Collecting Now; National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

This exhibition celebrates many of the recent acquisitions that have entered the collections since 2010.  It includes photographs, paintings, drawings and sculpture and spans the 20th and 21st centuries.  Of the paintings I especially enjoyed that of the author, Ian Rankin, in oils by Guy Kinder.  Rankin is depicted in Edinburgh's Oxford Bar, a favourite haunt of both the author and his fictional character Rebus.  Not only did I like the contemporary painting, I also enjoy the Rebus books.  Another favourite among the paintings was the triptych in oils of Chris Hoy painted in 2012 by Jennifer McRae and also the chalk, charcoal and pastel portrait of actor, Gordon Jackson completed in 1996.
Among the photographs was a very interesting four image series of photogravures from 2013 by Alex Boyd.  Unlike most of the exhibits, which are portraits, these are landscapes taken from the summit of Stacashal on the island of Lewis.  These were rich black and white images printed on textured paper and looking almost like pastels.  Interesting that people are still using such a technique.  Of the portraits I liked the one of actor Brian Cox taken by David Eustace.  Again in rich black and white and printed in 2011.  The image fills the frame and is cast partially in shadow; it is an intense portrait.  Another black and white portrait is the series of singer Carol Kidd by celebrated Magnum photographer Eve Arnold.  These are silver gelatine prints taken in 1987.
On image I found very interesting was, Mill of Menie Mike and Shiela Forbes, by Alicia Bruce in 2010.  In this postmodern work Bruce collaborated with the residents of Menie, a small community in Aberdeenshire. The area was the focus of extensive press coverage following the threat of compulsory purchase orders on several homes as part of Trump International's planned golf course and housing development.  In Bruce's portraits she approached them from an art historical point of view, with the residents restaging compositions from famous paintings in much the same way that Cindy Sherman restaged her Untitled Film Stills. This image shows the couple reenacting Grant Wood's critical and influential 1930 painting American Gothic.  Bruce portrays the couple as defiant subjects ready to fight for their land.
There is also a portrait by Jitka Hanzlova: Untitled from the series There is Something I Don't Know (2007-13).  In 1982 Hanzlova defected from the communist regime in Czechoslovacia and settled in Essen, West Germany.  Since then she has explored her experiences through photography producing a thought-provoking body of work some of which featured in an earlier solo exhibition, which I enjoyed.
Another moving portrait was of Louise Page, and Edinburgh resident and charity worker who died of bone cancer in 2013.  The heart-rending image of her bu Rankin portrays her in tears with mascara running down her face, presenting her as both defiant and distraught in the face of death.  The picture is part of a project inspired by Susan Sontag who wrote 'To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality.  Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to timeless, relentless, relentless melt.'
One final image that struck me was the 1964 image by Joseph McKenzie Horse and Cart, Gorbals. This reminded me very much of Alfred Stieglitz's horse bus images Winter on Fifth Avenue.

As always the National Portrait Gallery has produced a fascinating exhibition, which I enjoyed very much.

Poststructuralism and The Rhetoric of an Image.

Poststructuralism

The course notes tell us that poststructuralism is often linked with postmodernism.  We are told that a statement such as "The cat sat on the mat" is understood because there is an underlying structure to the English language, which we all subscribe to; other languages have their own structure. Roger Jones on the philosopher.org.uk website says that by the mid 20th century a number of structural theories of our existence were prevalent.  He goes on to say that Ferdinand de Suassure argued that meaning was to be found in the structure of language.  Marxists liked structuralism as the truth about human existence could be explained by analysing economic structures. (Jones, 2015)

The course notes tell us that Saussure coined the term 'sign' which might be a written or spoken word or a photograph or a pictogram.  According to Saussure:

·         A sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified.

·         The signifier is the picture or the word

·         The signified is what the signifier implies or connotes.  (Suggests seems a better word to me; I had difficulty getting my head around the difference between denotes and connotes. The dictionary definitions are: denote - stand for or sign for; connote - imply or suggest)  The signified is not the thing but the idea of the thing.

Jones tells us that the most important proponent of poststructuralism in the 1960s was French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. (Jones, 2015)

Poststructuralism argues that understanding the role of the signified and signifier in a sign is not because it was intrinsic within the sign (structuralism) but because it was learned or intertextual.  Poststructuralism also argued that a sign could mean different things to different people at different times.  In the course notes I find that the word 'Kite' is a good example of this.

