Category: Part2: The archive and the found image in digital culture
Project 4: The artist and the World Wide Web
Read ‘New Media and Vernacular Photography: Revisiting Flickr’ by Susan Murray in Lister, M. (ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Abingdon: Routledge (pp.165–82), which is provided with your course materials.
The book was written in 2005 and updated in 2013. The chapter is five years old. With the speed of development in the area of Social Media an essay like this is out of date almost as soon as it is written. The result is that when it is read five years after it has been written one must keep in mind that it was very innovative and still ‘new’ when Murray wrote this essay. The usual history of the development of photography from its early days through analogue to digital is included. The remainder of the article seems to favour heavily the Flickr community.
I joined Flickr in 2010 and used it for about a year or so. I never really got on with it and have not looked at my account, for years, until this morning. I discovered I couldn’t log in. I was directed to a Yahoo page requesting that I set up a Yahoo account. An online search indicated that Yahoo no longer owns Flickr. The new owners are SmugMug. I have decided to close my account but first I need to get into it. I have only 38 images on the site. I will now have to research how to log into my account.
Flickr was a great photo sharing site when it opened in 2005. Each contributor was given 1TB of space so contributors were using it as a storage sites well as a sharing platform. Murray points to the fact that contributors themed their photos and formed groups. I never did this so cannot comment on how helpful it might have been. According to Murray it was a great idea for helping to improve the quality of images. The content of these groups was the every day, the ordinary. This was a shift in what was considered good photography. Images could be uploaded either from a smart phone or computer and shared immediately.
In the analogue days people photographed occasions, holidays, family events etc. With the arrival of digital everything became photographable. Flickr became the site to share these images. This was a complete photographic paradigm shift. Murray researched certain tags and discovered that groups existed for almost any tag. The group decided to like or not like these images. An autonomy was set up which had little to do with the ‘rules’ of photography. But Murray claims the process did encourage improvements in photographic technique.
My own research uncovered the fact that this explosion of content lead to overload and the inevitable consequence that by 2018 free accounts were limited and millions of images were deleted by Flickr. (1). This move did not seem to generate the financial impetus to improve the site. In 2016 contributors were still getting a terabyte of sharing space. This PC Magazine article was lauding the ‘whizz bang” technology which classified images on the basis of what was in them. At the same time it was encouraging the reader to upgrade to a Pro account(2). By 2018 the company was sold on to SmugMug. In this article the reasons for Flickr’s decline were becoming obvious(3)
Flickr had 122 million users in October 2016. So that’s from 0 to 122 million in 12 years. When you compare this against Instagram’s 0 to 700 million users between October 2010 and April 2017, the last 100 million of which were added in just four months (source: TechCrunch), Flickr’s growth looks decidedly wobbly (3)
Because of the date of the essay there is little mention of Instagram which has become the place to share photographs as is evident from the statistics above. The algorithms on Instagram seems to recognise what a contributor might like to see and follow. This seems to be a lot more sophisticated than Flickr but as an inactive Flickr contributor I cannot comment and an out of date article does not help.
It appears that removing ones images is not simple (4).
Also read:
- David Chandler’s essay on Mishka Henner’s Dutch Landscapes at Link 10.
This is a really interesting short essay on Mishka Henner’s Google Map images of sensitive areas in Holland. It would appear that the Dutch have blocked out these areas by creating patchwork like patterns superimposed on the maps. The end result is quite attractive. Chandler noticed while travelling along a motorway that a Morrisson’s depot was camouflaged which prompted him to investigate Henner’s work. In Ireland I think we just leave that sector of the map blank. The nuclear power station here in the Vaucluse, Cadarache, is just blurred.
- ‘When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets’ by Annebella Pollen at Link 11
This is an interesting essay. I have rarely been interested in making images of sunsets. This is because I love being outside at sunset but it is the three dimensional aspect of this phenomenon which I enjoy. But I do like making images of the effect of a sunset on places like water. I liked the way the author did not appear to take the high moral ground, as Susan Sontag does, about sunset images made by amateurs. Photos like art are a question of personal taste once the basic rules are followed more or less. The fact that social media has lead to an explosion of images of the sunset does not make them bad. The idea that one is less cultured if you likes a sunset image is preposterous. My husband likes sunsets, he has several degrees, and has bought a photo made by a friend of a sunset. I dislike this photo because I find the sunset on the water is blown out but this does not make me more or less cultured than my husband.
