OCA Photography

Photography is simple

Martyn Rainbird

December 2016

I have chosen the often photographed subject of railways to convey my frustration at the quality of political debate and the impact on the voting public. The key debate regarding the railways is nationalisation versus privatisation. I believe an honest debate is required using facts and expertise, unlike the current trend for sound bites and outright lies.

I have chosen to produce a series of diptychs to convey the two sides of a debate. The final selections have been paired based on similar attributes – colour palette and objects. The selected images are difficult to see and interpret – more so the right than the left. I have appropriated this to a ‘debate’ which requires extra effort to deliver a well rounded decision. I am presenting the images as a sequence of left and right pairings with both sides moving increasingly towards clearer understandable images.

The initial idea was based on the concept of photographs being a small fragment of a whole, like jigsaw pieces. This characteristic of photography had come up a lot in my research from such people as Susan Sontag in her Plato’s Cave essay [1] and in the Quentin Bajac interview on the aperture.org blog [2].   

I have attempted to produce more abstract compositions than in previous assignments and have been influenced by the Illuminance [3] book by Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972). The pairing of images also inspired my final submission. Paul Graham’s (b. 1956) exhibition ‘Whiteness of the Whale’ [4] (2015) demonstrated the creativite use of positioning on the gallery wall. I was also influenced by the overexposed images

in the ‘American Night’ (2003) series challenging the viewer to work harder at ‘seeing’.

I have positioned the image pairs closer together on the horizontal axis rather than centre them on the page to convey a ‘working together’ debate rather than taking an entrenched immovable position.

References

1. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography, Penguin,  pp3-24 “Plato’s Cave”

2. Quentin Bajac Interview  aperture.org blog

3. Kawauchi, R. Illuminance (2011), Aperture.

4. Paul Graham exhibition ‘Whiteness of the Whale’   exhibition at Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco (2015)