VISION issue 2 by Helen Jessica

V I S I O N Research

journal

& notes

PHOS330: photography final major project portfolio, mnhp level 3

issue

NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR WHY, WHAT AND HOW...

In this second and small issue of VISION I have put together extracts from essays, books and journals all with parts that have informed my photographic practice. Personally to fully absorb information I need to do more than just read it, I learnt from a young age that I am dyslexic so have therefore learnt different ways of learning written information. If I find text that is helpful or I find interesting I copy it down, either by hand of by way of typing. With this in mind I decided that with the time I spend re-writing I should probably put it to a better use. With this I decided to create this, my second issue, and have it comprised completely with extracts I have written up with an explanation, in my own words, of how and why it has helped inform my photographic practice.

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BEACONS CONVEYING CONSERVATION MESSAGES TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC

by Daniel Kramb

t is inevitable ,”

Stephanie Bernhard wrote in The New Inquiry in January, “that our fictional landscapes will evolve in tandem with our physical landscapes.” A changing climate, she argued, will change the way we write: the ravages of a warming world “will soon be ubiquitous enough that novelists will make them a central concern.” Climate change literature will become the war literature of our generation—its central concern so “painfully known to readers that it will hardly need to be named.” Inevitable perhaps … but how “soon” really? Last fall, I posed the question “Where is all the climate change fiction?” in an article in the Guardian. And yet, since then only Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior has offered itself up as a mainstream, non-genre response. Perhaps, this lack of climate change fiction reflects what’s going on in the world: we know how serious a problem we face, but do we engage with it directly? Perhaps tomorrow, we say to ourselves. Aren’t other people looking into it? We are not too concerned about our relationship with climate change, and neither, it seems, are the characters in most published novels. But now Beacons has been released, a collection of 21 Stories for Our Not So Distant Future.It’s a rich and diverse book—brave in its intention, and original in its writing—and it places its emphasis firmly on what we can sometimes neglect in our theoretical, often abstract discussion of temperature rises

and carbon reduction targets: the very human aspect of climate change.Beacons is “not polemical; nor is it a policy document or a lifestyle guide,” the collection’s editor, Gregory Norminton, points out in his introduction. “It is, rather, a meeting place for new stories that recognize where we are and where we might be heading.” Which future will it be? The one where people living in regions threatened by climate change get “Zero-rated”? In Liz Jensen’s chilling contribution to the book, dubious TV shows trick these unfortunate “Zeros” and “Sub-Zeros” into believing that suicide is the honorable thing to do. After her mother has complied (“Five floors is a long way, if you’re someone falling”), a young daughter confronts the TV host—Mother Moon—in her office, but Mother Moon only snaps at her: “Honest truth, the big picture can’t afford people like Mummy.” It’s hardly surprising that speculative fiction continues to be a natural choice when it comes to writing about climate change: a distressing sense of uncertainty runs through most aspects of the issue. Not about the Whether there’s precious little doubt about the Whether in the year 2013, unless you receive a paycheck from the fossil fuel industry. But about all the Hows and Whens and What Exactlys. About: how on earth are we going to deal with it? When, in the middle of the night, Clare Dudman’s protagonist encounters a refugee in front of her fridge with a knife, his logic is simple: “I hungry. I have baby, wife, child. They all cry. You not need. I do.” It’s an unsettling illustration of a potential consequence of a warming world—the mass movement of displaced people across borders—that is all too often neglected, or simply ignored, because we can’t quite stomach the implications. The same goes for armed conflict. In Jem Poster’s devastating story, soldiers are patrolling the Welsh countryside, looking for “protestors, draft-dodgers, saboteurs. The so-called resistance.” It’s a future where only a huge military presence, within our own borders, seems able to protect the “freedom to live as we want,” as the soldiers put it. It’s a future where anyone

