Repetitions - Student Task

Repetitions Research Task

Research task: (1) Choose one these photographers, and examine how they use repetitions in their practice.Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Ed Ruscha, Roni Horn, Thomas Demand. Consider: (a) What is their Subject matter; (b) How do they take their photographs?; (c) What photographic equipment do they use?; (d) How do they exhibit and combine their photographs?; (e) What access are we given to the objects / events they photograph?; (f) How, before these works, do we interpret the objects depicted?(g) How do the individual images interact with one another, and influence the way we comprehend them?; (h) Can we link this analysis to Baudrillard’s notions of simulation, and the hyperreal? (j) Are these images representations or simulacra?

(2) Choose a type of object, architectural structure, or person, and create a series of Photographs of them. Develop an approach to taking your photographs that allows you to examine the individual attributes of the images, and explore the relationship of the images to one another. Think specifically about how you comprehend these objects. Think about how they exist individually and in relation to one another. What is most real about these objects? The individual presence of the object or the way it exists in relation to other objects of this types? How will the way you take and present the objects reflect this.

Repetitions

Bernd and Hilla Becher

The Bechers‘ are the leading proponents of the objective school photography. Their purpose has always been to make the clearest possible photographs of industrial structures. The Bechers' goal is to create photographs that are concentrated on the structures  themselves and not qualified by subjective interpretations. The Bechers make their photographs using similar lighting conditions,, camera position, and without dramatic skies or deep shadows. Their contention is that through these technical procedures the photographs objectively represent these architectural structures. Barthes might describe them as non-coded images. However, the artists also exhibit their photographs in groups according to  type. From a distance we get a mass of objects , yet close up they we can see variations between these families of objects. 

Dan Graham

The typologies created by Bernd and Hilla Becher, which set out structural variations between
different kinds of objects have been linked with a photoconceptualism. Practitioners such as Dan
Graham, Ed Ruscha, Douglas Heubler and Joseth Kosuth. These artists deskilled photography, and
removed all trace of manual process or subjective decision making from the photographic
process. Graham used instant cameras enabling the mechanical limitations of his tools
show in the final outcomes. In 1966 he presented a photo essay called “Homes in America”.
Graham took the coding systems, and serial repetitions that characterised minimalist sculpture
and applied, and used them to examine repetitive organisation of domestic architecture. 

Ed Ruscha

Photoconceptualism presented serialised traces of objects, contexts, behaviours and interactions
in order to make visible the complexity of public space, and social interaction. Ed Ruscha made
books that recorded repeated objects along a given route. In Twenty-six Gas Stations he recorded
every gas station he encountered in a trip from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles. He employed the
same exhaustive impulse for Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966). Ruscha photographed each
building at noon in order to wash out the images making the street appear like a hollywood
movie set. The repetitive structures that comprise Ruscha’s books showing a world depleted of
difference. 

Thomas Demand

Each of Thomas Demand’s photographs is one or more steps removed from reality, creating
tension between the fabricated and the real. He begins with a pre-existing photograph of an
actual location culled from the mass media. While his large-scale photographs resemble these mass
media images, they actually show three-dimensional, life-sized models made from cardboard and
paper that Demand builds in his studio solely for the purpose of being photographed. Demand
knowingly uses the traditional role of photography as a faithful transcriber of the world to throw his
subject’s artificiality into doubt. This confounding of references is such that the very idea of an original
recedes completely.

The Rhetoric of Images - Student Task

The Rhetoric of Images Student Task

I’m going to give you a choice this week, between analysing photographs in relation to the semiotic theories we explored this week, and using these theories to generate photographic images.

You can either

1. Produce a 300 word visual analysis of a work by one of these artists Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, David Salle, Sherrie Levine, Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Hamilton, Wilhelm Sasnal, Luc Tuymans, Vija Celmins. Consider – (1) What images are these pictures created from? (2)Where were they sourced / what sphere of visual culture do they originate from? (3) What has the artist done with / to them? (4) How / where are they presented? (5) How do we interpret these images? (6) How does the context in which these photographs have been situated, influence these interpretations? (7) Do they get us to think in terms of presence or absence?
2. Create a series of photographs that re-produce and re-frame advertising imagery. Your task here is to choose images that appeal to you, and develop ways of photographing them that draw out, and emphasise how they appeal to you. You should draw upon, and investigate techniques used by Richard Prince - cropping, zooming in, contextualising, occluding materialising, and juxtaposing, exploring reflections. You might also look at the typical or unusual places where branding / advertising crops up –clothing, architecture, wasteland, domestic environments, refuse, retail environments. Alternatively you might consider how advertisers construct associations by presenting particular objects or juxtapositions, look at the types of materials or surfaces they use, or consider how they deploy the human body.

