To be clear; here I discuss the topic I am aiming for as I plan for the extended essay. I mention several key texts that I think will be helpful and which I will include in my A2 Literature Review. A previous blog also links to several important texts but there is minimal reflection in that one:
I need to get on with writing the literature review element of my extended essay. I am still thinking and gathering – but wanted to just put something down in writing to help me clarify where I’m at at the moment.
I’ve identified a key problem so far – how do I relate my inquiry which I think is about ‘the loss/destruction of reality (as it has been construed)’ to photography? After all, the degree has photography in its title and I need to link the central theme to that discussion. Photography has played its part in that destruction – although there are plenty of other factors/actors.
NB Destruction might also be seen as transformation. I believe this is what my BOW A1.2 is expressing.
Photography’s role in mythmaking
- As I said in parenthesis in A1, “photography may have been a very brief interlude in the journey that begun with cave drawing, developed to become printing, followed by the invention of mechanisation, and moving towards a total simulated reality” (2019; 6) In response, Roberta suggested, “Although this has not diminished the demand for those other media – indeed it has given them a new lease of life.”
Printing is in trouble – we do still buy books but it is in a terrible competition with digital text. Painting, not mentioned above, which played such a big role in expressing religious propaganda existed in a feedback loop of development for that purpose. Although people still paint, I wonder if it is fair to say it is no longer used for what it was originally developed for – and that is a relic like still photography is perhaps becoming. People will continue to revel in it but they are making ghosts – sorry to all painters and still photographers. I do not intend to be dismissive – I understand lots of people still gain pleasure from these media.
2. I am also aware that my first essay could be read as a justification for moving away from photography ‘proper’ and focusing instead on moving image.
3. It seems like a key question in that essay and previous ones, along with the way my work is going is: Why is it more useful/fun/relevant/interesting to look at how images are used rather than the making of them? This is where Postmodernism is relevant.
But I’m not sure that’s really what I believe or what I want to ask.
If the construction of reality is a continuous re-invention of the moment we’re in (which I think is a simplistic way of describing current scientific understanding), the conscious self relies on…
i. memory – an intangible remnant of consciousness which we sometimes exteriorise using various forms/materials;
ii. our hyperdyadic* existence – perhaps represented by collage made with appropriated material;
iii. and mechanical construction (which includes language as a technology – see Andy Clark) – perhaps represented by the output of machinery we have invented, and which to greater or lesser extent becomes prosthetic – i.e. phones.
*dyadic – interconnection between two things. Hyerdyadic – interconnection between many – lots of people but also the environment
4. Whatever route I take, James Elkins book What Photography Is (2011) is an entire book which isn’t really about photography, even though its title suggests that’s all it is about. It’s a response to Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980), another book which suggests photography is its main topic but it might also be read as an elderly man coming to terms with his mother’s – and so his own impending – death. I need to learn from them.
How do I keep this related to photography?
- I think I need to state early on – that I am looking at the moving image as well as still and come up with a generic term to encompass both. I might use ‘image’ and then qualify that. Image, therefore, might refer to drawing /painting/film. In which case, is there space or a need to address the arguments made about differences between each of these forms and attempt to lay them to rest for the sake of the discussion? (See Barthes – indexicality of photography and also Elkins’).
- Perhaps I need to also talk about why moving image is key nowadays, and perhaps more so than still – as the masses embrace technology which makes video recording so easy, and advertisers use it more and more as it can potentially grab our attention with its movements and flickers more successfully than still. Or at least suggest we can make that assumption with some certainty. This feels a bit like a justification again and might take up too many words, but it feels crucial.
- Although it may seem like I am dismissing still photography, I am not. In amongst the plethora of photographic projects and bodies of work which all seem very similar and flaccid, there are a number of photographers making potent and striking work, such as (but not exclusively) Thomas Ruff and Zanele Muholi.
(Intention is key)
- Elkin says, “beyond that, talking about the surround as I did for the photograph of the greyhound reveals that the surround is boring, and possibly also that photography as a whole is, in the end, also a bit boring.” (loc 1706) Perhaps, I will suggest that if this is true it is because we as a society are desensitised to photography, now that its initial magic qualities have faded. Seeing a photograph in 1845 must have been incredible and exciting and perhaps awe-inspiring. To capture a person and then have them rendered as delicately as those older processes were capable of would have seemed extraordinary. But now it is mundane and every day. Now our representations move, can be built by anyone – even children as young as two, and offer adventure and flexible narratives. They are engrossing and enticing and overstimulating. So the poor old still photograph has a great deal to compete with. While some, perhaps people with time on their hands, may revel in the luxury of contemplating an image of a leaf or a fragment of a person or people, or the emptiness of a blank page, others are fed a diet of shiny, fast-paced, noisy and enticing media. Most of us have this latter fodder in our lives and perhaps that is where the mythology I am interested in exists. If still photography (academic art) is to remain relevant, then perhaps it can a useful tool for deconstructing the myth I’m exploring.
