JIm Mortram Small Town Inertia

"While it covers difficult subjects – disability, substance abuse, self-harm – Mortram's work is rarely without hope, and never without dignity. It is also deeply moving, focusing upon the strength and resilience of the people he photographs. " Dave Stelfox, The Guardian

Jim Mortram is a photographer working in Norfolk.  According to an interview with The Guardian he only works within a three mile radius.  He photographs people who are on the margins of society; people struggling and perhaps living on benefits for a variety of reasons.  His work challenges the status quo that suggests people struggling are somehow 'scroungers' or trying to live of the system.  His subjects are often vulnerable people who are ill or caring for others, as he does for his mother, and who for one reason or exist on the peripheries of the economic system.

His photographs remind me of Chris Killip's, whom I wrote about earlier in the course, and the writer of The Guardian article also connects them.

The reason I am writing about Jim Mortram's work here in conjunction with A5 is because he portrays intimate and difficult scenes of people in way that is not about vanity, or prettiness, revealing fear, darkness, vulnerability and awkwardness but also strength and immense presence where people might assume it doesn't exist.  He works collaboratively and gets to know the people he photographs.  He does not see them as objects to be used but by getting to know them and spending time with them, he enables the people in his photographs to have a voice.  His photography, as far as I can make out, is not coming from the place of 'the gaze'.  He is a positive enabler rather than a metaphorical 'collector of butterfly wings', or specimens of humanity, like so many other photographers far more established or famous than he (although that will change and I suspect his work will be become extremely well known in time.)

I am impressed by his approach and attitude towards the people in his photographs and compare that to how I photographed my mother for A5.  (I'll talk about that further in the A5 supporting statement rather than here.)

As well as photographing the people in his town, Jim Mortram cares for his elderly and unwell mother.  He fits the work he does around that.  Many of the people in his work (I hesitate to use the word 'subjects') are also ill or caring for people who are.  There is a great deal of empathy in his work and he puts it down to his caring role.  He feels he has learnt a great deal through that.

I feel as I look at Mortram's work and read about it, that his photography is about so much more than 'photography'.  He is really using the medium to communicate, and not only his voice.  Somehow he manages to make it possible for a whole community to express their frustration, sadness, anger, despair as well as hope and strength.

Jim Mortram's site

Assignment 5 Context & Narrative

Link to images

Please note that the link above is a second submission following feedback from Andrew Conroy. The first submission can be seen here.  You will note that some of the things I mention below describe how I felt about the first set of images I submitted.

(These sets of images are password protected.)

I wanted to do something for A5 that continued the story I think I have been trying to tell since starting this course.  The previous assignments ended up being very much about coming to terms with a new paradigm, as well as some introspection; trying to figure out how I tick, why and what led me to this point in my life.  I knew I wanted to turn outwards at this juncture, having done quite a lot of self portraiture. Not only because it felt somewhat narcissistic but also because I felt it was the right time to stop looking inwards quite so much.

One of my ideas was to extend something I was doing already, photographing my local area. Although I did not do this for the course the result is a set of images that I printed and exhibited in a local cafe, and have sold several prints. You can view these here and there is some research here. They are images mostly of walls but not all.

The other thing I was really interested in was prisons.  But I learnt that since I was not in any way established with a body of work behind me, I wouldn't have a cat's chance in hell getting in to any prisons.  I have very recently come across Amy Elkins' work where she got round the problem of not being able to enter a prison by writing to prisoners on death row and working collaboratively with them that way.  The results of several years' work can be seen here.

I am also in retrospect interested in the symbolism of 'prison' walls and what it was about that made me consider this as a possibility.

After chatting with Andrew Conroy and dismissing some ideas, I eventually settled on documenting a family, which is an idea I've had for a while, and since I already sometimes take family portraits it felt like a good focus. However, this didn't seem to lead on neatly from the work I'd done already for TAOP, so in the end I decided to use my own family which felt like a natural and sensible progression.

I chose a regular holiday in Italy at my mother's house.  Apart from the practical reasons I thought that photographing from a place that is very much about my mother would be a useful exercise.

In A4 I looked at object identification from the point of view of a developing infant.  The first object being the mother (actually her breasts and then her).  It takes some time for the infant to recognise the self as a different object to the mother and how this process unfolds informs further object recognition.

