Exercise - Kingsmead Eyes

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www. kingsmeadeyes.org

One example of collaborative documentary is that of Photographer Gideon Mendel and the school children of Kingsmead, a deprived Hackney school.

Kingsmead Eyes Speak’ is a radical collaboration between the children and staff of Kingsmead Primary School and photographers Gideon Mendel and Crispin Hughes . A class of 10 year old pupils spent an intensive week working with the photographers in the school, then a month documenting their friends, families, community and school life..

I have been looking at the images on the website here ...

ABOUT KINGSMEAD EYES 2009

Kingsmead Eyes was the result of a unique collaboration between photographer Gideon Mendel and 28 pupils from Kingsmead School in Hackney which took place in 2009. The children documented their world over six months, photographing their friends, families, community and school to create an accomplished and vibrant body of work. At the same time Mendel undertook a parallel photographic engagement in the school and the Kingsmead Estate. Using old Rolleiflex cameras he made a portrait of every child in the school. These 249 portraits were all used in this video and assembled into a composite image for the exhibition. With the remarkable diversity and origins of these children in more than 46 countries this became a truly global portrait, taken in a small Hackney school. This video installation was part of the Kingsmead Eyes exhibition which was on display at the V&A Museum of Childhood between November 2009 and February 2010.

ABOUT THE KINGSMEAD ESTATE

The Kingsmead Estate, home to many of the pupils, is recognised as among the highest 4% for deprivation in the UK. The estate has suffered from a negative reputation in the past but conditions have improved in recent years and regeneration initiatives have encouraged a stronger sense of community. The school has played a major role in this turnaround, striving to achieve the highest standards with academic achievement above the national average – all the more impressive considering that 85% of pupils speak English as a second language. The success and creativity of the school has long been a source of local pride. For this project the ten year-old pupils were trained in the use of digital cameras in a series of workshops led by photographer, Crispin Hughes.

Kings Mead Eyes and Kings mead eyes Speak

I really like this idea of photographers working with children.  I think as I am sometimes stilted for ideas I would love their fresh approach.  They have no fear of camera or surroundings and just click away developing their projects.

It is good that the photographers are critical of their work and make them make a selection of their best work, editing harshly and also then looking at their own image in a completely different way and writing a poem to go with it.  This can be either explanatory  or completely imaginary, making a whole new story for their picture.  Giving their picture flexibility and removing any ‘rules’ or restrictions, allowing them to look at their work in many different ways and having fun.

They we free to make anything they wanted keeping it of their home life and surroundings.  They were taught to compose a picture not just snap one, and they experimented with light ( not using a flash ) composition etc ..

I loved to look at their  work and poems, this would be a lovely thing to be apart of.  I really hope the children got something out of this and maybe get them interested in photography in the long term.   I can imagine it was great fun  and something more fun than normal in the school reportoir .. 

At first when I looked at the website it just looked like lots of school pictures of children from a very multi national school and wasn’t sure what it was all about.

I later discovered that each child had their own space and you click on their photo to discover their work, their written poem and the poem spoken on a video link.

This is great the children must be so proud, it makes it accessible if you only want to look at a specific child and I feel all the media types work well together.  In fact very organised.  Much better then my very first glance..

Post Documentary Photography, Art and Ethics

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http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/oca-content/key-resources/res-files/inegevers.pdf


When looking at documentary photographs we can be made to feel many different ways.  Sometimes
we are unaffected, and others can be life changing, if not for us then for others around us.

Documentary has its own history and over the years there has been a blurring of the boundaries and a mixing of disciplines. Its hard to tell if something is a document, piece of information, or just an art form.

There are a number of difficulties in post documentary that inspire critical action. Image makers are managing to stretch the boundaries of perception. Where aesthetics and ethics meet each other is not just with post documentary, it happens with all disciplines.
Aesthetics stood for the capacity to remove yourself from your own framework so you could learn to see the unprecedented from that view point. It grew from an 'ethics of perception' into a concept that appeared to be more autonomous, only accountable to itself.  Previously, beauty and good meant the same, but ended in a stalemate.

Aesthetics seduces you to open and broaden.  I makes you notice what you had not previously seen.
We are no longer capable of anything but perceive and recognise according to endless repeated principles.  Aesthetics threatens to colonise our gaze.

