Practice

Morning tutorial with Sylvia

I sat down and said honestly that I don’t have  a fixed idea on what I want to for this year so I shared my brainstorm. Sylvia noticed it was a long list and suggested we talk about what I did last year. Bringing up the summary of my year long project from last year I pointed out some of the works that I completed and what my final pieces looked like. The weaving of the images together and the reasons why I was doing it, in terms of trying to get out of my comfort zone and do something manual and analogue rather than digital.

She asked me about the text I’d chosen for the artists library task so I talked about the dystopian view of Gotham city and the wider world in the book The Dark Knight Returns, by Miller Janson and Varley, about night time images with anonymous silhouettes of the characters.

I mentioned my goal to go and visit Tokyo to take pictures in the dark rain soaked streets and the work of Liam Wong as well as my fondness for Blade Runner movies and aesthetic. It was at this point I showed Sylvia my car park zine and the concrete class zines and she seemed pleased with the content of them.

She said that the pictures in the zines were much stronger than the submission I handed in at the end of my L4 year. She said that she liked the lighting and the shapes that were shown in the photos and said it was like working at the work of two completely different photographers.

We then discussed that I might want to expand more into the night time photographs of car parks, concrete buildings, even the industrial premises that I work in.

She asked if I was still interested in taking photos like this and I said yes, with my goals to explore empty spaces, people in hidden societies as Wong does with his take on the night-time vision of Tokyo after midnight.

We then talked about the research about dystopias and how these could be key to tying all of my photographs together for this year and the practice part of this module.

I went to the Library to look for books on Dystopias and  find writing behind the supposed future state of the human race.

I read through a book called Sci Fi Architecture, by Architecture Design magazine and there were some interesting ideas of building designs but I felt they didn’t fit in with my dystopian view.

I had a read through a book called Le Corbusier by Kenneth Frampton and enjoyed seeing how this famous architect was thinking about how his buildings were to be designed and how they would be used.

I also borrowed (I can’t write “loaned” it feels wrong) a book called Between Dystopia and Utopia by Constantinos Doxiadis in which he discusses town/city planning and how humands plan to build a Utopia but it ends up as a dystopia. This is seen in the tower blocks built in the mid 20th century that turn into crime ridden paradises for the underbelly of society, whilst they were actually designed to be beneficial to the communities engaged in the projects.

I will read more of these last two books and perhaps make some research notes on this blog.

Contextual:

Seminar

We started the session in the lecture theatre today by talking about Victor Burgin’s essay Art, Common sense and Photography.

We each picked out a part of the text that we’d made notes on and had some good discussions about manipulation of images, biases, framing, political ideology, truthfulness and other notes.

My main response to the text can be found here:

We discussed further questions from the topic too such as.

What biases do I bring to my images?

Each person brings their own lived experience to the creation of the photo. If I am squeamish I might avoid pictures of gore. If I was brought up to not like swear words I might not photograph a piece of graffiti due to the language in it. Sexuality, political leanings, faith, religion, spirituality, conspiracy theory belief etc might all play a part in the choice of what I put in the frame of my camera before I press the shutter.

What do I include in images ?

In terms of subjects I include in my images I think I’m fairly open, as discussed in the lecture theatre, I took photos of my Dad who died in March this year, during the years, months, and days leading up to his death in hospital as well as photos of him after he’d died. It’s all important subject matter. I’ll take many photographs during a street photography session and won’t include photos of homeless people passed out on the floor, but if they’re trying to fight the police that is a different matter. I’ve often been criticised by my family for taking pictures of random people and I feel that if I didn’t take an interesting picture of an interesting person or event because they were different, disabled, part of a minority, vulnerable group then that is a form of discrimination. Why would I have no issue of an able bodied person dressed in a fancy dress costume on a hen party, but then have scruples about taking the same picture of a comparable event with the person not being able bodied. I’m an ally of all minority groups and will correct people for doing something to  offend that person or group, but I won’t treat them differently when it comes to making images of them. As long as I’m not exploiting their protected characteristic for a baseless reason.

Why do I include these things?

I try and act fairly across all my subjects, I like to think that I don’t have any obvious biases preventing me from taking photos of certain subjects but I’m sure there are some hidden in my psyche that mean I steer towards some subjects and away from others.

