Japanese fascination with the fleeting, combined with a cultural drive to control nature, the outcome of which is no better represented than in the Fukushima disaster, that makes consideration of otherness through a Japanese perspective central to my work on visualizing other forms of existence in the information age.
In his consideration of the art of Japanese life Fox reflects that “in Japan nature is ignored at one’s peril” (The Art of Japanese Life: Nature, 2017). That we should ignore our own ‘nature’ through dissolution of the human condition to a digital existence is surely perilous and worthy of dialogue, visual dialogue included.
Sources
Rijksmuseum (n.d.) Under the Wave off Kanagawa. [Online]: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.45735. Available at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-1956-733 [Accessed 9 February 2019]
The Art of Japanese Life: Nature (2017) BBC World, 19 January 2019. 10:10 CET. Part 1 of a series produced and directed by Ben Harding. BBC Studios, Pacific Quay Productions, Scotland.
Tinnell, J. C. (2012), Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Félix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective, Edinburgh University Press, Deleuze Studies, 6.3 (2012): 357-388
University of Cambridge (2019) People: Dr James Fox MA (Cantab), MPhil, PhD. [Online] Available at https://www.hoart.cam.ac.uk/people/jf283@cam.ac.uk [Accessed 31 January 2019]
07.02.19 > I Am Here
In photographic intent I endeavor to reach an embodiment of otherness.
In purpose, I try – more often than not failing – to convey no message, only asking for consideration of different perspectives on the societal themes I explore. It starts with the viewer listening to the dialogue in the image, a simple invitation to join in. My images are boundaries between different points of view. They are visualizations that accommodate differing information spaces, each of these spaces a different existence. Visually I try to speak of ‘grace’, through a gaze of acceptance that strives to free itself from judgment, power and exploitation. But neither my thoughts nor my images are ever free of these burdens. The mask of acceptance that I wear creates an acknowledgment of difference. An apparent objectivity exists only in the presence of its companion subjectivity.
Fig. 1 Gordon Sutherland, 2018, Untitled Work in Progress. [Unpublished Digital Infra-red Photograph IR 590]
In the above image of More London (Foster & Partners) – from an unpublished mini series realized over one morning in summer 2018 – my intent was to visualise the dialogue between nature and the built environment in the context of global capitalism (Fig.1). The subject matter, perspective and compositional elements of the image release it from the power struggle between nature and capitalist development, although the overall series has a more dystopian, linear narrative on exploitation of resources in a non-circular economy. This image emerges, naturally, at the mid-point of the narrative.
I work at the crossover between architectural photography, social documentary and fine-art photography exploring buildings and infrastructure as an art-motif for awakening social conscience. My approach is influenced by many photographers, however the two most influential are James Welling, in particular his use of colour theory in the series Glass House, and Hélène Binet, from her embodiment of religious – arguably masonic – and cosmic motifs and references in her photographic oeuvre. The resonance of these works on my personal, indoctrinated world views emerges throughout my photographic practice, much of which is highly autobiographical.
Fig. 2 Gordon Sutherland, 2018, Untitled Work in Progress, 2018 [Unpublished Digital Infra-red Photograph IR 590]
Fig. 3 Gordon Sutherland, 2018, Agora Simone Veil & the Willy Brandt Building, European Parliament Complex, Brussels. [Unpublished Digital Blended Spectra Photograph]
Fig. 4 Gordon Sutherland, 2017, Braigh Craobhach [75 x 50 cm (30 x 20 in.) fine-art giclée inkjet pigment print] (Private Collection, Athens)
Fig. 5 Gordon Sutherland, 2018, Knightswood Flats, Glasgow [60 x 90 cm (23.6 x 35.4 in.) fine-art giclée inkjet pigment print] (Private Collection, Brussels)
The photographic journey to here has been a development of self-expression coupled with a conviction for dialogue and acceptance without judgment. My most recent project, this time I’m voting, constituted a visible departure from that intent, with less subtle messaging. At any rate, the cultural and personal context cannot be entirely separated unless the photographer is a machine – and even that is open to debate. The image, or the photographer, remains a burden. The one does not escape the other.
