Brian Ulrich

After looking at consumerism in Photography and the current capitalist society in which we all live in, we began to explore photographers such as Eugene Atget, Barbra Kruger and Andreas Gursky, all of whom have documented the rise in capitalism, focussing mainly on retail in their work. 
After spending some time looking analysing the work of these photographers, we were introduced to Brian Ulrich's work on consumerism, which takes a very different view point. Instead of photographing large retail stores like Gursky, Ulrich adopted the project of document thrift shops in America. 

As a group, we chose Ulrich's image 'untitled (2006) 0614' shown below:

This photograph was part of a series exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art , Overland Park, KS in 2008. The subject of the image VHS' is something that is not sold often anymore due to the release of higher platform film distributions such as DVD's and Bluray's. They are considered retro and are currently unwanted items that have very little to no monetary value. This is what makes Ulrich's photographs different to others that have been used to document consumerism, he is photographing what are essentially unwanted items, and yet people fill up their trolleys with these items, still consuming these un-needed objects.

People usually shop because it is a sense of stress relief, as displayed in the common phrase 'retail therapy', they do it because it makes them feel better about themselves. After seeing a poster of a beautiful woman wearing a TopShop dress, the viewer then thinks that by purchasing that object, they too will be beautiful. We the human race have this constant need to fill our lives with products to try and make ourselves seem appealing to other people. 

Moving on to the technical analysis of the photograph, it was taken on a medium format SLR, and the colours of the image seem to have been saturated making it extremely bold. I think that the colours were enhanced to give the image more of a sense of consumerism, as a lot of the time when people are trying to sell you something they use simple but effective techniques in order to try and divert your attention to them, essentially making you want to buy the product. Making a product bright will hypothetically catch your attention making you essentially want to buy the product.

The image critiques consumerism as well though, with the use of the smaller scale image, and with the rest of the series, which shows a lot of people and not so many products.

The composition of the image is very similar to those taken by Gursky, with the shelves dividing up the image, very much like the photographs Gursky took of the sides of buildings. I think that as an image by itself, it is very much a consumerist image that captures the extent of the capitalist society we live in, but when it is in the series it shows how much it really does contrast the standard documenting images of consumerism.

I find consumerism and capitalism to be a very interesting topic when related to photographic documentation, and feel it is something I would enjoy reading more about in the future, and possibly doing a photographic project of my own on it as well. 

Shoot: Existential Photography

In this Context of Practice session, we were looking closely at the similarities and contrasts of the use of the camera in comparison to a gun, particularly paying attention to the way in which Susan Sontag articulated her opinions on the matter in her book 'On Photography'.

"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time." - Susan Sontag, On Photography.

She acknowledges the way in which a camera can be used to objectify the subject of a photograph, causing the metaphorical 'shooter' to have a certain knowledge of the subject that they can never fully understand. I fully agree with this argument, and think that as a budding photographer, I can understand how having a photograph of someone, whether it portrays them in a negative or positive way can give the photographer a certain sense of 'control' over the subject. It's an aspect of power that is not usually articulated, yet is subconsciously acknowledged constantly.

She also refers to how using a camera can be a 'subliminal murder', the word murder of course linking back to the similarities between the camera and the gun. She goes on to speak about how taking a photograph of someone is a type of murder, knowing that everyone's life will eventually end, and accepting that eventually the subject of a photograph will die, and the photograph will live on like a spiritual memory of that person or people.

We then looked at the Shooting Gallery Exhibition, a photographic exhibition focusing on guns used in images and the messages they portray. We were given the photographer Agnès Geoffray and her photograph 'The Female Shooter' (2005). Here is the image:

After studying this image there are a lot of messages that come through it that makes it unique to the rest of the images displayed in that exhibition, in particular the use of a female subject and the direction of which the gun is pointing, towards her instead of away.

The subject is looking down the barrel of the gun instead of down the sights, making her the hypothetical victim of the shot, possibly linking back to the idea that the subject of a photograph is also the victim. Also the viewer is looking down the gun linking again to the idea that the 'shooter' of the camera is also the shooter of the metaphorical gun.

The use of a woman as the subject is particularly interesting because through history women have always been  viewed as inferior to men, men being the dominant gender. This image shows this very clearly, but what makes it even more interesting is that the photographer is a woman herself, which therefore leads me to two conclusions, 1 that she was acknowledging that women are supposedly inferior to males, or the more likely, 2 that she was trying to make the viewer see this blatant stereotype through the use of this shocking image, making the him or her question what is really going on.

"Agnès Geoffray (F) is an artist living and working in Bruxelles (B). She currently works with photographs, writings and printings."
'The Female Shooter' looks to have been taken on black and white 35mm film, and is a one off image, not a part of a series or theme. As stated earlier in this blog post, I believe that this photograph's historical context might be the feminist movement, it appears to be older than it is because of the grainy quality of the 35mm film, possibly trying to make it look like it fit in with the time of the movement. 

After doing some deeper research on the photographer, I found out that from her past she has always been interested in the connections between art and mortality. Her mother, father and brother all sadly died when they went to an art exhibition when she was younger, and she wrote that 'I lost my parents because of art.'

It got to the stage where she actually 'rented' out a fictional family to come and live with her, getting them to dress and act like her family she lost. She lived with these people for such a long time she actually came to hypothetically 'adopt' them as her real family. It is because of this devastating loss of her family that photographer Agnes Geoffray has such a 'complecated' relationship with art, saying on her website "And eventually, what I hated the most : art, which took my parents away from me, gave me something else since now I use photography in my work. "

Knowing this information now makes her work all the more interesting, I can appreciate her as a person as well as a photographer and understand in depth the complexity behind her images.