Just some rambling

I have been thinking a lot about 'style' recently.  Mine is still all over the place but I am beginning to have an opinion about my photographs which I don't think I had before.  For instance, I look at some and think "Uuugh!  Over processed rubbish" even if there has been a fairly positive response on Flickr and then look at others and think "OK, I'm OK with that" even if it doesn't get much response.

I have this incredibly ambivalent relationship with Flickr - deleting my stream one minute, starting it up again, hating the whole thing, finding it enjoyable and fun and feeling compelled to keep posting for some crazy 21st century reason.  But what is really useful about it is that I put photos up there and then see it through different eyes.  It's a very helpful thing to be able to do at the moment.

Anyway, I am trying hard to get the exposure spot on and keep things as simple as possible for A4. It's a departure from A3 & A2 for me -  but simplicity, integrity and absolute honesty are what I'm after in these images - I'll talk about it more in the intro when I'm done and submitting it.

I am so glad I read James Elkin's book.  At the time when I was finished with it I was so appalled by the violence in the images at the end that I basically accused the man (whom I've never met!) of being a narcissist - I must have got a bit carried away. But the book really upset me  - however, it it has stayed with me and I think a lot about all that is discussed within.  I think it has had a profound effect on me really.  I'm not 'there' with my images; by there I mean at a place that I am happy to be stylistically.  But I posted something a moment ago which I was pretty sure I didn't like - and yes, as soon as I posted it I could confirm in my mind it was not the sort of image I want to be producing.  I do however, think the work I'm aiming for with A4 is heading in that direction - well it is for the moment anyway.

Keith Carter

"I never felt childhood was an idyllic play in pristine green parks.  Any parent knows that children don't spend all their time laughing, smiling and playing.  Left to their own devices they are often pensive, absorbed, alarmingly attuned to the changing mood of their parents, aware when something is amiss with mom and dad, and occasionally solitary"

Keith Carter in the Introduction to Fireflies 

I think when I get round to redesigning my own website I will use this quote somewhere.  It is a much more eloquent version of something I say already about photographing children and families.  I was enthralled by Keith Carter's introduction when I first read it. His idea of childhood, of how to capture it and how to relate to children resonates loudly with with me.  And I am totally besotted with his photographs too!

Keith Carter became a commercial portrait photographer in Beaumont, Texas after growing up and watching his mother work as one too.  She bravely as it was not usual used natural light and outdoor settings as well as her studio, having set up after her husband left her and she had to make a living and bring up her children.

Carter did not want to have a shop front studio in a mall or on the high street but instead found a property with outhouses so he could live and work in the same environment, although he keeps his home and studio very separate and rarely hangs his own work in his home.  He has worked commercially as well as developing his artistic practise,  and during his lifetime has become a well known artist whose images are exhibited worldwide.

I love reading about his approach to working with children.  "When making these images Carter often asked the children, '"Do you have something you would like to be photographed with?"'  This creative collaboration between photographer and subject has produced images that conjure up stories, dreams and imaginary worlds."  

I  know that often the most successful photographs I have taken of children are the ones where they have contributed in some way to the process, although it is good to read that sometimes the results are "...mediocre.  Other times the centre holds and the results are (as) graceful...".  I know from past experience that working collaboratively in any field is a good way to achieve creative and interesting results but it requires a degree of trust in oneself and more than a modicum of generosity of spirit plus patience. Children in our own culture are wildly underestimated, bought up to believe they are not capable and so grow up thinking that is the truth, which renders it the truth until their minds are changed.  It can in some cases be quite challenging to get them to open up, to believe their ideas are valid and worthy of consideration.  I wonder if the more controlling the parents are the less concentrated the children can be, the more difficult it is for me to connect with them and I do struggle under these circumstances.  If I continue working with kids then I would like to work towards being able to click in with them under any circumstances and to find a way to circumvent my own shut-down responses when I find myself in tricky dynamics.  Of course, the more I do this and the less I have to worry about the technology the better too.