Pollen studied a large number of sunset images which had been rejected for a competition. She realised each image is created by someone and as such it is unique. Many of these images were made for special reasons and as such have merit. She discusses the project, One Day for Life, in 1985. I remember this project. Many people submitted sunset images for this project. The author believed that some of these images were created to indicate the time of the day on which they were made for the project and therefore had a validity. The cover of the book was a sunset Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This was apparently to indicate that the project was not about cats or dogs or other ideas but about a day.
Penelope Umbrico’s project Suns from Flickr is an ongoing project started in 2006. The title changes with each exhibition. There are ever more sunsets being posted on social media so she is never short of material. The ubiquity of sunsets on social media indicates that there are a very large number of people who like making images of sunsets. Each one is unique and has a different signification. So
Just like sunsets, then, every sunset photograph is different.
- The Guardian. 2019. Flickr to delete millions of photos as it reduces allowance for free users | Technology | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/02/flickr-delete-millions-photos-reduce-allowance-free-users. [Accessed 25 January 2019].
- PCMag. 2019. Flickr Review & Rating | PCMag.com. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2324482,00.asp. [Accessed 25 January 2019].
- DIY Photography. 2019. Flickr is on its way out, what are your alternatives? – DIY Photography. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.diyphotography.net/flickr-way-alternatives/. [Accessed 25 January 2019]
- Thorin Klosowski. 2019. Why We Continue To Use Shitty Old Apps Like Flickr. [ONLINE] Available at: https://lifehacker.com/why-we-continue-to-use-shitty-old-apps-like-flickr-1794959431. [Accessed 25 January 2019].
Exercise 2.3
In your exercise for this section, you’ll produce a piece of work that either explores the family album and its iconography or reflects on representations of the self in digital culture.
Do ONE of the following:
1. Produce a series of six photographs (these can be photomontage, staged photography, work using found images, work including images from your own family archives, etc.) which reference the family album in some way.
OR
2. Produce a series of six photo-based self-portraits that use digital montage techniques to explore different aspect of your identity.
Produce a 500-word blog post outlining your working methods and the research behind your final submission. (Whose work did you study in preparation for this exercise? Why did you choose the techniques that you did and how effective do you think your choices have been, for example?)
Six photo-based self-portraits exploring different aspects of my identity
The images I have chosen to represent some of my identity span a fifteen year period following the death of my father in December 1963.
I went to University at the age of sixteen and graduated at the age of twenty. I was the first of my family to attend University. My father did not live to see me graduate. I was too young and torn between the life I knew I had to lead and the life of my friends. My mother and I had very little money after the death of my father so I needed to work.
I completed a Masters degree while working and married in 1968. My husband is also a scientist. We share many interests including a great love of walking.
In 1970 our first child, a daughter, was born. I continued to work part-time as a researcher. But the first signs of deafness began to become evident. I had a stapaedectomy operation to replace a bone in my ear.
In 1973 our son was born. But my hearing was deteriorating.
We returned to our island home every Summer wherever we were living. I love the sea and my son and I often sailed from our island to Baltimore on the mainland on his Laser sailing boat.
We left Ireland in 1978 to live in Luxembourg . Away from Ireland and the constraints of my upbringing I felt liberated. I was baptised a Catholic without any choice. As I became more European and met people of many different nationalities and religions I questioned more and more the role of the church in Ireland. Finally I decided that the church had played a very sinister role and I could no longer support the institution.
Project 2 The artist as archivist
Read Allan Sekula’s essay ‘The Body and the Archive’ in Bolton, R. (ed.) (1992) The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.343–89. You’ll find this on the student website (PH5DIC_ The Contest and Meaning_The Body and the Archive).
Also read:
Tim Clark’s interview with Erik Kessels on the vanishing photo album: Link 4
‘Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument’ by Okwui Enwezor: Link 5
Having lost my initial reviews of these articles I set out to re-read them but this time with an overall view rather than individual reviews.
Sekula’s paper is difficult but really interesting in its study of early archiving. It is quite astonishing to read about how the study of the shape of the head was considered as a determinant of whether someone was criminally orientated or not. One could laugh at it now but at the time if you were lower class and fell foul of the law that was you set firmly on the Gaussian scale of ‘normality’ or otherwise. It reminds me of that undercurrent in the 1960s that people of colour were somehow less intelligent than white caucasians. Looking at Simon Reeves television programme (13 october BBC2) many thing do not seem to have changes. The statistics for prison inmates reveal that the proportion of coloured people, compared to white caucasian, is really high.
