The Photographic Image in Digital Culture: Susan Murray.

Source: Murray, L. (ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture: Susan Murray. Abingdon: Routledge. (Pp165-82)

Revisiting Flickr

• Flickr images organised in groups and batches (technological features) and fetishization, classification, collection, memory, flow, taste, signification, identification (functions).
• Members page – “decentralised network of similar pages” contributing “to the construction of a community [through keywords tags, comments and contact lists] and larger collection of photographs.” Lister: 2013:165)
• “Collaborative experience: a shared display of memory, taste, history, daily life and judgement through which amateur and professional photographers collectively articulate a novel, digitized (and decentralised) aesthetic of the everyday.” (Lister: 2013:165)
• Digital camera is necessary to document daily life, resulting in a temporal shift with our association of everyday images and narratives about ourselves and our relationship with the world.
• Online photo-sharing with Facebook makes it accessible for anyone to upload whole album in one go to share with family and friends.  Other sites focus on on-line storage with personalised memorabilia such as mugs, I Phone cases.
• Flickr and Facebook differ in sharing with the community which has enabled the two to remain in the digital world.
• Flickr influences the development of photographic technique – e.g. filters, calls members artists and concentrates on aesthetic practice rather than online social identities and offline lives.
• Flickr – slow photography “goal is the experience of studying some object carefully and exercising creative choice.” (Wu as cited by Lister, 2013:168) “Another redefinition in digital practice.” (Lister, 2013:168)
• Flickr blog - techniques, teaching, sharing – different from other social networking sites.

Brief history of amateur and domestic photography

Zimmerman – Kodak cameras – leisure / consumer activity. “organised social and artistic practice that was valued for its spontaneity, authenticity, naturalness and emotialism (particularly in the widespread use and reference to pictorialism).” (Lister, 2013:169) Two types of amateurs – fun or special events recording and “serious amateurs” who engaged in art and middle to upper class leisure. Professionals worked in studios. Pictorialism was inescapable; people wanted to replicate nature and so modern urban life and subjects which populate social networking sites was considered unacceptable. Zimmerman argued that this “deflected cameras, at least on the discursive level, from insertion into the day to day world of industrial capitalism.” (Lister, 2013:169)

Manovich in 1995 wrote “The logic of the digital photograph is one of historical continuity and discontinuity. The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes and of display, and patterns of spectreship in modern visual culture – and at the same time, weaves this net even stronger. The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalising the photograph. In short, this logic is that of photography after photography.” (Lister, 2013:170)

Theorists have now moved past the issue of indexicality and representation to study the materiality, universal presence and ephemeralness of digital photographs and question whether the value and meaning of the images is diminished. Cohen studied photobloggers and noticed that they appeared to post banal images to stress that their images are not traditional snapshot images but life as they experience it.

Transience, collection and the everyday image

Photography linked to history, memory, absence and loss by several writers including Barthes and Benjamin. Pollen argues that Flickr and digital photography websites is more transient than loss. Flickr moves the old photos to the back when new ones are uploaded, providing an autobiographical account of the photographer.

“Mobile imagining as autobiographical practice proceeds according to a logic of catalogue or database...Such a logic privileges techniques of selection and (re)combination, which do not operate according to cause-effect relations.” (Heidi Rae Cooley as cited by Lister, 2013:174)

Some categories on Flickr have very strict rules on what can be included but although the images are all a specific type, they are all unique. E.g doors and windows in decay.

Line is blurred on Flickr between serious amateurs and professionals but clues are present such as comments and followers. New category emerging called “ephemera” because photographs are not as precious as they once were. Disposable – images on memory cards are deleted. Visible straight away and the owner can decide if they keep the image. Taken as everyday moments. Group photo pools have larger albums – shared interests and fetishes.

