Assignment Four: reflections against learning outcomes
LO1 produce convincing visual products that communicate your intentions, using accomplished techniques in complex and unfamiliar environments, with minimal supervision from your tutor.
I have increasingly learnt that I am working with a living changing subject, both metaphorically and visually. The landscape had transformed at this time to sparse vegetation except for abundant carpets of moss. So I had to swivel my perspective, which I did by focusing on the moss as a protector of other woodland species, a nurturer and homogeniser of the various elements.
I photographed the same woodland subject, but with even more of an internal emphasis on my internal dialogue and intention as a poet would, as I photographed. This sharpened my attention as I chose my subjects and perspective. This fits with my intention to use the ancient woodlands as a metaphor for my feelings about community.
In terms of visually capturing my woodland subject, I have moved through various stages of experimentation from, psycho-geography, from Macro to Micro, contemplate constructionism and abstraction, and have distorted with perspective and scale. This time I chose to progress my work by continuing with a low to mid distance perspective which I am finding enhances the subject.
Technically I have now tried a variety of approaches with a variety of lens. This time I shot with my prime lens and have become dexterous with my tripod adapting to the difficult terrain heightened in the winter by heavy rain and frosts. The low winter sun took some adapting to also.
I also shot for the first time intending to crop to a 5:4 ratio, having seen to effectiveness of this ratio after cropping to this after my last shoot.
Using padlets when editing images and combining with my images proved helpful.
It has been suggested that generally images are full of visual nouns but not the adjectives and adverbs that we need to signify emotions – I don’t agree with this however I do see now that combining images and text as poetry has strengthened my concept – my feelings about harmony and disharmony in communities.
LO2 demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of your area of specialisation and be able to situate your own work within a larger context of practice in your field.
This work continues to build alongside my contextual studies work on affect and effect and other photographers.
I have researched landscape photographers who use the landscape to share their internal and external passage.
This assignment I researched Poetry and photography for the first time. I learnt from various photographers and writers how poetry can aid reflection, focus thoughts and like images be a metaphor for something else.
For this series my outcome combines my learning from both photographic and poetic contexts.
LO3 transform abstract concepts and ideas into rich narratives and integrate them in your images.
The visuals, the photographs came first, but I realise that they need signposting to transform them from my abstract thoughts in a narrative for readers.
So, this assignment I have experimented for the fist time with using poetry to add to the narrative of my series of images.
I asked myself whether the accompanying poetry is intrusive or provoking. I don’t want it to tell viewers what to think but to provoke thought. I believe my poetic narrative helps to unravel the images – but hopefully not too much.
My narrative and visuals are integrated in the photopoetry I have created. Though the poetry and photography retain some independence, but together creates something new – possibly a third personality? I think a richer overall narrative, drawing the reader beyond the frame of the photograph
LO4 critically review your own work and evaluate it against desired outcomes.
I have reflected as usual throughout this work. Using poetry from the shooting through to the final product added clarity and depth to my work. Thinking like a poet has helped me to self-examine my intentions and concept at every stage.
Using padlets helped me to be critical at various stages.
LO5 demonstrate management, leadership and communication skills and have deployed them during the negotiation and production of the final body of work with your tutor and third parties.
I have managed this work and communicated both within it and about it.
I have yet to discuss with my tutor, but I have reviewed the work against the course learning objectives and my personal intentions.
Make another submission of work in progress as a tightly edited, sequenced series. You may have continued to shoot; you may have changed direction since your last feedback report. However your project has developed, make the development clear in the image selection.
Pay particular attention to how you will use words alongside your images (captions, titles or additional ‘relay’ type text) and re-frame your images accordingly.
As in previous assignments, include a short commentary outlining the development of your ideas during your work on this part of the course.
Artist statement
This work is a continuation of my photography within an ancient woodland. It serves as a photographic celebration of cooperation and harmony within the community, along with a submerged representation of my internal discomfort on the divisions in my local community. “What lies beneath” is a visual exploration of a diverse harmonious woodland community, that in contrast to a divided and malcontented nearby human community.
Commentary
This series of work was a progression from my previous series. Still with the overarching theme of harmony, set against the antithesis of the disharmony in the local community, which is the driver for portraying the ancient woodlands as a visual metaphor for a harmonious community.
Working with a natural subject through natures cycles, caused me to reassess my photographic intention at the outset, which had been to develop the story of harmony in a musical sense as a collective of choral parts. It was December and the woods were bare, except for the prolific moss, which covered and protected the more dormant species hidden below itself. This is a time of nurture, acceptance and sleep in the woodlands, against a continuing backdrop in local village life of festering resentments and division. I reassessed how I could use this as a metaphor to communicate my concept.
