Light settling

Fourteen O six

The material I’m gathering for assignment five has been diverging for a little while, I was conscious of it, but couldn’t work out what was happening. I had some strong feelings for what I now realize are twin narratives, both these strands are important to me, to how I feel about both myself and each investigation.

The course brief for this assignment is to produce fifteen images and write about 300 words, and I was thinking about this containing brief when listening to Fiona Yaron-Field’s presentation at the OCASA study visit. Of course a student’s life has a trammeling delimited by course structure, whereas once a student is released from those confines the parameters become self bounded. The ‘work’ may take a few weeks, or a few years, or more likely an indeterminate period and become a ‘work-in-progress. Fiona started to document her relationship with her daughter – born with Down’s syndrome – and by implication the artist’s relationship with the condition itself. The work with her daughter came to a natural conclusion after her daughter entered her teenage years, but the investigation into the condition has carried on – some eighteen years or so to date. Other projects this photographer has underway have a longevity that I found had me questioning the sense of purpose within an eight or twelve week period of an assignment.

Fourteen O six

Fourteen O six

Another spectral presence that has been hovering over me for some time is text, or perhaps more accurately words and reflecting on the discussion from the Study Day has helped to unlock some barriers I have had coupling text to images. This course of study and research into a visual medium has done nothing to diminish my respect for the words. The strength of words still holds me to account far easier and far harder than imagery, this course has compounded the notion I have had that pictures; photographs, paintings and any constructed visual medium, are constructs, fictions, lies – whether intentional or not. Perhaps intentional fabrications have greater integrity than the ‘records’ of social documentary, news reportage.

Thinking of an exercise at the beginning of another course, which had me, presenting a ‘document’ of the place where I live was brought back to mind as I considered the work on the current assignment on this course. I had ambled around the village I have called home for close on thirty years for that previous exercise, and I remember thinking about how shallow the pictures provided, how the fiction that I presented was informed by the sole use of framing – or by whatever creative approach I provided to produce the post processed result. The village, the home that I ‘documented’ has a greater sense of depth for me than those provided, it didn’t go nearly far enough to the deliver sense of place that I feel it has.

And similarly I have been documenting the same sense of ‘light’, that illuminating presence that occurs and pricks and constructs a narrative in my home. These domestic and village narratives are becoming distinct and need to be encouraged to part from each other. Underpinning, or perhaps undermining, these thoughts is the partial reconstruction of the family home and I wonder if that destruction and subsequent reconstruction is playing a more significant role in the scenarios being played out in front of me.

The decision is made to bifurcate the project and develop the two strands independently, to see where both strands lead. The decision has already had one significant ramification which is to do with the addition of text. For the exterior image of home the text will come from a number of sources both contemporary and older, perhaps ancient. I will use sources such as the local history group and publications to provide a partial view of the village ‘where I live’. And then to the interior view of the domestic, which I now think will be intensely personal, but despite – or maybe because of this – I will continue to post on this and make the decision which one to submit in a while. I will also start to research texts that chime with these images; my thoughts are that they maybe directly coupled or decoupled to the image, but, despite what someone said to me earlier, and I paraphrase ‘this is a visual arts course’ I may decide to allow the text to have primacy. Either way I think that denoting the images with a time has served it’s purpose and I shall continue with or without text.

Two shows: Uncertain States annual exhibition in Whitechapel and the John Goto show at Art Jericho, Oxford.

 

What connects these twin exhibitions is Goto’s work Lewisham which appears to have had their first outings at these events and that leads me to consider the effect of context, of the artwork in a situation, but I’ll come to that later.

Uncertain States is ‘a lens based, artist led collective Releasing a quarterly newspaper we attempt to expand a critical dialogue and promote visual imagery. The work reflects some key social and political concerns and challenges how perception is formed in a society like ours, on issues as diverse as politics, religion and personal identity.

In a time where the proliferation of imagery is rendering itself insignificant and meaningless, the artists in Uncertain States are concerned with the intention of the work. All the work published is made to be viewed with consideration and concerned with the meaning and reading of the photograph.

Uncertain States aims to showcase both established and emerging artists also through our exhibitions and web based publications. We include work from all photographic genres. Releasing a quarterly newspaper we attempt to expand a critical dialogue and promote visual imagery. The work reflects some key social and political concerns and challenges how perception is formed in a society like ours, on issues as diverse as politics, religion and personal identity.

In a time where the proliferation of imagery is rendering itself insignificant and meaningless, the artists in Uncertain States are concerned with the intention of the work. All the work published is made to be viewed with consideration and concerned with the meaning and reading of the photograph.

