The Brief

Go to the artist’s website and look at the other images in Shafran’s series.

You may have noticed that Washing-up is the only piece of work in Part Three created by a man. It is also the only one with no human figures in it, although family members are referred to in the captions.

• In what ways might a photographer’s gender contribute to the creation and reading of an image?
• What does the series achieve by not including people?
• Do you regard them as interesting ‘still life’ compositions?

Critique

The brief draws attention to the work in Part 3 being almost entirely created by female artists, with Shafran being the exception. I hadn’t initially spotted that while working through the projects and exercises, so this was the first area I wanted to explore in answering the brief. My neutrality in appreciating the works naturally stems from my life experiences to date. Many of my strongest influences have come from the key women in my life and I believe that has shaped my perspective on how people share their opinions and emotions with others. It’s not to say that I haven’t had strong male role models of course, but I think the balance of both influences is responsible for the fact that I haven’t considered gender in my interpretation of the works in this unit.

With regard to how gender contributes to the work and its interpretation, I think the starting point for me is the artist’s experience within their environment. Men and women naturally have different experiences caused by their biology and so it’s not unreasonable to expect their expression of the emotions surrounding them to be different. For example, Brotherus’ story of unsuccessful IVF treatment is told from the painful perspective of being a woman unable to conceive. The women that I know who have been through that experience, all had huge doubts about themselves because of being unable to do what is the most natural thing in the world for their gender. Some felt like failures and shouldered the responsibility for any unsuccessful treatment cycles. Brotherus’ story is incredibly raw and moving, however her series also contains her references to her partner who is, for the want of a better expression ‘in the same boat’. His role in the work is relatively small compared to hers and the photographs say little about his experience. Would a series from his perspective be as powerful? Undoubtedly so, but perhaps it wouldn’t be as focused on the biological disfunction as hers. My male friends who’ve experienced IVF spoke of trying to remain supportive, calm and patient, despite sharing the anger and disappointment when it didn’t work. I believe a male perspective on the same event would have similar themes, but different narratives. In the case of Lee’s Projects, the artist explores the cultures and sub-cultures that were alien to her as a young Korean woman. The themes range from age to race, societal roles to sexuality and Lee places herself in this virtual world to experience and comment from within. In an interview [1], Lee said that she always includes other people in her work as she feels that she learns more about who she is through the eyes of the people around her. This self-perception is likely more about someone who emigrated to the US to complete her study (Lee moved to the US to study for her Masters degree), but there is also likely to be an element of gender, bias simply because she is of a generation where women were more empowered in their pursuit of career. While I cannot speak for all men, I personally don’t view myself through the eyes of other people, but do use their feedback to inform my opinions on my behaviour and the way that I interact with them. Perhaps then, I would have worked on Projects with more of a feeling of ‘outsider’ documenting human relationships, rather than their effect on my own self image.
With Shafran’s Washing Up the subtle compositions have contextual elements that tell a story of daily life through the lens of what he and his partner have in common. When I look at the images, I see a very factual representation of domestic life and the cues such as paint brushes and brightly-coloured utensils don’t really have a gender bias. He creates as sense of ‘done’ about the subject (the washing up) as well as alluding to his and his partner’s presence or absence through the amount of crockery on the rack. I found the inclusion of the initials behind the taps to be an almost passive-aggressive statement because of the crudity of their construction, but they could have been created from the perspective of either of them. Where the other artists in Part 3 have told stories of events in their lives, Shafran tells a factual tale of the passage of daily life through a series of aesthetically appealing still life type shots.

With regard to Shafran omitting people from his compositions, I think that the overall effect is that of a broadly interpretable context. The pictures say something about the lives of the people involved, but tell very little about them personally. We cannot derive any information about age, looks or social standing, but these are traditional contextual elements for portraiture. Shafran isn’t interested in showing himself or his partner to the viewer, but instead tells a story of their lives through images of their environment. We are not distracted by wondering about the traditional contexts, but instead are looking at the evidence of their lives in a way that is relatable to everyone. We all have some type of kitchen domesticity to contend with. For me, the bottle of wine that appears next to the sink in a number of the pictures is a relatable feature of modern stressful living. The ever-present washing up gloves acting as separation from the task also tells me that there is an order to their world, without worrying about saying who wears them. Shafran’s work takes the concept of storytelling further than portraiture, making the statement that we are not just a physical presence to be captured, but our lives have an impact that can be just as interesting a document as a simple shot of the face.

When I look at Shafran’s Washing Up I do see a series that could easily be interpreted as a still life.

“Still life can be a celebration of material pleasures such as food and wine, or often a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures and of the brevity of human life”

Tate Definition of Still Life [2]

Shafran’s images show everyday items in a recognisable scene that do indeed point the brevity of human life as above. The washing up Is either underway or finished which is a snapshot of time that may be repeated the following meal, but will be different each time. The lighting in the photographs emphasises the different textures and colours of the items in a way that traditional still life does, but their arrangement leads away from a simple appreciation of them with relation to each other. The other contrasting elements suggest more connection between the items and their surroundings; only after looking closely do we see that there might be a story about the owners being told here. As we move through the series, the items in the kitchen are either arranged differently or changed completely, which again suggests the images are not of the items but of their part in the daily routine of the owner’s life. To that end, still life isn’t really the right genre to assign to this work.

Conclusion

I find Shafran’s work interesting in it’s seemingly simple representation of the banal. The trace elements of his and his partner’s lives are very subtle, but Shafran bring them out of the background for the viewer to interpret how they wish to. In leaving himself and his family out of the photographs, there are no preconceptions about them only a suggestion of what they life might be like. I’m not convinced that Shafran’s gender is a contributing factor to the impact of his work as could potentially be said of the other artists in Part 3. Shafran talks of reacting to something he sees and wanting to communicate it in a simple way [3]. Perhaps the reaction is emotional or environmentally driven as with the other artists and that Shafran chooses to express himself through carefully using props instead of people. Whatever the reason, his work has a wonderful sense of the ordinary about it in the way that Anna Fox’s work did in Part 2.

References

[1] Unknown, 2013, “INNERView EP65 Who am I? The artist drawing attention in New York – Nikki S Lee, ARIRANG TV Youtube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMychWgKedA

[2] Unknown, “Art Term – Still Life, Tate Online, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/still-life

[3] Smythe D, 2018, “Everyday Beauty with Nigel Shafran”, British Journal of Photography, https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/05/shafraninterview/