Panel 26 Abstracts:
Against editing: the natural, the evidential and the maternal in some family photography
Gillian Rose (g.rose@open.ac.uk), Professor, The Open University, UK
This paper draws on extensive interview work with women with young children in two towns in south-east England. It examines what happens to family photographs once they are taken, and will refer to photographs in both printed and digital forms. A great deal of work is done with family photographs, and this is overwhelmingly women's work: they are dated, stored, printed, displayed and gifted in a range of different ways. This work with visual images has various effects. In particular, it establishes both familial affliliation and domestic spatialities. However, this paper will explore more what it does for mothers, as mothers. It will suggest that photography is a crucial technology in the production of maternal subjectivity, and that part of this entails a refusal to edit the photograph because what it shows must be seen as natural. The paper discusses the ambivalent effects of this claim to, and practising of, photographic naturalism.
Social Science Research as Auteur Filmmaking
Martin Wood & Sally Brown, (mw510@york.ac.uk) Senior Lecturer, University of York & Senior Research Fellow, University of Durham
This paper will explore empirically and theoretically the practices and processes by which the act of social scientific research becomes more than the unproblematic practice of describing, recording, revealing or otherwise registering daily life, without apparent mediation. Inspired by the movement called auteurism that came to dominate film criticism and theory in the 1950/60s, we reflect on our experiences as social science researchers of making a short documentary film. Theoretically, auteurism refers to the relation between the camera, as the point of communication, the filmmaker and the world. It sees the filmmaker less as a witness to ‘things as they are’ and more as a creative artist, as the person responsible for a film’s aesthetics and who uses the film’s mise en scène reflexively as part of his or her self-expression (see, for example, Micheal Snow’s The Central Region).
In practice, the auteur’s use of the mise en scène directs our attention to the often unconscious, hidden or unsaid, sites and processes of production that lie behind what the film represents and reflects. For example, how do filmmakers choose between what to include in a film as the ‘work’ and what to leave out? To what extent are personal and inter-personal factors (we were a filmmaking team of three) criteria in debating the film’s progress? How do filmmakers mobilise and use the ‘system’ of cinematic techniques such as camera, lens, angle of view, levels of music, sound, gestures, reflections, characters and scenes, etc., to initiate the spectator into a direct and sensory appreciation of the film as event? What is the division of labour and, indeed, its reverse, the labour of division – the continuous work through which representations of the social are created, consumed and performed – that goes into filmmaking?
Our presentation will include recollections and excerpts from personal diaries together with short sections of our award winning documentary film. The film puts in question the important relationship between the organisation of work and life and of the conditions that make creative lines of escape possible in modern society. It combines conceptual ideas about running free, refusing to settle, interruption and resistance, applied to the northern English cities and towns and their history of mining, steel and textile manufacturing and uses the fascinating and striking sensations of free solo rock climbing on the surrounding moors as an example of how relationship is performed.
References
The Imaginary of the Darkroom
Ignaz Cassar (I.Cassar@leeds.ac.uk), University of Leeds
This paper will explore the photographic darkroom as a site of production in its relevance to a sociological imaginary. As a space of specialist labour – be it professional or amateur – the darkroom has been a significant feature in photographic education and in the photographer’s self‐portrayal. The changing methods of creative labour with the expansion of digital imaging technologies have made the darkroom practically irrelevant yet, at the same time, its imaginative potential remains a compelling one.
