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
In order to bring together some ideas and thoughts about the theme family, we decided to make a spider diagram. Here are some of the ideas we thought about when thinking of ‘Family’.
Nicholas Nixon, born in 1947, is known for the ease and intimacy of his black and white large format photography. Nixon has photographed porch life in the rural south, schools in and around Boston, cityscapes, sick and dying people, the intimacy of couples, and the ongoing annual portrait of his wife. I am hoping to do a similar project over the Christmas holidays when I go and visit my family in England. I love black and white photographs especially as portraits when they have a lot of detail. I have a young cousin called Dylan who has beautiful curly hair and I can’t wait to photograph him as he has an amazing personality which will hopefully capture in the photographs. I will also visit my Nan who is falling very ill, so it will be nice to capture some photographs of her so that I have them in case anything happens to her. The contrast between young and old will be interesting to compare in the photographs especially with the expressions that they pull. The lighting in his photographs is really complimenting the people in the picture and black and white images make the over all image more flawless.
I want to explore accidental and purposeful gatherings within my work, and how buildings and places create the right environments for these different gatherings.
First I want to think about what kind of places people accidentally gather in in Jersey. Places where lots of people go at the same time, but not intentionally. For example at a bus station lots of people go there to get buses, but not everyone is there to catch the exact same bus. Compared to a concert, where people all buy tickets to go see the same thing at the exact same time.
Accidental Gatherings.
Bus Station
Beaches
Liberation Square
Royal Square
Millenium Park
Millbrook Park
Elephant Park
Restaurants
Cafes
Town
Fort Regent
Les Quennevais Sports Centre
Dual Carriageway
Supermarkets
Its quite a difficult time of the year for looking at Purposeful gatherings, because most of the Purposeful gatherings have already happened during Summer. E.g. Jersey live, Jersey Pride, Groove de Lecq etc.
Purposeful Gatherings
School/Work
Assemblies
Lunch Times (within school)
Ticketed events (Concerts/festivals/comedy shows)
Organised classes/activities/clubs
Organised events (weddings/parties etc)
Churches/religious places
Organised Family gatherings
Places that can be considered both Accidental and Purposeful gatherings
Planes/Ferries
Cinema
Viewing Rugby/Football club
It is slightly difficult to define exactly what is a purposeful gathering and an accidental gathering.
Even within accidental gatherings there will be smaller purposeful gatherings. For example when a small group of friends arrange to meet in a park, but there are other people there who they didn’t organise to meet with.
Also within Purposeful gatherings there can be accidental gatherings. E.g. When people buy tickets to a specific event, they know that other people will be there seeing the same thing at the same time, but they don’t know exactly who the people there are going to be, and so may bump into people they know (because this is Jersey and Jersey is small and you will always bump into people you know).
The actual term ‘documentary’ was originally used by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the early 19th century but as a reference within visual culture it was British film maker, John Grierson who famously in 1926 in a review of a film by Robert Flaherty about Polynesian youth, described the film as having ‘documentary value.’
Collection of historical documentary photographs which collaborate within societal issues and regimes.May 16, 1957. Chicago, IL. Vivienne Meier
The birth of documentary as a popular form is clearly linked historically to the development of print technology and the proliferation of large-scale mass press in the 1920s and 30s of popular illustrated photo magazines and publications such as Life Magazine in the USA, Picture Post in Britain, Vu in France, Illustrierte in Germany, Drum in South Africa and many others.
‘VU’ French Magazine, published 1937‘Life Magazine, published 1964
These magazines which were based on the extensive use of photographs to tell stories to the needs of a newly literate urban population constitutes the start of the modern movement of photojournalism.
‘Life’ Magazine, published July 14, 1972A collage made of ‘Drum’ Magazine, South Africa published 1960’s.
This new breed of photographers were the ones ‘out there’ bringing photographs home – a reporter of everyday life who supplied the pictures for this growing market.
Early Documentary Photography
Curtis was criticized for altering his photography so that it represented the Native American people as the “noble savages” that they were stereotyped as at the time. By retouching photographs in order to remove traces of western civilization, he’s been accused of painting Native Americans as a “vanishing race” and drawing attention away from their true plight. This was the start of regarding documentary photography as a false representation of society, sparking the new era of ethics in photography, and setting guidelines of what makes an immoral and moral photograph.
By the time of the Civil War, the daguerreotype and other modernized equipment had entered the realm of middle-class consumer culture and established a popular follow up, often to the dismay of photographers promised and dedicated to uphold photography as an art form. Documentary photography developed during this period and was often consigned by art critics to become the new era of journalism, an association that persists to the present.
This consignment implied that documentary photographers were mere recorders, skilled technicians to be sure, but passive observers of the social scene but not wanted as the depiction of an artist. Documentary photographers accepted this characterization in order to burnish the perceived realism of their imagery.
In 1906, etiologist and photographer Edward S. Curtis set out across the United States to draw, photograph and otherwise document the lives of Native Americans that hadn’t yet been contacted by Western society.
Photographers like Edward S. Curtis have valued the art of documenting society as a way of reflecting the cultures of the early American lifestyles. Since then, the bounding of events which happened throughout history have been recorded through the lenses of moral choice, a question which over time has been issued in modern documentary photography.
Modern Documentary Photography
Two urban photographers, Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, took up the effort to explore the “wilderness” of the inner city and thereby establish documentary photography as a tool of social reform. Lewis Hine used his photographs as instruments in changing the Child Labor laws in the United States. This opened up a new generation of demoting world change in order for democracy to demure and relax the laws cared for by young, mostly migrant children.
A Variety of Jobs: Young boys working for Hickok Lumber Co. Burlington, Vermont.Worker on Empire State building, ‘Signaling the Hookman’ (1931)
Photographers now revive the impacts crisis have towards communities in order for the public to react in a debating and democratic way. Documentary photography is now a looking glass tool into the eyes of people fighting against these events in order for governments and large parties to make and ensure political change on that place, in order to cut back on any future deconstruct. For instance, Indian documentary photographer Abir Abdullah captured some of the victims following the floods in Bangladesh in early 2004.
A women in Bangladesh struggling to cope with the drastic changes she must deal with prior to the devastating flooding. Abdullah would of wanted world leaders to reconcile aid into Bangladesh to promote more devastation.
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.
Jean-François Leroy, the director and founder of Visa Pour l’Image.
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.
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.
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.