Carter says, "I soon learned that kids, particularly young ones, have a short attention span.  I learned to work quickly and never to schedule an appointment near nap time.  I let them look me over when I first arrived at their homes.  I often talked to parents while bouncing a red ball and carrying a toy bag. Routinely I would sit down on the ground to let the children pick out toys from my bag and talk to me at their own eye level.  I picked backgrounds rapidly and and paid close attention to the whims of colour and tonality".    I could do worse than to write this down and keep it stapled to my sleeve so I always remember it when working with children. (And oh, by the way, it was Carter who mentioned Irving Penn and looking at his work to see a great example of grouping - written about here.)

He also talks about the difference between his colour commercial work which is happy, smiling and idyllic because that is what is clients are after and this is something I must remember if I'm to be have any success as a commercial family portrait photographer, which incidentally is not something I set out to do but it does seem to be heading that way for now.  My tendency to hone in on the less happy, less idyllic more honest moods isn't going to be what clients want all the time.  I'm always vaguely embarrassed by what I call the 'toothpaste advert' images - I've got to get over that.

He talks about his photographs sometimes touching on the darker side of childhood dreams although they in no way go anywhere neat the savagery of Roger Ballen's work where children are also sometimes present.  "My pictures occasionally tend towards the dark or solitary side.  In a world of truths and half-truths, the inhabitants might be amiss or fallen from grace, but my children inhabit a peaceable kingdom where everything that falls deserves a chance to be restored.  My children are beautiful, intelligent, sometimes sad, pensive, devastatingly perceptive, complex, occasionally humorous, always creative, and often inscrutable."  I am reminded of the desolation in James Elkin's book, What Photography Is and am struck by how very different these states of mind appear to be.

Carter's images in Fireflies are all taken on plate cameras using old technology, obviously all black and white.  Many have a very narrow depth of field and they are all square format.

I am quickly becoming really infatuated with old formats, very narrow depth of fields, oblique angles between camera and subject and the dream-like images, be they nightmares or more lyrical poetic dreams such as Carters.  I do adore his photographs and look forward to seeing some sense of influence emerge in my own work - let's hope so!

Taken directly from Fireflies: Keith Carter holds The Endowed Walles Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and is the recipient of a 2009 Texas Medal of Arts Award and the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Centre for Documentary Studies at Duke University.  He is the author of ten previous books...()...Carter's work is included the collections of the National Gallery of Art; the Art Institute Chicago; the Smithosian American Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the George Eastman House; and the Wittliff Collections' Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection.

All quotations are take from Fireflies By Keith Carter, University of Texas Press, 2009.
Keith Carter's website

James Elkin What Photography Is

I read this book because someone I follow on Flickr wrote a review about the book when it first came out in response to some comments Elkin made about images on Flickr, which are, it has to be said a little more than condemnatory.  The writer of the article felt the comments were elitist, based in ignorance and displayed a total failure to look beyond the ‘kitschy and tedious images[1]’ that Elkin bemoans.  Having not read the book I felt myself jumping on the Flickr guy’s bandwagon of rage aimed at Elkin, and without thinking joined his Flickr group – “Bollocks to James Elkins”.   After thinking about it later I realized I’d reactively joined his group before bothering to make up my own mind,  based on the accusation of elitism which I too find difficult to stomach.

So I downloaded What Photography Is.  I’ll respond to the Flickr criticism later and probably rather briefly as that is hardly the point of the book, and within the context of the whole is a little insignificant, or at any rate only a tiny part of something else that is going on.  At any rate it’s not worth getting upset about.  In all honesty, what he says is undoubtedly true, but there are so many other factors to consider that it becomes only a slither of the truth  - anyhow, more later.

The book is written as a response to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.  I had no idea about this as I downloaded it and was pleased once I realised having just read that other difficult and at times impenetrable book.   I discuss that here in an earlier blog.   (Another serendipitous moment on my little TAOP amble.)  However, a phrase Andrew (tutor) used – ‘basking in the glory of Barthes’ did keep popping into my head and I so tried to remain cautious as I read.

