Story of the book: Mitch Epstein went back to his home in Holyoke, Massachusetts to study his father’s failing real estate and retail furniture store businesses after a group of bored teenagers set fire to a building in 1999, the book was published in 2003.
Genre: This book’s genre is Photojournalism, presenting the demise of his father’s business through portraiture, landscapes and still life images.
Who is the photographer? Mitchell Epstein (born 1952) is an American photographer. He has created many books throughout his career, his first being published in 1997 and his most recent in 2021. By the mid-1970s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. Ten of the photographs he made during this period were in a 1977 group exhibition at Light Gallery in New York.
The book:
Book in hand: Quite a heavy book, paper’s quite smooth, smells like a book. Paper and ink: All of the images are printed on matte photo paper, no black and white images, all printed in paper . Format, size and orientation: The images are a mixture of landscape and portrait orientation, there are 295 pages, including the ones with written work. Cover: The cover is a plain fabric cover with an image wrap dust jacket which shows products that his father sells in his company Title: The book is about his father’s business, making the title Family Business literal. Narrative: He builds his narrative using a mixture of landscapes, still-life images, portraits and stills from interview footage with his dad, mum and staff members of the business. Design and layout: There are no images that go over both pages of the book, most images have a border around them, highlighting them more. Editing and sequencing: Very often, Epstein places an image of somewhere unclean next to an image of his father or another staff member, highlighting how put together the people of the business are. Images and text: Most images have text to describe them, and the stills of interview footage have text saying what was said during the interviews.
After photographing different products and the bakery, I had around 100 images, I, however, narrowed that down to 50 before importing them to Lightroom.
By the time I had narrowed them down again, there were around 16 that I liked and would like to use in my photobook.
Editing process; most of the images were slightly under exposed but that was easily fixed, apart from that, not much had to be done to the images.
Mitchell Epstein (born 1952) is an American photographer. His books include Vietnam: A Book of Changes (1997); Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award; Recreation: American Photographs 1973–1988 (2005); Mitch Epstein: Work (2006); American Power (2009); Berlin (2011); New York Arbor (2013); Rocks and Clouds (2018); Sunshine Hotel (2019); In India (2021); and Property Rights (2021). By the mid-1970s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. Ten of the photographs he made during this period were in a 1977 group exhibition at Light Gallery in New York. In 1999, Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father’s two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire. The resulting project assembled large-format photographs, video, archival materials, interviews and writing by Epstein, the book, Family Business, combined all of these elements.
His Work
As I can’t go over all of his projects, I will go through my personal favourites:
1. Family Business
In the summer of 1999 a couple of bored teenagers set fire to a disused building in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Epstein’s father was the owner and was ruined in the ensuing law suits. Mitch has recreated his father’s universe before it was destroyed in a series of images, both electronic and book-based.
I will be using this book as my main form of inspiration, Epstein discusses his father’s family business and what he does, using stills from interviews, archival material and more. I would like to involve all of these things but if not all then most as I myself am talking about a family business.
2. The City
Having lived and travelled beyond the United States for over a decade, Epstein began to spend more time in New York City. His 1999 series The City investigated the relationship between public and private life in New York.
I am not planning to use this project during my personal study but I like how he explores and photographs normal people in their everyday lives.
To start off my project, I would like to take images of the main bakehouse during non-working and working hours, showing the contrast between these two times of the day.
When? Non-working hours at the bakery are limited but between 1pm and 7pm there is usually nobody in the bakery, so in between these times will be best. As for working hours, I’m hoping to get a mixture of busy times and quiet times so I will need a chance to go in early in the morning (5-7 am) and later on in the morning (10 am-12 pm). I’m hoping to be able to show how the bakery works all through the day.
What? The main Vienna Bakery bakehouse, this is an area I have easy access to so this will be the first place I photograph.
Who? As much as possible, I will be aiming to take landscape-style images without anybody in the images, the main focus will be the building and the objects, not the people, within the building, however if some of the images have the workers in them, it won’t bother me.
