The Brief

Write an essay of 1,000 words on an image of your choice

The image can be anything you like, from a famous art photograph to a family snapshot, but please make sure that your chosen image has scope for you to make a rigorous and critical analysis.

Introduction

For this assignment, I chose a photograph from the series East of Eden, by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The theme of the series is described by diCorcia as America’s ‘loss of innocence’ experienced towards the end of George W Bush’s presidency in 2008[1]. The title refers to the ongoing struggle between good and evil that is referred to in the Book of Genesis[1], Cain becoming the symbol of ‘evil’ through murdering his ‘good’ brother Abel in a jealous rage. diCorcia invokes this struggle by relating it to the immoral banking practices that led to the financial crash towards the end of the Bush era. The photograph that I selected is called The Hamptons (2008), shown below. In this essay I read the photograph using the techniques learned in part four and describe my interpretation of it.

I chose this photograph because of the obvious, slightly shocking humour of the subject; two dogs watching a pornographic film. The photograph follows diCorcia’s consistent style of work that developed while a fashion photographer with W magazine in the 1990s. The composition is devoid of any distracting clutter and arranged with a ‘cinematic’ feel; diCorcia describes his subjects being square on to the camera and shot from a neutral position, i.e not from the photographer’s perspective. The result allows the viewer to ‘step into’ the frame in a similar way to modern cinema.

My Reading of The Hamptons (2008)

I started by deconstructing the elements within and looking for possible meanings using semiotics[3]. In the version below, the formal elements of the photograph are labelled in red. The potential meanings of those elements are labelled in blue.

The red items are signifiers which are identifiable to most viewers. The room’s plain, light coloured decorative elements: the coffee table, fireplace and audio-visual equipment, are all formal elements that create the impression a living space. Although lacking sofas or chairs, the signifiers are strong enough to signify a living room. We also have a restricted view into the next room, which gives the impression that of a large space; an apartment or house. The furniture and the audio-visual equipment could signify the room part of an expensive home; the size of the television and appearance of the other items signify something that has been carefully designed and executed. The first sign then is that this is a room belonging to someone with money. This is further supported by the photograph’s title, The Hamptons, referring to a region of upstate New York that has among the highest property values in the US, some homes costing over $100m. The other formal elements are the dogs and the pornographic film. There are two light coloured dogs of the same breed facing away from the camera in the direction of the television. One is lying down and the other is sitting upright. The latter’s hind quarters are reflected in the mirrored side of the coffee table. The film itself is mildly explicit, shows a man taking control of the sex through the position being used. The TV and the surrounding elements provide the only colour contrast to the muted tones of the scene. In terms of what the dogs and the film signify, the first impression is of entertainment being viewed by a viewer. The way that the photograph asks a viewer to look at someone (in this case something) viewing something else aligns neatly with diCorcia’s cinematic perspective described previously. The sign here is one of voyeurism, with we the viewers being the voyeurs on the scene.

In terms of what the elements mean, the way the room appears to connote a highly ordered purity, with a lack of clutter or signs of life within. The dogs share the same ‘pure’ appearance, but their reactions to what they are looking at are different. These poses could connote how what looks the same isn’t necessarily the case. For me, the dogs represent people in this image – perhaps the owners of the house who are absent from it. People may be similar but we are all different. The presence of the porn film connotes the ‘impure’ that is invading the space and perhaps points to corruption of innocence. The impressions of wealthy, class-led society being somehow better are rich in western culture, referenced many times through the years in the writings of authors like Dickens. Victorian society liked to think that people with wealth are of a higher moral standing as illustrated in his novel Oliver Twist and the idea that they might not be, makes us uncomfortable. In the case of Dickens, he had to make street urchin Oliver’s character almost angelic so that his readers could more readily accept his transcending from working to upper class[3]. When considering these connotations the studium of wealth and implication of class or being better than everyone else is, for me, being revealed or debunked by the punctum of the pornography. Our relationship with pornography is one of secrecy and sub-culture, a thing should be hidden or not spoken of with exceptions of highlighting how it corrupts society[3]. The idea of the pure dogs, in their pure environment being corrupted and the implication of damnation suggested by the fire, helps create the narrative around good vs. evil; the theme of the series the photograph comes from.

Conclusion

Introducing this photograph, I described my initial reaction as one of seeing a slightly edgy humour at it’s clear contrasts. However, after analysing the elements, their potential meanings and the context within the series, I can now appreciate the many layers of narrative that this image allows for. With my reading, the more sinister ideas about clean becoming dirty, pure becoming corrupted and how the evil is not limited to class or standing, becomes evident in the representation of the dogs in their living room. Far from being a little edgy or shocking, the image takes on a sad feeling that through our own indolence or blind trust in ‘our betters’, we somehow let evil in, a good metaphor within the original intent of diCorcia’s series.

