Assignment One - First Shoot

In planning for assignment one, I looked at the various aspects of my own local community that I could document in photographs. My town, although not generally well-known, is famous for its long history of lock-making. I decided to use this as the theme for my assignment, and began brainstorming some general ideas of the kind of images I could capture. I identified various elements in the town that provide evidence of its history in this industry, such as:

1. A Morrisons supermarket, built on the site of the former Yale lock factory.
2. A housing development, built on the site of another lock factory.
3. A lock-makers memorial.
4. Key-shaped signage in the town.
5. Businesses still producing locks and keys.

With regards to point (5) above, I considered approaching a company that produces locks in the town, with a view to getting their insight into the industry, and taking photographs of their working environment. I liked this idea, but found it very daunting; cold-calling a stranger to ask them to show me their premises and allow me to photograph it is certainly against my normal instincts. However, convinced it would be of great value to the assignment, I emailed a local family company. I chose this particular company as they had been in the lock business in the town for 100 years, and had several generations working at the business.

The company, A. Lewis and Sons (Willenhall), were very quick to reply, and told me that it would be no problem for me to visit. A few days later I called and spoke to Terry Lewis, who had over 50 years experience in the business, and whose son now runs it. We arranged a day and time for me to go along, and I did so the following week. Terry was extremely helpful and knowledgeable, generously giving me around 2 hours of his time and recollections.

The assignment requires that a single focal-length is used for all images. My 50mm prime lens is ideal, as it means I don't have to tape the barrel, and having a fast lens was useful in the lock factory, as it was a very dimly-lit environment. This ultimately provided a different problem though; shooting at f1.8 in order to enable a lower ISO meant that depth of field was severely limited. Once back in Lightroom, I found this was detrimental to several of the images. In hindsight, if I had thought of it at the time I could have easily taken several images of each subject, and focus-stacked them in Photoshop.

Before the visit, I had contacted my tutor to obtain his thoughts on my idea. He said it was certainly something I could run with, and gave me the idea of using the locker-maker to bind the various elements that I wanted to photograph together, perhaps using hand-written notes to accompany the images. My current thoughts are to assemble the 10 images for assignment, then to post the prints to Terry, asking if he wouldn't mind writing a personally-relevant sentence or two about each one, on a post-it note. I could then present my images in a book format, with each image on the left, with the scanned post-it note from Terry on the facing page. For now though, I need to begin planning the rest of the images.

The Ontology of the Photographic Image - André Bazin

In the course notes for the exercise 'The Myth of Objectivity', a link is given to the full documents from which the quotes by Bazin and Sekula were taken. This is my notes on Bazin's document.


Bazin begins by talking of how people historically attempted to 'preserve life', utilising mummification and statuettes as in ancient Egypt. He then goes on to say how painting took over this role, with people being content with having their likeness preserved in a hand-made picture, rather than embalmement. This process has evolved over time, and in the fifteenth century, Western painters became to become more concerned with as complete an imitation of the outside world as possible. Today's cinema has been described as the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Photography and the cinema are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.

Bazin states that regardless of the skill of the painter, there is always an inescapable subjectivity in their work, as a human hand intervened; this casts a shadow of doubt over the image. He also says that photography is '...a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part'. Which we of course now understand to not be accurate.

 It seems that in this writing, Bazin's main points are that paintings are inevitably subjective, regardless of their realism, while photographs are inescapably objective, and that they have 'irrational power to bear away our faith'. Also, that photography has taken over the job of accurately reproducing a scene, giving painting freedom and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.


Direct quotes from the document that I found interesting and useful:

'the preservation of life by the representation of life'.

The evolution of art and civilisation has relieved the plastic arts of their magic role. (of preservation). Initially people were embalmed to preserve a representation. Later, painting took on this role.

No one now believes that these representations actually preserve life, but they help us to remember the subject.

Andre Malraux has described the cinema as the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance and which found a limited expression in baroque painting.

In the fifteenth century Western painters began to become more concerned with as complete an imitation of the outside world as possible.

Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the
expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely
psychological, namely to duplicate the world outside.

In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their
obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion
was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries
that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.

No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity.
The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image.

...a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part.

A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings
of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear
away our faith.

it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism and
allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.

Discontinuities

For this exercise we are asked to select five images from our personal collection, that could not belong to someone else. We are then to ask other students to write a short explanation or caption for each image; the idea being that they are viewing the images in isolation, with no supporting context or information.

My five selected images are as follows:

 

With no supporting information, the viewer of the images has to use any visual clues they have in the image in combination with their imagination to provide a narrative and context for the image. Firstly, here are the responses from my fellow students:

Jane494769

1) Nothing beats a warm summer's evening for a spot of camping
2) A Bambi-rometer
3) I'm still smiling.. just. Hurry up its moving and about to run up my sleeve!!
4) I want to play too!  If I just roll around here a bit and wag my tail it should really liven things up a  bit
5) On the road - alone again

Maurice512591

1. Camping holiday in France. This was our spot.
2. Barometer says this has to change. Wash up and clean!
3. Testing her fear of spiders in a zoo. Look: she is not afraid.
4. The cat disturbs a game. And is forgiven.
5. The end of a holiday - alone

Miriam506964

1. A great campsite, with lots of space and shade.
2. Abandoned in the shed, a barometer decorated with a deer head.
3.  She looks so calm!
4. A cat insists on being the centre of attention
5.  the morning after a lonely night away from home.

Anne507559

1. A perfect spot for camping
2. Time I was clearing out the shed
3. I am NOT afraid of spiders
4. If you think your going to have a game without me you have another think coming
5. Back on the road after your holiday

Judith Bach

1. Camping holiday / road trip
2. An abandoned shed on your travels full of rather interesting objects.
3. A brave lady ! She seems quite composed but perhaps is less keen on the (huge) spider than the photo suggests .
4. Cat interupts game , making sure he/she is not ignored .
5. End of road trip

Now, I will give the actual circumstances for each photograph:

1) This was indeed a camping holiday, for me and my then girlfriend (now wife). It was taken on a camping and caravan site on North Hill in Somerset.

2) Lots of people thought this was taken in a shed; in fact it was taken during a spell of 'urban exploring' of an abandoned farmhouse. The image taken was just above the kitchen sink, and that is the kitchen window. I found the barometer with a deer's head to be quite a novelty!

3) Again in Somerset, at a place called Tropiquaria, where you can handle a tarantula. This was my then girlfriend (now wife). She's very scared of spiders, so was being particularly brave here!

4) About 10 years ago, we were playing a card game on the floor at my parents house, when the cat decided he wanted some attention, so spread himself all over our meticulously organised cards!

5) A family holiday in Cyprus. My and my girlfriend (again, now wife!) were probably sharing the single bed, leaving the other untouched. I quite like the open narrative to this image, it asks more questions than it answers in terms of the one bed made, and the other unmade, who the suitcase belongs to etc.

Reading In, Around and Afterthoughts by Martha Rosler

I found this a difficult piece of writing to read, probably due to my inexperience with reading this kind of literature. I spent a lot of time using an online dictionary and thesaurus, translating the dense wording into something I could better understand. I was successful with this for the most part, and the essay raises some very interesting points, which I’ll briefly outline here. It is worth bearing in mind that this essay is around 30 years old, so certain points made may no longer be applicable; references to The Bowery for example as being ‘an archetypal skidrow’.