So, I photographed moss in its various guises, accentuating it’s vibrant, abundant blanket and it’s welcome benefit and mutual exchange and respect to the rest of the diverse woodland community.
Having discounted my original intention to experiment with musical terms as descriptors and context for the woodland elements, I searched for a way to signpost my work, to add some context, but not too much. My research led me to experiment with combining my images with poetry. Could poetry bring something else into being? Could my images made up of visual nouns represent something else? Would words in a form of poetry give more clarity and depth without being too restrictive to the meaning?
Experimenting with words led me to connect my visual representations to the local community beyond the woodlands; this the original trigger for my visual work. Would combining poetry develop these images in another dimension, bringing “a third creative personality”? (Hurn and Fuller, 2010:11). After some experimentation I have added my own poetry to unravel the images a little, amplify my internal dialogue, whilst not giving too much directional context – this I hope will create third personalities, beyond the images and the poetry.
Reference:
Hurn, D. and Fuller, J. (2010) Writing the Picture. Bridgend Wale: Seren.
What lies beneath
What lies here beneath the abundant enveloping eiderdown, slumbering peacefully together? What lies elsewhere beneath structural facades, sheltering but murmuring malice?
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What lies here beneath the softest downy dress, sharing nourishment contentedly? What lies elsewhere beneath mans’ disguised demeanor, civil but deliberately divisive?
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What lies here beneath the verdant creeping coverlet, collectively sharing comfort? What lies elsewhere beneath community spirit, concealed but festering?
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What lies here beneath the softest downy dress, sharing nourishment contentedly? What lies elsewhere beneath mans’ disguised demeanor, civil but deliberately divisive?
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What lies here beneath the soothing snaking sleeve, insulated from harm by another? What lies elsewhere beneath deceitful welcomes, smiling but spewing spite?
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What lies here beneath the willing emerald wrapping, acknowledging their collective realm? What lies elsewhere beneath acceptable appearances, charming but prejudiced?
My intention at the outset of this series was to shoot at longer range images that show the harmony and varied components living peacefully together; and possibly to combine this with signposting related to the musical concept of harmony.
What I hadn’t factored in was the time of year. In December when I began scouting to shoot I should not have been surprised to find that vegetation was sparse in the ancient woodlands, apart from moss. Even when the woodlands were not sprinkled with frost, ice and snow, there was very little sign of life beneath the earth, bark and moss. But the moss was abundant, carpeting many elements of the sleeping woodland, rocks, bark, fungi, trees, logs, and earth.
I revisited my earlier research on moss. Moss protects, nourishes, stabilises, and filters the woodland environment. It is a great showcase of just one of the woodland plant species that thrives and enables other species to thrive…it does not thrive at anyone else’s expense, and in the winter is most obvious because most other species are visually in hibernation.
I reflected on how this compares to the local human community nearby. Although it is winter and much goes on behind closed doors, what is being shared behind those doors occasionally escapes. Despite the low number of tourists (a common thing for some locals to snipe at), tension still surfaces between “locals” (those born and bred locally), and incomers (those who live locally) and especially those with second homes (who visit periodically).
At its worst it could be called xenophobia. Spiteful comments, by word and mouth, and on social media continue to be shared but more anonymously than in the tourist season. This saddens me when the majority of the community works well together, enjoys the relative peace in the winter and the “incomers” do much to support the local community, in fact in my opinion they are the backbone of the community support. It is a shame that prejudice and resentment from a minority who can’t cope with diversity and evolution, spoil the peace, and cause disharmony in the community.
So, I revisited my visual intention. I would focus on the moss in the woodlands as an example of a nurturer and protector, a reflection on the harmony which is possible in diverse communities and a visual antithesis of some harmful elements in the disharmonious local human community.
Shooting
How would I achieve this? For me it is about showcasing the moss as a protective blanket, covering, and combining other species, a positive reflection on “what lies beneath.” Sometimes we can’t be sure what lies hidden beneath, but in the woodland setting it appears peaceful.
First shoot
I shot with my prime lens and aimed to shoot mainly at more of a distance. I composed so that I could to crop afterwards 5:4 ratio, this was a first for myself, normally I crop as I compose in camera. Visually I looked for subjects within the woodland covered in most and as luminous green as possible. The keywords and phrases I associated with as I shot were carpeted with moss, green, protective blanket, softness, peaceful, stabile, togetherness. I remembered my research on poetry and tried to think, feel and shoot like a poet.
