The OCA reminds us that as we develop and photographers we must not only develop strong technical skills but we should use then effectively to promote our ideas and intentions or (practical) work should reflect what we have learned in terms of technique and conceptual intentions.

Self-reflective writing helps us to gather and process our thoughts and ideas as much as it illustrates to our tutor and assessors that we were not just blindly clicking away with our camera, i.e. it allows them to understand our intention, how we intended to carry them out and how the results met or failed to meet our expectations.

Reflective writing is we should step back a little and be critical, (although not necessarily negative) thoughtful and reflective. Our writing should be factual of how our technical decisions, ideas and contextualisation’s have come together with each project and assignment. And we should give reasons why we feel our work is successful or unsuccessful.

Joachim Schmid is a pioneer of the genre of ‘found photography’ and has been described thus ‘an archaeologist of the ordinary and every day of our visual culture … preoccupied of what is commonly seen to be culturally devalued visual material, Schmid organizes and recycles pictures into ordered arrangements’. (Schuhmacher 2013).

On his Flickr page, we find an overview of his work ‘other people’s photographs’, a series of 96 books covering all manner of mundane subjects captured by Flickr users. Prior to the internet, he completed similar projects using physical photographs he ‘gathered’ from junk shops etc. Schmid avoid using the word ‘collected’ as he sees himself as a consumer rather than a collector of images

From reading interviews with Schmid on weareOCA.com and americansuburbx.com it is hard to define his motivation for his passion, although there appears to be a theme that he is illustrating that perhaps photography is the most assessable and widely undertaken art form and because of this, not all photography is intended to be art. Schmid, however, appears angry that the artistic world at large wants to exclude the photographs that are not intentionally taken as art.

Schmid acknowledges that photography it is much more than art. He is interested in how people usually take the same sort of photographs, even though they are not ‘taught’ how to do this and therefore, he argues, there must be some kind of ‘unspoken or unconscious code’. This is a something that I think is very clear in society – as babies we learn by mimicking our parents, as adolescents we mimic pop stars / our idols and therefore this transports into photography.

Most people holiday or family snaps are similar because there is an unwritten code of what your friends at work expect to see and this is true of those of us who aspire to be serious photographers – initially we start copying the adverting and news images we see around us. I know that I at 14 when I first got a camera I wanted to take photos like Din McCullen and Steve McCurry.

Schmid also acknowledges the physical quality of photographs. “An important feature of the work is the physical quality of photographs. They are kind of objects. They have an object like character, people have them in their wallets or wherever and then they tear them apart. I like the physicality of that work and I think it makes most of the fascination.” (Schuhmacher, 2013)

And it with this statement that he appears to be acknowledging the collector in him, the desire to possess and collect all that is available – and a trait that many people have young and old. Just look for example how the Pokémon Go app/game captured the imagination of the world in 2016.

Personally, I find “found photography” strange, there is a fascination to see what out there and how someone like Schmid is documenting it – and if I’m honest I would spend hours poring over his books. However, I have little desire to replicate; which to some degree is a failing on my part because as an artist we need to collect inspirations for our future and work. But I’m scared that I would become just obsessed with collecting for collecting sake.

In summation though Schmid work is more than just collecting inspirations, it appears to be some between a crazed child obsessed with their collection of Star Wars Figure, Trading Cards, Panini stickers, the list is endless and a serious reflection or reaction to the stuffy nature of the art establishment treatment of photography – reminding us that whatever the reason for the photograph it is still a piece of art.

Bibliography

AMERICAN SUBURB X. (2013). ASX Interviews Joachim Schmid. [online] Available at: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/12/asx-interview-interview-joachim–schmid-2013.html [Accessed 16 Jan. 2018].

Joachim Schmid. (2018). Joachim Schmid. [online] Available at: https://schmid.wordpress.com/ [Accessed 16 Jan. 2018].

Flickr. (2018). Joachim Schmid. [online] Available at: https://www.flickr.com/people/joachimschmid/ [Accessed 16 Jan. 2018].

WeAreOCA. (2013). An Interview with Joachim Schmid – WeAreOCA. [online] Available at: https://weareoca.com/subject/photography/an-interview-with-joachim-schmid/ [Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].

Thanks to the camera-phone, we are drowning in images. Which are important, and what gives them meaning? In Montreal, a group of artists attempt to decide

Source: Mois de la Photo: making sense of the photograph in the web era

I booked mark this page a couple of years ago while I was drowning in a little uncertainty during “expressing your vision” and perhaps in a moment of clarity thought it might be useful going forward.

This article in the Guardian explains how a Joan Fontcuberta curated expedition will examine the role of the photograph and the photographer in the age of the camera phone and the proliferation of images through the internet.

