THE OBJECT
By Evie Turner
Objects can bring many different emotions to a person all depending on the perspective you look at it. Whether the object has been discarded, decayed or kept in perfect condition. Layout, setting and colour are just some of the factors that can benefit or disadvantage the object and its significance. I will discuss the extent of effect these factors have on people in more detail in my essay.
“‘Found’ things and everyday stuff as central to their movement: by recombining and presenting them in unexpected ways, they could give access to the desires and urges of our subconscious.” - The Tate
MIYAKO ISHIUCHI
I came across the work of Miyako Ishiuchi when researching for my project on objects, I watched a video from The Tate website when Ishuichi was talking about her town she lived in and her first inspiration. S h e s a i d , “ Yo k o s u k a w a s a
Japanese naval base, and since then it became an American naval base. So in a sense it is a town full of wounds. I find traces of wounds beautiful; there is part of me that is attracted to these negative beauties.” This is evidence that political and moral concerns were the starting point. The first piece I want to look at is one of the prints from a series Miyako Ishiuchi created in 20008 called ‘Hiroshima’. It consists of large prints of clothing worn at the time of the atomic blasts and now held in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
Ishuichi’s style is that she likes to look at the environmental and human effects on a subject. The work offers a vision of post-Hiroshima Japan, focusing on the alienation and disaffection characterising urban life. The pieces of clothing are placed on a light box or piece of large tracing paper. Ishiuchi often used spotlights to focus on the stains, rips and creases of the clothing. There is recurring tones of discoloured pink which emphasise the decay of the shirt. The equipment and setup are very basic. Miyako occasionally uses an automatic point-and-shoot camera and she often speaks to the objects while photographing them. Both casual and intimate, Ishuichi’s practice involves fostering a relationship with each object that she ultimately decides to depict.
Tears and discolouration in the blouse, white background emphasises it.
Moreover, Ishuichi tends to isolate fragments of clothes or details in the garments, such as hems, buttons, lace, wrinkled fabric as her subjects. She presents them in vivid colour and in large scale, therefore encouraging viewers to look at what might otherwise escape their notice. Ishiuchi hangs the photographs at various heights on the walls of galleries and museums, giving the impression that the objects “float” like ghosts, or rather like animated objects imbued with life. Looking at the series of images will make some viewers feel sad and nostalgic about a crucial political time. Miyako Ishiuchi must have felt sad looking at how discarded items from her village were."This city was not real, but created by my photography" says Miyako Ishiuchi. The ‘Mother’ photograph series is close up pictures of her mothers skin, her thinning hair and including all her scars from a cooking accident.
The whole idea was to have memory of her mother, a strong-willed woman who came of age in colonial Manchuria and drove a munitions truck in wartime Japan. Ishiuchi's mother was diagnosed with liver cancer and died within a few months. In an attempt to cope with what she described as "a grief surpassing imagination," Ishuichi began to photograph her mother's possessions: her lipsticks and lingerie, her shoes and slippers, her dentures, her hairbrush still tangled with strands of her hair. In one photograph, her mother appears in a snapshot from the 1940s, young and fashionable, standing before the open door of a taxi. So to conclude you can see that Ishuichi’s emotions drove her to choose her subjects. This is reflected in her images.
“I can’t photograph the past. I can only photograph what happens in the moment I encounter this particular object, my most personal reactions, what I feel and see. (On photographing the clothing of Hiroshima atomic bomb victims)” - Miyako Ishiuchi
ANTHONY HERNANDEZ
The next piece I want to focus on is part of a collection called ‘Landscape of the Homeless’. a series of colour photographs made between 1988 and 1991, details with precision and restraint the empty encampments of the homeless, sheltered beneath the concrete freeway overpasses and in the brush of vacant lots found at the edge of downtown Los Angeles. A crude chair made of sheetrock, pants hung inside out on tree branches, a wall built of plywood and cardboard all stand in for their absent owners. The items in this are loosely arranged, in their natural habitat. There is a variety of shapes, tones and textures. The shoes stand out because of the shine reflecting off them whereas the paper blends into the background because of the dirt on top. All the objects are different despite looking like a complete collection.
