Summary
Weeks two and three have overlapped into each other. Busy with life things outside of Uni work which has taken up a chunk of time but I managed to squeeze in some posing practice with my wife and got in a library visit to the Baltic Art Centre. Very good webinar with tutor Georgia and others.
Webinars
Had a webinar with Michelle and a smaller group (Week 2). Very encouraging feedback from others and this reinforced not repeating myself and driving to look for depth of narrative in my work. Look at representing the identity through performance and gesture – found some decent references in YSJ library following this and starting to look at photography of dance performance in The Fugitive Gesture. Two interesting quotes from that here:
“… the more painstaking [the movement], the more pointless the effect. You don’t see the change in the movement, so you don’t see the rhythm, which is dancing.”
(Edwin Denby, cited in Ewing 1987)
“At some point well in my research I realised that the most dynamic pictures were generally created at the extremes of a continuum: either they were made in intense sustained collaboration with a dancer or choreographer, or they were made without the dancer’s awareness.”
(Ewing 1987)
This brings up the question of how to address movement in a still photograph – do I look at sequences / triptychs or combined stills with video?
In the week 3 webinar with Georgia and a much larger group. I presented a few images that I had worked on during a posing session with my wife (see below) This also went well with a few different recommendations:
- Tim France recommended looking at black and white to see how to break shapes down
- Chris Finnigan said to look into structure and have a system in place to start tying things together, referencing the likes of Erwin Wurm and John Baldessari
- Lots of other artists to look at including Trine Sondergaard, Birthe Piontek and Michael Clark.
In a webinar with Steph Cosgrove in Week 3, she covered Jeff Wall’s idea of Hunters and Farmers – the idea that a photographer is either capturing or creating / developing a picture. I think this is more of a sliding scale. In the case of my own work I’m moving much more towards being a farmer as I’m working towards posing and building narratives, not just grabbing things as I go past.
Portraits
Test session with my wife both indoors and outdoors looking at directing people and poses. I’ve not got a common theme or narrative to explore yet, these were just practice. I think once I have more of an idea of narrative, I can delve further into it. I’m also brainstorming / moodboarding in my sketchbook and Miro.
Reading through a summary of Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory I want to delve more into looking how I would be encoding a message or a meaning into my work which would add more narrative depth – I think I barely touched on this in the last module. Need to research more into who does this and how.
Below: examples of posing session. Top is outdoors, bottom set are indoors crammed into our box room.







Library visit
To the Baltic Arts Centre Gallery, where I made good use of their library. The actual photography section is quite small but they’ve got an absolute stack of artists’ monographs. I came across some goodies including Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence which covers how photography is used in evidence in crimes using different case studies. Has a very good introductory essay which I had the library scan in – more on that later. This also gave me inspiration on looking at framing as some of the crime scene photos are put together in a very specific way – making the bodies of the murdered almost look as though they’re dancing in particular pictures.
Another interesting thing that I came across was a production of a play about Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home, which brings up questions about framing and staging of photographs when they’re transferred to a different medium. They’re New York Times articles behind paywalls but you can read them archived linked below:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/t-magazine/pictures-from-home-broadway.html [archive link https://archive.ph/rz72S]
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/opinion/nathan-lane-new-play-pictures-from-home-larry-sultan-book.html [archive link https://archive.ph/8Q2rA]
Critical Report
Nothing this week. Part of the current exploration work in the next few weeks will build towards this
To do
- Got a couple of results from callouts on different Facebook groups and the like for collaborative portraiture subjects so following that up to get it going in the next few weeks.
- Researching performance in photography – deepdive into different methodologies and seeing if there’s any critical writing or research on it.
- Further research into staging and framing of the subjects.
Upcoming
- Further researching and thumbnail sketching on concepts for images.
References
Critical theory
BARTHES, Roland. 1982. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang
DOHERTY, Roz. 2021. ‘A Discussion on Authenticity in Posed and Candid Photography.’ The Pupil Sphere [online]. Available at: https://www.pupilsphere.co.uk/home/a-discussion-on-authenticity-in-posed-and-candid-photography [accessed 10 February 2023].
DUFOUR, Diane. 2015. Images of Conviction : the Construction of Visual Evidence. Paris: Le Bal.
GLEN, Alex. 2014. Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory. Available at: https://www.slideshare.net/alexeglen/stuart-halls-reception-theory [accessed 10 February 2023].
GREENOUGH, Keith. 2012. ‘Critical Review – outline of intention and photographers/work to be reviewed.’ photo-graph [online]. Available at:
https://photo-graph.org/2012/09/27/critical-review-outline-of-intention-and-photographerswork-to-be-reviewed/ [accessed 10 February 2023].
GREENOUGH, Keith. 2013. ‘Disarming the Pose.’ photo-graph [online]. Available at: https://photo-graph.org/2013/02/16/disarming-the-pose/ [accessed 10 February 2023].
JOBEY, Liz. 2016. ‘Hold still: Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern.’ Tate [online]. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-36-spring-2016/hold-still [accessed 10 February 2023].
Photographers and artists
WURM, Erwin. ca.2018. ‘Photographic Sculptures’. Erwin Wurm [online]. Available at: https://www.erwinwurm.at/artworks/photographic-sculptures.html [accessed 13 February 2023].
BROTHERUS, Elina. ca.2016. ‘The Baldessari Assignments.’ Elina Brotherus [online]. Available at: https://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography#/baldessari-experiments/ [accessed 13 February 2023].
PIONTEK, Birthe. ca.2022. ‘Janus’. Birthe Piontek [online]. Available at: https://www.birthepiontek.com/ [accessed 13 February 2023].
SONDERGAARD, Trine. 2003. ‘Versus’. Trine Søndergaard [online]. Available at: https://trinesondergaard.com/works/ [accessed 13 February 2023].
CROMPTON, Sarah. 2020. ‘Introducing Michael Clark.’ Barbican [online]. Available at: https://sites.barbican.org.uk/introducingmichaelclark/ [accessed 13 February 2023].
BENGAL, Rebecca. 2023. ‘Nathan Lane’s New Play
Is Photography Brought Alive.’ The New York Times. 21 January [online]. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/opinion/nathan-lane-new-play-pictures-from-home-larry-sultan-book.html [accessed 13 February 2023].
SOLLER, Jurt. 2023. ‘On Broadway, a Family Portrait Full of Secrets.’ The New York Times. 7 February [online]. Available at:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/t-magazine/pictures-from-home-broadway.html [accessed 13 February 2023].
Books
EWING, William A. 1987. The Fugitive Gesture : Masterpieces of Dance Photography. London: Thames and Hudson.
LEOUSSI, Eleni. 1998. Rehearsal. Stockport: Dewi Lewis.
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