Assignment Six

Assignment Six

 Pre-assessment tutorial

During the video call I had with my tutor on Assignment 5, we also talked about Assignment 6.

We agreed that it would be appropriate to produce a document in which, retracing my entire training path, I would summarize my experience and my reflections.

 

Reflections

This unit has urged me on the role of photography in digital culture and has stimulated me to question which photographer I want to be and to what extent I want the digital culture to be part of my photo works.

The reflection on the relationship between real and virtual and how this defines the new role of photography has connected, like a red thread, all the themes I have faced during these months.

With the advent of digital, enormous possibilities have been created to manipulate the image collected from reality and to distribute the outcome.

The diaspora between what reaches the sensitive support through the photographic lens and the final visual work has extended to the point that, by now, the camera and the shooting process have become part of a larger and more multidisciplinary creative process. They have been assimilated by a narrative with broader semantics and, therefore, the role of the camera is no longer central and can be redefined in this context.

Aware of not having fully understood, until then, the extent of this revolution, I began to delve into an unexpected paradox: many practices that seem to have arisen from the advent of the digital age had corresponding analogues since 1850.

Authors such as Henry Peach Robinson (on whom I did a research) and Oscar Rejlander, masterfully used photomontage techniques, pushing the tools and technologies of that period to the limit.

Therefore, the manipulation of a photographic image is not a phenomenon solely linked to the birth of digital photography: it has been possible since day one.

It is the very nature of the image created through the photographic shot that allows it to be modified, and this makes the relationship between reality and the final image increasingly indirect, so much so that we can speak of a "constructed image" and not of " taken image".

I have repeatedly (and uncomfortably) wondered if the existence of the camera, which had continuous technological evolution but whose structure has remained substantially the same since its birth (the set of lenses that make the rays of light converge on a sensitive surface), could be jeopardized by the advent of digital culture. I had several answers from the didactic material, the ideas, the reading of the authors, the researches, from the exercises and from the assignments that I completed during this unit. In fact, new multidisciplinary artistic currents have been born that have configured different roles for the photographic tool, sometimes replacing it with other tools and techniques.

However, camera and photography have a (redefined) future within a digital culture, which must be embraced in all its forms of expression.

I am convinced that the fixed image retains its place in art and culture and that it will keep it in the future as well as the pictorial image. In my opinion, still and moving images are not alternatives to each other, but they are different forms of expression that the authors can use and mix in any combination.

Personally, I preferred, while working on this unit, not to create videos. I do not reject the moving image a priori, but I prefer to stay focused on the still image.

Nevertheless, in Assignments 4 and 5, I was inspired by some authors and I used some photo-editing techniques to build a paradox: movement in the still image.

 

Study path

Starting from reading “Each Wild Idea", by Geoffrey Batchen, I made a reflection post on "Is there a relationship between the birth of computing and digital photography?" and I wondered about "The reversal of roles between nature and photography and me as a photographer.”.

I gained experience with the technique of layers in “My personal discovery of layering and some reflections.”, and I made further reflections on “Reading Pandora's Camera by Joan Fontcuberta.”.

In Part 1- Project 1 (The origins of photomontage, The layered Images) it was interesting to refer to late 19th century authors who, through more than a century of photography, applied layering for the same purpose of today.

I realized that the Photoshop layer technique is inspired by techniques used since the second half of the 1800s, overlapping different negatives and blending the various “layers” into a single image. Even today, however, as before the digital age, painstaking finishing work is required to make the image as natural as possible.

Exercising on layer techniques was my first practical experience (Exercise 1.1) with the Photoshop tool, and, despite the initial difficulties, I acquired it easily, thanks also to my school background.

Even if my reflections on my personal photographic orientation and what type of photographer I want to be in the future are recurrent, at this stage I decided to fully employ this technique and I started the development of those creative ideas that I then fully mastered in assignment 4 and 5.

In Part One - Project 2 (Through a digital lens) I relived my personal experience of the transition from analog to digital through other authors.

I investigated the initiative by recent practitioners such as Jeff Wall and Wendy McMurdo when they use a digital montage to refer back to the narrative traditions of tableaux painting and also to question the status of the photographic image as a mere document.

I built my exercise 1.2 by photographically replicating Edouard Manet's watercolor decorated letter of 1880.

Thanks to a research on Hanna Hoch and the Berlin Dada movement I realized that “The found image in photomontage”, the theme of Part 1 - Project 3, is a technique that has been used a lot, even in the past, by those who wanted to send a political message with their works, as opposed to artistic currents considered formal and non-proletarian-enough, such as Cubism.

From the actual "copy and paste" of pieces of paper, I entered the digital "copy and paste" of Part 1 - Project 4 (Photomontage in the age of the internet).

It is a creative process in which scissors, glue and paper, but also brush and camera, are replaced by scans of other images, digital storage re-use and editing.

In the post "The political strength of symbols and artworks.", I investigated artists such as Peter Kennard and the fact that the symbolic and political message of his works was so effective that it came out of the socio-political context of his country of origin and influenced movements of political claim like Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution.

In Assignment One, I juxtaposed traditional and digital copy and paste techniques, and I realized that the tools and techniques of expression are different, but the creative process is not.

Although this is not the kind of visual art that fascinates me, I believe that this experience was useful for me to broaden my creative horizons and to provide me with ideas for a less “extreme” use of the photographic tool.

In Part Two (The archive and the found image in digital culture) I confronted myself with the importance of the found-image in contemporary photographic culture.

