Tag Archives: creativity

Syd Krochmalny and Simon Yuill: visual cultures in Argentina and Scotland

On Thursday I attended an event organised by my colleagues, Sarah Wilson and Scott Hames. Syd Krochmalny and Simon Yuill addressed the topic of visual cultures in Scotland and Argentina.

Sarah Wilson introducing the seminar, and Syd Krochmalny

Syd is a sociologist and artist based in Argentina; he mostly works on video installations addressing social issues. In Argentina it is very unusual to work in both art and sociology. Simon Yuill is an artist and writer based in Scotland, who has been heavily involved in The Strickland Distribution and Variant magazine. I thought it might be of interest to publish my notes on their two presentations - I make no guarantees regarding absolute accuracy, but I hope to have recorded some key elements of their talks.

Argentina

Syd gave a presentation entitled The Crisis of Success: Visual Arts in Argentina 2001-2011, describing a move from an art utopia to a market utopia. There are three distinct periods in a chronological account of this period: 1) a social crisis related to the financial crisis of 1997-2003, that came to a head in 2001; 2) an expansion of the art world from 2003-2007, in part as economic recovery happened; 3) from 2005, however, there was a severe fragmentation of the art world. Although the current situation is often seen as beginning with the 2001 economic crisis, the root of this crisis in turn lies in the implementation of neoliberal policies from 1975 onwards that led to the total collapse of the economy in 2001.

Social relationships during the 2001 crisis became critically important. Different forms of art appeared; so, for example, street art that critiqued the social order played a key role in helping a better understanding of what was happening in the country. This was an artist-led movement, and the artists - through mutual recognition and cooperation - were the ones who legitimated their work, indeed, the creativity of their work in itself legitimated what they were doing. This meant there was no need, no call for, no desire for, external and/or institutional legitimation. This is not to say that there were no problems in this period (for example, there were many long debates about the distinction between art and politics, between creativity and social action), but it was a tremendously creative time for a wide range of artists who produced all kinds of interesting visual work that helped to change the way people understood their situation.

Syd Krochmalny (with Sarah Wilson)

As the economy improved (2003-2007), a more formal art market and parallel institutions began to develop. These appeared to increase artists’ opportunities to create. Galleries rapidly made international connections to the global art world and consequently began to direct work to make it ‘fit’ into what was perceived to be an international artistic community, culminating in a 2011 pavilion being bought by the Argentinian government at the Viennese Biennale. However, as artists began to participate in the global art market, it was noticeable that they began to fall into line with the market-led art institutions. Disagreements emerged over how to react to the marketisation: is this art or political action? is it ‘inside’ or ‘outside’? is the creator an artist or a social agent? what has primacy: a love of art or professionalisation? are people (still) working for themselves? Many artists felt themselves to be caught up in a series of contradictions, and struggled to reconcile these divergent positions.

These changes in the Argentinian art world, brought about directly by the commodification of an artistic practice - street art - that had emerged in a context of social action, did not just impact upon the artists of the time, but also impacted upon the new generation of artists. This new generation, however, do not feel the same contradictions about their work as their elders. In part this comes because their work integrates social and political issues from the beginning: in their understanding, activism itself can be a commodity, with artists working with disadvantaged groups in favelas (urban shanty towns), for example. Furthermore, many of the younger artists come from upper and upper-middle class backgrounds whose parents already have some kind of established connection to the art world, perhaps as gallery owners, art editors etc. This essentially makes this younger group of artists an ‘aristocracy’ utilising privileged family connections to further their work. A lack of social movement is the result, heralding a less equal society. Syd termed this ‘social closure’, pointing to the success of the art world in the post-economic crisis period: “The simultaneous qualitative and quantitive growth of institutions, of the market and in the number of artists has produced a ‘social closure’” - of course, this also mirrors wider stratification of society.

Therefore, although there might appear to be a vibrant new art scene that has emerged in recent years, Argentinian art, Syd argued, is actually facing a ‘crisis of success’ as a result of the commodification of what had previously been a means of critiquing neoliberalism. The problem now, he argued, is that neoliberalism appears in many instances to have taken over the critical nature of art, and thereby neutered the critical edge.

Scotland

Simon noted that Scotland has not, of course, had to cope with the same kinds of crises as Argentina. But other crises in the art world have emerged, also centred around neoliberal marketisation. For example, the very idea of there being ‘creative industries‘ is inherently problematic as a means of valorising artists’ work. There is a contradiction in this statement: it appears to be something outside the ‘art world’, but is valorised within it. This leads to ‘organisation isomorphism’, a term that originated with analyses of the co-operative movement. It describes the ways in which the egalitarian and horizontal nature of co-ops began to change to meet the needs of external actors, resulting in hierarchies and more vertical structures (chief executives, spokespeople etc.). Regardless of how an organisation conceives of itself, it is forced to change in order to interact with external agencies. In the art world, this is especially manifested in artist-led groups’ relationships to funders, and there is clear evidence that artist-led groups begin to mirror the structures desired by funders. These market-driven imperatives also then impact upon the priorities of the groups concerned and even the areas deemed appropriate to work in. Jennifer Wolch’s work on ‘the shadow state’ discusses precisely this issue: she shows how governments co-opt critical and liberatory movements, thereby maintaining control over them.

Simon Yuill

Simon pointed to two key ways, amongst others, in which this manifested itself:

there is a general issue about the access to resources: artist-led groups need funding, and they often need space in which to work.
there are also constraints imposed upon artistic expression through the market or the state. Such constraints are often structural (how to organise in order to suit funders, for example, becoming charitable bodies etc.) or situational (relating to opportunities and threats) or operational (when regulatory norms determine a group’s behaviour).

