Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Joan Fontcuberta

Category: Theory and Concepts

  • Joan Fontcuberta

    Joan Fontcuberta co-opts all forms of media and public communication. In essence, he creates modern-day Trojan-horse-type bodies of work and presents them, deadpan, in scholarly journals, hard-bound “scientific” books, large-scale legitimate museum exhibitions, and as newsworthy “discoveries” that fool even the most professional of experts, journalists, and their readers.
    He produced a number of series:

    • Miracles & Co. (documenting the miraculous powers of a
      secluded religious sect);
    • Orogenesis (which “tricks” military satellite terrain-imaging software to create images derived from paintings and photographs rather than satellite imagery);
    • Herbarium and Fauna (botanical and biological findings of previously undiscovered bizarre plants and animals);
      Sputnik (mythical story of a Russian cosmonaut who is still lost in space),
    • Pin Zhuang (when a US spy plane crashed in China, the Chinese re-assembled the pieces into a variety of working spacecraft);
      Hemograms (exploring identity through blood and its self-expression as abstract art);
    • A series of photomosaics using photo-imaging freeware and Google’s image search engine to re-create popular media images (as usual, the supporting text often contains the “real” message).

    He is the author/creator of more than 20 books, including The Artist and the Photograph, which “proves” that Picasso, Dali, Miro and other famous painters actually used photographs as the original source material for some of their greatest masterpieces. That work created a real shock and backlash from the art world, because so many people believed it was true. (Serious museums joined in the joke and presented the “original” photos side by side with the actual paintings, and even experts in their fields got duped — and then angry). His latest book, “Landscapes without Memory”, is published by Aperture.

    Joan Fontcuberta

  • Thomas Demand

    Thomas Demand, (born 1964 in Munich, Germany) is a German sculptor and photographer. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.

    He invites us to question the reality of what we are looking at—not just in his photographs, but in everyday life as well. At first glance, his images appear to be photographic records of “real” and oddly familiar places. Then the viewer realises that they are looking at something entirely artificial. It is this sudden realisation that something so apparently real that gives Demand’s work its undeniable psychological impact

    His art-making process begins with selecting photographic images from the mass media, often of rooms or spaces that are politically or historically charged (for example, the kitchen in Saddam Hussein’s hideaway in Tikrit, Iraq).

    Trained as a sculptor, Demand then creates life-size replicas of the chosen image using colored paper and cardboard. But he strips his creations of the detail, frames of reference (and of any people) that would create a specific context; Saddam’s kitchen, for instance, could be almost anyone’s.

     

    The next step is to photograph the tableaux.

     

    Then, finally, he destroys his constructions.

     

    .

  • Exhibiting documentary photography

    Exhibiting your images
    In many cases of social documentary the natural vehicle to bring the work to the public is
    exhibition followed by or simultaneous with a book. There are a number of issues to be resolved:
    • Who will stage the exhibition?
    • Where will it be seen?
    • Who will it be seen by?
    The work itself will have been based around some decisions made before the shoot took place.
    There must be a context and there will be a relationship between the subject and context that
    you will explore. This may influence format and quality which may in turn impact on the nature
    of the equipment involved. If your images are made using a mobile phone then you’re unlikely
    to get A1 reproduction.
    The aesthetic supporting the work may justify a departure from conventional sharp prints or
    solid colour. It may be that the exhibited prints are from a professional level piece of equipment
    and yet are printed postcard-sized – again an aesthetic consideration of the photographer.
    All of these factors will support the condition of the work relative to the reality that you as
    photographer want to convey. Your work may be seen as part of an installation where the viewer
    becomes part of the experience. It may be placed exclusively online as a media-based piece. The
    book may be interactive or stand separately from the exhibition. You’ll need to look at the cost
    of bringing the work to the market – the viewers that are its intended destination – before the
    project starts.

  • Can documentary photography make a difference? How?

    This discusses non-profit – the future of the photographer/author and the delivery of images
    rights-free to give voice to a cause. Is there a connection to be made with the work of Riis and
    Hine in the first half of the twentieth century? Can a documentary photographer really make a
    difference?

  • Awoiska van der molen

    Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city. Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom. 

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molens photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing; expressing these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

    ???

    She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places:

    Sequester (2014) “photographed throughout the whole of Europe” including the volcanic Canary Islands,contains monochromatic “landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey”.

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molen’s photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Awoiska van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing. She plays out these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books#sequester

    Blanco 

    (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees.

    “Spending long periods of time in solitude in remote landscapes, Awoiska van der Molen slowly uncovers the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities. Using her personal experience within the landscape for her creative process, she instinctively searches for a state of being in which the boundary between herself and her surroundings blur”.  

