Make Do & Mend
or How to make photographs in the time of COVID
The phrase 'Make Do and Mend' comes from a pamphlet issued by the British Ministry of Information in the midst of WWII. It was intended to help households make the most of what they already had available during a period of heavy rationing. Readers were advised to create ‘decorative patches’ to cover holes in worn garments; unpick old jumpers to re-knit fashionable alternatives; turn men’s clothes into women’s; as well as darn, alter and protect against the ‘moth menace’. An updated version of the book was recently released to coincide with the economic recession, offering similar frugal advice for 21st century families.
Why is this relevant to photography?
No new images until all the old ones have been used up |
The following resources, questions and suggested tasks are designed to encourage you to embrace the constraints of making photographs in the time of COVID. Depending on your personal circumstances, you may experience greater restrictions in school than at home. Perhaps not. It is up to you to try to make the most of your situation. Try to behave like an artist/photographer who has accepted the challenge of working with creative constraints, who enjoys solving problems and sees challenges as fuel for their creativity.
The resources here may grow and change over time. Your teacher may re-present some of these prompts in lessons, possibly not in this order, framing them in different ways. There is no one way of approaching this work; no correct answers. If nothing else, COVID has taught us to accept responsibility for our own actions and to make do and mend as best we can. Good luck!
The resources here may grow and change over time. Your teacher may re-present some of these prompts in lessons, possibly not in this order, framing them in different ways. There is no one way of approaching this work; no correct answers. If nothing else, COVID has taught us to accept responsibility for our own actions and to make do and mend as best we can. Good luck!
Suggested task:
- Create a new web page entitled Personal Project: Make do & Mend.
- Write a short introduction about why we are having to work in different ways because of the COVID-19 epidemic. How has your life changed since March 2020? What are the constraints we are experiencing in school?
- What does the phrase Make do & mend suggest to you?
Threshold Concepts
This project will help you think about some of the big ideas in photography. We call these Threshold Concepts. These are ideas that may not immediately make sense to you but, once you've had time to explore them, will help you develop a deeper and more critical relationship with the discipline. These are the main concepts that are relevant to this project. Hover over each image below fo a more detailed explanation. Click each one to visit a whole page of resources related to each concept:
#1 - How do artists/photographers play with our expectations about what a photograph should look like?
#3 - How do we all use photography in our daily lives?
#5 - How are photographs different from the way we 'see' with our eyes?
#10 - How do photographs affect our relationship to the passing of time?
Suggested tasks:
- Choose one or more of the Threshold Concepts above. Visit the relevant web resource on the PhotoPedagogy website, read about the Threshold Concept and make some notes about what you find interesting.
- Add one or more of the Threshold Concept illustrations (above) to your web page for Make do & mend. Copy and paste the brief introductory explanation about the relevant Threshold Concept(s). Photograph or type up your notes about the Threshold Concept(s).
Creative constraints
It's not always pleasant to be told you can't do something. The COVID situation means we can't work in the same way (in school and out). We might feel frustrated, thwarted or disappointed when we realise what we can no longer do as before. However, artists (of all kinds) are brilliant at finding ways to embrace constraints. In fact, some people argue that rules and restrictions can actually help us to be more creative. Why is this?
- Too much choice can be unhelpful. How do you know what to do next when anything is possible?
- Rules or constraints can focus our minds/bodies on particular challenges, increasing our levels of attention and energy
- people are often motivated by solving problems
- Choosing constraints, rather than them being forced on you, can be a way of regaining control of a situation
- Games have rules and people tend to enjoy playing them
Here is a current advert (for a famous car manufacturer's latest app) that dramatises the problem of having too much choice:
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In 1970, artist John Baldessari taught a course at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) entitled Post Studio Art: Class Assignments (optional). He produced a list of assignments for the students including, for example, instructions to "imitate Baldessari in actions and speech. Video," and "Disguise an object to look like another object," or "Develop a visual code. Give it to another student to crack."
