Graham Clarke: The Photograph

My tutor for contextual studies has recommended this book suggesting that I read the chapters shown below, highlighting what I consider important points and including my thoughts.  Important points are bullet pointed and thoughts highlighted in yellow.

Chapter 1 - What is a Photograph

·         The photograph has become almost visible

·         A photograph is one of the most common objects to hand around endlessly.  Today we would share photographs on a smart phone (Iphoneography)

·         The Daguerrotype allowed nature to reproduce herself

·         Paul Delaroche lamented that "Painting is dead". (P13)

·         The literalness of Daguerrotypes (P15)

·         A fascination with accurate recording (P15)

·         Walter Benjamin quote: "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." (P15)

·         Calotype means 'Beautiful Picture' (P16)

·         Kodak, Box Brownie, universal, cheap - photography for all. (P18)

·         There is a complex distinction between photography as art and the photograph as a mass-produced object. (P18)

·         At its most basic level a photograph is a 'picture, likeness or facsimile obtained by photography'. (P19)

·         Roland Barthes refers to a photograph as " a transparent envelope'.

·         A photograph is dependent on its content.

·         Those photographs deemed to have the most value are the least functional. (P19)

·         Berger: "in 20th century terms photographs are records of things seen."

·         Delacroix: "A photograph is not a mirror up to nature but a veritable catalogue of the world." (P20)

·         Siegfried Kracauer: "Photographs do not just copy nature but metamorphose it..."

·         At the end of the chapter Clarke has several points to make:

o   The efficacy and effect of a photograph is dependent on the size and shape.

o   A snapshot is a standard mass-produced size.  When we get an enlargement made the difference and value are underscored.

o   Landscape and portrait formats are painterly references.

o   The surface of a photograph is flat.

o    Although both colour and black and white were established at the time of publication (1997) colour remained suspect!!!  Interesting!

o   Colour remains problematic; it is central to the snapshot.

o   A photograph fixes a moment in time.  Hubert Damisch: " A photograph presents a moment from a continuum".

·         Barthes: "When we look at a photograph we look at something which no longer exists.

This chapter works through the early history of photography and looks at the difference between the mass-produced snapshot and 'more serious' photography.  Graham Clarke also touckes on the importance of size and format of the image.  I like the comment from Damisch which suggests that a photograph represents a a moment from a continuum.  That moment can be very brief if very short exposures are used - Ansel Adams' capturing a moment in time - or a longer moment from the continuum when an ultra long exposure is used to provide movement blur in waves or people moving.

Chapter 2 - How Do We Read a Photograph?

·         Looking at a photograph is passive.  We need to read it, not as an image but as a text.

·         Burgin: " We should employ photographic discourse - a language of codes." (P27)

·         Nineteenth century photography was 'read' in relation to the accepted language of painting and literature of the time, especially in terms of symbolism and narrative structure.

·         Far from being a 'mirror' the photograph is one of the most complex and most problematic forms of representation.

·         The photograph is the product of a photographer.

·         One never' take's a photograph in any passive sense.  The photographer imposes, steals, re-creates the scene/seen according to cultural discourse.

·         We must be aware of the photographer as arbiter and namer of significance. (P30)

·         Roland Barthes refers to the denotative and connotative aspects of an image. (P30/31) (refer back to Poststructuralism and the language of photography in course notes.)

·         The image is as much the I of the photographer as it is the 'eye' of the camera. (P30)

·         Each genre has its own terms of reference. (P31)

·         A photograph (via the photographer) can reaffirm or question the world it mirrors. (P31)

·         Barthes in Camera Lucida refers to the 'studium and Punctum of a photograph. (P32)

·         We can then speak of a language of photography in which every aspect of the photographic space has a potential meaning beyond its literal presence in the picture. (P.33)

·         We can read a photograph within its own terms of reference, seeing it not so much as the 'reflection' of the real world as an interpretation of that world. (P.33)

·         Brady et al on war photography - once we begin to question the context, the terms of imaging, the treatment of the subject and so on, a very different image of war emerges.

·         What such images show us is not so much a history as an ideology. (P.36)

·         Such a critical and self conscious use of the medium is most often associated with radical 20th century photography, particularly since the 1950s.  When there has emerged a substantial questioning of the terms of representation and structures of meaning very much influenced by critical theories associated with modernism and the postmodern period by structuralism and semiotics.  But in many ways we need to see all photographs in the same terms. (P.36 reference to early war photography)

·         Friedlander's images change the history of the photograph and give us a critical vocabulary by which to read its development.  They return us to the basic distinctions between the denotative and connotative so insisted upon by Barthes and Umberto Eco, and make clear that, much as in painting and literature, the meaning and practice of photography takes place within its own series of codes and frames of reference. (P.39)

A thought here is did the photographers mentioned intend the meaning that people today read into photographs or did they just press the shutter because they liked what they saw at the time.  I can imagine that some American photographers working for the government such as the FSA or the early landscape photographers portraying the settlement of the west did as they, perhaps, were working with a strict brief and their images would be used for propaganda.

