Part 2 - Coursework

For this exercise, I have chosen a typology that I will then resume in Assignment two. 

On Flickr, I searched for the keyword "feet", and, of course, I found hundreds, probably thousands of photos with this subject.

I then extracted 5 grids of 16 photos, which I present below.

I stopped to look at the photos both one by one and as a whole, and I made some reflections.

Considering that what I have selected is a typology associated with the word "feet", it can be clearly seen what occurs most during these 80 photos. 

First of all, the association of ideas between the word "feet" and the feet of a human being: only in 4 cases out of 80 the photos do not contain feet but concepts that are indirectly linked to the feet, such as image 13, which portrays the footprints of a bird, or image 23, which depicts three dolls sitting with their feet facing toward the camera. 

I then noticed that most of the subjects are bare feet, or in any case without shoes, and female (you can see that they are female precisely because the use of female socks and the anatomy do not deceive). This recurrence may suggest that the classic male photographer / female model pattern is more common and that this pattern remains in place even when photographing parts of a body. 

I also did a search on Adobe Stock and the trend is confirmed. 

Furthermore, only in rare cases is there the simultaneous presence of male and female feet (which would suggest the uncomfortable theme of sexuality), while images that bring together infant and adult feet together (which would suggest the much more politically correct theme of family and paternity/maternity) are more frequent. 

In no case, at least of those I have found, is there an image that brings together adult and same-sex feet. All this tells us that the preponderant visual culture is sclerotized on schemes reduced to canonical ones, which are intrinsically associated with positive messages. Everything else is either avoided or considered not politically correct, as stock imaging sites are a catchment area for those who work in marketing and advertising. 

In the textbook, on page 40, reference is made to what Joackim Schmid stated:

".... an artist-curator collecting outside the constriction and bias of the institution, Schmid paved the way for a new generation similarly interested in exploring the role of photography as ‘evidence’ of broader social impulses....".

This is a vast and very articulated theme, which I do not feel like exhausting in a few lines and which I do not feel competent to deal with. 

However, I have again confirmed that the psychological/visual process of the viewer, when the image contains a part of the whole, unconsciously leads to completing through the imagination of the whole, and this process is conditioned by culture, social conventions and a common sense of what is positive and what is negative. This psychological process is often induced by images, which, as such, have well-defined and always reduced boundaries, compared to the boundaries of our imagination. This is the theme that I will return to in Assignment 2.

Tacita Charlotte Dean 

Floh and the schratced image

Tacita Dean is a British artist, born in 1965.

Although her artistic production is mainly film-oriented, Dean dedicated herself also to photography and painting. 

In 2001 Dean produced "FLOH" (a German word meaning "FLEA", from the flea market), a photo book of 163 photos, all recovered from flea markets in the United States and Europe. 

Contrary to other works by the same author, FLOH is composed only of photographs and has no texts. 

Indeed Tacita Dean, about this work, stated:

".... I do not want to give these images explanations, descriptions by the finder about how and where they were found, or guesses as to what stories they might or might not tell. I want them to keep the silence of the flea market, the silence they had when I found them, the silence of the lost object ..... "

("Aside" text, written on the occasion of the Paris exhibition of 2003).

In a way, this consideration is the same as I did on the occasion of my Assignment 2, where I produced a photobook titled "HALF". The title is the only text that can inspire a meaning, and that can serve as a trigger for reasoning made by the viewer. However, it does not condition its interpretation, in particular for the found photos, which I collected from the internet.

A distinctive feature of FLOH is that the work consists entirely of analogue photos collected from flea markets, which have then been carefully digitized. 

With this method, in fact, Dean has brought images of previous generations into the current one, through digitization. This process also has an impact on the identity of each image and projects it into a volatile, whirling world of mass use. 

It is a bit like the photo was published in a newspaper, with the difference that the world wide web and digital publishing are much more distributable. It is therefore a projection from the private to the public, through digitization by someone who is neither the author nor the subject, so it has nothing to do with these photos.