The significance of the darkroom as an ‘alternative’ space, set up by photographers’ networks in 1970s and ‘80s Britain, for example, has been acknowledged by writers such as Roberts and Burgin for enabling emancipatory politics and differing social practices of that time. However, the darkroom’s potential rests also with its experimental and momentary dimensions, as it does not require an architectural infrastructure of its own. As such, darkrooms are improvised spaces, and outlines for its set‐up are a recurring trope in photographers’ biographies and accounts (e.g. Feininger, Adams). Crucially, the functionality of the darkroom overlays itself often with that of spaces of privacy and leisure (a kitchen or hotel room, for example), breaking down strict distinctions between spaces of labour and leisure, or public and private. This paper, then, will foreground the impromptu complex of the darkroom as its creative force. Considering photographers’ accounts of the photographic darkroom and its figuration in photographic representation as a motive in its own right (a recent thematization is Mike Nelson’s ‘secret’ installation of a darkroom at Frieze Art Fair 2006), the paper will explore this peculiar space as one that is, on the hand, geared towards technological procedures and pragmatic requirements of organizing labour, and, on the other, remains embedded within a genealogy of the ‘dark chamber’, as a space of intimacy, secrecy and mystification (Kofman, Flusser, Silverman). By exploring the darkroom’s phenomenological aspects, the paper will bring into relief the fantasies evoked in its psycho‐spatial dimensions, such as the linkages between photographic reproduction and (sexological) procreation. In so doing, the paper seeks to consider an ‘ethics of the darkroom’ at a time when the darkroom and the forms of sociality it once sheltered have become a relic of the past.
Female Film Editors
Julia Wright, (msjuliawright@gmail.com), PhD Student, UCLA
The field of editing is one of a very few places in the film industry that women have been able to create a strong presence in prestige and number from the beginning of cinema to the present day. The purpose of this essay is not to reveal the “reality” of female editors, but rather to seek an understanding of how public representation and self-representation are created and what informs their construction. This examination of the representation of female editors will focus on three cultural-industrial modes: the historicization of female editors, the celebratory representation of award-winning female editors, and a mode of performed self-representation used by female editors to navigate the industry and negotiate their identity.
Studying contemporary texts and artifacts that circulate both within the production community (e.g. trade magazines, web communities, promotional advertisements) as well as those accessible to the general public (historical information and interviews from books and film) illustrate how female editors are perceived, and how they perceive themselves and their roles in the production community. Texts created within the industry by editors and trade organizations account for the majority of the historical information about female editors. Women’s historical presence is often omitted or discounted in these texts due to a lack of historical research, reductive theoretical frameworks, and ahistorical assumptions made in contradiction to historical evidence. These versions of history go uncontested in light of the privileged location of the author, who is often a celebrated male editor or an exclusive institutions (such as professional societies and guilds) where the majority of membership is male.
Members of the editing community have also produced celebratory self-representational texts made available to the public, such as books of collected interviews with award winning editors and promotional film and media. These reflexive texts attempt to bring greater public recognition to accomplished editors, whose names remain largely unknown to those outside of the craft. However female editors are cast in all too familiar notions of womanhood, conveyed through male director testimonials that promote an essentialist view of women’s work. Also problematic is the manner in which an explanation of their work is often framed within a discussion of distinctive “sensibilities.” In this context, the type of language and rhetoric used reinforces the view of women as nurturers with greater emotional proclivity than men.
My interviews with working editors illuminate the distinctive challenges that arise when professional and gender expectations must be carefully navigated and sometimes “performed” in order to remain competitive in a cut-throat profession. In these interviews, there is a strong resistance to gender representation and any association with feminism. Seeing feminism as outdated and too political, they opted for a post-feminist attitude that emphasizes personal choice and individual needs, which is consistent with the uncomplicated, work-a-holic outlook that is consistently voiced in the post-production community. However, I consider this a distinctly post-feminist attitude precisely in the way it reduces the complications of identity politics in favor of seeing everyone as “individuals.” I argue that as a result, this attitude couches the shortcomings of the industry’s flexible labor market in which most work is freelance and temporary, requiring editors to maintain a strong social network to secure future employment. In this context, editors feel they have little agency to address sexism directly, and instead “perform” against undesirable gender stereotypes that questioned their professionalism. Strategic self-representation can alleviate some of the problems female editors face, but offers no permanent solution to combating sexism.
A feminist approach to theorizing representation has many advantages: it can critique historical assumptions and theoretical frameworks, investigate the politics of epistemologies, and understand the ways performance constructs representation. Refocusing beyond a gender-based analysis that considers economic conditions and labor practices can reveal the specific bind female editors find themselves in.
