Monthly Archives: Jan 2022

Reflecting on Identity and Place

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Introduction

I have now completed the coursework and assignments for Identity and Place, which also concludes Level 1 of the degree course. This post is a reflection on the key learnings from this unit and how it has changed me as a photographer.

Reflection

I suppose the first real learning point for me in Identity and Place was that the very definitions of these two words are not a obvious as they first appear. Identity is not limited to the facsimile of our faces and Place is not necessarily a physical location. An identity can be represented by the place that a person occupies and a place can represent the identities of the people who live there or are part of the culture. In many cases, a person doesn’t need to be physically present in order to represent them or their identity. Similarly, props and backgrounds in a portrait can speak volumes about the place that someone occupies in society.

We looked at the origins of photographic portraiture and the way that a picture represents a person as a collaboration between artist and sitter. The idea that portraiture tells a story about the person at some point in their life but nothing about the history leading to that point was something I hadn’t occurred to me before. While the photograph can more readily capture the differences in a person’s face at intervals, say separated by years, any interpretation of what has happened to them in the intervening period is created by the viewer using the visual cues included by the photographer. In the first project of Part 1[1], I looked at two very different portraits of General Ulysses S Grant, later President Grant, taken when he was a serving army officer and one in office. The pictures were clearly of the same person, but the years and events had changed the way he both looked and carried himself. In both cases, the photographers were representing Grant’s status as a man of action, but with different environmental influences. The same research looked at the works of Julia Margaret Cameron, who was one of the pioneers of the photographer deliberately presenting their subject as they saw them. Her images were deliberately blurred with motion, harshly lit or slightly out-of-focus as a way of revealing their character. This learning was another element that reinforced the fact that photography as a technical process is secondary to the idea that is being presented. If the technical perfection is subverted to tell us something about the subject, that’s fine. It’s important for me to remember this point, given my technical background.

