For this exercise, we are asked to go to Nigel Shafran’s website and look at his series Washing-up as well as his other work.  Shafran’s Washing-up project can be seen here.  The course book talks about the captions that accompany the images in this series, Shafran’s website is royally useless as it does not contain the caption, which are really fundamental to understanding the work – or they are in my opinion. I have done some searching and I have found 3 images with a caption that I have created into a gallery here for casual viewers to understand, although I suspect the assessors and my tutor know this work like the back of their hands.

Did it surprise you that this was taken by a man? Why?

It’s a cultural perception that many of us have grown up with – that men don’t do housework, that cooking and dishes are women’s work. This was never the case in the household I grew up in, nor when I lived in a domestic partnership and as I am now living alone it would be downright impossible as I would just end up living in squalor if I didn’t do these things . Unfortunately there are many household the world over where this perception is still very much alive and well. So does this image surprise me that it authored by a man? No, but not because I have grown up doing the washing up but because it a very male thing to the do record what they do. When I read the captions I see that they possible taken buy man who suddenly found himself in the more domestic of the role in a household and decided to record it.

In your opinion does gender contribute to the creation of an image?

Of course. Men and women see things differently and even if they both photograph the same subject, the end result would look completely different as a result of their different points of view and perceptions. This does challenge feminism in some way but that not the intent. In general, men photographers are more reluctant to show their own image in their pictures – I know I am. Is this motivated by the influence of Western Culture, where the female figure is notoriously more represented in art than the male body? “active looking has been accorded to the male spectator ‘Woman’ becomes the object of his gaze.” (Wells, p.326). This no doubt must influence male photographer, who are influenced old stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. In my last module Introduction to Film Culture I read a lot about gender and gender representation – what I too form that is that sex is binary, the gender traits we portray are and should be more fluid due to the influences on us from our environment and the modern world is happening more. Shafran’s work echoes to me of a modern man starting to go through this process – he is becoming more domestic but still wants to retain the tradition male matter of fact-ness.

What does this series achieve by not including people?

A mystery created in this series by not featuring people. Even without referring to the captions ( which I feel really are needed for to understand the piece) I am intrigued by the ever-changing scenario around the sink; the variation from natural light to fluorescent or tungsten leaves little clues as to the time of day and therefore meals the washing up is from.

The captions like “16th March 2000. 1.30pm Second photograph of the day. Breakfast crumpets and tea [mine with cottage cheese and honey, Ruth’s with Marmite with Jose and Claudio who I think washed-up]” add a different dimension.  Yes, we are given a description of the meal that we can wonder about, but the caption are so matter-of-fact you know they are from a male. Therefore, you start to wonder why on earth is he taking pictures of a sink. I wish this was my project, I really do.

 Do you regard them as interesting ‘still life’ compositions?

Why not? The images are full of detail they fit well together as a set there is a repetition about them, however, each image gives a little more information on the subject. Within some of the pictues, there are elements that raise questions the “N” & “R” behind the taps does that relate to the artist and his wife, the paintbrush. Also, the sink and location changes did they move house? I said above I wish these was my assignmemt

References

Nigelshafran.com. (n.d.). Washing-up 2000 [2000] : Nigel Shafran. [online] Available at: http://nigelshafran.com/category/washing-up-2000-2000/page/13/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].

weareoca. (n.d.). Still Life with Nigel Shafran – #weareoca. [online] Available at: https://weareoca.com/subject/photography/still-life-with-nigel-shafran/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].

Wells, L. (2015). Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Anna Fox British photographer and professor at the University of the Creative Arts. The video below features Anna Fox talking a little about her major projects so far – that is until the video was pubished circa 2010.

Fox explains in the video, she presented the Cockroach Diary in a very personal way. The work is presented in a sleeve containing two little books. The photographs are featured in a separate book, while the diary itself is in a spiral bound book containing scans of Fox’s actual diary, giving it an authentic feel.

Although the photographs feature cockroaches and their traces, the narrative is more about the family and friends living in Fox’s house at the time and their dysfunctional relationships with comic and sad elements to it.

References

YouTube. (2018). Anna Fox / Cockroach Diary & Other Stories / Impressions Gallery. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S86X0iPO_iw&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].