The theme of interpretation, therefore, is decisive for the presence or not of any text by the author/editor/collector Dean, who, correctly, in my opinion, does not intervene and lets the images speak for what they can, because they were created by others.

Tacita Charlotte Dean, from FLOH, 2001

In the image above you can see a group of 23 people. 

They are probably army cadets and the objective characteristics are that they are men and women, that almost all of them are smiling, that they are arranged in three rows and that there are the faces of two women who have been damaged by scratches. 

The reactions to this apparently ordinary image of no great significance, if not for the protagonists themselves, can be manifold and can reach anguish due to those expressly damaged faces. 

The damage made ex-post, on the printed photo, forces the viewer to look at the photograph not for the reason for which it was made, but for the message sent by scratched faces. 

Mark Godfrey, in "Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean's Floh" (2005, October Magazine, Ltd & MIT) states on page 110: 

".... Could these latter marks act like a punctum, then? Could a punctum be something not in the photograph but something on it? The punctum, Barthes wrote,“ rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. " 

 

Even if the scratches were made ex-post, and therefore are not part of the original photo and probably were not made by the author of the photo, I agree with the juxtaposition made by Mark Godfrey. This "punctum" in fact affects us and conditions in a decisive measure the meaning that we will give to the image and all the emotional process that we will have in elaborating other meanings. 

This photograph then (which probably had been printed in several copies), becomes unique and is no longer part of the copies.

What does FLOH represent as an opera and for photography? In my opinion, FLOH represents a very peculiar way of dealing with analogue photography, when compared with other works by authors who have dedicated themselves to found photography. 

The approach of many authors is aimed at preserving as much as possible the allure of the analogue photo, with all its flaws and the limitations of the technology of another era.  

It is also aimed at building / confirming a thematic order and structure. It is therefore the rigorous preservation of memory, in all its forms. 

For Tacita Dean, on the other hand, in FLOH and in other minor recovery works, digitization is a recovery but also a manipulation in order to restore an image, through today's technology. Furthermore, the images are presented in a non-thematically structured, almost chaotic form and in any case not connected to each other. It is not a recovery of memory, but a reconstruction of another or more memories.

Mark Godfrey states: 

"..... With Floh's expansive and chaotic vision of analogic photography, digitalization's contrasting ambition to present only the chosen and selected is brought into focus. Whereas for Kraucaer, photography destroyed the possibility of memory and knowledge, for Dean, facing digitalization, analogic photography offers a messy and necessary kind of memory...... " 

(Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean's Floh" (2005, October Magazine, Ltd & MIT), page 114).

My father passed away on 11 November 2021. 

My mother decided to leave the family home, which was too big and depressing for her, and settled in an apartment. 

The family home, in which I spent all my youth, has remained untouched, with all its furniture, paintings, knick-knacks. It has become an empty place, full of memories. 

This exercise coincided with my periodic visit to the house, where, inside an old trunk in the attic, I found the old family photo albums. I also found the first album (which dates back to 1949) in which my mom inserted the first photos of her and my father, as they were engaged. 

All the photos are taken by my maternal uncle Alberto, except on the first page, where there is a studio portrait of my mom, with a dedication to my dad.

The following is an excerpt from this album.

My experience and my reflections on this "found album" begin when I opened the trunk in the attic. 

Despite being a family album, from the beginning of my family, I had never seen it. For me, therefore, it was an emotional journey of remembrance that I could not have and the discovery of something strictly familiar. 

I remember that chapter of "Camera Lucida" by Roland Barthes, where the author describes all the thoughts, feelings and semantic speculations in front of his mother's photos:

 "...With regard to many of these photographs, it was History which separated me from them. Is History not simply that time when we were not born? I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her. There is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently........" 

(Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage Books, London, chapter 26, page 64).

However, this is not the theme of the exercise and therefore, beyond the emotional involvement, I try to analyze this album and how the photos of that era were made, compared with the culture of the family album, provided that there is one, in the digital age.

First of all, the family photo album.

Searching google with the phrase "the family photo album in the digital age", from the large number of results obtained it is easy to deduce that this topic is very much felt and debated. 

