HOW does a photographer construct the view?

From the work we produced for the mini movie "Constructing the View" we tried to decompose and recompose the photos to illustrate and highlight what we loved about those pictures and what made them so powerful - the sky's reflection in the car's ceiling, the movement of characters and objects, the hat, etc. The Winogrand sketch we did puts the viewer in the place of Winogrand exactly at the moment when the people walking towards him are framed by the business man to the left and the man looking straight at the camera to the right, exactly when he decide to take the picture.

 Gary Winogrand - New York - 1968

My idea is to continue the process we started through the film about how and what the photographer implemented to capture a great photo. 

Time: What did he think at the time? Was it carefully prepared in advance of the picture being taken or was it thanks to "the decisive moment" Henri Cartier-Bresson talks about?

 Henri Cartier-Bresson - Derrière la Gare Saint-Lazare - Paris - 1932

Composition: How much do you keep in the frame how much do you have in focus? What does he want to highlight? How does he construct, through porportions, objectivity or flatness? What made him select a certain frame from another?

The Mental Level: How the photographer through is art impacts on the viewer's impressions and emotions? What he leaves out of the frame for the imagination? What are the photographer's intention when taking the picture?

Michael Woolf - Tokyo Compression 75 - Tokyo - 2010

I base the structure of my anlysis on sub-titles seen through the semester but to look more carefully at the photographer's process. Photographers have multiple methods and tools to create impact on the viewer. I want to research what decisions were made and what approach were taken to create Art through photography.

Looking Through A Bigger Camera

The photographer Alec Soth using an 8-by-10 film camera.

Photographers usually start off with a small format camera, 35 mm, then acquire more lenses moving towards the medium format. What happens when you move to the large format view camera? How as a photographer is your 'seeing' of the world changed? Do you become more considerate of the image you will produce or are you simply just looking for a better quality of photo at a larger scale?

With the large format the photographer carries the heavy equipment to site. Then takes precious time to set up the camera. Looking under a black cloak at an inverted image the scene is considered. The image is not instant as a digital will be. The ground glass shows you a preview of the image but its not final. The photographer judges what exposure is right and waits for 'the decisive moment' (Cartier-Bresson).

Stephen Shore in 'Uncommon Places'  was, at first intention, attempting to recapture 'American Surfaces' only this time in full colour and with better equipment. Yet he almost immediately found that this new equipment forced him to carry out his process in a different way.

"The view camera forces conscious decision making. You can't sort of stand somewhere, it is exactly where you want to be... So what happens is that you develop a kind of taste for certainty'.

Stephen Shore - Main Street, Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, August 18, 1974

Edward Burtynsky in Manufactured Landscapes tells in an interview how it slowed him down, made him methodical in his study and search for the image. How he sees himself in the final image.

"It's a contemplative approach. You find your way to the image slowly. ...I looked upon the ground glass the same way you might look at a blank canvas - a space to be filled. The beauty of it was that it filled so quickly and with such exquisite detail."

Ansel Adams in 'The Camera' suggests this contemplative nature of the view camera. he also comments on the way in which you take the photo. Like the opening image of Alec Soth the photographer can be in isolation from the world around him while giving complete attention to the image in front of him.

"With a smaller camera we see the subject through
a viewfinder, and release the shutter at the desired moment of exposure.
A view camera favors a far more contemplative approach,
partly because it is slower to operate... In addition
we see the image on a ground-glass screen that is in precisely the
same position the film will occupy when we are ready for exposure."

Ansel Adams - Yosemite Park

The detail a 4 x 5 or 8 x 10 format camera gives is the most impressive compared with medium format or 35 mm. Maybe this is why photographers move to a large format. Shore did this, he realised he didn't have to be as direct with what the subject was.

'Especially if I'm photographing an intersection, I don't have to have a single point of emphasis in the picture. It can be complex, because its so detailed that the viewer can take time and read it; they can pay attention to allot more.'

I want to investigate this affect, if indeed there is one, of the large format camera has on the psyche of the photographer. In an age where images are capture and instantly available is it a version of “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” (Robert Capa) or is there still a place for the slow process of the 'Bigger Camera'.

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.