The Uncanny and the Weird and the Eerie – encountering the writings of Mark Fisher.

Posted on 8th Jun 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research Journal, ResearchTagged Contextual Research, Project DevelopmentLeave a comment

Colaton Raleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.

I’ve a lifelong love of horror, ghost stories, sci-fi and fantasy, and though I’ve long been familiar with Freud’s notion of the unheimlich – weakly translated into English as the Uncanny – it’s never sat well with the work I prefer or the moods I sometimes seek out when photographing the landscape. Mark Fisher (2016) has done an excellent job of teasing apart three interrelated but distinct concepts – the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie – and this has helped provide a focus for my work over the past weeks as I’ve roamed in the weird and eerie moods and sensory encounters made possible by the long dusks as we approach the summer solstice.

Fisher argues that while all three are similar in their affect and in their defamiliarising effects, the uncanny is quite different to the other two, pointing to Freud’s original word, the unheimlich, as rooted in the domestic as the literal translation – the unhomely – suggests. The unheimlich, he argues, starts with the familiar and makes it strange from within whereas the weird and the eerie impose strangeness from the outside. Hence, for example, the automaton of Hoffman’s The Sandman, mentioned by Freud, is created out of ideas of the family. The unheimlich therefore requires a degree of retention of the homely to exert its unhomely effect.

Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, on the other hand, might similarly seem to be a tale of parenting turned monstrous, but there is nothing homely about its golden-eyed children from the outset; they are imposed from the outside. This is a good example of what Fisher describes as the weird as bringing ‘to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely” (10), particularly when two things are brought together that should not logically be, in this case a hyper-intelligent hive mind and biologically human children.

Of course it could be argued that, in the case of The Sandman, the wild science which makes possible the automaton is ‘beyond’ the homely, but I would counter this is only in a very limited way: it is the father’s job, keeping him within the orthodoxies of family structure, and it is also within the orthodoxies of contemporary culture through science, though only just. There is, to the weird, a contingent unknowability, and I might draw the distinction between two canonical doubles, the double often considered as de facto uncanny. The Mr. Hyde of The Strange case of Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde is, like the automaton, a creation of the laboratory. He is monstrous, the science is extreme, but Mr. Hyde retains some of the familiar behaviours and traits of a gentleman; it is this latter that especially provides its deeply unsettling uncanny effects. There is nothing unknowable about Mr. Hyde’s existence – Stevenson saves his explorations of that for his psychological insights. The Portrait of Dorian Gray, on the other hand, is the result of a form of curse which (at least in the book) is never adequately explained. There is a clear intervention of something unknowable from the outside: how has this happened – and why? We are not told. The monstrous double in the painting is thus not homely at all and so cannot be considered unhomely: it is, rather, weird.

Fisher’s idea of the eerie is related but quite distinct: whereas with the weird, something exists where there should be nothing, or where nothing exists where there should be something. Hence, despite its iconic familiarity, the Tardis always retains a sense of the eerie wherever it crops up and hence the empty motorways at the height of lockdown were frequently referred to as eerie. In both cases, as with the weird, unknowability plays its part, though quite differently. The unknowability of the Tardis is the logic-defying otherness of time travel and its Doctor; this unknowability allows the Tardis to occupy tellingly liminal spaces in each storyline, spaces where there should typically be nothing. The empty motorways of March and April 2020, however, did have a logical, knowable cause – the application of government restrictions in response to a global pandemic. All the same, empty motorways are not a unique phenomenon and can be caused by serious accidents, road works, demonstrations, and do not then appear eerie. I would argue that a failure to fully accept, grasp and adapt to a reality that was continually shifting and unpredictable was behind this feeling of eerie more than any connection with apocalyptic cinema. One simply did not know when, if ever, the motorways would run again, and this demonstrates how an unknowable outside acts on the familiar to render it eerie.

So what has all this to do with my practice? First, one has to acknowledge the utter subjectivity to applying these modes. One has to experience a familiarity in something to experience the uncanny; one has to experience a lack of knowledge of what should or should not be to experience the weird and the eerie. The failing light of dusk helps to weaken certainty just as the purple hues accentuate strangeness. In such a state of mild reverie, it becomes easier to suspend what might otherwise be knowable and suggest less literal readings of the landscape.

East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.

Hence, the fallen and felled trees entangling roots and pebbles seem to become a single, Lovecraftian organic entity; what has caused this fusion of vegetal and mineral is unknowable; it becomes weird.

Hence the child’s drawing which does not belong in the brambles of East Budleigh common sheds daylight’s familiar explanation of a family picnic and infers a family snatched by fanged monsters.

A chunk of the Rock of Gibraltar sits on a rise on Woodbury Common, a commemorative gift for the Royal Marines who first cut their teeth there. The rock is a pale blue and always looks out of place, but the dusk makes it shine purple against the dark heathland vegetation and its shape becomes a ghostly abstract. In the midst of this darkening landscape where there should be nothing, there is a palpable eerie something; perhaps the rock fulfils a darker purpose, perhaps some obscene evil lurks beneath it.

