Project 3, Exercise 1: Comparing telephoto and wide angle views

I'll make my comments based on the two images printed in the course manual.

Image A: wide angle

• A large, white gate dominates the foreground and portions of a brown fence are visible on either side of the gate.
• There is rubbish scattered on the dirt in front of the gate. Behind it is a large, grassy field with nothing in it.
• Beyond the field, and below it, we can see the buildings (some high-rise, most low) of a city stretching far into the distance.
• At a rough guess, the horizon is many miles away and the sky is partially cloudy.
• The gate appears to be level in the foreground, but the horizon seems to slope slightly toward the right side of the frame.

Image B: telephoto

• There is no sign of the gate and the foreground is now occupied by the buildings of the city that appeared to be some distance away.
• The sky takes up less of the frame and very few clouds are visible in it. The horizon line seems closer and we can see buildings on it that were not perceptible in the previous frame.
• We can see the distant objects in the frame with much greater detail.
• Compared the wide-angle shot, the angle of view is much narrower and the perspective in the frame (front to back) is compressed quite a bit.

Project 3: A sense of place

In the case of Ian Berry’s images of Whitby, removing the people from the frames would take away a number of things:

• a natural human interest in the subject matter;
• a sense of the era in which the pictures were taken (based on clothing, glasses, hairstyles, etc.);
• some identifiers about the place (people playing cricket and men in flat caps suggest a UK location);
• an idea of the time of year (warm enough for sitting in the grass, wearing short sleeves and paddling in the sea); 
• a sense of scale in the landscape, based on human proportions in it; and
• a hint at why the photographer may have taken these images (to document people enjoying their leisure time together).

Without these indicators the pictures would be much less interesting and tell a very different story about Whitby: it would look quite lifeless and bleak.

When familiar figures are missing (pp.168–169) we are lacking crucial information that helps us to establish scale, depth, proportion and perspective. What would otherwise 'read' as three-dimensional appears flat and of uncertain size.

Project 2, Exercise 4: Photography and land art

The question posed in this exercise is whether photographs of a work of 'land art' are the documentation of the art or the art itself.

After working through the readings associated with this portion of the course (such as John A. Walker's piece on "Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning"), I am not sure that this is an 'either-or' question. Given the role that context plays in understanding the layers of meaning for a particular piece, it seems to me that the proper response is 'both-and.'

The original work of land art or installation is certainly a work of art, but so is the subsequent recording or documenting of the piece or installation. The original piece had its context—place, time, etc.—but any resulting photographs of the piece contain the results of decisions made about format, light, focal length, angle of view and framing. Artistic decisions have been made about what to include, what to leave in and how to present it. And the results of these decisions are then seen in a new frame, and a range of new contexts (particularly if the photographs appear in different settings and times), particularly when photographic processes are used to introduce the perspective of time to the way the work is viewed.

A good example of this is Keith Arnatt’s Self-burial (Television Interference Project). In this case, the performance doesn't really make sense unless it is seen as a series of photographs. A spectator watching the development of Arnatt's self-burial would have seen the artist climbing in and out of a hole that was being progressively deepened. It would have taken a long time and might well have been incomprehensible. Viewed as a planned sequence, however, the work takes on greater meaning as a coherent whole—as a photographic work more than as a live performance.

If anything, then, the photographs of a work of a land art are a new thing: based on the land art and sharing a kind of heritage or lineage with it, but a work with its own integrity and layers of meaning.

Research point: Documenting a journey

Paul Graham, A1: The Great North Road

http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/a1.html

From the publisher:

Photographer Paul Graham spent two years completing this documentary on the life and landscape of the Great North Road. Throughout 1981 and 1982 he made numerous trips along the A1, crossing and recrossing the length of the nation to record every aspect of life at the verge of this great road. The photographs reproduced in this book build not only into a significant documentary of the A1, but also provide a thread along which we can travel the Great North Road, deep into the nation’s heart, and weave a picture of England in the 1980s.