So, by looking at my mother's space and at the people in my mother's space I think I was perhaps going back to that place - a place where mother and baby are not quite separate -  in order to try and reframe the process of separation, somehow taking control it it myself.  Marriane Hirsh certainly discusses how photographers use their work to rewrite their internal narratives in Family Frames.

But such work can also be used to explore and discover and I think I have tried to do that here.  I look at these photographs and see a fragile mother who washes and cleans and looks after my children for me.  She is involved in the family and she is sad when we leave, although exhausted as I do so little whilst I am there, leaving all the the 'mothering' to her.

I have made sure all the images are inside the house.  I have deliberately kept inside my mother's house as these images are about me looking and seeing from some part within her.  Is it about trying to identify with her, to try and understand some of our history.  I very consciously chose to do this - keeping inside always and editing to ensure everything was seen from within her thick Italian stone walls, built to withstand earthquakes.

At this point I think about my initial ideas - scenes from my local area which ended up as a series of images that are mostly of walls and one in particular of a window with the word Mum placed across it, and then the other idea - prison.  And it's difficult for me not to make connections and links.  The images I use are inside my mother's house - not outside.   I wonder if I have been exploring my way of seeing, which is somehow 'imprisoned' inside the metaphorical walls built with the history I have with my mother, impacting on my life in a profound way.  Somehow I am trapped inside these 'internal and maternal prison walls' and there is a desire in me to understand, record and explore that, and certainly to break out of that. (Perhaps this contradicts an earlier post about the other work - I don't see why both interpretations aren't valid however.)

Regardless of what I thought the images might be suggestive of, my mother felt that I must hate her when she saw one of the images. There are two in particular at the end which are not flattering photographs and in many ways very unkind.  The photographs I refer to are definitely not vanity shots and I did warn her that she would not like them. I think about how I would feel to have such photographs of me 'out there' and I don't suppose I would very much.  In fact I'd be quite upset.  I have talked about it elsewhere so don't want to go into it too much in this document.

Her reaction was utterly understandable and had made me think about how photographers, especially those exploring difficult human depths and emotions, such as mental illness, age, and frailty, approach sensitive subjects.

I think about my approach and compare it to Jim Mortram's - he gets to know the people in his work and checks in on them continually, finding a way to record their worlds without intruding on them.   They share something of themselves with him.  Many of his images are of people in a vulnerable state.  He works collaboratively.  I, however, took the image of my mother and used it to communicate something about me.  It is not a collaborative exercise for me.

I wanted to use these images but in the end I am not entirely at ease about making my mother feel uncomfortable.  I wondered if I should use the series but cover the ones with her in them with a black mask therefore mimicking the SA newspapers during the state of emergency as mentioned in my post about The Bang Bang Club.  I don't think this would have been the right thing to do though - she is not after all an authoritarian state. It would however have expressed a certain sense of authentic rage, I'm sure.

I also thought about submitting an entirely different edit which was colourful rather than black and white, but suggested a sense of alienation and separateness, which would have been authentic too but abstract.  Since I have already submitted some quite abstract work I think it would serve me better to submit something more tangible.  Although, I must say, the more I look at the two edits, I do prefer this coloured one.  I think it lacks anything of a 'Freudian Family Romance' and is far truer and more reflective of my reality within those walls.

In the end I am going to the use the black and white images, despite my mother's distress, because the narrative is clear, albeit a romanticised one.  However I will submit them privately, using a password. Other students whom I have met are welcome to have the password.  (Following feedback from AC I changed from back and white to colour and have explained why in the feedback post I wrote)

I do feel that by doing so (opting for B&W as I originally did) I am making a compromise which I'm not entirely happy with, I have to say. But I also realise that this is an exercise at the end of course for a university and not my 'big work' if ever such a thing were to materialise.  It has been a stepping stone and I have learnt from it, but I must end this module and make a decision about which one to do next.  So that is how I am going to end it otherwise I could think about what to do forever.  It is quite hard to let go of for some reason.

I have not used any words with the images (following feedback I have now used words although am still not entirely happy with them at all).  I would like them (the images) to speak for themselves.  I have not put them into a book here (although I have prepared one if that is recommended - which it was and so am now supplying that along with the blog for submission).  I think that might detract from the images and make the exercise about something other than the story I hope they tell.