The other artists that struck chords with me were Walker Evans and August Sander. The former is someone I was aware of from his book American Photographs (1938). His work in this unit was uses to explore the idea of subjects that are unaware of being photographed. The Subway series revealed the lives of the people on the train with Evans in a way that was entirely natural. Their interactions with each other and the occasional suspicious glances towards Evans and his hidden camera, made me ask questions about life in 1930s New York, which tied in with the later work on Postmemory. In that piece of work [2] we learned that postmemory isn’t just limited to our own experiences, but includes that of our ancestors and our culture. In the case of Evans, I am a huge fan of New York and have travelled on the same subway many times. My reading of Evans’ series was naturally influenced by my own experiences as well as the traditional images of the city from history. With Sander, we have another revelation of identity whose origins were in a sinister cataloguing of German society between the world wars. Sander’s subjects are pictured in the clothing that they would wear for their profession but there are also tools, props and the background, all of which help ‘place’ the person and identify their category.. The intention for the work may have been a flawed pseudo-science, but the resulting series speaks of the individuals as well as society at what was a fragile time. Sander’s work heavily influenced my submission for Assignment Two in which I used inappropriate dress for particular activities [3]. For me, Sander’s work continued my fascination with constructed tableaux. His portraits reveal a great deal about the subject and their ‘place’ despite looking at first glance like a practical document. Tableaux has featured in my all of my assignment submissions since Assignment Two, with the only departure being a more documentary approach in Assignment Four Even in that assignment, I was carefully including contextual elements in a semi-constructed manner and specifically excluding others, for example people. The research into in absentia portraiture followed on from what we learned in Context and Narrative with further emphasis on the traces of human activity. I was particularly struck by the artists Alec Soth and Martina Lindqvist, who asked questions of the viewer with their images of recent events within a specific culture. The latter’s seemingly simple compositions of buildings in a snowy landscape contain many subtle layers of meaning, inviting the viewer to ask questions about the people who live there and how their lives are affected by their environment. Soth’s series about Mississippi revealed wide ranging aspects of live in the region, some which are stereotypical and influenced by media perception and some that are testimony to the uniqueness of the culture. Where one aspect ends and the other begins isn’t always clear, which adds to the intrigue of the artist’s intent. This style of work has had an impact on how I approach a series, asking myself what I am really trying to say with my own work. When it came to Assignment One: The Unfamiliar, Sander shaped how I approached what was a challenging piece of work. Like many students, I found approaching strangers and asking them for a portrait very uncomfortable. In my series, I was trying to reveal what the local park meant to people who visited it and, though conversation something about their lives. Sander’s setting a subject into a specific context and Coburn’s comments about the establishment of a relationship with them made this assignment less of an issue than I thought it would be. Sander continued to influence my thinking when it came to Assignment Two, where I subverted the expected style of dress in certain social or cultural situations. In this assignment, I allowed my sense of humour to feature in the work which is something I’ve learned to do throughout Level 1 of the degree course. I learned a valuable lesson about my integrity as an artist at the end of Assignment Two with the criticism I received for self-censorship. What was an intended protection of my subjects (who are my friends), actually said more about my idea of what is acceptable and what is not. My image of the school teacher dressed as a saloon girl was the one that stood out as the model didn’t care who saw it. My own sensibilities wanted to avoid any form of online backlash given her position on the school board of governors. I learned about committing to an idea and being confident to share the outcomes, wherever they might lead. This self-awareness continued into Assignment Three [4] where I told the story of vinyl’s decline and resurgence through photographs of my own life growing up. The work was inspired by Trish Morrissey and Hans Eijkelboom[5] who physically placed themselves in the portraits of others. Both artists manage to blend in and stand out from the subjects around them in a way that makes the viewer question what they are looking at. In my series, my very personal family photographs took the form of album covers and were placed in the setting of a vinyl record shop. I enjoyed the opportunity to play with tableaux construction in that assignment, which gave me increased confidence in the rest of the unit. Assignment Four[6] took its inspiration from Barthes’ paper Rhetoric of the Image, which discussed the use of relay text as complimentary context for the iconic and symbolic messages in a photograph. The pairing of scenes with quotations from the Government COVID-19 briefings was a powerful combination that received positive feedback from everyone who has seen the series. I think that this assignment taught me how to really observe a scene and think about how it fitted a narrative that I had already. The idea stemmed from an idea I had considered for an ebook which, thanks to Assignment Four, is something I am now pursuing outside of this course. The most significant learning from the unit came in the final part. Until that point, my work had been rooted in factual stories or situations, whether viewed from my perspective or deliberately subverted in some way. In Part 5, I was inspired by Michael Colvin’s Rubber Flapper[7] series to explore something fictional. His story of an eccentric woman living in a self-cleaning house, whose private life was a mystery being investigated by the artist, was so apparently real that I found myself instinctively Googling the story. Colvin constructed the character around his own experiences of privacy and acceptance of his sexuality, based it on some real events in the early 20th Century and cleverly used modern props to help the narrative through the series. I took Colvin’s work as inspiration for Assignment Five[8]. This departure from representing real people, events or cultures was like a release of my imagination. My series explored modern society’s reliance on communication technology through the re-telling of The Vanishing Hitchhiker, a ghost story that has become an urban legend. I really enjoyed the creative process of framing the story, choosing the costumes, props and lighting and the curation of the series in a way that I hadn’t really experienced since Assignment 5 of Context and Narrative[9]. I also worked with models, something that I have really learned to embrace in this unit as it gives me the opportunity to build those relationships to the extent where everyone involved is bought into the intended narrative. My models (also my close friends) contributed ideas for their characters throughout the shoot which I felt made the series more impactful; this was an experience I had in Assignment Two.

The experience of taking something that interested me (the ghost story) and relating it to the struggles of modern life prompted me to start carrying a small ‘ideas’ notebook around with me. When a similar idea comes to me, I write down the key details to be expanded later. Identity and Place has taught me to be more observant, look for meanings in images and not be afraid to let my imagination take over when I feel like it. It has changed my perspective on photography as an art form, which is most noticeable when I look at aesthetically beautiful pictures. If the image doesn’t tell me something about the place, it’s identity or that of the people who inhabit it, I get bored fairly quickly. In conclusion, the unit has continued to push me from taking such aesthetically pleasing photographs to creating work where a story is being told, asking the viewer to look carefully at the contextual elements in order to create narratives.