Chapter 4 - Landscape in Photography

·         Perhaps more than the portrait, landscape photography remains encoded within the language of academic painting and the traditions of landscape art from the 18th and 19th centuries.

·         Photography emerged at a time of the continuing exploration and settlement of new lands.  It allowed the land to be controlled at least visually.  (P55)

·         Photography also established itself when the landscape, especially in England, was viewed through a highly developed and popular picturesque aesthetic.

·         The picturesque tourist sought out ideal scenes. (P.55)

·         ....offered images of a rural idyll quite at odds with reality. (P.55)

·         The sense of the photography as privileged tourist is underscored by the way Roger Fenton often photographed established tourist areas which had already been depicted in painting and literature.

·         Fenton portrays and idealised world.

·         No evidence of work in a Fenton photograph.

·         Foreignness is made safe. (P.58)

·         In the USA the idyllic Arcadia of Fenton is not appropriate to a frontier culture

·         Timothy O'Sullivan was an exemplary figure in USA landscape photography.

·         Sublime scenes in USA. (P.58/9)

·         O'Sullivan, like the government he represents, is embarked on a mythic enterprise the very reverse of Fenton's: the mapping and imaging of a land. (P.60)

·         Other American Landscape photographers of the time respond in similar ways. (p.60)

·         William Henry Jackson reflects a sense of wonder that is to remain a key element in the American tradition. (P.61)

·         ........give way to an underlying sense of the spiritual; as in so much later American landscape imagery, the picture begins to suggest a religious element. (P.61)

·         Carleton Watkins was involved in government expeditions and his work is a precursor to Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.  He was a compatriot of Alfred Stieglitz.  "Cape Horn, near Celilo, Oregon is definitive Watkins - railway line and telegraph poles suggest increasing settlement and control.

I wonder if Carleton Watkins and others intend the suggestion of increasing settlement and control or has this type of interpretation been placed on such images by people who 'read' them later.  Had he been given instructions by the government to include such 'suggestions'?

(Early American photography seems to be about recording and, even, 'excusing' the conquering and 'taming' of the west and its native inhabitants, as if the American people feel that they have a God-given right to the land and dominion over the native 'savages'

Think back to Liz Wells Land Matters and Americans dominating the west and the native indians.)

·         If settlement and political control over the land (and native cultures) has marked one tradition of American landscape photography, so Transcendentalism has formed another. - Emerson Thoreau. (P.63) (A very important paragraph for me.  Refer back to the Afterword in Eliot Porter's Intimate Landscapes.  See my blog at http://mikesocalevel3learninglog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/eliot-porter-intimate-landscapes.html

 Also Blake "The whole world in a grain of sand"  I think my leanings are very definitely towards the naturalist photographer or soppy sentimentalism ;-)  Also moss quote "forest in a clump of moss", Sarah Maitland, Gossip from the Forest  )

·         Edward Weston Dunes, Oceano Pl. 30 The camera transposes it as part of a larger mythology of spiritual and mysterious presence. (P.63)

·         Weston's work esp Pl. 31 finds its literary base in the philosophy of Thoreau and Walt Whitman. (P.64)

·         Whereas American documentary photographs saturate the photograph with human figures, landscape images empty the land of human presence. (sometimes in my own photography I like to have no human presence at other times it is useful for scale and to show the landscape (or city) being used and lived in.)

·         They construct their own Arcadia, quite different from the English equivalent. (P.65)

·         An ideal image in an ideal land. (P.65 top)

·         Adams and Weston (and Stieglitz before them) form the high point of a formal and ideal American landscape aesthetic which continues with Minor White. (P.65)

·         Later, Robert Adams has a similar impulse but the terms of reference have changed.  He carries many of the preoccupations of the 19th century into a postmodern context.(P.66)

·         British landscape photography of the 20th century follows a different path.  It still finds roots in the picturesque code of the 19th century.

