Exercise – Project 1 – Autobiographical self-portaiture

 

I have been looking at the images by artist such as Francesca Woodman, Elina Brotherus, Sally Mann, Elinor Carucci, Richard Billingham, Tierney Gearon and Gillian Waering.

Francesca Woodman

Photo by Francesca Woodman. This lined image is available to view on line: http://bibliotecaiie.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/francescawoodman.jpg

Francesca Woodman’s images I find both a little erotic and disturbing.  Woodman clearly a lot of pent up sexual-tension with an artistic voice wanting to be heard.  If I was to say that there was an element of narcissism in Woodman’s photos I think I would be wrong.  I think that she was probably insecure about herself and her looks, yes she was very self-indulgent which may sadly have lead her to her death.  I believe there are indications of her moods of depression in her images.  We all sometime feel that we could just disappear and I think that Woodman acts out some of these wished imaginings in her photos.  I personally, think that Woodman’s images don’t need accompanying text for the images to be appreciated.  However, they communicate best as set.

Woodman clearly had mental-health issues and I wonder that perhaps the wider issue here is the stigma attached to this form of health-issue and the lack of understanding and help available for sufferers.  Many artist suffer from depression as many artists by there nature are bipolar in some degree and perhaps educational institutions such as schools and colleges / universities should also watch for this and offer counselling and support.  Woodman committed suicide in 1981 and over 30 years later we are still loosing talent through our lack of understanding of how to help.

Elina Brotherus

Photo by Elina Brotherus. This linked image is available to view online on her website: http://www.elinabrotherus.com

Brotherus has used her naked body to put ‘a spotlight’ on herself.  I think that her nakedness not only reflects her sense of vulnerability but also her lock of power and sense of naked honesty.  She uses nakedness to grab the attention of the audience / viewer in order to pass on her intended message.

For me Brotherus images instil mixed feelings of sympathy and admiration for both her struggle and sadness and her honesty and dignified strength.

Some may interpret Brotherus’s work as a little self-indulgent; but I would disagree.  Brotherus has used herself as a subject to bring to peoples attention issues that are often hidden.  These issues she has experienced for herself and therefore can tell the story from the inside.  By using herself as the model and subject she enforces the truth and her own honesty.

I don’t believe that this style of images can be imitated purely for image sake by ‘outsiders’.  These images come from the heart and therefore if mimicked would lack the context that these images were created to represent.  These images have been made to represent the artist own feelings and emotions and whilst the images can be replicated the emotional message the originals carry can not without some honest intent from the new artist.  In this way only another artist going through similar experiences can produce similar work and would then have his or her own style and signature.  Anything else would be a false facsimile.

As mentioned above, I believe that the motivation of these artist are to raise awareness of issues, that are often hidden from public-sight.  Naturally these issues have to be close and personal to the artist in order for the artist to be able to be an insider and produce honest and truthful images.

Photography by Stephen Bull

Photography, by Stephen Bull, published by Routledge.

I have just finished reading this book as part of the required reading for my course and I found it inspirational for my current exercise Image and text as part of project 2, Part Two – Narrative.  It has also provided me with ideas for my next Assignment.  This book helps to tell the history of photography, explaining what and how modernity, modernism and postmodernism is and influenced photography.  It helps explain for photography can and has been used to communicate ideas and how photography has developed in both the professional world and in the hands of the non-professional amateur / general-public with snap-shot photography which has gone full circle with snap-shop style photography adopted by the professionals.

A good book and with a useful guide to further reading in the back.

Postmodernism: The Artist as Photographer and ‘The Death of the Author’ by Stephen Bull     (Bull, 2010, pp.137-141).

A Synopsis in Quotations.

It is possible to identify major cultural changes happening from the 1960s onwards where ideas associated with modernity such as progression and fixed individual identity are turned on their head. For example, instead of progressive new ideas, in postmodernity old ideas are constantly revived and the concept of a fluid, fragmented self that is performed replaces that of a single unified identity. Postmodernism, as the representation of postmodernity, constantly recycles recognisable (or figurative) imagery from mass culture rather than the abstract expression of an artist’s mind. (pp. 137).

Following the legacy of Pop Art’s return to the figurative and art’s reengagement with society through Conceptualism, Krauss introduced the semiotic term ‘indexicality’ to the analysis of visual art to argue that many of the new artists were making work that had direct links to the real world via the use go photographs and other media….Solomon-Godeau identified a return in the early 1980s to what she refers to as ‘pseudo-expressionist’ painting during an era of burgeoning capitalism – and so promoted the postmodernist as an alternative to this, both in their techniques and in what she interpreted as their critique of capitalist ideology….Many of these writers were inspired by the Situationist Guy Debard’s idea of the ‘society of the spectacle’ developed a decade earlier. Debard argued that contemporary society was dominated by spectacular images of entertainment and capitalist products (on billboards, magazine pages, and cinema and television screens). These distracted people from the real world, transforming them into numbed consumers. One reaction to this was to use Debord’s technique of ‘detournement’, where mass reproduction images that are part of the spectacle (and which might otherwise be hardly looked at) are appropriated in order for their meanings to be playfully and subversively redirected by artist: a move the Solomon-Gadeau characterises as shifting photographic practice ‘from production to reproduction’. An engagement with culture and social issues, the use of a range of media, and the appropriation of existing popular imagery from what Campany calls ‘the domains in which values, opinions and identities are formed’ was detected by postmodernist critics in the work of artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. (pp.138).