Authors such as Oliver Laric, on whom I wrote a post, and Tacita Charlotte Dean, whom I chose for exercise 2.2, are just some of the many who have chosen not to produce their own photographic images, but to collect (or appropriate) from others and recontextualize, decontextualize, modify, compose and break them down in order to create other works.

I realized that these authors have developed “derivative” works that have an irreplaceable place in the artistic/visual panorama. Furthermore, I am aware that the enormous availability of images online has stimulated those artists who have understood and grasped the potential of the found image as an artistic creation tool.

In this context, the family album (on which I developed exercise 2.3) is significant as an icon of memory, self and identity. It could be appropriated by others, in order to build works with another memory and another identity.

Furthermore, reading a provocative book like “The Fury of Images” by Joan Fontcuberta stimulated me and I wrote some reflections on the chapters “Archive Noises” and “Fugitive Identities”.

The "HALF" project, that I developed in Assignment 2, is my personal stance on the role of "found images" in my creative process.

I deliberately demoted the found images from a role of inspiration to a role of didactic comparison of my project idea.

I then re-selected some images from my photographic archive, detaching them from their original context. I restructured them into one typology and another context to, in the end, create a new photographic work.

The feedback from my Tutor helped me to better focus on the final result. I am happy to have done this work as a “curator of myself”. I think I will repeat this experience in the future.

Part Three contains, in the apparent provocation of the title (We are all photographers now), the current reality of photography and the potential distortion of the figure of the photographer in the digital age.

Actually, the massification of the production and circulation of images has deeply changed the nature of some professions (such as that of photojournalists) but it has also stimulated the practitioner to leave his world, no longer exclusive, of producing reality-bonded images and "reinvent himself", to enter a world of total creativity, without apparent limits of narrative and imagination.

In the post “Stay away from postcard photos!” I reflected on Annebella Pollen's article about clichè images.

I reflected in particular on Ritchin's readings (I wrote a post on "After Reading Toward a Hyperphotography", analyzed "Unmasking Photo Opportunities, Cubistically" in Exercise 3.1, and wrote a post “Imagine your own renaissance” on "Making Pictures Matter" from the Ritchin’s book "Bending The Frame".

In Assignment Three I chose to focus on technological evolution inducing such profound and extensive changes in various fields, including the professional one, where practitioners are forced to change part of their working methods or even face completely new ones.

Above all, the creative process is profoundly modified and opens up to a new relationship between the “real” and the “constructed”, which, according to my conclusions, could create numerous opportunities for today's professional photographer.

Ritchin's book "After photography" was the best guide and I mentioned it a lot.

I perceived Part Four (Digital Identities) as a reversal of the point of view.

In the previous parts of the textbook, the focus was on the changes induced by the advent of the digital age on the subject-photographer and his creative process.

In Part Four, the focus is on the photographed subject, on identity and how, in the digital world, they become part of new creative and communicative processes.

Once again the atavistic and unsolved conflict emerges between what is real and what is constructed, between what is true and what is constructed to be declared true.

Identity is questioned, manipulated, modified, made polymorphic, double, multiple and autonomously performing.

Exactly as it happens in social networks.

These are themes to which I reacted with some posts: “The photographed myself”, “Photography is functional to selfie”, “Cloning in the work of two artists”, “Pancalism and reality”, the research “The double in photography” and some exercises.

In Assignment Four, entitled “Before It All Fades Away”, I chose to use the digital post-editing techniques of layering and cloning.

I started from the reality of a familiar place (the rooms, the objects) and the story of a loved one and his identity, whose memory fades with the passage of time and the progressive alienation of the rooms in which he lived.

I applied modern visual techniques to classic and dated contexts, to build a narrative in a sequence that performs within every single image.

During the rework I created a post on Thomas Struth, an author suggested by my Tutor. I then completed research on Duane Michals, in whose work the theme of life and death and the memory/return of loved ones is central. The photographic works of the latter helped me to better focus the photographic series of assignment 5, in particular with regard to ghosting and sequences.

I used the same photographic post-editing technique of Assignment 4 in Assignment 5: however, I worked on two series that differ in context, narrative and references.

During the rework of these two last assignments, I faced and developed, from different points of view, the theme of the double and the multiple.  So I did further research on other authors, on which I wrote two posts: “The staging of the double and the multiple: some authors” and “Anthony Goicolea: the manipulation of identity”.

These works are also relevant to the theme that accompanied me during this unit, from the very first chapter: the relationship between real and virtual in digital visual culture and my personal position towards the moving image as well. In fact, I made sets of still images that portray the subject in different positions: it is a “movement in the image” versus a “moving image”. 

Conclusion

When I started studying this unit, I didn't know what to expect.

Now I am fully aware that the advent of the digital age in photography not only had a technological implication.

It made it possible to free new, multidisciplinary forms of artistic expression and communication, which have in fact changed the role of photography in the world of visual art.

I am aware that the roots of this evolution arise from the origin of analogue photography, and that many authors have exploited the ability of the photographic medium to stop time and space in a single image, making the first photomontage experiences and, in fact, photographing what is not visible, or rather, what is not real.

The role of the photographic medium, upon entering the digital world and the web, was undoubtedly questioned.

However, despite the introduction of new digital features (which also allow you to record the moving image or create images without recording them), the role of the camera (and therefore of the photographer) has been better (re)defined and I believe that today we can to affirm that, in the total identity crisis of everything that is real in the world, photography had not the same crisis and, on the contrary, reached the full awareness of being an essential component of visual art.