Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing is photographer and filmmaker that documents shocking, and sometimes amusing behaviour of the people of Britain. Wearing is interested in society and the British public. Most famously Wearing stopped the general public and encouraged them to write the first thing that came into their heads onto a piece of paper, and then would photograph them with it. The piece became a social commentary as it revealed the private thoughts of the public and brought them into the public sphere.

In the piece Broad Street, 2001, Wearing presented a six-screen colour video projection which lasted 40 minutes, and depicted the social scene of Broad Street in Birmingham on an average night. The piece showed people drinking, smoking, dancing and getting in and out of taxis. Unfortunately I haven't actually seen the piece within the gallery context - I have had to interpret it mainly from stills of it in books and online, so therefore my perceptions will be skewed. Apparently the surrounding video projections caused the viewer to be disorientated, - almost replicating the feeling of being inebriated and in a busy club. I, too, have been looking at creating the effect of a 'drunken haze' by using blurry lights; sometimes soft, and sometimes eratic. I also blur other parts of the image and erase other parts to further the effect. Wearing chose to film Birmingham as it is her hometown; and she wanted to show the culture of nightlife that was happening here at the time. I'm interested in creating work for the same reasons - I have also been creating work based on Birmingham Broad Street, as I want to look at the student nightlife and binge-drinking culture that is currently happening in Birmingham. The reason that I am interested in Birmingham is that I'm interested in the city, as well as the crossover of personal and collective memories of myself and other students living here for University. I have been taking my own photos and stills from videos similar to Wearing, but also collecting images from the media and online. Looking back at Wearing's work now, (at Broad Street, which is over ten years old), it really sums up an era. The fashion; hairstyles and people smoking indoors are all giveaways to the time in which the video refers to; even if at the time it was just 'current'. I want to sum up recent years in Birmingham in the same way - using similar hints to the time and place. Wearing's aim is to honestly depict life and life around her; which is really what I want to do. I am interested in the shared experiences of today and of recent times - drawing inspiration from society.

Muntean and Rosenblum

Muntean and Rosenblum create large-scale paintings of adolescent figures, often set in urban landscapes. The paintings are almost cartoon-like and show contemporary society. The individuals in the images look young and trendy; casual, but also slightly bored and disengaged. Although their clothing and fashion sense is what places these paintings into modern day, the actual painting style seems to reference the Renaissance; as they sometimes have dramatic landscapes and have an almost theatrical composition of people. Beneath the imagery is text, almost like comic-book style captions but it is far less explanatory and more philosophical than comic book text. The text could be a commentary on modern society but only if we want to make that link; as the phrases could be interpreted in different ways by different viewers.

In my own work I am interested in depicting the generation of the urban youth, similar to Muntean and Rosenblum. I find their work interesting because of how nonchalant the adolescents look; pictured casually doing everyday things. I like this idea of the subject matter being current or everyday life; - I'm not interested in creating drama or depicting particularly unusual scenes. I like the idea of capturing a sector of society, or creating a picture or mirror of society, not with commentary or judgement; just to show today's times. Muntean and Rosenblum also focus on urban settings which I'm also interested in. I live in the city so it's easy to draw inspiration from that, and it's where a denser population are. I'm not particularly interested in the classical style painting of Muntean and Rosenblum's work, but I am interested in the content. I might try and add more painting into my work in the future though, as feedback seems to be that people find most of my work to have a painterly quality.

Marianne Hirsch

Marianne Hirsch coined the term 'postmemory', and talked about it in relation to Boltanski's work. Postmemory describes how memories are inherited by the second generation after a traumatic event; their transmittance is so strong that they constitute memories in their own right, even though they happened before their births and are in fact their parents’ memories. Hirsch developed this notion in relation specifically in relation to children of Holocaust survivors; but believes the theory can be transferred to other second generation memories of traumatic events. The children of Holocaust survivors have their own memories of the trauma, even though it was the experiences of their parents; due to the passing on of information and images the memories become the child’s own. Hirsch is interested in how we remember this traumatic event; often recalling familiar images that we have seen through photography, film, television, art and cultural artefacts. Even more widely, I think the holocaust has come to be something that we all remember, even those of us that have no personal relationship to it, through the documentation and photography we still see.