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who dares to criticize society’s agreed mantra—that we need to stay in the game, and that we need all the oil supplies we can get our hands on for it—has become an enemy. It’s a future where the empty barn of a widowed farm-owner (located next to a refinery) is suddenly a security threat. The widow can only stand back—powerless, and strangely resigned—as the soldier burns down her property in front of her eyes. It’s deeply saddening to watch, and yet: it seems to be one of the more harmless acts we are prepared to tolerate in our effort to keep this show running, slaves to the monster we have created. When, in Alasdair Gray’s story, a bunch of gods (of a kind) reckon that “it was maybe a mistake to give big brains to mammals” a nod doesn’t feel too inappropriate a reaction. Last year, during the six hours of the US presidential debates, there wasn’t a single mention of climate change, not even during an extended discussion of offshore drilling. President Obama had merely sprinkled his campaign speeches with a reference here and there. Back in office, he—like most politicians of his generation—seems happy for it to remain a second-tier issue: too many other, allegedly more urgent, things to think about; too much uncalculated risk in acting; too little play with the electorate. Tell that to the “pre-Revolt” Prime Minister of Adam Thorpe’s contribution. Living as a recluse in a world of ration cards and attacks on petrol-driven cars, he has started to write his autobiography, but “his years in politics, his period of apparent power and influence, some twenty years ago” has long fizzled out. All that’s left are “issues and small dramas no one save the academics now remembered.” In the end, “he wished to say sorry.” How many of today’s politicians, I wondered, will feel this way in twenty years’ time? Arriving at Maria McCann’s story after all those accounts, its present-day quarrel—about changing our lifestyles—has almost a touch of silliness: Is this really what we’re still arguing about? This kind of interplay between stories is one of Beacons’s strengths. There is nothing silly about it at all, of course: what it

means to do “the right thing” is by no means obvious, and we are all filled with contradictions when it comes to our personal response to climate change. After much soul-searching, the couple in the story decides to shun a holiday in Italy for a house swap closer to home. In bed, at night, the wife asks her husband the tormenting question that hangs over all our personal efforts to change: “What if nobody else stops?” Meanwhile, companies and governments of all persuasions are using the adjective “green” to describe even their smallest (and often bogus) efforts to become more sustainable, loading the word with so many different meanings, it has lost almost all of them. Holly Howitt provides a dazzling twist to this: in her story, “Green people” are those living in a zone where mankind has learned to control the weather (“You press this button, it rains. You press this one, the sun shines”). The controlled environment allows them to keep growing food—to the detriment of those living in the “sandtowns” next to them, where people are perishing. “Don’t tell me you believe in being Green now?” a furious wife shouts at her pragmatic husband, who, for their newborn baby’s sake, has just accepted employment as a “weatherman.” “You can’t be that stupid. Or that shallow.” The story poses another uneasy question: What does it really mean to care for the next generation? To give your daughter a good life (by playing the system), or to fight the injustice the system is based on (to her detriment, probably)? Tensions like this are what make climate change such a challenge for the environmental movement. The unique nature of the situation—that we have to drastically change our ways now to prevent something becoming truly terrible in the future—is one of the hardest messages to get across. Might we need to see the post-glacial flooding of our cities to realize the full extent of our predicament, or perhaps, like the guy in Lawrence Norfolk’s story who builds self-sustaining “earthships” near the Rio Grande (and who everyone thinks is half-crazy), might we understand a little earlier than that? Closing Beacons, I felt—perhaps more strongly than

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ever before—that fiction writing is one of the greatest aides we will have in our collective coming-to-terms with climate change. These “fictional landscapes” did not just resemble our future “physical landscapes” in enlightening, often challenging ways; they also resembled my inner journey as I read through the stories, from sunlit peak—from the conviction that we can meaningfully come together, and put the struggle against climate change at the very heart of who we are—to desolate sandtown, where quiet resignation lives. Will we ever be able to turn this around? What stops us from simply going on the way we are right now? And then where would we be?

Although this article is about fiction writing I feel that what these authors are attempting to do with their writing in these short stories is what I am hoping to achieve through narrative in my imagery. I am not sure yet whether or not I plan to focus down specifically

on climate change, but more at the moment on mankind’s track record of abusing the natural world without thought to the consequences. I hope to, like these authors, create photographic work that has a strong narrative as well as a powerful message.

IN PLATO’S CAVE THE BASIC THEORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

by Susan Sontag

umankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that MichelAnge and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of

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them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a

wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the

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shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as

David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

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To understand the theoretical world of photography Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ is a text that needs to be read and re-read. I decided to re-read this at the beguinning of this project and although all of it is applicable i found that the first chapter was the one that i found the most helpful. This was mainly because of the idea put forward by Plato, that if we only see something in a certain way we don’t know any different and therefore may never know the

truth. This idea is particually important in the world of images meaning to inspire conservation, as when creating an image to inspire a message we need to be particually carfull that the right message comes through to the viewer. And with the modern world being so saturated with images it makes it increasingly important to change peoples perceptions of the challenges your environment is facing.

