Further thoughts about using my own family for A5

When I edited this I was surprised to see an additional refection of myself taking a photograph of me in the background, seemingly across the street from where I am.  For me this is a wonderful illustration of what I describe below.  

I have started the book, Family Frames by Marianne Hirsh.  Admittedly I did not get very far; as soon as I start reading anything my eyes start to close, no matter how interesting.  Something to do with having 3 kids running riot round me most of the time, no doubt.  However, the little bit I did read started me thinking.  The book starts with a quote from Camera Lucida and describes the well known photograph Barthes looks at of his mother in the Winter garden and how he searches for the essence of her.

Not all photographs manage to get even close to capturing the essence of someone and Barthes himself struggles to find what he's searching for.  Something about the Winter Garden image simply epitomises his mother for him.  When you look at the plethora of selfies today, I think it would be difficult to suggest that many of those communicate anything essential and precious about their takers - or maybe I'm being horribly judgemental.  I don't think there is anything wrong with selfies per se at all - but the 'pout lip look' is tricky not to find ridiculous.

I'm not sure about capturing the essence of someone.  People's essences are in a constant state of flux. But I do know for sure that photography does seem to capture the essence of a moment, and fix it in whatever state it's eventually rendered, print, jpg, Facebook selfie.

In Gerry Badger's book, The Genius of Photography, photography in its early days was described as a memory trace and I liked that description.  What it records may be something frivolous and unimportant, or it may be more substantial, deeper and meaningful.

I have been thinking for a while about my own relationship with photography; and it is something I mentioned briefly to someone on Flickr the other day.  I seem to use photography at the moment as a means not only of expressing myself, but as a means of communicating with some inner me -the unconscious me that is difficult to hear much of the time.  The cacophony of day to day living means I barely know what day it is - for which I was accused of being indefatigably stupid the other day (I won't say by whom but you can probably hazard a good guess).  And so, it's not always easy to remain mindful and in tune with myself.  Because I take photographs all day every day those 'memory traces' seem to inform me of things that my little soul wants me to be consciously aware of.  Our brains our so powerful but we rarely take notice of everything that is going on around us.  Modern living makes it all but impossible - but when I look at the photographs I have been taking I can see what I was noticing that day, or in any particular moment.  And we notice the things that are on our minds.

So or instance - when I first bought a Seat car, I have to say, I don't think I've ever heard of Seat before really.  But suddenly I noticed there were Seats everywhere.  There is nothing magical in this - it's just the brains way of working.  In the same way, if something is on my mind then I find my photographs are full of imprints of those thoughts, conscious and unconscious;  which is very handy actually.

I do wonder if I'd had access to photography as I use it now, if I would have struggled with anxiety for so many years.  I do believe that anxiety, in my case anyway, was a result of ignoring my inner voice and not listening to what my little soul was trying to tell me during those years.  So photography does me an awful lot of good, it has to be said.

In light of that, I think it will be really interesting to use photography to record my 'memory traces' during my upcoming trip to Italy, and perhaps use the results for A5.

The house in Italy is my mothers.  She and her late husband bought it when they took early retirement and moved out there about 15 years ago.  Sadly, he died suddenly of a heart attack after 5 years. Although my mother would like to sell the house, it is worth not much more than they paid for it due to the sate of the Italian economy, and so we are lucky enough to have somewhere to visit abroad. However, it is not an easy place for me to be.  As I have discussed very briefly in an earlier post, like many mother/daughter relationships, ours has not not always been easy one.  I find the house awkward to be in and histories and relationship structures, not to mention internal landscapes seem to be imprinted on the place in way that is very uncomfortable for me.  Literally.

However, I am a very different person to the one I was last year, certainly the year before and so on. As the work I have done while on this course seems to document a process of grieving, coming to terms with and beginning to get over a divorce, I think it will be fascinating for me to see what my inner voice has to tell me about where we are all now - at that house in Italy which has been quite a significant place for me over the years for one reason or another.

