I’ve been back from my Arles trip for a couple of weeks without posting anything on here, as it seemed to take a while for me to digest what I saw at the festival and filter my own work-in-progress and developing ideas through some of the observations, inspirations and realisations that I gleaned from the photography I saw out there.
Priorities
At this (still early) stage in my Level 3 journey I have a short but important to-do list:
- The coursework (mainly reading and thinking) pertaining to Genre
- Research the many photographers suggested by Wendy my tutor
- Make a start on the Contextual Studies reading
- Research memory more widely (scientific rather than critical theory)
- Just take (or make) some photographs!
I’ve made a conscious decision to start with the last item on the list: I want to get some of my ideas worked up into mockups as quickly as possible, before my mind is further influenced by the work of others. I will almost certainly revisit some of this before submitting Assignment 1, but it feels right to go with the flow and crack on with some photographic work at this point.
Current approach
I decided a while ago on my area of interest: memory.
At the moment I’m further narrowing it down to the fragility of memory – or maybe you could call it the opposite of memory: forgetting.
What I haven’t got yet is a grip on the kind of subject matter I want to be in the photographs, but I’m OK with that so far, as I’m getting most satisfaction out of formal experimentation.
My current thinking is based on manipulation of existing photographs, both digitally and physically. All my experiments so far have been on two specific photographs – one deliberately nondescript new photograph and one more personal archive shot.
What I’m seeking is a way of depicting forgetting. I want to visually represent the experience (sensation?) of missing information from your memory. I’m looking for visual metaphors.
Progressing from earlier experiments
About a month ago I did a couple of quick mockups of images as a starting point.
Both of these were intended to depict a process of forgetting, from the event to the loss of the memory of it. However, in hindsight this doesn’t really work – memory can fail instantly (never stored) or intermittently; it doesn’t feel right to treat forgetting as a process.
Also – frankly they are way too busy visually.
So my next experiment was to strip this idea back from multiple in-between steps to a more simple beginning state (the event) and end state (the forgettance – yes, I know that’s not a real word).
I also wanted to try moving away from the Photoshoppery of the initial experiments and get into the physical world, with actual prints being messed about with…
Let’s get physical
By using a more personal archive photo I wanted to get across the sensation of forgetting a face, or forgetting an important event from the past.
What I’m trying to do here is subvert the idea that a photograph can help you recall a event – if the supposed focal point of the image (e.g. a face, in a portrait) is missing, it disrupts the viewing experience in a way that jars – in a manner similar to being unable to remember something.
The stepping stone idea was this: a 6×4″ print with a faded instant film print stapled to it.
This sparked a few more ideas on physical manipulation of the print to simulate forgetting:
There is however one issue with these physical approaches (maybe not 1, more likely 2-5), something my wife brought up: the physical damage implies some kind of angry intervention, and given the romantic ambience of the original, rather than evoking memory loss, they may inadvertently evoke a bitter relationship breakdown…! This may be a reason not to use such subject matter.
It’s also a reason to investigate further options on obscuration techniques…
And back to digital…
Once I’d come up with ways of obscuring faces physically I found myself imagining ways of doing so that could work digitally (with less connotation of psychopathy) – so back to Photoshop…
Next steps
- I’m putting these on my study wall to live with them for a few days
- I’d love it if anyone reading this could give me feedback on which (if any) of these executions is more successful in ‘photographing forgetting’ – thanks in advance
I was struck by the initial image you posted and was going to ask who made it until I saw you did. The cardboard cut out effect looked at first like an iPhone. Could the faces inside the box be a little better defined perhaps as sepia or black and white images? Maybe not necessary but I think there could be room for more development.
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Thanks Amano, I’ll chalk that up as +1 for the first image :-) Interesting that the box looked iphone-like, hadn’t thought of that. I actually tried b/w and sepia and ended up preferring simple colour faded. Cheers.
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I have flirted with this subject in the past and agree that the physical manipulation could imply anger. In my case it was an album that had had about a third of its pictures ripped out by my maternal grandfather, when we think he was suffering from dementia, that prompted the idea. No one knows why the very specific photos were removed but you could perhaps point to some memory, distorted or not, being the cause. I guess what i am saying is don’t necessarily exclude the physically manipulated ones. Of the digitally manipulated ones for me the blank faced (middle) one works best, followed by the mosaic (top left) as I think they both give a good illustration of memory failure/loss.
