One thing I am interested in is the subject of how people cover things up and put on a front and pretend to be fine in the public eye but behind closed doors they suffer with anxiety. I have some ideas of how to approach this. I could show that person in the environment that they feel safe to let themselves express their own struggle. This idea challenges me as a photographer. It still involved truth and identity in portraiture.
I now need to research different practitioners.
Being a foreigner in Paris and feeling slightly de-rooted, I tried to get closer to the things and people around me by studying and understanding them, and that is by photographing them. Thus I started to make portraits of Parisian women, who I first felt a little distant and who I found quite different from myself and also different from what I had thought they would be. My wish was to explore what hides behind their public behaviour and how they really are when they are in their own intimacy. I love undressing people in front of my camera because I belive that it sends them back to the idea of who they are. Having nothing on to cover their bodies, my models seem to envelope themselves in their souls. It is this magic moment I am trying to capture in my lense.
“My project ‘Memories and Nightmares’ is concerned with making images inspired by narratives of individual experiences, both real and fictional. At the beginning of 2008 I asked several of my friends to send me written accounts of early childhood memories or nightmares and have discovered a rich vein of fascinating stories.
We all have our own tales and myths which we use to tell our lives. In many ways, memories are an essentially human experience, and over the years they can change; for instance, an early childhood memory will be retold and re-remembered, and the way one person describes an event may be different to others’ memory of it. In recounting nightmares, some people remember a clear narrative, others only a particular feeling or location. And of course the surreal or impossible elements of the dream, which at the time of dreaming seem entirely logical, are often the most fascinating. Our memories are part of the collection of human stories, and by using them as inspiration for these images I hope to celebrate them and encourage us to tell us more about ourselves.”
Davis account of other peoples memories and nightmares are amazing. The images are greatly detailed with the photographer constructing her own surreal sets. I find the memory images the strongest because they have more depth. There is an extremely large amount happening in each images, this make me examine them for a long time. The nightmare images are much too obvious. I think the images are aesthetically amazing but because how the devil and the woman are posing gives the images less of an impact.
The main reason I have included this photographer is because she has touched on a similar way of recreating past memories to myself.
‘In many ways, memories are an essentially human experience, and over the years they can change; for instance, an early childhood memory will be retold and re-remembered, and the way one person describes an event may be different to others’ memory of it’.
What Davis has to say about memories above is exactly how I approached my images. Instead of trying to re-create the exact scene I have shown how I felt during time time. The mood I am expressing in my series is one of darkness, and choosing not to leave that dark place in my life.
Barthes, R (1981) Camera Lucida, 67/70
An important feature of cultural resistance and alternative identity stems back to the Freudian concept of “the uncanny”. After the end of World War I, psychiatrist Sigmund Freud theorized about what he called the uncanny, or a notion of both familiarity and threat manifesting through the same person, object, or event (Israeli 379). Basically, he conceptualizes that the things we find the most terrifying appear that way because they once seemed familiar. Freud described his theory of the uncanny as such,
“This class is frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old fashioned in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression” (Israeli 381). http://students.english.ilstu.edu/rrjohns/hypertext/repurposing/uncanny.html
This boils down to the fact that the things that we find to be frightening are things that we have had contact with before, things that are part of our society already. Once something that we are familiar with undergoes change, and appears to be estranged from its original meaning or contexts, that is when we become afraid, or at least wary, of it.
This experience of being attracted to something, yet repulsed by it at the same time, creates a dissonance that often times leads to rejection of the uncanny object or notion. This reaction warrants the formation of subcultures; those who come to embrace the uncanny aspects that dominant culture has rejected and removed from the considered normal traits of society. Uncanniness often times becomes its own culture
Memories can take us to places in our life that we never thought existed. They can bring up times that are not particularly welcomed back into your life, like a death or heartache, but I believe it is how we choose to acknowledge theses memories that result in the way we led our lives.