From what I can gather, Rosler’s over-arching point in the essay is how the use of documentary photography had changed for the worse. She said:

‘The meliorism (the belief that the world can be made better by human effort) of Riis, Lewis Hine and others is in contrast to pure sensationalism of much of the journalistic attention to working-class, immigrant, and slum life’.

 In other words, Riis, Hine, and others were trying to use their photographs to bring attention to a particular problem, and encourage a gradual (rather than revolutionary) change. With their images they were trying to show facts, facts which were made more clear and concrete by being photographed. Jacob Riis alluded to this when he said; 'I wrote, but it made no impression'. These photographers used visual imagery in combination with other forms of discourse as propaganda to argue for the rectification of wrongs. They would also attempt to prompt action by appealing to polite society’s self-interest, arguing that the symptoms of poverty would affect their own health and security. Their work was in contrast to the sensationalistic journalistic attention to working-class, immigrant, and slum life.

This quote from the essay encapsulates Rosler’s thoughts on the progression of documentary photography over time:

            ‘The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting—and careerism’.

Rosler also talks about the emphasis on the photographer, rather than the people they are photographing. Florence Thompson, the subject of Dorothea Lange’s famous image The Migrant Mother, is one such example. She gave her consent for the images, as she believed they would help to improve her situation. In fact, she personally benefited very little; her identity was not discovered until the late 1970s, where she was found living in a trailer home. Florence was quoted as saying:

 "I wish she [Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."

Lange’s image was public domain (as the project was government funded), so she didn’t directly receive royalties from the image, although it did make her a celebrity and furthered her career. It seems to me that once the image was taken, it became a distinctly different entity to the person herself; the image thrust into the limelight for decades to come, and the person herself all but forgotten. As Rosler put it in her essay; ‘Florence Thompson is of interest solely because she is a postscript to an acknowledged work of art’.

To get some further insight into the essay, I searched YouTube in the hope of finding a video of someone talking about Rosler’s work. I didn’t get exactly that, but I did find an interesting video titled Aperture Foundation at The New School: Documentary Photography which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6nTXZKoggQ. The video is a look at the work of three contemporary documentary photographers, although the speaker does begin with a few words on Rosler’s essay. She talks about how ‘pictures of the poor are framed with a liberal rhetoric’ and how ‘Power relations characterise documentary photography; it's part of the genre’. Both points made by Rosler. The video was made recently, and so is a more up-to-date viewpoint than Rosler’s essay. The speaker in the video made a particular statement that I think is very pertinent to what we are looking at in this part of the course:

‘21st century documentary photography has a much more pervasive uncertainty about facts. It reveals the transparency of the medium, and the subjectivity of the photographer. It's not about giving truthful information; it's questioning what all that might mean’.

What Makes a Document?

I believe all photographs qualify as documents, in that they are, in John Berger's words - 'a trace naturally left by something that has passed'. It is time and context that gives value to a photographic document. A photograph of a person standing in front of a plain wall might have little value to the world at large, but to that person's mother would be very precious. The meaning and importance of an image can change over time, when further events happen or come to light, as happened with Jose's balloon image.

I believe hindsight can also affect the meaning of an image.A group photograph of Jimmy saville with a group of schoolchildren might have made a mildly interesting tabloid picture at the time, but now, with hindsight, such images have a dark, sinister overtone. People's perception of an image has changed with new knowledge of the situation that was ongoing at the time, even though the image itself hasn't changed. What was happening at the time has not changed either, it's just that we now know about it, which shows such images in a different light.

How much we know of the circumstances of an image dictates to a large extent how useful it is as a document. A photograph can be attractive to look at, even when we don't know what it is we are looking at, however its usefulness as a document is impeded when supporting information (in the form of text, or additional images) is limited. Having no prior knowledge of Jose's photograph in Spain, I simply see two figures standing in front of a wall. The one on the left is evidently military, but I wouldn't neccessarily have guessed the one on the right is a religious figure, as the style of dress is unfamiliar to me. It is difficult to see with such a small image, but it appears that the military figure is smiling, and the religious figure is not. Is this significant? I enjoyed John Berger's example in his esssay 'Appearances' of the image of the smiling man and the horse. He recognises that with no contextual information, the viewer is forced to conjure their own interpretation of the scene. Would I look at Jose's image and see two friends? or would I see the man on the right fearful of his immediate future, and the man on the left relishing the thought of executing his prisoner?

Authenticity is another interesting facet to this debate. In Robert Fenton's famous photograph 'The Shadow of the Valley of Death', he had moved the cannonballs onto the road from elsewhere, presumably to dramatise the image. It is a staged photograph, however I believe that this doesn't make it less of a document, but that its documentary focus has shifted. The image still records a scene where fighting took place (but not as it turns out where the charge of the light brigade happened), and it still records the actual cannonballs used in the battle. Bearing these facts in mind, the photograph is a document. It is however documenting a slice of time not from the original battle, but from from the moment the image was being made. In effect I would treat it similar to an image taken of a battle re-enactment. On the sliding scale of value however, Fenton's would register more valuable due to its proximity time-wise to the actual event.

To sum up my thoughts of 'what makes a document?' - A photograph becomes a document the moment the shutter is pressed, but its documentary value is based on a flexible, fluid, sliding scale, which is influenced by context and time.

Kendall L. Walton - Transparent Pictures (Essay)

André Bazin, a film critic, said that ‘the photographic image is the object itself’. I don’t think that Bazin was actually saying that a person looking at a photograph lying on a table or mounted in a frame would think for one moment that they were looking at that actual object, but that you are seeing the object itself through the photograph, not a representation or depiction of the object.  Kendall L. Walton supports this viewpoint, and talks about photographic ‘transparency’, as if the photographic image is a window into the past.

In my opinion, which follows the lines of Walton, is that when you look at a photograph, what you are seeing captured on film or screen is the same reflection of light as your eye would have been exposed to had you personally been present at the scene. This is markedly different to even a hyper-realistic oil painting or drawing, which is still a product of the artist’s hand, not light. Even so, it is hard to disagree with Edward Steichen’s comment ‘Every photograph is a fake from start to finish’. Photographic images are usually bigger or smaller than their real life subject, they are sometimes monochrome, or with more saturated colour, elements in the frame may be out of focus, at odds with their real-life counterpart. The photographer has made a personal and artistic choice on what to include in the frame, and what to exclude.

In essence, photographs don’t fall neatly into either camp, however unlike hand-made pictures, their origin is in the basis of reality – real light did strike the subject, then reflect back into the camera’s lens and was recorded on the film or sensor, even though it is certainly manipulated on the way there, and also after the fact.

Work: Missions Héliographiques

Missions Héliographiques' was a 19th-century project initiated by Inspector General of Historical Monuments Prosper Mérimée in 1851 to photograph landmarks and monuments around France so that they could be restored. The intent was to supplement Monument Historique, a program Mérimée started in 1837 to classify, protect and restore French landmarks. The French rail network was still in its infancy and many of the commissioners had never visited the monuments in their care; photography promised a record of such sites that would be produced more quickly and accurately than the architectural drawings on which they had previously relied. Mérimée hired Edouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq and Auguste Mestral to carry out the photography, with the aim that architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc could eventually restore them. The five photographers were all members of the fledgling Société Héliographique, the first photographic society. Each was assigned a travel itinerary and detailed list of monuments.

