Make a small series or piece of work that responds to your theme, supported by the activities, reading and research you are doing into different genres.

You should experiment with producing different sets of images to explore your idea(s). You will need to add evidence of your work to your blog. 

You should show your process, investigations, and your thinking through a combination of contact sheets, reflections, exploring the presentation of different combinations of images and reflecting on these different outcomes.

You should evidence your reflections on reading and research as well evidencing your engagement with the suggested course materials which will support your study.

You might explore ways of combining your genres – to find overlaps and ways of merging the genres together into something different and new. You might also develop work that challenges a particular genre convention and produce work that plays with the audience’s expectations. 

You may decide to produce a set of images for each genre and then put a selection of the images together to explore the narrative that may be created across genres in combination.

Introduction

During the previous projects I identified a broad theme that has many potential projects that could be developed from it. My interest in communication, how it has changed and how people respond to it, resulted in my shooting a number of experimental photographs. These images were not centred on a single narrative, instead covering a number of areas. Nor were they rooted in a single genre. In parts 3 and 4, I deliberately selected source texts that covered the genres that are particular to my general theme, but have concluded that the active use of multiple genres within a body of work can be both powerful in shaping the narrative, but also more provocative in how the viewer interprets them. For example, the use of portraiture to can be used to challenge a cultural stereotype, even thought the series may be about a landscape, whether literal or geo-political. Landscape or still life images create the sense of place, but the portraiture invites the viewer to understand that place as seen through the eyes of its people. They are stitched together using the photographer’s observations either as part of the subject, or as an observer and it is this that can drive the way the genres are used to tell the story.

Approach

In my experiments, my perceptions of the changes in communication were driven by a middle-aged perspective, but one that worked in engineering and technology for many years. I have mixed feelings of embracing technology. It has to relevant to me and I need to understand. I tend to reject areas that are aimed more squarely at people younger than me. I also have elderly family members, for which communication technology is like a completely foreign language, which gives me an empathy with those who cannot work with it. The other area of my personality that was revealed by thinking about this theme, was my sense of compliance and order. I was brought up to follow the rules and to an extent that makes me compliant. It’s when I know that something doesn’t makes sense, that I rebel against what I consider to be ‘petty authority’. I acknowledge that this is why I’m drawn to artists like Martin Parr, Nan Goldin, Garry Winogrand and Robert Mapplethorpe, all of whom pushed back about strict ideas about expectation, fun, love, relationships and towing the line.

For this assignment, my approach was to take the narrower themes of ‘rebellion’ and ‘subliminal communication’ and curate two brief series from my experiments.

The starting point, an unedited collection of experimental images can be found in this Padlet:

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

My process of creating the series is contained in this Padlet

https://oca.padlet.org/richard5198861/v2c72vez23akt92c

Series 1 – My Way

Series 2 -Why Not?

Reflection

In these series, the images work across the documentary, landscape and still life genres. We can say that because the obvious visual conventions come through in the images. The documentary images say something about the people and place, through observation of behaviour or previously established norms. For example, the small boy defying the traditional autumnal weather conditions at the seaside in My Way, speaks to the British attitude to their climate – if it isn’t thunderstorm or freezing cold, why not run around in your swimming costumes? The visual elements of that image firmly establish where it was taken, how bad the weather was and the contrasting attitudes of young and old. When it comes to the landscape images, such as the mown pathway in Why Not?, we have traditional ideas of foreground, mid-ground and background. There is land and sky, as well as a path leading through them. With the still life images, the elements suggest meaning through their placement, such as the discarded flyer shot in My Way. These conventions are apparent in my work here, but they do not define the way the images work as a series. Indeed, I didn’t set out to shoot within a particular genre, but instead wanted to explore a theme that speaks to our adoption of technology within the culture that I am part or, how we take cues from what we see and, sometimes, disregard what we are being told. When looking at this single-sentence description, it’s not easy to see a single genre that covers how it should be represented. We are left with considering how impactful a genre might be in creating a narrative. For this, it’s easier to see how I curated the both series from my experiments.

