Week 8 Homework: The Monophase Narrative - Cinematic and Constructed Narrative

Our homework this week was to deconstruct a photograph and we were given the choice of two photographers to work with - either Julia Fullerton-Batten  or Lottie Davies. I went with the latter, and specifically her photograph "Home", commissioned by Crisis, the homelessness charity. You can see the photograph here, and hear what the photographer herself has to say about the work here - from the latter video, I noted the following: 

1. The photographer is wearing pale blue and red, colours replicated in the picture in the mother's blood-splattered gown, in the red accents of her slippers, the drying blood on her leg, and to a certain extent in the vivid red-pink of the newborn baby. (You can hear the thoughts of photographer / lecturer David Ulrich here on the relationship between how photographers look and their work: if you don't have time for the whole interview, start from about 45 minutes in - he says that he sometimes gets his students to stand next to their work so as to point out that they often look like their photographs! He also addresses those students who say they don't have a colour sense by telling them to open their wardrobes...). 

2. Davies says of her picture that she didn't want it to be saccharine and that she wanted it to have a bit of an edge, that she didn't want it all to be about safety and comfort because for some people, (especially, perhaps, those who need the services of Crisis), "Home" isn't necessarily somewhere warm and soft and safe. Note, though, that she says a "bit" of an edge - the fact of the birth having been in a dining room and on a hard floor; the blood; the hard chair: these are in contrast with the comforting of the child by the mother, the affluence, the reassuring presence of the midwife and her clean professionalism, and the sense of solidity and family lineage provided by the portraits on the walls stretching back through time and, presumably, though generations of the same family. 

3. Davies wanted a slice of her own history in the picture, telling us that her mother was born in a bucket, and of course there it is, bucket included. 

Other aspects of the photograph that I noticed: 

1. Though birth can be (is?) a bloody messy business (the mother's leg, her gown, the clothes and other stained items in the bucket and on the stand that the midwife is using), there is a sense of cleanliness and order in this picture: there is no blood or fluid on the floor, the midwife's uniform is pressed and spotless, the room is immaculate with hardly a thing out of place, perhaps just the letter that is on the table and that the photographer explains here, (though what "Home" means to her friend doesn't really relate to what we see in this picture, at least to my mind). What's more, the mother's dignity is spared - she looks beautiful and her body is mostly hidden from the viewer with the exception of her legs. 

2. The technical execution is spotless: composition (we're looking into the corner of the room and the door is shut - our eye is not led anywhere but back to the baby and the mother and their connection, her eyes on the baby's face, her desire to bring peace and comfort to the child); exposure - the use of the artificial lights doesn't overpower the daylight (balanced?) light from the left, and even has a logical consistency in that you would imagine that the midwife might want to work with as much light as possible. The artificial lights also serve to give a slight degree of warmth and complexity and interest overall. Focus is sharp back to front, the colours are beautiful and harmonious, and there is no colour cast (as far as that is ever true given human eyesight, given monitor/screen calibration issues etc etc) - white is white. 

3. No one is making eye contact with the camera (and thus us, the viewer) from within the photograph - it is as if the photographer isn't there, thereby helping to make the scene appear more realistic, less posed, though we know, of course, that it is posed: aside from the context in which we are seeing it (on the artist's website, at an exhibition maybe), the "perfection" of the colours and the focus do not suggest the same date as the 1930s (?) midwife's uniform - we would expect a photograph from that decade to look somewhat different, less "clean" somehow, to have "tells" that would distance it from us through time. 

4. The midwife's pose put me in mind of Vermeer's Milkmaid, though when I looked up the painting for the purposes of this blog the similarity didn't seem that significant. I liked the reassurance given to me, the viewer, that the water was warm and clean by the presence of the steam. 

5. There are three figures in the picture - the rule of odd numbers in photography holding true? I'm not quite sure on this - the mother and baby seem to form one unit, the midwife another. 

6. Is there a punctum? For me, I'd have to say the mother's right leg, especially her foot: it seems perfect, like something from a Greek statue, even more so when you contrast it with her left leg - there is nothing technically "wrong" with her left leg though, in fact it just emphasises the perfection of the right. Note, too, that there is flow, there is harmony, between the mother's right leg and the midwife's left arm. 

7. I might be about to go too far here, but I think there is a triangle between the bucket; the mother and child; and the midwife: a triangle or even a circle that one's eye delights in moving around. 

8. The blood-red velvet slippers - indexical of the womb? The mother's feet on the cold wooden floor (I mean, it's never really warm in Scotland is it?!), they've left the warmth and comfort of the wombs they were in just as the baby has left the warm safe womb of her mother. 

Overall, a picture worthy of study - the photograph is unique and beautiful and interesting enough to intrigue and stay in our mind, whilst we don't have to worry about the baby: he or she is safe with these two women, safe in the beautiful, caring environment they are creating even if it is a bit at odds with the birth having taken place in the "wrong" room and there being no soft surfaces for the mother to lean back on (the child has the mother as a soft surface - perhaps Davies doesn't think her mother had a warm and comfortable upbringing? Perhaps I am just reading too much into this aspect of the picture...). In this way I think Davies has been successful in giving the picture a bit of an edge, an edge added to by the slightly cool light, by the baby not being swaddled, perhaps because he or she is due to be gently bathed following the trauma of entry into the world...

In terms of a sense of story, of narrative, I'm not getting much of a sense of what we might imagine took place immediately before this photograph was taken - historically, yes, (the oil paintings again) but immediately? Not so much: the blood in various places hints at birth but doesn't exactly illustrate it.  However there is a sense of what will follow, of the baby joining those on the walls after a childhood of care in the hands of their beautiful and child-focused mother. 

If you want to donate to Crisis, you can do so here.