4) Reading Group for John Berger, Liz Banks - 20/10/17

On Friday we had the reading group to feedback on the John Berger TV show we watched as well as his text 'The Ambiguity of the Photograph'. My notes from the TV show can be seen scanned in below, and my notes from the text are on the text itself scanned in.

Ways of Seeing TV show notes and reflections:

One of the things I found interesting from the TV show was the way that the things in photos relate back to the things depicted in oil paintings - I thought it was so interesting how the two mediums were linked! They are also linked in terms of the ideals they show, for instance oil paintings show what people have and publicity photography shows what people could have.

Another interesting quote I took away from the TV show was in relation to publicity and how "It suggests that you are inadequate as you are, but it consoles you with the promise of a dream". I really think this statement is true, in the time this was written and its still relevant today. Our society is so throw-away and obsessed with having the next best piece of clothing etc thinking that buying these advertised things will allow us to have our "dream" and allow us to be happy. In reality we're never going to keep up with this consumerist way of living, because there's always new clothing and gadgets coming out to replace the old ones. I feel like this point really related to my own project also, because people think that buying new objects and clothes will make them happy, when really once you have money to pay for the basic needs of life, anything materialistic on top of this does not make a difference to happiness (source of research: 'Happy' documentary on Netflix - I will go into further detail on this in another blog post).

The Ambiguity of the Photograph notes and reflections:

The first intriguing thing I took away from the text was "What the photograph shows goes with any story one chooses to invent" (page 48) - I really like the way that although there is irrefutable evidence that this man and horse existed, everyone who looks at the work could give it a different backstory and interpret it in a different way. I like the way that one image can create so many unique reactions, while also having its original purpose of what the photographer wanted to show.

The text follows on from my previous thought highlighting the thought that "It requires a caption for us to understand the significance of the event". We had quite a long discussion in our reading group about this quote, both agreeing and disagreeing with it. I feel that in some senses, a caption is needed for work, for instance when I looked at Jason Evans' 'The Daily Nice' website I feel his way of showing what makes him happy is quite ambiguous because he has an image and no text explaining it. However in other examples of photography such as war photos, the meaning is pretty self explanatory. Or thinking in another sense, sometimes the photographer doesn't want to spell out the meaning to the viewer. So in some ways I agree with Berger's quote however it is quite a sweeping statement that could also be seen as outdated due to the time the text was written (1972).

Another point I'd never really thought about was the comparison between photography and paintings in terms of translating the scene and the concept of time. Drawings and paintings are only a translation of a scene, whereas photography shows the environment as a given. In terms of time, drawing and painting possesses its own timeframe from how long it took to create the artwork, whereas photography possesses the time of the snapshot it was taken in, for instance 1/125 of a second. This leads me on to think about the question of whether the camera never lies in comparison to other mediums of art. The text goes on to talk about this later on.

In light of my previous point, page 53 goes on to talk about how the camera never lies, stating that "the camera cannot lie. It cannot lie because it prints directly" (page 53). We also discussed this quote in detail in the reading groups, with the agreement that the mechanical processes of the camera cannot lie, however the subject or environment of the composition can be manipulated and lie. Again I feel this text is quite outdated because even though it says that there were and are faked photographs, it also underlines that "You can only make a photograph tell an explicit lie by elaborate tampering, collage, and re-photographing" (page 53). I don't agree with the use of the word 'elaborate' here, because I feel the camera can be told to tell a lie by the simplest of changes in the frame, for instance taking a photograph of a fake plant and making it look real to the viewer.

Here below you can see some short notes I took down in the reading group, with some helpful pointers from Liz about moving image inspiration for my project that I'm going to look into.

All in all I found this reading group and the materials we had to read very insightful and in some ways helpful for my own project. I enjoyed the TV show more because it was easier to engage with and had more topics of interest relating to my project, but the reading was also interesting and I can still apply points from it into my later work.

#readinggroup #photographyincontext