Coursework – Page 3 – Digital Image & Culture

Exercise 1.3: The found image in Photomontage

Listen to Peter Kennard talking about Photo Op, a piece made in collaboration with Cat Picton-Phillipps, at Link 7

If you can, look also at British artist Lisa Barnard’s recent book Chateau Despair. Barnard used found archival news images of ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher alongside shots of the then Conservative HQ to construct her narrative See Link 8

I found the piece a little lightweight given the strength of Peter Kennard’s work. But it did encourage me to go and have a re-look. As before I love the apparent simplicity of it. He has been making work in this genre since the Vietnam war so his work has developed and become ever more sophisticated. Cat Picton-Phillips does not appear to exist as a separate artist she seems to be joined at the hip to Kennard. I could not find any independent work by her. In their joint work it is impossible to say who is responsible for what.

I was able to see Chateau Despair on Vimeo (1). I am afraid that I missed the point. Without, at least, some pointers or words the book looses, for me, an anchor. It is evident that Margaret Thatcher was a great believer in the markets and globalisation. Hindsight it is easy for us to see the folly of her policies. But at the time many economists believed in her policies. We are still suffering the consequences today. Many of our European and world leaders follow her policies still despite what we have learned in the interim. These policies support the rich and the poor don’t have the time or the strength to protest. They are too busy trying to survive.

To complete this exercise, use readily available images to make a short narrative series of four to six collages based on a recent or contemporary news event.

I want to create a series on the treatment of refugees worldwide. I decided to make physical and/or digital collage/montage work.

COLLAGE 1.

For the first collage I used photographs which I purchased from Alamy, images I found on Google and some of my own archives.

FMC8EM Saint Louis, Missouti, USA. 11th Mar, 2016. Donald Trump salutes supporters at the Peabody Opera House in Downtown Saint Louis Credit: Gino’s Premium Images/Alamy Live News

I have to reverse the direction of the Trump image to have him look in the correct direction. The image of the refugees was also purchased from Alamy but unfortunately I had flattened the image before saving it separately. The barbed wire was a google image.

COLLAGE 2

This collage is about the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to enter Europe. I tried to create the image of the sunny Mediterranean with beaches and flowers while the below the blue sea lie many drowned people who did not make it to the shores of Europe.

I used mostly images found in magazines.

COLLAGE 3

I wanted to indicate that little has changed, in Europe, with respect to our acceptance of people who arrive on our shores. Our acceptance seems to be in, almost, direct proportion to the depth of colour of the skin of those trying to gain entry into our European countries.

I also used old newspapers to show what it was like years ago. The hands grasping the politicians are all white. I superimposed the portholes on the paper to indicate boat arrivals.

COLLAGE 4

This is about the Spanish ‘colony’ in North Africa, Ceuta. Africans who have crossed the Sahara, usually on foot, wait around hiding in the forests, outside the Spanish area trying to cross the impossible fences that surround this north African ‘paradise’.

I used the map of Africa, changed to black and white and torn roughly down the centre with images of the refugees (taken from Google) spilling from its interior trying to get across the fences towards Gibraltar.

I tried not to be too explicit as I wanted the viewer to read ‘into’ the collages. I am not sure how well I have succeeded, if my husbands reaction is anything to go by!

1.Vimeo. 2018. Chateau Despair by Lisa Barnard on Vimeo. [ONLINE] Available at: https://vimeo.com/57283237. [Accessed 05 December 2018].

Ex 1.1 The Layered Image

Using the list of artists given above (Esther Teichmann, Corinne Vionnnet, Idris Kahn and Helen Sear)as inspiration, create a series of six to eight images using layering techniques. To accompany your final images, also produce a 500-word blog post on the work of one contemporary artist-photographer who uses layering techniques. (This can be any of the artists cited in any section of Digital Image and Culture.)

I started this exercise by looking at the work of Nancy Burson(1). Over her lifetime she developed an amazing layering technique of layering portraits. I then moved on to Esther Teichmann‘s work. (2). This interview gave me some idea of who Teichmann is. I found no softness in her. She appears to me to be a complicated person. There was no lightness in her, her images are dark reflecting her personality. Corinnne Vionnet’s (3). was a relief. I loved her combining of images, she found, of travel photos, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower and Sydney harbour Bridge. The work looked accessible, understandable. Next up was Helen Sear. I liked her video work best. I loved the idea that videos could be layered. Most references just gave her CV and solo exhibitions.

