Week 5 - Reflection
Select a single image from your own photographic practice and outline your ethical approach.
Fig. 1. George Bull. Tailor Shears. 2024
- I feel that I generally have an ethically positive approach towards my image making particularly when it comes to formal portraiture. As a starting point my engagement of and with a person comes from a conversation and getting to know the person and explaining my aims for my work is important before I ask them for a portrait. I feel it is important to be clear that I aim to exhibit the work and use it to communicate with a wider audience than just the people I am photographing.
- I also feel the gaze is important when it comes to my portraits, I feel it is a key responsibility of the photographer not to abuse the trust of a person agreeing to have their image captured. I liked Daniel Chandler and James Elkin’s writings on the gaze and the different forms it can take. Before reading these two accounts, I was more aware of how the subject was interacting with the camera rather than the next stage of the process and who was then gazing at the person within a photograph.
How might you adapt your photographic practice (visually/technically/conceptually) as a response to this reflection?
- Reflecting on this reading has made me consider the audience more when creating my work. How will people be looking at my photographs? Will be they pick up on messages and the overall collective feeling of my work.
- It has made me consider the stack of images I have, ever growing stuck on a hard drive and has encouraged me to print all my images and live with them in a space, this will encourage others to look at them but also messages and potential new meanings will become clear. I feel another potential benefit of doing this is I will learn what is missing from the project and how I can further refine my images and shoots.
Are there any approaches/practices/practitioners that specifically resonate with you?
- Laura Pannack and the triangle of communication and gaze she discusses with David Campany:
- ‘ I guess my relationship to that process in a sense for me I think of it as this sort of three as a triangle, myself, the person that I’m photographing and the person looking at the photographs, they’re all there, and it goes in different ways, there’s no one direction and I strive for that gaze to capture that gaze.’
(Photo London 2023)
- Pannack’s awareness of the people outside of the experience, looking at the photograph in a different location makes me think deeper about the relationship between the photographer, person being photographed and the audience. I like the analogy of a triangle and think this empowers the people in the photographs as it explains they have their own stories to tell.
Outline any ideas/visual practices you were particularly interested in.
- I want to continue exploring and developing an allegory for the images I am taking on the road. Currently this is surrounding the concept of hope and dreams, that the people of Oxford Road’s ambition cannot be confined to a box. Once these things feel possible and these ideas, aspirations and targets become like birds soaring in the wind, caught in the flow of the place. We/they are no longer in control of the dream anymore, the road is in control. Some fade, break and disappear, other develop, grow and prosper.
Identify any ideas/visual practices that challenged/shed new light on your existing practice.
- The multiple different options when it comes to the observation/gaze. I considered my work to empower the person but think that this additional knowledge can inspire further exploration of the gaze.
Contextualise these in the context of your own photographic practice and the nature of the gaze within it.
- I want there to be a sense of power for the people featured in my portraits, the sense of pride in who they are and where they live, despite the impressions and ideas of other people. By having them disengage with the audience makes them seem like they are important, makes them powerful because they do not need the viewer’s attention or approval. The people I am photographing may be people that are overlooked within society because of where they live, by empowering them through portraiture I want to give them a spotlight and a platform to reject the ideas and opinions of others.
Outline/summarise your independent research.
- I have been reading allegories by Orwell and Kafka to improve my own story telling ability. This has helped me come up with the allegory about dreams and ambition I want to within the images.
What are your actions points? Where are you going next?
• Shoot more – improve the ’looking’/’seeing’ photographs that aim to give a sense of the flow.
• Add theory – I have been looking at the gaze – Oxford Road is seen as a negative area in Reading - I want to explore the gaze beyond the concept of a personal based portrait and look at the atmosphere of a place and how the gaze can impact this.
• Get more people involved with the work - going to the local library on Oxford Road and taking prints to chat to people about the work.
PHOTO LONDON. 2023. ‘Artist’s Talk: Laura Pannack and David Campany | Photo London Talks 2023’. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYyGWu5PH9k [accessed 16 Feb 2024].