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TRUTH, FANTASY OR FICTIONA2 Unit 4 2016

Truth

Olivia Parker, Whelks (from "Lost Objects portfolio), 1980

Olivia Parker often produces intricate still life photographs of natural objects. The apparent simplicity of her technique acts to emphasise the complexity of these natural forms the hard shell which had at one time contained the soft living creature, the feather which once adorned the a birds exterior.Photographic document: it is what it is

Laura Letinsky

Edward Weston

An objective representation?

Rineka Dijkstra established her reputation with a series of photographs made of young people aged at that difficult time between childhood and adulthood which all humans must traverse.Krazyhouse

Dianne Arbus is known for her photographs of those on the fringe or edge of conventional society: transvestites, circus performers, dwarves and so on. These people often lived within society and yet were simultaneously a set apart.

Walker Evans "Subway Photographs" (1938-1941)

Marcus Bumbot

Excursie la Sulina, 2011Henri Cartier Bresson

Nick Waplington, The Living Room 1992

Nan Goldin

Tina Barney

A photographic documentWalker Evans, and more recently Rut Blees and Simon Norfolk, approach the need to document real situations.

Simon Norfolk

Rut Blees

Bernd and Hilla Becher, photographing seemingly mundane forms such as industrial water towers, famously attempted to produce a typology of forms.

Idris Khan layered the separate images by the Bechers to create a homage.

A room with a viewDear Stranger,

I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not knowI would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening. A camera will be set outside the window on the street. If you do not mind being photographed, please stand in the room and look into the camera through the window for 10 minutes on __-__-__ (date and time)I will take your picture and then leavewe will remain strangers to each otherIf you do not want to get involved, please simply draw your curtains to show your refusalI really hope to see you from the window. Shizuka Yokomizo, 'Stranger' project

The frame is dictated by the shape of the window and so the choice is not the photographers. Are these truthful, objective representations or the individuals who are photographed?

To crop or not to crop?Cropping is different to framing. Framing is what you do when you take the picture, working out what to include and what to exclude. Cropping happens later, either in the darkroom during enlarging and printing, or in digital editing software.

Henri Cartier-Bresson carefully framed his photographs but believed strongly that photographs should not be cropped in the darkroom. Interviewer: Youve been known for never cropping your photos. Do you want to say anything about that?HCB: About cropping? [...] I will get closer, or further, theres an emphasis on the subject, and if the relations, the interplay of lines is correct, well, it is there. If its not correct its not by cropping in the darkroom and making all sorts of tricks that you improve it. If a picture is mediocre, well it remains mediocre. The thing is done, once for all.This approach is often referred to as the Decisive Moment, after the English title of his famous book. His prints feature a black border (see above) to indicate the edge of the negative, proof that no cropping has taken place.

However, lots of other photographs are routinely cropped, especially those that appear in newspapers and magazines, often accompanied by words.

Take a look at John Hilliard's 'Cause of Death(1974). We are presented with four images featuring what looks like a dead body. The death appears to have four separate causes: Crushed, Drowned, Burned, Fell.

However, we soon realise that the body is identical in all four pictures. The image below shows how Hilliard cropped a single photograph, in four ways, to tell four different stories.

For much of its history, photography was seen as a kind of evidence, proof that something had happened. Hilliard is interested in the ways photographs can be used to provide unreliable evidence, to tell lies and deceive. They do this by only ever showing us part of the whole truth.

Surveillance: Capturing a truth

Derived from the French word surveiller, meaning to keep watch or to watch over, the surveillance camera has been used to police borders, to assist war-time reconnaissance, to gain advantage over political enemies or simply to gather information. Techniques of surveillance are closely linked to developments in photographic technology from the earliest aerial photographs to satellite pictures. In the twenty-first century, cameras on street corners, in shops and public buildings silently record our every move, while web-based tools such as Google Earth adapt satellite technology to ensure that there is no escape from the cameras all-seeing eye.Jonathan OlleyGrosvenor Road RUC Police Station, Grosvenor Road, Central Belfast 1998Jonathan OlleyRUC Police Station and British Army Patrol Base, Strabane, Co. Tyrone 1998

Thomas DemandCamera 2007

Laurie LongCompact, from The Dating Surveillance Project 1998

Laurie LongHairbrush, from The Dating Surveillance Project 1998

Mary Alpern: ShoppingWith a tiny surveillance camera and a video camcorder hidden in her discreetly perforated purse, Alpern wandered through department stores, malls, and fitting rooms. The images in "Shopping" (all 1999) are painstakingly culled from hours of accumulated footage, are in a sense arbitrary and unmoored - even the camera was detached from the photographer's eye.