Elaborating on these a little more, Simon pointed to some examples:

artist-led groups might, for instance, want to make use of collective spaces, but the allocation or continued use of these can be problematic. Long-standing arrangements that might exist (use of unwanted buildings for nominal rents etc.) are subject to sudden and unpredictable change. In Glasgow the city council has a long history of offering artist-led groups cheap rent for buildings they did not use but wanted to keep. However, in 2010 the council created a private property management company and many of these buildings were transferred to it. Two key things have now changed: high rents are being threatened (from a ‘peppercorn’ £1 to a ‘market-rate’ of £700 in one example that Simon gave), and new leases have been issued that include liability for maintaining the buildings, meaning much of the risk in using the buildings is being transferred to the artists. Evictions have become a real possibility.
the (former) Scottish Arts Council created a funding scheme to enable artists to be given opportunities to sell art commercially (using galleries and so on). This does not account for artists who may want or need to create art that is not for selling but that might have a different rationale behind it. The marketisation and commodification of art is a long way from the original raison d’être of some of these artist-led groups.
a key threat to artist-led groups is the constant worry about the possibility of funding that has been granted then being withdrawn (Simon’s Variant magazine is an example of this). Creative Scotland (the successor to the Arts Council), has been heavily criticised for cancelling a flexible funding scheme that enabled longer-term planning, as it could be used to cover a groups’ core costs. Now Creative Scotland focus only on project funding - and yet core costs still exist, of course. Furthermore, as this is all project-led, the funding is more easily withdrawn. Perhaps most seriously, project-led funding means that every single project needs to be vetted by Creative Scotland, resulting in hierarchical, top-down directing of what artists are doing.

In the wider context there is a suggestion that all of these funding and creative elements are part of an ‘art world ecology’. This kind of language suggests complex, self-sustaining, self-regulating structures - but it fails to recognise that ecology tends towards collapse as much as towards sustenance. This becomes visible in the hierarchy of art schools, through to artist-collectives, small galleries, and then larger (even national) galleries. The ‘industry’ of art managers, curators, funders and so on all play a part in the isomorphism of artistic creation.

In Scotland we have seen the emergence of a reactionary discourse that claims to protect, but actually reins in, artistic practice. The result is that artist-run practice can be seen as a kind of medieval guild system that includes a revival of a bourgeois structure, including hierarchisation and the construction of privileged networks. An increasing emphasis on philanthropy is a marker of this phenomenon. Subversion is claimed as if art is inherently subversive, without actually showing or declaring how this might be the case. The result is the establishment of an order, a bourgeoisie.

Of course, an artist-run space is not inherently subversive. It is more complex than that: subversion needs to be regained, not by invoking creativity per se, but by placing the artist as a worker, albeit a precarious worker (see the recent discussion around the widespread emergence of a ‘precariat’). In so far as possible, removing the effects of organisational isomorphism has the potential to enable the re-emergence of a more subversive art.

Concluding comments

In a week when the Tory Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, Maria Miller, displayed breathtaking levels of ignorance and philistinism in discussing the place of the arts in society (see Tiffany Jenkins’ comment from a Scottish perspective on Miller’s speech), the presentations by Syd Krochmalny and Simon Yuill offered clear analyses of the malign influence of neoliberalism on artistic cultures. The discussion that ensued picked up a number of these themes, but I think it perhaps best to end with a memorable line from Syd that seemed to me to encompass a key point of what both he and Simon were describing:

“Art is the possibility to create, all the time, the definition of art.”

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Photograms at the Alt-Photo Festival

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I had a wonderful time at the Alt-Photo exhibition in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens yesterday - not only seeing work by Alastair Cook, Alex Boyd, Lucy Telford and others (it is always a delight to see actual prints, rather than just images on a computer screen) - but also having the opportunity to create photograms, something I had never done before. The process of creating a photogram is very simple, but offer great potential to create unusual and conceptually-stimulating images. Kenny Bean, the organiser of the Alt-Photo Festival, led the workshop. Here are my five efforts…

First photogram - layers of leaves

Photograms are a form of camera-less photography: light-sensitive paper has objects placed over it to prevent or change the amount of light that can reach it, and the paper is then subjected to a light, and put through standard developer baths, and washed and dried. And that is all there is to it!

Second photogram - an image of halves

Kenny had 5″x7″ wooden frames for us, with a clear sheet of plastic over the top, and a collection of all kinds of interesting leaves and plants - this was all taking place in the Botanics! - that we could place onto the plastic, along with scissors to manipulate and cut the leaves as we wanted - as you can see, for the second image above I cut half the needles off each little piece. Having arranged the image, the frame was taken through to the darkroom, photographic paper inserted under the plastic, and this was then exposed under an enlarger light. All the images here were exposed for between 6 and 20 seconds. Then the paper goes into the developer (60s), stop bath (10s), fixer (60s), and then washed in a tub of water and left to dry. The key issue here is the length of time that the enlarger is on for: too short and insufficient light gets through the leaves and there is no detail of leaf veins etc., but too long, and it burns through.

Kenny told us that each time we went into or out of the darkroom we were to whistle a tune so that we’d avoid running into people who might be going in the other direction. I can’t whistle, but after the delight of making the first two images and beginning to appreciate the possibilities here, I was cheerfully singing to myself anyway. The song going through my head at this time was Karine Polwart’s Hole in the heart (from her Scribbled in Chalk album), that I’d been listening to in the morning:

This resulted in an obvious kind of image:

Third photogram - Karine Polwart, “Hole in the heart”

I wanted to try something with more fragile leaves, since the first and third exposures had not shown the veins in the leaves in the way I had hoped for (I had guessed the exposures incorrectly):

Fourth photogram - delicate leaves

My fifth image was intended to be a representation of a simple bunch of flowers, trying out something with the fine needles to see if I could use them as I wanted for my final image, which would be a bit more intricate:

Fifth photogram - a bunch of flowers

That worked just the way I wanted - but I didn’t manage to actually create my final image because I ran out of time. This means I have a great excuse to get do more with photograms at some point!