In the daytime, these army tracks lead to one of the flagpoles used to warn the public of the firing of live ammunition, but after sundown, the tracks and empty flagpole imply the absence of human activity, indeed the empty expansiveness of the heaths. Where has everyone gone? Will they ever return? It is easy to fall into such reveries without altering or fictionalising anything in front of the camera.

Commons are complex places, full of lost histories, silent wars of attrition and endless idiosyncrasies. Beyond being a place for picnics, dog-walking, den-building and mountain-biking, they are places of conflict and violent change, both political and environmental. The pebbles themselves are evidence of millions of years of violent climate change during the Triassic age, a long way from the comfortable beach pebbles one puts in one’s pocket. I have been searching for a way to incorporate this with the familiar and comforting way the heaths occur to most people. It may be that through deploying the weird and the eerie, sparingly perhaps, I might be able to achieve this reconciliation.

Fisher, M. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.

First encounters with Rancière.

Posted on 11th Apr 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research JournalTagged Contextual ResearchLeave a comment

I have very recently become aware of the work of the critic and philosopher Jacques Ranciere. My own interest in criticism is in work which engages fully with the artistic strategies – whether linguistic or aesthetic – used by an artist, rather than focussing primarily on the content of an artwork. That is to say, a strong focus on the way that an artwork is made, rather than primarily focussing on artistic choice of subject, but without resorting to apolitical formalism. For example, Bakhtin’s work, which I have studied extensively, can be used to evaluate the structure of dialogue in the novels of Dickens to see how characters come to terms with the power structures in which they are placed as a means of representing and evaluating those power structures beyond the world of the novel (1984). His work can also be used to consider, for example, editing choices in the film, and to a certain extent where aesthetic choices are brought into collision with a film’s linguistic elements (Flanagan, 2009).

Ranciere is an easier match for photography than Bakhtin, as he applies his theories frequently to aesthetics (Deranty, 2010). His work rests on his identification of three historical artistic regimes (into which literary art also falls): the ethical, the representative, and the aesthetic. While each progresses from the other to become dominant, with Romanticism making the transition from representation to aesthetics, all three co-exist and artists are influenced by and make use of the intents of each. He collects together the philosophical, economic, political and scientific influences which shape each regime and describes how artists respond to, express and work with such regimes, how these shape and are shaped by intended audiences, relationships to genre, and relationships between art forms. He rejects the identification of an art form with its technical features and downplays the impact of celebrated artists.

I am interested more in my own work in the aesthetic regime – whereby the language of art itself becomes the predominant subject, rather than being used as a conduit to represent ideas about the world. I am interested in using photography to explore and express my feelings about a place and engaging with place as a locus of aesthetic investigation of form, texture, colour, line and so on. I prefer to leave my photography open to interpretation rather than strictly adhering to genre or being didactic in the politics which are unavoidable when exploring ideas of place. I am also keen to hybridise my work with my skills in film-making and writing, and see my photography not as a thing in its own right, but an iteration of intents that can be and are expressed in a variety of other ways.

Nevertheless, the representative is, as I have been reminded numerous times by Falmouth tutors, ever-present and I think this is of particular relevance to photography, with its intimate relationship to scientific evidence and photojournalism. Photography is used as ‘evidence’ in a way more assertive than even film, despite its technologically similar heritage. The photograph, therefore, simultaneously categorises actuality (the representational) and interrogates it to tease out open and metaphoric meaning (the aesthetic), and whether or not this is an intention of my work, it will be received by others as having representational force. Acknowledging this and working with it is an important task for me at this point in developing my practice.

I am very new to Ranciere’s work, and need more time to read it directly, evaluate it, deepen my knowledge of it, and make links to my work and the work or other artists. Nevertheless, it is already a useful way of thinking about my own work not as an either/or aesthetic/representational, but as an interplay.

Bakhtin, M. M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deranty, J. 2010. Jacques Ranciere: Key Concepts. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Flanagan, M. 2009. Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Theorising the Spatial – Doreen Massey’s ‘For Space’

Posted on 8th Apr 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research Journal, Reflections, ResearchTagged Contextual Research, Project DevelopmentLeave a comment

If my photography is a way of ‘thinking-through’ and expressing ideas about registered commons, and if I’m drawing on sensory research as a methodology to do so, then what is the theoretical basis for my evaluation? This is an ongoing question, one begun during my film Masters, when I drew heavily on environmental psychology. Sensory ethnography uses both film and photography as practice-based research, is deeply influenced by phenomenology, and takes as a central concern people’s relationships with space by making use of some key cultural geographers (Pink, 2015). I briefly engaged with this area of research in my Masters dissertation film, and am now deepening my knowledge of it, starting with the work of Doreen Massey, and will be continuing through the work of Tim Ingold and Yi Tu Fuan. Massey was herself involved in interdisciplinary work, including with filmmaker Patrick Keiller on his influential essay film, Robinson in Ruins (2010) which drew knowingly on the traditions of landscape painting and photography; this was one of the last projects she was involved with prior to her premature death.