In a partial continuation of the Conceptualist use of the camera to record performances,  Sherman’s series of Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) where she acts out characters from a range of cinematic genres from earlier decades (familiar to audiences from watching old films on television) were seen as a critique of female stereotypes in the media, a feminist celebration of the different roles a women can have and even as an act of art criticism itself. Kruger’s addition of words to 1940’s and 1950’s image bank photographs in photo-text pieces such as You Are Not Yourself (1981) were interpreted as subverting the address to the consumer found in advertising. Prince’s series where cowboys were directly cropped from Marlboro cigarette advertisements were regarded as exposing the macho myths of Ronald Reagan-era America….Levin simply re-photographed pictures by canonised modernist photographers, such as Evans’ image of a farmhouse interior taken in Hale County, Alabama in 1936…In her 1981 essay ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde‘, Krauss not only suggested that the avant-garde idea of art moving forward through creation of new work was at an end, but also that originality in modernism itself was being simultaneously exposed as a myth…The practice of these artists also seems to visualise ideas put forward in Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author‘, a founding essay of postmodern theory written in 1968. Although Barthes focusses on writing in this essay, his ideas can be applied to work made in any media. However,Barthes uses the word ‘text’ instead of ‘work’. A work, he argues in another essay, is seen as something fixed in meaning and created by a single author, while a ‘text’ is never fixed in its meaning – its content relating to other texts through ‘intertextuality’. For example, a photograph analysed as a text (by examining the elements within it through techniques such as semiotics) can be seen as intertextually connected to other texts such as films, painting, other photographs, etc….This goes against the idea of authorship associated with modernism – where a work is isolated as original and unique, with all its influences deriving from the life of the creator. Barthes contends that authority of the text’s meaning does not lie with the its creator (the ‘author-God’) and their life. Instead, a text is ‘a tissue of quotations’ from cultural context in which it is created, where ‘a variety of writings, none of them original blend and clash’. The single meaning of a piece of work cannot therefore be discovered and fixed by examining the biographical details of the person that made it. Rather, the meaning of the text remain polysemous and depend on its interpretation by the viewer. …’The death of the Author’, Barthes argues leads to ‘the birth of the reader’. Although, as Carol Mavor has argued, Barthes’ use of a capital ‘A’ for the ‘dead’ Author suggests that the author’s own interpretation has not disappeared, but is a voice among many others. Prince seemed to sum up the adoption of this idea by postmodern artists that appropriated photographs with his remark, ‘I think the audience has always been the author of an artis’s work. What’s different now is that the artist can become the author of someone else’s work. (pp.138-140).

Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes

In Barthes essay, ‘Rhetoric of the image’ he uses photographs used for advertisements as an example of his argument.  Referring to an advert for Italian ‘Panzani’ pasta and salsas he describes the image as having a language that can be read, he suggest that by analysing the picture, three messages can be deduced: a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message.

Coded and non-coded iconic messages can be mixed together and they are visual queues often learned through cultural experiences.

A linguistic message is a message in text that accompanies the picture and this takes two forms ‘anchor’ and ‘relay’.

Anchoring is the most common and is commonly used for both advertising and press photography.  This is a form of text that anchors the meaning of the image to a written message of the advertisement or the news story.

Relay, is not so commonly used, it is often used for complementary relationships between fragments of text and images.  For example an appropriately complementing photograph to a section of text from a poem.  This type of message allows the picture and text to interact with each other. A picture of a green field dotted here and there with red poppies and a short section of a war poem suggests that the image reflects the text and the text reflects the image.  The image already has connotations of war and remembrance as does the chosen passage from a poem.

The denoted image.  Barthes writes that the denoted image for a photograph is a message without a code, the photograph is able to transmit the literal information but a drawing must first follow rules which even when denoted is still a coded message.  A drawing requires a certain amount of training thus introducing style as a second cultural coded message.  The photograph simply denoting the relationship of nature and a single culture coded message from the image itself.

Rhetoric of the image.  In an image rhetoric is the message based on cultural and educational experiences that communicate to the viewer at different levels based on education and life’s experiences this is done at an unconscious level. Objects that can be recognised as symbols for example the net bag holding the Penzani pasta products suggesting to some connotations of a fishing net or harvesting together a meal, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, connotations of the Italian flag, fresh healthy meal, etc.