MoMA Photography MOOC Assessment Stezacker Surfing the Ocean of Images
Saturday, 16 Jun 2018, 08:16
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Saturday, 16 Jun 2018, 09:39
1. Describe which module resonated with you the most and why. What are some of the
issues, ideas, or themes that particularly interested you, and how did they
change or complicate your understanding of photography? Please connect your
argument to specific artists and images addressed in your selected module.
I’m choosing Module 6 because it is in some ways a summation of my
experience of the whole collection. Elcott (2015:318) summarises a world where
innovative images are those which expose a world that has already turned into a
simulacrum of itself –presented to us as a sea of photographic images, it must
be treated and known as a photographic object in itself rather than a means to
know a world beyond it, the ‘veridical trace of reality’. Elcott underlines
this by seeing photographs as autonomous from the world as a ‘world of its
own’.
Hence we have to read photographs in the light of their own manufacture,
through all of the processes by which they are ‘made’. As Slifkin (2015:192)
makes clear, this was always so in that view-finding, focusing and editing a
photograph has always been the source of both the photograph as art, in Ansel
Adams, or as a documentary manipulation of reality, in Atget. However,
contemporary photographers utilise more radical manipulations, ‘created daily
by the mass media’ including collage or ‘cut-and-paste, or through
fragmentation and selection from the normative processes of taking an image (as
in camera-less images in which objects are exposed directly to light-sensitive
photographic film (as in Heinecken’s Are
You Rea, 1964-8) or even when found .jpeg images are enlarged beyond their
ability to show or access the illusion of an apparently undistorted world (as
in Ruff’s jpeg msh01,2004).
Horvitz’s images begin from a photograph of a man role-playing (posing)
as ‘depressed’ but by inviting normative internet processes through which
images get re-used, and otherwise metamorphosed by context or more actively
‘edited’ in scale, colouration, orientation or admixture of other imagery, for
instance, so that it does not just circulate but, as Horvitz calls it
‘propagates’. Such strategies expose the ‘deception’ or ‘artfulness’ (in its
negative sense of duplicity) at the base of all photography – perhaps even the
family snap, where various means are given to ‘make’ a photograph pleasing to
others or self.
More intriguing still are Kruithof’s inkjet prints of empty, other than
for the remnant of photo-mounting stickers, of photographs of pages of an old
photograph album. Mounted under layers
of coloured glass everyday phenomena such as the reflection of viewers on their
surface emphasise that images are open to contextual accidents that might
determine their interpretation differently each time they are seen. Moreover,
bearing the flash-bursts that expose they are photographs themselves, the
associations of albums with past events such as travelling abroad or on
holiday, allows these burst, which eliminate space to represent absences or
gaps in memory that photograph albums always to some extent inspire and more
so, in the context of their use by someone with an early dementia.
Proliferation when used to emphasise the role of art as the source of a
world experienced iun endless reproductive copies can make art itself that
comments on what art might, in fact, be, as in Gaenssler’s Bauhaus Staircase,2015. Here a ‘real’ staircase emulating Bauhaus
design leads to a fragmented set of reproduced collages using a reproduction of
an ‘original’ Bauhaus staircase in Dessau cut-and-paste with reproduced
paintings of the staircase with figures by Schlemmer and Lichenstein
respectively. What ‘price’ real? Indeed what is arts’s relationship to both the
worlds of photography and assumptions of what is the ‘real world’. We are in
already in therefore the existential phenomenological crisis of all moments of
decision – what is this world on which I am intervening? Fascinating!
2. Select a photograph
or a series of photographs made by an artist (someone that you don't personally
know): ideally these will be prints you can view at a local museum or gallery,
but if this isn’t possible you can choose a reproduction from a newspaper,
magazine, or other publication. Indicate which module(s) the photograph(s)
relate to. Explain why and how your choice of photograph(s)
reflects key ideas from the module(s) you selected. Be sure to describe your image(s),
why you selected them, and cite your sources, including the name of the person
who took the photograph, date, and where you found the image.
Stezaker’s work swims in ‘the ceaseless flow…that has been a consequence
of mechanical reproduction, mass media and popular culture.’ (Bracewell 2010:8)
However, just as Kurt Schwitters employed objects he found in his rambles and
incorporated into collage, architectural or sculptural work, Stezaker (cited
Stezaker et.al. 2013:110) insists the objects come to him by accident, ‘as if
they had been lying in wait for me.’
