Tutor feedback this month was a written report rather than a video chat as trying to find suitable space for both tutor and myself was difficult.

Very interesting comments on the idea of the “graveyard as a stage“. My tutor went onto comment that “Rituals and commemoration are about the performativity of status, both of the deceased and the mourner and the culture of the two protagonists“. (Xenou, 2022)  It is a fascinating idea that the photograph is also about performance. My tutor introduced a thought on how the interested parties provide points of balance between “the deceased/subject; the mourner/installer/holder of the photograph; the culture that elevates these ideas and the medium to the importance they hold”. (Xenou, 2022)

I will do more research on these ideas as they feel crucial to my work. I am especially inerested in idea of the culture in which these ideas sit. My own culture and how a death of a child might be thought of and how the representation of a medical scan showing the brutality of cancer and the frankness of death and then considering the medium of how I record such motifs and make sense of these and make them my own are of particular interest.

One interesting piece of feedback was on a thought I had about photography freezing time  but that also death freezes time. Today, it so happens, is my daughter’s birthday. She would have been 25. Yet Rebecca died when she was 18 so is forever frozen in time at the point of death (or before). It interested me that my research poses questions. This in turn leads to reasearch and attempts to answer questions. The paradox here is that some aspects of death and loss cannot be resolved or satisfactorily answered. I can start to see questions I can pose which might form the backbone of my written work. Running in parallel with my questions requiring thought, research and investigation is my creative work which looks from a different viewpoint and asks questions in a different form. This goes back to interesting comment from my tutor, “Remember that what is expected of death and places of commemoration, such as burial grounds, is a cultural imposition that is only of importance as far as it can show the researcher the social approach to these notions and allows for a challenge”. (Xenou, 2022) What I take from this is the idea of a challenge or a question. A written work and a creative photographic work which poses questions to the audience and to myself. I think of this as a work under tension.

One practical thing on my creative visual test pieces is to continue my progress in linking my research with my creative work. “reflect closely on what you are representing and how it feels – do the aesthetics of your artefacts work appropriately? Which parts work and why? Which don’t and why not? How can you resolve the parts that don’t?“(Xenou, 2022)

Looking forwards, next month, in addition to continuning my research, I will produce a mid-point review, which looks back at what I have done so far and forwards to where I might be heading.

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.