Exhibition Review

David Cotterell: Monsters of the Id, (curator Helen Sloan).

John Hansard Gallery 11 February- 31 March

Installation artist, David Cotterell was sent to Afghanistan by the Wellcome Foundation, in 2008, to document the conflict in Helmand province. Not content with just recording and photographing, he is presenting an “experiment with advanced display technologies” at Southampton’s Hansard Gallery. This exhibition attempts to capture the disorientation of civilian observers within a militarised environment by containing complex networked activity and interactive systems involving custom built hard/software.

Upon entrance one is immediately immersed within an eerie Afghani landscape projected onto a wall, before human bodies dramatically emerge, walking forward to confront the “voyeurs” (see below). We, the watching thus become the watched in an unsettling role reversal.

Next, a room-size chalk model of mountains upon which Cotterell has, via computer technology, created illusory human shadows randomly traversing the terrain which dovetails with a 6 channel-HD collimated display of a vitalised desert landscape where the viewer’s experience is encouraged to hover between “sublime reverie and the quiet anxiety between periods of violence”.

 Cotterell’s exhibition sets exciting standards in terms of technology, conception and originality by encouraging the public to fully interact, but although his work is visionary, even provocative, the uninitiated could conceivably benefit from more guidance in terms of his photographic work.

David Cotterrell's website


How others saw it? The Guardian Guide 25th Feb

Documentary Photography - an interesting blog

I chanced upon this blog via Source magazine and found it very readable.
vervephoto
What attracted me in particular was the variety, the fact that it featured so many different photographers and also each artist wrote about the actual image putting it into context and adding extra information.
I was struck by one image posted on February 1st 2012 by Anne-Stine Johnsbraten called Mom and Dad, Christmas Eve, Oslo 2007. A domestic scene with real unstaged emotion.

Many images in the blog are from around the world, often in exotic places but documentary photography can originate in your own house as Johnsbraten's image demonstrates. Some months ago my daughter was revising (with her mother helping) for her mock GCEs. She was tired and fed up and the atmosphere was tense so I took a quick shot of the scene, but she looked up just as I pressed the shutter, however her "hacked off" expression suitably conveys her mood and will always remind me (and her) of a moment in time which otherwise we would probably quickly forget.

 Semiotics

Today's lecture surrounded the world of "semiotics" (please note this is not a school dinner pudding). Of course we all have already been introduced to this world before without quite realising it. Signs, images, icons whatever they are called are everywhere; they guide us, advise us, instruct us, educate us, inform us and persuade us as we make our way through life.

If the reader can endure the monologue type diction of the speaker this short You Tube video (link above) is explicit in revealing more about the world of semiotics or, translated into English, "the reading of signs".

Signs come in all shapes and sizes, some our one-offs such as this one, above, or they can be mass produced like the one below.

The politics in hosting exhibitions.

In the Observer's photographic website Sean O'Hagan in his blog is bemoaning the fact that gritty social documentary photographer Chris Killip's latest exhibition appears to be shunned by British galleries and is instead to be displayed in, Essen Germany.

Sean O'Hagan's blog on Chris Killip

O'Hagan accuses the photographic/art powers to be in this counrty of deliberately turning their backs on Killip's work because it is overtly political chosing to depict the worst aspects of life in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher's "no such thing as society" doctrine. Killip's pictures so often portray working-class abandonment and despair brought on by unemployment which reached record highs during the Thatcher era. O'Hagan argues that it appears Killip's hard-hitting images do not fit into the artistic concept or ambitions of many of this country's leading galleries citing the Tate and the Hayward as examples.
Can Killip's work be considered artistic? Is photography losing it's way by trying two hard to be emulating art? Are galleries shying away from tough political messages? Watch this space - in the meantime consider one of Killip's most famous images from his "In flagrante" series.

Tableau photography......intentional artificiality.

Today's lecture centered around the art of narrative photography or the use of storytelling in contemporary art photography. This area of photographic practise is known as tableau photography and is covered in Chapter 2 of Charlotte Cotton's "the photograph as contemporary art" published in 2004.

In Chapter 2 "Once Upon a Time" she takes us through the various tableau practitioners which include such luminaries as Jeff Wall, Tom Hunter and Sam Taylor-Ward. As Cotton points out the meaning of this sort of photography "is reliant on our investing the image with our owns trains of narrative and psychological thought". In other words the photographer will lay before the viewer their creation, their narrative, but a lot of the interpretation that then follows is dependant on the imagination of the person viewing the photograph.

