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/