Present these images on your blogs and comment upon the process of making them. Say what you were trying to achieve, to what extent you think they are successful, and how you have drawn upon and explored Barthes / Prince’s ideas through them.

Don’t try to create finished works. Think of them as sketches or proposals that are part of a process of investigation.

The Rhetoric of Images

Roland Barthes Denotation / Connotation

Denotation – What an object or image is understood to
represent. What is that? What is it a picture of?

Connotation – the thoughts feelings and associations
that accompany one’s perception of an example of
visual culture.

Consider this advert  for spaghetti. What does it mean? What does it make us think about?
Roland Barthes wrote an essay in 1964 analysing it. He contrasted what “Panzani” denoted (named),  with what the advert connoted (suggested).

He claimed that whilst “Panzani” denotes a range of pasta products, the word also connotes the general dea of italianicity. He also  considered the imagery . The picture is composed of red white and green suggesting the Italian flag. The bag seems to have been put down on return from market suggesting the kind of fresh ingredients you might buy there. Barthes even claims that the bag suggests a fishing net. All of these elements combine to associate Panzani products with an idea of rural Italian culture.

Barthes wanted to emphasise that these associations weren’t incidental, but were a carefully constructed aspect of the advert , which was designed to make these products appealing. 

The Gaze - Student Task

The Gaze – Student Task

Create a 200 – 300 word visual analysis of a particular photograph or series of photographs that feature people.

Examine how the people in the photograph engage with one another and how you as the viewer are involved, or implicated in the image. Who is looking at whom? What access are you given to their bodies? How are they articulated in relation to each other and you, the viewer? What are they wearing, and how are they positioned within space? What parts of their body are visible and what parts are invisible? 

Think about the kind of interaction that you have with the image. Is the photographer trying to stimulate, or gratify you? Are they trying to shock you, or are they trying to release repressed desires, or overcome taboos? Is the image trying to make you critically aware of how you look at images of others? Is it trying to change, how people of different kinds are judged and used

Try to explore the images in relation to some of the terms we explored in today’s lecture, such as the gaze, the nude, nakedness, voyeurism, extra & intra – diegetic gaze.

Cindy Sherman, Araki, Larry Clark, Robert Maplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Catherine Opie, Nan Goldin, Jeff Wall, Barbara Kruger.

The Gaze

Naked / Nude Key points

(1) A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power (moral, physical, economic, social sexual) that he embodies.
(2) The object of this power is always exterior to him, and suggests what he can do for you and to you.
(3) A woman’s presence expresses her attitude towards herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.
(4) The surveyor and surveyed are two constituent yet distinct elements within her. She must monitor how she appears to men.
(5) Her sense of self is supplanted by her sense of being appreciated as herself by another.
(6) Men act, and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. 

Objectification / The Gaze / Voyeurism

Objectification – Pornographic imagery offers women as available for male
Sexual fantasy, in a restricted range of roles.  Objectification is the practice of treating
another person as a commodity or as an object for use.

The gaze – The power to look upon others. It has been suggested that men possess
the gaze and look upon woman. This operates at a societal level  and generates a
culture of image production in which women are contiually portrayed as objects for
men to look at, forcing women to internalise this gaze to the point where they survey,
and monitor their actions in relation to a perceived onlooker 

Documentary Student Task

Research historical and contemporary documentary photography, and prepare a 300 word blog entry comparing and contrasting them.

Consider

(1) How do the photographers you examine exploit the technical possibilities offered by photography, and to  what political ends? What are the aims of the artist? How does mechanical reproduction facilitate their artistic project? How does their work contrast with realist artist's such as Millet, and Courbet?

(2) How do they make their work, and how do they show it? Where do they go to make their photographs, how are they lit? How are they composed? What is their relationship to their subjects? How do they use the darkroom? How are their photographs distributed? Who is their intended audience?

(3) How do they respond to changing social circumstances? How do they respond to the social circumstances of people throughout the world? How do they choose who to photograph? How do they plan particular projects? Do they simply intend to raise awareness, or do they seek to initiate more concrete social change?

(4) How do they deal with the question whether photography is truthful to reality?  How do they overcome or highlight the problems posed by this question? Do they consider that photographic images are indexical? Do they consider how contexts in which their images are used transform their meanings? Do they consider how socially constructed meanings inform the reception of their work?

Benjamin and Documentary Photography

Documentary forms
Documentary photography developed  and came into widespread usage at the of the 20th century at the time when Walter Benjamin was writing?
2) It was widely understood to depict reality, at this time. This was understood as Indexicality.  The photograph was understood to record a passing moment in time.
3) Following Benjamin’s ideas photographers began to use photographic images to draw work events to the attention of mass audiences. Many of these images were distributed to mass audiences.
4) However, people were also aware that a photograph had to be constructed, and certain conventions were established such as leaving a black border,  or only using natural lighting as a way of confirming a photographs truth to reality. 