Durdan, M. (2009). Anna Fox: Photographs 1983-2007 – FOTO8. [online] FOTO8. Available at: http://www.foto8.com/live/anna-fox-photographs-1983-2007-2/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].

Fano, N. (2013). ASX Interviews Anna Fox (2013). [online] AMERICAN SUBURB X. Available at: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/06/interview-anna-fox-asx-interviews-anna-fox-2013.html [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].

Maria Kapajeva is the first artist mentioned in the course notes looking self-absented portraitures.  A self-absented portrait does not feature the photographer in a literal sense. The photographer may choose to use stand-in instead or might choose not to have anyone in the image at all.

Maria is an Estonian born, currently working in of the UK. She emigrated to the UK, leaving her life in Estonia behind to study at University of the Creative Arts – where he is now a tutor. And looking at her work and reading about her I’m starting to understand a little about myself.

As an expat who has lived in 3 separate countries, I can understand to her statement in ‘

It’s not easy to be Other and become someone in a foreign place.’

When you emigrate, you leave behind everything that is familiar and become a stranger, an interloper who has to learn to fit in and learn the culture of the new country. This is not always easy, as English male you try to find an English pub to act as a safe haven.

When  Kapajava talks about who how she works statement regarding methods of working.

I think there are two ways of working as an artist (at least I see these two): one is you start from a technique and develop / master/ transform it. The second way is to start from an idea and find a technique for it.

I am certainly in the former category, I seldom get an idea and develop it I tend to go from what in know and try to turn that into an idea. This something that I need to change.

Her project A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman features portraits of fellow immigrants who are her peers and with whom she identifies. The series of images can be termed self-absented portraits in that Kapajeva has expressed something of her own experiences, struggles and emotions in each portrait. The idea is that the women who are the actual subjects reflect something back to the viewer about Kapajeva.

References

Mariakapajeva.com. (n.d.). A Portrait of the Artist… | Maria Kapajeva. [online] Available at: http://www.mariakapajeva.com/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-woman/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].

Boothroyd, S. (2014). Maria Kapajeva. [online] photoparley. Available at: https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2014/05/13/maria-kapajeva/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].

Recreate a childhood memory in a photograph. Think carefully about the memory you choose and how you’ll recreate it. You’re free to approach this task in any way you wish. • Does the memory involve you directly or is it something you witnessed? • Will you include your adult self in the image (for example, to ‘stand in’ for your childhood self ) or will you ask a model to represent you? Or will you be absent from the image altogether? (You’ll look at the work of some artists who have chosen to depict some aspect of their life without including themselves in the image in the next project.) • Will you try and recreate the memory literally or will you represent it in a more metaphorical way, as you did in Part Two? • Will you accompany your image with some text? • In your learning log, reflect on the final outcome. How does the photograph resemble your memory? Is it different from what you expected? What does it communicate to the viewer? How? It might be interesting to show your photograph to friends or family members – perhaps someone who was there at the time and someone who wasn’t – and see what the image conveys to them.

One of the problems of living a very long way from your hometown is you don’t have access to family photographs very readily or do you have access to family members to recreate scenes if you so wish. Especially, went your already small family is already vastly diminished.

I thought long and hard about this project and I was initially very stumped – As I think I have mentioned in the previous post I’m a very shy and reserved person and unfortunately, this was the same as a kid. As a result, I was never one for large groups of friends at school, and I spent a lot of my time with either my own company or with my parents and maternal grandparents. Both my grandparents and mum have sadly passed away so even if I in the UK creating an xx years later shot of an existing memory would be possible. So I have created an imagre based a vague memory that I have of a photo me swinging between my grandad and perhaps mum or grandma on a family holiday in Blackpool when I was very young.

I recreated the image using HO scale (1:87) model figures because these hold a key memory for me as a child. For many years I built with grandad a model railway, and one day i hope to rebuild it with a child of my own (who am I kidding, I’ll be rebuilding it kids or not).

The image above is not an exact representation of the image – actually I’m unsure I could even track it down these days if it even still exists, but the image contains all the information my brain needs to actually bring a tear to my eye.

Obviously, I’m the little boy the red hair gives it away, my grandad away wore a suit, even to the beach, I want the memory to be of my swinging between my mum and grandad, and the figure reminds me of my mum, immaculately dressed, however, my mum was blonde and my grandma dark haired so the dark represents my grandma. The photographer is my Dad. The sand represents the seaside of my all my childhood holidays we taken.