Why is this process so wonderful? I had great fun, but after an hour practising in a workshop I don’t think I’m really qualified to answer this question. However, I am really struck by the fact that the process is so simple, and therefore it doesn’t get in the way of creativity. It is sort of obvious to use leaves to create images, and a quick online search turns up lots of photograms a bit like my fourth image here. That’s lovely, but just like the ‘arty’ Lensbaby blurs of flowers, a bit boring after one has seen the first few. The challenge with this process is very obviously in the pre-visualisation of something new, something that speaks of a wider concern or interpretative need, something that other photographic processes can’t achieve, for whatever reason. If you want to look at some rather amazing examples of what I mean, take some time for Lucy Telford’s photograms: she is creating really thought-provoking and emotional images (in colour too - apparently that’s even more difficult!).

Finally, if you haven’t previously been to the Alt-Photo Festival, make sure you go (if not this year, then next…). All the developer and paper used were provided by those lovely people at Ilford - now I’m off to look up their website and think about what I might need to order!

PS the promised blog posting on the privatisation of modernity in contemporary photography really is coming, once it’s been completed and shortened a bit…!

Nervousness and questions of interpretation

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I should be finishing the first page on wind farms (or working on a lecture for tomorrow!), but I wanted to share some reflections that I have found I can articulate quite clearly at the moment…

There are good reasons not to publish photographs. Some are very good reasons - the best reason of all probably being that the photograph in question is rubbish! Rubbish? Is that too harsh? How about “does not correspond to the pre-visualisation”?! (By the way, Alan Ross has just written an interesting post about Ansel Adams’ first moment of real pre-visualisation, if you’ve not come across this story before.) Of course, some are just rubbish!

However, many are not. Many might even be rather good: they are technically fine, they are reasonably well composed, and the exposure is sufficiently on target for it to be usable. And yet… and yet…

The safety of darkness (Loch Leven, December 2012)

… I don’t then click that “Export” button in Lightroom - the first step in moving an image onto my website and making it available to others to see. It’s not that I worry about what people will think of it: there are a select group of friends, particularly on Twitter, whose opinion I greatly value, but I wouldn’t not publish something just because I thought someone might not like it, nor would I publish something just because I thought someone might like it! Those who know me personally will know that I’m not really that bothered by what it is that others think in this kind of context.

The welcoming warmth of the cold (Loch Leven, December 2012)

No, the problem - if problem it is - is that I am not happy to share the image. My finger metaphorically (and sometimes literally) hangs over Lightroom’s “Export” button, and I study the image once more. And thoughts appear, almost as involuntary spasms in my brain: “it’s just another hillside”, “haven’t I photographed XYZ frequently enough?”, “what do I think I’m really adding to the world with this?” - and so on. Whilst some of these stop me, none of them necessarily do so. But there is another thought that does. So I don’t then click that button - and then nothing appears for others to see. Others being people like you, reading this. What is that thought? Before I come to that, it’s worth taking a step back.

The problem - if problem it is - is simply that in the meantime I know I have sufficient technical ability to be able to produce a certain kind of image and for it to come out reasonably well. I have many technical skills still to learn and don’t deny that, but I have come a long way from relying on the ‘auto’ setting! Now I’m wanting to inject more into the image, more than compositional ability, exposure, and so on. Now I seek to impart meaning through it.

First flight (Loch Leven, December 2012)

However, the problem - if problem it is - is that this meaning is not just down to me. Yesterday, the wonderful Deborah Parkin released this photograph, which I interpreted as the child (Deborah’s daughter, Fleur) being content and self-assured; Lucy Telford, another talented photographer, said that it “Captures that self-contained feeling - poignant - signs of growing up, going inside oneself, inevitable but somehow sad.” Deborah responded to us both, noting that we saw the image differently, but with some commonalities. It is stating the obvious, but so much of the interpretation of an image is down to the viewer. Sometimes this chimes with the intentions of the photographer (for example, I understand from their interaction on Twitter and the comment she left that Rob Hudson’s interpretation of Lucy’s recent new image corresponds closely to her initial vision), but sometimes it does not. And what makes me far more nervous than someone misinterpreting an image, is someone interpreting it correctly.

The great escape into freedom (Loch Leven, December 2012)

The problem - if problem it is - centres around how I deal with that. On the one hand, as I said, I am rather stubborn and that means I don’t worry about what other people think of what I do, but there is another side to that. I am aware that I see some things differently to others. In Assynt in autumn 2011 Bruce Percy looked at images I had made in one of the workshop’s critique sessions, and said something like, “ah yes, you see differently” - not as a judgement, just as a comment. What I see, and what I want others to see, varies, of course. All the images in this posting come from a morning last December, spent on the shore of Loch Leven, watching the sun come up - except that I wasn’t that bothered about seeing the sun itself, of course - and they communicate something for me. Should I give them titles that simply say “Loch Leven, 2012″, or should I give them titles that point to my mood at the time? Obviously, I have done the latter, but it takes effort. I was reflecting on a particularly difficult autumn teaching semester at the university - difficult not because of the students, of course, but because of management, and I was wanting to reflect on those experiences. Whether they communicate the same thing for you as they did for me, I don’t know. Do I want to explain what they do for me beyond what I have done here? No, I do not. But do I want to share these images in case you work it out? Of that, I’m not always sure.