Looking at other photographers using layers I came across Tom Gill (4). Not impressed with the aesthetics of this image

Then I came to Idris Kahn.(5). (the college Link 1 did not work). For my final assignment in L2: Landscape my tutor had suggested I look at the work of Idris Kahn. He pointed me to the layered images he made of the Becher’s work. I loved this idea and used this to create stacked images for the final assignment 6 Transitions. For this exercise I decided to study the work of Idris Kahn a little deeper. In the interview cited above the interviewer disclosed that she had bought one of Kahn’s works when he was still a student. This was a multilayered image of the whole of Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography“. I loved the idea of this work. I have struggled with Sontag’s work and her philosophies since I first met them at Level 1. This seemed such a fantastic way to ‘devour’ her philosophies… Although Kahn is very serious in this interview, for me the work is playful. I might have entitled it “If Only“…. His work using phrases, that he has made into stamps which he then stamps on paper, multilayering them until a pattern is created, is astounding. He has also worked with music committing whole works to a single image thus encompassing the essence of the entire work. He has also used hard metal surfaces onto which he sandblasts his multilayered texts. These are extraordinary. This young man has truly inspired me.

I have decided to use the work of Kahn as inspiration to create ‘stacked’ images of people moving about. I converted the square images to black and white as I thought it accentuated the shadowy people moving about over time in the images.

1. People passing in Marlyborne railway station, London, November 2018.

This image was made with hand held camera to create five original images from which a stacked image could be created. Because the images were not exactly superimposable I put all five into one file in PS and using the opacity slider and the move tool I moved each image to more or less superimpose it on the layer below. When they were reasonably superimposed I adjusted the opacity of each layer to create the above ‘stacked’ image. I did not want the images to be exactly superimposed so that the result would resemble Kahn’s work.

2. People passing the Etang, Cucuron, November 2018

For this image I used a tripod and I stacked 5 images in Photoshop using stacking mode. The passing people appear as shadows at the back of the pond.

3. People passing Under the Portail, Cucuron, November 2018

This is also a stacked image of five original photos. Although I used a tripod there was a small shift in position which I liked as I thought it increased the tension of the image.

4. People crossing a square in Aix en Provence December 2018

This is seven images superimposed on one another. I tried the automatic stack but the result was weak. I then manually stacked them in PS using varying opacities in each layer util I was satisfied with the end result.

5. People and traffic passing Aix bus station December 2018

This is five stacked images which were made from a bus in Aix in Provence bus station. I used PS stacking but this time I used ‘maximum’ for stacking mode instead of ‘mean’. I liked the result. I am aware that I had moved the camera a little as the bus was moving but I liked the result.

I am still looking out for more opportunities to create more stacked series.

Nancy Burson. 2018. Nancy Burson. [ONLINE] Available at: http://nancyburson.com. [Accessed 16 November 2018].
Esther Teichmann | 1000 Words. 2018. Esther Teichmann | 1000 Words. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.1000wordsmag.com/esther-teichmann/. [Accessed 16 November 2018].
Corinne Vionnet. 2018. | CORINNE VIONNET |. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.corinnevionnet.com/works.html. [Accessed 16 November 2018]
About Photography: Multiple exposure technique . 2018. About Photography: Multiple exposure technique . [ONLINE] Available at: http://aboutphotography-tomgrill.blogspot.com/2016/01/multiple-exposure-technique.html. [Accessed 19 November 2018].
YouTube. 2018. Meet the Artist: Idris Khan – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3rzmBb7Y-4. [Accessed 16 November 2018].
Photomonitor – Book Reviews – Inside the View. 2018. Photomonitor – Book Reviews – Inside the View. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.photomonitor.co.uk/inside-the-view/. [Accessed 15 November 2018].

Introductory Exercise

We all encounter photographs on a daily basis. For a few decades now, commentators have talked about a ‘flood’ or a constant ‘bombardment’ of images, permeating ever deeper into our lives. Depending of course on where you live, the intensity of this will vary a great deal. To try to get a sense of this, dip your toe into the floodwater and re-photograph every photographic image that you encounter on a single day.

The quality of the image doesn’t matter – use a camera phone or compact camera. You should include videos as well as still photographs; just shoot one frame to document a sequence.

Construct a grid or compile a contact sheet of all your images.
Write a short reflective piece in your learning log about this exercise. What have you learned from this exercise? Has it alarmed you? Has it confirmed any preconceptions? What do most of the images you encountered show? Does this tell you anything about the environment you live in?

My village

Reflection on Exercise

I live in a small provencal village at the foothills of the Luberon mountains. It is a very typical french village for this part of the world. What I think would strike city dwellers, who visit, is the lack of posters or publicity. It is a very quiet understated place. There are notice boards around the village on which publicity for local events or facilities can be placed. We have one medium sized supermarket, a pharmacy, three bread shops, a biological shop, a cinema, a library, a photographers studio, my printer, a newspaper shop, three estate agents and some tourist shops. There are no obvious publicity posters. Photographs are used in small posters, in the cinema publicity, in the pharmacy window, in the estate agents and in the tourist office. Other than this we live in an almost publicity free zone.

