First public display of some of my work

Last Friday a whole bunch of people, mostly friends, came to a local cafe and looked at some of my photographs which have been put up there and I even sold quite a few.  It was nerve wracking and exciting and I was very pleased to have been asked by the owners to provide the images in the first place.

Here is a link to the images: Wandsworth Colour

Someone local printed them for me and did a very good job.  My lack of printing knowledge frustrated me as I know from talking to Sharon Boothroyd that she did her own printing.  This is something I imagine will be good to learn about.

When I was first asked to do something we agreed that it should be local but that was my only direction.  I had been taking photographs of walls already, I guess copying other styles I had seen on Flickr at the time.  But then I started to wonder why "walls' as I became a little wall-centric for a while.  An obvious but rather pedestrian and unimaginative interpretation might be something to do with a lack of people in my life but that doesn't resonate with me  - especially as I am lucky enough to have lots of people in my life really.

I think rather if one had to try to interpret my focus on walls, it pertains to structure.  I suppose as the structure in my life was utterly devastated three years ago, my photographs are a reinforcement of the structure that I need, want and indeed am rebuilding as time passes.  I am surrounded by a strong sense of community which is extremely important to me and the landscape in which I exist, my home, provides a secure structure for me and my family.  As I photograph those real structures I somehow reinforce the internal ones which are so crucial to living.

The other thing that walls represent to me are a kind of metaphysical set of boundaries.  Less disparate societies than ours seemed to have had a much clearer societal infrastructure than ours.  We have so many cultures converging, giving us many more choices; but it also makes it harder to be certain of those internal structures that we really, really need.

My own internal structures have always been shaky, perhaps in part due to having grown up abroad but always told I was not of that country, born to a father whose family were wiped out in the second world war, and then like so many children, had to contend with the divorce of my parents.  I will talk more about this when I write up Family Frames.  My pictures of walls seem to me to be very much about trying to establish and envisage some firm internal boundaries when they have been lacking for so long.

Anyway, in the end I was very pleased to have shown my work to people.  Really pleased that so many bought prints.  And I look forward to doing it again!  Here's a link to my other blog about it.

Over the Hill - Tim Andrews Photography Project

I wasn't going to write about this project initially although it is one that I have been following for a few months.  It's an interesting project. Tim Andrews in not a photographer; I think he used to be a lawyer or something corporate in fact.  But over the last three years he has been photographed by over 300 photographers who he invites to take part in his project.  He started it by answering an advert when a photographer was looking for a model.  The project is interesting in itself because rather than a photographer recording his personal story through a series of self portraits the subject has taken it upon himself to manage that process, turning the usual photographer gaze upside down and inside out.  What makes it even more interesting is the fact that Tim Andrews is also managing an illness and through his project explores the fragility of his ageing body and self.  I have been prompted to write about this project after all because there is a sense of taking control, of agency which is extremely interesting for me and also because of the question of vanity - or lack of it.  Is this a vain project or is it a generous and extremely brave project, where Tim Andrews reveals what he can, through collaborative work, of his frailty and indeed failings, along with the more palatable aspects of who is he is.

My A5 project is currently in some sort of no-mans land while I think about what to do with it.  My aim was to explore a story that was about me and my family.  I have been heavily influenced by my reading of Family Frames by Marriane Hirsh where she discusses the role of family albums/photographs.  I have been particularly struck by the notion of photographs gazing back at us and informing us about who we are meant to be in this modern culture of ours, about who we are within our families.  Mostly people choose to have very flattering and rather unrealistic portrayals of themselves, their families - or am I just being incredibly cynical.  The reality of families, which are usually fraught with internal seen and unseen tensions, admitted and denied fractures, is not what is usually portrayed in the images.  In my A5 work I have tried to capture not only the happy, sweet and enjoyable moments but also some of the more painful moments and aspects of our family.  I am happy to look at these, to try and make sense of them, to use my project to deepen my understanding and empathy for all that is real - the good enough and not so good enough.  Despite having involved my mother in the taking of the photographs, letting her know what I was planning to use them for, she is not happy about the photographs and feel they are intrusive and unflattering, and that I have shown her little respect.  This leaves me in a difficult position.  And I am having to think about how to address this, how to solve it.