Baldus was sent south and east to photograph the Palace of Fontainebleau, the medieval churches of Lyon and other towns in the Rhône Valley, and the Roman monuments of Provence, including the Pont du Gard, the triumphal arch at Orange, the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, and the amphitheater at Arles.

Gustave Le Gray, already recognized as a leading figure on both the technical and artistic fronts of French photography, was sent southwest, to the famed châteaux of the Loire Valley—Blois, Chambord, Amboise, and Chenonceaux, among others—to the small towns and Romanesque churches along the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, and through the Dordogne. Le Gray traveled with Mestral and photographed sites on his old friend and protégé’s list, including the fortified town of Carcassonne (not yet “restored” by Viollet-le-Duc), Albi, Perpignan, Le Puy, Clermont-Ferrand, and other sites in south-central and central France. On occasion, the two worked hand-in-hand, for a few photographs are signed by both photographers.  

Henri Le Secq was sent north and east to the great Gothic cathedrals of Reims, Laon, Troyes, and Strasbourg, among others.

Hippolyte Bayard, the only one of the five to have worked with glass—rather than paper—negatives (and thus, the only one whose negatives no longer survive), was sent west to towns in Brittany and Normandy, including Caen, Bayeux, and Rouen.

An announcement of the project was made in La Lumière, the official organ of the Société Héliographique in its June 29th issue with the itineraries published soon afterwards. After the five photographers had completed their tasks in the summer and autumn of 1851, they returned to Paris with portfolios of prints and negatives. There was much fanfare upon their return, but the photos were immediately retrieved and locked in a drawer. Bayard’s glass negatives are yet to be found.

The Mission Heliographique was the first state-sponsored, photographic survey of architecture. Yet the visionary parent society, the Societe Heliographique, only survived for less than three years, from 1851-1853. The expedition’s failure as an artistic polemic to save architecture was perhaps – ironically – due to its success. According to Naomi Rosenblum, in “Documentation: Landscape and Architecture,” The photographers’ skill and artistry helped doom the project. The beautifully composed images of decaying buildings made them appear in a positive light, which did little to encourage the restoration work for which the Mission Heliographique had originally embarked. Many of the buildings whose images were taken by the five photographers no longer exist due to the urban renewal efforts of Napoleon III under the architectural supervision of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

References

Daniel, M. (2016). Mission Héliographique, 1851 | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [online] The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/heli/hd_heli.htm [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

H, J. (2009). Mission Heliographique - The Patrimony of Paris in Photos. [online] Bearings. Available at: http://www.terrastories.com/bearings/mission-heliographique-the-patrimony-of-paris-in-photos [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Missions Héliographiques. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missions_H%C3%A9liographiques [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

Roger Fenton - The Crimean War

Photographer: Roger Fenton (1819-1869)

Roger Fenton was a British photographer, and one of the first war photographers. His grandfather was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and banker, his father a banker and Member of Parliament. Fenton graduated from the University of Oxford in 1840 with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1841 he began reading law at University College, and qualified as a solicitor in 1847. During this time he also became interested in learning to be a painter, and may have briefly studied in Paris in the studio of Paul Delaroche. He registered as a copyist in the Louvre in 1844, and by 1847 had returned to London where he continued to study painting under the tutelage of the history painter Charles Lucy with whom he served on the board of the North London School of Drawing and Modelling. In 1849, 1850 and 1851 he exhibited paintings in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy.

Fenton was impressed with the photography he saw on display at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, and visited Paris to learn the wax paper calotype process, most likely from Gustav Le Gray. By 1852 he had had photographs exhibited in Britain, and had travelled to Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as photographing views and architecture around Britain. Fenton established the Photographic Society in 1853, which later became the Royal Photographic Society under the patronage of Prince Albert.

Work: Crimean War

It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the Crimean War grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerful friends and patrons - among them Prince Albert and Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War - urged Fenton to go to the Crimea to record the happenings. He arrived in Balaklava on the 8th of March, and remained there until the 22nd of June. It is thought the photographs were intended to offset the general unpopularity of the war with the public, converted into woodblocks and published in the Illustrated London News. For the project, Fenton took along a photographic assistant, a servant, and a large horse-drawn van of equipment.

Fenton was limited in his choice of motifs due to the photographic material of his time needing long exposures. He was only able to take pictures of stationary objects; indeed, it is remarkable that he was able to achieve what he did - over 300 photographs showing scenes of camp life, portraits of commanders and heroes, panoramas of sights of battles and carefully posed tableaux vivants – the beginnings of a long tradition of ‘staged’ war images. His letters and diary reveal that he saw plenty of evidence of the horrors of war, although he chose not to photograph corpses due to the government’s will for Fenton’s photographs to counteract the negative reports of military mismanagement. Taking into account the concerns of Fenton’s royal patrons, coupled with the need to create images that would have some commercial potential, it is hardly surprising that he chose not to record the full horror of war. It is because he only took ‘positive’ images of the war, that some critics do not consider Fenton to be a true war photographer.

Fenton photographed the landscape, including a place near to where ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ took place. The soldiers of the battle had referred to the original valley as ‘The Valley of Death’ – Tennyson’s poem about the event had used the same phrase. Thomas Agnew put Fenton’s picture on show, and assigned it and expanded version of the epithet – ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ – a deliberate evocation of Psalm 23.

Two images where taken in the aforementioned area, one with an empty road, and one which had cannonballs strewn across the same road. Opinions differ regarding which image was taken first, although there is evidence to suggest the picture with the empty road was first. It is suggested that either Fenton placed the cannonballs in the road to add dramatic impact to his image.

During the trip Fenton made 350 usable large format negatives after enduring high summer temperatures, breaking several ribs in a fall and suffering from cholera as well as becoming depressed at the carnage he witnessed at Sevastopol. 312 prints were soon on show in London and elsewhere in the country, and Fenton showed them to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and also to Emperor Napoleon III in Paris. Nevertheless, sales were not as good as expected.

Undaunted by the lack of commercial success for his Crimean photographs, Fenton remained driven with great energy to perfect his art and to record meaningful and artistic images. He travelled widely over Britain to record landscapes and still life images, but as time moved on, photography was becoming more accessible. Many, with sufficient knowledge and also the hunger to develop business, sought to profit from selling quick portraits to common people. Fenton fell into conflict with many of his peers who were willing, as Fenton saw it, ‘to cheapen their art’ for profit.

In 1862 the organising committee for the International Exhibition in London announced its plans to place photography, not with the other fine arts as had been done in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition only five years earlier, but in the section reserved for machinery, tools and instruments - photography was considered a craft, for tradesmen. For Fenton and many of his colleagues, this was conclusive proof of photography's diminished status, and the pioneers drifted away. In 1863, Fenton sold his equipment and returned to the law as a barrister on the Northern Circuit.

Fenton died 8 August 1869 at his home in Potter's Bar, Hertfordshire after a week-long illness, at the age of 50.
  

