Visit www.weareoca.com/photography/beneath-the-surface/ [accessed 24/02/14] for a blog about Jeff Wall’s, Insomnia (1994), interpreted using some of the tools discussed above.
I accessed the website on june 5th, 2018.
Read and reflect upon the chapter on Diane Arbus in Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs by Sophie Howarth (2005, London: Tate Publishing). This is out of print but you may be able to find it in your local university library: some of the chapters are available as pdfs online. You’ll find the Arbus chapter on the student website.
The chapter by Sophie Howarth on Diane Arbus is a clear, detailed, comprehensive journey through Arbus' photographic opera. The starting and end point is one singular photo.
It sounded a bit strange that, as a starting point for this analysis, Howarth's choice fell on the (famous) image the Brooklyn family.
Then I read about Arbus' comment modification by Peter Crookston and realized that the main theme of the piece is a discussion on whether a photographer has the right or not to manage, even manipulate, the intrinsic meaning of a picture, mainly when there are persons involved in it.
Howarth writes about the unscrupulous use of clichés (leopard-skin coat, the make-up, immigrants, Brooklin...), social and political convictions (scepticism and pessimism on post-war optimism and the questioning of all-American values) in order to cast a personal, maybe fictional narrative on singular images and then intentionally place them in a bigger project ('Two American Families', 'Freaks').
Since forty years I spend twenty days per year doing animation for families with one or even two handicapped children. About ten years ago I even started to photographically document these days.
Then, with Crookston's (modified) comment in my mind, I spent some time going back to my collections and watched some family photos in quite the same situation as the Brooklin Family.
Then, with Crookston's (modified) comment in my mind, I spent some time going back to my collections and watched some family photos in quite the same situation as the Brooklin Family.
Following is an example of some of the thousands photographs I shot during these days.
In five years of photos I found only two pictures of a complete family. Following there is one of the two.
The family does not look happy.
Does it mean that, when there is an handicapped child, sooner or later the family will split? Will it happen that the father, in most of the cases, will abandon the family? Or it is just a fact that, while mother and child go on vacation, the father remains at home to work? Will the not-splitted families be ' ... undeniably close in a painful sort of way' and therefore sad for all their life?
The main question is if, as a photographer, I have the right or not to manipulate these subjects in their candid mood for my own projects and for my own, constructed narrative?
Will I loose my philanthropy if I use these pictures in this way? Or, more than this, will I invade, violate the privacy of these families for the sake of my interest?
In 1968 and a lot later, privacy was not an issue as it is now. I believe that in these last years nobody would dare to act like Diane Arbus did.
