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. 

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

Identity

Richard Billingham’s “Ray’s a Laugh”



Photographer Richard Billingham was born into the world of Cider drinking, cat loving parents Ray and Liz not long after came a baby brother called Jason. His farther was an unemployed drunk his mother was larger than life and devoted to the two boys and her cats, they lived on a council tower block in Cradley Heath.
The series is based around the photographers dysfunctional family, who are torn apart by alcohol and poverty. The book depicts his alcoholic father (in images such as him sitting by the toilet after just being sick, below), squalid surroundings and violent interactions between the family members. It is raw footage of Billingham’s closest family members, that shows a sometimes-uneasy portrayal of their lives.
However, the images are contrasted with moments of love and happiness, and when I first went through the book from cover to cover, I was brought almost to tears of joy with the image of his grinning father lying in bed. This book takes you from despair to happiness with only a turn of the page, and is one of the most compelling photo-stories I have ever read.






Some of Richard’s own words:
“My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic.
He doesn’t like going outside, my mother Elizabeth hardly drinks,
but she does smoke a lot.
She likes pets and things that are decorative.
They married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11,
but now he is back with Ray and Liz again.
Recently he became a father.
Dad was some kind of mechanic, but he’s always been an
alcoholic. It has just got worse over the years.
He gets drunk on cheap cider at the off license.
He drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
Originally, our family lived in a terraced house,
but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation,
sold the house. Then we moved to the council tower block,
where Ray just sits in and drinks.
That’s the thing about my dad, there’s no subject he’s interested
in, except drink.”
“It’s not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise,
be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually
meaningful as I can make it -
in all these photographs I never bothered with things like
the negatives. Some of them got marked and scratched.
I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed
at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.”
“Sometimes Jason is there, sometimes he isn’t. He lives at a lot of different addresses. Now he’s got a kid. When I used to come home from college, he was in care. He ended up coming back to Mum and Dad to do his A-levels, but after about a month he didn’t bother getting up in the mornings and just jacked it in. He said he had no freedom when he was in care. Now he has loads. He just didn’t have any motivation.”
“My Mum will be looking at the book and if she hasn’t got full concentration on it she will say, ‘Pass me a fag, Ray.’ They relate to the work but I don’t think they recognize the media interest in it, or the importance. I don’t think that they think anything of it, really. They are not shocked by it, or anything. We’re used to living in poverty.”
“In all these photographs I never bothered with things like the negatives. Some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.”

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/07/richard-billingham-rays-laugh.html

Landscape myths fantasy and ritual
E- resource moodle


Stories like little red riding hood Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz all happened in and were related to the landscape.



David LaChapelle: Forgotten Doll, 1998

taken from:http://www.focus.de/fotos/david-lachapelle-forgotten-doll-1998_mid_161408.html


David LaChapelle

LaChapelle’s stylish base is made of obsessive scenarios erased on extremely artificial scenography, often on piles of details among which are sitting, lying or standing some of the most important products of American dream factory: actors and actresses, singers, starlets, those who had ones started the yellow road aiming for their five minutes of fame.

"My role is to find beauty in what is ugly to others. for me its like really, she is beautiful, when I photograph her its like celebrating the idea of finding the beauty in her."
His works are screaming, pre-apocalyptic landscapes of Hollywood and visually aggressive images of hedonism in its final stage. David LaChapelle started his work as an artist in the world of fashion photography, from where he turn aside to the sphere of art, using all means of modern technology in the creative process his thoughts are
“well the computer is slave to the camera, because without a good photograph all the technology in the world doesn't take a good picture you have to have a good photograph to begin with.”


Thomas Joshua Cooper-
centered his early his work around the ritual and ceremonial he treated the landscape as a place full of rituals such as pagan rituals places like Stonehenge for example paganism used the landscape narrative and seasons to inform their practices.




Magical moment' ... Thomas Joshua Cooper's best shot http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/aug/28/photography.art1#

This is what he had to say:

