Conflict photography involves photographing armed wars plus the effects it has on the places and people around it. During the early 1830s although the technicality of photography was limited the beginning of war photography emerged. It started initially in order to enhance the public awareness of conflicts and the strategies experienced. Photographers were not able to capture moving targets, therefore photographed fortifications, soldiers and land before and after the conflict. The first known war photographer was Josh McCosh a surgeon in the Bengal Army, he documented the Second Sikh war from 1848-1849. During the 20th century war photographers covered all the major war zones, many were sadly killed in conflicts. Robert Capa was famous for photographing the D-day Landings and the Spanish Civil war. Capa died in 1954 from a landmine in Indochina. One of the most influential images produced from a conflict photographer was produced by Joe Rosenthal, the photograph of the flag-rising in 1945.
Now a days photographers and journalists are protected in these conflict areas, by international conventions of armed warfare. War photography has become more dangerous due to terrorism. During the Iraq war, 36 photographers and camera operators were either killed or abducted during the war from 2003-2009.
“Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that employs images in order to tell a news story.”
Photojournalism is separated by ethical idea behind the photos, in that they should be both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms.
Photojournalism images have meaning to do with recent events. The situation implied by the images is usually fair and accurately represents the event(s) being shown. They are normally paired with other bits of information (a news article) to help make facts more relatable to the viewer.
When photojournalistic photos were originally printed in news papers, they were used more to enhance the text, rather than to be a medium of information. The first weekly newspaper to be illustrated with images was the Illustrated London News, which was first printed in 1842.
“In Migrant Mother Dorothea Lange produced the seminal image of the Great Depression. The FSA also employed several other photojournalists to document the depression.”Eddie Adams’ is well-known from having taken this photograph. “Saigon, 1968,”. Adams said the image haunted him for the rest of his life. Although he photographed 13 different wars, he is known best for his work during the Vietnam War.
Whilst thinking about the theme of Family in class, I decided that I thought a main feature of family life is home. Home is a place which everybody returns to after school, or work ect. It is a place where the people who know you best live and base their lives around. I decided that I would like to involve my grandparents house in my project as my dad and his brothers grew up there, so there has been a life time of memories created in that house.
My Grandparents have recently moved out of their family home and have moved to a new build in Le Hocq. These houses have been built to create an estate for over 55’s. I will be photographing them moving into their new house and unpacking their boxes, and how they decorate their new house to make it their home. Their are essential Items that my grandparents need to make their house their home. Some of these items may be my Grandparents chairs; my Grandma’s reclining armchair and my Grandpa’s wooden chair that he likes to watch the rugby on. Other items may be my Grandpa’s Piano and the family photographs.
As well as photographing my Grandparents moving into their new house, I would also like to dig into my family archive to find some photographs from when they first bought their house, and how it has changed over time. I will speak to my grandparents, my dad and my uncles and ask them about their most memorable times spent at their house, and I will see if i can find any photographs which captures their memories. I think it is a good idea to use the family archive in this project, as it will give me a wider breadth of photographs.
In class we watched a documentary film called ‘The Genius of Photography’ and we watched the scene which is called ‘We are Family’. From this video i think that to take documentary images a key aspect is to try to get someone to open up, so then in the images you can reveal the real person. Through the images that you take you are trying to capture a feeling or an emotion that comes across in the images. For these types of images it is not about the lighting the photos that you take can look quite amateur, as long as there is some kind of meaning behind them. It can also be said that when you take a documentary image and you try to get your subject to pose for you and it is not realistic that the feeling that comes across from the image is the feeling that the person taking the photograph is feeling. So the photograph that the photographer takes project how they feel onto the subject, so in reality the image is of the photographer and not actually the person who is in the photo. When some photographers take images they like to try and give it a vernacular feel to it, this basically means traditional and that the photographer tries to take images how an ordinary person would take them, and not from a photographers perspective. This is how they make their images look amateur.
The first photographer that was mentioned in the film was Tony Vaccaro. In the late 50’s and 1960’s there was a lot of high gloss images of celebrities.
Tony Vaccaro says that celebrity portraits shows the photographers opinions on the celebrity and not how the celebrity actually views them self. As when the photographer takes the image they get the celebrity to pose and that shows the photographers views on them not their own views.
