Reflections on Current Photographic Practice. Part 1. Portfolios of Thematically Linked Images.

It has taken me quite a few years to understand what is meant by ‘Conceptual Photographic Art’ and even longer for me to produce a portfolio of work that might be considered to fit this classification. During my first OCA Level 3 course, ‘Your Own Portfolio’, students were specifically asked, for their major project, to produce a portfolio of 10-20 images and that there should be a stated theme linking the images. Things started off well for me, as I produced a series of images of people feeding birds (including Images 1a and 1b) for a project whose initial idea was to represent the different benefits that we get from feeding birds.

                         

Images 1a and 1b: “Feeding the Birds” from my major project for OCA Photography 3: ‘Your Own Portfolio”

If I had stopped after producing a dozen or so images of this type and submitted my major project work for assessment without further ado I would probably have done ok at assessment. However, I continued with my ‘environmental hat on’ and produced a further, much more diverse set of images in which I attempted to illustrate all the ‘bad’ things that we do to the environment, thus effectively splitting the project (and portfolio) into two sections: ‘what the birds do for us’ and ‘what we do for the birds’. In retrospect I should not have been surprised by the assessors’ terse comments when I had passed the course with a very modest 48% mark. These comments included remarks that I should have stuck to and developed the portfolio of people feeding birds and that I appeared to be more interested in the birds than I was in the  photography (a bit harsh, but there is more than a grain of truth in this).

So where had I gone wrong? Firstly, I had not stuck to the remit of linking the images via a stated theme. Secondly I had been swayed by my own emotions into producing a photographic project that tried (not very successfully) to make a statement regarding something that I feel strongly about. In doing this I spent a lot of time and effort working on a project that was essentially wasted – at least as far as my journey towards an arts degree was concerned.

Bearing this in mind, how do photographic artists at the cutting edge of current practice avoid the pitfalls that I fell into and produce work that is considered outstanding by their peers? Furthermore, what can I learn from their work that will help me to produce portfolios that reflect current photographic practice (as my tutor has recommended and as the assessors will expect) and is there any way in which I can do this whilst making a powerful statement about an issue that I feel strongly about? This latter question is very important to me, because I don’t believe that I can produce ‘art for art’s sake’ – I need strong motivation to drive me.

For this post I’ll look at a handful of selected recent image portfolios by photographers or ‘photograph collectors’ whose work fits the criterion of having an obvious stated theme linking the images. All their work has been critically acclaimed and has appeared in books and/or exhibitions. The portfolios would no doubt have received excellent marks from assessors if they had been submitted as a major ‘OCA Photography 3: Your Own Portfolio’ project! What can I learn from these works? Do I like them and, if not, why not?

Chloe Dewe Mathews: “Shot at Dawn”

In her critically acclaimed work “Shot at Dawn”, which has been published as a photobook, Chloe Dewe Mathews has visited the exact sites where British and Allied troops were executed (mainly for desertion) during the First World War. Following research by Mathews and others she photographed the sites as they appeared 100 years later, at the time of day when the individuals were executed. The result is a series of landscapes, both urban and rural. Typical examples are shown in Images 2a and 2b.

              

Images 2a and 2b from “Shot at Dawn” by Chloe Dewe Mathews

A number of films, television series and television documentaries have dealt in a moving way with this emotive subject. My problem with this work is that what for me is just a series of bland and rather boring landscapes fails to convey any of the emotion relating to these horrific events that I can absorb from the other media. Perhaps video, of the camera moving towards the place of execution, followed by the noise of gunfire, might have worked. Despite the variability of subject matter (although they are all landscapes) there is a clear, linking theme between the images. This series highlights a problem relating to my own work, which I have mentioned before: it is sometimes very difficult to convey emotion or even atmosphere in a photograph. My own opinion is that this (commissioned) work has given Mathews a thankless task. However, other very different (and informed) opinions are available!