Everyone agrees that, coinciding with the advent of digital image technology, the progressive disappearance of the family album begun. To tell the truth, there is an "in-between" period that formed the bridge between the analogue and the digital age, that of the slides. 

It is with the progressive expansion of the slides that the printed family albums "lost weight", to the advantage of plastic containers to be used as fuel for endless evenings of projection within family and friends.  

The family album, the result of an obligatory ritual in the families of our generation, had the characteristic of being in a single copy, and of containing photographs that, over time, would have deteriorated physically, losing contrast, fading in colors or turning to unlikely shades. 

The old photos were old even because they were the same age as the subjects taken and with these subjects they aged. 

The negatives, which we could equate to the recorded files of today's technology, were often lost or ruined by neglect, as if they were no longer significant, once they had done their job to allow printing. 

At this point, the comparison between the family album in the analog age and the corresponding album in the digital age is definitely complicated by the fact that one should compare something that exists physically, that has a dimension and a weight, that is consumed. and grows old with us, with something virtual that does not have a physical location among the furniture in the house or in the library, nor a structure, nor an age.

However, it can disappear.

From the point of view of the content, what kind of photos are there in the family album, what were the aesthetic characteristics, the social and communication conventions that were practised at the time of the printed photo, compared with those of the digital age? 

In his essay "Curating the Photograpic Image in Networked Culture", Andrew Dewdney states: 

"...With computing the digital image makes photography ubiquitous and more clearly automated and it is this that presents new questions of photography's authorship and cultural authority for those to whom its singularity remains a central principle. of photography into general computing and the increasing aggregation of analogue photography in archives, collections, exhibitions and their organizational systems represents a new moment of an older problem of the identity of photography..... " 

(The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (Comedia) (p.95). Taylor and Francis. Kindle edition).

Dewdney poses the problem of the loss of uniqueness, of identity and authorship in a photograph that is in potentially infinite and ubiquitous copies. In family photography, the problem is in the ownership of memory.

Memory for whom?

".....the family album, with its holiday snaps – remits us to the same condition as the replicants and their desire to construct a past in which to ground themselves and build an identity.  This is just one of the areas in which we can see photography as being grounded in memory, and perhaps once again we can affirm this as an act of justice to photography’s origins, because memory, much more than aesthetics, has been the dominant narrative thread in the history of photography as we know it...." 

(Fontcuberta, Joan. Pandora's Camera: Photogr@phy After Photography . MACK. Kindle Edition). 

Family photography should have a clear place and ownership in the sphere of memory, in documenting a family life.

However, similarly to other types of photography, the family one, once brought into the virtual and network dimension, has changed its function: it has become the information to be distributed (ubiquitous, as Dewdney states), no longer the testimony within the family sphere, of an intimate memory. 

".....At the very pinnacle of that ubiquity, the image establishes new rules with regard to the real. Taking a picture nowadays is not so much the recording of an event as a substantial part of the event itself: event and photographic record fuse. Applying the indexical interpretation, we used to think that some kind of referent was embedded in the photograph, but now we have to think the contrary: something of the photograph is embedded in the referent...." 

(Fontcuberta, Joan. Pandora's Camera: Photogr@phy After Photography . MACK. Kindle Edition) 

The recipients of the images have also changed: on the first page of the photo album, my mother's handwritten dedication is for my father. Dad is the recipient of the album, and one day, when he will be married to my mom, the album will be dedicated to them and their family, to their memory and for their family. It is the sublimation of "We were there".

Today, in a selfie made with a mobile phone, dad and mom would continue to be the subjects of the photograph, but the recipients would be all those of their "network". The memory would be shared with "everybody of interest", in order to inform on "We are there".

"In short, photographs are no longer taken to preserve a memory, or to be kept. They are more like exclamations of vitality, extensions of our experiences that are transmitted, shared and then disappear, mentally and/or physically..". (Fontcuberta, Joan. Pandora's Camera: Photogr@phy After Photography . MACK. Kindle Edition).