Topic 1: Mirrors and Windows

From ‘*someone else’s, somewhere’, 2015*

Mirror or Window?

For me the ‘mirror’ and ‘window’ analogy is helpful as a ‘way in’ to thinking about photographs being more than mere images that show. Viewing photographs as items or events that have their own agency is crucial to developing more sophisticated ideas and finding a critical voice in the work one makes.

However, I find the binary nature of these analogies too simplistic and see the looking/showing paradigm as a much more fluid and evasive concept. I’m not sure if a photographer is capable of taking a photograph that is solely a window, framing and containing a section of the perceived world, without in some way mirroring their own perspectives, privileges and intentions. The topographic photographers of the 19th century, although appearing on the surface to be nothing more than data retrievers (much like a Google street view car), still operated aesthetic considerations and imbued their choice and eye on that which they photographed.

Andrew Joseph Russell Citadel rock, Green River Valley (1868)

As an image maker, I identify more with the mirror analogy as I see my photograph-making as an act of art-making. Although the distinction between artist and photographer is often blurry for me in relation to my own practice, I make photographs that enact a form of thinking or showing that I consider embedded in strategies developed in art. To this regard, my photographs mirror me and my intentions. They are the artefact of a chain of decisions, both formally and conceptually, made by me the artist. This is something I would like to challenge whilst on this course. To let my photographs happen upon me and for them to have their own voice and agenda.

Photograph As Stage

In light of the way I use photography, I would present the metaphor of a stage as an alternative. A stage offers a limited, defined space where an exterior world is alluded to, but it is forever invisible; ‘in the wings’ so to speak. The action and actors are located and sometimes choreographed within this limited view. We speak of foreground and background much like upstage and downstage. Locations are illustrated by propped one-sided facades. We only see the necessary, intended details. A stage also offers an opportunity for world-making, bending of reality and the fabrication of space. Perhaps this offering is too simplistic also but touches on a Platonic reading of photographs as ‘mere images of the truth.’ (Sontag 1977: 3)

Why Photography?

For me, photography is the one medium I return to and I find there’s a comfort, a challenge and an obsession in it. Reflecting on my education and practice as an artist and on my time teaching art and photography, the moments of ‘fizz’ come from learning about and making images photographically. I suffer from wanting to be good at everything, or at least know lots about everything. I’m hoping that this course will help me to zone in on photography as my ‘one thing’ and to get to know it and myself in the process.

Notes and reflections:

Historically photography’s function was ‘to show’ and ‘to tell’, as in the topographical stereoscope examples cited above. In this era, the critical image had not yet arrived. Subsequently, photography has matured and photographs now possess the ability ‘to ask’ and indeed ‘to see’ for themselves.

Soutter alludes to this in her summoning of the photographer as an ‘I’ in their work. I would go further to suggest that the photograph itself is the ‘I’. Detached from its maker, the photograph sees, and has a position exterior to both the intentions and the presence (embodied and conceptual) of its author. To test this, one has could view a photograph, or series of images such as Golding’s Ballad of Sexual Dependancy without any context or knowledge of the artist or their work. Themes, narratives, even a sense of authenticity may still be gleaned from this blind reading of the work. What some might perceive here as the photographer’s presence is, I would argue, actually the presence of the image itself.

For me, a clear lineage can be traced between 19th century modes of representing previously unknown, or unseen, visual information and our contemporary use of photography through technology in the 21st century. However, rather than bringing the world to you, through the selfie and other images presented online, photography now brings you to the world. We are the object of our own image making and as such photography can be viewed as a mirror that reflects us into a hybrid world; one that is both digital and real. One is reminded of Richard Serra’s video work ‘Television Delivers People’. In both eras the use of the photographic image as a fetishised, consumable object in a capitalist market is something I haven’t really considered a lot before.

HEIFERMAN, Marvin (ed.). 2012. Photography Changes Everything. 1st ed. New York : Washington, D.C: Aperture ; Smithsonian Institution.

Richard Serra ‘Television Delivers People’ (1973) [Film]. n.d. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvZYwaQlJsg [accessed 27 Jan 2022].

SONTAG, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

SOUTTER, Lucy. 2018. Why Art Photography. Second edition. London: Routledge.

Topic 2: Methods and Meaning