Essay: Constructing the View.

Now that the dust is settling on the symposium, it's time to write about some of the themes that have come up in our discussions preparing for and after it.
To complete the seminar, each student will write a 3,000 -3,500 word essay to be submitted in print  (formatted and designed to suit the subject matter, as a booklet) and soft copy as pdf by 1pm on December 16th.
The title of the essay is 'Constructing the View'. In it, each student will explore an aspect of what photography can offer architecture.
The first draft of 1,000 words with selected images is due to be published on the blog by each student by the end of the day on 23rd November.

Here are four ideas about photography that have come up in discussions that may help you develop the course of your essay this week.

1) Photography as a way of knowing the world.
When writing about his exhibition at MOMA, 'New Documents', Szarkowski describes the work of the photographers in the exhibition: (Arbus, Friedlander and Winogrand): 'Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it, not to persuade, but to understand. The world, in spite of its terrors, is approached as the ultimate source of wonder and fascination, no less precious for being irrational and incoherent...' (see full press release here).

There is also a great documentary on Winogrand at work available partly on youtube:




2) Form and Pressure
In this essay (full text here), Shore discusses a quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet in relation to his understanding of photography:
'but then there is this final line: "[To show] the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." This is within the realm of photography. A photograph can aspire to this.'

You can listen to Shore discuss how he makes his photographs  and watch him at work here:



You can also listen to a lecture he gave for the Architectural Association in London by following this link: Photography and the Limits of Representation - Stephen Shore, The Photographer's Gallery London, 13/10/2010/

3) Photography as a way of being in the world:
In the first session of the symposium, 'Lived Space', Mark Pimlott spoke about why he takes photographs 'in this perpetually unfolding present':
'I make photographs as a kind of necessity: I want to be in the World, I want to be open to its expressions.' He quotes Shore:
'And so the pictures are reflective of the condition of a self, paying attention'.
He goes on to say:
'More than documenting, or remembering, then, the photographic attention might serve to bind us to the World, regardless of whether that attention pertains to making or looking: constructing the view is constructing the bond between the self and the World.'

4) Photography as a way of representing an idea of built space - both before and after construction

'A great building, in my opinion, must begin with the unmeasurable, go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable.' - Louis Kahn

4a) The Vkhutemas School in 1920s Moscow, and the student exercises using models and photography.
This work was curated by Thomas Demand for the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice, and he exhibited these alongside his photographs of sketch models by John Lautner, a series entitled 'Model Studies' that was also exhibited at the Graham Foundation and is discussed here.

4b) Hélene Binet's lecture at Harvard: Composing Space:



4c) House: After 5 years of living by Charles & Ray Eames:

Constructing the View

Photography is a funny one, on the face of it, the photographic plate or chip, indiscriminately captures and records light, leading it to assume a kind of scientific impartiality, a fixed record of the truth.

In reality, photography is anything but.

However, our willingness to believe in its impartiality has allowed people, organisations and governments, to selectively shoot and frame the world in photographs, which they present to the masses as infallible evidence of ‘the way things are’.  

You could almost accuse them of ‘constructing the view’…

And although photography has been instrumental in this practice, it also has a way of subverting this effort to manhandle the truth.

The highly turbulent politicised landscape of early 20^th Century Europe, the rise of authoritarianism in Germany and the USSR and threat to U.S.' dominance as an economic and military superpower, created a potent breeding ground where this grew and developed.

Aleksandr Rodchenko embraced of photography as a way of broadcasting his Soviet ideals and vision of Utopia to a fragile country. Later in life he was forced to cut, modify and censor his work at the behest of the Soviet government who were eager to create an image of the utopia which had failed to materialise.

Despite the apparent coldness of August Sanders' indiscriminate cataloguing of people, it revealed a nuanced humanity, threatening the absolutist concept of the master-race, that the Nazi party were eager to promote. Showing 'The hard fact of it and yet the elusive nature of details.'

In America, Walker Evans ran afoul of the Farm Security Administration who had commissioned him to produce propaganda pieces about the life of American sharecroppers. His work, laid bare  the fragility and humanity underpinning the American dream. 

It's interesting to note that Evans called the work ‘documentary-style photography’, the inclusion of the word style implying that, it simply appears to give us the facts, but there is more to it than that.

A more modern manifestation of this is the work of Jules Spinatsch. His series 'Temporary Discomfort' acts as a foil to the adage ‘If the photo isn’t good, you’re not close enough’.