REALISM & REALITY A CHAPTER TAKEN FROM ‘THE KEY CONCEPTS’

by David Bates

eality is what we believe exists whereas ‘realism’ is the mode of representation that supports that reality. For example, during an ongoing war, we may not see many actual dead soldiers in reality (unless directly involved), but it would not be completely strange to us if a picture from the war showed them to us as a result. (Notwithstanding the fact that governments understand that ‘body counts’ create opposition to war.) The realism of an image corresponds to a preconception of reality. A photograph showing ‘aliens abducting soldiers’, no matter how realistic or believable as a photograph, is unbelievable (except possibly to UFO ‘experts’ and other alien believers) simply because we do not believe aliens exist. The point is that any picture is usually tested against preexisting suppositions and knowledge about the world. The reading of any picture will already involve assessing how far that picture is credible or plausible. Witness the ‘compulsion to repeat’ in viewing at the time of 9/11, partly because it was simply ‘unbelievable’ that it had happened. People struggled to grasp the ‘reality’ of what transpired, precisely because of the uncertainty of reference; such things had only been seen previously in fictional Hollywood movies and not as a reality. In advertising, a picture may show something unbelievable (e.g. that young people can reverse their heads on their body), but this does not challenge our concept of reality if we believe people cannot do that. In other words, how far a photograph corresponds

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to pre-existing conceptions of reality is partly to do with how far it fits with pre-existing beliefs about ‘reality’. Photographs are tested and assessed against these beliefs in the very act of perception, about how I already see the world. While this might seem like a tautological argument, it is the argument put forward by the realism of the photograph: the world is like this because this is how it looks. But it can look different, which depends on how it is photographed. What is certain is that, when the zoo photograph was made, in 1852, many people in England had never seen a hippopotamus, let alone a picture of one. We might speculate that the photograph of this gigantic and ‘exotic’ mammal was itself met with incredulity at the time. A thing from ‘another world’ or time, just as the aristocratic photographer, Count de Montizon, seems to have been struck by these ‘ordinary’ people, lined up against the railings looking at this creature. The photograph, it might be argued, has brought him closer to nature (the hippo) than to these ordinary people. This is also the same position his photograph offers us in the viewpoint given by his camera. In a way, then, one perhaps unintended conceit of the picture – its unconscious – is that the photographer also gives a ‘privileged’ point of view (an unmediated reality), which here happens to be that of an aristocrat: a Count. In that conceit, we are given not only a rhetorical position but also an ideological cultural position, one that is not only closer to nature, but somehow more noble and elevated than these ordinary people ‘behind bars’. No doubt photographers often need to think of themselves as having a special point of view, a privileged position, in order to function. It is one of the miraculous features of photography that viewers feel they share in that privilege, the viewpoint of what is seen. This remains one of the core ideological values of photography, the sense of veracity that it claims and organizes. So it is important not to forget that there is difference involved in photographs. What the realist takes for granted as ‘reality’, semiotics argues is constructed through a photographic discourse, of codes. Contrary to the views of some sceptics, visual semiotics does not refute the existence of ‘reality’, rather it develops a way to speak about

how the graphic marks on a flat piece of paper come to signify a ‘reality’. However, this is not a static procedure. Meanings do not ‘stand still’. To unpack a photograph, as I have done here, is only to temporarily stop the flow of meanings, which constantly circulate in society, between and across people in the world.

When trying to produce images that inspire a message or a view of an actual event or notion it is important to first understand how people view and understand the reality of photographs. The most important thing I think I need to keep in mind when creating images with a conservation message is that people only believe what they can understand and that overly negative realities are more likely to be ignored or missinterpreted as fiction.

This extract explains that the photographer needs to keep in mind the backgound and knowledge of the viewers and what the reality of the situation you are trying to convince them off. In relation to my photographic work and the conservation messages I want to highlight I need to really take this into account and work hard to make sure I produce imagery that are not only aestetically pleasing but also show a powerful reality.

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STAGING REALITY A CHAPTER TAKEN FROM ‘THE KEY CONCEPTS’

by David Bates

he inevitable mediation involved in all photography, decisions about the position of the camera within and toward the event, the spatial relations of it, etc., are what organizes the staging of the scene. ‘Composition’ is here simply the organization of raw material into photographic codes, a rhetorical form to create a reality effect. The ‘neutral’ mode of descriptive photography merely attempts to circumvent such criticism by signifying its ‘neutrality’ through frontality. By facing the subject matter head on, it is also deploying the rhetoric of photographic codes too. This is not to dismiss documentary, but, as John Grierson, the acknowledged founder of social documentary once said in a lecture: “The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound. It does not matter whether that interpretation comes by way of the studio or by way of documentary or for that matter by way of the music hall. The important thing is the interpretation and the profundity of the interpretation.”