“Digitisation allows for reinvigoration or remediation of what is essentially a form of album making, which can co-exist with other forms of memory making.” (Hand as cited by Lister, 2013:176)

“While digital photography has become a social tool for “identity, formation, communication and experience” it also remains – like the forms of photography before it – a tool of memory.” (Jose Van Dijk as cited by Lister, 2013:176)

“Digital personal photography gives rise to the new social practices in which pictures are considered visual resources in the microcultures of everyday life. In these microcultures, memory does not so much disappear from the spectrum of social use as it takes on a different meaning.” (Jose Van Dijk as cited by Lister, 2013:176)

Photo sharing and communal aesthetics

Pollen compares Flickr to Bourdieau’s Camera Club studies in that they have similar aspirations and practices although Flickr is much larger with its various communities. Flickr in partnership with Getty images so if some images are chosen, members are paid. Pollen argues that the lines between what is an acceptable image and what is not is blurred, as well as amateurs and professionals being indistinguishable. Whereas old photographs may be scratched or grainy, people seek to do this by decreasing the resolution or compression or adding filters on Instagram or Snapseed; what Manovich calls manipulation.

“While digital photography itself has not revolutionised photography or led to the loss of authenticity of an image as predicted early on, it has significantly altered our relationship to the practice of photography (when coupled with social networking software) as well as to our expectations for and interactions with the image and everyday aesthetic.” (Lister, 2013:180)

When is a cliche not a cliche? Reconsidering mass produced sunsets. Annebella Pollen

Source: Pollen, A. (n.d.) When is a cliche not a cliche? Reconsidering mass produced sunsets. Either / and. Available at: http://eitherand.org/reconsidering-amateur-photography/when-cliche-not-cliche-reconsidering-mass-produced/ last accessed 27/6/17

 Sunsets are ephemeral. Every one is different. Sunset photographs on the other hand are "the most predictable, culturally devalued and banal of all image making practices." (Pollen, A. n.d) Beautiful like a chocolate box through misuse, or the type of subject matter which amateurs strive to photograph well.

As early as 1908, Adolf Loos, a Viennese artist claimed that simplicity was an asset and beautifying was a crime.  John Cooper Powys in Meaning of Culture (1930) suggested that “the less cultured you are, the more you require from nature before you can be roused for reciprocity” (Pollen, A) implying that amateurs took waterfalls and sunsets whilst the more experienced were happy with grass blades on a stone.

"Photographs create the beautiful and - over generations of picture-taking - use it up. Certain glories of nature... have been all but abandoned to the indefatigable attentions of amateur camera buffs. The image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like photographs." (Sontag as cited by Pollen, n.d) meaning photographic mass-production saturates the market and the awe is lost as well as declaring that sunset photographs are the products of the aesthetically naive. Sontag further explains that "In photography's earliest decades, photographs were expected to be idealized images. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful, like a woman, a sunset." 

In 1966, photography critic Julian Stallabrass's ‘Sixty Billion Sunsets’ studied the photographic practice of amateurs and concluded that they were similar to the object in question. His criticism "of mass photographic practice is based on what he perceives to be its overwhelmingly conventionalised sameness (unlike elite art practices, which are positively polarised as avant-garde, creative and distinctive). In commodified camera culture, everyone takes photos of similar things."  (Pollen, A) He declared that all sunset photographs were the same.

This idea continued throughout the 1960's where cliched photographs were given a low cultural status, being thought of as having a "limited aesthetic vision and an undeveloped practice." (Pollen, A) Sontag explained that as photographers became more experienced in art and photography, they grew out of taking cliched pictures. In the 1960’s Sociologists Robert Castell and Dominique Schnapper studied a camera club in which a member echoed these sentiments, suggesting that as photographers gain experience they don’t do banal or pretty.

It seems that training develops photographic vision. Bourdieu questioned whether taste is inherent in social hierarchy and cultural experience and reinforces differences between social groups with a single sunset image. Because everyone can access photography and there is not a judgmental coding system, interpretation is subjective so people will display their social dispositions based on how they take a photograph. He found that “the proportion who declare that a sunset can make a beautiful photo is greatest at the lowest educational level, declines at intermediate levels [...] and grows strongly again among those who have completed several years of higher education and who tend to consider that anything is suitable for beautiful photography.” (Bourdieu as cited by Pollen)

Advice in magazines, online journals, blogs and camera clubs still teach and confuse amateurs with technical and aesthetic advice to aspire to “a good photo”, recognising that not all sunsets are the same.