Sam Ivin: “Lingering Ghosts”

Sam Ivin’s ‘defaced’ images of UK asylum seekers (e.g. Images 3a and 3b) were featured in the ‘migration’ issue of the British Journal of Photography (BJP) in September 2016. One of the images made the front cover.

                                                

Images 3a and 3b: Sam Ivin, “Lingering Ghosts”

The idea of defacing or hiding faces of people in photographic portraits is not new (BJP recently devoted a whole issue to this theme) but here Ivin scratches out the eyes of his subjects to remove the obvious emotional points of contact and leaves images that “reflect the pain, disorientation and anger of those looking for sanctuary” in the UK.

Ivin’s work (which has been published as a photobook), whilst perhaps being not entirely original, does clearly make a political statement and there is a very obvious link between the images. I admire his stance. However, I do wonder (and this is not to denigrate his work in any way) what difference his work will make to the asylum seekers, or the system that they face in the UK. Who will buy the book? How many artists and photographers have the power to change the world through their images whilst still working within the field of conceptual photographic art? Very few, I suspect.

Katy Grannan: “Anonymous”

Katy Grannan’s portraits of ‘anonymous’ passers-by in San Francisco and Los Angeles featured in the “Out of Focus: Photography” exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2012. All the subjects gave their permission for Grannan to photograph them after she approached them in the street. The photographs (e.g. Images 4a and 4b) hint at lives well-lived, but perhaps without much reward.

                                            

Images 4a and 4b: Katy Grannan, “Anonymous”

I estimate that about 50% of all the portfolios featured in BJP during the two years that I subscribed to the magazine were portraits of people: the percentage is even higher when considering exhibitions of photography students’ final year portfolios. ‘People taking pictures of each other’ is still a dominant topic and it must be hard to find an original concept within this field. Sam Ivin (see above) succeeds and Katy Grannan’s portfolio works well because her subjects are neither young nor fashion models but ordinary citizens, many of them elderly, ‘snapped’ in a variety of natural but characterful poses. Is this work still valid as current photographic practice? Is it now necessary to add another layer of complexity to a portfolio of human portraits? I’m not a portrait photographer, so I don’t pretend to know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that portrait portfolios are pretty much guaranteed to have a theme linking them.

John Stezaker: “Marriage”

John Stezaker has made a very successful career as an artist by appropriating old photographs from flea markets and second hand bookshops, cutting them up and then combining them to form collages. Why he does this is not clear to me, so let’s call it ‘playful’ and ‘art for art’s sake’. His work, which is generally accepted as photographic art, has won him international acclaim. He has certainly carved out a very distinctive niche for himself. His work is original, based on clear concepts and within each series there is a clear theme linking the images. As an example I include two images from his “marriage” series (Images 5a and 5b), in which publicity stills, one of a man and one of a woman, are cut and then joined together to produce weird, androgynous, hybrid faces.

                                  

Images 5a and 5b: John Stezaker, “Marriage”

Stezaker’s work fulfils all the criteria for acceptance as conceptual photographic art, even if he is not the photographer. However, as with some of the other examples featured here, I have to question its purpose. For photographic art to make an impact on me or to stir my emotions it must be both aesthetically pleasing and have a purpose, other than to be recognised and lauded for its concept and originality. Stezaker’s work fails on both counts, although I’m sure that he won’t lose any sleep over this.

Eric Kessels: “In Almost Every Picture #14”

Eric Kessels and John Stezaker have at least two things in common: they were both finalists in the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize competition and they both work predominantly with appropriated photographs. Kessels has gone even further than Stezaker for his portfolio “In Almost Every Picture #14” by using the cast-offs from portraits of bathers photographed by somebody who made a living by shooting polaroid beach portraits of holidaymakers and then punching out his sitters’ heads to put them on to badges. Images 6a and 6b are representative of the cast-offs, which have been published in a book and also featured in an article for the December 2015 edition of BJP.