The practical issues I had was with weather shooting conditions. There were a couple of weeks where the ground was snow laden which covered much of the moss, and between those were mainly days of persistent rain. On the literally few days that it was dry over a month I made sure I was in the woodland. Harsh light was a problem due to the time of year, low sun, short days, and lack of vegetation.
As shooting progressed I strayed away from just long/medium range shots and just worked into what showcased the moss the best. I found that I gravitated towards trees as a habit and had to remind myself that moss was the subject whatever it was covering, rocks, earth, logs etc. I looked especially for subjects that were predominantly moss covered, whether that be as a whole, difficult to capture due to their size, or by shooting parts of large trees, and not always large areas from a distance.
Editing
As I edited I returned again and again to my intention to use the woodland community to example harmony, the anthesis of the local human community. In particular this series showcasing moss as a selfless protector and nurturer of the community, homogenising and integrating the diverse species below it’s carpet.
My working title began as “what lies beneath”, but maybe it should be combining and accepting? Both work whilst I am editing. I chose images that emphasis moss covering what lies beneath.
I quickly excluded, images 5271 & 5442 .I liked the subjects and their message but was hampered technically as to shoot these as I wanted I could only do so with harsh light behind them, I had tried on various occasions to avoid this, but it had not proved possible.
I dropped 5266 as it wasn’t so lushly covered with moss. Whilst I dropped 5316 &5236 as I preferred others.
I then looked at similar images and chose 5345 over 5353, and 5480 over 5558, and 5350 over 5292, and 5329 over 5431 & 5446. I later dropped 5350.
Of the eight remaining, I asked myself the questions:
Are they keeping to my intended message, protecting what’s lying beneath?
Do any of them dilute my message?
Do the images on their own say anything? I don’t think any of them have a message on their own.
To reduce these to 6 images I asked:
Do the images together say anything?
Do they make a coherent series?
How do I order them? This may depend on my signposting- my message is more important than my aesthetics. So, what signposting will I add?
My learning led me to think like a poet when shooting. I took onboard that poetry like photography can mean something other than the subject. This time when shooting I was conscious of word associations, and compact messages like poetry. I was unsure how or if I would combine my photographs with poetry.
Having edited my images down to eight, I set about experimenting with poetry to combine with them. Could I create third personalities by combining them? I experimented and settled on a form playing around with word choices for some time.
I reflected on the eight images again, and dropped 2 images to form a tighter series of 6.
I then experimented with poetry, combining poetry and images until I matched poetry and images.
My thought processes about how to signpost my work led me to investigate poetry and photography
“Poetry” is derived from a Greek word meaning to create or to bring something into being. This is close to that of the word “art,” derived from a Latin word referring also to items brought into being by human skill.
Photographer Guy Tal asserts that in writing, poets don’t try to assert their own style as the only valid form of writing. Where he suggests that in photography, expressing meaning poetically, rather than from objective representation, is often criticised. Tal says this shows that photography still has a way to go as an art form, if only just to catch up to where other media already are.
Landscape photographer John Hardiman says “I came to the conclusion that photographs, on the whole, have little to do with photography at all. They represent something else” (Hardiman, 2022). He believes that it’s not the photograph which captures life in a picture, we draw these connections ourselves; to capture them we need to feel them. “With a careful touch of colour and tonality, flavoured to taste in just the right way, we can create our own visual poetry, which I’ll call “landscape poetography”. He likens this to poetry, as the way words flow from one line to another in poetry can be as the lines, colour, tone, and layout in photography. Deliberate changes can throw the reader off surprisingly or make them feel uneasy, I would call this punctum. Words, colours or tones can be used to make us comfortable or mixed to cause questions and ambiguity. He proposes that “Photographs and poems can both be metaphorical, drawing on the visuals but meaning something else”.
Landscape photographer David Ward suggests that photographic description alone is not inspirational, as the exact meaning is elusive as viewers interpret in different ways. He says that images are full of visual nouns, but to signify emotions we need adjectives or adverbs.
Rob Hudson, conceptual landscape photographer, says when exploring how he relates to the landscape, he often resorts to words for clarity and more depth about how he feels and what he wants to represent in a given project; starting by making lists of keywords about feelings, and associations with place. For a project to work he says they must have three key features, be personal, restrictive either through subject, area, style and or theme and that he can be passionate about them.
