Documentary & portraiture photography

2.1 The gaze in portraiture 2.2 Image and text 2.3 Case studies

Image and text: Beginners | Intermediate | Advanced - 1 2 3 4 5

Advanced Part 5 of 5

In political terms, the word as a graphic element was liberated to a political symbol during the Dada movement. Here, words and letters included in photographic based collage, extend the narrative of the closed frame and extend both mediums used towards a third level. This graphic language was picked up by various streams of artists, on both sides of the Atlantic, from Atget to Walker Evans, and developed into the current powerful tools for expression used in the last century by a growing number of photo / text-based artists.

Evans used words within composition to extend meaning to his photographs, and play with the concept of graphic elements within the closed frame at the time of composition.

His works influence generations of photographers like Aaron Siskind, and Helen Levitt to photograph graphic elements like graffiti on the streets in the fifties. Here the narratives are recorded by the photographer, the graphic elements are there in life, and selected by the artists, edited, cropped, controlled. The narratives scrawled on the walls are by other people, the photographer using his medium to diversify the intended audience by mass production. Here, the messages are dispersed widely, where before they could only be temporary, and have an element of chance in their discovery.

The use of words and image combinations hasn’t restricted itself to the merely political statement, but has been used in sexual political discourse as well. Works by Barbara Kruger (amongst many others) use poster techniques with carefully chosen words and images to attack the viewer in the same way the Dada artists first attempted. Duane Michals uses naive storytelling with low tech photo-novellas to gently evoke sexual messages and social commentary about homosexual and heterosexual issues.

Artists like Sherin Neshat use a powerful form of combinations of words and text to evoke the emotional landscape of Arab women. Her Arabic text is painted over the final prints, over the exposed skin, in the eyes of the subject - in very personal areas of the human body, in order to extend and reinforce the narratives the pictures on their own convey.

Earlier, I explained how I became interested in the use of words and pictures to extend narrative. My example was that of an Ansel Adams picture, coupled with a letter to his brother, and how this combination had motivated me.

I have not actually used words beyond first names in my piece, called ‘reveal‘ but relied on the narrative being constructed by the subject of the photographs and myself in the picture taking process, and the intersection of that suggested narrative with the narrative invented by the viewer of the work.

Subjects are given the opportunity to choose two locations to present themselves in the context of the city of Bristol, where they all live. The portraits are taken in black & white, together with two colour pictures which provide background visuals. Each person is left with four pictures, which reveal themselves in the city in locations of their choice.

My idea was to challenge the viewers to confront someone presenting themselves through the medium of photography, aware of the photographic process and the eventual siting of the work in a public place. The challenge to the viewer was to decode the images and facts as they are presented, invent a narrative - a life of the person in the pictures, and perhaps, to question their own narrative construction - thereby questioning their own prejudices during the process of their narrative construction.

By not using words, I am hoping to avoid the anecdotal, and incidental, to free the imagination to rely on social conditioning to make these constructed narratives, and in the case of a few (I hope) to challenge their own ideas of how they view portraiture.