Elkin describes his book as speaking directly to Camera Lucida, and I do hope that reading it has given me a deeper understanding of the older one.    Crucially for me, in relation to Barthes, the notion of photography being about death, being literally a picture of death into which we stare every time we look at a photograph – ‘the feeling of that-has-been, it-has-taken-place, they-were-there, he-stood-there, he-is-going-to-die are sunk at the bottom of photography’[2] is questioned and rejected by later academics and certainly not considered the be all and end of all of photographic philosophy. Readers like me who are still finding their way with this theory stuff tend to believe everything we read.  Elkin continues, “all the writing toward death can be understood, I think, as a brilliant self-deception, in a way of avoiding thinking about what photography ‘itself’ continues to show us.”[3]  Elkin very clearly shows us by the end of the book what he thinks photography is, although perhaps you could and should replace the word ‘photography’ for ‘life’.

Elkin looks at Barthes’ ‘punctum’.

‘…what might be worse than the possibility that photographs “prick” us, that they harbour an “optical unconscious,”  that they point uncomfortably at the viewers own death? 

In a word:  that they might be boring. Or apparently meaningless.”[4]  

There are several references in the book that suggest that much of photography, including fine art photography might after all be dull, disappointing and uninteresting.  He suggests that actually all we see in a photograph is that life is intrinsically dull and uninteresting and no matter how much we wish to imbue photography with something interesting about ourselves we are left with this sense that that is not the case.[5]  

What’s most important for me here is not that I can't help wondering if Elkin in rather fearful he might be boring, but that by reading What Photography Is and being made to think and question Barthes’ work I am reminded to question Elkin's work.

As I hinted earlier I’m not actually sure that this book is about photography at all, and neither is Elkin.  “So how can this book be about photography in general?  Perhaps in the end it isn’t.” [6]  Just as Camera Lucida is about so much more than photography.  And this little review too has references to parts of my life that have nothing to do with the book or photography.

Elkin starts by examining a photograph of a selenite window – a pre-glass window that is difficult to see through, then ice and then salt – ‘Through a selenite window, a sharp bright day will appear fractured and broken; in lake ice, everything beyond the surface sinks into night; in rock salt, the photography is just a reminder that something cannot be seen’[7]. 

Then he examines in quite some detail photographs of rocks as well as some re-photography (photos taken of exact places from the same position after a long period of time – 100 years for instance).  Following that he looks at microscopic photographs of amoebas that he has taken himself with his own equipment.  Then he looks at photographs of the atom bomb being tested – not the famous iconographic mushroom image, but ones taken seconds earlier as the bomb starts its explosion.  Finally, and most distressing of all by a very long way, he looks at photographs of extreme physical torture – images of a man being sliced up alive in a brutal and chilling execution surrounded by complicit spectators and of course a photographer who documents the execution with a significant number of frames.  I must stress that I could not look at these photographs and swiped through them as fast as possible.  The tiny glimpses I had were more than enough, in fact too much; but it meant not reading his words either for those pages in which he describes in minute detail what is occurring in the images.  If he says anything else I missed it.  I kept wondering why there was no facility to avoid the photos altogether especially considering the fact that I was reading on a Kindle.  However, I am aware that I could have made the choice to stop reading at any point before the photos appeared.   Saying that, I don’t think I actually believed he was going to include them when reading the preamble before the images began to appear.  But then that’s admitting I hadn’t quite got the measure of Elkin up to that point despite all the signals – you live and you learn but very, very slowly, the saying should be.  

For me this obsession with the horrors of existence is all about Elkin and his relationship with the world.  All about his particular pathology, which he freely admits.[8]  And now as I write I continue to wonder how this ties in with photography.  Except of course I have come away with an extremely clear understanding that photography can be a shockingly powerful medium and in many ways potentially more powerful than painting or drawing for instance in showing us extremely detailed aspects of what it is to be. 

You don’t begin to get any idea of the horror of the torture inflicted on people when looking at drawings, prints and paintings of people being hanged, drawn and quartered in the same way you do when seeing the images of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ at the end of What Photography Is.  If I think of Heironymus Bosch’s work, which explores the gruesome side of humanity so grotesquely I also see that those paintings are nevertheless appealing to us in some way.  Bosch’s vision which is nightmarish in the extreme is also exhilarating, mysterious and beautiful  (although perhaps not to his contemporaries, I don’t know about that).  The photographs at the end of Elkins book are so awful and horrific that it’s difficult to find any reason for them to continue to exist except that they must as a testament to how very low human beings are capable of sinking.  What is even more horrifying is that there were a group of French collectors of this material and this fascination for extreme violence amongst humans is difficult to contemplate - although tales of Internet voyeurism into sadistic horror spring to mind, not to mention the reported high number of views the recent spate of beheadings by ISIS have had, so of course it continues.