References

Harding, C. (2012). Photographing Conflict: Roger Fenton And The Crimean War - National Media Museum. [online] National Media Museum. Available at: http://blog.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/remembrance-day-part-1-photographing-war-fenton-crimean/ [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Roger Fenton. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fenton [Accessed 5 Jul. 2016].

Mohamed Bourouissa

Page 19 of the course materials briefly refers to Mohamed Bourouissa, an French Algerian photographer based in Paris. The course says that if the long held notion - '[documentary] is the result of a recording process, and not a product of the imagination' - is true, then Bourouissa is not a documentary photographer. This made me interested in how Bourouissa makes 'imaginative' documentary photographs, and set out to do some research. What follows is a brief description of some of his works, and a short response of my own.


Shoplifters - This series consists of portraits of thieves caught in the act in a Brooklyn grocery store. These photographs were taken by the shopkeepers at the time of the crime and then displayed in the store as a deterrent. By presenting these photographs to a wider public (they have never previously been seen outside New York), Mohamed Bourouissa is keen to highlight an illegal activity – the theft of food –, which is harshly dealt with by the economic system and the law.

This is interesting in that Bourouissa didn't plan or take the images himself, but thought of a concept and brought the images together in a collection.


The Hood - Bourouissa spent part of the year 2014 in the Northwest district of Philadelphia (USA). Over several months, he photographed the district’s equestrian community: ordinary street scenes and riders. Back in France he concocted an experimental silver print procedure allowing his black and white negatives to be printed onto the surfaces of car body parts. The works encompass two symbols of American culture: cars and horses, and echoes the reflections of urban life reflected in cars parked in the street.

This type of documentary photography certainly warrants imagination and creativity. Bourouissa has clearly trancended a simple recording process, where the printed product is also a part of the vision, rather than just a material to display an image.


Périphériques - This series of images attacks the clichés associated with the suburbs creating stagings that feign spontaneity and caricature the decisive moment of Cartier-Bresson. For some of the pictures, Bourouissa was inspired by paintings: 'in Red Square, for example, I relied on Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca for image composition and arrangement of characters'.

'The series is a placement and organization of the tension in the space that is put forward. It depicts the suburbs as a conceptual object, artistic in situations that ordinarily would be the responsibility of photojournalism. By removing the cliches of this, I discusses the issue of balance of power and the question of the mechanics of power.'

It's difficult reading art-speak translated from French, but from what I can gather the images Périphériques were posed, in the style of the decisive moment. So in essence Bourouissa is documenting real people and places, but with an artistic spin which sees him place the characters, often following compositional concepts from paintings.


Temps Mort - Bourouissa asked a friend – known only as JC – detained in a French prison to share the banality of his confinement via an illegally smuggled cell phones pictures and over 300 SMS messages. JC and Bourouissa worked together over a period of 6 months. Initially Bourouissa had to instruct JC closely describing the shots he was looking for. Bourouissa broke down the boundary between the imprisoned JC and himself as a free man by filming repeated actions outside the walls on his own camera phone – at one point in the film JC’s steps on a jail corridor blur into Bourouissa’s steps through snow in the free world. Low-res imagery is associated with the spontaneous capture of event, with protest, with skirmish, with citizen documentation and more often than not with the testimony of the individual against the (violent) uncertainties of the State in which they exist.

A very interesting project, skirting legal and ethical boundaries. What I enjoyed most about this work was how Bourouissa channeled his vision through a third party - he wasn't able to be present at these scenes himself, but advised JC on the sort of images he wanted to create, and their composition. As I've seen with some other photographers, you don't have to physically press the shutter yourself to be the creative driving-force behind an image. 

References

 

Bahmed-Schwartz, S. (2016). Les allégories périurbaines de Mohamed Bourouissa | VICE | France. [online] VICE. Available at: https://www.vice.com/fr/read/les-allegories-periurbaines-de-mohamed-bourouissa [Accessed 23 Jun. 2016].

Bourouissa, M. (2016). Temps Mort. [video] Available at: https://vimeo.com/63764961 [Accessed 23 Jun. 2016].

Brook, P. (2016). Mohamed Bourouissa | Prison Photography. [online] Prisonphotography.org. Available at: https://prisonphotography.org/tag/mohamed-bourouissa/ [Accessed 23 Jun. 2016].

Fund, A. (2016). Photographic prints from the 'Peripherique' series by Mohamed Bourouissa. [online] Art Fund. Available at: http://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/11174/photographic-prints-from-the-series [Accessed 23 Jun. 2016].

Lespressesdureel.com. (2016). Mohamed Bourouissa: Temps Mort – Les presses du réel (book). [online] Available at: http://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=3155&menu= [Accessed 23 Jun. 2016].

Paris-art.com. (2016). Mohamed Bourouissa | P�riph�rique | Toulouse. Le Ch�teau d’Eau. [online] Available at: http://www.paris-art.com/agenda-culturel-paris/peripherique/bourouissa-mohamed/3611.html [Accessed 23 Jun. 2016].

Seixas, F. (2015). <02.> Artists - Mohamed Bourouissa. [online] Biennaledelyon.com. Available at: http://www.biennaledelyon.com/uk/la-vie-moderne-home-eng/artists/mohamed-bourouissa-eng.html [Accessed 23 Jun. 2016].

Felice Beato - The Second Opium War

 

Photographer: Felice Beato (1832-1909)

Felice Beato  was an Italian-British photographer who was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia, and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his portraiture, depictions of people’s everyday life (genre art) and views and panoramas of Asia and the Mediterranean. His travels brought images of countries, people and events that were unfamiliar and remote back to people in the West. Beato created the first substantial body of photojournalistic work, capturing events such as the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the Second Opium War. He influenced other photographers to a great extent, particularly in Japan where he taught and worked with other photographers and artists. He sometimes also worked with his brother, Antonio Beato, which for a long time caused confusion as to who created a particular image, as they shared a signature – Felice A. Beato.

Beato met the British photographer James Robertson in Malta in 1850, and accompanied him to Constantinople in 1851. In 1853 they began photographing together and formed a partnership called ‘Robertson & Beato’. They were joined by Beato’s brother Antonio on photographic expeditions to Malta in 1854 or 1856 and to Greece and Jerusalem in 1857. Several of the firm’s photographs produced in the 1850s are signed ‘Robertson, Beato and Co.’ – it is believed the ‘and Co.’ refers to Antonio.

Robertson became Felice Beato’s brother-in-law in 1855. The same year they travelled to Balaklava, Crimea, where they took over reportage of the Crimean War following Roger Fenton’s departure. Beato and Robertson’s approach differed to Fenton’s, in that they showed the destruction of the war, where Fenton had depicted the dignified aspects of war.
In 1858 Beato arrived in Calcutta and began travelling through Northern India to document the aftermath of the India Rebellion of 1857. During this time he produced possibly the first ever photographic images of corpses; it is believed he may have had skeletal remains disinterred and arranged for heightened drama in at least one of his images. Beato was joined in India for a year in 1858 by his brother Antonio, who later travelled to Egypt and set up a photographic studio in Thebes in 1862.

