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Contextual Studies: Assignment 1

Brief:

Part 1:

Write a 1000 – 1500word essay that relates your current work to an aspect of visual culture discussed in Part One

“Photography always bears witness by interrogating us: What is an act of witnessing? Who bears witness to what, for whom, before whom? The witness is always singular, irreplaceable, unique.” ( Derrida p.xxiv)

To start a discourse on Modernism with a quote from an major exponent of Post-modernism might appear self-defeating, yet the questions he asks are very valid in the context of this essay.

The socratic practice of answering a question with a question is also apt here: What happens when you cannot photograph, as, for example, when you are a prisoner?

This question arose when a friend wrote to me from prison saying that he wished he had a camera or a phone to capture what he could see from his window in HMP Dartmoor. I suggested that he drew it. Instead, feeling that he was ‘more abstract than Van Gogh’ (letter of 21st August, 2016), he wrote about it. In that respect, he is closer to Derrida than he would think possible because the writer states:”It is true that only words interest me … the relation of the body to words is as important as it is with painting.”(Derrida p. xvi)

The monthly letters were important to me as they offered a portal, as subjective as a photograph would have been, into a world I had only glimpsed when I had visited a member of our congregation in Exeter jail about ten years previously. What had startled me then was not only how ordinary the prisoners looked but also how strong my prejudices and my preconceptions were, and how unaware of them I was.

Was I silly not to have expected to see a ‘normal’ person? Had my preconceptions been so strongly formed and ingrained in me by the media, films and literature that I did not realise that Tom (not his real name) would be one of ‘them’ and that therefore ‘they’ would be quite normal, like a male version of ‘me’? When I stepped out of the prison after the visit I started looking at ‘ordinary’ people and I started wondering if they had committed some crime and were free because they had not been caught.

I took these images in February this year. None of them is staged and nor did I ask permission to take them. Can we tell the histories of these subjects just by looking at them?

The labelling of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is exemplified excellently by photographer Jenny Wicks who took a series of images of prisoners, guards and other professionals in Glasgow jails. In subverting the mug shot, Wicks asked her sitters to close their eyes and she tilted the heads of some of them. Her thesis is that you cannot differentiate between prisoners and staff purely by looking at their images taken in an unconventional way.

I was recently in Exeter prison again to share in a Sunday act of worship where I shook hands with the prisoners on their way out. Making eye contact with absolute strangers was an experience with surprising outcomes: the hardness in their faces seemed to melt away and was replaced by a vulnerability I would not have seen had we not made that contact. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ here too vanished for a split second primarily in my consciousness.

The letters from prison revealed a banality I had not expected. Themes emerged in the letters over the year: the weather, the food, the jobs he had applied for, the courses he had gone on, the treats he had had. In written form, Ian was painting a picture of what his life was like. When I wrote to him, I was aware that my cards were likely to be read before they got to him so I was very guarded in what I asked and wrote and I felt ‘false’. Furthermore, I had the feeling that Ian had the same filter when he wrote his replies. But I cannot be sure of that as I had simply spoken to him before & had never read anything by him.

The constantly negative press that prisons have received over the last few years had probably conditioned me to expect every letter to be covered in gory detail of all the riots that must have gone on every day. Not a word about any riot from Ian – it may have been a self-imposed censorship, of course. In the thirteen months that he was in jail, Ian only saw one incident in the prison of 500 inmates. The Panorama programme, conducted by an undercover BBC reporter in HMP Northumberland broadcast on Monday 13th February, 2017, presented wall-to-wall riots. When I watched it on iPlayer, the pixelated film, seen below as screen grabs, presented what I thought represented the coverage of everyday life in the prison:

I have taken fragments from a film and presented them as individual images which , as Allan Sekula maintains, are ‘incomplete utterances’ (Evans & Hall p. 184) particularly as they are also out of sequence. The text in these examples leaves the reader guessing as to what they might mean. As an example of deconstructivism, they are excellent. When we ask ‘Who bears witness to what, for whom, before whom?’ then we have a modernist answer: abstract political propaganda. It is true that the written witness of one inmate is not enough to stem the tide of public opinion but it should be enough to make us ask questions of the ethics of the editor of the film.

