Illustration - Symbols

The objective of this exercise is to devise some photographic symbols for five concepts: growth, excess, crime, silence and poverty.

Growth

A concept such as "growth" can be viewed as having a number of facets:

• Growth in the sense of enlargement of size: A photograph of the trunk of a large tree side by side with some young saplings. Ideally, the trunk would be broad and gnarled whereas the sapling would have bright young green leaves.
• Growth tied to a sense of aging: an old man holding a small baby posed so that there is eye contact between the two.
• Growth in the sense of multiplication: an array of photographs of brightly illuminated bacteria in a petri dish, one with just a few individuals, with subsequent dishes showing progressively more bacterial growth.
• Growth in the sense of overdevelopment: A cityscape of an Asian city such as Shanghai or Hong Kong with a foreground of slum houses, rubbish dump or similar.

Excess

In this case, the excess can relate to people or to things:

• Over-indulgence: a telephoto tightly cropped of, say, the waistband of someone overweight showing the stretched fabric and flesh escaping.
• Over population: Photograph of the interior of a bus or train in a city squeezed full with commuters (a photograph of a train in a poor country where surplus passengers are travelling on the roof would be a possible alternative)
• Superfluity: a container of some sort overflowing with a liquid, produce or the like.

Crime

The image which came to my mind in relation to this concept was a photograph of the body of an alleged drug dealer by Guillermo Arias that I saw at the World Press Photo 10 exhibition in Edinburgh last summer. I noted in my blog on 12 September 2010 the following comments about this photograph:-

I think that this photograph attracted my attention from a distance because of the chiaroscuro lighting. Looking more closely, it gradually becomes clear that the white sheet over the central chair is covering a body. More grimly, there is a splatter of blood on the wall behind.

Many of the press photographs of violent events in the exhibition grabbed attention because of the shock of seeing such explicit scenes, more than their visual qualities. This, on the contrary, is one where the visual qualities of the photograph lead the viewer to look more closely and subsequently grasp the nature of the violent event being portrayed.

As a symbol, I feel that this photograph portrays the hopelessness and contradictory feelings associated with crime. One senses the loss that a man has been killed, but at the same time wonder whether as a drug dealer and gang member he might have deserved this fate. Is society as a whole maybe better off because there is one drug dealer less or is society to blame for creating an environment where young men end up as drug dealers? He is both victim and perpetrator.

Other aspects of crime could form a basis for photographs :-

• The aftermath of a crime: photograph of a broken window in a jewelers, a room in disorder, a safe with the floor strewn with papers and muddy footprints.
• The fear of crime: A man's face in a balaclava against a dark background.

Silence

My first thoughts were about situations where silence reigns. One could be a view of space or the moon. A more familiar one would be a landscape at twilight with the sky reflected in a calm pool.

My second idea was the fearful aspect of silence. For some people (many Indonesians for example) a state of quiet and solitude is quite frightening. The photograph that to me exemplifies this is by Indonesian photographer Rio Helmi. Ironically, this is a photograph he took in a London underground station. One can see an empty platform with just a pair of legs jutting out onto the platform. In the background is the dark empty rail tunnel and some people leaving down an exit tunnel. Whilst this may appear to be innocuous for someone familiar with the London underground, I imagine that many Indonesians would feel a pang of fear from the emptiness, the fear of the unknown dark tunnel, and being left alone with a stranger whose face is invisible.

A third idea was a photograph of the clean up operation after a pop music festival or soccer match. The noise and vibrancy of the event would be indicated by the rubbish and turmoil in the field or arena, but the emptiness (except for clean up crew) would convey a feeling of peace and quiet. A wide angle lens would add to the feeling of solitude of the event location after everyone has gone home.

Poverty

Having lived in country with a significant level of poverty (Indonesia) various scenes come to my mind as potential photographs: a lady in a market sitting on the ground with just a few ragged vegetables spread out on a piece of sacking, a woman begging with a baby in her arms at a street corner, an empty school room with a simple cement floor, wooden walls, open windows and a few pieces of paper scattered around .

On the other hand, I can see pictures of people living in difficult conditions who are happy and proud. Images come to mind of children dressed in bright school uniforms emerging from ramshackle wooden shacks along the banks of filthy streams, or a family of eight framed in the doorway of a tiny wooden hut in a remote village really enjoying having their photograph taken.

Conclusions

I appreciate that many of these ideas are pictures of situations where the concept exists e.g. poverty or crime, instead of something merely symbolic. The reason that I consider the items listed as valid for this exercise is that a photographic image often needs clues for the viewer to understand the point of the photograph. A photograph of a people in a market, even in a third world country, will not necessarily convey the impoverished existence of the local people. The photographer needs to find the person in the market whose livelihood depends on just the sale of a few small vegetables, so that the viewer can appreciate the terribly harsh existence of the local population.

I was interested to read Jose Navarro's recent OCA Blog "Photo Manipulations", which I think is touches on a similar point. He contrasts two pictures he took of the Western Isles of Scotland, one for promoting tourism, which shows a deserted beach on a sunny day, and another which was for a project on the hardships of crofting, which shows a croft in the distance under a stormy looking sky, with a tufts of rough grasses in the foreground. He questions whether this is photo manipulation?

I do not think it should be considered manipulation. In a scene before the photographer, there are a multitude of facets that portray different and even contradictory perceptions of a scene. Almost all situations in the real world have both positive and negative aspects. As in the first assignment of TAOP, a characteristic of a good photographs is to portray contrasts: large against small, high against low etc. This is the essence of the photographer conveying what he or she has seen and appreciated in a situation. The photographer should not merely be a CCTV camera recording the changes in a passing scene.

To my mind, the term manipulation should be retained for situations where something that was not present in the scene is added artificially, or something that was present in the scene has been removed artificially. I believe that some photography experts take the view that a photographic image should be judged purely on the visual qualities, without regard to the reality or not of the subject. I disagree with this view. Whilst this may be valid for abstracts for example, the realism of the subject is quite crucial to portraits and most other types of photography.