The exhibition reflects on how after 150 years our relationship to the photograph has changed, mainly down to the proliferation of camera phones and the glut of banal snaps which seem to be made to be immediately forgotten

The article touches on the work of Joachin Schmid and Eric Kessels and others who have appropriated and repurposed found and cast of images (mainly from the internet into their own art projects.

Fontcuberta makes an interesting comment on this type work stating “I think that now most artists adopt images [ie select from images captured by others] because they don’t pretend to be the biological parents, they just pick those images to make them alive in another context. The importance is how we assign meaning. The craft and authorship of the image are no longer relevant issues, which brings us to the crisis of photography.”

This is perhaps a little strong, although I do believe there is somewhat of a crisis. With the fact that everyone has a camera-phone everyone is a photographer or should I say “Instagramr” and with the proliferation of affordable DSLRs, the hike in quality of point and shoot camera and the advent of the mirrorless systems there are more camera’s out there the value of the photographer to the public has reduced. Just as the camera made redundant the need for the portrait artist’s technical skills in drawing or painting.

Does this mean that the photographer of the future just becomes a selector and processor of existing images? I think not. We must remember photography is an art-form and those that use ONLY other images are artists that editor or curate not photographers for let’s not forget what the word photography means – writing with light and there are many artists still out there writing with light on a daily basis to create distinctive work.

Bibliography

Pett, S. (2015). Mois de la Photo: making sense of the photograph in the web era. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/15/mois-de-la-photo-making-sense-photography [Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].

WeAreOCA. (2013). An Interview with Joachim Schmid – WeAreOCA. [online] Available at: https://weareoca.com/subject/photography/an-interview-with-joachim-schmid/ [Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].

WeAreOCA. (2013). An Interview with Joachim Schmid – WeAreOCA. [online] Available at: https://weareoca.com/subject/photography/an-interview-with-joachim-schmid/ [Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].

Reading through the introduction section in the OCA’s Context & Narrative course book I thought it would be appropriate to take a few moments to summarise that section and reflect a little of what the aims of the course are in the eyes of the OCA – I guess focus on what the broad meaning is of “Context and Narrative.

Context: noun

the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.

The context of a photograph and its surroundings are fundamental to how it comes to exist and how it is consumed. No Photograph exists without a purpose, the meaning of a photograph is influenced by what surrounds it – and not just its physical location.

The above is a direct quote from the course manual and think this says a lot in just a few words – there is more to photography than just a quick snap, there is always a reason behind it.

These course manual goes on to say that as photographers we should also be careful that the messages within our images don’t convey an unintended meaning.

We should aim to become a thinking photographers rather than the masses joining every trend, new camera etc.

Context is just the geographical placement of a picture – although this is important, it’s the ideological positioning of the photograph (or series of photographs) and as such to understand this we are encouraged to research other photographers work both individually and in comparison, to one and other to get a sense of context and how we as individual photographers or artist fit into contemporary photography.

Narrative:noun

• a spoken or written account of connected events; a story “a gripping narrative”

• the practice or art of telling stories.

• a representation of a particular situation or process in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values.

Individual photographs and series of photographs hold within them their own narratives i.e. what’s in the frame. What the OCA means by narrative is the visual flow, the coherence of the set of images or construction of a single image.

With the frame of any photograph are elements that make up the narrative – the photographer builds on these elements to back up the general flow of the narrative but this is necessarily linear, these can be manipulated for example consider Pulp Fiction (1994) Dir. Quentin Tarantino. However, the overall narrative must be consistent, the OCA reminds us we should see patterns in our images which uphold our overarching ideas – a way of linking the images together to create the narrative.

Photography holds a close relationship to literature and film, the narrative has to hold together; so, as much as we might want to emulate Tarantino and Pulp Fiction we need to have very good reason for doing so i.e.

“You do not have to conform to standard narrative approaches, but if you’re to push the boundaries it’s important to understand why you’re doing so rather that submitting a random selection of disparate images that don’t hold together as a narrative.”

Single photographs contain within them visual codes that carry meaning very much like the mis-en-scène in a movie. These are there generally for a reason; even in straight documentary i.e. where element maybe by chance rather than design they become significant in the final reading of the image as they become fixed I frame and subject to lifelong scrutiny.

The OCA reminds us that as photographers we’re aware of what we are photographing and even if we see something in our images that wasn’t intended, we’re critical enough to make sense of it later.

Summary

As photographers, if we are alert to both the broad context (outside frame) and specific narratives (within the frame) of photographs we will develop the mean to delve deeper into creating and understanding meaning photography (art).

Context and Narrative enable us as photographers to produce projects expending upon our personal vision and begin formulating our personal voice.

Bibliography

Open College of the Arts (2015) Context & Narrative: course handbook. (2015). Barnsley: OCA.