Sharp Focus June 2024

MESSAGE FROM YOUR CHAIRMAN

July 2024

Hi all

The trouble started when we were to judge the February submissions – the projector wouldn’t work. Then, after much running around trying to borrow a projector for our club meeting and not being able to get one, it meant that our next few meetings would once again revert to Zoom (much to Lynn’s delight). A week later the projector was handed in for repair with the promise that it should be ready in about two weeks. Six weeks later and we were no nearer getting it repaired – being eventually told that the ‘mother board’ for that model was no longer available.

With the Committee’s agreement it was decided that it was time to buy a new projector, and Soulby offered to look into it. The club owes a great debt of gratitude to Soulby for all the time and effort he put into finding the right one. He not only contacted various members of other photographic clubs, but also worked through the various specifications of the many possible options available. Thanks also go to Peter for also helping Soulby. The final choice of projector was an Optoma HD30LV costing R16,990-00. I wasn’t at our May meeting so wasn’t able to see the projector at work, but by all accounts it worked well.

Thanks also go to Betzi for all the organising she has been doing to make sure our outings and workshops have worked so well this year. Our next workshop, with Ken Gerhardt, is on Monday, 10^th June – the venue is still to be confirmed. Then if there is enough interest we will do a ‘walkabout’ shoot with Ken. Please diarise the 10^th as it is import to show those who go to the trouble of arranging and preparing the workshop that we appreciate what they are doing for the club.

Geoff

 

FROM YOUR EDITOR’S DESK

For once in my rather negatively stellar photography career I have been in the right place at the right time. And wow, even if no one ever sees the images that I have on my PC that’s also OK, because I saw and captured the most incredible sunset that I have ever seen.

On my first trip to Britain very many years ago I was persuaded to travel to Scotland to see the Oban sunsets. Oban sits on the west coast of Scotland and is renowned for its sunsets, so marvel I did from a boat trip round the islands. Then many years later I dragged Errol from Sussex up to Scotland, also to experience the sunsets. No marvelling this time, though, just thick black clouds and a disappointed husband.

Back to Fish Hoek. On Saturday evening I was driving down towards the beach, and between roads and buildings I saw a bank of cloud above the mountains across the sea. The cloud formation was huge, reaching to the heavens in various shades of gold. No camera with me, so what to do, what to do? I tried calling Errol to ask him to meet me on the beach with my camera bag, but no luck, no answer.

A quick U turn, a charge into the house for the camera bag, praying that my camera was actually in the bag, couple of words to Errol, who leapt into the car beside me, and in what seemed like two seconds we were on the beach and already frozen. Fortunately my camera had been cleaned, and after quickly deciding on a fast speed I started clicking.

The challenge about doing things this way, rushing from unexpected beginning to end, is that you don’t have the time to stop, widen your eyes and absorb the beauty ahead of you. Or to decide on the f-stop that will be happy to gel with the speed you’ve chosen. And as for ISO, don’t worry – just give it permission to know what it needs!

Tonight was cold,  in fact freezing. Which meant that there were only three people with cameras on the beach – two with DSLRs and one with an Ipad. And believe it or not, all women. Our brave men had already dived into the coffee shop for a bit of warmth, and dare I suggest something that was not coffee?

The point of all this from me is just gratitude – gratitude that I was afforded the opportunity to spot what was pending, gratitude that I could grab my bag and ignore the cold; and even if I hadn’t had my camera at hand, gratitude to see the magnificence displayed before me, and that I saw the opportunity and took it. And when I had a quick chat with the other two ladies, they felt exactly the same.

Maureen

 

JUDGE’S CORNER

Last month I continued talking about the powerlessness of the sitter when it came to portraiture, and how the power to tell the story lay with the photographer and viewer.

I left you with the following image and an invitation to try to know it: what are you looking at; who is this person; what is the photographer trying to say?

CLICK ON IMAGE TO VIEW LARGE

I just noticed that last month’s article has been severely redacted – presumably an accident while prepping for the new newsletter – and only a tiny portion of the article I wrote over several hours (and the accompanying images) has remained. I can only hope that you saw the article in full before the snip-snippery!

If not, the gist of it was how the sitter is powerless to communicate through the photo, and essentially has no agency.

Of course we do have sitters who are in a position of some sort of power, e.g. a chief of industry who can hire photographers and then say to them, I wish to be seated in this chair by this desk, wearing this outfit, all the while meticulously pruning a leaf from my desk-top bonzai – and thus carefully crafting semiotics of e.g. power, efficiency and a pretend openness to climate change considerations.

