Final Reflection and Evaluation for Assignment FD202

FD202 (Visual Narrative)
A narrative is a story that can unfold anywhere at any time.

My intention was to tell a story through the use of the photograph and the mirror as objects of memory, family history and nostalgia. I intended my narrative to show how the object links the past to the present, and how the object of family history connects me to my ancestors. The second aspect of the narrative was to take the objects out into the landscape and to shoot my images close to home. The landscape is an important factor as it too connects me to my ancestors.

It is a personal narrative to recognise those who came before me, to respect their existence in the world and to thank them for giving me life. The use of the photograph becomes a reminder of my own mortality. Cecil Beaton said that “the proof of the photograph as memory or history is nearly always at stake” (Campany: 95). In looking at the photograph, I see my own family history. Barthes said that “the still image in film creates a pause” (Campany: 96). It is the same in life, when you look at a photograph you ponder on it, you give the photograph time.

I have attended all the lectures and considered my own personal identity with regard to family and memory.  In the lectures we were given tasks to familiarise ourselves with the aspects of narrative in film and photographs which helped to clarify what was expected for the assignment.

I was influenced by Roger Ballen’s interview; some of his sentiments struck a chord in me. He talked about the “human interior” and looking at life “according to your own reality.” The quote that I used for both FD201 and FD202 came from this interview. It is “Nothing in time is ever the same.” Life is never static, and in relation to my project using the landscape, the photograph and the mirror to show the connection between myself and my ancestors, I am trying to convey that my belief is that those who come before us have an influence on our lives, and that this influence is an inspiration to progress and develop in life. I believe that we have a moral obligation to those who came before us to live the best life we can.  Each of us is given the opportunity to put right the wrongs of the past so that equilibrium ensues.  Life for me is a journey about learning. To stop learning is to stop living.

I researched into Duane Michals work. He uses narrative to make sense of death, time, youth and desire. He wanted to capture ideas instead of images. Using a well-known children’s story “The Bogeyman” he uses light and dark to great effect. Light surrounds the child, the room is dark and menacing and the shadow is the bogeyman. The effectiveness is in the simplicity of the story and the mood is captured through the use of light and dark. I looked at his book “The House I once Called Home” which steered me towards family and memory. He wrote “our little lives are thus, perfect in their pain and happiness” (Michals 2003). He returns to a time that no longer exists except in his memories. The house is now in disrepair but the daily activities that took place inside it remain constant in Michals memory.

After my mother died, and a few years later my father retired, he sold the house which had belonged to my grandparents, and where I had grown up. I was not able to return to the village for ten years after this. I felt such a great loss; my mother’s death, and then to lose the home I had so loved that held so many happy memories was something I found difficult to bear. To this day I regret that I did not consider buying the house myself because I am still sad that it is no longer in our family. It held so much of our family history. Unlike Michals, I have no wish to see it as it is now; I prefer to remember it exactly as it was. The Mirror in my narrative is an important part of that memory because it was a constant in my life. It hung above the fireplace and never moved. Now that I have it, it once again hangs above the fireplace. To me this is its rightful place.

It was now time to choose a film that I liked. My first thought was to use “Ryan’s Daughter” directed by David Lean. This has always been a firm favourite with me. It is a beautiful romantic tale capturing breath taking scenes of Ireland’s land and sea. But after watching the film again and procrastinating for far too long about what I could take from the film, and how a narrative would take shape from it, I cast it aside.  I grew frustrated with myself and my gut feeling was that this wasn’t the right film for me to use.

I knew already that I wanted to capture a narrative to include personal memories. I had started to seek out old family photographs at home, and I remembered “Blade Runner” made in 1982. When I had first viewed it, it had had a big effect on me and had become one of my favourite films.  It captures the essence of what makes us human. It is a dark and intense film. The photograph plays an important role in it.  My interest grew in how the photograph is used in film. There is a quote from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes he writes that “ultimately photography is subversive, not when it frightens or repels or even stigmatises, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. The still image in film creates a pause” (Campany: 96). This mirrored my thoughts around the photograph. When I look at a photograph, all else ceases to exist as I ponder the narrative in front of me. The photograph I have in my possession of my Grandparents, may not tell me what they were like, but in looking at them I feel close to them and I think about what I know of them from other family members.

I began shooting digitally with my Nikon D300 first taking photographs of trees, and then taking my family photographs out into the landscape and pegging them on to the trees. I liked this idea. The tree as the “Tree of Life” and the photographs organised into two sides of the family. I had also now shot black and white images of the cemetery and central park with my 35mm camera. I wanted to stay “close to home” as I felt this was in keeping with my subject. On showing my sketch book at the first Group Crit, the consensus of opinion was that the black and white images were more suited to my narrative because the photographs I was using to photograph were in the main black and white. It was suggested that I continue to shoot and develop my narrative.

I was in agreement with the opinions raised during the Group Crit and decided that I too preferred the black and white images. The digital images did not seem appropriate for the mood I wanted to convey. The black and white images seemed to convey a better sense of time. I used both 35mm film and 120mm film and shot several films.

I also decided that in order to improve my photographic skills, using film would be the better option for me. I have continued to struggle with exposure but I find the more I practice using film, the more I enhance my skills. I like the poetic license film offers, I feel there is greater scope for creativity with film as opposed to digital. The more I use film, the less inclined I am to use digital.