I chose black and white because there is a type of crystalisation in the images, a freezing of time, which feels more frozen without colour.  The colour edit I nearly used seems far more vibrant.  I can almost hear the cicadas and the silent buzzing or humming of the empty spaces as I went about photographing them.  But I don't get that in black and white.  By removing the colour I feel like I have removed the life and left only shadows and impressions.  I know of course this is all in my own perception and interpretation but that is how it felt.  I might actually prefer the colour edit personally, but the one I'm submitting expands on the type of work I'm submitting for assessment.

The blog post about Family Frames is the main supporting material although all the other links and reviews on the A5 entry page have salient points in too.  However, I have linked back to posts on this page which I hope expand on ideas I've introduced in these paragraphs.  I have deliberately tried to keep this entry as clear and clean as possible, speaking with my own voice and using my own words.

Images can be found here and will need a password which will be supplied to Andrew Conroy and the assessors.  I am happy as I say to share this link with the small number of fellow students whom I have met on study visits, privately or at the Thames Valley meet.  Please email me if you are interested.



Demonstration of technical skills
I am more adept in Lightroom than I am with a camera but that is changing the more I work and get to grips with equipment.  I panic less when things don't go right and find ways to fix them or use alternative methods.  I like to experiment with composition and enjoy looking at other photographers to find inventive ways of composing that challenge the run of the mill.  Sometimes I'm successful with this and other times less so.  At this point the willingness to experiment is a good thing I think.

Quality of outcome
I think some of the photographs demonstrate a good degree of lighting, light use, composition, and story telling.  There is a mood in the series that is translated effectively.  I am torn within myself about using other ways of presenting the images and am still thinking about how I might do this more creatively. I know other students put things in films and on YouTube for instance.  It's very effective and I know works well.  But I'm wary of it - content rather than form is more important to me at this stage.  But I also think about how music and filmic editing can manipulate emotion and I think I'd hesitate to go down that route - a possible mawkishness is not what I'm after with these images.  I also think about Brecht and how he wanted his audience to think rather than be overwhelmed with emotion.  I do not know whether or not to present the Blurb book (which I have prepared) for assessment or to simply submit the online images. I need to think about how I present all the sets from TAOP in a cohesive package.

Demonstration of creativity
I feel like the the last series, on the surface at any rate, looks the least 'creative' in comparison to A3 &A4, but only because it is a quieter, less showy set of images.  I do feel my 'voice' has developed and continues to do so.  I look forward to finding more creative and imaginative ways of working, perhaps playing with some of the ideas I've discovered by looking at other photographers over the course.

Context
I am certain my context and reflection is of a high standard and enjoy this part of the course very much.  I look forward to developing these skills as I take on another module and my youngest son starts school, freeing up more time.  I suspect my research needs to develop some sort of academic rigour but that will come the higher up the levels I go.  I could have written about more influences such as Ray's a Laugh for instance but at the time of writing this I have not.  Perhaps by the time I submit for assessment I will have done but I needed to draw a line under this and think about moving on at some point.

The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich & Joao Silva

I read The Bang Bang Club quite a few years ago, long before I became interested in photography, and found it utterly compelling although harrowing.  The fact that I had grown up in SA where most of it takes place, and that the photographers worked at The Star newspaper where my mother and step-father were journalists might have made the book fascinating in itself but it is also well written and extremely moving.

I read it again last year (while I was probably meant to be reading the dreaded Sontag book).  I am writing about it now because I think it raises several important points about ethics of, and voyeurism in, photography.

The Bang Bang Club is written by surviving members of a group of photographers who worked during the troubling and extremely violent years following Nelson Mandela's release from prison and before he became president.  We left SA in 1986 when I was 16 and Mandela hadn't yet been released; not until 1990. Those intervening four years and the ones after his release saw the violence escalate to barbaric levels. However, it had certainly started in force before we left.  I do remember hearing about the necklacing, where someone is put inside a tyre filled with fuel and burnt alive when I was a young teenager living in Jo'burg.  The violence was undoubtably one of the things that made us return to the UK.

