Over the last week I’ve spent some time assessing the work of photography students who are finishing up the first term of the year at the photo school. It’s always great to see the finished pictures that are result of those few weeks together. Aside from giving out grades, the role that I and my co-assessor play is one of engaging critically, acting as viewers of the work who give it the kind of scrutiny that might not get from most other viewers (family and friends, say). So it seemed a little surprising to me the amount of resistance that my co-assessors and I seemed to get.
We’d offer an observation on the work, or perhaps some suggestion for improvement, and it seemed that not a few students would interrupt us with reasons for why this or that wasn’t done: the photo store didn’t allow that option, or they just didn’t like printing on that kind of paper, or it was too hard, or they weren’t interested. I’m not putting about that the co-assessors and I were trying to be authorities from on high, nor that most students were like this; most weren’t, in fact. It just seemed something we noticed and remarked on, this time round.
It got me thinking about the process of assessment. Obviously the criteria for a particular assignment need to made explicit, but perhaps so does the purpose of assessment itself. Quite by coincidence, a couple of days later, I got a questionnaire from an academic at the uni doing a project on the assessment of creative work, and this crystallized a bit more thought on it all. The next few paragraphs are pretty much cribbed from my response.
Assessment provides a means of checking that the student is learning effectively, so the the university/general community can be sure that graduates have a certain set of skills.For the student, though, it is itself a way that the student can learn, both by doing the task and getting feedback about it. Least important for learning, but a necessary evil, it’s also a way of ranking for scholarships, admissions, etc.
With creative work though, I wonder if a student’s sense of self-worth is more at stake, a feeling that the work is somehow more personal than traditionally scholarly critical work. Perhaps there’s a greater risk of vulnerability partly for this reason, and partly because creative work is probably more public. In any case, I reckon that in its assessment, creative work shares with critical work the need for clear criteria.
And what’s being assessed? The work should show us something new or show us the familiar in a new way. It should demonstrate craft competence. It should say what it aims to say clearly (and I don’t mean necessarily that it should be simple). It should be aware of history and context. It should fulfill the brief/answer the question/succeed in doing what it sets out to do. One doesn’t want the work to be solipsistic or incomprehensible, yet it shouldn’t be obvious and cliched either. Maybe here’s where some personal judgment comes in. The assessor needs to have experience and openness and rigour and generosity, all in balance.
What should not be assessed is the trouble it took to make (eg I had to climb four mountains to have this epiphany so I could write this bad poem), nor should we be assessing the work with reference to how the maker feels or how much it’s an evocation of their feelings or person (firstly, you can’t judge the work because everyone feels something, and secondly, if the work is crap then is the maker a lesser person?). This last point is one that David Hurn and Bill Jay make in their book On Being a Photographer.
It seems to me that there’s not a lot of difference in assessing creative and critical work: specific criteria being addressed, with the possibility of some special thing about the work or the writing or whatever to take it into High Distinction territory. Is making scholarship and making art simply a question of employing different mediums? If so, should that make universities more willing to admit the practice of art-making into the realm of scholarship? Not just by teaching creative arts production in a university context, I mean, but by being open to treating it as scholarship too.
A friend asked me recently what the best film I saw last year was. I’m not very good at these sorts of questions, wandering around as I do with just the most recent movie images in my goldfish brain. But on my shortlist for 2008 would have to be Waltz with Bashir. I noticed that the fellow nominees for Waltz with Bashir for the BAFTA best Animated Film were WALL-E (which won) and Persepolis. Bashir was also nominated for best film ‘Not in the English Language’, but the disparate movies in the animation category made me wonder how the comparisons were being made. The category is for ‘Animated Film’, rather than just ‘Animation’, so does this mean they are being assessed as whole films rather than as how well they show merit in a single craft area, like ‘Cinematography’, or ‘Original Screenplay’ (for which I think WALL-E ought to have been nominated too, because of its clever, almost purely visual, storytelling)?