I continued to shoot in black and white film now turning more to 120mm film because I love using my Mamyia 67 camera. It gives me a thrill when I see the images I create from it. I was now getting a little frustrated with pegging the family photographs on to the trees as they kept blowing away and I could not organise them in a way that was pleasing to my eye. The trees were too tall for me to display them as I wanted, and the images didn’t work aesthetically. To get all the photographs in the frame I had to take long shots, and I wanted to be closer to the photographs. At this point I was looking at Erina Brotherus work for the FD201 assignment and saw her “Bathroom” narrative. This gave me the idea to use the mirror I had inherited from my father that had first belonged to my grandparents. 

I was excited about this idea. The Mirror was a constant in my life as I grew up and holds so many memories for me. I felt that this was the link between the past and the present that I was looking for.

I now turned to look at philosophies relating to the landscape. In linking the past with the present and taking my objects out into the landscape, I have learned that in my phenomenological experience of landscape, that I have a sense of self as “being in the world.” I do not distinguish a difference between myself as a human being, and the world as a place I am detached from. My ancestors worked the land as farmers, they were part of it, and I too consider myself to be part of that land. The land is not separate form me. Of the philosophies I have read, I am inclined toward Maurice Merleau – Ponty’s Existential phenomenology that “the self is not simply in the world … the self is of it” (Wylie: 151). Descartes argues that we are thinking beings “I think therefore I am” (Wyllie: 146) and that our sense of self can deceive us; that the senses cannot provide a basis for certainty and that “thinking is the essence of being human.”(Wylie: 146). Martin Jay’s philosophy is that it is our opinions and the opinions of others that define the perspective of what it is to exist as a human beings. He says that “we define ourselves not as creatures in a world but as points of view upon it, as spectators looking at it from a distance.” (Wylie: 145).

Merleau – Ponty’s philosophy makes more sense to me. I agree with Descartes that we are thinking beings, but I do not agree that our senses deceive us. Thinking is only part of being human. In my opinion our senses are an important part of the human existence. If we could not see, hear, feel, touch, listen, what would happen to our emotions. If we could only think, wouldn’t we be quite boring and unfeeling. To me thinking is more on a par with practicality, pragmatism and common sense. Without emotion I don’t think that I would see the beauty of nature as I do. I could think “yes that is beautiful” but it wouldn’t be the same to me if I didn’t sense the beauty of something.

I do not agree with Martin Jay’s philosophy that we are spectators looking at the landscape from a distance, because to look at it we also have to stand in it. No matter where you are standing you are always part of it.

I took the mirror and my photographs out into the landscape, I had found a location to use when I had walked and searched in Central Park a few days previously. I wanted to find somewhere quiet where I would not encounter too many people and dogs. Central Park is quite a busy park at any time of day and dogs do have a tendency to be nosey. I had found a clearing with three trees that was a little away from the path which meant that people wouldn’t walk across me.

I spent a couple of hours shooting the mirror from different angles and placing my photographs both on the mirror and on the trunk of the tree. I was enjoying the experience and although there were people walking by, and I know that they did stop to watch, no one disturbed me. I didn’t take much notice of them because I was engrossed in my task. I turned and smiled on occasion but although people looked a little perplexed, they didn’t ask what I was doing.

These images were the best of all the film I had shot and I knew that in these two films I would have something for my narrative. I knew that I already had a selection of tree images that I could use for my narrative and now I had images that I liked of the mirror and photographs. But there was one more film I wanted to shoot before I made my final selection for my sequence. That was to photograph the mirror and the photographs in our Living Room, where the Mirror was hung above the fireplace. These would add the ending to my narrative; it would be a “coming home” shot.

I was pleased with the results though when I was sorting out all my images for my narrative, most of the interior shots were a little too formal, too contrived, too set up. The one chosen for my final was a darker shot where I had not set up anything but just left the room as it was.

So now it was time to try to construct my narrative. This was a complete nightmare. I discarded the 35mm images because towards the end of my time for this assignment, I had concentrated on shooting with 120mm film and I had more of a variety of images to choose from. In total I had shot 8 films in black and white and 4 films in colour.

From the total number of images I had shot, I narrowed them down to about 35. But from this 35 I looked and looked at them until I became completely stressed out. I just couldn’t work out which ones would work together. I left them displayed on a board on the floor for days until I reached the end of my tether and took them into college to seek help from my lecturers and peers who gave me some much needed support and encouragement. Now I was able to see more clearly what my narrative would be. I played around with them for a little longer until the final decision was made. What a relief.

My choice in choosing to photograph in black and white gives the subject more depth as it conveys a sense of time passing. I don’t feel that colour would have been as successful.

The images were scanned in the Digital Dark Room using the Hasselblad Scanner. I chose not to edit my images in Photoshop because I prefer to leave them as they were originally shot. I like the rawness that this conveys. I think that the strongest images are numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5. The reason for this is that no 2 is complemented by the mist that lay on the graveyard the morning I shot it, it has an ethereal quality. No 3 is compositionally strong and again, because of the early morning rain, it gives it an air of the past.  No 4 catches the dappled light on the tree which intensifies the photographs, and your eye is not distracted by the tree in the background because of the depth of field. I feel that No 5 is a strong image because I have filled the frame with the branches of the tree which I think aesthetically is very effective.

I am very happy with my final choice. I have enjoyed the experience that this assignment has given me. I feel that I have achieved my intention of creating a narrative that shows the link from the past to the present through the use of the mirror and photographs; and my attempt to show the connection of the landscape as an important aspect of my ancestral line.

The Mirror