Sally Mann is an American photographer now aged 64  who is well known for her black and white photographs of her young children and of landscapes which suggest decay and death. After she had graduated she worked as a photographer at Washington and Lee university. Her first publication was in 1984 and it was called Second Sight. She found her ‘trade mark’ with her second publication At Twelve: Portraits of Young Woman, 1988.  This publication stimulated a minor controversy, the publication included photographs of “captured the confusing emotions and developing identities of adolescent girls [and the] expressive printing style lent a dramatic and brooding mood to all of her images.”. Sally is also well know for her publication called immediate family which includes black and white photographs of her three children taken at her family’s remote summer cabin. I particullary like this publication because it’s appealing to the eye, the images look natural and I like that Sally took a risk in exposing her children for the rest of the world to see and that her children also got a say in which photographs would be published.

Photographer and painter Richard Billingham (born 1970) grew up in a cramped, high-rise tenement apartment with his mother and father in Birmingham, England. His father, Ray, was an unemployed, chronic alcoholic, often sleeping the whole day through, while Liz, Billingham’s overweight and heavily tattooed mother, filled her home with porcelain dolls and jigsaw puzzles, housing ten cats and three dogs. These are Billingham’s subjects. In stark comparison to conventional family photos around the dinner table or in front of the Christmas tree, Billingham’s images are raw, intimate and often uncomfortably humorous. First published in 2000, Ray’s a Laugh is now considered one of the most important British photo books of the recent past. This publication reproduces this renowned book spread by spread, including a contemporary essay by Charlotte Cotton.

Here are some of Richards words;

“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.”

Some photographs from ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ collection:

I really like this collection of photographs because I think that it shows a true representation of his family, and his home life. Its really interesting to read about Richards family, and how he focuses on the point of his father being an alcoholic, and his mother being an over weight animal lover. I also like the way that he has taken the photo’s, they don’t look overly staged and they aren’t perfect in that some of the photographs are over exposed due to flash lighting. Each of the photographs tell’s the audience something about his parents. For example the photograph on the top left, showing his parents sitting on the coach eating their dinner whilst watching the television. This looks like something they do everyday, as a family ritual.

Within photojournalism there is a code which consists of ethics and standards that the journalists are expected to respect and follow. This code had been broken by a photojournalist who had entered a piece of work into the ‘World Press Photo Contest’. Giovanni Troilo had entered a photograph and had misrepresented the location of the photo this caused an uproar with the photojournalist community as he categorised his photo as ‘reportage’. This then lead to another issue as he used a flash lighting with a remote control flash.

Who sets the boundaries of what defines photojournalism?

After this issue had occurred, it lead to a big panel meeting where they decided to re write the code of ethics in photojournalism. The festival director, Jean-François Leroy said he defined photojournalism as “witnessing the world.” Photograph’s today are easily manipulated and staged with the use of technology. However once a photograph has been manipulated it becomes art photography, not photojournalism.

Can photography change the world?

The debate of ‘Can photography change the world‘ is often discussed between different photographers. As some people believe that a photograph is able to change someones feelings and views on a subject. It is also thought that a visual image stays with someone for longer, rather than reading a paragraph about the subject. An example of this is the photograph of a pair of damaged lungs on a cigarette box. However some people believe that photography is unable to change the world, as a photograph is only there to provide information and to give the audience an insight into a subject.

This photograph could be seen, and make people understand the poverty in different countries and inspire them to participate in some charity events or donate money. Or it could be seen as an informative photograph, that is educating the viewer about the poverty and the amount of people in the world without access to clean water.

When technology makes it so easy to manipulate images, how much manipulation is acceptable?

In the NPPA code of ethics  it is said that photojournalists should resist being manipulated by staged photographers as it is not reporting the exact truth. Therefore the photograph becomes art photography rather than photojournalism. There have been various occasions when a photojournalist is reporting about a subject and supplies a photograph about the subject, yet the photograph has been staged.

