Dissertation - Sarajevo 1992: Recognising Yourself in a Distant War

An article by Adrian Brown for BBC news entitled Sarajevo 1992: Recognising Yourself in a Distant War. Accessible at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21519450

The subject of the article, Vladimir Vrnoga, describes how seeing an image of himself from the war in Bosnia in 1992 brought back all the memories associated with that troubled time in his life. He describes specific sensations such as "feeling the gelatin on my lips, feeling that protein in my belly" from searching for and eating snails, and "the dampness of air of that day". He says of the photograph, "as soon as I saw it the whole thing...came back to me" and "I was right there in that moment". Brown describes Vrnoga's reation when first seeing the image and the effect it has had on his opinion of his home town:

Discovering the photograph had a profound effect on him. Alerted to it by a friend, he found that just looking at it was enough to give him goose bumps and "a flow of blood to his chest". Memories came flooding back too, including many bad ones - of friends "who just vanished" or took their own lives, and the many horrendous sights on the battlefield.
He has no intention of returning to his home city.
"To visit, perhaps. To live? Never."

It seems that photographs can bring back unwelcome memories as much as positive ones - times that we may have repressed memories from can come flooding back to us in the present day when prompted by a visual images that confirms to us what really happened.

Independent Art and Photography - Edward Ruscha's books

Although Edward Ruscha was not featured in the New Topographics exhibition, his work does seem to fit into the same style of photography. Ruscha is recognised for creating books that do exactly as they say on the front cover - the book titled Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) consists of 26 images of petrol stations, nothing more, nothing less. He does not document with the highly regimented style of the Bechers, but the images are all shot with relatively similar lighting, only slightly varying composition and all printed black and white with a relatively low contrast.

A similar theme is carried through in Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Again, Ruscha has documented exactly what he has said he is going to document, and displays the images in a panorama style, but without trying to stitch them together too seamlessly. In this book, he has moved away from traditional pages in favour of a concertina style, where the viewer can fold out all the pages and see a scaled down, but otherwise relatively accurate, representation of the Sunset Strip. There is very little text involved - only the title, name and date, and then the number of each of the buildings on the road. This book fascinates me - Ruscha has taken something quite mundane, then documented it in so much detail that the viewer is forced to pay attention to every single aspect of it. The place has been photographed very cooly, in a very detatched manner, just showing the audience the pure and simple facts of what it looks like.

For me, Ruscha's work is very simple, but very effective. He appears to have set himself challenges of things to photograph - Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) or Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967), for example, and then followed through and presented them in photographs that attempt to portray them just as they are. This theme links into the New Topographic style - documenting things just for documentary's sake, trying not to place any of the photographer's own preconceptions onto the work.
For me, this is where I struggle. Although I see links between the style of photography seen in the New Topographics show and my own, I cannot deny that the images I take have been taken because of an emotion I feel about the subject. Although the images may look detached, they come as a result of knowing a city inside out, and feeling positive emotions towards it. I can't simply pretend that there are no emotions attached, so to progress with this project I need to find a fine balance between documenting the place, or documenting the nostalgia I feel about the place.

Independent Art and Photography - Topographic images of my hometown

For my essay in this module I have been thinking about whether the new topographic style of documentary presents a truly objective look at the world, or whether the images are actually influenced by the photographers’ opinions. I’ve recently been scanning a whole load of my old negatives, many of which were shot in my hometown, Norwich. Linking these two things together, I noticed that these photographs I had taken years ago were shot in such a way as to document a town I know top to bottom, and the style was quite similar to that seen in the New Topographic exhibition. The images are black and white, shot quite simply and with low contrast. These aesthetics lend themselves to the idea that I am purely documenting the place, with no blue skies and sunshine or ominous clouds to colour the images with emotion. Finding these photographs has given me inspiration to continue with this project, which understandably ground to a halt when I moved away from the city. Now I have lived elsewhere for almost 3 years, I find myself feeling nostalgic about my hometown. However, I want to move away from other projects I have undertaken this year, and attempt to document the town with an almost detached style, to discover whether I can truly remove my emotions from the photographs, or whether they continue to shine through.
Here are some examples of the photographs that I found inspiration in:

For me, the images that work best are the ones that have no people in them, which links to the New Topographic style. However, at the time they were shot I wasn't adhering to any particular project. The images themselves are quite unremarkable, but I quite like that fact. When displayed as a group I hope the images will begin to build up a picture of the place I come from - not just the nice parts of the city, but also the more industrial areas. For this project, I think I will mainly focus in on architecture - aiming to document the buildings themselves without any distractions from human interventions. I hope to finally produce a finished project on this subject matter.