The last dark refuge (Loch Leven, December 2012)

Despite what some may think, I’m a fairly reticent kind of person and do not like to give much away. Clicking that “Export” button in Lightroom is the first step not only to others being able to critique an image (“it’s just another hillside!” being an entirely fair response!), but more importantly, it gives others - that’s you - something of me. You get to see something of me, and I’m nervous about showing that, giving something of myself away. I’ve described a related issue in connection to photographing a model (the first image on this page), but my photography is also giving something of me. What you see might not be what I think I am showing, but… it might be. The danger - if danger it is! - is that you see what it is that I am seeing, as happened in the Lucy/Rob example given above, and that makes me nervous. My stubbornness means I don’t mind what people think of my images (good/bad/indifferent) because - as I don’t yet tire of saying - I am making photographs for myself, nobody else. They explore things for me, they explain and dissect and reassemble thoughts, they reveal hidden depths to me, and make me reflect on who I am and what I am doing. And now I’m supposed to share that with others, with you? Are you surprised I’m nervous about doing so, that I often can’t quite make my finger click that “Export” button?

Resignation, followed by return (Loch Leven, December 2012)

And yet - getting over that and sharing images, sharing myself, is also a privilege. So thank you for taking the time to read this posting, to look at the images, to think about them. Now, I had better click “Publish” before I change my mind and delete this posting…

Not a review of the year…

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Of all the constructions we create in the world, I sometimes think that time is the ultimate construction. Such breaks as exist are created by us, whether this be 1/125 of a second, or the end and beginning of a year. These segments are imbued with meaning only if we give them meaning, and in that context I grow very weary of reviews of the year (the only one I’ve read that is really worth reading is this one, by Deborah Parkin). So that’s not what this short posting is.

Scarista Bay

Instead, I want to show briefly where I am: this photograph from the Isle of Harris describes my photographic mood at the moment: a wide, apparently empty desert, with minor undulations and seemingly no points of interest (Michael Jackson clearly shows us that no beach is really empty). The mountains in the distance, to which I am more naturally drawn, seem a long way off, but I think I am perhaps also beginning to see much more in the emptiness of the sands and find new ways of expressing myself in such contexts. The move towards large-format photography is, for me, a part of that, and something that I look forward to developing in the coming months.

Vee, crossing a dark field

At times this is simply about not being alone. In recent months especially, I have felt as if I am walking in the dark with little light, and no idea where I’m going, resulting in much frustration. Often that is quite ok, but at times it can also be rather depressing. But I want to acknowledge all the people who have played a role in keeping me going by engaging in conversation and argument, thereby enabling me to keep going even if there’s not a lot of light. It seems invidious to name people, but… Rob, Lucy, James, Alastair (x2!), Deborah, Alex, Matt, Antonio, Mark, Mabel, Duncan, Mike, Marc, Tom and many more - thank you for the inspiration and motivation to continue exploring different aspects of creativity. A lengthy Twitter conversation with some of these lovely people last night reminded me of how much I value the kind of discussion that enables thinking to be clarified - even if I’m walking in the dark!

In that sense then, happy new year to all…

More on creativity…

Photography as an expression of self

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What this is not: a theory-laden exploration of self-identity. Or, at least, not much of it is.
What this is: quite long!

I have been following various recent discussions on Twitter about creativity between some very different photographers. Seeing the ways in which people have interacted and some of the statements that have been made has been thought-provoking (and at times rather irritating!). The debate initially came about because of another posting from Rob: A poem on a misty morning. One of the people in these debates, Rob Hudson, eventually felt so misunderstood that he sought to articulate his thoughts in a blog posting (helpfully entitled My views on landscape photography - “it does what it says on the tin”, and is worth reading). In the course of all this, he also posted this tweet:

A must read for creative photographers - or those that would like to be. laurenhenkin.com/getting-to-the… via @MikeGJackson
—
Rob Hudson (@RobHudsonPhoto) November 15, 2012

Do read the article at that link, if you haven’t read it already; it is a well-written and thoughtful piece. To begin with, however, I want to take issue with Rob’s tweet, because I think it can help elaborate on some important issues. I am aware that tweets are often written in haste, and given the 140-character limit maybe not always be formulated in a way that might more accurately reflect the author’s views, but this does give me an opening to reflect on my theme. But first, a story from a different context.

Aspirations and realities

Several years ago, I was in a large meeting of Members of the Iona Community, debating some statement about the Community’s purpose. I have been a Member for many years now, and these lovely people are my friends, in some senses I even regard them as my family. And as with all families, there are some crazy people. Sometimes, the crazies get a bit full of themselves, and I vividly remember several people standing up and in the heat of the debate arguing that we should be describing ourselves as a ‘prophetic community’. Eventually, Kathy Galloway, poet, seanchaidh, theologian and all-round wise woman, stood up and said:

Prophecy is in the ear of the hearer, not the mouth of the speaker.

She then sat down, and the room fell into complete silence for a moment. More sensible discussion then ensued - with that one line, she had silenced the pomposity of the lovable crazies and clarified the terms of the debate.

Iona Abbey, ca. 1990 or 1991

I think we need to think about creativity in a similar way. I’m not sure we can aim to be creative, instead I think we should aim to be true - true to our subject, true to our intentions, true to ourselves. I’ve written about similar themes before, in less explicit fashion and in other contexts (for example, here and quite a while ago now, here). I think one of the key issues is the importance of reflecting, of thinking, and not just of ‘shooting’, as another wonderful contemporary photographer, Christopher King, expressed it on Twitter a little while ago:

Sony Camera tagline:"Dont think, Shoot!". NO "Dont shoot, THINK" I hate the use of the word shoot with cameras: ad-man, macho bullshit
—
Christopher King (@thischrisking) August 31, 2012

Torridon, Scotland (click image for more Torridon photographs)

One of the issues that arises here is, of course, knowing what and how to think! Working that out can only happen over time, and by doing: I am very aware that I am on a journey with my photography, a journey that has taken me from seeking to make pretty images such as this landscape in Torridon, to images that ‘do’ more, at least for me. This is something that I continually struggle with. It has to do not only with how I understand what that ‘more’ is, but with how I might go about achieving it.