Stephen Shore, American Surfaces

http://stephenshore.net/photographs/seven/index.php?page=1&menu=photographs

From the publisher:

In 1972, Stephen Shore left New York City and set out with a friend to Amarillo, Texas. He didn't drive, so his first view of America was framed by the passenger's window frame. He was taken aback by the fact that his experience of life as a New Yorker had very little in common with the character and aspirations of Middle America. Later that year he set out again, this time on his own, with just a driver's licence and a Rollei 35 - a point-and-shoot camera - to explore the country through the eyes of an everyday tourist.

The project was entitled American Surfaces, in reference to the superficial nature of his brief encounters with places and people, and the underlying character of the images that he hoped to capture. Shore photographed relentlessly and returned to New York triumphant, with hundreds of rolls of film spilling from his bags. In order to remain faithful to the conceptual foundations of the project, he followed the lead of most tourists of the time and sent his film to be developed and printed in Kodak's labs in New Jersey.

The result was hundreds and hundreds of exquisitely composed colour pictures, that became the benchmark for documenting our fast-living, consumer-orientated world. The corpus of his work - following on from Walker Evans' and Robert Frank's epic experiences of crossing America - influenced photographers such as Martin Parr and Bernd & Hilla Becher, who in turn introduced a new generation of students to Shore's work.

Alec Soth, Sleeping by the Mississippi

http://alecsoth.com/photography/?page_id=14

From the publisher:

Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth's "Sleeping by the Mississippi" captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected "third coast". Soth's richly descriptive, large-format color photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, "Sleeping by the Mississippi" elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. "In the book's 46 ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex." Like Robert Frank's classic "The Americans", "Sleeping by the Mississippi" merges a documentary style with poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust.

Robert Frank, The Americans

https://steidl.de/Artists/Robert-Frank-1013194243.html

From the publisher:

First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In eighty-three photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank’s subject matter—cars, jukeboxes, and even the road itself—that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was fifty-six years ago.

Kevin McElvaney, #Refugeecameras

http://kevin-mcelvaney.com/refugeecameras/

Photographer Kevin McElvaney gave refugees cameras in Izmir, Lesbos, Athens and Idomeni. Of the 15 cameras he distributed, seven were returned and McElvaney displayed the resulting images on his website. The goal for the project was to ensure that refugees were able to describe their trip from their own perspective, rather than from the viewpoint of an outsider who did not share the experience. I found this a very compelling series and wondered how different our documentary and news narratives would look if they were told from within rather than from without.

24 Photography

http://www.24photography.org/about/

This project is organized around a rule of “24 hours. 24 photographers. 24 images. 24 years.” Starting in 2004, a collective of 24 then-student photographers documented the first 24 hours of each New Year in multiple locations—in other words, a documented journey through both time and space. Although many of the photographs are taken in the UK a substantial number are not, and the organisation of the project demonstrates that while we share a common calendar there are many other things that we do not share. It is a fascinating visual trip to work through the years and see the points of convergence and divergence.

Project 2, Exercise 3: The image as document

Why do you think that photographs are such a significant part of our lives? Write down how you feel about photos – or videos – from your family’s past.

• Photographs are tangible artifacts that promise to preserve memories intact and changeless across time. Faces and places are of particular importance to us, so anything that can channel their likenesses to us is meaningful. We can preserve other kinds of keepsakes like letters or personal possessions, but they don't seem to have quite the same power. Perhaps this is because relate to people is more important than relating to inanimate objects, and to relate to a person most often means reading his or her face where we look for recognition, what is familiar and loved, and characteristic expressions and signs of mood.
• I look at pictures and videos of my family's past to remember how people and things were. Sometimes they help me to recall a particular, mood or feeling, but it is hard to view them without adding on a layer of everything that has happened since the time the picture was taken. I also find that I feel differently about pictures taken of family members that I know than those that I have never known. Pictures of family members from generations that went before me are interesting in a curious (are those eyes like mine?) or historical (so that's where and how our family lived) way, but they do not have the same personal appeal—they both are and are not part of my story.

Will this archiving be affected by the digital revolution?

