Hay on the Highway – Henrik Duncker and Yrjö Tuunanen

Hay on the Highway (1993) – Henrik Duncker

Henrik Duncker (born August 27, 1963 in Helsinki) is a Finnish photographer.
Yrjö Tuunanen (born: Unknown)

Hay on the Highway (Dunker and Tuunanen, 1993) is student joint venture studying farming methods, communities and families in Finland between 1991 and 1993.

 ‘A joint project with Yrjö Tuunanen, benefiting from the studies on interactive documentary methods. Countryside / farming family portraits from the time when Finns contemplating joining the EU. Shown 25 times in 11 countries, starting from Helsinki in 1993. Won the first price of The European Photography Award 1993.’ (Henrik Duncker Photography).

I have read in another OCA Students blog (Middlehurst, 2016) is a self published book containing the authors’ photography degree submission.

This project was suggested to me by my tutor so I knew that it must be significant in some way. To find out that this was a 25 year old student project surprised me. It was relatively easy to find a used copy of the book but there was very little additional information available on the internet. The only one I could find was by a fellow OCA student, possibly as a result of the same research suggestion.

This was the first time I have analysed work that has not already been the subject of art critics and authors. In all other cases I have been influenced by these texts and the documented opinions. Knowing this was early experimental work makes a huge difference to reviewing the later work of established art photographers. With these you may not like it or understand it but you know they are respected by enough people in the art world to appreciate that there is value in it.

As a result Hay on the Highway has been one of the most challenging reviews I have done. The project is split in two halves…the first part is the work of Tuunanen and the second half is Duncker’s images. Although their study is about farmers and their families it is unclear if the two collaborated on any of it. It is likely that this is equivalent to two OCA students self-publishing their Square Mile assignments.

Hay on the Highway (1993) – Yrjö Tuunanen

Tuunanen uses the same device, a stage scenery arch, across the majority of his images. There is a foreground subject and a background scene seen through the arch. The initial images have an odd use of depth of focus and motion blur. I am unable to understand the use of it as it appears to be more of a mistake but is included as a demonstration of learning. I say that because some of the later images are well composed and constructed with warmth and humour.

Duncker’s images are far stronger in terms of conveying a sense of being there and pondering what is going through the minds of the subjects portrayed. There are some less interesting images which I found to be the ones that include the ‘normal’ snapshot type subjects…the ones that could be your mum or nan. Most have a surreal element but the set would be stronger if there was a consistency in the use of subjects, props and overall visual style and tone.

For example the following two images have a very different quality in the final colour tone. In some ways the blandness of the ‘grain on the floor’ scene detracts from that surreal motif. It is also flat due to the dominance of the single side light whereas the more successful ones have depth by use of multiple rooms allowing additional light sources.

Hay on the Highway (1993) – Henrik Duncker

Hay on the Highway (1993) – Henrik Duncker

The subject of farming leading up to the Finnish 1994 EU referendum is an interesting one and one that I have covered more directly using polling stations. Hay on the Highway has chosen to be more subtle by studying a specific community who will be impacted no matter what the result was going to be.

The book is in Finnish and English and uses a strange mix of coloured text and type face. In some places I am not sure if there are real printing mistakes as text disappears under the page fold. Nevertheless, it has a striking visual aesthetic. The only similar books I can think of are Phaidon’s surveys, such as Paul Graham (Graham, 1996), that vary the font size across chapers to distinguish the survey chapters from interviews and essays.

References:

Dunker, H and Tuunanen, Y (1993). Hay on the Highway. Finland: Musta Aukko

Graham. P (1996) Paul Graham. London: Phaidon Press

Henrik Duncker Photography At: http://www.henrikduncker.com/series/hay-on-the-highway/ (Accessed 25 March 2018)

Middlehurst, S (2016) A4 / A5 Research: Henrik Duncker and Yrjö Tuunanen, Hay on the Highway At: https://stevemiddlehurstidentityandplace.wordpress.com/2016/07/03/a4-research-henrik-duncker-and-yrjo-tuunanen-hay-on-the-highway/ (Accessed 25 March 2018)

Pictorial Effect in Photography – Henry Peach Robinson

Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaro-Oscuro for Photographers by Henry Peach Robinson

• Classic Reprint Series – Published by Forgotten Books, London, 2012.
• Reprint of the American edition published by Edward L. Wilson, Philadelphia, 1881.