There are, I think, two aspects to this. The first is very simple: learn technical skills. This is rather boring: it is something that happens through making images and learning from what has worked and what has not, learning from other photographers about how they created certain effects and so on. All this is, of course, important to some degree, but it is mostly a bit tedious and I don’t want to waste time on it here.

The second aspect is more complex: if I say ‘we should aim to be true - true to our subject, true to our intentions, true to ourselves’ then the obvious question to ask is ‘what is true to my subject, true to my intention, true to myself’? These are all related and inter-dependent, and I want to elaborate on each of them briefly.

Being true to my subject

Stephanie (click image for more photos of her)

One of the prompts for the recent Twitter debate on creativity was the recent debacle over the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition. I disapprove of such competitions and don’t want to discuss this story in any detail, but in short: the winning image was withdrawn and replaced with another after it became clear it had been manipulated in such a way as to break the rules, which specified minimal manipulation of the image. Whilst there are complex questions around what such representations mean (and I think Jean Baudrillard would have had much to say on this story!), one interpretation of the story is that the photographer had not been ‘true’ to his subject. Some people might say that landscapes can be more difficult than portraits in this regard: Stephanie told me that she likes this portrait, and, as I note on the page that this comes from, she has used a version of this image herself - so it might at first seem as if I am being true to the subject, if even the subject likes it.

However, being true to a subject does not necessarily mean that the subject likes the end result or that something should ‘look like’ whatever was in front of the camera. This next image, from my What Lies Beneath series, did not ‘look like’ this, because we do not see moving water in the way I have photographed it here - and yet I would maintain that it is still a true representation.

Glen Affric (click for more What Lies Beneath images)

Some photographers, such as the wonderful Lucy Telford, create images that sometimes bear only a passing resemblance to what something ‘looks like’. And yet I would argue that Lucy is being completely true to her subjects.

So how do we know when we are being true to our subject? I think it is not enough if someone says they like it and feel it is a good representation, and in some cases, that might even be counterproductive: I have made portraits of people that they do not necessarily like (I’m sure we’ve all had subjects say ‘I look too fat/tired/pale/silly/worried in that photograph’!), but which I think accurately reflects who they are in some way. I therefore think I am being true to my subject. And this takes me to the next point: the photographer’s intention plays a key role in whether a photograph is true to the subject.

Being true to my intention

Some photographs (actually, quite a few in my case!) don’t work out, and at the moment I can only be rather vague about how this relates to being true to my intention: perhaps this is about honing intuition.

What (doesn’t) Lie Beneath I

Sometimes an image appears to be technically in order, and I might even feel it to be true to my subject - but it doesn’t actually do what I want it to do. After releasing my What Lies Beneath series, I also put some images online that didn’t quite make it into the series. This is an example of the rejects. I was reasonably happy with these images, but none of them belonged in the final set. The reasons varied. Apart from the fourth image, which predated (by a matter of hours!) the beginning of the series in my head, all the others just didn’t evoke the right emotional reaction for me. It is very difficult for me to articulate precisely what that is, and I’m not going to try and do it here. I spent a long time with each image, studying it, letting it work its way into my head, seeking to ‘befriend’ it - a difficult selection process. But some photographs just were not right - they didn’t seem to be sufficiently engaging or they didn’t have the emotional connection I was trying to seek out. Whilst I feel I can’t say much more about this, it does point to the third aspect, because part of what I’m saying is that being true to my intentions involves being self-aware enough to be true to myself.

Being true to myself

Click the image to read why this doesn’t work

I have explained before why I think this photograph does not work. The fundamental problem is that what we wanted was to communicate a feeling of loss and abandonment, and what I have created is an image that emphasises Stephanie’s breast. But I didn’t want this to be about her breasts (and neither did she!), and being true to myself means not using this image (other than to illustrate a point, I mean - it’s not in my galleries or for sale; I feel I want to add that this photograph comes from 2009, and I hope that I would approach it differently now, taking in the entire frame rather than focussing on her facial expression before squeezing the shutter).

Being true to myself means that what I really want to create in every single image is something that is of me - and photographs that focus just on a woman’s breasts are not what I want to create. Portraits of people are in some ways also self-portraits (as Oscar Wilde and numerous others have said), but so are the landscapes I photograph. Therefore, whilst the monochrome portrait of Stephanie above communicates something of her joyful approach to life, it also communicates something about me (despite the faux-grumpiness I often exude, I am mostly optimistic and take great pleasure from being alive!); the landscapes I photograph are meant to do that too. This may not always be obvious to others, but - and I’ll come to this in a moment - I don’t really care what most others think about my images.

Dornoch Sands (click for more Dornoch images)

For example, this image from Dornoch Sands communicates something about my state of mind and thinking at the time I made it. It may be that this is a bland blue nothingness to most people who see it, but to me it conveys something very important. There are various factors at work here: the expansive depth of the sands, the sky and the clouds, the distant hills, the magical dawn light - all speak of home to me, though I had never been to Dornoch and the surrounding area before, and had spent just a few hours on this beach. Nonetheless, there was something inviting, welcoming and generous about what I was encountering, and that is what I have sought to capture here. Whether I have done that for anyone else doesn’t really interest me.

Having said that I often exude a faux-grumpiness, it may seem as if there is nothing ‘faux’ about it! I’ve said I don’t care what most people think of my images, I am not interested in whether they generate emotions for others… surely that makes me a grumpy misanthrope?! Far from it…

The question of identity

Kwame Anthony Appiah, one of the truly great philosophers of our age, has written a profoundly important book on The Ethics of Identity. He discusses the need for us in the contemporary world to pursue what he calls ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’. This, he argues, is a way of engaging in the world that allows the individual to make a life for themselves (the classical task of modern individuality), but he connects this individuality to the global context we are in and the ways in which we relate to others. We need to understand our own place in the world in order to be able to engage with it. What and who we love needs to be clear to us, because without that we cannot relate to others: ‘no island… is an island’ (p219).