Which has led me to think about Tim Andrew's work.  A work where an individual has over the course of several years offered his body and self to artists so that they can explore aspects of him and of course themselves, their perception of age, of illness of maleness, an ageing and unwell body.  It's an extremely generous act - but one that he has been in charge of to some extent.  My mother on the other hand is not in charge of anything to do with my work, and perhaps I was expecting too much of her.  Perhaps not working collaboratively enough although to be fair to myself, I have tried to.  And in any case the work's underlying importance has only over time started to reveal itself to me.

I won't say more about Tim Andrew's project for now.  Take a look at it yourself.  There is a range of photography, some that appeals to me and some that doesn't.  But it's fascinating, especially when you consider how the subject is in control of it.  It's perhaps Tim Andrew's way of taking control of something when he is dealing with an illness that he has little control over.  It's really worth thinking quite about seriously in relation to the book I mention above which I will finish soon and eventually be able to write about.  How I resolve my issue with the images, I am less sure about just now, but am sure I will find a way.

Tim Andrews

A5 Narrative images - impact

"In horror I turned to other poems I had written at Oxford, in East Anglia.  They were no better; even worse.  The truth rushed down on me like a burying avalanche. I was not a poet.

I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to co-exist in the same mind" 

The Magus, John Fowles.

Instead of finishing off Family Frames which I really should be be doing so I can get on with writing the commentary for A5 and then submitting it I have started reading The Magus by John Fowles.  I mention this because the quote above feels pretty accurate about how I feel at the moment about the work I do.  I certainly feel like I have a long way to go before I will truly believe I am a photographer of any worth, although I do not feel hopeless about it.  Just that the work ahead is still to come and it might be a hard slog at times.  There is so much more to photography then mere photographs.

I have been wondering what the images I have taken for the A5 are about really - not just some family photographs but surely, hopefully something more.  Last week I was asked by an online magazine if I would like to be featured after I retweeted an article they had posted.  I was flattered to be asked so said yes, although I do understand that the magazine is small, young, growing and that the internet is starving for fodder, so it is a modest start and one which is good for me no doubt. I am pleased they thought my work was worth the effort.

However, I feel like a fraud and also horrifically exposed for several reasons.  One obvious reason is that I really like naturally to hide under a shell and find any form of recognition, no matter how small, excruciatingly painful and awkward - I have just about got used to the constant 'marketing' I must do if I hope to spread the news about my photography and occasionally get some work.
The other reason I have found this process difficult is because I know now that the work for A5 reveals some intense long held familial rage on my part which I have used unashamedly in the work and how I go about editing and then presenting the work is really something to think very carefully about.  I discovered this because I included one of the more difficult portraits of Evelyn, my mother, in the article and she was of course rather unhappy to have it on FB where I had posted a link to the website.  As I look at the image now, rather than see the slightly clever composition, which I was proudly boasting to myself about, I do see very clearly the expression of her face, and my unkindness or lack of compassion in choosing to use it.  It probably doesn't help me in the least for commercial work either.  I wonder about my motivation for including it there where something less brutal would have done.

Now I must think carefully about how I edit the final piece for submission - although for me the image says a great deal about what the work is about; and if I were to exclude it would I be diluting my work?  Yes, for sure, which is not the point.

All of this does bring up the question of responsibility of the photographer - a huge, complex and contentious issue.

I shall try to quickly finish The Magus which seems like a very important book for me be to be rereading now (perhaps, not only as I do really recognise a lot of the narcissistic pretension of the protagonist) and then get on with Family Frames so I can write up the commentary and submit the work by June which is when it is due - and it is almost upon us!  How did that happen??

Saul Leiter

I came across Saul Leiter via a Twitter connection and ended up watching a wonderful documentary called In No Great Hurry about him.  Apart from the fact that Saul Leiter comes across as a genuinely remarkable and kind person, I absolutely fell in love with his photography.

Saul Leiter was the son of a rabbi and was expected to follow the same path but he abandoned his studies and went to New York at the age of 24 to pursue art.  He was a painter who started using a Leica after being encouraged, and eventually became a fashion photographer.  He became part of what is known as the New York School and was working at the same time as other well known photographers in New York from that era, such as Diane Arbus (he took a portrait of her) and Robert Frank.  He used colour film when it was unusual to do so and his colour street photography is incredibly distinctive and beautiful.

