Category: Uncategorized

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”

Negotiable Space I

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 3rd 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!!

  1. 1Stephen Gill. 2018. Stephen Gill Best Before End. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/best-before-end. [Accessed 09 December 2018].
  2. Vimeo. 2018. Stephen Gill – Best Before End on Vimeo. [ONLINE] Available at: https://vimeo.com/97808945. [Accessed 09 December 2018].
  3. 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].
  4. 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].

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.

  1. 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)
  2. 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)
  3. 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].