Post documentary photographers are asking themselves whether their engagement can be defined on the basis of an ethical instead of purely aesthetic perspective.  Oscar Van Alphen, a documentary photographer, was inspired to give a form to his engagement and turn away from aesthetics and images that functioned as illustrations of other peoples interpretations.

Photography opens up our world and enlarges our awareness, it creates knowledge and makes everyone share experiences.

Anton Corbijn seduces us into another way of seeing his photograph of musicians.  Firstly you see musicians its only on the second look that you see they are handicapped in some way.  Instead of sensationalising the fact they are handicapped, it creates space for the viewer and those who are represented in the picture.
Photography can also bring the opposite, turning people into objects reducing their vitality to a picture, losing their individuality

Sontag concludes that photography has contributed at least as much to the numbering of our conscience as to it development.   Documentary made a false start presenting itself as a mirror of reality, it has too been subservient to that reality.   Photographic pictures of the world around us are experienced as more real than real.   Although nobody believes anymore in the reality effects of documentary photography everyone is still expected to behave as though they do.  In this way image perception, language and consciousness continually reproduce and confirm each other.

Documentary photography has endured much post colonial criticism at the moment that ‘documentary practice’ seems to have had its day. 

After photographys invention it was used also in scientific areas.  The camera became not only suitable for building up an archive but also used for research. 

In the medical area electric shocks were carried out before the camera and a record was made of the outcome.  Also the convulsions of a person having a fit .

These weren’t shown to the person as they were just kept for medical reasons.  These pictures were not only intended to record reality but to explain it.

These images were a violation to the person involved.

This medical view of people perverted to a monstrous degree during the Nazi regime.  Pictures of children were taken like a normal album and then after that there were pictures taken of their skulls once they were killed.

Martha Rosler not herself a documentary photographer but makes use of it in her work.  Her work – The Bowery – is about the homeless and alcoholism in her neighbourhood.  By emphasising the inadequacy she give the people space to regain  control.  These people get back their individuality rather than an identity judged by their condition and hence their life. 

Roslers works are conceived on the basis of an ethical awareness and are never just about people, they combined projects and people, giving the people a voice.

A similar approach is the work of Allan Sekula who is a documentary photographer.   He opts for a more consciously for a recognisable aesthetic approach, with the goal of involving the viewer in an ambiguous world with all its pitfalls.  His project focus on social, political and cultural in todays society.

The photographic work never stands by itself, text is added to tell the story.

His work has a sense of humour which engages the viewer.

Another example of harrowing photographic documents were during Pol Pots reign of terror – there were portraits taken of the prisoners just before their execution.  Two photographers, Douglas Niven and Christopher Riley developed a project to save this threatened archive.  They were presented to a worldwide audience and finally had their book printed in 1995 – The Killing Fields.

In 1997 the MoMA in New York exhibited a selection of these portraits oblivious to their problematic role in the politics of misrepresentation.  The public however regarded them as art. 

The presentation of this archive also came in for criticism because of the ‘muteness’ of those portrayed.  The medium of photography was seen as preventing the deceased subject from speaking.  Powerless to give the subject a voice when living.

In 1950, Hannah Arendt – the choice is to no longer accept the world as it is or as it appears, but to see the world that we experience and participate in as a complex of problems and challenges that we have to face. 

Alan Badiou’s essay Understanding of Evil,  says the artist is someone who feels the necessity to pursue a personal truth and to remain faithful to it in spite of considerable opposition.  According to this argument, being an artist an ethics are inextricable bound up with each other.

Badiou is looking for an intiating, active and processual form of ethics.

According to Badiou abstract ethics is a farce if only because there is no such thing as an abstract subject.

Martha Rosler argues todays  documentary photography is no longer seduced by grand narratives.  Photographers have moved to the small and personal.  Their goal no longer seems to want to change the world but to know it.

The danger of this is that it becomes swallowed up in what you would call general visual culture and is them made harmless by the system.

It is up to the viewer as co author to give weight to pictures.

A process that gives the viewer a ‘ moment of insight’ which is able to help resist the prison of quotation perception.  A process that enables not only the first maker but also the one who consummates to become someone. 

It is here that ethics and aesthetics merge.  Images that initiate something that is expressive of more than what the material thing ‘a sich’ reveals, have the potential to appeal to the viewer in a aesthetical / ethical sense.