Finally, I am mindful of the fact that Larry Sultan staged many of the images in his work about his parents and I will probably do some of that too; and see what what comes of it.

Exercise Positioning a Point

3 photographs - Experiment with the different positions in which you can place a single point in a frame.

All three were taken at 200 ISO, 55mm, f8, 1/200 sec.

1. Point to the lower left.  The building in the field stands out anyway but the lines of the branches also take your eye to the point.  The landscape and the way it has been manipulated frame the building too - so the lines of the fence and hedge make you focus on the building. The two hedges behind the building do the same. The trees and bushes behind which I was standing make a good frame.  I will discuss what I hope to communicate at the end of this post.

2. Here the building is to the right and is balanced by another building peeking through the trees.  The frame is sliced into thirds by the vertical line of trees and bushes just to the left of the building.  Although the point has a counter balance in the other building I think this image is less successful than the first one.

3. The building is right in the middle of the image and gets lost.  There is nothing to balance it and although the line of the road sort of outlines the point (building) there is little that seems dynamic or interesting.  

The building I have photographed here belongs to a man who has had to endure some awful, quite harrowing events in his life.  Although surrounded by rugged hunters and farmers and despite growing up in this rural place he became extremely attached to his animals and refused to slaughter them after suffering two dreadful losses in quick succession.  There is little sentimentality here even for pet dogs so the man's position is unusual.  The man is very old now and quite unwell so has had to move away to be cared for and no longer visits this house - where he would sometimes have supper and his goats and chickens lived. The house is not entirely abandoned.  Someone in the village is using the land for grazing but the gate was always locked while we were visiting recently, so it seemed rather a sad place as the man used to come regularly and shout down my mother's drive sometimes bringing gifts of freshly picked zucchini or homemade wine.  He would talk to me very hopefully in Italian despite the fact I know very little Italian and seemed utterly unfazed by my total incomprehension.
The building is situated near the house my mother and her husband lived in when they took early retirement and escaped to the Italian countryside.  She too experienced a sudden and shocking loss after 5 years of living there when her husband died of an unexpected heart attack, aged 61 (only just).
There are many sad stories of early death and loss associated with the people of the nearby village, and not forgetting a local curiosity, a museum where people who were buried in the church crypt became mummified by a combination of a particular fungus and by being locked up in the cool are on show.  Literally - dead calcified bodies, some wearing the clothes they were buried in, displayed in glass boxes.  I wasn't allowed to take pictures when I went this time although perhaps that's a relief for me.  The whole area evokes thoughts of death and loss for me whenever I go  - but perhaps that is simply because I too have often been dealing with difficult emotions whilst there.
So the first picture, which is the one that I prefer as it may communicate something of what I was thinking about during my visit (but I am really not sure), is what I will briefly discuss.
The picture is at first glance a straightforward image of the beautiful Italian countryside in spring when life is regenerating.  It is extremely verdant and fecund looking.  Rebirth, growth, and a new beginning are all evident.  The trees in the foreground are beginning to show blossom although it is hard to detect.  The Judas trees are covered in their purple spring flowers which adds to the richness. It is interesting to me that the Judas trees are so evident  - it is relevant; betrayal and violence.  I have not cropped the photograph although there is an intrusive tree trunk to the right of the photograph.  It's only just in the frame.  The branches, (like the tentacles of death's hand) take up much of the foreground and point to the dying man's farm house. The trunk encroaches.  It's like you can't get rid of it, can't escape it.  But it does contribute to the framing.
For me the photograph looks at rebirth and spring but it is also explores death and dying and how you have to accept the cycle of nature, how you can't escape the nature of 'things'.  Just like you can't escape the tree in the foreground of the picture or it's tentacles.   The photo relates to the impending death of the man who owns the farm building; it relates to my own recent personal experience of loss, betrayal and acceptance of the nature of the people involved, the situation and the death of a marriage.  It relates to nature and humankind's struggle with it.