Progress Update 12 April 2017

My major project work is moving inexorably forwards and yesterday (11 April) I completed a first draft of my photo book for publication and sent it off to ‘Blurb’ for printing. When I receive the book later in the month I will, for the first time, be able to look at a hard copy version of the result of 18 months’ worth of project work. I have asked for two copies of the book; one for myself and one to send to my tutor for feedback. I am under no illusions that there is still work to do before I complete the project, but I hope that the second draft of the photo book will be the final version.

Following my tutor’s feedback from the 5^th (penultimate) assignment and my own review of the project work to date I made some minor revisions to the text, splitting one section of text into two in order to incorporate one additional montage. I then reviewed each of my images in turn, looking both for technical faults or problems as well as for ways in which I could introduce greater emotion and/or clarity into the montages. Following the review I made minor changes to most of the images, major changes to a few images and also replaced one image with a new one (although I retained the same basic idea in this last case). I produced one new image, to incorporate with a section of ‘split’ text (see above). The square format and 50% desaturated ‘style’ for the images was retained for the book – I have the option of using full colour if the printed images look too ‘washed out’. I did consider using monochrome for the images, but although this works well in many cases there are problems with a few of the montages.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what images to use for the front and back covers. For a long time I planned to use a new montage (one that did not directly relate to any of the images inside the book). However, I could not come up with a montage or single image that successfully summarised the content of the photo book. Eventually, having looked at many published photo book covers in shops, on the internet and in “The Photobook: a History Volume 3”, I decided to place a pared down version of one of the early images in the book on the front cover (Image 1) and a portion of another image on the back cover. Both images reflect ‘memories’ and the documentary nature of the project. The covers are, of course, subject to later change.

Image 1

I changed the title of the book on several occasions, but in the end reverted to “I Am Not There”. This is the title of the poem which I have included towards the end of the book, but also relates to the guilt, foreboding and other emotions that I experienced when I was not with my mother or even when I was with her but was unable to give her appropriate emotional support.

I have used ‘Blurb’ before to publish photo books and know how to handle their ‘Bookwright’ software, so it was relatively easy to produce the book template by combining the text and images. I asked for a soft cover book. I will seek advice and consider other photo book producers before producing the final version for assessment. This book will most likely have a hard cover.

Having completed the draft photo book I do not intend to ‘rest on my laurels’. I will produce large square prints of all the images used in the book (for studying fine detail and also possibly for submission for assessment). I still intend to produce a multimedia file, including video, potentially for assessment and am always looking for new ideas for montages in order to add to or replace those that I have already produced. However, replacement of images at this late stage of the project will only be done with good reason. I have one tutorial and one assignment left before assessment and I intend to use these to iron out any remaining faults and problems with the format and design of the images and photo book.

Major Project Influences (18) and Book Review: Richard Billingham - "Ray's a Laugh"

(Re-printed edition by Errata Editions (New York) as part of their "Books on Books" series)

It would be remiss of anybody attempting to produce a photo book referencing members of their own family not to cite Richard Billingham’s classic photo book, ‘Ray’s a Laugh’, first published in 1996, as being of relevance. The book, which features Billingham’s photos of his dysfunctional family (in particular his father Ray, who was an unemployed chronic alcoholic), has become a classic of post-modernist photographic realism. The photos were taken between 1990 (when Billingham was 20) and 1996, shortly before the book was published. I first saw some of Billingham’s prints of his family a few years ago in an exhibition at The Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. However, the book has long been out of print and copies of the first edition (the original print run was for 3000 books) sell second hand for several hundred pounds – well beyond what I would be prepared to pay for it. Luckily the book has recently been made available as a ‘facsimile’ edition as part of a series by Errata Books (New York) and I have purchased a copy. Although the quality of the prints in this new edition is poor the power and emotional charge of the published photographs is still very evident.

What I find remarkable about this book is not the powerful day to day photo-realism of seeing a socially deprived ‘problem family’ living a disempowered day to day existence on the bread line, but the fact that the photographs were taken by a member of that family, somebody who had the strong will and artistic drive to move to the University of Sunderland to study for an art degree whilst regularly still returning and re-integrating with his family and taking more photographs of them. When Billingham started taking photographs of his family his parents had separated and he lived with his father, taking intimate and emotionally charged photographs of Ray that were for his own personal use – Image 1 is a typical example.