For Grierson, a good documentary is a good ‘interpretation’ of real life, one that ‘lights up the fact’. The means is not proscribed as essentially one form or another, as ‘staged’ or

not. So documentary could include a number of approaches; it is about interpretation, not objectivity or truth. In this sense, the two modes of documentary discussed here offer different genres (sub-genres) of social documentary interpretation. Reportage (and snapshots) signify human involvement and expression of life in events (from a subjective and fragmented viewpoint), while so-called objective or descriptive photography offers a more disengaged position (an objectified, distanced position) to the scene. Despite the differences, both subjective and objective are variant modes of the ‘straight photograph’ and depend on the idea of witnessing ‘life’, which is so crucial to the documentary form.

In reading chapters on the techniques and theories on documentary photography I am hoping to gain enough knowledge to be able to seemless mix the art of documentary and fine art photography in my practice. I found the idea that all photography is staged to some level a very interesting way of looking at documentary photography, I do have to agree though, as even by the

photographers decision of what to photograph and what not too, as well as the selected framing of what has been selected to be photographed has already shown alot of the photographers own opinions and vision of what the reality of the situation or subject being photographed is. This means that they could be no form of un-staged completely unbiasis photography.

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EDGELAND’S EXTRACTS FROM A JOURNEY INTO ENGLANDS TRUE WILDERNESS

by Paul Farley & Micheal Symmons Roberts

…Loved landscapes, lived in landscapes, need a litany of names so we can map out storied across them. Chapter//WATER England’s edgelands include not just fields but ash copses between broken factory walls, fathomless lakes, scrublands vivid with wild flowers, almost unmapped and unseen. When we look into the murk if standing water, we can imagine the imponded carsof the fifties and sixties and seventies, weedy wrecks, and death traps all over again waiting for the unwary swimmer, the reckless divers who will come each year during spells of unseasonal heat. Deep standing water fascinates because of what it might contain, because of the riddle of depth and a corresponding, deep-seated idea of the bottomless. The surfaces that give back only our leaden, flake white skies seem to be hiding something, thoughts that lead us down, down. Chapter//WEATHER

Edgelands do weather very well. The aesthetics of

weather are enhanced by the forms and colours of the place. Rain at night is often beautiful, but look at slant rain at night, falling on a fenced off yard full of identically livered vans or brand new cars, lit by powerful security lights; the multiple tones and rhythms of torrential rain on metal roofs and door. As Paul Mauldoon says in his early poem ‘Wind and Tree’. ‘most of the wind/ Happens where there are trees’. Chapter//PIERS So where do the edgelands end? How far can the idea take us? As an island people, we have our own ideas of edges, and between the specifically English urban of the seaside town, and the wilds of the ocean beyond it, we have developed our own very particular coastal edgelands. The underside of piers is another world. As a child, these dark, dripping strips of sand and sea are irresistible. However much gentrification or modernisation a sun-side pier has undergone, its belly always looks ancient, decayed, like a beached shipwreck. …rotten boards, the sea calm and well behaved, though it’s unnerving to look down through the slats.

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A DREAM OF ENGLAND EXTRACTS FROM A WORK EXPLORE ENGLISH SOCIETY AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE LANDSCAPE

by John Taylor

“…the power of this ‘art’ was limited: ‘the sublime cannot be reached by it’, and ‘its power is greatest when it attempts the simplest things’ (Robinson, 1869).” In the same way that the gaze is meaningful in relation to what it is not – the glance – so landscape is a relational term: calling something ‘landscape’ places it in a superior position to whatever is not designated in this way. ‘Pleasing prospects’ rewarded the educated eye, whereas everything outside the park or garden could not be read, and had no meaning as landscape. …after all, that England was an ‘old country’ and signs of its age were worth preserving (Wright, 1986). Chapter//WASTES AND BOUNDRIES …treasured landscapes, one notices that their most strikingly characteristic is an apparent newness… whereas even if the place itself is ancient, in the publicity photographs it appears to be unblemished. Promotional photographs recall an ideal world of beauty, in which everything remains young, whole and symmetrical.

