AN EXPERIMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY

FROM INSTINCTIVE AND INTUITIVE,

TO INTENTIONAL IMAGES.

Fig.1: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 11/2021. Banana Couture Dream

A CRITICAL REVIEW OF PRACTICE

BY ERIC DON-ARTHUR

PHO720 21/22 INFORMING CONTEXTS

MA PHOTOTOGRAPHY FALMOUTH UNIVERSITY

25th APRIL 2022

• INTENT & ASPIRATION:

The aim of my year long photographic study of Dawn, (who is

simultaneously my wife, my muse, and activist as well as an artist in her

own right) - is to help me to find out if, and how it might influence my

photography of other subjects. At the same time, my hope is that it

would individually help us learn more about each other as a couple;

and would over time produce a body of work whose parts and

collective whole would resonate with various critical and casual

viewers in a way that might to some degree reference the

multifaceted art of 1 Wolfgang Tillmans in his 2021 Fragile exhibition at

the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra, [www.ifa.de, 2021]

Fig.2: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 01/2022. Dawn Drive Dream

Fig.3: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 03/2022. Untitled

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• THE ARTISTIC APPROACH:

At the time of commencing this study, I had fully incorporated my

photographic practice into my daily reality by completely integrating it

into my everyday life.

After decades of practice in advertising, fashion, corporate and

editorial assignment photography, I resolved to move away from

staged and manipulated photographs, and to even not go out of my

daily way to seek out scenes or subjects that are of interest to me; but

rather find elements, aspects, combinations, and manifestations of

beauty, harmony, power and philosophy in my everyday life.

Like Todd Hido I work instinctively ie from practice and what this results

in is that more often than not “I stumble across something, do it, and

then realize that something really interesting and worthwhile looking

at.” …“Sometimes you just make things and you assemble them later

because there’s clarity often in making pictures - and that’s how I

work.” 2 (TODD HIDO 2020).

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• METHOD & STYLE:

My chosen fine-art / documentary genre and straight out of camera

(SOC) style - are as authentic and honest as my individual perspective

and my chosen subjects permit, in the sense that (except for some

relatively rare instances) - they are unplanned, unstaged, undirected,

and unmanipulated; and I apply this method to subjects that are as

diverse as portraits, landscapes, seascapes, food, street photography,

and nature – that all combine to form my total visual experience of

many splendored parts. “I basically photograph many different thing at

the same time” 3 (TODD HIDO. 2020).

Fig.4: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 04/2022. WIP-2022 FOTOGRID-1

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• INSIGHTS GATHERED:

Through my juxtaposition of a fully collaborative study of my spouse

and muse, vis-a-vis a non-collaborative one of people, places, and

plants in our wider world, I have as one result of my practice come to

directly experience that the psychological interplay of power

relationships between the observer and the observed that was first

called The Male Gaze by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay titled Visual

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 4 (LAURA MULVEY, 1989) functions in

the same ways across the entire spectrum of photographic genres and

subjects ie, from instances of intimately individual, intuitive and

instinctive photographs of private, personal, public and planetary

subjects, through to the institutional and industrial aspects of intentional

visual communication. I have also become acutely aware of how

aesthetics can have the effect of anesthetics.

As my photographic study of Dawn progressed, I’ve come to a point of

actually photographing less and philosophizing about it more; and I

have come to realize, that the decision to commit an image directly to

my memory and hope to recreate, reconstruct and restage it later ie,

in retrospect rather than capture it as it naturally occurs in real-time - is

just as important to my process of intellectual introspection, and

valuable to prospectively informing my imagination as otherwise. In

other words - “I begin by not photographing.” 4 (JEFF WALL, 2007)

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• MOOD AND MEANING:

Through my simultaneous study of personal and public subjects, I have

come to a deeper appreciation of how the mood resulting from the

relative circumstances and respective frames of mind of the subject,

photographer, and viewer - can help to convey, construct, contrive,

create, and conceal the meaning within and of an image.

“The meaning of artwork resides in the viewer. So I make pictures that

obviously mean something to me, but they also mean something on a

larger scale to other people – which I think is fascinating.” 5 (TODD

HIDO, 2020).

Fig.4: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 04/2022. WIP-2022 FOTOGRID-2

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• TECHNIQUE AND AESTHETICS:

Reflexively shot in stealth mode drive-by style, and often in motion from

the hip, the people and places in these images might at first glance

appear as random, anonymous, and disparate subjects, without a

consistent theme or topic, and only united by being photographed via

the technique and aesthetic.

