All quotes unless otherwise noted are from John Berger’s programme ‘Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972).

It was frustrating not being able to get hold of his book of the same title, so I was especially pleased to find the BAFTA award-winning documentary ‘Ways of Seeing’ available on YouTube.  Being dyslexic, I also found this a more accessible way of interacting with the subject.

Although he speaks about paintings, oil paintings in particular, he references digital imaging, and his comments are an insight into photography as a medium as much as paint.

This series is still as relevant today as it was when it was broadcast in 1972.  Being a child of the 70’s it also stirred a great sense of nostalgia and highlighted culture and ‘ways of seeing’ have changed even more in the last 50 years. The programme questions ‘some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting’ (Berger, 1972) from around 1400 – 1900.  But it goes further than that because he is examining them and relating to them from the perspective of his own time and in so doing, he says we shall ‘discover something about ourselves and situation in which we are living’.

Overall, one of the things I enjoyed most about this series was its lack of pomposity and ‘artiness’ and Berger’s assertion that we have our own individual ways of looking and each of us is right. He takes a blatant swipe at what he considers artsy types, as he puts it ‘the false mystification which surrounds art’.

Part 1

Context and perspective (many ideas for this programme first outlined in essay by Walter Benjamin 1936)

At the start of this episode John Berger seemingly cuts a section showing the head of a young woman from a classical oil painting (Botticelli’s Venus and Mars) and by so doing removes it from its original context.

He mentions perspective or perhaps more precisely, who’s perspective ‘everything centres on the eye of the beholder’ – it is the person looking that matters, ‘a large part of seeing depends on habit and convention’

How we see something, the time, its setting our cultural background our emotional status even affects what we see. ‘The human eye can only be in one place at a time, we take it with us when we walk’.  Initially what and how we ‘saw’ something was chained to that fact. Berger goes on to say that camera changed this allowing us to see things that were not in front of us.  I think of this as the difference between seeing a classical painting hung in a gallery and seeing an image of it on my smart phone for example.  I see the same picture but the context and perhaps my understanding of it has changed. Or the camera has allowed us to experience something that we could not do in any other way for example the inside of a live human body.

Our eye naturally blurs out the areas we don’t want to see.  In everyday life we might focus on the beautiful shapes and colours of tulips in a pot, our brain separating them from the chaos behind.  Of course, we can try to emulate this using depth of field on our camera.

How we encounter an image also affects how we ‘view it’.  Is it as Berger asks, unique, an original? Have we gone to the effort of visiting a gallery or is it in the comfort of our own home?  How have we accessed it, is it as a photobook or an online version? Berger notes that with a digital image ‘You are seeing them in the context of your own life. They are surrounded not by gilt frames, but by the familiarity of the room you are in and the people around you.’ 

He also makes the point that once removed from its original or unique location, the image itself can be altered for example by cropping or zooming in on a section and thereby change its meaning.  If you had never seen the image in its entirety, how would you ever know – how many songs have you been surprised to learn were not originals but cover versions?

He remarks that ‘The camera, by making the work of art transmittable, has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning.’

When used out of its original context, perhaps in print, the words that surround it or the other images besides which it is placed have an impact on it as do any competing images. We are challenged to question not only how we are being shown an image but also why?

References:

John Berger / Ways of Seeing, Episode 1 (1972) (2012). Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk (Accessed: 12 May 2021).

My tutor had also mentioned how the layout of photographs, how they are presented, affects their meaning.  The mode of communication allows the photographer to direct the viewer and decide the viewer experience.

Where we encounter them matters. Before the digital revolution, photographs like paintings before them, would have been more or less unique.  Each could be reproduced with techniques such as pouncing for paintings and obviously developing more prints from negatives, but there was a physicality in the seeing as John Berger comments in his programme ‘Ways of Seeing’ (Berger, 1972). The chaotic, ‘pile ‘em high’ fashion as favoured by the Royal Gallery the ‘pictures were hung frame-by-frame from chair rail to ceiling. The higher canvases, sometimes more than five tiers overhead, were tilted forward to enhance visibility and reduce glare’(National Gallery of Art) gave way to a more minimalist way of displaying images.

