The Brief

Read “Chapter 1: Images, Power, and Politics” in Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An introduction to visual culture (3rd ed.) (2018) Oxford University Press, available on the unit Reading List.In your learning log, write a response to the chapter (300-400 words). How do you understand “truth” in your photographic practice? What relationship do your images have to truth? How does the learning from this project and Sturken and Cartwright’s chapter prompt you to think about your own practice or about work produced by others?

Response

In my work, “truth” is a concept that I have only recently begun to explore. Until the end of the unit Context and Narrative, I shot photographs to rigidly document what I saw before me, primarily as a way of remembering a moment. When I started to work more in constructed tableaux, that changed. I consciously started to reverse-engineer cultural references related to my life experience using Barthes/Saussure’s ideas of semiotics in visual language. Incorporating denotive elements that offered a variety of connotations allowed me to change formal reality to something more interpretive. This culminated in Modern Monsters in the previous unit. 

In considering the reading chapter, I would say that my work points to relationships between people and circumstance, in a largely fabricated way.  I relate to the work by O’Sullivan and Van der Born as they create something familiar and believable, but less so the power relationships of Alfridi et al and Orr, who present injustice directly to the viewer through iconic references.  This chapter made me think about the act of observing and then connecting the elements of the composition with other meanings, as in the case of Frank’s Trolley and Lange’s Migrant Mother.  I am interested to know to what extent the moment contributed to these photographs and how much was reflective after the fact.  We know that both were taken during long documentary trips that yielded many similar situations, so how did the context of the rest of the shooting (that day, that week, that month) influence the production of a particular image to represent power (or lack thereof)?  I concluded that this is probably what holds me back in photographing events unfolding before me, and drives me towards the more fabricated image. 

 In considering how the ideas of power, ideology, iconography and cultural representation will affect my own work, I believe the focus will be more about planning how to represent the subject before taking a single picture.  As well as the central ethical questions about ‘should I?’, I’m going to explore what I want to say in more detail.