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Alex Titarenko

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It comes as no surprise that Shostakovich forms the aural backdrop to many of Titarenko’s photographs. Just as Shostakovich played with ambiguity, tonality and sharp contrasts, so too Titarenko’s images beg to be noticed, highlighting the edges and dark corners of visual experience.

Perhaps his best-known work relates to St Petersburg, but it is his more recent work about New York that best showcases his range of darkroom and in-camera techniques. Long exposures, camera movement, selenium, sepia and gold toning, solarisation, bleaching  – all come into play as Titarenko edges towards the limits of silver gelatin possibility.

Very interesting work….

 

New York Public Library © Alexey Titarenko, 2017.

 

Fifth Avenue. © Alexey Titarenko

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Knut Skjærven

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Blow Up © Knut Skjærven

Blow Up © Knut Skjærven

Of course, good photographs should at one level speak for themselves, as this wonderful photograph by Knut Skjærven does. But, I venture to ask, why do they?

There is so much else to a good photograph than the sum of its components.

It has nothing to do with beauty or the specific content of the photograph or the tonality or indeed any individual ‘property’ of the image, although these things contribute. They may be necessary but they are not sufficient. These things attract your attention, but they do not in themselves give you an aesthetic experience. The individual qualities of the photograph invite you to sit at the dinner table but you don’t get to taste the delicious food by doing nothing more.

The aesthetic experience occurs when you become engaged in recreation with the photograph. This is actually quite complex, but as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said “…the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”

At first, there is the encounter with the photograph as an object of experience, pre-cognitive if you will. Then there is a physical feeling – the photograph is objectified as being the subject of the feeling; a relationship of distance is recognised. This gives rise to a conceptual feeling which is the subjective reaction to the physical feeling, the distance. Other emotions and memories enter the arena of experience and thereby a relationship to the photograph evolves. It starts to become part of you. A fresh feeling emerges from the contrast between the ‘conceptual feeling’ and the ‘physical feeling.’ Finally the resulting relationship is contrasted once again with the ‘physical feeling’ giving rise to a ‘completed unity’. The energy behind this process, called ‘Concrescence’ by Whitehead, is causa sui,  that is, self-generated.

At heart, therefore, is an interplay, a recreation, between the photograph and you such that the photograph establishes a you that is different in some way from the you of a moment ago. The extent to which this happens depends upon the ability of the photograph, acting as a whole, to set up the aesthetic experience.

And this particular photograph is very successfully at setting up such an aesthetic experience. We can analyse the components of it that create something ‘other than the sum of its parts’, of course, but the end result is that it is complete in-itself – causa sui.

So, yes this image speaks for itself at one level. But it opens up much more if you are quiet and listening.

 

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Presidio – Stephen Shore

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© Stephen Shore

© Stephen Shore

A picture that stops me.

Gerry Badger identifies Shore with the “quiet photo”. To a certain extent he is right, (although Shore has bridged many genres in his long career). For me his images are particularly compelling because they start quietly, but get louder like an underground train approaching at speed.

You look down this street. Telegraph post shadows cut across, suggesting a divide. The dog checks your thoughts. The man stands there, unmoving, passive and staring. The fence hems you in. It is late evening. What to do? A moment of doubt opens.

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Beachy Head

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© Tony Ray-Jones

© Tony Ray-Jones

A young man and woman embrace, seemingly oblivious to everyone around them. They are intimate and gentle, locked into a private world – a love affair, a love scene even. A very private act in a public space. But although the lovers hold centre-stage, the photograph is not principally “about” them.

We see the other trippers looking out of the frame, presumably at Beachy Head’s chalk cliffs. Their faces betray unease. Everyone is quiet, pensive and above all avoiding the love scene that is playing out, as though there is an unspoken agreement at work – an act of collusion. Very English! “No sex here please, we are British”!

So the photograph is about the relationship between the lovers and the other trippers. The lovers with life-unlived, care-free; the trippers with life-lived, care-worn.