    Anna Dannemann, The Photographers’ Gallery | Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2017.

    The Living Mountain 

    (2020) is “a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit.”

    ‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’. 

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books

  • The Gallery Context

    Traditionally the photograph has been considered in terms of a print, and the high point of recognition for a photographer being an exhibition of their prints in a Fine Art Gallery. Galleries may present very different types of space in terms of lighting conditions, amounts and shape of space and general ‘feel’. But a tendency has been to galleries presenting white ‘neutral’ space. However the apparent ‘neutrality’ of this space needs to be questioned in terms of the implicit meanings this imposes on the image and the presumed ’empty mind’ of the viewer.

    I would argue that a more interesting approach would be to acknowledge the importance of both context and the viewer’s life experience in giving meaning to the image, as valuable and integral parts of the art itself. This could mean displaying the same image in different conditions and explicitly promoting discussion of the ways that different life perspectives and everyday experiences of different viewers affect the meanings attributed. This could in turn lead photographers to discover ever more interesting perspectives and innovative approaches to their own work.

    For the moment I do not have the equipment or skills to produce for gallery exhibition.

     5.1 The Origins of the White Cube

  • Photobooks: Inspiration

    Types of Photobook

    Surveys and catalogues
    • catalogues for exhibitions
    • ‘Survey’ publications draw together a collection of individual images or a group of practitioners working in a similar area. Some surveys seem more didactic or directed at the art market, such as 50 Photographers You Should Know (2008), Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (2009), reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow (2005) and reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today (2010).
    Monographs and artists’ books Monographs are mass-produced (relatively speaking), but often they are the primary context for the photographic work. A monograph published to coincide with an exhibition of an artist’s work may  draw together several different bodies of work, but it will be devoted to one practitioner alone. An artist’s book may be produced in editions, but is generally more individual in terms of its design, the materials used and the printing technique or finish. Some may be printed, stencilled, stitched and embossed by the maker themselves. Others will be a collaboration with a professional bookbinder and a graphic designer. Early photobooks Many of these were topographic images for travel and tourism.
    • Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • Maxime Du Camp (1822–94)
    • Auguste Salzmann (1824–72)
    • Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819–96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.
    Some developed more innovative design
    • Soviet and Fascist propaganda books with novel design features, such as fold-out pages that extend the dimensions of an image

    Inspiration

    I have a large collection, but not had time to look through or properly review apart from getting some layout ideas.

    Colour

    • Martin Parr: documentary photographer. Some of his works have been mass produced and re-printed (e.g. The Last Resort, 1986 and 1998); others have been limited editions or even more exclusive artist’s books such as Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo, 2001. See: www.martinparr.com/books/. Layout in Last Resort has one, or very occasionally two, large images per spread, with white margin around and no border. This focuses attention on the content of the socially complex saturated colour images. There is a short introductory text at the beginning.
    • Paul Seawright : Invisible Cities a very large hardback book of colour images. Some images are full bleed crossing the whole spread, sometimes with some space to one side or top/bottom. Other spreads have only one half page image generally placed full bleed to one corner with the rest of the spread as white space. There is a text introduction to African cities at the beginning.
    • Urbex ‘Beauty in Decay’ this has beautiful limited palette images . The book is divided into chapters with some introductory text. But the book is mostly large images with  whitespace. Some images and spreads are on black background. A few text passages are on beige background. Some have black or white boders and vignettes to increase contrast.