What I want to glean from this relates to the first part of my statement: ‘we should aim to be true - true to our subject, true to our intentions, true to ourselves’. I have explored, briefly, three aspects that I suggest constitute being ‘true’. As should be clear, these are all aspects of our identity, and identity can be formed in numerous ways, for example:

ascription - to attribute an identity to someone (e.g. ‘you are… [something]‘ - clearly, this is often problematic because it silences the voices of others and casts a singular identity upon them, something that Amartya Sen criticises)
treatment - to act as if someone belongs to a particular group (e.g. ‘women are… [something]‘ - but this silences a collective group that may not choose to mark any common identity in this way at all - for example, in certain contexts, being women might not be important to the people concerned, whereas being photographers, for example, might be more so)
identification - when someone uses particular markers to identify themselves (e.g. ‘I am… [something]‘ - this allows individuals to speak for themselves).

Ardalanish Bay (click for more Mull images)

We all, of course, aspire to the third of these possibilities - who would not want to be in a position to define themselves, rather than be defined in some way by others?

And yet, this is not easy!

Above all, it requires self-knowledge, self-understanding, self-awareness. We need to know what our roots are before we can engage with the cosmopolitanism of wider (photographic) society, and that means we need to know what we want, what we are trying to achieve, and how we might go about portraying this in photographs. Most of this activity is not about thinking, it is about feeling, about emotion. This happens by listening: to ourselves and to the landscape, for example - it is always possible to force a composition when out somewhere, but to engage with the landscape, to really begin to understand it, requires more. Michael Jackson, who photographs just one beach, is an exemplar of someone who listens to the landscape and himself - and his images convey profound personal emotion.

In the course of the Twitter debates, I have seen the term ‘workshop photographers’, meaning those who go on workshops and produce images similar to those of the workshop leader. Now, I have been on two Bruce Percy workshops and have benefited from them enormously, but his images are not mine. I do not want that photographic identity to be ascribed to me (‘oh, look, you can tell he went on one of Bruce’s workshops’), nor do I want to be treated as someone who makes images in a ‘Bruce Percy style’ (not that I could or would, and Bruce wouldn’t want it either!).

Instead, I want to make my own images that are rooted in my own experience, that come from my own listening to the hills, my own engagement with my subject, my own conversation with the individual I am photographing, my own understanding of my place in the wider cosmopolitanism of the world. My photographs should be about my voice. I need to know what it is that I am wanting to express with my images - and my sense is that I am gradually getting there, gradually finding my own way to express my thoughts in my photographs. Getting there requires a certain level of stubbornness (something I do not lack…!) and the ability to persist with something, even when others have no idea what I’m trying to do.

Tolastadh Chaolais, Isle of Lewis (click for more What Lies Beneath)

I have found that there are many people who would look at an image such as this from Tolastadh Chaolais and ask why I pointed the camera downwards instead of seeking to capture the fantastic hilly vista cliché visible from the road. Part of the process of finding my own voice has been to differentiate between (a) the people who say that, and (b) those who ask what it is that I am trying to do, or find something for themselves in the image. That is what I meant by not caring what other people think - if I pander to the beautiful hilly vista people and produce clichés, then I miss the stones and grasses under the water that actually speak to me, if I take the time to listen. Being true to my subject, my intention, myself is what creates my identity, and enables me to be rooted in a wider - cosmopolitan - context, and this identity-construction is, of course, an on-going process. I’m not, in the words of Rob’s tweet, trying to be creative, I’m just trying to be… me.

Two final thoughts

Firstly: doing all this is about being whole people. Photography is not my ‘hobby’, in the sense that it’s something I do in my spare time for pleasure (I’m reminded of the Edinburgh-based artist, Trevor Jones: ‘Whoever says painting is relaxing isn’t doing it right’). It’s an integral part of who I am, as is my academic work, and my engagement in contemporary Middle East issues - and all of it needs expression. That is one of the things I was trying to communicate in my What Lies Beneath series, and it is also why it grates and irritates me that a student resource page I used to have on this site had to be moved due to administrative managerialism (see e.g. Richard Roberts’ article on this, summarised in a short blog posting here) in case students - who are not as stupid as the university’s managers seem to think they are - thought the university was endorsing my photography. All of these things are part of me, and I seek to live out my identity in my academic work, my writing, and my photography.

Secondly: all of this requires effort, and in some ways, courage. Many of us are conditioned away from listening to ourselves (‘scientific medicine’ has often led us to ignore our bodies and seek a ‘fix’ for ailments, for example). It is, of course, immensely rewarding to do so, but the effort is a strange one. Much of the time I find the effort is about the need to stop trying to constantly do - it is about being still and listening to the inner voice we all have. Letting that voice come to the fore is a risky business. We may find things out about ourselves that we would rather not know, or rather not share, and doing so can involve courage. We are, after all, exposing something of ourselves to others, and that makes us vulnerable - it’s like becoming naked. On the other hand, it is only through allowing ourselves to be touched at our core that we can truly be who we ought to be.

Finally, one last thought from Christopher:

Don't worry about whether the audience will like your work, or even understand it. I many ways work is more interesting when misunderstood.
—
Christopher King (@thischrisking) November 18, 2012

Warm thanks to Rob Hudson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this text.

