This month my work was part research, part review and part practical with some student feedback sessions.

My research previously touched on work by Geoffrey Batchen on photography and remembrance. As a follow on from that, I looked at the idea of metonymy and on how an object that is in some way related to a person can become a substitute for that person when they are missing and specifically how photography relates to metonymy. I also looked at the work of John Berger on the memory of strangers and the violence of photography and Elizabeth Edwards about the tactile and aural characteristics of photography.

I have taken some photographs and worked on some haptic test pieces based around the grave and the graveyard. My work touches on 2 variations on this idea:

• an idea I had about of fragmentation and how we can know a person and how much can ever be shown or discovered through memorial
  This work uses a photograph of a broken gravestone to which I have added fragments of images from my daughter’s life. I am interested here in the tiny fragments which in themselves mean little, but together build up into a more rounded sense of a past life.
• a related idea about two-dimensional nature of photographs shown against the background of a graveyard which shows tumbled down gravestones.
  For this work I photographed a graveyard and stitched imaged together to create a letterbox format. I have deliberately left this as a curved image as I wanted to use that shape to build a model. My model put the landscape on some card and to this I added some photographs of my daughter which I have constructed into literal ‘headstones’. This work is about exploring death in a graveyard of forgotten people and using this as a backdrop to consider a ‘known death’.

These two works have made me question how relevant the graveyard is to my project. Through these works I have been considering that my project, initially conceived as a way of showing a medical image and putting back a sense of a real person, ties together with death, both of the subject but also forces the audience to confront their own mortality. How then to convey death, mortality (and this might well contain the medical image as a form of symbol), grief and loss in a visual sense? I am intrigued by John Berger’s idea of the still image being torn from the original context of which that image was a part. He speaks that the image seized by camera as an act of violence. I have previously explored the idea of changing the context of the medical scan and presenting it as an art image. It is interesting to think more on Berger’s idea that a life remembered through photography is a torn fragment forced into a new context. The work of Elizabeth Edwards who said photographs “are tactile, sensory things that exist in time and space, and thus in embodied cultural experience” This again is an interesting thought. Is the modern western idea of the photograph as a social object less about the extended family setting and more about the ‘dry’ space of the gallery or the academic paper?

The physical works I have created have once again filled me with doubts and I question myself. I am starting to form ideas and can see how my research informs my creative work which in turn feeds back into my thought process and onto further directions of research. However, I worry that I don’t yet have a cohesive whole in my mind as an end point. I worry about quality of my creative work and if my research is lacking.

Part of these doubts are because of the nature of home study, which have always thought makes me feel a little paranoid, so to try and combat the feeling of isolation I spoke about my work to two groups of students and following on from those chats, I have some links and other artists work to explore. I think next time, rather than just talk about my work I might let them see some examples to bring my work to life for them.

The other part of my doubts is partly due to the emotional pull of working on this subject which impacts my sense of balance so to speak.

In Project 5 next month I will continue my research and provide a mid-point review, detailing progress so far and what I see happening for rest of this unit and beyond.

This was a quick feedback session this month luckily squeezed in before my tutor off on research leave. This means that the paperwork for this meeting will be done closer to the next session but this not seen as an issue. As usual feedback in the form of a video chat and as is normal the feedback was more a sharing of ideas rather than a review of previous works.

Despite being short call arranged at short notice, we covered a lot of ground.

My tutor commented on my notes about the Geoffrey Batchen book “Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance”  I had commented on a vanity mirror where a woman had replaced one of the panels with a photograph of her dead husband. When looking at the mirror, the image of her dead husband would have always been seen in relationship to her own reflection. My tutor commented that this was a literal mirror with memory which is a term first used in 1859 from when photography only 20 years old by Oliver Wendell. As an aside I looked up Wendell and learned he was a poet and more interestingly for my research, a medical professor. I commented that it occurred to me that the mirror with that photograph also spoke of life as well as death. I can infer that the woman never remarried as if she did, would she have kept the image of her deceased husband in such a prominent place?

We spoke of Batchen’s idea that something creative must be done to a photograph to connect that image to the ritual of death. This an interesting thought of the idea of a shrine of which the photograph might be one element. This similar to the idea of use of human hair or baby teeth as a physical, haptic artefact which connects the person remembering to the person who is dead. The haptic idea is reenforced because of two-way nature of our senses. The touch and feeling of an object but also how the object touches us. My tutor mentioned the photograph as being just the same. A two way thing which we look at but in a way which looks back. The photograph is a frozen instant. This set my mind off at a tangent as it spoke to me of time. All light is a form of time travel. Light from the stars for example is light from however long it takes for light to travel to our eye. Photographs are also about time travel. The light which touched that person or object and touched film or camera sensor is frozen just as the image is frozen.

