Documentary Photography
Some artists explore family using a documentary approach to storytelling, others construct or stage images that may reflect on their childhood, memories, or significant events drawing inspiration from family archives/ photo albums and often incorporating vernacular images into the narrative and presenting the work as a photobook.
Documentary is storytelling through a series of images of people involved in real events to provide a factual report on a particular subject. It also aims to show, in an informal way, the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Documentary photography can be looked through both a objectively and subjective lens. This means the photographer can use a camera to simply record objects, people and events, however a photographer can also document objects, people and events with some sort of purpose or theme in mind. This can be to tell people’s stories and explore their lifestyles or to document more unconventional events that are not covered in the same way by the news or media. Documentary photography that is approached subjectively I personally would like to investigate.
Artist Reference – Larry Sultan Vs Richard Billingham
These are artists who photograph their parents, either using straight photography or a snapshot aesthetics, in both an informal or formal setting.
Larry Sultan
He grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life.
Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies, which are myths that are constructed to deny the reality or idealise an aspect of family situations.
Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols.
In these series of photographs called ‘Pictures from home’ he attempted to preserve the memory of their home, his mother and his father. He clearly felt a lot of love and admired his parents, which is clear from the photographs he produces. When I researched Sultan’s work I came across a quote that supported this:
“These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows. I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures, the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.”
The photos taken of his parents show a lot about them as individuals and the family as a collective. It also says a lot about their personalities, interests and what Sultan as the photographer, felt it was important to capture on film. It tells us a lot about his parents as a married couple, who are clearly now retired and would be now spending a lot of time in each other’s company. You can also tell by his photographs that his parents are wealth and well to do, you can tell this by their clothing as they look sophisticated and stylish for their time and also their ‘show’ like house.
His mother, I assume is fond of the colour green as photographs are taken in many different rooms of their house and there is a clear theme of green. His father is presented as a man who has been in profession that required a suit and earned a fair amount of money as in varies photographs he is dressed in a suit or at least smartly dressed, he is also shown engaging in many activities in the photos as he now has time for some well earned leisure.
As I did more research into the meaning behind Larry Sultan’s photography I learnt that his father was an orphan and worked his way up to be a vice president within a company. His father was not happy he became an artist. He started taking images to rediscover his childhood and his family, which helped him and his family ‘bound together’
ANALYSIS
This image is called ‘My Mother Posing For Me’
His mother is leaning against the wall, facing the camera, making eye-contact. His father is in the bottom left of the image watching baseball on the television. His mother is clearly the main subject of this particular image, I feel this image is showing that although they are both living together and spend most of their time together they also have different interests and things that they want to do without the other. But they will also be in each others lives. The couple wear similar outfits throughout the series of photographs, which could be to do with the fashion of the time, but also can be seen as a strong connection between the couple. They are both wearing off white trousers and collared long shirt with a purple or lilac undertone. I find this element of “matching” rather charming as this often occurs with my grandparents which results in my grandmother forcing my grandfather to change. This reminds me of my grandparents, as they often match when going to family events or when they go out together. The image is quite a square shaped photograph and the image is well framed.
Sultan’s photos have a sense of warm despite their often cool colour palette because the people he is photographing are happy in their environment. They are photographed cooking, cleaning, swimming and just generally doing what they do everyday in their retirement; which is doing the things they love and enjoying each other’s company. Sultan’s father can be seen to be a hardworking and traditional man and his mother is shown as eccentric, stylish and glamorous and yet still very caring and warm.
Richard Billingham
He is an English photographer, artist, film maker and art teacher. His work has mostly concerned his family, the place he grew up in the West Midlands, but also landscapes elsewhere.
He is best known for Ray’s A Laugh which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily tattooed mother, Liz. I personally, looked through this book, I found it interesting to learn about a family and their story through images instead of through written research. Within the photobook there are varies photos of where he lives, the first image you see inside the book is of the area he lives in.
As you get further into the book you see varies images of the couple arguing or physically fighting. The images appear to show the mother Liz acting aggressively, while the father has a look of almost fear on his face. There are also images of his dad falling over or sat next to a toilet, where he had previously been sick into. This shows how his father was an extreme alcoholic as the images were taken as if this was the norm in their household. There are images of both his mother and his father sat on the couch eating, what looks like their dinner. Both have spilt food down their clothes and round their mouth. This is a different sight to what we seen in Sultan’s photography.
