Exercise: analysis of an advertisement

This exercise is all about advertising and how a product is presented to the consumer in a way that makes us want us to buy it.  We are asked to choose an advertisement from a newspaper supplement and comment on what it is, what it says about the product and why we think it is there.The advertisement that I have chosen to discuss is from Get Living London and is advertising new homes for rent in the new East Village London E20 development, formerly the London 2012 Olympic Village.  It was published in January 2015 in ‘Time Out’ magazine and can be seen here.

Here are my initial thoughts:

• Text: ‘East Village London E20’
  • The use of the word ‘village’ hints at a community, where the residents take ownership of an area and build a community spirit.  Adding the name ‘village’ to an area in London seems to give it instant kudos with thoughts of an upmarket style, tree-lined avenues, specialist ‘foodie’ shops and coffee bars
  • The use of the postcode E20 links the area to London, again with upmarket connotations – one immediately  thinks of W1 in central London
  • The colour of the text (yellow) suggests light (the sun?) shining onto the face of the man.  This is aided by the direction of the light beaming on the man’s face – shining from above gives a heavenly, spiritual connotation.
• Text: ‘New Year’s resolution #14’ – once a New Year’s resolution is made you need to keep it otherwise there is a sense of failure, both to yourself and in front of others.  It’s effectively making the decision to move for you, spurring you on, giving no room for indecision or going back
• The man used as a model infers and encourages a young, socially diversified culture.
• The clothing (well the top half anyway) of the man suggests a young professional. Using mobile technology implies success will be yours and that you are ‘with it’ – tech is a must-have accessory these days.   Posture – arm raised as in success gesture
• The boxer shorts with the monkey on bring a ‘home’ element into an advertisement that is otherwise pretty corporate in style
• Not sure what the buttonhole is supposed to represent – white for heavenly?  ‘I am worthy of you’?
• Text: ‘Move out of your flat where EVERYTHING reminds you of your ex’.  Another instruction – by moving into a new home (one of their apartment) your life will magically become better and bad times will be left behind.  Just do it
• The white graphic line makes me think of an Apple iPod cable – Apple products being synonymous with ‘must have’ in the eyes of many
• The trophy suggests that  you are gaining a prize, winning a challenge, being top of the heap
• Text: ‘Into an apartment THAT SAYS ‘look-how-good-my-life-is-without- you’ – by moving, he  will show the ex-girlfriend how his life has improved, also hints of achievement to others; by moving into a new apartment he will be able to impress others, upwards social mobility
• London cityscape view through the window reminds you that you will be part of the capital city with its connotations of power and money
• Text: ‘Rent a 1 – 4 bed home in the former Athletes’ Village’  hints that you too will be part of Olympic glory

This advertisement is all about status and upward social mobility, about belonging to a  ‘set’, being part of the ‘in-crowd’, how successful you will be and how much better life will become once you’ve moved into an East Village London E20 home.  The signifiers in the advert steer the viewer towards the belief that the purchase of an apartment (or rather money that you pay to Get Living London) will buy you success and status with the implication of resulting happiness.   An exchange is necessary and as Williamson (1983, p.42) states ‘So as money is given its value by how much food or clothes etc. it will buy, so signs are given their value as currency through use by us in our ‘recognition’ of what they stand for/(replace)’.

References

 East Village London E20 (2015) in Time Out London,  13 – 19 January, 5

Williamson, J. (1983)   Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising.  London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

Exercise: Nigel Shafran – ‘Washing Up’ (2000)

We are asked to look at Nigel Shafran’s series of images entitled Washing Up (2000) and then to respond to some questions.Washing Up is a series of images taken by Shafran in 2000 of completed washing up, usually in his own kitchen but sometimes elsewhere.  The photographs are accompanied by text detailing what he ate and sometimes other interesting snippets of information, for example who else was present at the meal.The first thing that struck me about Washing Up is how organised and structured Shafran’s images are.  The kitchen items are stacked neatly into sculptural forms with no untidy clutter lying about, which gives us an insight into the dish-washer’s personality (we are not told whether it is Shafran or his partner Ruth who has done the washing up).  This neatness and use of form reminds me of Thomas Demand’s image Sink (Spüle) (1997); although different in composition and construction (Demand’s ‘sink’ was a paper model) I immediately felt a similarity with Shafran’s images.