Describing how thinking like a poet can be inspiring for photography Hudson says artistic expression is about being self-aware, and spending time thinking about our feelings, where we are in the world and so on. He suggests that thinking like a poet in “prose, sometimes poetry and sometimes a simple “self-examination” in words”(Hudson, 2010) is useful. Not that this is poetry but that the processes involved are similar and words can develop and define ideas, which can feed into photography. He describes this photography, experiences of place feeding back into the words creating a “virtuous loop”.
Tal, G. (2021) Colour as Form: Transforming without deforming: Toward subjective expression and away from objective realism. In: On Landscape 254 pp.41–66. At: https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2022/04/colour-as-form/ (Accessed 27/08/2022).
PHOTOPOETRY
Photopoetry 1845-2015: A critical history: An essay by Michael Nott on the roots of photopoetry (2022)
Not defined in the oxford English dictionary, the first use of the term was 1936 with pairings of both by Constance Phillips. Boulestreau used the term to describe the poems and photographs in Facile (1935) saying “meaning progresses in accordance with the reciprocity of writing and figures: reading becomes interwoven through alternation restitching of the signifier into text and image” (1982).
Photopoetry: A manifesto (Crawford and Mcneath, 2016) suggests that photopoetry should be:
revealing to engage the readers imagination
a variety of connective strands between text and image
not be literal – reader needs to work to gain an understanding
Nott talks about a working practice between poet and photographer. Each are usually wholes when separate. The poetry can be prose, captions, poetic prose or other. He suggests that the best photopoetry retains the independence of both but creates something new when they are interdependent. He outlines that Retrospective photopoetry is when photographers provide images to already written poems. Collaborative is mutually conceived, whilst self-collaborative is less common. However, Nott argues that captions tend to describe images, and that photopoetry is not reductive and places the reader at the centre of their work.
Fuller says both poetry and photography are concerned with images and that poetry can unravel the image. Poems are “gradually constructed in words and images that has to pass muster as an alternative reality. But the photographer is exploiting reality itself, almost directly.” (Fuller and Hurn, 2010:8) They can “ blend, clash, contradict, embolden, evoke…” creating photopoetic images that encourage” serendipity” and “obliquity”. “gradually constructed in words and images that has to pass muster as an alternative reality. But the photographer is exploiting reality itself, almost directly.”
Barthes (2000) talks of when the undevelopable poems and photographs engage in dialogue, saying that the poem may draw the reader beyond the frame of the photograph, or challenge or conform the viewers impression of the photo.
References:
Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Howard, R. London: Vintage books. loc 325
Boulestreau, N. (1982) in “le Photopoem facile ». Meisine. Lausanne. Cited in Nott, M. (2022) Photopoetry 1845–2015, a Critical History. London: Bloomsbury. pp264.
Crawford, R and Mcbeath, N (2016) Manifesto in Chinese Makar. Edinburgh. Easel press.
Fuller, J and Hurn (2010) “A conversation by way of introduction” in Writing the picture. Bridgend. Seren.
Nott, M. (2022) Photopoetry 1845–2015, a Critical History. London: Bloomsbury.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND POETRY
The Photographers Gallery has an interesting page on the above (The Photographer’s Gallery. 2023), it describes that:
“As forms of artistic expression, both poetry and photography can convey a narrative or story without certainty or being merely descriptive. However, both the poetic or photographic act are often still perceived as solitary pursuits, occurring in isolation from other creative acts. Notions of composition, language, light, sound, space, printing, narrative and writing reveal themselves as fundamental to both arts, from collaborations between the media.
This led me to the work below Writing The Picture by David Hurn and John Fuller, and the photo haikus of Ann Attwood.
Writing The Picture by David Hurn and John Fuller (2010)
This book is a collaboration between a leading photographer and poet, where the poet responds to the images and draws out their meaning.
Their conversation in the book’s introduction is illuminating. Fuller describes the photograph as instant, exploiting reality, whilst a poem unravels overtime and is a constructed reality which the reader creates their own picture for them. Hurn believes that the best photographs share the unseen as well as the visible, and Fuller describes how they can “give voice to the photographer’s intensity of silence”, the implicit meaning. Fuller says that to be suitable for an accompanying poem a photograph must be thought provoking and stimulate the imagination, but there is a danger that an accompanying poem can be an intrusion. He generously suggests that the poem may only supply a memory to the photograph and has no life of their own. Fuller emphasises that a caption is quite different to a poem, which is more of a “title”.