Reappraising Documentary
1) In the late 1970s Allan Sekula, and Matha Rosler re-appraised the status of the documentary genre. 
2) They criticised the neutrality of documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, who did not consider the actual political frameworks in which their images were going to be used. Along with Matha Rosler, Sekula continuously questioned the extent to which documentary images can initiate social change, in relation to the instituional mechanisms that distribute them, and the socially constructed meanings through which are interpreted.
3) Other artists such as Hito Steyerl focus upon conventions and social codes that infuse documentary. Her film November focuses more upon how documentary images are created in relation other genres.

Panopticisim Task

FD Year 2 Photography Contextual Studies

Surveillance - Student Task

Research artists from the recent exhibition at Tate Modern Exposed - Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera (2010). Choose three photographs by artists in the exhibition, and conduct a short visual analysis. Examine the different elements that construct the image. Consider how they are arranged, and how they interact with each other. Think about the intended purpose of the image, and consider the way the image is presented, and how people engage with it. When was the image taken, and what technology was used to create it? How does the photographer interact with the scene that is depicted, and how do they interact with the subject? Is the artist making a comment or criticism through the photograph, and if so how are they doing this. Compare and contrast between the images. In what ways are they similar and in what ways are they different. By contrasting them your task is to consider different modes of photographic presentation, how they are distributed / presented to viewers, and how the image communicates with them.

Choose three artists from the list and use the resources in the library to research them. You might also want to consult the exhibition website http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/exposure

Vito Acconci, Merry Alpern, Nobuyoshi Araki, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sophie Calle Larry Clark, Edgar Degas, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Bill Eppridge, Walker Evans, Harun Faroki, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Nauman, Helmut Newton, Thomas Ruff, Andy Warhol.

Structure your research into three 1-200 word statements examining the images. Consider each image and contrast them with one another. Post these on your blogs with the images you are examining as the first entry on their blogs.

Panopticism

A panopticon is a kind of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The design allowed the guards to observe prisoners.

In contemporary society advances  in photographic technology have transformed contemporary social spaces  into a giant panopticon. Secret or discretely positioned cameras, the instantaneous transmission of images to remote screens, and digital archiving now mean that our behaviour can be continuously observed via multiple points of access.

Surveillance - close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal.  (OED online)

Surveillance relates to and extends acts of observation. For example, we might observe someone in the process of caring for them. In contrast surveillance is motivated by suspicion.

“Surveillance pictures are voyeuristic in anticipation, seeking deviance from what is there”.

Voyeur - a person who gains sexual pleasure from watching  others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity. (OED online).

Sophie Calle

“On Monday, February 16, 1981 I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms

On the forth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me”.  (Sophie Calle)

Calle works in the medium of inventories. She records activities within these unitary spaces, and through textual and photographic documentation. She records ephemeral actions. The works capture the process of looking, examining, observing and recording. In this sense her role is similar to a detective. This role is also captured in the factual seemingly disinterested manner in which the photographs are made, and the documents
presented. The mode of presentation subtracts Calle’s motivations, yet the piece remains voyeuristic. We can occasionally see this when she narrates her own responses to the space.

Scheme of Work FD Year 2 Photography Contextual Studies

FD Year 2 Photography Contextual Studies

Scheme of work

1 Surveillance and Society

To examine how different modes of photographic technology facilitate surveillance and how artists have used them as a vehicle for critical art practice.

Reading: Michel Foucault - Panopticism

2 Critical Positions on the Media

To examine the social function of documentary photography, as a form of mechanical reproduction historically and within contemporary globalised culture.

Reading: Walter Benjamin - The work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction

3 Film Theory, 'The Gaze' and Psychoanalysis

Consider how the gaze is reconstructed in Cindy Sherman's, and Merry Alpern's photography.

Reading: Rosalind Coward - The Look, and John Berger Ways of Seeing Chapter three.

4 Communication Theory

To examine how meaning is constructed in advertising imagery, and why these modes of representation were appropriated by artists such as Richard Prince and Jeff Koons in the 1980s.

Reading: Malcolm Barnard - The Sign

5 Reality Virtuality, Hyperreality

Objectivity in photography. Bernd and Hiller Becher, Thomas Ruff , and Thomas Demand. Contrasting photograph as index and simulacrum.

Reading: Jean Baudrillard - America

6 The Media Globalisation & Sustainability

The role of documentation in the representation of globalised space. Alan Sekula, Gabriel Orozco and Andreas Gursky.

Reading: David Harvey - Space as a Keyword

7 Review, and submission of blogs

Review themes from the lectures in recent work by Walead Beshty, Marlo Pascual, Jonathan Monk, Darren Almond, and Roe Ethridge. Students submit their completed blogs.