I love his street photography and now have a copy of his book, Early Colour.  You can really see the knowledge he gained as a painter in his photographs and I think his work might be timeless for that reason.  He mediates what he sees and transforms seemingly simple quotidian scenes into something very beautiful.  He is not as well known as some of the other big names from that time but that is changing and I think his work has a quality that will endure.  His style is incredibly expressive and I wonder if a lot of people are emulating (perhaps without realising) what he used to do on various online platforms today.

The colour prints I have looked at explore colour, shapes, reflections and blurred scenes, all of which he uses to create small masterpieces that to my eye will be worth looking at for many, many years going forward.  Saul Leiter was born in 1923 and died in 2013.  Anyone interested should certainly see the film I mention at the top.  It's beautifully made and he is wonderful to listen to.  His lack of grandiosity, his low key modesty, his  kindness and the appreciation of his all the good as well as all the sadness from life is wonderful to witness.

Wikipedia
Guardian

Exercise: Rain

Imagine a magazine cover on one subject: rain.  You have the entire cover space to work with and you should produce a single, attractive, strong photograph that leaves no one in doubt about the subject.

Rain (c)SarahJaneField 2015

This was taken on my iPhone 5c using Camera+ and then edited in Snapseed.  I darkened it and increased the contrast plus sharpened and increased the structure, then turned it upside down so the reflection of the building appeared the right way up.  I hope it leaves no one in any doubt about the subject.

Family Frames - Unconscious Optics, Seeing, Screens

I am still making my way through the book, Family Frames.  Its a very difficult book and I should no doubt have read a couple of other key texts before trying to tackle this one.  Although what it has done for me is made me very eager to go back and finish Sontag's On Photography which has sat languishing on my chest of draws for months abandoned a third of the way through.  I must also tackle Ways of Seeing,  I know.  Nevertheless, I am enjoying what I can in Family Frames and am intrigued and excited by unconscious optics.

Hirsh explains that we look at flat pictures which have the illusion of depth, that we see them through multi-layers of screens such as religion, culture, personal history, romantic illusions - but that photographs are a slice of an unconscious moment.  And being so offer up details we would otherwise not see.  I remember discussing how I am beginning to enjoy photography as it lets me know what is going on with me at an unconscious or semi-conscious level.  In the same way the minute physical details which can be seen in Muybridge's horses.  Photographs also show us the minute psychological details of our lives; thoughts, interests, moods.  Things that are wholly or partially hidden by consciousness.

Jung talks about becoming enlightened by making the unconscious conscious, and that includes becoming aware of the darkest aspects of ourselves.  Photography seems to offer a way of enabling that need.

I am also thrilled to read about screens.  When I started looking at different cultural childrearing practises I remember thinking it doesn't matter how many books are written about this methodology or that one - people will gravitate towards the ideologies that fit with their own personal outlook on life, be those outlooks conscious or otherwise.  Many of mine were not conscious when I first had a child.  I had a totally unrealistic view of who I am and was utterly uninformed and unaware about myself.  Having children unravelled and unearthed parts of me that I had no idea about, and I am happy to say I was pleasantly surprised by some of what came to the surface but also horrified later by other less easy to live with aspects of myself.  Photography is doing the same thing.  And I am reading how photography is also looked at by individuals and societies through ideologies that are conscious and unconscious; screens.

"Looking occurs in the interface between the imaginary and the symbolic.  It is mediated by complex cultural, historical, and social screens."

However, she goes on to say;

"Photographs may capture some of this process, but, as the opaque and masked images of Luthi, Meatyard, and Sherman illustrate, they alone do not allow us to read its many dimensions."

This second sentence is important for me to remember in all of this.  My family narrative photographs may on the one hand be revealing for me (perhaps others too...) but they may also be frustratingly opaque.  I think I have set out to explore something about my relationship with my mother in those photographs and am certain what I have discovered is something I knew intellectually but couldn't see as have been looking through daughter's eyes.  The photographs on the one hand do indeed show me what I knew but couldn't see - and that's what makes me cry when I look at them.  But I suspect there is also much I cannot read, stuff that is hidden regardless of the camera's helpful trick of suspending moments in a frame.

I continue to read...

Other books that have been recommended are The Imaginary Signifier by Christian Metz and Questions of Visual Pleasure by Laura Malvey, both of which look at Lacan's Mirror image and seeing ideas.  I am not sure whether to tackle these before I get that Sontag one digested!  However, I am keen to read her now which I wasn't before because it is dense, verbose and challenging in the extreme.