Stezaker’s images are rescued from ephemeral genres: film-stills from
popular-cinema and post-cards, which bear no monetary (or any other) value to
any potential ‘owner’ of them in the present-day. He identifies them as
‘orphans’ (ibid.) in want of someone whose role it is especially to see and
develop value within them. From acquisition and over long periods these images
are developed using collage that plays with similitudes and differences between
the genre and content of each image source, such that they both are manipulated
to nearly-match but yet, in seeking continuity between their boundaries, merely
emphasise ‘distances’ between them. This is achieved in Portrait-V by the misalignment
of the female’s shoulder and absent head with substitute figures that mimic
absent shapes expected by the viewer. The shoulders and neck become the lines
of the steep river bank edge. The head is perceptible in the arch of the bridge
through which shows foliage above a chalk bank (for hair) and the bridge coping
(as hat) perhaps. Yet the images have different borders, emphasised by trees
stretching upwards on the side-frames of the postcard and which emphasises that
no cutting of the image has been allowed to facilitate the illusion of the
woman’s pictured head. Other obvious intended discrepancies (half of the thumb
on the picture’s left is occluded) emphasise edges that deliberately don’t
‘marry’ as Stezacker puts it of another image (ibid:108).
This promotes the viewer’s self-identification:
·
As agent in making the whole picture legible, where it is, and:
·
With disturbed reflections about their collusion in this act of
meaning-making.
Stezacker explains these effects as ‘hesitations or reflective
confrontations of this implied beholder’ (ibid). Thus, I remember recognising
the implication here that this female head is represented by absence, by
pictured empty space between the bridge’s sides.
Recognising that I colluding in building an image of the stereotype of
the ‘airhead’ woman – even when the originals are dated, was a shock to me. It
caused me to hesitate and reflect on myself emotionally and cognitively since,
although the materials are dated, the collusive reconstruction is contemporary
and personal and does not match my self-perception as a gay-male committed to
female empowerment. This ability to include the viewer in the deceptive
manipulations of self-and-other presentation is described by Stezacker (ibid.) as
his images’ in-built third-person: a ‘double’ or mirror-image of the viewer (ibid.).
Bracewell (2010:8) argues that Stezacker’s images emphasise relationships
between visual projection (the active imposition from within of meanings and
visible signs outwards upon the perceived object) and occlusion (which looks
under barriers to vision for the ‘hidden’). Hadar (2013:127f.) further
identifies disturbances in self-reflection in the viewer’s inability to escape
collusion in meanings they might otherwise disavow as potential within
themselves.
This hints that Stezaker reinvents some of the authorial role of the photographer. Hence, Stezaker isn’t, as
some photographers in Module-6 are, just emphasising formally the artifice that
goes into making meaning in the world but seeing in that process a deeper
concern with the nature of the subjective world we all uncomfortably inhabit.
Portrait-V queries ‘vision’ itself by absenting the returned gaze of the
portrayed, indeed replacing it with a potential mirror of emptiness: Stezacker says, ‘the mask is a meeting with death in the
midst of the life. It is also an inscription of interior space onto the
exterior, the space of the face, whilst at the same time, it hides those clues
of facial expression from which we recognize the interior life of another.
(Stezaker et.al 2013:101)’
Bracewell, M. (2010) ‘The Space Between’ in Stezaker, J. Tabula Rasa London, Ridinghouse in
association with ‘The Approach’ Gallery, London.
Hadar, I. (2013) ‘Arresting Resistance’ in Landau (ed.) John Stezaker: One on One London,
Ridinghouse in association with Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 120-115 (note pages in
sequence run from back to front in this text)
Stezaker, J., Gallois, C. & Herrmann, D.F. (2013) ‘The Third
Meaning’ in Landau (ed.) John Stezaker: One
on One London, Ridinghouse in association with Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 114
– 95 (note pages in sequence run from back to front in this text)
MoMA Photography MOOC Assessment Stezacker Surfing the Ocean of Images
1. Describe which module resonated with you the most and why. What are some of the issues, ideas, or themes that particularly interested you, and how did they change or complicate your understanding of photography? Please connect your argument to specific artists and images addressed in your selected module.