Beato documented the Second Opium War between 1860-1861, after which he returned to England. By 1863 Beato had moved to Yokahoma , Japan, joining Charles Wirgman.  In 1864 the two formed ‘Beato & Wirgman, Artists and Photographers’ which they maintained until 1867; it was one of the earliest and most important commercial studios in Japan.  Beato's Japanese photographs include portraits, genre works, landscapes, cityscapes, and a series of photographs documenting the scenery and sites along the Tōkaidō Road. During this period, foreign access to (and within) the country was greatly restricted by the Shogunate. Accompanying ambassadorial delegations and taking any other opportunities created by his personal popularity and close relationship with the British military, Beato reached areas of Japan where few westerners had ventured, and in addition to conventionally pleasing subjects sought sensational and macabre subject matter such as heads on display after decapitation. His images are remarkable not only for their quality, but also for their rarity as photographic views of Edo period Japan. Many of the photographs in Beato's albums were hand-coloured, a technique that in his studio successfully applied the refined skills of Japanese water-colourists and woodblock printmakers to European photography.

After ending his partnership with Wirgman, Beato attempted to retire from the work of a photographer, attempting other ventures and delegating photographic work to others within his studio. The other ventures failed, but Beato’s photographic skills and personal popularity meant he was easily able to return to work as a photographer.

In 1871 Beato served as official photographer with the United States naval expedition of Admiral Rodgers to Korea, making the earliest photographs of Korea whose provenance is clear. On 6th August 1873 Beato was appointed Consul General for Greece in Japan. In 1877 Beato sold most of his stock to the firm Stillfried & Andersen, and apparently retired from photography for some years, focusing on his parallel career as a financial speculator and trader. On 29 November 1884 he left Japan, ultimately landing in Port Said, Egypt. It was reported in a Japanese newspaper that he had lost all his money on the Yokohama silver exchange.

From 1884 to 1885 Beato was the official photographer of the expeditionary forces led by Baron (later Viscount) G.J. Wolseley to Khartoum, Sudan, in relief of General Charles Gordon.  Beato arrived in Burma probably in December 1886, after Upper Burma had been annexed by the British in late 1885, probably attracted by the news of the annexation after his experiences covering military operations in India and China. He arrived in Burma after the main military operations ended, but there followed an insurgency which lasted for the following decade. Beato photographed military operations as well as insurgency soldiers and prisoners.

Beato set up a photographic studio in Mandalay and, in 1894, a curiosa and antiques dealership, running both businesses separately and, according to records at the time, very successfully. His past experience and the credibility derived from his time in Japan brought him a large clientele of opulent locals, posing in traditional attire for official portraits. Other images, from Buddhas to landscapes and buildings, were sold from master albums in Burma and Europe. Beato’s photographs had come to represent the very image of Burma to the rest of the world, which it would remain for decades to come.

Although Beato was previously believed to have died in Rangoon or Mandalay in 1905 or 1906, his death certificate, discovered in 2009, indicates that he died on 29 January 1909 in Florence, Italy.

Work: The Second Opium War

In 1860 Beato left the partnership. He travelled from India to photograph the Anglo-French military expedition to China in the Second Opium War. He arrived in Hong Kong in March, and the images he took of the city and its surroundings under extreme wartime conditions are some of the earliest photographs taken in China. During his eight-month trek, Beato carried the cumbersome equipment needed for the albumen process: chemicals and large, fragile glass plates. While there, he met artist and correspondent for the Illustrated London News, Charles Wirgman. The two accompanied the Anglo-French forces travelling north to Talien Bay, then to Pehtang and the Taku Forts at the mouth of the Peiho, and on to Peking and Qingyi Yuan, the suburban Summer Palace. Wirgman’s (and others) illustrations for the Illustrated London News would often be derived from Beato’s photographs.

Beato’s photographs of the Second Opium War are the first to document a military campaign as it unfolded, doing so through a sequence of dated and related images, although the images were not always taken in order. His photographs of the Taku Forts form a narrative recreation of the battle: the approach to the forts, the effects of bombardments on the exterior walls and fortifications, and the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers within the forts. In contrast to his photographs of the conflict in India, Beato was able to capture battle scenes immediately after they occurred, rather than months later.

Just outside Peking, Beato took photographs of Quingyi Yuan (the Summer Palace), a private estate of the Emperor of China comprising palace pavilions, temples, a large artificial lake, and gardens. Beginning on 6th October, these buildings were plundered and looted by the Anglo-French forces, and torched by the British First Division on the 18th and 19th of October. Beato’s photographs taken between 6th and 18th October 1860 are unique recordings of the destroyed buildings. They appear to be the earliest images of Peking so far discovered, and are of the utmost historical and cultural importance.

Among the last photographs Beato took in China at this time were the signatories of the Convention of Peking, Lord Elgin and Prince Kung. Beato returned to England in October 1861, and during that winter he sold 400 of his photographs of India and China to Henry Hering, a London commercial portrait photographer.

References

Cabos, M. (2015). Felice Beato. [online] Photography of China – Pre-Mao, Mao & Post-Mao Era. Available at: http://photographyofchina.com/blog/felice-beato [Accessed 4 Jul. 2016].

Fisher, N. (2016). Photography in the Face of Adversity | the War Photographs of Felice Beato. [online] The Culture Trip. Available at: http://theculturetrip.com/europe/italy/articles/felice-beato-living-through-the-lens-of-war/ [Accessed 5 Jul. 2016].

Getty.edu. (2016). Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Getty Center Exhibitions). [online] Available at: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/beato/ [Accessed 5 Jul. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Felice Beato. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_Beato [Accessed 4 Jul. 2016].

William Henry Jackson - The American West

 

Photographer: William Henry Jackson (1843-1942)

William Henry Jackson was an American painter, Civil War veteran, geological survey photographer and an explorer famous for his images of the American West. Jackson was born in Keeseville, New York, on April 4, 1843, one of seven children. His mother was a talented water-colourist, and Jackson was passionate about painting from a young age; as a teenager he worked in retouching for photographic studios in Rutland, Vermont.

In October 1862 as a 19-year-old private in Company K of the 12th Vermont Infantry of the Union Army, Jackson spent much of his free time sketching drawings of his friends and various scenes of Army camp life that he sent home to his family as his way of letting them know he was safe.
Jackson fought in the Battle of Gettysburg during his nine months participating in the American Civil War, as well as spending much of his time on garrison duty. His regiment mustered out on July 14, 1863, after which Jackson returned to Rutland, Vermont, where he worked as an artistic painter in post-Civil War American society. He broke off the engagement to his fiancée Carolina Eastman, and left for the American West.

In 1866 Jackson boarded a Union Pacific Railroad train and travelled until it reached the end of the line at that time, about one hundred miles west of Omaha, Nebraska, where he then joined a wagon train heading west to Great Salt Lake as a bullwhacker, on the Oregon Trail. In 1867 along with his brother Edward Jackson he settled down in Omaha and entered the photography business, however in Jackson’s own words –‘Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country; the taste strengthening as my successes became greater in proportion to the failures’ – less than three years later he left it in the care of his wife and two of his brothers. On ventures that often lasted for several days, Jackson acted as a "missionary to the Indians" around the Omaha region, and it was there that Jackson made his now famous photographs of the American Indians: Osages, Otoes, Pawnees, Winnebagoes and Omahas.