Quotes from Family Frames as before page 118.

Some thoughts on A5, Family Frames & Breasts

I am currently busy working my way through Family Frames, Photography Narrative and Postmemory by Marianne Hirsh.  It has set off all sorts of thoughts in relation to the narrative photographs I have taken for A5, and I am constantly on the look out for relevant work that might be worth thinking about.  Recently I stumbled across a magazine article about women’s pay.  Included was an old photographic essay relating to a wife/mother who worked at a bridal company during the 50s.  The essay offers an alterative narrative to the usual 50s story we are more familiar with where women stayed at home warming slippers for their husbands whilst keeping their homes in perfect order.

The images show a husband and wife sharing the domestic chores, financial decisions and child rearing while a housekeeper looks after the children as both parents work.  The woman is seen out with her friends at lunch for example, experiencing a life that is fulfilling and nourishing, and also at home caring for her children rather perfectly.  It seems like a thoroughly modern and progressive existence.

The problem for me is how very idealistic this narrative is and it is simply the other side of the supposedly idealistic ‘stay-at-home’ housewife coin.  Both images are suggestive of an impossible and unrealistic life for women to construct their lives around.

As Hirsh states in her book: ‘Freud’s ‘family romance’ is a shared individual fantasy of mythic origin: the child’s dream of parental omnipotence and infallibility which, when shattered, becomes the fantasy of replacing the father with a different, richer and more noble one, in Freud’s terms, a king or an emperor.  This is more than an Oedipal desire: it is also a fantasy of class aspiration, an economic fantasy of enrichment.”[1]

It seems to me that each side of the 50s feminine ideal as illustrated in the essay I have mentioned and in the more usual images one expects to see from that era is a ‘family romance’ about the role of the mother.  One that persists today, although it is probably quite surprising to think of the ‘working mother’ myth having existed so solidly during the 50s too.  Women now are perpetually suspended between these two supposedly opposing positions.  On the one hand today we have stay-at-home-mothers who are made to exist at the very least along the edges of our economy, if not right outside it, along with their inconvenient offspring.  Or, working mothers who often feel they have little choice but to leave their young children in the care of others if they are to keep any career break to a minimum.  (Taking time out is proven to be detrimental to a woman’s future economic prospects; pension gaps, the fact they often need to start again from scratch work-wise, part-time work for those who can get it. Not to mention that long breaks potentially destroy any confidence about being able to contribute effectively in the work place.)  

I am only part way through Hirsh’s Family Frames but one of the overriding themes I am getting to grips with so far is that the images we surround ourselves with reinforce ‘myths’ about family, support structures that our culture for a variety of reasons has constructed about who we all ought to be, where we should fit, and what is expected of us.

These images are immensely powerful and reflect who we are back to as well as inform us about who we ought to be – a complex feedback loop that potentially imprisons us.  My interest in particular is about how women relate to these images.

One of the most striking and perhaps obvious examples for me is about how women see their breasts in our culture.

I would like to state very clearly before I say anything further (as I know how contentious and difficult this issue can be for women everywhere) that I am in no way condemning any woman’s decision to breastfeed or bottle feed – how a person chooses to bring up their children is entirely their own choice.

However, it seems extraordinary to me that Page 3 has only just stopped being published. Even so, the idea of breasts being sexualized is reinforced by imagery in advertising, in films, in magazines and on TV pretty much constantly from the moment we are born.  Even our toys reinforce this idea – Barbie, springs to mind.  It is so pervasive and firmly entrenched in our culture that for many women the fact that their breasts might be for child rearing is simply anathema. 

Katherine Dettwyller is an anthropologist who has studied breast-feeding cross culturally and across species for her entire career.  She has written countless articles during her career and the thoroughly researched book, Breastfeeding; Biocultural Perspectives, amongst others.  Detwyller promotes the notion that formula may one day be seen in the same way we see smoking now – utterly detrimental to health and emotional well-being.

In her book about breastfeeding she compares breastfeeding in the West to foot binding in China, which “persisted well into the 20^th century”[2]. “Most Americans view Chinese foot-binding as the barbaric practice of backward people.  Yet breast augmentation, or female mammary mutilation, as it more properly called, is essentially the same thing…. A perfectly, healthy, functioning organ, the breast, is mutilated through surgery into something useful for only male sexual pleasure.  Rarely is the lactational function of the breast preserved, or even considered, in breast augmentation surgery.”[3]

I have chosen to concentrate on the subject of breasts and breastfeeding here because it’s such an extreme example of a cultural more.  In many non-western societies breasts are seen as organs for feeding children primarily.  In Western societies, and societies heavily influenced by the West, breasts are seen as almost exclusively sexual, to the point where their biological function is almost obsolete, or seen as strange, unusual, and even taboo.  