I’m choosing Module 6 because it is in some ways a summation of my experience of the whole collection. Elcott (2015:318) summarises a world where innovative images are those which expose a world that has already turned into a simulacrum of itself –presented to us as a sea of photographic images, it must be treated and known as a photographic object in itself rather than a means to know a world beyond it, the ‘veridical trace of reality’. Elcott underlines this by seeing photographs as autonomous from the world as a ‘world of its own’.
Hence we have to read photographs in the light of their own manufacture, through all of the processes by which they are ‘made’. As Slifkin (2015:192) makes clear, this was always so in that view-finding, focusing and editing a photograph has always been the source of both the photograph as art, in Ansel Adams, or as a documentary manipulation of reality, in Atget. However, contemporary photographers utilise more radical manipulations, ‘created daily by the mass media’ including collage or ‘cut-and-paste, or through fragmentation and selection from the normative processes of taking an image (as in camera-less images in which objects are exposed directly to light-sensitive photographic film (as in Heinecken’s Are You Rea, 1964-8) or even when found .jpeg images are enlarged beyond their ability to show or access the illusion of an apparently undistorted world (as in Ruff’s jpeg msh01,2004).
Horvitz’s images begin from a photograph of a man role-playing (posing) as ‘depressed’ but by inviting normative internet processes through which images get re-used, and otherwise metamorphosed by context or more actively ‘edited’ in scale, colouration, orientation or admixture of other imagery, for instance, so that it does not just circulate but, as Horvitz calls it ‘propagates’. Such strategies expose the ‘deception’ or ‘artfulness’ (in its negative sense of duplicity) at the base of all photography – perhaps even the family snap, where various means are given to ‘make’ a photograph pleasing to others or self.
More intriguing still are Kruithof’s inkjet prints of empty, other than for the remnant of photo-mounting stickers, of photographs of pages of an old photograph album. Mounted under layers of coloured glass everyday phenomena such as the reflection of viewers on their surface emphasise that images are open to contextual accidents that might determine their interpretation differently each time they are seen. Moreover, bearing the flash-bursts that expose they are photographs themselves, the associations of albums with past events such as travelling abroad or on holiday, allows these burst, which eliminate space to represent absences or gaps in memory that photograph albums always to some extent inspire and more so, in the context of their use by someone with an early dementia.
Proliferation when used to emphasise the role of art as the source of a world experienced iun endless reproductive copies can make art itself that comments on what art might, in fact, be, as in Gaenssler’s Bauhaus Staircase,2015. Here a ‘real’ staircase emulating Bauhaus design leads to a fragmented set of reproduced collages using a reproduction of an ‘original’ Bauhaus staircase in Dessau cut-and-paste with reproduced paintings of the staircase with figures by Schlemmer and Lichenstein respectively. What ‘price’ real? Indeed what is arts’s relationship to both the worlds of photography and assumptions of what is the ‘real world’. We are in already in therefore the existential phenomenological crisis of all moments of decision – what is this world on which I am intervening? Fascinating!
2. Select a photograph or a series of photographs made by an artist (someone that you don't personally know): ideally these will be prints you can view at a local museum or gallery, but if this isn’t possible you can choose a reproduction from a newspaper, magazine, or other publication. Indicate which module(s) the photograph(s) relate to. Explain why and how your choice of photograph(s) reflects key ideas from the module(s) you selected. Be sure to describe your image(s), why you selected them, and cite your sources, including the name of the person who took the photograph, date, and where you found the image.
I have selected Portrait V, 2015 © John Stezaker. Courtesy York Art Gallery and The Approach, London. Photo FXP Photography. Available at: https://www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/exhibition/paul-nash-and-the-uncanny-landscape/ (Accessed 15/06/2018). Viewed by myself first at York in 2017.
Stezaker’s work swims in ‘the ceaseless flow…that has been a consequence of mechanical reproduction, mass media and popular culture.’ (Bracewell 2010:8) However, just as Kurt Schwitters employed objects he found in his rambles and incorporated into collage, architectural or sculptural work, Stezaker (cited Stezaker et.al. 2013:110) insists the objects come to him by accident, ‘as if they had been lying in wait for me.’
