Exercise

I was surprised to find out that Shafran’s images were made by a man, but I think that my supposition has more to do with gender stereo-types with which I was raised under, rather than the work itself. Being born in the 1970’s by parents themselves raised in the 1930’s, it’s hard to escape the input from previous generations. Although there is a distilling with each passing generation the process of informing takes time. Although I’ve moved a long way from the generational conditioning of my youth, perhaps there is an element of this conditioning hiding in my subconscious, so that when viewing a stack of washing up my first assumption is to hark back to outdated gender stereotypes. I think I also associate the images subtleties with more feminine qualities. The image feels soft and sensitive. Perhaps that is enhanced by the quality and direction of the light and the order and composition of the image.

Regarding the role of gender in the creation of photographs, I think that people’s reactions vary greatly to any given circumstance. You could have two people, male or female, of similar social standing, similar ethnicity and with similar points of view on life, put them in front of the same subject and their interpretations are going to be unique to them. Let’s say that they were both women, one could produce work that is supposedly identifiable as female and the other produces work that is identifiable as male, it’s their minds and creative process that got them there, not gender. I really don’t think gender comes into it.

Although lacking humans in the images the images do not lack signs of humanity. There is a notion of lives being lived, a feeling of interaction with others – the food needs to come from somewhere even if the person lives alone. There are questions; who owns them, how many shared the meal, was there a pleasant discourse? I would say that there’s an archaeological resonance to them and for that reason they contain huge interest to me.

Bibliography

Nigelshafran.com. (2020). Washing-up 2000 [2000] : Nigel Shafran. [online] Available at: http://nigelshafran.com/category/washing-up-2000-2000/page/7/ [Accessed 17 Feb. 2020].

Exercise 2

My earliest memories are vague, but none the less they are still lodged in my brain. Lacking in exacting detail they remain a surreal reality, a whisper of a memory, a shimmer of consciousness. I hold buried deep within memory a scene from when I was still crawling. An image of a gaudy 1970’s patterned orange carpet, an open plan living/dining room and an image of the semi-iconic 1970’s print of the Blue Lady – a print that adorned many a wall in this decade. Fast forward a few years, just as I was exiting my toddler years and approaching nursery school age, an event happened that was indelibly burnt into my psyche. I can’t clearly remember the run up, but I can remember the act and the aftermath. I grabbed, off the kitchen work surface, a full bottle of open junior aspirin, hid behind the green sofa and proceeded to eat as many as I could. I don’t exactly remember why, and I don’t remember them tasting awful, what I do remember though is my mother’s scream and her fearful expression as she realised what had occurred. A fast-paced trip in an ambulance and the procedure of having my stomach pumped ensured no lasting damage, but the trauma of the event made sure that it was logged in my memory as one of my earliest vivid memories. I can only assume that I’d made the association with sweets, hence my desire to eat them.

Stomach Pump, 1974.

I think my image is a representation of my childhood confusion. At such a tender age we are constantly being guided/told what to do, what’s good for us and what’s bad for us and our own intuition questions and often pushes against parental advice. Replace Tutti Futtis with Skittles and Junior Aspirin with Nurofen, add a dose of Freudian child psychology and the results are the same, a child that is questioning what is told and pushing the boundaries of behaviour. I like to think my image represents hidden danger and how children see things with an air of intrigue.

“Don’t play with matches.”

“Why?”

“OOPS.”

Exercise 1.

Why do we gravitate towards certain social groupings? What enables us with a sense of belonging when we find some tribe that we identify with? These are heavyweight questions that sociologists search for answers to. I’m not wholly convinced that Nikki Lee’s exploration is anything more that voyeurism. I know that she spends time with the groups (up to three months) and shares experiences with them, but she doesn’t live their life, she becomes a bit part in it. A more convincing way for me to understand specific social groups is to see long form documentary work based around them and more importantly, made by someone from within the group. I might be putting my own bias on my reasoning (I surf and am and always will be a Punk), but it takes shared experience and friendship to become part of or to understand such social dynamics. I would also question why she needs to be in the photograph herself. To me it just feels as though she is engaging in roleplay and the series felt like a charade. You have to have the scabs of a skateboarder, understand the racism experienced by the Hispanic community or make money like a Wall Street yuppie to understand better what is involved with theses groups. I don’t know why she needs to be in the picture if it is a sociological investigation.   

It’s funny, although Trish Morrissey engages in a similar type of practice, that being a stranger within a group, I don’t feel such animosity towards her as I do towards Lee. Maybe animosity is too strong a description? I feel that Trish’s work attains a more genuine outcome. There appears a relaxedness in the pose and expressions from her participants and she seems to slot into the group setting without becoming a focal point within it. The images hold a sense of playfulness and ease about them and knowing that the female of the group whose role she is taking, even to the act of swapping clothes, is involved in the act of collaboration with her, gives the images a greater sense of purpose. Regarding the question of whether I’d agree to participating in her images if ever asked, I think I would. I think her work poses interesting notions regarding intrusion into physical and psychological boundaries and group assimilation, giving more meaningful connotations.

I am fast become a fan of Trish Morrissey. There is a great deal of originality in her explorations of human condition and mental reasoning. The subjects she chooses to engage with contain many complex issues. In Seven Years she uncovers the often fraught tensions and paradoxically joyous interactions between siblings and parental influence. The gait and poses adopted delineate these familial interactions in succinct way. Acting as a reminder of our own past.