Fantasy

Surrealism movement- dreams and fantasy

Man Ray

MagritteHerbert Bayer

Surrealists such as Man Ray, Wanda Wulz and later Erwin Blumenfeld, used photograms, montage and double exposure to play with expectation and narrative.

Refined in the 1970s by photographers such as Duane Michals, fantasy and surrealism continued to be a fertile ground for experimentation.

Erin Chase

Andrea Constantini

John Stezaker

Mitsuko NagoneJohn Stezakers combined faces are just the starting points for unexpected and surreal departures into fantasies of the unconscious.

Joe WebbLaura Guarie

Beethy Photography

Mariana AbasoloSurreal Cut Away

Jean Faucheur

David Samuel Stern

Anonymous

Jordan Clark

Anonymous

Diane Meyer

Ana Teresa BarbozaKay S Lawrence

Robert MannSurreal Embellishments

Lynn SkordalBene Rohlmann

Collage Analogico Toshiaki Uchida

Joe WebbHannah Hoch

Surreal CollagesLaszlo Moholy Nagy

Ex-students responses to politically motivated collage techniques and Moholy Nagy.Jamie DennyFlorence Clapcott

Ulric Collette

Ex-student: Lydia FrancisImpossible

Shadows

PoL beda Hervs Sam Taylor Wood

Floris Neusss

David McKean

Illustrate a poem, lyric, fairytale... Combine real and fake elements when taking the photograph. Edit digitally or draw /collage into the image.

Fiction

Nick Knight used a selection of photographic imagery, submitted by SHOWstudio viewers, to inspire an experimental musical performance of Antony Hegarty, lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons. The visuals were projected onto Antony and incorporated over 500 contributions.

The project's spectacular final piece is a fantasy of colour and imagined forms often closer to the appearance of paintings than photographs.http://showstudio.com/project/antony/film

The fashion photographer Nick Knights statement I think photography has been wrestling with a burden of telling the truth, which I dont think it was ever particularly good atimplies a sense of possible liberation from the need to record reality. Nick Knight

Great way to develop your photography or experimentation skills by doing some projection photography. Could link it to hidden identity, disguise, alter ego/multiple personalities or expression.

The camera never lies?

Brian Walski combined two photographs hedtaken during the Iraq war to create the most dramatic composition. Unfortunately he was caught out and lost all credibility as a Photojournalist.Photographic TruthIn Camera Lucida Roland Barthes wrote that a photograph could be a certificate ofpresence an unbiased record of reality. Is this the case? Do we still look to photographsto show a true image of the world around us or has the digital age brought the wholenotion of photographic truth into doubt?

Cottingley fairies, 1917

Yevgeny Khaldei, 1945

Khaldei

As iconic as the image is, it has raised some controversy because it was staged. Khaldei recreated the event, using a handmade flag sewn by a tailor, and later added smoke to the photograph for dramatic effect, and airbrushed off one of two wristwatches worn by one of the soldiers, for fear the soldier would be branded a thief.Cottingley, a village outside Bradford in Yorkshire, would have remained in much deserved obscurity had not 16-year-old Elsie Wright taken a remarkable photograph of her ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, playing with 'fairies' on the banks of a stream which ran behind the garden of Elsie's house. Arthur Wright willingly agreed to lend his daughter his camera when she said she wanted to take a photograph of Frances by the stream.Knowledge of photography was not widespread at this time. As a result, many Spiritualists were encouraged to believe that the camera could 'see' what the naked eye could not, a belief which helped legitimise the Cottingley fairy photographs.

Cottingley, a village outside Bradford in Yorkshire, would have remained in much deserved obscurity had not 16-year-old Elsie Wright taken a remarkable photograph of her ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, playing with 'fairies' on the banks of a stream which ran behind the garden of Elsie's house. A few days earlier, in the summer of 1917, Frances had slipped and fallen into the stream. When she got home, her mother demanded to know why her dress was soaked and the tearful girl offered the excuse that she fallen into the water while she was 'playing with the fairies'.Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1077709/Sherlock-Holmes-curious-case-garden-fairies.html#ixzz1DPRGSIz7

KhaldeiAs iconic as the image is, it has raised some controversy because it was staged. Khaldei recreated the event, using a handmade flag sewn by a tailor, and later added smoke to the photograph for dramatic effect, and airbrushed off one of two wristwatches worn by one of the soldiers, for fear the soldier would be branded a thief.35

Fiction: Narrative, Tracey Moffatt

The Movie Star (1985), the aboriginal actor David Gulpili drinks a beer and reclines lazily across a car hood, appropriating the stance of white Australian surfers as they are popularly displayed in the media. Something More has the style of a set of stills for a film about the trials of a poor but restless coloured girl in rural Australia who wants something more out of life than her lot in the back-blocks. In the opening shot, the would-be heroine wears an exotic Asian dress and later steals an old evening gown in her quest for a new identity. After various fragmented images of her encounters and adventures, the heroines ambitions to cross into the world of glamour and luxury are thwarted and she dies on the road which promised escape from her origins.

Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. For example, in her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, (1977-1980) Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines.Fictitious Identity: Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman responses by ex-student, Lydia Francis

Hendrik Kerstens

Hendrik explores some of the many intersections between painting and photography. Using his daughter Paula as his only subject, Kerstens not only photographs her in reference to Old Master Dutch painting but also in relation to her own life and the world we live in today. From early on, he became increasingly interested in combining the art of photographic portraiture with the game of creating a conceptual and sometimes humorous dialog between past and present. In "Bag", a plastic grocery bag is shaped to look like a lace hood.

Life Imitating Art, Imitating Life

Referring to both vulnerability and impermanence, I'm investigating the texture and feel of both the present and past. Since 2007 I'm working on the series 'foam sculptures': caps and collars, inspired by 16th and 17th century paintings, made from materials currently used for packaging and insulation. This is also an inferior material which is often discarded after use. By using this material I make a reference to consumerism and the rapid circulation of materials. With these foam sculptures, but also an i-pod, a tattoo and a foot in plaster, we end up in the 21st century.Suzanne Jongmans:

Tom HunterLife and Death in Hackney, John Everett MillaisOphelia, 1851-52Tom Hunter: Life and Death in HackneyThis maligned and somewhat abandoned area of Hackney became the epicentre of the new warehouse rave scene of the early 90s. During this time the old print factories, warehouses and workshops became the playground of a disenchanted generation, taking the DIY culture from the free festival scene and adapting it to the urban wastelands. Hunters images draw upon these influences combining the beauty and the degradation with everyday tales of abandonment and loss to music and hedonism. The reworking of John Millaiss Ophelia shows a young girl whose journey home from one such rave was curtailed by falling into the canal and losing herself to the dark slippery, industrial motorway of a bygone era.

Tom HunterWoman Reading a Possession OrderTom Hunter: Persons UnknownThis series of photographs was taken in my street in Hackney, 1997. Myself and the residents who made up this community were fighting eviction as squatters. The title of the series comes from the wording used in our eviction orders. The postures and gestures reference Vermeer's paintings and set out to give status and dignity to our community.

Tom HunterThe Art of Squatting

Jan VermeerThe Art of Painting, 1666

Tom HunterThe Anthropologist

Jan VermeerThe Geographer, 1668Jan VermeerWoman in Blue reading a letter, 1662

Jeff WallJeff WallGust of Wind, 1993HokusaiGust of Wind, 1832In the case of A Sudden Gust of Wind the source material is a Nineteenth Century Japanese woodcut, though Wall also references paintings from Western art history. In the main his use of historical source material is less obvious and less precisely referenced than is the case with A Sudden Gust of Wind.

The work is carefully constructed. Wall photographed different elements of the scene over a period of several months, before seamlessly collaging these together in digital post-production. Its not clear what brings the four main protagonists to this place; two look dressed for the location but the other two look more like businessmen in their suits and overcoats. Whatever the contents of the file of papers, it seems likely that most will now be lost to the unexpected gust of wind that has also taken the Trilby hat of one of the men.

Gregory Crewdson (27 mins)

Gregory Crewdson summary (5 mins)

Gregory Crewdson works within a photographic tradition that combines the documentary style of William Eggleston and Walker Evans with the dream-like vision of filmmakers such as Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch. Crewdsons method is equally filmic, building elaborate sets to take pictures of extraordinary detail and narrative portent.In a Crewdson photograph, the world as we know it has been re-ordered to a perfect, still, moment. In the Hokusai print, the artist has drawn us another world. We are no longer seeing the world as we know it, but a world previously unexisting we are (if the artist is succesful) excited by line and shape and colour and somewhere in there, content and narrative. We do not need to believe, only imagine.

Ex-student response to Crewdson.What happened before, what happens next?

Gillian Wearing: Fictitious Family

Using masks, prosthetics and make up Wearing transformed herself into different members of her family.