By focusing on the collection of photographs prior to the final set – all without people and scenes, Elkin strips away the ‘ecstasy, the sublime, the punctum, memory, history, race, gender, identity, death, nostalgia[9]’ as much as he can to get to the bottom of what photography is – if indeed that is what he is exploring here.  The ‘perverse’ (his word) finale leads us to his notion of the core of something – either photography or what it is to be human.  Or both.

For James Elkin, photography’s most precious use is not about families or prettiness or cleverness or ‘kitsch’ – a word or derivatives thereof he uses throughout the book in relation to a wide variety of work.  It is about its power to show us reality – although he claims we do not see that reality – ‘the photograph itself is scarcely being seen’.[10] We avoid seeing it, choosing instead to see what we want to see.  Unless, I guess the point is, the subject is so extreme as in the case of the execution that we cannot help but see it – and I literally avoided seeing those by sweeping right past them as fast as I could.  The fact that he was able to sit and study them, despite his reported feelings of revulsion is something to think about very carefully - how much does it take to make James Elkins feel alive? Photography, like the selenite window, the ancient lake ice and salt also obscures what there is to be seen, says Elkin.  We have chosen to obscure it? As prolific users of that medium who frame, expose, and realise photography in a certain way.  Perhaps.

In this book, through structure and plot; through his obsessive studies of rocks which evoke the deafening sound of eternity stretching out either side of the 100 or so years between photograph and re-photograph; to the molecular violence and lack of humanity, monstrous beings that devour one another as only a selfish gene can; to the nightmarish and detailed pictures of explosions that are devastatingly destructive and ‘godlike’; and ending with the horrific images of torture that are so upsetting and removed from the life we in West like to think we live now, Elkin describes his view of  photography, of existence, of life.  He shows us a brutal and violent nightmarish Darwinian struggle and he uses the excuse of photography to do so.

The whole time I was reading What Photography Is I had to hold in mind that I have an unhealthy habit of being drawn in by such provocative types, a type I recognised very early on despite my previous statement that I hadn’t quite got the measure of him (I’m so predictable to myself), and Elkin’s book is a gargantuan ‘intellectually superior’ provocation from start to finish.  That is why it is pointless to become riled by his dismissal of Flickr or fine art or Sally Mann or Andreas Gursky or Thomas Ruff or any of the other big names he brazenly sweeps aside, along with every ‘people’ orientated photograph ever taken, never forget.  That part of his essay is an affectation, although one that in the end does serve a purpose.  This sort of intellectually superior thought process can and often does come from a place of extreme cleverness – but you are made to work rather hard to sift through the verbal dexterity to try and get to grips with what is actually being said.  It also comes from a place of deep and searing pain.  And it’s that pain that we see discussed again and again and again throughout the book.  Life is searing and painful, life is horrific, life is about being devoured and/or destroyed or about devouring, and destroying. 

I’m glad I read the book.  I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone due to the shocking images at the end and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for imposing those or other aspects of the book on another person.  I’m not sure it is necessary to read it to get to the bottom of what photography is because I don’t believe it is possible to do so.  And there must be plenty of less painful and terrible books to read (I don’t mean the book is terrible – I mean the pain within it).  Photography is many different things to a wide variety of people and situations.  It’s a fascinating invention, developed at a fascinating time and what we humans are doing with it now, frantically, obsessively, inanely and gratuitously photographing every moment of our lives and sharing it across the Internet is extraordinary.  It’s almost as if we’ve been programmed to record all aspects of life on earth for prosperity before it all comes to an end

Ultimately I don’t think I can say Bollocks to James Elkin, although there is still a part of me that wants to.  The art world and especially the New York art world are notoriously elitist.  He is part of it and yet has pilloried much of it in his book in order to get to the bottom of something, life or photography, his own sense of what existence is, whichever you will, and that takes a certain degree of chutzpah, arrogance and dare I say it, a degree of narcissism.  Whatever  - I can’t help feeling that it is worth trying to work through or work out some of what he is saying – difficult as that may be.