In 1987, the One Day for Life large-scale charity amateur photography competition, where a national press campaign encouraged “everyone with a camera” to take a photograph of everyday life in Britain competing for a place in a chronological 24-hour book. There were 50,000 photographic rejects of the competition and an archive containing thousands of sunset examples is stored at the University of Sussex. The overall winning photograph was a sunset.

The context of the book suggests that sunrise and sunset within the 24hour time frame. Capture this successfully and you could be featured in the book. This opens the cliché to all who enter the competition rather than just amateurs. Pollard argues that the sunset becomes the signified and signifier of amateur photography. If the book is about amateur photography, photographers may choose to shoot the ordinary, everyday subjects, or even bad photographs. The cover design was a sunset to represent a book of photographs rather than other subjects such as dogs.

The narrative of the images included sunsets (of) and social and aesthetic narratives such as industrial chimneys against the sunset depicting disease (about) often with text because the book was to raise money for charity.

“Their potential to be, at once, undistinguished and prize-winning, clichéd and rich with supporting meaning, is evidently the case with the overall ‘winning’ image, which, despite its ‘chocolate box’ appearance, was a photograph taken in and of the Republic of Ireland, and was intended to function as a critical political commentary on the nationalist limitations of One Day for Life’s British focus at the time of the Troubles.” (Pollen, A)

The digital culture has made us more visually-literate times and artistically knowledgeable, and although the dissemination of images has changed, preferred photographic subjects do not differ much with photographs of friends, family and leisure still dominating. Even advice is still similar to historical advice. Pollard argues that the amount of images produced has increased significantly along with the number opportunities for circulation.

Lynn Berger explains that images become more stereotyped because people see thousands of images of the same subject e.g. 6,000 photographs uploaded to Flickr each minute.  In Penelope Umbrico’s ongoing project of 8,730,221 Suns from Flickr (2011), sunsets are the untouchable photographic subject. In 2006, she found half a million photographs on Flickr. “She then cropped just the sun from these images and printed a partial representation of the mass in a grouped format that borders on the mathematical sublime. The title of this work changes whenever the work is exhibited to reflect the ever-rising quantity of sunsets available on Flickr on the day that the work is hung; currently there are over 9 million examples. Umbrico says that “the title itself has become a comment on the ever-increasing use of web-based photo-communities, and a reflection on the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there.” (Pollen, A)

People continue to photograph sunsets and other clichés because each photograph is exclusive to the photographer. Sunsets are still submitted for competition or public appraisal, representing a lasting, shared significance. Sunsets could be themed linguistically relating Victor Burgin to photography – “signalling “repetition with different significations, or one repeated picture with different captions… As Richard Dyer has argued about stereotypes: they “are a very simple, striking, easily-grasped form of representation but are none the less capable of condensing a great deal of complex information and a host of connotations.” (Pollen, A)

The digital family album

Explore the family album and its iconography or reflects on representations of the self in digital culture.

I chose to produce a series of 6 photographs (these can be photomontage, staged photography, work using found images, work including your own family archives etc.) which reference the family album in some way.

Produce a 500 word blog post outlining your working methods and the research behind your final submission. (Whose work did you study in preparation for this exercise? Why did you choose the techniques that you did and how effective do you think your choice has been, for example?)

I saw an advert for an exhibition called “Reportrait” advertised for Nottingham Castle from late May onwards, exhibiting the work of a wide range of artists including Julie Cockburn who embroiders photographs and Samin Ahmadzadeh who weaves shredded photographs together. This, together with a post from Colossal, prompted me to research Julie Cockburn’s work and the work of other photographers who embroider onto photographs. The craft seems to attract female photographers, although there are male photographers who have exhibited at galleries in America. I was attracted to the idea because it links in with World War 1 postcards and I found examples of photographs being embroidered on Spanish and German postcards from circa 1925.

Julie Cockburn re-imagines found photographs using geometric shapes to add a modern interpretation to nostalgic images – a link between the past and the present. By embroidering over or in front of the face, the viewer sees more of the unseen image.

