This week will see us in the Independent Practice module have a seminar/session about Effective Reading. Gavin has given us a list of 10 texts and asked us to read and review at least two, these are the listed titles in the Canvas system.
- Most Photographed barn in America
- kristeva-powers-of-horror
- Socially engaged photography and wellbeing
- something and nothing
- New Fashion Photography
- The Politics of Staring Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography
- Colourism-and-the-Politics-of-Beauty-Aisha-Phoenix
- Facades of Suffering Clients Photo Stories About Mental Illness
- Sick Women Theory
- Gemma-Rose Turnbull – Surface Tension Navigating Socially Engaged Documentary Photographic Practices
From this list I selected two and another to have a read through, my interpretation of them will be documented below.
Barn Storming
The first text I selected was “The Most Photographed Barn in America”: Simulacra of the Sublime in American Art and Photography by David Allen and Agata Handley. (Allen and Handley , 2018)
It is a discussion based around the Thomas Moulton Barn in the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, USA. From this one topic, it jumps into multiple areas of other artistic works and multiple philosophical standpoints about what happens to a subject of an artwork, whether it is photographic or painted, in terms of its originality and how people see it forever more.
The work opens with an abstract discussing a scene from Don DeLillo’s 1986 book White Noise and one of the characters “complains the barn has become a simulacrum, so that “no one sees” the actual barn anymore.” (DeLillo,1986). The word Simulacrum means something that is a copy and that it is no longer original. Reading through this first part of the essay suggests that the barn is the most photographed because of the barn and the location. They also argue that the barn and the locale only exists to service the photographers and artists who make the pilgrimage to the location. It reads as though the original barn no longer exists, and people are only interested in capturing their version of this widely known about building.
Without the artists, the barn would simply be a barn, but because there is a mutual reliance, they both are part of the same phenomenon. It also talks about other barns regularly photographed are also part of this same barn, barns in the US all appear to make viewers reflect back to the Moulton Barn so by extension they are all simulacra of the original barn.
The essay goes on to discuss how this barn represents the Sublime, which according to Merriam Webster Dictionary is defined as:
1a : lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner
b : of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth
c : tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality (as of beauty, nobility, or grandeur) or transcendent excellence
Further into the essay it discusses adventurers first documenting their view of the Yellowstone Canyon and how sublime it was. Thomas Moran created a huge painting of the scene that is mentioned several times too. The same is true of the view of the Moulton Barn, people think it is a sublime vista with the mountains in the background of the image and how it represents this part of middle America. The people using the word sublime are stuck for words to describe the beauty and awe of what they see before them and capture it on a canvas. People are then viewing the canvas and painting thereupon, then deciding that they wish to go and witness the scene themselves.
Of course, the photographs and paintings of these scenes are just that, and it reminds me of Rene Magritte’s 1929 painting The Treachery Of Images, which shows a simple painting of a pipe with text on the canvas “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” or in English This is not a pipe”. Whilst its a surrealist view on the topic, it explains that the pipe in the picture is a picture of a pipe and not a pipe. The same is true of the Barn and the Grand Yellowstone Canyon, there are inconsistencies with the actual contents of the vista if a viewer stood in the same location. Changes were made for convenience and to to make the sublime look even more sublime. The Barn is not a barn. It is a representation of a barn that may have stood some time ago, and the article argues that the original barn no longer exists, that is the barn that was never photographed or painted before. Once it enters the cycle of existing for photographers and photographers existing for the Barn, then it disappears into becoming a simulacrum.
The Moran painting of the Yellowstone Canyon used foreshortening and changes to the geography of the area to fit it all onto one canvas, and a tourist attraction known as Artists Point, is where people gather to capture the same image of the canyon, except that it doesn’t look like the original painting. The visitors now capturing the images no longer see the differences between the real life location and the painting, as they see the mental image of the canyon including the huge waterfall.
I think the essay explains to the reader, over very many pages, that capturing an image on film can sometimes lift it from being an original one off view to an ideal, the picture everyone wants when they travel to an area. Many tourists, myself included, look at guide books and travel brochures to decide where to visit and then capture the same images that millions of others have previously. My trip in 2023 to Pisa, Italy showed me how many of the visitors walk up the fence surrounding the tower, pretend to be supporting the tower for the purposes of a photograph and then move on. It’s an instagram/tik tok must do, because everyone has done the same. This reduces the architectural marvel of the leaning tower to being a punchline of a joke. The tower as a three dimensional object ceases to exist and I see this as a sort of modern day example of the simulacrum from the sublime.