Project 4 Photomontage in the age of the internet

Watch Stephen Gill describe his exhibition Best Before End at Foam, Amsterdam, at Link 9

What an amazing and fascinating video. I am transfixed by Stephen Gill’s work. I love the progression from being more ‘explanatory’ in the earlier work to entering into the work ‘from behind’. In his Best Before End series this is what he is trying to do, to take us by the hand and then let us get lost within the picture. I find the work fascinating.

In this critique, written by one of my other favourites, Will Self, of his book “Best Before End” I absolutely love and empathise with the sentiment expressed below. (1)

I’ll sleep when Im dead, for all sleep is the sleep of reason we need our wits about us: its an accelerated world out there, demanding split-second decision making capability to hit the right button so as to make the right multi-million dollar trade, or order the next pizza, or download the next app

The images are all there in this critique – my breath is taken away. There is also a vimeo of the book here (2)

Hear Eva Stenram discuss her Drape series at Link 10

Such a pity Eve Stenram is such a hesitant presenter. It is almost as if she is not convinced of the strength of her own work.

I found the email exchange between the editor of LensCulture and Eva Sternum much more enlightening than listening to hesitant self on the video. The exchange made this artist’s raison d’être much clearer for me. Her quote

I am interested in how all absences reveal something else; absences enhance our looking and trigger our imagination at the same time.

This is certainly true of her work. The quote gave me a much deeper understanding of what she was trying to achieve.

Gill is a highly experimental photographer who often rips, tears, folds and even burns the photographic image to create the effects he wants. These strategies are present also in the work of another British artist, John Stezaker. Stezaker uses the cut and the tear to uncomfortable effect, forcing connections between previously unconnected images. In Marriage LXI he splices together two found photographs, originally intended as publicity shots. In bringing these two images together to create a third meaning, Stezaker suggests that the identities created in these publicity shorts are both constructed and infinitely interchangeable

READING:

Nina Lager Vestberg’s essay ‘The Photographic Image in Digital Archives’, Chapter 7 in Lister, M. (ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Abingdon: Routledge (pp.113–30), which is provided with your course materials.

The chapter opens with a summary of what will be discussed. It then moves on to a historical review, mentioning the literature in the late ’80s and throughout the 90s, of the movement from analogue archive to digital storage both for research and for re-sale of images by agencies like Getty..

The author, who worked as a picture researcher, differentiates between digitisation and computerisation. The former being the digitisation of the previously held catalogues and low resolution scans of the analogue material, to the change in the practice of gathering and archiving the material directly by computers. The next big change involved the user being able to access the archived material directly using search engines cutting out the need for librarians to do the searching. I was acutely aware of this change at the time as my husband is an information scientist who worked in the library environment. The opposition from the librarians to the user directed searches was palpable.

The chapter then moves on to the announcement in the Guardian in 2012 that the Tate and the V&A were ‘destroying’ their analogue archives. But the Tate archive was ‘acquired’ by the Paul Mellon centre and preserved. The V&A archive was lost. The Guardian itself moved its archive from the old building to its new headquarters following an exhibition of a selection of the material. The move to this new building came when the newspaper was moving to digital but they did find a place to preserve their material image bank.

Lager Vestberg uses two images to explore how images are held and catalogued in two of Getty’s sub agencies. The one, an image from 1950, held in the Keystone Press Agency and the other in the Hulton Archives. Both images show a woman looking at photo images. The second image from the 1990s is posed using a model the other is an image of a researcher working through a pile of images. The metadata for the older image is short and to the point, while the metadata for the more recent one is extensive so that someone searching for an image could come across this even though they might not use succinct search terms. The overlap of search terms between the two images is also very limited. The licence type is also included in the data, “rights-managed” or “royalty free”. As a contributor to Alamy Stock images I am aware of these licence differences. The other information contained in the archive data is ‘collection’ type. This is supposed to assist researchers in finding a particular genre of image. The information contained in the data set also indicates if the image is virtual only or exists as a paper copy. Certain of Getty’s collections fall into one or the other category.

The term residual archive is discussed as being the cross over space between old technologies, such as analogue, and the new digital technologies. Getty is described as a residual archive since it contains old digitised analogue material and new digital only material. The move from preservation of material images to digitisation is considered as a loss. A loss of the actual image itself but also of the information, or meta data, which the picture librarians added to the rear of the image and finally the loss of the profession of the picture librarian. The chapter ‘s conclusion is that

Viewed together the two images provide an analogy of the very process of dgitilisation, where the analogue referent is not just preserved but enhanced by its digital record.

David Campany’s Deutsche Börse essay on John Stezaker at Link 11

I agree with the observation in the notes introduction. that John Stezaker’s images produce an uncomfortable effect. Whether I was happy to be made uncomfortable by looking at an image is an as yet unanswered question. I cannot say I like these images but then I don’t think one is meant to like them but to look at them and see what meaning can be extracted from the if any. I wanted to do this before reading David Company’s essay.

