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CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO PHOTOGRAPHY:
DOCUMENTARY & NARRATIVE
by Jesse Alexander
We are probably all familiar with the idea of a 'document'. I expect you even have some 'official' documents on you at the moment, such as a National Insurance card, library card or maybe a driving licence. There might be some dotted around where you are sitting right now. In fact, you are reading one at this very moment. To an historian or another sort of investigator, a variety of documents, or sources, might be necessary to piece together clues or create an idea (or a narrative) of what a particular situation was like. They might use letters, journals or diary entries, legal documents, newspaper articles and oral accounts. It's quite likely that photographs would feature prominently in some way too. Part of an historian's job is to weigh-up how biased, or reliable a particular source might be. So what questions might one ask about a particular photograph to assess its usefulness as a 'truthful' document?
Conscious of the technical capabilities of image editing computer software such as Adobe Photoshop and CGI technology in the cinema, as twenty-first century consumers of images we are likely to be at least a little sceptical as to the reliability of still photographs: For example, we are aware that, on top of all the cosmetic attention given to them before a photo shoot, fashion models and film stars are stretched and 'airbrushed' digitally during post-production to remove any blemishes and appear more attractive. This knowledge informs and influences how we perceive photography in other contexts besides advertising and fashion or celebrity magazines.
Actually, terms that we are familiar with in Photoshop, such as 'cutting and pasting' and 'airbrushing' are borrowed directly from darkroom methods that were used well before the digital age to roughly the same effect. However, knowledge of these techniques was not as widespread as it is today and for generations people believed in the reliability of the photograph as a truthful, unbiased document, and in the cliché that 'the camera never lies'. Take for example Henry Peach Robinson's image A Holiday in the Wood made in 1860 which is a composite image made using six different negatives. Even at a casual glance, this photograph appears to have been 'faked', but supposing you were looking at it around the time it was made: do you suppose that it would have seemed so unrealistic then? Contemporary artists such as Joan Fontcuberta, Jeff Wall, John Gerrard, have used applications such as Photoshop to make technically complex work digitally, forming 'seamless' pictures out of various layers and fragments of other photographs. Although the ideas and subjects behind these artists' work are varied, they share common themes exploring our perception of reality, and our dependence upon the reliability of the photographic image. Eva Stenram's work involves placing herself digitally within old family snapshots, replacing members of her family or adding herself to these situations that took place before her time. Her pictures are manipulations of her personal history and explore ideas about identity, belonging, and the nature of the family photograph.
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Despite the creativity of some photographers in their darkrooms, the camera's unique capability to reproduce a visually accurate reproduction of a subject, mediated by an objective, mechanical tool has made it indispensible when it comes to recording things. Think again about the contents of your wallet: your most valuable or useful piece of identification in there is most likely to be something with your photograph on it. Although photography is closely associated with the visual arts, newspapers, books and magazines, in many applications photography is simply a means to record for evidence or to be referred to at a later date: consider the infinite list of people who might take photographs for purely practical uses; forensic scientists, insurance claims adjusters, medical photographers, accident investigators. Most of these photographs will end up carefully filed away in an archive of some sort, to be referred to by someone else at a later date, and perhaps eventually destroyed or deleted. In recent years, artists, curators and writers have studied and incorporated in their work various photographic and general archives, considering the vast range of photographic subjects, applications of photography and perhaps more importantly, exploring ideas about memory as well as the institutions that maintain and have control of these vast resources of images. Some contemporary artists, such as Joachim Schmid, Patrick McCoy, Susan Meiselas, John Stezaker and Fiona Tan have developed their practices around 'found' photographs or 'appropriated' photographs from other sources, and pursued the idea of presenting them in a new context.
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Like Eva Stenram, Patrick McCoy's work explores the family album of photography. McCoy creates a family album of found family snapshots, discarded by their previous owners for whatever reason, to create an imagined family of individuals. The photographs show the scars of time, bearing the physical damage and wear and tear, which lead us to ponder the fate of the subjects in the discarded photographs, and perhaps prompting sentiments of pity.
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But what about when photographs are not taken for purely utilitarian functions - such as forensic photographs - and the photographer is trying to tell a story, get across a message, or suggest an emotion within their pictures: can we really 'read' photographs, and how are meanings communicated?
