Photographing the public/private threshold

Based on the previous research I have done here on a number of photographers, there are some themes that I am interested in picking up and pursuing original research on. Themes which I am most interested in are privacy, voyeurism, intimacy, the way that people respond to and inhabit the built environment, and the ubiquity of the photographed world and people’s consciousness and reaction to photography in the public realm. These are themes which have been explored and risen particularly in relation to the work of Michael Wolf and Doug Rickard.

Michael Wolf - tcd051

 

Doug Rickard - 39.259736, Baltimore MD (2008), 2011

 I also propose to make a series of images which reflect on thresholds between the public and the private. I am interested in how people occupy space in ways which show they register it as either public or private, and when slippages might occur. What is it about certain public spaces which make them acceptable for private moments? What architectural features denote transitions between public and more private, and how do people respond to these? What private spaces are visible from public space?







One image which comes to mind which particularly illustrates this idea is Children with Masks by Helen Levitt. It is an interesting study in the transition from the private self getting ready to enter the wider world, stepping into it, and adopting the public self projecting confidence out to the world.

Helen Levitt - New York, Children with Masks, c1942

In a similar vein to the way that Alec Soth works, it is a series of images that speak together as a unified whole which I am interested in making. I am also drawn to the way that photography functions not only as a document of a particular time and place, but can also be a kind of archetype which speaks far beyond its specificity. A similar idea occurs in Doug Rickard’s streetview images, of which he says, “the subjects then are really symbols or icons, and not individuals”. Alec Soth has shied away from calling his work social documentary for, I think, this same reason: maintaining a poetic quality that allows images to be read as having a wider resonance, and not weighed down by the need to be exhaustive or truly accurate in a representative sense.

When researching Alec Soth’s work I came across some projects he had run on Flickr. To coincide with his Walker Art Center retrospective and his book From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America, he invited people to complete a series of photographic challenges. He then selected a winner of each challenge. There were 4 assignments he set up in 2010, and one further challenge at the end of 2011. These included photographing a list of items; photographing a stranger and getting them to show you something, then making more photographs based on what they show you; double portraits, one by you of a non-photographer, and one of you by your subject; and documenting an encounter with photographs and text. The 2011 challenge was to recreate an iconic photograph.

The assignments he set are based on working methods he actually uses himself, or came out of the responses which people had to the assignments themselves. In the spirit of these assignments, I have created an initial list of things to photograph, which I will look for, as a starting point:
     Thresholds - doorways, gates, entrances etc.
     People doing private things in public
     People in public without shoes
     People working in public space
     People looking back at me photographing
     Glimpses through windows (nighttime)

Again, as in Soth’s assignments, I see this as the beginning of an open process which encourages looking at things that might otherwise be missed, and not simply a list to be found as is. I am also interested in how double images and the addition of some text might further the ideas that I am exploring.

In the essay, I wish to reflect on the images taken and the process of photographing them. Whilst street photography has a long tradition, the social environment for street photography has changed now, as more people are now wary and suspicious of photographers in public. Does the use of streetview possibly allow private moments to be captured more easily than a photographer on the street can? I will also look further at the work of Michael Wolf, Doug Rickard, and to a lesser extent Philip Lorca diCorcia, as it relates to thresholds between the public and the private realm.

Doug Rickard - A New American Street View.

A New American Picture by Doug Rickard is most simply described as a book of images harvested from Google Street View, which show downbeaten and neglected views of America. But this belies a complexity of thought and ideas which underpin the work.

Rickard’s previous projects - American Suburb X (ASX), and These Americans, show him to be deeply engaged with photography as a medium, and well versed in its history and canon. Looked at as a view into Rickard’s mind, they attest to an ongoing search for the iconic image which transcends its specificity, and an obsessive collecting and cataloguing of what might define the American psyche.

Now focussing his gathering, collecting and editing eye through Street View, Rickard appropriates and recontextualizes as social documentary, an image originally created as pure documentation. The social aspect of this is important, and Rickard cites his conservative upbringing and subsequent study of civil rights and slavery as formative for his work. The book’s essay by David Campany also draws Rickard’s work into the tradition of street and documentary photography the likes of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, but also other artists concerned with the day-to-day “beneath the canopy” of American idealism, such as Edward Hopper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Toni Morrison.