- Art photography is often inherently elitist. Not always, but so much of it can’t help being so – refs from Elkins:
“It is easy to agree that photography’s apparent realism has been formed by the middle-class hope that the photographs give us reality itself (as Bourdieu says).” (loc 762)“‘photography is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration’. (Bordieu, Un Art moyen, 48)” (loc 707)“For Bourdieu, photography is bourgeois to its bones, and it even includes its own futile anti-bourgeois gestures, like my own attraction to things that aren’t family photographs.” (loc 716)
- Still photography is one fragment of a re-enactment of our biological processes – by focusing on it alone we persist with a Cartesian construction/understanding of reality. But it might be more relevant nowadays to explore these topics more holistically. Intro/preface?
Mythmaking
Hoffman’s book below references advertising and images extensively. Held within these images are myths.
I have become really interested in mythology – and the relationship between science and religion. It seems to me that both do the same things, i.e. put difficult concepts into narratives we can try to manage.
The following is from the author, Jonathan Raban’s biography A Passage to Juneau.
“Within the last 9,000 to 12,000 years, when people were present to witness such events, they would have seen the sea close over islands as earthquakes rearranged topography. You couldn’t look at the delicate compromise made here between land and sea without imagining the Flood: and you couldn’t imagine the flood without inventing a Noah or a Gilgamesh” (1999) (Perhaps this quote will be on the cover page or at the top of the essay).
Books
Return of the Real Hal Foster 1996
The Case Against Reality Donald D Hoffman 2019 (see below) (He mentions Plato’s Cave his description may be useful to quote.)
How we Became Posthuman Kathryn Hayles 1999 (in particular Chapter 7, Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid Sixties of Philip K. Dick)
What Photography Is James Elkins 2011 (see identified quotes here – https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2019/09/08/a2-useful-links/)
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, 1980
Essays
Myth Today Roland Bart’s 1957 https://uvcsjf.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/notes-on-myth-today-by-roland-barthes-1957/
Baudrillard (Disneyfication): From Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html
Originality_in_Postmodern_Appropriation – JULIE C. VAN CAMP (Academia.edu)
I need to look at Deleuze but I do not know his work and have no idea where to start.
Popular Culture, films, TV
The AO (Netflix) 2016-19 TV – Series One explores a kind of inverted Plato’s Cave which becomes a metaphor for digital culture. As part of my research, I have been watching plenty of reality-bending films and TV, this being one of them.
Total Recall, 1990 and 2012 Film
Inception, 2010 Film (this leads to Memento – also directed by Christopher Nolan but I am trying to avoid clinging to memory as a key theme, even though that is an important topic.)
Added 2/10/2019 45 Years, 2015 Film
Specific Artists’ work
- Mark Lecky’s O’ Magic Power of Bleakness
(In the link above, I talk about several influencing works which had fed into my own practice but which may also be useful for the essay.
I will need to revisit this at Tate Britain as there is much to link to, moving image, youth culture, myth, everydayness.
2. Katinka Schuett, Cosmic Drive – I have only just come across this work and will look at it as a possible example of still photography looking at similar themes. ““Cosmic Drive primarily explores the way humans handle ignorance,” says Katinka Schuett of her Female in Focus winning series, which examines the contradictory spheres of fantasy and hard science. “I am interested in our perceptions of space, and the question of whether or not life can be found in the universe.” Schuett is as concerned with fantasy as she is with facts, merging the two to consider the illusions we create when there is a void of information. ” (Roberts, 2019)
https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/09/female-in-focus-cosmic-drive/
I probably need to have a few more references here.
Blog Conclusion (not essay) – is there a question/title here yet?
I’m not sure … perhaps:
Should we re-evaluate our relationship to myth/humanity’s need to create myth? (And what role does the image play?)
I feel it will be necessary to use the word image in the extended essay rather than photography – because photography is such a nebulous term and describes a range of activities – and perhaps I need to explain in a preface. Does a preface count towards word count? Something to ask when submitting the review.
Something I’ve not addressed here which I think fits but which may be too far outside the inquiry – the body/blood/softness/boundaries/flesh. Hayle’s looks at this and references Donna Harraway several times – I don’t think I fully comprehend what’s going on here yet and need to read these sections again, as well as Haraway’s Cyborg essay which I’ve only read once so far (and found it a little bewildering – perhaps I was tired/distracted).
I know I am interested in the fractal nature of reality and our conscious understanding of it. So, we function (construct reality) in a certain way and the patterns of that construction are evident in our expressions (media – films/adverts.any narratives, the way we produce them.)
I still think I’m focusing too much on why photography is becoming irrelevant and need to look more at boundaries/flesh/death – life/self-other; I suppose these things to tie into myth and the breaking down of self as a definitive object as technology and science evolve. Therefore perhaps we might say, “it is a myth that you and I exist at all” – however, this myth is all we have and so we need to take it seriously even though we understand it is a myth.”
Added 2/10/2019 – https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ai-will-forever-change-create-find-truth-images
“Sometime in the not-too-distant future, anyone will be able to take a picture without a camera. Instead, we will be able to generate photographs, indistinguishable from those made by a camera, using artificial intelligence (AI) software. You will be able to create an image by simply typing out a description of the scene, or describing it to (presumably) Siri. “Siri,” you’ll say. “I’d like an image of a red-haired woman walking through a park in autumn, the breeze blowing red, orange, and yellow leaves around her.” And—though it may require more detail than that—presto! Your phone will provide various options on the screen to choose from.” (Palumbo 2018)
Other refs:
Raban, J. 1999 A Passage to Juneau, Picador, Basingstoke and Oxford
SJField - OCA Level Three Study Blog 