The exploration of my visual voice continues through extension of Guattarian philosophy at today’s confluence of the environmental crisis and the information age. By exploring critical contextual theory and contemporary visual culture I am preparing for the next stage in informing my degree major project through exploration of surveillance and data flows in digitally connected cultures.
This exploration emerges ahead of a photography project this coming summer in Tokyo as part of the Surfaces and Strategies module.
For this reason my starting point for exploration of context and visual culture is art and religion in Japan, building on the perspectives and photographic practice already explored from my very own, personal western perspective.
Sources:
Sutherland, G. (2017) Another Path. [Online] Available at http://www.irrationalangle.com/another-path/ [Accessed 7 February 2019]
Sutherland, G. (2018) Looking for Daylight. [Online] Available at http://www.irrationalangle.com/looking-for-daylight/ [Accessed 7 February 2019]
12.11.18 > The Digital Divide (Working Title)
The ideas, concepts, and critical theory underpinning my initial considerations for a project investigating the nature of digital space are collated in the video The Digital Divide, an Artist Talk presenting the road to my visual voice and early research for the project.
24.10.18 > Observing our digital DNA
In exploring the phenomenon of digitalisation of society I’m first of all reflecting on the nature of the digital world.
Thought experiments on Schrodinger’s unfortunate cat and developments in quantum computing aside, today’s digital world comprises of a series of zeroes and ones.
Within this digital hierarchy I’m naturally drawn to explore – for the first time in my photographic practice, other than a short undergraduate project using a Rollieflex SL66 medium format camera – images in a square format: the square format lending the photographic surface an essence of the digital DNA.
And even if the real world is not black and white, at least to our human eyes, perhaps the digital world is. So I’m also naturally drawn to explore seriously – again for the first time in a personal project – the use of black and white, or at least monotone, photographic imagery.
These are two fundamental departures from my current photographic practice, and enough to be getting on with for the time being.
Taking the square format and monotone as my creative limitations, or boundaries within which I choose to express myself, I pulled together a short series of images for informing the steps towards my Final Degree Project.
Fig. 1: Agora Simone Veil – Esplanade Solidarność 1980, European Parliament, Brussels (Image © Gordon Sutherland 2018)
Taken over one morning in and around the halls of power of the European Parliament in Brussels and the institutional district surrounding it, I feel that these locations are ideal for reflecting on power and control within the expanding datasphere. They subtly start to reveal how data flows, transmissions and surveillance are becoming omnipresent in the so-called digital transformation and start to shape the way society behaves.
Fig. 2: Esplanade Solidarność 1980, European Parliament, Brussels (Image © Gordon Sutherland 2018)
The images presented here are representative of a series of around 21 images that emerged from location scouting session and –to my mind- reveal that the square format and, in this case, monotone infrared images using a 720nm IR filter as opposed to black and white, demonstrate the futuristic feeling that I’d like to instill in the images.
Fig. 3: A short portfolio of images informing the development of a proposal for the Final Degree Project, Brussels, Saturday 13 October 2018 (Image © Gordon Sutherland 2018)
What is our digital future? What shape does it take? Is it a habitable space? – these are perhaps the emerging questions I’d like to raise in the mind of the viewer of my images.
Looking at these images, although they form part of a development process, they sit as a finished portfolio, a portfolio of developmental sketches for an emerging project.
Fig. 4: Parc de Bruxelles – Brussels Park, Brussels (Image © Gordon Sutherland 2018)
As with my previous projects they may frame and accompany the final project until its completion.
The questions thrown up by these images revolve around inclusion, or not, of people in the final set of images. And if so, how to include people, other than the viewer, within the image? Staged, or random street photography?
On the other hand, I’m wondering if people actually live in the digital world, so perhaps their complete absence from the images would magnify that enquiry?
23.10.18 > Surveillant or surveyed? – Photography, the double agent
The idea of the datasphere as existential space is the main avenue of current exploration for my Final Degree Project.
The datasphere is considered as the “notional environment in which digital data is stored” as well as “the space of virtual reality, or cyberspace” (Oxford Dictionaries 2018).
My thematic direction for this project remains open, my initial considerations lying in identifying how a space as invisible as the datasphere can be visualized.