Before starting my degree at SSU, I remember watching a BBC4 documentary called "The Genius of Photography" and a section of one programme covered an American photographer called Gregory Crewdson (b 1962).

I watched fascinated as Crewdson went through an incredibly elaborate, costly direction process whereby he stage managed a fake scenario including actors so just one photograph could be taken (seen below).

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

I was amazed that he thought it worth spending so much time just to get one photograph and one that was so unnatural or contrived. I appreciated that his work sold for vast sums but could not truly grasp the concept that the contemporary art photographer very much likes to create a scene rather like the artists who painted pictures before the arrival of film. Everyone starts with a blank canvas and what goes down on that canvas can be artistically created, even by photographers. Crewdson's technique is fully explained by him in the video clip below but he admits that he likes to portray an "eerie stillness" in his photography and it would be impossible to depict this "stillness" in anything but a "still" negative. He also likes to present the "ordinary and yet the strange" and again this mix is part of the narrative process and can be conceived directly from Crewdson's imagination and then physically constructed rather than a search for the right location with real people.

The critic Stephan Berg said this of Crewdson - "his photography revolves around a simple theme: the intrusion of the suppressed, eerie and inexplicable into the seemingly idyllic normal world. With an almost obsessive energy he works on creating an imaginary world whose carefully painted idyll, rich in detail, is permanently and irreversibly subverted....it might seem surprising that he sees himself as 'an American realist landscape photographer' placing himself in the tradition of great chroniclers of everyday life in America from Walker Evans via Gary Winogrand to William Eggleston. But this self-description isn't as teasing and far-fetched as it seems".

Exhibitions - a previous experience and some thoughts!

Last year (2011) I had a lucky break when visiting, Dimbola Lodge, in the Isle of Wight. It was once the home of Victorian portrait photographer Julia Cameron but now is a museum/gallery. At first I thought I was unlucky because the exhibition I wanted to see wasn't opening until the next day. It was Chris Gabrin's "From Hear to Photography" and featured his work within the music industry in the late 1970s when he photographed punk/rock icons such as Elvis Costello and Ian Dury.

I watched the curator hang the images with interest, happy to get a sneak preview but all of a sudden Chris himself turned up and seemed happy to chat about his work. It was really interesting to hear first hand the methods and techniques he used to get the shots that adorned contemporary LP covers of that period.

I  persuaded the reluctant Chris to pose for my Rolleiflex in front of one of his pictures of Costello.

Perhaps his most famous LP cover was Ian Dury's "New Boots and Panties" and Chris let me into a secret - how embarrassed he was that his white mini van and tripod (on which his trusty hasselblad was mounted) are reflected in the window of the shop which Ian and his son are standing in front of. It is only when you meet the artist you get to hear and see the flaws in their work which otherwise would be undetectable. If only I could get to talk to some other photographers to discuss their exhibitions for this module.
                                            Meanwhile see if you can spot"his mistakes."

In the beginning
Welcome to my new blog, rather unimaginatively called Visual Representation which will be investigating the wonderful world of blogs, exhibitions and anything else that grabs my eye in the photographic world.

Everything has to start somewhere and where better than the bizarrely named blog
cupofpea
Why I hear you ask? Well the author of this particular blog, Rasmus Vasli, has based it around his penchant for photographing strangers in the street and, as that is something I have done, I was fascinated in his style and technique. He is Norwegian but operates mainly in London which makes it even more fascinating in the ways the strangers react to being asked to having their photo taken by someone from outside their immediate environment.

I am also intrigued in how he gleans little pieces of information from his subjects - something I wish I had done. A few months ago during a shower I stopped and photographed these two men who were walking in Bedford Place sporting identical umbrellas and oddly, belts. Talking of peas, they looked like two peas in a pod but I never asked if they were related or even where they got their brollies. They were looking at me in a rather bemused manner, mainly because I was using an old Rolleiflex and they had obviously never seen one before. Having visited and learned from "cupofpea" I shall, in future, try and engage my "victims" in conversation.

TWO PEAS

Time to check out some more blogs! Here is another one recommended called "Lenscratch" and it is interesting to check out some of the design differences between the various blogs.

Next step, a brush-up on my creative blog skills which at the moment are pretty rudimentary.