The use of Street View to source images immediately raises questions and encourages debate about the very nature of what it is to be a photographer, and more so what it is to be a photographer in the art world. It recalls long standing and recurring debates surrounding the validity of the ready-made as artwork, and the merits of photography as art. It also raises new questions about privacy, the place of technology in the world and the consequence of its ubiquity for photography. 

The process which Rickard uses is relatively straightforward — he searches until he locates the exact view he wants, composes the image on screen, and re-photographs it with a 35mm camera directed at the monitor. It is a process accessible to almost anyone, and does not necessitate a visit to the location in the image - a fact which draws criticism of his work.

51.310296, Amite City, LA (2008), 2010

The very specific technology of multiple wide-angle captures shot from well above eye level and stitched together, creates a look which has a particular feel. As Rickard says, “the actual dynamics of the camera within Google emphasized the way that I wanted to speak in these images.” (From interview recorded as part of a TV segment on Rickard). Particularly striking features of the look are the strong diagonals stretching out to the edge of the frame, the sense of looking down into a scene, and even the lense flares Rickard often includes in his captures. Additionally, the incredibly poor quality, the antithesis of ordinary photographic competence, lends a softness and which recalls early photography or even painting.

42.418064, Detroit, MI (2009), 2010

Initially selecting locations based on what people consider areas to avoid, Rickard also searched by the key phrase of “Martin Luther King”, which invariably located impoverished and neglected urban landscapes to select images from. Seeking a capture which speaks precisely of the place where it is located, he seeks within a frozen world exactly what he thinks is there to be found — an archetypal image. Framed and presented as a large glossy printed, they also wander into the tricky territory of the aestheticizing poverty - beautification possible through the safe access allowed by Street View.

Each picture in the book is identified with a number sequence and place as its title. Whilst based on the geographic location of the image, Rickard has manipulated it to ensure the exact location of each capture cannot be identified. This reinforces the anonymity of the works - connected to the world, but disembodied from it - perhaps similar to the experience of actually using Street View.

Yet the images somehow possess a kind of intimacy too. Rickard has sought out images containing people — never crowds, but almost always there is a lonely figure or small group present. The images draw us in with their universality and apparent glimpse of how other people live their lives. They also feel intimate in their familiarity. However, the blurred faces and the camera perspective which forces even close figures into the distance, emphasise again the effect of anonymity and isolation. As Rickard puts it, “the subjects then are really symbols or icons, and not individuals”.

39.259736, Baltimore MD (2008), 2011

So, A New American Picture is not so much about being completely new, as harnessing technology of the current time to produce something intimately connected and conscious of what has come before it. It also straddles various tensions — of intimacy and distance, placeness and universality, photography and the painterly, the aesthetic and the social. That each of these are palpable in the work ensures it lives beyond being a simple screen capture, and has a power that resonates wider.

Space Framed 2013 - Week 3

Joel Sternfeld - Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta Georgia, April 1983 from American Prospects

" I am looking at the landscape for what it reveals about the human moment...This is the surface of the earth and what we do with it tells us an awful lot about ourselves"
- Joel Sternfeld, in Interview  'New York Voices'


"Without caption or comment, a photographer can communicate the taste of an era through content, structure and form"
-Stephen Shore in lecture 'Photography and the Limits of Representation' 

"It seems to me that a good photographer is a combination of two things. One is interesting perceptions and the other is an understanding of how the world is translated by a camera into a photograph. You have to have something to communicate. But you also have to have a real understanding of the tools of communication in photography: That you are taking a three-dimensional world that flows in time, and are going through this transformative process of making this flat, bonded, static objects."
-Stephen Shore, in Interview 'The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real'.


This week, we will be looking at Joel Sternfeld's study American Prospects (reviews of this here and here) followed by Doug Rickard's recent work - A New American Picture (here's a post made earlier about this, which came from this essay)

Reading this week is from  John Szarkowski's works - Looking at Photographs and The Photographer's Eye (both on temporary reserve at Richview Library)