I know in my heart that this a constructed image, a combination of memories thrown into a pot but the more I look at it the more I can imagine the day, and I’m going to print it and hang it on the wall.

PostScript

One of the other things the exercise asks us to do is to show the image to family members who would have been there to witness the memory. I did wonder if someone knew what I doing would their impression of the image to tainted? Does knowing what an intention is, affect the viewer’s interpretation of an image? I think it may do. So unannounced I send the image to my Dad via WhatsApp, he had no I idea about the project I was working on. His response was “Looks familiar”; I think I can take it I have succeeded in whatIi intended.

In this series, Australian photographer Tracey Moffat dresses up as a number of famous females Scorpios, which is her own horoscope sign, including among others Hillary Clinton, Bibi Anderssen, Vivian Leigh and Bjork.

“Like all artists, we make art to see if we can do it. I think that’s why I did this, to see if I could do it, if I could become all these women”

While Moffat conceals her face in many of the pictures, it is remarkable how well she resembles he subjects. Moffat manages these transformations through Photoshop and various costumes – I’m assuming many trips to the charity shop. And as she is concealing her face the majority of the time she is relying on gesture and copying the subjects body language.

The project works well when viewed I conjunction with Moffat’s series “Being” which serves as 2^nd part to “Scorpio”. This series shows the contact sheets of the transformation process and selection for the base images that were then photoshopped to the final images of “Scorpio”. There is a nice juxtaposition here as they are rather mundane whereas the final images of Scorpio are quite flamboyant.

Reference

Roslynoxley9.com.au. (2018). Tracey Moffatt – Being – Under the Sign of Scorpio, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2005 – Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. [online] Available at: http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/26/Tracey_Moffatt/385/ [Accessed 8 Oct. 2018].

Roslynoxley9.com.au. (2018). Tracey Moffatt – Under the Sign of Scorpio, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2005 – Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. [online] Available at: http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/26/Tracey_Moffatt/380/ [Accessed 8 Oct. 2018].

The Sydney Morning Herald. (2018). The secret lives of Tracey Moffatt. [online] Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/the-secret-lives-of-tracey-moffatt-20050730-gdls0e.html [Accessed 8 Oct. 2018].

The coursebook asked me to look at  3 pieces of work by Trish Morrissey

Front (2005-7).

I this project, she visits beaches around the UK and Australia and gets random family groups to allow her to swap places with the mother including wearing their clothes and copying their mannerisms. She then assumes the physical place of the person, i.e. cuddling “her” children and/or snuggling up to “her” partner, while the person she replaces takes the photograph.

the artist’s statement,

These highly performative photographs are shaped by chance encounters with strangers, and by what happens when physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. Ideas around the mythological creature the ‘shapeshifter’ and the cuckoo are evoked.

The cuckoo metaphor very obviously (after reading the artists statement), and there is a sense of Morrissey taking advantage of the people involved. Obviously, they agreed to allow her to enter the group however the whole series gives off a sense that she has crossed boundaries, this is echoed by the boundaries the individual groups have built around themselves at the beach.

While I would love to go back and be a fly on the wall for the conversations that must have preceded each shoot – which no doubt were very interesting.  I doubt I would have to Morrissey’s request, as a male I doubt I would have been asked but I would encourage anyone I was with to refuse too.

Interestingly, on the point not agreeing to the request, I doubt a male photographer would be able to accomplish this project – there would be much-ingrained resistance males rarely swap clothes with mates never mind strangers…

The Failed Realist (2011)

Based on a very interesting premise; that young children’s imagination is very much more mature than their ability to draw what they are seeing. The project consists of a number of portraits of Morrissey, with her face daubed in face paints by her daughter. Which are a mess due to the daughter being too young to be controlled in her actions

The project is one trick pony with most of the pictures being very very similar, this is a mess. It strikes me as the self-indulgence of a parent, showing off anything there child does. I would have enjoyed it more if was a series portraits of different mums (or dads) with the face painted by their own child.

Seven Years (2001-4)

In this series, Morrissey and her sister assume the characters of a variety of fictitious family scene, from the 1970s and 80s, to say something about the generalities of family life.

