Jeff wall focuses on cinematic photography and constructs his images in an elaborate fashion using art, sculpture and literature in combined art forms to make a photograph which represents contemporary art in a conceptual format. He used a Nikon F camera “point and shoot” to create his work and although this photograph was shot in the 1990’s it appears to come from another era, perhaps the 1970’s.

After researching about how to read a photograph, when describing an image there are formal elements within the image that need to be described, and then what is outside the image like information about the photographer, how this image was taken, what other photographers do similar work?, the thoughts and feelings of the viewer, personal connotations to describe, what perhaps has not been included in the composition (the context). This is what I have attempted to do below when reading the above image:

After researching semiotics the Insomnia image by Jeff Wall can be commented on by denotation which describes the literal meaning of what is in the image and in this instance it is a kitchen because it contains a cooker, refrigerator and cupboards that are familiar with a kitchen space. The kitchen table and chairs are arranged in a haphazard way, one chair is not facing the table no pictures on the wall and the colours of the cupboards and walls are cold, which is compounded by a cold fluorescent light. The window implies it is night time by the black colour and the cupboard doors slightly open. There is a cooking pan left on the stove, salt on the table and a cloth on the kitchen chair which leads the viewer to assume this man may have cooked and eaten something. There is a dark circular mark above the cooker which looks like a clock used to hang there and has been taken down. This leads me to think that this may have been removed in a way to cope with the insomnia.The general state of the room is it’s in need of a little “Tender Loving Care”, this to me could also be a reflection of the subject’s state of mind and wellbeing, neglect springs to mind. The main subject of the image is a man lying in an unexpected place and the anchor word in the caption “Insomnia” answers some of the questions that start to form in the viewer’s mind. This caption is also a relay message since it communicates meaning around the image. The wide angle used to take the shot shows clearly that it is a small room, the depth of field used allows the viewer to explore the room and the eye is led from the open cupboards in the top third to the table and then to the main subject in the bottom third right hand part of the image. The open brown paper bag on top of the fridge in the top right hand part of the image balances the visual elements within the image.

Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photography : Diane Arbus

Reflection on the essay:

This essay and others in the book have taught me what needs to be included in an essay about reading a photograph, there is so much more to consider both within the image and beyond its borders. The viewer can interpret what is within the frame in several different ways depending on experience, knowledge, attitude, each person will take something different from a photograph and will ask different questions about what they see.

The essay begins with emotional judgement relationships and feelings of the subjects within the frame before continuing to talk about the factual circumstances that came about to produce this image. The essay then describes the photographer.

One of the most poignant thoughts of the essay was the quote ” the aim is not to reform life, but to know it. Another quote from Diane Arbus herself that I particularly enjoyed was that the subjects in the photo were described as “undeniably close in a painful sort of way” by Arbus – she didn’t know this but made an assumption which the author thought was quite patronising to which I agree. Their body language certainly appears to suggest they are close.

I like how the author describes Arbus as having sympathy for the frailty and imperfections of society, even the ordinary are remarkable and worth looking at.

The author describes how others describe Diane Arbus and what they write about her. There were other photos taken on the same day that this particular image was taken and this is talked about in the essay to add more context – outside of the frame.

What similar artists have been inspired by Diane Arbus?

The essay also talks about where this image was displayed, when and what the circumstances were around this – there is an interesting description around the dialogue between the curator of the Museum of Modern Art and the photograher.

When I was initially asked to write an essay about a photograph I was struggling to understand how I could possibly write a thousand words and now reading this essay I understand there is so much to consider inside (denotation) and outside ( connotation) context, outside the frame.

Bibliography :

We are OCA website blog:

An Ameican photographer who has been considered controversial because of candid shots of her children. She shoots life as it happens within her family and often offers very little explanation as to the meaning of the images.

Main bodies of work include:

Explosure

These are double exposure images of the photographer and her family

The Mother Project

With her kids in tow, she chronicled visits to her mom in upstate New York, shooting spontaneously as events occurred, walking in fields, peering or placing herself in quotidian bedroom or bathroom scenes. As she went along, sometimes she would add an element to see what might take place — asking her mom to put on a mask for example — then shoot.