I like the description by Fuller that a successful collaboration between photographer and poet can create a third creative personality.
Attwood, A. (1971) Haiku The mood of earth. New York: Charles Scribner & sons.
She says that Haiku is the most verse form like art, and that many of the techniques can be used when making images; the writer must search for just the right word, limited by seventeen syllables, must be evocative. Haiku means beginning, it is begun by the writer and completed by the reader – it must allow a full spectrum of response. She describes the writer’s role as a painter evoking but not describing a scene. It can though take a reader from a closeup scene to a wider picture. She asks can applying Haiku principles help to see “inside out”.
Through dripping branches
The woods and I are one
In the eyes of the rain (Attwood, 1971:31)
Personally, I don’t enjoy her images and haiku however her suggestion of applying the principles of Haiku, careful word selection for evocation rather than description is interesting. Also, the possibility of using poetry to take the reader from one view to a wider context.
References
Attwood, A. (1971) Haiku The mood of earth. New York: Charles Scirbner & sons.
Hurn, D. and Fuller, J. (2010) Writing the Picture. Bridgend Wales: Seren.
A Few Words. SJ Fowler, A Last Day at the Museum of Futures
Steven J Fowler a writer and artist, lead the course The Written Eye: Poetry & Photography at The Photographers’ Gallery in spring 2018. He says that language, the tool of a poet, is usually short and concentrated. This is not to say that poetry should not make sense, but it does go beyond documentation. He says that it doesn’t tell us what to think, just like other art, usually needing interpretation, “a celebration of paradox, of using the communicative tool to go beyond mere communication”, and is usually a metaphor for other things.
How poems inspire pictures (MacDonald and McCarthy, 2017)
This article describes and experiment where photographers were asked to read poems and then photograph how they inspire them to photograph. One thing that came out of it was how the poetry led them to want to make images with the same level of intimacy that the poems inspired in them. I was struck by how several described that they tried to hold onto their feelings about the poetry as they wandered and photographed. This is what I do when photographing the woodlands- hold on to my feelings about both the woodlands and human community.
One photographer Todd Heisler describes poetry as “what is right in front of you every day that you fail to see” (MacDonald and MacCarthy, 2018), adding that photography amplifies internal dialogue which is often diluted by outside distractions. He suggests that lyrical poetry is often hindered by too much thought.
Sabine Thoele is a self-taught photographer who started out in street photography and has since moved on to event and Fine Art photography. Over the course of one year Sabine Thoele observed the floating world on the surface of a pond in her local park. Her photographs document the traces of nature which gusts of wind left behind: floating leaves, flowers, seeds, roots, feathers and insects – a mirror of the changing seasons. Held temporarily afloat by surface tension the camera captures them just before they will completely vanish, a last celebration of their being. The eternal cycle of life and death played out in a small manmade pond. A meditation on what has been and what we will remember.
Adrift
Invisible walls of loss
The world a rectangle
measured by your paces
A craving for solitude
brought you here
where still waters promise nothing
Bird less flights dropped their cargo
Drifting anchors for your searching grief
Tomorrow was expected
Memories took its place instead
You wish you had …
Unfortunately, I have been unable to find and other work of hers like this.
These explorations were to help me to understand how poetry and photography might work together.
I can see the similarity between poetry and photography and understands Hardiman’s proposal for the term landscape poetography where visuals can be metaphorical, meaning something other than the subject. I can see that photographs may be amplified by adding adjectives and adverbs as well as visual nouns as Ward suggests. I identify with Hudson’s description of using words for clarity, by drawing up key words about place (feelings and associations) to help explore the landscape.He also writes that prose or poetry can bring self-examination in words This may be as far as I go with combining my photographs with poetry – using word association to verbalise and develop my reflections.
I need also to consider whether combining my images with poetry may be a way to unravel my images and add context beyond the image. Hurn suggests that accompanying images with poetry may be intrusive, whilst Fowler holds that poetry doesn’t tell us what to think and needs interpretation. However Fuller believes that when they are a successful collaboration they can create a third personality. Barthes in Camera Lucinda also talks of the poem drawing the reader “beyond the frame if the photograph (Barthes, 2020)I will have to experiment.
How I will do this I don’t know yet. I feel it should be with my own poetry, but I am not a poet. I have also looked at forms of poetry to help me such as Haiku and Koans, but I feel if I am able to write anything it will be freeform, most probably nearer prose than poetry; but then poetry can be in any form apparently…
NIKI SOUTH 