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Really good feedback, interesting. I’m increasingly thinking of linking the overall project to dementia but no definite plans yet. I might pick your brains at some point if that’s OK.
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of course
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Did you see Erik Kessel’s work in Arles a few years ago with the cutouts before digital when people you did not want to see were just cut out?
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I did not – sounds interesting and relevant. Do you have a link? Don’t worry if not, I will Google :-)
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Great start Rob!
I would say visceral more than necessarily angry, but it definitely point to something painful and unresolved. Losing memory, when it reaches some degrees, could call for this kind of strong reactions depending on what you are looking for.
May be your digital photos are too neat, the loss of the face details works very well, but it seems almost too easy if you see what I mean. You don’t pick up what you forget, and it is not necessarily the obvious details, like the face. I feel that you are treating ‘forgetting’ maybe too metaphorically and that you should maybe bring to it something more specific to your experience for a start, without worrying about us understanding immediately what is ‘missing’ or ‘forgotten’ in the image.
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Merci! On the point about making the subject matter more specific to my own experience, funnily enough my original idea was to recreate significant memory lapses of my own (the ones I can remember!), then manipulate them – so they’d be disrupted memories of things I’d forgotten, if that makes sense.
I might still go down this route – I just wanted to get started and it was quickest and easiest to work with an archive shot :-)
Thanks again and good luck with your own L3 body of work…
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I don’t think of forgetting as the opposite of memory, I think of it as losing the tools to access the memory, if that makes sense? Perhaps like losing a map or forgetting to remember where I parked the car. For me, showing memory/forgetting might also be about that moment at the top of the stairs when I forget what I went up for, or picking up an empty mug because I forgot I drank my tea…. Also confusion – when I mix people up, because perhaps they were both in the same club at school, or their name starts with the same letter. I think my point is that there are many different manifestations of forgetting. I like the first one with the instax, and I also like the digital ones, they make me think of something going wrong with the process of memory.
I saw an exhibition at TPG a while back of some work where the faces in school photographs had been altered (moved around, all substituted by the same face) and Sawada Tomoko has made similar work. Also Julie Cockburn – she embroidered over photographs, then got Google reverse search to try to identify the images – really interesting results!
Another suggestion is the kids film “Inside out” which has some fascinating stuff about memories. Looking forward to seeing how you grow this one!
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Thanks Kate, some good food for thought there. At one point my interest was specifically in the more everyday memory lapses that you describe, but I haven’t yet given enough thought to how to make that sufficiently visually interesting, hence the experiments with an archive shot.
For me the digital ones speak more of ‘brain glitches’ with the mind-as-computer metaphor (‘file corrupted’ sort of thing) and so are inherently more contemporary – I think in a weird way I can justify doing digital obscurations to images taken digitally but feel better about physically defacing old-fashioned analogue prints!
I will look up the names you mention. And I LOVE Inside Out :-D
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I die-cut some scanned old school photographs and was sufficiently happy with the results that I’m planning to do the same with one of B’s more recent ones (though I haven’t told her yet). It’s interesting how we feel that digital images require digital manipulation and analogue ones require analogue manipulation. I’m glad you love Inside Out because it’s such a hard film to explain to people who haven’t seen it.
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https://kateastoneyv.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/die-cutting-school-photos-and-considering-shapes/
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I’ve been looking at your post on die-cutting shapes and am fascinated – however I confess I don’t really know where to start with die-cutting! What kit do you need? Any pointers (eg online tutorials) on how to get started? Thanks so much x
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It’s a bit like pasta making! Kit is a die-cutting machine, I use a Sizzix Bigshot + from Hobbycraft. You then need metal dies (like flat pastry cutters) to cut shapes) and/or embossing folders (a bit like the innards of a sandwich toaster) to emboss. They are very straightforward to use, just jook for you-tube videos. You put the photo on one plate, put the cutter where you want it to cut, put the other plate on top, then feed it through the machine. Use shims to get it at the right height. It will sound like it’s breaking, but it isn’t. The kit is quite heavily marketed on a gendered basis… look for something sturdy and not too small. back late.
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If you have access to a child who’s into crafts, they will love you forever. It is great for cards/collage etc as well as tampering with photographs.
