Children and Partners (Family) Web

Dad on Bed, 1985 Larry Sultan© Larry Sultan.


"Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology." (Larry Sultan)

Larry Sultan often takes photographs from home. he shoots his mother and father the most in their comfortable middle class home, capturing their 'perfect' family life. but is it really the 'perfect' family life? this image indicates otherwise; we can see the relationship between Sultan and his family straight away. We get the feeling and understanding between the family. This image creates a narrative - what this image says to me, is possibly the dad got sick of waiting for the image to be taken and just gone back to watching TV. His mother, however, is more patient. As Sultan's dad was a retired lawyer and in those days photography was deemed as not a real job, it is almost like his father didn't take Sultan's job too seriously. 

I personally love these images, the colours really make them. it provokes questions and whether they are fully staged or not, it leads us to create our own narratives about the image. 

References:


BBC - Photography - Genius of Photography - Gallery - Larry Sultan. 2012. BBC - Photography - Genius of Photography - Gallery - Larry Sultan. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/gallery/sultan.shtml. [Accessed 24 April 2012].

Larry Sultan: The king of colour photography - Features - Art - The Independent . 2012. Larry Sultan: The king of colour photography - Features - Art - The Independent . [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/larry-sultan-the-king-of-colour-photography-2043204.html. [Accessed 24 April 2012].

Families Photographed: Histories

Harry Jacobs was brought up in the East End and moved to Brixton in the 1950s. He began photographing people in their own homes, before getting his Stockwell studio in about 1965. In an interview in 2004, Harry said: “Our first shop in Granville Arcade was right opposite

Geneva and Somerleyton Roads where most of the black people were living. They already knew my brother’s jewellery shop, so going out knocking door-to-door, they were my obvious customers. “I used to do my spiel. I’d get the woman at the door and explain what I was doing, taking photographs… And then I’d arrange to go back in the evening; the whole family would be there in the front room in their best clothes.

Harry Jakobs photographed their rites of passage: christenings, marriages, graduation ceremonies and funerals.

Harry never turned a job down and tens of thousands of local people passed before that famous studio

backdrop which many people believed was a view of somewhere in the Caribbean but which actually he bought from a wallpaper shop in Peckham.

“I’d put Photo-flood bulbs in the light sockets, burn about a pound’s worth of their electricity and take the photos.” For any black celebrity visiting Brixton, from the Jamaican High Commissioner on down, a visit to Jacobs’ studio for a photo-shoot was one of those thing which you just did. Here boxer Frank Bruno poses with his manager Terry Lawless in 1985. When Harry finally retired in 1999 he left some 5,000 anonymous portrait photos stapled to the walls of his office and studio. This remarkable ‘community archive’, the record of over 40 years’ work, was carefully removed and is now preserved at Lambeth Archives. 

Contemplation, Mediation and The Landscape.

Landscape is traditionally thought of a pretty trees, and skies. There often delightful pictures in which draw in the attention of the viewer, predominantly used as house décor to brighten the room and create a sense of bliss.

Clearly inspired by the work of Ansel Adams, photographer George DeWolfe has a series of photographs titled “Contemplative Landscape”; although his photographs appear in every way to be an ordinary when the image has your full attention unknown aspects of reality are recognised. The tight frame of some of his shots draw you in but make you feel slightly on edge or uneasy. His images have a strong tonal range and a strong contrast between dark and light. Dependant on the environment of the finished print alters the way in which you view his work. For example, if his work was in a dark room, the images would have a darker meaning to the innocence and beauty they’d have if placed in a bedroom as décor for example.   

http://georgedewolfe.zenfolio.com/p330010399/h6768540#h6ffd9c1

Landscape

Ingrid Pollard (British, b.1953, Guyana). From the series Pastoral Interlude. 1987. Gelatin silver print coloured by hand. © Ingrid Pollard.

Ingrid Pollard’s ‘Pastoral Interlude’ explores the experience of Black people living in the English countryside. Steeped in the heritage of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, her photographs explore the beauty of the English landscape and coastline, alongside the memories hidden within England’s history and its relationship to Africa and the Caribbean. Her interest in the layers of history is echoed in her use of 19th century photographic techniques.

“…it’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I though I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread….” Ingrid Pollard

Typologies

E-resources.


The origins of typologies in photography came from the Germans Bernd and Hilla Becher. It was the subtitle of their first monograph 'Anon-yme Skulpturen: Eine Ttpologie Technischer Bauten"

(Bernd and Hilla Becher)

(Jeff Brouws)

Another photographer using typologies is Jeff Brouws. Influenced by the photographs by the artist Ed Ruscha, Brouws also created a series of photographs of 26 abandoned gas stations.