The images certainly make me uneasy. Why did he create them? Just because he could or wanted to?? Who knows.

In the Guardian article(4) on Stezaker the author talks about Negotiable Space I. have to hold my hands up and say “I don’t get it”

This PC ‘stuck’ on on top image, apparently, helps us to see all sorts of detail in the image behind. I am afraid I had already examined it see if I could find why there was a train postcard coming out of the patient’s head!! But I failed. The Trail series left me equally confused. In fact looking at the latter two series made me ‘appreciate’ the combined facial images. But this is all probably due to my own lack of experience rather than the shortcomings of the artist.

I am not sure I agree with David Company that:

Collage can be a means of holding on, of finding calm in the eye of that storm.

certainly when discussing the work of Stezaker.

I would certainly agree that:

that collage involves a love of images and a desire to destroy them

and that

For Stezaker at least, collage is iconoclasm (the destruction of images) in the service of iconophilia (the love of images)

It would be extremely interesting to visit one of Stezaker’s exhibitions to check out Company’s observation that his work is an ongoing process. Series are being added to all the time and the results are apparently seamless and dateless. In these exhibitions

we are allowed to enter into that suspension of time

Company calls on Jean Paul Satre’s experience of being in a forest firstly alone and then seeing another person, to ‘explain’ Stezaker’s series, The 3^rd Person Archive, These images ‘taken’ from an illustrated encyclopedia Countries of the World (1920) are mounted with an off white mount and then presented as seen. Company feels that these images

affect our shared space and our shared visual culture.

I wish I could ‘feel ‘ all this. I am blaming the fact that the cold computer screen is no match for the visual experience of being present at an exhibition. I do concur with Company’s conclusion that images are ‘anarchic’. Whatever cataloguing restrictions we try to put on photographic images, they somehow escape from these restraints and stand alone proud and independent saying their own thing.

‘Why do we call it Love when we mean Sex?’ in the collection Pandora’s Camera, provided with your course materials.

I love how Fontcuberta writes. It is simple and he does not always follow the grand Gurus of traditional thinking. He claims that historians of photography are not a very gifted bunch.

The historiography of the sector has never managed to resolve the articulation of successive pictorials waves

He passes quickly over the idea that there was always a veracity in analogue images. This was because the image is created by merely pressing a button. Unlike painting which required

the orchestrated impulses of the hand to guide the graphic configuration

But photographers know that there was more to image making than mechanical processes. However despite advances and some experimental work historically photography was documentary. That has and is changing. Some artists are creating work using photographs to create paintings, or music to create paintings or photography to create sculptures. The boundaries of these media are blurring. The more we photograph the more we move away from the origins of the medium. Photographers are not, Fontcuberta says, robots, cameras are machines, but we have to input certain instructions into these machines. So document becomes art guided by the photographer’s hand. But

photography as a whole continues to occupy a lowly station, somewhere between the page, between the bearded lady and the midget.

Change came with the arrival of the digital camera. This is a true, according to Fontcuberta, painting with light. We can, using software, manipulate the pixels we have imaged. he says

analogue photography is inscribed and digital photography is written

Digital photographs couldn’t go wrong because the camera decided what was best. Perfection of the resultant image does not necessarily mean better. It can result in stiff, lacking in originality, and emotionless images. This is where we are according to Fontcuberta. But

this may be the price we have to pay for photography to attain full maturity as a culture of seeing

Digital photography has not yet found its own voice. it is still straitjacketed in analogue photography. We still use the word photography to describe this practice but we really should be inventing a new word for a new genre.

How about DIM? (digital image making). remember you read it here first!!

1Stephen Gill. 2018. Stephen Gill Best Before End. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/best-before-end. [Accessed 09 December 2018].
Vimeo. 2018. Stephen Gill – Best Before End on Vimeo. [ONLINE] Available at: https://vimeo.com/97808945. [Accessed 09 December 2018].
Eva Stenram | LensCulture. 2018. Drapes // Parts – Photographs by Eva Stenram | LensCulture. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/eva-stenram-drapes-parts. [Accessed 09 December 2018].
The Guardian. 2018. Brian Dillon on John Stezaker at the Whitechapel Gallery | Art and design | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/29/john-stezaker-whitechapel-gallery. [Accessed 09 December 2018].

Project 3:The found image in photomontage

Reading:

Read ‘Intention and Artifice’ in Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (pp.22–57). You’ll find this on the student website (PH5DIC_The Reconfigured Eye_ Intention and Artifice).

It is difficult to believe this paper was written in 1994. It reads fresh and very pertinent to todays world.

