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.

 

Reflection Module 2 3.1

How many images  do we see in a day? How many do we see and not notice?How many move us? How many do we recoil from? One study, available here, www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads-see-one-day/10 Sep 2015     suggests the figure is somewhere between 4000 and 10000 images. And it has to be said that most of these are trying to sell us something. Not only advertising, but we might look at this car or that coat, this sandwich or that drink, and decide that is what we would like. This subliminal desire to possess is what fuels and motivates advertisers.

as far as individual images aqre concerned, they can be used to create a need, to create a mood or to create fear.

 The following video, The damage of life by Hawkwind (Agents of chaos) is an example of  anti propaganda. I have muted the music so it doesnt detract from the imagery. The sheer volujme of disparate images contained within it serve to show allegorically the kind of onslaught we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

 


 So where does this leave my practice? What bearing does it have on anything I do?
My work is becoming increasingly Post Modern.  There are cinematic inflouences creeping into what I am producing. I find myself harking back to the work of Edward Hopper.

Landscape 34 (2016)

Landscape 34 is an attempt to create a narrative within the viewers mind, a subconscious storytelling. There are elements both seen and unseen, shown and also implied. I have only realised its cinematic properties since engaging with this module.

So where do I go from here?  It was formerly my intention to show that visually challenged people can hacve a photographic voice, and that voice can sit shoulder to shoulder with almost anybody else holding a means to take or make a photograph. I am still persuing that objective, indeed I am running tutorials for other visully challenged people and organising an exhibition of their work in an effort to prove what I am saying.
My own work however, is shifting towardsa more constructed approach. I am finding more opportunities to photgraph images which consist of two colours or shades of two colours

 A30 Traffic lights, green (2016)

 Blue moon over petrified forest (2016)

 Moon over Sherborne (2017)

The three images above serve to illustrate this point about limited palettes. I am amazed by how many of the images I take have only two colours.
But back to advertising. The consumer society exploded into life in the 1950s in America, with every mod con and futuristic car being snapped up by the Jioneses and all their neighbours.

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? Richard Hamilton 1956
accessed at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-just-what-was-it-that-made-yesterdays-homes-so-different-so-appealing-upgrade-p20271   12/02/2017

Richard Hamilton's collage sums up this period perfectly, he asks a question wryly, the answer as we can see is that to be different we have to be the same. To appeal to us  we have to possess all the things advertisers are telling us we must. Mayhbe this is the lens we should look at all the images thrown at us on a daily basis. Hamilton shows us the vacuousness of advertising, 

One last thought. If you waqnted to advertise yourself and all your ideals, what better place than on a stamp?

These are stamps featuring the head of Adolph Hitler. Suddenly his image was all over the world. .

Exploring contexts reflection

This has been quite a challenging but eventful week for me. I have learned how to build an online gallery for my images with Wix, which can be found here.
 http://kdfphotography.wixsite.com/kdf1

It was not as challenging as I had assumed it would be, and it is quite satisfying to see the  whole thing taking shape as a vehicle for my ongoing work.

My project proposal has mutated into a different beast, with me now deciding to concentrate on my own work and to curate an exhibition of work by visually handicapped photographers alongside it.

To this end I have made contact with a blind society and they are going to ask their members for volunteers. They have about 30 already!

I have been very lucky to have  been offered a very large exhibition space for my own work, and I have decided to split this in two for myself and the curated part of the project.

I am looking forward to the challenge of curating work by others. the examples I have seen so far are both impressive for their attention to composition and surprising for their attention to detail. There seems also to be a certain amount of humour present, of which more at a later time.

Peer commissioned micro project

This project was an opportunity to find out if I could deliver an image requested quite specifically by one of my peers. I must admit to being a bit trepidatious when I first considered it, but as time went on it definitely got easier.

This is the brief that Philip gave me "The theme is "autumn flora". The twist is to produce an image of some autumnal flowers, but indoors in a still-life. And possibly shot in the style of the impressionists."

I don't usually do still life, much less work indoors, so I thought this was going to be quite a challenge for me. I thought long and hard about what "Autumn flora" might mean. Flowers that appear in autumn? Fungi? I finally decided to show flowers that had come to the end of their lives, their autumn, if you like.

I guessed a bunch of dead flowers wasn't going to show what was asked for, and would not show what I wanted it to. 

I realised quite quickly that there had to be something else in the image to point the viewer towards the theme of autumn. So I decided to stage the flowers (Roses in this case)with apples, autumn leaves and a conker. i figured this would give a sense of the season and possibly act as allegory for the autumn of the flowers.

The photograph itself was quite straightforward to make once I had worked out the composition. I decided to add a few jars of pickles and preserves to further show it was autumn, and took the photograph.

The next problem was how to make it look impressionistic? I knew from previous studies that the impressionists were not really enamoured with decay or death, preferring to celebrate life in the main , with just a few exceptions.

So I used a bit of artistic licence and decided to make the photograph look more like a late renaissance image, a time when the fascination for dead animals and rotten fruit was at its strongest. 

I darkened the image down a bit,gave it some more soft focus, added a partial vignette and gave it a bit of a dirty wash to make it look like a painting with the varnish going off a bit.