Figure 1: The Dahlia Effect (2014) Julie Cockburn

Diane Meyer sees photograph’s failure as preserving the experience and personal history. A photograph is nostalgic and obscures the understanding of the past. (Reminds me of Fontcuberta’s Spanish archives).  By cross stitching some of the image, Meyer erases content and context, replacing it with “pixels” (cross stitch) which the viewer is drawn to. There is a connection between the representation (or glitch) and forgetting what really happened.

Figure 2: New Jersey (2011) Diane Meyer

Carolle Benitah explored her old family photographs which represented her and her family, and shared her identity her family history, family secrets, identity and place in the world through revisiting the image and coming to terms with the memories by sharing her version of events through reconstruction of the event by embroidery. Benitah’s use of beads and embroidery is her way of coming to terms with the past event. Making holes in the image, she puts the past behind her.

Figure 3: Les Carfads (2009) Carolle Benitah

All the photographers who use embroidery on their images sew either a mask or a grid over the figures or place we are supposed to be looking at. This physically adds another layer to the image giving it more texture and the photographer experiences the materiality of the photograph, rather than printing and framing or posting on social media. Because the craft involves design and working with the image but using traditional embroidery techniques, it is quite a meditative process and does not have to be done in front of a computer using photoshop. I began to question the authenticity of the older image; some sites claimed to have old embroidered postcards for sale, but I wondered how hard it would be to produce a fake?

I have used this as an exercise to see what works and what doesn’t and am hoping to visit the Nottingham Exhibition.

Starting with a few images which I downloaded from my Facebook albums, I printed them out in a mix of sepia and colour images. The printer didn’t recognise sepia as a tone, instead printing in monochrome which was too dark. I wanted to experiment with different methods and see which worked and which didn’t. The first 6 images worked and the last 3 were not brilliant. They were also chosen to fit in with the embroidery silks in my collection.

Arranged in chronological order, the first image is a corporate image from a firm my husband worked for 18 years ago. This had a mix of people on it, some we kept in contact with and others who are lost when jobs change. It brought back memories, some good, some bad and I can see why some photographers see the needlepoint as therapeutic. I was happy with the result. I would not be able to tell who the people were any more, focusing my attention on smaller details.

So, what happens when you apply the same type of embroidery to a photograph where someone is no longer with us? It doesn’t feel like the image has been destroyed. The memory of the person and the event is still there. It was a chance to revisit the good memories by spending longer with the photograph and reinterpreting it.

In the third image, I was keen to see if the landscape colours worked. They did, which gives me an idea for an assignment 2 image. (These 3 were inspired by Diane Meyers)

The 4^th image uses a different technique, one similar to the old postcards. By embroidering some of the shapes such as a fountain and a bicycle wheel, I got to spent time with a photo that was posted on social media as a holiday picture which is forgotten after the holiday. This would have been a good exercise for seeing shapes in photographs in the days of The Art of Photography.

Images 5 and 6 take Julie Cockburn’s idea applied to my images.   I preferred the small dots. They were much harder to finish – I covered the image in tracing paper, marked the areas to sew and removed the tracing paper at the end. There was a risk of pulling the stitches through. I played with the number of strands. 6 worked the best for the large image and 3 for the smaller dots.    

     

The ones which didn't work

I tried embroidering a squiggly line. It made an already complicated photo look messy. 

I think the circles should be different sizes and colours. The photo is too large for the small circles.

When 2 faces are covered, I couldn’t decide which way to rotate the stripes. Perhaps this is where a geometric shape works best? (managed to get a glitch in it when uploading)

I came across Jane Wagner Deschner's website with a collection of interesting found photographs which had been embroidered. This one is from her "crazy quilt series". It brings together a group of unknown people. In some collections she has taken a quote and embroidered across the images. I thought this may be useful for one of my assignment images.