                      

Images 6a and 6b: Eric Kessels, “In Almost Every Picture #14”

At first glance one might imagine that Kessels is having a laugh at our expense, but closer examination reveals that there is a clear concept here and the images are linked by a very clear theme (the hole in the middle of the photograph, the beach and the sea for starters). Also, this work features in his 14^th book along the same lines and he makes a living out of appropriating and producing this work. Using true ‘Art Speak Bullshit’ Kessels has produced a rationale for why these images are important. It will not surprise the reader to know that I am far from impressed by Kessels’ project, which also presumably took minimal effort to put together, but I cannot deny that it is photographic art.

Annalisa Murri: “Then the Sky Crashed Down on Us”

I’m going to finish this review by looking at a project that impressed me and has influenced my current work. Annalisa Murri came 3^rd in the ‘Contemporary Issues’ section of the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards with a project in which she interviewed and photographed survivors of the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh, where an 8 storey building collapsed, killing over 1000 people. This was essentially a piece of photojournalism, re-telling the story of the tragedy through the eyes of some female survivors. What made her feature stand out was the clever use of monochrome double exposures, featuring portraits of the survivors blended into urban locations, presumably at or near the site of the tragedy (Images 7a and 7b).

                       

Images 7a and 7b: Annalisa Murri, « Then the Sky Crashed Down on Us”

For me, this portfolio fulfils all the criteria for acceptance as conceptual photographic art, in which the images are linked by a clear theme and form part of a harmonious set. Furthermore, I find the images to be aesthetically appealing and relevant to my own work, particularly as they have atmosphere and provoke an emotional response. Indeed, they influenced my decision to work with double and multiple exposures for the ongoing project – I have written a more detailed article on Murri's work  in the ‘Influences’ section of my blog.

However, I do have one concern about Murri’s project. Is it exploitative? Does it help the survivors of this tragedy in any way or is it used as a vehicle by the photographer to make a living and build her reputation? Photojournalism of this kind always raises these moral and ethical issues. Even Don McCullin, whose photographs of the human suffering caused by war and famine in the ‘third world’ did so much to raise both awareness and relief aid in the west, suffered from moral dilemmas of this nature.

Final Thoughts

The six very different projects that I have discussed in this post are, I believe, good examples of current practice in conceptual photographic art. The images in each portfolio are thematically linked and form harmonious sets. My reaction to each set has been very variable, however, and this says more about me than it does about photographic art. I tend to dismiss ‘art for art’s sake’, where the message is either superficial or relates to the artist’s own philosophy, which is usually shrouded by what non-artists might call “art speak bullshit”. I am more interested by projects that raise moral, ethical and/or political issues, even when the images are not particularly interesting. I am even more interested in projects that raise these issues with images that are aesthetically appealing and/or produce an emotional response. These are the projects that I want to talk about and share with others. I am still searching for the ‘holy grail’, the project that does all these things and also changes the world for the better. If I could produce such a project I would die happy!

Does my philosophy mean that I am not an artist? I need to look at my past to resolve this issue. Throughout my working life as a medicinal chemist within the pharmaceutical industry I had the goal of trying to discover a cure for a disease or, at least, something that would improve the health of people I had never met. I never achieved this goal (very few scientists do) but at least I tried. Now and in the future I have similar ideals: to bring my art to the attention of the world and to make a difference. Of course this is probably a pipe dream but as long as I’m trying to make art I will need motivation and that motivation will not come from potentially making money or gaining acceptance within a community that I hardly know or understand. Perhaps this makes me a perennial outsider. Perhaps my aims are not achievable. However, I will never compromise these aims.

Progress Update 6 October 2016 and Reflections, with reference to the BBC 2 Documentary 'A World Without Downs Syndrome' (Sally Phillips), Aired on 5 October (9.00pm)

Well, I’ve just started the second and final year of the Photography 3: Advanced course and events have taken a turn for the worse. I had felt reasonably happy with my submission for the 4^th course assignment, having produced a very early draft ‘mock up’ of a photo book incorporating 33 images to accompany text on a ‘one image per double page spread’ basis. Roughly a quarter of these images were new, whilst the remainder had been modified, to a greater lesser extent, or replaced following comments from my tutor after Assignments 2 and 3. I had divided the book up into four chapters and accompanied each chapter heading with a new, very different looking square image (giving me a set of four). I was happy with these new images, each of which related to the content of the appropriate chapter. Full commentary on the submission, my reasons for making changes and the degree of flexibility that was retained was sent as part of the submission.

