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.
Steven DuPont: Cuba Workshop Dec 6th – 11th, 2015. ‘Havana Particular’. Steven adds the quote: “It doesn’t happen everyday. Seize the opportunity while you can”.
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.
The Migrant Mother, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936President Ronald Reagan as he makes his most iconic speech “Tear down this wall” in 1987. The Berlin wall was taken down in 1989 with the help of Reagan’s speech.
Illustrator Andy Warhol was one of the most prolific and popular artists of his time, using both Avant-Garde and highly commercial sensibilities.
Born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol was a successful magazine and advertisement illustrator who became a leading artist of the 1960’s Pop art movements. He ventured into a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, film making, video installations and writing, and controversially blurred the lines between fine art and mainstream aesthetics.
Micheal Jackson
Andy is very clever at challenging the subverted roles of famous and well known people. He sets them in a role through the technique of pop-art and recent art culture, to signify their characteristics and bring out their personality through colour and vivid lines and geometry.
A collection of Andy Warhol’s Polaroids which he captured in the late 1900’s.
Some of Andy Warhol’s work includes that of Polaroids. Andy captures many of the risen stars of the late 1900’s through Polaroids in a technique of challenging their fame and why they are at the top. Warhol worked with the likes of Mick Jagger, in a way he wanted to show society what life is like in fame. Using a Polaroid also suppresses the normality and mundane surrounding regarding the characters chancing their role through a normal and reflective stance.
The images below are mine that I took during my time in Idaho Springs, Colorado. I thought this rustic and classic composition can work alongside his work in a comparative and subversive way. The edits I made of these images show how I’ve used colour and sharp edges to receive an outcome like Warhol.
Below, I have created a grid in the style of Andy. I did this in Photoshop using a ‘web’ format to create this grid.I also used a layer mask in order to bring out the colours and vivid lines within the photograph. Overall, I am very happy with the success of this interpretation, as I feel I have grasped his ideologies in society and how he uses art to encounter everyday life and its events. I feel as if my interpretations have really challenged and changed my approach when it comes to working with the public’s reactions and ideologies and how its chanced me to venture outside my comfort zone when approaching these interpretations.
John Baldessari is an artist that radicalizes ideas such as psycho-geography and situationism. His approach to society and the public sphere radiate through his playful and symbolic works. His ideas suppress many aspects of chance, challenge, and change as John Baldesssari tests reactions of people who are put in the vulnerable position of interpreting his art.
John Baldessari’s most early project was him self-erecting a fake $100,000 Bill At The High Line. His objective was to challenge the views of the public after the attitudes towards 100,000 dollar bills in the early Great Depression, that hit the united states in the 1930’s. It was recorded that only around 42,000 dollar bills were printed, ensuring that John’s work suggests severe importance and rarity which dates back to the time dollar bills where seen as such as a idyllic characteristic in society. Johns expansion of this piece of art sticks out to the public as a figure of historic significance, regarding that money is a valuable and suggestive object which is precious to any growing economy.
“Bill Board”
Other works of John show strategic and abundant ideas. John chances his own ideas by showing his thoughts in a more modern, developing society. Here, John’s work ‘Brain Cloud’ shows how society looms over paradisaical and ideal aspirations.
Dadaism, is an art movement of the European Avant-Garde in the early 20th century. Dada, in Zurich, Switzerland began in 1916 and was reaction against the horror and futility of WW1.
“Freedom. Dada, Dada, Dada, crying open the constricted pains, swallowing the contrasts and all the contradictions, the grotesqueries and the illogicalities of life” – Tristan Tzara, 1918
Dadaism focused primarily against an art subversive to any traditional values and morals. This meant abolishing all logic and wanting to destroy the deceptions of reason. This meant that Chance and spontaneity: what ever came along would be considered art in every form. This was then considered a anarchical and irrational action and event which sparked emotions such as shock, surprise and scandal. This was all result on a wanted audience reaction, testing their taste and level of tolerance.
Dada has influenced most of the 20th century art movements: Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, Situationism, Fluxus, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism and Performance Art.
Dada was used as a model of revolt for these movements, including influence from the ‘Sex Pistols’ and Punk rock.
Cubism was the new age and beginning of Modernism. It was a new regime and cycle of artists expressing themselves with new materials (photography in particular). It surrounded the subject matter of contemporary life, that aside with not anything religious and historic. Traditional aspects and regimes have been tested and the normal perspectives where therefore abandoned.
Cubism holds many multiple viewpoints and is not based on naturalistic observation but on mental conception. It was then situated that there was a sort of freedom to manipulate a subject-matter to create new and variable compositions. Elements in a picture would then be chosen and placed purely according to aesthetic consideration rather than being based in reality. This thought by the normality of society , it allowed people to suppress the norms and expectations through art and various multimedia.
Cubism relates to chance, challenge and change because it expresses the movement of people going beyond the public domain and expectations.
“Nature should be treated as cylinders, spheres and cones” – Paul Cezanne
Some of the more early works of Cubism.
Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-06, oil on canvasPablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas
Cubism nowadays has been modernized by various technologies and techniques. With new and developed processes, Cubism has been turned into a more eye-catching and popular approach to everyday life.
Elvis PresleyMicheal Jackson
Some of the more modernized interpretations of cubism is example of Philippines-based designer Dre Ilutsre. He is just one of the many artists that has created a collection of pop-culture character illustrations in his own distinct style.
The eye-catching illustrations are cubism-inspired digital art where the characters are portrayed in an abstract form, made up by different shapes. Ilustre uses mostly red, blue and yellow in his works.
In his collection, famous figures such as pop-icons Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and martial artist Bruce Lee have been featured.
