Dawn Langley |

Alternative Titles

By Dawn Langley | April 9, 2015 - 3:23 pm | Exercises

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Exercise: Cut out some pictures from a newspaper and write your own captions.

Based on images from The Guardian, Tuesday 7th April 2015

Original Title: Western sanctions cut options for Crimean shoppers (shows a woman being served at a meat counter)

My alternatives:
Anchor
• Pork sales outstrip beef for the first time
• Independent meat retailers return to high street
• Women still responsible for 98% of food shopping

Relay
• Meat prices falling following new BSE scare
• Row over ‘aged’ meat claims
• Do you know your food miles?
• Superstores cartel in meat scandal
• Proposal for meat rationing put forward to combat obesity
• EU meat trade in crisis

Original title: Alternative Manifestos for School Reform (shows a male teacher in a suit at the front of a classroom)

My alternatives:

Anchor
• Male entrants to teaching profession is rising
• Teaching profession faces highest levels of early retirement in any sector
• Male teachers still mostly teach maths, technology and science subjects

Relay
• Use of untrained teachers grows under Conservatives
• Teacher CPD at an all time low
• Teacher morale declining following recent policy changes
• Schools in special measures at an all time high
• Free school is failing local residents
• Schools reforms have not gone far enough says Minister
• • Failing school turns fortunes around in 18 months

Original title: Tehran’s reborn Symphony orchestra: an ovation before playing a note (shows the full Tehran Orchestra with their instruments)

My alternatives
Anchor
• Gender balance in orchestra improved
• Tehran orchestra on stage at the Barbican for the first time
• Women allowed into orchestra for first time

Relay
• Orchestra caught in maelstrom over new conductor
• Investment in young musicians essential says conductor
• Orchestra plays new piece by Iranian composer
• Orchestra threatened with closure

Original Title: If Jail on its own worked America wouldn’t have crime. You need a different approach (Shows two policemen in Hi-Vis jackets walking under the statue at the Rangers ground)

My alternatives:

Anchor
• PCOs given bravery award
• High Visibility vests save lives of two policemen
• Police to be given new footwear as a result of damage to feet

Relay
• Police to be given improved public order training
• Football memorial damaged by vandals
• Sectarian violence on the decrease in Scottish football
• Rangers to move to new purpose built ground
• Football hooliganism on the rise again
• Funding cuts mean less Police on the beat
• Police and fans in dialogue about future match policing

The Dad Project & Country Doctor

By Dawn Langley | April 9, 2015 - 3:10 pm | Exercises

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Black & white image of a single figure in a doctor's coat

w. Eugene Smith, Country Doctor, Life Magazine, 1948

Wow, that was a hard read. I had to take Briony Campbell’s photo essay in several bite size chunks. The Dad Project is extraordinarily intimate, touching on something so personal yet at the same time universal in theme. It also tackles a subject, which I think is still to a certain degree, taboo. Part of is power for me is its ability to resonate, it speaks to me as a daughter, now a stepdaughter and a photographer. I utterly relate to her thoughts around narcissism, and not putting yourself in the frame.

I think there are similarities with W. Eugene Smith’s “Country Doctor,” in terms of what I would define (as an ethnographic researcher) as ‘participant-observation’. They were both engaged in studying cultures, that of the work of the Doctor and of a family undergoing one of the most profound changes we have all have to face. They both appear to draw on humanist traditions and looking to speak of human experience and relationships. Both sets of images also pose questions about the human condition.

They also have their differences. While Eugene Smith’s works remain fresh and vital, for me they have an almost painterly quality. The fact that they are black and white highlights the tonal differences and the chiaroscuro effect. I am also conscious of the fact that while Eugene Smith built a rapport with Dr. Ceriani he only spent 23 days with him and his community. Briany Campbell’s work is about a lifelong relationship coming to an end in its physical form. She also puts herself in the frame as a means of acknowledging this relationship. Not all of her images are in sharp focus and I think their softness speaks of emotions, and the ambiguities and challenges she writes about struggling with. They have gentleness and like others my response to her words and images has been tears. Tears for the beauty and pain she has captured, and tears for my own family losses and grief.