Among some of this work there were people who seemed less in the clouds than others. Bertillon, the head of the French Police Department at the end of the 1800s used a technique that I could recall from research in the 1960s, that of the index card on which one wrote relevant information about the person. Bertillon included a photo of the person involved. The problem then arose of how to archive and make the card retrievable. He used a system based on the ‘average man’ and arranged the cards around this in drawers. He was the first to suffer from photograph overload….
The system dehumanised people. But with the arrival of fingerprinting in the US and the recognition of environmental considerations humanity regained, to some degree, it’s individuality be that criminal or otherwise.
Then along came Galton in the UK whose mission was to ‘improve’ humanity by ‘eliminating’ the unfit. Not sure how he planned on doing this but it sounds awfully like ethnic cleansing to me although Sekula was careful not to describe it thus. However we have Galton to thank for the first combined or stacked images. His methodology compared to our ‘pop them into Photoshop and reduce the opacity’ seems a whole lot of very hard work. No wonder he claimed his efforts as ‘pictorial statistics‘. He even went on to claim to be able to create composites of ‘types’. The best claim that could be made for Galton’s composites is that they were a ‘collapsed archive‘.
The legacy of these two men according to Sekula is that
Bertillon sought to embed the photograph in the archive while Galton sought to imbed the archive in the photograph
In the early part of the 1900s librarians began to organise archiving using the Dewey classification system. Photographs had to be classified but this proved more difficult than text based documents. Photographers like Evans, in creating books like American Photographs 1938, created their own archives. The modernists created a type of archive of ‘everyday life’ in their images by juxtaposing ordinary details with other general images.
Sekula then moves on to the work of Ernest Cole in South Africa which resulted in his book “House of Bondage”. He uses this to stress that we as artists should bear witness to what is taking place in our world. I can only add my own voice to this and say “never more so than today“.
All this reading on archives and albums encouraged me to look at my own stock of family material. I was a little surprised to find that we did, in fact, have about seven or eight albums as Kessels says was the norm for families. Ours did not follow the normal pattern of early relationship, marriage, first born and later travel. We only had two very early album which fitted the profile of marriage and children arrival. But these albums did fit the criteria of being bad quality, dull and utterly forgettable except to us. The later albums were mostly of travel and contained a lot more information.
In the essay by the Nigerian born curator of “Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument” he goes into great detail about each of the participating artist’s work. His style is complicated so I searched out another review of this exhibition (1). I found this to be more comprehensible and explanatory of the work. The work in the exhibition was all appropriated and thus challenges the old notion of truth in photography. The description of the exhibition made the whole thing much clearer for me
what the exhibition offers is not a genealogy of the archive but an opportunity to understand critical engagements with the archival document as part of the contemporary “broad culture of sampling, sharing, and recombining of visual data in infinite calibrations of users and receivers”
Many different war or post war images are worked on so the original intention or truth of the image is totally lost . In the reconstructed sequence of the trial film The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1999) the whole veracity of
evidentiary claims of historical forms of representation.
are called into question.
Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page (2001) work is also included. I saw this work and was greatly impressed. Another work included which I have seen is the film The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–96) which I found also very interesting in that the whole life had been invented. Woody Allen also created a similar film, called Sweet and Lowdown, about a jazz player. I was totally taken in by this film and remember how cheated I felt.
Some participating artists dealt with race and ethnicity in their work and how this is and was represented.
On the whole the review is somewhat negative of how the concept of ‘archive‘ is used in both Enwexor’s essay and the exhibition itself . The interpretation is more literary than data based. I have to agree with this having read Enwezor’s catalogue essay.
1.Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. 2019. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1111#.XDnBtS-ZPsE. [Accessed 12 January 2019].
Exercise 2.2
Write 500 words in your learning log on a piece of work by one contemporary artist- photographer who uses the archive as source material. You may focus on any artist you wish here but you may wish to select either:
- an artist who exhibited as part of the exhibition Archive Fever (2008): Link 6
- one of the British artists’ projects produced by UK organisation GRAIN: Link 7
I have chosen to write about he work of Broomberg & Chanarin. I have seen some of their work at the Rencontre d’Arles a couple of years ago and it impressed me.
For the GRAIN project they worked collaboratively, on the Benjamin Stone photographic archive, held at the Library of Birmingham, with the writer, Eyal Weizman. Stone collected photographs, and eventually made his own, from the middle of the 1800s to the end of his life. He classified these into types like Races of Mankind, Feminine Beauty and Criminal Types . The purpose of these classifications was to distinguish between the superior classes and the inferior, between beauty and ugliness and between criminal and law abiding. Broomberg and Chanarin wanted to investigate the link between Stones images and a set of images they had made in Moscow of ordinary Russian people, a little like Sanders Weimar images. They used a facial recognition technology to make these images. One such image is that of the imprisoned Pussy Riot singer entitled The revolutionary.