These instructions were designed to force the students to think hard about art (what is a work of art?), to focus their creativity by restricting their choices and to make them less reliant on traditional/conventional ways of doing things (i.e. using particular media, tools and techniques). Try to think of an instruction you could give to a fellow photography student - i.e. some rules for making a particular type of photograph in the time of COVID. What makes a good/bad instruction? Try to imagine what it would feel like to receive your own instruction? |
Suggested task:
- In your own words, explain why rules, constraints or limitations can be helpful for an artist/photographer. The following resource may help you think about this:
Something new, something borrowed, something blue
Artists don't work in isolation. They are influenced by one another, passing on ideas and traditions over generations. Sometimes, particular images become very well known and have greater influence over future generations. Take a look at these two images.
The 'Mona Lisa' is one of the most famous works of art ever made.
- Why do you think it is so admired?
- Why do particular works of art become famous?
- Why do you think the artist Marcel Duchamp decided to appropriate (make creative use of) da Vinci's famous painting? What has he added to the image? How has he changed the meaning of the painting?
- He called works of art like this 'readymades'. What does this suggest?
- Duchamp has drawn on a photograph (postcard) of the original painting. Why did he choose to do this?
Suggested tasks:
- Try to find out as much as you can about the history of the 'Mona Lisa'. Make some notes about what you discover.
- Find out as much as you can about 'LHOOQ' and Duchamp's other readymades. Make some notes about what you discover.
- Choose a reproduction of a famous work of art. Adapt the work of art in some way e.g. change its title, draw on it, obscure the subject with other objects, make a plasticine version of it etc. Now, take a photograph of your adapted work of art and add this to your website. Make sure you display your adapted version alongside the original image.
Readymades?
Duchamp's 'LHOOQ' is just one way of appropriating an existing image. Here are some other examples of artists/photographers who use appropriation in their practice:
Kensuke Koike
Koike is a Japanese artist based in Venice. His practice involves manipulating vintage photographs and other found photographs - cutting, tearing, punching, slicing, re-assembling etc. - to create beautiful, often humorous and sometimes disturbingly surreal images. Check out his Instagram feed and Youtube account where he posts short videos revealing his working process.
Some questions:
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Hannah Höch
Höch was a member of the Berlin Dada group, an important collection of artists who responded to the violence of the First World War by making politically charged images communicating their disgust and anger. Höch is known for her innovative use of collage, taking pictures and text from newspapers to create new combinations in her images.
Do some research about Hannah Höch and her practice of creating collages of newspaper text and images. Here are some good places to begin your research: Hannah Höch, art's original punk
Hannah Höch at the Whitechapel Gallery (video) Hannah Höch - the Art Story Some questions:
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Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden, an African-American artist and writer, is known for his collages and photomontages. Bearden’s work reflects his interest in jazz and improvisation. He would let an idea evolve spontaneously.
You have to begin somewhere, so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way. Resources: |
Aaron Turner
Turner uses photographs of Black historical figures, not all of them very well known, to create sculptures and montages. He manipulates and re-photographs the images which makes them more abstract and distorted so that the viewer is required to disentangle a visual puzzle.
Photographic paper curls, folds, and shimmers with reflection and reams of light and shadow. An image of Frederick Douglass repeats itself throughout the series – at times with softened focus, at others collaged jaggedly. Some questions:
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Julie CockburnCockburn finds her images online. She is attracted to pictures of nameless people and empty landscapes. She uses these pictures as a kind of canvas which she embellishes with a range of materials - beads, embroidery, paint etc. In this way she is able to create new stories about the unknown people and places which often involves obscuring part of the image.
Do some research about Julie Cockburn's practice. Here are some good places to begin your research: Truth and fantasy in the work of Julie Cockburn Julie Cockburn at Flowers Gallery Aesthetica Magazine interview with Julie Cockburn Some questions:
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Joachim SchmidSchmid is a German artist who works more like an anthropologist. He finds images that others have discarded, sometimes piecing them back together or re-combining them in new ways. His project Pictures from the Street contains 900 specimens. Each of the carefully archived images suggests a story about its original owner. Why was it thrown away and, often, ripped into smaller pieces. He founded the the Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs in 1990, a place where people could donate photographs they no longer wanted. The artist either creates new works from these old images or disposes of them ecologically. The series Photogenic Drafts were created by splicing together two donated negatives from a commercial photography studio. To protect the identities of the sitters all the negatives had been cut in half. Schmid decided to re-assemble the heads but using two different subjects.