Scenes seen

“Occasional unseen scenes, now seen: a photoblog from Michael Marten”

That is the byline for a new photoblog I’ve created. Having commented yesterday on how difficult I was finding it to select images for a series, I want now to point to what might almost be seen as the opposite: a new photoblog with a very different purpose. The intention here is simply to show images, some old, some new, that would not necessarily have a home on this site, but that I think are perhaps worth putting online somewhere to give a slightly different perspective or outlet to a certain kind of creativity. I don’t like Flickr and such sites very much, so creating my own little site seemed like a good idea. I expect there to be very little text, if any, accompanying each photograph - the point is just to offer photographs for viewing (and commenting etc.). There will not be a new photograph every day, but there probably won’t be more than one a day. I have an ‘about‘ page that explains all this in more detail. So take a look!

Here is the photograph I posted yesterday - an expression of positive thinking, that this little project will hopefully go down a route that will (at least occasionally!) show something interesting and different!

Portobello Park, Edinburgh

(By the way, if you’re kind enough to follow this blog, it won’t automatically post details of the new one - but there are follow and RSS options down the side.)

Working on a series is hard work

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As regular readers of my Twitter feed will know, I’m working on a series called ‘What Lies Beneath’. I want about 12 or 13 images for this, and whilst I don’t want to say more about the series just now (all should be revealed in the next couple of weeks sometime - my final film needs processing first), but I do want to say: it is SO hard to pick images! I have been working on this series for a little while now (since autumn 2011), and have created quite a number of images - yet whittling it down to a small number is very difficult. Every image has a story attached to it, but the meta-narrative I want to create necessitates some exclusion and continual re-focussing. This, as will soon become clear, is an integral part of what the series is, but deciding to discard images is hard - I feel as if I’m cutting away something that I really like. Perhaps some of the discarded images will find a ‘home’ elsewhere, but for now, they need to be excluded, however frustrating such decisions about narrating a certain kind of creativity might be. Here is one of the rejects, a photograph I made in Strathconon this summer. It was early in the morning, and I was standing in the river with my camera carefully set up on the tripod - and just as I was squeezing the cable release I realised the laces on one of my boots had come undone and the water was coming in…

River Meig, Strathconon

I’ve spent a while studying and meditating on this photograph, and in discarding it, I feel as if I’m letting an old friend down. Maybe it belongs back in the series after all, and I should get rid of another one…?

Or perhaps I should just add one more to the series?

Oh, but…

See what I mean? It’s hard to do this stuff!

Something a little different

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On a recent outing to Helmsdale, I made this:

River Helmsdale: road and river

Made with a Lensbaby selective focus lens, it is one of the few times I’ve really managed to use the lens in a way that resulted in a meaningful image, rather than just something that used the Lensbaby for the sake of using it. Photographing flowers with it is just incredibly boring; I do have some interesting portrait ideas I want to use it for, but haven’t quite organised the model for this yet.

I stood on the opposite bank looking across the river for some time. I felt the road bridge in the top right appeared to be more of a gaping mouth into complete darkness, and the stream that came down into the main river was somehow escaping from it. I played about with a 50mm f1.4 lens, but when I looked through the viewfinder, I didn’t feel it really communicated sufficient menace (or rather, I couldn’t visualise what post-processing I would need to do to enable that to happen). The Lensbaby - that I almost didn’t bother taking with me on that day - was just right. All I’ve done to the image in post-processing is cropped it to 5×7, adjusted the levels/curves a bit, and added a vignette.

There is not much here that could be regarded as representative photography, which is just what I wanted.

Why workshop?

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A while ago I mentioned on Twitter that I had booked myself a place on a photography workshop. Someone commented on this in what felt like a throw-away remark, saying they had never seen the point of going on workshops. So I - in 140 characters! - sought to explain why this was important to me. Now that I’m just back from the workshop I booked on at the time, I thought I’d try and say more about it, and include some images from the time away (these are just the digital ones - I have yet to take the film rolls to be developed).

Achnahaird Bay

Firstly, it’s worth noting that I have no formal artistic training (unlike my correspondent, who has, I think, a degree in art/photography), and so for me, I hope that a workshop can serve partly to teach me something. Secondly, having a pretty intense full-time job means that if I get the time to go and photograph for a few days and do nothing but think about photography, that is really fantastic! The week was a proper holiday, and I didn’t read a single academic text whilst away (even though I did have a book with me… I rarely travel without one!).

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, engaging with a photographer leading a workshop is about having someone critique what I do and help me move forward in my thinking and my photography.

Loch Bad a' Ghaill

My week away was with Bruce Percy, who has been running workshops for several years now. Exactly two years before going on this Assynt workshop, I went (with my neighbour, Mabel Forsyth) to Torridon on one of his weekend workshops. That was a great experience, as I wrote about here at the time. So I was confident the week in Assynt would be a good week.

There are some people who seem to be workshop-regulars, going from one to the next all the time. I am not like that: I have attended a couple of other day-workshops in recent years, but have not been on residential workshops other than the one in Torridon and this one in Assynt. So if you’re wanting me to offer comparisons, I can’t do so (though I have now heard quite a few horror stories of other workshops, some by really famous photographers… and no, I won’t say more on this). My main purpose in going to Assynt with Bruce was that I wanted to rediscover something about my own reasoning and motivation for making photographs - especially landscapes - that I had found increasingly difficult to identify in recent times. I felt I knew enough theory in terms of operating my cameras (though of course, Bruce was able to help me improve in certain areas, such as my exposures and hyperfocal focusing). But I felt I needed input on more important things, especially aspects of composition and how and why I frame the way I do or give more attention to certain things in a scene, and what all that says about my own ‘visioning process’ (sorry, I think that is a rather horrible phrase, but I can’t think of a more suitable one; pre-visualisation covers some of it, but is not the same thing).

