This is the final project for the MA and continues my interest in what the industrial estate can tell us about contemporary social relations. My aim is to produce a series of images of the everyday, ordinary conditions of labour as these are represented in the built environment.
The specific objectives that I have set for the project are:
- To further develop an understanding of the history, techniques and uses of architectural photography
- To identify visual themes that express the conditions of contemporary labour and to locate these in an appropriate political and cultural context
- To create, curate and present a series of images that express these conditions
- To experiment stylistically with the use of colour, line and form as well as scale in the production and presentation of images
- To present these images in a way that is appropriate to a relevant audience
The site of the project will be Manchester’s Trafford Park, the world’s first and still Europe’s largest industrial estate.
It sounds rather grand to try and examine aspects of social structure and the distribution of economic, political and cultural power through the lens of a camera, specifically my camera, especially when the images are likely to be no more than empty buildings, wasteland and the curious detritus of an industrial estate.
In one sense though, casting the project in such terms, as well as fashionable, is also inescapable as this is how I see most things.
Writing in 1923, photographer and film maker Paul Strand, denouncing the artistic pretensions and the pictorialism of his time, argued in favour of a form of photography that was both true to the camera (“craftsmanship” in Strand’s terms) and also to the ‘meaningness’ of the subject;
“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people’s vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.”
Paul Strand (1923) p. 615
In Strand’s case, as in mine, that ‘meaningness’ was closely bound up with his leftwing politics. He was a socialist and one of the founders of the Photo League, an influential co-operative of US photographers that variously included Weegee, Robert Frank and Edward Weston amongst its members before it fell victim to McCarthyism and was formally declared subversive by the US Department of Justice in 1947. (Paul Strand and the Photo League will be the subject of subsequent blogs, probably.)
This is not to argue that every photographer is like Picasso’s artist who is fundamentally,
“a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery, or happy events, to which he responds in every way … No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy”
(Picasso, 1945, cited in Chipp, 1984).
While there is “no view from nowhere” (Owen, 1995), not everyone finds their ‘meaningness’ in political terms. I find much of mine there but not all of it – my world view is strongly influenced by Buddhist thought too and, specifically, in the case of this project, the idea of ‘right livelihood’*.
To refer to the ‘meaningness’ of an image is not to enter into the stale debate about photography’s relationship to literal or any other kind of truth. Quite the opposite; it is a re-assertion of intentionality, artifice and the desire to influence on the part of the photographer.
Neither I nor anyone else can be the kind of camera with which Christopher Isherwood, ironically, introduces his sketches of pre-Nazi Germany in Goodbye to Berlin (1939):
“… a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
I come to this project with all of the prejudices, misunderstanding and conviction that I employ in the rest of my life. I bring my own ‘meaningness’ to whatever I photograph.
This kind of reflexivity is common enough in contemporary social science research and is a useful corrective there to both naive scientism and to universalising romanticism. It helps to keep the researcher honest. It is sometimes found too in the narratives that photographers provide for their own images although it can founder when confronted with the need to commodify the work or commercialise the photographer.
Hence, this reflection is partly a habit of thought acquired in previous careers but it is also a specific response to a question raised in the feedback on my last project that raised a question on the use of “Marxist terminology in the intro – perhaps shoehorns the viewer into a reading – should it be left more implicit? More bland?”
The terminology in question was ‘late capitalism’. The phrase was not in fact used by Marx but dates from the turn of the 19th century and was popularised in the 1950s when it was used to denote the economic conditions from the end of the second World war to the early 1970s. More recently, it has come to acquire a kind of mimetic quality, a “catchall phrase for the indignities and absurdities of our contemporary economy, with its yawning inequality and super-powered corporations and shrinking middle class” (Lowrey, 2017).
I understand the point being made in the feedback but my answer to the question would be ‘no’. The images were taken by a Marxist and were intended to ‘shoehorn the viewer into a reading’. That’s why I took them. There may be a distinction but not a difference between the intent and the express articulation of that intent. The ‘meaningness’ of the work remains the same however and without it, there would just be one more bland, “extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.”
Strand was at pains to point out the distinctiveness and uniqueness of each photographer’s “vision” (Strand, 1923, p. 614),
“As a matter of fact, your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.”
Paul Strand (1923) p, 614
My photographs are just that, a record of my living and that includes the way in which I understand the social world.
For Marxists, Strand’s individualism and abstraction from a specific historical context raises another set of questions about the enduring power of art across shifting economic phases and structures. This has been addressed by other Marxists, such as John Berger through his own revolutionary practice as an art critic, but that may have to be a topic for another day (see Minto, 2017). This is meant to be a blog about my photography rather than my politics after all … although that might be another distinction without a difference.
* Right livelihood is a step on the Buddhist path to freedom from suffering and applies the essential ethics of Buddhist practice to labour. Right livelihood means to abstain from any occupation that brings harm to others and to speak and act with compassion and respect for all sentient beings in whatever job we do.
References
Chipp, H.B. (1968) Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, US.
Lowrey, A. (2017) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/
Minto, R. (2017) http://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/visual-art/item/2443-a-smuggling-operation-john-berger-s-theory-of-art
Owen, D. (1995) Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity, London, Sage
Strand, P. (1923) ‘The Art Motive in Photography’ British Journal of Photography. Vol 70 No. 3309, October 5th 1923 pp. 612-615
