unit 2:
additional context / professional skills
Looking at the link between text and image / signs, symbols and semiotics
Ld
1980s: Photographing Britain exhibition
︎Tate Britain
THE TATE ON IMAGE & TEXT
“Conceptual art prioritises the idea (or concept) behind an artwork. The photographs in this room focus on photography’s ability to carry ideas. They challenge the notion of the photograph as a window on the world and use text to complicate the medium’s relationship with reality.
Artist and academic, Victor Burgin wrote that our most common encounters with photographs – in advertisements, newspapers and magazines – are all mediated by text. Informed by semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, Burgin highlighted our reliance on existing systems of codes and social meanings to ‘read’ photographs. By making work that combines image and text he was ‘turning away from concerns inherited from “art” and towards everyday life and its languages, which are invariably composed of image/text relations’. Burgin used image and text to ‘dismantle existing communication codes’ and ‘generate new pictures of the world.’
Burgin’s art and ideas influenced the photographers in this room, several of whom he taught. They used text borrowed from literature, film, parliamentary speeches and journalism to expose hidden meanings, heighten emotion and confuse. The resulting artworks expanded contemporary photographic practice while offering new ways of viewing the world.”
Testing image & text within my own collage work
Bedroom Stills & Self Portraiture
Both of these image displays made me think about the kind of thing I could photogrpah as part of my own practice. I really like these repetitive stills of both the bedroom, and self portraiture. There’s something intimate and voyueristic about it that feels like an insight into the person.
MY RESPONSE: SHOOTING MY OWN BEDROOM
Seeing the close up bedroom stills in the 1980s photography exhibition made me reflect on my own space in a new way. I started photographing my bedroom, focusing on small details that often get overlooked.
It’s the place I spend the most time, especially when I feel stuck or overwhelmed. Living with ADHD means I sometimes miss moments happening around me, and my bedroom becomes both a comfort and a kind of container for those missed experiences. Photographing it felt like a way of quietly
acknowledging that.
I plan to print these images onto some ceramic pieces, it brings a sense of looking into my world. Showing the most personal place to me,