In 1869 Jackson won a commission from the Union Pacific to document the scenery along the various railroad routes for promotional purposes.

Work: The American West

When geologist Ferdinand Hayden discovered Jackson’s work, he asked him to join an expedition to survey the Yellowstone River region.  The following year, he got a last-minute invitation to join the 1870 U.S. government survey (predecessor of U.S. Geological Survey) of the Yellowstone River and Rocky Mountains led by Ferdinand Hayden. He also was a member of the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871 which led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park.
Hayden’s surveys were annual multidisciplinary expeditions meant to chart the largely unexplored west, exploring flora, fauna, geology, and identify likely navigational routes. As Jackson was the official photographer for the survey, he was in a position to capture the first photographs of legendary landmarks of the West. These photographs played an important role in convincing Congress in 1872 to establish Yellowstone National Park, the first national park of the U.S., and his involvement with the survey established his reputation as one of the most accomplished explorers of the American continent.

In 1874, on one of several independent expeditions that he headed, Jackson also became the first to photograph the prehistoric Native American dwellings in Mesa Verde, Colorado.
Jackson worked with the wet-plate collodion process, utilizing a variety of camera and plate sizes. He travelled with as many as three camera-types—a stereographic camera (for stereoscope cards), a "whole-plate" or 8x10" plate-size camera, and one even larger, as large as 18x22". These cameras required fragile, heavy glass plates (photographic plates), which had to be coated, exposed, and developed onsite, before the wet-collodion emulsion dried. Without light metering equipment or sure emulsion speeds, exposure times required inspired guesswork, between five seconds and twenty minutes depending on light conditions. Jackson would use hot spring water or melted snow in his development process, and the weight of the glass plates and portable darkroom, as well as the rifles carried by his photographic division of 5 to 7 men made the project arduous. Jackson’s military experience and his peaceful dealings with Indians were welcomed. He suffered setbacks due to the challenging conditions, including his mule losing its footing, and Jackson a month’s work, resulting in him having to backtrack to remake some images.

Despite the delays and setbacks Jackson returned with conclusive photographic evidence of the various western landmarks that had previously seemed only a fantastic myth: the Grand Tetons, Old Faithful and the rest of the Yellowstone region, Colorado's Rockies and the Mount of the Holy Cross, and the uncooperative Ute Indians.

Jackson continued traveling on the Hayden surveys until the last one in 1878 after which Jackson again opened his own studio, this time in Denver, Colorado. There he continued photographing the West, taking on many side projects photographing for hotels and railroad companies like the Mexican Central, New York Central, and the Baltimore & Ohio. In 1893 many of these photographs were displayed at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Moreover, Jackson was asked to be the official photographer of the fair, a job he desperately needed after losses during the Panic of 1893. Soon thereafter, Jackson was offered an all-expenses paid trip around the world by railroad publicist Joseph Pangborn as part of the World's Transportation Commission. Jackson travelled to and photographed many parts of Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Australia.  Shortly thereafter he became the cameraman and part-owner of a company in Detroit, Michigan, that bought the rights to the new Photochrom process for printing photographs in colour. He worked there until the company’s collapse in 1924. Jackson moved to Washington, D.C. the same year, and produced murals of the Old West for the new U.S. Department of the Interior building. He also acted as a technical advisor for the filming of Gone with the Wind. From the mid-1920s until his death, he pursued painting in earnest, producing many oils and watercolours, many on themes associated with the American West.

In 1942, Jackson died at the age of 99 in New York City. He was honoured by the Explorer's Club for his 80,000 photographs of the American West. He was also memorialized by the Adventurers' Club of New York, of which he was an active member. The SS William H Jackson steamship was in active service in 1945. Recognized as one of the last surviving Civil War veterans, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Mount Jackson el. 8,231 feet (2,509 m) just north of the Madison River, in the Gallatin Range of Yellowstone National Park is named in honour of Jackson.

References

Encyclopedia Britannica. (2016). William Henry Jackson | American photographer. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Jackson [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles. (2016). William Henry Jackson (American, 1843 - 1942) (Getty Museum). [online] Available at: http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/1853/william-henry-jackson-american-1843-1942/ [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

University of Chicago Library. (2016). Guide to the William Henry Jackson. Photographs 1870-1878. [online] Available at: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.JACKSONWH [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). William Henry Jackson. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Jackson [Accessed 29 Jun. 2016].

Timothy O'Sullivan - U.S. Geological Surveys of the West

 

Photographer: Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882)

Timothy O’Sullivan was born in Ireland but came to New York City two years later with his parents. As a teenager, he was employed as an apprentice by photographer Matthew Brady (known for his photographs of the Civil War). When the Civil War began in early 1861, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Union Army but there is no record of him fighting. He most likely did civilian's work for the army such as surveying, and he took photographs in his spare time. After leaving the army, O’Sullivan rejoined Brady’s team. In 1862 he followed Maj. Gen. John Pope's Northern Virginia Campaign, and joined Alexander Gardner’s studio, thereby having 44 of his photographs published in the first Civil War photographs collection – Gardener’s Photographic Sketch of the War. In July 1863, O’Sullivan made some of his most famous photographs, of the war's anonymous dead, lying bloated in the bloody fields of Gettysburg and elsewhere, which are emblazoned into the consciousness of Americans.

Until the Civil War, photography had been a refined, mostly indoor craft, geared toward people in their Sunday best stopping by the studio for a family portrait. The Civil War changed all that. Its photographers essentially invented photojournalism, though McElroy says they were not always above staging their scenes.

From 1867 to 1869, O’Sullivan was the official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under U.S geologist Clarence King, tasked with photographing the West to attract settlers. In 1870 he joined a survey team in Panama to survey for a canal across the isthmus. In 1871 O’Sullivan joined Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the 100th meridian. He spent his last years in Washington, D.C., as official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 42.

Work: US Geological Surveys

O’Sullivan’s pictures from Clarence King’s exploration of the Fortieth Parallel and Lt. George M. Wheeler’s survey of the 100th meridian made him one of the pioneers in the field of geophotography. Because of his work in U.S Civil War of 1861 to 1865, the organisers of the two geological surveys that he photographed knew that O'Sullivan was made of stern stuff and therefore could cope with the rigors of life outdoors far from home. During the Wheeler survey, O'Sullivan nearly drowned in the Truckee River (which runs from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake, located in north-western Nevada) when his boat named ‘Picture’ got jammed against rocks. Gold pieces, photographic negatives and food were lost.

King’s survey was funded by the War Department, the plan being to survey the unexplored territory that lay between the California Sierras and the Rockies, with a view toward finding a good place to lay railroad tracks while also looking for mining possibilities and assessing the level of Indian hostility in the area. O'Sullivan was famous for not trying to romanticise the native American plight or way of life in his photographs and instead of asking them to wear tribal dress was happy to photograph them wearing denim jeans. He was trying to capture the everyday aspects of life for the indigenous peoples of North America; he did not use a studio to capture imagery of Native Americans, like many other photographers were at the time.