[image: Waltz with Bashir from Channel4.com]
WALL-E’s appeal as animation is partly from how deftly it, well, animates. The bouncing Pixar desk lamp is emblematic of the way that the studio has made objects come alive, using their pre-existing component parts (the red unicycle in from an early Pixar short is another example). Add to that the evolution of Pixar CGI technology and you have unprecedented vividness from tracks and cogs and air and dust. (WALL-E actually makes me think of I Am Legend in its startling evocation of an abandoned metropolis.)
Persepolis does the opposite. With its animation it makes things look less real, so as to be able to accommodate the events it narrates. Executions, interrogations, and most memorably for me, the scene with ranks of identical soldiers walking towards each other and falling into a pit in front of them quickly makes the futility and waste of the war all too clear. The war frames Marjane’s life, but the narrative here is about her own journey through it, and the animation serves that narrative quite effectively. Satrapi herself, in an interview on the film’s website, emphasises the importance of the story being animated, because that way, it comes to look less specifically foreign to a Western audience: “The novels have been a world-wide success because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. I think this helped everybody relate to it [...]“.
But back to Waltz with Bashir. That this documentary, about an Israeli veteran Ari Folman’s recollections of his part in the 1982 Lebanon War, is animated, allows us into dreams and half-memories. The film opens with a nightmare of some dogs running through a city in search of a guy holed up in his apartment. This guy is a friend of Folman’s, and the dream signals an unease about what happened with them as Israeli troops that went into Lebanon in 1982. Folman continues to investigate, interviewing old comrades about the period. There is so much he can’t remember, and his own recurring dreams are vivid but enigmatic.
[image: Waltz with Bashir, from The Guardian online]
This frame shows Folman in his dream wading towards the war-torn city, flares dropping into the ruins. His two comrades are lying in the water next to him. Soon they too get up, and all three start towards the city. As the narrative shifts back to a waking reality, Folman gradually pieces together the events that his unit was involved in.
[brief discussion of the ending coming up, so skip a couple of paragraphs until you've seen the film] At the core of the story is a massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Phalangist militia that has been facilitated by the stationing of Israeli troops in the area. While the Israelis did not actually participate in the killing, they sent up flares to illuminate the area. Folman’s guilt at his complicity has been so great and so hidden that he’s had no conscious memory of his part in this for most of the film. The flares in the dream both point towards and obscure his recollections. And what happens at the very end is stark and shocking: the animation turns real, into news footage of the aftermath of the massacre. Folman’s images defer to the reality (such as it is) of video. It’s as if the whole film has been driving towards this. The conversations, the investigation, all depicted in Folman’s animated reconstructions, are his story, but at the end, the story is no longer his. It is of the Palestinians caught in the massacre. We see them wailing and screaming at the camera, as it pans past ruins and bodies: “Look at this! You have to see this!” Folman becomes silent and merely points towards the horror that is the ultimate reason for the film, and the source of its final images.
Unless the documentary narrator is a virtuoso of the on-camera persona like Nick Broomfield, there is a risk that the teller overwhelms the tale. In this case, Folman’s sudden change of style allows his voice and ruminations to dominate most of the film, but when it matters, not to overshadow the motivating event in it.
In some ways, to have Persepolis and WALL-E and Waltz with Bashir in the same awards category seems a bit arbitrary. Do we have a category for black-and-white movies? Or movies shot with hand-held cameras? The distinctions of genre here seem to function as artifacts of the kinds of movies that animated films mostly once were. WALL-E probably is most aligned to that tradition, and it does a great job of it. But the other two, one an autobiography and the other a documentary, show us that animated films can be, just as much as any other kind of film, honest and real and significant, and that they are these things in part because they are animated.
[thanks to Juju H for the translations from Arabic]
I probably pay too much attention to book covers. When I read the back cover, it’s usually to check out the photo credit rather than read more about the book. Having been a literature major, I’ve pretty much kept this little inclination under wraps. Until now.