Against editing: the natural, the evidential and the maternal in some family photography
Gillian Rose (g.rose@open.ac.uk), Professor, The Open University, UK
This paper draws on extensive interview work with women with young children in two towns in south-east England. It examines what happens to family photographs once they are taken, and will refer to photographs in both printed and digital forms. A great deal of work is done with family photographs, and this is overwhelmingly women's work: they are dated, stored, printed, displayed and gifted in a range of different ways. This work with visual images has various effects. In particular, it establishes both familial affliliation and domestic spatialities. However, this paper will explore more what it does for mothers, as mothers. It will suggest that photography is a crucial technology in the production of maternal subjectivity, and that part of this entails a refusal to edit the photograph because what it shows must be seen as natural. The paper discusses the ambivalent effects of this claim to, and practising of, photographic naturalism.
Social Science Research as Auteur Filmmaking
Martin Wood & Sally Brown, (mw510@york.ac.uk) Senior Lecturer, University of York & Senior Research Fellow, University of Durham
This paper will explore empirically and theoretically the practices and processes by which the act of social scientific research becomes more than the unproblematic practice of describing, recording, revealing or otherwise registering daily life, without apparent mediation. Inspired by the movement called auteurism that came to dominate film criticism and theory in the 1950/60s, we reflect on our experiences as social science researchers of making a short documentary film. Theoretically, auteurism refers to the relation between the camera, as the point of communication, the filmmaker and the world. It sees the filmmaker less as a witness to ‘things as they are’ and more as a creative artist, as the person responsible for a film’s aesthetics and who uses the film’s mise en scène reflexively as part of his or her self-expression (see, for example, Micheal Snow’s The Central Region).
In practice, the auteur’s use of the mise en scène directs our attention to the often unconscious, hidden or unsaid, sites and processes of production that lie behind what the film represents and reflects. For example, how do filmmakers choose between what to include in a film as the ‘work’ and what to leave out? To what extent are personal and inter-personal factors (we were a filmmaking team of three) criteria in debating the film’s progress? How do filmmakers mobilise and use the ‘system’ of cinematic techniques such as camera, lens, angle of view, levels of music, sound, gestures, reflections, characters and scenes, etc., to initiate the spectator into a direct and sensory appreciation of the film as event? What is the division of labour and, indeed, its reverse, the labour of division – the continuous work through which representations of the social are created, consumed and performed – that goes into filmmaking?
Our presentation will include recollections and excerpts from personal diaries together with short sections of our award winning documentary film. The film puts in question the important relationship between the organisation of work and life and of the conditions that make creative lines of escape possible in modern society. It combines conceptual ideas about running free, refusing to settle, interruption and resistance, applied to the northern English cities and towns and their history of mining, steel and textile manufacturing and uses the fascinating and striking sensations of free solo rock climbing on the surrounding moors as an example of how relationship is performed.
References
The Imaginary of the Darkroom
Ignaz Cassar (I.Cassar@leeds.ac.uk), University of Leeds
This paper will explore the photographic darkroom as a site of production in its relevance to a sociological imaginary. As a space of specialist labour – be it professional or amateur – the darkroom has been a significant feature in photographic education and in the photographer’s self‐portrayal. The changing methods of creative labour with the expansion of digital imaging technologies have made the darkroom practically irrelevant yet, at the same time, its imaginative potential remains a compelling one.