Some questions:
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Ruth Van BeekVan Beek is a Dutch artist whose practice involves collecting a huge archive of pictures, mostly photographic illustrations from old books, which she manipulates in various ways - folding, cutting and adding pieces pf painted paper to disguise the original image.
The primary source for her odd and playful collages are specialist books and magazines of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Titles on subjects including the proper tending of bonsai trees, the care of cacti, and the art of Japanese flower arranging—often found at thrift stores across Europe and the United States—provide rich material for her unique pieces. |
Ellen Gallagher
Gallagher works in variety of mediums and explores issues of racial identity. She has produced a series of collages, often displayed in large grids, using magazines dating from the 1930s to the 1970s aimed at African American consumers, such as Ebony, Our World and Sepia. Images and texts are cut and layered to question their original messages. The advertisements she selects promote a range of beauty products for women and men, especially those relating to hair including wigs and pomades. Other publicity materials advertise items including slimming aids, underwear, feminine hygiene items and skin treatments, such as bleaching creams.
You might also want to take a look at the collages of Lorna Simpson, Romare Bearden and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
You might also want to take a look at the collages of Lorna Simpson, Romare Bearden and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
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The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive. Some questions:
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Duane LinklaterLinklater's Native American heritage informs his practice. His recent contribution to Aperture magazine's 'Native America' issue entitled, 'Other Workers Will Follow' is a series of folded pages from a previous issue of the magazine featuring Native American portraits. Linklater has appropriated these pages, drawing on top of them and then disguising these marks to create new configurations or text, image and mark-making.
Linklater began his own line work atop scanned pages from that earlier Aperture issue to establish a space of experimentation and improvisation {...} As he marked the pages, he folded, collapsed, and covered much of his own drawing to hide his decisions and leave us only with possibility. |
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Joseph Cartwright
Joseph Cartwright's Instagram feed contains a series of witty exercises in which selected portraits from colour magazines are folded to create surreal new bodies. Bodies are deprived of heads, faces are contorted, two people become one etc. These elegant interventions are playful and light-hearted in spirit but the results are often more than a little unsettling.
Suggested tasks:
- Research the work of one or more of these photographic artists.
- Make sure that you find at least two reliable sources for each artist and make notes about what you see and read. It's important to look at the images yourself first before you are too influenced by the views expressed by others.
- Choose your favourite artist from those listed above and create a response to their work. Remember, it is important that you don't simply copy what they have done but find inspiration in their practice. Try to find your own solution to a particular problem or challenge the artist has set him/herself. For example:
- Hannah Höch and Romare Bearden chose to work only with pictures and words they found in newspapers and magazines, creating collages that comment on the societies and political situations in which they lived
- Kensuke Koike and Joseph Cartwright manipulate found photographs but do not add anything or take anything away
- Aaron Turner re-photographs his subjects which are drawn from Black history
- Julie Cockburn and Ruth van Beek add new materials to obscure their chosen vintage photographs
- Joachim Schmid mends destroyed pictures (as best he can)
- Ellen Gallagher and Duane Linklater manipulate photographs they find in newspapers and magazines, questioning the representation of gender, racial and ethnic identities
3D>2D>3D>2D
One of the ways that photographs abstract reality is by flattening the world. Some photographic artists have been interested in the relationship between 2 and 3 dimensions in their practice. What happens when you flatten reality by making a photograph and then use this 2 dimensional image to create something 3 dimensional (which is then re-photographed so that it can be printed and displayed in a book or exhibition)?
3D > the world
2D > a photograph of the world
3D > a three dimensional structure made from photographs
2D > a photograph of the three dimensional structure
Here are some examples for you to consider:
Hannah Hughes
Hannah Hughes collects found images from books, magazines and catalogues, forming an archive. These are then selected, shaped and recombined to create what appear to be illustrations of imaginary modernist sculptures. In the process, the original figurative images are transformed into a set of abstract forms. Shadow areas are carefully arranged to create the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface.
Cut from the overlooked corners, edges and in-between places surrounding photographed bodies or objects, the image fragments are transfigured into radically altered forms and liminal inner spaces. Their shapes, which are continually repeated but never identical, resemble building blocks, with an abstracted vocabulary of irregular geometries |
Abigail Hunt
Abigail Hunt works with found images, transforming them through a process of delicate and precise cutting and collaging into new configurations which often question the relationship between 2 and 3 dimensions.