Image 1. Ray (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")

Later, Ray moved back in with Billingham’s mother Liz at her flat and Billingham’s younger brother Jason returned to the household, having been in social care. The family portraits, now taken in the new environment of Liz's flat (complete with a menagerie of animals, decorative furnishings and wallpaper), continued to provide an intimate and brutally honest portrait of family life, featuring Liz and Jason as well as Ray (for example see Images 2 and 3). The book features photos of cats, dogs and a pet rat taken in the flat, together with a single (urban) landscape and three appallingly bad wildlife photos, the latter representing the only photographs in the book that were taken outdoors as Billingham sought to escape family chaos for a short time.

Image 2. Jason and Ray (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")

Image 3. Liz (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")

Photojournalism often highlights the lives of people in socially deprived areas of society, for example those living on the streets, migrants, prostitutes, drug users and abusers. However surely nobody had, prior to the publication of this book, produced anything so brutally honest about their close family. Billingham’s images take us into his home. They make us feel emotions that must have manifested themselves in his mind and they make us shudder and think “there but for the grace of god….” And yet, for all the sadness, for all his father’s drunken antics that are captured on film (see, for example, Image 4) and all the hopelessness of his parents’ situation there is still a feeling of a family bond, even of love between family members.

Image 4. Ray (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")

Why did Billingham take these intimate photos in the first place? As Charlotte Cotton describes in her essay describing the evolution of “Ray’s a Laugh” in the ‘Errata’ book, they were never intended for publication. Billingham describes taking his first photographs of Ray at home (Ray was living with Richard after Liz had left) as a means of documenting what was happening to them, physically (for Ray), as well as psychologically and emotionally for both. He has commented that he felt like a wildlife photographer, documenting the behaviour of a particular species (his family). He took a shopping bag full of these family prints to the University of Sunderland, where some were used to produce sketches and paintings of his father. Here the photographs were seen by a tutor (Julian Germain) who alerted his friend Michael Collins (then picture editor of The Daily Telegraph) regarding their potential. Thus a process started, which ended with the publication of “Ray’s a Laugh”.

How can I relate “Ray’s a Laugh” to my own project work? The family photos that I took were, unlike Billingham’s images, never candid. All the archival photos that I have used were relatively formal and often posed. Nevertheless the deterioration in my mother’s health and mental state can clearly be traced photographically, from the ‘early years’ following my father’s death to the photos taken at Christmas 2006, a month before she died. The fact that I am confident enough to use these latter images, which I still find hard to look at, in a photo book that will be viewed by people who are not a part of my family stems from the confidence gained by studying the candid nature of Billingham’s images. “Ray’s a Laugh” is an important stepping stone in the photographic journey from Modernist formalism to Post-Modernist realism.

Exhibition Review. "The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection" (Tate Modern, London)

(Visited on 3 December 2016 and 1 April 2017)

Despite its reputation as a ‘trailblazer’ for the arts, the Tate Modern only started collecting photographic art seriously in 2009 and its collection is naturally rather limited in scope. Sir Elton John has, on the other hand, been a serious collector of photographic prints since the early 1990s and has built up an unrivalled collection of modernist photographic art prints dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. Not only does he have an eye for the very best of modernist photo prints but he has the financial clout to obtain these works of art when they appear on the market. This is a very fine collection indeed and I really enjoyed wandering round the galleries, marvelling at what was, of its time, the very highest quality cutting edge photographic art.

The list of featured photographers reads like a “Who’s Who” of modernist photography - André Kertész, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko and Dorothea Lange to name but a few. Lange’s best known work, “Migrant Mother” (Image 1), looks awesome when viewed close up, whilst Rodchenko’s classic “Shukhov Tower” (Image 2) is one of several prints that feature photographs looking up from below or down from above.

Image 1. Dorothea Lange: "Migrant Mother" (1936)

Image 2. Alexander Rodchenko: "Shukhov Tower" (1927)

Irving Penn’s 1948 portraits of celebrities (Dali, Duke Ellington, Noel Coward) posed between two angled walls are early examples of non-conformist portrait photography. Man Ray’s famous portraits of his fellow Surrealists are also here – indeed, a good proportion of the collection features portraits of one type or another.

Did the exhibition hold any specific value for my current project work? Herbert Bayer’s “Humanly Impossible (Self-Portrait)” (Image 3) provided me with some inspiration regarding the use of mirrors in composition and reminded me that even in 1932, when this work was produced, photographers were experimenting in the darkroom with image manipulation.