Originally published in 1881, Henry Peach Robinson describes what makes a good photographic composition. He does stress that there are many ways to combine ideas to make a good image. However, what makes this book different to all ‘How To’ photography books is that he compares the good with the bad and explains why. There are no images in the book, just sketches. Interestingly it is probably due to not wanting to include bad images or offend some photographers that modern day ‘how to’ books steer clear of explaining the bad.

Robinson was an early practitioner who wanted photography to be accepted as art by emphasising the attributes and unique properties that photography provided. He encouraged photographers to be creative and not just use it to capture the object as it was. I was surprised how valid the points he made then are still as valid today. The technology has changed but the basics of composition were very well understood.

I have included some references to give a flavour of what the book aims to achieve and include some of his thoughts and opinions.

p1. The opening paragraph is as true today as it was then. ‘Nine out of 10 photographers are ignorant of art.’

p3. Discusses how it was alleged that art had nothing in common with photography. Felt by many that photographs can only project things as they are. Whereas art transfigures and glorifies by use of ‘poetic treatment’. HPR argues that photographs offered a number of opportunities to photographers to interpret a scene. Their eye, their viewpoint, their glass (lens), time of day, and adding subjects.

p6. He describes artistic sight – the knowledge of what is picturesque and beautiful. He subscribes to the need to study how these desirable qualities are produced. Effects of character of form, light and shade. ‘To a photographer, the addition of colour would only be a complication’. Szarkowski repeated this view in 1976 in ‘The William Eggleston Guide’.

p8. Seeing is a habit. Not only are things unnoticed, they are also unseen. Need a trained eye. ‘eyes open, minds blind’.

p11. ‘Art should be a guide only to the study of nature’.

p28. ‘In photography there is no colour to distract the attention from the design’. Therefore I conclude that more skill is required to capture images in colour. I partially agree with HJR when he says that an image should fully pronounce its own meaning and there should be nothing left for verbal explanation. However, I think there is room in art for ambiguity and unintentional meanings. HJR believed ‘everything must have a meaning, and the meaning must be the object of the picture. My response is ‘Can the ‘object’ be an unanswered question?

p31.’it is of little use endeavouring to teach a man to write poetry until he has learned to spell.’

After the opening chapters he then moves on to specific subjects such as capturing skies, the use of variation and repetition, plus some later on chapters on portraiture and poses of individuals and groups.

All in all these chapters make a useful reference and are also entertaining due to the use of 19th century writing.

William Eggleston Guide essay – John Szarkowski

This post discusses John Szarkowski’s views on colour photography with reference to his essay that accompanied ‘The William Eggleston Guide’. The book was first published in 1976 to accompany the exhibition ‘Photographs by William Eggleston’ at MoMA New York the same year.

Szarkowski (1925 – 2007) was an author, curator and photographer and regarded as key voice on art photography during the latter half of the 20th Century. He initially came to my attention during the OCA Expressing Your Vision (EYV) module where we looked at his ‘Photographer’s Eye’ publication where he documented the attributes of a photograph. This formed part of the modernist/post modern discussion where Szarkowski believed the content was all in the frame, the modernist view.

He was also known for his role as curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1962-1991) where he acted as a barometer for what was in fashion or not. One of his most significant, and at the time brave, decisions was to put on a solo show of the ‘colour’ work of William Eggleston in 1976. Controversial at the time and seen today as a key moment in the acceptance of colour in photographic art.

During a feedback session with my EYV tutor in 2016, I had expressed a concern of my lack of understanding of essays such as Szarkowski’s ‘William Eggleston Guide’. I return to it now as research for my Assignment 4 essay. Not only as an education in writing art critique’s but also to glean some extra knowledge of the emergence of colour in the world of photography.

For assignment 4 I have chosen the black and white image ‘Toy Horse’ (1987) by Abelardo Morell. It has similarities to Eggleston’s ‘Untitled, Memphis 1970 (a.k.a. ‘Tricycle’), the image used as the front cover image of William Eggleston’s Guide. The obvious difference being ‘Colour’, or more importantly, the lack of it.