I want to examine how I look at my past. In my previous project I studied an area in my past where I felt depressed. I looked at my life in a way I never did before. In most cases people will tell you to let your past lay where it is, “in the past’ and to move on with your life, but from my experience digging into your subconscious helps to deal with certain aspects of your life. For example during my last project I focused on a period where I couldn’t bear to look at my reflection in the mirror. By putting this into my work I started to welcome pervious infortune back into my life. As I have discovered these memories aren’t always fact, they are, at times, made up memories that appear familiar but in fact they are not. Freud calls this ‘The Uncanny’.
Freud’s description of the uncanny
“This class is frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old fashioned in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression”
What I take away from this is that, things we find frightening are things that we have come in contact with before. They are things that surround our daily lives. Once the things that we are familiar with start to change or become disconnected with its originality it is then that we become afraid or confused.
Again I am researching this because looking back at my past I cannot remember everything. I start to fill in the gaps with made up images. They appear familiar, but in reality they aren’t.
Freud is essentially talking about the real and not real. In Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ she talks about Plato’s Cave, where prisoners mistake shadows for reality, they perceive the shadows as reality and they forget that reality is somewhere else. Their lives become what is played out on the wall. For example a shadow of a chair would be talked about as an actual chair. The shadows are as close to the prisoners get to reality.
For my current project I am examining a stage of my past where I was depressed. During this time I remember people trying to help me, but I felt they were turning their back on me. It wasn’t until I overcame this dark time that I realised that I was turning my back on myself. I felt safer to stay in the shadows rather than confronting my issues. By reading about Plato’s Cave inspired this idea. I am representing reality, but with my subconscious. I want to take people inside my mind and show them, that this is how I see myself during this time. Much like Plato’s Cave when the men mistook the shadows for reality I now start looking at the images I have produced from my past as complete reality. I have started to vision myself as I am in my images, believing that this is how I actually was during the time this happened, laying around in darkness waiting for someone to pull me from it. I start to challenge my own concept of reality. The photographer Trish Morrissey has created work that challenges the concept of reality and deals with time. In her series titled seven years she uses old family photographs. Morrissey analyses the family album and how most families produce very similar family albums.
Second Draft
Freud’s description of the uncanny
“This class is frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old fashioned in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression”
What I take away from Freud’s quote is that, things we find frightening are things that we have come in contact with before. They are things that surround our daily lives. Once the things that we are familiar with start to change or become disconnected with its originality it is then that we become afraid or confused.
The photographer Trish Morrissey has created work that explores the uncanny. In her series titled ‘seven years’ she uses old family photographs. Morrissey analyses the family album and how most families produce very similar family albums. Morrissey stages these images exactly how the old pictures were taken, for example if the person taking the image accidently put their finger over the viewfinder, Morrissey would incorporate this small mistake into her series, giving them an ‘uncanny’ resemblance to the originals.
When I look at Morrissey’s seven years series I engage with them on a personal level because the images she is recreating have a strange resemblance to old photos from my child hood, and possibly, most people’s childhood pictures.
In Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ she talks about Plato’s Cave, where prisoners mistake shadows for reality, they perceive the shadows as reality and they forget that reality is somewhere else. Their lives become what is played out on the wall. For example a shadow of a chair would be talked about as an actual chair. The shadows are as close to the prisoners get to reality. They also believe that the echoes are real sounds made by the shadows. The prisoners are completely unaware of reality. Sontag related this analogy to the way we see photographs. If we look at the photograph we instantly relate it to reality but in reality what we are looking at is the paper.
Plato’s Cave, to me is a perfect analogy of how I am looking at past events in my life. What I take away from Sontag is that when I look at my past, I start to think of this in terms of time. I can remember a time I my past that was tough, but because I cannot remember most of what or why I was going through this I too am unaware of reality. What I am taking photos of could be a made up interpretation of what feel when I look back and reflect on this stage in my life. So what people will see may not necessarily be a direct link to my past, it will be how I interpret the way I see that time.