Because of my mother's job, I knew in the years before we left that much was not reported fully or at all.  The Star and other centre and left wing papers got around restrictions imposed by the ruling National Party by leaving huge gaps across newspapers where column inches should have contained text and images, but instead contained just a few words along the lines of 'due to the State of Emergency we cannot print this story/photograph' or, simply, 'This article has been censored'.  The lack of information, the absence of print, said a great deal, not only about the violence but also about the government and what the editors of those newspapers thought about the censorship.

Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silver worked at a time in SA when the boundaries of a didactic and authoritarian state were being violently dismantled.  They witnessed and photographed some shocking things, young people murdered by angry mobs using machetes, necklacing as well as shootings.  They did not hold back from photographing the most disturbing scenes, and the book looks at the opposing tensions they all felt in their jobs.  They wanted to record what was going on, not only the sickening treatment of the black population but also the fighting between the Xhosa and Zulu factions.

In order to fulfil these assignments they all had to find ways of coping.  Emotional detachment, propped up with alcohol and drugs led to problems for each of them.  But the most tragic was Kevin Carter who shortly after receiving a Pulitzer prize for his photograph of a vulture sitting behind a starving child committed suicide.  I have to say when I look at photographs of him I imagine I see the frailty in his expression and gestures, and his eventual suicide does not seem surprising given the trauma photographing such scenes must have had on all of them.  Not only were they witness to truly shocking scenes, they each had to come to terms with the fact they had witnessed these things without intervening, choosing instead to take photographs.

The moral implications are are not clear cut.  It was of course imperative the world outside of Soweto and other townships were aware of what was going on and photography has the capacity to share stories at a very immediate and visceral level. There is something about images being pre-verbal, and maybe therefore capable of 'speaking' to our emotions in a very different way to words (sure there is a dissertation in that sentence but I'll have to expand another time).  And had anyone intervened they would very likely have been killed. As it was each of them risked their lives each time they ventured out, some were indeed shot and recovered, but Ken Oosterbroek was shot dead in a gun battle shortly before Carter's suicide.  So, although the moral implications might be difficult, there is no denying their immense bravery in telling stories about atrocities and telling them from as close to the centre of it all as you can be.

The authors explore this dilemma, about how complicit they were by the fact they were present at all, choosing to photograph what was going on.  I am not sure that even they are always a hundred percent convinced by their arguments. "I was one of the circle of killers, shooting with a wide-angle lens just an arm's length away, much too close", says Marinovich when describing one of his first encounters with gang murder close-up, and "I was as aware of what I was doing as a photographer as I was of the scent of fresh blood, and the stench of sweat from the men next to me."

But the authors also say that if the pictures of atrocities exist they should be seen. "To censor pictures that are too strong, indecent or obscene was to make decisions for the reader that was not theirs to make."

In the end photographers have to try to live with themselves, whatever they choose to shoot. Kevin Carter describes how the trauma affected him and the authors agree they all felt the same at times.

"I suffer depression from what I see and experience nightmares.  I feel alienated from 'normal' people, including my family.  I find myself unable to relate or engage in frivolous conversation.  The shutters come down and I recede into a dark place with dark images of blood and death in godforsaken dusty places."

Carter's image of the little girl and the vulture caused uproar as well as praise.  People wanted to know what happened to the child, why had he not helped, how could he have taken a photograph of a child suffering like that rather than dropped his camera and run to pick her up, did the vulture take the child.  He gave vague and contradictory answers.  The reality is he had been working, looking for a story, and Marinovitch describes a probable quotidian and emotionally detached scenario that took place.  All those questions by all accounts put an incredible amount of pressure on a man who had always struggled mentally.  The intense focus on him and his photograph, the emotional difficulties witnessing so much extreme violence must have caused him, cannabis (or daga as it is know in SA) and cocaine all contributed to eventual serious clinical depression.  After he lost some rolls of film for Time magazine he was found dead with a pipe leading from his exhaust to the inside of his car.

Ultimately the elections took place and the four journalists had documented, at enormous cost to themselves, an incredibly important process where human beings were as vile as they can possibly be to each other.  You can see some of the images Kevin Carter photographed here, including the first photograph of a necklace killing which is so shocking and utterly horrifying to think about.  It is of course critical that these actions by humans against other humans are recorded and shared.  Who does it though and how is another matter.

The book is really worth reading whether you're interested in photography, journalism, even South African history or not.  It is written with an admirable honesty and sense of humility, a retelling of a moment that must have been extraordinarily painful to revisit at times.

