Another photographer hailing from a middle-class suburban background who plunged headlong into the abyss of a drug-fuelled life, Nan Goldin also uses documentary technique to narrate a story that is not about the other, but essentially an autobiography: “People commonly think of the photographer as a voyeur, but this is my party, I’m not crashing.” Continue reading “Nan Goldin”
Author: carlwhetham
Larry Sultan, The Valley
On a different note, the author also mentions Larry Sultan’s work, The Valley,which at first glance is simply a behind the scenes documentary of the porn industry. Both pornography and documentary rely on the viewer suspending disbelief and playing along with the notion that the subjects were unaware they were being filmed or that the whole scenario had not been staged or choreographed for the cameras. Sultan is using the documentary tradition to raise a number of questions, mostly concerning the production and consumption of those very images. Continue reading “Larry Sultan, The Valley”
Karen Knorr, Marks of Distinction
Karen Knorr’s work is similarly laden with irony. Her images are also of the documentary style (recall the depression-era interiors of Evans), as well as bearing some resemblance to Arbus’s subjects posing in their homes. In this case the freaks are the aristocratic and wealthy classes. Continue reading “Karen Knorr, Marks of Distinction”
Martin Parr, Cost of Living
The tradition of documentary photography is to shoot pictures of the Other, to enter an unfamiliar or foreign situation and reveal it to the outside world. Since photographers generally come from middle class backgrounds, the other is predominantly working class, developing world, poor, weak, diseased, abject etc. artists breaking with this tradition (of pointing the camera downwards, as Rosler put it) include Martin Parr, whose Cost of Living looks at his own middle class roots, and Karen Knorr’s Marks of Distinction, which turns the camera on the wealthier strata of British society. Continue reading “Martin Parr, Cost of Living”
Thomas Struth
I have looked at the work of Gursky and Ruff (his andere Portrats) but I had not really seen the work of Struth. In the true tradition of the Becher school, this is evenly lit and geometrically composed work that would look really great blown up and hung on a gallery wall. Continue reading “Thomas Struth”
Mirror of Visual Culture: Discussing documentary, Maartje van den Heuvel
In this article, van den Heuvel looks at the phenomenon of documentary images being displayed in art galleries, and whether this actually changes the way we should view documentary. She argues that it has largely come about as a result of “an increased role of the media in how reality is experienced in our western society” combined with an “increased visual literacy” among producers and audiences of images. The idea is that not only are our experiences of the world (reality) being shaped by the media, the media are actually becoming the sole means of our experience – a vicarious substitution or ersatz experience. Continue reading “Mirror of Visual Culture: Discussing documentary, Maartje van den Heuvel”
Mary Klages, Postmodernism Again
Trying to find out where that first article came from, I found another article on postmodernism by Klages. According to my Google search, it appears that the previous article is one that is often recommended to students as an introduction to the concept of postmodernism, so I probably got it from the OCA website after all. Continue reading “Mary Klages, Postmodernism Again”
Mary Klages, Postmodernism, from ‘Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed’
Don’t recall where I got this article, but it seems to me that it was on the OCA website. Anyway, it’s a solid text that gives a clear understanding of the modernist and postmodernist positions. Her description of the fundamental ideas of modernity helps the reader to understand why much of postmodernist discourse is intertwined with gender, race and other forms of discourse that challenge norms that were accepted and promoted during the modern, industrial era. Continue reading “Mary Klages, Postmodernism, from ‘Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed’”
Marianne Hirsch, Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory
This essay looks at what Hirsch terms the phenomenon of ‘postmemory’, which occurs when a trauma is revisited or experienced anew by a generation that comes after the generation who experienced the trauma first hand. She focuses on the Shoah, probably since it is the most accessible (there is a wealth of data) and it is now separated by more than one generation of postmemory and as such can be more readily used to illustrate her concept. Continue reading “Marianne Hirsch, Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”
Walid Ra’ad
I was introduced to the work of Walid Ra’ad and the Atlas Group by an artist friend of mine this summer, and want to look at it in more depth.
Ra’ad is based in Beirut and New York, and his work is published and/or exhibited under numerous alter egos – Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, Souheil Bachar, Operator #17, and the Atlas Group, among others. Since he changes what he says at different times and in different places according to the audience and their knowledge, he questions notions of truth, authenticity, authorship and history. Continue reading “Walid Ra’ad”
Carl Whetham photography 