Their collaboration lead to the book entitled “The Spirit is a bone” which comes from Hegel’s essay “The Phenomenology of Spirit”
The subject of remote surveillance and the use of AI to ‘create’ an image of a human is becoming ever more present in our daily lives. The lack of consent and even the lack of awareness of these ubiquitous cameras should be of prime importance to all of us. Broomberg and Chanrin were interested to explore this topic with Weizman.
There are two types of face recognition technology, two dimensional and three dimensional. The latter works on two images from different angles or on laser scans. The skull is used as the basis.
Face recognition technology is an attempt to capture and archive individual likeness(1).
Weizman maintained that the archive that Broomberg and Chanarin had created from the Moscow images opened up the entangled and co-constitutive relation between technology and ideology .
The study of Phrenology was discredited at the end of the nineteenth century but in fact modern technologies are very similar. A person’s movements are continually surveyed and if it is deemed probably that they will commit a crime they can and may be assassinated by an agent of the state. There is no reliance on judicial process , the state predicts their crime and eliminates them.
Broomberg and Chanarin felt restricted when accessing the Stone collection as it is housed in a temperature maintained environment and was only accessible by certain individuals so they had to work through staff members. This lead them to discuss the idea of the archive as a non static object. Once a photograph has been made and archived it can be re-interpreted by anyone at any time and there is no limit on the number of interpretations.
Weizman felt that the images created by Broomberg and Chanarin hacked into the source code of photography to create something which spoke of the past and also the future. He described the work as hovering between death and life and the crime that separates them.
I found this work fascinating.
1.Broomberg & Chanarin. 2019. Text – The Bone Cannot Lie — Broomberg & Chanarin. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.broombergchanarin.com/article-the-bone/. [Accessed 10 January 2019].
Exercise 2.1
Bring together a series of 12 images (a typology) in which a particular motif appears again and again. For this exercise, you may use found images (images you have at home as part of a family archive, for example) or images found online (from photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, for example). Select an appropriate way to display your series (as an animated slide presentation, in grid form, as single images, etc.) and present them on your learning log.
Look at the work of Corinne Vionnet. In her series Photo Opportunities, Vionnet uses Flickr archives to pull together vast series of images taken from a similar position in popular tourist sites. She then uses digital layering techniques to bring these images together into the one frame. See Link 3
I feel this exercise is all about the image overload which we are all experiencing with social media. I wanted to see what part I was playing in that both consciously and subconsciously. I am not sure my ideas fit the brief exactly but it is how I would like to interpret it,
I love the work of Corinne Vionnet. I am really interested in stacked images. My first reaction was the places chosen were so obvious but then, of course that was the point of the work. I was interested to see how many of the places I had visited and how I had photographed them. We all strive to find the angle, the place, the light, the detail in these ‘must see’ places. Alas there is nothing new or original under the sun…..
I decided to see the result if I superimposed my images of these most photographed places on an image stack either of Vionnet’s work if available , or creating a stack of Instagram or Flickr images of other tourist places I had visited and superimposing mine. Many of the images are of very low resolution and all required resizing. I was limited in the final stack by my own image which did not always superimpose well. To overcome this I used different stacking modes. The work is meant to be fun and slightly cynical of tourist images.
Although it does not fit the brief exactly the recurring theme is “We tourists keep photographing the same sites”……
1.Taj Mahal
There are 1 million images under #tajmahal on Instagram. This has to be a good reason not to go there to visit. But on a visit to Hyderabad, India in 2012, to see my brothers project with the children of prisoners, we decided to go north and see Rajasthan. We had spent a week with the children and were so privileged to be part of the everyday life of these children. We were not wanting to be involved with tourists or to visit places like the Taj Mahal. Nevertheless we were advised by a young Indian man that we really should go and see the Taj. On our way back to the airport in Delhi we decided to stopover in Agra. We queued with the masses at 6a.m. and as we got to the entrance the security man did not like my rice filled bean bag in my camera bag. This was removed and we were allowed to enter with our guide. I was feeling less than well disposed towards the Taj Mahal by the time we were allowed in. We came to the arch which forms the entrance. We were both completely overcome with emotion at the magnificence of this building. I raised my camera to my eye and framed the image you see below. I like how it stacked with Vionnet’s stack showing the people in the front.
