Topic 2: Methods and Meanings Reflection
What has challenged you?
- This week and topic has challenged me through the production of my images and creating photographs that communicate my ideas and give me results that I am happy with. On reflection and with the support of peers I need to reach out and produce some portraits of people and communities in Reading in order to start the project and produce a more effective piece of work that reflects me trying to find my place in the town.
What has surprised you?
- I have been surprised by the lack of confidence in my own idea, particularly in how uncomfortable I felt when I presented images and when it was challenged. I realised that I have a swirling mess of ideas and no true starting point for the work, which also surprised me.
What do you feel you learned?
- I learnt I need to get out and take photographs. This week in particular felt like the shove I needed to get out the door and start producing images, rather than just talking about ideas and concepts from the safety of my office and behind a screen.
- I learnt that whilst I can have rules and methods in my work it may not always lead me to produce photographs that I like or communicate the concept of the project. On reflection I set myself rules when going out to shoot, but potentially shooting first and considering my practice second might be a more successful outcome for the work.
- Reflecting on my images and the week in general has led me to a focus, I still want to maintain the focus on Reading however I would like to start focusing on the people and communities that make up Reading. I have accessed the Reading Borough Council ‘Services in social clubs and activities’ page which could lead to further contacts and potential photographs. I have also contacted two artist studios, to seek permission to photograph different artists who live and work in Reading.
- I learnt that I am trying to find my identity with the place that I live and whilst this may start out as an introspective project, I aim to turn it outwards.
What methods and methodologies have you consciously applied in your practice to date to communicate a concept or an intended meaning?
- Reflecting on my practice, worryingly, I cannot think of methods I have consciously applied to my work, especially to convey meaning. When I have produced portraits in the past I have photographed people in their own homes or places of work in order to communicate more about them. However, this is not always straight forward or consistent.
Can you identify and describe methods in your practice that convey meaning, which you might not have intended at the time?
- On reflection of the self-portrait I produced for Topic 1: Windows and Mirrors. I believe I have created a sense of disconnect between myself and Rachael. At the time this was not intended, I wanted to show the closeness of our family and the connections we share, however, when looking at the image again there is a distance between us which an audience member reading the photograph might interpret as disconnection or rift in the family dynamic. This has made me think about how I am photographing people and forced me to pay closer attention to what is being communicated through body language and positioning.
Have any of the practitioners you have looked at this week (including your peers) given you any inspiration for strategies or methods you might ‘impose’ upon yourself to expand the creative possibilities of your own work?
- Robert Darch’s use of lighting has inspired me, the isolation of subject gives the audience focus on what the person is trying to communicate. This also links to the poetic nature of his story telling that makes me consider how I might include and communicate a narrative within my project work. By having a narrative running through the work, I could expand the creative possibilities of the work so rather than being just documenting the things and people around Reading I can have them communicate something to the audience too.
Methods and Methodologies - Robert Darch - The Island
Technical Considerations
- Dark photographs – overexposed, foreboding
- Visible grain – friction
- High contrast – difference
- Portraits with haunted looks – demonstrating the feeling/response to Brexit
- A lot of the images could be anywhere, there are elements that remind me to places I have been, but I have never been to the places photographed. The everyday of England
- Black and white, misty, foreboding, grainy landscapes – challenging the idealistic representation of the rolling green hills of England aesthetic popularised by conservative ideals and how people might stereotype England.
‘Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.’
John Major, speech to the Conservative Group for Europe, 22 April 1993;
‘They are shot in black-and-white, and suffused with an almost palpable melancholy. “When I tried monochrome before, it felt like I was trying to force it,” recalls Darch. “But here it made sense symbolically and aesthetically.”’
- Joe Lloyd, 2020 Robert Darch’s poetic response to the Brexit vote https://www.1854.photography/2020/04/the-island-robert-darch/ Accessed: 04/10/2023.
The method of using his own and other people’s emotions as influence, combined with his method of documenting the landscape and storytelling, gives the audience a greater understanding for what he is trying to communicate.
Rather than trying to explain or rationalise what happened I started taking pictures that reflected how I felt about the freedoms we had lost and what I imagined the future would hold’
The Guardian (2022) ‘I feel for this generation.’: Welcome to Brexit island – In Pictures. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2022/dec/13/i-feel-for-this-generation-welcome-to-brexit-island-in-pictures Accessed: 04/10/2023.
Research strategies
Darch draws on feelings and life experience to influence his work. In ‘The Island’ he revisits areas around where he grew up and where he lives in order to create a response to the results of the Brexit vote.