The significance of the darkroom as an ‘alternative’ space, set up by photographers’ networks in 1970s and ‘80s Britain, for example, has been acknowledged by writers such as Roberts and Burgin for enabling emancipatory politics and differing social practices of that time. However, the darkroom’s potential rests also with its experimental and momentary dimensions, as it does not require an architectural infrastructure of its own. As such, darkrooms are improvised spaces, and outlines for its set‐up are a recurring trope in photographers’ biographies and accounts (e.g. Feininger, Adams). Crucially, the functionality of the darkroom overlays itself often with that of spaces of privacy and leisure (a kitchen or hotel room, for example), breaking down strict distinctions between spaces of labour and leisure, or public and private. This paper, then, will foreground the impromptu complex of the darkroom as its creative force. Considering photographers’ accounts of the photographic darkroom and its figuration in photographic representation as a motive in its own right (a recent thematization is Mike Nelson’s ‘secret’ installation of a darkroom at Frieze Art Fair 2006), the paper will explore this peculiar space as one that is, on the hand, geared towards technological procedures and pragmatic requirements of organizing labour, and, on the other, remains embedded within a genealogy of the ‘dark chamber’, as a space of intimacy, secrecy and mystification (Kofman, Flusser, Silverman). By exploring the darkroom’s phenomenological aspects, the paper will bring into relief the fantasies evoked in its psycho‐spatial dimensions, such as the linkages between photographic reproduction and (sexological) procreation. In so doing, the paper seeks to consider an ‘ethics of the darkroom’ at a time when the darkroom and the forms of sociality it once sheltered have become a relic of the past.
Female Film Editors
Julia Wright, (msjuliawright@gmail.com), PhD Student, UCLA
The field of editing is one of a very few places in the film industry that women have been able to create a strong presence in prestige and number from the beginning of cinema to the present day. The purpose of this essay is not to reveal the “reality” of female editors, but rather to seek an understanding of how public representation and self-representation are created and what informs their construction. This examination of the representation of female editors will focus on three cultural-industrial modes: the historicization of female editors, the celebratory representation of award-winning female editors, and a mode of performed self-representation used by female editors to navigate the industry and negotiate their identity.
Studying contemporary texts and artifacts that circulate both within the production community (e.g. trade magazines, web communities, promotional advertisements) as well as those accessible to the general public (historical information and interviews from books and film) illustrate how female editors are perceived, and how they perceive themselves and their roles in the production community. Texts created within the industry by editors and trade organizations account for the majority of the historical information about female editors. Women’s historical presence is often omitted or discounted in these texts due to a lack of historical research, reductive theoretical frameworks, and ahistorical assumptions made in contradiction to historical evidence. These versions of history go uncontested in light of the privileged location of the author, who is often a celebrated male editor or an exclusive institutions (such as professional societies and guilds) where the majority of membership is male.
Members of the editing community have also produced celebratory self-representational texts made available to the public, such as books of collected interviews with award winning editors and promotional film and media. These reflexive texts attempt to bring greater public recognition to accomplished editors, whose names remain largely unknown to those outside of the craft. However female editors are cast in all too familiar notions of womanhood, conveyed through male director testimonials that promote an essentialist view of women’s work. Also problematic is the manner in which an explanation of their work is often framed within a discussion of distinctive “sensibilities.” In this context, the type of language and rhetoric used reinforces the view of women as nurturers with greater emotional proclivity than men.
My interviews with working editors illuminate the distinctive challenges that arise when professional and gender expectations must be carefully navigated and sometimes “performed” in order to remain competitive in a cut-throat profession. In these interviews, there is a strong resistance to gender representation and any association with feminism. Seeing feminism as outdated and too political, they opted for a post-feminist attitude that emphasizes personal choice and individual needs, which is consistent with the uncomplicated, work-a-holic outlook that is consistently voiced in the post-production community. However, I consider this a distinctly post-feminist attitude precisely in the way it reduces the complications of identity politics in favor of seeing everyone as “individuals.” I argue that as a result, this attitude couches the shortcomings of the industry’s flexible labor market in which most work is freelance and temporary, requiring editors to maintain a strong social network to secure future employment. In this context, editors feel they have little agency to address sexism directly, and instead “perform” against undesirable gender stereotypes that questioned their professionalism. Strategic self-representation can alleviate some of the problems female editors face, but offers no permanent solution to combating sexism.
A feminist approach to theorizing representation has many advantages: it can critique historical assumptions and theoretical frameworks, investigate the politics of epistemologies, and understand the ways performance constructs representation. Refocusing beyond a gender-based analysis that considers economic conditions and labor practices can reveal the specific bind female editors find themselves in.