The Rhetoric of the Image: Roland Barthes

In this essay Barthes explains how to read the messages that images contain by using the Panzani advertising image that was used in France to advertise an Italian product.  Interestingly the advertisement is actually in Italian.  The beauty of advertisements is that they need to get their message over very quickly in order to be able to convince people to buy the product.  Barthes feels that adverts are a good means of looking at ideologies.  He examines the relationship between the signifier and signified in a sign (the Panzani advert) by looking at them in terms of denotation (stand for) and connotation (suggestion).  According to Barthes connotation is a higher level skill and he suggests that people of the same culture (in this case France) will infer the same idea.  Barthes also looks at the text in the advert and discusses its function.  He suggests there are two: anchorage and relay.  Anchorage directs the viewer through the signifieds and the relay further helps by telling a story as in a comic strip.

Jones, R. (2015) Poststructuralism [online] Available from: http://www.philosopher.org.uk/poststr.htm [Accessed 6 May 2015]

More thoughts on Photographs for Assignment 1.

As well as working on the conceptual side of this module, I feel that it is important to keep getting out and taking photographs.  The shot below was taken with a long exposure to show the spirit of movement in the tree. Taken last Autumn this shot may, perhaps fit somewhat in the postmodern bracket. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I am interested in photographing trees and woodland.  If I am being purely modernist, then I would use a fast shutter speed combined with a small aperture to produce a sharp image with all movement stopped; motion frozen in time. (Prodger, 2012, p.5)  I am, however, interested in the fact that trees are living organisms that have life and movement and wanted to capture that spirit of movement and so used a long exposure.  I am not sure that this image has worked, but it is a technique with which I shall continue to experiment.

 Another experimental shot from last Autumn where I wanted to concentrate on the colours of the leaves in an abstract way.

 I am fascinated by working in really close and challenging the viewers concept of reality and scale.  These images of tree bark could be landscapes taken from space.

 Some more conventional spring woodland shots follow.

A view looking vertically down on the woodland floor.

 A bit of an experiment here.  A dandelion in close up to challenge the viewer to wonder what it actually is.

Prodger, P. (2012) Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea, USA, Peabody Essex Museum

Postmodernism

The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition for Post modernism:-

a late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories.

Again, Wikepedia describes postmodernism as a late 20th century movement that was a departure from modernism.  It includes sceptical interpretations of the arts and philosophy and is often associated with deconstruction and poststructuralism.  The term postmodern was first used in the 1870s but its use became more common in the second half of the 20th century.  In 1971, in a lecture delivered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, American conceptual artist, Mel Bochner described postmodernism in art as having started with Jasper Johns, "who first rejected sense-data and the singular point-of-view as the basis for his art, and treated art as a critical investigation" (Wikepedia, 2015)

In the Youtube excerpt from "Rebellion of Thought" we are told that postmodernism is a suspicion of all truth claims.  Win Corduan, Professor of Photography at Taylor University explains that French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard says that postmodernism embodies and incredulity towards metanarratives which is explained as a sceptical attitude to all claims of absolute truths.  He tells us that a postmodern would say that there are many, many stories.  Bill Ramanowski, Professor of Communication, Calvin College argues that postmodernism is a rejection of one narrative; any one story.

David Bate in 2009 explains it as a shattering of modernism.  He says it was a direct challenge to fine art photography as exemplified by Alfred Stieglitz.  In the 1970s and 1980s the work of women photographers became more usual as part of this new era. (Bate, 2009, p.144)

Bate, D (2009) Photography: The Key Concepts. London and New York: Bloomsbury

Exploration Films (2015) Rebellion of Thought                                                           Wikipedia (2015) Postmodernism

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism

By Douglas Crimp from Crimp, D (1993) On the Museum's Ruins.  Massachusetts: MIT Press

Douglas Crimp is an American professor in art history based at the University of Rochester.  He has been an important critic in the development of postmodern art theory and in 1977 hue was the curator of the influential exhibition Pictures at Artists Space.  This exhibition featured the works of, among others, Sherrie Levine.  Levine is an American Photographer and appropriation artist; pulls from the works of others and the worlds they depict to create her own work. This is referred to as intertextuality.  His most important work on postmodernist art and institutional critique was published in the 1993 book, On the Museum’s Ruins.