The opening scenario concerning the Libyan planes shot down by the US military sets the scene perfectly. The image displayed by the US military does not prove anything. We are in the territory of ‘fake news’ to quote a present day president. The discussion moves smoothly on to the discussion of how ‘true’ is any image. Is the photograph a ‘trace‘ of something that was or happened as Sontag would claim or according to Berger is it a record of things seen?. Mitchell describes the camera as a perceptual prosthesis. An image is bonded to its referent with superglue. The photographer has little influence on the outcome and in this, according to Scruton, he differs from a painter. The statement that: ‘a photograph of a horse must be of some specific horse while a painting of a horse is not a particular horse’ neatly explains, for me, the difference between photography and painting. With all the intellectual words written about the difference of these two genres this is by far the simplest. Mitchell also quotes Berger’s claim that photographs are ‘records of things seen … no closer to works of art than cardiograms‘. The discussion moves on to describe photography as being more akin to art where the artist follows either a stencil or copies an image. But photographs could always be retouched and one of the ways to confirm the truthfulness of an image is to produce the negative to show the printed images has not been tampered with.

But digital imaging completely changes all these ‘rules’ of authenticity. Portions of images can be seamlessly added together so that the referent has become unstuck. Mitchell continues by using the opposite interpretation of an image, for this he uses images of cubes, to investigate how plausible is the image. Working through the various images he ends with the image that is impossible like Eschers sketches. But there are parameters we can use like shadows or clocks or inserted objects, to establish if an image is ‘possible’ or not. A number of famous photographs or videos like those the group of astronauts on the moon, Capa’s falling soldier or the Chernobyl aftermath are discussed for their authenticity. Fake provenance is also discussed citing the Ronald Reagan’s false claim that he was one of the photographers who filmed the Nazi death camps

The problem of defining an original image with digital media is even more difficult. The image is held electronically so it is impossible to say what the original is or was. Dates can be altered on these forms of images. Goodman differentiates between one stage or two stage art. Photography and music composition are two stage processes while painting is a one stage procedure. The former are harder to authenticate. Copyright becomes a minefield if images can be easily transformed. Old black and white films can be made into colour. Is this adding value to the original. What is fair use of digital work by someone else? What about the ethics of digital manipulation by photojournalists. Twenty years on from this paper we are still asking these questions and we still have not found definitive solutions.

Read a review of Hannah Höch’s 2014 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London at Link 5

Luckily for us women Hannah Hoch’s obituary could not be written today as it was in1978. Such blatant sexism and patronisation of a brilliant artist. And brilliant she was. The image below is packed with vignettes. One could live with and look at it for an entire lifetime and find something new almost every glance.

Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany

Because she was bisexual and jewish she was fair game for the male obituary writers. But her works tells her story better than weak and insulting words.

Her mixing of male and female bodies is so delicately done. I feel this reflects her bisexual orientation. In The Father the male holds the baby gently but the boxer violently hits the baby on the head. She is satirical but never cruel except perhaps in that piece The Painter which she wrote. Really hard to imagine someone with that insight in 1920 and a woman prepared to express it. Her eye for colour and mixing images gives the impression of calmness while depicting some fairly hard hitting commentary. I have downloaded the following PdF for further reading (1)

Read Sabine Kreibel’s essay ‘Manufacturing Discontent: John Heartfield’s Mass Medium’ at Link 6

This is a very short article on John Heartfield’s work. I had to remind myself of his photomontage images. (2). Kreibel talks of ‘suture’ which is defined as:

a stitch or row of stitches holding together the edges of a wound or surgical incision.

as the basis of Heartfield’s work. For me this is too simplified an interpretation of the work. Mearly binding together terrible injustices I would feel is less than what Heartfield was hoping to demonstrate but Kreibel did write a whole book on Heartfield’s work so this may well be an unjust criticism.

I think the Turkish art critic Meral Bostanci (2) described more vividly what was involved in this work.

Heartfield’s real purpose is to ridicule the opposition and its manipulation of reality

What one wears, for example, or what one reads marks us out as to who we are and what we believe. Heartfield used his montages to ridicule these beliefs and practices. The author distinguishes todays political art from Heartfield’s in that we know from todays artist’ work what their beliefs are. But there is no attempt to change the beliefs of those who look at the work.

Heartfield was not interested in personal fame he was preaching a message against the Nazis. What a pity the people did not heed him.

https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_241_300063171.pdf
John Heartfield Exhibition. 2018. Heartfield Political Photomontage “Blind and Deaf” by Turkish Art Critic Meral BostanciJohn Heartfield Exhibition. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/about-john-heartfield-photomontages/heartfield-photomontage-dada-political/turkish-political-art-dada-fascist/political-photomontage-bostanci. [Accessed 04 December 2018].