Massey defines space and place as distinct but indivisibly connected concepts (2006). Space, she sees as ‘the product of interrelations’, ‘the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist’ and ‘always under construction’; ‘relations’ here are ‘understood as embedded practices’. It is thus constantly unfolding, unpredictable and full of the unexpected. Her model is thus a fundamentally political one – describing ‘the realm of the configuration of potentially dissonant (or concordant) practices’. Massey also argues that time and space are only divisible in the abstract, that ‘time unfolds as change [and] space unfolds as interaction’, especially social interaction.

Place, on the other hand, is where the trajectories and interrelations become ‘thrown together’, and equally where they fail to do so, held together by sets of ongoingly contested rules resulting from the ‘throwntogetherness’ of these trajectories and interrelations. Place is also constantly unfolding, hence it is both temporal and spatial, hence one cannot return to exactly the same place; attempts to enclose place in order to render it static is the basis for dangerous conservatism, but also poses difficult questions for heritage and conservation organisations. Doing so necessarily arrests many of the trajectories which constitute place. Rather, place is a negotiation between trajectories which are ‘sometimes ridden with antagonism’, and socially ‘places pose in particular form the question of our living together…the central question of the political’. Place formation can also require a more or less rigidly constructed ‘we’ or sets of ‘we’.

So what does this have to do with common knowledge? First, it describes perfectly the two ways I approach my practice, as ways of engaging with the Pebblebed Heaths as space and as place. The Pebblebed Heaths first became known to me as places. They are held together by sets of rules which name them, are written into law, are written onto maps. Commons are a particular type of place and when I first visited in 2008, I mapped my understanding of those rules, many of them unexamined and cultural, onto my experience of being there. I have chosen commons because I believe there is much to be learned about such rules and their physical, psychological and phenomenological manifestations, especially the historic and unfolding politics and conflicts which shape them via different constructions of ‘we’. These rules and conflicts – signs of enclosure, and of controlled burning, for example – are the markers, if you like, which plot any walk I take through the commons. My examination of the heaths as places, then, is akin to working as a hunter, or a farmer, with distinctly formed intentions informed by my understandings of the commons as places. By hunting evidence, or nurturing its eventual appearance through farming, of the various conflicts and rules which construct the heaths as places, I am experiencing and representing them as a ‘throwntogetherness’ of trajectories. I am seeking out evidence.

Andy Thatcher, East Budleigh Common, 2020.

On the other hand, to experience anywhere solely as place is limiting, and to interrogate it critically one must also consider it as space, to tease apart the trajectories which form it. Doing this requires a loosening of intent, an openness to the happenstance and unexpected, as described by Massey, and this is precisely what most of my shoots are like: impulsive, aimless wanderings chasing after momentary fascinations and whims, and embodied experience which lets me be led by aesthetic and emotional response rather than hard-nosed wishes to represent as Rancière (2014) might put it (more of this in another post). This is when I am a gleaner, that is to say, most of the time. It is in doing so that I encounter the multiplicity of trajectories, including those excluded from the commons as closed ‘place’ – the fly-tippers, and the graffiti artists – as well as the non-human trajectories of ecological change – the ceaseless passage of water, the willows in bloom. Rather than seeking out evidence for the heaths as a place, and thus dealing with place in the abstract, I am becoming entangled in the heaths as space, and thus dealing with them in the particular, physical and as embodied experience.

Both approaches complement one another; a quick email to the site manager about a freshly-gleaned trajectory lets me examine it in light of it being included or excluded from the heaths as rule-bound places. An intentional set of rules about, for example, military exclusion areas, gives me an emplaced starting point from which to begin exploring space. While the writing for this project deals more with the heaths as places, freighted as they are with facts, they are loosened by the absence of hard context in many of the images; using text more playfully and spatially is, perhaps, something to explore further at a later date.

Deranty, J. 2014. Jacques Ranciere: Key Concepts. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Massey, D. 2006. For Space. London: Sage.

Pink, S. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography (second edition). London: Sage.

Gleaning and essayism

Posted on 6th Apr 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research Journal, ReflectionsTagged Contextual ResearchLeave a comment

Gleaning and the essayistic.

In The Gleaners & I (2000), director Agnes Varda makes the comparison between gleaning and making art. This popular and influential documentary was Varda’s first using the versatility of digital video which for the first time let her make films unencumbered by a film crew. The film takes for its subject the variety of people who glean, whether for rejected potatoes, unharvested olives, discarded furniture, or unsold market produce. Varda makes clear the difference between those who glean because they are poor and those who glean because they value the activity, saying of her own ‘artistic gleaning…you pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from other people, and then you make it into a film’ (2001). Tellingly, having found this out about herself, Varda continued her gleaning to create installation art, a completely new but entirely logical direction for her work.

There is an embrace of the happenstance and the accidental in gleaning. When one gleans, it is impossible to predict exactly what one will encounter; there is a deeper engagement with the environment because one loses agency over what one expects. What matters is not what one sets out for, but rather, what one does with whatever one finds.

Andy Thatcher, March 2020, Colaton Raleigh Common.