Photoshoot 2:
As, this weekend, I will be working both days, I will take the chance to do a photoshoot of the staff in the shop, popular products in the shop and the shop.
When? Over a weekend. On Saturday, it’s a busier day so I won’t get much time to do a photoshoot but I will take the opportunity after 7:30 once the shop is set up to take images of different products coming into the shop at different times. On Sunday, not a lot of people will be expecting us to be open so it shouldn’t be too busy so this will be more of an opportunity to do a photoshoot of anything I don’t manage to capture on Saturday.
What? Objects-wise, I will be photographing different popular products that are made mainly in the shop but my main aim is to photograph products that people would recognise as Vienna Bakery products. I will also be photographing the actual bakery shop, whether that’s inside the shop or just the façade.
Who? Different staff members of the shop, I am hoping to photograph all the staff members in the shop, especially the more long-term and key workers i.e the bakers, the manager and staff members who may have been there for longer periods of time.
Photoshoot 3:
Even though it may not be an actual photoshoot, I am hoping to interview the director and maybe even the owner of the company, documenting the interview in a similar manner to Mitch Epstein in his book Family Business, picking stills from parts of the interview where we discuss specific topics about the business like why the creators chose the name or what makes the bakery different to others.
Interview questions:
What is the history of Vienna Bakery?
What made Bob Dodge decide to found Vienna?
How has the company kept going over all these years?
Are all the same traditional techniques used within the process of making products?
How did Covid-19 affect the company?
What is the difference, in your opinion, between Vienna and other bakeries in the island?
Michelle Sank was born in South Africa and currently resides in the UK. She is a documentary photographer whose work explores contemporary social issues. Her photographs have been exhibited and published extensively in the UK, Europe, Australia and Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.A. Her imagery is held in the permanent collections of Allan Servais, Brussels, Open Eye Gallery Archive, Liverpool, Société Jersiaise and Guernsey Museum, Channel Islands. She has undertaken numerous commissions for prominent galleries and magazines in Europe and the USA and her work has won awards in prestigious competitions including the National Portrait Gallery and the British Journal of Photography. Sank has four published books, The Water’s Edge – Women on the Waterfront;Becoming – a major monograph featuring her youth portraits taken over five years; The Submerged about the landscape and inhabitants of Aberystwyth, Wales and My.Self about the cultural identity amongst diverse young people in the Black Country. Sank’s work tends to be themed around certain groups of people for example, people who live in her neighbourhood like in her project Breathe or local workers in a certain region like in her project Insula. Most of the time, her images are environmental portraits, on the rare occasion that they aren’t, they are just of the surrounding area of the subject and not the person.
Her Work
As I can’t talk about all her photo projects, I will just mention some of my favourites by her
Insula
“Insula eschews a specific brief though the work responds to the wealth of nineteenth century portrait photographs within the Jersey Photographic Archive that it now joins as a powerful point of interpretation. The beguiling qualities of these new photographs call to mind the position that Lewis Baltz found for photographic series, ‘somewhere between the novel and film.’ As such, Sank’s photographs offer a visual poem to the island” – Gareth Syvret
I will be taking a lot of inspiration from this project as the style of photography is part of what I would like to do during my personal study. The main image style being portraits really says a lot, I think she wanted to show what the people of the island look like, more specifically in their places of work.
2. Sixteen
“What is it like to be sixteen years old in the UK now? This is the central thread running through the national project Sixteen where some of the UK’s foremost documentary portrait photographers collaborated in opening up conversations with young people about their hopes and fears, and who or what sustains them, giving prominence to voices rarely heard.” – Sank on the project
This project is one of my favourites as it focuses in on people who are around my age, showing their experiences of growing up in an isolated place, which I can relate to from living on an island for my entire life.