Her practice is based upon a procession of tasks: the investigative research of an image, the deconstruction of a line, the disablement of form and finally the reconstruction and reconfiguration of the object. These processes are similar to that of understanding a new language. Through translating one language of images and the later reformation and retelling through made objects Abigail creates her own structures, tones and descriptions. |
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Matt Lipps
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Matt Lipps is a collector of images from books and magazines which he cuts out from their original contexts to create new three dimensional assemblages.
Part 2 of this interview can be seen here.
in, with and alongside photography |
Daniel GordonI am definitely interested in the 2-dimensional to the 3-dimensional and back to 2-dimensional translation shifts within my photographs, or in other words, flat to sculpture and then back to flat, but I am also interested in a further transformation to a more deeply flattened space after the final photograph has been produced. Daniel Gordon is interested in the ways that photographs transform reality. Beginning with pictures of himself 'flying' whilst at college, he know creates incredibly complex, colourful and multi-layered three dimensional collages - mostly portraits and still life compositions. He cuts and tears photographs of a particular subject before presenting them as collage constructions or tableaux. The final part of the process involves re-photographing his 3D constructions, flattening them back into 2D photographs.
Gordon's approach to image making is playful and experimental. In the project Thirty-One Days, Gordon set himself the challenge of creating an image a day for a month and then, working with web designers, created an app that both encouraged visitors to make their own Gordon-inspired collages with images found online and to download the print Gordon's own book. |
You may also be interested in the paper constructions of Thomas Demand and three dimensional collage installations of Lavett Ballard.
Some questions:
- How do photographs transform the world we see with our eyes?
- What are the similarities and differences between the ways in which people and cameras 'look' at the world?
- It has been suggested that both Matt Lipps and Daniel Gordon create works of art that are like paintings. How would you explain this comparison?
Suggested tasks:
- Take a series of photographs of a familiar subject (a family member, your breakfast, objects on a mantelpiece etc.), print these out, cut them up and re-arrange them as a 3D construction. Re-photograph your collage construction and print this image out again. You could experiment with photographing the whole construction or selected parts of it. You could even experiment with re-photographing your photograph (either a printed image or on screen) See Photographs of photographs below.
- Collect a number of images from Google Image searches. Search for things that interest you - hobbies, people you admire, objects you own or would like to own etc. Print out these images and mount them to card. Cut out the objects. Experiment with arranging these cut-out shapes thinking carefully about their relationships in space. Tip: Figure out a way of making the shapes stand up on their own using supports or a shelf, for example.
Behind Bars
It's hard to imagine a more confined place than a prison. Prisons are places full of rules, warnings, restrictions and constraints. Prisons are all about the loss of freedom and choice. Imagine running a photography workshop for prison inmates. This is exactly what the artist Nicolò Degiorgis did between 2013 and 2018 for prisoners in Bolzano-Bozen Penal Institution in Italy. The results of his students' work were published in a book entitled 'Prison Photography' (see extracts below). Degiorgis embraced the limitations given to him by the prison authorities whilst, at the same time, allowing the prisoners to explore a range of photographic genres (landscape, still life, portraiture etc.) and express their frustrations about prison life.
Take a look at some selected pages from the book below:
Take a look at some selected pages from the book below:
Some questions:
- What does the word 'genre' mean?
- What are the main photographic genres?
- When we look at a landscape photograph, for example, what do we expect to see? Are the landscape photographs in this book surprising in any way?
- Why might it have been difficult for the inmates to take conventional landscape photographs in prison? What kinds of landscape photographs have they made? What makes them landscapes?
- Rectangular photographs can be either landscape or portrait format (Note: this is a different use of the word 'landscape' in photography). The pictures in this book have all been printed so that they almost fill the right hand page but are all the pictures portrait format?
- Why are most of the faces in the fashion pictures pixellated?
- The still life photographs sometimes make use of an infinity backdrop. What is this and why might you use one?
Suggested tasks:
- Make a list of as many photographic genres (types of photograph e.g. portrait) that you can think of. Now do some research and try to add to your list.
- Choose one of the genres of photography. Try to create several photographic examples of this genre observing the following restrictions:
- You must be sitting when you make the photograph
- The photograph must be black and white
- You can only photograph another photograph
- Your photograph must be square
- Now, try to repeat this process with another photographic genre.