I Am A Camera

This was her first exhibition and it proved very controversial because of the naked images of her children. This is a documented recording of the artist’s family, and were not staged, although props were used and the photos were taken with careful composition in mind. Innocent and grotesque exist alongside each other in many images within this series.

Bibliography

Tierney Gearon Photography. 2020. Bio – Tierney Gearon Photography. [online] Available at: <https://www.tierneygearon.com/bio/&gt; [Accessed 23 October 2020].

A British photographer who has focused mainly on work of his family, based in the east midlands.

He was the pioneer of squalid realism, documenting the harsh reality of life growing up in a council flat with his alcoholic father in the Black Country. The private part of family suddenly became very public. His photobook called Ray’s a laugh is about a close to home account of his parents. He documented their chaotic life with his camera from a young age. It is a classic depiction of Poverty in Britain in the 1980s. At the time this sort of candid photography was something new and it stood out as shocking.

I find the photos very interesting from a social history perspective, the decor in the flat adds to the overall feeling of deprivation. The way the shots are quite obviously not staged makes them feel somewhat voyeuristic.

The main subject, his parents are the main subject within the image, but there is balance with the numerous other objects in the images that represent the clutter within the house, one even has a cat in it. These are made to feel even more authentic as reality since the parents aren’t posing but going about their lives as if the photographer wasn’t even there. In reality they probably hardly noticed he was there taking photos because his father was drunk most of the time and his mother preoccupied with TV or keeping her husband in check.

Bibliography

Roupenian, K., 2020. A Photographer’S Intimate Self-Portrait Of Womanhood In Middle Age. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-photographers-intimate-self-portrait-of-womanhood-in-middle-age&gt; [Accessed 19 October 2020].

American/Israli photographer who uses a family portrait style that is not the stereotypical attractive image but a more realistic approach.

Monograph: a detailed written study of a single specialized subject or an aspect of it.

Her main works are monographs and a great example of self reflection and portraiture.

Closer : (2002) immediate family and closest relationships

This was her first monograph and was produced as a book. It touches on intimacy and mortality. She shows parts of family life that usually stay behind closed doors. She feels that the Israeli culture is more open and receptive to the not so pretty images that her work portrays and the American audience can find them shocking at times. This personal study is honest and takes a look at some of the most painful aspects of living that often are never shown, let alone to the public.

Mother 2013

This work documents pregnancy to the time her children were around 8 years old, a time where they gain independence. This work, as opposed to her previous work forced her outside, following her children. It captures the highs and lows of being a parent. It could also be called a photo diary.

Being a parent makes you see the world through new eyes. Similar to her other works, the everyday is central to her work.

Midlife – 2019

Elinor captures close up magnified parts of her body as well as the seemingly mundane domesticity of her life. The close up images reflects how woman often overthink and magnify imperfections on parts of their body, these show the imperfections that emerge in midlife. The middle aged woman seems to become invisible and this work highlights this and makes them visible again.

Bibliography

Roupenian, K., 2020. A Photographer’S Intimate Self-Portrait Of Womanhood In Middle Age. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-photographers-intimate-self-portrait-of-womanhood-in-middle-age&gt; [Accessed 19 October 2020].

Feedback from Assignment 2: Photographing the Unseen, was that I need to do more reading around the theory of photography in order to describe my images using the language that relates to the theory around photography practice. I have made notes below on the key points in the suggested reading recommended by my tutor. I am learning that becoming more knowledgeable about the theory will improve my work and ultimately will feed through into my practice, with hard work and consistent application and effort of course.

A short History of Photography Theory

There are three times in history when outbreaks of theory in and on photography have occured:

Late 1830’s when photography was invented

1920’s and 30’s when mass reproduction happened

1960’s, 70’s and the beginning of the 80’s – Postmodernism

Victorian Aesthetics – 1830’s: how far is photography able to copy things accurately? Can we trusty photography as accurate representations of the things they show?

If photography copies things, how can it be art?

The camera requires a creative being to bring it into art, the creative use of technology. This debate, to a certain extent is still around today.

Photography was used for reproducing portraits for the wealthy for the majority of time.