• Digital photography has many advantages over film-based photography, but one of its downsides is the fact that I print so few images now. I realize that none of my children has probably had the experience of poring over a family album because there isn't one. There are now thousands more images in the house but they are not as easily available and we are not likely to sit looking at them together. (Although we did happen to do this recently and it occurred to me how much I missed looking at family pictures together, even those taken just a few years ago.)
• Looking at screen-based imagery is not the same as looking at a photographic print: we are used to digital images being transitory and are more likely to browse rather than contemplate them. If we need to research or consume images, digital is much faster. If we want to take time over a picture there is no substitute for a print you can hold in your hand. I wouldn't call one approach better than the other—it is more a question of being appropriate to the task.

Research point: Context and meaning

Notes on John A. Walker, "Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning"

• Walker distinguishes between 'immanent structure' (immediate, local context) and the broader context outside the frame of an artwork. The frame itself is a form of self-containment or bracketing of meaning and can lead us to ignore the wider context within which a work appears and is understood.
• A given work can have multiple contexts. These have different impacts on the connotations of a work but are less likely to affect denotation.
• When context changes there is potential for a 'third-effect' meaning created by relationships with items in the surrounding context.
• Change of context became particularly important as artworks were less often attached to a specific place. (John Berger makes the same point in "Ways of Seeing," noting that it used to be common for works to be created for, and installed in, specific settings. Often, these were places of worship.) Now, media context is more important than 'architectural setting.'
• Walker uses the terms 'circulation' and 'currency' to describe the ebbs and flows in the life of a work as it changes contexts.
• The different locations in which Jo Spence's project—Beyond the Family Album, Private Images, Public Conventions—has been seen demonstrate the impact that context has for setting an interpretive frame.
• Walker states that if we are going to talk about the "efficacy" of the exhibit we would need to know about the viewers. But which viewers? Spence's 'ideal viewer' or someone else? I don't know how useful this would be as a line of inquiry. If we can't always be sure about the intent of the artist (as though there were just one and the artist herself could articulate it perfectly), and context has an important role in the creation of meaning, why do we think that knowing about the 'viewer' (as though there were just one) is helpful?
• Just as context can shape interpretation of a work, so the work can shape interpretation of its context. This is a good point and Walker's example is worth copying here:

If display context can influence the meaning of a photograph, the photograph
can influence the meaning of the context. This reasoning lay behind John X.
Bcrger's comment at a Hayward Gallery evening discussion that the socialist and
feminist photography 'had radicalised the gallery space'. But the influence is twoway:
it could also be argued that the gallery—a High Art cultural institution
serving the interests of the bourgeoisie—had de-radicalised radical photography!

• Walker then describes the 'mental context' of the viewer. Much of this seems like basic communications or rhetorical theory: how is the viewer/listener disposed to the work/message? He then spends a few paragraphs pointing out that we are not all just individuals but share common opinions, values and viewpoints. In other words, there must be sufficient commonality between communicator and audience to allow communication to happen. 
• This seems like a fairly obvious point to me, but it may still need to be made explicit. People regularly claim that advertising has no effect, but it must: commercial enterprises and governments wouldn't pay what they do if advertising had no impact. Perhaps this is a more insidious side of imagery if we are not even aware of its effects.
• Walker closes his article with a brief discussion of the frustration that some artists have of losing control of the meaning of their work, given that they cannot always choose the context within which it will be viewed. (Sounds to me to be a bit like having children. We bring them into the world and do our best to raise them well, but we don't own them and we cannot control them. You must accept it.)

Exercise 3: Gallery or site visit

In the last few weeks I have visited three sites that could not be more different in nature or content. Two could be classed as "galleries" while the third describes itself as a museum, but is closer to a cross between a repository and a site-specific installation.

