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

Jacob Felländer

24-hours

cityscape nr 4

Los Angeles - Hong Kong - Bombay

Soho

Jacob Felländer is a Swedish photographer /artist. He has been experimenting with photography since the late 1990s. He is known for his large scale cityscapes and landscapes in which he uses his own specific technique of photographing. In his latest work he has added another dimension to his photographs; paint.

When he works Felländer tries to capture multiple exposures in a single image, he tries to capture a span of time in one frame. Felländer uses analogue techniques, using old cameras that he modifies. Jacob at work 

 

Exhibition: I want to live close to you

Jacob Felländer was inspired by continental drift. The discovery that space and time are not constant brought forth many thoughts and questions. Felländer asked himself;  “I wondered, if space drifts over time, perhaps can time drift over space.” He was intrigued about how we experience time and space. Can our experience of time and space be captured in a photo, what would that photo look like?

Using his modified analogue camera Felländer traveled the world taking photographs. In twelve days he went to New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Bombay, Dubai and Paris. These are locations on five different continents that were once joined. By winding forward the film in his camera, he was able to expose it one centimeter at a time and thereby ‘capturing the whole world in one shot’.

The densely populated cities also brought Felländers attention to how people are merging together in cities, living closer and closer together.

Books:

- Stand Still
- I Want To Live Close To You
– Anatomy

(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!

Phillip-Lorca DiCorcia and his Rorschach-like pictures

The intent behind Phillip Lorca diCorica's work is explicitly left open to the imagination. This perhaps comes from his habit of constructing suggestive, and often familiar, scenes, while omitting certain key information, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. ‘The more specific the information suggested by a picture,” he says, “the less happy I am with it”.

His cinematic style of work became poignant in his Hustler series, where he photographs the L.A's rent-boys, who are cast in the shadows of Hollywood’s bright lights.

As always, the pictures are meticulously constructed by diCorcia. However, he opts to title the photograph with: the name of the subject, his age, home town and the fee he was paid for the photo - a few words, suggesting a rich but un-elaborated narrative that is left to the audience to construct.

Similarly, in his recent collection ‘The Storybook life’ ,diCorcia assembled a broad swath of photos from across his career.  By arranging the work in a seemingly unrelated order he believes “ the content can constantly mutate according to both the external and internal condition of the viewer”

Reflection on Photography (work by Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander)

Robert Frank. New York City 1947

Lee Friedlander: Mannequin 

Lee Friedlander. New York City, 1966

One of the first Robert Frank’s photographs in the United States, captured the reflection on the street after a summer heavy rainfall near the Central Park. This photo is composed upside down to emphasize the building reflection on the puddle, while also showing a glimmer motion of activity on the street.

Using a hand-held 35mm camera, Lee Friedlander photographs of mannequin have a weirdly odd composition that manipulates the reflection on the storefront windows with mannequin as the main object. The photographs are intended to reflect the notion of sex, fashion, and consumerism in the big city lifestyle.

 The last photograph is another work by Friedlander using shadow reflection as an important of his composition. The picture was taken in New York City in 1966 when he captured his own shadow on a woman’s back. I like how he uses things that are less “valuable” objects into the main piece on his photography composition.

Joel Sternfeld. McLean, Virginia, December 1978

Joel Sternfeld. McLean, Virginia, December 1978

A photo by Joel Sternfeld at McLean, Virginia in 1978. The frame captured a ghoulish photo of a fireman shops for pumpkin and a burning house on the background. However, the burning house in the background is in fact a firefighter training house, Sternfeld successfully uses photography as a tool of manipulation to create his own narrative composition 

Nicholas Nixon: Friendly, West Virginia, 1982

This apparent family portrait appears in the 'depictive' section of Stephen Shore's book 'The Nature of Photographs'.

'... a photographer solves a picture, more than composes one.'

Shore inisists that Nixon's photo 'solves' the scene it captures. He seems to be suggesting that a photograph recreates the world as a more coherent version of itself; a photographer doesn't simply 'compose' its elements into a certain arrangement, but selects the ideal point of view. In the case of Friendly, West Virginia, Nixon's photo is clearly referencing Walker Evans' photos of the victims of the Great Depression. We duly make the comparison between depression-era sharecroppers and the poor of Nixon's own time. This perhaps makes the photo more of a complication of than a solution to the world it depicts.