Major Practical Project/Dissertation - Nostalgia

An article from December 2012 entitled A Point of View: Nostalgia - it's not like it used to be by Will Self explores the authors opinions about nostalgia and his growing feeling that he is not truly living in the present.

Full article available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20726824

Here follows some quotes from the article.

"The ease with which we can now assemble a digital archive of our lives and times means younger people are far more nostalgic about their loves, losses and travels"

"Like everyone else, I suppose, there was a period in my life when 'now' was of paramount importance - if we take "now" to be a wobbly phenomenon, something like a raindrop, encompassing the moment as well as immersing consciousness, and reflecting each to the other as it plummets into the future.

Inside the now all was scintillatingly significant, hip and happening, while the un-become future was void of everything except for one or two events I was looking forward to, or away from. As for the past, well, it was black and white, jerky, frumpy and lifeless - gelid, certainly, but altogether uncool. Unless, it was coloured by my own vivid memories."

"I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom. For those of us who have months, years and even entire decades mouldering in the attics of our memories, nostalgia seems a curiously boastful kind of hoarding. So you had a love affair, or moved abroad, you got ill, or had a parent die - well, so did I, so did I - and more than once."

"Before the late 19th Century, the manufacture of memory was a laborious business, requiring cumbersome mechanical processes and even craft. Offset printing, followed by the mass dissemination of photographic images allowed the generality of people - who heretofore had been denied a record of the times - to line their shelves with them.
Throughout the 20th Century, the preservation of individuals' memories became cheaper and so more ubiquitous, but it wasn't until the last decade that the seamless interconnection of mobile recording devices with the world wide web allowed for the retention of the past almost in its entirety."

Self suggests that now, in the digital age, we have nearly all of our memories on record, photographs of all events and our own past recorded almost daily through social networking updates. Nostalgia is a reflection on the past with a sort of longing, a homesickness, often triggered by something familiar in the present. It has been described as looking back on meaningful memories that we have idealised over time. But if our collective past is almost entirely on record, is there still room for nostalgia?
I think so. Perhaps it is simply because I am from a different generation and, like Self suggests, I "have so little by way of personal history that [I] polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom". I think back to my childhood as an almost perfect few years. Ask my mum, on the other hand, and she'd probably disagree.

Major Practical Project - The first shoot...

Here is the outcome of shooting 3 films worth of images at home over the Christmas break. I used only natural light, and shot on 400ISO colour film with a Hasselblad medium format camera. I wanted to shoot 6x6 in order for the images to be square, as opposed to 6x7. I also wanted a good amount of detail in each frame, and to keep images sharp and crisp, even if only printed relatively small.
I will post all 36 images, then talk about the ones I feel are most successful, and those I like, but could be improved. The images on the left are those that I feel work as they are, the ones on the right I would need to re-shoot.

Here, I really feel that the pops of colour from the teapot and cafetiere add interest to the image, although if I were to print it myself I might tone the reds down slightly - they do dominate a bit. I also like the subtle reflections in the worktop. Lines in the tiles in the background are not straight, but I might be able to fix this at the printing stage. Also, the focus appears to be slightly soft, which could be down to my scanning of the image - something to address.

Again, this lines in this image are not quite straight, which I hope can be rectified because I feel that the subject matter is strong. The Christmas turkey is an image that has all the connotations of home and family, and the fact that the carcass has just been left on the side relates specifically to MY home and MY family. It's a shame I can't shoot this image again, but because of that fact I will spend plenty of time trying to improve the framing whilst editing/printing.

In this image, I feel that the simplicity of the scene is really effective. The muted greeny-brown tones just stop the image from becoming boring in my eyes. This photograph communicates both my parents' taste, and also the kind of homely, slightly worn look of this area of the house. Being the hallway, it doesn't really get as much attention paid to it, and hasn't been redecorated in years. The lines in the composition are straight, and not being able to see what the framed picture is of leaves a little bit to the imagination of the viewer.

I feel that this is probably the strongest image I have produced so far. Our family's tradition of drinking an abundance of cups of tea is communicated. I didn't touch the set-up of the items at all, and that makes it feel so much more genuine for me. I feel the lighting, focus and composition pretty much hit all my aims of how I wanted my images to look.

