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We talked about the essay and I mentioned my interest on how photography represents our times. Photography is seen as something to validate our experiences, as Barthes wrote “a photo is of something”. I am interested in the fact that photography has a role as testimony of historical events, as it happened with Joel Meyerowitz’s pictures. He was commissioned by the Museum of the City of New York to make for posterity the official images of the scene in Ground Zero after the 9/11 events. These pictures where exhibited in the city and later internationally.
Jonathan mentioned a website www.mercurynewsphoto.com where the news are presented in a highly stylised approach. I looked at one of their reportages, “Uprooted”, it is presented as photographs with a voice over plus insets of video. It is beautifully made and it brings back the debate about photography serving a memory function, evoking the memorable and giving a feeling of “pastness”, in direct contrast to the moving image and its “presentness”.
It is very interesting to see how moving image and still image cross over and are integrated. Another example that was mentioned was the film “Hunger” by Steve McQueen where there is a scene that last for about 10 minutes and is a single shot in a straight angle. In the scene Bobby Sands informs a member of the clergy that he intends to commence a hunger strike. This scene is showed to us as an almost still image, accentuating the scene’s gravity and its transcendence.
As photography is my chosen methodology, I have been reading about its relation to memory and time. I have come across several essays where photography is discussed in comparison to film. Exposing its function and contrasting its temporality to the flow of cinema. By observing the function of freeze frames and cinema, the role of photography is asserted as a medium on its own right and not dependent. Nowadays there are a lot of artist, such as Bill Viola, that work in the boundaries of both mediums. These are some extracts from the essays:
(Safety in numbness: some remarks on problems of late photography)
David Campany tries to define photography as a medium to represent memory. Photography is compared to the moving image and focused on how, in popular culture, a freeze frame is often used as a “simple signifier of the memorable”. A photograph and its simplicity, in a world of moving image where there is a sheer amount of information, can somehow relate to the process of our memory. A freeze frame is used on television and film to evoke the memorable and by contrasting it to the “presentness” of the moving image, it emphasizes its ‘pastness”. Photography is been given a memory function with a wish that its muteness will appear to be uncontaminated and serve as a memory trigger.
(Marking time: Photography, Film and temporalities of the image by David Green)
Raymond Bellours talks about how freeze frames within a film can have two different effects; the viewer can be made aware of two kinds of temporality, “one which belongs to the film and the intrinsic forward movement of the narrative”, the other is when the spectator is being made aware by this pause in the narrative that he is watching a film. The attention is then directed to the present making the freeze frame being a stop within a stop.
Garreth Stewart extends the argument considering that a freeze frame, a photogram, allow us to engage in a critical interrogation of film, giving it the possibility of cinematic reflexivity. Reflexivity allows the identification of the properties and characteristics peculiar to a medium. Therefore photography can define film as well as film can define photography.
Bill Viola: “The Innocents”, 2007
Bill Viola: ”Two Woman”, 2008
These two videos belong to the series Transfigurations.
The title of the series Transfigurations refers to the moment when a person or an object is transformed not by external means but from within. Viola says “the transformation of the Self, usually provoked by a profound inner revelation or an overwhelming sensation of clarity and fathomless emotion, overcomes the individual until literally a ‘new light’ dawns on him or her… Some of the most profound human experiences occur at times like these, arising at the outer limits of conscious awareness.” In Viola’s Transfigurations works, black-and-white images of ghostly figures emerge slowly from complete darkness eventually passing through a threshold of water into a world of color and light. Reacting with a range of emotions from surprise, to confusion, fear and anger, often with a desire to linger, the figures are finally drawn back through to the other realm. Viola combines images recorded in grainy analog video using an old surveillance camera with those shot in High-Definition video to bring the viewer to the intersection of obscurity and clarity—from death to life—and back again.
Press Release: BILL VIOLA – Bodies of Light
James Cohan Gallery, 2009
Bill Viola’s works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism.
Viola’s work often exhibits a painterly quality, his use of ultra-slow motion video encouraging the viewer to sink into to the image and connect deeply to the meanings contained within it. This quality makes his work perhaps unusually accessible within a contemporary art context. His work strives towards meaning; using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories he attempts to deal with the big themes of human life.
A roundtable discussion attended by Robert Polidori, staff photographer for The New Yorker, Douglas Nickel, Professor of Modern Art at Brown University, Bevil Conway, Professor of Neuroscienceat Wellesley College, David Freedberg, Professor of Art History at Columbia University, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, President of Antidote International Films and Cristina Alberini, Profesor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
The discussion was about trying to understand the ways in which photography influences memory and the objectivity of photography. It was an interesting discussion where academic viewpoints were contrasted with the practitioner viewpoint.
As a result of watching the discussion these are the ideas that remain with me:
A photograph can be considered as an imprint from reality; many times the photographer makes an effort to record nature objectively. There is the acculturated belief that photography is objective, although as we observe a photographed image, there are cultural references that inform our reading and help us put things into context. Our visual objectivity is put into question. But we could just look at a photograph from a physics point of view where the camera conveys the laws of perspective from the art of the western world so this hasn’t got a specific cultural input to us.
The relationship between photograph & memory was discussed; how a photograph carries the moment in time and the emotion of that moment, a photograph is a fixed reproduction but memory evolves and changes and moments are reinterpreted.
A photograph can replace a memory, a sharp photograph of a place in some way is given us a new interpretation of the experience of a place, so it is more than just a documentary visual. Our peripheral vision has much less accuracy therefore our experience of the moment is very different to that captured in the photograph. A memory is not a recording of an event as it occurred, but a group of fragments that represent an event. An emotional recollection strengthens the visual memory thus giving photography a utilitarian use. A photograph can move us emotionally but we need to consider what we project into that photograph as well as the image itself.
Robert Polidori,Classroom in Kindergarten #7, “Golden Key.” Pripyat. (June 6-9, 2001)
This led me to think about the visual effectiveness of out of focus pictures, pictures that include movement and blurred sections, how they trigger our perception of the moment/memory. They can work in a manner where the photograph mimics memory, as our peripheral vision does, highlighting one element in within the frame and letting the rest fade into the background. I think this can be applied to my work, using different exposures of the same subject and working on them in post-production. It also can be contextualised with the surrealist photography movement and even earlier than that with the photography of Peter Henry Emerson(1856-1936), he believed in objective photography and he photograph accordingly to what he believed was our way of viewing, so he played with selective focus and careful gradation of tones.
Peter Henry Emerson, A Rushy Shore, 1887-88
