Progress Update 20 January 2016

Well, I’ve been working on the “Photography 3: Advanced” course for around four months now and progress has been slow. I’ve made plans and agreed the way forward with my tutor, following a very useful tutorial session. I will be concentrating, for the foreseeable future, on a single project which deals with a very personal topic: my relationship with my mother and the deterioration in her health (she suffered from severe clinical depression) during the final years of her life. I’ve drawn up a project plan, which can be found on this blog.

Positive aspects of the project are that it takes me well outside my “comfort zone”, whilst allowing me to experiment with areas of image production, such as the use of blending to integrate two or more images, that I am particularly interested in, despite having very limited practical experience (most of which was obtained on an earlier, now discontinued, level 1 OCA course: “Creative Digital Art”). The major negative aspect is that I will be re-living some very difficult and, occasionally, traumatic times and trying to produce a portfolio of work that deals sensitively with a very personal issue, whilst conveying some of the emotion associated with the story.

I chose to initiate the project by producing a series of passages of text which dealt, roughly chronologically, with periods and events in my mother’s life between the time of my father’s death in 1995 and the time of my mother’s death in 2007. Each passage of text relates to one of 20 images that will eventually form the project portfolio. The combination of images and text will be produced as a photo book. Producing the text was a relatively straightforward, if somewhat emotional challenge. However, relating the images to the text has proved considerably more difficult.

Visualising and producing the images for the project was inevitably going to involve much research and experimentation, which is still ongoing and is likely to be so for some time. I have several challenges to overcome. Firstly, my mother died nine years ago and I have to rely mainly on formal, posed family portraits (some of which are of dubious quality) for my archival footage. Secondly, I am finding the process of coming up with a clear visual link between each of the proposed images very difficult. I have considered using text, either within each image or as a caption beneath each image, as a link, but am unsure how best to do this or whether to do it at all. I am planning to produce blended images or "double/multiple exposures" in every case, but these plans are far more suited to some images than to others. Thirdly, whilst my plans for some images are well advanced in other cases they have not been properly worked out. Finally, the images that I propose to produce may vary greatly in appearance. Some are best suited to a monochrome interpretation (I originally intended to produce all my images in monochrome), whilst others will look better in colour.

Bearing these problems in mind, I feel that whilst the experimentation and research will continue I need also to think creatively about finding a simple visual concept that will bind my images together. As an example of such a concept I was interested to watch the section of the recent OCA video relating to the final assignment of a level 1 photography student’s course work (link). Madelina Androne’s work represents a simple, creative and very effective conceptual approach to the use of double exposures, which works very well, both in my eyes and (far more importantly) in the eyes of her tutor and assessors. It is abundantly clear that my biggest problem as an artist is a lack of creativity, whilst I have also as yet been unable to develop a distinctive personal style (both features were commented upon in the assessors’ feedback on my submission for the recently completed level 3 OCA course: “Your Own Portfolio”). Given all this negativity I feel that I must take a step back from the detail of my images and try to come up with a broad artistic concept that binds them together in a clearer manner. This may entail using my images to inform the text, rather than the reverse. I hope that an imminent major holiday will stimulate my creativity and that I will return in February full of ideas and with energy to burn.

This blog has been regularly updated and includes research on other artists dealing with family issues. The research continues, but it is clear that the projects that I have looked at so far have been realised in a straightforward manner, usually featuring portraits (posed or un-posed) of family members taken specifically for the ongoing project. I have to rely on memory and archival images, which makes my project more challenging (but also, hopefully, ultimately more rewarding!). I have also looked for photographic representations of clinical depression. These have been hard to find. One photographer, Christian Hopkins, has tried to represent his thoughts and feelings (as somebody who suffers from clinical depression) in the form of some interesting and imaginative self-portraits (link). I will place a post about his work on my blog in due course. Although I have been through some very low periods in my life I have never, as far as I am aware, suffered from clinical depression. I therefore find it difficult to express the experience of clinical depression through my photographs, although I need to try to do this for the project. I strongly suspect that the experience of suffering from clinical depression renders it difficult to express feelings and emotions creatively in any form. A number of books have, however, been written by those with first-hand knowledge of the subject and I have started to try to gain insight into the illness by reading some of these. My research continues.

I have made a start at producing some blended images, to give me a feel for the techniques involved and to see how closely the picture in my mind's eye relates to the final product. At the moment these are just sketches, which will inevitably be re-worked or abandoned. Some of the images work better in my eyes than others; all vary in style as they represent some of the different approaches that I am trying. I am some way away from deciding how I am going to integrate text and images for the photo book.

Despite the difficulties that I am experiencing I am still totally committed to producing a piece of work that does justice to the memory of my mother.