Again, here I focussed on our taste in decoration, with someone having bought these coasters as a present. I also like the subtlety of the slightly grimy coffee machine, cleaning not being high on my list of priorities. The neutral style of lighting has been continued. I feel that the papers in the foreground could be slightly distracting, I might have to look at slightly cropping this area of the image.

Looking at this area of our lounge brings back nostalgic memories for me - playing hide and seek as a child and crawling down here to hide behind the sofa. The parallel lines of the pipes lead our eye through the image, but again, this area appears to be in slightly soft focus, which needs some attention. The cobweb in the corner and the dark wood of the bookcase again provide subtle nods to the realities of a well-lived-in home.

Here, I feel that the subject matter is right, but the way I have composed the image is wrong. The lines are not straight, and I don't feel that the damaged light switch should be in that area of the frame. In my opinion, the lighting is fine as it is, but I might need to look at how I can compose the image better to make the viewer's attention go to the light switch as opposed to the calendar. Also, the switch is in soft focus, so I definitely need to re-shoot here.

I really wanted to document our fridge, mainly because having home cooked family meals is one of the main things i associate with going home. However, the composition of this image doesn't work at all, and I feel that I have gone in too close. If i were to re-shoot this image I would focus on the whole fridge rather than just a small section - this might have more effect.

Again, this bit of curtain is a little eccentricity of my home, and something which I wanted to document. However, the yellow cast caused by the ceiling light makes it stand out too much from the other images in the series so far.

Here is another nostalgic item from my childhood - a children's coat hook hung just at the height for when I was about 4 or 5. The fact that it is still there fifteen years later is interesting to me. Again though, I need to work on my composition and framing to communicate these ideas properly.

Here is another example of a bit of unfinished DIY from our home. Once again, I need to work on composition, but the lighting and colours are fine. The top of the cabinet in the right hand corner is distracting - maybe I should have moved the frame to the left to make the line of the switch fall on a third.

I realised I had not shot many photographs in our lounge, and I wanted to photograph the slightly sagging sofa where people have so often fallen asleep in front of the TV. If I were to re-shoot this image I would need to consider my composition, focus and lighting more carefully.


I'll be heading home again in about a weeks time, so I will be re-shooting the last 6 images and also looking out for any more bits and pieces that signify coming home for me.

Major Practical Project - Laurenz Berges

Laurenz Berges studied at the Dusseldorf school of art under the instruction of Bernd Becher. The body of work that most interests me in the context of my project, is that of Berges' documentation of the abandoned military barracks, once home to the Soviet Army during the years of the Nazi regime. His images are of interiors that are, for the most part, empty. However, traces of human activity still often remains in the images, reminding the viewer of what had been there before. Here follows a brief background to the project, which can be found here: http://www.ifa.de/en/exhibitions/exhibitions-abroad/foto/presentation-representation/die-kuenstler/laurenz-berges/

" Laurenz Berges is a chronicler of absence. His minimalist photographs point to the earlier use of spaces, only fragments of which are shown, whose inhabitants have put them to other, new uses. Berges depicts the traces of this change in austere images that, due to their reduction, tell their stories indirectly and almost involuntarily. These are stories about the existential significance certain spaces have for our identity, and also about their transitoriness and their loss."

©Laurenz Berges

©Laurenz Berges

©Laurenz Berges

©Laurenz Berges

With these images, the subject matter is not this thing I relate to the most, more Berges photographic style. However, it is easy to notice that the photographer has focused on the small details of the place that catch his eye as opposed to giving the viewer wide, expansive views of each room. This way of shooting would provide the viewer with more visual information, but wouldn't be nearly as effective or pique our interest as much. For me, a very simple image of a bit of rumpled carpet, or the latch of a window is far more powerful at communicating the fact that there used to be humans here. than just demonstrating it in a more obvious manner. Aesthetically, the neutral, white lighting and almost bleak, washed out colours reflect the way the building has been left, devoid of life.The image that intrugues me most is that of the window, with a dirty, tatty looking curtain on the laft hand side of the frame. The only colour in the image is provided by a slightly dubious pattern on the curtain, in a dull green. I can almost imagine someone standing at the window, looking out at the world.
In my images, I aim to communicate almost the opoosite of Berges - that the house I grew up in still has life left in it. However, the set of aesthetics that he employs allow the subject matter to speak for itself, without the involvement of dramatic constructed lighting casting a set of connotations over the image we see. Berges' images are neutral and simple, recording the space in an almost detatched way. However, when you read the background information about the project, the viewer applies a whole new set of emotions to the photographs. Our understanding of the project builds the longer we spend with it. which is something I aim to replicate in my images.