In 2016, Trangmar was commissioned to create a film in commemoration of the Battle of The Somme. To do so, she visited the area, both the landscape, the war graves and the everyday places in Somme.

Unfound (2016) is not a film that has me convinced, and lacks coherence – markedly different to A Play in Time (2008). Trangmar has described the difficulty of creating a work about which so much has already been said, and that the film did not capture her entire response, something which she has set right in a later article (2098).

I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t a voiceover. Unfound seems to demand verbalising, as if Trangmar has decided to keep her thoughts muted. This would have been fine if her thinking were more explicit, through the development of a more strident range of symbols, or carefully placed events, but Unfound seems like a slide show. There is thinking happening, quite clearly – juxtapositions of industry and commemoration, agricultural routine and leisure – but it’s hard to penetrate. A Varda, or a Keiller would have quipped, mused, questioned. And I wonder if this reluctance to narrate is one of the features of video art as a moving image genre. If so, and there most definitely are works which don’t require narration – A Play in Time for starters , then it’s a decision which should arise from the work and its demands. To refuse one of the most powerful facilities of the moving image – to be able to have words and images in a single experience – seems deliberately obstinate. Perverse, in fact.

Trangmar, S. 2019. Passages of Inscription. Photographies 12. pp. 63-80.

It’s time to reflect on what’s happening with my practice since I – essentially – stopped shooting stills and moved on to video. It needs to be said, this hasn’t happened exactly like this – I’ve always shot stills alongside video, but video has always been project-based, not the casual shooting of stills. That’s changed – if I’m currently going out shooting, then it’s going to be video. 

I’ve learned lots. One of the first things is practical: if I’m looking at an image, whether still or moving, then I want to be able to look at it for a while. Hence, I need to make sure each take is around 30 seconds and – crucially – that I don’t mess around with ND filters, exposure comp, depth of field or any of that. I just need to set the shot up and let it run. The only thing I’m happy with changing is focus, to move that to where my attention goes, or where things are happening. 

This is instructive. It reminds me that there’s a pleasure in looking, whether the image is still or moving. There’s an ontological sameness, gazing, focussing on different parts of the image, weighing up, making sense, appraising. That’s probably because I’m looking at the image on a screen, the framing of an app reminding me of a certain parity. But that curiosity, and that meeting of inquiry with stimulus, is identical. 

But there’s a distinct difference in duration: to a certain extent, movement divorced from narrative, movement that’s reactive and reflexive, can appear abstract, ghostly. There is no hand making this movement: it’s not the movement of a car or a pan or a couple kissing. It’s movement not put on for the camera, but captured by it. It has agency beyond the frame. The world is revealed – or at least foregrounded – as alive and with its own agenda. 

It’s these kinds of movements that I seek out, have always sought out. Reeds waving in the wind. The play of patches of sun on concrete. A butterfly shooting across the frame. Clouds moving across the sky. Even the slightest wave of a dead twig suggests a continuity, foreshadows greater movement. 

Such movement, for me, jars against a too restrained, too formally literal composition. Composition that’s too neat, too obvious – this is the ground, this is the sky – imposed an order on the world that the movement demonstrates to be completely artificial. The shots I’m happiest with are ones you have to work at – using shallow depth of field to keep the moving trees blurred, having only the treetops against the sky, not having the banks of the river, looking up at the tree without roots or tips, avoiding horizontals. In the field I shot on Friday, there’s no structure to fix things, anchor things, like the motorway bridge. There’s no information. There’s just sense. I think, for this project, I’m moving towards the impressionistic. 

I’ve taken one or two shots that repeat the tree close-ups of ivy and weird shapes. These have fascinated me, for superficially, they are repetitions, but the slight movement provides a sense of the spatial completely different to the stills. In those, the tree is everything, and the background is scenery, whereas with moving image, the background has its own life, its own agency. It invites the viewer to look longer and more carefully. 