References

[1] Zwirner D, 2015, ‘East of Eden Press Release’, David Zwirner website, https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/east-eden/press-release

[2] Zwirner D, 2015, ‘East of Eden Exhibition Catalogue, David Zwirner website, https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/east-eden

[3] Fletcher R, 2020, “Preparation and Research for Assignment 4”, OCA Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2020/11/13/preparation-and-research-for-assignment-4/

The Brief

Choose between the following two assignments:

Photographing the Unseen

Start by doing some reflecting in your learning log.  What kinds of subjects might be seen as unphotographable? How might you go about portraying them using photography? List a few examples of things you’re experiencing now or have been recently thinking about. This doesn’t have to be too in-depth or revealing, but can be if you want.  Equally, it might be something as apparently trivial as you are going to fit everything into your busy day.  At first you may come up with literal examples, but the more you think about them the more those ideas will develop into specific and more original ones.  Make a list of at least seven ideas.  Trust to keep to things you have a personal interest in or curiosity about.

Implement one of your ideas.  Aim for a tightly edited and visually consistent series of 7-10 photographs.

Using Props

This option is about photographing an object to suggest a narrative.

Choose between a white shirt and a hankerchief for your subject. Once you’ve decided, make a series of 7-10 photographs which tell a story about or including you object.

You can make your photographic style anything you like.  You may wish to include the prop in all of your series or just some of the images, depending on the narrative.  Bear in mind that the story is being alluded to through the use of the prop and its location – and characters should you choose to include them.

Draw a storyboard before you start to help you consider the progression of the plot and how you’ll use the shots.

Now implement one of your ideas.  Aim for a tightly edited and visually consistent series of 7-10 images.

Initial Thoughts

In this assignment, we were presented with two different takes on narrative; one that explores what isn’t obviously visual and one using a visual prop around which a narrative is created.  When I first looked at the two topics, I was immediately drawn to thinking about something that isn’t a subject that is traditionally photographed or represented through visual media.  The reason was largely found in the feedback that I received for Assignment 1.  That work was aimed at describing something with more than one interpretation, where the viewer drew conclusions from the contextual elements in the individual images as to the meaning.  I really enjoyed the challenge of this duality and when working through Part 2, considered photographing the unseen as an interesting challenge.

In my consideration of the Props topic, I started to think about storytelling in the more traditional sense.  Written stories are created in a fairly linear fashion, resulting in a defined ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’.  As Barthes mentioned [1], the author of a story takes familiar or established cultural texts and stitches them together in a way that leads the reader through the narrative.  The nuances of the story, internal visuals and intents are created by the reader with the author as the guide; the point being that the reader never really understands the real intention of the author.  We know that this linearity is not always present in photographic stories, but the for me the idea of ‘storyboarding’ links back to that more traditional storytelling approach.  While the individual images can be created out of sequence, a storyboard brings back that sense of linear timeline when the collection is assembled, e.g. when a movie is shot, the takes are done out of sequence because of environmental factors, availability of the set etc. and it only truly becomes a story when assembled in edit.    As my natural tendency is to the literal (something I’m trying to break away from here), I felt the Props topic would be dangerously close to what I am comfortable with.   For this reason, I decided to choose ‘Photographing the Unseen’ as my assignment topic.

Ideas

I first started to think about the unseen in general terms.  What does it actually mean?  As sight is just one of the senses, the unseen could anything related to the other four.  I started to recall the recent lockdown challenge that I took part in with some photographer friends where we started with the obvious subjects.  These included The Decisive Moment, leading lines, macro etc., but we then moved to more obscure subjects, one of which was ‘the senses’.

The five senses

Taking a photograph that evokes the sense of a smell turned out to be a challenge with some creating images with broad ideas of the theme while others went for something more specific.  In the case of the former, flowers can be said to have a scent, but the viewer may not necessarily know the specifics of it, whereas in the case of the latter, a cup of steaming coffee is a smell familiar to almost everybody.  I then considered the other senses and how they might ‘be photographed’.  For all of them, there were subjects that could convey what we understand to be the senses, however my initial thinking about what I would shoot felt to be too literal.  An idea for working with the senses would be to contrast the obvious scent with an anchoring reference that completely contradicts it.  For example, there have been intelligence tests for pattern recognition that use the names of colours but using a different coloured font.  For example, RED might be written in a blue font.  When presented with this, the viewer has to quickly say what the colour is.  Many people react to the word before the colour, so will get the answer wrong.   The same thing could be done here with the other senses.  While this was an interesting idea for a project, the brief (and feedback so far) pointed towards something I had a personal connection or interest with.  I didn’t feel at this point that I wanted to use this for the assignment.

Depression and its many effects

Over many years I have suffered with my mental health for a variety of reasons, most of which relate to the loss of my mother when I was in my early twenties.  The struggle to keep this condition at bay continues to this day, so would work as a project or series of separate ideas.  Within depression there is an innate sense of loneliness (even when not alone), coupled with a constant anxiety  around the speed of recovery and, in fact whether recovery will ever happen.  There is also the damage done to the people around the sufferer and in some cases (not mine) addiction to alcohol or medication that makes the whole situation worse.   There is a very unhelpful expression that people use with depression sufferers that talks of the illness as being less obvious to others than a broken leg, which is something I’ve had said to me over the past 20 years.  This got me thinking that the condition and the secondary effects are indeed unseen, so this could make a good subject for the assignment.   What prevented me from pursing this further was twofold.  Firstly, my last assignment in Expressing Your Vision was about my struggles with depression, so it felt too soon to be looking at this subject again even though the two objectives for the work were different.  Secondly, while it’s very personal to me I have learned not to dwell on my experiences too much.  Rather than be a catharsis, the subject doesn’t really interest me that much and I’ve never really seen my photography as an expression of that pain; quite the opposite, it serves as an escape from it.