With viewers more sophisticated and skeptical than ever before, how can photojournalists preserve their integrity and maintain trust?

The public rely on photojournalists to report the honest truth to them about global issues and topic’s. It is expected for the journalists to tell the truth about what they are reporting. Because of previous innocents where the journalist has manipulated their stories by using staged photographs. A code of Ethics has been created, which contains rules such as ‘Be accurate and comprehensive in the representation of subject’ to help prevent inaccurate reporting.

Defining Documentary Photography:

Documentary Photography can be defined as representing a static moment of time which may have relevance to history or historical events circulating around everyday life to document a certain topic, event or purpose. The Photographer is set aside to capture a truthful, and realistic representation of a particular subject, more commonly of people.

From the beginning, people have found ways of experimenting with storytelling as a type of art, in order to express and illustrate our daily lives and events. This can be suggestive of uses of stained glass windows in churches and tapestries, illustrated manuscripts, and even paintings depicting historical and biblical stories.  Neither art nor advertising, documentary drew on the idea of information as a creative education about actuality, life itself. As contemporary and modernized art became a more developing thing, documentary photography gave the idea a new life and social function: a way of publishing reality. Documentary aimed to show, in an informal way, the everyday lives of ordinary people and the photographer’s goal was to bring the attention of an audience to the subject of his or her work, and in many cases, to pave the way for social change.

Documentary has been described as a form, a genre, a tradition, a style, a movement and a practice, but it is very problematic to try to offer a single definition of the term as it could be said that every photograph is in one sense of another a ‘document’, since it is always a record of something – a document of an occurrence of light and shadows recorded in time and space.

Documentary photographers across the globe have managed to change the way society acts towards world events, crisis’s and the sociology of mankind.

Martin Parr

Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer and photojournalist. He is famous for his photographic projects that focus on photographing the social classes of Britain. Parr’s photography has an intimate, critical and anthropological nature on modern life. Parr has been a member of the Magnum photos group since 1994.

I think Parr’s work is a true reflection of the un-photographed perhaps ‘ugly’ side of society. He explores the unpleasingly aesthetics of daily life that we sometimes intentionally forget. The bright colours could possibly be a representation of our enthusiastic attitude to an imperfect world. Parr documents with a passion to uncover the concealed, photographing at unpredicted angles of imaginative concepts with the real people of the modern world. I like his style of photography because the subject does not have to be beautiful, he finds a way of bringing out the beauty in the images. His style creates unusual, critical and vibrant images that tell a story in each one.

Joel Meyerowitz is an American street, landscape and portrait photographer. He is considered one of the greats of street photography, and a pioneer of colour in photography as a serious form of art. After discovering photography at the age of 24 in 1962, he is still actively photographing 53 years later, at the age of 77.

Meyerowitz was born on March 6th 1938 in New York City. He began photographing seriously in 1962 after becoming inspired by witnessing photographer Robert Frank at work, and after some consideration he quit his job as an art director at an advertising agency to become a full time photographer, taking to the streets as a black-and-white street photographer.

Over the next 10 years although enjoying some success, Meyerowitz had little critical-acclaim for his work. He experimented in both black-and-white and colour, but by 1972, he decided to photograph exclusively in colour, a medium that was not highly respected nor acknowledged in the art world at the time. Meyerowitz’s first book Cape White however shot him to worldwide acclaim as a photographer, was one of the first photography books of colour photographs to be given serious worldwide recognition.

Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank who are also viewed as greats of street photography, Meyerowitz is very different in his approach. His style more so reflects the work of another renowned photographer, William Klein; producing lively photographs full of suspense, drama and action in a direct close-up manner, separate  from the distant, observed style of Frank and Cartier-Bresson. Meyerowitz likes to photograph his subject whilst they are engaged in a particular movement or action, with his images telling a story. Meyerowitz believes that it is important for his photographs to tell a story about the humanity on the street. His photographs focus heavily on human interaction, usually two or more people engaging in a physical game, communication or moment. He photographs in colour, which is rare for a street photographer to do as street photography is traditionally viewed as a more appropriate in black-and-white. His style has drawn both praise as well as criticism, viewed by some critics as a cheap mockery of the work of some iconic street photographer. Meyerowitz use of colour relates greatly to his willingness to change and push the boundaries of photography, and criticism does not affect him greatly.