When I think about the uncanny it comes down to how we view time. Roland Barthes book Camera Lucida deals with the photograph in time. Barthes looks at images of his dead mother and discusses the importance of photography.
‘There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.’
Here Barthes says ‘gradually moving back in time with her’. This is Barthes using still images to spend time with his mother. He is essentially saying that by looking through old photos of his dead mother helps to transport him back to a time when she was alive. By doing so helps him remember (and not forget) his dead mother.
While looking at an image of his mother titled ‘The Winter Garden Photograph’ Barthes states, ‘I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother.
Barthes looks at images of his mother as a child. What he noticed from the image was expressions, which distinguished her as an adult. Barthes calls the Winter Garden photo ‘accurate’. I believe he thinks that photography can be an accurate depiction of reality. Which is false because the photo is not giving us the full story, but I understand what he means, there are time when we look at loved ones in images and we instantly see things that formed that persons character.
I am researching this because looking into my past I cannot remember everything. I start to fill in the gaps with made up images. They appear familiar, but in reality they aren’t.
For my current project I am examining a stage of my past where I was depressed. During this time I remember people trying to help me, but I felt they were turning their back on me. It wasn’t until I overcame this dark time that I realised that I was turning my back on myself. It felt safer to stay in the shadows rather than confronting my issues. By reading Sontag’s theory on Plato’s Cave made me aware how photography challenges the concept of reality. I am representing a subconscious reality with my photography. I want to take people inside my mind and show them, that this is how I see myself during this time. Much like Plato’s Cave when the men mistook the shadows for reality, I now start looking at the images I have produced from my past as reality. I have started to vision myself through my images, believing that this is how I actually was during the time this happened, laying around in darkness waiting for someone to pull me from it. I start to challenge my own concept of reality. The photographer Trish Morrissey has created work that challenges the concept of reality and deals with time. In her series titled seven years she uses old family photographs. Morrissey analyses the family album and how most families produce very similar family albums.
Memories can take us to places in our life that we never thought existed. They can bring up times that are not particularly welcomed back into your life, like a death or heartache, but I believe it is how we choose to acknowledge theses memories that result in the way we led our lives.
I want to examine how I look at my past. In my previous project I studied an area in my past where I felt depressed. I looked at my life in a way I never did before. In most cases people will tell you to let your past lay where it is, “in the past’ and to move on with your life, but from my experience digging into your subconscious helps to deal with certain aspects of your life. For example during my last project I focused on a period where I couldn’t bear to look at my reflection in the mirror. By putting this into my work I started to welcome pervious infortune back into my life. As I have discovered these memories aren’t always fact, they are, at times, made up memories that appear familiar but in fact they are not. As I have touched on above, Freud calls this ‘The Uncanny’.
My Feedback From Sian
Have you thought of a title yet?
Freud’s description of the uncanny
“This class is frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old fashioned in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression” REFERENCE this would be underneath & to the right – Author (Year:Page).
What I take away from Freud’s quote is that, things we find frightening are things that we have come in contact with before. They are things that surround our daily lives. Once the things that we are familiar with start to change or become disconnected with its originality it is then that we become afraid or confused. Great!
The photographer Trish Morrissey has created work that explores the uncanny. In her series titled ‘seven years’ she uses old family photographs. Morrissey analyses the family album and how most families produce very similar family albums. Morrissey stages these images exactly how the old pictures were taken, for example if the person taking the image accidently put their finger over the viewfinder, Morrissey would incorporate this small mistake into her series, giving them an ‘uncanny’ resemblance to the originals.
When I look at Morrissey’s seven years series I engage with them on a personal level because the images she is recreating have a strange resemblance to old photos from my child hood, and possibly, most people’s childhood pictures. Great… your writing in much improved from when we last went through your essay. These are good analytical passages, you are clearly understanding Freud and being able to apply the theory to image making. Excellent!
In Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ she talks about Plato’s Cave, where prisoners mistake shadows for reality, they perceive the shadows as reality and they forget that reality is somewhere else. Their lives become what is played out on the wall. For example a shadow of a chair would be talked about as an actual chair. The shadows are as close to the prisoners get to reality. They also believe that the echoes are real sounds made by the shadows. The prisoners are completely unaware of reality. Sontag related this analogy to the way we see photographs. If we look at the photograph we instantly relate it to reality but in reality what we are looking at is the paper. Similarly, we spoke about the weightless transparent envelope that Barthes referred to in Wednesday’s lecture. These are similar ideas and are both basically saying that we talk about the photographic image as though it WERE real. (“It’s me”)
Plato’s Cave, to me is a perfect analogy of how I am looking at past events in my life (where?) This is a good place to talk about your photographs. I sent a critical essay over that I wrote at Level 6, have a look how I wrote about my own work…
What I take away from Sontag is that when I look at my past, I start to think of this in terms of time. I can remember a time I my past that was tough, but because I cannot remember most of what or why I was going through this I too am unaware of reality. What I am taking photos of could be a made up interpretation of what feel when I look back and reflect on this stage in my life. So what people will see may not necessarily be a direct link to my past, it will be how I interpret the way I see that time.
When I think about the uncanny it comes down to how we view time. Roland Barthes book Camera Lucida deals with the photograph in time. Barthes looks at images of his dead mother and discusses the importance of photography.
‘There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.’
Here Barthes says ‘gradually moving back in time with her’. This is Barthes using still images to spend time with his mother. He is essentially saying that by looking through old photos of his dead mother helps to transport him back to a time when she was alive. By doing so helps him remember (and not forget) his dead mother. Good. You’ve clearly understood Barthes quite well.
While looking at an image of his mother titled ‘The Winter Garden Photograph’ Barthes states, ‘I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother.
Barthes looks at images of his mother as a child. What he noticed from the image was expressions, which distinguished her as an adult. Barthes calls the Winter Garden photo ‘accurate’. I believe he thinks that photography can be an accurate depiction of reality. (You can be confident here and say – ‘He believes that photography can be an accurate…’) Which is false because the photo is not giving us the full story. I understand what he means, there are times when we look at loved ones in images and we instantly see things that formed that persons character.
Such as? Might this relate again to Barthes theories on portraiture? Have you looked at Clarke as well? There’s a chapter in Charlotte Cotton that you might like to read called This Intimate Life…
I am researching this because looking into my past I cannot remember everything. I start to fill in the gaps with made up images. They appear familiar, but in reality they aren’t. This is interesting – why do you think that this is? Doesn’t the photograph take the place of reality sometimes – memory and image can become intertwined. You could start to look at the idea of memory as a part of this writing?
Through photography (?) I am currently examining a stage of my past where I was depressed. During this time I remember people trying to help me, but I felt they were turning their back on me. It wasn’t until I overcame this dark time that I realised that I was turning my back on myself. It felt safer to stay in the shadows rather than confronting my issues. By reading Sontag’s theory on Plato’s Cave made me aware how photography challenges the concept of reality. I am representing a subconscious reality with my photography. I want to take people inside my mind and show them, that this is how I see myself during this time. Much like Plato’s Cave when the men mistook the shadows for reality, I now start looking at the images I have produced from my past as reality. I have started to vision myself through my images, believing that this is how I actually was during the time this happened, laying around in darkness waiting for someone to pull me from it. I start to challenge my own concept of reality.
The photographer Trish Morrissey has created work that challenges the concept of reality and deals with time. In her series titled seven years she uses old family photographs. Morrissey analyses the family album and how most families produce very similar family albums. And how does this relate to your ideas? I think that you could find another author that talks about this work to help you with your references.