1920’s, 30’s – avant-garde and modern theories exploded and tried to situate photography in new ways. Concepts of montage, realism, formalism, democratic vision, modernism, documentary, political photography, psychical realism, and others were all formed in avant-garde manifestos and by individual writers and photographers.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) – A German writer and critic. A key essay from that era of explosion of theory that still survives today.

Famous caption from the essay:

“Earlier much futile thought has been devoted to the question of whether photography is art. The primary question, whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised!”

He immediately overturns the 19th century debate.

His arguments and ways of thought went on to influence John Berger’s book “Ways of Seeing” first published in 1972. This book located photography, as it still does today, within our social environment, and showed the massive significance photographic images have in terms of their meaning.

1960’s and 70’s : The Critical Turn: The role of photographic images in the agents of culture (cinema, TV, fashion, marketing, advertising) provoked a range of studies about their significance.

Roland Barthes wrote 2 theoretical essays : “the photographic message” on news photography and “Rhetoric of the Image” on advertising photography.

The new thinking about society and culture in Paris (Structuralism) broke out onto the streets with student revolts in May 1968. In USA civil rights movements raised the issue of race and Women’s rights were raised.

Conceptual photography started challenging the orthodoxies of fine art. Artists began to use and interrogate ways photography had overturned traditional notions of art in the manner that Walter Benjamin inidcated in his 1936 essay “Work of Art” Victor Burgin was probably the most prominent – an English conceptual artist turned to photography as a basis for his own practice – his edited volume of essays in 1982 ” Thinking Photography” brings together some of the key new theoretical arguments about photography during this period.

At the end of the 1980’s photography finally began to be absorbed into art institutions in the way it is seen today – as a dominant modern art form.

Photography theory of this period remains a main reference to this day so it’s worth going into more detail:

The Politics of Representation: The role photos play in social relations? How we see the world? Other people in general or see ourselves? The role of photographs in advertising is controlled by the government. Although we see dozens of photos every day, they seep into our subconscious and it’s easy to forget the impact they have on us.

Louise Althusser, a french philosopher argued that ideology is primarily communicated through images, myths, ideas or concepts in ways that we do not usually think about. Manifested through representation, these ideas are unconscious. Ideology is reproduced through ways in which society represents itself to itself. How are these ideas perpetuated and supported? Often by people or institutions who have least to gain from them. The first serious attempt to develop a systematic theory of the ideology of photography was through the discipline of semiotics,a method of cultural analysis most famously proposed and developed by Roland Barthes during the 1960’s.

Structuralist Theory: Structuralism focuses on structures and systems of rules that underpin and organise any practice, and was based primarily in a new, expanded use of linguistic semiotics. The aim was to find out the grammar of forms, like language.

Semiotics: The Study of Signs: Language helps to construct reality. saussure saw that the work that language does that as securing reality. An image of a man throwing a grenade can be interpreted as a terrorist in one view, and a freedom fighter to another. Language and images are not the passive reflection of a pre-existing “real world” they are the way through which we come to see it as represented as “reality”

Photo Codes: We can vary the perspective codes by “point of view” Different genres of photography tend to emphasise different aspects of codes.Lighting is culturally coded, a direction of light has meaning, ie. top light can signify “other worldly” feel or angelic innocence. Move the light behind the head and you have glamour photography, and bottom light makes a face look devilish. a street lamp at night gives a dark moody scene, not ideal for a wedding for example.

Rhetoric: in terms of photography, defines the organisation of codes into an argument. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion and aims to move, please and instruct. Separate codes are meaningless like individual letters in an alphabet, but when combined effectively they have meaning, and we make a “good” or effective photograph. It is from a particular configuration of such codes that the rhetoric of the image determines the range of meaning available from the photograph.

Realism vs Semiotics,they are both two different theories of photography that can be drawn upon when making work.

Terry Barrett, Art Education July 1986

This article is suggested reading from my tutor in response to the submission of my second assignment, Photographing the Unseen. I have made notes of the key parts of this article below:

Viewers who want to understand and appreciate a photograph need to see what fresh and significant relationships the photographer may have brought about and the means used to make them manifest. Considering context allows this.