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski uses photography to evoke the past in his work; particularly relating to collective memory  of the Holocaust. Boltanksi is mainly interested in the tragedies of the Holocaust, and uses photographs; often of Jewish children, to serve as a reminder to the viewer of the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust. Boltanksi works with a wide range of media comprising of sculpture, installation, photography, film and painting. Boltanski’s installations awaken memories of the Holocaust; whether it is that these memories are personal, collective, real, invented, or imagined by the viewer. The installations usually comprise of close-up photographs (of Holocaust victims, we presume); which are found photographs that Boltanski has re-photographed, cropped and enlarged, causing the facial features to lose clarity – similar to the blurry nature that our mental visualisations of a memory might have. The photographs are displayed with black desk lamps placed very close to the images, which aim their light right at the centre of the faces, giving us sinister ideas of torture and interrogation. Boltanski then adds sound, light and objects to awaken our senses and cause involuntary associations with the Holocaust. Boltanski’s added objects might include clothes, which are evoke an emotional response as we presume them to be the clothes of the people photographed. The clothes match the photographs as they appear archival in nature. Boltanski deals with memory by presenting documentation of survivors’ lives: - their clothes, their photographs, their possessions, which he describes as ‘small memory’. His installations are almost like altarpieces; their use of candles and shrine-like display making us associate them with a commemoration of death. 

In The Storehouse, Boltanski displays seven enlarged photographs of young girls resting on piles of unlabeled biscuit tins containing scraps of fabric. Archives, 1988, is of a similar nature; in which Boltanski displays thirty photographs, each atop a biscuit tin with an individual lamp. Both works appear to be an archive, or perhaps a memorial, of Holocaust victims’ lives. The biscuit tins, which in the past were often used as a safe and easily locatable place to keep the family documents, are displayed, weathered and rusty; having connotations with the past and the preservation/store of memory. The photographs are black-and-white, blurry and enlarged, appearing to be old and faded. Boltanski uses titling to suggest possible meanings to the viewer. The titles of two of his works, The Storehouse, which could be describing memory itself, and Archives, both refer to documentation of the past. This is further emphasised by the aged biscuit tins and faded photographs. The work becomes about collective memory because of the sense of anonymity. Unlike Goldin’s photographs, where the viewer is looking at the artist’s own personal memories, here the viewer is confronted with the memories of anonymous people. The faces are intentionally blurred so that their features lose definition and become unrecognisable. The volumes of unlabeled biscuit tins also add to the idea of a collection of unnamed people.

Boltanski doesn’t actually use ‘true’ images; - the photographs of supposed Holocaust victims are in fact of random school children, which are from magazines and newspapers, and other found sources. Boltanski then edits them in a way to forge an aged quality to the image, making viewers think they are old photographs. In my own work I am interested in editing photographs so that the viewer believes them to be something that they are not. I am not trying to create a fake ‘archive’ of a past event in the same way Boltanski does, but I do want my photographs to appear general enough that viewers can attach their own memories to them. Boltanski blurs the facial features of people in his photographs, which helps to add anonymity to the piece; making it more relatable to collective memory. This is a technique that I could use myself when I am using images of people in my work. Although I am interested in Boltanski’s work because it relates to collective memory and uses photography, I don’t want to display my work in the same way. Boltanski focuses heavily on the ‘archive’ and his work is very static in nature. What I want to do is create pieces of work that portray what we might mentally visualise when recalling a memory. It needs to appear more fleeting and have more life than Boltanski’s.

Marcel Proust

As the idea of 'memory', the struggles of perfect recollection and collective memory, have been an inspiration for my practice I decided to do some reading into memory itself. While I have been reading about memory mainly from a psychological and scientific point of view, I decided to read Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, to get a more philosophical scope on the subject. Proust coined the term 'involuntary memory' in Swann's Way (Vol I In Search of Lost Time). Proust distinguished between voluntary and involuntary memory; voluntary referred to a person consciously trying to recollect a past memory, whereas an involuntary memory is when a sensory experience might trigger a memory. Familiar smells and tastes might take us back to our childhood without us actively trying to recall that memory. For example, the taste of children's sweets or smell/texture of plasticine. Within the novel there are several occurrences in which a sensory experience triggers a memory for Proust. The most famous of which is when the taste of a madeleine cake invokes a memory of his childhood:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way).


If I am interested in the idea of collective memory I need to think about how I can trigger a memory for a viewer. There is a difference between a viewer seeing my work and consciously trying to recall similar memories, which would be a 'voluntary' memory, or whether the memory is triggered for them by familiar imagery, smells and sounds etc ('involuntary' memory). At the moment I want to continue concentrating on solely imagery in evoking memories for the viewer. I need to get better accomplished at the techniques I am currently using before I can think about introducing more performative aspects to my work.