I wondered why Shafran chose washing up as a subject and I found the answer in an interview he gave to Paul Elliman in 2000:

‘I wanted to start the New Year with something  optimistic.  And personal.  Something with lots of shapes, where shapes would change, keep changing.  Also something in which the light was important, the kitchen window or the overhead kitchen light, I mean.  I really wanted to have one that was lit by lightning, haven’t got that yet. There are signs of ageing in it, like signs of time, of course’.

(Elliman, 2000)

What I like about this series is its simple style and how Shafran makes ordinary, everyday items into an interesting composition which gives rise to many questions.   For once I agree with Charlotte Cotton who writes:

‘With an understated photographic style, use of ambient light and relatively long exposures, he transforms these scenes into poetic observations about the ways we conduct our lives through our unconscious acts of ordering, stacking and displaying objects. There is something highly intuitive in Shafran’s way of working.  He resists the urge to construct a scene to be photographed ; rather, his is a process of staying attuned to the possibilities of everyday subjects as a means of exploring our characters and ways of life’

(Cotton, 2014, p.121)

Question: did it surprise you that this was taken by a man?  Why?

No, not at all.  In fact the question did not even cross my mind.  I think this is due to my recent research into photographers such as Thomas Demand and Jeff Wall where I’ve learned that such stereotypes do not seem to exist now in contemporary photography.

Question: in your opinion does gender contribute to the creation of an image?

In general I think the creation of an image is more due to the interests and personality of the photographer than their gender.  However I do believe that men and women have different ways of looking at things and this can come across in their interpretation of a subject or theme.

Question: what does this series achieve by not including people?

It makes me very happy!  Seriously, I think that the lack of people gives far more depth to the image than if they were present.  We know that a person was there (the washing up is done) so Shafran’s images convey a presence of absence, adding a sense of the passing of time. The viewer is encouraged to explore and to trace the human activity from the evidence left behind – who was there?  What did they look like?  I also think that the inclusion of people would also change the tone of the series completely from still life (fine art even?) towards social documentary.

Question: do you regard them as interesting ‘still life’ compositions?

On an aesthetic level I find the shapes, lighting and splashes of colour give interest to what could be seen initially as quite banal images.  Shafran has made the ordinary into something artistic and I really like his use of natural light.  Looking deeper, I like the way the images provide a visual punctuation mark, a comma, in the daily routine – cooking, eating, washing up, the putting away of dry dishes so we are invited to think about what has happened before and what will happen after.  We are told a little – the composition of the meal that had just been eaten and sometimes who was present – which whets our appetite to know more.

My main take-away from Shafran’s work in relation to my own practice is that everyday subjects, ones that might be considered banal even, have their worth photographically on a number of levels.  I find it is very easy to overlook, maybe dismiss even, what is immediately around me in search of the ‘great and the good’ so Shafran’s images are a timely reminder of what I have been missing and of a need to really look, rather than just see.

References:

Cotton, C. (2014) The Photograph as Contemporary Art.  3^rd ed.  London: Thames & Hudson

Demand, T. (1997) Spüle. [photograph] [online image]. Bundesverband deutscher Kunstversteigerer e.V.   Available from http://service.kunstversteigerer.de/de/i/5201304/p/1/ [accessed 16 January 2015]

Elliman P. (2000)   Interview with Paul Elliman, Fig-1. [online].  Nigel Shafran.  Available from http://www.nigelshafran.com/pages/texts_pages/002texts.html  [accessed 16 January 2015]

Shafran, N. (2000) Washing Up [online images].  Nigel Shafran.  Available from http://www.nigelshafran.com/pages/washing_up_pages/001washing_up_pages.html [accessed 16 January 2015]

Exercise: Recreate a childhood memory in a photograph

For this exercise we are asked to recreate a childhood memory in a photograph.  When planning the exercise the course notes suggest that we consider the following:

• Does the memory involve you directly or is it something you witnessed? 
• Will you include your adult self in the image (for example, to ‘stand in’ for your childhood self ) or will you ask a model to represent you? Or will you be absent from the image altogether? 
• Will you try and recreate the memory literally or will you represent it in a more metaphorical way, as you did in Part Two? 
• Will you accompany your image with some text? 