It may seem unlikely, but we read photographs and other pictures in almost the same way as we read books. In the same way that we learn a vocabulary of words as we grow up, we make visual connections between physical things such as objects, gestures, types of people, and places, and their associated meanings. These things all make up a dictionary of visual language.
The fact that photographs can render such clear and realistic impressions of things makes them excellent devices for communicating messages and describing or suggesting narratives. You probably don't have to look very far around you to find photographs that have been either set-up, arranged, or taken in a particular way so as to communicate a message - an advertisement on a poster perhaps? Photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Hew Locke, Maxine Hall, have 'constructed' photographs, experimenting with objects, poses and locations to explore visual conventions and stereotypes, and our capacity as viewers to form narratives based upon them. Hew Locke's exotic self-portraits taken posing amongst lavish backgrounds of intense colour and hundreds of objects are an expression of the 'darker' side of the artist, and explore ideas about materialism and power.
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Visual language is also an important part of photographs that we don't really associate with being pre-arranged or constructed, such as photojournalism in newspapers, magazines and on the web. Although it is likely that we associate photojournalism with capturing 'real' events at the very moment they are happening, a news photographer is constantly making technical choices as to how to encapsulate an event effectively. Following that moment, an editor will most likely select only one image out of many that they feel tells the story appropriately. Their choice will be based upon the visual elements within the picture (subject, pose, gestures etc), selecting the one which contain the message that they want their readers to understand.
The methods of conveying messages using photographs do not always have to be as obvious as those often used in advertising or journalism. Most contemporary documentary photographers do not deal with singular images in the same way that photojournalists do, but are more likely to present people, stories, situations and places using a series of images. Working with a set or sequence of images in a book for example, can allow for a narrative to unfold gradually and more subtly, often requiring an element of consideration from the viewer of the work, and perhaps allowing the viewer to form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions about what the work really communicates. Tobias Zielony's series Curfew records life for teenagers on housing estates in Bristol and South Wales, upon whom a police curfew has been imposed in order to control anti-social behaviour. Zielony's series, which was made over a sustained period of time, documents these young people trying to entertain themselves as their 9pm curfew approaches. Zielony's mix of photographs taken at a distance, and then moving closer into his subjects, have a narrative whereby at first he records their anti-social behaviour, then reveals their vulnerability in closer, more intimate portraits.
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Whatever form or genre of photography a picture belongs to, it will contain elements of visual language. As well as these pictorial aspects (that is the different subjects within the photograph), there are other things that can influence how messages are conveyed, including accompanying text (such as captions, titles or descriptions), juxtaposition (the combination of different images next to one another) and the context - where the photograph is presented (such as in a newspaper, in a gallery or in a family album).
Above all else, photography is a tool for communication, and understanding how meanings are constructed and expressed using photographs can open-up ideas about how we perceive our surroundings, our environment, each other and ourselves.
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Group Discussion Topics:
- What questions might an historian ask about a particular photograph to assess its authenticity? How useful is any photograph as a document from a particular time?
- How do first impressions effect how we read a photograph? List different contexts in which photographs are used, and the conventions that are associated with them. For example, 'Passport photo': white background, flat lighting, head-and-shoulder crop, subject not smiling.
Activities:
- Reading the pics: Select an appropriate photograph from a newspaper or magazine that is being used to illustrate a particular story. Ask students to list the pictorial elements, and describe how they help communicate a message to a reader. The image/article should be current and relevant to the students.
- A tableau of emotion! Working in groups, ask students to describe an emotion (such as 'envy', 'fear', or 'gratitude') within a single, staged photograph. Students should think carefully about what scenario could be described, what props they can make use of, and how members of the group should be posed to create a narrative that describes the given emotion(s). [Select the same number of emotions as members of each group, so that each student has an opportunity to be the 'photographer', directing a scenario.]
- Tell a short story: Working individually, ask students to create a short storyboard made up of photographs, depicting any story or scenario of their choice. (It must be simple and it must be short). Set a maximum number of frames, such as 6. Students should consider how to shoot each frame to ensure that the narrative is communicated without the aid of any text or captions.
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