Essay Introduction Draft:

 ‘The duty thus falls upon the snapshooter not to just ‘save’ moments, but to ‘immortalise’ the people who they photograph’ (Bull 2009:92) 

The notion of family is a theme that is closely exhibited within photography from a multitude of perspectives, ranging from the demonstration of healthy relationships, to more negative storytelling through nostalgic cues, being that ‘a photograph can be a site for conflicting memories’ Kuhn (2003:397). Photographers like Yury Toroptsov and Philip Toledano use conceptual methods in their work in order to implicitly give away clues about the events of their childhood. These events are centred around the memory and loss of immediate family, as well as attempts to transform an emotive notion into singular images, for example a visual representation of an intangible feeling. My personal study focuses on the difficulties and struggles of growing up with a family member who, over time, deteriorates from gaining a mental illness, this being my brother who has Bipolar disorder.

I find an analysis of Toroptsov and Toledano to be most appropriate here as my work resonates with theirs in a relative manner, allowing me to convey the difficulties of grieving someone who is still alive yet not who they once were. A dominating factor, however, lies in the direct contrast between Toledano’s project of ‘When I Was Six’ against Toroptsov’s work entitled ‘Deleted Scene’. Toledano’s project inhabits a dark tone throughout the photobook where he depicts archival material from his older sister’s life, Claudia, before she died in childhood, and characterises these images through ethereal dream-like images in between to represent disorientated emotions. I found that his still-life images of childhood keepsakes of which belonged to Claudia were able to create tension within his storytelling which is what I aim to do in my own work in order to depict life before my brother fell unwell to enable my viewer to follow the narrative in a chronological way and learn at a vulnerable perspective. Additionally, I wanted to interpret his ethereal images, which can be seen to resemble fluidity of emotion, into a more domestic setting by using a relatively low exposure and low angles. Alternatively, Toroptsov expresses echoes of his father within his home town of Russia in the form of ambiguous images through the formal elements and zooming into the more discrete patterns in his surroundings. I wanted to manipulate this into my work by showing the echoes of my brother in the areas of which we once shared pleasant childhood memories, yet these are sites of nostalgia and grief now. This obscurity that Toroptsov employs will allow me to be subjective and add a morose tone to my images.

The idea ‘snapshots did not reinforce the positive messages of the images, but instead went ‘beyond’ the album to fill in what the photographs did not record: negative memories’ (Bull 2009:94) is something I am also inhabiting in my work through the use of archived images of my brother in childhood and creating digitised alterations to further pursue this idea of change from the person he was remembered as. I looked at the work of Carolle Benitah for this concept as one of my artist references as she redefines herself by using her own archived images from family albums in order to symbolise and hint at different events of her life.

Bibliography:

Bull, S. (2009), ‘Phototherapy: The Family Album and Beyond’ in Photography, London: Routledge 

Kuhn, A. ‘Remembrance: The Child I Never Was’ in Wells, L. (ed) (2003) The Photography Reader. London: Routledge