Ageing

Something that became more obvious to me during lockdown is the way that people’s quality of life varies with their age.  We have been surrounded by commentary about the effect of self-imposed isolation on the elderly in terms of their struggles to get food, loneliness and often concerns about how the virus may be more lethal to them than the younger generation.  This suffering, similar to my thoughts above is largely unseen.  Ageing itself has obvious physical effects that we can all see, but the decline in confidence and acceptance that physical ability are not what they once were, are largely unseen.  My idea here was to contrast images of youth with the thoughts of the elderly.  This idea was my favourite so far and would have been the subject for Assignment 2 if I had not connected it with an event that occurred during my time reflecting ahead of starting the work.

Evolution of the Idea

My previous ideas broke down into the following themes:

1. Sensory – the senses that are not specifically sight
2. Suffering –  Depression and the long road out of it
3. Anxiety – that things won’t get better, linked to depression, but also the heightened focus on trivial issues during the current pandemic
4. Loss – related to control when suffering from mental illness, but also the loss of faculties with ageing
5. Loneliness – the isolation of suffering in general
6. Ageing – the change in outlook and many challenges that come with ageing
7. Acceptance – also related to ageing, the slow process that many go through of accepting that they are old.

Yes, the brief talks about 7 ideas but it became apparent that these were all related to each other in some way and, unfortunately most having largely negative connotations.  While these things were of interest, I wanted to explore something that wasn’t just another documentary of something bad happening.  I thought back to Campbell’s Dad Project, which was a sad but heartwarming story of the evolving relationship between father and daughter.  It’s underlying theme of coming to terms with his terminal illness was offset by the sense of warmth and love within the family,  The supporting context which included her father’s views added his personality to the images.  This was something I wanted to bring into this series; something unseen but a contrast of an experience with a situation.  One of these could be positive or humorous and the other something sad or contemplative.

It was at this point that the 25th anniversary of the death of my mother occurred.  It’s naturally always been a sad and contemplative day, but always with a ‘happy’  remembrance of a very special member of our family.  This year had a particular poignancy for me as I am now the same age as she was when she died.  One of the experiences I always have on this day is a replaying of her final moments in my mind – I had never seen death happen in front of me before.  One thing that struck me about the immediate aftermath was a random, bizarre thought that I had as I left the hospital.  My world had just seemingly collapsed and as I waited to pull out into the traffic, I asked out loud “Where are all these people going right now?”  Of course, bereavement is personal and naturally the commuters going home from work weren’t aware of or part of the recent events.  It was the randomness of the thought that gave me the idea for this assignment.  I began asking around and realised that these thoughts occur with pretty much any serious trauma, from bereavement and loss to illness and injury.  The situations themselves were serious, but the thoughts were often fairly banal.  My idea formed around contrasting the randomness of the thought with something that metaphorically represents the sadness or negativity of the event.

Planning

The first task in planning was to seek random thoughts.  I polled my friends and connections on social media to see if they would be prepared to share some thoughts with me.  This would be a challenge in terms of asking people to re-visit traumatic events in their lives, but I assured them that the thoughts would be used, but not the detailed context (in fact, I stated that they didn’t need to share the context with me at all).  The use of the thoughts would take the form of a single sentence and would be completely anonymous.   Using a single sentence would be an open enough contextual element to create a narrative without the photograph, e.g. my thought “where are all these people going right now?” could relate to anything from being stuck in traffic to being at the scene of a major terror incident.  The reader can build their own narrative from a sentence that is not too prescriptive.

I then considered what would sum up the types of trauma that would be experienced. People suffer serious problems every day that can be considered traumatic. What I wanted to do here was to focus on the type of problems that people are most familiar.  As I was going to ask people for their random thoughts, I similarly didn’t want to predict or limit the range of traumas.  However, I started to work on the assumptions that they would fall into categories of loss, bereavement, serious illness, the breakdown of a relationship or some shock that provokes a negative emotion such as fear or disgust.

The next area I focused on was the theme for the photographs.  I started with the idea that people with obviously contrasting expressions or facial features could be the focus of the images.  I quickly dismissed this when re-visiting the works of the photographers in Parts 1 and 2.  For example, Public Order[2] features the real but fake scenes from a police training facility which, while telling the seemingly believable story of the environment during the photographer’s early life, is contrasted with the emerging knowledge that the scenes themselves are an interpretation of that environment.  The contrast is subtle rather than literal; by using people as the centre of my series, I was in danger of falling into old habits.   I started instead to think about how trauma makes us feel.  For me personally, the overwhelming sense of isolation and the temporary broken patterns of normal life are the key feelings.  Although I’m no psychologist, I believe the randomness of our thoughts when we suffer something serious is our brains connecting to what we recognise as normal life.  In my case, wondering where everyone was going when my world had collapsed was simply a question prompted by the sight of life going on as normal.   I considered what represents isolation to me and concluded that large, open, derelict or abandoned spaces sum up those sensations of being alone and also fairly unimportant to the rest of the world. By presenting an object or even a single person in the space, I could use the commonality of empty spaces with a connection to the words that wasn’t too obvious to the viewer.