• FOOD FOR THOUGHT:

So far my research has led me to consider the thoughts and work of

such diverse artists and authors as Wolfgang Tillmans, Martha Rosler,

Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, John Szarkowski, Todd Hido, Michelle

Borges, and Walter Benjamin - across topics such as the gaze,

documentary photography, art as activism, and photography as

advocacy.

Many philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists

have pointed out that humans are uniquely symbolic creatures.

6 (ROUTLEDGE. C, 2016)

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A truly powerful image speaks to us on a symbolic level, feeding us

information by intuition and association. Humans are associative

creatures. We naturally derive deep, multifaceted meanings from

visual cues, an idea brought into prominence by both Sigmund Freud

and Carl Jung. 7 (DEMERÉ N.E., 2016)

A symbol must possess at one and the same time a double or a

multiple significance ... Thus all symbols possess both a 'face' and a

'hidden' value, and it is one of the great achievements of psychology

to have shown how the 'hidden' value is generally, from the point of

view of function, the more important. ...Behind this face value lies a

mass of undifferentiated feelings and impulses, which do not rise into

consciousness, which we could not adequately put into words even if

we wanted to... and which, though they go unattended to, powerfully

influence our behavior. 7 (BARTLETT, F.C. 1925).

Now, it is true that opinions matter greatly, but the best are of no use if

they make nothing useful out of those who hold them.

7 (BENJAMIN WALTER, 1934:777)

A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary

approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has not been to

reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy (almost an

affection(for the imperfections and the frailties of society.

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They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder

and fascination and value(no less precious for being irrational”

“What they hold in common is the belief that the commonplace is

really worth looking at, and the courage to look at it with a minimum of

theorizing” - 8 (JOHN SZARKOWSKI 1967)

In other words, the photographer as either faux naif or natural man,

with the power to point - but not to name. 8 (MARTHA ROSLER, 1981)

It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious,

just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.

8 (BENJAMIN WALTER 1936-2008:37)

“It’s important to remember that photography has the ability to

document, but also to distort and reshape the world it records.

Photographs are always rhetorical, because photographic meaning is

not fixed or univocal. A photograph is a dialogue between

photographer and viewer. Photographs preserve a specific moment of

time, but that moment remains a latent memory until viewed in the

present. This means that readings of historical images change

depending on who is viewing the image and when. During the process

of analyzing images, we must ask who told the story, when it was told,

why it is being told, and how that authorship impacts the truth, keeping

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in mind that time can alter how truth is perceived. When

photographing we must consider whose truth our photographs will

represent and whose story we are telling.”

9 (MICHELLE BOGRE, 2019:53).

“…a documentary incorporated into an explicit analysis of society and

at least the beginning of a program for changing it. The liberal

documentary, in which members of the ascendant classes are

implored to have pity on and to rescue members of the oppressed,

now belongs to the past.

The documentary of the present, a shiver-provoking appreciation of

alien vitality or a fragmented vision of psychological alienation in city

and town, coexists with the germ of another documentary (a

financially unloved but growing body of documentary works

committed to the exposure of specific abuses caused by people's jobs,

by the financier's growing hegemony over the cities, by racism, sexism

and class oppression, works about militancy, about self-organization, or

works meant to support them.

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Perhaps a radical documentary can be brought into existence. But the

common acceptance of the idea that documentary precedes,

supplants, transcends, or cures full, substantive social activism is an

indicator that we do not yet have a real documentary.”

10 (MARTHA ROSLER, 1981-2006:6)

In this century, the older generation of photographers described

photography as a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline, a

mystic receptivity to the world which requires that the photographer

pass through a cloud of unknowing. According to Minor White, “the

state of mind of the photographer while creating is a blank...when

looking for pictures.... The photographer projects himself into everything

he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to

feel it better.” Cartier-Bresson has likened himself to a Zen archer, who

must become the target so as to be able to hit it; “thinking should be

done beforehand and afterwards,” he says, “never while actually

taking a photograph.” Thought is regarded as clouding the

transparency of the photographer’s consciousness, and as infringing

on the autonomy of what is being photographed. 10 (SONTAG, S. 1973-

2005:90)

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• REFLECTIVE EVALUATION:

Whereas my fine art, documentary, food, and fashion photographs

with and of Dawn are fully collaborative, completely interactive, and

have several continuously developing threads of thematic and topical

dialogue and set-up shots; my street photography has so far been in

the early stages of observation during fleetingly brief encounters, with

relatively few direct engagements and functional relationships to

facilitate extended photographic studies at individual or group levels.

However the principles and ethics of authenticity, integrity, and

honesty, as well as the underlying theoretical framework of

interpretation, representation, symbolism, and the gaze apply

consistently across board; and the same goes for the applied

techniques, functional aesthetics, and subjective perspectives.

