Exercise 2.3: Typologies

Posted on February 3, 2020 by gingervisions

In 1975, William Jenkins curated a photographic exhibition which he called New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape. The exhibition featured works by Stephen Shore, Nicholas Nixon, Lewis Baltz and others that rejected the canon of the idealised landscape photograph depicting beautiful natural vistas and concentrated instead on showing the everyday impact of mankind’s urbanisation of the land.

The exhibition was universally derided, the images deemed banal and dull. Shore’s works in colour were considered career suicide, and indeed it has taken many years for the true influence of his work to be recognised. Today, Shore’s influence is seen on every social media site in millions of images uploaded daily, from ordinary street scenes to people’s dinners. Shore’s work is more than merely vernacular, though. Despite having been called ‘snapshots’ his images display evidence of careful composition and mastery of colour.

Similarly, the use of typologies in photography was deemed a novel method of recording which shows its influence in social media today. Nowadays there are flickr groups dedicated solely to photographs of telephone boxes, doors and water towers, but the 1980 series Water Towers by Bernd and Hilla Becher were part of the derided Topographics exhibition. In displaying a series of objects of the same type together, the objects take on a new significance. The viewer starts to notice subtle differences between the individual water towers and the group becomes an object in itself, a collection of pieces which is in itself more significant than the sum of its parts.

References:

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/feb/08/new-topographics-photographs-american-landscapes [accessed 2 February 2020]

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/09/stephen-shore-america-colour-photography-1970s [accessed 2 February 2020]

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bernd-becher-and-hilla-becher-water-towers-p81238 [accessed 2 February 2020]

Exercise 2.2: Explore a Road

Posted on February 2, 2020 by gingervisions

I take a daily walk during my lunch break so for this exercise I decided to record what I notice when taking this familiar path. The process was not pre-mediated so the photographs are of random objects and scenes that caught my eye.

Looking over the result, I think the common themes that thread through these images are humankind’s impact on nature and pattern and colour.

For the second part of this exercise I watched the film Mango Dreams. The film follows a Hindu doctor, Amit Singh, as he is diagnosed with dementia and takes a road trip with a Muslim rickshaw driver, Salim, to revisit the locations of the major milestones in his life before he forgets the memories forever.

At the beginning of the film we see Dr. Singh as a young child walking down a path in a sepia tinted clip interspersed with a modern day adult Singh running down a path; the path is used as the connection between the two scenes, acting as a metaphor for the passing of time. Shortly after we see Singh and his friend watching a television history documentary on the partition of India; scenes of thousands of refugees walking and travelling uses the road to signify mass migration and displacement.

After his dementia diagnosis, Dr. Sing’s son arrives from America, wanting to move him into a nursing home until he can be moved to America. The two men fight and Dr. Singh walks out. We see him walking down dusty streets; the road has now come to signify his escape and freedom.

Dr. Singh meets rickshaw driver Salim who reveals the doctor saved his son’s life some years ago and would not accept any payment and offers to take him anywhere he wants to go. Dr. Sing answers ‘home’; he wants to return to his childhood home.

The two embark on their journey, and the road becomes a metaphor for the development of their relationship. There are many arguments between the two and we learn that Salim hates Hindus because his wife had been raped and burned to death by Hindu rioters in Gujarat. Dr. Singh talks of his family who were murdered by Muslims, and of the personal responsibility he feels for the death of his brother. We see the road develop from dusty track to tarmac roads to multi-lane highway as the pair visit sites such as Dr. Singh’s college where he studied to become a doctor and the orphanage where he met his future wife. The locations are in reverse chronological order in Dr. Singh’s lifetime; the road follows a timeline backwards through his life.

Eventually, Dr. Singh’s son catches up with him and after some discussion and argument, the two embark on the final leg of the journey on foot, with Salim in his rickshaw following behind. The road has become a simple dirt track again as the trio journey to Dr. Singh’s birthplace and the location of his family’s murders.

The road performs several aids to the storyline in this film; as well as the literal interpretation of the journey, we see it as a link to time. At the same time as Dr. Singh is moving forward on his journey, he is moving backwards to relive his past. We also see scenes of mass displacement via the images of refugees travelling along roads and this links to Dr. Singh’s physical and mental displacement from his childhood and his quest to reconnect with his memories. The road also follows the thread of the relationship between Dr. Singh and Salim as they slowly cast aside their preconceptions of different religions and become close friends over the course of the long journey.