Presentation choices
Darch presents The Island in book form. ON opening the cover the viewer is greated by a dark blue (Torito Dark Blue) page with the title and name. The following page has a date 23.06.2016 also on dark blue. This is the only colour in the book and could be a reference to the blue in the Union Jack flag, the deep inky blue of the night sky or the deep isolating parts of the sea. All of which could set the audience up for understanding themes of isolation created by the Brexit vote and a sense of loss.
‘On 23 June 2016, the UK’s electorate voted to leave the European Union. For Robert Darch, the morning after remains etched in the memory. “I woke up feeling this overwhelming sense of heaviness, and the sadness that we’d lost something,” he recounts.’
Joe Lloyd, 2020 Robert Darch’s poetic response to the Brexit vote https://www.1854.photography/2020/04/the-island-robert-darch/ Accessed: 04/10/2023.
Intentions and conceptual underpinning
Darch’s work is a response to Brexit and the feeling of loss and isolation he experienced on the morning of the vote’s result. The work takes the audience on a journey through the landscape and introduces us to various people. All of the work maintains the feeling of loss and a sense of someone trying to bring together and understand what is going to happen next. Key images in the series that represent this for me are the photograph of a woman, showing vulnerability and surrounded by unknown darkness. The unknown figure of a person stood halfway along a track, suggesting the isolation that the UK may now experience and the image of a person, on the edge of a cliff top, peering out over the edge into the vast mass of water. This represents the unknown and reminds me of a sense of uncontrolled falling, the kind you experience in a dream or when you tip backwards a little bit too far on a chair, the stomach lurches and for a split second you are between falling and fallen, a euphoric and terrifying mid-point of complete unknowing, you know you are dreaming or have that hope that you can rebalance the chair, but you might also not.
All this was refined into the following prose:
In his project The Island, Robert Darch uses black and white images to give a sense of foreboding, isolation and sadness in response to the result of the Brexit vote in 2016. There is a darkness to the work which could be attributed to overexposing the images or prints and this, along subject matter of the project, reinforce these feelings.
A key image in the series is of a person, on the edge of a cliff, peering out into a mass of water. I feel this represents the unknown and reminds me of a sense of uncontrolled falling, the kind you experience when you tip backwards too far on a chair, the stomach lurches and for a second you are between falling and fallen, a euphoric and terrifying mid-point of complete unknowing, you know you have that hope that you can rebalance the chair, but also not.
Darch presents The Island in book form. On opening the cover the viewer is greeted by a dark blue page with the title and his name. The following page has a date 23.06.2016 also on dark blue. The silver grey of the text stands out and is reminiscent of the grey that runs throughout the images in the book. The blue pages could be a reference the Union Jack flag, the inky blue of the night sky or the deep isolating parts of the sea. All of which set the audience up for understanding themes of isolation created by the Brexit vote and a sense of loss presented in the work.
Topic 2: Methods and Meaning
Fig. 1: Shafran 2008-9. From the series Compost Pictures 2008-9.
When it comes to the photographic ‘faux pas’ there are lots of options. The blinking portrarit, tress coming out the top of a subject’s head, a finger over the lens, purposeful under or over exposure of an image (American Night by Paul Graham comes to mind).
The topic makes me reflect on a conversation I had with my Dad. I had received a £5 Photoworks voucher for subscribing to their mailing list and used it to buy a copy of Nigel Shafran’s Compost Pictures 2008-9. I was very proud of myself because I had got what I considered to be an exciting and intriguing set of images (albeit a publication supporting an exhibition) for free, using my £5 voucher.
I took it home whilst on holiday from university and was looking through when my Dad asked to see what I was looking at. After looking through the images he asked how much I had paid and when I told him it was free with a voucher he laughed and said ‘I’m glad you didn’t waste real money on photographs of rubbish.’
I was taken aback by this because I considered the images to be careful studies of unintended sculpture and particularly of a subject matter that most people want to get rid of or ignore.
My idea for a response to the photographic ‘faux pas’ is the concept of photographing the mundane or every day and how it can be misunderstood. Without spending time or reading into a photographer’s motivations for an image or set of images, photographs with this aesthetic can be dismissed, derided or ignored. Could this present a wider issue between photographer and audience? Is the ‘faux pas’ the fault of the audience or the photographer? I think in the case of my Dad and Shafran’s Compost Pictures, there is an element of disconnect between a person that has used photography to document key family life moments and things he is interested in, to the photographer who is trying to reach out and communicate with an audience. The ‘faux pas’ is the mundane and how it is communicated but I hope to use it to open up debate about the photographer/audience relationship and explore it within my own photographic practice.
List of Figures
Figure 1: Nigel Shafran. 2010. Compost Pictures 2008-9. Brighton: Photoworks.
Bibliography
McMullin, D. (1980). ‘An Interview with John Baldessari,’