(Ed Ruscha)

Typologies, are basically, similar objects that are  identified by their external appearance, and things that have that appearance have other things in common with it. So things are grouped together by how they look. 


                                                                     

Still Life: Documentary

During the Great American Depression of 1935 – 36, the Missouri-born photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) embarked on a photographic project that would produce some of the most iconic images in the history of photography.

Evans was employed as an ‘Information Specialist’ in President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration.  He was commissioned alongside other eminent photographers of the time (Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein) to record the work of the FSA’s rehabilitation programme, as well as to document the daily lives of farmers and flood victims.   

He travelled to Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina photographing churches, graveyards, busy streets, shops, cafes, signs and billboards as well as making more intimate portraits of family life.  He also recorded interiors and exteriors of sharecroppers’ homes, group portraits and the famous close-up portraits of the Burroughs family.   

These disquieting, provocative images are seen by many as the culmination of Evans’ photographic career, capturing the expressions of the weak and vulnerable and showing the fragility of their existence.  His work bears witness to the realities faced by Depression-era communities in the Deep South. 

Through the evidence of trial and error in successive images and through Evans's own words this important book reveals how a major American artist actually worked. The 747 photographs document chronologically his choice of subject and his lifelong technical experimentation. Page by page, the reader experiences what Evans saw, what he recorded and how he altered what he recorded to achieve the image he intended. One sees the same subject photographed with different lenses and in different lights.

Installation Art: Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy is a brilliant British artist who collaborates with nature to make his creations. Besides England and Scotland, his work has been created at the North Pole, in Japan, the Australian Outback, in the U.S. and many others

Andy Goldsworthy regards his creations as transient, or ephemeral. He photographs each piece once right after he makes it. His goal is to understand nature by directly participating in nature as intimately as he can. He generally works with whatever comes to hand: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns.
He thought he'd end up as a farmer, but has made a career out of creating exquisite sculptures from twigs and stones, leaves and snow. Now, for a major retrospective, Britain's foremost landscape artist is making a curtain of horse-chestnut twigs - and smearing dung on gallery windows.

 in his words:

"I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and "found" tools--a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I take the opportunities each day offers: if it is snowing, I work with snow, at leaf-fall it will be with leaves; a blown-over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn. " 

"Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there." 

"I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue."  

"Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature."

"The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below."

We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature. We’ve lost our connection to ourselves.

http://www.morning-earth.org/artistnaturalists/an_goldsworthy.html

Still Life - Traditional

Still life photographs can be something so excellent, that is everyday, that is things you often miss during your daily routine, and it can also be something you stage. Like, how you stage your cup of tea next to your plate of toast, or a flower vase next to the window. one of my favourite examples of traditional still life photography is the work by Josef Sudek. .

JOSEF SUDEK AT PHOTOGRAPHY-NOW. 2012. JOSEF SUDEK AT PHOTOGRAPHY-NOW. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.photography-now.net/josef_sudek/portfolio1.html. [Accessed 24 April 2012].

Sudek’s still lifes, often rejected by photographic critics at the time, tend to feature limited tonal scales and are heavily involved with mystery and darkness. These mysterious images are powerfully personal explorations of himself, his self-examination coming from a philosophy shared by many painters of his era that symbolic form equates with inner emotions.

This thoughtful and isolated nature led to many of his still life images being shot from his studio window in Prague, using the window as a backdrop, often through a curtain of ice, dew or rain drops acting to distort the barrier between the outside world his own; and as a method of framing his chosen objects. Sudek was particularly interested in the refraction of light through glass objects and so his studio window served him well in his studies.

Family and Photography

It might seem a simple task for somebody to take photographs of their family, capturing the memories to store in an album, documenting what will eventually become history. But Richard Billingham differs greatly from the traditional portraiture shot; he raises formal awareness into the life of an alcoholic by capturing his father highly under the influence of alcohol.

His photographs show what goes on inside his family home. As expected, the décor isn’t too up market and the cleanliness is despicable. Odd contrasts run throughout Billingham’s book “Ray’s a Laugh”; he often depicts his father in his half-conscious alcoholic state whilst his mother goes about normal daily activities. His photographs appear as a simple snapshot yet document a social subject matter that is very serious.  To an extent each photograph is an auto biography which breaks the tradition of silent surrounding private secrets of his family.