When she speaks of it being an ‘ending without an ending’ I think she is referring to the story living on in her images and photo essay. I also think she is talking about her on-going relationship with her father even though his physical presence is no longer with her.

The real and the digital

By Dawn Langley | April 6, 2015 - 6:05 pm | Exercises

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The debate about whether a photograph shows ‘truth’ seems to me to have more to do with ontology than the nature of photography and whether it is digital or film based, as I have mentioned earlier in my learning log. I am inclined to agree with Campany that photography…

“…derives less from what it is technologically than what it is culturally.” (Wells, 2009: 75)

This allows for the blurring of photographic practices as art, documentary, still life, etc., wherein they can borrow from each other and develop in dialogue. As this evolves it brings into question our ability to make meaning from and of such images.

I do not hold the view that there is a single, objective reality to be found and represented – a realist ontology. I am more inclined to a relativist position where there are multiple truths created and constructed intersubjectively through discourse and social experience. This perspective allows for multiple realities. My concern is therefore less about whether an image represents a reality so much as from whose perspective it has been created (either in the camera or in postproduction) and what discourse are they inviting me into.

References and citations
Wells, L. (2009). Photography: A critical introduction (4th ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

The High Street

By Dawn Langley | April 4, 2015 - 4:18 pm | Exercises

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: The Bakery

: Glimpse

: Door lock

: Letterbox

: Creeper

: Trees

: Baskets

: Lamp

: Accessible

: Doorway

Title: The High Street

Exercise: Find a street that particularly interests you. Shoot 30 colour and 30 black and white images in a street photography style. Reflect on your experience and work.

Approach: I thought about where I wanted to go for some time. I thought about somewhere very ordinary, a town high street that could be anywhere or an area that looks tired and neglected. So, did I go somewhere with obvious character or see how I might work with a place with a less obvious identity. Added to which street photography is not a field I have worked in other than covering some big public events. I was not particularly comfortable about taking my camera out in public and despite reading around the subject still felt unsure about what the ‘rules of the game’ both socially and legally were about photographing people as they go about their daily lives.

Reflections on ‘The High Street’

This was an exercise I enjoyed more than I imagined I would. It was not an area I visit regularly and when I do I tend to be driving through so it is not somewhere I have spent much time observing. I was not at all comfortable about stepping into the High Street with my camera, it felt obtrusive, particularly as most of the time I work with still life and food.

I had decided before I went I would try and avoid shooting people and focus on capturing the essence of the High Street. Inevitably, I did capture people but those shots were generally from behind. Once I got started I began to notice things I had never seen before. I was absorbed by my surroundings and while there were some longer shots that were interesting it was the points of details that increasingly caught my attention.

I did not have a specific plan in relation to shooting in both black and white and colour; in fact part of me thought I might shoot everything in colour and then change some in PS. However, once I got started I saw more and more in terms of colour or black and white, different aspects seemed to lend themselves to different treatment. I also became interested in the ‘traces’ that people leave; in ways to capture everyday life without necessarily having people in the frame. This has perhaps been influenced by looking at the work of the other photographers included in the course.

Colour leant itself to the more everyday, to aspects of action and daily life. The black and white seemed to add drama and emotion. It is not a case for me of whether I preferred one set or the other, they achieved different things. I am pleased with some of the results I got from both. It seems to be a matter of appropriateness – of context and narrative!

Eyewitness

By Dawn Langley | January 26, 2015 - 9:20 pm | Exercises

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Four Syrian boys hold up toy guns and show the peace sign

Azaz, Syria

Syrian Crisis

Exercise: Look up examples of news photographs of emergencies. Are the pictures objective? Can pictures ever be objective? Write a list of the arguments for and against.

