Self-reflection for Assignment 5 – Documentary

I felt I showed good technical skill in producing the diptychs because it required patience and practise to get enough tourists taking pictures/selfies in front of the camera at the hotspots. Likewise I felt I showed more patience and paid attention to detail in order to get the framing and poses right for the self-portrait part of each diptych. Lastly making the composites in Photoshop required further patience.

The quality of outcome was good in my opinion. At first the project started out with me just trying out the composite technique as can be seen in the post: Photographs Inspired by Chris Dorley-Brown and Peter Funch but with tourists taking pictures as integral parts to the composites. Then after some correspondence with my fellow student Bryn, it developed into the idea of myself interacting with the tourists retrospectively through pictures. This was then embellished when I realised that I could take similar photographs to that which they had taken from those same spots, further affirming my relationship through pictures. I put this last part together in a scrapbook style which for me resembled the of the kind of scrapbook a typical tourist coming home from holiday would make.

In my opinion the creative aspect of the project was good and I learnt how valuable conceptualisation through shooting photographs and experimenting can be. However, certain aspects of the creativity in terms of creating the composites did initially bother me. I did at times question the ethics of my project in terms of depicting a true-to-life rendition of reality. This was especially true while ‘cutting out’ the tourists from one image and layering them into the composites using layer masks. I used a tablet with virtual pen to make more precise selections while painting in the layer masks. On occasions I had to look closely at the computer screen during this process which made me aware just how much I was making the camera lie and deceiving what was once an indexical relationship. However, I kept coming back to Umberto Eco’s assertion that: ‘the photograph reproduces the conditions of optical perception, but only some of them.’ – (Eco In. Burgin, 1982). Here I was just reducing another of those conditions of optical perception; that of juxtapositions within the frame and it could be argued I was doing so to highlight the perceived uncertainty over the nature of photographic realism nowadays. As Peter Funch (whose technique is very similar, and was a big influence for Assignment 5) puts it in an interview with Gregory Jones while talking about Babel Tales (2006): ‘Everything depicted in Babel Tales is true to life, however, the elements that construct the photographs were taken at different times.’ – (Jones and Funch, 2013). He previously says in the interview: ‘I present them [the pictures in Babel Tales] as documents that aren’t necessarily true. It is for the viewer to decide was is real and what is unreal – it’s not my prerogative.’ – (Jones and Funch, 2013). These comments by Eco and Funch alleviated my preexisting notions that a photograph ‘has’ to appear real. I began to think instead the viewer’s gaze was not predetermined by the nature of the photograph and they could make up their own mind.

I thought it was a documentary project in the sense that it documented parts of life – even though the composites were not indexical to the life the photographs had been made up from. In this manner it was more a topical commentary on tourism and consumer culture where pictures are a commodity which are more and more disconnected from reality. It was less a traditional documentary project where the photographs are an authentic document but it could be argued it still conveyed a message as clearly as traditional photojournalism.

References:

Eco, U. In. Burgin, V. (1982) Thinking About Photography. London: MacMillan.

Jones, G. and Funch, P. (2013). Peter Funch and the Constructed Moment ⋆ In the In-Between. [online] In the In-Between. Available at: https://www.inthein-between.com/peter-funch-and-the-constructed-moment/ [Accessed 10 May 2018].