A few days later I spoke to my tutor on ‘Skype’ (and these discussions are invaluable for me – thanks to him for setting them up) and it was clear that there were problems. He discussed the images mostly in general terms, also picking out one or two specific examples, and listed ‘nine and a half’ as being presentable. Only one of the new images that I had produced was included in the list, so it appeared that my work during the summer months had been of little value. We didn’t discuss why images had been excluded by him nor, in most cases, whether there was anything salvageable from them. That will come later. In the mean time I am left to ponder what I can do with 9.5 images and a load of text that will turn this into a portfolio worthy of submission for assessment.

So why am I struggling with this project and what can I do about it? The first question is difficult to answer, but after some thought I have come up with two main reasons. The answer to the second question is, as Dylan put it, “blowing in the wind”.

Reasons for Struggling Part 1

I am attempting to present my photographic work in a radically different way, blending archival photographs from the time when my mother was alive with either other archival images or (in the vast majority of cases) with images taken by me specifically for the project. The goal was to produce a photo book dealing with my mother’s battle against depression in her later years and how it affected me. My tutor has been very helpful in giving me references to (photographic) artists who blend two or more current images together and also artists who have produced portfolios of work relating to their mothers, fathers and/or other family members or acquaintances who may have been suffering from disabilities. I have been active in finding many other references in these areas. However, I am unaware of any photographer who has combined a restricted number of not very good archival family photographs with current images to try to tell a moving family story. I can’t ask my mother to pose now (in January 2017 it will be ten years since she died), I can’t photograph inside her house (long since sold) or in the garden. I do have a handful of photographs of the bare rooms of the house following clearance (and I have used these in a couple of images). In other words I have very limited resources to put together my montages and this has led to some repetition, particularly in the portraits of my mother that I have used.

Reasons for Struggling Part 2

In the montages I have tried in some cases to depict images that reference events that are described in the accompanying text. Some of the results are, by my own admission, crude and/or naïve. Worse still – and here we have the crux of the problem – they may not add anything at all to the text. The text may promote empathy in the reader, whilst the images leave them cold. If this is the case I might end up having to remove a lot of the images from the book, leaving a lot of text with a handful of images – hardly assessment material for a project in photographic art.

Which of the various art forms moves me the most? Which stirs up the greatest emotions? I have to put music (certain types) at the top of the list, followed perhaps by the spoken word, films (which often have a music sound track) and the written word. Photography comes at the bottom of the list! Not only that, but I am discovering that it is easier for me to arouse empathy and emotion through the written word than through my photography (I’m not a musician, although I do occasionally write poetry). It is no wonder, then, that a lot of my montage images are failing to elicit a positive response.

This issue was brought home to me when I watched the documentary ‘A World without Downs Syndrome’, presented by Sally Phillips, a scriptwriter with an 11 year old child with Downs Syndrome. Phillips argued passionately for all mothers to have the right to choose whether to bring children with Downs Syndrome into the world, having been fully informed about the issues involved at the eight week stage now that recently developed non-invasive technology can be used with a high degree of certainty to detect Downs’ babies at that point. Furthermore, she stressed how sad and isolated people with Downs Syndrome would feel if all ‘Downs pregnancies’ were in future terminated. As part of the documentary she visited Iceland, where currently 100% of Downs pregnancies are (with parental approval) being terminated. She spoke with an Icelandic photographer who had produced a project portfolio of over 30 images of the very few Icelandic people having Downs Syndrome. I thought back to so many exhibitions that I have visited where people from minorities, migrants and people with disabilities have had their portraits taken, the portraits then being displayed in order to make political and/or socio-economic statements. Am I moved by these portraits? Very rarely. Does the accompanying text move me? More often. It is true that the images may ignite peoples’ interest in who these people are and common bond they have. However, the hard-hitting message is in the text or, in the case of Sally Phillips’ case, the spoken word and moving image. Even though I did not feel the desire to take sides in the debate I was moved by this programme in a way that would not have been possible if I had walked into a studio and seen 30+ photographs of Icelandic Downs’ Syndrome people.