The first visit was to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to see, among other things, an exhibit called "Human Scale." The exhibition is designed

to explore the evolving relationship between the body and sculpture through the work of [...] internationally renowned artists. It reflects upon the persistent question of scale in sculpture, as contemporary artists adapt to new materials, means and technologies for figurative representation. The works on view each vary dramatically in size and proportion, making for a provocative exploration of the physical, psychological and expressive character shaping what it means to be human. (source: Human Scale exhibit web page)

The artists in question are Ron Mueck, Evan Penny, Ugo Rondinone, Karin Sander and the late Louise Bourgeois. Mueck's large-format wood, wire and latex constructions are startlingly realistic—they are often referred to as "hyperrealistic"—and the impression they leave on the viewer is striking. Their scale and accuracy invite us to step up close and examine tiny details in a way that we might not observe a real person. And yet we would not be surprised to feel warmth radiating from the skin, see blood pulsing through the veins and hear breath coming from the nostrils of the oversized newborn portrayed by A Girl. (In fact, a toddler at the exhibit wandered up to the gigantic creature many times her size, pointed and said "baby!"). The sculptures by Evan Penny are also slightly larger than life but it is not their size and accuracy that capture attention, but the way that they have been scaled so that their perspective is slightly "off." When viewed from one angle all seems well; when viewed from a slightly different standpoint the human form has clearly been distorted. The effect is unsettling and shows how much we take for granted in the way we usually view the human figure. And that might be the real benefit of such works: although Mueck's work has been criticized as a "parody" of the body, he and the other artists at this exhibit succeed in making us reconsider the wonder of our own ordinary embodiment.

The second visit was to the Bellago Gallery of Fine Art in the Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas. Gambling is of no real interest to me so I was looking for something else to do during my down time on a recent business trip to the city. I was very pleased to hear that not only was there an art gallery on the Vegas Strip, but that there would be an exhibit of photographs by Yousuf Karsh, the Canadian portrait photographer.  Like most people with an interest in photography, I am very familiar with reproductions of his work in books, but I have not had many opportunities to see his large-format prints in person. The fact that Karsh plied his trade in Ottawa also made for a nice local tie-in for me, so I ordered a ticket to see "Icons of the Twentieth Century."

The gallery is a very small facility comprising just two rooms, well back from the street on the ground floor of the hotel. It's not an easy place to find in a complex the size of The Bellagio. But the size of the gallery is not at all the problem: it's the lighting. It is impossible to view the Karsh photographs properly. There is so much glare from the harsh overhead lights that is impossible to view any of the beautifully-printed images without seeing light flares or the reflections of visitors in the glass covering the images. The images themselves are large, with the very smallest being 11x14" and the more common size being 16x20" or larger. Each contains a character study designed to reveal something of the personality of the sitter and, although the style belongs to another era, the work stands among the best of its kind for its time. On close inspection it is possible to see that they have been printed with great care, with clean highlights, wonderful tonal range and deep, rich blacks. This is what viewers have come to expect of a Karsh image (and pay to see!), but the experience is marred by the distracting lighting and presentation of the work.

The third visit was also in Las Vegas: a night-time tour of the Museum of Neon, more colloquially known as the "Neon Boneyard." The site is the last resting place for many of the famous illuminated signs that lit up the Vegas Strip in the 50s and 60s. Rather than sending the signs to a scrapyard or recycling facility, they are being preserved in the dry Nevada air by a non-profit group keen to celebrate local history and... art.  Although perhaps not site-specific in the strictest sense of the term, the signs flourished in the desert city and have a credible claim to being a distinct local art form. Part of what made (and makes) The Strip the experience that it is, neon was employed in Las Vegas on a scale and with imagination seen in only a handful of places. It is now yesterday's technology, having been largely replaced by cheaper, more reliable and ultimately more flexible video screens.

The site itself is a two-acre fenced lot containing a large number of signs that appear to have little order in the way that they have been displayed. Nevertheless, a certain number have been illuminated and turned toward the walkway in a fashion that shows the placement is not entirely random. The signs are constructed of sheet metal and painted in bright colours that supplement or contrast with the neon or incandescent bulbs they hold. Some of the neon signs are "animated," but most contain static lighting displays. All of the signs are intended for commercial advertising, with some simply announcing a service or business and others being more complicated and imaginative in design. The more interesting signs are those that try to convey a sense of style or excitement about the establishment they announce. This is the era of "Mad Men" at its colourful, gaudy best. The museum members had originally planned to restore the signs to their original state wherever possible, but it became clear that this was neither possible (because of costs and availability of materials) nor desirable (visitors to the museum repeatedly said that they liked the patina of age and exposure on the objects). It would be nice for visitors to be left to their own for a few minutes to linger over the design and craftsmanship of the signs, but all visits are guided and kept on a tight schedule. Because the visits are guided, there is also non-stop commentary from the guide.

