Exercise: The photograph as an Intersection of Gazes.

Exercise: The photograph as an Intersection of Gazes.

Before reading this article I had only considered three interested parties as being interested parties in a photograph: the subject, the photographer, and the viewer.

This article certainly challenges the way I view an image but is not the way I take an image.  The Institutional Gaze is still mine in that I carry out my own editing, cropping, and selection.  The rest is down to the viewer.

My photographs practice changes according to the circumstances and what I want the image to say.  I have obtained images both with and without the subjects permission, but I hope without exploiting them.  

The following three images were taken with a different message in mind.

The first was for the Digital Practice module of this course and was taken in Spain.  This was a set that I took to show how the financial crash had affected Spain.  The subject was a willing, and genuine, participate.  She is holding a card that roughly states she is desperate for a job and is good at domestic work.  I wanted to make her look as pathetic as possible so as to highlight the poverty that some people had fallen into so photographed her from a high and so as to diminish her.  My then tutor said I had been unkind to her but I achieved what I set out to obtain.

The second was an attempt to show how pictures can tell lies.  The scene is the main street in Canterbury, the two boys were in fact obviously students from the University.  This is a picture I took on the fly from inside my flapping coat.  The subjects were unaware.   The angle of the image, the close cropping and the fact there are three Afro Caribbean and one lounging white man give an edgy feel to the image.  This was in reality an innocent scene, but the way in which I presented it tells a different story, and is a lie.  

The last is one I took in holiday is obviously taken with the permission of the subject.  A straightforward portrait in good light with a little fill in flash.  

I, as the photographer, can only control a number of the Gaze possibilities; the rest are up to the viewer.