Approach: From 911 and the London Bombings to the Japanese Tsunami and landslides in Nepal there is a wealth of documentary images of emergencies on the web. I wanted to include some images as part of the blog and after looking through flickr I found the two above. I chose to include these two here because in some ways I thought they highlighted the contrast, both looking direct to camera but one apparently posed and one more of an action shot. As a viewer you might be forgiven for assuming one is an ‘objective’ journalist shot taken at a crucial point in time. Whereas the other is arranged, and a more familiar group portrait type shot, a more leisurely image where it is probable that the photographer arranged it and chose the moment to press the shutter. There are of course alternative readings, there is no way of knowing that the Free Syrian Army Fighter is who the caption says he is and where he is, we are being asked to put our trust in the photographer. This issue of truth and objectivity was highlighted in the recent coverage of the staged Syrian ‘hero boy’ Youtube video.

Equally, the group shot of the boys could have been something they staged and asked the photographer to take for them, or their parents asked to have recorded. Looking at it from my uniformed perspective I have no way of knowing if the guns are toys, again it is only the caption that for me delivers that information.
Considering arguments that might be made for or against objectivity in documentary photography I would suggest the following:

For
• An outsider view brings and open perspective
• Shot might have been taken quickly so no time to pose or fully see the entire frame
• Photographer may be in fear of own safety and therefore work very quickly
• The outsider may not fully understand the context and therefore is objective by virtue of their naivety

Against
• Images are always from a human viewpoint therefore they bring some background
• Shooting to a brief
• Technology can make things look ‘natural’
• Technology makes manipulation easier
• Similar frames and rules to follow – still composing in the frame
• Images are later selected or cropped so we don’t know what has been included or left out or who had the final say

Drawing on my experience as a researcher I question the ability of anyone to be completely objective, I have always tended to work with the notion of ‘critical subjectivity.’ It is based on the view that meaning is not static; it is continually created and recreated. This means that there was no single ‘truth’ to be found in the field.

The polar perspectives of objectivity and subjectivity are thereby replaced by ‘critical subjectivity’, meaning that “we do not suppress our primary subjective experience, that we accept our knowing is from a perspective; it also means that we are aware of that perspective, and of its bias, and we articulate it in our communications.”(Reason & Rowan, 1981)

Reason (1994) argues that critical subjectivity involves a self-reflexive attention to the ground on which one is standing and thus it may be close to what Bateson (1972b) describes as Learning III (see table 5). This notion of critical subjectivity means that there will be many versions of “reality” to which people may hold. It also means that the method is open to all the ways in which human beings fool themselves and each other in their perceptions of the world.

References and citations
Reason, P. (1994). Three Approaches to Participative Inquiry. In N. Denzin, K & Y. Lincoln, S (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 324-339). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Reason, P., & Rowan, J. (Eds.). (1981). Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of new Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley.

Images
Syria Crisis © 2012 Goran Tomasevic/Reuters available under licence: Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic flickr
A Free Syrian Army fighter takes cover during clashes with Syrian Army in the Salaheddine neighbourhood of central Aleppo

Azaz, Syria © 2012 Christiaan Triebert available under licence: Attribution 2.0 Generic flickr
Four young Syrian boys with toy guns are posing in front of my camera during my visit to Azaz, Syria. Most people I met were giving the peace sign. This little city was taken by the Free Syrian Army in the summer of 2012 during the Battle of Azaz.

Kites

By Dawn Langley | October 7, 2013 - 7:00 pm | Exercises

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Title: Flight and Flow

The Portsmouth Kite Festival happened just after the other two narrative projects and was a great opportunity to carry on with some trial and error in terms of capturing the story of my experience of the event. The weather was very mixed ranging from brilliant sun to thick, dense cloud. This forced me to work hard in terms of getting the right exposure and as a result some shots were definitely more successful than others.