These are just tentative thoughts. I need to go back over David Campany’s Photography and Cinema (2008) to flesh this all out a bit. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

Not coming from a background in fine art, I’ve struggled with the fine art focus of much contemporary photography, much of which leaves me completely cold. I’ve also struggled to address this with tutors and peers, who have of occasion been quite definite that fine art isn’t such an integral part of contemporary photography as I think. And yet, on deciding for the current module to return to shooting video, it’s been indicative that I’ve been pointed in the direction of video art by everyone I’ve spoken with. 

If I’ve had any contact with video art, it’s generally been by accident or because there’s a crossover of some kind with a filmmaker. Every once in a while, I’ve come across video art in gallery spaces and the only one that has left any impression was a ridiculous black and wide film of a naked man bouncing on a trampoline from the 1960s, memorable only for its absurdity. I went to Mark Leckey’s retrospective at Tate Britain essentially because it was built around a motorway bridge, and I enjoyed it as an installation – less sure what I’d have made of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcoreif I’d come across it in isolation. Much of Agnes Varda’s installation work is an extension and reconfiguration of her films. Hassan Hajjaj’s recent exhibition at the Arnolfini included a brilliant film which was basically an extension of his portraits of musicians and performers, but playing with the juxtaposition so that the separate portraits appeared to be aware of one another. I’d had Tacita Dean recommended to me and went to her exhibition last year at the RA – and I’m afraid walked out after 10 minutes as I just didn’t get what on earth was supposed to be going on (without such knowledge, the whole thing was an ugly mess). 

It’s worth recalling the reasons for my return to video. First, with my new Sony, I’m now able to shoot video that looks the way I want it to look. Second, my background is in film and narrative form, primarily the novel. Third, I’m curious to learn just how video occurs in the context of the discipline of stills photography – I’ve heard repeatedly that working in video is something photographers do, but nothing about how that works and why it’s done. Last, I’m keen to bring what I’ve learned over the past year into the way I shoot the moving image and see what happens. 

The first book I tried engaging with, Still Moving(2008), is a collection of essays. It is, I swiftly discovered, an exercise in interrogating the medium, a solipsistic analysis of the technological, economic and ideological contexts of the making of still and moving images. The focus is here on the act, as often in academic works on photography, and rarely moves beyond that. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not interested in these conversations, at least not right now; what interests me is what I can learn and draw from my environment, physical and cultural, through the act of photographing. I have other means of doing this at my disposal – writing, walking, discussing, researching, looking, listening. When I listen to the world, what interests me is what I can hear and through experimentation, getting the most out of hearing; I’m much less interested in HOW I can hear, and it’s the same for me with photography. After a skim through of introductory paragraphs, Still Moving is consigned back to the shelf. 

The second, Moving Image(2015), is a collection of interviews, articles, reviews and the like, investigating the subject of video art. There is here, too, an overwhelming emphasis on interrogating the medium, a fascination with scratches on celluloid, repurposing tv adverts, the technologies of utopias and a telling discussion which attacks narrative cinema for being toxically ideological (I think there are better ways to destabilise ideologies than making difficult art which is only readable by your peer group). It is telling that Bill Viola, who I’d never heard of until beginning this investigation (such is the invisibility of video art beyond itself), and who makes work that is accessible and exquisitely crafted but philosophically astute (my personal definition of what makes for great art), has explicitly stated his gradual rejection of these obsessively abstract, obfuscating means of practice. 

In amongst this is the concept of ‘expanded cinema’, which envisions video art as a development of, not a reaction against, narrative film. Expanded cinema reconsiders the context in which the moving image can be experienced, whether in an art gallery, projected onto derelict buildings, through water, or whatever. I think this is useful as a defining concept that draws a line, however tentative, between the cinema-based film, in all its forms, I have come to develop considerable knowledge of, and video art. It – literally – expands cinema, suggesting novel opportunities and creative forms. In an era when the moving image is now nearly always experienced on a personal digital screen, this strikes me as crucially important. Other discussions comment on the relationship between film and context as a central part of the art – such that a work of video art can only be exhibited, indeed will only make sense, if the artist’s instructions for exhibition are followed. 