I mentioned human hair and my tutor mentioned the idea of a metonymic (hope this spelled right) artefact which is when we replace one aspect of something or someone with an object which is a symbol for that something or someone. I will need to explore this idea. More specifically, metonymy is when the thing/person that is meant is substituted with one of its attributes or something that is contiguous to it. In this way, hair and the photographic image (which has shared light and time with the person meant) is the substitute of this person in their absence. It comes to mean this person; it is metonymic of that person.

I mentioned by visits to graveyards and some of my photographs and we spoke of the symbolism carved on gravestones but also the symbolism, one stage removed, of the flowers at the graveside which in themselves symbolism, life, growth, death, corruption. This idea echoed by the graveyard itself particularly if an old graveyard where graves are uncared for, being swallowed by moss or are eroded and worn. This idea of decay, of the forgotten, of memory fading as the body and grave fade is very interesting to me.

I mentioned my thoughts about the process of my study and of my research and how I feel that my project is shifting from how I first imagined it. I do worry that each time I look at something new, I am taken further and further from my starting point. It has crossed my mind that if my starting point thought of as a home port and the unknown of my research is represented by the open sea which is deep and unsafe. My destination then is unknown and is out of sight over the horizon. In equal parts terrifying and exciting but also I have no idea if my end result will make any sense, nor what if any destination I might reach.

Some recommended texts to look at.

John Berger, “About Looking” and specific thoughts that image seized by camera is violent, ritualized photograph and the memory of a stranger.

Elizabeth Edwards , “Photographs and the Sound of History” about the tactile and aural characteristics of photography.

Carlo Ginzburg, “Myths, Emblems, Clues”

This month I have revised my plan based on what I have learned about course structure allied with my progress to date.

I have been very reluctant to spend too much time on my plan, which if honest, in my opinion, I feel is given too much prominence in course notes which in turn has generated a great deal of discussion amongst students. But having said that, I have redrafted my plan into a slightly different format to make this more visual and have incorporated known milestones including as plan updates such as this one, the reflective presentation, critical review/dissertation proposal and the literature review. I have tried not to spend too long on this task but wanted to be able to show how my plan, and alongside it and more importantly, how my research and process and attitudes are shifting.

In some previous research, I explored the idea of a metonymic object such as hair while a photograph might be considered a sign rather than a metonymic object in its own right. I also showed that Allan Sekula wrote that while photographs might function as a metaphor, some possess metonymic qualities, “the photograph is invested with a complex metonymic power, a power that transcends the perceptual and passes into the realm of affect.”(Sekula, 1982, p. 100)

Edwards essay moves on from that idea of metonymy to look at the way photographs operate as objects used for the telling of history. “The central tenet of my argument is that photographs are not merely images but social objects, and that the power of those social objects is integrally entangled with the nature of photography itself” (Edwards, 2005, p. 27)

It seems immediately obvious to me that in thinking of the anthropological impact of the visual image as opposed to the dominance of semiotics, provides a very different way of engaging with the photograph. Edwards quotes Csordas who argues that semiotics dominates and is concerned with representation rather than ‘being in the world’. The difference between a semiotic view of the world and a ‘real life view’ is framed as a distinction between language and experience. (Edwards, 2005, p. 28) I went back to this source and was interested in another idea of Csordas, “You cannot really study experience, because all experience is mediated by language – therefore one can only study language or discourse, i.e. representation” (Csordas, 1994, p. 11) This reminded me very much of the argument made by historian Jenkins, and I apologise as I reproduced this quotation in my research on metonymy but feel this is of enough interest to produce again. Jenkins speaks of the difference between the past and history, “The past has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again by historians in very different media, for example in books, articles, documentaries, etc., not as actual events. The past has gone and history is what historians make of it when they go to work. History is the labour of historians” (Jenkins, 1991, p. 8) It is interesting to consider these two ideas are framed around language and in particular, written language. Csordas goes on to quote Ricoeur saying, “language gives access to a world of experience in so far as experience comes to, or is brought to language”  (Ricoeur in Csordas, 1994, p. 12) This is an interesting concept with respect to photography. How can I ever use enough words to describe what my eyes see? Unless, of course, what my eyes see, are words. Also, and of relevance to my work, in the context of a worn gravestone where the words have vanished over time, what then of the idea of language giving access to experience? That person who was placed into the ground no longer has a name and it seems to me that the most basic thing about any of us is our name.

As an aside, I remember an exercise in an earlier unit looking at comparing the human eye with the camera lens. The visual world, or more importantly, how humans perceive the visual world, is way beyond the complexity of a camera. Just how complex the sense of vision is can be shown by some facts I collected for a previous unit. These are very relevant when I was thinking of my son’s loss of vision due to cancer and of his medical scans.