Quotes from The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich & Joao Silva Random House Books 2001

Family Frames by Marianne Hirsh

It took me a while to make my way through Marianne Hirsh’s book Family Frames.  The book is so dense with information that it is quite impossible to retain all of it. I think the best thing for me to do here is to concentrate on the themes that I have absorbed, things that I can apply to my own work as it continues to develop; and as my understanding of what photography might be evolves.  I have to say, the more I learn, the more the notion of what a photograph might be is unraveling.  Not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

There are perhaps four reasonably solid ideas I take away from the book:

The first being that the family album serves to sustain the notion of family, reinforcing our ideas of how that institution is shaped and how we might fit into it.  Hirsh says early in the book, “At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[1].

The next big subject that really got me thinking was the idea of the “Gaze” and unconscious optics.  I had come across the gaze earlier in the course but Hirsh looks at the impact of looking, seeing and being seen.  She explores Lacan’s mirror theory and the chapter on this has made me eager to discover more.  Unconscious optics fascinated me;  the screens through which we view the world and thinking about the gaze, how we imagine those looking at us, in the flesh or within a photograph, might perceive us. 

Hirsh then looks at the role of mothers and photography; how the camera interrupts the maternal gaze, transforms it, and ultimately renders the maternal viewpoint, including her fantasies, tangible in the form of a photograph.

Lastly, although by no mean exclusively, as the book really covers a great deal more, is the notion of post-memory which has really struck a chord with me.  Those long held family myths that stem from before one’s own arrival in the world, and which inform so much about how a family operates and sees itself in relation to the world outside of it, and within it.

I will aim to cover each of those aspects in this essay, which forms the basis of my research for Assignment 5.

The Family Romance

The way in which families operate across cultures and history varies significantly and according to Meredith F Small in her book, Our Babies Ourselves, is dependent in large part on the economic needs of the society.  She refers to research that compares urban and agrarian societies, for instance: “In more urban-industrial societies, Le Vine suggests, parents don’t need much from their children because the economic system is constructed so the children are peripheral…*”[2] as opposed to agrarian societies where children are more central and very much expected to contribute to the economic activities of the society, i.e. they will work in the fields, for example.

So it is interesting for me to think about why families take photographs of themselves, which in turn gaze back, reinforcing a fixed idea about how that family should look and be.  We seem to need to believe the way we (whoever we might be) do it is the only way or perhaps the right way.

Hirsh’s second chapter is titled Reframing the Human Family Romance and covers various aspects of myth making with family photography but it is her exploration of Steichen’s Family of Man, which at the time was by far the most successful photographic exhibition to date, that resonated with me most. 

The exhibition is on the surface a celebration of the human family.  There are photographs from all over the world, by famous and not so famous photographers, of people and families; starting with lovers, then pregnancy and babies, then on to play, family, work, war, religion and government.   The way in which it is presented suggests that we humans are essentially all the same – despite our different and varying cultures. 

The power in that message is delivered with considerable force due to the nature of photography.

Hirsh says, “The illusion that photographs simply record a pre-existing external reality, the fact that photographs freeze particular moments in time, and the ambiguity that results from the still picture’s absent context all help to perpetuate a mythology of the family as stable, static and monolithic.”[3]

The Family of Man exhibition sold the idea of a “globalized, utopian, family album, a family romance imposed on every corner of the earth”.[4] 

Hirsh goes on to discuss Freud’s notion of the family romance being “a shared individual fantasy of mythic origin: the child’s dream of parental omnipotence and infallibility…” and then “The Family of Man disseminates the fantasies of Steichen and his contemporaries…”[5]

In my mind it is hardly surprising that this sort of mythology, the mythology of a paternalistic, Western, middle class ideal, Freud’s family romance, should be collectively conceived and expressed at that particular point in history.  Why wouldn’t a scarred and traumatised society who had just come out of a global conflict in which many millions of people were brutally slaughtered on all sides, and in the case of the Holocaust, whole towns and communities systematically murdered, need to see the world as a global family who fitted in with an ideal.  Of course that traumatised society, rightly or wrongly, wanted to perpetuate the fantasy of a family romance across the entire globe.  It would be, considering the recent extreme trauma, a mythology that Western society should very much want and perhaps need to buy into. 