Szarkowski begins his essay by challenging Eggleston’s view that his images are only about colour, nothing more, nothing less. Szarkowski thinks this is a convenient way for the artist to sidestep specific questions about content and how that may relate to the artist himself. He concedes that, even if true, a photograph and its meaning is a combination of the photographic process and the photographer. Eggleston’s images tell us something about his identity even if he does not want us to read them that way.

Szarkowski moves in to the main discussion of the use of colour by ‘serious’ photographers and , as he saw it,  their failure in producing anything meaningful with it. There is an acceptance that photographers knew that their black and white pieces were not natural  but were taken because ‘they looked good, and seemed to mean something, as pictures’. The emphasis was on form and the introduction of colour was a complication too far, based on decades of learning the language of black and white imagery.

The essay continues in the vain of disparaging terms and descriptions for amateurs mindlessly pointing and shooting with colour film. He viewed the National Geographic colour images as interesting for cobalt blue skies but nevertheless they were fundamentally failures in form. His other observation was photographers using it to show beautiful colours in pleasing relationships resembling ‘reproductions of Synthetic Cubist or Abstract Expressionist paintings’. He dismissed these photographs as being inferior to paintings so in his view, why bother producing something worse with photography.

He saw that using colour outside of the studio was problematic and photographers were either producing work that was either formless or pretty.   ‘In the first case the meanings of color have been ignored; in the second they have been considered at the expense of allusive meanings. While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky.’

He then moves on to some examples of successful uses of colour photography by the likes of Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore who were using it for street photography, capturing the everyday and the commonplace. He affirmed that they were not ‘photographs of colour’ but photographs of an experience in the hands of artists using their imagination and precision. His acceptance of Eggleston’s colour work, taken in 1971, is in the fact that the images show the locality, the place, the family and brings it to life for the viewer in colour.

Szarkowski seems to be accepting of a colour photographer as an artist more than the colour images themselves. He accepted earlier in the essay that colour adds a complication to the art form, but rather than see it as something new to learn and excel at, he has the opinion that it really isn’t worth the hassle.

Although he was presenting Eggleston’s work for people to view, he had prepared his ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ excuse up front within this essay. Not too brave or visionary in my view even if there was lot of hostility around the photographic art world at the time.

Visual Culture – Howells & Negreiros (2nd Edition)

Howells, R and Negreiros, J. (2012) Visual Culture, Polity Press

This book was a recommendation on one of the OCA photography forum threads.

I chose to read this book prior to starting the Context and Narrative module as a response to my EYV module assessment feedback. It was the comment ‘your images concentrate on shapes and lines with little meaning at times’ that I wanted to investigate. On EYV I struggled to know whether my tutor would like the images I submitted, which in the main he did. I also became aware, following assessment submission, that I needed to improve my critical analysis and use more art terminology.

I have acquired a number of books on photography and art history as part of EYV. In most cases I have quickly been overwhelmed by theory and concepts eg. Liz Wells, Photography: A critical Introduction; David Bate, Photography; Graham Clarke, The Photograph. These books were specifically on photography so I was widening my knowledge with ‘Visual Culture’.

The authors’ aim for this book is to explore how meaning is both made and transmitted in the visual world. They state that in a world of increasingly sophisticated images unless we are taught how to read them, we run the risk of being visually illiterate.

The book is split in to two parts: Theory – six chapters covering strategies for the analysis of visual texts; Media – five chapters analysing specific media forms. This post is not only a review of the book but a record of the concepts, theories and practitioners which will benefit me on the course.

The six strategies for analysing visual text are:
Iconology – the content/subject matter of an image
Form– the form of an image
Art History – usefulness and limits of an images place in art history
Ideology – use of societal attitudes
Semiotics – signs, signifiers and signifieds
Hermeneutics – interpretation of literal and intended meanings

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Iconology

The chapter starts by letting us know that we can read an image by what we see – ‘what you see is what you get’. The attributes we can glean from such an image are:
Genre – what type of image – Landscape (townscape, cityscape, seascape), Portrait (single, group, nude), Still Life, Genre Painting (everyday life)
Central subject matter
Location or setting of the subject
Historical period represented
Season or time of year
Time of day
The particular Instant – eg. just after a horse jumps a fence

The authors use John Constable’s (1776 – 1837) The Haywain (1821) as a good example of ‘what you see is what you get’. However, it starts to get complicated with historical figures, theological scenes and paintings containing symbolism. These images require some additional knowledge to get a true understanding of the artists intention such as history, religion and fashion.