A broad minded perception is the beginning and it is precisely there that ethics and aesthetics can achieve a great deal in partnership. 

Jim Goldberg - Open See

Watch Video ...

http://vimeo.com/22120588


Visit ..

www.opensee.org

This below was copied from the open see web page ..

Open See tells the story of refugees, immigrants, and trafficked individuals journeying from their countries of origin to their new homes in Europe. This project addresses the struggle of immigrants to leave conditions where war, disease, and economic devastation prevail. It also addresses their struggle to adapt to new European cultures and the reciprocal struggle of those cultures to adapt to them in turn. My approach to creation and distribution requires personal, active engagement with the material from both artist and participant. With this work, I hope to shift attitudes, experience, and public perception. 

-Jim Goldberg, 2011




Golberg was asked to take pictures in Greece in the run up to the 2004 Olympics.

As above the open see project tells the story of refugees and immigrants and trafficked persons and their journeys from their homes to a new place in Europe.

The first pictures in the video were in a multi level building and each floor there was a different imigrent of refugee group, most of them illegal.  Prostitution is legal in Greece and his picture of a working woman shows a fair woman and he also notice the men are blond too.  This shows that these people are not native Greek.  These people were forced to be there and not there of there own choice.

These people had a dream to come to Europe and hoped for a better life and try to get a better life.

There is a picture of a boy crossing a river which could have been an idyllic setting but the boy probably has a more desperate story, crossing a polluted river filled with dead fish and near an industrial area, and the boy is trying to cross the river to a better place.

There is also a picture of a human trafficker, he used to be a fisherman but like so many lost his job and the said picture tells of his journey getting to Europe.

There is an underground economy, globalisation and wars starting all have an effect and push these people to search for something new and better.

I dont think this would have given a very upbeat image prior to the olympics but maybe thats the point, we sweep all the problems under the carpet whilst we watch the glossy sports.

The Judgement Seat of Photography

Read the article ...

http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/TheJudgementSeat.pdf

From a photographic print you can make any number of prints .. to ask for an authentic print makes no sense. ( Walter Benjamin ) .

Alfred Stieglitz - my ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price no higher than that of a popular magazine or daily paper.  To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the path that I have chosen.  

Photography would be the very type of Jean Baudrillards, industrial simulacrum, the modern industrial processes produce endless chains of identical objects.  Duplicates, copies that refer back to the original.

The fact that photography's  sheer multiplicity informs much of todays discussion of the medium. 

From a museums point of view the photographic print is much less predictable product than the print from an engraving or etching.  

MoMA department of photography, for over 50 years, has with increasing authority set our horizon of expectation with respect to photography.  Through investing in photography, with what Walter Benjamin called the 'Aura' of traditional art.  Equally important has been the museums considerable effort to reappropriate those very aspects of of photographic reproducibility believed by Benjamin to signal the Auras demise.  

The cultural transformation of photography into a museum art provides an ironic post script to the thesis of Benjamins 1936 essay, and retained in this discussion are the terms .. 'Cult value' and 'Exhibition value'...  Their opposition provides the basis for Benjamins claim that "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the works art".

Cult value was rooted in arts origin in religious and magical ritual.  Exhibition value involved the gradually changing function of the work of art as it gradually became portable and, later, duplicable.  religious mystery was progressively displaced by the mysteries of creative genius, who's meanings could only be interpreted by connoisseurs or art critics.

Benjamin saw the 19th century perfection of technically precise reproduction media with regard to photograph and film.  Because of this duplication it gave way to a previous gap between the aart and the people, but now it was universally available and accessible.
The techniques or reproducibility , Adorno claimed having arisen within the framework of the capitalist
order, were not to be so easily disentangled from their role in the functioning of that order.
Adorno insisted, Both bear the scars of capitalism, both contain the elements of change.
Benjamin, unaware of the utopian aspect of exhibition, he can see the two modes of reception as providing a useful starting point for the consideration of a remarkable process - the way in which photography - the medium believed by Benjamin to have effectively overthrown the 'Judgement Seat' of traditional art - has in turn been subjected to the transfiguring gaze of arts institutional guardian - THE MUSEUM.