O'Sullivan’s work during Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the One Hundredth Meridian in Black Canyon has been called some of the greatest photography of the 19th century and a clear inspiration for that other great American photographer Ansel Adams who later championed O’Sullivan’s work. The ordeals of the Wheeler survey pushed O’Sullivan to the extremes of his endurance, even as an experienced explorer. As well as surviving the rigours of the environment, O’Sullivan had to make pictures with a cumbersome wet-plate camera, developing the images in a portable darkroom pulled by four mules.

During the winter of 1867-68, in Virginia City, Nevada, he took the first underground mining pictures in America. Deep in mines where temperatures reached 130 degrees, O'Sullivan took pictures by the light of an improvised flash - magnesium wire - in difficult circumstances.

O'Sullivan one of the most intrepid and successful of the U.S. government expedition photographers who roamed the West under appalling conditions in the late 1860s and 1870s. Most of the photographers sent to document the West's native peoples and its geologic formations tried to make this strange new land accessible, even picturesque. Not O'Sullivan. At a time when Manifest Destiny demanded that Americans conquer the land, he pictured a West that was forbidding and inhospitable. With an almost modern sensibility, he made humans and their works insignificant. His photographs picture scenes, like a flimsy boat helpless against the dark shadows of Black Canyon, or explorers almost swallowed up by the crevices of Canyon de Chelly. There's not the sense that people were the equal to or above the landscape. They were not in charge.

O'Sullivan has been described as the right person who was there at the right time as he managed to document the re-birth of the nation through war in the early 1860's and then managed to be at the nexus of the great wave of exploration and migration westwards as the United States assumed what it thought to be its manifest destiny.

References

Cooper, R. (2012). How the Wild West REALLY looked: Gorgeous sepia-tinted pictures show the landscape as it was charted for the very first time. [online] Mail Online. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2149899/The-American-West-youve-seen-Amazing-19th-century-pictures-landscape-chartered-time.html [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Regan, M. (2003). The life of Timothy H. O'Sullivan. [online] Tucson Weekly. Available at: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-life-of-timothy-h-osullivan/Content?oid=1071872 [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Geophotography. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophotography [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Timothy H. O'Sullivan. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_H._O%27Sullivan [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].

Albert Kahn - The Archives of the Planet

 

Photographer: Albert Kahn (1860-1940)

Albert Kahn was a French banker and philanthropist, the eldest of four children of Louis Kahn, a Jewish cattle dealer and Babette Kahn (née Bloch), an uneducated homebound mother. In 1878 Kahn became a bank clerk, but studied in the evenings for a degree. He graduated in 1881, and in 1892 Kahn became a principal associate of the Goudchaux Bank, which was then regarded as one of the most important financial houses of Europe. He also promoted higher education through travelling scholarships.

Work: The Archives of the Planet

Kahn initiated the vast photographic project The Archives of the Planet after travelling to Japan on business in 1909 with his chauffeur and photographer Alfred Dutertre. With Jean Brunhes as the project director, he sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using state of the art autochrome plates and early cinematography.

For Kahn, photography was a way of cataloguing the human “tribes” of the world and constructing a vibrant, colourful quilt of our shared humanity.  Between 1909 and 1931 the photographers collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 metres of film, forming a unique historical record of 50 countries. They documented age-old cultures on the brink of being changed forever by war, modernization, and Westernization, recording the last years of Ireland's traditional Celtic villages and the late days of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. They photographed First World War soldiers in their trenches as well as the post-war celebrations in London. In the course of their travels, they also took the earliest colour photographs in countries as varied as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States. For decades, the collection — which spanned everything from religious rituals to cultural customs to watershed political events — remained virtually unknown, until it was rediscovered in the 1980s.

Kahn became bankrupt during the Great Depression, spelling the end of his project. Today, the archive is housed at the Musée Albert-Kahn, located in the financier’s former garden estate in suburban Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris.

References

 

Amazon.co.uk. (2016). The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet: Amazon.co.uk: David Okuefuna: 9780691139074: Books. [online] Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dawn-Color-Photograph-Albert-Archives/dp/0691139075?ie=UTF8&redirect=true&tag=braipick0d-21 [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Popova, M. (2012). The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Catalog of Humanity. [online] Brain Pickings. Available at: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/02/23/the-dawn-of-the-color-photograph-albert-kahn/ [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Albert Kahn (banker). [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kahn_(banker) [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Zeiger, M. (2012). A Trip Through Time. [online] AFAR Media. Available at: http://www.afar.com/magazine/a-trip-through-time [Accessed 27 Jun. 2016].

Richard Billingham - Ray's A Laugh

 

Photographer: Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham is an English photographer and artist whose best known work is ‘Ray’s A Laugh’- a photobook documenting the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily tattooed mother, Liz.

Billingham was born in Birmingham, and studied as a painter at Bournville College of Art and the University of Sunderland. He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in Cradley Heath which later became Ray’s A Laugh, published in 1996. In 1997 Billingham was included in the exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Art which showcased the art collection of Charles Saatchi and included many of the Young British Artists. In the same year, Billingham won the Citigroup Photography Prize. He was shortlisted for the 2001 Turner prize, for his solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

Billingham has also made landscape photographs at places of personal significance around the Black Country; more of these were commissioned in 2003 by the arts organisation The Public, resulting in a book. In late 2006 Billingham, on commission by Birmingham-based arts organisation VIVID exhibited a major new series of photographs and videos inspired by his memories of visiting Dudley Zoo as a child. In the following year he created a series of photographs of ‘Constable Country’, the area on the Essex / Suffolk border painted by John Constable.

Billingham now lives near Swansea, but travels widely. He is a lecturer in fine art photography at the University of Gloucestershire and a third year tutor at Middlesex University      

Work: Ray’s A Laugh

Billingham started out as a painter, but later bought some cheap cameras and films to take photographs of his parents in a very intimate space. His intention was not to make a body of work as a photographer, but to take pictures he could use as the basis of his paintings; it was very difficult to get his father Ray, an alcoholic, to sit still for any length of time. The photographs allowed Billingham to make more detailed paintings from the photographic reference.

 For the project on his parents he was inspired by British post-impressionist and 19th century painters that painted about everyday life. He particularly liked the painters that could situate the figure in an interior really well, almost as if the figures are part of that interior; they really inhabit it, they’re part of it. His mother Liz left to live in a neighbouring tower block due to Ray’s alcoholism which had tormented him since being made redundant. Ray, saddened that Liz had left to live in a neighbouring flat, stayed in his bedroom all day and night drinking; there was no structure to day or night. There was around 18-24 months of never going out. A neighbour in the tower block made homebrew and delivered it to Ray. He also cashed Ray’s giro at the post office and paid his bills, and gave Ray the change. Billingham thinks Ray possibly drank so much during this time because he thought Liz would feel sorry for him and come home.

Billingham didn’t care if the images he took were blurred as long as they gave an idea for a painting. There were also mistakes in several of the frames, like black on one edge where the flash didn’t sync with the shutter speed.  The composition of the images came from looking at the work of other painters, and he was always thinking formally about composition, and trying to make a picture. He would also sometimes place his thumb over the lens to create an area of black to balance other elements in the frame. During the time of making this work he never looked at the work of other photographers. He didn’t particular take care of the negatives, which were frequently covered in scratches and dust. He did however experiment with different types of film.