Jeff Wall’s description of photographers being either hunters – who know what they want from a photograph and go after it – or farmers – who also know what they want but prepare for it by nurturing the conditions of an image – is a useful and supple analogy (Cotton, 2014). This is no clear binary, and Wall makes clear that he often indulges in a bit of both. Likewise, so do I: I decide I want some shots of the grenade range on the Pebblebed Heaths and I track it down – click. I’ve also found a couple of spots that I return to whenever I can to get the right shot, under different light conditions and to test out angles, such as the military bunkers – click, click, click.

Andy Thatcher, February 2020, East Budleigh Common.

But both hunting and farming presuppose that I know exactly what I’m looking for and while my portfolio includes examples of both, the majority of shots included are things I’ve stumbled across along the way, things that have caught my interest and attention, things I’ve picked up, things discarded that I’ve gleaned. So, to add to rather than contradict Wall’s two methods, it makes sense to include another form of subsistence food-gathering, the gleaner.

If the creative work of the farmer is primarily in the preparation, and the work of the hunter is primarily in the moment, then the work of the gleaner is primarily after the event. In the case of Varda, this happens in the sifting, sequencing and tight editing of a huge amount of collected material. This was exactly my approach in the making of my film (In Search of) Old Sunshine: I amassed bits of writing, my own and those of others, visited a variety of places just to see what they were like, returned regularly to one particular green space, talked to lots of people, and then created a film from what emerged from the material.

Andy Thatcher, 2019, (In Search of) Old Sunshine.

It was also my approach in creating common knowledge, weaving together ‘knowledge’ gleaned from conversations and readings alongside images gleaned from a series of occasionally directionless and impulsive photo walks across the Pebblebed Heaths, and drawing this together with personal observation and speculation. From this, I have drawn together the themes of the portfolio, the subthemes of each double spread, and the main themes – historical context, changing landscapes, working together. The problematic objectivity and vagueness implicit in the title is entirely deliberate, as is the occasionally tenuous connection between text and image. Does the heath’s one commoner really live in a run-down caravan? Is that graffiti really on a military bunker?

There is an important philosophical point to be made here. In the social sciences, such a methodology is known as thematic analysis, and is self-avowedly subjective. There is a general area to be explored, and certain topics to be covered, but the work is essentially a summary of findings rather than a defining argument. This approach is central to the literary essay, and has a companion in the essay film, the loosest of documentary categories of which Varda’s work is considered exemplary. Neither an objective approach to actuality, with its risk of didacticism, nor a wholly subjective one, with its risk of solipsism, an essayistic approach hands agency to the reader or viewer.

But to what extent can photography be considered essayistic? And does the essayistic, being originally a literary form, require text to be considered as such? Aldous Huxley (2017) proposed that the literary essay was a ‘personal investigation’ which revolved around three poles: ‘…the personal and the autobiographical; …the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and…the abstract- universal…The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best…of all three’ (p. 84).

Ingrid Pollard, 1988, Pastoral Interlude.

Of this, Ingrid Pollard’s series Pastoral Interlude (1988) is exemplary: the result of meticulous contextual, aesthetic and in-the-field research, deep introspection, and a lively and perceptive philosophising that involves the viewer, uncomfortably so if one is the conventionally white consumer of ‘countryside’ and landscape photography.

Very differently, Jack Latham’s Sugar Paper Theories (2019) permits the viewer to immerse themselves in the concrete-particular of documents, from which he has drawn out universal themes of identity, authority and the suppression of truth: his personal involvement emerges stylistically, and it is argued that the authoring implied by notable styling works self-reflexively in the essay film to place the filmmaker within it. Here, when placed alongside more vernacular archival photography Latham’s meticulous eye and playful framings imply his presence no less decisively than had his shadow or reflection appeared, and the entire book is, surely, as much the result of gleaning and happenstance as Varda’s documentary work.

In his essay Truth and Landscape (1996), Robert Adams tells us that ‘landscape pictures can offer us…three verities – geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious’ (14). Here are, extraordinarily, precisely Huxley’s three poles. Having not yet seen Adams’ series, I cannot evaluate this further, but it is intriguing to say the least, especially as Adams’ images are typically presenting without text. As Adams’ work is pointedly but playfully political, and uses aesthetics in complex ways, I intend to do so. My own project is still very much in its infancy. I have much to learn, to explore and to glean. I have barely begun to draw themes or decide on how to address the essayistic in my work. Nevertheless, my work-in-progress portfolio is a very tentative first step towards doing so.

Adams, R. 1996. Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture.

Andreson, M., & Varda, A. 2001. “The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker – an Interview with Agnes Varda.” Cineaste, 4. pp 24-7.

Cotton, C. 2014. Photography as Contemporary Art. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Huxley, A. 2017. Preface to The Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley. In N. Alter & T. Corrigan (eds.) Essays on The Essay Film. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 83-85.

Latham, J. 2019. Sugar Paper Theories (second edition). London: Here Press.

