Human Choices
Leaving aside my commercial advertising practice my personal practice is prolific and extremely varied. I will shoot landscape, cityscape, street documentary and portraiture. I’ll pursue the banal, and then be concerned with only subjects of a certain colour, unintentionally symmetrical or follow a pattern or form. Humour, light and shade, irony, the human condition. It’s rare I have a set purpose beyond setting a few rudimentary rules for that day or week.
However social commentary is a definite theme that is omni present and that crosses all the boundaries of the subject matter that interests me.
In effect I have a number of projects occurring simultaneously, in some respects this is a slightly chaotic approach and can leave me struggling to decide which images to work with which is a weakness of my working methodology but possibly unavoidable for the time being as my life is in itself transient as I undertake paid commissions.
As a consequence it can take me a number of years to realise a project. Occasionally I will find something that I can accomplish very quickly. The South Beach Miami series is a good case in point, I knew I wanted to feature the deco lifeguard stations, what I wasn’t expecting was the way beach goers interacted with them be it in selfie imposed isolation or in a small group. Once I knew what I was looking for two days visiting the beach in the right light was enough to generate a small study which was subsequently awarded at the International Photography Awards in 2018.
These images do put me in mind of Martin Parrs Last Resort book, shot from 1983 to 1985 in New Brighton, near Liverpool, the images concentrate on the public ‘enjoying’ the beach and facilities of the resort. Parrs images are much generally tighter in frame and often flash lit. The work is not without criticism, some saw it as a cruel sociopolitical commentary Robert Morris said in The British Journal of Photography that “this is a clammy, claustrophobic nightmare world where people lie knee-deep in chip papers, swim in polluted black pools, and stare at a bleak horizon of urban dereliction.”
Parr explained that, “At the time, when I first showed it in Liverpool, no one batted an eyelid because everyone knew what New Brighton was like. And then when I showed them in London [at The Serpentine Gallery], there was all kinds of responses; people were somewhat shocked.”
My images are arguably not as invasive although I am making a social commentary, my main motivation was initially trying to match the colours of the huts to the people but soon became very aware of the selfie and posing culture of South Beach which the shots then became more about and more voyeuristic.
The viewpoint of these images is that of an outsider, I find I am often conflicted about featuring members of the public, it can feel a little predatory, the criticism of Parrs images often rings subconsciously so if I were to criticise them maybe getting in closer might be better sometimes for a stronger shot? Am I invading the subjects privacy? They’re on a public beach but obviously unaware Im capturing their moments, the slight distance I think reflects this conflict. My choices therefore are possibly compromised because of my unease.
Maybe my work is closer to Joel Meyerowitz approach who famously stepped purposefully back to allow the whole scene to be revealed, the events surrounding the event, often just as interesting.
Stuart Jeffries interviewing Meyerowitz for The Guardian talks about one of his favourite images that depicts a Frenchman who has fallen outside a Paris Métro station one day in 1967. ” By this stage, Meyerowitz had started to take longer shots – moving back from eight to 20 feet from what he sought to capture. It’s a shift from chamber music to symphony. Everybody is looking at the fallen man, the chic young woman descending the station steps, the delivery guy pushing boxes on a trolley, a cyclist swivelling to get a better look at a stranger’s misfortune. A worker in overalls even steps over the prone man, carrying a hammer that takes on sinister import”
“Those fuckers,” laughs Meyerowitz. “Not one of them helps him up.”
On a recent time limited trip to New York I had a lot of thoughts whirling around my head about my observations on how the city and the population has involved to interact depending on who they are, social status since etc etc its highly unlikely anyone working in a service industry could actually afford to live in Manhattan. Theres nothing unusual about this but Manhattan being an Island somehow magnifies this. Thus you have an unofficial segregation situation whereby the less well off occupants vacate it after work finishes. As we were based in Jersey City for this trip I found myself part of this twice daily movement of humanity.
This is clearly a huge subject and I could spend many years trying to document, make sense and comment on this, I had various narratives flying around, mainly revolving around individual stories, maybe a series of portraits of the workers and how to tie this back into the architecture however that would have to be for another time but then something happened.
It rained.