- Collaborate with a partner. Design a set of instructions for making a photograph that include specific rules/restrictions (e.g. make a photograph standing on one leg). You should include at least 2 rules/restrictions. Swap instructions with your partner. Carry out a photo shoot observing these instructions. Upload these images to your website and invite your partner to comment on them.
Svoboda's table
The Czech artist/photographer Jan Svoboda lived and worked in the same space. His photographs feature the spaces and objects that were familiar to him every day. He also photographed his own torn and damaged photographs, sometimes scattered on the floor or pinned to a wall. In the recent exhibition of his work at The Photographers' Gallery, the curators installed a glass wall near the entrance to the show on which were displayed numerous images of a table. The glass wall enabled the visitor to see both sides of the photograph, the marks made by the artist, and to understand that these pictures were frequently handled, slightly damaged and meant to be thought of as objects in the world. Svoboda's tables (he seemed to own several) function as surfaces for still life arrangements and are often draped with cloths. However, the table itself is also the subject of many photographs. It's an amazing example of how an entire body of work, a whole lifetime, can be spent making photographs in one space with very few resources.
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Here is a gallery of some examples of Jan Svoboda's pictures of tables:
The following video is a discussion about Jan Svoboda by both the curators of the exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery:
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Some questions:
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Suggested tasks:
- Think about your desk in school (and/or a table at home) as a mini studio. Place simple objects on it. Think about the light. Experiment with repeatedly photographing objects on this table over a number of days, weeks or months. For example, you could commit to taking one picture every lesson of an object placed on the table.
- Think about an object that you know or own that has special significance for you (like Svoboda's table). Try photographing it repeatedly. Try photographing from above and from other angles. Consider different lighting conditions. What happens when you photograph it up close and from further away? Experiment with various ways of framing your subject.
- Now, print out a few of the photographs you have taken. Tear/cut them up and arrange them on the floor, a table or on a wall. You could experiment with mounting the fragments on other pieces of paper or card (like Svoboda). Re-photograph these fragments. How might you display all these photographs together?
Tabletop sculptures
Working in a fairly confined space, like a desktop, isn't necessarily a disadvantage. There are numerous photographers/artists who have used small objects (often made by themselves) in order to create sequences of still-life images. There's something about the repetition of forms and intensity of the investigation that makes these projects strangely compelling. Erin O'Keefe creates boldly coloured images of small wooden shapes that she arranges on block colour surfaces and backdrops. The compositions play with perspective and viewpoint so that we are sometimes confused about what is 2 or 3 dimensional. Her Instagram feed demonstrates the seemingly endless variations that can be achieved with an economy of means.
Bill Leslie is interested in what happens when sculptures move. He makes small sculptural objects, drawing on diverse references including Modern abstract sculpture, 1950s B-Movies, Russian Constructivism and modern architecture. He photographs and films these objects, using a mixture of digital and analogue processes. Bill collaborates with Lucy Cran (Leap Then Look) offering innovative contemporary art workshops for young people. They specialise in using ordinary, cheap and easily available materials in their art making, proving that you don't need huge spaces or expensive equipment to create exciting work.
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Some questions:
- What does the term 'still life' mean?
- How can photographs confuse our understanding of the scale/size of objects?
- How can photographs transform ordinary objects/materials?
- Why might it be a good idea to photograph still life objects against a backdrop?
- What materials/objects could you use to create interesting, surprising or mysterious still life images?
Suggested task:
Experiment with combinations of backdrops and small objects to make photographs which confuse viewers' sense of scale and perspective. Explore different colour combinations (like Erin O'Keefe) or consider playing with still and moving images (like Bill Leslie).
Up close and personal
One of the main COVID constraints we are experiencing is the need to stay in the classroom and mostly work at our desks. This means that our desks have become a kind of mini studio space. The dimensions are much smaller than a traditional studio and we are going to have to be really creative in order for this not to feel like an impossible limitation. One of the solutions might be to investigate how artists and photographers have worked at close up to their subjects and materials.