For example, Image 4 in Why Not? is a landscape with a sign pointing towards two paths. There are indications of the presence of people having been in the place (the garden, the damage to one of the signs etc), but there are no people in the frame. The image is highlighting the assumption that the viewer understands that there isn’t actually some ‘naval warfare’ going on, that the sign didn’t have enough space for the word museum or memorial. As a stand alone image, it suggests something that we can’t really place in the context of the town and its people, because there are few identifiers or ways to connect with it. However, when we add it to Image 3, which adds a documentary element to what is also essentially a landscape, we have much more information to help create the narrative. Now we see the disabled buggy, the old-style public toilets, the flag etc. We get the sense of a classical British town as a concept, as well as the ‘that’ll do’ element of its people (the use of the buggy as an advertising billboard). Perhaps the buggy goes around the town as a mobile advertising board. On its own, landscape part has impact, but when combined with the conventions of documentary, it’s increased. I had inadvertently crossed two genres with these two images. The series also include still life in some of their compositions.

When considering artists and works that fit within a single genre, I see a more tightly focused idea being explored than mere observation of a response to communication. For example, Trish Morrissey’s recreation of her family archive in her series Seven Years [1] transports the artist to a time in her family history. She plays the part of her parents and others in the fashions of the period, alongside her elder sister. The series not only crosses history, but also revisits the situational tensions of the original images through their adoption of body language and the micro-expressions contained within any family portrait. Morrissey doesn’t venture outside traditional portraiture because the source material for her exploration doesn’t. The genre unifies the concept behind the family portrait – it’s a picture of a person or people, everything else is the underlying narrative about the situation. We learn about the characters through her acting, in a similar way to Rosy Martin’s performance as her mother in Getting Changed [2]. While both artists’ work sit largely within the portraiture genre, they directly challenge some the traditional concepts that the genre is associated with, namely the faithful representation of a real person. As with other artists such as Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman who used themselves as performance ‘canvasses’, both Morrissey and Martin use their pictures to comment on generational differences, personal experiences in their growing up and the memories invoked by life events. All of these are a far cry from the use of portraiture to identify (passport) or classify (August Sander).

The works of Martin Parr, Anna Fox and Chris Coekin heavily influenced the curation of my own series above. These artists use different genres to highlight or ‘zoom into and out from’ a cultural idea or setting in a way that punctuates the wider series. Parr’s From The Pope to a Flat White (1979 to 2019) [3] mixes staged portraiture with street photography (a sub-genre of documentary) and the occasional still life under the banner of documentary to show how much the country has changed over many years. Similarly, Fox’s Work Stations (1986 to 88) [4] mixes the conventions of portraiture, street photography and urban landscape to create a mock news article about corporate finance. The series invokes the memories of 1980s Britain and the post-memory associated with the cultural and political landscape of the time and, more importantly, how it ultimately led to failure. Coekin’s series Knock Three Times takes a similar approach to working class culture in the face of political turbulence (studied in Exercise 1 [5]. All three spent time within the environment as observers and represented their experiences both past and present, using whichever visual style suited at the time. In my experiments, I was looking for example of my theme in action but it was in the curation that I selected which images had the biggest impact. Like these artists, I used crossing genres to make a point if the visual impact of the series was enhanced in some way.

