I.T.A.P week eight: 30.11.2010

1. How can you add text to change an image
2. How text can influence our emotions

 It’s unusual to see how much text can affect and change an image – without it I think that photographs are left open to personal interpretation and judgement, unless of course the subject is strongly portrayed within the image; such as the work of John Heartfield and Peter Kennard – quite different artists from very different lifetimes, but their works really drive home their strong political, anti-war, views in a manner that I think everyone can relate to.

“In the American West” by Richard Avedon

Avedon started his career as a fashion photographer, working for big magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for a number of years, before choosing to also branch out to portraiture, he believed that it was possible to capture and view the soul and personality in an image.

 He photographed a number of famous faces as part of this, but his biggest and best regarded collection is numerous black and white photographs of miners, oil field workers and ‘drifters’ living and working in Western America, along with teenagers that are growing up in this area. Just from looking at the photographs it’s easy to see that these people must have interesting stories to tell, but there is a tiny gap between the viewer and that story in that Avedon never included text in his work; and although I think that it’s a shame that we don’t know more about these people, the photographs are still striking and interesting in their own right.

If we were presented with a picture of, for example, a car park or an unfamiliar housing estate we wouldn’t think anything of it – it would just be a photo of a car park or a housing estate. But if text was then revealed explaining that the site in the photo was the scene of a tragic murder our feelings about the image would instantly change as our emotions took over; this technique is exactly what one photographer put into practise, although I cannot find any other examples of his work – I can provide some of the photos of the victims of the ‘Cambodian killing fields’ that were in this lecture. 

This tragedy occurred when Cambodia was under a strict Communist rule; anyone who defied this rule in anyway were taken to S-21, a school that was turned into a prison, to be horrifically tortured and then killed. Often their families were sent to this prison as well to prevent them from avenging their loved ones deaths.

 

In the book that these photos can be found in there is text that explains who these people are and what happened in Cambodia, but without it you could quite easily compare the photos to those taken by Richard Avedon in West America.