Figure 4: From the crazy quilt series (2012) Jane Waggoner Deschner

Bibliography

Benitah, C (n.d.) Lens Culture: Carolle Benitah: Photos – Souvenirs. Available at: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/carolle-benitah-photos-souvenirs last accessed 10/5/17

Binding, A. (2012) Deface book. Sleek 33. Fashion Now Art Forever [online] p112 Available at: http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/juliecockburn last accessed 10/5/17

Colossal (2010-16) Found photographs embroidered with colourful thread by Julie Cockburn. Available at: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/tags/embroidery/ last accessed 10/5/17

Deschner, J. (n.d.) Embroidery. Available at: http://www.janedeschner.com/ last accessed 17/5/17

Jobson, C (2017) Found photographs embroidered with colourful thread by Julie Cockburn: Colossal [online] Available at: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/03/found-photographs-embroidered-with-colorful-thread-by-julie-cockburn/ last accessed 17/5/17

Jobson, J  (2014) Artist Hinke Schreuders alters 1950’s advertising and fashion photography with hand stitched embroidery http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/08/embroidered-images-hinke-schreuders/ last accessed 17/5/17

Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery (2017) Reportrait. Available at: http://www.nottinghamcastle.org.uk/exhibitions/reportrait last accessed 17/5/17

O’ Hagan, S (2014) A stitch in time: The dreamlike world of embroidered vintage photography. The Guardian [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/28/embroidered-vintage-portrait-photography-julie-cockburn   last accessed 10/5/17

Robert Mann gallery (2014) Robert Mann gallery: Embroidery. Available at: http://www.robertmann.com/2014-embroidered-gallery/ last accessed 17/5/17

Radwanska Zhang, I (2016) A matter of memory: Photography as object in the digital age. British Journal of Photography [online] Available at:  http://www.bjp-online.com/2016/10/a-matter-of-memory-photography-as-object-in-the-digital-age/ last accessed 17/5/17

Stem, M (2014) Transformative touch: Photographs laced with thread. Hyperallergic. Available at: https://hyperallergic.com/142366/transformative-touch-photographs-laced-with-thread/ last accessed 17/5/17

Taylor and Francis (n.d) Reframing photography: Theory and practice [online] available at: http://www.reframingphotography.com/resources/diane-meyer last accessed 10/5/17

The Photographers Gallery (n.d.) Julie Cockburn Available at: http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/juliecockburn last accessed 10/5/17

The Saachi Gallery (2017) The Saachi Gallery: Maurizio Anzeri. Available at: http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/maurizio_anzeri_new_britannia.htm last accessed 17/5/17

Yourazeri, S (2013) Diane Meyer’s embroidered photography. Available at: https://www.yatzer.com/Diane-Meyer-Embroidered-Photography last accessed 17/5/17

The artist as archivist

Sherrie Levine

Levine documented the “materiality of photography” Cotton, C (2011:221) using well known images from Walker Evans, Elliott Porter and Edward Weston, which she re-photographed from exhibition catalogues and hung in contemporary art galleries.

Levine was interested in exploring Walker Evans subject of poverty in the Great Depression, and how the emotions are conveyed to the viewers. These images were available in art catalogues and books and so her role could be seen as that of curator of Walker Evan’s image to the public in the exhibition at the ICP (International Centre of Photography) New York. The work is not vernacular, it is already in the public eye, and this is perhaps where the idea became controversial. Walker Evans had set out his authorship, which Levine over-wrote as her own by giving his work a female narrative.  

Levine as the author changes the intent of the original image. Evans contributed to art history with his oeuvre, gaining recognition and becoming a household name. Levine challenged this, encouraging the viewer to question the meaning and history of the image. Walker Evans’ photographs of the Burroughs family, sharecroppers in the Depression era were published in a book that became the archetypal record of the rural American poor. In 1979 Levine re-photographed Evans' photographs and without any manipulation of the images. Her work was exhibited in 1981 (entitled After Walker Evans) in New York, and was both a scandal and a success. Labelled as feminist and post-modernist, her exhibition exhibited a “critique in the commodification of art…Levine prefers to view her work as a regenerative act of collaboration, transforming the considered extraordinary masterpiece into something organic and continually renewable.” (Leeuwen, n.d.)