We also discussed how the manipulation discussed by Burgin, is not merely a part of the image or text associated with the image but it can come from the placement of the image on a gallery wall or in a magazine. Imagine a picture of a drunk person fighting the police next to another image that might suggest that Police brutality was happening in the first image. It’s incredibly important to select the images displayed, are they shown  solo, two, three etc. A single image might have more impact than a series of five, but a story might be easier to convey with five images rather than a single photograph.

Listening to Images Task

We then discussed the “Listening to Images” task that we completed by visiting the Wolverhampton Art Gallery and my main response can be seen here.

As a group we discussed our chosen works and thoughts behind the selections. A couple of my course mates had chosen the Su Richardson’s Soft Power exhibition and in particular an exhibit called Expressing Breasts (Blood, Tears, Milk) https://www.richardsaltoun.com/artists/309-su-richardson/works/23021-su-richardson-expressing-breasts-blood-tears-milk-bad-blood-2017/

They said that they could feel the pressures mother’s were under to cope with the stresses of motherhood and could hear the mother’s at the end of their tethers, whereas I was unable to hear anything about the years of sexism enacted against women. I was being too literal in trying to hear the sounds of metal crashing in the pictures I selected, when I could have been listening out for the years of oppression of women that resulted in the crocheted breasts being an artwork that would have no doubt started many a conversation.

Noah quoted me when I’d said “I don’t have the lived experience of these women, so I don’t feel qualified or comfortable having an opinion on the work” which I often do feel. Bo Burnham’s “Inside” album has a song in which he mocks “white saviours” and “healing the world with comedy” and as a privileged, middle aged, white male, I don’t feel that I have suffered oppression as many minority or vulnerable groups have so I don’t want to overstep the bounds and cross into being a “saviour” in the sarcastic sense of the word. This means I am sometimes overly cautious about the amount of empathy I can show for these groups that I am not a part of and am most likely part of the group that is causing the oppression.

Care

Moving into the afternoon’s seminar we were introduced to the title: “Who cares? The practice of care in art and photography”

• We would be looking at work by  Anthony Luvera  “Construct” (2022)
• Andrew Norman Wilson “Workers leaving the Googleplex” (2011)
• And Steve McQueen “Year 3” at Tate Britain (2019)

Discussions would be about the Practice Of Care in photography.

Sylvia shared with us a quote by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez from #85 Issue of e-flux Journal

For Slow Institutions

“This is an invitation for curators operating in distinct geographies but within an intertwined geopolitical reality to slow down their ways of working and being, to imagine new ecologies of care as a continuous practice of support, and to listen with attention to feelings that arise from encounters with objects and subjects. This is a call to radically open up our institutional borders and show how these work—or don’t—in order to render our organizations palpable, audible, sentient, soft, porous, and above all, decolonial and anti-patriarchal.“

It is a quote about how we as photographers, and every other industry truthfully, could be more caring if we slowed down to think about the communities and resources affected by the work that will be done. It relates to photography in the fact that we need to stop and think about the photos we make and whether we’ve given due consideration to the ethics of the situation, we talked about power dynamics which follows on from last year’s discussion on the topic.

Sylvia challenged us with the question What is care and how does it connect to photography?

We, as a group, had a chat about what we thought it meant as photographers to care for the subject or subjects. Whether it is the photos of a vulnerable person that has no agency in the decision on being photographed and then published in an advert or exhibition, or images of subjects that could prove divisive or even damaging to a community or group of people.

We talked about a few photographers, Emma mentioned Sally Mann for the criticism that she had taking photos of her naked children, Ieva mentioned Martin Parr and his critics saying that he is mocking the poor and working class with some of his work.

Can you think of photographers that engage with the notion of care through their work?

Whilst I could not think of any at the time we had a talk about the topic and how we might address care in the practice of photography. Shellie offered Robert Sturnam as a caring photographer who photographed Yoga Instructors with a description of the subjects and their stories. The accompanying story is the subject’s consent for the image and future presentation of it. Emma mentioned a photographer who lived with the homeless community for six months in order to understand the subject before capturing elements on film or ccd sensor and how this was seen as more ethical, but I heard the lyrics of Pulp’s “Common People” in my mind when I was thinking about this. Whilst it appeared sincere and good natured there would always be that escape hatch or as Jarvis Coker puts it “if you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah”

Anthony Luvera

We looked at Luvera’s “Construct” series in which he photographed the homeless after volunteering at a day centre for four years in order to work with the community. He then provided them with disposable cameras to document their experiences and then invited some to get involved with assisted self-portraits in which the subjects are all photographed , holding the shutter release cable, showing that they had the agency of when the final picture was made.