The Words

After asking my social media friends and some of my family for their help, I received the following random thoughts.  I was really happy with the variety of the thoughts and the circumstances during which they occurred.  I combined them with my own thought which was the basis of this idea.

1. “Where are all these people going?”
2. “I hope the paramedics don’t traipse dog mess through the house”
3. “I’ll have to make my own dinner tonight”
4. “How am I going to teach them what I know?”
5. “I won’t know anyone there”
6. “Tell them I may be late to teach the class tonight”
7. “Did I eat too many of the wrong foods”
8. “Must remember the right way out”
9. “Are we the only entry in the phone book now?”
10. “I’m glad my parents aren’t alive to see this”
11. “I hope my cat hasn’t got into any fights”
12. “I could murder one of those chocolate biscuits”

The challenge was to now represent these unseen thoughts in photographs of spaces and objects that metaphorically represent them with the trauma.  The variety of the thoughts I received led me to call the series ‘Random Access Memories”, a reference to the ordered but unstructured way that information is retrieved in computer hardware.

But wait…

I started to consider how I would photograph subjects that documented the thoughts of the people I had spoken to.  It was at this point that I realised that I had lost sight of what the unseen element in this story is.  Indeed the thoughts were random and unseen, probably not ever discussed with anyone before I had asked for them.  However, they were a response to something terrible happening in the lives of the people concerned.  It is actually the trauma and the response that make up the unseen that I needed to document.  This was a serious turning point for me during this assignment for reasons that I will discuss later.  For now, I had to find subjects that suggested the trauma being experienced and marry the words to the photographs to help support the narrative.  This required returning to the beginning and thinking carefully about metaphors for trauma. I created the mind-maps below to help steer the project, which I found to be useful in what was becoming an increasingly difficult challenge.  Based on the types of traumas that my friends suffered, I created maps for Bereavement, Illness/Injury and Separation/Divorce to cover them all.  The maps show my thought processes and ideas for subjects to shoot as metaphors for aspects of the trauma rather than just describing the event itself.  These were ideas that I took forward into shooting.

As I mentioned previously, I don’t find metaphor easy to deal with partly because I’ve never considered myself particularly creative.  The act of ‘engineering’ the ideas into potential subjects was falling back on what I’ve known throughout my career.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the challenge of seeing those subjects and photographing them.

Shooting

I had settled on the idea of trauma being isolating and lonely on a personal level; even a shared event impacting people differently and in a way that makes them feel like they are the only people involved.  I looked for subjects that contained visual elements that suggested but didn’t point to the trauma being experienced, taking the cue to leave as much room in the image for the viewer to make up their own mind.   To this end, I also elected to leave out the idea of a single person in the frame, which felt a little too obvious to me.  Unlike Sank’s lockdown story [3], which was about the people she met on her walks and their outlook on life during COVID-19, my story was about the speaker of the words. I felt that adding people into the photographs would distract from the anonymity of the speakers that had shared their thoughts with me.

What I found really difficult with my project was to look for the metaphorical, despite having the mind-maps to help me.  I took my camera everywhere I walked and changed routes to take in industrial areas and secret footpaths through them.  However, I found myself shooting anything and everything that may support my story.  This was a departure from what I’d believed to be the way these photo stories were created.  I’ve strived to be more clinical in my approach to shooting, tending towards fewer images of my subject than taking lots of pictures.  For this assignment, the editing process was much more pronounced than it had been previously.  From a total collection of 288 photographs, I created the collection of 10 photographs that I then matched to a selection of texts.

Random Access Memories

“Did I eat too many of the wrong foods?”

“I could murder one of those chocolate biscuits”

“I’ll have to make my own dinner tonight”

“Tell them I may be late to teach the class tonight”

“I hope the paramedics don’t traipse dog mess through the house”

“I’m glad my parents aren’t alive to see this”

“Where are all these people going?”

“Must remember the right way out”

“Are we the only entry in the phone book now?”

“How am I going to teach them what I know?”

Reflection: Photographing the Unseen

In keeping with the anonymity and not wanting to steer the narrative, I elected to not describe in detail my intentions for each image in this section.  Instead, I’ve included the themes and how intended the images to work together in the series.

As described previously, my theme was trauma which takes many forms.  The series starts with ill health and injury, which can be debilitating, frustrating and of course life-threatening.  The reactions of the people here were focused primarily on the disturbance to their routines or daily lives, but also including self-doubt.  The questions around whether the situation could have been avoided were powerful.  Similarly the denial in the fourth photograph was something most people could relate to as we never really want to have a change of circumstances forced upon us.