Hurrying through showers, dodging puddles, hiding under brollies everyone was the same, a sudden and new, albeit temporary single common purpose, to stay dry.
Its not the answer to the big questions I was asking myself but it provided an opportunity to see how a simple thing, in this case rain, unofficially unifies the crowd. For an unplanned off the cuff mini project I was very happy with this. I tried stepping back and unusual for me getting in quite close for some images. Whilst my observations about Manhattan remain unresolved this was fulfilling, everyone equal under the rain.
My methodology is without doubt bordering on chaotic at times which is in stark contrast to my commercial advertising shoots which are so planned, literally to the tiniest detail maybe I welcome the random approach.
Sean O’Hagen in his interview with the street photographer Matt Stuart for his article “Why street photography is facing a moment of truth” recalls Gary Winogrands own description of his methodology which gives me some comfort and common ground it seems.
“When I’m photographing, I see life,” he once said. “That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head… I don’t worry about how the picture is going to look. I let that take care of itself… It’s not about making a nice picture. That anyone can do.” Winogrand also said: “When things move, I get interested,” which gets close to the instinct underpinning street photography: the desire to capture for a split-second the city’s unending, ever-changing momentum in all its everyday oddness.”
Lee Friedlander later said of him, only half-joking, “He was a bull of a man and the world was his china shop.” Joel Meyerowitz later recalled how Winogrand “set a tempo on the street so strong that it was impossible not to follow it. It was like jazz. You just had to get in the same groove.”
O’hagan goes on to say “Winogrand photographed relentlessly. When he died in 1984, he left behind not just a wealth of images that are a testament to his impatient vision but also thousands of rolls of unprocessed film. In the end, his obsession had become a kind of mania. He was not searching, like Henri Cartier-Bresson before him, for the “decisive moment” when form and content, vision and composition merged into a transcendent whole. Instead, he was continuously chasing after the eternal nowness of life itself in all its raw, unmediated energy. That is what most street photographers hope to capture when they walk out into the city”
So clearly street based, opportunistic photography is a large part of my practice but I also derive a great sense of satisfaction exploring landscape the style in which I prefer to shoot being a complete anathema to my street work.
With the gift of a book from my Mother, Andreas Gursky Photographs 1984 to 1998. I was immediately struck with the simple beauty and order contained in the images. I felt parallels with my own practice as I was naturally attracted to symmetry found within disparate objects within a scene, often placed with no regard by corporations, councils and a melange of bodies somehow creating a chaotic balance. Gursky made sense of this and I became an immediate fan. Also the fact Gursky manipulated his scenes gave an added dimension to his work that resonated as in my commercial practice many of the images i’m paid to shoot are carefully considered constructs, usually due to the varying technical challenges of constituent parts rather than to deceive the viewer with a false narrative.
Seeing the works full size at the Hayward Gallery this year was revolutionary still, so often works in reality do not live up to expectation, these certainly did and we even had a little fun building my daughters into the compositions.
Gursky would be my gateway into this new (to me) realm of landscape leading me to the new topographic movement and then filtering out into a whole new undiscovered world I became an avid consumer and collector of photography books and continue to be hungry to see and learn more. Again this slightly chaotic approach has meant that I will be studying a number of genres at any one time. I found a natural affinity with the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz and other American Photographers by extension like Lee Friedlander.
Baltz work included in the “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape“ was an exhibition that epitomised a key moment in American landscape photography. The show was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), and remained open to the public from October 1975 until February 1976.
Baltz studies of what at first glance are banal scene themselves to be anything but, wonderfully observed details and coincidences, presented in a style somewhere in between snap shot, documentary and the carefully considered.
In Jean-Pierre Greff and Elisabeth Milons “Interview with Lewis Baltz – Photography is a Political Technology of the Gaze” (1993) when asked the question “We often discuss your work in terms of aesthetics. Do you agree with this kind of interpretation, that you are creating beauty out of ugly things?”
Baltz replies “The idea of beauty is completely arbitrary. Duchamp saw this clearly and acted on it: you don’t put an object in a museum because it’s beautiful; an object is beautiful because you put it in a museum. Everything is photogenic once it has been photographed. The – successful – mission of photography was to deliver the world and all its contents into the category of the picturesque. None of which has anything to do with art.