All references taken from What Photography Is, James Elkin, Kindle Edition, Routledge, First published 2011

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Chris Friel Photographer/ Artist

For some time I have been wondering to myself if there is a difference between photographers whose work is so profound and evocative that it is rendered Art and artists who use still cameras to create their work rather than paint or stone or objects or film or sound.  I'm sure there are many who will tell me I'm wrong because by creating those two distinct and separate groups I'm basically saying that not all photography is art.  Doesn't Susan Sontag says in her book On Photography that even the most amateurish photograph is rendered Art by its age once it becomes old, but I cannot for the life of me find the quotation which is quite annoying.  (Her book slipped down the back of my headboard a week ago or so and has been there ever since... I have not stopped reading but am reading two other photography related books and of course will retrieve Susan Sontag's book soon enough.  She is quite hard going - harder than Roland Barthes and his devotee James Elkin I think).  The conundrum I have in my head is not an easy one to address, I should think.

Chris Friel is an artist.  He was born in 1959.  He used to be a painter.  Then in 2006 he picked up a camera and, so every entry about him across the internet tells us, has not painted since.  He is a prolific photographer and says in an interview when he first started this process his success rate was 1000:1, i.e. for every 1000 he took he arrived at 1 image which went some way towards achieving what he was after.  His ratio is now much smaller.  But he recommends taking as many photographs as it takes.  This is good news for me given the amount I took for the last assignment - and even then I feel I should have kept trying as many of my images fall short for me.

Chris Friel uses long exposures, 2/3 seconds, camera movement, sometimes but not always a tilt shift lens.  He also uses an ND filter and a polarisor.

In an interview with Andrew Gibson dated November 2012 Friel says he concentrates on land and seascapes and doesn't think he is very good with people although that must have changed because I have seen a lot of people orientated images of his lately and they are incredibly evocative.  I like them in particular.

Most of his work is black and white and very dark.  However, he has also produced a series of coloured landscapes which is interesting considering he is reportedly colour blind.  Added to the warped, blurred images he takes, he also scratches and distorts the prints too.

What I like about his work, especially the ones with people, is that they seem to come from somewhere outside our material reality.  I am reminded of inner worlds, dreams, nightmares. I recognise the scenes as something intrinsically human and am reminded of a collective consciousness because he is producing something so recognisable but difficult to grab hold of. For me he creates a feeling that is universal and perhaps even prehistoric, something that is viscerally tangible and takes me back to a place I can't quite place or remember.  I love that about his work.

The list of artists and photographers who have influenced him is extraordinarily long.  And he is kind too.  I followed him on Flickr - and when I have commented on his work he has replied privately to thank me, which suggests to me a conscious rejection of modern narcissism.  He eventually followed me back and sent me a link to the artists he lists as having being influenced by on his site when I said I was studying here.  I have had time to look at a few but the list is so long it's going to take me ages!  I will of course be writing about the people whose work I particularly like in my blog.

Alexey Titarenko, who I came across a few weeks ago and was so enamoured by is one of three he lists as being key.

I do not fully understand why I am drawn to this sort of photography so much and am torn about whether I want to pursue an artistic style of photography such as Chris Friel's or a photographer's style of imagery.  I took some pictures of my children recently and am quite pleased with a couple - I would really want to keep doing that especially from a work point of view.  I have no idea what else I might do with it - documentary style photography perhaps?  Who knows?  It would be wonderful to work for a charity; heh, me and a million others, much younger and less tied down than me.  But I also love creating images that are interpretative.  I feel utterly compelled to do so especially when I see photographs like the work I've been describing in this post.