In this essay from the book Crimp begins by saying that modernism repressed photography and it is during the postmodern era that photography makes a return to the fore.  He says that postmodernism is about plurality, that is the production of multiple copies.  He says that postmodernist photography has a peculiar presence created by the absence of the artist or the original image.  It is the subject of the photograph that provides the aura, not, as Walter Benjamin argued, the presence of the original and its authenticity and history.  He goes on to say that Benjamin argued that the authenticity or aura is destroyed through mechanical reproduction.  Benjamin, he argues, granted an aura to only a limited number of photographs; those taken in the early years of photography before its commercialisation after the 1850s.  In these images he tells us that Benjamin argues that the aura is not due to the presence of the photographer in the same way that the hand of a painter can be seen in a painting.  It is the presence of the subject, of what is photographed.

In order to destroy the myth of the aura or authenticity of photographs, Crimp writes about a mode of photography, appropriation, practiced by a group of young artists at the end of the 20th century who believe that photography is always a representation, always-already-seen. Their images are appropriated from other work and turned into new; the original is gone.  Examples of these practioners are Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman.  Another example used by Crimp is that of Richard Prince who began appropriating photographs in 1975.  He specialised in reworking photographs that had been used in advertising such as that of a cowboy, originally taken by Sam Abellard and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement.  Prince's picture is a copy of a copy (the advertisement) of an American myth of a cowboy perpetually disappearing into the sunset.  It was a high point in his deconstruction of an American archetype.  (MOMA 2015)

Crimp also suggests that the appreciation of art is a subjective process and a photograph is always a representation of the subject, the original.  If this is so is the image true or real.  Modernist thinking suggests that the camera never lies and modernist photographers used the technology at their disposal to portray the world as accurately as possible.

How relevant is this to my practice?

I certainly don't feel that my work is postmodern in the way of Levine, Sherman and Prince.  I think, if anything, I work in a modernist style and have always been inspired by the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Galen Rowell.  Having said that, although modernism suggests one reality and poses that the camera does not lie, a perfect reproduction of a landscape, cityscape or documentary subject can be taken of what is in front of the camera, but where has it been pointed, what has been cropped out or deliberately included?  Even in a modernist image there may be one truth.

In the image of the whitethroat, above, taken yesterday morning (3.5.15), my aim was to take a faithful portrait of the bird singing as part of its territorial display.  I wanted the bird to be pin sharp, especially the eye ring, and used all of my camera and lens's technical abilities to achieve this effect.

In the above image of afternoon light in an early Spring wood my aim was to produce a faithful representation.  However, a post modern would argue that, in the same way that Sam Abellard did with his photograph of the cowboy, I am portraying an archetype of a rural idyll, which perhaps does not exist.

This image of the same wood is perhaps a hark back to the days of pictorialism before modernism in that I have tried to achieve a painterly effect.  It is certainly not what the wood 'looks like'.

Of course, very few images are totally original and premodern thinking would suggest that these three photographs are always-already-seen.

Crimp talks about subjectivity and all images are subjective.  I like to think that much like modernist photographers I only process my images to produce pictures that were as I remembered them.  But this is, of course subjective.  I processed the sunset images, below, taken in Sutherland last September so that the colours were how I remembered.  The rocks seemed to glow from within.  My wife thinks they are more saturated than she remembers.  It comes down to a matter of personal preference.

Photographer Pete Cairns discusses this in his Northshots Blog The Box of Believability. This theory argues that your final image, however you choose to process it, should remain within the Box; it should be Believable.  Many images, however, are over processed and manipulated in all manner of ways to make them, perhaps postmodern.

Again the image below taken last Autumn may, perhaps fit somewhat in the postmodern bracket. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I am interested in photographing trees and woodland.  If I am being purely modernist, then I would use a fast shutter speed combined with a small aperture to produce a sharp image with all movement stopped; motion frozen in time. (Prodger, 2012, p.5)  I am, however, interested in the fact that trees are living organisms that have life and movement and wanted to capture that spirit of movement and so used a long exposure.  I am not sure that this image has worked, but it is a technique I shall continue to experiment with.

Cairns, P. (2015) The Box of Believability [online] Northshots.  Available from : http://blog.northshots.com/2015/04/the-box-of-believability/ [Accessed 5.5.15]

Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015) Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History [online] MOMA . Available from : http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2000.272 [Accessed 5.5.15]

Prodger, P. (2012) Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea, USA, Peabody Essex Museum