(Boothroyd, 2014)

When planning this exercise I drew inspiration from  OCA Level 3 student Jodie Taylor’s work Memories of Childhood (Boothroyd, 2014) that I had looked at as part of my studies in Part Two of the course.  What I took from Jodie’s work was that rather than physically reconstructing a memory, she had photographed places that held childhood memories for her, letting her mind recreate the memory.

My overriding wish from my childhood was to learn to ride and to own a pony.  Every year Santa got the same request – could he bring me a pony please.  I nagged my parents constantly and read every story book on horses and ponies that was going – the ‘Jill’ series was one of my favourites.  Unfortunately my parents couldn’t afford the cost of riding lessons until my Great Aunt died and left my mother some money.  To my great joy, at the age of 13 I was given twelve riding lessons as a present.  Thereafter every Saturday was spent at my local riding stables, learning the basics of how to stay on and helping out in order to pay for more lessons.

The riding school where I learned to ride is long gone, but I continued riding as an adult and have recently started again after a gap of nearly two years.  My image therefore is of my current riding stables, but it contains not only what you see but a lot of longing and a bit of sadness from a little girl that ultimately became happy memories.

In response to the questions above:

• The memory involved me directly and was all about my childhood dream that ultimately came partly true (Santa never did deliver that pony although I did participate in a horse-share as an adult for a while)
• I decided to be absent from the photograph as the image is all about my thoughts as a child. As I now ride at these stables, including me in the image would have transferred the past to the present which is not what I wanted to achieve.
• I’ve recreated the memory semi-literally (the photograph is of a riding stables, but not the one where I went as a child) and also metaphorically; to me it represents longing and also happiness, although I appreciate that these feelings may not be apparent to anyone else.
• The image itself is self-descriptive so I don’t think that a caption would add anything to it.  If I was going to publish this image I would accompany it with a paragraph of text outlining my childhood dream.

The photograph resembles my memory in that looking at a picture of a traditional riding stables, which is pretty much visually similar to the one where I learnt to ride, brings back the thoughts, feelings and experiences that I had as a child. I think that if I had taken a picture of a modern American barn style riding stables (where the loose boxes are indoors inside a barn) that this would not have had the same effect.  So this tells me that it is visual recall (the visual appearance of the stables) rather than factual recall (‘riding stables’, ‘horses and ponies’, ‘riding lessons’ etc) which produces my memory on this occasion, particularly the emotions which are attached to it.

References

Boothroyd, S. (2014) Part Three: Putting yourself in the picture.  Photography 1 : Context and Narrative, Open College of the Arts

Exercise: Photographing the unseen

We are asked to read three case studies of work produced by OCA Level Three students who chose to explore themes that are not necessarily visible, using metaphor rather than straight representation to tell their stories.

• Peter Mansell portrays how a spinal cord injury has affected his life
• Dewald Botha’s Ring Road is a personal journey of self-reflection about displacement and survival in a different culture
• Jodie Taylor looks at memories of childhood and the nostalgia that these bring.

(Boothroyd, 2014, pp. 62-67, 126-129)

We are then asked to respond to the following questions:

• Which of these projects resonates with you most, and why?
• How do you feel about the loss of authorial control that comes when the viewer projects their own experiences and emotions onto the images you’ve created?

Question: Which of these projects resonates with you most, and why?

Without a doubt, Peter Mansell’s project resonates the most with me, for two reasons.  Firstly I can identify with his subject matter by revisiting my own personal history, having had late family members who suffered from ill-health and disability issues over a number of years.  Secondly I have followed Pete’s OCA work online with interest for a while now so that I am already involved with his project as a viewer.  I also feel that I have got to know a little of Pete (to be precise his online persona) in some way through both his study blog and his conversations in the OCA student forum and the Flickr OCA group, which makes his project more interesting to me.

Question: How do you feel about the loss of authorial control that comes when the viewer projects their own experiences and emotions onto the images you’ve created?

I pondered this question for a while.  My initial reaction was that the loss of authorial control does not worry me; once I have taken images and presented them to the outside world, I have mentally released them from my control and I am happy for the viewer to project their own histories and feelings onto them.   I consider that the images that I’ve taken are still mine emotionally and for me they will continue to carry the meaning that I originally intended regardless of how others relate to them.  I can see that with some of the work that I’ve looked at during this part of the course, for example Bryony Campbell’s The Dad Project, viewers in certain circumstances could take comfort from being able to transfer another person’s stories and experiences to their own situation and this movement of ‘ownership’ has to be a good thing in my opinion.