Despite the serious matter of the photographs, they do appear quite humorous thus reinforced by the title of the book. His facial expression throughout add commercial elements and the sexism and traditional womanly chores are visible. A sense of heartache comes with the pictures; the poverty and deprivation in which Billingham grew up in is capture on film, despite being taken in the care at the age of eleven, we can guess at the upbringing he had through these photographs.

There is such integrity in this work which creates a sense of beauty. Capturing them in their own home shows the innocence; the naturalness and lack of print quality compels a desire of happiness. 

'untitled' / 'ray's a laugh', 
1995 © richard billingham
courtesy scalo books

'untitled' / 'ray's a laugh', 
1995 © richard billingham
courtesy scalo books

'untitled' 
1994 © richard billingham

the body as an aesthetic object.

what makes a body 'aesthetic'? The abject body.

Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking, Chris Townsend, Prestel, 1998

Townsend , C, 1998. Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking (A Channel Four book) [Paperback]. 5th ed. England : Prestel; illustrated edition edition.

in this book are images by Joel-Peter Witkin. 

Witkin's work is very dark, his images provoke and startle. his work focus' on 'freaks' and 'deformed people' other themes in his work includes death and corpses. 

here are some examples.

METAL ON METAL: Joel Peter Witkin's transgressive photographic art. 2012. METAL ON METAL: Joel Peter Witkin's transgressive photographic art. [ONLINE] Available at: http://metalonmetalblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/joel-peter-witkins-transgressive.html. [Accessed 24 April 2012].

the kiss.

Reminiscent of portrait as a vanity. 

i find these photographs controversial to look at and not what we would class as normal. in our society, we turn our noses up at the 'ugly' yet we are still so intrigued with death.There is nothing more fascinating death because we all have death in common, yet it is a mystery to us all.  It's an uncertainty and a real loss of innocence when we become aware of death.

Contemporary Still Life With Reference To The Traditional

Arguably, we take still life objects for granted. We pay lack of attention to them but in some ways abuse them to the extent they become broken, consumed or forgotten. When thinking of contemporary still life, what springs to mind is paintings such as “Still Life with Vegetables and Fruit” by Vincent Van Gogh or Claude Monet’s painting of “Bouquet of Sunflowers”. However, I believe photography has modernised the way in which we interpret and admire still life objects. Photography has gone beyond the analysis of an object and raised the status of something ordinary; drawing out attention to fine detail and applying relevance to still life we may not have acknowledged before. 

Painting, Oil on Canvas
Nuenen: September, 1885
Van Gogh Museum
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Europe

Bouquet of Sunflowers, 
Claude Monet, 1881, 
oil on canvas 101 x 81.5 cm

Edward Weston had the ability to apply a democratic approach to his subject matter. His intentions were to make a commonplace/object unusual. The tonal qualities created in his photographs of imbue everyday objects, both natural and manmade. He takes simple objects and produces photographs that look like a modernist sculpture. Weston once wrote that something as ordinary and as extraordinary as a pepper "takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind". Western was interested in the formal qualities of mundane objects, which lead him to take a series of photographs of peppers. His lighting techniques allow us to investigate the curves, shape and design of this specific vegetable. Although at the same time, it also throws us slightly off balance. Is it just a light weight pepper we see? Or does the dark harsh lighting make it seem heavy and dense? Creating a monumental sculpture from a piece of fruit is something that differs greatly from traditional still life.

Edward Weston
Pepper #30

Edward Weston
Pepper 1930

Social Networking and Sharing.

The vast development of the internet has encouraged the population to go online thus resulting in the creation of social networking websites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. The majority of both young children through to adults are computer literate, providing them with almost unlimited access to information and the ability to keep in touch around the globe; whether it be with friends/relatives or the news worldwide. People can now exploit a huge range of digital communication tools, allowing them to share experiences and keep in touch in a way that previous generations could only have imagined. The power of the internet has had a strong impact on photography, both technically and visually.

Flickr

(Although many websites have this layout, I have chosen to focus on Flickr with it being the most popular online photo manager)

Image and video hosting website, Flickr, allows pictured to be stored, sorted and shared online. It helps organize a huge mass of photos into categories which can be searched by any user of the web without even owning a Flickr account. The creation of such websites has democratised professional photographers; there has always been a clear view between professional work and ‘family snaps’ – i.e. space in the gallery. However social networking websites don’t divide any specific quality of photography into categories, allowing amateur photographers to share the space with highly professionals.

