Marion Shoard on ‘Edgelands’:
This book could perhaps have had more investigative rigour. The edgelands now need something beyond a merely subjective celebration of their identity. Far more than our towns and countryside, they are being subjected to ceaseless change. Wild space is being prettified at the expense of its character and creatures. Industrial ruins are being cleared away.
We could be in the process of losing this landscape just as we are discovering its charms. Should we be trying to conserve it, as we conserve the best of rural environments? Or would any attempt to regulate this space destroy the wildness that makes it special?
It is time for us to consider what relationship we want to see in the long term between our activity in the edgelands, their epic infrastructure, their unique wildlife and industrial archaeology and their peculiar place in our imagination.
I think a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-class men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot. I have spent the last twenty years walking around London and living here in a precarious fashion. I’ve had fifty addresses. I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different to theirs.
Laura Grace Ford. Savage Messiah 2011 pxvii
Visual Documentary Overview and Links Padlet
Visual Documentary: Some Key Questions
Documentary
- Subjective perspectives
- Artist and subject: the visual artist as voyeur ‘shooting’ images of issues and themes that are not necessarily the same as the subjects of the photo.
- Is the image showing how things are, or how the artist wants things to be? or how the audience wants to see them? Selective editing and erasure (eg cars and rubbish bins)
- Different focus and viewpoint – is the artist directing the image or leaving interpretation open?
- Present, past and future – places change over time – even over a few seconds – short term, long term, historical perspective and layers – the past is always present but maybe the message is for the future.
- Exploration and deepening understanding of tensions and contradiction of reality over time
Psychogeography
Visual Communication
All projects are further developed with the benefit of hindsight and perspective of deeper investigation and local knowledge to have wider relevance, appeal and impact. My body of work will include different ways of engaging with audiences to improve my work in terms of:
- refining the ‘messages’ by getting a range of local views and information on social and environmental issues through conversations and interviews and local social networking sites.
- engagement with campaigning organisations to get their input and advice on how to make my work most relevant and contribute to changes.
- feedback on the effectiveness of the ‘communication aesthetics’ from local, national and also international overseas audiences to improve my technical and visual communication skills through ZemniImages Facebook page crosspasted to other social networks.
- finding different marketing, promotion and advocacy outlets for the different dimensions of the body of work. Including campaigning organisations like National Trust, Woodland Trust, local Wildlife Trusts, RSPB and Rural England.
Creative process
Starting from sketchbooks, photography, video/soundscapes and written reflections from walks, car and/or boat journeys, together with conversations with local people and on-line contextual research, I develop a diverse body of work including illustration, printmaking, creative photography, short documentary and allegorical books and moving image work.
I am particularly interested in the ways in which working in different media affect:
The creative documentary process:
- what ‘realities’ we perceive, and interlinkages between the different senses that are most active
- how we interprete our perceptions and relationship between ‘objective perceptions’ and ‘subjective’ preconceptions and feelings
- how working in different media affect which interpretations are most ‘natural’ and how these interpretations can be stretched and manipulated through creative rules and prompts
Communication to audiences
- how do different media affect how people interprete messages
- how do different media affect how we see and interprete things
- How does mood affect what we see and how we use media
- How do our expectations about audience perceptions affect what we communicate and how
Aim to significantly extend my technical skills in drawing, photography, printmaking and moving image skills.
Sequential narratives:
sketchbooks, photobooks
I continue to explore the range of effects of digital black and white and colour processing in Lightroom, Photoshop and DxO FX filters on interpretations of images. I look at different Photobook designs.
photographic interpretations from the first set of impressions.
Sketchbook drawing, painting and collage
Potential for serious drawing in sketchbooks on location was limited because my only access was in the winter when there were no crowds. Quick pencil sketches and notes as the basis for collage that can be used to interrogate my photographs. And be of interest in themselves as product. And some of the sketches and photo references worked up as ink drawings and/or graphite and/or gouache.
Karen Stamper sketchbook site
Mapping and abstraction
Time-based narratives:
moving image, animation, video and soundscapes
Documentary animations from these different outputs for Vimeo channel.
Single image narratives:
photography, print-making and illustration
Prints: solar plate, cyanotypes, screen print, cardcuts, linocut based on photographs and sketches that and woodcut over the summer of 2021.
‘Tales from the Edge’ is part of a longer term cross-media concern with creative documentary and activism that underpins my creative identity and all my visual work. The four location projects explore different approaches to addressing a number of fundamental underlying axes of tension and questioning in location-based visual narratives and the nature of documentary work:
- interlinkages between multiple ‘objective’, ‘subjective’ and imaginary perspectives on ‘realities of place’
- diversity and unpredictability of audience responses and meanings within and between cultures
- potential possibilities and limitations of visual narratives to address these complexities, how far challenges might be addressed by working across different media, and/or different ways of combining images and text.
- What all this means for creative visual documentary for future activism to ‘Make the World a Better Place‘ accessible to different global audiences. Including my own future work.
Drawing on and feeding into this specific set of four location projects I was also concerned to further develop my conceptual and technical skills for my future work.
Page Contents
This page provides and overview and links to theoretical and experimental explorations that underpin my portfolio work:
- Factual narrative vs telling stories? Creative Documentary Axes
- Place, Time and Consciousness: What is ‘Reality’ anyway?
- Activism, Ethics and Aesthetics: Why and How questions
These issues are then discussed in more detail as relevant in the individual projects.
Factual narrative vs telling stories?
Creative Documentary Axes
Visual documentary can take many forms. Psychogeography….Documentary and Landscape Photography courses and Reportage Illustration
Not binary. But axes that offer multiple possible approaches.
Of particular interest are the works of:
- Georges Perec
- Marc Auge
These are dealt with in more detail in the page on Media Approaches
.
