The word 'evidence' means proof of something. Evidence is a series of verifiable factual clues that can be used to determine whether something is true or not. We rely on evidence in different forms to make sense of the world and to differentiate between fact and fiction.
Throughout its history, photography has provided different types of evidence of things having happened. When light bounces off objects and into a camera it leaves a trace on a photo-sensitive surface. This suggests that a photograph contains within it factual evidence of reality. Surely, then, we can trust the evidentiary status and reliability of photographs? However, the more we know about photographs, the more we might suspect that the situation is more complex than this.
Throughout its history, photography has provided different types of evidence of things having happened. When light bounces off objects and into a camera it leaves a trace on a photo-sensitive surface. This suggests that a photograph contains within it factual evidence of reality. Surely, then, we can trust the evidentiary status and reliability of photographs? However, the more we know about photographs, the more we might suspect that the situation is more complex than this.
“All images are excessive and enigmatic. That is their essential condition. For reasons both technical and social, photography was responsible for a quantum intensification of this essence. The camera always captured more than anyone wanted, more than anyone could be held responsible for. Of course, it rarely seemed that way. As soon as photography had been invented steps were taken to contain its wildness: the explanatory and reassuring caption, the instructive sequence, the album, the forced laws of genre. But none of these containments hold fast forever. Eventually a photograph works itself loose and even the simplest, most functional document will burst wide open.”
-- David Campany, discussing Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s ‘All My Gone Life’, 2016
Campany argues that a photograph is much stranger, wilder, than we might suppose. A photograph can't be contained, or tamed, and will eventually "burst wide open". How? Perhaps he means that photographs are open to interpretation and don't tell us as much as we might hope. A photograph might look like a simple record or document of reality but maybe it can't be so easily tied down...?
In the following video, photographer Alec Soth discusses the importance of gaps in our understanding of photographs. He talks about Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's book 'Evidence' from 10:40:
In the following video, photographer Alec Soth discusses the importance of gaps in our understanding of photographs. He talks about Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's book 'Evidence' from 10:40:
'Evidence': the second most important photobook ever!
In 1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel published a book called 'Evidence'. It featured a series of photographs that they found in the archives of American industrial organisations like the Berkeley Fire Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories and the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles. These photographs had been made to document various technical experiments and tests. However, when the artists published them in a sequence without the captions that explained what they represented, something very strange happened. The meanings of the photographs became less secure, more mysterious and poetic.
Here are some of my favourite images from Sultan and Mandel's book:
A closer lookWhat seems to be happening in this photograph, for example?
This, and the other images in the book, remind us how much we rely on words to help us understand what photographs mean. Mandel and Sultan described their intention in making the book as: a poetic exploration upon the restructuring of imagery |
Experiment #1: Photograph of a photograph
We were given a photograph from a scientific/industrial archive, purchased by our teacher on eBay, and instructed to:
- Photograph the photograph so that light is reflected on its surface, partly obscuring the subject
- Photograph the photograph with someone else’s hand (holding, pointing, obscuring etc.)
- Photograph the photograph in an unusual place
- Photograph the photograph inside a book. Consider the relationship between the photograph and the adjacent text/image(s)
- Photocopy the photograph. You may do this in any way you like. Photograph the photocopy
- Disrupt/obscure (don’t damage) the photograph in some way. Photograph the disrupted/obscured photograph
Exhibition visits
I was very excited to see this retrospective exhibition of the work of Daido Moriyama. Taking over the entire gallery, the show is packed with images from the photographer's 60 year career and imaginatively curated. It was great to see so many of the publications that have made Moriyama famous and which demonstrate his interest in the distribution of images within the media industry. My favourite display was Moriyama's response to Nicéphore Niépce's photograph Point de vue du Gras. Entitled Letttre à St. Loup, Moriyama's images are a kind of homage to the origins of photography and its language of light and shadow.
To focus on reality or be concerned with memory, choices that, at first glance, seem opposite are, in fact, identical twins for me.
-- Daido Moriyama
Sugimoto's practice is rigorously conceptual. However, his pictures are also extremely seductive and visually stimulating. He is obsessed with the relationship between photography and time and each project is a kind of self-contained analytical enquiry. I really enjoyed the relationship between the exclusively black and white images and the Brutalist building. The curation was excellent and the lighting superb. A thoroughly enjoyable experience. I decided to take a creative approach to documenting the images using close-ups, dramatic crops, odd angles and finding relationships between the building and the work. This really enhanced my experience of the exhibition.
Fossils work almost the same way as photography... as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.
-- Hiroshi Sugimoto
There were lots of obvious differences between these two photographers:
SugimotoCalm
Elegant Balanced Parallel Intellectual Thoughtful Subtle Conceptual Distanced Spiritual |
MoriyamaWild
Rough Wonky Diagonal Emotional Instinctive Dramatic Sensational Close-up Physical |
...etc.
However, I began to think that there might be an interesting similarity because of their shared interest in the relationship between photography and time. Sugimoto describes his camera as a time machine, a way of contemplating time, making it visible and measuring it in light. He reminds us of the difference between huge expanses of prehistoric time, the length of a feature film and an instantaneous spark of electricity, for example. Moriyama is mostly focused on the here and now, the moment when he is moved to raise the camera and make a picture. He is taking slices through time that are fractions of a second. Even the longer exposures, made at night, are no more than seconds (if that). Yet the sheer volume of images and the way he sometimes presents them in series (as contact sheets or in books and magazines, for example) suggests that he is also interested in duration and in what the photograph can tell us about our experience of time passing and, in particular, the experience of memory.
The Challenge
We were challenged to make a series of photographs influenced by Horoshi Sugimoto and/or Daido Moriyama. We had about an hour to make some pictures on the streets of central London, near The Photographers' Gallery. I used a digital SLR, 50mm lens (equivalent) and shot in black and white. Here are my pictures:
I am relatively pleased with these pictures. I tried to combine Sugimoto's careful, logical, slow, deliberate way of making photographs (all carefully composed with parallel and perpendicular lines) and Moriyama's more instinctive, chaotic and chance-based practice. I tended to alternate between the two approaches, partly based on things I could see in the streetscape that reminded me of their photographs. My camera was more similar to the hand held point and shoot favoured by Moriyama but I did occasionally try to stand very still and line everyhting up in my viewfinder in an attempt to achieve the same feeling of balance and stillness that I experience looking at Sugimoto's work. These are all displayed in the order I took them so hopefully you can see two slightly different approaches to subject matter and composition in them.
Developing & Refining
Once I'd downloaded the pictures and done some basic post-processing in Lightroom, I decided to make an edit of the pictures, choosing to create a combination of single images, diptychs and triptychs, I'd made a few more pictures on the way home so included these too. I shared these edits on Instagram.
I really like the process of editing and sequencing photographs because there are so many possibilities and no right answers. I'm looking forward to making a small zine with these and other pictures soon.