Such invention of websites has meant that the creation and documentation of family albums are no long archived but stored online for other people to see. Personally to me, this makes them less intimate and delicate giving them less meaning. 

Instagram

With the ever changing techniques and styles in photography, people have begun using old cameras to get something more genuine out of their image. However the development of technology and social networking has encouraged the creation of new photo manipulation iPhone apps, e.g. Instagram and Hipstamatic. Both of these being photo sharing websites, connected to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr. 

“Digital photography never looked so analogue” after all the development of digital photography, why is it that we now want to convert back to the way old pictures look? Is it because this is the way we want our photographs too look but simply too lazy to go through the development process of film? The excitement of waiting for the process does not exist in this context. The idea of that has been destroyed, this method allows you to capture the image and continue to retake it until you’ve got what you want, the app then allowing you to make it look as though it was captured in an instant.  

Identity

In her fashion series of 1983-1984 Cindy Sherman explores the conditions underlying the depiction of women, and questions the conventional ideal of beauty through a use of exaggerations and reversals. “I don’t do self-portraits. I always try to get as far away from myself as possible in the photographs…” this statement poses a serious challenge to art and cultural critics; if it isn’t Sherman herself then who is the women depicted throughout the series?

My attention was really drawn to this statement after reading it, as to why she doesn’t want to create self-portraits yet uses her own body, distorted by costumes, make-up and props. The woman we see depicted withdraws herself from the world, finds refuge in her own room and impersonates different identities. Thus to me implying she felt her identity was not strong enough to deal with the urban violence in New York City in which she felt threatened and alienated within her own family. To reduce the threat she learnt to transform her identity, creating a brave persona in which she then photographed, forming this body of work.  

It seems inevitable that Sherman created her own version of a fashion spread; she started to study her own face continually from different angles until she became unfamiliar with it. She disguised herself by dressing up in different costumes until her figure became that of a stranger when she saw the reflection of herself in the mirror. Her portraits articulate her sense of dissatisfaction with the expectations of cultural femininity. 

A feeling of sorrow and loneliness is created within this body of work. The fact she changes her identity to feel comfortable, firstly doing this in her own bedroom and then bravely moving to do so in her studio. “People are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognizable. I’m trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me”. Whether the purpose is to supplement a narrative or reshape a fantasy theme, trigging the memories the viewers is something that is clearly intended by the work of Cindy Sherman.

Untitled #132, Cindy Sherman, 1984

Untitled #138, Cindy Sherman, 1984

Untitled #96, Cindy Sherman, 1984

                                                                                                                       

Photography and the Family

Families and Sub-Cultures.
Is the 90's still a time where 'children should be seen and not heard'?
The 1990's presents the end of Modernity and the dawn of the Post Modern age. A time where peoples rights were at a high, including the rights of children and young people. As a child is is defined by UNCRC as under 18 years old, society begins to question their own rights. Predictably causing conflict many artist began to respond to such changes.

I have been looking at the work of Tierey Gearon a female photographer who photographs her own family. Her work is clearly provoking and is very suiting of the 90's. She questions the role of children and their relationships with adult and each other in her project 'I am camera'. Other than the obvious controversy associated with images of her children naked, Tierey allows her children to wear quite disturbing masks. she often captures them in playful and familiar childlike surroundings and settings, however her use of masks creates quite a
sinister and striking theme.














http://www.tierneygearon.com/exhibitions/i-am-a-camera-gallery/
By- Tierey Gearon- project ' I am camera'

Her work gives the power over to the children in a sense. Particulally in the images above the children's posturse are very stern and grounded, giving the audience a sense on confrantaion. As if to say we have a voice and we are going to use it. By wearing masks the children aren't individually identified they are speaking of behalf of all children. I can imagine that these images would present parents with a fear, a shift in power balance is taking place and Tierey's photos present this beautifully. Everything about these images presents family snap shot with a twist. The bright colours and the defacing the only adult in the picture on the left, again puts the children in control.
Her work in the book 'Mother Project' similarly provokes the conventions of family relationships and what we expect to see.

"Tierney Gearon’s photographs have been called manipulative, disturbingly ambiguous, even perverse; the London police demanded that the Saatchi Gallery which first showed the offending photos of her young children take the pictures down. Tierney has always maintained she loves her subjects deeply and understands them better than anyone else. How could she not? They are her family."
http://www.tierneygearon.com/exhibitions/the-mother-project/- Taken from Tierey Gearon's website.