Even if you completely eliminate the idea of beauty, to photograph a ‘wilderness’ seems in itself a political act.”
This entirely resonates with me and has helped me immensely to explain my own motivations for the things I shoot, all the time when Im shooting I have many thoughts, sometimes its the sheer aesthetic, other times I want to make a point, maybe political or social.
My motivation for this shot was apart from the hand painted aesthetic and starkness of the scene the town this was taken was virtually deserted, some cars to actually park there would be welcomed im sure but the town slowly but surely dies. I chose the frontal point of view because it reduces the entire street into a simple graphic device, indeed Baltz says “Architecture, real architecture, always defies reduction into two-dimensional representation; if not it’s hardly architecture at all – more like a built piece of graphic design” which echoed my thoughts about this scene entirely.
In this image again my impression of the town was one of the edge of capitulation, the main Street literally ending at these now cleared vacant lots which continued on for some distance while the street furniture remains intact.
Where I am I going?
So my practice is as I said varied and I have no plans to change this but I do wish to give it more order and be able to contextualise the images better to a new audience. Although much of my practice is concerned with showing humans on the street or wherever I happen to be my final major project is based around the actual geography, although dealing with very human emotions and constructs it will almost certainly be excluding them.
I have decided to explore the concept of land ownership, national identity and borders as the over arching theme.
“A world without frontiers is an ideal that has always appeared to the more sincerely humanist individual as a world from which all forms of exclusion have been abolished”. “The notion of frontiers remains rich and complex. It does not necessarily signify compartmentalisation and separation. The ideal, egalitarian world may come not through the abolition of frontiers, but through their recognition” Marc Auget Non Places 2008
The project has gained clarity with my clarification and understanding behind my theme, this is brilliant as it now frees me to concentrate on the work itself from practical point of view. I’m finding that having established an aesthetic that proved to be quite successful early on in the project I am concerned that I do not circumvent a process tat may well have led me to a different aesthetic. So right now Im looking at artists who work in the tableau genre notable for their use of image construction treat this genre, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Barbara Kruger, Peter Kennard, Karen Knorr to name a few and then artists like Alex Prager, Gregory Crewdson and to an extreme level David LaChapelle who create fantasy constructed worlds for their characters to inhabit. Each artist has used a different approach to make various points, some political, some purely aesthetic or humorous. Karen Knorr in her series Villa Savoye explores bourgeois lifestyles with architectural studies and added elements to create indexical qualities of the photographic to invite the viewer to read the image raising questions of ownership, locality and identity.
I hope to do the same.
Where and in what context will my practice be consumed?
This is an important consideration, on a practical and theoretical level. The images have to be of a sufficient quality to be made into large scale prints, be made into a high quality book fo consumption by a photography or arts orientated audience however my motivation for this series is to challenge the man in the street assumptions about nationality so the images could be seen in places where this audience is more likely to be.
This could mean billboards if used my an NGO in an awareness campaign or it could mean being displayed in shopping malls as a pop up exhibit.
Digitally, although important as more images are now consumed digitally as a matter of course the subtly of these tableaus may mean theyre better suited to larger format display means. Then again
if this is the best means to reach the target audience maybe I have to loook at my images again and evaluate if they need to be less subtle. Peter Kennard used very bold means to convey strong socio political messages.
Maybe this is whats needed to communicate with a broader audience?
References
The Last Resort. Martin Parr. 1986 Dewi Lewis Publishing.
https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/8073/martin-parrs-last-resort
Joel Meyerowitz. Where I find Myself 2018 Laurence King Publishing
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/mar/07/photography-legend-joel-meyerowitz-phones-killed-sexiness-street-most-stunning-shots
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/apr/18/street-photography-privacy-surveillance
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/15/-sp-garry-winogrand-genius-american-street-photography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Topographics
www.mocp.org/detail.php?type=related&kv=6860&t=people
www.americansuburbx.com/2011/03/interview-interview-with-lewis-baltz.html
Marc Auget Non Places 2008 2nd edition.