Where do people, individually or collectively, enter into, or interact with, the datasphere? Can those portals be associated with visual markers? How much of the human condition is lost through interaction with, and habitation within, a digitalized world?
Fig. 1: Sunday, October 7th 2018 in Place Eugene Flagey, Brussels, Belgium (Image © Gordon Sutherland 2018)
Musings on surveillance, propaganda and societal control by the gatekeepers to the datasphere and considerations around policing of cyberspace point to potential literary and visual texts as inspiration: Orwell’s Nineteen Eight Four, the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, and Toffler’s Future Shock, for example. How much information can a society absorb before it suffers from culture shock within its own culture?
But where is this digital world and is it tangible enough to be visualised? How is it changing society?
A recent Pew Research study in the United States shows that teens are trying to find the balance between the anxiety of spending too much time on their mobile phone against the worry they feel when they are separated from it (Tiku 2018). Whilst the youngsters involved reveal that they are taking steps to limit the time they spend on their phones, these efforts aren’t necessarily making them happier. Over fifty-five percent of American teens have feelings of anxiety and loneliness – or felt upset – when they are away from their mobile phone.
The report states that American parents also struggle with similar issues in relation to screen time, sometimes to a greater extent. Thirty-nine percent of parents admit to often or sometimes losing focus at work when looking at their mobile phone, this in comparison to the thirty-one percent of teens who state to having lost focus during class time for the same reason. Further, fifty-one percent of teens say that whilst trying to have a conversation with their parent or caregiver, the other person has been distracted by mobile use.
The layers of digital invasiveness in day-to-day life are not only from mobile phones, but come in the form of notifications through various media. These notifications shape the way we live and respond to those around us. I find myself wondering what would happen if the notifications stopped? How would a contemporary digital society respond without these signals?
The 2014/15 exhibition “Watching You, Watching Me” at the Open Society office in New York featured the work of nine visual artists documenting and exploring the surveillance and data retention activities of governments, corporations, and individuals. The exhibition explored not only how photography has been used as much to challenge the practices of surveillance as it has itself been an instrument of surveillance.
Of interest for further research is the work of Edu Bayer for the New York Times in 2011 in which he documented the surveillance apparatus of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime, the headquarters of which were housed in a six-story building from which citizen’s movements and correspondence was monitored (Bayer n.d.). The work can be viewed in the context of ‘the ruin’, exposing surveillance in its aftermath.
In his work ‘Plain Sight: The Visual Vernacular of NYPD Surveillance’, aka profiling.is, Josh Begley uses Associated Press released visual texts to produce a wall of images from the NYPD’s surveillance of institutions of businesses affiliated to the Muslim faith. In this project the data artist, filmmaker, and app developer Begley draws attention to the scale of photography’s role in state apparatus surveillance activities. The wall of surveillance material makes me think of a massive contact sheet. Taken more subtly, reference can be found in the display approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Over two years, Simon Menner had access to the Stasi’s visual legacy archived by the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives of the former German Democratic Republic. Menner’s presentation of the images allows reflection on the use of photography as a tool at the service of the secret police, whether for training secret service agents, conduction of clandestine home searches, or to track people’s movements (Yamagata 2014). Menner states “They concern photographic records of the repression exerted by the state to subdue its own citizens. For me, the banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive.” (Menner 2018). He further reflects that many of the images are fully open to interpretation making them susceptible to attribution of meaning according to the suspicions of the secret service.
Perhaps the discourse around surveillance, truth, and the (mis)use of data is not too distant from the broader photographic debates of subjectivity and objectivity, or discussions on the fundamentals of intertextuality between visual and written texts. What is the true reading of a photograph in the absence of corroborated written or recorded texts?
The idea of photography as a double agent, or perhaps simply the devil’s advocate, arises in the discourse around its capacity to awaken social conscience of the role that surveillance and state control play with regards to fundamental rights and civil liberties. The ubiquitous nature of the ‘connected’ camera phone and tethered or wi-fi enabled DSLRs means that in both citizen documentary and professional photojournalism, photographers are as much capturing images of socio-political concern with a view to informing the viewing public, as they are providing evidence for use by the surveillance apparatus of the state and other organisations, real or virtual.