Photography offers a powerful reflection of those fantasies which because of its capacity for perpetuating “an illusion of pre-existing reality” can be used by a society in one way or another, commercial advertising as well as cultural exhibition, to convince itself of a reality that is more palatable than the reality they have just experienced.

Hirsh explores the troubling aspects of this wholesale rejection of cultural difference, saying “One could argue that Steichen follows Parsons in promoting the patriarchal bourgeois nuclear family as the norm and standard against which other arrangements are measured.” And “the exhibit invokes nature over culture, thus diminishing, if not erasing, pronounced differences due to culture and history, and thus also naturalizing and sentimentalising the institution of family”[6].   I think this is worth considering whether you’re thinking in micro or macro terms.

Unconscious Optics

I was absolutely fascinated to read about unconscious optics.   Our perception of life, of people, of ourselves are all filtered and mediated through unconscious optics.  I don’t think this was news to me but the level of exploration and the introduction of Lacan’s mirror stage certainly triggered lots of thoughts.  I have always been fascinated by varying cultures and about how people from different parts of the world relate to the word.  I find it extraordinarily interesting for instance, that a tribe in South America (frustratingly I don’t have access to the documentary so have no way of giving any further details) make beer out of saliva.  To us in the West this seems incredible and I have to admit as I watched it I felt revulsion as I saw people drink the frothy fermented liquid.  These differences in culture are so deeply and firmly held that it makes a bit of a nonsense of the Family of Man’s promotion; where we are all ‘naturialized’ in accordance with a Western patriarchal bourgeois model.  The chapter on unconscious optics looks at how we ‘see’ through our cultural and historical screens, and how we have very little control over that since we don’t really have access to our unconscious minds where the foundations for this screens stem from. 

The term ‘unconscious optics’ comes from Walter Benjamin, and Hirsh uses it throughout the book and in particular in relation to Lacan’s notion of the gaze, or look.  I wrote about this earlier on this blog so won’t go into much here but the idea of a looking and seeing, reflecting and being seen all being intrinsically related and caught up in how we build our realities is incredibly interesting for me.  Hirsh goes on to say that the ‘family as a social construct depends on the invisibly of its structuring elements.  Inasmuch as visuality functions as a structuring element determined by the familial gaze, its workings must to some degree remain unconscious”.[7]

This fed into my thoughts about how I would approach A5 and what I hoped to get out of it.  Photography, however seems to have the capability and potential to both perpetuate the myth of the family romance and expose some of its invisible structures – perhaps even do both concurrently. 

Walter Benjamin, who Hirsh quotes, discusses Edward Mybridges series of horses running:

“Evidently a different nature opens itself up to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.  Even if one has general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride… Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.”

We as a culture, when putting together family albums at any rate opt for feeding into the myths, the romance.  The details of everyday life, the quotidian mundaneness is not typically focused on.  But what I found in my own project is that emerges regardless, and even when it is, the mythology is very difficult to quash.  So, my photographic interventions may have revealed some of the structural relationships within our family or perhaps exposed some of the tensions, but my edit nevertheless feeds into the notion of a family romance, albeit a more than slightly tense one. 

Post Memory

Hirsh describes post memory as one of the most important or influential unconscious screens or optics.  By this she is referring to the history of a family, not only theirs but also of the family’s community.  I was very interested in this aspect especially since Hirsh’s Jewish family was from Romania, and like so many during WW2, relatives she never knew were deported or killed.  Whole communities wiped out.  The legacy of this history continues to inform generations since and I certainly relate to this as my own family, as I have mentioned in previous blog posts, were from Czechoslovakia.  My father’s father, as far as I am aware, was one of very few Fried’s to have escaped the Final Solution, having left for England before the war began.

I touch on post memory briefly here because it seemed like an incredibly important aspect of the book, and of how we see in general, plus how families see  - both as individuals within the family plus as a group looking inwards and out.  The sense of persecution, guilt, and pain, deeply held horror that exists within families who have a history linked to the Holocaust is immensely powerful and influential.  I am reminded of the book about Diane Arbus and a quote I used when writing about it –

“We grew up in an emotional desert of shame - never affirmation - and those of us who were taught to be assimilated were filled with self-loathing'"[8].  