In the film one other photographer that was mentioned was Duane Micheal’s, he said that he doesn’t believe portraits and they do not tell you who the person is. I think that this is true as when you look at a portrait you cannot tell anything about the history of a person or anything about their personality. If there is a background to the image then you can maybe get the context of their life, but if not then i think the photograph is just a still image. This is why some photographers choose to take photographs of celebrities as they are pre-packaged as the media know about celebrities lives and they do not need to tell their story through one still portrait image. Pablo Picasso refused to get his portrait taken for many years until around 1966 and 1967 when he asked Tony Vaccaro to take a portrait image of him. Tony says that Picasso kept pulling different poses and Tony could tell that the images just didn’t show his personality, so he pretended to be fixing the light that was on his camera and when he was doing this Picasso relaxed and Tony took the photo. This image of Picasso was taken in 1968.
This image of Picasso shows a relaxed version of himself compared to the other portrait images that were taken of him, and that Picasso himself did not like. I think that by Clarke taking this image when Picasso didn’t realise it shows more of Picasso’s personality.
When taking documentary photography there are two view points that the image can be taken from, one is an insider, where you are apart of the culture or family of the subject that you are taking photos of. Or you can take an image from an outsiders perspective, this would be taking images of subjects who maybe do not come from the same background as you, and these people may be strangers to you. Taking photos like these can be interesting as you are documenting life from an outsiders perspective and this explore someone else’s life.
Another photographer that was mentioned was Martin Parr, his documentary photography is considered as dairy photography, this is because Parr kept a diary while he was taking his images. In Larry Clarke’s book called Tulsa there are sections in the book which show Clarke’s dairy and what he wrote in his diary. These images that are in ‘Tulsa’ are very intimate images and can be considered as an impolite genre. In these images there is drug use in the photographs, which makes the images intimate.
Larry Clark photography
Larry Clark photography
Nan Golding was another photographer that was mentioned in the video. Golding was a New York photographer who photographed her ‘own tribe’, this consisted of transsexual’s and images of drug taking and party animals. However Golding did not call them this she called them third gender, i think she did this so she did not discriminate them from everyone else. Golding took this images to show people how ‘third gender’ people live normal lives and she wanted this to come across in her photography. Golding considered her photographs as confessional photography and for this she was inspired by film makers when she took her images. Sometimes Golding puts herself in this images to tell a story, there is one famous image of Golding with a black eye that her boyfriend at the time gave her.
These images show part of Nan Golding’s life and show how her life was not always perfect. Nan said on the film that in a photograph there is an ‘ability to be present in the moment, but you can be there and get lost at the same time’.
Some photographers consider it that when you do not take a photograph then you do not remember the memory or the moment, so therefore they believe that is you don’t shoot you don’t remember. But also documentary photography can be seen that you only photograph what you want to remember, as sometimes you do not want to remember the memory. When taking these images it can be considered that you have to be in the mindset that you are going to take the perfect documentary image otherwise you will never take the perfect image. Black and white photographs are interesting as they show past to present in one image.
Richard Billingham is a famous photographer who photographed his drunk father, his father could drink uninterruptedly. When Billingham first started taking his photos they were to make art out of, he would use a triple print as he thought this made for more interesting paintings. So when Billingham was taking these images of his father he was not taking these from the eyes of a photographer but from the eyes of an artist. However Billingham was criticized as people said that he was photographing his parents for his own fame. Whereas i think that Billingham took the images so that he could understand his father and so he could be closer to him. I think that by him taking these images it made him more aware and try to understand why his father/family was like this.
On the other end of the scale, a photographer Sally Mann took idealistic images of her family showing them off in their best light. She took these images from an insiders perspective whereby she took image of the idealistic family life. She took these images in collaboration, as when she was photographing them she said that they need to ‘give you the picture’.
Sally Mann family photographySally Mann family photographySally Mann family photography
I have become fascinated by Corinne Day and her photography book ‘Corinne Day Diary’. I’m interested in the explicit nature of the book, exposing drugs, intoxication and nudity. These type of books interest me as I feel they push the boundaries of society and the photographers seem to not care what people think of them of their work, this therefore has interested me to study them . All of days pictures represent a feel of community to me, she is taking us through Tara’s community of friends.
Corinne Day is a British photographer whose influence on the style and perception of photography in the early 1990s has been immense. As a self taught photographer, Day brought a more hard edged documentary look to fashion image making, in which she often included biographical elements. Day is known for forming long and close relationships with many of her sitters (most famously Kate Moss), which have resulted in candid and intimate portraits. The most notable of these being the photographs of Moss in the 3rd Summer of Love editorial for the FACE magazine in 1990. Days approach as illustrated within the lifestyle and fashion magazines of the 1990s, came to be known as grunge and grew into an international style.