The essay quotes Plotinus, Plato and Baudrillard who are philosophers whose work I find it very difficult to read and make sense of. Baudrillard argued and is quoted in the essay as saying that in the age of mass communication, the image has become “weightless” it has become a thing in the ether that is no longer tangible. Plotinus who followed after Plato is known for making points about how life can exist on multiple different levels and how they are interpreted. He talked about removing oneself from the real world and combining with the One to become divine. Some of the words in the essay kind of fit in with the topic, but it reads as adding confusion to the paper in a way that I find to be unnecessary.
Plato explains in his work “The Republic” that as an example a bed may exist in three forms, the first being the ideal, the second made by a carpenter based on the ideal and thirdly that made by a painter. This makes sense in terms of how the barn is considered in the essay, the ideal form is an idea of a barn in the US overlooked by the grand mountain range, the second being the “original” the exists in the environment made of wood and nails. The third is the painting or photo of the barn that gives off an aura of a place where the early settlers and explorers may have suffered through harsh winters.
Philosophy is not one of my strengths or a huge part of my practice, but the philosophy of Platonism is defined by Merriam Webster as:
Platonism.
a: the philosophy of Plato stressing especially that actual things are copies of transcendent ideas and that these ideas are the objects of true knowledge apprehended by reminiscence
The same dictionary defines reminiscence as:
Reminiscence
a: apprehension of a Platonic idea as if it had been known in a previous existence
I can see how Platonism relates to art and photography in general as well as many other areas of life. He seems to be saying that anything that exists in physical form is a copy of the idea, the “true knowledge”. Where I struggle with this philosophy is discussion of “previous existence” and spiritual ideas that I don’t have any understanding or belief of. I do understand how they are thought experiments designed to focus the human mind on the matters that matter. But how this fits in with my photography practice I am at pains to fathom.
The Horrors, The Horrors
The second essay I chose to read through was Powers Of Horror, An Essay On Abjection by Julia Kristeva, 1982.
This essay was a mind melter for me. One of the first paragraphs in the document was:
What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. (Kristeva,1982)
This paragraph does not mean an awful lot to me, it sounds like a jumble of clever words designed to sound super high brow. I understand that, as part of this degree, that we need to learn to read effectively, and expanding our range by exposing us to this sort of writing will ultimately help but I find it tiring to have to read through a sentence multiple times to try and decode what is being said.
I picked up from the first page or two that Abjection is the act of being repulsed by a thing, idea, experience or suggestion, the abject. I understand that this represents a real feeling where one feels a need to look even though it might be vile. In my world, away from all of this overly complex language, it is the feeling you have where you “need” to look in your tissue when you’ve blown your nose or have a quick gaze into the toilet bowl after opening your bowels.
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . (Kristeva,1982)
This quote documents some more high level examples of sources of abjection but for me and my practice it might represent me feeling that I need to make an image of a pissy stairwell in a multi-storey car park when there are ne’er-do-wells hanging in the area. The reason that other photographers document the homeless, why I capture images of dead animals. For me it seems to be about documenting the world around me and the beauty in the beautiful and the ugly.
Something ? Nothing ?
As I did not get an awful lot from the second text I chose to read I selected another which seemed to fit my practice more closely and mostly used natural language rather than the overly complex or technical language of philosophy.
The Photograph As Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton, 2020, more accurately Chapter 4 Something and Nothing, is an exploration of photographs that seem to contain unusual subject matter and are used as an artwork themselves. she writes that this shows;
“how non-human things, often quite ordinary, everyday objects, cane be made extraordinary by being photographed” (Cotton, 2020)
In my practice I capture images of many things, not considered beautiful by many people. Sometimes people look at my images with a form of revulsion or misunderstanding. I often see beauty in objects or scenes that my friends and family don’t immediately observe. Some of these same people will change their view on some of my photos after understanding that it was there in their view all of this time yet remained unseen by them.
