The Brief

Create a visual working map or diagram of the theme you are exploring. This is to help you visualise the shifting boundaries, the connections, the overlaps and historical territories. You will map how contemporary practitioners are expanding or shifting the boundaries and consider sub categories within genre classifications.

Introduction

Continuing with my broad theme of communication, the work carried out for this assignment is contained in the following Padlet:-

https://oca.padlet.org/richard5198861/9hxxw1tldkapcvo8

The work is supported first by Exercise 1- Select a Broad Theme [1], where I attempted to break down communication into sub-categories and identify the genres and practitioners whose work connects with my understanding. It’s further supported by Exercise 2 – Review your Broad Themes [2], where I selected Documentary and Portraiture as the two genres I believed the idea to spanned in terms of territory. Finally, I created a Padlet for my ‘experiments’, which are photographs I shot throughout Part 3 that helped me explore Communication as a theme which I plan to take into my Self-Directed Project later in the course. This Padlet can be found here:-

https://oca.padlet.org/richard5198861/ravahb4mjp0ac8xl

Reflection

This assignment was a challenge for a number of reasons. The first was that my broad theme was precisely that. Communication and the ways in which it affects us, is a vast subject that is inextricably linked with our identities (real or created), our age group and familiarity with technology, as well as our willingness to engage with the world around us. I had feedback on my very first assignment in Expressing Your Vision that warned of the dangers of a theme for a series being too broad, which is something I’ve taken forward throughout my studies. The work in this assignment has helped my understanding of how my theme is/could be represented by one or more genres and how it relates to the work of practitioners who have worked across them. In addition, it has helped me identify the areas of the theme that interest me with regard to the later Self-Directed Project.

The biggest learning point here was that the boundaries between formal photographic genres are not rigid. With the exception of Documentary, the key genres have evolved from classical art which neatly categorised the visual and technical approaches so that we recognise them. This would be ok if the meaning of the image was solely driven by the genre of the work. For example, Alec Soth’s Sleeping By The Mississippi, all of the traditional genres are utilised to describe the region, its ecology and its people. Portraiture sits alongside Landscape and Still Life that lend context to identity. Some images use the codes of mise-en-scène, the constructed image, while others appear more natural. What Soth is trying to say with the series is something about the culture of the region and how it’s largely incongruous with the public image of the Unites States. The hardships and economic decline of the region forces the people to adapt, which in turn influences their identity. For me, Soth’s main aim is to narrate his observations as observer, with the genres as mere tools to achieve this.

“I believe that photography is essentially non-narrative. That, while it aches to tell stories, it doesn’t really tell stories that have a beginning, middle and end. This has constantly frustrated me about the medium, and I’ve been constantly battling it. What I’ve come up with, is that when I’m looking at a photographer’s work, I’m looking as much at that person’s experience as a photographer in the world, almost as if they are a first-person narrator, as I’m looking at the subjects of the photographs.”

(Alec Soth, Sleeping By The Mississippi, s.d.)

Thinking about how to recognise genre codes and manipulate them, led me experiment with shooting images related to my theme. I then analysed them to see how effectively they supported a narrative and also how they use multiple codes. I also incorporated an image from my family archive in one of the comparative analyses to identify how it crossed genre boundaries. I concluded that I had become more aware of the photographic codes available to me and how to blend them to represent the ideas I have about a topic.

The map that I created is the start of a further analysis of my theme, but still only scratches the surface. I used the Documentary and Portraiture source material as the basis of the work in this part and the resulting overlay of the theme does show the crossing of the boundaries of these genres. That isn’t to say that Still Life and Landscape don’t have a part in the map, more that they don’t appear to be as relevant at this stage. This may well change as the unit progresses.

With regard to taking my theme further, I have identified the following ideas that interest me:

1. What happens when we reject the real world information in favour of the cyber world? Is our obsession with technology creating a virtual reality where our aspirations are social media followers and our voices are from behind a keyboard? I could explore this either from a position of ‘Devil’s Advocate’ or from my own perspective of having computer technology until my teens.
2. How are people consciously rejecting the connected world? The narrative could be driven by fear, lack of understanding or simply protest.
3. Protesting the idea of the ‘Nanny State’. There has been a lot of recent discussion in politics about the ‘regulation’ of the country, which plays into my initial thoughts about the number of directional or mandating signage we encounter day-to-day. As with 1, it could be straight reportage (drawing people’s attention to it) or from my own perspective and experience.

At this stage, I am keen to pursue one of these smaller ideas as my Self-Directed Project.

Against the Learning Objectives

LO1: Compare the theoretical features, characteristics and histories of different photographic genres. 

The exercises in Part 3 explore documentary, portraiture and how my theme spans them. I have included historical terms and definitions from that work into my glossary.

LO2: Deconstruct a given genres’ conventions and create visual material informed by that knowledge.

Retrospectively analysed an image from my family archive using Barrett’s CRIT process. Determined that there are mixed codes from the documentary and portraiture genres.

LO3: Produce new visual work informed by your research. 

Created experimental work along the ideas of my broad theme and analysed them to verify that they contain the visual codes of the genres and compare their potential narratives with contrasting images shot the same way.

LO4: Analyse the wider global contexts surrounding contemporary image making.

Looked at Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi as an example of a cross-genre contemporary series.

References

[1] richardfletcherphotographyblog (2022) Project 3: Exercise 1 – Select a Broad Theme. At: https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2022/06/03/project-3-exercise-1-select-a-broad-theme/ (Accessed 14/07/2022).

[2] Project 3: Exercise 2: Reviewing your broad themes | Richard Fletcher OCA Photography Blog (s.d.) At: https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2022/06/26/project-3-exercise-2-reviewing-your-broad-themes/

[3] Sleeping By The Mississippi (s.d.) At: https://independent-photo.com/news/alec-soth-sleeping-by-the-mississippi/(Accessed 15/07/2022).