Notions of Truth

Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother

Behind the photo the Mother in this photograph had  just sold the wheels off a car to raise money for her family.

This photograph as a universal sense of motherhood. It has a resemblance to Madonna and child. Lange has played on a cultural reference, to get the meaning across.

It was shot on large format film, still in frame. Its not been cropped to show that it is an  authenticity photograph.

Robert Doisneau

At the cafe 1958 Paris

this photo has been used to translate three different messages two of my were done without the photographers consent 

1. prostitution 
2. parisan cafe
3. alcohol 

the actual intended message was the Parisian cafe.

Pictorial realism

the running horse

by Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge answered a bet to see if a horse, while running, had all four hooves off the ground at once. He proved this to be the case by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutter of a bank of cameras.

These photographs were shown as a slide show and this was the start of animation.

Scripts

Rankin's 7 iconic photos recreated   

Marry Kelly, post - partum document 1973-9

Post-Partum Document is a six-year exploration of the mother-child relationship. When it was first shown at the ICA in London in 1976, the work provoked tabloid outrage because Documentation I incorporated stained nappy liners. Each of the six-part series concentrates on a formative moment in her son’s mastery of language and her own sense of loss, moving between the voices of the mother, child and analytic observer. Informed by feminism and psychoanalysis, the work has had a profound influence on the development and critique of conceptual art.

Artist’s Statement: In her own words... Mary Kelly talks about documenting six years of motherhood in her landmark feminist work Post-Partum Document (1973-9)

"There are three things that came together to make Post Partum Document possible. One was historical - it so happened that 1969 was the beginning of the women's movement and I was involved with groups who were trying to question and understand gender and sexuality. 

At the same time I was also an artist who was interested in the conceptual movement and language theory, and I did a lot of film work before I started Post Partum Document, so I tried to bring notions of real time and durational qualities to the piece. 

And the third, more fortuitous thing was that I was having a child myself. So with all the discussion about domestic labour at the time...well, I really wanted to understand this process of socialisation, the division of labour in the home, and the relationships of women with their children. 

When I began to work on the piece I found out this was much more complex psychologically than I had anticipated, and I tried to touch on that by combining the ambiguous diagrams with the mother’s memorabilia.

It took six years. That's two years for each element of Post Partum Document. So the first part which I made was about feeding and clothing the child. Introducing the child to solid food becomes a psychological relationship–- about how it's hard for a mother to control the outcome of events. 

And this carries over into the second part, which is also a relationship, but less visible. It now shows when my son is beginning to speak. I'm asked to be an interpreter, but he says things I don't understand and then I realise he uses the system of language on his own and there's another moment of separation.

It goes on like this through the other sections with the occasions where he asks questions about sexuality and I ask questions about where this places me in the social scheme of things and, finally, I document how he learns to write. 

Throughout this process I'm still helping him with his letters, but when he goes to school and writes his own name, what I discover is that this further separates him from me and in fact it concluded the project. 

I used found objects and materials to give this archival and archaeological look to everything. So the work is a kind of parody of museological display. 

When I first showed the piece in 1976, it seemed to annoy everybody in some way. There were those who loved the theory and hated the mucky stuff, and those who loved the experiential evidence and hated the theory. 

There was this expectation that work had to be either masculine and rational or feminine and experiential. But I never intended to make something that was homogeneous, I was after the contradictions."

Post-Partum Document is in Mary Kelly: Projects 1973-2011, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until June 12 2011.

Royal road test

a lot of self published books began in the 60s

ed ruscha sunset strip self published book 1966

Documenting how far a royal typewriter goes when thrown out of a car at 30mph and what state its in when it stops.

This sort of refers to the concequenceies  of stopping distances.

Sunset strip

Starting in 1963, with the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha began a series of photographic art books that documented ordinary aspects of life in Los Angeles. For Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha mounted a motorized Nikon to the back of a pick-up truck and photographed every building he passed. The resulting book, with the pictures printed in order and labeled with their street numbers, achieved an effective non-judgemental and almost anthropological record of previously unexplored details and aspects of the urban experience. Ruscha exercised control over each step of the bookmaking process and with the use of inexpensive offset printing, standard paper, and simple, paperback bindings, he created a new genre of art book designed for commercial distributors rather than art galleries. Ruscha's books, which became a staple of Conceptualism, were extremely influential to younger generations of artists.

What's so special about Ruscha work is that it is the everyday, it is what's on the doorstep. Its quite a simply concept but it has captured and documented a journey.


Scripting

The idea for scripting came from the theatre, where actors know exactly what to do, the queues and places on stage.

Scripting also works in photography, it came from illustrated magazines. When the editor would send a photographer to get a shot for a story. The photographer would have to develop a script-plan. 

When it comes to scripting questions have to be asked such as:

• is there a background theory or political how i treat the work, story 

• establishing shot - what kinda shots can be anticipated  a cover 

• what viual language am i gunna use

• lenses, light, colour , b/w, angles

• permission modle release forms

• one off event- time lapse 

The script is rough structure for learning report



Pictorial realism  (extract)

Lecture Task (within learning group)

Under your feet

Aim to take photographs from the floor level, to show different perspectives, the unusual.
We were trying to notice things that are normally ignored.
Trying to make sense of the world in a different way.

• Textures