Exhibition Feedback

I have been recieving feedback on the photographs I chose to exhibit.

Comments on the whole have been encouraging thus far,

Comments have ranged from " You create dreamscapes" to "Evocative landscapes that make me want be there now" and " These photgraphs have made me smile. I love them"
I must be doing something right.

Evaluating Practice

‘The way we see things is affected by what we know, or what we believe’ (Berger, 1972: 8)

This statement is obviously accurate, but it does not take into account temporary changes in mood, we might know its wrong to kill another human being, but feel there is justification for photgraphing somebody else doing it.

 

Execution of VietCong soldier 1968

Equally we may have ethical or religious qualms about suicide, yet would we stop to photograph it if we passing?

                                                 Buddhist Monk Self Immolation 1963

This puts power in the hands of those making the images. Both could be used for propaganda. We may see either of these occurences as good or bad, important or not, but its those who then look at the images produced who have the final word.

I can put a picture of a dead tree on a wall. If I explain its dead because it was poisoned by broadleaf weedkillers, then viewers may be symnpathetic to its passing. With no explanation it is just a dead tree. 
But when its the last tree, what then? That ha nothing to do with my knowledge, my perspective or my mood. It is a record of fact. Thats the distinction. We might take photographs as an aid to memory of a special occasion, a holiday, a wedding, a birth. Our mtoives are selfish and are informed by the lives we have led. 
Photography as information, or documentary is something quite different, as the images above show.

 

Pre or post processing?

I tend to apply filters to my work after I have taken photographs when I get home. My visual problems make it difficult to see small LED screens, and in the light of day it becomes more impossible still

I am enjoying messing around with filters and effects, as the next few images should attest.

I am learning to see my images in a different light, for want of a better phrase, and am beginning to feel that I can bring real creativity to them

Exhibition

My work is being exhibited at The Octagon Theatre in Yeovil Somerset. They kindly agreed to take 23 images from three series and exhibit them for me. My first exhibition, this was a steep learning curve. Which order to hang them in? How to show off each series to best advantage?

Its quite a large space, and to fill it properly was a bit of a challenge.

As can be seen, after 6 hrs of moving stuff ,reframing and hanging it was all finished. I couldnt have done it withoput Pauline Burr, above, who guided me through all the vagueries.

Parkinson and Post-Modernism

“I like there to be a joke in practically every photo I take. Nobody has the right to make photography boring."

Norman Parkinson had a career spanning over fifty y7ears. Many see him as the grandfather of modern fashion photography. I believe there was a more complex side to his work.

                                           Fashion shoot New York 1963  Norman Parkinson

The image above gives us a small glimpse into the worlod he was creating. The humour is obviously there, the billboard advertisement mirroring the the gaze of the viewer, but look more closely and there are two iconic pieces of Americana in the photograph. We see the Shell logo on the left and the Coca cola logo on the right.
This brings the question "What is the bloke on the billboard actually looking at?"
We have any number of interpretations of what constitutes post modernism, the humour, the message, its inscrutability. I think Parkinson was embracing it with gusto.

                                           Wenda and the Cow  1954  Norman Parkinson

In the image above we see a great old staple of post modernism, the juxtposition of the unlikely. The humour is there and as usual the composition is faultless.

2.5.2 Thoughts on Post-Modernism

Researching ideas based on post modern photography I am finding lots of wonderful practitioners.





 



Sumpfinselwormloch from Scottlandfuturebog by Nicolas Kahn and Richard Selesnick
Accessed at    https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-725-fall2013/files/2013/11/Picture-8.png  1/3/17

And I am also discovering that postmodernism stirs people up a bit.