“This rock is perched on a cliff, behind which is a sheer drop of 500-600ft. I made the picture in 2004, at the southernmost point of the Cap-Vert peninsula near Dakar in Senegal, which is the westernmost point of continental Africa. It is part of a project I've been working on since 1990, to make pictures looking out to sea from all the extreme edges of the land masses around the Atlantic ocean.
The Dakar army base is situated on the cliffs above this rock, and it's extremely hard to get to because of the high-level security. My guide had grown up in the area, however, and knew of some holes in the fortifications. So we snuck through under cover of night, with armed guards all around us. The swell of the sea in the background was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. My guide whispered to me, "We really have to go as soon as possible, because if we're caught, we're both in jail."
When I started to look at the scene more closely, I noticed that at the base of the rock was a graffitied double arrow, almost certainly a reference point for some refugee boat, which is one of the reasons why the place was so heavily patrolled by the army. What made me extraordinarily happy about the arrow was that it was pointing to the easternmost point of South America, where I was heading next.
I had to be quick, but I just had time to make the picture, which was a long exposure of maybe 15 minutes. Behind the rock, you can see there is a white slanting line, which is a long breaker that fell more or less regularly because of the underwater geography. It happened over and over again during the time of my exposure, so that I got a continuous but fuzzy white line. The picture is one of my favourite things in the world. If it doesn't sound too silly for an adult to say so, this was an entirely magical moment”

Truth and Credibility, fact and fiction bookstock

The notion of objectivity of the photograph as a document and its ability to tell the truth and the ease with which photographs can use artistic tools to manipulate images far beyond accepted standards has been under pressure since the inception of inexpensive digital methods of recording information in the early 1990s in photojournalism it started in earnest with the digital composite of Olympic ice skaters Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, showing the rivals practicing together on the cover of New York Newsday in 1994.



This digital composite of Olympic ice skaters Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan appeared on the cover of New York Newsday. The picture showed the rivals practicing together, shortly after an attack on Kerrigan by an associate of Harding’s husband. The picture caption reads: “Tonya Harding, left, and Nancy Kerrigan, appear to skate together in this New York Newsday composite illustration. Tomorrow, they’ll really take to the ice together.”


Does the fake photo-shoppery or the orchestration of an event by a photojournalist affect the integrity of camera-based imagery elsewhere? Can news images ever really reflect objective reality? Is there such a thing as "reasonably real news"? Do people still presume photographs to be evidentiary? Are the photographs we see on the front page of the New York Times transparent vehicles of the subjects portrayed? Is viewing a photograph the next best thing to being there?
Reuters admits altering Beirut photo
Reuters withdraws photograph of Beirut after Air Force attack after US blogs, photographers point out 'blatant evidence of manipulation.' Reuters' head of PR says in response, 'Reuters has suspended photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to photograph.' Photographer who sent altered image is same Reuters photographer behind many of images from Qana, which have also been subject of suspicions for being staged
A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web logs. The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage. The photograph showed two very heavy plumes of black smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut after an Air Force attack on the Lebanese capital. Reuters has since withdrawn the photograph from its website, along a message admitting that the image was distorted, and an apology to editors.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html
Yaakov Lappin




Careless digital alterations by Adnan Hajj using Adobe Photoshop software embellishing Israeli air-strike damage in Beirut on August 5th 2006 was caught by Mike Thorson, a Wisconsin-based artist who alerted the publisher of a popular conservative media blog watchdog, "Little Green Footballs", and a fire-storm of controversy broke out. Charles Johnson's public outing of Hajj's embellished photographs on his blog led to the photojournalist's firing and the removal of his 920 photographs from the Reuter's archive. Is it incidents like this that are destroying the credibility for news organizations and photography as a vehicle for truth Or Is everybody pushing their own brand of reality?

I found you can’t believe what you see and that the era of photographs being used as a form of document of truth are a thing of the past.
The interesting point for me that people are so used to seeing the horror of war that the photographers feel a need to make it look worse than the photographs show as if its not enough
I think if I lived in the city where the bombs were dropped and you found out that photographers were doing this it would make you feel awful.
Although I have always known about you can manipulate photographs I wasn’t aware about the extent of the use in photojournalism airbrushing for fashion is one thing but using as a tool for giving war photos more of an impact to sell to the press I think is disgusting.

Evidence And Typologies

Evidence And Typologies

Internet based research


The Dusseldorf School of Photography


A group of students at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the mid 1970s who studied under the influential photographers Bernd and Hiller Becher,known for their rigorous devotion to the 1920s German tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity). The Bechers¿ photographs were clear, black and white pictures of industrial archetypes (pitheads, water towers, coal bunkers). Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth modified the approach of their teachers by applying new technical possibilities and a personal and contemporary vision, while retaining the documentary method their tutors propounded.

Gillian Wearing
“Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say”
This photograph is from a series called ‘Signs..(you can see the very long title above)’. Gillian Wearing
asked random people who walked by to write down their thoughts on a piece of paper.

If Wearing stopped you on the street today, what would you write down on the piece of paper? Desperate means the same as ‘really need’ – what do you think this man needed? What do you think happened to him after this picture was taken?