Bibliography

Trishmorrissey.com. (2020). Trish Morrissey. [online] Available at: http://www.trishmorrissey.com/works_pages/work-front/workpg-01.html [Accessed 11 Feb. 2020].

Mocp.org. (2020). Museum of Contemporary Photography. [online] Available at: https://www.mocp.org/detail.php?type=related&kv=6723&t=objects [Accessed 11 Feb. 2020].

Exercise

When I first saw Elina Brotherus’s series Annonciation I was thoroughly moved by the images, especially as I viewed them after reading the accompanying text which gave context to them. Often, I prefer to view images on their own first and then review them after reading the text, but having knowledge through the course materials, I thought it wise to be more informed by the artist prior to viewing. There is an absolute sense of mental isolation with regard to her situation and the yearning for motherhood that is seemingly unobtainable, and although there appears to be a partner in one of her images the rest of the set convey to me a sense of “this is me, no one else can feel what I’m feeling, I am alone with my thoughts”. The images reflect her feelings of loss and sadness at the apparent hopelessness of her situation. Her head is often bowed in contemplative expression and her nakedness in some of the images adds weight to her vulnerability. The image Annonciation 12 shows how real her pain is regarding her difficult circumstance, this cannot be enacted, you can see her plight, her emotion is absolute in this image and on display for all to see.

Brotherus, Annonciation 12, 2012.

Regarding the work of Gillian Wearing, her approach to understanding comes from reflecting on herself in a more youthful incarnate and also in the way people close to her have had an effect on her upbringing. After all, our close family all leave some sort of mental imprint on us that helps shape our understanding of the world and our place in it through shared experiences. There is the moral programming of parental influence, the joyous and sometimes cruel interactions with siblings, the wisdom of grandparents, all could be understood to shape our understanding of self and Wearing series Family Portraits seems to me to be a introspective reflection on such relationships.

Of the artists I’ve looked at for this exercise, Richard Billingham’s book Ray’s A Laugh holds a duality of purpose in the way that it shows an ‘outsider’ a hidden world without need of explanatory text. The story unfolds by strength of images alone. When viewing the work, one can see the exhausting effect of alcoholism, the symbols of poverty in the confines of a tiny high rise flat in the socially deprived Cradley Heath and the matriarchal dominance of his mother Liz. The images allow insight without the need of wordy explanation, they are a depiction of self without the need of the artist being present within them. Add to this the exposing of wider issues such as poverty, alcoholism and coercive control, a world that unfortunately many face in run down, economically starved areas of this and many other countries worldwide.

Billingham, Untitled, 1994.

I don’t think any of the artists I’ve looked at for this exercise display overt narcissism, moreover, to me, they’re being reflective of their own lives or experiences perhaps with a view of understanding themselves more or to enable a shared experience of understanding with the viewer. That’s not to say that there isn’t narcissism in photographic practice, but I think that holds more relevance to social media and selfie culture – where it is rife.

Bibliography

Elina Brotherus. (2020). Photography — Elina Brotherus. [online] Available at: http://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography#/annonciation/ [Accessed 7 Feb. 2020].

AnOther. (2020). The Many Selves of Gillian Wearing. [online] Available at: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/7906/the-many-selves-of-gillian-wearing [Accessed 7 Feb. 2020].

ASX, E. (2020). Richard Billingham: “Ray’s a Laugh” (2000). [online] AMERICAN SUBURB X. Available at: https://americansuburbx.com/2010/07/richard-billingham-rays-laugh.html [Accessed 7 Feb. 2020].

Artnet.com. (2020). Untitled by RichardBillingham. [online] Available at: http://www.artnet.com/artists/richard-billingham/untitled-9su994z6eeEC165qDNxmiA2 [Accessed 7 Feb. 2020].

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was a female photographer based in New York. Her work was predominantly self-portraiture, but also at times she used other female models. Francesca often shot the naked female form, using movement, masking the identities of her subjects and also allowing the subject, be it herself or others to merge into their surroundings. Other signatures of her work included the use of props and abandoned buildings. Unfortunately, much emphasis has been placed on her suicide and the state of her mental wellbeing at this time. Diagnosed as clinical depressed during the last year of her life and suffering some major mental setbacks which may have informed her reasoning on taking her own life, I fail to see this as the underlying influence on the majority of her work.

My reason for this belief comes from statements given by people that were close to her and also the fact that I understand her work to be playful as opposed to be a portent. As her mother states in an interview with Rachel Cooke of The Guardian in 2014, ‘She had a good time. Her life wasn’t a series of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them.’ (Cooke, 2014). To me it seems easy to make statements of prophetic wisdom after the fact, to draw conclusions with the benefit of hindsight, to steer argument in one direction only. I like to see her work as playful, that she’s acting out her fantasies and dealing with issues of the gaze and female form. Perhaps now in the era of #MeToo her work should be seen more about female empowerment and the taking control of her own body. If anything, I think the supposed darkness of her images just tallies with her own sense of humour and that her work was as much an experiment in photographic surrealism.

Woodman, Angel Series, 1977.

Bibliography

Cooke, R. (2020). Searching for the real Francesca Woodman. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman [Accessed 26 Jan. 2020].

MCA. (2020). Francesca Woodman, From Angel Series, Roma, September, 1977, 1977. [online] Available at: https://mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1977/Francesca-Woodman-From-Angel-Series-Roma-September-1977-1977 [Accessed 26 Jan. 2020].

En.wikipedia.org. (2020). Francesca Woodman. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Woodman [Accessed 26 Jan. 2020].