Uncertain States aims to showcase both established and emerging artists also through our exhibitions and web based publications. We include work from all photographic genres.’ Website here

The catalogue for the show lists nearly thirty artists with, perhaps notably, Kennard Phillips, Tom Hunter and  Roy Mehta amongst them. Most of the work has a price tag, indicating a selling show. I had arranged this visit with Fiona Yaron-Field with whom I had contacted after visiting the Taylor Wessing 2013 show where she had been selected for her image ‘Becoming Annalie’. Fiona spent some time discussing the work with us, I was joined by two fellow students: Catherine Banks and Keith Greenough and her generosity was very helpful as we discussed the work and the artists behind them.

My overall impression of this ‘Group’ show is how difficult it was for me to comprehend the diversity, the inclusiveness of all the works on show. Spencer Rowell’s physically layered work that used dimensionality as part of it’s aesthetic explored the notion of self portrait from many perspectives, the layers of narrative matched by the application of layers of substance. The context of the work – which also interested me because of its use of text as a vital component – anchored in the written word became cogent only after Fiona provided the circumstance of the work and that opening to the work was extremely important to my comprehension – at least partways. Julian Benjamin’s ‘experiments in social fiction’ interested me in its use of a fictive narrative to develop ideas – in this case – as he says: “These are not pictures of things, these are pictures of ideas. I’m not saying this thing happened, I’m saying this idea happened.

And this is the photograph to prove it.”

But, as Benjamin says in the catalogue, he uses digital manipulation to create fantastic events, the photograph is evidence of it’s own truth and therefore is a self depiction of the real.

Frederica Landi’s examination of the transient marks on the human skin initially made me think of scarification but when I contemplated further I saw that these marks – the crumpling of skin, the marks of hair and the pressing of clothing to the skin’s surface were all transient marks, these marks reminded me of some work I have planned to explore about love and to which I hope to think about about starting soon.

Fiona Yaron-Field’s work continued her exploration of Down’s Syndrome condition.Ophir, her daughter, was born with is and I have written about it previously here and here. This new work looks at women – the 2% of expectant mothers who know they are carrying a child with this condition but who choose, for many different reasons, to carry the baby to term. It maybe the end of the project for this artist, but her discussion surrounding the work, her motivations were very interesting to hear in the context of the gallery.

So to John Goto’s work Lewisham. The artist spent some time in the 1970’s photographing young black people either singularly or as couples in front of a very makeshift backcloth before he left for Paris and a photographic scholarship that resulted in another work called Belleville. The Lewisham series were represented in Whitechapel by three images which were denoted as being printed by Micro piezo printing. Initially I wondered whether this technology was related to Piezography which I used in it’s very early introduction to the UK as a carbon based pigment ink system. It turns out that Goto was using he term as it relates to every inkjet printer and so I now wonder why, what I thought must have been an aesthetic choice that I couldn’t fathom is perhaps instead a simple issue of technical incompetence – which I can’t understand at all. These Lewisham Lover’s Rock series all have colour casts that I found distract from the observation of the subject. It may be that this colour casting is a deliberate ploy to add a tension to the image and in my lack of comprehension I gave up wondering and asked the artist himself. He very kindly provided me with other information but to the question of colour he hasn’t yet responded.

Now, whilst I am perplexed about the Lewisham series, which have a notion of Sidibe’s work about them his other work Belleville is another aesthetic altogether. These are moderately sized images one achieves a 20” x 16” size, but most are smaller, printed on Agfa Record Rapid with Neutol WA, these are works of beauty in and of themselves. Their consistency of tonal structure is at great odds with the digital prints, their stillness as images are though very similar. What I found myself thinking about is how now through a perspective of nearly forty years hence both sets of images are about memory. The instant generation of memory by the recording of these youngsters in Lewisham and the old architectural studies of Paris which were already steeped in memory as they were photographed.

The Belleville studies were of shop windows, old streets and doorways, old pictures in dilapidated condition, these images were layered in patina after patina of echoing and aching memory, marked by the presence of the jetsam of life and, as in a few images, the depiction of peoples long forgotten in old photographs. These images were still, marking the passing of a time and now, printed as they are in a process and on a paper that no linger exists they are images of something that is no more, just as much as the fleeting capture of the Lewisham Lovers Rock portraits are of a people and a place no longer there – though the genre of Lovers Rock is making something of a comeback – perhaps that is why these images turned up at the gallery in Whitechapel and not the ones that had been selected by the artist originally?

Which leaves me considering the way in which these prints were created. The wider expansive digital prints, from scanned negatives with clear and apparent digital artefacts about them and the gorgeously toned lustrous warm tine, moderately sized prints, printed to express the images in the best possible light. I am confused. Goto kindly provided a link to a Photomonitor article where he suggested I might find the answers to the questions I posed to him earlier today. I’ve read it a couple of times and this question of aesthetic still eludes me.