References

[1] Fletcher R, 2021, “1) Project 1: Historical Photographic Portraiture”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/02/23/1-project-1-historical-photographic-portraiture/

[2] Fletcher R, 2021, “3) Project 2 – The Gaze”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/09/02/project-2-the-gaze/

[3] Fletcher R, 2021, “Assignment Two: Vice Versa”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/06/25/assignment-two-%E2%80%8Bvice-versa/

[4] Fletcher R, 2021,”Assignment Three: Mirrors or Windows, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/09/06/assignment-three-%E2%80%8Bmirrors-or-windows/

[5] Fletcher R, 2021, ” 3) Project 1: Mirrors”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/08/11/3-project-1-mirrors/

[6] Fletcher R, 2021, “Assignment Four: Image and Text”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/11/06/

[7] Fletcher R, 2021, “4) Project 3: Fictional Texts”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/11/05/4-project-3-fictional-texts/

[8] Fletcher R, 2021, “Assignment Five: Your Inspiration”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/12/27/assignment-five-your-inspiration/

[9] Fletcher R, 2020, “Assignment 5: Making it Up”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2020/12/24/assignment-5-making-it-up/

Post Assignment Five Feedback

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Introduction

I have now received feedback from my tutor on my submission for Assignment Five: Your Inspiration. On the whole, the feedback was positive, with the view that my idea of re-telling the ghost story in the context of the modern digital life came through in the series. A number of suggestions were made as to how to improve the series impact and visual, which are described below. This post addresses the points made and any actions taken prior to submitting for assessment.

  1. The triptych of photographs (Three, Four and Five), that tell of the first meeting between the characters, was thought to be one image too many. The impact of the sequence and Eve’s sudden appearance was thought to be represented adequately by Three and Five.
  2. Eleven was thought to confuse the continuity of the sequence in that it doesn’t contain any indication of from whose viewpoint the door is being ‘seen’. This was in contrast to Nine which shows the man saying goodnight to the Eve at her front door.
  3. The man alternates from one hand to the other when holding his phone. Although this was felt to be a very subtle disruption in the continuity, it was noticed by my tutor.
  4. The final image reveals Eve to be something supernatural with the lingering doubt around whether she was a figment of the man’s imagination. In the picture she was felt to be too solid to maintain this mystery.
  5. The comic strip aesthetic could have been more impactful with a page layout rather than the traditional newspaper look that I had chosen. It was suggested that I look at the layouts of graphic novels as an inspiration for how to present my work here.
  6. Some of the captions were thought not to add to the image on the way that I intended. The example given was the use of *sigh* in Four. The man’s expression made the word redundant in terms of supporting the picture, in contrast to the use of *beep* in Two which signals the notification from the dating app.

Response

The feedback was interesting and matched some that I had received from members of my I&P cohort. My response to the feedback and rationale for making/not making changes is shown below:

Point 1

I understand the sentiment about Four and the idea that Eve’s appearance without any leading into the frame does suggest that she has materialised. I originally had the idea of a diptych for this part of the series during shooting and actually decided to include the third image to add another question to the sequence. The story has a continuous thread of modern technology, and our dependence on it, running throughout. One of the ideas being portrayed is the way that the mobile phone keeps our attention when lots of other things are happening around us. The original inclusion of this frame was intended to show the man not noticing Eve when she appears, either because he hasn’t noticed her materialisation or that he is transfixed by his phone. During our call, my tutor and I discussed 5) Exercise 2: Georges Perec, where we had to look at a scene in front of us and note what we had observed. One of things I noted during the exercise was the number of people sitting alone with their phones, almost existing within their own bubble. The other activity in the cafe scene had some interesting aspects, the grandfather carrying a baby in a papoose for example, which the phone users completely missed. When I reflect on this, I am guilty of the same thing whenever I’m by myself in a public place. In terms of this assignment, I am not inclined to remove the image because I believe that without it, this ambiguous situation and the question it raises about his awareness of her presence is missing.

Point 2

This was very valuable feedback as it is a subtlety of visual storytelling, particularly the mise-en-scène approach to cinematography. I hadn’t considered the jump between the man realising that there was something wrong (observed by the viewer) and the visual of the derelict front door. I decided to re-shoot this image as I still had access to the model and the props (the front door being my own). The new frame can be seen below:

Point 3

This was something I hadn’t noticed during shooting and post-production, but it was another good observation in the same context as Point 2. As it was accidental, there was no way of using any of the other photographs from the contact sheets to correct it. The result was that I had to leave the error in the series. As a side note, I discussed it with the model who stated that he naturally swaps hands with his phone, depending on the light and the function that he is using. It doesn’t distract from the point that I hadn’t spotted the disruption in continuity; something to watch for in future.

