So I started thinking about what to do, just basically mapping out what I was interested in both ascetically and on a more personal/political/critical level. I thought in terms of movements/aesthetics but also in terms of theme and cause...
expressionism
Since my first year discovery of German Expressionist film I have developed a huge fascination in the conflicting relationship between light and dark and a love for the aesthetic of shadows, movement, shade, and the exploration of the sinister, the psyche, and the forces of societal discomfort.
left: a still from The Cabinet of Dr. Calligari, Robert Wiene, (1920).
below right: a still from Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau,
(1922).
below left: a still from Faust, F. W. Murnau,(1926).
I love the power of these images, using shape and light to imbue a deep discomfort whilst engaging the viewer almost to the point of mesmerisation.
As an aesthetic I feel expresionism would be a really exciting course to take with my project and I feel it'd give me lots of freedom to explore both documentary and studio based work. However, an aesthetic it is, and it'd need substance, a subject, causality.
Below left: Zebulon Rouge
Below right: Frantisek Drtikol
Below are several photographs I've taken with elements of an expressionist aesthetic in mind. Whilst they do not exhibit many classic expressionist marks, they draw focus on shape, the tension between light and dark and some sense of the dramatic. The latter being a huge element of expressionism (within film and photography), images within this style are most commonly of 'set-up' scenarios; either within studios or at least with preconceived lighting and staging. To this point i've not orchestrated any such event, and as more documentative in nature the images below draw on as opposed to embody a full 'expressionist' structure. Depending on how ideas continue to develop I may consider using a studio and lighting in order to experiment further.
Featuring in almost all of these images, I've found trees incredibly powerful within the expressionist aesthetic, a power furthered by their deep bonds in mythology...this is potentially something I'd be really interested to pursue.
surrealism
As close brethren of expressionism i'm also interested in surrealism, and in their union...
I really engage with the founding philosophy of surrealism concerned with challenging the bourgeois conception of meaning. As my involvement with photography has developed over the years i've become increasingly challenged and inspired by the critical theory debates surrounding art and culture (to which i shall return later), and am most inclined towards the surrealist coalescence of striking aesthetic and powerful ideological underpinning.
right: Jacques Andre Boiffard
below: Man Ray
I've tried to find opportunities to experiment with surrealism but given it's nature it does really demand 'set-up' scenarios and a concerted construction.
Having been long involved with cultural and media studies, much of my involvement with photography comes from a perspective of critical theory. I am particularly interested in ideas of the authority of the physical reality (and from this the authority of the image).
What is the reality of the world around us? It seems quite likely there is not a universal one. I am interested in the way we perceive what is real, and furthermore how the photograph can have a tremendous role within this process. Can the camera ever accurately perceive? How do engage with the 'truth' of an image? Sontag argues that “...images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image, an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real." (1982, The Image World, 350) Whilst
Sontag's concerns about the authored selection and portrayal of 'the real' are essential considerations for the nature of photography and it's role within society (especially from a journalistic perspective), I'm quite inclined to challenge 'the real'...our eyes are the mediators, be that first or second hand. It is then that surrealism in photography becomes particularly interesting, expanding it's deconstruction of bourgeois art and meaning to a deconstruction of the meaning on a much deeper level. I'd be quite interested to engage within surreal aesthetic from a locus generated more the concerns of the postmodern (than Marxist).
Although seemingly contradictory in era (surrealism being a 'suppressed' modernist movement), I believe the agendas of both overlap particularly in their disregard for the parameters of the metanarrative, and I'd be particularly interested in blending and bending both aesthetics and philosophies.
The the images below are not surrealist but they exemplify how i've been influenced by the desire to play with composition to influence subject...
multiples and moments
"Where the hell has the time gone?". "F**k me, how is it 2010?"....I think fairly common thoughts of many. Traveling, university, traveling again... lots of stark changes in location, circumstance and self over the past four years have made me sense time (or a lack of it) more than I have ever known. I spent a while confused and almost angry at time for pulling me from a given place (both the fractional moment or wider experience) before I was ready, before I had even realised I was there. Over the past year or so this has given way to a somewhat more peaceful state of timelessness and the ever-presence of the moment. I'd be really interested to explore this wider concept and personal feeling through photography, using the camera to investigate the both the fractionality* and the all-ness** of the moment.
* This is not a word, though I think it should be as I cannot find another to express the meaning 'the state of being fractional'
**I cannot find the word to use here that expresses what i mean; that the moment is everything and everything is the moment. Omniexistance? If you know words/have thoughts on this PLEASE comment as it really does help to have the tools (language) to express these ideas.
Notions of time have been explored vastly throughout photography from numerous perspective, below are just a few examples of some i've engaged with.
Above:
Breno Rotatori. Taken from the Manélud series, in which he juxtaposes his own images with his grand mothers amateur images taken at the same moment. It lends itself to thoughts surrounding the authority of the camera and the photographer, multiple experiences of the 'same' moment, making me think of the richness of every instant and how photography can both reclaim and reduce this.
Right: Bill Sullivan.
In this collection Sullivan uses elevator doors to frame fractionally different moments to dramatically portray a simple scene. Starting with the doors wide open revealing each passenger, subsequent images as the doors close in draw focus to a particular individual or fraction within the lift.