I really liked the shapes and forms and colours with everything from stunt and fighting kites to cherubs and pink elephants, though they were quite difficult to do justice against such a variable sky. I did however become interested in watching the kite flyers in their comfort zones, they were completely in the flow (Czikszentmihalyi, 1997), absolutely absorbed in their kites.

Having seen these elements I tried to capture images that told a narrative of contrasts between crowds and chaos, and individuals absorbed in their own space.

References:

Czikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.

Rain Illustration

By Dawn Langley | October 2, 2013 - 9:16 pm | Exercises

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Title: Rain

Exercise:

Produce a single strong image that could be used for the front cover of a magazine on rain. This is an exercise in both imagination and working to a specification. The photograph should leave the viewer in no doubt about the subject.

Approach:

I started by thinking up a number of symbols for rain and sketching ides. I then took some different shots to see which ones worked best in practice. I was keen to try and produce something that could be easily understood but which at the same time was not too obvious.

Juxtaposition 2

By Dawn Langley | August 21, 2013 - 9:32 am | Exercises

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Title: The Journalist and the Murderer

Exercise: Take any book you like and make a suitable cover illustration using two or three relevant elements…you need a picture that has not been seen hundreds of times before, but is not so oblique or unrecognisable that a viewer could not make the necessary associations.

Approach: I chose to work with Jane Malcolm’s book ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ because it is a complex and fascinating story. I was interested in seeing if I could capture the different elements of betrayal, murder, ethics, journalism, life-writing and the law. I know that journalists probably seldom use a pen these days but I felt it had enough symbolic value to work, and I was loathed to cover my keyboard in ink or fake blood! The knife is perhaps a little obvious but the crime featured in the book does involve stabbings. I included text to try and illustrate what for me is the central issue of the book about how people respond to what is written about them.

Juxtaposition 1

By Dawn Langley | August 20, 2013 - 10:02 pm | Exercises

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: Before Snow White

Title: Before Snow White

Approach: I actually had this shot in mind when I was working on the exercise ‘evidence of action.’ I had the rose in a vase and it made me think of a final use for the fake blood I had made for the other shots. I then had a conversation with a friend about other photographers who had made work based on fairytales. I did a bit of research and apparently at the beginning of the Brothers Grimm fairytale Snow White’s mother pricks her finger on a rose and she wishes for a daughter with skin as white as snow, lips red as blood and hair black as ebony. Shortly after giving birth to Snow White she dies.

Symbols

By Dawn Langley | August 20, 2013 - 9:11 am | Exercises

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Title: Symbols

Exercise:

This exercise is designed to help you think further about symbols and how they can be used to represent different subjects. Using the following list suggest a number of symbols for each concept and what sort of photographs you might take. There is no need to take actual photographs unless you feel inspired to!

The subjects are:

Growth
Excess
Crime
Silence
Poverty

Approach:

I recorded a number of responses to each prompt – a bit like a word association exercise – and then thought about how they might be visualised:

Prompt	Associations	Possible Images
Growth	Plants, children, populations, money, cities, stains, mould, animals. buildings	Seedlings, shoes of ascending sizes, height lines on the wall, piles of money growing in size, Monopoly houses – 1 and then a group and then a hotel, Lego people – 1 and then a group
Excess	Capitalism, consumerism, something left over, too many, different lengths, gluttony, bonus, over-indulgence	Massive groups of objects, something longer than another, a large yacht, three buttons and only two button holes, my shoes, an electric socket with a large number of wires
Crime	Robbery, mugging, knife crime, weapons, police, stab vests, Kevlar jackets, campaigners, crowds, looting, theft	Broken window, knife, money on the floor, scattered contents of drawers and cupboards, police type note book
Silence	Lack of voice, deafness, peace, quiet, enforced, meditation, chosen, religious order, listening, exams	Closed mouth, headphones, back stage at a theatre, library shelves, sign language
Poverty	Drought, climate change, women, homelessness, penniless, hunger, lack, loss, inequality	Empty fridge or cupboard, torn clothes, dirty sleeping bag, dirty water in a cup, dead crops