Everything that I have written about here, all that has resonated with me seems to be at least in part due to the post-memory of my own family.  Not only the Holocaust connection but also the Victorian ethic that pervaded my mother’s upbringing.

I remembered the following quote for years although could not recall where I had read it until I picked up The Magus recently to reread. 

“”I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.”[9]

The post memory in our family that pertains to that ‘monstrous dwarf’ resonates today and I have long been aware of it, especially in relation to the family mythology (as opposed to family romance – by mythology I refer to the stories within a family that get told again and again over the years) which I have listened to since yearly childhood.  For instance I was told repeatedly about how my mother was punished and shamed for undressing her doll in front of boys at an early birthday party, or how she undressed herself at boarding school and stood on the window ledge for passers by to see (mostly boys I am led to understand).  These stories feed into our perception of ourselves, our families and how we see; looking inwardly and outwardly. In other words, family mythology and post memory are integral parts of those unconscious optics.

Mothers and photography

The final aspect to the book (and I have in no way covered everything), which I found useful in terms of A5 at any rate, is the chapter about mothers and mother photographers.  Lacan’s gaze is important here because of the idea that a child’s development is dependent on a loving gaze from their primary carer, which in most cases tends to be the mother. 

The role of the mother in mammalian development has long been understood to be critical for healthy, well-adjusted, functioning mammals.  John Bowlby’s attachment theory was hugely influential and for instance led to a change in the way children are hospitalized, so that care is taken to keep consistent and regular contact with parents, and in cases of very young children, constant during a child’s stay. 

Although only one aspect of the symbiotic relationship between mother a child, the gaze between these two, and other members of the family informs and influences the way in which a child develops.  In Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book, Mothers & Others[10], there is a diagram indicating just how much of a human’s brain is given over to communicating, seeing, looking understanding, receiving and giving information – and although the eyes are by no mean the only part of this process, seeing, looking and being seen are integral. (The question of blindness brings up many questions when thinking about Lacan’s theories and I can only say at this point that the subject is so complex I can’t quite get my heard around it for now, however, I wanted to flag it up that I am aware of it!)  (You can see the full article inlcuding the diagram I mention here - page 75) . 

Hirsh looks at how there has been criticism of mothers who photograph their children and amongst others she focuses on Sally Mann whose Immediate Family is so well known, and which generated such a strong response, both positive and negative.  She discusses how the looking that goes on between a mother and her children, looking that is essential to a developing sense of self, is said to be disrupted when eyes are replaced by a camera, changing the mother’s organic eye into a machine.  And therefore replacing the process of looking with a “gaze”.  As I have seen and understood it the word gaze is pejorative; it is power based and I have noticed often used to describe the activity of male artists creating female nudes over the centuries.  Hirsh doesn’t fully accept the negative ramifications of turning a mother’s look into a gaze and explores various positions surrounding what feels to me enormously difficult and contentious. 

“Mann’s children can see in her photographs the operation of the gaze; they can see how the maternal look can be displaced by a maternal gaze.  The images show them how culture sees children, what fears and fantasies structure childhood and therefore structures them”.  She also goes on to say that Mann’s children ”demonstrate some control over the perpetuation of their images… they can manipulate the images through their own play with costume and make-up; they can mimic and thus play with the childhood into which the maternal gaze – even if it is seen as disembodied, monstrous, phallic and devitalizing  - has fixed on them”.[11]

Mann argues that “Photographing them in those quirky, often emotionally charged moments has helped me to acknowledge and resolve some of the inherent contradictions between the image of motherhood and reality”.[12]

The difference between reality and pre-conceptions of what that reality ought to be is what interests me mostly.  It ties in with the opening paragraphs of this (rather long!) blog entry-

“At the end of the twentieth century, the family photograph, widely available as a medium of family self-presentation in many cultures and subcultures, can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images real families cannot uphold”[13].

I think Mann in this instance has perhaps turned that on it’s head by taking photographs that defy the usual self-presentations, challenges the status quo and instead deals with a different reality, one that links to our very real and in some cases justified fears about childhood and sexuality, as well as fantasy, play, and the idea of children being separate from real humanity.

Conclusion 

Before I end I will briefly say that Hirsh covers a great deal about the Holocaust and I am a bit lost with some or much of it – although I find myself drawn to these chapters due to my own family links I feel I will need to revisit those chapters when I have understood and digested bit more about the role of photography and linking us to our histories.