August Sander

Portraits from August Sander's Citizens of the Twentieth Century (1929-30)

In 1929, German photographer August Sander announced his plan to create a photographic manual that would become a social inventory of Germany in the form of portfolios. Although this project was incomplete, August Sanders succeeded in creating an awareness to what he called "exact photography". He presented his photographs as technical products instead of art pieces. His portrait subjects were usually aware of the camera and assumed representative poses.

The three portraits above show seemingly ordinary men. However, only after closer observation can we see Sander's genius touch on these photographs. The first two photographs are portraits of tramps, people who came from the lowest layer of society. The third photograph is a portrait of a head farmer, someone who is considerably in a much better social standing than the other three men. 

The third photograph has a similar composition to the first photograph creating the illusion that the two men came from the same social group. But Sanders wanted the viewer to focus on the person portrayed, not his surroundings. The head farmer assumed a stern pose showing leadership. His shiny shoes and tailored coat told us that his social status. In the other hand, the tramp seemed more at ease. He had one hand in his pocket and the other held a walking stick. He looked away from the camera and his face expressed a sense of longing. His worn shoes completed the image of a vagrant. Some of these could also be seen in the second photograph despite it having a different composition.

These subtle hints are what makes Sander's portrait so special. He stepped away from making portraits looked like paintings, something that was still considered the norm at his time. Instead he presented his subjects as people, real and breathing.

Phil Wira

Eugène Atget, 1857-1827

"These are simply documents I make"


Eugène Atget; flâneur, photographer of turn of the century Paris.
Abhorred by the modern movement and it's infringement on the historic quality of Paris Eugène Atget made it his life's work to document the sense of 'Old Paris'. Atget did this through photographing not only the laneways, slums, bridges,stairways which constituted pre revolution Paris but also the street vendors, prostitutes and beggars which contributed to the fabric of the Parisian street scene. He seems to have identified with the peripheries of everyday life, facing his camera away from the bustle and concentrating on the overlooked.




Atget's primary source of income was selling his images as study documents for artists and architects from his studio in Montparnasse and it was here where he gained notoriety among the surrealist movement. The wispy sense of light resulting from his very long exposure times created an eerie ghost like scene. This new take on his subject; the everyday and ordinary things of Parisian life and the way his images seemed to capture a sense of ambience with their wide angle views attracted the attention of Man Ray. By this stage Atget's technique and equipment were well antiquated his large bellows camera being 60 years old yet he refused the use of the newer equipment of his new acquaintance Man Ray . These encounters began 2 years before Atget's death and saw him being published for the first time in Man Ray's 'La Révolution Surréaliste'. It is only after his death in 1827 that he received renown for his work in part thanks to a young Berenice Abbott who published his work into the book 'The World of Atget'

Prostitute on her Shift, Rue Asselin, Paris
An figure typical  of Atget's documentation
of the peripheries of Paris

Gladiateur Mourant; Gardens of Versailles
Aget seems to wish to convey the fall into disrepair of old 

France.

Barges on the Seine opposite La Consiergerie,
 1er Arondissement 1923
Here Atget's long exposure perfectly capture the
ambience of a Winter's morning on the seine.

Thomas Annan; Close No.61, Saltmarket

This photograph is taken from Thomas Annan's collection documenting the slums of Glasgow between 1868 and 1877.  It is a document of purpose commissioned by Glasgow city council in order to map out the inner city's poorer areas however the author's composition of the image is much more considered.
Annan frames this scene and focuses at the black void at the end of the alleyway. The rest of the image seems wispy and almost transient. The viewer's eye is drawn down this almost impossibly narrow space to the uncertainty of the dark void encapsulating the confining character of the area he is documenting.

Candida Hofer

Candida Hofer

Her sustained examination of the architectural and perceptual order of public interiors- the orderly arrangement of space swept clean, absent of its implied inhabitants. Hofer's primary interest lay not in landscape or architecture, but in space- not necessarily in the function of a public building or a particular interior, but in the space itself, which could have a physical/ social presence of its own.
She seems to prefer her spaces to be uncomplicated by the unpredictability of people moving through her strict composed frame. She does not feel that her spaces are empty but that they are highlighted and animated by light, form, pattern and references to the human presence. The individual and the collective _empty chairs, that are a sign of the absent, but yet these motifs create engagement with the pictures and make one want to find out more. From the clear, sharp compositions, Hofer's images can let ones eye wander easily around the picture.