Place, Time and Consciousness: ‘Reality’ challenges
Questions of what constitutes ‘objective’ truth are not unique to visual communication, but is a key area of intense debate among historians, sociologists, economists and anthropologists. The inherent subjectivity of our experience of ‘reality’ and how we that have always dogged debates about qualitative research in sociology and anthropology. And also my own professional research practice. Although in many cases it is possible to say that certain things definitely ‘happened’, there are always questions about details, how they relate to other ‘facts’, which particular ‘facts’ are important and for whom. And particularly their relevance for future action.
Equally there are also questions about ‘subjectivity’ from both philosophical and psychological perspectives. It is not physically possible to record ‘all of the facts all of the time’. There is inevitably a need for some sort of filtering of what and what is not documented. This is evident from framing and technical choices in photography and video, note-taking rules in freewriting and what is drawn in what detail from illustration.
Time is particularly problematic. Each project in different ways explores interlinkages, interferences and tensions between:
- ‘explorations in now-time’: ways of heightening personal ‘stream of consciousness experience’ of place and affecting ‘hauntings’ from past memories and future visions, hopes and fears merge in our experience of the present
- ‘shifting histories’: ways in which multi-layered and multi-perspectives on physical, social and environmental remembered and re-imagined ‘realities’ are manipulated for consumption in the present time
- ‘unstable imaginings’ of future uncertainties – where alternative potentialities are often shaped and restricted not only by personal experiences, but powerful economic and political forces.
- how different media – sketching, moving image, photography and printmaking – and aesthetics affect perception, understanding and communication of time.
Activism, Ethics and Aesthetics
The issue therefore is to be aware of these limitations, and explicit about the underlying principles on which these decisions are made. Which then brings us back to the question of why one is documenting in the first place, for whom and what this implies for the aesthetic choices one makes. Of particular interest have been the works of:
- Mark Fisher
In my own work there is not not one answer to these questions – working differently in different locations and for different purposes and audiences helps me to increase my awareness of my own biases as well as develop technical skills. Much of my work is informed by – and will in future when my skills are fully developed be more linked with – activism. Underlying my work on ‘Tales from the Edge’ have been
- Debates about capitalism, democracy and activism – particularly writings of Deleuze and Zizek
And particularly:
- Debates about rewilding, ‘trespass’ and sustainable farming and tourism.
What is a photograph?
What is photography?
Realism
Kendall L Walton ‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism’ Critical Inquiry Vol 11 No 2 (Dec 1984) pp 181-354The documentary photograph is mute. It doesn’t tell us anything; rather it shows something. But it shows it in a way that offers the viewer the possibility of connecting with it and starting to ascribe meaning to the photograph.(Navarro 2012 p20)
A documentary [photograph, film] takes an audience to an existing or past reality and is so compelling that they can empathise with mind, emotion and imagination. In that sense documentary is an ambitious creative and critical enterprise.(deJong, Knudsen and Rothwell 2011, p23)
Documentary testifies…to the bravery or the manipulativeness…of the photographer, who entered a situation of physical danger…human decay…and saved us the trouble. Or, who, like astronauts, entertained us by showing us the places we never hope to go.Martha Rossler 1992 p308
What is documentary?
The Latin word documentum means, amongst other things, proof or evidence. Director, producer and writer John Grierson (1898-1972) was the first to use the term ‘documentary’ within the visual media in a 1926 article on Robert Flaherty’s 1921 ethnographic film ‘Nanook’. Until then, realist photography had been accepted as the norm. So it was seen as inherently ‘documentary’ in the sense that it ‘ promoted a systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose of providing information and encouraging understanding of the world (Rogers, 1994)‘photography itself was the technical analogue to the absolute belief in the legitimacy of appearances, a belief whose philosophical expression was, of course, positivism and whose artistic expression was realism and naturalism’Solomon-Godeau, 1994, p155) Arguably all photographs become documents.
Social documentary records the conditions that humans endure and the nature of their interactions with the world. In a practical sense it is the re-creation of a condition or event, something factually accurate that doesn’t contain any falsity or fictional element. Rather than making an account of the subject in words, the photographer chooses to use a method of visual communication to inform the viewer.Gesture and Meaning pp??
Actually there is no limit to the world of external reality the photographer may record. Every subject is significant, considered in its context and viewed in the light of historical forces. It is the spirit of his [sic] approach which determines the value of the photographer’s endeavour, that plus his technical ability to say what he wants to say..His purpose must be clear and unified and his mood simple and modest. Montage of his personality over his subject will only defeat the serious aims of documentary photography.McCausland 1939 The development of documentary has been multi-dimensional. Visual recording of events has mushroomed with the spread of visual media like the Internet, iPads and mobile phones. Uploading immediate images has been instrumental in informing us of unfolding events, disasters and conflicts. Instagram meet-ups enable many people to jointly document places and events and share their views on social networking sites. In a sense, then, we have all become documentary photographers. Listen to Miranda Gavin Types: reportage, visual ethnography, street photography, travel photography.
Documentary: approaches and photographers
Key issues
Can documentary photography ever be entirely value-free? Documentary purports to produce truth and fact for us rather than the connotations required by the photographer, art director or editor. But, all photographs are subjective in the sense that they represent the creator’s interpretation of the scene – the photographer chooses what to take and when, even if they don’t have a conscious motivation. See Documentary typologies for Eugenics Where does the boundary lie between social documentary and photojournalism or editorial photography (pp.69–71 of the course reader )?Ethics, integrity and truth
How will you operate as a photographer?This is a major question relevant to your production ethics.- Will you ask permission or will you be a fly on the wall, a ghost who never affects the image?
- If you tell people what you’re doing, then they’ll react differently to you; they may be guarded or wary of how you’ll portray them.