Ex 1.2: Through the Digital Lens

Discuss a photograph that takes an existing work of art as its starting point. Write a 500- word reflection on your chosen piece in your learning log.

This is a genre about which I know very little. I would normally have a queasy feeling about this type of work. I remember attending a dinner in Chile where there was a number of young people. It was some sort of celebration which I cannot now recall. One of the young women guests dressed as Frieda Kahlo. I found the experience unnerving.

But on researching the area I was introduced to many interesting photographers and their work. It was hard to choose a special favourite in this genre. I found the self portraits by Laura Hofstadter(1) interesting up to a point. In this blog a number of photographers contributed to a request from the blogger to recreated famous portraits (2). The following I found extraordinary.

Another interesting, not simple to recreate painting by Casper David Friedrich, was the following by Spencer harding (3)

But I was totally blown away by the work of Sandro Millar(4) working with John Malkovich. It was almost impossible to choose one from this series of images . But I finally settled on this image of Marlyn Munro originally by Bert Stern. This has to be my favourite of all the images I looked at.

The reason I chose this one was because I knew the original image and I found the fact that John Malkovich could dress (or undress) to resemble a woman and above all a woman so beautiful as Marlyn Munro, amazing and very convincing. There a couple of small ‘differences’ besides the major one of Malkovich being a man and Munro a woman! The appendix (?) scar is shorter and the end less puckered, Malkovich has a small gap in his front teeth while Marlyn’s are perfect. Malkovich’s wig could have been better coiffed to more closely resemble Marlyn’s beautiful hair. But although one could not say that Malkovich is beautiful or even good looking with the make up and the props Stern managed, with the photographic expertise of Sandro Millar, to recreate a very passable resemblance. Miller’s lighting is beautifully soft making Malkovich’s body look almost feminine. Everything about the recreation makes me smile.

Next, re-make an existing work of art using photography. This can be a simple re-staging – using photography – of an existing painting, drawing or print (see, for example, Sam Taylor-Wood’s Dutch still life-inspired Still Life video portrait at Link 4) or a more elaborate figurative tableau (like that of Hara).

For this part of the exercise I felt I had to choose a Cezanne painting since I live for half of each year in Provence. I chose the following painting.

I did not go to the village of Gardanne to recreate the image as it is a little too far away from where I live and in addition it certainly does not look like the above painting today. It is the centre of cement works between Aix en Provence and Marseille.

I decided instead to ‘recreate’ the painting using my own village. This had to be done in sections in Photoshop.

I used the actual painting as the base.

I created several images of my village.

I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out certain sections from the image. I pasted each on to a transparent background. Then using ctrl c, ctrl a, I cut and pasted these on to various parts of the Cezanne painting. I feathered the edges so they would not be too sharp. I then found a sky in my image files and altered the colours to a greenish blue to ‘match’ the Cezanne sky. I juggled the layers to get the best fit I could. The final PSD file consisted of nine layers.

Then I flattened the layers and saved the image as a JPG. I then took it into Photomatrix and tone mapped it. I then took it back to PS and blurred it.

I am reasonable happy with the result.

Hommage to Cézanne’s Gardanne using Cucuron

PetaPixel. 2018. This 65-Year-Old Photographer is Recreating Famous Paintings as Self-Portraits. [ONLINE] Available at: https://petapixel.com/2016/01/13/this-65-year-old-photographer-is-recreating-famous-paintings-as-self-portraits/. [Accessed 30 November 2018].
EMGN. 2018. 25 Famous Paintings Recreated In A Whole New Light By Amateur Photographers. [ONLINE] Available at: http://emgn.com/entertainment/25-famous-paintings-recreated-in-a-whole-new-light-by-amateur-photographers/. [Accessed 30 November 2018]
Bored Panda. 2018. 20 Modern Remakes Of Famous Paintings | Bored Panda. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.boredpanda.com/famous-painting-remakes/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic. [Accessed 30 November 2018].
Bored Panda. 2018. Photographer Recreates Famous Portraits With John Malkovich As His Model | Bored Panda. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.boredpanda.com/portrait-remakes-malkovich-homage-to-photographic-masters-sandro-miller/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic. [Accessed 30 November 2018]

Project 2: Through a digital lens

Jeff Wall and Wendy McMurdo

The image displayed in our notes A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)(1) was created by Jeff Wall to be shown in a light box. These images which he was creating at the time are huge. He maintains that the space behind the image and in front of the light creates a different space. He created many of these very large back lit images. They were all composites of various images. It is hard to see them today as anything extraordinary. Both techniques, backlighting and images ‘creation and manipulation” are everyday occurrences today. At the time of its creation it must have been quite sensational. He states that this is after the original painting by Katsushika Hokusai, “Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshū Ejiri)” which formed part of a series called “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)”.