In the mid 1800’s Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery in London, choose dark red for the wall colour. According to the thinking of the day, this took into account ‘the subjective contributions made by the eye itself in the process of seeing’ (Klonk, 2011) which required a balance of all primary colours, red, blue and yellow in order to achieve ‘a balanced perception’ (Klonk, 2011).

In the early 20^th century, a concept for displaying art using white walls, the white cube, became popular (tate,2021).  It was thought that this would prevent visitors from being distracted and allow them to focus solely on the images.  

Now we can access images almost anywhere and this changes how we respond to them.

 “You are seeing them in the context of your own life. They are surrounded not by gilt frames, but by the familiarity of the room you are in and the people around you” (Berger, 1972).

My research blog Photography and Context carries on this theme.

In response to Assignment 4 my tutor suggested I consider how the glassware of Alvar Aalto was displayed online. Looking at the Alvar Aalto Museum website it provided a good example of how to photograph objects along with how they can be displayed online but isn’t restricted to his glassware.

The background of the page is a light cream which means that if the subject has been shot against a white background the photograph still stands out from the page. The faint vertical grey lines encourage you to scroll down and ensures you take in all the images. This is also the way they draw together the few images that don’t fit within the main aesthetic of the page.

There is no horizontal separation between the images except on a few occasions and this doesn’t work for me in a few ways; firstly, where two or more images with the same background colour are placed together and secondly, where a small gap has been left between the images.

The images are very ‘factual’.  the subject, whether a chair or light fitting is the centre of attention, there is little to distract in the background which are neutral off whites, greys and blacks.  There are a few exceptions on this page which show situ photographs rather than a studio setting:

• Aalto Glass Vase
• Floor Lamp A805
• Light Fitting A 333
• Auditorium Light Fitting

I particularly like how in the photograph of the glass vase, the background is rough, light-absorbing concrete and provides the perfect foil of the smooth, luminosity of the glass. 

The studio lighting emphasises the shapes of the items for example ‘light fitting A 331’ where it lifts each of the sections and there’s fun in the photographs too, in Table Lamp A702 the two lamps appear to be having a little tête à tête.

References

Design archives – Alvar aalto foundation (no date). Available at: https://www.alvaraalto.fi/en/works/design/ (Accessed: 22 May 2021). 

Exercise 5.2

Fay Godwin was a landscape photographer.  She did big skies, clouds, played with reflections in water, noted gleams of light but importantly, she captured meaning in her images.  In an interview with Photographic Historian and her friend, Roger Taylor (2010), he notes that Fay had initial aspiration to be a documentary photographer, she then entered a ‘romantic’ phase before ‘becoming more politically sensitive’ and taking photographs with a desire to ‘report back’. 

She detested any idea or romanticism in her photographs and fiercely denied that this was the case. Perhaps she would have been happier with Margaret Drabble’s (2011) thought that she was instead, ‘with her portraits of authors, bleak landscapes and scenes of urban dereliction – was the most poetic of photographers’.

Godwin had not only a keen eye for photography, but through necessity, a keen eye to making a profit from her work. Her photographs were usually destined for books, working in collaboration with a plethora of writers such as Ted Hughes and Fowles and, in her travel book The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye, the playwright Allen Sillitoe. The Saxon Shoreway was published in 1983 and, as Margaret Drabble (2011) of The Guardian writes, ‘follows the indefatigable and map-loving Alan Sillitoe as he takes a nine-day walk munching on rye bread and Polish sausage round the Kent shore from Gravesend to Rye’

It is from this volume that I have chosen the photograph to which I will pay homage although in truth it is an homage to Godwin rather than this particular image. 