Since the initial success of Cape Light, Meyerowitz has since produced over 20 books, including ‘A Summers Day’ (1985) and ‘Bystander: A History of Street Photography’ (1994). As well as photographing, Meyerowitz also gives lectures on a regular basis around the world. His working methods were subject of a 1981 documentary presented by Robert Gilgberg.

September 11th: In the aftermath of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks, Meyerowitz was granted unlimited access to photograph the ruins of ground zero, recording the immediate effects of the event and also the 9 month project to repair it. His work was made into a series entitled Aftermath: World Trade Centre Archive.

I find Joel’s work to be very interesting because of the way that he greatly immerses himself in his subject matter. His dedication to street photography is impressive and inspiring

Here is the 1981 documentary of Joel Meyerowitz. Gilgberg follows him working on the streets of New York, as well as talking to him more formally in his studio. Although an old documentary, I nevertheless found this to be very insightful and interesting.

This is Joel’s official blog. He has a list of all his past and current work. I would recommend it as a good read.

www.joelmeyerowitz.com

Tableau photography is a form of narrative documentation which involves the photographer creating a story through a series of carefully staged images that are decided beforehand. Tableau photographers usually create a series of images that link together, progress and expand a particular theme or story.

Tableau has a diverse meaning and is not limited entirely to photography. Any form of conceptual art which is deliberately planned beforehand can be considered as tableau, and many photographers involved with tableau will venture into other forms of art to express the story they are trying to tell. Although tableau is a documentation of a particular theme or idea, it cannot truly be considered documentary because the work produced is based on interpretation, whereas documentary photography is all about the photographer observing the world.

Re-creating old photos is a fun and popular way that has been and still is  used as a form of tableau photography.

Tableau is often used by photographers and conceptual artist as a crossover with documentary  photography. It is very hard to create a story based solely on tableau because staging every image can take away the raw meaning of what the photographer is trying to show. A lot of photo-books which include tableau therefore will either use tableau to strengthen the meaning of their documentation, or documentary photography to help convey the narrative expressed through a tableau piece.

Tablaeu  very often allows for the exploration of surrealist viewpoints

The advantage of tableau photography is that the photographer has complete control over the how the photograph is created. This is very helpful if the photographer wants to produce surrealist styled images because it allows for the manipulation of events which would not otherwise be realistically possible. Tableau photography is often used by photographers who want to explore personal themes, such as family, because it is easier to stage photographers from an insider perspective, and there is a more subjective viewpoint, which makes the staging of images more appropriate.

Photographer Phillip Toledano explored elements of tableau in his photo-book series ‘Days With my Father’, documenting his elderly father’s battle with dementia.

This brief interview explores to work of tableau photographer Jeff Wall. He talks of his preparation for his upcoming exhibition, and expresses some of his views regarding his own work and ideas.

Nick Waplington – Living Room

“What is remarkable about the photographs is the special way in which they make the intimate something public”

Nick Waplington born in 1965 is a artist and photographer who is based in New York.  He studied art at West Sussex College of Art & Design in Worthing, then Trent Polytechic in Nottingham and at the Royal College of Art in London.  He has many publications his first one being ‘Living Room’ .In the late 1980’s England was under the Conservative government for now 10 years there was a collapse in the industry and a rise in poverty and unemployment. Photographer Nick Waplington decided to spend 4 year photographing  the everyday life of middle class families in a council estate in Nottingham rather that photographing contemporary photography. He photographed family’s intimate moments in their living room by capturing physical and emotional dysfunctionality of everyday families.