    Black and white

    • Daido Moriyama  Tales of Tono – small portrait format book of very high contrast black and white images. Full bleed in landscape across a double spread on black background. This makes the abstract flashes of white shapes in the often barely readable images standout. Text is reserved for a narrative section at the end. I like the moodiness of this book and all the images demand close attention in themselves, as well as producing an overall edgy impression as a apparently random narrative.
    • Algirdas Seskus ‘Love Lyrics’ Lithuanian 149 contrasty documentary Black and White images in landscape format. No text except the number of each photo and date. One or two large images per spread. No border with generous white margin.
    • Arunas Baltenas  Vilnius  2007 images from 1987. Small misty sepia images one per spread with no border and lots of white space. Delicate handwritten titles and date. One page introduction in English and Lithuanian at the beginning. No other text. I find the delicate nostalgia of this book really beautiful.
    • Henri Cartier Bresson in India  Thames and Hudson. 1987 with forward by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. One large black and white photo per page with short caption. Black border on white paper. Occasionally one large and one small. The images themselves are quite low contrast. The black border makes the eye focus inwards.
    At the Brighton Photography Biennial I saw a lot of interesting innovative designs, but did not have time to note all the details.
    • David Galjaard Concresco. A book about Albania. Has a brown opening cover with short explanatory text. Then  double page spreads with small white text insert pages. For this and other work see his website: http://www.davidgaljaard.nl
    • Dara McGrath ‘Deconstructing the Maze’  This has two coloured photographs on one side and page of text on the other. The strength here is in the photos. For this and other work see his website http://www.daramcgrath.com/index.html
    • Xavier Ribas  ‘Concrete Geographies’.  Photos of concrete blocks in Barcelona. See his website: http://www.xavierribas.com. This has inside views and links to vimeos of other books like Sanctuary – no text, one photo per spread. Sometimes a cross-over image. But the onscreen resolution is not good enough to really see the images.
    • Alessandro Rota A Neocolonialist’s diary.  Small paisley pattern cover. Coloured photos of sheets in Lusaka. Dark night streets. Lights. See his website . And vimeo of the book. https://vimeo.com/28099164
    • Irene Siragusa ‘Six weeks in Dublin’.   Lots of photos of spattered blood. Small juxtaposed rectangular images. website
    Unknown author/title glimpsed over other peoples’ shoulders:
    • Book with glued images folded.
    • Aids (author???).  Small and simple brown cover. Photos of slits one on a page opposite a blank page.

     Sources and overviews

    • The Photobook: A History, Volumes I,  ll and III Gerry Badger and Martin Parr
    • The Chinese Photobook: Martin Parr and Wassink Lundgren from the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition
    • Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
    • Channels on YouTube and Vimeo with videos of certain books;
    • Tate video about William Klein which shows his assistant with one of Klein’s early maquettes:
    •  José Navarro discussing OCA students’ photobooks
    OCA Student links Joe Wright

    Assignment 5: Perspectives on Kyrgyztstan

    ————————————-

    Photobooks offer a tactile one-to-one viewing experience for the reader were they control the place and time.  Photographer/designer can give detailed narrative guidance through the images by linear sequencing and juxtaposition in page layout. At the same time, the reader is freer to override this design and establish their own viewing experience.

    !! Rough notes and links. !! To be significantly updated for assessment with detailed

    Photobook Key Inspiration

    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/martin-parr
    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/alec-soth

    !! Sketchbook analysis of page design and layout of key sources of inspiration. bearing in mind copyright issues.

    Photobook History

    Early photobooks

    Many of these were topographic images for travel and tourism.

    • Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East
    • Maxime Du Camp (1822–94)
    • Auguste Salzmann (1824–72)
    • Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819–96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.

    Some developed more innovative design

    • Soviet and Fascist propaganda books with novel design features, such as fold-out pages that extend the dimensions of an image
    • Japanese Photobooks
    Colour
    • Martin Parr: documentary photographer. Some of his works have been mass produced and re-printed (e.g. The Last Resort, 1986 and 1998); others have been limited editions or even more exclusive artist’s books such as Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo, 2001. See: www.martinparr.com/books/. Layout in Last Resort has one, or very occasionally two, large images per spread, with white margin around and no border. This focuses attention on the content of the socially complex saturated colour images. There is a short introductory text at the beginning.
    • Paul Seawright : Invisible Cities a very large hardback book of colour images. Some images are full bleed crossing the whole spread, sometimes with some space to one side or top/bottom. Other spreads have only one half page image generally placed full bleed to one corner with the rest of the spread as white space. There is a text introduction to African cities at the beginning.
    • Urbex ‘Beauty in Decay’ this has beautiful limited palette images . The book is divided into chapters with some introductory text. But the book is mostly large images with  whitespace. Some images and spreads are on black background. A few text passages are on beige background. Some have black or white boders and vignettes to increase contrast.
    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/martin-parr
    https://illustration.zemniimages.info/urbex
    Black and white
    • Daido Moriyama  Tales of Tono – small portrait format book of very high contrast black and white images. Full bleed in landscape across a double spread on black background. This makes the abstract flashes of white shapes in the often barely readable images standout. Text is reserved for a narrative section at the end. I like the moodiness of this book and all the images demand close attention in themselves, as well as producing an overall edgy impression as a apparently random narrative.
    • Algirdas Seskus ‘Love Lyrics’ Lithuanian 149 contrasty documentary Black and White images in landscape format. No text except the number of each photo and date. One or two large images per spread. No border with generous white margin.
    • Arunas Baltenas  Vilnius  2007 images from 1987. Small misty sepia images one per spread with no border and lots of white space. Delicate handwritten titles and date. One page introduction in English and Lithuanian at the beginning. No other text. I find the delicate nostalgia of this book really beautiful.
    • Henri Cartier Bresson in India  Thames and Hudson. 1987 with forward by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. One large black and white photo per page with short caption. Black border on white paper. Occasionally one large and one small. The images themselves are quite low contrast. The black border makes the eye focus inwards.