The series then moves to loss, both in terms of a relationships and death.  Here we have people having to cope with trauma that is happening to them almost indirectly.  I was fascinated by the randomness of thoughts had by the people who had just lost something or someone dear to them.

For me, the strongest image is the last one.  My friend had that thought upon learning of the suicide of a family member and went into automatic pilot; one responsibility was to hand over her work to her colleagues.  Such a simple statement contrasting with the horror of the event needed a simple composition with the evidence of the bleakness of the trauma clearly represented.   For me, the dull grey walls and barred windows give the sense of a world less colourful; the simple instruction to use the dilapidated tin and the discarded cigarettes suggested a lack of understanding of how awful suicide is to those affected by it.

For me, the weakest image is number 7, which is actually the trauma that I experienced.  I found it extremely difficult to express the pain of losing my mother through a photograph, irrespective of where it sat in a series.   Throughout this assignment, I struggled significantly with metaphor and inspiration.  I’m not surprised that my own experience would be the biggest challenge and I believe this to by why I don’t like this image as much as the others.   What I ended up with was a representation of my world collapsing while people went about their business.  However, the composition and lighting aren’t what I wanted for the series; harsh direct sunlight that I toned down with a filter, but still leaving the highlights a little jarring.

Overall, I believe that this series meets the brief.  The unseen elements are represented metaphorically and the words add context to the images in changing the way the viewer interprets them.

Against the Assessment Criteria

Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills

My intention was to shoot the images in a way that connected them together, but without relying on a simple visual to link them.  The compositions largely follow conventional techniques but I’ve used focal length, depth of focus and leading lines to draw attention to the key elements in each photograph.  An example would be number 5, where the short focal length and wide aperture allow for metering on the point of focus (the TV screen) as well as keeping everything relatively sharp around it.  What this achieves is the viewer seeing the TV before exploring the rest of the composition to see the other key elements (the pipe, the disturbed earth in front of the building and its general state of decay. I’ve also tried to use colour to draw out key features, such as the hazard tape and dead leaves in number 9.  Overall, the photographs work as a series without any significant clashes in colour, light or composition.

Quality of Outcome

As described above, I believe the images to be technically good quality.  In terms of the use of elements within the images, I believe there to be enough to raise questions in the viewer’s mind as to what the series is about.  At the heart of the story, is the contrast between the effect of trauma and our less obvious reaction to it.  I feel that I’ve taken on board my tutor’s comments about the strength of words when added to the pictures.  The texts here add information that supports the narrative (relay) rather than being a direct route to a meaning (anchor).

Demonstration of Creativity

This assignment has pushed me to be much more creative than any of my previous work on the course.  I believe that I have successfully fought my natural instinct to be literal and achieved a series that has enough scope for variety in its interpretation.  Using almost empty space and derelict buildings to represent the trauma and contrasting with the random memories was inspired by Fox’s work, with nods to Botha’s Ring Road.  What I set out to achieve was to work on  a subject that really interests me and that I have my own relationship with and perspective on.  It has been a significant challenge but I am  happy with the resulting demonstration of my creativity.

Context

In the context of the learning, I’ve demonstrated that I understand how stories can be non-linear and that photography can be used to visually represent an idea, feeling or unseen element without having a subject that links directly to it.  This has been a tough part of this unit, but I believe that I have demonstrated my understanding and, hopefully my new interest in this genre of photography.

References

[1] Nicholas, T, 2019, “The Death of the Author: WTF? Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author Explained, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9iMgtfp484

[2] Pickering S, “Public Order”, artist website, https://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/works/public-order/

[3] Sank M, 2020, “Portraits from a Distance”, Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/Xsd98hAAACIAhct_

[4] Botha  D, 2013, “Ring Road”, Artist Website, https://www.dewaldbotha.net/ring-road.html

Contact Sheets

The Brief

Create at least two sets of photographs telling different versions of the same story.  The aim of the assignment is to help you explore the convincing nature of documentary, even thought what the viewer thinks they see may not in fact be true.  Try to make both sets equally convincing so that it is impossible to tell which version of the images is ‘true’

Choose a theme and aim form 5 to 7 images for each set, depending on your idea.

Send your images to your tutor by the method you’ve agreed.  Include an introduction of 300 words outlining what you set out to do and how you went about it.  Also, send the relevant pages of your learning log or your blog url.

Introduction

I started thinking about this assignment shortly after reading through the course notes for the first time.  I had been working on a long-term project which would document the decline, battle for survival and beginnings of rebirth of the high street in my home town of Malvern.  Over the 20 years I have lived here, there have been huge changes to the retail and recreational landscape of this old town, whose roots were established during the Victorian era.  The changes from that time were significant as Malvern was then considered a destination for health and wellbeing.  The Victorians believed that the spring water from its hills was a cure for common ailments, so along with the desire to walk in the countryside that inspired Elgar, people flocked to the town to ‘get well’.   The more recent changes though, have been as a result of the shift from traditional high street footfall to the online shopping model and an age where everything can be purchased in one giant supermarket.  The town had become a place where only national chain cafes, restaurants and charity shops are the only places that could survive; the latter benefitting from vastly reduced rents.  However, there are some signs of revival, with independent specialist shops opening up to serve niche markets.  This evolution is slow and gradual, which meant that my project was probably not going to work for this assignment because of how long it would take to complete.

