Photography, Narrative, Time

Description

Providing a wide-ranging account of the narrative properties of photographs, Greg Battye focuses on the storytelling power of a single image, rather than the sequence. Drawing on ideas from painting, drawing, film, video and multimedia, he applies contemporary research and theories drawn from cognitive science and psychology to the analysis of photographs. Using genuine forensic photographs of crime scenes and accidents, the book mines human drama and historical and sociological authenticity to argue for the centrality of the perception and representation of time in photographic narrativity.

Introduction 

Chapter 1: A Different Kind of Look: Picturing Narrative 

Chapter 2: What Narrative Is 

Chapter 3: Made for Each Other: People and Photography 

Chapter 4: Time 

Chapter 5: The Eternity of a Moment: Evidence

Chapter 6: A Cognitive Turn 

Chapter 7: Scripts and Schemata 

Chapter 8: Possible Worlds

Postscript

Sujets

• Energie & environnement
• Cultural Studies
• General
• Engineering
• Photography
• Technology
• General officer
• Literature
• Sciences et techniques
• Power Resources

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783202393
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2014 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2014 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Critical Photography
Series Editor: Alfredo Cramerotti
Series ISSN: 2041-8345 (print), 2042-809X (online)
Cover design: Holly Rose
Copy-editing: Janine de Smet
Cover photograph: Greg Battye. Bondi (1984)
Production manager: Bethan Ball
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-177-8
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-238-6
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-239-3
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
List of Figures
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Different Kind of Look: Picturing Narrative
Chapter 2. What Narrative Is
Chapter 3. Made for Each Other: People and Photography
Chapter 4. Time
Chapter 5. The Eternity of a Moment: Evidence
Chapter 6. A Cognitive Turn
Chapter 7. Scripts and Schemata
Chapter 8. Possible Worlds
Postscript
References
Index
List of Figures
Figure 1: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Place de l’Europe, Paris, 1932. Copyright Magnum Photos / Snapper Media. All rights reserved.16
Figure 2: John Singleton Copley, American, 1738–1815. Watson and the Shark (1778). Oil on canvas 183.51 x 229.55 cm (72 ¼ x 90 3/8 in.). Museum of fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs George von Lengerke Meyer. 89.481.21
Figure 3: Greg Battye. Bondi (1984). Copyright the author.25
Figure 4: Larry Clark. Untitled, 1971 . Black and white print 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.28
Figure 5: From Evidence , Sultan and Mandel (2003). Copyright Mike Mandel and the Estate of Larry Sultan.93
Figure 6: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive.101
Figure 7: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive.103
Figure 8: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive (detail).105
Figure 9: Von Eckardt’s model for operation of scripts in relation to photographs. Reproduced with the kind permission of Barbara Von Eckardt.137
Figure 10: Evidence photograph, Justice and Police Museum Archive.140
Figure 11: Mark Hogencamp. After crash-landing during WWII, Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol . Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved.163
Figure 12: Mark Hogencamp. Captain Hogancamp discovers Marwencol (Detail). Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved.164
Figure 13: Mark Hogencamp. General Patton comes to Marwencol to inspect the troops . Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved.165
Figure 14: Mark Hogencamp. Hogie marries Anna in front of the SS soldiers who captured him . Copyright Mark Hogencamp and Open Face LLC. All rights reserved.167
Foreword
From the Series Editor to the Reader
On complex matters
Complexity science grew out of the study of chaotic systems in the 1970s. It started from within the physical sciences and then expanded progressively to include processes such as infrastructure networks within logistic, the spread of disease within biology, climate change, finance, sociology, and many other fields. It is one of the fastest-growing areas of science.
Despite the great variety of complex systems we live with, they behave similarly. In visual terms, I would argue that a multi-level narrative in a single image is a good case in point for a complex system. A narrative is such a complex system that encompasses not only intentional meaning (of the author) or unintentional interpretation (of the audience), but also a range of spaces for possibilities for the story to unfold otherwise, in space and time, as well as similarities with other narratives factual or fictional.
It seems to me that what is narrated (and managed) visually is more about behaviour than content, since it implies a personal response to the matter exposed. That is, image-makers adopt simple rules to generate a rather complex knowledge system. And this system has largely replaced older sources of knowledge in popular use, such as text, or oral histories.
