16) Reading Groups Seminar, Amanda Harman - 7/2/18

On Wednesday we had a seminar with Amanda for 3 readings that had been set:

1. Known and Strange Things - Teju Cole

2. What we hear when we look: The (In)audibility of Photographs - Clare Hewitt

3. Online Photographic Thinking - Jason Evans.

My notes from the session can be seen on the scanned pages of the readings.

1. The first reading we looked at was Clare Hewitt's, which you can see scanned in below.

The first point we picked out was about authorial voice, prompted from this part of the text "Gerry Badger highlights the broad capacity and potential for authorial voice, and the sound of that voice within an image". Immediately there are photographers whose work you would describe as having an 'authorial voice', for instance Martin Parr. He has a specific style and way of showing his voice within photography to tell a story. The whole text focuses on this idea of photographs having a voice without sound.

For instance David Birkin's series 'Confessions' which depicts individuals sharing secrets they'd never told before. This was shot with a long exposure technique so you can see all the movements of these people while speaking. I think this is a great example of images showing authorial voice without sound, because their body language of head movements and closed off arms underlines that they're sharing a secret. I feel Clare described this well, with the quote "His work feels like a delicate yet potent balancing act, and here that balance strikes somewhere between secrecy and revelation, audibility and inaudibility. It is from this that the images gain their charge, their intensity, their richness". The movements depicted in the images make me want to know what these secrets are, but the images will remain silent.

Clare introduced another body of work which plays with the idea of sound - Hiroshi Sugimoto's 'Theatres'. These images are also use a long exposure technique, where Sugimoto kept the shutter of his 5 x 4 camera open for the duration of the whole film, creating a "window on a bright world, whilst still remaining silent". Differently to Birkin's work, I'm not as intrigued to know the sounds of the whole film, but instead I just appreciate the beauty of the interior of the theatres, and I feel quite drawn in by the bright white light. I think this difference in wanting to hear sound is well explained in this quote "Sugimoto has photographed something that has a structured life of it's own; a film begins and ends and it can be replayed if so desired. The confessions made in Birkin's series are swallowed in these images, and a close resemblance to human experience is amplified because his subjects have an indexical presence that cannot be precisely repeated".

Another example of sound in photographs mentioned by Clare was Donald Webber's series 'Interrogations', where he gained access to interrogation rooms in Russia and Ukraine. There is definitely a lot of sound that comes from these images, from a mix of factors. The first is from the subjects, because the interrogator is "pressuring the accused for information", and another is through the aesthetics of the images - for instance the red tint of colour throughout the whole series. The effect of this silence mixed with these factors "is that the noise and emotional intensity of the subject becomes louder" and "our emotional responses to the images are intensified because we are confronted with soundless raw vulnerability, the sight of human beings often at breaking point".

2. The second reading we looked at was 'Touching Strangers' by Teju Cole, where he's discussing a series of images shot by Richard Renaldi where he got strangers to embrace each other in different ways and in different environments. My notes from the text can be seen below.

Here's also some examples of the work.

"The portraits in Renaldi's book are situated in this terrain of taboos and consolation. In the silence between his two subjects, there is a charge". I agree with this quote, for instance the image above of the young girl and the officer could be seen as taboo, especially through his body language and the way he's holding her. It makes the viewer feel uneasy. Whereas on the other hand, other images are seen in the realm of consolation, for instance the image of the man holding the woman in her wedding dress.

Another point I picked up on within the text is how touch is the only traditional sense that is reflexive, "to touch is to be touched". This sense mixed with the collaboration of strangers creates these feelings of taboo and consolation to the viewer. It makes me think, maybe the photographer wishes we as a society were kinder and more open to each other.

I really liked this quote in the final paragraph of the text, which I think rounded it off well "Renaldi has shepherded chance and intuition into something both luminous and unreassuring".

3. The third text we looked at was Jason Evans' 'Online Photographic Thinking', which I had previously read for my Obsessions project. This meant I didn't print it out but I did still make some notes which you can see below.

The first point we made is that it's a very outdated article, and considering it's about utilising online opportunities for photography, things have changed quite a bit since it was written. For instance Lisa Barnard's interactive photography website is a massive step forward in the way that photography is exhibited online, very different to just static websites with images.

Due to reading the article previously for another project, I was more interested in the comments section of the reading. One comment that caught my attention was from Amir Zaki, whose comment I've added in below.

I agree with this comment in the article, because like Zaki stated, there's no gatekeepers online like in galleries or in publishing, and you need these to filter out bad work. Also when viewers look at art online they could respond badly to it with ease, whereas I feel people that view art in a gallery may respond more positively because they've paid to see it and can't escape it, it's surrounding them.

Overall I found the reading group with Amanda really informative due to discussing the content of three different texts, however none of them really stuck out as my favourite, and none of them stood out to me to link directly to my own practice. However I do think looking at these texts has allowed me to practice my analysis of texts more, which will help in the third task for Photography in Context.

#photographyincontext #readinggroup