Left: David Hockney.
In the past I have mostly considered this Hockney piece through postmodern critique, considering the breakdown of the meta-narrative of the one image/universal truth and our image-saturated reality. I recently looked at it in a different light, thinking of the ideas of how fractions of time are both so divorced and so unified at the same time, and how the camera has the power to illustrate this so wonderfully.
Considering this now I do think that much of this work, powerful as it may be, is somewhat a 'one-trick pony'. Were I to develop ideas on this concept I'd try and set wide parameters (of subject and method) in order to avoid just reproducing ideas of others/the same idea of my own repeatedly
.
junk/things out of place
One of the ways I approached thinking about my dissertation project was thinking about what i liked on a more basic level; leaving out the academic side of things to start with something real and raw to me. Well, I like junk. In fact, i'm fascinated by junk; how it looks (and more importantly, how it has come to look this way), how it has been used, and how it has become 'junk'. Why are these items discarded, worthless? What is 'worth' anyway; how did it get there and how did it get lost? In times gone by the answer to this may have been simple; worth is use, purpose, functioning. But in the post-industrial society of consumers of today this is not the case.
A few weeks ago I stood at the Meanwood road recycling centre and watched a man pull a wide-screen silver television by its cable across the centre court to a collection of varyingly similar models stacked outside a carrier. My mind flashed back to the Curry's 2006 Christmas catalogue where these very models gleamed out of the pages, sale savings and promises to complete that 'ideal family day'. Now bumped along the concrete, a new High Definition Flat Screen Plasma Super Duper model smirks over the fat little 32inch. It wasn't broken, it wasn't even old - i've had tins in my cupboard longer than the now bastard Toshiba sat on its slinky Ikea stand. Worth, it seems, now has absolutely nothing to do with use.
It is this issue of meaning and place that really does interest me. Consumption, and it's ugly junky spawn, is rife. But few bother too question it. Too busy at B&Q maybe. I wanted to take photographs of junk, not just in itself, but what it was a symptom of, what it meant, how it reveals some intricate happening in our society. Meaning.
As I continued to muse on this, i started to think about the relationship (the unity and separation) of material 'thing' and immaterial 'meaning'. It is a fairly well established thought that nothing within the physical world has an inherent meaning as such (i am not talking about the realms of science that there is no structure or root of the physical), but that what we understand of it is a social construct. Nothing changes in the 'thing' but it becomes junk. I start thinking too about context; about the placing of said 'thing' and it's effect on meaning (valuable or junk that is).
One streak of this junk creating is the need to continue to consume e.g. buy a new tv). But there is another; the dependence of worth on physical location. Think about food; packaging that offers indulgence, well-being and health, chic urban living, or hearty old fashioned comfort food sings to us from brimming colourful isles. Advertisements that set it in the home, at the party, or on it's own staged being sexily drizzled in some delicious sauce. This food is desirable, it's a lifestyle choice, a reflection of your personality, a friendship maker, a romance aider.
But this meaning is only given in certain contexts. That healthy sexy comforting indulgent
morsel falls on the floor, gets put in the bin, falls on your lap, leaves traces round your mouth and all it's promise, desire and worth is lost. It is now wrong, socially uncomfortable and disgusting. The exact same physical thing becomes something completely different just through being re-located in someway. This is the contextuality of meaning, and it extends far beyond food to virtually all realms of the physical thing.
[From princess to landfill. Above; Chris Jones @ Flickr, Below; AboutDoll@ Blogspot]
Junk
Yes, meaning has always to some degree rested on location, but the force and ubiquity of this contingent has proliferated to a new realm with late capitalism. Our branded world now buys and sells symbols, tokens for imagined communities and performed hypothetical identities. The material is now just a vector for an immaterial meaning. Although the the value of the physical has been removed, it stills holds meaning in carrying meaning, it's meaning making role is now a purely physical one - thus the essential importance on its location.
It is the collision of these paradigms that really interests me, the disruption of correspondence makes them visible, and opens the system up for investigation and challenge. I want to explore this issue with my camera to find and expose those glitches in the matrix. I've seen designer clothes left on street walls, homeless men carrying Waitrose 'bags for life', a fish through cellophane wrapping swinging in a bag down the street, they intrigue me as to how meaning moves.
When I was thinking about this, looking to clarify my stream of thoughts, I came across this word which succinctly portrays what i'm looking at :
vicissitude
noun (usu. vicissitudes)
a change of circumstances or fortune, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant
poetic/literary alternation between opposite or contrasting things
It really resonated with me, and although having informally decided that this topic was to be the founding of my project, set the concept of 'vicissitude of meaning' as a core theme.
I do not wish to simply use the photograph as a vessel for these abstract ideas, i want to explore the medium itself through them.
Through the exploration of the relationship between the material and immaterial i want to:
- consider the role the photograph plays in constructing and negotiating this relationship
- explore how photographic institutions (art and commerce) structure contemporary consumerist society
- deconstruct the photographic aesthetic and explore the arbitrary nature of meaning and
idea of 'worth'.
- renegotiate the process of how photographs construct the meaning and worth of objects, individuals and actions.
Sat outside the union talking to some friends about my project and I noticed a 'Give 
