To what extend have Justine Kurland and Jeff Wall explored narrative in their work?

Introduction:

I am exploring different narratives through my work, by pulling inspiration from Justine Kurland’s themes of youth and identity, and Jeff Wall’s compositional elements, so that I am able to not only create different narratives, but also to make my photographs visually pleasing to the viewers eye. A narrative is a story that you can tell, or present and the narrative for my work is my own personal youth and identity, as well as presenting a range of other identities that range from more feminine to more masculine. I am using experiences from my youth and my girlhood to create different narratives in all my photographs, by taking images of activities I used to, or still do. However, I am also exploring similar activities to the ones Justine Kurland used in her ‘Girl Pictures’ book, so that I can not only explore and present my identity by using different narratives, but so I can also display a range of other identities as well.

‘If you wanted a place in the narrative, you had to imagine yourself inside of it.’

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Tableaux photography is a staged photograph in which characters are arranged for picturesque or dramatic effect in a constructed environment, but the photographs appear to be candid photographs, as the characters appear absorbed and completely unaware of the viewer. This conveys a pictorial narrative through a single image. Tableaux photography originated from Pictorialism, which was a union of photographers that fought to separate photography as an art form from photography used towards various scientific and documentary purposes, as they focused on the beauty of subject matter and the perfection of composition rather than the documentation of the world as it is. Photography was viewed as a Scientific experiment by many, because photography originated from Scientists, such as Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce. The Daguerreotype was created in 1839 from many Scientific experiments made from these two Scientists and it created photographs on silver-plated copper sheets using light and chemicals, such as mercury vapour to create these photographs. From the 1800’s and onwards photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make images that resembled paintings, especially Allegorical paintings. Allegorical paintings communicate deeper moral, social, religious, political or spiritual meanings, such as life, death, love, virtue, justice, charity, greed, envy and more. Allegorical paintings tend to communicate these messages by using symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation, such as angels, or wings. In order to create images that resembled paintings they had to manipulate images in the darkroom, scratching and marking their prints to imitate the texture of a canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery based on allegorical and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes.

Julia Margaret Cameron was a photographer in the Victorian era, who supported the Pictorialism movement and was considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She was born on 11th June 1815 and died on 26th January 1879. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorians and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity and literature. She mainly used siblings as her models, including her own sisters, and her daughters, so that they would all look very similar in her photographs. She created allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters and contemporary artists. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks and limp poses and soft lighting. Pre-Raphaelite would urge artists to “go to nature,” as they believed in an art of serious subjects treated with maximum realism. Their principal themes were initially religious, but they also used subjects from literature and poetry, particularly those dealing with love and death, very similarly to Cameron’s work. Cameron was contentious in her own time and her photographs were unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus.

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‘At least my narratives were honest about what they were: fantasies of attachment and belonging that sharply diverged from the hardships experienced by so many actual teenage runaways.’

‘They were trying on a version of themselves that the world has thus far shown them was “boy”.’

‘If you wanted a place in the narrative, you had to imagine yourself inside of it.’

‘They were Pre-Raphaelite…’