Philip was happy with the result, so I count this exercise as a success. 

Once again I have found that working outside my comfort zone has been really quite fulfilling. As I have said before I do not really see any new challenges in what I do usually, and i feel I am become stale within it. These new challenges are helping me to use my creative side in a way I would never have considered before. I like solving puzzles and solving problems, and this seems to be giving me an opportunity to do both. I know the finished image is quite amateur, but I am beginning to see how I could make my work look at least as if I might know what I am doing.

There were a number of abortive attemptsw, different lighting composition etc, and a few follow here.

 

 

Reflection on project proposal

My project proposal "The art of seeing, an exploration of light", seems to be firming up a bit more in my mind now. I have more of an idea of which direction I might be taking it, or is it taking me?

We see so many images on a daily basis, we ignore most of them. So we have this repository of images in our head, a dustbin full of memories we are not really aware of.

My project is about showing what is seen but unseen. It is about how some things can be visible but invisible at the same time. A simple example of this would be to ask yourself the last time you noticed a postman going about his business when you were not actually waiting for a letter, or you were just bimbling along the street. If he was there you saw him, but you didnt realise you had. He is both visible and invisible.

That is the experience of many disabled people, both blind and sighted. Visible but overlooked. My project, I hope will bring about a greater awareness of all those things we see but do not notice. I have asked some people who live locally and are registered blind to take some photographs so that I can find out if there is any subject which binds their creativity together, for instance family, food, pets, gardens etc. I might be surprised and be faced with wonderful abstraction, I just don't know.

In any case that mini project will hopefully inform my ongoing work and give it some direction. 

Photography and Ethics Who's moral compass?

 In a world where an image can be sent to millions of places in a split second via the touch of a button, it is increasingly difficult to ensure images are not used in a way which is contrary to the photographers original intent.

 Jeff Mitchell's image of refugees waiting to cross the border from Croatia into Slovenia speaks of the misery that the conflicts in the Arab world have created. They appear to be patient people,mostly male.


 
 
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/22/jeff-mitchells-best-shot-the-column-of-marching-refugees-used-in-ukips-brexit-campaign     
retrieved 23/10/16

It became this during the UK Referendum campaign by UKIP, a British political party of the right of politics to leave the EU of 2016






https://politicaladvertising.co.uk/2016/06/20/breaking-point/      retrieved 23/10/16

Ukip were trying to play to the fears of the white working class and the retired that all of these people would be getting on the next train to St Pancras and over running the UK. You might notice if you compare the copies of this photograph that the box which says "Leave the European Union" is covering up the only ostensibly white person in the photograph. Blatant racism and xenophobia.

Jeff Mitchell was understandably upset by the use of his image in this way, but he had sold it and the rights to it to Getty Images who had licenced it's use in this campaign. 

It is arguable that picture libraries and archives should investigate a bit more thouroughly to what use images they lease will be put, buit there is also, I think an argument for a change in the way photographers sell their images to photobanks. 

In this case a perfectly legitimate image of the effects of sustained warfare on humanity was changed into an obscene xenophobic, racist image for the purposes of political scaremongering. 

With technology becoming ever more prevalent, and the internet becoming more of a staple in our lives than a luxury, as it was previously, I think the time has come for some kind of conversation regarding the licensing of images, especially in a world where there are such religious and racial tensions and ongoing wars. 

We as photographers have a moral duty to show things "As they are", but that deuty swings both ways as far as the organisations we sell or lease our images to. They also have a duty to ensure that images are not used to incite hatred of any kind.

Re-Thinking Photographers

For what it's worth, I think the line between "Photographers" and "Non photographers" has become so blurred as to make any kind of comparison meaningless. The days of the celebrity photographer are coming to an end with the proliferation of ever more sophisticated cameras on smartphones, backed up by production software that does all the work for the snapper.
The perception of the photographer is coloured by which of the genres of photography he represents. There is still a mistrust and loathing for the "Papppazi" type photogaphers who were variously blamed for the death of Princess Diana, with all its attendant hysteria, but as Josie rightly points out, Medical photography is probably something that never enters the mind of a non photographer.
Being pedantic I would suggest that as soon as anyone records an image on a camera, or a smartphone, then they are a photographer. If you asked 5000 people to take a photo of a sunset on thier phone, probably some would be good photos, and a fair few would be outstanding, but although they were taken by photographers, they were not taken by professional photographers. The attitude is that all a pro does is be in the right place at the right time, best equipment, best corporate back up, etc etc.
In my experience the truth is rather different. Standing up to my knees in cold slimy water waiting for one species of Dragon fly, or lying soaking in the dew to document the return of one particular orchid, the glamour isnt there. 
The place for photography as a documentary tool is the most important aspect . Whether that be Bob and Carol's wedding or the destruction of Aleppo, it is important to document these events for nostalgic purposes, memory purposes and future legal puposes.
I wonder how many non photographers stop to think how much photography has helped to change and shape our world? Or the service, in some cases the life or death service it has been to mankind?
I am a photographer and I wouldn't want to be in Syria for a gold clock. Non photographers see images from there in their newspapers, on the web,on the tv. They expect to see those images, they turn up like magic every day. How many times do they stop and consider the people supplying them? And would they then say "I could do that"