Exercise 2.1: Territorial Photography

Posted on February 2, 2020 by gingervisions

In Joel Snyder’s essay Territorial Photography he discusses The developments in American landscape photography practices from the 1850s to the 1870s. He begins by explaining how early photographers were from privileged backgrounds and were familiar with tropes of landscape depiction learned from paintings; the picturesque and the naturalistic.

However, by the mid-1950s photographers were increasingly from less educated backgrounds and this led to a turn to a more factual, realistic and ‘mechanical’ approach to landscape photography.

By the 1860s the value of photography for documentary use was becoming more recognised and thus more practised. Photography leaned further toward ‘articulation, high finish and precise rendering of detail’. One photographer to embrace this new direction was Carleton Watkins. A champion of progress, he was devoted to the idea of developing the land with new railroads and other industrial innovations but did not seem to have considered the impact on the local inhabitants. Snyder discusses how Watkins’ images show of locations including Utah, Nevada and Yosemite Park show man made infrastructure and the natural landscape coexisting in picturesque harmony alongside each other.

In contrast, Snyder examines the work of Timothy O’Sullivan, who participated in two geological surveys across Nevada, Utah and New Mexico, and whose work depicts the land as bleak and inhospitable. O’Sullivan was not given any specific instructions or brief but was merely told to ‘give the sense of the place’.

The difference in approach by Watkins and O’Sullivan can clearly be seen in the images below.

Watkins’ image is idyllic and picturesque and follows the traditional landscape composition; even today it could be produced as a picture postcard.

Carleton Watkins

Cathedral Rocks, 2,600ft, Yosemite

In contrast, O’Sullivan’s image defies landscape tradition in using a portrait format and the composition is arranged so that the rock completely blocks the sky. Unlike Watkins’ image, the landscape looms forebodingly and even the evidence of human habitation in the form of the Anasazi Indian pueblo does little to convince the viewer that the land is hospitable, not least because of its location at the mouth of the vast cave entrance which diminishes it into insignificance.

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona (1873)

References:

www.britannica.com/biography/Timothy-OSullivan [accessed 18 January 2020]

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2014/nov/04/carleton-watkins-yosemite-photography-america [accessed 19 January 2020]

Assignment One – Beauty and the Sublime

Posted on February 1, 2020 by gingervisions

I spent a lot of time thinking about the sublime for this section of the course and what it means to me. For me it is a sense of longing mixed with trepidation, of desire for something mixed with a sense of uncertainty or danger. I saw several examples of works that represent the Sublime; a common subject in this area is the sea as I discovered in works by Tacita Dean, Nadav Kander and Dafna Talmor.

Thinking about my own experience, as a parent the greatest day to day fear is of something happening to my children. My daughters are of the age to be beginning to forge their own independence, with some of my eldest’s friends allowed to ‘hang out’ with others in various public spaces. Whilst at my aunt’s recently she told me that an unexplored World War Two bomb had been found in the woods where we used to play as children and I distinctly remember as a child seeing a bra hung from a tree and wondering what had happened to its owner. It is the attractiveness of these places that are so desirous to youngsters with their ability to stir up mixed emotions of being grown up coupled with the possibility of a sense of the unknown, even danger and the parents’ over-imaginative visions of terrible accidents and abduction that I have chosen to explore with this project.

Having seen Mark Preston’s work Zone A – A Palestinian View of Jerusalem I became interested in the cyanotype process and liked the idea of using it on a more industrial subject other than the usual delicate florals with which it is traditionally associated in art. I also looked at the work of Dafna Talmor and liked the idea of holes in the image seeming to represent the uncomfortable, even dangerous. Similarly, Aliki Braine uses holes in her work, this time to encourage the viewer to fill in what is missing from their own imaginations.

With the above in mind I have created a series of cyanotypes of the places children and youths like to play and congregate independently, the places where they can be free of parental influence for a short time. Such locations are beautiful in their own way by being desirable and exciting not only for the escape from adult control but also the very fact that parents often do not really like their children playing there coupled with the sense of unknown danger. The sign at the railway line wants of the danger of trains, a lone man walks across the deserted car park, a crudely made rope swing resembles a noose, all alluding to the fear of the parents and hint at the possibility of something going wrong. The black circles resemble holes that allow the viewer to insert their own imaginary fears and thus the work becomes more personal.

I would like to develop this work further and experiment with cutting actual holes of different shapes into the images. I have not done this at this stage due to the time constraints of making individual cyanotypes and the need to move on in the course. I would also like to try burning the images and investigating other methods of destruction to find alternative ways of representing the trepidation element of the works.

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