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Landscape and wasteland express a form of the binary pair utopia/dystopia, both of which hold different fascinations. In one interpretation, the idealised view of treasured landscapes or ‘beauty spots’ requires the prolonged look of the gaze. Wastelands appear to be negative in relation to beauty spots. Educated not to notice wastelands, tourists routinely avoid them, or look at them quickly and neutrally searching beyond them for ‘real’ landscape. Landscape is no longer ‘green and pleasant’ because the countryside is so patently ‘rationalised’ for profit, and much of its picturesque detail erased or corralled in parks. Concerned with sight, with landscape as an effect of looking. I have discussed the steady gaze required to ‘read’ landscapes; the use of discovery rhetoric, in which the observer (metaphorically) stands on a promontory and relays everything from that masterful point of view; the observer as one who see within prescribed sets of rules, codes, regulations and practices. In a different vein, Keith Arnatt has long been interested in ironically employing the designation ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, which normally attaches to conservation areas and beauty spots of national significance. He photographs patches of unsightly, desolate ground, and entitles them with the acronym ‘AONB’. In the picture from his series ‘Pictures from Miss Grace’s Lane’. Arnett depicts the dreary landscape. Yet he inflects the meaning of the picture in a way foreign to nineteenth century artists by focussing on the grey tyre in the foreground. Arnett’s frame of reference, like Jem Southam’s, is the collision of nature and ecology. The fascination for decay resulting in beautiful works of art and photographs now makes, specific reference to the danger of polluting the environment (Mellor, 1988). Decay is present in natural ecological systems, but O’Donnell’s piece suggests that in modern life this decay can be progressively poisonous, ultimately clogging or eliminating the natural systems with waste which never degrades.

Chapter//THE GENDER OF LANDSCAPE LOOKING Though artists, serious photographers or travellers gaze at wastelands, tourists either do not notice them, or try to avoid seeing them, only glancing at them furtively. Norman Bryson draws attention to the way that in English, gazing and glancing are separate activities. He writes that in contrast to the steady look of the gaze, the glance is ‘a furtive or sideways look whose attention is always elsewhere, which shifts to conceal its own existence, and which is capable of carrying unofficial, sub rosa message of hostility, collusion, rebellion and lust’ (Bryson, 1983). This list implies that the sub rosa messages of the gaze are altogether pure, standing in contrast to the pejorative attributes od the glance. However, this attempt to separate the gaze and the glance cannot succeed for long. Attributes of the glance are attached to the gaze, despite attempts to empty it of bad association. The gaze, in short, is not a disengaged, objective look. Like the glance, it has characteristics of hostility, collusion and lust in everyday usage. Through the gaze (in one of its guises) is a ‘prolonged, contemplative [look] regarding the field of vision with a certain aloofness and disengagement, across a tranquil interval’ (Bryson, 1983), this practice alone is insufficient to rule out hostile messages. Lovers gaze into one another’s eyes in admiration and lust, but the observer might gaze without permission or reciprocation. The contemplative gaze might be the prelude to or begin the process of furtive, interrogative and destructive effects. The motivation to separate the ‘pure’ gaze from the ‘impure’ glance is similar to that which drives other hierarchies, such as the differences between travellers, tourists, trippers, or the differences between having ‘taste’ and not – namely, the motivation is one of separation of knowing groups from though others who by definition are excluded.

The gaze and glance, variously disinterested anf

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investigative, are commonplace ways of ‘taking in’ landscape. Landscape thus viewed is commonly conceived to the body of a woman. The apparently disregarded spaces of wasteland, or perimeter fences, or the scrubland which runs along their edges, are ever empty of meaning. Indeed, apart from a ‘beauty spot’, nothing is likely to excite as much attention as its seeming opposite – the abandoned or derelict site. Some reasons for the interest lie in conventional ways of seeing the picturesque, or in contemporary concerns doe the environment. Most crucially, interest in desolate spaces derives from the ceaseless action of the colonising and objectifying gaze. The gaze abhors the invisible and perpetually strives to bring it to light. The gaze cast over land recognises no distinction between landscape as beautiful and wasteland as it’s opposite. The aim is always to bring land within range and conquer it, actually or mentally. Because the hierarchies of sight are continuous wuth other inequalities in culture, the gaze remains the most powerful (though resisted) of the various ways of looking, and is crucially tied to masculinity, with its object the feminine ‘other’. Wasteland as a peripheral space will remain as the centre in establishing the meaning of landscape, and will continue to engender anxiety as a point of resistance, with implications far beyond its function as a sign of the picturesque.