Her books have retained their value.  This is no doubt a good thing but in these straightened times of Covid-19 restrictions they have become unaffordable and those in the public domain are inaccessible. Because of this I have only encountered her images on the web and with all the limitations that imposes; digitisation of images, quality, image size, context and lack of accompanying words. Thus, the external context, the information surrounding the picture as envisaged by the photographer, is gone.  Without any further information her Large Cloud could be just that, a beautifully shaped, beautifully shot photograph.

Although Godwin did do colour photography, she favoured black and white for a long while. The strong lines of the crops in the fields draws the eye towards the beast of a cloud which is separated from the viewer by the man-made barrier at the top of the hill.  The crops look as if they have been recently harvested, the gate is the only reference to human occupation as there are no people in the photograph. For someone wanting to ‘get away from it all’, this is an alluring scene. The drama in the clouds, a portent of rain perhaps, adds a sense of drama to it. This gives me its internal context

What about the original context? Knowing that it comes from a travel book, I can imagine that the image was meant to give a sense of place, a reference to the rural nature of the area and the big open skies that are created as the land gives way to the marshes and the sea. The clue to what was important to Fay comes from her title, simple Large Cloud ands its location. From what I have read online about Godwin and her photographic journey I know how important the environment was to her, as Margaret Drabble (2011) says she ‘became increasingly concerned with our connection with the earth and our assaults on it, by the way we mess up our rivers and canals, our shores and embankments.’  She saw nature and walking as a way of healing her body (Southbank Show 1986). Wherever possible I like to listen to what a photographer has to say themselves rather than relying on second-hand interpretation and we are lucky enough to have a documentary by the Southbank Show in 1986 to give some insight into Godwin and her work.  

I hope my photograph does justice to her ideals.  It could easily have featured in her book the Saxon Shoreway in that it is taken where her journey ends, in Rye.  It is an AONB yet there among the salt marshes and river is an industrial site so I hope I have echoed her passion for the environment. Like Godwin might have done (Southbank Show 1986), I have eschewed the tourist postcard view which would have omitted the factories juxtaposing them instead  with the bucolic rural scene. As in her image, my photograph focuses on the clouds which can be seen blending with the steam rising from the factory; an odd blend of romanticism and realism.

This exercise also asked us to look back on other photographs which were taken in homage and reflect again on them. The first example is of how Bauhaus influenced a series of photographs and was triggered by a reference to Moholy-Nagy in our course folder. Not knowing who Moholy-Nagy was I looked him up. I liked how he made ordinary objects interesting by how they were framed and how they were lit. You can read more in my Bauhaus Influences blog.

The second image below came from research I did surrounding Thomas Ruff’s pixelation of images. I discovered Mona Kuhn and how she allows abstraction into her work. You can read more about my Mona Kuhn influences in my blog

References

Drabble, M. (2011) ‘Fay Godwin at the National Media Museum’, The Guardian, 8 January. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/08/margaret-drabble-fay-godwin (Accessed: 5 March 2021).

National Science and Media Museum (2010) Fay Godwin photography exhibition ‘Land Revisited’ [Online] Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpxQvhmgWpg (Accessed: 10 March 2021).

Southbank Show – Photographer Fay Godwin documentary 1986 (2020). [Online] Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJR_UJnry8s (Accessed: 5 March 2021).

The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye, by Sillitoe and Fay Godwin. London: Hutchinson, 1983

I made the following alterations to this assignment following tutor feed back – I explored and rearranged the order in which I have presented the images. Discussion here had focused on how each of the photographs leads through the going down of the light and the subsequent end of the day. With this in mind, I moved the first picture, ‘Going down in a blaze of glory’ to the end. The discussion had also focused on the captioning of the images – it was noted that I had switched between lyrical, descriptive captions and practical ones. The suggestion was that I should try to do the series both ways and choose which one best suited the intent of my series. Talking about why I chose to take this series of photographs, I realised that they were symbolic of the situation created by the Covid-19 crisis. It feels very much like the sun is going down on the life that we know and have become accustomed to, crowded places are now empty and we are not yet certain of what the next day will bring. With this in mind I decided to keep the lyrical captions, amending some along the way, as a way of leading the viewer’s understanding of the photographs.