But by and large the power resides with the photographer (who decides how to show the sitter and under what circumstances) and the viewers who have blind faith in their ability to interpret what they are looking at, yet are totally unaware of the cognitive bias that has them interpreting the scene according to their own experiences and not that of the sitter.

The image above is one that attempts to address this power imbalance. The title is Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island, and it is by Hoda Afshar (2018).

Boochani is a refugee on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea: if you are a single male refugee arriving in Australian territory by boat, this is where you get sent. I am well aware of the full gamut of political sympathies to be found within a club like ours, and also that thanks to what is happening in Europe and America this is a hot-button topic, but it is not my intention here to convince you of the correctness of any particular view vis a vis refugees. However, I would ask you to think for a moment about the disempowerment experienced by people who flee their home countries for fear of persecution or death only to be sent to an island that is in a different territory from the one they fled to (presumably, as with Guantanamo Bay, for reasons of deniability), where they may spend years waiting for the outcome of their application for refugee status with no interaction with normal society, severely restricted and constantly monitored. It is a hopeless situation, one that must take a massive toll on one’s spirit, and which often surely would shatter all hopes and aspirations beyond the will to survive.

Extraordinarily, while on Maunus Boochani wrote a book of his experience as a refugee, using a mobile phone and WhatsApp to smuggle out thousands of PDF files. It was written in Persian and translated to English, and went on to win one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards, even as he remained an inmate on Manus island.

Hoda Afshar, an Iranian documentary photographer who is based in Melbourne, managed to get permission to go and do some documentary work with the men on Manus where she was restricted and constantly monitored, and the photograph is part of a series called “Remain” which involves collaboration between Afshar and the sitters. In the case of the portrait above, in which we see Boochani bare-chested, eyes confronting the camera directly, with smoke rising behind him, Boochani had been asked how he would like to be represented. According to Afshar, “Behrouz said from the beginning that he wanted an octopus on his head.”

“For two days, the local fishermen were looking for an octopus, but they couldn’t catch any. So I said ‘Ok, we don’t have the octopus, so what else do you want to express yourself with?’ And he said, ‘Fire’. In the background of that image, we had a whole crew of people; one was holding a piece of wood, one was putting petrol on a piece of fabric wrapped around the wood, another was saying, ‘One, two, three, look at the camera.’ It was a group effort.”

In the end they explored other ways to express his sense of self and the situation he was in, and this was where he arrived, a simple, central pose, stripped of the authority or dignity bestowed by the appropriate clothes, with someone holding a burning taper off-camera so that the smoke billows nebulously behind him until it encounters his head and starts dissipating. Although he is a co-author of the image, he was disturbed by the end result, a disturbing image of a troubled man. When the photographer contacted him and showed him the image:

“I said, ‘This is you, Behrouz, with your passion, your fire, and your writer’s hands. It symbolises your resistance.’ He heard this, and paused. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘But I do not see myself in this picture. I only see a refugee. Someone whose identity has been taken from him. A bare life, standing there beyond the borders of Australia, waiting and staring.’ He fell silent, then said, ‘This image scares me.’”

It is right that he should be scared: this image is not of the person he once was or had fled in the hope of becoming – it is of the person he had been forced to become during this period of his life:

“Behrouz talks a lot about this image of the refugee idealised as one of two different paradigms; either they’re an angel or they’re evil, there’s no grey space in the middle,” says Afshar.

This is a really important insight into the decisions made by him about how he wished to be photographed – compare this with the way colonial photographers used to photograph the typologies of the people they encountered, or even the “poverty porn” photos of crying, starving, African babies that was prevalent in charity ads seeking aid from willing pockets until a decade or two ago.

It may be difficult to see how the decision to have an octopus on your head, or indeed a burning taper behind you could be such a powerful tool towards self-representation rather than a mere whim, but I would refer you to the powerful poetic tradition in Persia/Iran, and the importance poetic imagery would take on as an allegorical representation of a reality that is too liminal to describe in functional language. In another example from the same project we have a portrait of  Emad, a Kurdish-Iranian refugee seated while passively resisting a downpour of sand. “I asked them to choose something natural that will help them express their emotions,” said Afshar.