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This is something my husband and I discuss endlessly. We have lived and worked in many places and a habitual conversation begins “Do you remember that guy we worked with in xxxxx” The answer is usually “Yes” “What was his/her name?” “I don’t remember” “He had red hair” etc. but this army become faceless people. I would put them on a map as a faceless army!!!! One could do this with all the deceased or disappeared members of your family. I find it hard to put features on my parents but I would stick a cigarette in a faceless image of my father!! My mother would have beautiful white hair etc. Not sure f any of this makes sense
Nuala
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It does make sense :-) All these comments are making me realise first of all how common memory slippages are and secondly how many different forms they can take. All great inputs for my next iterations. Thanks!
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I really like the shredding and sandpaper effects. I don’t see them as an anger element either. Someone suffering from loss of memory could be looking at the photograph and think – who the heck are these people – I don’t know them and physically try removing them from the album. Kind of like creating an absence through memory absence … I also like the blank and the glitch. The overexposed might work – but it feels a little too overexposed :-). Have you tried just erasing certain facial features, for example just erasing the eyes or mouth? How would that affect the reading?
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Thank you Lynda, thoughtful and helpful comments as always. I quite like the overexposed execution and will play around with it a little more to vary the effect. I like the idea of just obscuring certain features – more experimentation… :-)
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A couple of thoughts, Rob. Firstly – it feels to me that ‘forgetting’ is something that probably takes place over a period of time; so representing it through process may work best when that, too, takes place over time. Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, since memory itself tends to be a construct and unreliable, is ‘forgetting’ just another element of memory?
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Thanks Stan – yeah I had a similar comment about whether forgetting is a process or an event from another student – and my first experiments did depict a progression of a fading memory, but I found them too visually busy so simplified to the end state (hope that makes sense). Regarding your second point, memory as a construct is very much one of my guiding thoughts for the overall project, although I haven’t attempted to really address that yet. An idea I have for a later assignment is creating new tableaux images based on old memories, then defacing them to illustrate the disruption of forgetting – so I think that might cover the point you raise…
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Hi Rob, I promised myself a weekend away from thinking about photography this weekend and yet I found myself scanning your blog……Anyway, I was thinking about the images and reading that you’re thinking about the possibility of linking your project with dementia. In this context the images with the cut out faces might still be appropriate in my opinion. Also on memory, I agree with Kate that forgetting and memory loss are not synonymous. One aspect of memory that occurs to me is how photography has changed memory, I wonder if we remember the images rather than the experience? For instance I know there are certain times in my life that I don’t remember the details but I can go to a photo album and pull out the image which helps me to remember more details. Do we remember photographically? Photography has changed the way we see but has it changed the way we remember? On dementia I came across an artist here in Ireland who is making a piece of work on dementia, her name is Sue Morris. Yesterday I found this http://visualartists.ie/category/jobs-ops/intern-vol/
Her website is http://www.suemorris.ie and there is a Facebook post here https://www.facebook.com/events/291555614585422/
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Ha, sorry I disrupted your photography-free weekend :-)
How photography changes memory is definitely one of the strands I want to investigate at some point. It’s the links between photography and memory that fascinate me – whether those links are interconnections or similarities. I need to do some reading on the nature of memory to help me work out what direction I might take this in…
Thanks for the Sue Morris link, will check that work out.
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I like the glitch image a lot. The visual link with water and surfaces and ripples. Good work, babes!
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Cheers. I like glitch and overexposed in the digital ones and the ripped holes and stapled instax print in the physical set. Next phase will include these four on a different set of photos…
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It might be worth your while doing some research on the different types of memory which have been identified, and how we imprint each type. I did a short MOOC course on the subject a while back, which was interesting, as I hadn’t known anything about the stuff before hand. https://www.coursera.org/learn/memory-and-movies
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Oh absolutely – my whole Contextual Studies research plan I’ll be doing in parallel with Body of Work will also be about memory, so they will intersect and feed each other… at L3 we’re encouraged to experiment and iterate a little before getting too deep into the critical theory side of things, so I’m planning on getting my A1 out of the way before too much research – and then I’ll probably completely change my approach after some research :-) Thanks for the Coursera link, it does look right up my street!
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I prefer the digital ones. The last images, top left, is the one for me. I regularly forget peoples names. This comes it up as I know I know them but cannot remember the name, i.e. a blurring occurs. The images that are physically changed i.e. cut out or taped over look more like the attempt of a maniac to erase the person, like in a Hollywood Movie.
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Yeah I came to the same conclusion! I changed the approach quite a bit for the subsequent drafts…
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