The philosophical question remains: is virtual also real? And what does photography the double agent have to say in this debate?
Endnote
Whilst reflecting on surveillance in the data age I was listening to the soundtrack from the film Good Bye Lenin!. The music recalled the story of the fabricated reality created by a young man to protect his mother from shock after she awakes in 1990 from a long coma, to prevent her from learning that the nation of East Germany that she knew and loved had disappeared, and together with it much of her identity [Yann Tiersen 2003].
Sources
Bayer, E. (2018) Gadhaffi Intelligence Room. Available at https://edubayer.photoshelter.com/index/G0000nniWlU_S9oM [Accessed 22 October 2018]
Begley, J. (n.d.) The visual vernacular of NYPD surveillance. Available at https://joshbegley.com/ [Accessed 22 October 2018]
Menner, S. (2018) Images from the Secret Stasi Archives
or: what does Big Brother see, while he is watching? Available at https://simonmenner.com/_sites/SurveillanceComplex/StasiImages/_StasiImagesMenue.html [Accessed 22 October 2018]
Oxford Dictionaries (2018) Definition of datasphere in English. Available at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/datasphere [Accessed 21 October 2018]
Tiku, N. (2018) Even teens worry that teens are addicted to their phones. Available at https://www.wired.com/story/even-teens-worry-that-teens-are-addicted-to-their-phones/ [Accessed 21 October 2018]
Yamagata, Y. (2014) Taking a closer look at surveillance culture through photography. Available at https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/taking-closer-look-surveillance-culture-through-photography [Accessed 22 October 2018]
Musical inspiration
YANN TIERSEN, 2003. Good Bye Lenin! [CD]. 7243 5 82548 2 2. Labels
20.10.18 > The global image
Fig. 1: Students participate in a photography summer school at Central St. Martins – University of Arts London (August 2018)
The global image is all around us: ubiquitous and pervasive. We are bombarded by images. Try walking down the street consciously ignoring every image that you see. Make an effort to delete them from your field of vision. The world quickly becomes uncluttered. It seems that the still image is everywhere, pushed aside only by the multitude of moving images that steal our attention, pulling us in through a kind of animal instinct that focuses on movement.
To continue to gain our attention the global image stretches the boundaries of cultural acceptance before becoming banal or mundane. An alien browsing photographic archives of personal photographies in the second decade of the 21st Century on planet Earth might be excused for thinking that we are a profoundly communal species sharing moments by peering out of digital slices of time, whether to express, to consume, or perhaps to be consumed. Like fledglings in a nest consciously, or unconsciously, needing to attract attention to survive in a competitive world.
The boundaries of photographic representation once determined, they become the quotidien acceptance of the global image as an unconscious representation of society today. And so the next step in pushing the boundary of photographic representation must arrive and photographies evolve further: continuously flexible temporal networks, or interconnected systems, which interlink visual representations of space, time, reality, imagination and the human condition.
When everything has been photographed what is there left for photographers to do? I remember wanting to visit an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre a few years back, which explored the concept of there being nothing left to photograph. The queue was too long, so I’ve been left with my own thoughts on the possibilities that remain for photography now. Are they endless?
The pervasive nature of photography is not a new phenomenon. Hand (2012) informs us that “the New York Times ran a story in 1884 concerning an ‘epidemic’ of cameras, with amateurs described as ‘camera lunatics’ training their cameras simply on those walking down the street” (Hand: 4). The sociological response to this was similar to today’s concerns about privacy, invasiveness, decency and the breakdown of societal norms.
In the image above a photographer takes an image of photographers talking about photography: this allows for humorous or iconic discourse, revealing aspects of today’s version of this lunacy (Fig. 1: Sutherland 2018).
In another instant, the photographer ‘steals’ a moment of someone sleeping, a private moment in which the person is disconnected from self-consciousness, captured consciously by a photographer using an optical instrument which records unconsciously (Fig. 2: G. Sutherland 2018).
Fig. 2: Sleeping visitor in the National Theatre, Southbank, London represented in IR 590nm post-processed to black & white (August 2018)
Reflecting on my place within the concept of the global image, I again recall lyrics from Coastguard by British Sea Power: “We’re all in it, we’re all in it, we’re all in it and we close our eyes” (British Sea Power 2013).