Memories can take us to places in our life that we never thought existed. They can bring up times that are not particularly welcomed back into your life, like a death or heartache, but I believe it is how we choose to acknowledge theses memories that result in the way we led our lives.
I want to examine how I look at my past. In my previous project I studied an area in my past where I felt depressed. I looked at my life in a way I never did before. In most cases people will tell you to let your past lay where it is, “in the past’ and to move on with your life, but from my experience digging into your subconscious helps to deal with certain aspects of your life. For example during my last project I focused on a period where I couldn’t bear to look at my reflection in the mirror. By putting this into my work I started to welcome pervious infortune back into my life. As I have discovered these memories aren’t always fact, they are, at times, made up memories that appear familiar but in fact they are not. As I have touched on above, Freud calls this ‘The Uncanny’. You can develop these last couple of paragraphs I think with example of other photographers work that deals with similar issues… You can use the opportunity to compare and contrast approaches to your own work with theirs.
This has come on massively since I read your last draft, you’re getting a very good idea of how to structure and write an academic essay at this level, which is great going in to your third year. You’ve understood the theories that you’ve read really well – and have tie to improve your essay through researching your ideas
more with other authors and targeting your referencing.
There’s a good tool here that shows your how to reference each type of source (on the left tabs): http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nmp/sonet/rlos/studyskills/harvard/
A few more resources with artists that might interest you:
http://www.source.ie/learning/approaches/portraiture.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibitionseries/artist-rooms/theme-portraits
In todays lecture we covered Roland Barthes book ‘Camera Lucida.’
Graham Clarke
I have gone back to Graham Clarke’s ‘The Photograph’. I have been reading the chapter on the portrait. It mainly describes the portrait as a documentation of the social classes. The part I have found interesting is on page 114. Clarke discusses the photographer August Sanders portraiture
“Sander’s images suggest an almost hidden sense of self-one asks where is the emotion, the felt dimension of these individual lives”.
Clarke is basically that Sander’s portrait’s are devoid of reality. The hidden sense of self suggests that the subjects are hiding their true identities and supressing their emotion. Personally I don’t believe it is emotion that gives the portrait layer of ‘the real’. In my opinion it can me simply a person looking directly into the lens or away for the lens. To determine what a ‘hidden sense of ones self’ is we have to ask ourselves what makes a portrait real. Everybody will have a different suggestion on what reality in a portrait if for them. It might be candid snap shots where people are dropping their guard (where actually these people may be acting for the camera so in that case are they really candid snap shots?) A candid snap shot suggests that the people being photographed don’t know they are having their portrait taken but for my experience people are mainly aware of when their picture is being taken or if they are aware there is a camera in their company they will preform for this occasion or not preform whatever the case may be. I have started asking myself, what revels a person’s true identity? Is it a mirror is it a candid snapshot? I don’t know but I do believe there is a level of the real in all portraits. As Barthes said, “everything that falls before the camera is real”.
At the moment I am in a dilemma about my project pitch. I started of wanting to explore staged narratives and playing with the idea of truth and fiction. As I have been researching and digging deep into my own mind. I have been asking myself, is this really what I want to photograph? And the answer is no. I always go back to the documentary of Sally Mann for inspiration and when I watched it for the 20th time Mann said in the documentary that you should photograph what you love and if are not photographing what you love then your work will suffer and so will you. I listened to this carefully and made the decision that I cannot waste anymore time working on the staged narrative idea any longer as it would be a waste of my time and I also don’t want my work to suffer because of it.
I have now started researching something that I love, which is portraiture. I still like the idea of truth in the portrait so my idea is not a million miles away form the last one. I want to find something in portraiture that challenges me and I think truth and identity is a good place to start. Portraiture is mainly about identity. If you look at any portrait you will be sure that the photographer was dealing with some kind of personal identity or a concept that surrounded identity. I am thinking about exploring the idea of how we lie to ourselves which deals with truth and identity. At the moment I don’t have much more to go on.