CRJ Task W8: Exhibiting my work

Posted on 22nd Mar 202022nd Mar 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research JournalTagged CourseworkLeave a comment

Into the Woods: Trees in Photography was a small exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum which opened in late 2017. It contained the work of 40 photographers from throughout the history of photography, some chosen from the V&A archives, others from those of the RPS. Photographers included Crystal Lebas, Abbas Kairostami, Stephen Shore, Alfred Steiglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Mitch Epstein, Paul Strand, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen, Wolfgang Tilmans, Lee Friedlander, Jean-Eugen-Auguste Atget, Jem Southam, Simone Nieweg, Paul Hart, John Davies, Robert Adams, Ansel Adams, Ingrid Pollard, Paul Hart, Paul Hill and Fay Godwin.

Tal Shochat, Rimon (Pomegranate), 2011. Museum no. E.1127-2012. © Tal Shochat

It’s interesting that many of these names have become very familiar to me and influenced my work, although the majority I’d not heard of at the time. The exhibition intended to demonstrate the enduring fascination with and diversity of responses to the tree as aesthetic object and was expanded into a book published in 2019 by Thames & Hudson.

Royal Engineers, Cutting on the 49th Parallel, on the Right Bank of the Mooyie River Looking West, about 1860. Museum no. 40090

Despite its impressive roster of names, Into the Woods appears to have been almost entirely overlooked by the critics. This is perhaps due its size, or perhaps that such a theme wasn’t considered worthy of critical attention. As such, only The Times‘s Nancy Durrant took the trouble to do more than provide an enthusiastic gloss over the bare details. Her review focusses on the sensory experience of being amongst this subject, and is appreciative of the formal and technical excellence and diversity of the selection, making no attempt to draw out any kind of political statement from the exhibition. This, to me, is entirely the point: politics are glimpsed – environmentalism via Robert Adams, race via Ingrid Pollard, for example – but the tree remains the focus of the exhibition. It does not use trees to talk about other things.

Ingrid Pollard, from the series *Self Evident*, 1995.

I also take pictures of trees. Of course, my work would never appear in such an exhibition because I’m not even a paid photographer, let alone a celebrated one. But I do have my own relationship to trees, my own way of using them. I’m especially interested in the eerie, monstrous shadows trees cast when they’re bare, and the ways these completely alter their environments.

Andy Thatcher, St Michael Hill, Somerset, January 2020.

I’ve also been through periods of photographing urban trees at night as they interact with artificial lighting from buildings and street lights.

Andy Thatcher, Bristol Eye Hospital, October 2018.

Neither of these ways of looking at trees was represented in the exhibition, which sometimes was a little too reassuring, and maybe if I got really good at what I did, one would have found a place here.

Barnes, M. 2019. Into the Woods: Trees in Photography. London: Thames & Hudson.

Durran, N. 2017. Come where you can see the art for the trees. The Times. December 12.

Various notes on shooting

Posted on 22nd Mar 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research JournalTagged Project DevelopmentLeave a comment

When I’m out shooting, I tend to make notes on my phone. I’d been waiting for some moment of revelation that tied them all together, but that isn’t going to be happening so it seems, so I’ll just have to leave them as bulletpoints to be woven into something some other time.

In addition to the hunter and the farmer, there needs to be the category of the gleaner, following Agnes Varda’s argument that art is a form of gleaning. By this, I mean, creating art from the things one comes across without specifically seeking them. So I go out shooting with a vague idea of what I’m looking for, but usually what I come back with is something entirely different – a reflection in a boggy mire, an abandoned caravan, frost on a path, fly-tipped waste, a stand of pines. Of course, this means coming back with a bit of a mess and endless contradictions. The vast majority of my images will be disregarded, but at some point, a coherence will start to form, and it’s in the editing and sequencing, the thinking through of the images, that things take shape. It’s an immersive, open response to place. It’s how I make films, too.
I take various types of shots. These fall into a variety of categories, which I could loosely call: Weird (as in the idiosyncratic and the atmospherically unsettling), archetypal (including objects and vistas), enchanted (a close relative of the picturesque), traces, abstracts, (these two are often pictures of the ground), and the political (sometimes actual things like enclosure banks, sometimes metaphorical).
An alternative to the gaze is interpellation – as in projecting one’s ideology onto the world, but as an act of testing out, and an act that is shaped by context, shaping one in turn.
Photography is understood popularly as a looking for something rather than just looking. I’m often asked what I’m photographing – once, when I said I was photographing a pylon because I like them, the person asking thought that must be what I photographed generally, as if I was creating some personal catalogue of the things. Last week, I was asked if it was insects. I always say I’m photographing whatever I find. This confuses people. It must be quite a radical approach, I’m thinking.
It’s OK taking different types of shots, but really, sometimes they just won’t work together – i.e. vista shots with abstracts. I recall this in books I’ve read – suddently coming across a ‘straight’ photograph of a place, even if there’s a very good reason for it, is often a bit of a disappointment.

Politics vs. aesthetics

Posted on 18th Mar 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research JournalTagged Contextual Research, CourseworkLeave a comment

It might seem like a bit of a cheat, but I’m reposting a forum post here, as I can’t think of anything more pertinent to where I’m at in my practice right now. This week has been absolutely on the money for me.