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1. “Emad, this stateless Kurdish guy said to me, the sand is my land, the land I’m torn from. Land is the most precious thing in Kurdish culture. So we talked about how we could use sand. He threw sand at the camera, he threw sand in the air and at some point, because he has this masculine body, we poured sand over his body which makes him look fragile and puts a weight on his shoulders and the pain that he kept within him is there.”

There are other examples of photographers collaboratively engaging with their subjects. In one instance a photographer workshopped with children from a really poor community (I am pretty sure it was the Appalachians, but for the world of me I cannot relocate the original thesis on the project), where she workshopped with financially destitute and hopeless kids about image-making and ways of representation, and then sent them off for several days with disposable cameras with a single brief: to explore ways of representing themselves in the resulting images. As I recall, there were some spectacular, unexpected, results. Not only were these financially disempowered children empowered in the crafting of their own self-images, but the artist also unharnessed the wonderful creativity of children unconstrained by adult ‘rules’ of creativity and expression. As a children’s author once wrote (something like): you give a child a talking doll, and it says three phrases, but that’s all it can do. By its very nature it sets its own limitations. But you give him a box, and he is a bus driver one moment, a pirate captain the next – the possibilities are endless.

The story of Hoda Afshar’s collaboration with the refugees at Manus does not end with the photographs, however. The next step was to print them large and to display them along a grim industrial section along the busy train commute into Melbourne – hopefully resulting in discussion, curiosity, questions. And in the process these people who were encouraged to explore ways of representing themselves, were able to say “Look! This is me, see who I am.” to the very people who had refused to recognise them, and denied them any agency in their self-actualisation.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO VIEW LARGE

1. “Making these images was a real bonding experience. Before shooting, we were cooking together, we had fires, we’d sit around and talk about the policies that made them invisible. It was an intriguing, beautiful, sad experience. The trust we built up and the trust they put into it was really important and made the responsibility twice as big.I’m not saying that other approaches are wrong and mine is right. I don’t know if what I’m doing is the right thing. But some of the approaches we do have have an opposite impact and make us immune to images of suffering. We stop seeing people as individuals, we see them as masses. I’m in search for new possibilities.”

Winners of Digital Image of the Month (June 2024)
Please click on images to see titles and photographer names.

Evaluation of Digital Photography
Digital Entries
Title	Category	Author	Star	Score	Award	Points
A Lifetime in a Face	Portrait	Geora Zadok	1	11	COM	4
A Stroll in Venice Beauty	Open	Peter Franklin	3	11	Gold	3
Aqua Flora	Open	Derek Goldman	4	10	Silver	2
Bedraggled	Nature	Derek Goldman	4	12	Gold	3
Calm before the Storm	Landscape	Betzi Pierce	3	10	Gold	3
Curves in the Air	Open	Margaret Silk	1	10	Gold	3
Evasive Tactics	Open	Peter Brandt	MB	10	Bronze	1
Ewe Run	Wildlife	Lorne Sulcas	4	11	Gold	3
Facing the Light	Open	Ceridwyn Jamieson	4	10	Silver	2
Got You	Nature	Johan Kloppers	MB	13	COM	4
Grass Bells	Macro	Ceridwyn Jamieson	4	11	Gold	3
Intense	Nature	Geoff Jamieson	4	11	Gold	3
Lessor Doublecollared Sunbird	Nature	Johan Kloppers	MB	13	COM	4
Loading the Boat	Scapes	Mike Wesson	3	9	Silver	2
Neighbour	PJ	Peter Brandt	MB	11	Silver	2
Oil Can	Open	Margaret Silk	1	10	Gold	3
Onion so Blue	StillLife	Geora Zadok	1	11	COM	4
Pink Hibiscus	Open	Mike Wesson	3	10	Gold	3
Portal to Light	Street	Marian Shinn	2	11	Gold	3
Robin Red Breast	Open	Lynn Toms	3	9	Silver	2
Smits Aurora Sky	Open	Peter Franklin	3	10	Gold	3
Starburst	Open	Geoff Jamieson	4	9	Silver	2
Street Eyes	Travel	Marian Shinn	2	10	Gold	3
Tasty Morsel	Nature	Lorne Sulcas	4	10	Silver	2
They have Abandoned Me	Open	Lynn Toms	3	11	Gold	3
Three Rondawels	Landscape	Betzi Pierce	3	10	Gold	3
Venetian Night Lights	Open	Didi Franklin	3	11	Gold	3
Walking By	Street Photography	Didi Franklin	3	10	Gold	3

Winners of Theme Image of the Month – (June 2024)