I want to ask Dave and Sian if it would be okay to end with this as I would like to present how I got to this stage, from researching staged narrative to how I arrived at my chosen area of practice. I have a tutorial with Dave in the morning so I will be such to cover this important question then.
While reading about portraiture and the early staged of photography I came across a part where Graham Clarke talks about the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype was the first photographic process that became accessible to the public. The part that interested was how he describes the daguerreotype, “it was a mirrored-image, not as we see ourselves, but as others see us. It gave, that is, the public image of a private person” (Clarke, p103)
This quote says to me that the daguerreotype was able to show the public a truth depiction of a person that is always shielded from the world. If this is true and the daguerreotype was able to show a privates persons true self to the public then the daguerreotype must have been sen as a true and honest depiction of that person in the image. I believe this to be true because the daguerreotype could not be manipulated (in no way that I have heard) so there for the subject would be sitting for a long exposure which would mean it would be almost impossible to keep a fake persona of ones self for that length of time. I recently took a 3 minute exposure of myself using the wet-plate process and I found that you get lost in the moment and because the exposure is so long you cannot possibly express yourself in a way that will led people to think that you are a different person from the one in the image.
The end of year show is not far away and we have been meeting for this past month to plan and strategies. I am on the financial team along with Sylwia and Lynn for second year. I ma happy to be on this team as I was part of the financial team last year. The planning of the exhibition takes time and things got off to a slow start (which is to be expected). As part of the financial team it is our job to contact breweries and printing companies. For the end of year show we are planning to have booklets made up which will be handed out to people as they walk through the door. This booklet will include short introductions about the photographers and their work that is on display. I have got two quotes from Printed.com which I have attached below.
We are now waiting for Printed.com to get back to us about printing the booklets for a lower price in return we will advertise their logo on the booklet.
Emmett Hunt
Statement Of Intent
The working title of my project is ‘unknown fiction’ or ‘real truth fiction fake’. The title comes from the question I ask myself on a daily basis, which is, is there reality in the image and can I as a photographer depict reality through portraiture? When families see a picture of a loved one or some they know well, you often hear them say, ‘that has captured the real you’. I want to experiment with this idea true photography and work towards producing a series of images that blur the line between reality and fiction. What I am aiming for is to create a scene and challenge the viewer’s perception of what they believe reality to be when exemplified through photography. I intend to create six images of different scenes, which will include people.
Research Plan
Researching books and other practitioners will help me produce a strong level of understanding of what I want to achieve with my images and what I want the finished aesthetics to be.
Resources include books such as;
The photographer that I am drawing most of my creativity from is Philip-Lorca diCorcia. DiCorcia’s images have an elaborate staged quality to them for example he achieves this fictional aesthetic by using lighting and giving the images a cinematic look.
To ensure I get the best from my images I will experiment with old and new processes such as the wet plate collodion, film and digital format cameras. Because I am researching reality in photography by using these different processes will help me understand if there are higher degrees of reality in each process. I will conduct practice shoots which will allow mw to expand on my knowledge of my chosen conceptual practice.
A timeline of my work and actions is important and ensure that I deliver my work on time and in a professional manner. The timeline will be set up on my calendar, this has proved a successful time management process in the past and one I will continue to use.
In order to get the highest standard of work from myself I will set up one to one tutorials with my tutors and allow them evaluate my progress. Through these tutorials I will asses the success of my project with the constructive criticism that has given to me.
Today I have been researching staged narrative. I have been interested in staged narrative for a number of reasons. I would like to work with cinematic light and I would like to work with the idea of fiction and reality. I have found images that illustrate a staged narrative. I like these image and I like how the photographer has come up with a different scenarios for the people to act out.