2. Eifel Tower
There are 5.2 million images under #eiffeltower on Instagram. My husband worked in Paris for a couple of years. Although we lived in the south I got to visit Paris very often. Like any place one lives or with which one is very familiar one tends not to make images of that place. That said I do have a number of images of the Eiffel tower, mostly made when I rented an apartment in Paris for a week just to photograph the city. I used maximum stack mode so that the buildings would be evident in the combined stack with Vionnets.
3. Mount Fuji
There are 327 thousand images under #mountfuji on Instagram. We visited Japan in 2016 but as is our way of travelling we did not especially want to visit Mount Fuji. We did travel from Tokyo to Kyoto in the Bullit train so I caught a VERY fleeting glimpse of the majestic mountain from the high speed train. Not a very majestic image but the one that says “I was there”!! Well that I flew past….
4. Palace in Paris Disneyland
There are 18.3 thousand images under #parisdisney. We went there with our son and daughter and grandchildren in 2011. I had avoided taking my children to any Disneyland when they were growing up. Obviously both felt totally deprived and they got together to take their children there. They invited us to come along as they obviously felt we needed educating in how to bring up children….
5. Tokyo Shamble crossing
There are only 330 posts under #tokyoscramble but there are 40 million posts under #tokyo.
6. Trinity College Library, Dublin
There are only 333 images under #trinitycollegelibrarydublin. This is probably because it is forbidden to use a camera inside the library. Of course this does not stop anarchic people from snapping surreptitiously. I used “Variance for the stack mode in the final images as I though it brought out the colours better.
7. Torres del Paine, Chile
There are 401 thousand images under #torresdelpaine on Instagram. We have visited Chile twice. On the first visit in 2014 we walked the W in the Torres del Paine. On the day we struggled up the four hour climb the weather turned really nasty and a deep fog came down. We could not see a thing. The next morning we walked out of the park and as I looked back the three peaks of the Torres looked incredible so I took the image below. I liked the way the person in red in the Instagram stacked image which I made is still evident in the stack of this image with my own image. The lake under the Torres is evident in the stack of five but blends in with the hill in my image.
8. The Leaning Tower of Pisa
There are 205 thousand posts on the leaning Tower of Pisa on Instagram.
My brother-in-law lived in italy for many years and he took us around the “must see” sights in 2004 so of course we visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa. So like all the other tourists I took ‘the picture’. In an attempt to make something different of the final stack I used the ‘range’ as stack mode. Kitch but I like it!
9. Mont Blanc
There are 1.8 million images of Mont Blanc on Instagram.
We were lucky enough to have friends who had a house just facing Mont Blanc and we spent a couple of wonderful holidays with them there before they both sadly passed away. The house had been in M.Vidal’s family since it had been built sometime in the late nineteenth century. He remembered, as a child, the chauffeur driving him with his family for holidays. The chauffeur then donned white cotton gloves to serve the supper!! And M. Vidal became a socialist!!!
To make my image I just had to go out on the balcony of the house.
10. Colosseum, Rome
There are 1,388,542 images of the Colosseum in Rome on Instagram. I thought I would be precise about this number.
We go to Rome every second year for the Rugby match between Ireland and Italy. This is more an opportunity to meet up with friends who now live all over Europe than it is to see spectacular rugby. Well I have to admit I never go to the matches – how could I miss the opportunity to wander around Rome with my camera. I was a little surprised to find that I did in fact take a picture of the Colosseum. Most of my other images are of discarded trainers, rubbish bins and other more interesting finds on the back streets of Rome.
This has been a most amusing exercise for many reasons. Firstly I was totally flabbergasted by the millions of images, of most of the above famous places to visit in the world, on Instagram. I was then amazed at the really bad quality of almost all of these images. And finally I was devastated to find I had fallen into the exact same trap as all of these snappers – I just had to take that photo of that famous place – why?
MY FINAL GRID
I only included 9 images. Unfortunately they are not absolutely square because when they were stacked I had to crop some of them and a square crop would not always include what I wanted in the final stack. If I were doing this professionally I would search images on Instagram which matched mine as closely as possible. For this exercise I decided to expand my stacking technique rather than use the time to find exactly the right dimension images on Instagram.
Project 1: The artist as curator
READING:
Read the essay ‘Archive Noises’ in Fontcuberta, J. (2014) Pandora’s Camera – Photogr@phy after Photography, London: MACK, provided with your course materials.