Suggesting that a maintaining distance allows room for crucial objectivity, he photographs the security and . Turning his back to the action he produces unpopulated, contemplative images of the security apparatus surrounding world summits. A counter-point to the emotive crowded images, which appear in the world media following these events.

In his view, the sometimes tightly controlled, one-sided nature of photography in the mass media highlights the importance of examining the motivation behind the photograph’s rather than its content.

The huge democratisation of photography, camera's have become omnipresent, has raised the question the most interesting photography’s comes from the subjects, who are part of an event, rather than the photographers, who have been tasked with recording it. The images with the most impact on society are usually amateur photographs, and CCTV or camera-phone footage.

Space Framed: Constructing the View

This year's Space Framed students will be presenting their work at the Constructing the View symposium on Saturday Nov 2nd at IMMA.

The work, also titled 'Constructing the View' is a brief filmic exploration of the photograph as construct - a negotiation between depth and flatness, surface and space, content and its meaning. 

Team: 

Cillian Briody, Sarah Carroll, Beibhinn Delaney, Fiona Gueunet, Radina Ka, Daniel Moran, Nicky Rackard, Malin Schwan, William Spratt-Murphy, Jeffrey Widjaja, Jennifer Wilson, Philips Wira

(de) Constructing the View

After Monday's session, the proposal for the presentation at the Constructing the View conference is starting to take shape.
Essentially what we are trying to do is to present the photograph as construct - a negotiation between depth and flatness, surface and space, content and its meaning.
This week both groups will experiment with one aspect of our proposal and propose images for analysis in the presentation, ie both groups will have people working on technique, and people working on content.

We will test and discuss both the content and techniques next Monday.

In the meantime, all students are to post ideas to the blog.
Some of those discussed on Monday were:
The Fog of War by Errol Morris
Film by Tacita Dean
Documentaries such as 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace' by Adam Curtis
Also, the work of a previous colleague at UCD, Sarah Breen Lovett, will be of interest - expanded architecture, film as space etc

Good luck with your experimentation this week, looking forward to seeing how you get on!

Space-Framed 2013/14 - Weeks 2+3

This week our discussion has evolved into two groups:
Portrait + Space and the Collective Portrait - Cities and Crowds.

Some of the photographers you will be looking at over the next week are August Sander, Alec Soth, Walker Evans, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Lisa Larsen, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander and Mona Breede.

Here is the film by Helen Levitt that came up in discussion yesterday. (link )


In the Street (1948) by Lost_Shangri_La_Horizon


Reading for week 3:
Geoff Dyer: The Ongoing Moment (on reserve in the library), first essay.
Susan Sontag: The Image World from On Photography
Peter Schjeldahl: Thomas Struth
Peter Schjeldahl: Reality Clicks from the New Yorker


Assignments:
Each student needs to upload their work to date on the blog as follows:
Week 1: 1 photograph and 50-100 words
Week 2: 3 Photographs and 150-200 words.
When posting, include labels (can be added in column on rhs of posts, and searchable in column on rhs of blog) , links, relevant reading etc so that the blog can be used as a collective resource during the semester

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)

Space Framed 2013 - Week 2

Walker Evans - Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, Georgia, 1936

"As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others.
It is not difficult to imagine a person...who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension...we would be uncertain ... how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from the pattern created by the pointer"
- John Szarkowski, excerpt from catalogue essay for The Work of Eugene Atget: Old France, MOMA, NY, 1981.


Over the next two weeks, we will be looking at four major American photographic works.
This week, we will be reviewing Walker Evans' book American Photographs and Robert Frank's work The Americans
There is an interesting essay on the two photographers by Tod Papageorge here.


At the same time, we will be reading Stephen Shore's book The Nature of Photographs (on temporary reserve in Richview library). We will also look at this lecture - Photography and the limits of Representation given by Shore in London in 2010 that explores further the themes introduced in the book.

Space Framed 2013 - Week 1

Welcome to Space Framed.

This week, to get yourself acquainted with our subject matter, you will watch the BBC series ‘The Genius of Photography’ (Available on dvd from Richview Library or on online). 

The series has six episodes. Please watch episode 1&2 and if possible, the rest of the series.

Select a practitioner from one of the episodes and print out 5 of their photographs that interest you. Research where, how and why the photographs were taken and present these to the seminar at the first session. 

Familiarise yourself with this  blog, and the references and research from previous years.

Space Framed will be held in Hugh Campbell’s office every Monday at 1-2.30 pm from Monday 28 Jan.