As an archive, these images still ‘maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power’ (idem p. 186) and it is that which, presenting the events as historical documents, replaces ‘historical understanding’ with an ‘aesthetic experience’: viewers’ reading of the images supersedes their analysis of the events, their understanding of what they are witnessing.

The myth of the objective truth qualities of photography will always be pulling in the opposite direction of the subjective aesthetic experience. In this instance, it would have been a fairer report had there been some hint of balancing it: was there some semblance of everyday ‘normal’ behaviour in the prison? How politicised had the editing been in order to present a cohesive artefact?

“The ‘everyday’ is where the ideological struggles over values are fought out and not in any hypothetical realm of aesthetic sensitivity and beauty.” (Roberts 1998 p. 8)

In this quotation Roberts argues against the photography as art issue also rejected by modernist ideology. It is precisely this which is represented in the work of photographers such as Donovan Wylie and Valerio Bispuri who represent prisons in two very diverse ways: one clinical, clean with a muted palette and devoid of people, the other gritty, black and white, depicting the shocking state in which people survive or perish in gang warfare and insanitary conditions as reflected in the popular press. Both have to explain their rationale. Both present people, past or present and future, at the mercy of government policy and philosophy which have let them down. In his film ‘Modern Times’, Charlie Chaplin depicts the dehumanising and alienating effects of modernist mass-production in which there is no ‘original’ anything, everything is a reproduction and politics determine how a man lives and dies. How much has changed since the 1920’s?

In my project, I would like to investigate how the ‘everyday’ in the UK prison system is depicted and how the identity of the individual prisoner is determined. In Donovan’s Maze project, he refers to the disorientating effects of the repetition in the architecture of the Maze prison. I would also like to investigate that aspect of 20th Century prisons in the UK and how they define the politics of isolation and control.

Chaplin bore witness in his film to his times not just for viewers of his times but for all the generations to come: his message of dehumanisation and alienation is valid today as witnessed by photographers such as Wylie, Bispuri and Wicks. Documentaries today do the same but with a different agenda.

Part 2:

Check your work against the assessment criteria listed in the introduction to this course guide.

Demonstration of subject based knowledge and understanding.
Demonstration of research skills.
Demonstration of critical and evaluation skills.
Communication.

I have shown that I am aware of some of the complexities and exponents of modernist and post-modernist theory.

My research has gone along ways which relate to my particular project.

My critical and evaluation skills need more attention.

I think I have communicated effectively using text and images, anecdotal evidence with theoretical underpinning.

References:

Bate,D. : 2009. Photography. Bloomsbury

Bispuri, V.: 2014. Encerrados. Contrasto srl. Roma.

Derrida,J. 2010. Copy, archive, signature: a conversation on photography. Stanford UP

Evans, J. & Hall, S. (eds): 1999. Visual culture: a reader. Sage.

Goffman, I.: 1968. Stigma. Penguin Books

Goffman, I.: 1961. Asylums. Penguin Books.

Goffman,I.: 1971. The presentation of self in everyday life.

Panorama programme on HMP Northumberland.(Now off-line)

Roberts,J. 2014. Photography and its violations. Columbia UP

Roberts,J. 1998. The art of interruption. Realism, photography and the everyday. MUP

Wicks, J.: https://prisonphotography.org/tag/jenny-wicks/

Wylie, D.: 2016. Maze. Steidl.

Tutor report for Assignment 1

Overall Comments

Many thanks Anna for sending in your first assignment. It does the job of introducing your

area of interest for your body of work well. Where I think it is lacking a little is in your

discussion of relating the work to a particular theme or movement. You make a number of

interesting and valid points and comparisons but what you don’t do is to consider what

theme or style of photography you anticipate using. It may be that you are yet to decide this -

fine! But you need to address this, consider the options and their concomitant pros and cons

and then if still undecided say so and why. It demonstrates that you have considered the

issue.