This week’s topic could not have come at a more apt moment for my work. Following feedback from both Jesse and Steph at last week’s symposium, it’s clear that my work is currently weighted too heavily towards aesthetics at the expense of communication. This is something I’ve been wrangling with for some time, as on the one hand, I get great pleasure and satisfaction from the formal process of composing a well-balanced and executed image, while on the other, wishing to convey the deep politics and complex histories of registered common land. These aren’t incompatible, but this demonstrates how uneasy is the partnership between aesthetics and message. I’ll get to my images later in this post.

I’m looking at two interconnected bodies of work: first, Elliot Porter’s The Place No-one Knew (1963). Porter was an associate of Ansel Adams, a fellow campaigner in The Sierra Club, and a trailblazer in the use of colour. I’m a great admirer of his work on a formal and technical level, and because his work powerfully communicates sense of place through abstracts, something central to my own approach. He’s been a big influence on my work.

Eliot Porter, *The Place No-one Knew*, 1963.

The Place No-one Knew was created to raise awareness of the imminent flooding of Glen Canyon, Utah, to create Lake Powell. A copy was sent to the president. The effort failed in the short term, but as so often, the awareness raised helped mitigate and slow down the ongoing flooding of the US South West’s canyonland for hydroelectric schemes.

So far so good. However, Porter, like Adams, was deeply influenced by a very white middle-class form of conservationism – indeed, this is still a huge problem for the conservation movement, as demonstrated by the paucity of diversity in Extinction Rebellion – although this an issue specifically being addressed within this dynamic and vital movement. Porter’s effort thus spoke to a specific audience – and on behalf of others without consulting with them first. Though remote, Glen Canyon was, in fact, already well known to hikers, fishermen, and a small local population that included Native Americans. This group, while appreciating Porter’s efforts, were nevertheless furious, not least at the name of the book.

So we have Porter’s unique vision. It IS glorious, but it’s highly individualistic, and that becomes a problem when it’s married to politics. The work is, frankly, a bit TOO glorious. It might evoke a sense of place, but it does not evoke a sense of uncertainty or danger. The images are, in other words, and in spite of the accompanying essay, devoid of context (something picked up on by both Jesse and Steph in some of my own). In other words, Elliot has let aesthetics get in the way of his message. The very beauty communicated so effectively and intended to instil concern and galvanise action, ends up soothing, reassuring. Glen Canyon becomes no place at all, just another site for Porter’s work, and in that case, this suggests an abundance of glorious places for glorious work. The aesthetics anesthetise.

Drowned River: The Death & Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado is the second project resulting from a collaboration between Mark Klett, Byron Wolfe and environmentalist, journalist and art critic Rebecca Solnit. It takes Porter’s work as a starting point, respectfully but critically, and uses it to explore Lake Powell as the climate-change-driven receding water levels reveal Glen Canyon once more. The work is no less aesthetically glorious. The colours are more mute, but that’s more to do with the different technologies and tastes of each era. Klett and Byron pick up on abstracts, just like Porter, and their framing is clearly influenced by the original work. It is a celebration of a landscape and a brilliantly-executed communication of place, even if it’s quite a weird place.

Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, *Drowned River: The Death & Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado*, 2018.

Unlike the standard essay-then-images of Porter’s work, Solnit’s essay flows through the images, creating a dialogue with them, providing the contexts of climate change, critiquing Porter, but also revelling in the experience of being out exploring. There being a notable lack of prominent female ‘landscape’ photographers, having a female voice is part of the strength of the project. Both images and text situate the collaborators throughout the work, and this enhanced subjectivity, and that this is a collaboration both disrupt the individualistic vision of The Place No-one Knew. In doing this, the viewer is encouraged to develop their own relationship with the place; the observers are in this way part of what the viewer is able to observe, rather than Porter’s direct communication of a unique viewpoint. This engagement helps develop agency, and an active viewer is more likely to feel prompted to act than a passive one. The socio-political and historic context of place is also communicated through the images, though without didacticism. Hence litter, cracked mud and vapour trails are stark reminders of environmental destruction, while abandoned picnic tables, boats and closure signage remind of the cost of the receding waters to local communities. In this way, the viewer gets the impression of being a fellow traveller to the leading edge of catastrophic climate change and the novel landscapes it is already creating.

I took on board what was said to me by Jesse and Steph, and with this in mind, went looking more specifically for the military traces at the Pebblebed Heaths. Aesthetics have remained important – and there are here images taken just to communicate a sense of place – but a meticulous, critical eye keen to communicate context was also something I had in mind. I’m still sorting through these images, but below are a few.

Andy Thatcher, Colleton Raleigh Common, March 2020.

Klett, M., Solnit, R., & Wolfe, B. 2018. Drowned River: The Death & Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado. Santa Fe: Radius Books.

Porter, Elliot. 1963. The Place No-one Knew. San Francisco: The Sierra Club.

Vision 20/20: Falmouth Flexible Photography Symposium.