3. Bye-Bye Baby/Celestial Echoes
These images deal with the notion of developing adulthood within the milieu of British society today. In Bye-Bye Baby I am exploring the way young boys and girls interpret their understanding of masculinity and femininity. Having left the purity of their childhood worlds, they seem to take on the trappings of the grown ups they mimic and of the status quo as set out in popular culture and the media. Celestial Echoes continues with this theme looking at this phenomenon within older adolescent girls.
Image Analysis
In this image, the use of natural daylight is intentional, Sank is trying to show the subjects in the most natural way possible, whilst still having light on them, even the girl in the background of the image has light on her. Continuing on from this, even if the girl in the background is slightly blurred, you can still see her and her emotions. For me, I naturally get drawn, visually, to the girl in the background, I think the lighting in this part of the image is more visually appealing, I however do understand why the girl in the foreground of the image is there, she has a more “domineering” aura, it’s almost as if she had asked Sank to put her in the foreground of the image. Contextually, I think the two girls in the image could be sisters, I think the one in the background could often be overshadowed by the other one, making me believe that she could be the younger one, however their ways of dressing contrast this, the one in the foreground looks as though she could be the younger of the two based on her way of dressing, the one in the background is dressed much more conservatively, just a hoodie and jeans, whereas the girl in the foreground is dressed much more “out-there”, wearing a colourful skirt and top. Out of the two, the girl in the background seems to be more mature. About this project, Michelle Sank said “Having left the purity of their childhood worlds, they seem to take on the trappings of the grown ups they mimic and of the status quo as set out in popular culture and the media.” In my opinion, this image presents this ideology and statement very well.
For my personal study, I have chosen to create a project based off Vienna Bakery, but more specifically how it came into my family and how it’s been a large part of my life growing up. I have a lot of nostalgia surrounding the bakery, as I live next to the bakery, over the years, I have seen, employees come and go and there are some that have been there since before I was born, my old neighbour even used to work there. Most of my family members in Jersey have worked or work there, making it massive part of my childhood. I would like to focus in on this for this project because I’ve always been around the bakery growing up, my mum being a manager at the bakery and me, now, working in the shop, selling products, growing up in the Vienna Bakery community has definitely shaped me as a person, whether that’s by knowing the people working there over the years or just by more recent events like working as a sales assistant in the shop in the Central Market shop.
My plan is to talk to and take images of people who work at the Bakery now, more specifically the long-term and more important members of staff, take images of different popular products and take images of both premises (Rue des Pres and the Central Market) using photography styles inspired by photographers like Michelle Sank, Mitch Epstein, August Sander, and David Goldblatt. I hope to use multiple styles of photography, not just sticking to one, but doing a mix of still life, portraits and landscapes. I would also like to use a mixture of documentary style images and staged images, showing the bakery during normal working times as well as specifically styled images. Taking inspiration from Mitch Epstein’s project “Family Business”, I hope to interview my mum’s cousin and owner of Vienna Bakery David Dodge and his daughter and the recently appointed director of the company Sarah Dodge. I hope to present this project within a photo book with stills of the interviews and text, quoting what’s said during each interview.
Essential that students build on their prior knowledge and experience developed during the course.
Develop your written dissertation in the light of your chosen focus from the practical part of previous coursework and projects.
From all the coursework (Personal Investigation) that you have produced write an overview of what you learned so far (both as Yr 12 and Yr 13 student) and publish on the blog.
1. Describe which themes (Nostalgia, Anthropocene, Home, Feminity/ Masculinity/ Identity etc,) medium (photography, film), approaches (documentary, tableaux, conceptual), artists (incl contextual references to art history, movements and isms) and photographic skills, processes, techniques and methods (incl learning new software) inspired you the most and why.
2. Include examples of both previous and current experiments and imagery to illustrate your thinking.
Ideas for Personal Study
Within my personal study, my plan is to do something linking to Vienna Bakery, a family business. One technique of photography I would like to include TYPOLOGIES, using the workers from different parts of the bakery i.e the shop, production, night shift and dispatch. I would like to take them in the same deadpan style of Ed Ruscha, the only difference would be that instead of taking images of buildings, it would be people.
