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Essay Plan
Make a plan that lists what you are going to write about in each paragraph – essay structure = 2000-2500 words

• Essay question
• Opening quote
• Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?
• Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography and visual culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian. 
• Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
• Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
• Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced
• Bibliography: List all relevant sources used

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Essay introduction: convert draft introduction to final version.

• Think about an opening that will draw your reader in e.g. you can use an opening quote that sets the scene. Or think more philosophically about the nature of photography and its feeble relationship with reality.
• You should include in your introduction an outline of your intention of your study, e.g.
• What are you going to investigate?
• How does this area/ work interest you?
• What are you trying to prove/challenge, argument/ counter-argument?
• Whose work (artists/photographers) are you analysing and why?
• What historical or theoretical context is the work situated within?
• What links are there with your previous studies?
• What have you explored or experimented with so far in your photography project?
• How will your work develop.
• What camera skills, techniques or digital processes have you used, or going to experiment with?

Below is link to a blog post which will provide you with helpful guidelines if you are struggling to structure your essay or writing paragraphs.

ESSAY WRITING | 2024 Photography Blog (hautlieucreative.co.uk)

How have Todd Hido and Hiroshi Sugimoto used the medium of photography to record and present the intangible?

Introduction:

‘A photograph might be a fixed image but, socially speaking, photography does not keep still.’ David Campany, The Photographic (2004)

A Photograph Is Intangible

A photographs takes a fleeting moment – the natural atmosphere and emotion – and immortalise it in a still frame. Once taken, that moment can no longer be revisited: it is intangible. Intangibility is the absence of a physical body. While a print out can be held and felt, the subject of the image is now immaterial – a copy of a memory. Take for instance a tourist. He may photograph himself in front of a landmark as “indisputable evidence that the trip was made” (Sontag 1977:9). But once he moves to the next location he cannot return to that same spot, the moment has passed. It does not exist any longer outside the frame. All the same people will exist, the same landmark stands however the exact makeup of that image is only present within the bounds of the frame. Similarly Susan Sontag draws parallels between the shadows in Plato’s Cave and the photograph. The shadows are a believed truth based on bodiless projection used to show the deceptive nature of our own perception. Both these shadows and photographs mislead the viewer into believing they know the ‘full picture’. What’s seen is believed as fact. “The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist” (Sontag 1977:5).

Photographing the Intangible

How do you photograph something that doesn’t exist? There is a common consensus that the camera in one way or another killed the paranormal. If something exists there’s a picture so if you haven’t seen it, then it mustn’t exist. Tales of beasts in the woods and monsters in marshes have become increasingly difficult to believe without evidence. For early photographers like William Hope and William Mumler this was a matter of manipulation: using simple double exposure techniques to create ghastly effects. While its impossible to photograph the ghost of a loved one, printing a copy of them achieves a similar effect. Photographer Todd Hido captures feelings of isolation by alluding to humanity without ever showing it. The loneliness of his images utilises familiar imagery to trigger a personal response. Hiroshi Sugimoto turns something familiar into something unrecognisable through distortive blurs. “any single statement about photography is likely to fail on some level” (Campany 2004:10). This is because a photograph on its own has no context. It is an abstraction. Without context any interpretation is valid. In a collection, a narrative can be crafted however the ambiguity is what makes images resonate with the viewer. Any feelings associated with an image are entirely disembodied.

Pg 1: Historical/ contextual
Links to surrealism, the uncanny, Psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud.

Bibliography

Sontag, S. (1977) ‘In Plato’s cave’ in On Photography. London: Penguin Books.

Campany, D. (2004) ‘Thinking and not thinking photography’. Engage 14 (Winter) The Photographic: 7:12. London.

Freud, S. (1919). The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books

Freud_Uncanny.pdf

Surrealism Art Movement: A Window into the Mind

Surrealism and Psychoanalysis – Smarthistory

Surrealism and Psychoanalysis

One photographer’s surrealist impression of mental illness