Conclusion

This assignment is the culmination of the research from Parts 3 and 4 of the course, which started with identifying a broad theme, developing some more focused ideas from it and mapping them onto the concepts of genre and the artists who have worked with similar ideas. When it came to Part 4, the research was focused on how landscape has evolved from the traditional picturesque to the ideas of power, ownership and the symbiotic relationship between man and the natural world. Artists working in this area were creating landscape as we know it, but using the visual codes of the other genres to make their point about the subject. At this point, I struggled to recognise landscape as a pure genre. If Sibusiso Behka’s night-time images of his district of Joburg were landscapes, how come they contained people living their lives as principle subjects in the compositions? When it came to the other source text that I examined, Backwards and Forwards in Time, the works were blended by including images that were recognisable as having the visual codes of all the genres. The meaning of the works themselves came across, but not in a way that favoured any one of them. After reviewing and curating my own experiments into two mini series, I realised that genre wasn’t what I was particularly cognisant of when shooting; like some kind of automatic pilot. What was important was to create the context and narratives for the theme with whatever got the point across with most impact. I observed the artists that I had been researching as having drawn attention to a detail of their story or setting a scene/establishing a location for the work, by crossing into still life and landscape, but all the time maintaining the conventions of documentary for the whole series. I conclude from this that genres, while a way of classifying an image or series, actually don’t define them in terms of meaning or relevance to wider context. We don’t look at the works of Ansel Adams as excellent examples of a genre, more that they capture and represent the beauty of the natural world. We could equally represent that same beauty through an image of a flower or some wildlife, but the common thread through both works would be our intention, rather than the genre that we used. I recently read Stephen King’s latest novel Fairy Tale (2022) [6] whose plot explores the tropes of traditional ‘fairy tale’ folklore. We recognise the genre as being fantastical stories told to children in schools and before bed, but we associate King with the genre of horror fiction. Of course, we know that the origins of many fairy tales are in classical stories by the likes of the Grimm brothers and H. P. Lovecraft, whose writings were more akin to horror than children’s fiction. What King recognised in his latest work was the connection between the two and, more importantly, the common themes that can be represented by both, such as the repercussions of trusting the wrong person or making a bad decision, the dangers of avarice and ill-treatment of others etc. With photography, we can represent ideas like ‘delusion of grandeur’ by creating a mise-en-scéne composition, shoot a self-portrait as someone else (Sherman’s Centrefold) or capture a still life that invokes some form of post-memory (Martin’s Too Close to Home). For me, how we use genres beyond being comfortable with the the ability to identify visual codes, is pretty irrelevant to creating art.

My conclusion isn’t firm, however. I still have questions about how we decide what makes us comfortable. In Colin Pantall’s presentation The Way We See, How We Look and What We Show [7], he refers to the image below as a landscape.

While there is a landscape element to it and, while we know from the rest of the series that this is a place which is contested in terms of cultural ownership and racial dominance, I didn’t seen that when looking at this image in isolation. I saw it more as documentary (despite it being a staged photograph), so what is it what leads some to see one genre when others see another? I will be using this as the question to answer in Part 5.

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

Completed research into landscape and documentary within Exercise 1.

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

Reviewed and updated experimental images from Part 3.

LO3: Produce new visual work informed by your research. 

Created two stand-alone series derived from my broad theme of Communication; one about how people rebel against communication that is forced upon them and the other about subliminal messaging that we acknowledge but don’t think about or recognise as having an impact on us.

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

Examined how genres are crossed by contemporary artists who use the visual codes from each to create blended narratives. Discuss my thoughts on whether genre is useful for anything other than labelling what we recognise.

References

[1] Morrissey, T. (s.d.) Trish Morrissey – Seven Years. At: https://www.lensculture.com/trish-morrissey?modal=project-230591 (Accessed 21/09/2022).

[2] ‘Getting Changed’ – 2.5 mins extract from 17 mins video work (s.d.) At: https://vimeo.com/101215690 (Accessed 21/09/2022).

[3] Recent Work 2 | Martin Parr (s.d.) At: https://www.martinparr.com/recent-work-2/ (Accessed 21/09/2022).

[4] Work Stations – Anna Fox (s.d.) At: https://annafox.co.uk/photography/work-stations-2/ (Accessed 21/09/2022).

[5] richardfletcherphotographyblog (2022) Project 4: Exercise 1- Looking at artistic practice & research (Part 2). At: https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2022/08/30/project-4-exercise-1-looking-at-artistic-practice-research-part-2/(Accessed 21/09/2022).

[6] Fairy Tale (s.d.) At: https://www.goodreads.com/work/best_book/94912019-fairy-tale (Accessed 21/09/2022).

[7] Colin Pantall Presentation (s.d.) At: https://oca.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=7818fd51-11c1-4dec-b524-adc100b4b808 (Accessed 21/09/2022).

[8] Mohamed Bourouissa (s.d.) At: https://www.mohamedbourouissa.com/peripherique/ (Accessed 21/09/2022).