MOMA opened in 1929 and photography has been recognised as a modernist practice. Alfre H Barr Jr, recognised photographic activity with the european avant-garde. In 1932 the first photography exhibition was at the museum.
Newhalls exhibition 'Photography' 1839-1937 was cited as a crucial step in the acceptance of photography as a full fledged museum art.
Prior to these first exhibitions the museum, the role of them had been historical or educational / scientific.  The art museum started to become a service of joy rather than knowledge.  It began to serve as a treasure house of 'eternal' monuments of art.
The four exhibitions of 1936-38 with their vast installations, exhaustive documentation, and ambitious catalogue essays - they carried the process one step further.

Referring again to photography 1839 - 1937, we see that Newhalls exhibition is frankly uninterested in the old question of photography's status among the fine arts it signalled MoMA recognition.
Newhalls exhibition ( over 800 items ) .. was grouped as per their technical process ie : daguerreotypy, wet plate, dry plate, x-ray, infrared etc ..  Stiegolitz, on the other hand, who still insisted on their utter
opposition of the fine art and applied photography, not only did he decline to cooperate with Newhall but refused to allow his later photographs to be represented.

Newhall carried on and presented this way, Lewis Mumford raised the question in the New Yorker - What is lacking in the present exhibition is a weighing and an assessment of photography in terms of
pure aesthetic merit.  In Newhalls long essay we find an articulated program for teh isolation and expert judging of  the aesthetic merit of photographs, virtually any photograph regardless of derivation.
Newhall outlined photographys history as a succession of technical innovations, independent of developments in the neighbouring graphic arts or painting - that were to be assessed for their aesthetic consequences.  For Newhall the recognition of significant detail and in the arrangement of large simple masses or a fine range of shimmering tones.

In 1940 Newhall was appointed Curator of Photography - this was the first time the museum had had such a post - and he redirected his interests to photographys creative rather than practical side.

Newhall  went on to imply a comparative system of classification - physical authenticity rather than the technical process.  Newhall called attention to the photographic interpretation of such traditional genres as Landscape, Portraiture and architectural studies. The main claim made for work presented in '60 photographs' was that each print was an individual personal expression.'  
This change couldnt always be applied to older prints as many old photographs were not intended to be art. 
In 1947 Newhall resigned after his exhibition program failed to retrieve photography from its marginal status among the fine arts and to attract what the museum would consider a substantial popular following.  Newhalls insistent championing of photography as fine art drew the open hostility of that section of the photographic press that claimed to speak for the nations millions of amateurs.  
The next 15 years at Moma were marked by Steichens inclination not to give a hoot for photography conceived as an autonomous fine art.  

Bayer called on the modern exhibition to apply all the techniques of the new vision in combination with colour, scale, elevation and typography. All of these serve to a decidedly instrumental end.  
He wrote.. The Modern exhibition.. 
... should not retain its distance from the spectator, it should be brought close to him, penetrate and leave an impression on him, should explain, demonstrate and even persuade and lead him to a planned and direct reaction.  Therefore we may say that exhibition design runs parallel with the psychology of advertising. 

The 'Road to victory' depended on the ingenious installation divised for Steichen by Herbert Bayer, who left Germany in 1938.  Spectators were guided along the twisting path of enormous freestanding enlargements of documentary photographs - some 10 x 40 feet !
This arrangement was calculated to produce visual narrative that combine the most dramatic devices of film and lifestyle photojournalism.   They didn't sit on the wall, they jutted out and up from the floor to assault your vision. The exhibition attracted large crowds.

Photographers complied to signing over to the museum giving them the right to print, crop and even edit images, - the photographer as autonomous artist, the original print as personal expression  was promptly filled at another by the museums emergence as orchestrator of meaning. 
Under Steichen the typical gallery installation resembled nothing so much as an oversized magazine layout, designed to reward rapid scanning rather than leisurely contemplation.
Although it should not be thought the fine art photography of the kind Newhall had sponsored vanished entirely from the MoMA gallery as it did not. 

During photographys first century it was generally understood that what photography did best was to 'describe things'  -  their shapes and textures, situations and relationships.  The highest virtues of such photographs were clarity of statement and density of information. They could read as well as seen - their value was literally and intellectual as well as visceral and visual.

As we study photographs we recognise that although in the conventional sense they may be impersonal, they are also consistently informed by what in a poem we would call a voice. This voice is, in turn, comic, harsh, ironic, delighted even cruel.  But it is always active and distinct - always infact a narrative voice. 