·         There was a problem with industrialisation in Britain.  America still has wilderness but in the British tradition the photographer is pushed to the margins of the landscapes using such habitats to recover a sense of isolation. (P.67)

·         The photographs make available icons of an alternative existence: primary spots of release and contemplation as if they literally, stand in for a landscape that we rarely see but need to know. (P.67)  (To some extent I agree with this sentiment in that we do 'need to know'.  I also take issue with this and later reference to Martin Parr's New Brighton series.  I think this is a case of being citycentric, possibly Londoncentric.  I was brought up in rural Lincolnshire and  knew the woods, lanes and fields intimately; I knew where every birds nest was in the local area. I agree that there is very little land in Britain that hasn't felt the influence of man (but neither is there in America), little true wilderness, but there are vast tracts of this country that are very rural the whole country is not like Parr's New Brighton and I realise he was, perhaps, tongue in cheek.  I think that there is a real need in this country for photography to show the rural landscape and the mountains, coasts and moorlands so that people in New Brighton can see what exists outside the city and be encouraged to care for it and preserve it. Not in a 'pretty' postcard sense but to show the rural as it really is; I am not against showing people in the landscape at leisure and work.)

·         The photographs of Fay Godwin and Don McCullin suggest a tentative presence, lost as it were, to the eye.  And yet there is a hint of human activity: fence, path or track from McCullin, whereas Fay Godwin is more likely to show an archaeological trace. (P.68) (I think this suggests too much that the rural is only to found on the fringes.)

·         To read them from our predominantly urban perspectives is to return to a strange, almost forgotten Britain. (No - it still exists)

·         John Davies industrial landscapes such as Agecroft Power Station - The English Countryside, and with it the myth of Arcadia have all but disappeared. (P.70) ( I think that Photographs such as this are important in that they show what can happen to the land but the English Landscape has not 'all but disappeared'.  Interestingly when industrial landscapes are left derelict, nature soon takes back her own as has been found in the extreme at Chernobyl or in the disused old railway line in Manhattan's West Side as photgraphed by Joel Sternfield and illustrated on P.11 of Jesse Alexander's Perspectives on Place.)

·         Also of the same period Raymond Moore who used landscape photography to seek out structures and images to allow him to comment on life in general.

·         In recent years other British photographers have created a distinctive critique of landscape as a cultural construction and in so doing have established a body of photography which deconstructs the myth of England as it observes images of the contemporary scene. (P.71)

Chapter 5 - The City in Photography

·         Photography became established at a time of growth in cities and a response from art and literature.

·         The depiction of the city in painting is related to the panorama. e.g. Robert Barker's Novel View of the City and Castle of Edinburgh.

·         Three main cities were singled out by early photographers: New York, London and Paris.

·         The height of the camera above the city has established one of the primary areas by which the photographer has sought to image the urban scene.

·         The photographer has always attempted to rise above the street. (reference John Davies who spoke at the recent Level 3 Study Weekend.  See my blog at:

http://mikesocalevel3learninglog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/level-3-study-weekend-barnsley-2021.html  )

·         The skyscraper became a symbol of the modern

·         The city has always been celebrated in terms of its central icons and photography has followed these: skyscrapers, church spires and towers.

·         Street level is different; it engages with the clutter of the city and it's chaos.

·         The 'flaneur' has rightly been celebrated as a distinctive figure in the modern city.

·         In the 19th Century the city became a central image for the camera. Atget and Brassai were exemplars in Paris which must vie with New York on being the most photographed of cities.

·         Thomas Annan concerned himself with social and economic conditions in urban areas, especially Glasgow.

·         Stieglitz brought to the city an idealism which bordered on the spritual. eg The Flatiron (P.78/9) (Reference the work of Weston and Adams in the landscape world.)  The Flatiron has often been photographed but only Stieglitz photographed it divorced from the chaotic textures of the city streets surrounding it. ( I remember a time when I attempted to photograph in towns and cities without including people; now I strive to have them in the shot.)

·         More importantly Stieglitz empties his images of any human figures.  He seems to inhabit a city given over to ideal forms and ideal moments.

·         Stieglitz was defeated by the city...... (P.80)

·         Other photographers of the period were different e.g. Jacob Riis focused on the appalling conditions of New York's lower east side in an attempt to alter housing conditions. (Similar to Thomas Annan in Glasgow)

·         Lewis Hine recorded New York over 30 years in direct opposition to Stieglitz - he made the street and the figure absolutely central: Ellis Island, Lower East Side and official photographer for the building of the Empire State Building.

·         What distinguishes Hine's approach is that the human figure is always central to the meaning.

·         Flaneur reference (Bottom P.83)

·         The city is part of a perverse world of sensation, danger and the violent: not an ideal environment of the kind Stieglitz visited.

·         Weegee is a good example.  His subject is exhibitionism and he is the photographer as voyeur.  Weegee images a secret city: murder vcitims, muggers, transvestites. (He used to listen in to the police radio channel in order to arrive early at crime scenes[ 20th Century Photography, Taschen.  Nickname Weegee came from the Ouija board, for he was felt to have an uncanny knack of predicting photographic events.])