Point 4

This point was more of a comment on the creative decision that I’d made to have Eve standing over the man with an ethereal glow. My tutor felt that I could have placed her as a reflection in the painting on the back wall in a translucent visual, or with a different composition where she appears as his desktop image. My initial response to this point was to consider how I could make Eve less solid in Photoshop, but I quickly realised that my decision to light her with a different colour temperature to the man made it difficult to see a way achieving this. Even if I could make her less solid, the fact that she emits light in the form of a glow on the background, means that the result would not work technically. The other issue was that the lighting setup used in the shoot meant that I didn’t shoot other images with her missing from the frame that could be combined to achieve the effect. As I no longer had access to the both models and costumes, I elected not to re-shoot the picture. The idea of having her as a desktop or screensaver was something I had originally considered when preparing for the shoot, but I didn’t want to include more than one composite image using Photoshop (I already had created the fake dating app profile and layered it onto the phone screen in Two). On reflection, I didn’t agree with my tutor on this point as in following the original ghost story idea, Eve needed to be as real and believable as possible throughout, rather than follow the stereotypical notion of being transparent.

Point 5

This was perhaps the most difficult feedback because my intent for the series was not to present it as if it were a classic graphic novel. I wanted to include the textual elements as a nod to Barthes and the idea that they could support the main narrative, while leaving the images to reveal the other layers. The genre of graphic novels wasn’t the point, but by presenting this way I have received this feedback from more than one person. In response, I looked at modern examples of comic and graphic novel layouts with a view to arranging this series in a a more tabular form. As the feedback suggested, by laying out the panels together, the viewer is presented with the story in one instant. The viewer gets a sense of the action without linearly progressing through the panels. I could see the benefit in laying out my series in the same way. Unfortunately when it came to arranging my images, I realised that the comic panels generally followed a format where one of the dimension of each box was consistent with the others. The tessellation of the panels depends on the variation on the other dimension of the panels which, in terms of my series, presented a problem. I had shot each picture with the frame filled to the extent where I could then crop to my preferred 4×5 format. This meant that selecting another crop that would suit a comic book layout would potentially remove details that I had included in order to support the narrative. I concluded that in order to have made a traditional comic, I would have needed to have shot the pictures with that in mind.

Point 6

The final point made was related to the inclusion of some of the captions. My intent was to use text as a relay to the images, describing the main ghost story but not sighposting the more subtle elements of images themselves. The point was made that some of the images didn’t need their caption to increase their impact. Following this feedback, I removed the example that was given and re-reviewed the captions for the whole series.

Changes made to the series

In addressing the feedback, I made the following changes to the series:

  1. The most significant change was to the arrangement of the comic strip. I had struggled with the arrangement of the panels to fit a page, without making major changes to cropping of some of the photographs. As each image was a mini tableaux, I didn’t want to lose important symbolic messages within the frames by cropping just to make them fit. After careful consideration, images Seven, Eight and Twelve were changed from landscape to portrait without any loss of elements, which meant that I could make a 4 page comic. As most of the comics and graphic novels that I had looked at were in portrait format, the arrangement followed this style. To make each page more visually interesting, I made three images, where there is ‘close-up’ action taking place, stand out by rotating them slightly in their position on the page. This is frequently done in comics and graphic novels and has the effect of breaking up the static format of the panels.
  2. The final image where Eve is revealed is now a single page on its own. This decision suited both the layout of book and also the drama in that picture. In my previous layout, the image was somewhat lost because it was a portrait composition which reduced its size on the page. The picture now serves as the climax of the story and is large enough for all of the details to be seen clearly.
  3. I made some further changes to captions and sizes, removing those that didn’t contribute to the narrative and adjustments to make the size consistent when the panel sizes varied. The most notable removal of caption is the selfie picture where the activity is both obvious and also brought to the reader’s attention by the use of rotation mentioned previously. Some captions were adjusted to make the new sizes fit within the frame of the images, mostly on the first page where the landscape panels are smaller than pages 2 and 3.

Conclusion

In general, I was happy that the series achieved what I intended for it. The feedback from my tutor, family and friends, as well as my fellow cohort members, was constructive. I found that my initial reaction was to focus on what I agreed with them on and be less interested in anything that I thought was a misunderstanding of what I had intended for the series. However, I realised that the opposing views were still intended to help improve the series, so gave them more thought. The changes I made to series involved significant edits to the photographs, captions and the layout, all of which result in what I believe is a stronger series. The final presentation of this assignment can be seen in the original post Assignment Five: Your Inspiration linked here:

https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2021/12/27/assignment-five-your-inspiration/