One of the great frustrations of video art – and one I suspect that keeps it from being better known – is its inaccessibility, which is a perhaps inevitable outcome of all the above. With non-time-based media, like photography, painting, sculpture, it’s easy to encounter this work second hand, through print and digital media. Even with time-based media such as cinema or theatre, it’s possible to encounter through DVD, scripts, streaming services, Youtube and so on. But video art appears difficult to experience remotely. There doesn’t seem to be a platform which lets you view video art: the majority of films being talked about aren’t available and so – and this is surely a bitter irony – the only way of accessing them is through the words of someone who isn’t the artists. There ARE platforms, but aimed at exhibitors and at a discouragingly high price tag. And whereas you can experience excerpts from a photobook online, there is not the complete caesura in experience as that between a still from a work of video art – which is an art of movement – and the video art itself. 

Anyway, the upshot of all this investigation is this: being a video artist and a filmmaker are not the same thing, though a filmmaker can also be a video artist (such as Agnes Varda, who is exemplary at both), and a video artist can also be a filmmaker (such as Steve McQueen, who likewise is exemplary at both). And the defining element, to me, is not to be found in interrogating the medium (which film has been doing anyway right from the outset – the Lumiere brothers played with still and moving images after all), but in the contexts in which video art is encountered. It is the markedly different possibilities and limitations of ‘expanded cinema’ which I will now need to investigate to see how my photography can be reconfigured as video art, rather than narrative film. Or whether I will continue to work as a filmmaker, but draw on the experience and knowledge acquired through the practice of photography. 

Beckman, K., & Ma, J. (eds.) 2008. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Kholeif, O. (ed.) 2015.Moving Image. London: Whitechapel Gallery. 

Susan Trangmar originally trained as a sculptor and has in time moved through still and into moving image work. A Play in Time is the result of a year’s residence, partnering with Photoworks and Brighton and Hove District Council, in St. Ann’s Well Gardens, a small formal municipal park. Trangmar worked with a digital camera fixed on a tripod, recording small details of plants, the activities of the users, the park’s built environment, as well as considerable sound archives. The result is a 25-minute film with one or two clips playing at any one time, and a book containing stills, essays and an interview with Trangmar. 

This is a work I can really relate to. It demonstrates a very deep immersion by the artist in a place, such that she becomes a part of it. The long take, fixed-frame format, taken from a tripod is exactly my preferred way of working, and Trangmar is likewise interested in the formal possibilities of the frame beyond the representational. Many shots are semi-abstract, and all are lovingly composed. Where Trangmar differs from my work is that she has not sought to ‘explain’ the park: there is no walking of the boundaries, no attempt to orientate the viewer, but rather it is as if we have been transported to the park and are looking around to discover it for ourselves. This is something I can learn from. Nor does she differentiate between semi-abstracts of the human and the non-human – park users are often headless, or just a pair of limbs, and their activities abstracted, such as the shadows of children on swings – again, more to provide a sense of place than a logical, linear document. 

Trangmar has constructed space in a fascinating way. This is partly due to the split screen format, which gives both a sense of simultanaeity of events, rather than singling them out as a single screen would do, and it is also in her lavish use of sound, almost all of it off-screen, giving snippets of conversation, seagulls, traffic, and many sounds which can’t be easily identified. The bird song, like the traffic, is foregrounded to the point of exaggeration and this provides a considerable sense of the pastoral. The split screen also adds a disorienting sense of slippage where different moments of the same shot are side by side; this is partly intended to emphasise the slipperiness of memory, but for me it suggests the park as embedded in individual routines. 

It’s also interesting that Trangmar has chosen not to delve into a key moment in the park’s history: in the late c.19th, it was the site of the second ever film studio, and a huge number of early films, many of them technically revolutionary, were made in St. Ann’s Well Gardens. Many filmmakers and artists would have taken this as an opportunity to ‘interrogate the medium’, but for Trangmar it appears to be sufficient that she is continuing a tradition, leaving the accompanying essays to flesh out this detail. 

The accompanying book is also notable: it picks out stills from the film and resets them against the white of paper, hence the images resonate differently. It is a different and by no means inferior way of encountering the park which emphasises the images’ formal aspects. It also emphasises the importance of movement to the film. 