But that’s not all. A parallel scene is being played out:

“Photography is the process of rendering observation self-conscious” Berger explains, “What it shows invokes what is not shown”.  1.  What is shown is clear: the lovers and the travellers, (the “also-rans”). But what is not shown? The lovers have a different destiny to the travellers. The two groups are bound to different fates. From premises, consequences flow. The lovers look forward in time, entwined within a common fate. The travellers look back, remembering their own past experiences which are now unfolding before them in the guise of the lovers, momentarily halting the remorseless succession of moments. The former with Future; the latter with Past. We see ourselves as simultaneous members of both groups. With a foot in each camp we are caught between them, between past and future: outside of time and place.

  1. Understanding a Photograph by John Berger; Penguin 1967; ISBN 978-0-141-39202-8
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Intersections by Josef Koudelka 1976

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Uninterminable sameness. The road travels straight and up, beyond and over (to a difference, perhaps?). The man seems unsure. He is at a crossroads, but is turning to the right. Deep down he realises it is already too late for change.

A wonderful picture by Koudelka.

© Koudelka

© Koudelka

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In search of a classic photograph

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I went out recently, film camera in hand, specifically in search of a ‘classic’ photograph. I happened on this scene in which the man’s hat, coat and briefcase would give me that ‘timeless’ look, helped of course by TRI-X film.

I think this would have been difficult, but not impossible, to create using digital equipment. It’s the combination of the grain with the slightly faded greys.

film street photography

© Tony Cearns 2016 St Georges, Hall, Liverpool. Tri-X rated at 320 developed in XTOL 1:1.

But what do we mean by a ‘classical look’? Is it simply a photograph in black and white? Well, no, as this do not necessarily give such a look. We could take a photograph of a modern scene in black and white and still it could look modern. Is it the fact that a photograph harks back to a previous era by virtue of its costume, street furniture and architecture? Again, no, as it would be possible to take a photograph of a historical reenactment without it looking ‘classical’. Is it more to do with the way that a photograph is expressed through the rendering of a film. I think this has more to do with it, but it is difficult to define. We seem to know when we see it but find it hard to define. This is because it’s more a mood or atmosphere rather than a specific set of attributes, although it is the attributes that give rise to it.

 

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In Praise of Joel Sternfeld

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Sternfeld’s pictures can leave me strangely quiet, as after leaving a church service or a long meditation. The scale of his backdrops, the counter-pointing of urban against rural, of people against artefact, all have the effect of making one feel small and insignificant.

Perhaps best known for ‘American Prospects’, Joel Sternfeld // American Prospect ‘Stranger Passing’ and ‘Walking The High Line’, his images seem disarmingly simple and unified despite their epic scale and ambition. Perhaps this is partly achieved by his muted use of colour, integrating objects together rather than forcing them apart, a technique he learned from studying William Eggleston.

In “Architecture Museum” we see these hallmarks coming together: muted colours, the juxtaposition of scales, the ethereal quality to the framing.

© Joel Sternfeld

© Joel Sternfeld

As he himself said on the use of colour:

“The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily”.

And on framing:

“You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium”.

And here is why Sternfeld so interests me as a street photographer: his ability to control all the elements (none of his photographs were posed) and his ability to keep you guessing with only half the story – surely two crucial components to good street photography.

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On Colour Street Photography

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“I even think of black and white as colours, it just happens to be limited to two,” explained Bruce Davidson, comparing himself to a baseball switch-hitter able to swing both ways depending on the score 1

A far cry from his mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson who famously rejected the use of colour. We can now look back on this sterile debate (i.e. B&W versus Colour) with the advantage of having seen the wonderful colour work of Cartier-Bresson’s contemporaries Helen Levitt, Ernst Haas,  Fred Herzog and in  particular Saul Leiter.  [Read more…]

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Who are the best writers on photography?

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I immediately think of the “big four”: Barthes, Sontag, Benjamin and Berger, of course. Roland Barthes Camera Lucida was ground-breaking at the time, but I tire of semiotics and structuralism. Sontag? Again hugely important in the genre. I read “On Photography” in 1978, but it didn’t speak to me at the time and still I find it dry and dull. A giant that Walter Benjamin is of photographic criticism, again it’s hard work isn’t it? [Read more…]

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