I am interested in the power of imagery; powerful imagery that supports the idea of breasts being exclusively sexual, as well as the less obvious, harder to discern manipulations of culture, of how we see ourselves.  Let's look beyond the breasts one might say...

One of the most interesting things I have come across in the Family Frames book so far is Lacan’s idea of looking and being seen:

“Looking and being looked at are identical processes for Lacan – when you look you are also seen: when you are the object of the look you return it, even if only to reflect light back to its source; ‘things look at me and yet I see them” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 109).   I need to know and understand more of this before I can discuss it in further depth but the reflective nature of seeing is fascinating to me.   

When describing Meatyard’s Family Album of LucyBell Crater (which incidentally I love and can’t wait to do something heavily influenced by Meatyard’s work!) Hirsh talks of subjects being “constructed relationally through an elaborate and multiply inflected process of looking[4]”, which as I understand it ties in with Lacan’s looking and seeing thesis.

I feel like I have only got fragments of different ideas and haven’t quite tied them together yet but I am intrigued by how this seeing and looking process informs our state of being given that we are constantly bombarded with images that inform us about who we are, that construct our being.  Which means that the whole breast thing might be impossible for women to reconcile, given the imagery we are surrounded by every moment of our lives, and breasts are just one tiny and very obvious example - look further. 

If I were to think about how women and indeed men are generally represented in photographs as well as other mediums, and also about how that looking and being looked at process works, it seems we are indefatigably caught up in an interplay that is a little like a snake eating its own tale.  The gaze that we choose to exist in front of, coming from the images that we create perpetuate the fantasies we construct about ourselves in those very images.

How does any of that tie in with my assignment?  Well, I’m not sure yet.  Family Frames discusses how family photographs ‘produce family relations and form family memory’[5]. I have taken a series of photographs of my family, which in the main centre round my mother, with whom I have had a difficult and fragmented relationship, although much has changed recently. 

At the beginning of this very long post (in which I try hard to bring together several strands of thought and perhaps a bunch of disparate ideas, all of which I hope feed into my assignment) I discussed the idealistic photographic essay about a mother in the 50s.  On the surface the essay seems like a positive alternative narrative which opposes the more usual 50s story we are used to seeing, where women wait cheerily for their husbands to return home while they happily get on with domestic chores before welcoming their hardworking men home.  And it certainly seems more positive than the overly sexualised images we are all bombarded with, which as I discuss negate any biological realities about who we are. 

However, I found the idealism in that essay just as awkward and difficult as its counterpart.  

Family photography is typically idealistic; and in fact I make a few pennies taking photographs for families that serve to reinforce those idealistic fantasies.  They are seemingly so important to families within our culture – and I wonder how helpful that is.  Hirsh says “the family as social construct depends on the invisibility of its structuring elements.  Inasmuch as visuality functions as such a structuring element determined by the familial gaze, its workings to some degree must remain unconscious if the familial ideology is to be perpetuated and imposed”[6]

For A5 I have taken a series of photographs, which I hope will reveal some of the realities of our family what ever those are, rather than the ideal – although I’m not sure at this point how possible that even is.  At the moment, however, every time I look at them I find myself crying… so who knows that they are doing or saying.

I end by repeating the quote from Hirsh’s book, “Looking and being looked at are identical processes for Lacan – when you look you are also seen: when you are the object of the look you return it, even if only to reflect light back to its source; ‘things look at me and yet I see them” (Four Fundamental Concepts, 109).  This sentence seems incredibly important somehow.

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Family Frames Photogaphy and Narrative Postmemory by Marianne Hirsh 1997, Harvard Publishing, reissued 2012 (FF)

Breastfeeding Biocultural Perspectives Ed. by Patricia Stuart-Macadam & Katherine A. Dettwyler, Aldine de Gruyer 1995 (BF)

[1] Page tbc FF

[2] Page 177 BF

[3] Page 177 BF

[4] Page 107 FF

[5] Page 116 FF

[6] Page 117 FF