There is much for me to learn here: returning to filmmaking after developing a stronger sense of how and why I make images the way I do, it’s interesting to see a work where formalism is both central but never overbearing. It’s also worth considering what can be achieved beyond a cinematic context, by the use of split screen and different media. I will be investigating Trangmar’s work more thoroughly in future. 

Trangmar, S. 2008. A Play in Time. Brighton: Photoworks.

Given that the two filmmakers who’ve made the biggest impact on my own filmmaking – Agnes Varda and Gideon Koppel – have both worked on installation projects (prolifically, in Varda’s case), it’s a medium that should be relevant to me. In fact, I’ve often wondered whether this wouldn’t be a better place to put some of the very slow films I’ve made like Strands, which is surely too ponderous for a film festival screening. I find it also neatly straddles the divide between photography and film, both contextually and phenomenologically. To a certain extent, I want to create works in which to dwell, to rest oneself rather than be propelled along, and an installation strikes me as an excellent medium for providing such an opportunity. 

My reason for taking this Masters had nothing to do with this interest. I had wanted to explore my visual sense, its cultural influences and – latterly – its autobiographical imperatives. I had also wanted to begin exploring how others connected with landscape visually and phenomenologically and to find ways of expressing this in my own work. I had also wanted to deepen my connection with the Pebblebed Heaths, and all of this has been in preparation for a film PhD. To a considerable extent, I’ve achieved much of what I set out to do, and in some ways even surpassed that. And so it’s little wonder that I have found myself floundering during this module. I just don’t know where to go next. 

There have been further destabilising factors. As I’ve mentioned previously, the arrival of the Sony a7siii has completely thrown me, and this has been compounded by an ever-increasing abundance of film work. A recent trip to Bristol brought me to the buildings where I studied for my MA in film – a difficult experience, but the difficulties were practical, and I found myself absolutely flying in that context in a way I never have on this MA. And with all this general vagueness, the deliberate vagueness of this photography MA has just compounded things: right now, being asked to make a specific kind of film with a set length and specific objectives would be wonderful. 

And so I have to set my own specific objectives: create some kind of video-based thing. I’ve the germ of a concept: base the work around the tiny enclosures on Colaton Raleigh Common, as these are weird places, places to dream and imagine, and so can extend the Hidden Corners ideas (perhaps referencing works like The Secret Garden, The Enchanted Castle and other examples of childhood magical trespassing) but also connecting this to the deep politics of enclosure (childhood as anarchy). Deliver both a sense of place, but an angle on that which draws on both the politics and the reverie. 

But who to model what I’m doing on? I’ve had a few ‘video artists’ recommended to me, but for the most part I can’t stand this stuff. It feels – well, if I’m being honest, it feels horribly precious and pretentious. It feels like the kind of thing you could only ever connect with if you were from the same world as the person who made them – that fine art background, with all the attendant ‘criticality’. I’m sure if you know how to read her work that Helen Sear is really good, but I don’t and – frankly – I’m not interested to learn how to. I can see this is going to be a struggle, but I’m sure there will be fellow travellers. Likewise, though much ‘video art’ is performance based, even though work such as that of Bill Viola is stunningly good (that I’d never heard of him demonstrates how niche video art is, all but invisible to most), it’s not going to be useful to me to investigate that. I’m certainly not about to put myself in my work as I just don’t think I’m that interesting as a subject, and there, quite frankly, isn’t anyone else to work with. 

Given his deep connection to the Parisian film scene of which Agnes Varda was a part, it’s perhaps little surprise that William Klein, a photographer/ filmmaker recommended to me, is one whose work resonates. His Broadway by Light, from 1958, is dazzlingly beautiful, both documentary and abstract, grabbing the gorgeousness and complexity of the world of actuality and building a montage piece that overwhelms in a way that is both aesthetically rich and highly political. I will be looking at his work further. 

And then there’s Susan Trangmar, whose A Play in Time I encountered exactly a year ago at the Martin Parr Foundation, back when the world made rather more sense. Trangmar, I can see through her work and the way she talks about her work, is someone from who I can learn a great deal. I suspect the next post from me will be exactly about her.