The group chatted about the self portrait nature of the images, meaning that the subjects had chosen to take part and selected the final images. We discussed about whether the subjects had any control of where the final images were placed and debated whether this type of work would benefit the homeless charities it set out to help or whether it was of any benefit at all in opening conversations about the emotive subject.

After the group chat we were presented with some questions that we should think about.

Do you see collaboration as part of your practice?

I do see collaboration as an important part, my family have come around to being collaborative in my family photography and in some street photography I sometimes ask for a portrait of someone before I bring the camera up to my face. It’s not always something I do though, I will take plenty of candid photos and sometimes disguise the fact that I’ve just made an image of someone by looking at the building above them after the camera comes away from my face in a feat of misdirection. Collaboration also happens when I’m making a candid image, some people realise what I’m doing and engage with the camera wither in a positive or negative way.

How do you invite the participant?

I’m quite open and will often ask people for a photo if they are interesting or doing something interesting, if they say “no” I will leave it there. Often times I have also taken a photo before I get closer and ask for a non-candid shot in which the subjects often pose and this I find is damaging to the integrity of the final photograph. If it is a photo shoot at a wedding or an event I will invite people to stand in for the photos and work with them to capture the best image I possibly can for them.

What questions do you need to consider?

I’ve mentioned it earlier in this write up of the seminar, I consider whether it’s an interesting photo to me, whether I’m taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable position for the sake of it, whether there is any wider benefit of me making the image etc.

London July 2021, a photo of a young woman on the steps of Stratford Station who was in tears, on her phone and smoking a cigarette was an interesting photo as the mystery of the reason she might have been upset along with the geometry of the surroundings led me to take the picture, but if I’d asked her if I could take her photo she would probably have told to “Eff Off” I imagine. It’s this balance I find tricky to strike, is it so important that it needs to be captured, or is it too upsetting that it needs to be left alone. In most cases I will capture the image and then discard it once on the Lightroom screen if I feel it is too exploitative.

What are the power dynamics? Especially in doc and photojournalism, a move to post documentary?

Power dynamics is what we referred to with the chat on Martin Parr and Sally Mann earlier, who has the power in the situation. Sylvia argued that it’s almost exclusively the person with the camera who has the power over the subject.  This is true in my street photography, I have the power, to take the photo leading the viewer to think in a directed manner, chosen by myself. The subjects have little power or control aside from turning away or stopping me from taking their photo. It can feel like being a bully sometimes who is just going around taking subjects pictures, “because I can”. I’ve had many a chat with subjects and other interested parties about the law and photography and whilst I’m not anywhere near as over the top as the “Auditors” on YouTube I do find it necessary to stand up for my rights as a photographer sometimes.

I’d never come across the term “post-documentary” before so I went to find a definition, Aperture magazine provides this, “The term “post-documentary” has described many things, including a photography that examines these issues of authenticity and power. It now frequently refers to a poetic or ambiguous style whose meaning or message is not overdetermined.” (Lucy McKeon, Aperture, 2021)

I read this as documentary photography with less context around it, either in terms of other images making the story evident or explanatory text accompanying the images. It also sounds like it’s questioning the authenticity of images and the documentary nature of them, this in some ways goes back to the Burgin discussion for me, just because it’s a photo of something that’s happened doesn’t give you the full story and can be manipulated.

This work by Luvera is mentioned in a podcast on Photo Ethics, we have a task to listen to this ahead of the next session in the lecture theatre.

Andrew Norman Wilson

Sylvia also then changed tack and showed us a short film by Andrew Norman Wilson called “Workers leaving the Googleplex”

We watched the film which the video was mostly static camera positions of two views of the Google Buildings where he worked for a third party contractor. He noticed the differences in the ID badge colours and how some with one colour badge had access to every benefit available whilst another had none of the access to these benefits. The “Yellow Badge” workers as he called them were data entry staff, scanning books page by page into the Google databases for inclusion in their library. He set up some cameras and then decided to talk to the workers to see if they knew about the differences in the badges but was almost immediately reprimanded and eventually lost his job. This was due to the fact that he was interested in the differences between the badge colours and that most of the yellow badge workers seemed to be people of colour and he started noticing things, but then when he was open and transparent it cost him his job at the site, but he got a work of art from it which he has gone on to display in exhibitions since.

