Wednesday 17 April 2013

Repetition, repetition, repetition

The book I've just finished reading is The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer, a sort of history of photography. I think (it's a fairly dense tome to get to grips with) the thesis is that photographers are repeatedly photographing the same things, and have been doing since the camera was invented. Dyer concentrates on a handful of these things - hats, people's backs,overcoats (seen from any angle but often the rear), benches, doors... A photograph by Kertész of a man wearing a hat and an overcoat photographed from behind while looking at a broken bench sends him into raptures! You get the idea.

Much play is made on the symbolism of these tropes. Symbolism is something I am wary of. It's subjective and dependent upon the viewer. There is no guarantee that what the viewer of a picture reads into it is what the maker of the picture intended them to read. However, the fact that certain things have been, and continue to be, photographed repeatedly by diverse photographers over the generations hints that there is something about them which speaks universally - at least to members of the same culture. This appears to be irrespective of them being aware of preceding photographs.

For this enlightenment the book has given me solace. I can ignore Sontag's assertion that everything has been photographed and stop worrying about repeating what has been photographed before. Such repetition only becomes cliché when the manner in which the photographs are made is also repeated. I can now think of my photographs of doors, petrol (gas) stations, benches and people's backs as being part of a long tradition of such pictures, and not dumb parodies. Well, I can kid myself!

Although The Ongoing Moment concentrates on the works of a selection of influential American photographers of the early 20th century, who perhaps have been too influential, it did make me look at their pictures in a different way. I got the impression that Dyer's readings of them is far more concerned with content than with form - hence his references to symbolism. This is a way of looking at, and making, pictures that I tend to neglect. My reaction to pictures is more instinctive. Form influences gut reactions more than content because it can be taken in at a glance.

Winogrand claimed that he photographed things to find out what they looked like photographed. I think I photograph things to work out why I photographed them. I can only divine that by looking at the photograph, not at that which was photographed. This might partly explain why I rephotograph things. Sometimes knowingly, with or without reference to earlier pictures, and sometimes unconsciously.

The yard I took a picture of with my old digital camera the other week caught my eye again when I took the 'new' camera out on Monday. The two pictures are similar in the way the light falls, but differ in composition. The earlier picture is primarily about shadows and blocks of colour and tone forming an abstraction.


While the viewpoint is almost exactly the same as the perspective reveals, the later picture has the same concerns an extent, but much more about the red door, the blue sky and the three dimensional space of the yard. The green pipe was unnoticed at the time of making both pictures, yet has become a small but important element in each.


I am fairly sure that I have a taken a third, even earlier, picture of this same yard but it has either been deleted or mislaid. Without doubt it is the bright red door that attracts my eye. What it symbolises is anyone's guess. And a guess is what it must be.

Returning to consciously try and improve a picture is another matter. Far more a technical exercise. I tried this yesterday at the entrance to the beach. The aspect ratio of the camera made for a different picture. The viewpoint was closer to what I wanted, but still there is wasted space bottom left. Maybe another try when they've finished work on the public conveniences is in order.


Returning to rephotograph played a part in my photographs at the quarry, and might continue to if I carry on with them. Some show the same scene at different times, others from different points or angle of view. Perhaps these are attempts to make a static, two dimensional, time-freezing medium picture a four dimensional world?

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