  The post-modernism movement is based on the unfortunate belief that the most important purpose of art is to deal with theoretical intellectual issues. So, following in the footsteps of the post-modernist painters, post-modernist photographers take un-creative badly-composed, crappy-looking photographs of mundane subjects, and print them with tricky edge effects and other gimmicks (such as enormous size and cutesy frames) to hide their pathetic lack of substance, and then stand around in their hip haircuts and black turtlenecks waxing eloquent about all the grand intellectual theoretical issues that their great works supposedly raise.
    And, if you ever make the fatal mistake of admitting that you don't "get it", you're instantly relegated to the masses of lower beings who aren't smart enough to understand real "art." What a sad state of affairs! I've personally never seen a post-modernist photo that I'd hang on my wall if it were free.
    What this movement misses is the tremendous capacity for art to carry an intuitive message that speaks to our spirit on a primal level which cannot be reduced to bland intellectual concepts. Just think of Bach's fugues, and think of how silly it would be to sit around and talk about the theoretical issues they raise. To anyone willing to show up with their soul, the meaning of Bach's fugues is obvious and profound, and no amount of intellectual discussion would ever convey their meaning to someone who didn't get it directly from the music. That's what all of great art was about for 4000 years or so, until the modernists showed up and turned art into a self-aggrandizing sales pitch based on intellectual intimidation. Happily, that movement finally seems to be coming to a close (for some wonderful articles on this, check out http://www.artrenewal.org/).

     regards,
    ~chris jordan (Seattle)
    www.chrisjordanphoto.com  accessed 09/03/17





Jordan's statement that postmodern photography "misses ... the tremendous capacity for art to carry an intuitive message" is surely counter intuitive. The whole point of postmodernism, to my mind at least is that it relies on the viewers intuition. A denial of the right to authorship allows for an intuitive viewing. 

 If for instance, I show this image with the title "Misty morning" I am leading the viewer into an autumnal vision of bucolic romanticism. If I call it "Two lovely trees just before they were cut down to make way for an abbatoir" it creates a whole new mental, intuitive image. If I give it no title at all, I suspect due to its subject matter, the first description weill probably uppermost in viewers minds. 
But a more abstracted image, that is an image created to form conflict or tension, an image created to provoke thought, or even intuition works completely differently.

 This image works completely differently. The subject matter is to some extent alien. If I were coming to this image as a viewer I would be asking how big are the dice? How far away is the sea? Is there a significance to the combination of numbers? Why are the dice red? Why are they there at all?
If as the photographer I leave this untitled then every viewer has the chance to ask these questions or not, and form an intuitive opinion. I can take this intuition away simply by giving the photograph a title, for instance " Two concrete dice left on a beach by a giant", or "Installation no 6". Either way, I have led the viewer down a path I want them to walk. 
Barthes' "Death of the author" frees us from explanation. It also frees us from forcing the viewer to look at a photograph in exactly the same way we do. It creates the opportunity for the viewer to have an intuitive opinion, and that is what I am striving to create within my own practice.


 

2.6.1 A sea of images

 A sea of images? What does that mean? According to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette  "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation… The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective."

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette    on       http://arthistoryunstuffed.com/postmodernism-in-photography

Accessed   1/3/17

So everything around us has been turned into a never ending stream of disparate objectified images being fired at us from a myriad of sources. Faced with this fact it would seem to be extremely difficult to be original, or at least to produce an original image. 

 

 Untitled  K Darling-Finan 2017

Is this original? What does it say? Whats going on? Is anything going on? Quite obviously an image of a horse's hoof. We are all au fait with horse's hooves,  but where was it? Where had it been? Where was it going? Was anybody riding it? To illustrate this further,

 

 

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978    accessed at    http://art134.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/post-modern-photography-idea-before.html         1/3/17

 We are all aware of cityscapes. Cindy Sherman creates an image here with post-modern attributes. Firstly it is enigmatic we have to create it's story ourselves, it is untitled. Secondly it has cinematic properties, indeed it is called Untitled Film Still. What film could this have been? Did it exist at all? Thirdly and most importantly (to me at least), is it's obscurity, it's denial of convention. The image is given a name which leads us down a path. How would we interpret this image without that prompt?

That brings me to the reason for this upload. I am increasingly drawn to the post-modern in my own practice. The concept of  The death of the author as written about by Roland Barthes which revolves around the denial of description, or at least the denial of ego, almost the negation of ownership of any creative work. Leaving personality aside and leaving the reader, watcher or listener to construct the narrative in it's purest form, without reference to the authors age, personality ethnicity or belief. Therefore in my practice I am now deliberately not titling my work in an effort to force the viewer to construct their own story based on what they are looking at.

                                       Untitled  K Darling-Finan 2017

I am embracing this post-modern ideal as I believe it is a way to show true originality. The image above has no title. There is nobody visible in it. Not a lot is happening but it is still possible to construct any number of narratives from it.