Overall, the book has deepened my understanding of what photography might be, carrying on from my reading of Barthes and then James Elkin.  Hirsh does adumbrate some of Barthes theories, which is always useful.  It must all be very much on my mind though because last night I dreamt a photograph of mine was hanging in a restaurant.  In it there were trees, a stream and a group of children, some of whom I think were mine.  And every time I looked at the photograph I noticed the children come to life and start playing.  When I looked away they stopped.  They couldn’t leave the photograph, they were tiny but they were real - although real in another reality and one that I could not actually climb into.  And that is what I think I have learned about photography – the illusion of reality is immensely powerful even though it can never be real.  The photograph is nothing more than a flat representation of a version of reality at one particular moment in time, made up of dots on a screen or pigment on paper.  And that is all it will ever be.  But our brains expect a photograph to be real because it looks real, and so our brain does what it can to make it seem real.  Editing, in the case of a series of photographs, adds to the illusion.  This makes photography an extremely powerful tool for advertisers and makers of propaganda the world over.

---

[1] Page 9 Family Frames

[2] Our Babies Ourselves Meredith F Small page 54 Anchor Books 1998 *I would argue that within our present cultural paradigm women are expected to make a choice about whether or no they want to exist on the on the periphery with their children or else abandon the caregiving role of mothering in order to be at work.  Although this is changing with more sustainable maternity laws, and in some countries for both parents.

[3] Page 51 Family Frames

[4] Page 51 Family Frames

[5] Page 52 Family of Man

[6] Talcott Parsons – Structural Functionalism

[7] Page 117 Family Frames

[8] Diane Arbus: A Biography By Patricia Bosworth, Open Road - Integrated Media, Published 1984, Kindle Edition 2012

[9] Page 15, The Magus by John Fowles, Kindle Edition, Vintage, New Edition 2004, First published 1965.

[10] Page 40, Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Belknap Harvard, 2009

[11] Page 159 & 160 Family Frames

[12] Page 161 Family Frames (Sally Mann quoted)

[13] Page 9 Family Frames

First public display of some of my work

Last Friday a whole bunch of people, mostly friends, came to a local cafe and looked at some of my photographs which have been put up there and I even sold quite a few.  It was nerve wracking and exciting and I was very pleased to have been asked by the owners to provide the images in the first place.

Here is a link to the images: Wandsworth Colour

Someone local printed them for me and did a very good job.  My lack of printing knowledge frustrated me as I know from talking to Sharon Boothroyd that she did her own printing.  This is something I imagine will be good to learn about.

When I was first asked to do something we agreed that it should be local but that was my only direction.  I had been taking photographs of walls already, I guess copying other styles I had seen on Flickr at the time.  But then I started to wonder why "walls' as I became a little wall-centric for a while.  An obvious but rather pedestrian and unimaginative interpretation might be something to do with a lack of people in my life but that doesn't resonate with me  - especially as I am lucky enough to have lots of people in my life really.

I think rather if one had to try to interpret my focus on walls, it pertains to structure.  I suppose as the structure in my life was utterly devastated three years ago, my photographs are a reinforcement of the structure that I need, want and indeed am rebuilding as time passes.  I am surrounded by a strong sense of community which is extremely important to me and the landscape in which I exist, my home, provides a secure structure for me and my family.  As I photograph those real structures I somehow reinforce the internal ones which are so crucial to living.

The other thing that walls represent to me are a kind of metaphysical set of boundaries.  Less disparate societies than ours seemed to have had a much clearer societal infrastructure than ours.  We have so many cultures converging, giving us many more choices; but it also makes it harder to be certain of those internal structures that we really, really need.

My own internal structures have always been shaky, perhaps in part due to having grown up abroad but always told I was not of that country, born to a father whose family were wiped out in the second world war, and then like so many children, had to contend with the divorce of my parents.  I will talk more about this when I write up Family Frames.  My pictures of walls seem to me to be very much about trying to establish and envisage some firm internal boundaries when they have been lacking for so long.

Anyway, in the end I was very pleased to have shown my work to people.  Really pleased that so many bought prints.  And I look forward to doing it again!  Here's a link to my other blog about it.