Feedback on assignment

Technical and Visual Skills,

A post modern approach would suggest an acknowledgement of a multiplicity of self-

expression and representation of a situation - both on the part of the author of the work and

the consumer of it. In your discussion you indicate a mistrust of the authorities approach to

imprisonment and the architecture of prisons. This would seem to resonate with a post

modern approach; and so it seems odd that in your opening you imply an intention to adopt

a modernist approach when you say: “To start a discourse on Modernism with a quote from

an major exponent of Post-modernism might appear self-defeating...”.

Type of tutorial Written

Your imagery of people taken after your visit ably supports your questioning of identity and

how outward appearances can be deceiving. These coupled with your interesting and

evocative screen grabs from the TV panorama programme and discussion make for

powerful reading.

In your discussion of the screen grabs you say: “When we ask ‘Who bears witness to what,

for whom, before whom?’ then we have a modernist answer: abstract political propaganda”. I

question this as it seems to me that you are adopting a postmodernist stance here in that

you distrust the government. This together with your opening paragraphs and your quote

from Roberts which seems to be somewhat of a non-sequitur makes your position unclear

and I suggest you need to re-examine review this aspect of your discourse.

I’m sure you are aware of copyright issues and the need for care in regard to use of the

screen grabs; if not and you intend to use them I strongly suggest you seek informed advice

and think about whether or not to approach the programme makers for permission.

Quality of Outcome

You have obviously worked hard in your research and visits and produced interesting

thoughts and ideas around the subjects of identity, prison, control and media coverage of

same. What you need to work on is bringing these together in relation to what you want to

say and just as importantly what style or voice you want to use and how this relates to the

main themes or movements in photography. This later aspect is what I feel you need to

concentrate on and develop.

Demonstration of Creativity

It’s interesting to see your ideas about disorientations, identity and prejudicial conclusions

about people based on stereotypes. These are good and thought provoking but I’m

concerned that you are covering a very wide agenda with all of them - perhaps too wide.

This may change and crystallise out as you progress with the work.

As mentioned you have done some interesting and creative work - especially with the screen

grabs. This together with your picking up on the different approaches of Wylie, Wicks etc is

good; what you need to do is meld all this together to manufacture your own approach.

Coursework

This is the first assignment and there is no initial course work to comment on.

Research

On the question of identity and your interest in Wicks’ mug shots have a look at

Richard Alvedon’s In the American West - his use of plain backgrounds to concentrate

attention on the sitter. True he shows the sitter with additional stuff that enables the viewer to

speculate about the person but this could be seen as a development you may wish to

pursue. What level of control are you going to exercise in any portraits? Then again compare

this with Leila Alaoui’s The Moroccans ( http://www.loeildelaphotographie.com/en/

2015/12/10/article/159882194/leila-alaoui-the-morrocans/ ) See how similar methodology in

terms of plain backgrounds can achieve subtle differences in emphasis of meaning and

implication.

Have a look at how Wylie develops the themes started in the Maze and carried through

Watch towers to Outposts. Elements such as repetition and control - the towers in Northern

Ireland and how these were dismantled and transported into different war zones. The

consistent use of colour palette - as you put it “almost to the point of being a mesmerising

monochrome style". Sean O’Hagan reviews Wylie’s work here https://www.theguardian.com/

artanddesign/2013/oct/24/donovan-wylie-vision-as-power-exhibition .

There’s a discussion of Outposts here https://vimeo.com/29834282

Learning Log

This is ok but you lump everything together under one post I suggest to make finding

elements more easily you stratify the elements and create links to them.

“Photography always bears witness by interrogating us: What is an act of witnessing? Who bears witness to what, for whom, before whom? The witness is always singular, irreplaceable, unique.” ( Derrida p.xxiv)

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