As well as his parents, and later his brother who returned to live in the flat after being in foster care, Billingham also took advantage of items in his father’s room and around the flat. He became aware of how his parents placed objects, and their juxtaposition. On one of his trips home during his painting studies at Sunderland University, he found his father had moved into his mother’s flat. It was full of pets and opulent colours. With a portrait you have to see someone’s identity, but in this picture (Liz with jigsaw puzzle) you can’t really see what she looks like, but you can see what she’s about.

Editor Michael Collins started showing Billingham books of photographs; he didn’t know they existed before then. After this he realised the work he was doing would make a good a photo book.

References

 

Chobi Mela, (2016). Richard Billingham: Artist Talk@ Chobimela VII. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu8XLg0Zskc [Accessed 21 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Richard Billingham. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Billingham [Accessed 21 Jun. 2016].

Robbie Cooper - Immersion

 

Photographer: Robbie Cooper

Robbie Cooper is a British artist working in various media, including photography, video and video game modifications. Cooper studied media production at Bournemouth College of Art, and in 2002 embarked on long term project Alter Ego, which explored the identities people created within virtual online worlds. The images from the project have been exhibited internationally, and were published as a book in 2007.

     

Work: Immersion (2008)

In 2008 Cooper began the Immersion project, in which he records the expressions on people’s faces when they are watching TV, playing video games and using the internet. As a viewer of the project, you can’t see what the participant sees, only their facial reaction to what they are experiencing. For the project, Cooper uses a technique developed by filmmaker Errol Morris called the Interrotron method; a modified autocue using a one-way mirror to reflect an image towards the viewer whilst they gaze into the camera. As well as capturing the participants ‘immersion’, Cooper created a studio environment which he called ‘anti-shoot’, in which the attention of the participants is diverted away from the purpose of the activity.

The aim is to build up a portrait series that begins with babies and ends with the very old, taking in every type of media content along the way. Screen time takes up an increasingly large part of our lives: babies being born right now arrive in a landscape where computers, smartphones, the internet, and social media already exist, while the oldest generation alive today can remember a time before TV was a fixture of our living rooms.

The idea came to Cooper while working on his project Alter Ego in China and Korea; in those countries there are huge internet cafes with row upon row of kids playing virtual world games. It got Cooper thinking about our interaction with the screen. The first media he used for the Immersion project was video games but wanted to expand this to as many different subjects as possible; comedy, sports, religion, literally any subject we interact with through screens. Immersion was filmed with very high resolution video from which still images are lifted. With video you are shooting between 25-30 fps, and it’s amazing how the human face changes; an expression can pass across a face in less than a second. Much research has been done into micro-expressions, such as when someone is trying to hide something. Those kind of emotions will come out very quickly. Cooper initially considered shooting Immersion with an environmental background, but he wanted it to be something that’s completely removed from that so you just concentrate on the person and their headspace and psychological world rather than their social world. As soon as you’ve got a room you’ve got a whole bunch of other information that’s coming over that’s maybe unnecessary. He wanted it to look a bit like advertising or something in a really off-kilter way. On average people look at a screen for 8 hours a day. The project is trying to capture authentic emotional life.

References

 

National Media Museum, (2010). Robbie Cooper Immersion. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jXpvGBP0U0 [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Thom, E. (2013). Do You Spend A Lot Of Time Screen Watching? Collaborate With Robbie Cooper On His Immersion Project - National Media Museum. [online] National Media Museum. Available at: http://blog.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/robbie-cooper-immersion-mass-collaboration-kickstarter/ [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Robbie Cooper. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Cooper [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Robert Frank - The Americans (1958)

Photographer: Robert Frank

Robert Frank is a Swiss-born American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most well-known work is The Americans, first published in France in 1958. Partly to escape the confines of his business-orientated family and home, Frank turned to photography and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before creating his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. 40 Fotos incorporated original photographs in various genres, and displays Frank’s early recognition of the power of presenting multiple photographs in a single page spread or in a bound series.

In 1947 Frank emigrated to the United States, and worked for Harper’s Bazaar in New York City as a fashion photographer. He then travelled around South America and Europe before returning to the states in 1950. In that same year he met photographer Edward Steichen, and participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Frank was initially optimistic about the United States society and culture, but this quickly changed when confronted with the fast pace of American life, and his perception of their overemphasis on money. He now thought America an often bleak and lonely place, a theme that would become evident in his later photography. He and his family briefly moved to Paris, then returned to New York in 1953 to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall’s, Vogue, and Fortune. Along with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 50s.       

 

Work: The Americans (1958)

Photographer Walker Evans was a major artistic influence for Robert Frank, and with his help Frank secured in 1955 a Guggenheim Fellowship; a grant awarded to established professionals to allow blocks of time in which to have as much creative freedom as possible, spending the money as they see fit. Frank’s project was to travel across the United States with his family and photograph all strata of society. Over the next two years he took 28,000 shots. 83 were selected to be included in his book The Americans. Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write the introduction to the U.S. edition of the work. 
   

Frank’s photography in The Americans was at odds with what was considered a ‘good photograph’ at the time, due to his unusual focus, low lighting and cropping. Because of this divergence from contemporary photographic standards, Frank initially found difficulty securing a publisher. The work was first published in Paris in 1958 by Robert Delpire, and published a year later in the United States. It received substantial criticism, where the tone of the book was perceived as derogatory to national ideals. This criticism also came from Popular Photography who derided the technical quality of Frank’s images, citing ‘meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness. Sales were poor at first, but popular Kerouac’s introduction helped it reach a wider audience.

The Americans was a huge influence on future artists, and over time became a seminal work in American photography and art history, becoming Frank’s most famous work.

The Americans is considered a fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society, and are notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society, laying bare the anxieties that the chrome and the advertising jingles obscured. Sean O’Hagan writing in The Guardian said ‘[Frank’s] aim was to photograph America as it unfolded before his somewhat sombre outsider’s eye’. It presented a different viewpoint of the United States, and forced them to look at themselves in a very different way than they were used to. It was more truthful, but less glamorous and wonderful than they were used to thinking about themselves.

The images weren’t just representational, you felt and emphasised for these people. It’s raw; there’s a certain life to it that didn’t seem like a set up photograph.  America was a country in transition, beginning to feel that it had a lot of potential, a lot of world power and that everyone could work towards a really fantastic life. But the reality was closer to what Robert Frank was showing – a country that was segregated by race and class.

The term snapshot aesthetic is often used in reference to Frank’s work in The Americans – it feels informal. But it really was more than just the snapshot; he was very deliberate and fully aware of what he was photographing, making very conscious choices. He wanted his photographs to be more ambiguous, like poetry, so that the viewer would fill in the blanks. It’s visual poetry; you want to embrace it, you want to look at it again and again because there are so many layers of information and you want to experience that to its fullest extent.  

 

References

 

Museum of Photographic Arts, (2016). Streetwise - Robert Frank and The Americans. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_xJAd0piCM [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Smithsonian Magazine, (2016). Inside Photographer Robert Frank's The Americans. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHtRZBDOgag [Accessed 14 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Guggenheim Fellowship. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Fellowship [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Robert Frank. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). The Americans (photography). [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(photography) [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

The Genius of Photography. (2009). [DVD] BBC.