Figure 1 Walker Evans 1936, After Walker Evans 1981

Levine showed that once the image becomes commodified, the original photographer is forgotten although by re-presenting images to contemporary audiences allow different meanings to be gleaned from them. In Fountain (Buddha) takes Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) urinal and turned it back into a photograph, which she considered to be an art object. Instead of a white porcelain urinal, Levine photographed a gilded bronze one and re-contextualised it portraying it as art which is valued higher. In this she demonstrated the distance between “objective document and subjective desire.” Eklund, 2004)

Figure 2 (2010) Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Sherrie Levine's Fountain (Buddha) during the opening of The Corporeal, Whitechapel Gallery

Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince worked with Levine in the 1970s and 1980s and were labelled the "Pictures" generation in which the concerns of photography facilitated the viewers’ understanding of art. Levine’s copies of photographs questioned the principles of originality and examined strategies and codes of representation, drawing attention to the diminished possibilities for originality in our image-saturated world. Their work included reshooting Marlboro advertisements in which they assumed the roles of director and observer. “In their manipulated appropriations, these artists were not only exposing and dissembling mass-media fictions, but enacting more complicated scenarios of desire, identification, and loss…Levine’s works from this series tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past, and our own lost illusions.” The Met (2000-2017)

References

Cotton, C (2011) The photograph as contemporary art. London: Thames and Hudson.

Leeuwen, R (n.d.) International Centre of Photography: Sherrie Levine: Biography. Available at: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/sherrie-levine?all/all/all/all/0 last accessed 7/5/17

Eklund, D (2004) The Met. The pictures generation. Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pcgn/hd_pcgn.htm last accessed 7/5/17

The Met (2000-2017) The Met: After Walker Evans: 4. Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/267214 last accessed 7/5/17

Bibliography

Cotton, C (2011) The photograph as contemporary art. London: Thames and Hudson.

Lee, S. (2007) Sherrie Levine. Available at: http://www.simonleegallery.com/exhibitions/sherrie-levine-june-2007 last accessed 7/5/17

Leeuwen, R (n.d.) International Centre of Photography: Sherrie Levine: Biography. Available at: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/sherrie-levine?all/all/all/all/0 last accessed 7/5/17

Eklund, D (2004) The Met. The pictures generation. Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pcgn/hd_pcgn.htm last accessed 7/5/17

The Art Story (2017) The Pictures Generation: After walker Evans (1981) Sherrie Levine. Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-the-pictures-generation-artworks.htm last accessed 7/5/17

The Broad (2017) Sherrie Levine. Fountain. Buddha (1996). Available at: http://www.thebroad.org/art/sherrie-levine/fountain-buddha last accessed 7/5/17

The Met (2000-2017) The Met: After Walker Evans: 4. Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/267214 last accessed 7/5/17

Lens Culture (n.d.) Book Review: A lifetime of shooting self portraits at a shooting gallery. Collected and edited by Eric Kessels. Available at: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/erik-kesselskramer-a-lifetime-of-self-portraits-at-a-shooting-gallery last accessed 1/5/17
Time (2013)The Vanishing Art of the Photo Album: Tim Clark. Available at: http://time.com/3801986/the-vanishing-art-of-the-family-photo-album/#22 last accessed 1/5/2017
https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/archive-fever-uses-of-the-document-in-contemporary-art

List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Pinterest (n.d.)Walker Evans 1936 and After Walker Evans 1981. [Photograph]  Available at: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/530087818625349999/ last accessed 7/5/17
Figure 2. Docklands and East London Advertiser (2010) Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Sherrie Levine's Fountain (Buddha) during the opening of The Corporeal, Whitechapel Gallery [Photograph;Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Sherrie Levine's Fountain (Buddha) during the opening of The Corporeal, Whitechapel Gallery] At: http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/entertainment/arts/duchamp-s-fountain-takes-centre-stage-at-whitechapel-gallery-1-672292 last accessed 7/5/2017

Archive noises - Joan Fontcuberta (2014)

Source material

Fontcuberta, J. (2014) Archive noises. Pandora’s Camera. Photography after Photography. London. Mack. (pp169-181)

At photography’s inception, people believed the photograph would capture that which we don’t see and preserve what we don’t remember. The conservation of the moment captured on the photograph started as a dialogue between memory and forgetting.