When I came to actually plan for the assignment, the world had been plunged into a crisis, the like of which hadn’t been seen since the Second World War.  Coronavirus originated in China towards the end of 2019 and by the beginning of March 2020 had taken hold in almost every country on Earth.  Life had changed immeasurably during that period, with most countries introducing strict lockdown measures that restricted the movements of their citizens.  Every way of life has been affected and businesses have had to react quickly to survive.  In my own company, all personnel that can work from home are now doing so, which presents its challenges, anxieties and impacts on family life.   My team of 25 comprises families, single people, those with physical and mental health vulnerabilities. My daily challenge with the team has been navigating the fear and anxiety that the virus has created, focussing on what is important to them while maintaining control over the business.  During our daily calls, we talk about the news coverage, the panic-buying and social distancing that have become everyday life for all of us.  This got me thinking about my how the current situation has more than one side to the story.  For every tale of the speed of the virus spreading and how people are acting irresponsibly, there are numerous stories of positivity, gratitude and solidarity during what is an unprecedented, horrific time.

My Theme

I decided to choose a statement the describes, perhaps controversially my perspective on the experience of the coronavirus lockdown.  My first set would support the statement and the second present the counter argument.  I was inspired by the work of both Gideon Mendel and Paul Seawright as two things resonated with me during the work in Part 1.  The first was Mendel’s use of traces of the event in his work in the immigrant camps [1].  His use of possessions to tell a story about the owners without them actually being present was documentary in the way that we could relate to the objects, but built around a specific context that resonated with the artist.  Seawright’s Sectarian Murders [2] was hugely powerful to me as the context was layered with news reports, themselves steering us towards a particular narrative.  Yes, the blame wasn’t specifically apportioned in the works, but the documentary of the horror without historical context (the causes behind each event) leaves the viewer with their own take on the Northern Ireland conflict.  As Seawright said in an interview, using too few contextual points leaves too much room for narrative and too many leaves the viewer with nowhere to go. For my series then, I would not be using anything that specifically referred to the virus or the lockdown, only imagery that includes the context and space to allow the viewer to create their own narrative.  My take on the brief is that the two sets of photographs will have a sense of duality about them, making it difficult to understand what is happening or determine if the ‘truth’ is being told.

For my theme, the statement is “Coronavirus is changing society for the better”

Ground Rules

I set out with some simple ground rules for the images for this assignment and how they would be presented.  They were as follows:-

1. There would be no visual references to Coronavirus or COVID-19 in the images.  As with Mendel’s work [1], the contextual details in the image would only suggest that something has happened/is happening.
2. I would include people, but not exclusively.  As this theme was a take on the changes to society, it would be easy to simply depict people in their new environment.
3. I would present them as a jumbled collection with no external context applied to begin with.  This is how I viewed Seawright’s work and was startled by how the addition of the simple contextual paragraph changed my perception of them.  I would not give them names or numbers at this point.
4. I would then add a two word context to each image to split them into their supporting and contradicting stories and review how effective they are as a document of these unusual times.
5. Each image would be the colour and the same crop.  Since I believed in Exercise 3 that black and white was able to actively assign a mood to the images, I would avoid its use. I naturally tend towards landscape format with an 8×10 crop, probably because of my connection to film.  Making them all the same would avoid any distracting elements that steered the viewer one way or another.

The Unordered Images

Initial thoughts

Since starting this degree course, I’ve noticed a need that I’ve developed for making sure that the elements in a photograph work with each other.  If something is superfluous and doesn’t connect with my vision of how I want the photograph to look, I generally discard and reshoot if possible.  Of the images here, only one of them is staged, while the rest were observations during my government-sanctioned daily walks. I’m happy that the set contains no distractions or jarring compositions to begin with.  As we’ve been blessed with glorious weather during this work, I don’t believe there to be any context created by differences in the light either.

Applying the Context

Here are the images again, presented individually with two word context added in the form of a title.

Now we have some clearer ideas about the intended message behind this photographs.  From this, they can be grouped into their supporting and contradicting sets:

In support of…

Contradicting…

Review – Intent vs. Alternative Meaning

Smile, People – We saw this camper van on the driveway of a house in a less affluent part of the town one evening.  The whole street had put out smilie face and Jolly Roger flags in their gardens to cheer up any passers by.  This simple smile gesture certainly made me smile, even though there is a sadness to the van that is going nowhere while we are in lockdown.

You ok? – One of the many negative things about COVID-19 is the queueing for food, which at the start of the crisis was further characterised by panic buying and stockpiling essential items.  Standing in this orderly queue for the supermarket, the lady in from started a conversation with a friend she hadn’t seen since lockdown.  They had their conversation over the barrier at a safe distance from each other.