His work captures a sense of isolation within an urban setting, acknowledging people whose lives are on the fringes and create home wherever they can, focusing instead on the traces of this precarious form of existence. In order to work quickly and intuitively, he would pre-focus the camera and then wait for subjects to come into the zone of focus--only briefly bringing the camera to his eye as he walked past them. The pictures were all taken on the streets underneath bridges and train stations around Los Angeles. Hernandez wanted to get peoples attention when trying to end homelessness.
Darker shoe in the background has less focus and blends into the photo.
Shoe in foreground has sharp focus.
His photography has ranged from street photography to images of the built environment and other remains of civilisation, particularly those discarded or abandoned elements that serve as e v i d e n c e o f h u m a n p re s e n c e . Hernandez liked focusing on traces; items of clothing, bedding, and crudely crafted furniture. Continuing in a similar vein, Hernandez’s most recent series, Discarded (2012-2015), explores abandoned sites in desert communities across Souther n California. Featuring interior shots of vacated homes, as well as exterior photographs of the buildings and desolate landscapes.
In later decades, Her nandez's photography might seem to have changed dramatically: from black-andwhite to colour, from wide shots to close ups, from people to places. Anthony Hernandez's work plays a significant role in todays society as poverty and homelessness is one of the biggest problems we face. When people will look at these photographs they will see some of these discarded objects and feel nostalgic. Some of these objects will have significant memories attached and these will remind viewers of how the homeless are normal people with memories that have faded.
“ T h e p h o t o g r a p h s w e re made from a site where somebody actually slept. Some of them are active, some abandoned, but they’re all real… The older photographs were like looking in, now I am looking out from their point of view.” - Anthony Hernandez
KEITH ARNATT
Keith Arnatt was a conceptual artist and photographer that often looked at the human form from a different perspective and liked looking at land art through the medium of photography and film. Arnatt was inspired by the photography of Walker Evans, August Sander and Diane Arbus, and began to explore the documentary photography form. He worked initially in black and white, before moving into colour and looking to details in his immediate surroundings for his subjects; these ranged from items unearthed in rubbish dumps to tourists visiting Tintern Abbey. One of his other series is titled ‘Notes from Jo’ for which Arnatt photographed and enlarged domestic reminders written by his late wife. Arnatt reveals the beauty, intimacy and humour in these seemingly mundane missives.
The next image I want to discuss is one from a series called ‘Pictures from a Rubbish Tip’ by the photographer Keith Arnatt published in 1988. This is a series of five large colour photographs featuring close-up shots of rubbish that has been dumped at a local tip. In each photograph, the lens focuses upon select pieces of discarded food such as bread, chicken bones and vegetables. Arnatt chose to photograph them on clear and pale-coloured plastic bags to emphasise the colours and decay. Furthermore the bags both reflect and diffuse the surrounding daylight, highlighting the variety of colours so that the scenes appear brightly coloured and partly abstract. For example there is contrast of texture and colour between the bones and the sauce. The rubbish has been arranged in a relaxed manner to portray the way it would have looked in the bin.
Decaying food photographed in the bottom righthand corner to draw your attention.
The same arrangement of colours and relaxed layout have been applied to all of the images which creates a sense of cohesion in the series. Arnatt would have needed to pick out each individual piece of rubbish and then set up the plastic bags. It would have taken some time for him to decide the layout of the objects then, taken photographs in all angles to decide which one would look best. He did not use any artificial light when shooting the frames, relying just on daylight, and used an extremely shallow depth of field, sharply focusing the lens on the closest part of the featured object.
According to the critic Mark HaworthBooth, “(Arnatt) chose to place this very narrow plane of focus on each object’s nearest edge. Arnatt believes, puts the viewer in the position in which he himself was when he first noticed and picked up these half-buried objects�. I agree when Haworth-Booth suggests the idea of Arnatt wanting the audience to view the images from his perspective. This gives the photographs a personal touch, therefore suggesting that there is a metaphor for life, slowly decaying, behind the scenes. The main theme seen in this series is decay which is seen as something dirty and disgusting however the lighting, colour and framing techniques portray the beauty of the objects. This again relies to the idea of these photographs representing life both beautiful and slowly decaying. The decay is bringing the sad reality that your prime time in life is very short lived. The way Arnatt has played out this idea has been deliberately exaggerated because of the zoomed lease focus on the decay.