Stezaker’s images are rescued from ephemeral genres: film-stills from popular-cinema and post-cards, which bear no monetary (or any other) value to any potential ‘owner’ of them in the present-day. He identifies them as ‘orphans’ (ibid.) in want of someone whose role it is especially to see and develop value within them. From acquisition and over long periods these images are developed using collage that plays with similitudes and differences between the genre and content of each image source, such that they both are manipulated to nearly-match but yet, in seeking continuity between their boundaries, merely emphasise ‘distances’ between them. This is achieved in Portrait-V by the misalignment of the female’s shoulder and absent head with substitute figures that mimic absent shapes expected by the viewer. The shoulders and neck become the lines of the steep river bank edge. The head is perceptible in the arch of the bridge through which shows foliage above a chalk bank (for hair) and the bridge coping (as hat) perhaps. Yet the images have different borders, emphasised by trees stretching upwards on the side-frames of the postcard and which emphasises that no cutting of the image has been allowed to facilitate the illusion of the woman’s pictured head. Other obvious intended discrepancies (half of the thumb on the picture’s left is occluded) emphasise edges that deliberately don’t ‘marry’ as Stezacker puts it of another image (ibid:108).
This promotes the viewer’s self-identification:
· As agent in making the whole picture legible, where it is, and:
· With disturbed reflections about their collusion in this act of meaning-making.
Stezacker explains these effects as ‘hesitations or reflective confrontations of this implied beholder’ (ibid). Thus, I remember recognising the implication here that this female head is represented by absence, by pictured empty space between the bridge’s sides.
Recognising that I colluding in building an image of the stereotype of the ‘airhead’ woman – even when the originals are dated, was a shock to me. It caused me to hesitate and reflect on myself emotionally and cognitively since, although the materials are dated, the collusive reconstruction is contemporary and personal and does not match my self-perception as a gay-male committed to female empowerment. This ability to include the viewer in the deceptive manipulations of self-and-other presentation is described by Stezacker (ibid.) as his images’ in-built third-person: a ‘double’ or mirror-image of the viewer (ibid.).
Bracewell (2010:8) argues that Stezacker’s images emphasise relationships between visual projection (the active imposition from within of meanings and visible signs outwards upon the perceived object) and occlusion (which looks under barriers to vision for the ‘hidden’). Hadar (2013:127f.) further identifies disturbances in self-reflection in the viewer’s inability to escape collusion in meanings they might otherwise disavow as potential within themselves.
This hints that Stezaker reinvents some of the authorial role of the photographer. Hence, Stezaker isn’t, as some photographers in Module-6 are, just emphasising formally the artifice that goes into making meaning in the world but seeing in that process a deeper concern with the nature of the subjective world we all uncomfortably inhabit. Portrait-V queries ‘vision’ itself by absenting the returned gaze of the portrayed, indeed replacing it with a potential mirror of emptiness: Stezacker says, ‘the mask is a meeting with death in the midst of the life. It is also an inscription of interior space onto the exterior, the space of the face, whilst at the same time, it hides those clues of facial expression from which we recognize the interior life of another. (Stezaker et.al 2013:101)’
Bracewell, M. (2010) ‘The Space Between’ in Stezaker, J. Tabula Rasa London, Ridinghouse in association with ‘The Approach’ Gallery, London.
Elcott, N.M. (2015) “From Darkroom to Laptop.” In Photography at MoMA: 1960–Now. The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, 316-319. Available from: https://www.coursera.org/learn/photography/supplement/sKBEX/6-10-required-readings-additional-resources (Accessed 15/06/2018)
Hadar, I. (2013) ‘Arresting Resistance’ in Landau (ed.) John Stezaker: One on One London, Ridinghouse in association with Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 120-115 (note pages in sequence run from back to front in this text)
Slifkin, R. (2015) “Reality Testing.” In Photography at MoMA: 1960–Now. The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, 192-195. Available from: https://www.coursera.org/learn/photography/supplement/sKBEX/6-10-required-readings-additional-resources (Accessed 15/06/2018)
Stezaker, J., Gallois, C. & Herrmann, D.F. (2013) ‘The Third Meaning’ in Landau (ed.) John Stezaker: One on One London, Ridinghouse in association with Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 114 – 95 (note pages in sequence run from back to front in this text)