I was at first quite reluctant to read this book after it was recommend to me as I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see the tourist angle that this book about relevant to my photographic practice. I am extremely glad I decided to anyway though. I particularly found the theory of glazes and glance interesting. With the photographic work I am trying to produce I am trying to question what people see and think to look at, I am in fact questioning the gaze of the observer. I am attempting to photograph and shine a light on what I personally see in our

coastal landscapes, which in terms of this text is the parts that are usually reserved for the glance of the normal observer, and never once taking images of the, as said in this text, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;beauty spotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; I am uninterested in photographing the picturesque landscape of the seaside and work on making the overlooked, glanced at, areas more visually appealing. This links very well to my research into the banal, as people tend to overlook the banal aspects of landscapes and focus on the sublime, whereas I am trying to turn the banal into the sublime in my imagery.

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WHY ART PHOTOGRAPHY EXTRACT LOOKING AT THE BANAL

by Lucy Soutter

he term “banal” is used most often in relation to the bland repetition of commodity culture. Artists and photographers turn to the banal subjects matter in part because it is familiar, producing what Eugenie Shinkle has described as “a find of postindustry realism, a turn away from the spectacular.” In an age dominated by the excesses of entertainment culture, banality can also represent a refusal of interestingness, a desire to underwhelm the viewer in hopes of eliciting a more authentic or more critical response. Hofer’s interiors are usually too grand to be described as banal, but other Dusseldorf-trained students have put the banal at the centre of their objective investigations. Frank Breuer was one of Bernd Becher’s last students. His serial work pursues the prefabricated elements of the manmade environment, in bluntly entitled series such as “Logos,” “Containers,” “Warehouses” and “Poles”. Shot with low horizons and pale, timeless skies, Breuer’s images have a consistency of approach the verges on the formulaic. Again, critics assert that the taxonomic approach allows viewers to move back and forth between the general and the specific in ways that spur contemplation. The roadside corporate logos float somewhere between the abstract seduction of successful branding and the abject reality of the dreary environments where they are placed. The international shipping containers have a satisfying monumentality – like giant stacks of children’s blocks - marked with corrosion, anti-graffiti

paint and polyglot logos that illustrate the global movement of capital. The utility poles are like a parody of portraiture; the photographer lavishes his expertise on individual poles that are functionally interchangeable. Although each location is specific, the series only underlines the anonymity of the ugly poles. If the Bechers’ approach succeeded in monumentalizing their previously neglected subject matter, we could say the Breuer’s work is more concerned with the failure of its subject matter to live up to the grandiosity of his approach. Art critics find pathos in the work, and also flashes of comedy. Not everyone will feel included in these responses. While different audiences will have different thresholds, there is going to be a point for many viewers at which the combination of deadpan approach and banal subject matter will fail to engage. Shinkle describes the way that the banality in contemporary photography can be alienating, the more so once it has been given the art world’s stamp of approval: institutionally sanctioned banality neutralizes fleeting and contentless encounters with images… Disinclined to pass judgment on what they see, audiences, for their part, learn to leave to leave such tasks to those more qualified – writers, curators, and other cultural pundits. When the temporary distraction of the active look starts to shift towards this more permanent kind of paralysis, perceptual boredom risks turning into perceptual ennui. Although their content ranges from the banal to the spectacular, the flat affect of deadpan photography risks pushing viewers into a state of boredom, especially as this mode becomes more and more prevalent with contemporary art. On the one hand, it is easy to be bored when you do not fully understand what is in front of you. Being informed about the context and ambitions of this kind of work is conducive to having a meaningful experience. Sometimes work that initially bores or irritates can

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become more interesting the more we think about it. The is also the fact that work like Breuerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s may deliberately avoid anecdotal interest or beauty because it seeks to challenge or inform rather than to please; it may propose boredom as a critical strategy, an extension of Frankfurt School difficulty. Whatever photographers may intend or critic may argue, aesthetic judgement rests on the individual experience of the viewer. Some work will leave you cold.

With the change in direction my photographic work I have taken within this portfolio, I also need to change the direction of my research; the main think I can say about my new direction is that I am aiming to work with the banal. However to do this I need to fully understand the term banal and what it means to capture images of banality but are still aesthetically pleasing and visually interesting, but also carry a message. This is a lot of

thing to combine and I hope through thorough research I can achieve this in my imagery to a high standard. I did read the entirity of this book, which had insights into the all aspects of using photography as art, however I do not have the time to type up all parts of the book that interested me, so I have just focused on an extract that outlines just the information relating to the banal.