I have to admit I find the Japanese artist’s painting much more pleasing. I also have to admit that I am not overly excited about photographs which are created using old paintings as inspiration, although I have tried this technique myself. In Wall’s image I find the backdrop dreary and although I realise that the characters are not meant to have anything to do with the background, I find their presence jarring.

I listened to a youTube video (2) of Jeff Wall talking about his images. This did nothing to increase my interest in his work.

Wendy McMurdo’s work is interesting in that it creates a sense of inquisitiveness. What exactly is going on in these images. In the interview with Sheila Lawson(3) they discuss the relationship of McMurdo’s work to painting. McMurdo seems to be a little ambivalent about this direct connection. She would appear, to me, to be more concerned with the ‘doppelgänger’ or different aspects of the same person. I find this much more interesting, having grandchildren of my own. They are complex little beings displaying several personalities depending on the situation. I would find that McMurdo has captured this completely in the double images of the children. The image of the child sitting on her ‘double’ holds, for me, a very interesting insight into what is going on in the life of that child.

I also find the group images intriguing. Perhaps this is the ‘relation’ to the ‘digital natives’.

Are these young people incapable of looking into themselves? Are they in some ‘other’ digital space as some of the literature would have us believe of digital natives? Or is this reading way too much into the image?

Her images provided plenty of food for thought. Considering the paper on digital natives was written in 2008 I wonder what the conclusions on the influence of the digital world and social media, on young people, would be considered to be in 2018.

READING:

Read the essay ‘The Digital Image in Photographic Culture: Algorithmic Photography and the Crisis of Representation’ by Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, Chapter 2 in Lister, M. (ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Abingdon: Routledge (pp.22–40).

I found this chapter difficult to read and understand. What I took from it was that the old philosophical norms for analogue photography can not be applied to digital images. Where the former had a subject and objet, a signifier and a signified digital images no longer follow these ‘rules’, digital images are transferred to a screen from the camera CMOS via an algorithm. Its fate once online is no longer definable. It is free to repeat and change as it moves across different networks. The authors did say that analogue images did have the chemical process between the subject and the object.

In conclusion the authors feel that we need a whole new set of philosophies to define this new methodology of creating images.

Watch American artist Daniel Gordon discuss his work and his digital montage methods at Link 3.

I found this video really interesting. I am not sure I ‘like’ Gordon’s final images but the journey to producing them is really great. But the video left me wondering “Who was paying the bills in the Gordon household”? His methodology reminded me of Francis Bacon – the torn up magazines all over the floor. But alas I do not think I could compare the final outcome. But that is a subjective comment.

Computerisation and digitalisation of images breaks the sequence of signifiers and puts an end to the semiotic interpretation of images. But the screen shows beautiful images which the authors describe as ‘after’ images which is not representation but is nonetheless sensual.

Tate. 2018. ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)’, Jeff Wall, 1993 | Tate . [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wall-a-sudden-gust-of-wind-after-hokusai-t06951. [Accessed 28 November 2018].
YouTube. 2018. Jeff Wall: Tableaux Pictures Photographs 1996-2013 – YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNWWrKXNeBA. [Accessed 28 November 2018].
‘Dopplegangers’ | Wendy McMurdo. 2018. ‘Dopplegangers’ | Wendy McMurdo. [ONLINE] Available at: http://wendymcmurdo.com/text/dopplegangers/. [Accessed 29 November 2018].

Project1: The origins of Photomontage

It is interesting that both of the following papers were written twenty years ago. As historical documents this is not difficult to comprehend but the conclusion that we have to look at the past, present and future in a different way holds good today.

Obedient Numbers, Soft Delight by Geoffry Batchen (1998)

The introduction to this project advises us to read the essay (1) by Geoffrey Batches which discusses the origin of todays computers.

The article commences with the claim that the development of photography is very similar to that of computing.

The origin of computing can apparently, be traced back to 1833. Babbage invented his Analytical Engine. Babbage was a close associate of early photographers and especially Fox Talbot whose work he displayed during his soirees. Talbot was a mathematician as well as photographer and worked with Babbage on his machines. He ‘created’ his first image using a camera obscure. This, he claimed was nature drawing its own likeness. Babbage meanwhile was using his machine to mathematically ‘create’ a result hence, like photography, disintegrating natural philosophy.

Talbot started to ‘make’ his lace contact prints from which he could make copies which would be black on white if the original was white on black. He made a magnified image of a piece of lace thus demonstrating it was made up of pixels. This lead to the use of cards, by Jacquard, to ‘program’ machines to make lace. The french used a type of human computer to set up their ordinance maps. Babbage then replaced these humans by ‘intelligent’ ‘programmable’ machines. Babbage’s machines were used to create ‘life tables’ hence transforming human beings into data.