Unfortunately, since photography has never been simply an art medium - since it has operated both within and at the intersections of a variety of institutional disclosures.  

Thus endowed with a privilege origin - in painting - and an inherent nature that is modernist avant la lettre, photography is removed to its own aesthetic realm, free to get on with its own vocation of producing 'millions of profoundly radical pictures'.. the formal isolation and cultural legitimation of the 'great undifferentiated whole' of photography - is the disquieting message handed down from the museums's Judgement seat.

Exercise - Cruel and Tender

Look at the Cruel and Tender brochure ..


http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/CruelTender.pdf




Listen to two videos ...


here..

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/rineke-dijkstra-cruel-and-tender

Rineke Dijkstras photos at this exhibition was a contrasting selection of new mothers, lets say in their raw state, alongside the equal raw, but different, macho Bullfighters.

I dont think its is something I would immediately put together as a 'pair' but she explains her reasons.

She had been at a close friends birth of her child and was amazed at all the emotions.  Maybe a little fear, exhaustion, proud and very happy, all in the same space of time.  She wanted to see if it was possible to capture all of this in a picture.

Prior to that, she had been on a school art trip and they had visited a Bullfight in Portugal.  Here they don't kill the bull just wrestle them down, very dangerous.  She felt both the mothers and the Bullfighters were in a life threatening situations.

She wanted to take pictures which showed something of the person, as people are too guarded when they see a camera today. Different from when August Sender took his portraits, people then were much more giving of themselves.  She doesn't like to force this but it makes a picture much more interesting.

Her initial intentions were not to hang theses two set together as one exhibition but they seemed to go together,  something to fight and a baby to protect. A male / female role.. showing women are more protecting and men are more fighting.

Most of the photographs she isolates, not giving much away about their surroundings or personal life, as thats not what its about.

I think its an interesting combination, if slightly strange, but it works, I think I would have gone more for the beauty in new life and motherhood, but then thats probably boring and not as memorable.


here..

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/fazal-sheikh-cruel-and-tender


I listened to the video by Fazal Sheikh about his pictures for the project.  His father was born in Kenya and he was going to the coast to document the Somali communities but it was at this time that 1/2 a million people, refugees, were fleeing to north Kenya so he felt this was a more important issue.

Between 1992 and 1994 he visited various camps and returned to revisit families. He wanted to find out what life really meant to these people.  He had been annoyed by the media for depicting them as frail and starving, victims of a cruel world.  He knew the area before the the refugees, and knew there was more to these people than the papers were reporting.

He photographed people in their own settings, in their camps and outdoors, but keeping it simple to avoid any distraction away from the sitter.  He showed a grid of work which were taken in a food tent and later he returned to see if he could find some of these children, 8 years later.
It was interesting for him as some of the desperate children had survived and lived on.

Fazal says he is drawn to places where others do not really want to go.  Most of his images were taken on a polaroid camera.  He also drew on everyone to make decisions on who was to be photographed and where, giving the images a more relaxed feel about them.

He felt that for this exhibition it was essential for him to have text because in this instance the photos do not tell you the full story, so need text from him or the sitter to make them complete.  Text married with the image make the overall piece.  Both a good picture and good text can stand alone, but can be even better when bought together.

Response to tutor for Assignment 4 .

Thank You for your comments on my Assignment four.  The Critical Review.

I feel this essay is a good representation of me at this time.  I haven't written an essay or anything like this for many, many years, if ever. This is an honest account of me and how I would write something prior to any comments and tutoring.  I liked the subject and was happy with what I wrote down.

I have however learnt a lot from the comments that you made and will approach my next essay in a different way.

I can see now that my essay is a very personal approach and needs to be more of a critical review. It doesn't make my writings incorrect it just needs to be written in a different way. Which I now understand.  I was a bit blind as to what is expected, but I felt the comments made were really helpful and explained how to improve on my next essay.

I have to do more research and not be my opinions, and reference properly, again referencing is all new to me and I take note.

I realise also that everything I have said can always be expanded further, things I have touched on which maybe didn't seem so important, even they can have a for and against argument.  Its all about looking deeper all the time, expanding on all things.

So I actually quite enjoyed doing this and feel I have learnt a lot mostly from the tutor comments and hopefully I am now in the right direction for my next essay.