    !! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.

    Contemporary Photobooks

    At the Brighton Photography Biennial 2016 I saw a lot of interesting innovative designs:

    • David Galjaard Concresco. A book about Albania. Has a brown opening cover with short explanatory text. Then  double page spreads with small white text insert pages. For this and other work see his website: http://www.davidgaljaard.nl
    • Dara McGrath ‘Deconstructing the Maze’  This has two coloured photographs on one side and page of text on the other. The strength here is in the photos. For this and other work see his website http://www.daramcgrath.com/index.html
    • Xavier Ribas  ‘Concrete Geographies’.  Photos of concrete blocks in Barcelona. See his website: http://www.xavierribas.com. This has inside views and links to vimeos of other books like Sanctuary – no text, one photo per spread. Sometimes a cross-over image. But the onscreen resolution is not good enough to really see the images.
    • Alessandro Rota A Neocolonialist’s diary.  Small paisley pattern cover. Coloured photos of sheets in Lusaka. Dark night streets. Lights. See his website . And vimeo of the book. https://vimeo.com/28099164
    • Irene Siragusa ‘Six weeks in Dublin’.   Lots of photos of spattered blood. Small juxtaposed rectangular images. website

    Unknown author/title glimpsed over other peoples’ shoulders:

    • Book with glued images folded.
    • Aids (author???).  Small and simple brown cover. Photos of slits one on a page opposite a blank page.

    !! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.

    Photobook How To

    https://photography.zemniimages.info/photobooks-publishing/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJCLNKoZ8gE

    https://youtu.be/OxlgFLIfOSE

     Sources and overviews

    To do a proper annotated bibliography of a selection of the many photobooks I have in my library. Linked to the annotated sketchbook analysis.

    • The Photobook: A History, Volumes I,  ll and III Gerry Badger and Martin Parr
    • The Chinese Photobook: Martin Parr and Wassink Lundgren from the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition
    • Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
    • Channels on YouTube and Vimeo with videos of certain books;
    • Tate video about William Klein which shows his assistant with one of Klein’s early maquettes:
    •  José Navarro discussing OCA students’ photobooks

  • Documentary Integrity and Truth

    Being there

    How will you operate as a photographer?

    Will you ask permission or will you be a fly on the wall,
    a ghost who never affects the image? This is a major question relevant to your production ethics.
    If you tell people what you’re doing, then they’ll react differently to you; they may be guarded or
    wary of how you’ll portray them.

    Photographers who lived with the communities they were photographing:

    • Chris Killip with the sea coal gatherers in the North East
      of England
    • Martin Parr with the people of Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire.
    • Bruce Davidson has done a similar thing in New York.

    This is very different to the approach of Garry Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson, neither of whom interfered or announced their presence. Winogrand operated like a ghost but got quite close to the action to produce his wide-angle views, whereas Cartier-Bresson
    remained peripheral, on the edge, trying not to be important to the subject.

    Truth
    This is a big one for the social documentary practitioner. The image has to have integrity – it has to be honest and factual in order to validate it for the viewer as an accurate portrayal. This is arguably where the boundary lies between social documentary and photojournalism where the image has more of an editorial purpose. In photojournalism the choice of photographer and the style of image-making will always have to suit the editorial nature of the publication and this is perhaps a bridge too far for the documentary photographer. Most documentary photographers would have no objection to any magazine or media publishing their documentary images provided that they were published as the photographer intended the viewer to see them, not cropped or enhanced.

    Kendall Walton ‘Transparent Pictures’

    ‘Ambiguities and discontinuities’  Berger & Mohr 1995 p91.

    Bazin

    For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a non-living agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man…in spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually, re-presented…’

    The Ontology of the Photographic Image 1945

    Sekula

    If we accept the fundamental premise that information is the outcome of a culturally determined relationship, then we can no longer ascribe an intrinsic or universal meaning to the photographic image.