Context can be “INTERNAL” “ORIGINAL” or “EXTERNAL”

Internal Context:

Description and analysis of what is seen in the photograph – identification of hte subject matter, consideration of its form and relationships between the two

Photography brings its own set of formal elements and terms, beyond those shared with paintings and drawings and need to be learned and investigated. Focus, dept of field, angle of view, shutter speed, types of illumination, grain size, tonality, contrast range shoudl be explored to see how they effect the subject matter and form and how form and subject combine to express.

Not all photographs can be understood and appreciated solely on the basis of what is shown.

Original Context

These are photographs that need outside contextual information to understand the image.

Original context is information drawn from sources outside the photograph that, if used, adds meaning and therefore a fuller appreciation. It is information that was physically and psychologically present to the photographer at the time the photo was made.

A good example of an image that benefits from original context is the famous image of a naked girl and soldiers fleeing from smoke and running towards us. Knowledge of the circumstances around this photograph is what makes it powerful, the original context is that the girl is Viatnamese and she is burning so has torn away her clothing because she has just been sprayed with napalm. It is about the US involvement in the Vietnam war. This knowledge could never have been gained by simply viewing the image.

External Context

Refers to the photographer’s presentational environment:

How and where it is being, has been presented

Received

How other interpreters have understood it

Where it has been placed in the history of art

Robert Doisneau’s Photograph: external context has radically altered its meaning

5 places (external contexts) for this photograph:

Photo was published in a magazine called Le Pont, devoted to cafes

This photo ended up in a small brochure about the evils of alcohol abuse

French scandal newspaper : “Prostitution on the Champs- Elysees”

Since this misinterpretation this image has also appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and

Szarkowski’s (1973) Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art

No photograph is presented without context.

Summary / My Thoughts

When presenting my assignments I need to think about and describe the context more accurately. Using the knowledge from this article and others given to my by my tutor has helped me to understand why it is so important to describe the context of the images I make.This is something I need to practice doing so my assignments improve.

This essay, written by John A Walker (2009) provides useful information about this subject, something I need to get to grips with when writing up my blogs for assignments.

The following are notes I have made as a result of reading this text:

A wedding photography can be in several places, a family album, on the wall in a house or in the shop window of the photographer, in a local newspaper – with each shift of location the photograph is recontextualised and as this change happens so does the meaning.

Most critical analyses of photographs concentrate on their immanent structure ie. their internal relations (part to part and part to whole within the framing edge)

Context is an important determinant of photographic meaning, it continues to influence our perception

When the word “context” is used, it should be really be qualified in order to make it clear which of the several different types are being referred ie architectural, media, mental, socio-historical etc

Recontextualisation dosent usually produce a redical transformation of its depicted content – but merely different parts of the image are emphasised (appear to be important) in different contexts – so it’s whole meaning is modified, enhanced or given a new significance.

However, if an image enters into a montage relationship with either a caption, text, another image or a particularly potent display text, then a “third effect” meaning can be generated from the juxtaposition which was not apparent in the photo when in isolation

Photography has created a rapid global reproduction through the internet today, from one cultural context to another, this has lessened the importance of architectural or physical display context.

Meanng is crucially influenced by moment of production, but the meaning may change as the photograph enters into relationships with new circumstances and audiences. The life of an image as well as it’s birth need to be considered. The words “circulation” and “currency” as it moves through time and space from one context to another. It may then be archived and then be re born and used again in the future.

The mental set or context – the “beholder’s share” is about how everyone has a different relation to the same image according to the different places they occupy in socieyt, age, gener, race, age, class, nationality, religion etc

In opposition to this there is an opposing view to this where there are large groupings of people who do see images the same way and this is referred to as pictoral stereotypes otherwise the mass media would simply find communication impossible. Pictorial stereotypes inhabit us, they don’t just exist external in the world of mass media.

Text that accompanies imagery does try to force or impose a meaning on the audience but this can be opposed, such as the women’s movements.

Context is often a troublesome determinant of meaning for artists because it is so often out of their control. Left wing imagery is designed for certain audiences in mind to exercise control over the messages to the most receptive of audiences. The mental context is carefully considered.