Image 3. Herbert Bayer: "Humanly Impossible (Self-portrait)" (1932)

Frederick Sommer’s double exposure of fellow Surrealist Max Ernst (1946) represents an early example of the deliberate double exposure, a motif that I use often in my current project work whilst, in addition to Irving Penn’s work (see above), there are many examples of creatively produced ‘non-conformist’ portraits, of which Stieglitz’s portrait of Georgia O’Keefe is a classic example. Man Ray’s portrait of Max Ernst, in which Ernst appears to be placed behind a cracked glass window, represents another motif that I have used in my recent studies, although I had already produced the image before I visited this exhibition – great minds think alike!

Overall, however, this is an exhibition to ignite the imagination and creativity of any photographer with a serious interest in modernist art. To see so many excellent quality prints produced by the great photographers of the modernist era is inspirational. One final point: Sir Elton says that he has never bought a work for profit. Nevertheless, with the massive increase in interest in photographic art in recent years his collection must represent an excellent investment. If only The Tate had had the foresight to start a photographic collection 30 years ago…..

Major Project Influences (17): Surrealist Photography

For many years I have enjoyed the art of the Surrealists – in particular the work of Salvador Dali. In the 1930s, when the movement was at its peak, painting, sculpture and prose were the dominant art forms that the Surrealists used to express their individual interpretations of dreams and psychic states. Photography was generally viewed at this time as an objective medium for realism and therefore hardly suitable for artists wishing to express their thoughts in an abstract or ‘dreamlike’ form. However, the Surrealists’ love of experimentation and invention not only overcame this potential hurdle but led to the discovery and development of new photographic techniques. By the time the Surrealist movement faded as war broke out in Europe some of its finest and most memorable works had been produced in photographic form.

Whilst the contribution of Man Ray to photographic art (photograms, solarisation etc.) is generally considered to have been of the greatest importance, my own work for this project has been influenced more by the montages and double exposures that were (painstakingly, in the darkroom) produced by Surrealist photographers, many of whom remained largely unknown and/or unheralded. A number of these works were included in ‘The Radical Eye’ exhibition at Tate Modern in 2016-17 (see elsewhere for a  Review). I will mention here just a small number of examples of Surrealist work to give a flavour of how they were not just ahead of the times but how they also influenced my current project work.

Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) came from the Bauhaus school of photographers but produced several imaginative, hallucinatory photomontages that were absolutely typical of the output of the Surrealists. “Lonely Metropolitan” (Image 1) is perhaps his best known work – the use of hands and the overlay motif can be found in my current project work. Bayer loved to experiment in the darkroom in order to produce apparently impossible photographic effects: a typical example of this can be seen in my review of “The Radical Eye” exhibition.

Image 1. Herbert Bayer: "Lonely Metropolitan" (1932)

Erotic subjects were commonplace in the work of the Surrealists and Heinz Hajek-Halke’s montage, “Erotica – Close Up” (Image 2), is a typical example. Once again, the overlaying of one photograph over selected parts of another photograph has been liberally used in my current project work.

Image 2. Heinz Hajek-Halke: "Erotica - Close Up" (1930)

Double exposures were also liberally used by the Surrealists. An interesting example is the photograph of Max Ernst, one of the driving forces in the Surrealist movement, by the Surrealist photographer Frederick Sommer (Image 3). Ernst was himself a prolific polymath, who produced many photo-collages in his lifetime. The use of digital double and multiple exposures has formed a major part of my repertoire in the current project.

Image 3. Frederick Sommer: "Max Ernst" (1946)

Of course photography does not always have to resort to trickery and darkroom techniques in order to influence my work. Lee Miller (1907-78) was best known as Man Ray’s assistant and muse, but was an extremely accomplished photographer in her own right (see my post reviewing the major retrospective exhibition of her work at the Imperial War Museum).  Her photograph “Portrait of Space” (Image 4), with the camera apparently looking out onto a barren land through torn fabric, provided me with ideas for a couple of my own images. It is sad and ironic that, like my mother, Miller struggled with clinical depression in her later years.

Image 4. Lee Miller: "Portrait of Space" (1937)

Whilst I have cited specific examples of Surrealists’ work that has influenced me in this post their use of experimentation, abstract ideas and novel concepts has also provided me with inspiration for my current project, as well as for past projects. It is reasonable to assume that my future work will also be influenced by Surrealism.