Anne Tronche suggests that archive is a space of experience. The image remembered is not necessarily the image that was taken.

Historians look at archived papers (which may be fairly recent) and desensitise them. (Deconsecrate, remove authoritarianism from discourse.) This is similar to the work of Joachim Schmid. He promotes recycling of images so that people see things again. “Schmid cancels the value of production (taking pictures) and shifts to selection, to the act of pointing and choosing.” (Fontcuberta, 2014:172) We should be concerned with the use of photographs rather than the production of more.

1989 was a commemorative year for photography. History of photography was taught in line with incorporation into the art movement. Values developed with regards to “photography as a commodity and a collector’s item – the fetishism of the signature, notion of the original, the limited edition, the technical qualities inherent in the singularity of a photographic print, the mise en valeur with the appropriate presentation – in other words, the recovery of aura.” (Fontcuberta, 2014:173)

Schmid and Fricke looked for anonymous, amateur images in second hand shops and flea markets which resembled master photographers, which they mounted and signed and passed off as the real deal to question our values of photography. The works were genuine so they were labelled alternative masterpieces. The recognition of a masterwork shifted from the act of making it to the act of recognising it. “The creative act no longer consists in the application of a primitive gaze but in a superimposed gaze, a gaze that is correlative of the palimpsest.” (Fontcuberta, 2014:174) Palimpsest means altered but bearing original form) Creativity is now seen as identifying and using the best of the existing images which links back to the Dadists and Duchamp.

“On one hand, every single photograph represents or depicts a fragment of reality, while on the other hand, that same photograph is a part of reality, both as a psychical object and as an image/symbol. It’s much more interesting to use these existing images and work with them than making new photographs – because existing photographs not only represent parts of our realities, they are realities.” (Schmid as cited by Fontcuberta, 2014:175)

Photos are an unstable triangle of reality, image of reality and reality of the image.

Schmid thought that memory should not be a mausoleum. Other photographers also destroyed photographs to remove “history and mementos of authoritarian discourse.” (Fontcuberta, 2014:177) Schmid placed his images in groups, shredded them and pieced them back together with pieces from different groups to resemble digital noise. With Stasis (Joachim Schmid) instead of images going into an archive, they go to the museum for discourse. “Documentary photography invades the space of art to the extent that the photograph as an illustration occupies the pages of the information media.” (Fontcuberta, 2014: 178)

Deconstruction and reconstruction or fragments and synthesis. Transformation of images but not readable so they confuse people.

Fragmentation present in art world with romanticism, cubists, impressionists. Schmid believes there is “More truth in the image of reality which is perennially ending, than the vision of the real, which is fleeting.” (Schmid as cited by Fontcuberta, 2014:180) By engaging with Schmid’s Stasis, we have shown that “Vision is always partial, a series of snippets of a structure whose totality we are unlikely ever to perceive.”

This work teaches us a unique way of looking at archived material. Although it contains information, it may not be accessible or understandable in its current form and may need to be re-invented, Data fills the gaps between memory and forgetting but the rubbish needs removing. Memory must not become sterile so there should be creativity with the information. 

The artist as curator

Joachim Schmid
Joachim Schmid gathers (collects for his own use) vernacular photography to compile books of photographs which have been forgotten, lost or discarded (anti-museum) encouraging people to reconsider how photography and collecting are cultural practices and questions the value of photographs to people. His visual survey of snapshot photography in the 20th century includes postcards and studio prints. With flea market finds, Schmid notes that he is about a generation behind. Online photographs are instantly there, with photographs from around the world being uploaded in a pattern through the 24hour period.

Schmid produced several books, 96 cataloguing mundane finds such as feet, airline meals, coffee - the sort which end up on social media. Schmid questions why we all take the same photo and who taught us? Perhaps this is because they work? It portrays a family who is functioning as society expects and painting a picture of people being OK. He examines family photography through the generations and worldwide. He uses a book format because it doesn't rely on electricity or internet access to look at it and it means more to people if they can physically hold it. Their attention span is longer with a book.