Exercise 2: Interpreting video art

I found Sam Taylor-Wood's Still Life unappealing when I first started watching the time lapse video of rotting fruit. The fruit sits on a plate on a table against a dull, neutral background and gradually does what any living thing does when it dies: it decays. The camera stays in a fixed position during the shoot, meaning that the only movement to register in the frame is that of the subject itself.

Surprisingly, it does move. And this is what sets it apart from the "still life" tradition of painting that Taylor-Wood references both in the way she presents the fruit and in the title she gives the work. While still life paintings often hint symbolically and statically at decay, the artist uses time and technology to show the process at work. A plastic pen lying on the table belongs to the contemporary world and does not change during the video: its material has no life in it, or on it (as far as we can see). 

The movement in the video also suggests that even in the face of death there is "still life" present: spores and insects live on the host and change its shape while consuming it. There are ebbs and flows of mini "circles of life" taking place on and within the dead fruit. 

The key to seeing all this is the ability to play with time photographically, which allows us to remain attentive through a process for which we wouldn't usually have the patience or interest. Taylor-Wood might be saying to us, "Slow down: you're missing a lot of life." 

The same attentiveness to the passing of time and uncomfortable detail is present in a number of Taylor-Wood's other video works, such as A Little Death (2002; a time-lapse of a rotting rabbit's corpse), Pieta (2001; a real-time observation of a couple mirroring the pose of Michelangelo's sculpture), and Hysteria (1997; a video of a woman who seems to move gradually from joyous laughter to hysterics... and back again?).

The subject matter of Taylor-Wood's Still Life (and other works) does not always appeal to me but I can appreciate the way she uses time in her pieces. 

Exercise 1: The fourth dimension

This exercise marks the beginning of Project 2: Time and time-based media.

Make notes on your own thoughts about time

As someone who has done graduate work in theology and learned to read a couple of ancient languages I have certainly thought about time. I learned through those studies to pay close attention to issues of history, culture and language, all of which are directly affected by time. The understanding of ancient texts is aided by giving care to the history of interpretation and the realization of the distance that exists between our time and that of the first writers and readers or hearers. We have to be conscious of the temptation to project our own views onto the past and the future and resist making our own period normative. To interpret an ancient document faithfully is to try to inhabit—however imperfectly—the world of the text.

Even without formal study, the process of aging must encourage most people to think about time and its passing. It happens to us all (birth, growth, maturity, decline and death) and comes close to home as we see our children gain strength and our parents gradually lose theirs. And talking with family members has made me conscious of the malleability of memory as we realise from each other that the accuracy of the things we remember can change with the years. And that our frame of reference may not be theirs. Or completely reliable.

Have you thought about time in relation to artwork before?

Much of what I wrote above applies to artworks as well as to ancient texts: the role of time in shaping culture and interpretation, and even the decaying effect that it can have on physical materials. The further in time we are from the moment a piece was created, the more our world is not the world of the artist.

I also have a particular interest in photography which owes much of its power and interest to the way that the camera can play with time: 1/1000 of a second for this frame; four hours for this one. Photography allows us to experience and abstract time beyond the way our senses usually allow. A camera is a time machine.

Have you already come across pieces that explore what time is?

Again, photography is the obvious answer, whether it is Eadweard Muybridge's pictures of human and animal movement or Harold Edgerton's images of bullets frozen mid-way through fruit and playing cards. Time-lapse shots of passing clouds, waves and even passing seasons demonstrate how the camera can capture much longer periods. Painters also play with time for effect, whether subtly in the  memento mori pieces mentioned earlier in this course or more obviously in Salvador Dali's melting clocks.

In the last segment, the videos and articles on Damien Hirst's works also mentioned the effect that time can have on artistic materials themselves: sharks can rot even when swimming in formaldehyde.