    On the Invention of Photographic Meaning 1997 p454

  • Reality and hyperreality

    This is a practice-based course so we won’t be going into detail about the nature of truth,
    hermeneutics, reality and hyperreality. What follows is a very brief summary. However you may
    want to research some of these areas for yourself. You could start by looking at some of the titles
    in the reading list at the end of this course guide.
    We all feel that we’re aware of reality but what is ‘real’? If you live in a desert region perhaps
    access to a tap with fresh clean water within five minutes walk is fantasy. This is not the world
    of the suburb where everyone has several taps of their own. Therefore one person’s reality and
    normality is not that of another. The freedom to travel is a reality for most of us, but not in
    all countries. As a tourist it’s possible to travel from region to region in Cuba but for a Cuban
    national it isn’t – unless you’ve got the correct paperwork. If we see a travel programme on
    TV we see a reality for the tourist, for the paying visitor, a valued source of national income.
    There may be many issues that are a reality of life in the countries we visit that we’re not aware
    of and wouldn’t like if we were. This is not to say that there is a judgment to be made by us.
    As a tourist with a completely different set of values that underpin your reality, how can you
    make such a judgment? This is where the photographer living within a society must start to
    consider the nature of the imagery that is produced. How will it portray the subject – in reality
    or hyperreality?
    Philosophers and critics talk about hyperreality where the human mind can’t distinguish reality
    from a simulation of reality. Hyperreality is what our consciousness defines as ‘real’ in a situation
    where media shape or filter an original event or experience. In other words, it’s ‘reality by proxy’.
    As photographers we need to understand where we are with the images we produce in terms
    of their reality. Is the image reality, a representation of reality or a simulation of reality? Jean
    Photography 2 Gesture and Meaning 47
    Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French philosopher who addressed hyperreality and who talked
    about the nature of reality in terms of simulacra and simulation.
    The link below will take you to an interview that discusses simulacra and simulation. It talks
    about the destabilisation of the media and our ability to identify what’s real and what’s not real.
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=80osUvkFIzI
    In a nutshell, simulation is the process whereby representations of things come to replace
    the things being represented and indeed become more important than the real thing. At the
    extreme, you end up with a simulacrum which has no relation to reality. So an image may:
    • truly reflect of reality
    • mask and pervert reality
    • mask the absence of reality
    • bear no relation to any reality – it is its own simulacrum.
    We need to be careful to avoid simulation lest we engage with hyperreality as a reality without
    recognising its values.
    Jorge Louis Borges (1899–1986) in his work An Exactitude of Science (1946) describes
    hyperreality as “a condition in which ‘reality’ has been replaced by simulacra.” Borges felt that
    language had nothing to do with reality. Reality is a combination of perceptions, emotions,
    facts, feeling, whereas language is a series of structured rules that we need to obey to help
    others perceive our reality. The same is true of visual language.
    Baudrillard argues that today we only experience prepared realities – edited war footage,
    meaningless acts of terrorism, the Jerry Springer Show:
    “The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give
    an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced,
    but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal… which
    is entirely in simulation. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no
    longer possible.”
    Baudrillard argues that we must attain an understanding of our state of perception and the
    message content that is communicated in terms of the images we construct. Even if we see it as
    a straight record of what we saw on the day, can this be a reality and, if so, for whom?
    48 Photography 2 Gesture and Meaning
    Documentary photographers are entering a new age with a new set of criteria. The issue of
    technical quality is not relevant. Images from mobile phones that capture the ‘moment’ will
    be printed by newspapers if the image tells the story. Where then is the need for a bag full of
    cameras and kit? In a new age of photography the documentarist will need to engage with the
    issue of hyperreality by establishing credibility, motivation and integrity. The reputation or name
    is then the status giver, the endorser of reality and truth to the images produced and offered to
    the media and the public.

  • Landscape as a Call to Action

    Photography, and the manipulation of photographs, is often used to highlight and raise political questions. Landscape photography in particular is often used in environmental activism – images of environmental degradation, urban squalor. In NGO advertising (eg GreenPeace) photographs are often manipulated to juxtapose elements that are then countered by a caption.

    • Peter Kennard produces explicit political photomontage in the dadaist tradition linked to political campaigning organisations – for example his ‘Hay Wain with Cruise Missiles’ (1980)
    • Edward Burtynsky produces large-format photographs of industrial landscapes altered by industry – an ‘industrial sublime’ creating tension between awe-inspiring beauty and the compromised environments he depicts.
    • Mitch Epstein also uses large format, but less ‘beautiful’ images that do not aim to convey a specific message, and are more documentary in juxtaposing complex narratives.
    • Dana Lixenberg in works like the Last Days of Shishmaref uses landscape and portrait photography alongside working with environmentalists and local activists to produce powerful participatory social documentary.
    • Ikka Halso uses digital montage, including 3D, to build dystopian landscapes that raise questions about the ways in which human beings are attempting to control nature.

    Exercise 3.4: A persuasive image