It seems inherent to photographies as visual expressions of personal or cultural world-views that they concern the boundaries of the socially acceptable. Photographic images have the ability to grab attention, when the written or spoken word can’t be heard above the voices of others. It could be that what is stated visually, has more potency than written language, albeit with less clarity. Perhaps this is because of its ambiguity?
In photographic practice I’m increasingly challenged to remake any image brought into the photographic realm, or saturated as Walter Benjamin would have stated it, from amongst all the concepts of images in the minds of a world of photographers. That said, it can make sense to look at new light through old windows, or to project new considerations of old stories in the light of the (digital) age in which we now live. Times have changed and so have the interpretations.
Fig. 3: Art gallery visitors in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall represented in IR 590nm (August 2018)
The question remains: is there anything new under the sun to photograph? And will it remain ‘new’ once it has come into existence from its previous existence as an idea ready to become a photograph?
For the most part, commercial and art photography today sit both within and aside of the realm of digital photography, which in itself is a sub-culture of digital culture. They sit within it when they conform to its norms, they sit apart when they are breaking those norms. Yet, once they break the norms, they become part of the norm. “The Shape of Light” abstract photography exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2018 was an example of a critically acclaimed and publicly accessible photography exhibition which demonstrated how photography has taken its place with other arts, on a mass scale, as art for awakening conscience and art for consumption (Fig.3: G. Sutherland 2018).
The other part of this sub-culture is personal photography and together they reveal everyday photographic practices, whether production or consumption, which in “contemporary Western cultures involve unprecedented levels of visual mediation” (Hand: 3). Even analogue or alternative photographies rely on digital distribution and consumption, clearly placing photography as a part of today’s digital society.
For my part I interpret the concept of the global image ontologically as the current culture of production and distribution of images through which they pervade every aspect of our life, whether as personal or professional photographies. Photographic image has become an intrinsic part of our existence.
Sources
BRITISH SEA POWER, 2013. Coastguard. In: From the sea to the land beyond [Vinyl]. RTTRDLP679. Rough Trade Records.
Hand, M. (2012) Ubiquitous Photography. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN-978-0-7456-4715-9
18.10.18 > We’re all in it
Fig. 1 Herbert List, 1937. Santorin 1937. [36.3 x 26.0 cm (14 5/16 x 10 1/4 in.), Gelatin Silver Print]
It enfolds, The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow, Always, always, always the sea, Brilliantine mortality
Close our eyes, Close our eyes, We’re all in it and we close our eyes
from
Coastguard (British Sea Power 2013)
By 1936 Herbert List had been forced to leave Germany due to the political situation (Bieger-Thielemann 2001: 396) and in the greater cultural context of 1937 fascism was taking its hold across much of the European continent. The cultural context of the time constitutes the backdrop for exploration of List’s image on many levels, whether in terms of the European continent in the greater world, in terms of impending unsettled times, or in personal terms for the photographer.
Two worlds are revealed, the goldfish bowl and the sea, otherwise the microcosm and the macrocosm. The apparent freedom experienced by the viewer contrasts with restricted environment of the fish, the large fish in the small bowl commands its small world, the still waters in the bowl are a counterpoint to the choppy seas.
From a formal analysis the viewers response is found in the play between the symmetry and asymmetry, the straight lines of the wall and the curved lines of the bowl, the smoothness and the roughness, the hardness and softness, the light and dark, that permeate the image.
The fragility of the goldfish’s small world, and the play between the apparent safety of the bowl versus the dangers of freedom in the larger world, provide a sublime tension in an otherwise culturally approachable image.
Sources
Bieger-Thielemann, M. (2001) Herbert List in 20th Century Photography – Museum Ludwig Cologne. Cologne: Taschen. ISBN-3-8228-5867-6.
BRITISH SEA POWER, 2013. Coastguard. In: From the sea to the land beyond [Vinyl]. RTTRDLP679. Rough Trade Records.
The Metropolitan Museum (2018) Goldfish Bowl, Santorini, Greece. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/265321 [Accessed 16 October 2018]
Gordon Sutherland - Photography Research Journal 