Posted on 14th Mar 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research Journal, ReflectionsTagged Project DevelopmentLeave a comment

A challenging, occasionally frustrating but often fun few days at Falmouth University’s Face to Face 2020 for distance learning MA students. Somewhat depleted in numbers due to the ongoing worries over coronavirus, but we still had students from Scotland, Vienna and Spain. It’s going to take a bit of time to unpick everything, but the two key learning outcomes for me were these.

Realising through my struggle to learn enough about film to operate a 5×4 camera, and a wonderful but hugely pricey digital medium format camera with its vast file sizes, that the most important thing with a photography practice is to start with myself rather than jump to any technology because I think it’s something I should be using. This is why I have a gimbal I never use. It’s why I bought a compact with a vast zoom I never used. My practice, if truth be told, is an extension of my walking. Any technology I use needs to leave me free to walk – hence only one camera, one lens, no tripod. At least, at the moment. Should I develop another way of photographing – like portraits, for example – then it’s worth thinking about. But my photography needs to start with me, be almost prosthesis. It needs to enhance not distract. And that means necessary compromise, but being weighed down with the physical and cognitive burden of kit has to be more benefit than cost. This realisation comes as somewhat of a relief. Maybe, some day, when there’s the opportunity to get tuition and support over a period of days I’ll go back to 5×4. But right now, it’s my Sony and my zoom.

One of my constant anxieties about my photography can be described succinctly as ‘Who fucking cares?’ Yeah, it’s a beautiful path. Yeah, it’s an eerie ruin. Yeah, it’s a madly abstract reflection. But WHO FUCKING CARES? My group portfolio reviews pretty much focussed on that without meaning to. It’s not enough to be formally excellent: an image has to communicate. I’ve long since had enough of writing that falls into this category – I loathe a clever but empty novel – and I’m very clear about photography that feels that way to me. What I need to do is have the bravery to detach myself from shots that I take that have seduced my through their formal composition. And that’s a hard thing to do. I guess that’s what it’s going to take for my photography to move on from images that are created mainly to please myself that, yes, I’ve composed something skilfully, to, yes, I have something to communicate that’s going to engage others. Asking myself Who Fucking Cares? when on a shoot doesn’t mean that I can’t engage with images I find striking in their weirdness of their beauty, but I need to ask myself, just as I think about the formal aspects of a frame, I need to consider their communicative elements as if this were indivisible from the lines and textures I take so much time over. Because they need to be. (Though of course, sequencing or text can also address this question – but really this should be a good place to start).

Informing Contexts W7 Task: Preparing for tutorials

Posted on 7th Mar 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research Journal, ReflectionsTagged CourseworkLeave a comment

Working towards my critical review, I’m answering the following questions posed on my current module.

How do you critically articulate the intent of your photographic practice (verbally or in writing)?

This is something that’s radically changed over the past year. I’ve spent much of my academic life clearly demarking my critical writing from my creative output. I think this has been a mistake and a lost opportunity to create something much more coherent – and potent. Studying the essay film, and the essay form more generally, has been the catalyst for this. Essayism permits a hybrid intermixing of styles: according to Aldous Huxley, a formidable essayist, describes this ‘personal investigation’ as existing between three poles: ‘…the personal and the autobiographical; …the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and…the abstract-universal…The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best…of all three’ (p. 84). Curiously, this very closely mirrors Robert Adams’ discussion of landscape photography: ‘Landscape pictures can offer us…three verities – geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious’ (p. 14). Also central to essayism is a tentativeness, an incompleteness, a depiction of the act of thinking through which invites rather than closes down debate (Rascaroli, 2017). After many years ignoring my emotive, personal responses to the world in favour of the cool logic of the critical, it has been a joy to return to subjective response and use that as the starting point for criticism, rather than treat it is an embarrassing burden. It has returned critical activity to the realm of play.

Andy Thatcher, East Budleigh Common, March 2020.

How is your photographic practice critically, visually and contextually informed?

My response here is connected to the previous one. When I head out with my camera, I usually have in mind things I want to explore and think through; my photography, from the planning stage to the sequencing, is itself an act of criticism. For example, on my last shoot, I wanted to explore the military ruins on East Budleigh Common, and consider how they have been reappropriated by conflicting users – graffitti artists and The Bat Conservation Trust – while remaining under the ownership of the Army. Doing so, I thought through ideas of impermanence, conflict, subversion, and also felt the weight of distance between my own artistic activity and that of the graffitti artists. Was I being voyeuristic capturing their decaying art, or was I responded to it and extending it artistically? Probably both.

When I go out, I immerse myself in a place: this is something referred to by other landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams, but I suspect is also commonly found among street photographers. To an extent, I lose myself in experience, allow my surroundings to act on me and coax responses from me: the external world has an agency which I believe the apparently one-way model of ‘the gaze’ does not consider. Rather, there is a dialogue between myself and the external world: through my photographs, I shape it, while it in turn shapes me. I test out my ideologies by identifying subjects that allow me to consider them and see what comes back. I rarely take pictures that I could have foreseen. Finding expression for this blurring of boundaries between self and environment is a central concern of cultural geographers who study place and landscapes by drawing on phenomenology, such as John Wylie. It has been foundational to my filmmaking for the past year and, without my quite realising it, has shaped my photographic practice similarly.

