Documentary Photography: A History of Photography
Paul Martin's photography deals with surveillance and reality as my first project did. I like that the simplicity of this photograph and low quality, as it shows that the meaning and representations or connotations in photographs are of greater importance than the aesthetic quality.
I love the personalities displayed in the photo's below and the respective eye-lines of the crowd of people looking slightly to the right of the camera, suggesting that there is life and action beyond the contextual frame of the photograph -adding further dimensions and thus reality to the picture. I like the different relationships that can be inferred from expressions and body language between the blonde cross legged woman, the man and the lady sitting next to him, as well as the couple to the right of them. The fact that the subjects attention are diverted by something else other than the camera also allows for more naturalistic reactions. In my project I hope to talk to my subjects and create a relaxed atmosphere, like a conversation, thus making the subjects almost forget that they are being photographed and help them to relive their memory more realistically.
I really liked this photograph due to the neutral or 'blank expression' (referred to by David Blake) of the young boy. There seems to be emotion present but perhaps it is more due to the viewers projection onto this blank canvas. This is what Roland Barthes would term a 'punctum', a photograph which incites personal and emotional engagement between the subject and the viewer, as opposed to the 'studium' which portrays more of a contextual/cultural or linguistic understanding. I really hope to achieve something like this in my project, as a neutral expression would work at a parallel to the performed or non-naturalistic elements in the past photograph that my subject holds up. In saying this, I do not wish to direct the outcome of the subjects expression but hope that it comes naturally from their reliving of their memory.
Henri Cartier-Bresson is an important person to include as he underlines the harmonic moment when a significant act or emotion is aesthetically pleasing. This is something which is greatly factored into my project as I have to capture a moment of realistic emotion from memory recall, to contrast against the performed emotions of the past photograph. In the image below I personally believe that the 'decisive moment' lays within the simultaneous stretching movements of the 3 women in the background, matched with the pulling motion of the women in the forefront. I also like the way that the rugs merge with the landscape in this photograph.
Eugene Atget's approach to photography was as an objective documenter. although it is debatable as to whether there is such thing as this, as reality and truth is a subjective notion, and a photograph is always to some extent subjective even in terms of the camera used to document a situation or the location of the photograph. However, I do wish to be somewhat impartial in my project, like Atget, by allowing the subjects to relive their memories with as little input from me as possible. I will ask questions to encourage the memory but aim to photograph the outcomes of this neutrally.
Documentary: Light from the Middle East: New Photography
This exhibition really gave me food for thought in terms of my project. It dealt with similar themes such as the reliability of the photography discourse and the photograph as memento and evidence.
The photograph below is an example of Photojournalism during the Iranian revolution. It serves to undermine the authority and power of photographic representations/connotations as the photograph of The Shah is burnt as to symbolise a challenge to political and social power structures. This made me question the power that the photograph asserts in terms of memory, and the extent to which highlighting a specific moment affects the reality of the memory on the whole.
Portraiture: Light from the Middle East: New Photography
This photograph, taken by Jean Pascal Sebah for Thomas Cook is a classic example of documenting The Other. Wells writes that "images of 'the other' reestablished the West as powerful and progressive by comparison." and I feel that this photograph relates to this sentiment and the going away and "bringing back" of photographs of strangers or the unfamiliar, especially due to the travel context. The different representations in this photo serve to provide the Western public with information on the 'types' of people that inhabit Middle East, and as this is an advertising document these 'types' could have been presented as intriguing in their different culture and clothing etc. The elements which David Bate refers to in Photography: The Key Concepts, with regards to Portraiture (i.e. Pose, Face, Background Clothes) are all features which come to play in these photographs and are useful in helping me consider similar elements within my project.
These photographs, taken by Newsha Tavakolian, entitled Mothers of Martyrs, in 2006, display elderly Iranian Women whose sons died decades ago during the Iran/Iraq War. The mothers have aged whilst their sons remain immortal in the framed photograph. The aesthetics of these images are very similar to how I want my project to look; utilising the same idea of a photograph within a photograph. I was worried that including a contextualised background would detract from the memory revival in my project but I feel that it works in this series as we can establish inferred meanings of the photograph better. Perhaps including a background, as opposed to a blank wall, would portray the personality of my subject and give greater depth to the emotion on their face. The expressions on these woman's faces are also quite neutral which is an element which I really like.
I was surprised to find that there was such a wide variety of photography and that the discourse encompasses elements which I wouldn't necessarily have deemed to be part of the photographic discourse beforehand. For example, the superimposed blanked out and censored faces of those at private parties in Iran, created by Amirali Ghasemi (2005, Party - below) portray cartoon like images which are hard to distinguish as deriving from a photograph. I had a similar idea to do with identity and photography which I created a test of at the beginning of my project, which can be found in this section of my blog:) However, I disregarded this as I felt it wasn't aesthetically pleasing and felt was straying from the photographic genre into the realms of something completely different. I have now come to understand that photographs are highly ambiguous and their importance lays in what they symbolise rather than their consistency with certain photographic conventions. I also learned that photography can come in many different forms such us on copper plates (early photography) through to graphically projected, video like footage.
Amirali Ghasemi
Jowhara AlSaud, 2008 Out of Line
Mugshots dowloaded from US government website after 9/11. Digitally manipulates faces through blurring/scratching so that they are indistinguishable. Information which can be gleaned reflect simplistic stereotypes of Muslims by the West (headscarves)
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