His series on discarded photographs, the subject of several books, stopped when photography became digital. Schmid reflects on the physical role of the photograph, collecting destroyed, often violently, and questions their relationship with another person, although this is never revealed to him or his readers. He explains that some photos were cherished which is shown by the marks or fading on them. These are as important as the destroyed images. In Photographic Garbage Survey Project (1996-7) he included a street map which he walked over several days, pinpointing the location and type of photograph found as if part of a study, comparing the number and type of each major cities' discarded photographs.

Schmid refers to the amount of student photographers and number of images already out there. We need to look at and make sense of the existing images. Perhaps one question that should be asked is what do people not photograph? What is the relationship between memory and photography? Is it the event or the photograph that is remembered?

Looking through the book list of Joachim Scmid, the title "X marks the spot" (2013) caught my eye. In this book, Schmid notes that tourists visit the road where the assassination of John F Kennedy took place. Tourists run into the road to have their picture taken on the X. A hidden security camera mounted where the assassinator stood captures their images.

Exercise 2.1 The artist as curator

Bring together a series of 12 images (a typology) in which a particular motif appears again and again. Use found images from a family album or online photos. Select an appropriate way to display your images - grid, animated slide show or single images.

Following on from the research of Joachim Schmid's work, my initial ideas included life events such as weddings, Christenings, family holiday activities such as eating an ice cream, the seaside, boating lakes, children on the first day back to school in September, birthday parties, collecting awards, new car, new pet.

I decided to look at "new bike day" as I could start off the collection from my archive. Over the last few years I had 3 bikes and my husband had taken pictures on his phone to share with friends on social media. All 3 showed the bike and me in the same position. Even the one of our son was similar. I asked friends on social media if they could share theirs (the criteria being people with their new bike, not riding it.)  Hoping to keep this to people I know, I trawled friends' social media pages and found a few more.

A search of google images showed people worldwide in similar poses! Instagram provided the best pictures with its #newbikeday (52,174 posts although not all met my criteria)
                          #newbikedayisthebestday (567)
                          #newbikedayrocks (12)
On Facebook the use of #newbikeday shows several posts, some of which are duplicated on Instagram.

There are different styles of #newbikeday photos; on the bike, off the bike, in the shop, outside the home, in the landscape, bike in the air, bike ready to ride or being ridden. Plenty feature the bike and not the rider. I had one last square to fill so went through parent's family albums, remembering the different bikes we had as children for birthdays and Christmas. There were a handful of photos of them in the albums, but only of riding the bikes which didn't fit my criteria until my Mum remembered the last bike my brother had as a child. Being younger, there are more photo's of him on #newbikeday because she took more pictures towards the end of the 1980's.

I think the selection is representative of the photographs which are on the internet.All my images feature people I know.

This collection of "new bike day" images works as a grid because they use a similar typology. Photographers such as the Bernd and Hilla Becher used a grid to present us with industrialized images of coal mines and water towers. August Sander's portraits are typology arranged in a book. Ed Ruscha's Sunset Strip is typology images joined together like the road. Gillian Wearing's Masks. Thinking back to Strange and Familiar (curated by Martin Parr) the linear framed photographs are typology arranged by photographer but the theme is the same. Parr chose his categories for each photographer and exhibited photographs which fitted the exhibition title. Acting as a curator, the photographer selects images from existing ones rather than taking new photographs.

#newbikeday

I looked Corinne Vionnet's Photo Opportunities for the first exercise. See the link at:Exercise 1.1 D I and C


Bibliography
Boothroyd, S. (2013) Open College of the Arts. An Interview with Joachim Schmid. Available at: https://weareoca.com/photography/an-interview-with-joachim-schmid/ last accessed 24/4/17
Divya Rao Heffley (n.d.) Carnegie Museum of Art: Urban Archaeology. The practice of Joachim Schmid. Available at: http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto/posts/678/essay/13 last accessed 24/4/17
Schmid (2013) X marks the spot. Available at: https://schmid.wordpress.com/works/x-marks-the-spot-2013/ last accessed 24/4/17