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