Cotton begins discussing still life in photography as an artform that was used after the 1960s, but arguably before, to “create puzzles and confound our expectation” (Cotton, 2020). She shares an image by Richard Wentworth, titled King’s Cross London 1999, showing a doorway in the capital city barricaded by car doors.
As Cotton notes, this collection of objects in this location invites the viewer to consider the reasons these doors might be wedged into this doorway. Questions arise in the viewer’s mind, in my mind such as what car are they off? Are they being saved from disposal? Are they put there to be disposed of? Are they blocking the door? To stop people going in? To Stop people getting out?
The questions that arise from an artwork are something that makes me happy. In my example of a dead pigeon above, did it die before it got run over? did it land on the tyre tracks? did it get run over? was it an accident? is it bird flu? why was it left there?
Nigel Shafran and Jennifer Bolande are noted in the work as creating images of still lifes where an object is in an unexpected place and the questions about why we are interested in them.
She also documents Wim Wenders and Anthony Hernandez photos of architecture, which she notes show the dilapidation and degradation of the buildings before demolition or restoration.
Interestingly, a picture by a Wolfgang Tillmans Suit 1997, is discussed briefly as the artist documents a boiler suit that has been left to dry or disposed on the ground and its apparent structure that implies a strange event might have occurred to the once-wearer of the garment. I used the word interestingly, as Euripides mentioned Tillmans as an influence I might like to look into in the session last week. Most of the work in this essay would easily fit in with my current Lightroom Library.
Jeff Wall’s Diagonal Composition No. 3 2000 is also shown as a collection of items in the corner of a room, showing the state of the floor and the contents in the location. This photo, as many of Wall’s, is set up and configured to appear as a found scene, when it is carefully composited to consist of a series of diagonal lines, a mop bucket and a grubby floor. It might remind us of a time when we mopped a floor in a location such as this and tap into a long tucked away memory. It might also trigger a memory from a previous existence such as Plato might have believed.
This essay explains why the viewer might take from an image, that which you bring to it, meaning that your experiences prior to viewing the photo will have a. bearing on what you see in the photo. It also appears that this is a reversion to the older days of painting still lifes, I still see these paintings today. So why are still life paintings and photos so popular? It’s a real world, real life experience that many viewers have felt, and personally I feel that a perfectly painted, hyper real image of a bowl of fruit might be ok, but if there is a random detail in there, it makes me think of a reason or a story as to how this item got there.
A painting I saw in 2023 at the National Gallery, London, ‘Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family’ (c. 1470) by an artist from the German (Swabian) School shows a woman in a headdress with a fly on the material. It is well documented that painting flies was often to display the skill of the artist, but this particular painting caught my attention for the questions it raised in my mind, rather than the perfectly painted, yet seemingly boring, images all around.
Reflection
Of the three essays I chose to read, this was by far the most pertinent to my work and practice. I felt that I was able to read it and make sense of the arguments for the reasoning behind the works. I was connected with the works by the similarity to some of my own photographs that I have captured over the last 10 or 15 years. Namely, scenes I find interesting for their natural beauty even though they may seem mundane. Light coming in through a pinhole of a curtain, a shadow created by seven lights at various locations in a building, a dead pigeon, an odd alignment of features in an environment all lead me to think of the word Sublime. It is a wonder in the daily mundanity that I have learned to witness since becoming more observant through the activity as a photographer and artist.
Unsurprisingly, to me at least, the essays I enjoy the least are the wordy documents that need a dictionary every other sentence and multiple attempts at piecing them together to make a coherent argument or point. I am an engineer at heart, not a philosopher or spiritualist with an eye and understanding of what works and how it works, this hinders me in conversations around art, I am aware of this, but by undertaking exercises such as this I am learning to expand my horizons and at least dip my toe into the word soup. Ultimately, this will assist in my growth as an artist with an ability to perform critical thinking and have the ability to read other books, essays, and poetry with a more open mind.
Bibliography
Allen, D. and Handley, A.G. (2018) “The Most Photographed Barn in America”: Simulacra of the Sublime in American Art and Photography. Text matters (Łódź) [online], 8(8), pp. 365–385 .
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of horror : an essay on abjection. [online] New York: Columbia University Press..
Cotton, C. (2020) The Photograph As Contemporary Art. [online] 4th ed. London: Thames & Hudson, Limited..
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