While looking into a staged narratives I remember that some photographers, such as Jeff Wall and Tom Hunter. In the attached document I have copied into this note gives me a good insight in the staged narrative and where it comes from.
http://www.answers.com/topic/staged-photography
“Staged photography involves a performance enacted before the camera, akin to the arrested dramas of tableaux vivants and poses plastiques. It embraces studio portraiture and other more or less elaborate, peopled scenarios directed or manipulated by the photographer. In the 19th century, the intention was often allegorical. One of the earliest-known dramas staged for the camera was Hippolyte Bayard’s Le Noyé (The Drowned Man, 1840), a self-portrait intended as a protest against the French government’s apparent indifference to his development of a paper-based photographic process in 1839. An early example of staged photojournalism was Gioacchino Altobelli’s (1814-78) image of Italian troops ‘storming’ Rome’s Porto Pia on 21 September 1870, the day after the actual event.
Though the fictional and artistic impulses of staged photography have persisted throughout the medium’s history, two major periods of staged photography can be identified: mid- Victorian narrative photography, and a late 20th-century critique of representation informed by conceptualism and postmodern theory.
Nineteenth-century staged photographs sometimes involved techniques such as multiple exposure or combination printing. Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s controversial The Two Ways of Life (1857), for example, created from 32 wet-plate negatives, is an ambitious example of the latter. The discrete elements are staged in the studio, while the overall composition is manipulated in the darkroom. Henry Peach Robinson, who learned from Rejlander, won acclaim with painstakingly assembled pictures such as Fading Away (1858). The narrative intention of his imagery was frequently reinforced by the transcription of lines of verse on the mount, as with The Lady of Shalott (1861).
Many Victorian photographers, however, created narrative scenes using a single negative. In the 1850s-1960s, Lady Hawarden photographed her daughters in elaborate costumes and dramatic poses, to suggest and inspire stories. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) photographed young girls in a variety of roles, and choreographed images that made reference to dreams and myths. Julia Margaret Cameron conflated the ‘real’ with the ‘ideal’ in a series of photographic personifications, e.g. by portraying her maid as the Madonna. In 1874-5, she directed scenes from Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King for use as photographic illustrations. The famous collaboration between Countess Castiglione and Pierre-Louis Pierson between 1856 and 1898 produced over 400 staged scenes based on contemporary fiction and events from Castiglione’s life.
But by far the largest number of 19th-century staged photographs were either by anonymous individuals, or by others whose names alone have survived. They were among the thousands of ‘operators’ who fed the boom in stereoscopic photography between the 1850s and the 1900s. In addition to countless views and architectural studies, stereo publishers issued narrative series on religious, historical, fairy-tale, and erotic subjects. Most used live models, costumed or not, while some incorporated figurines or cardboard cut-outs. Examples from the prolific London Stereoscopic Company included titles like A Ghostly Warning, a hand-coloured scene by James Elliott showing two men terrified by a female apparition, The Death of Thomas a’Becket, also by Elliott, and a Hamlet series by ‘Phiz’. These and thousands of other picture stories produced by hundreds of companies around the world anticipated both the cinema and other mass-market products like the photoromance.
In the 20th century, portraiture and self-portraiture continued to incorporate staged manipulations of the self, from de Meyer, Beaton, and Yevonde to Cahun and Leibovitz. Fantasies of glamour and consumption, often involving elaborate sets or exotic locations, became central to fashion and advertising photography. Likewise with erotic photography, both in its most sophisticated (commercial and private) manifestations and at the high-street level of makeover and boudoir images.