His book contains a quote by Robert Frank about his book saying ‘Flash into the face of Mom and Dad. A british family-album so cool that i can see and hear what goes on between the frames. No room for judgement or morality… Reality and no pretence. Richard Billingham is the son and he knows- his family.’
Richard Billingham describes the book to be about ‘my close family. My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic. He doesn’t like going outside and mostly drinks homebrew. My mother Elizabeth hardly drinks but she does smoke a lot. She likes pets and things that are decorative. They married in 1070 and i was born soon after. My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11 but is now back with Ray and Liz again. Recently he became a father. Ray says Jason is unruly. Jason says Ray’s a laugh but doesnt want to be like him.’
I feel like it is a chronicle of everything that hurts him. He admits that his family originally lived in a terraced house, but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation sold the house. After this they moved into a council tower block and this is where Ray sat and drunk all day, everyday. I think it’s endearing that Richard felt comfortable, showing both his parents at probably their worse and shine a light on how they were living for multiple years. It is not the family life we as a society are used to seeing, not because this doesn’t happen but we are not drawn attention to it. So, it shocked me that he decided to draw our attention to this and clearly doesn’t feel hate or angry towards his family as he describes them as ‘close’.
ANALYSIS:
This is an image of Richard’s dad who is standing on the right and Richard’s brother standing on the left. I found this fascinating as this is a father and son stood side by side. Normally you would be able to see some resemblance between father and son, which I find hard to recognise. His father is extremely skinny and old looking which, could be partly because of the amount of alcohol he consumes daily. It almost can be seen as a before and after image from before Ray became an alcoholic and was healthy. Also a son feeling some kind of aspiration to be alike his father is the social norm. However, this image has a different meaning as Jason admits that Ray, his dad is a laugh but he doesn’t want to be anything like him, which is not a common response you would get when taking about your father.
Comparison:
By Larry Sultan
By Richard Billingham
Both these photographs are of a couple eating a meal, they are both doing the same activity but individually. In the first photograph they are both reading a newspaper, while sitting at a table. In the second photograph I assume they are both watching television or simply sitting on the couch. So, both images are of the same thing, however they both have different meanings and show completely different things.
In the first image they are clearly middle/upper class people, who take pride in their appearance, they will be the type of couple who religiously have dinner at the table as a formal meal every night and will eat home cooked meals for every meal. This is completely different to the second image as they clearly don’t take as much pride in the way they look as they have spilt food on their clothes and round their mouth, with cats sat next to them while they eat, which is not so hygienic.
Both photographers are trying to portray a different style of life, both keeping to the theme of family. Comparing these two artists show that every family is different in their own unique ways and all families contrast with the ways they do things.
Photo-Assignment
“Make one environmental portrait using a family member/members”
I took this image of my three younger cousins, who are from Scotland, they are all brothers and are fairly similar in age. I asked the boys to all wear the same t-shirt and shorts but in different colours, this was to represent the fact they are very similar in many aspects and all have the same view on things as they were all brought up in the same piece by the same parents. However, the different colours show the differences in their personalities, their interests and hobbies. I chose to photograph the image by the sea as they all enjoy the waves whenever they arrive in Jersey and spend most of their time down at St. Ouens, where I conducted this shoot. I decided not take the image in a house because they haven’t grown up in a specific household, this would then mean it would not be sentimental like it would have been for these two artists I have studied. The photograph shows how close they are to each other as a family, they are all laughing and smiling with one another, which is a normal thing to see in their household. The overall theme of this photo is similarity between family members but also that they are all slightly different in their own unique way. The 3 brothers have a strong connection and I feel it was shown in the image. This is similar to the two artists I have conducted research on as they photographed to show some sort of connection between family members, this is what inspired my image. I also feel like there was a connection between the 3 boys and the camera as me and my cousins are close and have a strong bond with one another, which I feel was portrayed through this image. We also scattered our granddad’s ashes there when he pasted away, which makes St. Ouens a very special place for us as a family. The smiles on their make the image bright and happy, which is how our granddad made us feel and still makes us feel in his memory.