Babbage was followed by the mathematician Boole who proposed that things were represented by the number 1 and the absence of things by the number 0. This is the basis of computing when we add three basic operations: And, Or, and Not. It is also the bases of metaphysics according to Jacques Derrida.

Photographic history like computing history is inscribed in the past. What we need to do now is perceive the past, present and future differently. We are not given any indication in this essay about how we might do this.

Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age By Geoffrey Batchen (1998)

The ‘death’ of photography seems to be a favourite topic of writers on the subject. I find this a little strange as photography, like other technological developments, is continually on its own spectrum of development. it is continually changing and mostly improving. It would appear to me to be in rude good health.

The arrival of the computer, according to the article, was supposed to herald the death knell of photography. As discussed, in this article, computers offered the possibility to ‘doctor’ images. Images could be ‘faked’. It would no longer be possible to tell any original from its simulations. Ethically the situation would be changed. Photography as it had been known was dead.

In the early days photography had its own detrimental effect on other artistic genres. Everyone was, as is still the case, fighting for their share of a market.

The author wondered why photography took so long to be ‘invented’. Its inception seems to have been born with the death of ‘Nature Philosophy’. It’s early days a dance of life and death since it needed light to exist but was destroyed by exposure to light. Talbot described photography as ‘the art of fixing a shadow‘. It is hard for us to be impressed by the idea discussed in this paper that photography permits us to see the passing of time. Today we can see a photographed event which took place in the 1800’s. We can ‘experience’ the past. Barthes describes photography as allowing us to see, this will be, and this has been.

The idea that digital imaging will be the death sentence of analogue photography is discussed. Bill Gates saw the potential of digitising early images and bought Corbis which makes available a huge archive of digitised analogue images. This, for me, is a maturing of photography rather than a death knell. It uses available technology to preserve the past.

Digitisation does offer the possibility to alter an original image. It removes this ‘truth’ element of earlier photography. Newspapers and magazines were disquieted by this possibility in the early days. But they have always altered images themselves. I loved the case cited of National Geographical ‘moving’ the pyramids closer together, presumably to ‘fit’ them on to the cover. We don’t blink today at the idea of manipulated images being used in publications. But in earlier photography we knew that what was photographed was in front of a camera and then photographed. Something had ‘been’ even if it was subsequently ‘altered’.

Where all this is changing is with the possibility that the computer can be programmed or manipulated to ‘create’ an image of someone or something which never existed.

Digital images are in time not of time

None of this pronounces the death of photography it is, as it has always been, an evolving technology. it is, and will continue, for the moment, to be, a system of concepts and relationships. But nothing is written in stone and may change with advancing technologies.

Photographic, it appears, is a logic that continually returns to haunt itself.

The paper concludes with the idea that photography will only die if we cease to want to make images. That it will evolve is inevitable. We may have to change our way of ‘seeing‘ and ‘being‘.

I knew the Spice Girls by Joan Fontcuberta (p56-63)

Fontcuberta opens this chapter with a personal story for 1997. He went to a photographic booth to get a passport photo. he was offered the possibility of inserting his own image into a preset image of a celebrity image he chose the Spice Girls. This sowed the seed for investigation from where photography had come in its analogue days to where it had arrived in 2014, the date of writing the book.

Photography in its early days produced, with the aid of chemicals, an object which could be looked at and archived. It represented what had been seen and reproduced. It contained information. It spoke ‘the truth’. It could not be easily manipulated except in expert hands.

Digital photography is ‘constructed’ with pixels. He likened it to the application of paint on a canvas with a brush. He felt that digital imaging should be the development from painting but somehow photography intruded in between fine art and digital imaging.

Digital photography differs from analogue in that it is easily manipulated. It can no longer be relied on to represent what had been in front of the lens at the time of making the picture. It can be easily distributed electronically and altered and re-altered along the way. The images are volatile in cyberspace. Can we rely on digital imagery in photojournalism? How much manipulation should/could be allowed. Will digital imaging set its own values in the future?

If anyone was to listen to President Donald Trump it is all fake news anyway…..

Many interesting question are asked in this chapter. Some questions, Fontcuberta indicates, he will attempt to answer in later chapters. It will make interesting reading.

Chapter 8 ‘Obedient Numbers, Soft Delight’ from Geoffrey Batchen (2002) Each Wild Idea, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (PH5DIC_Each Wild Idea_Obedient Numbers_Soft Delight)
Geoffrey Batchen’s essay ‘Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age’ in Squiers, C. (ed.)(1999) Over Exposed: Essays in Contemporary Photography, New York: The New Press, pp.9– 23. (PH5DIC_Over Exposed_Ectoplasm)
DIGITAL EYE. 2018. I knew the Spice Girls — DIGITAL EYE. [ONLINE] Available at: https://digitaleye.photography/blog/i-knew-the-spice-girls. [Accessed 15 November 2018].