It’s hard to consider how my practice is visually informed. It’s rarely a conscious choice. Certain photographers create work that chimes with my own intentions and I immerse myself in the experience they communicate. Increasingly, I am finding the means to evaluate such work critically, as evidenced throughout this journal, to understand my responses to it, and to consider what I believe is being communicated. It’s rare that I take a shot that quotes another photographer consciously: I have a ‘Fay Godwin’ view of a tree that I’m very fond of shooting under different atmospheric conditions, and I’ll sometimes square off a shot looking down at surfaces in a vaguely Stephen Shore-ish way. And I have always taking shots which I believe have picturesque or sublime qualities; the only difference is that now I understand the heritage of these.

Andy Thatcher, Piccadilly Circus, December 2019.

How do you reflect on your photographic practice (e.g. editing / research etc) in order to progress it (consider successful and less successful work)?

I reflect in three ways. Firstly, I expose myself to photographers whose work I believe I can learn from, especially work which I can see is reaching for similar ideas or effects but which does it with vastly more sophistication and polish. Secondly, I go out and take shots. Again and again and again. I try new things, I develop and refine old things. Lastly, I review my work and consider it first on its formal and technical merits, and then I will consider if it is communicating or suggesting something worth caring about – an idea, a mood, a narrative.

In what professional / viewing context should your work be seen in. why?

I’d like to see my work in galleries, photobooks, because that’s where the photographs I like and aspire to are found. I’ve an idea to work up my commons project into a text-led book, but this is still in the development stage. I don’t think I’m yet at a point – or if I’ll ever get to a point – where any of this is possible. Besides, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I’ve no idea who’d care enough about my work to help make that happen. This is probably a question best left unanswered until after the next module. Frankly, it intimidates the hell out of my. Why should anybody care about my work when there are so many great photographers out there still struggling to get noticed?

Adams, R. 1996. Beauty in Photography (Second Edition). NYC: Aperture.

Huxley, A. 2017. Preface to The Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley. In N. Alter & T. Corrigan (eds.) Essays on The Essay Film. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 83-85.

Rascaroli, L. 2017. How The Essay Film Thinks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wylie, J. Landscape. 2007. London: Routledge.

Adventures in the Lea Valley – Polly Braden & David Campany.

Posted on 5th Mar 2020 Posted in PHO702: Critical Research JournalTagged Contextual ResearchLeave a comment

I was excited to find this book, being both a fan of Hoxton Mini Press AND the Lea Valley. When my wife and I lived in London, in Leyton, it was an area I came to know fairly well. We’d sometimes take the bus from where we lived out to Tottenham and walk back along the canal. We’d walk out to Hackney Marshes and explore the old sewage works, which had the best blackberries I’ve ever tasted. On Sundays, we’d have a full English at the greasy spoon by the Lea Rowing Club. It featured in my rubbish attempt at a Chemical Generation novel.

Braden and Campany’s book is a beautiful mess, confusing, contradictory, inconsistent in style and content. It’s reassuring and depressing in equal measure. It is, because of this, a perfect expression of the Lea Valley, which will lull you into buculoic reverie and then slap you in the face with industrial ruin without warning. It’s a place for families going pond dipping with their kids, and a place for fly-tippers. This is clear from the introduction: it’s a very personal immersion in and expression of a place. Nothing is being sought, or hunted down. It is full of happenstance: a drowning bug, kids smoking spliffs on a picnic table. It’s an excellent example of what Agnès Varda describes as making art through ‘gleaning’. There’s no definitive statement being made here, but a record of coming to terms with facts, stories, emotions, images. It’s, albeit arguably, somewhat essayistic in its approach.

That’s not to say the book is apolitical by trying to embrace everything. Far from it. Against the background of the Olympic Park and gentrification, individuals and communities assert that this is their land. It may be that Braden and Campany were aware that much of the Lea Valley is registered common land, or they may not, but there is a palpable presence of the rights of everyday people – common people – to roam and use the land as they see fit. And that neither corporations nor politicians should have the right to take this away.

There is much in the photography that I recognise in my own work: the post-industrial sublime, the idiosyncratic and abstract. I suspect these works, loosely identifiable as landscape in the introduction, are Campany’s. But Braden is more a documentarist and a portraitist, and her striking and tender depictions of people, whether posed or going about their day, communicate the human activity of a place in a way that I struggle to do in my own work. At the end of the day, it’s people that make commons what they are, and however much I can frame a stand of pines or a grassy tuft in a mire, juxtapose barbed wire against an ancient beech, the immediacy of human activity is absent. How I accommodate this is something I need to consider.

Braden, P., & Campany, D. 2016. Adventures in the Lea Valley. London: Hoxton Mini Press.

The Gleaners & I. [feature film] Dir. Agnès Varda. Ciné Tamaris. France. 2000. 82 mins.

out of the picture

Category: PHO702: Critical Research Journal