Extract from the artist’s statement,

They assume different characters and roles in each image, utilizing body language to reveal the subtext of psychological tensions inherent in all family relations. The resulting photographs isolate telling moments in which the unconscious leaks out from behind the façade of the face and into the minute gestures of the body.

The images produced are familiar to anyone who has a family album covering that period – stilted, posed pictures and typical clothes and hairstyles. I actually enjoy this series more from a pure nostalgic point of view.

Together these projects show that  Morrissey is a performer as much as a photographer. She has to convincingly act the part of the person she is pretending to be, in order for the fantasy to work.

Even though I want to push my comfort zone I cannot say that this type of self-portraiture I would try to emulate.

References

Trishmorrissey.com. (2018). Trish Morrissey. [online] Available at: http://www.trishmorrissey.com/works_pages/work-sy/workpg-09.html [Accessed 7 Oct. 2018].

Nikki S. Lee is a Korean photographer and filmmaker, living and working in Seoul, although formerly based in New York. Lee uses different artistic disciplines: Photography, performance, film and multimedia. She combines the different media to explore the different layers of information on which the identity question can be examined.

According to her own words, she likes to have many layers in her artwork and she makes a kind of art that seems very simple at first, but once you peel off the layers you find many stories inside of it. The more you think about it the harder it gets to interpret.

In her various projects, she transforms herself into different types of people: Drag Queen, Hispanic, Yuppie, Senior, Lesbian, Exotic Dancer, Skateboarder. For some of these projects she had to learn certain abilities (e.g. to dance, to ride a skateboard, etc..) to play the roles convincingly; and for the “Senior Project” she needed a professional makeup artist to characterize herself as an old person.

Lee believes that all people have fantasies about living other people lives ( I tend to agree on that). Lee says: “I am free. I can become anyone. Don’t ask me who I am”. Within this series of “Projects”, she does not appear to have any intention to make fun of these social groups. And she says she does not have any identity issue, although as a teenager she fantasized about being someone else. It would be deemed as such, however, when you look at it in relation to her other project she does appear to be more commenting on her own identity.

“Parts” is about taking photos with people that she had a close relationship with, and then she cut them out from the picture.

The idea of the “Layers” project is using drawing portraits of herself drawn by street painters in different cities of the world and putting three of them from the same city into a single image, to illustrate how people from different parts of the world portray her.

Although her work can look “amateurish” (in fact, the pictures are not taken for Lee, but for non-professional photographer friends/passers-by by), it has been carefully planned and executed. Using snapshot quality/style pictures make viewers believe that the pictures are “real”, and the method makes the subjects feel at ease in front of the camera.

Each project requires a three-month period preparation when she makes friends among the people of the group she wants to characterise herself as. She spends a lot of time getting to know the individuals in the group She has learned that each group has its own quirks and outlooks on life and there are  similarities between all the groups

Through this process, she appears to have achieved a better understanding of herself. Playing other roles is a way to demonstrate to herself that she is able to do many things, that she perhaps would not have been able to do without hiding behind a masquerade.

References

YouTube. (2018). INNERview Ep65 Who Am I? The artist drawing attention in NY – Nikki S. Lee. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMychWgKedA [Accessed 7 Oct. 2018].

YouTube. (2018). Photographer Nikki S. Lee Can Turn Into Anyone. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI8xpJItPVI [Accessed 7 Oct. 2018].

Tonkonow.com. (2018). Nikki S. Lee. [online] Available at: http://www.tonkonow.com/lee_projects_3.html [Accessed 7 Oct. 2018].

She was born in 1963 and is an English conceptual artist, she’s won the annual British fine arts award and the 1997 Turner Prize.  In 2007 she was elected as a lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  Gillian Wearing (2016).

Wearing make self portraits going back in time to when she was 3 years old, Self-portrait at Three years old (2004), but she also models in masks of her family members and takes self portraits as them too.  She does this with elaborate silicone recreations of their faces and except for the gaps around the eyes they are quite convincing.

Gillian Wearing: Self-portrait at Three years old (2004)

According to Alastair Sooke writing in the Telegraph in 2012  Wearing has a fascination with artificial things, portraits and masks, which became a video and the series masks, The point of the masks in the Family series, was according to The Guardian (2012),  to have been to make a collection of herself and family members’ portraits all at about the same age (17), apart from grandparents.