Family Projects (1)

My photographic project revolves around my relationship with my mother during the last few years of her life. As part of my research I have been studying photographic projects involving the relationships of other photographers with members of their own families, looking at how they deal with the subject matter and whether I can learn from their work. Here are a few examples.

Matthew Finn: “Mother” (www.mattfinn.com)

Matthew Finn has been photographing his mother since 1988, when he was a teenager. All the photographs have been taken using black and white film, at his mother’s home in Leeds, and developed by Finn in a darkroom. They appear to be a mixture of posed and un-posed images, which give the viewer an insight into the life and personality of one person. A couple of representative examples are shown below. Finn won one of the inaugural national Jerwood/Photoworks awards for this project. There is an underlying tension in this work which, Finn believes, defines his relationship with his mother. The use of black and white adds atmosphere to the images and reduces the distractions that bright colours can sometimes bring. Given that all the photographs were taken at the same home, with the same subject matter, there is impressive variety, both in terms of composition and the use of light, in the portfolio.

Matthew Finn: "Mother"

Matthew Finn: "Mother"

Perhaps Finn’s work is the closest that I have so far (January 2016) found to my own current work in that it concentrates on his relationship with his mother over a prolonged period of time. It is also clear, both from the photographs and from his accounts, that the (ongoing) relationship is not entirely straightforward or easy. Nevertheless, Finn does have a significant advantage over me in that he has a living subject to photograph, whereas my photographs of my mother were almost invariably posed and produced purely as a record of a moment or an event, long before I had any plans to incorporate them into a project. Clearly there is no attempt to manipulate his photographs (something that I will need to do), which tell their story in a straightforward, yet subtle manner.

Anna Fox: “My Mother’s Cupboards and my Father’s Words” (www.annafox.co.uk)

My tutor brought this work to my attention. Fox describes her project as: “colour photographs of my mother’s tidy cupboards together with excerpts from my father’s rantings….. an unexpectedly wicked narrative exploring a claustrophobic relationship.” The project, which does pretty much “what it says on the tin” (see images below), was published as a small photo book in 2000. Taken singly, the images of the tidy cupboards are hardly inspirational, but the clever combination of one feature of each of her parents’ characters into each image gives the project a unique and distinctive flavour. Somehow we can get a hint of their relationship without actually seeing them.

Anna Fox: "My Mother's Cupboards and My Father's Words"

Anna Fox: "My Mother's Cupboards and My Father's Words"

I can see two learning points for my own project work. Firstly, here is an original combination of text and image, both of which are essential for the project to work. Secondly, this is an example of a simple but original concept that is relatively easy to realize and yet has an impact. If I could develop a similarly creative approach to my own work and, in particular, project development, the production of project portfolios would become much easier.

Sian Davey: “Looking for Alice”

Whereas the previous projects concentrate on the photographers’ parents, Sian Davey’s project features Alice, her youngest daughter, who has Downs Syndrome (see images below).

Sian Davey: "Looking for Alice"

Sian Davey: "Looking for Alice"

Sian Davey is a psychotherapist and the project deals with how she overcame the initial shock of having an “imperfect” child, as well as deep-rooted prejudices, to reach the point where Alice was treated as an equal and much loved family member. Davey’s series of photographs of Alice, alone and with other family members, can be taken as just another “family album” of snapshots. Indeed, there appears to be nothing special about the images, although the quality of the work has been sufficient for it to have won a number of awards and feature among the “Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize” winners. Davey makes the point that not so long ago children born with Downs Syndrome would have been marginalised and ultimately institutionalised. Nowadays 92% of Downs Syndrome babies are terminated at the pre-natal screening stage. Whatever one’s views on this statistic, the project does raise some important issues within a relatively conventional but high quality framework.

 There are some links between this project and my own work. Both deal with what, in many respects, might be considered an inherited illness in the family (although the balance between hereditary and situational factors in clinical depression is complex). Both deal with the stresses that are placed on families when one member has an illness or disability. Both deal with feelings of guilt by the photographer, caused by their relationship with this family member. However, Sian Davey has the advantage of working in real time, repairing any damage that may have been caused in the relationship and choosing how to represent this relationship in single, unaltered photographs.

Conclusions

All the family relationships represented in this post are portrayed using straightforward, “real time” images. The family is dealt with respectfully or, in the case of Anna Fox’s parents, with a degree of wit. This research leads me to the conclusion that, even though I have the added difficulty of portraying my mother’s final few years, her illness and my relationship with her several years after her death I should reconsider my approach to the project. Am I trying to do too much? Is the idea of blending current and archival images too complex? How can I produce a portfolio of images that is original and consistent? Can I introduce text into or by my images in a novel way, in order to link them? How can I develop the project in a way that is respectful to my mother? I still have a long way to go!