The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434) by Jan van Eyck (1395 -1441) is communicating the purity and  standing in society of a couple on the occasion of their wedding. The contentious aspect is the female figure appears to be pregnant – at least to the 21st century eye. The alternative explanations are that it was a fashion at the time for ladies to clutch and lift the fronts of their dresses. It could also be she is demonstrating her potential for childbearing. Art historians believe she was not pregnant which means you cannot always read an image based purely on what you see.

The paintings contains well placed symbols which must be regarded as significant as the artist has chosen to include them – the dog, the shoes, the mirror, the fruit, the single lit candle. These symbols all have meaning but you need to understand the era and the people in the scene to fully understand them.

Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), a German iconologist, published a system, using examples from the renaissance period, that allowed images to be studied at various levels. To identify the meaning he devised a 3 point system:
First level – ‘primary’ or ‘natural’ subdivided into ‘factual’ and ‘expressional’. This is simply what we can see.
Second Level – ‘secondary’ or ‘conventional’ level. The viewer has to know the convention in use ie. a casual meal out and ‘The Last Supper’. Cultural knowledge is brought in to play.
Third Level – ‘intrinsic’ meaning. Reveals the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class or religious persuasion. The Arnolfini painting tells us about attitudes towards marriage, religion and wealth in 15th century Flanders. This level includes unintentional attributes and cultural attributes.

Panofsky used an old fashion example of a gentleman tipping his hat at a passer by in the street. The first level is a street scene where a man tilts his hat to another person. The second level recognises that this action is a greeting and a sign of politeness used in a western culture. The third level reveals something of the man’s personality along with his national, social, educational and cultural background. The man may not have been intentionally communicating these things but they are there.

The Beatles Abbey Road album cover from 1969 (pp26-30) is used as an example where too much can be read in to an image as highlighted by the Paul McCartney is dead conspiracy theory.

Form

This chapter concentrates on how meaning can be communicated by form and the manner in which it is depicted. This is important when reading modern and abstract art. Painter and critic Roger Fry (1866-1934) went as far as saying content was secondary to form. In essence his opinion was what is the point in just accurately capturing the ‘thing’. Form on the other hand allows us to relate emotionally to a piece of art.

Examples of form in art are: Paul Cezanne’s (1839-1906)  Still Life with Milk Jug and Fruit (circa. 1900); Jackson Pollock’s (1912-1956), Number 32 (1950) and Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) untitled (1969). The Cezanne is the only one that is of recognizable objects but it is the black outlines and odd perspective that separate it from an accurate still life. Pollock’s work is patterns made my paint dripping on to a canvas. Rothko’s work is blocks of colour but no objects where the colours become darker and moodier as the artist gets older. The work of the latter two artists are regarded as being self portraits as they are a record of their actions (Pollock) and state of mind (Rothko). Even the Cezanne work says more about his personality than it does about a jug and some milk.

Fry’s emotional elements of design were:
1. The rhythm of the line
2. Mass
3. Space
4. Light and Shade
5. Colour

These elements allow us to analyse ‘abstract’ art although not as precisely as Panofsky’s iconoly of ‘realist’ art.

Art History

This chapter examines art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich’s (1909-2001) approach where he states that there really is no such thing as art…there are only artists. His view is that artists have worked hard at producing their work and they deserve the right to ask us to understand what they wanted to do.

Gombrich’s is one of many versions of art history but they all follow a particular approach. But why is that? What is left out? Why is it male dominated? Is it just about monetary value? Note that a reattributed Rembrandt and subsequently lost its value. Physically the painting is the same so there must be value in the artists ‘mind’.

Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Guernica (1937) is a good example that shows art can be more than just financial or aesthetic value. This piece is a symbol of matters of life, of death and of cultural identity. The painting is of a Basque town obliterated by the Luftwaffe in 1937.

Gombrich’s approach to Art History has been subject to fierce attack for its western European oriented view. Is it artist led…history made by individuals… or sociological…art work and the artists are the product of their time. The sociological argument leads into the next chapter.

Ideology

John Berger (1926-2017) provided the world with a new way for people to look at art. His book and accompanying television series The Ways of Seeing (1972) was as controversial then as it is today. He believed that images gave us an insight in to the past and went as far to say that ‘images are more precise than literature’. He is critical of the way that art has been used to obscure the past by the privileged minority. His was an ideological approach as it was concerned with the distribution of power relations within society.

Berger observed that oil paintings were used by the elite to show off their possessions, their property and their land. Berger politically leans to the ‘left’ and his views are contentious and are countered vigorously from the other side particularly from Kennet Clarke and Peter Fuller, a one time friend of Berger.

The Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1728) painting Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750). Clarke describes it as ‘enchanting’ and painted with ‘love and mastery’. Berger however, wants us to see the proprietary attitude on the faces of these land owners and consider the fate of people caught on their land who were subject to public whipping and deportation. Berger uses other examples but the main criticism towards his view is that he conveniently chooses examples that fit his ‘way of seeing’.

Berger’s other main area of criticism is gender inequality where the subject of female bodies in art are created by men to be viewed by the owner, presumed to be men. ‘Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own’.

Sociologist John B. Thompson provided a 3-part analytical system for understanding mass media texts a) the social and historical conditions in which texts are produced; b) the way they are received by real people; c) our familiar, close analysis of the text under discussion.

Pierre Boourdieu, a French Sociologist,  believes texts are produced with twin concepts: ‘habitus’ and ‘field’. The former can be described as ‘people assume and articulate the world vision of their particular social group’. It is their second nature based on childhood and upbringing and held for a lifetime. These dispositions are unconsciously absorbed and operated. The latter is the particular social conditions in which the individual operates. It is split into 3: the literary and artistic field; the field of political power; field of economy and class relations. Although his theories are useful to explain context but less so on the matter of content and meaning of visual texts.

Semiotics

Semiotics originated with Swiss linguistic analyst Ferdinand de Saussure. He showed that language was a system of signs or signals which enabled people to communicate with each other. The terms he used were: ‘signifier’-something that stands for something else; ‘signified’ – is the idea o the thing it stands for; ‘sign’ – is the union of the two. Where Saussure related semiotics to language, Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) used it for images and published his thoughts in the book Mythologies (1957).

He believed that anything could be treated as a text and decoded semiotically. One of his examples is a bunch of roses which he uses to signify passion. The roses are the signifier and the passion the signified. Each existed previously separately but when brought together the roses were ‘passionified’. He uses the term ‘myth’ to mean the sum of signs where things stand for something else.

Visual semiotics is all around us and is prevalent in the advertising world to sell products using symbols and imagery to make us feel we need this new product. Cars are sold using sexual connotations and how a visit to a fast food restaurant is an enjoyable family day out.

Hermeneutics

The final chapter in part 1 discusses culture and the interpretation of literal and intended meanings.  Culture used to be regarded as the cultivation of the mind – culture and education went hand in hand. In the nineteenth century the increasing discipline of anthropology identified culture as being a way of life, a complex system of customs and beliefs.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote an essay in which the subject was cock fighting in Bali. Although this activity was illegal the local community were using the event to raise money for local projects. Geertz observed that gambling was an important part of the activity. However, he felt that it was more the winning and how it made a person feel, their status in the community, than it was about the money. Geertz, an educated and talented writer,  was criticised for being an outsider, placing his meaning on another culture.

To me the criticism is harsh as it is commendable to understand other cultures and share that knowledge with a wider audience. It does highlight that care needs to be taken for the author and the viewer to ensure an accurate account is produced. Although there will usually be at least two sides to a story.

Summary of Part 1

The authors have given us tools and systems to help understand images. None are right or wrong and there are keen debates in every one of these areas. There is overlap between all of them. Some may not be helpful at all for some types of image. As a viewer you need to understand which one to use at any given time.