I have to admit I’m baffled by why the artist takes these self-portraits. I understand the technical challenge and logistics of the makeup and the fact that they are almost in repeatable as the mask quickly degenerate. I can see is she is exploring how she is in relation we family and her past self. Are the images narcissistic, perhaps not in the traditional sense but in how they draw attention to her and her family?

References

Sooke, A. (2012). Gillian Wearing: Everyone’s got a secret. [online] Telegraph.co.uk. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/9149522/Gillian-Wearing-Everyones-got-a-secret.html [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

the Guardian. (2012). Gillian Wearing takeover: behind the mask – the Self Portraits. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/mar/27/gillian-wearing-takeover-mask [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). Gillian Wearing. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Wearing [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

(born 29 April 1972) is a Finnish photographer and video artist specializing in self-portraits and landscapes.  Elina Brotherus. (2016)

Brotherus project Annunciation is about the hope and heartache of the fertility treatment she was undergoing, and which she has documented through her photographs, displaying the emotions felt as time and time again there was hope and then was found to be unsuccessful.  Relating back to part 2 she illustrates the unseen elements of time through the extracts of a year on page calendars (2008-12) and her changing haircut and style.  The final images indicate she has given up hope and this is the end.

Another of her series available here is, Model Studies, in which she gives her insight into the role of the subjects’ gaze in self-portraiture, where again she is the model.  Out of the all the images we can only see her eyes directly in one, however, she is still able to communicate to and direct the viewer.

Both these project are very different; Annunciation is highly a personal work and her nakedness implies fragility and closeness to the biological reality of the reasons behind IVF treatment she was undergoing. Model Studies is different it not as personal and she seems to be using nudity as the simplest form of the subject.  However, why is she using this nudity to “invite quiet contemplation” perhaps it is to illustrate that we almost expect female nudity in pictures and therefore she challenging us to look past to nudity to the reasons why the images were taken.

Annunciation stands on it own without text, although it has accompanying text, you can see that this about a woman fight to become pregnant. However, Model studies the intention is less obvious and it has limited accompanying text allowing in Bartherian term the viewer to draw their own conclusions.

References

En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). Elina Brotherus. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elina_Brotherus [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

Elina Brotherus. (n.d.). Photography. [online] Available at: http://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

Francesca Woodman in her short life produced over 500 self-portraits, and when I first saw her work I thought she was very daring, showing so much of herself both physically and emotionally.

Her pictures were often shot in deserted buildings, using mirrors and blurred movements to evoke feelings of being and not being there, kind of a ghostly exhibitionist. What was she trying to say?  Was she being narcissistic?  Immediately I’m drawn to think she wanted attention, but for some reason here personality was holding her back, she did hence was hiding in her technique.  She wanted to be naked, but she didn’t want to show herself.

Francesca Woodman, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, © Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman, Tate Modern

Bright, (2010) states,  “It is difficult not to read Woodman’s many self-portraits – she produced over five hundred during her short lifetime – as alluding to a troubled state of mind. She committed suicide at the age of twenty-two.”

 However, her mother Betty in an interview with The Guardian, Cooke, R. (2014), expressed an opposite opinion,  “You can reinterpret her pictures if that’s your point of view. But I don’t think that was there. Everybody was tied in knots about politics in the 70s, but she wasn’t interested.” She goes on to say Francesca wasn’t a“deeply serious intellectual”; she was witty, amusing and “she had a good time,”. Betty goes on to say Francesca’s “life wasn’t a series of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them…  Why did she put herself in the images? Francesca once said that it was just a matter of convenience: she was always available, whereas finding a model would take time.”

So can we say that there is evidence to support Bright’s comments? We can all psycho-analyse events after the fact and read into them whatever, we think and parents imparticular in a situation like Francesca Woodman’s will try to look away from the fact that her legacy i.e. her photographs pointed to something they missed.

Woodman’s pictures are dark and they are conveying unseen feeling perhaps of repression, but we can never know if that was truly how she felt – those closest to her believe the suicide was impulsive brought on by her own perceived failure as an artist not deep-rooted depression.

References

Cooke, R. (2014). Searching for the real Francesca Woodman. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].