THE AESTHETICS OF BOREDOM EXTRACTS RELATING TO THE THOERY OF THE BANAL

by Agne Narusyte

BANALITY

n the first chapter we discussed how banality is formed and how it becomes both the cause and the result of boredom, how it closes us into the vicious circle of routine, and how it is possible to escape it only by doubting the banality of things. The aesthetics of boredom uses banality particularly frequently, and only when we understand how it functions is it possible to see how such an art can become the opposite of ‘boring’ – interesting. However, the banality used in the aesthetics of boredom should not be confused with a simple lack of originality or repetition of artistic clichés. The aesthetics of boredom contests traditional relationships between art and banality. The root of this tradition may be found in the 19th century because it was then that the present concept of banality as an opposition to originality was formed as part of the culture of romanticism. Even estrangement, which we discussed earlier, was based on a romantic idea that language was banal and prevented us from reaching authentic experience; consequently, everything that we said was ‘banal’ and was not exactly what we wanted to say. The same was applied to the forms of the familiar world: any art that only imitated the world could only speak in the outworn banal language of that world and was therefore distant from true experience; moreover, this was inseparable from the artists’ imperative of originality. There was even attempts made to prove that it was precisely this desire to avoid banality that had stimulated the development of modern art. Modern art, after all was precipitated by a determination no to repeat established forms of expression, or recreate

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the shapes of reality, but instead present something unrecognisable and uniquely interpreted.

However, another powerful strategy to overcome banality has always been used in art as well. In this phenomenological analysis of banality Jerphagnon pointed out that throughout history artists have avoided banality by idealising it. According to Jerphagnon, everyday routine, ‘does not have the power to express humanity’, because it is, in itself, meaningless. Idealisation grants meaning to it, but also restricts all other possible meanings. An idealised image is like a distilled reality, reduced into a scheme where every ‘tiniest gesture is significant and has a profound meaning’. On the other hand, Jerphagnon observed that naturalism and realism used banality as an opportunity to refresh the approach and avoid artist dogmas; thus, in fact, they rejected the judgement that something was banal (because otherwise as work of art would be boring). Meanwhile, surrealism discovered the signs of another reality in banal everydayness and this denied its banality. A commonplace detail that serves some other idea is not banal, but meaningful.

By consciously choosing unchanged and non-idealised banality, artists also reject the schemes and meaning they help to construct. This refutes, on the one hand, the expectation of a noble, meaningful aesthetic object in the work of art; while on the other hand, it rebuffs the spectator’s imperative to try and understand original objects that he or she has never seen before. The banal object is peculiarly intriguing: it is too familiar, ‘worn away’ by the masses and non-original, but it is presented in art as something requiting ‘reading’. Although a banal object seems to be self-understandable, if one looks more closely, it does not have a defining meaning. From the semiotic perspective, a banal object is a signifier through which it is difficult to reach the signified or contents; an appearance that has lost any trace of being; a worn off sign that is incapable of making us wonder. But this is why its representation in art is interesting rather than boring and invites interpretation.

There have been attempts made to name a certain tendency in late 20th century art of simply listing banal objects or presenting the things themselves instead of creating something meaningful through the use of various terms that suggest no obvious meaning: there is the ‘concrete music’ created from the sounds of the environment, Pop Art and nominalism or an inventorisation of environment in literature and the visual arts. Seeing such a claim as an ‘impossible concreteness’ and

a deliberate refusal of imagination, causality and links between objects, Ihab Hassan interprets this as an abuse of meaning and also of art itself. Meanwhile, S.D. Healy presumes that nominalism in literature (and its possible to apply it to visual art and music) is the artists’ reaction to the derealisation of the environment – a situation in which hyperbordom prevails. According to him, making lists of ‘real’ domestic things may be a strategy for opposing boredom and experiencing reality again. We can agree that lists; the process of simply listing things or presenting them without any comment, creates the illusion of documentary reality – it is as if we should not forget that representations of things belong to the category of ‘appearances’, thus their function and meaning may be different.

I originally came across this book very early on in the project when searching from text to inform me on the banal in photography. However I passed it over as it was focussed on Lithuanian Photography, an area that at the time I had no interest in. However as my research went on this text kept on popping up, so I finally read the chapters specifically relating to the banal. I found that the historical insights of the banal in relation to literature and early art fascinating, but more relevantly, the idea that the banal came into effect as a realisation of our change into a more consumerist, capitalist society. The images I

am producing I think actually reflect this quite well. Although my object with my imagery was to photography the unobserved of the coastal environment, I have unintentionally been photographing human presence at our coast, which to me reflects this theory that the banal is boredom. We are no long satisfied to simply be in nature, in our environment, we have felt the need to add these places and objects into these areas to combat our ‘boredom’. But in doing so we have created more banal aspects, more forgotten places and overlooked things.