So what am I confronted with when in front of an image? Is it about seeing the links in unmatched data, or unrecognized patterns? Is it about reduction of those complex systems of reading into basic building blocks, which in turn can be modelled and re-shaped independently from the author of the image?
The perceived totality of any complex visual narrative is formed not only by the appearance and understanding of its component parts (what is represented in the image) but also by the relationships between those parts (the foreground / background relation; the time / age of the image and of the observer; the context / action shown; the casual / staged relation; etc.).
Complexity has indeed increased in every field since the modern age, but particularly in the visual culture field. It is quite hard to disentangle interactions and connections between various parts of a visual narrative. It is telling that, traditionally, sciences have tackled complexity by dissecting complicated systems in order to study each element or cause / effect relation separately. But this has caused drawbacks, since failing to spot patterns of interaction has left out important connections that would explain phenomena more thoroughly.
For example, in December 2013, an academic conference aptly titled ‘Grip on Complexity’ took place in Amsterdam, organized by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) . The conference explored a number of cases in which a lack of ‘connecting the dots’ caused myopia within the scientific community. One of the cases was about why scientists disagree about what constitutes healthy food. It would seem a rather straightforward business. Instead, since the microbiologist’s vision differs from that of the cell biologist, each one is unable to tackle the question properly; both fail to consider the organism in its entirety.
Hence the surge, spanning a couple of decades, of complexity science as a new approach to tackle collective phenomena. It has involved scientists from different fields with the objective to make sense of ‘transversal’ issues. The study of visual complexity also has started to take place; for instance, the discipline of visual culture studies is well established in many regions around the world. Has this, however, produced a new development in the way that a common ground emerged, say, between artists, journalists, cyber activists, or advertising art directors? Could such an emerging for cross-discipline research into different collective phenomena be sustainable? Would it be possible to formulate common techniques and a common approach to visual complexity in reading a visual narrative? Could this generate resilience, predictability, or a grip on what is produced and diffused visually today?
Many questions, too little answers. The attention ought to be on the connectedness of the various part of a visual narrative, and the method for reading it has to come from different fields. I admit that I am not sure if this ultimately would ‘stabilize’ the overall visual system, or rather break it up even more. But surely the traditional ‘isolate-and-reduce’ method to visual literacy rarely works well. We appreciate art, or reportage, or visual gaming, or simulation engineering, but we miss the links between the four that may as well address the same subject. The robustness of our capacity to decode our life passes through the possibility to combine these unlikely bedfellows, as amplifiers of our ability to process and do things. The combination might provide some surprising insight into our own, highly connected society.
Alfredo Cramerotti
Editor, Critical Photography series
Preface
In the opening pages of his 1982 edited collection, Thinking Photography , Victor Burgin pointed to what he saw then as some undeveloped and incompletely conceptualized aspects of photographic critique and analysis:
Photography criticism, as it is most commonly practised, is evaluative and normative. In its most characteristic form, it consists of an account of the personal thoughts and feelings of the critic in confronting the work of a photographer, with the aim of persuading the reader to share these thoughts and feelings. [...] The dominant discourse of such criticism is an uneasy and contradictory amalgam of Romantic, Realist and Modernist aesthetic theories. The ‘history of photography’ predominantly supports such criticism in that it is produced within the same ideological framework.
(Burgin 1982: 3)
Via the pieces gathered together in the book, including his own, he set out to begin freeing photographic criticism from ‘the gravitational field of nineteenth-century thinking,’ by providing a better framework for talking about the ‘central issue of the production of meaning in photography’ (11–12).
As with much of the best critical work at the time, part of Burgin’s solution was to position his alternative critical framework within Marxist cultural theory, itself then strongly focused on a reimagining of the production of meaning, at a whole-of-society level. But while Thinking Photography deservedly became, and remains, a classic in its field, neither it, nor the many subsequent works that it inspired and informed—nor, indeed, Marxist cultural theory itself—seem to have fully dislodged the tendencies and traditions in criticism that Burgin rightly sought to tackle. The task, more than 30 years later, is at best incomplete.
Meanwhile, things have moved on. Photography itself has not merely survived the transitio