• More than 50% of the surface of the brain is set aside for visual processing (Hagen, 1996).
• Humans can detect between 700 and 900 different shades of grey (Kimpe and Tuytschaever, 2007)
• Humans can make out between 2 and 10 million colours (Marín-Franch and Foster, 2010).
• Humans are able to extract meaning, or in other words the brain can process visual information, at the rate of around 75 images per second (Potter et al., 2014).
• The human optic nerve contains up to 1.7 million nerve fibres (Jonas et al., 1992). Compared with the sense of sound the difference is stark; sounds are collected by about 30,000 nerve fibres (Wolfram, 2002).

These facts are for healthy people. I wonder how these statistics change when eyesight doesn’t work and what the brain does with all that processing power? Does the memory and imagination of the visual world still occur? I would need to look more into that but it is for another day.

These facts give an interesting insight into semiotics and the limitations of language when being used as substitutes for other senses and especially vision. It seems that information gathered from what is seen has prominence over information perceived through other senses and even over what we read? The written word is also, in part, processed through vision but also needs recognition of word shapes, translation of what they mean and understanding. It is claimed that skilled readers can process between 250-350 words per minute.(Wu et al., 2020, p. 3) which is far slower way to absorb information than the 13 to 80 milliseconds per image as measured by Potter.

Strange then to consider Csordas’s argument that semiotics is so dominant it is over represented. Interesting when I was looking at graveyards that if the words on the gravestone have vanished, the carved visual symbols might still exist or at least the symbol of the empty gravestone. Edwards speaks of the dominance of the semiotic and an over reliance on “textual metaphors” and reading signs, She quotes Claessen, “This position reflects the values attached to Western understandings of the hierarchy of the senses where seeing and hearing stand for the production of rational knowledge—and touch, smell and taste for the lower, “irrational” sensory” (Claessen quoted in Edwards, 2005, p. 37). Maybe in quoting my facts and figures about the sense of sight, I have perfectly illustrated this idea of a western view of the senses?

To return to Edwards, she argues that photographs “are tactile, sensory things that exist in time and space, and thus in embodied cultural experience.” (Edwards, 2005, p. 28) She goes on to mention that in western civilisations, photographic theory tends not to regard the photographic image as a relational object and instead the photographic capture deals with the concepts of realism, subjectivity, truth, and especially the idea of historical ‘truth’, narrative, identity, death and loss. (Edwards, 2005, p. 28) When a collection of photographs is passed around as a social activity and the context of who a person might be, or might have been, or where a picture was taken is explained, this becomes a, “verbal articulation of histories.” The words and the story go together as “the oral, tactile and haptic component of telling histories.” (Edwards, 2005, p. 36) Interesting here that the photograph is considered a real, haptic object and to consider how this sense might change if the group were gathered around a projection screen for a slide show or a computer monitor to share images. It seems that the tactile and haptic senses would be missing in that case. Also, interesting that in this story telling, the photographer does not seem to feature. The story seems to be all about the subject and the photographer has become the same as the audience.

Edwards speaks of photographs not only being visual history but also oral history. The oral part of the story isn’t just describing the image but is about story telling which in turn isn’t just about speaking but also about listening. I wonder at this. About a photograph in a gallery, stripped of any orality. Maybe with a small white card to give the piece a title, a date, the name of the artist and maybe a few words on what the work might mean. This extends the idea of fragmentation of information and trying to extrapolate what we see into a more meaningful whole. Interesting to consider how much I want to try and fill out fragments in my own work and how much I want the audience to build their own stories. How much direction to provide? Edwards speaks of the voices within the photograph and of the power of oral articulation, “When individuals, events or other details are not known, photographs do not have voices. People were asked to ‘find voices and stories buried in the pictures’ (Lost Identities 1999). Oral articulation, the naming of names, invests tellers with a dynamic power over their own history” (Edwards, 2005, p. 39)

Edwards comes to end of her essay speaking of touching photographs and of the person in the photograph through their indexical trace, almost coming to life by the touch of the audience and by their reaction to that touch. The memory triggered by the photograph seems enhanced by the combination of the senses used to engage with the object, “a more sensory way of thinking about photographs if we are to understand their true impact in the making of histories.”(Edwards, 2005, pp. 40–41)

References

Csordas, T. J. (1994) Embodiment and experience : the existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, E. (2005) ‘Photographs and the Sound of History’, Visual anthropology review, 21(1–2), pp. 27–46. doi: 10.1002/j.2326-1951.1993.tb03119.x.

Hagen, S. (1996) The Mind’s Eye, Rochester Review :: University of Rochester. Available at: https://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V74N4/0402_brainscience.html (Accessed: 31 July 2021).

Jenkins, K. (1991) Re-thinking History. Routledge.