What Way Forward?

So, I have identified what I feel are the key reasons for why my project may go ‘off the rails’. Basically, I have chosen a unique but extremely challenging photographic method of describing my mother’s battle with depression and its effect on me and the resultant images have not, in many cases, worked. In addition the prose that accompanies the images is likely to raise significantly more empathy in the viewer than many of images themselves – thus downgrading the images to more of a supporting role. In a photographic project the images should be at the forefront!

I will obviously need to discuss the way forward with my tutor. One possibility might be to remove some images entirely and replace others with montages that do not directly relate to events described in the accompanying text, perhaps focussing on more general issues relating to depression. This would require a lot more work and would mean throwing out much hard work and effort, but might be possible within the time constraints of the project. However, my tutor’s initial reaction to the new square ‘chapter heading’ images, which start to look at this area, was not encouraging.

I promised myself that I would produce a photo book as a personal memorial to my mother and that promise still stands, whether or not it is done within or outside the confines of this course. I am also determined to finish this course within the two years that I have to complete it, submit for assessment and earn a degree.  After that it will definitely be time to move on!

Are Photographs Indestructible?

I recently went to see the film “Suffragette”. The Suffragettes used direct action in order to press their claims for suffrage and were not above creating wanton destruction. During their campaign one lady, Mary Richardson, slashed a famous painting by Velasquez, “The Rokeby Venus”, with an axe. Thankfully the painting could be restored and it can still be seen at the National Gallery. However, many other paintings have been lost, stolen or damaged beyond repair by fire or wartime bombing. Each painting is unique and can never be replaced. Paintings may take days, weeks or months to produce but can be destroyed in seconds.

In contrast, photographic prints can be replaced provided the negative, slide or, in more recent times, the image is still available. It is true that a print produced, say, in the 1850s will be of far greater value than any reproduction but it can, nevertheless, be replaced provided the negative has been preserved in a good state. Today, provided the photographer does not accidentally or deliberately delete their original image, it can be cloned many times, backed up or altered whilst retaining the original, unaltered image. Most photographs are produced in a split second. They can be accidentally or deliberately destroyed even more quickly by pressing a button, but once downloaded they can be distributed to literally millions of people via the internet. In this case the “genie has been let out of the bottle” and it will be impossible to ever remove all the clones of the image from existence.

Paintings, too, can be reproduced in a two dimensional form by photographing them. Indeed, one of the earliest professional uses of the camera was to photograph collections of art in museums and galleries, so that a faithful record of the painting’s appearance could be made. If the painting was subsequently lost or destroyed we would at least have a faithful reproduction (in black and white until the middle of the last century) of its subject matter, preserved for posterity.

The photograph is now ever-present. We use our mobile phones and I-pads to produce and instantly distribute our photographs. However, because they are ubiquitous they have no monetary value. Only a tiny handful of photographs have value. These are either works produced by well-known art photographers such as Gursky, as well as acknowledged experts in their particular genres, or images of important events captured at the “decisive moment” by photojournalists. On the other hand paintings and other works of art that have been collected by museums and galleries invariably have value. Not only are they unique and not reproducible but they have a texture, a history and an allure that is beyond the reach of the photograph.

Once they have been copied and circulated digital images (today’s photographs) can become indestructible. However, their value, if any, is purely emotional. As in any other field of art only a tiny number of photographs will become acknowledged as masterpieces – the rest will just continually expand to fill all available digital space.