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BANALITY AND THE CLICHE EXTRACTS AND QUOTES FROM the ONLINE JOURNAL, LENS GARDEN

by John Neel

t seems as though there is a fine line between cliché and banality, which is acceptable in photographic circles today.

Cliché and banality are both very close in definition, yet they are also used quite often to distinguish between certain types of photographs. I believe that there are subjects that are easily transformed into either of these classifications. It would appear that banality is an acceptable subject matter for many photographers. Cliché on the other hand is usually regarded in a bad light for its redundancy and therefore, lack of originality. But, I believe there is more to it than that. I guess my question is What is the difference between subjects that are considered everyday types (banal) and those, which fall into the “I’ve seen this a million times before” (cliché) types?

Banality The act of shooting a banal subject, when done through a caring (concerned and sympathetic) eye, tends to raise the subject to a new level of awareness of something much bigger and more profound. There is an underlying ‘something’ that is elevated through the act of photographic framing. The elements come together in a way that offers clarity to what might otherwise be seen as trite. This kind of subject matter is one of the more difficult subjects to shoot. It takes

a heightened sense of things in order to make successful and artistic images from banal subject matter. Yet they are everywhere. Because they are so ubiquitous, the subjects require contemplation, insight and uncommon awareness.

Cliché On the other hand, it seems to me that cliché has more to do with finding and shooting only those subjects, which are considered ‘photogenic’ subject matter. They tend to be those subjects that we see in most of the inline “Photo websites”. They are the images we see of sunsets, pretty faces, animals and waterfalls. They are about the things we want to see, rather than that stuff, which is along the way. The subjects are more fantasy than reality. The cliché tends to be something of beauty, desirable and/or romantic. The cliché is one that sells cameras and other goods, makes people happy, shows us the beautiful and creates a sense that all is OK. The cliché is a product of what we might all want the world to be like. It makes quiet calm at the doctors office and tends to be purchased for above the couch. It is almost always shallow and unoriginal. In the scheme of the now, it is mostly a fabrication. With cliché we tend to travel far and wide to get to what we think is worthwhile subject. In that sense, it fails to see most of the real world. It only sees what it wants to see. It buries our heads in a pipe dream. There is nothing wrong with showing the beautiful. In fact, we need to see the beauty as well as that which is not considered beautiful. We need to see it, especially when the world is being man-altered at the rapid rate it is doing so. The reality is that we need to be aware of everything our world has to offer. We need to know that there are things worth saving, that the world has magnificence. However, we need to see it all in the most truthful fashion we can find. But it is equally important to see the realities that banality can show us. Banality is to me all that other stuff that we seem to ignore. Believe me, I would wish a lot of it away if I could. But at least in photographic terms, banality is everyday life. Banality is the real stuff that most of us do not pay much attention to. It is the stuff that we turn from or don’t see, because it is everywhere. It is the shadow that we

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seem to forget. It is what we drive right past on our way to capture the magnificent cliché. But banality is where we find truth. It shows us our real world, our predicaments, our hope, our failures, our inhumanity as well as our humanity. It is like a mirror in that it shows us ourselves.

This article I found to incredibly helpful to my photographic portfolio. My main concern with the type of imagery I produce was that it could be considered to be on the boarder of the cliché. I never wanted to produce imagery that could be considered cliché, as to me this has a very negative connotation, however this article has an interesting view on the cliché and that these negative aspects that tend to follow it are

not necessary, and that the cliché if done right could be just as effective as the banal. Although the idea with my imagery is to look at aspects of the banal and not the cliché, the main point of my work is that the reception of the image is completely up to the viewer. This means that it is up to the viewer to decide if my imagery is banal or cliché, either can be correct.

EVALUATION

This issue might to some seem alittle pointless, as it is mainly just a cataloge of the work of others, with only small evaluative comments from myself. This is not the case however as to work in this way means not only I understand the text better, by the act of typing it out, but also that I could practice the editorial layout of text. Layouts with images is one thing, and I think I can do quite well, however large amounts of text or text on its own, as shown here, is very difficult to make look visually appealing in a zine. So by creating this small addition to my zines, I have gained theoretical knowledge, which will help me write my critical review of this project, and editorial knowledge that may benifit me in the future.

This the the final installment of VISION,

37due to printing times...