I signed on and they would not give me nothing' 1992-3

The complete series of Signs is comprised of over fifty colour photographs. A broad cross-section of people participated in the photographs and the series provides a fascinating social and historical document. It refers to the economic decline in Britain in the early 1990s, manifested by statements such as 'Will Britain get through this recession?'. However most of the signs express intimate thoughts or personal convictions. This selection of five photographs shows the wide range of responses Wearing elicited from the collaborating members of the public. One of the photographs shows an elderly couple, standing on the curb of a busy street, holding a sign saying 'I like to be in the country', while another photograph shows a homeless man bearing the poignant statement: 'I signed on and they would not give me nothing'. Among the group is one of Wearing's best known images which depicts a smartly dressed young man with a mild, even complacent, expression holding a sign saying simply, 'I'm desperate'. In a 1996 interview Wearing described how 'People are still surprised that someone in a suit could actually admit to anything, especially in the early 1990s, just after the crash… I think he was actually shocked by what he had written, which suggests it must have been true. Then he got a bit angry, handed back the piece of paper, and stormed off.' (Unpublished interview with Marcus Spinelli, South Bank Centre 1997)
Like many of Wearing's later works, such as Confess All on Video. Don't worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian. 1994 (Tate T07329), the Signs series examines the relationship between public image and private identity. Wearing often cites the influence of early British 'fly-on-the-wall' television documentaries such as Michael Apted's pioneering Seven-Up (Granada Television 1964), which charted the progress of a group of children at seven year intervals, or Paul Watson's raw investigation of family life in The Family (BBC 1974). In these television programmes intimate experiences were presented to a nationwide audience as apparently unmediated 'real life'. However the tradition of 'fly-on-the-wall' documentaries, as well as confessional TV chat shows, imply an authenticity which Gillian Wearing persistently questions. In an attempt to break down social stereotypes and masks, Wearing frequently works with people marginalised by mainstream society, such as homeless people, drunks, transsexuals or convicts. She has said: 'A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths… I'm always trying to find ways of discovering new things about people, and so in the process discover more about myself.' ('Sign Language', Dazed and Confused, no. 25, 1996, pp.53, 55)



Rineke Dijkstra
Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra tends to work in series, concentrating on individual portraits. She focuses on people in a transitional stage of their life, such as women after giving birth in 'Mothers', adolescents and pre-adolescents on the beach in her 'Beach' series and new recruits in 'Israeli Soldiers'. Her subjects stand facing the camera against a minimal background. The simplicity of the resulting image encourages us to direct all our attention towards the isolated subject. Dijkstra has published two monographs (Rineke Dijkstra: Beach Portraits and Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits) and her work is exhibited in museums worldwide.

The body as an object of medical research

The body as an object of medical research
Research via books

The body has been used for medical research as far back as records show and beyond weather it has been through the medical profession for research and teaching purposes or a person’s own curiosity for self-investigation when diagnosed with illness fighting their own disease, this was done not only through the written word but through painting, drawing then later by photographs this is known to this day as Medical illustration.


Gerhard Lang

Gerhard Lang’s artwork is poeticised science. His research involves investigating cultural processes, e.g. that of perception. How we explain our existence and the world is subjected here to a close examination that is both earnest and playful. In this context, the essential question for Lang is how landscape and man are related. Lang’s specific strategy of analysis employs a wide variety of acoustic and pictorial processes that he incorporates into his work in a per formative and playful manner.



2 composites taken from http://angusbehm.tumblr.com/page/2

In 1992 Gerhard Lang photographed all residents (58) of his home village Schloss-Nauses before superimposing them over each other by means of a particular photographic technique – composite photography. The outcome was The Typical Inhabitant of Schloss-Nauses 1992. Eight years later, Lang repeated the process. The composite from the year 2000 shows how much the typical inhabitant of Schloss-Nauses 1992 had changed within eight years





Jo Spence

Jo Spence is most famous for her self-portraits depicting her journey with breast cancer. Her most notable collection "A Picture of Heath?" features this struggle in which she recorded her treatment and growing dissatisfaction with the NHS and conventional medicines she credits homeopathy for her eventual recovery.
She used phototherapy, photography as a cure for emotional instability during her traditional Chinese cancer treatment. Jo Spence portrayed feelings of having no control over her life and worthlessness through her depression from battling cancer.

The artist eventually died in 1992 from complications arising from leukemia.

Taken from the book “Putting myself in the Picture” by Jo Spence