Sylvia asked us two questions about Wilson’s Googleplex project:

What do you think this work is about?

Personally I think it is about how large corporations can treat people differently and not have any issues with it. If they prevent people from discussing the differences between their badge colours, and thus their “Class” then there will be no uprising or unionisation to demand better pay and access to the benefits. It shows how large corporations can control their workers with indoctrination of rules and suspicions and then capture people causing disruption before ejecting them. It’s about bureaucracy and workers rights, the fact that the workers don’t realise their rights are being restricted and also about class and race.

How do you think it relates to care?

With regards to the Care element the artist/videographer has a duty of care to publish his findings, and as he’d mentioned he might have been leaving in two weeks anyway he chose to finalise the work and publish. If he’d been on a career path that he felt would continue maybe he would have sat on the story so nothing was disrupting “the man”. He felt he had a duty to publish it and bring attention to the differences in the classes working at the site, but did he do this as he has a social conscience or was it due to it being a form of protest art?

On the MoMA website page about his work Wilson is quoted as saying:

“However, the work started to feel dishonest, as it had momentum almost exclusively within what could be called the cottage industry of critical art. The most tangible outcome of this explicitly politicized practice seemed to be exhibitions, lectures, and press that connected me to a highly educated audience that already agreed with me. As someone with a background in activism and documentary and, now, a decade of experience in the art world, I’m honestly sickened by the current proliferation of bad-faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering.”

It sounds like he feels bad that he’s made a name for himself out of this expose of the Google employment practices and that he has done other works relating to the original such as “Scan Ops” in which he takes pictures similar to those that the yellow badge workers might be doing thousands of times per day.

Other articles on the web indicate that this secrecy about the different coloured badges, classes, or even castes as one other article puts it, but might be related to the secretive technology being used to digitise books in a rather faster than everyone else fashion. https://qz.com/1494111/googles-caste-system-is-bad-for-workers-and-bad-for-google-too by Ephrat Livni tells a similar story to Andrew Norman Wilson about the caste structure at google and how he felt it was bad for workers and also for the wider enterprise.

I’m lucky to work for a large global company and I see some of the same features about how people are employed in this business also. Full Time Employees are the main workforce but there is a reliance on a flexible workforce, to allow for peaks and troughs in the market demand. These temporary workers are treated differently from FTE’s, not because the company want to, but they are forced to. Temporary workers who are treated similarly to other employees could argue in tribunals that they are treated like an employee so should be an employee, with all of the benefits including redundancy and everything else. The flexible nature of the jobs means short notice periods and no redundancy but this is not really related to a class of person as in Wilson’s work, the situation is known about and is not restricted to our company, it’s a UK Law that drives this practice and it’s required to protect the workforce and the company simultaneously.

What I’m saying is, that although Google look bad in this work, it might be that the “class” of workers who want to do the type of work they’re paid to do in the book scanning project are people who don’t mind doing this for the pay that they receive. Any job is better than no job, for many people. The caste system mentioned by Livni and the Badge Colour differentiation is possibly a way of Google meeting their legal requirements. We’ve seen it recently in some instances where Uber drivers qualified as being employed by Uber so became entitled to benefits they wouldn’t have usually been entitled to. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing for the worker and the company, it’s never as clear cut as activists and companies want you to believe, but there are legal minefields around employment law both in the US and the UK.

We picked up some tasks from Sylvia to complete:

READ: ‘Post-Documentary, Post-Photography’ by Martha Rosler : https://www.are.na/block/1791938

LISTEN: Anthony Luvera: On collaborative representation https://www.photoethics.org/podcast/anthony-luvera

WATCH: Watch something of your choice that relates to photography

we will start to make a ‘Watching List’ that we can share with each other

We will discuss these in Week 5 (Tuesday 31st October)

As I complete these tasks I’ll create a post on this journal for them and a response to them.