One of the earliest exhibitions of photographic images by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839 at the Royal Society included several examples of close-up images: pictures of flowers and leaves; a pattern of lace ... a view of Venice copied from an engraving; some images formed by the Solar Microscope, viz. a slice of wood very highly magnified ... Observing and recording the world at close quarters was an important part of early photography history explained by microphotography and the role of scientists in the development of photographic technology. In the 1920s, artists like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy argued that photography could enhance human vision, helping us to see things invisible to the human eye. Modern film makers incorporated extreme close-ups in their movies and the Surrealists of the 20s and 30s used close-up photographs to disturb and disorientate the viewer. In recent years, conceptual artists have exploited the camera's ability to question the process of looking.
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Suggested tasks:
- Add the examples of close-up photographs featured in the gallery above to your website. Write a short description of them in your own words.
- Find out about each of the photographers. Once you have a better idea about their work, write a short paragraph explaining the various reasons why photographers might want to make close-up photographs of the world.
- Take inspiration from one or more of these images/photographers to make your own series of close-up photographs. Will you choose to photograph natural or manufactured objects (or even a combination). Where will you find your objects? Will you photograph two or three dimensional materials (or a combination)? How will you arrange and light your objects? What sort of backdrop will you need? Will you photograph in colour or black and white?
Photographing photographs
Once photographs have been printed (as a single image on a piece of paper, in a book or newspaper or on a poster/billboard) they become objects in the world. Some photographers have decided to photograph these photographs. Why might they have done this? Let's look at a few examples:
Jiro Takamatsu
These pictures are photographs of photographs from the family album of the artist, Jiro Takamatsu. Rather than take the pictures himself, Takamatsu hired a professional photographer. The subject of each image is also obscured by reflected light, reminding us that photographic prints have particular physical qualities - edges, a shiny surface etc. Some of the images are held, others pinned to a wall, lying on a surface or submerged in liquid.
Jiro Takamatsu - from the series Photograph of Photograph, 1972-3
Luigi Ghirri
In 1973 Luigi Ghirri took a series of 41 pictures of maps in an atlas. The series is called 'Atlante'. Ghirri takes macro (super close-up) photographs of the various signs contained in various maps of the earth, sky and oceans - the names of places, borders, palm trees, lakes and rivers, stars etc. Ghirri was interested in the way that physical places become abstracted in the process of making maps. He was also aware that photography (a very popular pastime by the 1970s) was becoming the primary way in which people were experiencing reality.
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The only journey possible would now appear to be within signs, images: within the destruction of direct experience. |
Julian Germain
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness, is a 2005 book by Julian Germain. It sensitively documents his friendship with Charles Snelling, an elderly man living alone in a small house in Portsmouth, whose portraits appear alongside pages from Snelling’s own photo albums and objects in the house, including framed photographs of his beloved wife.
Charlie was a simple, gentle, man. He loved flowers and the names of flowers. He loved colour and surrounded himself with colour. He loved his wife. Without ever trying or intending to, he showed me that the most important things in life cost nothing at all. He was my antidote to modern living.’
-- Julian Germain
Alice Walton & Anna Lucas
A recent collaboration between artists Anna Lucas and Alice Walton resulted in an exhibition at Tintype Gallery. Unfortunately, due to Lockdown, the gallery closed soon after the installation of the show so very few people were able to see it. One of the central components of the exhibition was a film entitled '113' (below). Using a split screen, the artists present a woman's hand placing and moving a variety of printed images. The result is a quiet, careful and meditative choreography in which images are brought into relationship with one another and the edge of the frame.
Some questions:
- Why do you think Jiro Takamatsu asked another photographer to re-photograph images from his family album?
- Is there anything surprising or unusual about the way these photographs have been composed and lit?
- What photographs would you choose to re-photograph? Where would you find them and how would you make your images?
- In the 1970s maps were printed in large books called atlases. Where would you go to find maps or directions today? How might you photograph them?
- What do you notice about the split screen filming of '113' by Lucas and Walton? Why is this technique so effective?
- What do photographs of family albums tell us about the people in them and the person who collected and displayed them? What do family albums look like these days? How do we share, collect and archive pictures of the people we love now that physical photo albums are a thing of the past?
Suggested tasks:
- Choose a selection of photographs from your own family album. These could be physical prints or digital images. Experiment with re-photographing these photographs. Think carefully about how you might frame each picture you take. How close will you be? What kind of camera will you use? How much of the image you make will be in focus? Will you include or try to remove traces of reflected light? Will you print out your digital family photograph first or try to photograph it on a screen? What happens if you combine physical and digital images?