·         Weegee was an influence on another New York photographer of the bizarre and hidden: Dianne Arbus.

·         John Thompson and Adolphe Smith in London were part of a continuing concern to place the figure in an urban context without recourse to the picturesque caricature. (P.85)

·         The quintessential study of Street figures remains Walker Evans' study of people on the subway.  These were candid pictures taken with a concealed camera.

·         Berenice Abbot photographed New York City as an urban space in its own right. (P.86)

·         Abbot's Columbus Circle is ahead of it's time and suggests a postmodern condition.

·         Joel Meyerowitz's Broadway and West 46th Street, New York (Pl45) is an image of New York as the postmodern city.

·         The first photographers of Paris looked to an historical city that was about to disappear.

·         The central photographer of old Paris was Eugene Atget.

·         Atget was the 'Flaneur' par excellence.

·         Atget was the opposite of the New York photographers as he saw Paris as a museum.

·         Post 1st World War photographers sought out a new Paris akin to its modernist image.

·         From 1924 Brassai also photographed a secret Paris and gave the impression that he only emerged at night.  He stalks the city as a voyeur.

·         Kertez also arrived from Budapest in 1925 but, unlike Brassai, moved among the daily and daytime occupations of its working city.

·         The postmodern condition, perhaps, is that every city will begin, as far as the photographer is concerned, to look the same. (P.98)

·         As we look at Bombay and Calcutta, Beijing, Hon Kong and Tokyo, they are new kinds of cities and demand new kinds of images and a new approach by the photographer.

Maybe I have laboured my point about the landscape being pushed to the margins of Britain but if that is the view of people who live in cities and photographers such as Martin Parr, then I think that there is room for photography of the sublime in the UK in order to redress that balance and to encourage those who live in the city to be interested in preserving a living landscape in this country.  I feel that it is the industrialisation of John Davies that is in pockets and on the margins, but if people don't care about the landscape industry will encroach more and more. Whist at the same time suggesting the there is a Londoncentric view of Britain (and I may be wrong) I am not suggesting planting my tripod in the marks left by current 'famous' landscape photographers, not that they visit Lincolnshire.  I take Professor Paul Hill's point in the forward to Jesse Alexander's Perspectives on Place when he asks "why is it that most camera owners seem to select the same 'scenes' - waterfalls, sunsets, toewering mountains, and sylvan glades?" And also at the end of his second paragraph when he argues that visitors to the Peak District nearly always try to recreate those photographs that persuaded them to go there in the first place and that to do 'something different' is rarely considered an option.  He goes on to argue that photographic magazines unashamedly offer advice on how to make 'good' landscape photographs, based on unchallenged compositional templates and stylistic gimmicks, with illustrations that are so similar that they could almost all have been made by the same photographer.   Further to my argument Sara Maitland in her book Gossip from the Forest points out on page 105/106 that in a new 2008 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary decided that the modern English primary school child had no use for a remarkable range of fairly basic 'natural words', including:

·         catkin;

·         brook;

·         acorn;

·         buttercup;

·         blackberry;

·         conker;

·         holly;

·         ivy;

·         mistletoe

She points out that these words have been replaced by such as: database, export, curriculum, vandalism, negotiate, committe, voicemail, dyslexic and celebrity.

My original Body of work for Assignment 1 was based on Eliot Porter's Intimate Landscapes using the landscape of the Lincolnshire Wolds and one wood in particular.  When I presented this work at the crit session on the Level 3 Study Weekend, it was felt that it was too much within my comfort zone and was not challenging enough.  Whilst not moving away from this body of work entirely (and I shall continue to pursue this anyway in my personal photography), I have followed two more lines. 

I have become fascinated by the idea of Psychogeography and have, in fact, bought and nearly read Will Self's entertaining book on the subject.  I have also read the work of Psychogeographer Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places and The Old Ways).  I have based one of my lines of work on Robert Macfarlane who always collects objet trouvee on his walks. I have photographed a local coastal walk and interesting objects that I came across and then brought some of these home and photographed them in a studio situation as assemblages.  This has a link with my Assignment 3 work in PWDP (see blog at http://mikespwdplearninglog.blogspot.co.uk/ ) There are various ways I feel that this could be developed.

My second line of work is another psychgeographical project based on personal memory.  In my child hood I used to travel to Lincoln with my mother from where I lived on the train, in those days steam hauled.  The line went post Beeching and is now a cycle and walking route called the Water Rail Way as it follows the River Witham where I used to fish as a boy.  I have cycled and photographed this route and intend to juxtapose the images alongside old images of the line and especially the stations.  I have various other ideas for developing this work including incorporating some Eliot Ported style intimate landscapes as well as the wider view..  This project really excites me.