Great Outdoors –  I came across this scene of an elderly and young woman out in the sunshine carrying their shopping home.  One of the positive elements of the lockdown is the encouragement of people to get some daily exercise following the government guidelines.  Here we have two people of very different age groups combining exercise with the necessity of shopping.   This could equally be a statement about isolation and vulnerability with the younger woman not obviously helping out the old lady.

Grateful Patients – Positive messages in support of the NHS have been everywhere, with weekly clapping and painted signs like this one saying thanks to the key workers.  While not limited to the NHS staff, they have been the biggest target of affection.  Here, the patients of a local care home are also thanking their carers.  This could equally have been a comment about being locked down in a care home and just wanting to communicate with the outside world.

Nature Reclaims – With no non-essential work being carried out, Malvern’s own street art is being reclaimed by nature.  Another positive impact of the virus has been the effect on nature, both wildlife and the wider drop in pollution.  This could also have been about a lack of attention to the town; letting it get scruffy through lack of maintenance.

Peaceful Parking –  This stretch of parking spaces is generally never empty.  The effect of less people out in town is that the whole place takes on a peace that is only normally witnessed at night.  It could also have been about the crippling impact of the virus on the local economy.

Typically British – One of the town’s many shops showed its sense of humour with the socially distancing bears.  They started out 2 metres apart and then moved closer together with the addition of some fetching wartime gas masks.  The masks themselves have a sinister appearance, which could be interpreted as part of the fear around the virus and the way that it has taken hold.

A Promise? – I shot this photograph because I noticed the juxtaposition of the advertisement that has slipped from its mount and the promise of being able to move in the summer.  I wanted to capture the interrupted good intentions of the window display where clearly nobody was at work in the building to fix the broken advert.  The pharmacy in the background actually relocated to another building before COVID-19 struck, but in this image it reinforces the impact of the virus on key businesses.  The duality of this image is that its possible that the advert hadn’t been noticed by the staff and the combination of the good weather and the promise could be read as resilience in the face of the virus instead.

Socially Distant –  On one of our sanctioned exercise slots, I followed my wife with the camera looking to capture the new behaviour of people deliberately distancing themselves from each other.  In this shot, my wife walks into the road to avoid the lady with her dog.  What I wanted to capture here was the matter-of-fact action taken by wife at this moment, almost ignoring the lady altogether.  The message being that despite the context of the sunny day, the excited dog and the smiling lady, the act is one of coldness.  In fact, the opposite is often true.  In this case the smile was appreciation of the gesture and pleasantries exchanged.  This is an example of a decisive moment not describing the sequence of events, but merely an instant where the internal context is the only thing we have to go on.

Behind Bars – The children’s playground in the Winter Gardens park was, for a while a place where people gathered defying the lockdown.  Since then, it has been closed with warning signs all around the perimeter fence.  As I had decided not to include specific references to the virus, I looked for a composition with just the sense of being abandoned.  This image of the roundabout with hazard tape around it struck me as sad, with no children around to play on it in the sun.  The railing lends itself to the sense of imprisonment.  The image could have been something less sinister, though with the park being temporarily closed for maintenance ready for the summer weather.

Little Choice – The pubs and cafes are all closed, but public transport is still running for essential journeys to be completed.  The sight of empty buses roaming the streets of the town with the stark ‘Stay Home’ message displayed is becoming all too familiar.  I like the conflict in this image with the pub and view enticing people to gather to enjoy the weather against the fact that we cannot.  With this image, though there is room in the context to create a narrative beyond the virus.   The message could be part of an advertisement instead of a government instruction and because we cannot see into the bus itself, we cannot tell that it is empty.

Thwarted Dream – This building is featuring in my series on the decline of the high street, but the shot I took for that was of a run-down, empty shop.  In the weeks before the virus took hold, work started on turning it into the new business.  This image without context could be interpreted as optimistic; the final step being the peeling of the transfer labels on the windows.  If we look closer though, we can see that the works inside have barely begun.  There is nobody working on the premises to get it ready to be opened.  For me, the sadness of the image is that the virus may make the business untenable before it gets going.

Faded Art – This is an art installation by students of a local college that was created to brighten up the windows of the recently-closed department store in the town.  Each installation has a colour theme and it has really lifted the look of the grand old building as it waits to be converted into new business premises.  Here, we have a balloon display which in itself should be a joyful image.  However, the building is empty and the helium has escaped the balloons.  I wanted to capture the sadness of the way it had been abandoned, unmaintained and how the loaned balloons would not likely to be returned or reused.  The image does contain am humorous inversion of that aspect though, saying ‘who thought that borrowing balloons was a good idea?’