- Choose a variety of pictures, either from your own 'archive' (images you have already collected/made) or searching for new ones in books and on the Internet. Place images next to one another and make a sequence of photographs in which a portion of each image appears. Frame your picture so that only the two images are visible. Experiment with different arrangements. Which work best and why?
- Choose a book that contains images of some sort - these could be maps, drawings, illustrations or photographs. Experiment with making photographs of the images in your chosen book. Try to get as close as you can when you make your photograph. Think about lighting, framing, composition and focus. What if you combine images from two or more books? What happens if you introduce movement and film your decisions?
The Bad New Days
Sometimes artists and photographers create work which criticises and protests bout the state of the world. In the following examples, all concerned with the evils of war, three sets of artists comment on conflict by appropriating the work of other photographers. As Bertolt Brecht once said:
Don't start with the good old days but the bad new ones.
-- Bertolt Brecht
between 1939 and 1945, the years of the Second World War, the German Playwright Bertolt Brecht, a war refugee, collected clippings from newspapers and magazines. To these he added poetic epigrams which are witty, scornful comments on conflict. Brecht hated the Nazi dictatorship but his views of war extend beyond simple propaganda. He was concerned about the manipulation of populations, the dangers of nationalism and a descent into cruelty, suffering and lies. After several failed attempts to find a publisher, War Primer was eventually published in 1955, shortly before Brecht's death.
In 2011, artists Broomberg and Chanarin decided to appropriate Brecht's War Primer to comment on the War on Terror. They silk screened text over Brecht's photo-epigrams and superimposed low resolution images taken from the Internet over Brecht's newspaper clippings, creating a new layer of protest entitled War Primer 2. . In 2018, artist Lewis Bush, disturbed by some aspects of the making of Broomberg and Chanarin's book, decided to create another version, War Primer 3, commenting on inequality, labour and capital.
In 2011, artists Broomberg and Chanarin decided to appropriate Brecht's War Primer to comment on the War on Terror. They silk screened text over Brecht's photo-epigrams and superimposed low resolution images taken from the Internet over Brecht's newspaper clippings, creating a new layer of protest entitled War Primer 2. . In 2018, artist Lewis Bush, disturbed by some aspects of the making of Broomberg and Chanarin's book, decided to create another version, War Primer 3, commenting on inequality, labour and capital.
Some questions:
- Why do you think Brecht struggled to find anyone to publish his War Primer?
- Why might Brecht have wanted to criticise or decode images of war? Why did he write short poetic comments about the images? What happens when you add words to images?
- How have Broomberg and Chanarin chosen to add new pictures to Brecht's book?
- Why might Lewis Bush have been disturbed by the Broomberg and Chanarin book? How do his additions draw out attention to issues like finance, work, profit, equity etc.?
Suggested task:
Get hold of a newspaper, magazine or book about an issue or set of issues that interest or concern you. It might be something you love (fashion, skateboarding, music etc.) or find disturbing (a right wing newspaper, environmental collapse, cruelty to animals etc.) Adapt this publication by adding other images and text that you find and/or make. Try to comment on the original pictures/text with your additions - they could be humorous juxtapositions, satirical captions or visually obscuring, for example. You could damage the original document in some way, alter its shape, cut holes in it, stick pages together etc. Feel free to experiment. You won't necessarily know what it all means until after you have made it. Think carefully about how might document the whole alteration process. Will you use still photographs, video, sound, photocopies, scans ... or a combination of these?
Note: It might be a good idea to photograph or video the original document before you begin to change it so that you can compare both versions when you are finished (just in case it's unrecognisable).
Note: It might be a good idea to photograph or video the original document before you begin to change it so that you can compare both versions when you are finished (just in case it's unrecognisable).
Mr Nicholls' example web pageTake a look at Mr Nicholls' web page for ideas and support in documenting your progress.
Remember, AO3 asks you to: "Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions as work progresses." This means you need to curate the evidence on your website, thinking about content, accuracy, layout and variety. Try to make your web pages stand out from the crowd. Make sure that the evidence on it communicates your understanding of photography. Make sure that the work you share on there is personal and meaningful. |