This study is still an ongoing work in progress[

[TOTAL OF 2,326 WORDS]

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• BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Pg.1 Wolfgang Tillmans. (2021) www.ifa.de. (n.d.) [online]

Available at: https://www.ifa.de/en/tour/wolfgang-tillmans/

[Accessed 24 Apr. 2022].

Pg.2 Todd Hido, (2020 ). Masterclass [online]

Available at: https://youtu.be/oQSBzN7Ip14

[Accessed 24 Apr. 2022].

Pg.3 Todd Hido (2020) Master Class.

Available at: https://youtu.be/oQSBzN7Ip14

[accessed Mon. 4th April 2022]

Pg.4 Laura Mulvey, (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

p.19 - III WOMAN AS IMAGE MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK

“A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has

been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining

male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled

accordingly.”

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Pg.4 Jeff Wall, (2007). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Available at: https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/jeff-wall-i-begin-

by-not-photographing/ [Accessed 24 Apr. 2022].

“I begin by not photographing. I developed that phrase

because it just described something I really do. If I see

something on the street, lets say, I don’t photograph it. So I

could be looking and hunting for things…but I just don’t

photograph them. It’s only a small difference, really. The

actual event disappears as a photograph. It vanishes as a

potential photograph. It doesn’t happen. But, it doesn’t

disappear because I am the photographer…” October 2007

Pg.5

Todd Hido (2020) Master Class.

Available at: https://youtu.be/oQSBzN7Ip14

[accessed Mon. 4th April 2022]

Pg.6

Clay Routledge Ph.D., The Power of Symbolism, Psychology Today

Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/more-

mortal/201009/the-power-symbolism-why-burning-the-quran-is-

disturbing [Accessed 24 Apr. 2022].

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Pg.7

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, (2016). [online] Available at:

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-images-that-attract-convince-

your-target-niche.[Accessed 24 Apr. 2022].

Pg.7

Bartlett, F.C. (1925). 'The social functions of symbols,' Astralasian Journal

of Psychology and Philosophy Available at:

http://www.bartlett.psychol.cam.ac.uk/TheSocialFunction.htm

[accessed Mon. 4th April 2022]

Pg.7

Benjamin Walter, (1934) The Author as Producer.[online]

Available at:

https://monoskop.org/images/9/93/Benjamin_Walter_1934_1999_The_A

uthor_as_Producer.pdf. [accessed Mon. 4th April 2022]

WALTER BENJAMIN - SELECTED WRITINGS VOLUME 2, PART 2 1931-1934

Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others Edited by Michael W.

Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith THE BELKNAP PRESS OF H

ARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London,

England Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard

College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First

Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2005

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Pg.8

John Szarkowski (1967), introduction (wall text) to the New Documents

exhibition, February 28th - May 7th, 1967.

Pg.8

Martha, Rosler. (1981) In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary

photography) (2006). [online] Available at:

http://web.pdx.edu/~vcc/Seminar/Rosler_photo.pdf.

[accessed Mon. 4th April 2022]

This essay was originally published in 3 Works, Halifax, N.S.: Press of the

Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 1981. It was republished in "In,

Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography" in The

Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Richard Bolton,

ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Pg.8

Benjamin Walter (1936-2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Its

Technological Reproducibility Second Version. (1936). [online]

Available at:

https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Benjamin_Walter_1936_2008_The_

Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Its_Technological_Reproducibility_Second_

Version.pdf. [accessed Mon. 4th April 2022]

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Pg.9

Michelle Bogre, (2019)

“Documentary Photography Reconsidered; History, Theory And

Practice.” “Published 2020 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017”

Pg.10

Rosler, Martha. (1981-2006). In, around, and afterthoughts (on

documentary photography). [online] Available at:

http://web.pdx.edu/~vcc/Seminar/Rosler_photo.pdf

This essay was originally published in 3 Works, Halifax, N.S.: Press of the

Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 1981. It was republished in "In,

Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography" in The

Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Richard Bolton,

ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Pg.10

Susan Sontag, (1973 -2005). On Photography - Photographic Evangels

For information address Editor@RosettaBooks.com

First electronic edition published 2005 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York

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• FIGURES:

Fig.1: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 11/2021. Banana Couture Dream

Fig.2: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 01/2022. Dawn Drive Dream

Fig.3: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 03/2022. Untitled

Fig.4: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 04/2022. WIP-2022 FOTOGRID-1

Fig.4: DON-ARTHUR, Eric. 04/2022. WIP-2022 FOTOGRID-2

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