I read Sharon Boothroyd’s interview and I listened to the interview with Arthur Ou before reading Fontcuberta’s chapter. This was an interesting way to do this exercise because I might have been swayed by Fontcuberta’s interpretation of Schmid’s work. He would, unlike me, be a great admirer of Schmid’s work. But with his considerably more experience of looking at and working with the work of artists he brought a much deeper incite and interpretation to the work than I was able to do from reading the interview and looking at the video.
Fontcuberta picks up on Schmid’s cynicism towards hallowed photographic works and photographers. Because he is selective in what he collects his ‘finds’ are someones masterpieces. Schmid, Fontcuberta points out, is also cynical of cataloguing and archiving. All that work to preserve our memories and prevent our forgetting. But the original image is a restricted version of reality. It is then re-photographed for archiving. So we are looking at a photograph of a photograph.
The Statics series by Schmidt is discussed and for me becomes the most interesting set of all his work. The destruction and re-construction of these sets of images produces really interesting final composite images. These, have for me a strong resemblance to the work of Mendjisky who cut his work into strips and reassembled it. Without having seen this Statics work I could not relate to Schmidt at all but seeing these images I re-watched the video and detected that little smile on his face when talking about his work. I wonder what he thinks of the latest Banksy trick of shredding his image just after it was purchased by someone, for a very large sum, in Sothebys.
If Schmidt’s ecological principals were so strong he would just destroy all the found images in one great bonfire and not create further images in book form or gallery prints. Or am I being too cynical?
Slightly unconnected with the work of Schmid, Fontcuberta opens the chapter with the story of the Salamanca papers. These are the spoils of the Spanish Civil war which after Franco’s downfall were supposed to be returned to their original owners. But successive governments both conservative and socialist bawked at doing this because they were scared of opening up old wounds. So much for archiving and remembering.
RESEARCH POINT !:
Read Sharon Boothroyd’s interview with Joachim Schmid at Link 1
I found the reference to Italo Calvinos book interesting, in this interview, as I find Joachim Schmid’s practise quite extraordinary. I like the play on this word in describing his work: “extra ordinary”!
It would be really interesting to interview non artistic people about their opinions of both Schmid’s books and his digital presentations. The answer to the question of why people only look, for short periods, at a screen compared to perusing a book would be interesting to investigate.
Schmid seems to feel we want, with our images, to generate the idea that life is good. We avoid topics that are bad. He maintains that although children’s behaviour is often bad we only make images of their good and happy behaviour. I don’t think this holds true anymore. Gill Greenbergs’ images of crying images are well known.
In reply to Boothroyd’s question about it being easier today as a photographer to be recognised as an artist. Schmid replied that there is an overproduction of qualified photographers. It has become harder and harder to get paid, as a photographer, for the work we do. I have to agree with that but I feel that if we can produce something truly worthwhile it will be appreciated and will have a value. I believe that digital imaging has reduced quality. I also believe that the ubiquitous presence of social media has lead to a mindless production of images.
Listen to Joachim Schmid talking about his collection and curation of discarded vernacular photography at Link 2
I find Joachim Schmid’s working practise completely bizarre. I think he is a compulsive obsessive which enables him to continue searching either the streets of various cities or in more recent times on the internet to find completely ordinary images. Most of what he found for his earlier work were destroyed or torn images. He concludes from this that these images have been discarded. Maybe this is so or maybe they have just been lost. He has no idea of their origin and no idea why they have ended up where he found them. He has no idea who made them or why. This would leave them meaningless for me. They are floating free in this world without a connection.
His series on a Day in May does have a sequential logic. Fifty murders occurred across America on that day and he chronicled these in a book which has a map of the location on the opening page. Compared to a whole book of food or bags I find this work really interesting. I would like to see it expanded with a further investigation of the exact locations and why these locations, how many were domestic, how many drug related or other causes entirely. There is so much more information which could be drawn from this work.
He does indicate that there are trends in what people choose to take as photographs and how they take them. Although this is not a learned process most of us seem to follow the same lines. I find this part of his work much more interesting.
But at the end of the video I find myself asking “Why”?
I find the work of other artist like Weronika Gesicka who worked with ‘found photographs’ much more interesting.(1)
- AnOther. 2018. The Artist Using Found Photos to Challenge Established Norms | AnOther. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/10277/the-artist-using-found-photos-to-challenge-established-norms. [Accessed 28 December 2018].
Digital Image & Culture 