“An interest in illusion (and delusion), in the sense of creating a false impression runs through much of my work. For example, the “Self Burial” photographs create the illusion that something is happening to me.” - Keith Arnatt
CANDY JERNIGAN
Jernigan would work with several different mediums, including watercolours, oil painting, pastels. She makes art about overlooked or castoff things, transforming ordinarily unlovely objects into images and sculptural works to express the abandoned element. A reporter for ‘The Morning Call’ said, "A glorification of the insignificant... rather to serve as evidence of our being. [Jernigan] creates unwanted relics of a society that wishes to be remembered on a much grander scale and not in the ordinary sense of its most basic ideas.�
The last image I want to look at is called ‘Found Dope’ made in 1986 by artist Candy Jernigan. The sidewalks of the East Village, New York, Jernigan found the source material for a body of documentary works. The artist g a t h e re d 3 0 8 c r a c k v i a l s a n d organised them into a grid, with marginal notations describing the location from where they were found in a diary style entry. Candy Jernigan was an artist who is known for her meticulous documents of castoff items, developing a unique style that is deeply sensitive and personal. Jer nigan’s drawings, collages, paintings, and sculptures charted her daily life and movements, elevating the mundane into objects of beauty. Homing in on what is otherwise overlooked, Jer nigan created haunting records of places and the things that used to exist.
Vials put in lines, looks organised yet informal.
Jernigans handwriting gives it a personal touch.
The drug vials have been arranged in lines with pencil annotations around them describing their state and where she found them. At the bottom Jernigan had drawn a small map and shaded in where she found them. The paper that has been used is a yellowy stained paper which makes the image seem more personal, like a diary. Pencil has been used in the background so it doesn’t draw your attention any from the vials, as they are the thing you notice first when initially glancing at it. The overall layout seems organised and well put together but still informal. In the 1980s drugs were seen as fashionable and lots of people wanted to try it, however alongside this came lots of the violent and depressing side. Jernigan also took photographs of the same area showing blood stains on the pavement where she found the drug vials.
This was her way of showing the public the bad side to drugs without being too vivd. This piece must have caused lots of religious and moral concerns because some people would applaud her for outlining the problems with drugs yet others would have been disgraced for even bringing up the shunned subject. I think Jernigans intention was to show drugs as a representation of how easy it is/ was to get hold of them. In the first stage Jernigan would have collected the vials, this would have taken a few hours, maybe more and whilst collecting she would have needed to map out the area where she found every individual item. Once she had collected her objects she would needed to experiment with the layout. Next Jernigan wrote all of her annotations and photographed the piece. Supporting photographs went along with the piece, as I mentioned before alongside some different sketches of maps that she used to record the details.
"She was one artist who pointed us in the direction of beauty within the scum of the city, she wanted to make desirable the undesirable, and she succeeded.� - Forbes
Miyako Ishiuchi photographed lots of discarded items which brought lots of nostalgia and pain because they were left behind from the Hiroshima bomb therefore referencing a huge political conflict. Then Anthony Hernandez projects feelings of being abandoned when he took photographs of objects the homeless collect. They are items we once treasured and now they have been destroyed and thrown away. On the other hand we have Keith Arnatt approach which is more literal, as he works with actual rubbish.
Adding the personal touch, Candy Jernigan takes ordinary rubbish and tries to make it personal in a diary like form. In this specific piece she made, it discussed boundaries of drugs which was a risk in society. One thing these pieces have in common is the context behind them, that is what makes them significant. Bomb magazine described Anthony Hernandez’s work as,�Interest in making the invisible visible has remained. His work enables us to see what we could not or would not see.� However I think this quote sums up all of the artists intention, expressing in different ways to emphasise an objects significance.
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Photography Personal Study, based on analysing the emotion of an object. By Evie Turner, 2021