Our trip to St Malo on the 17th of June 2015 with guests Gareth Syvret and Tom Pope, developed or aim to succeed the expectations of the locals in a foreign arena. In our small groups, we came up with several ideas to incorporate this enigma. Our first idea was using Sian. Sian bought 24 yellow roses at the local Market and our idea was to hand out the flowers in order to receive the reaction of the public. This was very successful in a way I felt encapsulated the senses of community and relationships.
Sian holding the yellow roses.
One of our targets for receiving the roses.
This experiment suggested positive, as many people where up to the challenge of exceeding this performance. In awe to Tom Pope, this idea of performance has given challenge by testing the public’s response. Chance has been established through the duration of the performance as many people changed their mind about receiving the flower. This then enabled the way we change our approach to people and the way we dictate our performance in order to receive a more positive outcome.
A woman happily receiving her yellow rose.
I was really happy with this photograph partly because you can clearly see the reaction upon this woman’s face. I am glad that our aim was established and that the roses gained a positive and interesting experience. I felt this interaction was key and I’m glad i challenged this.
Our next task was to use a blow-up ball through a mundane environment. The main aim was to characterize a movement which would represent a normal and sophisticated stance that we would use to challenge and chance the public community passing through this area and time. This movement was simple, the ball would roll down the metal railings and eventually, be passed back up to the top in which the movement would start over again. This action was repeated, and half way through, members of the public passed through and reacted in a surprised, un-realistic way. However, because we didn’t take much notice and reacted as if there was no abnormality, the action was suppressed as normal. This was also dictated through the way we kept quiet; regarding nothing abstracted or influenced our performance.
This technique proved very successful. I felt the aim was fulfilled due to the ordinariness, and the pace was very smooth and interactive. I feel an element of change was anticipated due to the challenge towards the transitions of normal and abnormal. I feel as a group we turned an action so simple to an action worth meaning, that the typical and mundane values where transgressed and pushed to the extremes.
Here is a link to the video of the Blow-Up Ball:
The next task we took was during our experience in St Malo’s local supermarket. The aim was to venture up and down the aisles of the market and pick up various items from the different shelves. This was among the public circle and wasn’t staged to the extreme. This was all captured on video and when one of us shouted ‘slow’, the movements of normal pace turned into slow-motion, leaving the only the public to react in a surprising and humorous way.
Surprisingly, the people of the public didn’t know quite how to react and in this in fact made them not appear in the video at all due to them realizing the performance and warding off because of it. The avoidance in such a public and mundane place ensured to us that we had really challenged and changed the transition of normal to radicalized, proving our performance as successful.
Setting up into our positions.practicing the repetitive actions.
Here is a link to the video of our Slow-Mo Market Dash:
The next task was to challenge the reaction of the public further. We directed one of our group members, Molly to climb into a small cardboard box. She then placed herself with our instruction in the middle of a busy pavement, central of St Malo’s town. We captured on video the audiences reactions and how they were challenged with the change of normality. This idea of chance was established too, as people who walked past gave molly the chance to perform.With the influence from Tom Pope, the suggestion of how if there wasn’t any people there would probably be no chance of any performance, so concluding this the location of this act gave this performance a chance to challenge the change in the public arena.
Molly waiting for her performance to start.Molly hiding in the box.
I felt this performance was very successful, and from the video you can clearly see the aim of this action being established. The feeling of change from normality to becoming surprised was clearly evident, and from the video this challenge was successful as we changed the normal transitions that wouldn’t of been there if our performance didn’t take place in that moment of time.
A collection of Pope’s images captured between 2005-2011
The results regarding the ‘Chancing Orange’ Shoot with Tom Pope – Societe Jersiaise June 2015
With regard to Tom Pope, our development of the key themes came down to various statements: repeating an action over and over again to benefit the chances of capturing the performance which becomes influenced / held within the margins of challenge and how you can change the chance by altering the subjects performance.
Tom’s influence comes down purely by walking through a threshold of chance and change. His approach to walking through a public arena or audience gives sense of a performance but not of that being successful, its always down to chance regardless of environmental, physical or social factors. I fell when approaching this challenge, this ideal of chance stayed in my mind. I questioned myself on how to make this shoot more successful, and doing so I changed the way I angled my camera and positioned myself in a more beneficial and approachable position. The more I did this with more control, the more effective the photograph turned out to be.
In this image above, Molly was positioned around 5 meters from where i was standing. She threw the orange towards my camera and I did vise versa. This photo was among the most successful, as using a manual blur helped contribute towards the main focus of the image, in this case, the orange. This also helped as during the editing processes in Photoshop, we were able to not insert a Gaussian Blur or any artificial focusing tools because this feature was so effective.
As a title of ‘Chance, Challenge, Change’ many ideas came to mind. On our workshop visit to Archisle, Jersey, we were given a talk by Gareth Syvret who’s a photo archivist in the Societe Jersiaise. He influenced me into thinking further when thinking about archiving photographs. Syvret mention that being an archivist allows you to test and question what the definition of art and what it is, as a photo library represents a cannon of personal history and time. Gareth was particularly influenced by Kessel Kramer where his collection ‘In almost every photograph represents this understanding of history to anticipate the future. Below are some examples of Kessle’s work.
“Visual History – Knowledge – Power”
Another influence of Gareth’s was William T. Collings, an Artist whom captured many of his photographs in neighboring Channel Islands. This then came relatable for Syvret as much of the photographs archived where found in the Societe Jersiaise. Much of William’s work was captured in the 1860’s all of working class men and woman. Syvret added that this “Anthropological representation may be deceiving” as the straight faces in Collings’ photographs can be seen as ‘ambiguous. Also, plate cameras which where used made the colour red deficient, resulting the eye to question the photographs profanity and truth. Below is an image William captured during his time shooting in Sark.