Glencanisp Lodge, with view to Suilven

Of course, this is not something that I discussed in any detail with Bruce before or during the workshop, because I knew from previous experience that this might come anyway - and it did. One of the two key things for me in thinking about a workshop is that I have to like the photographs that the workshop leader makes, and I really love Bruce’s work - it offers depth and challenge, simplicity and elegance, in both his landscapes and portraits. Of course, I have no desire to create images that are like Bruce’s, even if I could do so, since they represent his vision and not mine; however, I feel I can relate to his vision. I have come to realise that the other key thing for me is that I have to feel I can connect to the leader, and that he or she can connect to me. Of course, I’m privileged in that I was able to go on the Torridon workshop with Bruce and I therefore knew him a little already; and we’ve also become friends over the last couple of years - that is not something that is necessarily open to people who don’t live in the next neighbourhood to a workshop leader! But it is possible to at least gain some impression of the person from their images and their writings (such as their blog) and this offers good clues. And, of course, you can trust my recommendation that Bruce is a great workshop leader!

So, is it possible to sum up what it was that I gained from Bruce’s input? There are a number of things that come to mind, but the main one for me can be outlined in the following terms. At the beginning of the week, he noted that he sometimes found it difficult to understand exactly what I was seeing and why I had gone for a certain composition (I did say this was perhaps because the images were no good, but Bruce disagreed!). A day or two later he began to suggest that my visualising of scenes was perhaps too selective - I tended to visualise one or two really significant elements in a potential image, but I did not always frame these in a way that meant they were as apparent as I wanted them to be, whether this be unusual shapes, repeated lines, patterns on hills, the interplay between different elements in a scene, and so on. This is not simply about excluding extraneous elements - even if I intended to crop the image from whatever I saw in the viewfinder - although this is also a factor (see the tree image I discussed here recently and the grass in the bottom right of the image: 1, 2). Rather, for me, it is about expanding the view of the scene as a whole, about being able to encompass the elements that form the shapes, colours and tones in a way that enables a more holistic image to emerge. That is what I want to achieve, and I know that I do that, but not always as consistently as I would like.

At Achnahaird Bay, looking south

Of course, this is just me. Other participants will hopefully have found something in Bruce’s critiques (there were 2-3 hours of image critiques on every day but one; other participants also commented on images) that helped them with whatever they thought they needed - or perhaps that they didn’t know they needed.

A month or two ago I removed all the landscape galleries from this site. There really was a lot of rubbish there, in amidst some images that I liked. Before going to Assynt I had begun the process of recreating the galleries and they are gradually going to reappear, but this time with far fewer, more carefully selected images. In general, I make photographs for myself and not for others: being clearer about what I’m doing is therefore essential, and I feel the week away with Bruce has enabled me to see much more clearly exactly what kind of images I want to create, and given me more tools to enable me to go about doing that. Those are the images I want to show here.

In essence, I feel I am approaching my photography with new confidence, a clearer sense of why I’m doing it, and how to go about achieving what I want. So in answer to my correspondent: that’s why I wanted to go on this workshop!

Friedensreich Hundertwasser and creative processes

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I am currently in Kiel in northern Germany, and yesterday I went to the Hundertwasser exhibition in the Ostseehalle (that’s what everyone still calls it, despite the sponsoring bank insisting on naming it after itself…!). It was fantastic - do go if you’re anywhere near it!

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) came across as somewhat eccentric but fantastically creative, and applied his art to the ‘real world’, designing stamps, number plates, humus toilets, buildings/windows and much more, as well as creating more abstract imagery. The exhibition was extremely engaging, and I want to point to two significant thoughts that emerged for me.

A relative of mine had a large mounted reproduction print by Hundertwasser, L’expulsion, on her living room wall, and left it to me when she died… so it’s now hanging on my living room wall (sadly, it’s not a “real” Hundertwasser…!). I have always loved this image, though the colours on my print are different: they are richer, more saturated, than the image I’ve linked to and that was in the exhibition. In fact, many of his images were created in different colour palettes, though it is not clear to me what prompted him to choose the varying colour schemes. This is interesting to me: he seems to have seen various final possibilities for his images, none completely definitive, though all existing within certain fixed parameters. So often I try to get to one final image, but perhaps I should be more open to the multiplicity of possibilities that each image is offering me.

Secondly, it seemed to me that Hundertwasser had a perfect understanding of the theory and practice of pre-visualisation (what Steve Coleman memorably describes as taking a photograph you cannot see; I’ve also found Bruce Percy’s books to be most helpful on this topic) - he knew just what he was aiming for, and created images or objects that corresponded to an image he already understood and had discerned in some form. I don’t know that this was necessarily in the sense that the completed artwork was in some way visible to him in his imagination, but certain principles or guidelines - such as his understanding of the importance of spirals and his antipathy to straight lines - seem to have helped him to understand what he was working towards and what he wanted to reach with his art. In the same way, I think we as photographers need to know what we’re aiming for and what is guiding our creation of images, as this will help us in knowing what it is we are trying to achieve.

I think it is great to pick up on these questions in other art forms. I’m in the process of creating new image galleries to go online here sometime soon, and it’s helpful to be reminded of some of these themes as I try to think about the narrative underpinning images and image collections, however much of a novice I might be in this area.

Book cover commission

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At short notice, and with a tight deadline, I’ve been asked to provide a book cover for a friend’s publishing company, which I’m delighted to do. As it happens, my sketch book includes a certain set-up with a model, and it just so happens that a little development of this idea could suit the book very well. My thoughts about this set-up are not necessarily very original, but I nonetheless find the idea interesting (I’ve looked online and recalled a related image, but - though it sounds immodest! - mine is still different, so perhaps it’s even a little more original than I’m giving myself credit for!). There is something really stimulating about finding inspiration in the creativity of someone else and using that to develop an idea, and it impinges on questions of ownership (more on this shortly).

So, a model has been booked and time has been set aside for the editing… details of all this, including an image or two, to be posted here before long…

Michael Marten's Photography

life in photography - photography in life