One response to the almost unimaginable flow of photographic images in the world today is to work with existing images rather than creating new ones. Today we worked with existing images, rather than new photographs we have made ourselves. Working with other people’s photographs forces us to objectivity consider issues of selection, sequencing and contextualmeaning.
An archive is where things are stored somewhere, systematically.
MORNING
In this mornings lesson we were asked to go on Instagram and search a hashtag which we were interested in, I chose (ironically) #ihatehashtags. I chose to search this particular hashtag because I tend to use it on my own photos - simply because I actually do hate hashtags but I have to use them otherwise my work will not get seen. This task was inspired by Thomas Dworzak'sInstagram Photobooks - which began out of frustration and boredom, and the need to turn the overwhelming digital flow of images into something tangible, physical, printed, and permanent.
There is some trouble with using someone else's images as your own - because it begs the question 'is it authentic?'. However some photographers/artists believe that they should work with pictures that already exist instead of 'adding the the innumerable pile'. Some also believe that this is a counter initiative way of being a photographer - it is simply unethical to add to the pile. They view this method of working as 'recycling' or 'up-cycling'. In the 1970s it became a popular idea that 'photography is unethical' - because it was used to 'criticise people' and 'change peoples perceptions of things'. Photographers countered this idea with the notion 'lets not worry about the value of photographs...they are endlessly reproducible!'. This is where the idea that photos are just digital interpretations of the world and should not be taken so seriously came from. I think that this method of photography is actually very plausible because what in fact constitutes an 'original' photo when they are endlessly reproducible? I believe that we are subconsciously influenced by everything we see day to day, and that includes other peoples photos and art...so, we may subconsciously recreate other peoples art without even knowing it - so what makes a photograph original? Especially when in the modern world we and surrounded in a constant flow of images and media.
Instagram owns all the images we upload, so technically it is not illegal to screenshot, download or reproduce their images because Instagram has simply 'passed them on'. Every image uploaded to Instagram is stored in their archive, even when they're deleted off our accounts they are still out there on the internet somewhere. So, Instagram owns versions of every photograph ever uploaded and artists have 'creative possession' and freedom to do what they like with them. Non-originality is the WHOLE POINT of photography. It was invented to make reproducibility easier and quicker - it is the nature of photography. Some hashtags have many posts belonging to their 'archives'. The more specific the hashtag, the less posts appear in the archive as a result. My chosen hashtag has 169,209 posts belonging to it which is quite a considerable amount.
AFTERNOON
Task 1: In this task, we were asked to look carefully at the selection of books on our table. In our groups we had to open each of the books at a particular chosen page we liked, and lay them over each other so that the sequence of images flowed meaningfully.
(Inspired by Batia Suter's 'installation wave')First of all, we wanted to try and arrange the books open on pages with a yellow theme (in the first row) and a red theme for the row above.
As a group we then decided to try and arrange the books in a different sequence with a different concept to the first, where we focused on colour. We flicked through all the books and found our favourite images of women, and only women.
The fact that we played out these books in copious amounts of ways throughout the afternoon means that photos can be interpreted in endless ways. Photos don't mean anything on their own so they have to be put somewhere i.e next to another image or next to accompanying text. A caption is text next to, or underneath photographs. When a caption accompanies a photo/photos the words are automatically associated with them. Photos are usually used to illustrate words - like in a magazine or a news paper.
Task 2: In this task we, as a group, were asked to find and screenshot images off street view that hadn't quite worked - glitches, i.e half of cars, random legs or disfigured bodies captured by the Google cars which drive around every country and street in the world taking thousands of images.
Task 3: In the last task we were asked to arrange a load of physical prints (that were bought of Ebay) into a narrative of some sort - a way of reading. Again, we can arrange photos into radically different ways and make up what we (as a group) think it means. As I also mentioned before, photos have any meaning on their own...this was just a different way of portraying this idea.