Business Attire –  This image was spotted by my wife one morning as I started work.  Working from home may have saved me a commute but the negative impact on my routine has become apparent.  Here, I’ve not even bothered to get dressed prior to starting my first online meeting of the day.  Although staged with a tripod and remote release, there is an honesty in the elements in the frame.  The negative context is reinforced by the inclusion of the mug and the state of my dress.  It could also be read as a relaxed way of working where there are no expectations other than performing in the job.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this first assignment.  The question ‘can photography be truthful?’ was one that I had not asked myself before Part 1, but the artists that we looked at offered an insight into its subtle exploitation for documentary or art purposes.   With my collection, I feel like the duality of photography as a document is shown clearly.  The situation we find ourselves in with COVID-19 is unprecedented and for the main, terrifying.  However, one of the earliest realisations that I came to was that forcing people to change their lifestyles and stay away from each other would have a positive impact on society as a whole.  As a photographer, being limited in the places I could visit because of lockdown actually made me look harder for that positivity which resulted in my capturing more of it.  I actually struggled to find compositions that were overtly negative to be the greater challenge.  I am happy that my interpretation of the brief works; there are two sides to the story and part of that is being unable to obviously tell the difference.  By adding the simplicity of two words as a title, the narrative comes quickly.  If anything, even something as simple as that leads the viewer too readily to a narrative.   A change I would make to the series is to make the titles more obscure.

What went well

The strongest image for me is Typically British as I like the clear sense of humour mixed with the gravity of the situation.  Humour in photography has become something that I’m drawn to when times are difficult; a kind of self-medication, I guess.  The sinister side of the photograph is the thought that not even our teddy bears are safe from the virus.  Giving them WW2 gas masks emphasises how dangerous the infection could be.  For a simple composition, I think it tells both sides of the story effectively.

The other strong images for me were Behind Bars and Socially Distant, both of which provoked a negative reaction in me.  In the former it had not occurred to me that this happy space which is very popular with the town’s children would be abandoned.  Seems obvious, but its impact on me was profoundly sad.  I definitely felt like Soloman-Godeau’s outsider trying to capture this scene.  Socially Distant was also a sad image for me as the dog in the photograph came towards me for some attention, but I was distracted by my wife’s exaggerated deviation from the path.  Under normal circumstances, the dog would have been made a fuss of and pleasantries exchanged.  This situation is clearly not normal and that comes out in the photograph. Unlike Behind Bars, I was an insider in this shot.

What could have gone better

The weakest image for me is Business Attire because it is not as candid as the others.  I wanted to use natural light for the shot to ensure that there were no harsh reflections from the shiny surfaces on my desk.  This meant that I needed to use a tripod and tethered remote.   I think the sentiment and duality come out in the image, but for me there is a sense of overt context.  The inclusion of the Mr Grumpy mug, on reflection is too much of a sign-post element in the image.

Also, I would consider re-visiting the titles themselves as even though they are short and seemingly simple, they point very clearly to the intent behind the image.  Before I added them, I showed the collection to my wife.  Her interpretation of the context differed only slightly from my own, which I conclude is because we have been married so long coupled with her sharing my photographic ‘journey’ so far.

Getting Feedback

My intention was to share more widely to see which sides of the story are being ‘told’ and, more importantly, whether people believe my statement that we will be an improved society when the danger of coronavirus passes.  I sent the unallocated images to a small group of my photographer friends with simple numerical titles and asked them to arrange in the supporting and contradicting groups.   I deliberately asked them not to confer or share their thoughts on the meanings of the images with each other and perhaps unsurprisingly, some found the job of grouping them a challenge.  To make things more difficult, I told them that I wasn’t all that interested in their explanation of the narrative created for each image as discussion would have helped them form a view that was influenced by my intentions for the series.  The results were as shown below:

Results of Review of the Unallocated Photographs

What struck me first about the results was the strong agreement with my intention for the images of the playground, the NHS thank you and the unfinished shop front.  These images were strong with elements that steered to a great sense of sadness or extreme happiness.  The ‘negative’ images were almost signposted to contradict my story, so using photography to effectively prove a lie. The next thing that stood out was the balance in some of the responses, i.e. in two minds about what the photographs say to them.  In these photographs, the story about the improvement in society comes through but with an equally opposing feeling created by the knowledge we have about the pandemic.  Socially Distant is a good example of this.  I felt that we were losing personal contact, but three people thought differently.  Perhaps the act of social responsibility caused by the distancing in the image supports that we actually care more for each other with the current restrictions.  The final observation was where the consensus was generally in disagreement with my original intent.  Looking back at the earlier research in Part 1, I was reminded of how our perspectives are built on our personal circumstances, beliefs, biases and the previous events in our lives.  Four of the people asked are living in urban environments where the virus is affecting many people in a confined space.  Their views on the images are naturally going to differ from the other two (and me) who live in a more rural setting.

Overall, I am happy with the way this assignment has gone. In Part 1, I’ve learned the difference between being part of the story and an observer, how photographs are used to get a message across that is not always truthful and that there are many different versions of what is the truth.  With the ghost photography of the late 19th Century, the trust in photography as an honest viewer of events was severely tested, with the foremost intellects being conned by photo manipulation.  Where documentary fails though, art becomes the destiny for photography ‘stories’.  Powerful messages about society like those in Dzhangal and Public Order don’t need to rely on facts to have impact. Perhaps objectivity is not all it’s cracked up to be.

References

[1] Mendel, G, 2016, Dzhangal Work, Artist’s Website, http://gideonmendel.com/dzhangal/

[2] Seawright, P, c1970s, ‘Sectarian Murders’, Artist’s Website, http://www.paulseawright.com/sectarian