Week 5: Craig Hickman vs. Alfredo Jarr vs. Errol Morris
1 comments Posted by christine madsen at 11:37 PMIf Craig Hickman’s overwhelming presentation showed us anything, it was how hugely diverse the world of photography is. I feel that because the use of a camera is so relatively straight forward, things like technique or skill (sometimes, of course) may take a backseat to things like experimentation and interpretation. You can communicate so much and so many different things through photography because of its ambiguity and potential. Alfredo Jarr could only communicate that vast amount of emotion through a photograph. Otherwise, the medium would distract from the idea. Alfredo Jarr works with such emotionally heavy material that it could only be communicated through the medium of photography. If it were a sculpture or a painting, the abstract emotions would be much more difficult to communicate and the medium itself would distract the viewer. To most people, photography is not seen so much as art, but evidence. So when a photograph is used in a work of art, or as a work of art, whatever the artist is trying to communicate is much easier to absorb because of the familiarity and the believability of a photograph.
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| Frances and her fairy friends |
And yet believability is not so straightforward. People can look at a photograph in two ways. On one hand, you can look at a photograph as the ultimate truth: as evidence. You take a photo of something to prove that it exists or that it happened, you do not draw a quick sketch or paint a picture of it. On the other hand, photography is just as easily manipulated as any other medium. Ever since the beginning, people have been using photography to fool the eye, such as the infamous Cottingley Fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, cousins aged 10 and 16 respectively. And of course now, there is the huge being of Photoshop influencing photography today. What is there to believe?
With Errol Morris’s interviews I got an idea of what is really the largest problem people have with photography currently: believability. Photography is supposed to be the ultimate truth. People expect photography to be entirely real and 100% accurate; to be used as solid evidence of a particular event or person or location. But that is not necessarily what photography is. So when images like the photo of the four bombs surfaces and then are debunked, people are not really sure what to believe anymore. The super clear crisp photos that are featured in newspapers and magazines (especially not magazines) are hardly ever the real deal and people are starting to get a feel for that. And the more believable a photograph is, the more emotional it can be. For example, if I see a photograph of a model in a magazine, I can bemoan my less than stellar complexion, but the photograph is relatively unimpressionable. I will forget about it in a matter of minutes. But if a photograph is the true thing, the ultimate in evidence and it portrays something emotionally three-dimensional, I will remember it for a while.
The photograph is a very powerful thing. It can take something very vague and hard to grasp like sorrow or beauty and can document it so easily. It can communicate heavy, dark things like in the work of Alfredo Jarr, but it can also convey playfulness and spontaneity found in the work of Craig Hickman. It can even find that invisible medium between negativity and optimism found in the works of JR. This optimism is especially important. If one attempts to combat the world’s problems by sharing them in only a negative and depressing light, people will give up. Being an aware person and to successfully share that awareness through art is difficult enough, but to share it and still be optimistic for the future is another thing altogether.
Something I found on a favorite blog of mine, seemed pretty relevant to the discussion of the close line of believability in photography. The works of Philipp Schaerer are, in fact, not un-touched photographs, but digital compilations of photographed textures cute and pasted together to form architectural structures. In the artist’s own words “„Bildbauten“ deals with the effect and the claim to credibility of images of architecture that appear to be photographs. It further questions the medium “photograph” as a documentary piece of evidence depicting reality. Frontal views of fictional architectures serve as an example. By means of their exaggerated and orchestrated way of representation, they model themselves on the object-like appearance and the formal language of contemporary architecture in a rather ironic way. All images try to reproduce a reality. They are not a photograph; instead, they were newly designed and constructed from scratch by means of image synthesis and digital image editing.”
The making-of is quite intriguing too.
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