 
 DHFK Leipzig IV, 1991, 38 x 57.

Museo Civico Vicenza II, 1988, 38 x 57.

Colour theory defines white as the absence of all colour. Hofer chooses to let white define a lot of her compositions, from the most subtle contrasts illuminating architectural detail or refining perception of the space, to the motifs highlighted by emphasizing repetitive forms.


The overwhelming effect is that of being tonally pale, suffused with light. Usually white dominates more or less than half of the composition, balanced by the darkness of the contrasting area, which is often lightened by reflection.

Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami, ca. 1975

A static chair in a hotel lobby_ a note of absence that caught my eye. Elliot Erwitt uses the intense surfaces to swamp the chair and uses an opening door to end a moment but leaves the viewer to wonder what is beyond, creating the viewer's mind to continue more into investigations of the image. The amount of detail also helps to let the viewer to wander around the image. The compositions, where Elliott chose to place the camera, with the image continuing out of the picture's frame illustrates an open road.  
This image also made me question how one can share a state of mind through their photography. 

Judith Joy Ross: Untitled – Easton Portraits 1988

This image really appealed to my senses due to its visceral and shimmering quality. The composition of the image is extremely powerful in its use of three figures in the foreground which are shown in sharp focus against the background. This image depicts three young girls in the midst of adolescence. The sharpness of their portrait in relation to the out of focus background speaks of the brevity of youth and gives us the sense that this is a snapshot in time; a moment that is immortalized on film. The image was captures using a large format 8 x 10 camera which would have rendered the scene back to front and upside down on the viewfinder. Knowledge of this only serves to strengthen the power of the composition and the classical use of thirds.

Sarah Carroll

Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt

American photographer 1913-2009

Her black and white photographs from the early 1940's describes the streets of New York City. Her pictures features children playing, seniors gossiping and everyday errands. She didn't intend her street photography to be documentary but to capture the energy and interactions of people.
Helen Levitt's capacity to take pictures of people so close up without them noticing or posing for the picture is key to the quality and energy of her work . The protagonists don't notice her and don't change their behavior around her. She must have gained their approval or saw her as a local, not someone there to document or analyse their lifestyle but one of them.

The work I find the most powerful is her portraits of children playing with what they can find in their local streets of New York City. She captures the kids' innocence and happiness. Her work is powerful, objective and poetic. The composition of patterns, colour, people's bodies make her work recognisable from any other streetscape photographers.

André Kertész
1894 - 1985

André Kertész, was a Hungarian-born photographer. His contributions to photo-journalism and with his sense of composition set him apart as a master.
He was never tried to give meaning to his subjects but rather capture them in a quiet yet overlooked incident. Even though these images were of ordinary scenes he juxtapositions them in a surreal manner.   He used, as 'Eiffel tower shadows', unusual and unexpected angles that seem like a personal view. Away in which he draws the viewer into the image, leaving an image of the real world in a very surreal way.



 Meudon, 1928
This image is quite possibly one of the most iconic and discussed photographs that exist. Kertész visited Meudon, a quiet french town, and took two photographs. On a return visit to the town he took this mesmerising photograph. By taking the picture at exactly this moment, Kertész provides us with more than just an instant of a street. The mysterious man in the foreground, his stare is right down the camera lens but what is he carrying? Then attention is drawn right to the top of the viaduct with a train passing. The subjects are framed by the building facades. I think here, shown by the buildings, his photograph is his relationship with surrealism. Many parallels have been made between this image and Giorgio De Chirico's 'The Soothsayer's Recompense'.
    The image echos Kertész's realism and showing us an image full of questions and visual puzzles. He shows us a decisive moment which, in his way, is not about that exact moment, its not about freezing time. It is about what wonder and emotion the foreground figure, the subjects in the street and the train create in their movements through the image.



Distortion, 1933
Kertész express this concept through an elaborate processes of distortion.  He does so with the female nude. His nudes are a commentary on the sublimate beauty and harmony of the female form. And also an ironic take on the persistent representation of women as sexual objects. In 1933 Kertész is offered a concept cover for the french magazine Vu. He creates the series “Distortions”. It includes 200 female nudes that are the result of optical experiments with reflections and mirrors. In this article Kertész becomes the master of photo-journalism and he literally wants to write with light.