“Good friends make you face the truth about yourself and you do the same for them, as painful, or as pleasurable, the truth may be”
This is one of my favorite quotes from Day, as i completely agree with this. Your true friends and the community you surround yourself with, do have this affect on you as they can make you face things you wouldn’t normally, they encourage you to do this you may not also. You do the same for them as you know eachother the best so can influence them and yourself to do things.
Immediate Family: The book consists of 65 black-and-white photographs of her three children, all under the age of 10. Many of the pictures were taken at the family’s remote summer cabin along the river, where the children played and swam in the nude. Many explore typical childhood themes (skinny dipping, reading the funnies, dressing up, vamping, napping, playing board games) but others touch on darker themes such as insecurity, loneliness, injury, sexuality and death. The controversy on its release was intense, including accusations of child pornography (both in America and abroad) and of contrived fiction with constructed tableaux.
I think her photographs are beautiful, and the fact that they are her children, there is an immediate connection in the pictures. They’re so natural and simplistic but so effective, some of her photos are quite controversial too and I like that. One of my favourite photographs is the one of her daughter where she is holding a cigarette, its such a beautiful photo but is more risky and shes not scared of the publics reaction.
Ray’s a Laugh is a portrayal of the poverty and deprivation in which he grew up. The photographs, which were taken on the cheapest film he could find, provide brash colours and bad focus which adds to the authenticity and frankness of the series. Ray, his father, and his mother Liz, appear at first glance as grotesque figures, with the alcoholic father drunk on his home brew, and the mother, an obese chain smoker with an apparent fascination for nicknacks and jigsaw puzzles. However, there is such integrity in this work that Ray and Liz ultimately shine through as troubled yet deeply human and touching personalities.
Some of the images in Billinghams project are seen and perceived as disturbing and sometimes sickening. This is due to the poverty and unhygienic conditions, However we can see in the images that Billingham loved his parents as he takes pictures of the good and the bad. Some of my favorite images are when Ray is seen laughing, as his face crumples up as he laughs. For example the cover of the book-
“” my father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic. he doesn’t like going outside, my mother Elizabeth hardly drinks,
but she does smoke a lot.
she likes pets and things that are decorative.
they married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
my younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11,
but now he is back with Ray and Liz again.
recently he became a father.
‘dad was some kind of mechanic, but he’s always been an
alcoholic. it has just got worse over the years.
he gets drunk on cheap cider at the off license.
he drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
originally, our family lived in a terraced house,
but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation,
sold the house. then we moved to the council tower block,
where ray just sits in and drinks.
that’s the thing about my dad, there’s no subject he’s interested
in, except drink.””
Mitch Epstein is an American photographer that tackled a multimedia project about his father and their family furniture store and real estate business. The project includes photographs, videos, interviews, a personal essay and archival material. The photographing of William Epstein’s life is a reflection of the downfall of Holyoke, normally a lively and thriving town. The story questions how the American went wrong. I wanted to research this project because I like Epstein’s style of photography, he captures single moments in snapshots which are usually very bright and full of life; this is ironic considering it is based on a town which is struggling. I like the simplicity to his images, for example the suit case it a very interesting image as there is not a great deal to it yet it manages to tell a story. It allows the viewer to imagine the narrative or to create their own.
‘As an artist, I wrestle with the challenge of how to bring meaning and new ideas to my work. To keep picture-making fresh and meaningful has been a fundamental struggle since my beginnings.’
‘I worked hard to find a balance between my ruthlessly direct approach to the work and the respect and empathy that I felt for my father as his son.’
Sally Mann
Sally Mann is one of America’s renowned photographers famous for her black and white photographs of her young children. Mann was criticised for supposedly exploiting her children and being a bad mother. However in my opinion Mann’s maternal eye allows outsiders a glimpse into her and her children’s world.
‘One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.’ – Sally Mann
‘What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.’ – Sally Mann
I want to explore the Idea of family beyond the people that you are related to by blood such as communities, close friends and teams which can come through things such as hobbies. Linked on to this Idea I also want to explore what defines a family in the modern day rather than a typical traditional family. I’m going to try and photograph what it is like to be within a non- related family and the things that they get up to while spending time together on an everyday normal basis.
The second Idea that I would like to explore is the Idea of past family members, memories and old photo albums. By photographing what it’s like living without them now for example: taking pictures of what is going on in their past homes and what it was like before they past away by incorporating different photographs from family photo albums.