However I realise that there are occasions when I would regret the loss of authorial control, for example if an image I took is subsequently misused by others without my consent in order to promote or highlight a cause or issue that I don’t agree with or which is socially unacceptable or unethical.  I would feel uncomfortable and most likely angry if a viewer took personal control in that context.    And that is the key – it all boils down to the context in which the image is read and any resulting contextual distortion.

References:

Boothroyd, S. (2014)   Context and Narrative.  Open College of the Arts

Campbell, B. (2011) The Dad Project (online). Briony Campbell. Available from http://www.brionycampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The_Dad_Project_Briony_Campbell.pdf [accessed 29 August 2014]

Exercise: Metaphorical and visceral interpretations

Choose a poem that resonates with you then interpret it through photographs.  Try to give a sense of the feeling of the poem and the essence it exudes.

The aim of this exercise is to develop our metaphorical and visceral interpretations in other words to try to provide our feelings and emotions towards the poem rather than just our literal response to it.

I am not a great reader of poetry and I’ve never had the desire to write poems (I think being force-fed poetry at school put paid to both of those) but I can see how photographs and poems can work well alongside each other, either literally where a photograph describes a poem at its face value or more creatively where it is the task of the photographer to respond to the emotional value of the concept that the poet is communicating through his verse.

Michael Freeman wrote an article entitled Why poetry might help your photography  (Freeman, 2012) for WeAreOCA which I found useful and which gave some insight into how the photographer can find inspiration in poetry.

My lack of poetical knowledge not withstanding, I like poems about nature and the countryside and for this exercise I chose ‘All Nature has a Feeling’ which was written by John Clare in 1845.

All Nature Has a Feeling

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

John Clare, 1845

I found this a graceful poem, very spiritual and yet considered.    Here are some thoughts and feelings that came to me whilst reading it (not in any particular order):

• happiness  – beyond words and  expressed as the beauty of nature. Every piece of nature   contributes happiness in its own small way.
• silence – silence reveals many things
• death and decay, yet part of the circle of life
• calmness  – the quiet calmness found in natural surroundings
• the circle of life / the seasons
• spirituality
• evocative yet realistic – Clare’s words are not twee or gushing
• I could imagine this poem being read at a funeral
• I can feel myself walking though the countryside when reading this poem

I went to Icklingham Plains, an area of open-access heathland not far from where I live, to shoot my set of images as I wanted an open landscape as opposed to purely woodland;  I felt I needed to capture a sense of openness, of bleakness even, so that my images were not too pretty, too ‘chocolate boxy’ and included the feeling of  decay and the movement of time.  I also wanted to capture the feeling of walking through nature, of being a part of it, hence my inclusion of pathways.

I also used this exercise as an opportunity to try out my newly-acquired 10-20mm wide-angle lens.   Not having used a wide-angle lens before this presented its own challenges (mainly learning to get close-up to the subject in order to avoid too much foreground – or having something of interest in the foreground) but the lens had a good first workout and and six out of the eight images below were taken with it (nrs. six and eight were taken with my 18-200mm zoom).

 

Conclusion:

I found this a challenging exercise to start with but once I found a poem that I could connect with and really looked into, trying to understand what the writer was trying to express I found it became fascinating.  I do struggle with not taking the obvious route and this exercise was a good learning process for me.    Maybe more poetry reading is required!

Having looked at a number of poems before I found this one, I feel that I now have a better understanding of what poetry is and also what the point of it is (something that had escaped me before).  I’m not sure that I will ever feel the need to write poetry to express myself but I now get pleasure from reading it, although, like prose, there will always be some works that appeal more than others.

References:

Clare, J. (1845)  All Nature has a Feeling [online].  Allpoetry.  Available from http://poetry-allpoetrycom.netdna-ssl.com/All-nature-has-a-feeling  [accessed 25 October 2014]

Freeman, M. (2012)  Why poetry might help your photography [online].  WeAreOCA.  Available from http://weareoca.com/photography/why-poetry-might-help-photography/  [accessed 26 October 2014]