Information taken from:
Wikipedia
The Andrew S Gibson Blog
Chris Friel's website

Two things and some other stuff (Chris Friel, Jame's Elkin and Camera Lucida)

Anyone who dismisses Flickr is bonkers. I've read of people (tutors and students) saying it's mostly derivative and no-one bothers with it anymore.  Well, I find that not to be the case and have come across some incredibly talented people there.  I have been following Chris Friel whose work I think is extraordinarily powerful.  It's like he is making images that go straight to the unconscious part of ourselves, dreams and memories from all of history, not just one's own - I remember reading that it was now known that we carry memory in our genetic makeup which made perfect sense to me.  I also think that this long historical memory is part of a collective consciousness and Chris Friel's images for me explore some or much of that.  Last night he followed me back and sent me a link to all the people he is influenced by.  I would never have had this opportunity otherwise, so thanks to Flickr for providing it.

I will write an entry of Friel's work another time when I have thought a little more about it. 

In the meantime, I am also enjoying James Elkin's book, What Photography Is far more than I thought I would.  When I have finished it I shall of course write about it here; but yet again this is something I discovered on Flickr.  Although only because he was being accused of elitism by another person on the site.  I should think he is extremely elitist but reading through the book he dismisses practically every photographer and every genre, for some purpose which I'll discuss later, but also to be provocative so I can't see the point in getting upset by him.  It's a very useful book to be reading so soon after reading Camera Lucida.

Finally, before I go - I am feeling frustrated and torn between two different and seemingly opposing routes.  I desperately want to continue heading in the direction I've been going and feel frustrated I'm not there (which is of course daft because where on earth is there? At the end of the rainbow no doubt!) but am also pulled towards something that seems virtually impossible anyway, so why am I even thinking about it when the blurry arty stuff beckons?  Maybe because it is a possible route to earning something out of this venture.  I am a little envious of photographers who are photographing issues and people to tell stories that need telling.  I have been looking at some incredible work tonight and in the last few weeks by photographers and think that would be amazing to do.  Far away though - as I have children who need me here.  Maybe that's why I look at these people and think about it - a fantasy!  Perhaps there may be a way to pursue such photography in a few years locally by which I mean the UK - there are after all plenty of issues here that need looking at.  I'm not even sure as I write that  that sort of photography is what I would want to do - perhaps I just feel I ought to.  Something to think about in the months to come.

For now I do feel like I'm sliding about all over the place on legs that don't quite work in shoes that don't quite fit as I try to figure out where it is I'm aiming for.  Or what is it.  Of why I'm even doing it!

James Elkin's "What Photography Is"

So, after reading about Jame's Elkin's reported dismissal of Flickr as "kitschy" and "tedious" I thought I at least ought to read it myself so downloaded and have read the first few sections (Elkin has structured his book in the same way as Barthes' with short numbered sections, some of which are very short indeed) .  I'm so glad I did download it, and sorry, Susan Sontag, I shall be putting you on hold while I get on with Elkin's book as it is written to fit very neatly, almost with pages from each inter-leaved into each-other, with Barthes' Camera Lucida.  The book is an updated response to Barthes' and within the first chapter he has described the original so accurately that I am compelled to keep going especially having read Camera Lucida over the summer just a few weeks ago. 
"Like it's author, who had lost his mother, Camera Lucida is unstable: on one page it lectures, and then suddenly it becomes a rhapsody or a soliloquy: at one point it is lucid, and then instantly nearly incomprehensible; in another place it is gentle and calm, then almost demented with sadness."1   
Ha! -  he could be describing me as well as Camera Lucida: at least I do hope I am at times lucid and gentle.  But more importantly this is for me a wonderful description of the book.
My first impressions are that Elkin's book is extremely well written and with a gentleness that surprised me given that he is accused by Micheal Szpakowski of a "magisterial denunciation delivered in a scornful tone not unlike Humpty Dumpty’s: 'Nothing is more amazing than Flickr for the first half hour, then nothing is more tedious' and '..each group puts its favoured technology to the most kitschy imaginable uses'."2  I've not got to this part yet and look forward to making my own mind up.  I liked Micheal's writing and a review of an art show he posted previously seemed to  me well written with bravery and a refreshing honesty that I enjoyed.  I  also hate elitism of any sort so all in all it will be interesting to read this book which I have found compelling so far.  Now, if only I could find there the kids have put my Kindle so I can stop reading it on my tiny phone.


1. What Photography Is, James Elkin, Kindle Edition Routledge 2011

2. Michael Szpakowski's review