Jonas, J. B. et al. (1992) ‘Human optic nerve fiber count and optic disc size’, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, 33(6), pp. 2012–2018.

Kimpe, T. and Tuytschaever, T. (2007) ‘Increasing the Number of Gray Shades in Medical Display Systems—How Much is Enough?’, Journal of Digital Imaging, 20(4), p. 422. doi: 10.1007/S10278-006-1052-3.

Marín-Franch, I. and Foster, D. H. (2010) ‘Number of perceptually distinct surface colors in natural scenes’, Journal of Vision, 10(9), pp. 1–7. doi: 10.1167/10.9.9.

Potter, M. C. et al. (2014) ‘Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per picture’, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 76(2), pp. 270–279. doi: 10.3758/s13414-013-0605-z.

Sekula, A. (1982) ‘On the invention of photographic meaning’, in Burgin, V. (ed.) Thinking Photography, p. 249.

Wolfram, S. (2002) A New Kind of Science, A New Kind o Science Online. Wolfram Media. Available at: https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-10-8–auditory-system/ (Accessed: 31 July 2021).

Wu, A. et al. (2020) ‘Language Processing in Reading and Speech Perception is Fastand Incremental: Implications for Event Related Potential Research’, Nature, 388, pp. 1–14.

John Berger wrote an essay which caught my eye, titled, “Photographs of Agony”.  This takes me back to my youth and watching news stories filled with the Vietnam War and the so called ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Berger writes of a photograph of a man with a child cradled in his arms, both are bleeding.

Vietnam del Nord-Hue , Don McCullin, 1968

Specifically, he asks why such photographs appear in the press, his suggestion that either the press recognise a demand for the truth from their readers or alternatively that, “that these newspapers believe that their readers have become inured to violent images and so now compete in terms of ever more violent sensationalism.” before dismissing both of these ideas as firstly too idealistic and secondly too cynical. (Berger, 1980, pp. 41–42) I think the truth must lie somewhere between these two poles. Continued exposure to shocking imagery of violence, death and suffering, I believe, desensitises us. Is the picture of a famine as shocking as the first time any of us saw such a scene? There is also a matter of context. The image showing a famine, seems far away, both physically and in terms of the comfort and security of western lives. That famine, it seems, happens to others and never to us. It is seen on the television or in a newspaper but is not experienced first-hand. An image which brings the problems of faraway to a location familiar to us has the power to re-introduce the power to shock the viewer. So, an image of a suicide bomb in London or Madrid or the image of a dead child on shores of Greece are shocking because of the context. The city which might be known to us or a European beach where some might have holidayed are places seemingly far removed from war and famine and suffering.

Berger goes on in another essay, “Uses of Photography”, to provide a response to Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography”. He quotes Sontag, “a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled  off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.” (Berger, 1980, p. 54, from Sontag, 1979, p. 154)  Berger tells us that photographs do not preserve meaning. Interestingly he say that this is unlike memory. (Berger, 1980, p. 55) I am not sure that I agree with this. His use of the word ‘meaning’ seems to imply a kind of truth. Photographs do preserve a certain kind of truth, once we accept the limitations of what is shown in a two-dimensional image. The event captured by the camera did happen in some form. However, the photographic image is not the same as the actual event. The meaning behind a photograph can be open to interpretation but then so can what we see with our own eyes. Then if we remove what has been seen directly one stage and try to recall the event, it is open to change through time, through pollution of the memory caused by other related events, or by disease or simply by misremembering.

Berger goes on and talks of violence. Of the still image being torn from the original context of which that image was a part. He speaks that the image seized by camera as an act of violence. The group or individual who view the photograph, whether by an audience with knowledge of the subject of the photographic capture or not, might respond to the violence of the capture of that still image in different ways which might be expressed as “incredulousness” or “strangeness”.  “The total stranger might take any meaning or make any use from the photograph, “because the photographs carry no certain meaning in themselves, because they are like images in the memory of a total stranger, that they lend themselves to any use.” (Berger, 1980, pp. 55–57) This reminds me of the idea of photographs of the lost. Images I can buy where I know nothing about the subject or their story. These images lend themselves to my use and in return I create a new story for these images. One other thing occurs to me. All photographs will likely be lost forever or might fall into the hands of strangers who can make any use of these images or indeed can make no use of them. In that sense, our photographs and memories are identical, in that both will surely vanish. Our physical body and our memories vanish into ash or into the sea or the ground and after time passes there is nothing left. We might have told some of our stories to other people but they too will die and soon our stories vanish just the same as the photographic image fades and the paper rots or the memory card corrupts.

This is a key concept of my project. It isn’t just giving back a face to a medical scan, or in how I think of death or loss or remembrance, it is giving a new story to a new audience. Well at least for a short time.

References

Berger, J. (1980) About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books.

Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.