Covering Photography is an archive I ran into this week that connects book covers and photography. When I saw this in the bookstore a couple of years ago, I could remember Richard Misrach as the author of the cover image of this book but not Norman Mailer as the author himself.
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There’s a calm melancholy about Robert Adams’ images, but being put on the cover of a book on small-town crime imbues it with a sense of unease. It’s not just the image creating a tone for the book, but the image itself changes, becomes darker.
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And using Robert Frank for this edition of Kerouac’s On the Road is perfect, given that Kerouac wrote the introduction to Frank’s The Americans.
The bookstore is a gallery.
I’m not normally drawn to photo magazines that just display what look like a random collections of current work. Often the quality of what’s on offer is inconsistent, and you only get mere glimpses of potentially engaging portfolios. JPG Magazine is an interesting elaboration of this idea though. Made up entirely of work from jpg members, each issue goes through a two-stage process. Members post their photographs for other members to vote on, creating a shortlist that the editors make their final selection from. Issue 16, at left, is the one currently in newsagents here in Australia. Some of its subsidiary themes like ‘On the go’ and ‘Fresh’ show us the expected cheerfulness of people at play, kids in a street and so on. But the main theme of ‘Human Impact’ provides an essay that makes for a more sustained engagement with the world. One section has individual images by a variety of photographers from all over the world. Two examples from here, ‘Urban Squalor‘ by Tony Oquias, of garbage floating along the river in the Binondo district of Manila, and ‘Flotsam‘, by Kevin Meredith, of cargo ship wreckage off Dorset, are vivid examples of the illustrative possibilities of photography, and of how good editing can make meaningful relationships between images.
Not only are the images less superficial in their appeal than most reader/amateur compilations, together they make up a troubled series of landscapes that are not just confined to the exotic slums of the third world. An adjacent section carries the same theme, but explored by small portfolios from fewer photographers, such as this fascinating one by Eamonn Aiken.
Upcoming themes for future issues include ‘Frenzy’, ‘Fluid’, and a number of variations on ‘Democracy’: ‘Protests’, ‘Communities’, ‘Propaganda Posters’. One of the founders of JPG was Heather Champ, now managing Flickr, so the participatory nature of the project is no surprise. There’s a positive atmosphere around most web-page projects like this, but I like the actual engagement here with issues that aren’t easily resolvable and with images that aren’t always cool and pretty.
[post amended 30 June 2009]
I’ve been trying to convince my editor to send me to Fremantle, Western Australia as a special correspondent for this year’s FotoFreo photography festival. Since my editor is, well, me, and since I demonstrated a stunning lack of anticipation in realising this was going to be on in April, all I can do is watch wistfully from the across the continent.
One of the highlights I’ll be sore at missing will be the presence and work of Edward Burtynsky, whose Manufactured Landscapes is a powerful essay that has life both as a photo series and book and an important element in a Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary of the same name. He’s spent many years documenting large-scale industrial effects on the natural landscape, and at FotoFreo he’ll be presenting a new series of work on Australian mines. As a strong admirer of his work, I want to know more, but I also note that the Fremantle exhibition is sponsored by BHP Billiton. Aside from the PR cachet of sponsoring a photographic activist like Burtynsky, I wonder about the specific spin that BHP might put on the series. Does he photograph BHP sites? What is his take on the sponsorship and demands of corporate resposibility that he might have made?
[image: Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy,
Western Australia, 2007 © Edward Burtynsky]
Much of Burtynsky’s other work has been shot in China (including in shipyards, coalmines, factories, and the Three Gorges Dam site), and so it’s interesting to see among the Chinese presence at FotoFreo the work of Chen Nong, who constructs his own response to the Three Gorges Dam with subjects dressed as terracota warriors, seemingly enacting a pause in some battle against large mystic forces.
[From the San Xia series by Chen Nong]
These are just two of the many things on offer; I’ll be keeping an eye open for any substantial material on the web that FotoFreo might put out. Meanwhile, if you’re in Freo in April, go have a gaze at some photographs for me.