Another technique I would like to use is Environmental Portraiture, taking pictures of some of the main workers in their usual working area, i.e the foreman, production manager, the manager and even some others that may have been there for longer periods of time than others. I’m hoping to take these images in the style of Michelle Sank, an artist who actually did a project in Jersey at one point called Insula, using locals workers from local industries to create environmental portraits.
I am also hoping to use some ideas linking to the still life aspect of our HOME project, taking images of some of our most popular products whether that’s the cakes or the bread taking inspiration from Mary Ellen Bartley, I will be taking the images in her simplistic style as I want the focus to be on the product and not the background or anything else. Within this I will also be taking images of the bakery and shop, hoping to capture what they look like while people are working and while it is empty.
The final concept I will be using is photojournalistic documentary style images, taking inspiration from Mitch Epstein, more specifically his photobook “Family Business“. In the middle of the book, he has stills of an interview with his father about the business, I am hoping to do the same with the owner of Vienna Bakery, David Dodge, my cousin and maybe even his daughter, Sarah Dodge, who is now the director of the company.
Using Adobe Audition, I created soundscapes for our Elizabeth Castle film, one with sound of the sea and the other with sounds you may have heard in the bunkers during the German Occupation including a german radio.
I made these using the multitrack function, adding and editing different audio files to make the soundscape sound the best it can.
All the different audio files used are stored in the files section or the “bin”, then being dragged over to the mixer to create the soundscape.
To change audio volume and add effects to each sound file I used Parametric Equalizer (PEQ) and Convolution Reverb, I did this especially in the bunker soundscape to make it more eerie and echoed.
Archives are used to store knowledge, this can be in many formats, including paper documents, photographs, digital files, audio recordings, video recordings, and more. They make historical information accessible to the public. They serve several important functions, these being:
Preservation of material: Archives safeguard and protect valuable historical records so they can be accessible for generations to come. This includes different techniques to prevent deterioration, like proper storage etc.
Access: Archives make historical materials available to researchers, scholars, and the general public. This is typically provided through finding aids, catalogues, and, in some cases, digitization efforts that allow people to explore these resources online.
Research: Researchers, historians, genealogists, and students often rely on archives to access primary source materials for their studies and projects. They can contain a wealth of information, such as letters, diaries, photographs, official documents, etc.
Documentation of history: Archives play a crucial role in documenting the history of individuals, organizations, communities, and societies. They provide insight into the past and contribute to a better understanding of historical events and cultural heritage.
Archives may be specialized, focusing on a particular topic, period, or region. They can also vary in size, from small local collections to vast national or international archives.
Archives can take various forms, including:
Physical archives that can be found in libraries, museums, government buildings, universities, and other institutions and digital archives, as, over the past few years it has become difficult to visit archives, many archives have digitized their material for it to remain accessible.
The Société Jersiaise focuses on Jersey history and has everything about it ranging from what the Island looked like hundreds of years ago to peoples’ registration cards during the Occupation.
In summary, archives are important safeguarders of knowledge as they collect and make accessible historical records. They play a key role in advancing research, education and cultural and historical preservation.
The Société Jersiaise was founded in January 1873 by a small number of prominent Islanders who were interested in the study of the history, the language and the antiquities of Jersey. Membership grew quickly and the aims of the new society soon widened to include the publication of historical documents, the founding of a Museum, and the study of the Island’s natural history. The charity’s mission is “to produce and facilitate research, and to share that knowledge with the widest possible audience for the benefit of our island community.”
What we did
We began the day with a talk from the Chief Archivist Patrick Cahill and Assistant Archivist Rochelle Merhet about the importance of the archive and how it works. They told us that the Photographic Archive works to allow the island to see and understand its past with images that either depict exactly what happened at a certain point in history (photographs from the Nazi Occupation of the Island) as well as what is believed to have been there in the past (drawing of St Helier Harbour or drawings of the hermitage on the Elizabeth Castle breakwater as it looked in 555 AD).