In the late 20th century, staged photography became overtly theorized and politicized. Artifice was accentuated in a bid to question narrative authenticity and undermine belief in ‘documentary truth’. Quotation and parody were deployed as critical tools. Digital technology offered new ways to combine disparate moments and interrogate accepted meanings. From the 1970s, Jeff Wall problematized the relationship between photography, documentary, and art in his dramatizations of apparently ordinary street scenes and social encounters. As with much 19th-century staged photography, his constructed realities regularly quote from the history of painting, although his purpose is different. Depicting the photographer and his camera reflected in a large mirror, Picture for Women (1979) takes Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1881-2) as its referent. Joel-Peter Witkin has constructed photographs that refer directly or indirectly to well-known paintings, in order to subvert stereotypes and transgress notions of taste; Las Meninas, New Mexico (1987) is a provocative appropriation of Velázquez’s famous group portrait of King Philip IV of Spain’s family (1656). Often adopting fancy dress and prosthetics, Cindy Sherman has emphasized artifice to question the representation of femininity, and the existence of an essential, unified subjecthood. The parodic intent of her black-and-white Untitled Film Stills (1970s-1980s) increasingly gave way, in later works, to images of the abject and macabre. Other authors of staged series from the 1980s and early 1990s include the American Duane Michals (Christ in New York, 1981), the Australians Farrell & Parkin (Rose Farrell and George Parkin, both b. 1949; Repentance, 1988; A Passion for Maladies, 1990-1), and the British photographer Colin Gray (b. 1956; The Parents, 1985).
In Twilight (1998-9), Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962) borrows familiar tropes from American cinema, and ‘makes them strange’. His images of suburbia are ambiguous, surreal, and unnerving, suggesting a narrative that resists resolution. Tina Barney (b. 1945) and Hannah Starkey (b. 1968) dramatize seemingly everyday situations. Their aim, however, is to suggest hidden psychological states. Members of Barney’s family appear before the camera stilted, self-conscious, and tense. Starkey’s tableaux, featuring teenage girls, articulate the apparent ennui of growing up in late capitalist society. In Spirit West (2001), Justine Kurland (b. 1969) directed a cast of adolescent girls who enact enigmatic dramas in the landscape.”
The index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” —Peirce
This morning I read this introduction on indexicality.
The first paragraph of this introduction discusses that photography has lost its credibility as a trace of the real. It focuses on digital photography in particular because we are after all living in a digital era. It goes on to say “the digital offers an ease of manipulation and distance from any referential grounding that seem to threaten the immediacy and certainty of referentiality”. What I take from this is that because of the digital era it has become much easier to manipulate an image which creates this separation of whats real in the image.
While reading this introduction I was confused as to what ‘indexicality’ means. From what I understand, ‘indexicality’ is one of three sign modalities or expressions.
‘Aiming to specify what was different and unique about seventies art in relation to previous projects of abstraction. Krauss, in a brilliantly intuitive gesture, pointed to the dominance of a photographic logic in that art working to suggest, “the mute presence of an uncoded event”. Citing Barthes’s analysis of the photograph as a “message without a code”.
I was struggling to understand what was being said here until I read this paragraph. What I now understand is that Krauss was saying that the art work of the seventies did not have to be decoded like past art movements such as abstraction it was a ‘mute presence’. Barthes says a ‘message without a code’. I think they were trying to basically say was ‘things speak for themselves, they are not spoken’. To grasp a greater understanding of this I looked up ‘signifier’ and the signified. The the signifier is the visual key within an image and the signified can transmit a message or concept. For example, the glowing neon sign in a shop window that says ‘OPEN’ is a ‘signifier’ and the signified is that the shop is indeed open and you are permitted to enter.
Indexicality does not simply have to do with the trace-like property of the photograph but also with the sheer fact that it was taken.
The specific engagement of the photography with the real lays in its recourse to performativity. It points to what is there: “These photographs point to the real while reminding us that photography can NEVER represent it”.
Fascination of time fossilised.
I found this introduction tough to read and to understand but I have taken away some aspects that I can turn into my own ideas.
For example the biggest thing that sticks out to me is the part where she says that digital photography has lost its credibility as a trace of the real. What I think she is trying to say here is the immediacy of the medium (photography) has distanced itself from the ‘real’ because of how easy it has become to altar the image in order to replace the original truth or purpose the image once stood for.
Emmett Hunt Photography 