User:Elleke Hageman/Trimester 3/Reading and Writing/Draft essay on method

I am still working on this…

The project that I’m doing is a photographic series/documentary installation which concentrates on my relationship with my parents and is a process to understand the ways of their working and my personal relationship with them. Momentarily I am working on a photographic serie on my father and more of my family. My father is mildly autistic and can often be socially awkward. When the project started last summer, it derived from an interest to show my father in the way he really is to outsiders and to give him credit. It came from a sort of protection urge in which I wanted to protect him from the “evil” that others do to him. He is a very generous man and good at heart but he can be socially awkward and people tend to use his goodness. Use him for their own benefit, don’t respect him and don’t value him in that sense for what he does. It was a means to portray him so that others could understand him. I wanted to show his ideas and his actions to the rest of the world. I have the feeling he often does things for others to create a certain value for himself, but it is very hard to create a certain value for yourself in such a way. Because I think this is very interesting and beautiful. I really tried to emphasize the beauty of him and all the good things he does. I came across a lot of discoveries about his life. I had the feeling that it had to become a universal documentary about someone and that others had to be able to understand him. But along the way, my interest changed into a way for me personally to understand him and why he does certain things in the way he does them or why he acts a certain way. It became a way for me, personally, to understand him better. The documentary uptill that point had been quite abstract and distant. I realised that actually it wasn’t about this documentary at all but about my personal relationship with him. This project also has to do with a certain annoyance: I often wonder why he didn’t make more of his life? He has so many capacities why didn’t he go further than where he went. Why didn’t he force himself in a better position?

In the proces of documenting him which in the documentational fase I filmed him in different social contexts and observed how he acts in these different social contexts and how others react to him. At a certain point I started gathering more. I documented him and his surroundings. I took pictures of his body and of his belongings, I documented his house in photography, I recovered undeveloped films. I would put all of this together and just saw where it would take me. In this process I noticed that the ideas I have of him often don't coincide with reality. It started of with ideas of his knowledge physics and science and later it seemed that there were more fields in which my idea of him was different from reality. I used to glorify my father, I thought he was really intelligent and that he has a lot of knowledge about, photography, physics, electronics, technology etc. all things he is interested in but the process had become a demystification of him as a person. I had created a fantastical construct which blurred my vision. When I got older I noticed that he actually is a very strange man and that he is short sighted and that he is socially abnormal, he is slightly autistic and he is a man who doesn’t take care of himself. I became annoyed by his shortsightedness and the fact everything has to be done in a particular way. This mystification of him as a person and the demystification of it now is very interesting. What is interesting to me is this fantasy I created around him. This childish glorification of a father. He himself also mystifies his life, maybe as all people do. For example his travelling which he talks about a lot. He took a certain trip in the past, he hitchhiked with a friend to Poland. This one event seems very beautifull and seems like a big event in his life whereas it was only a couple of weeks. Also it is just a story which he re-tells. On the other side how many big events does a person need in his life? But sometimes it does not have to do with a fantasy that he has made but a fantasy I have made. I always had the feeling he was afraid to become a proffessional photographer but actually it was just the fact that you have to work really hard to become a proffesional and get credit for it, this is a very pragmatic solution. He then said it’s better to keep it as a hobby which is a very pragmatic solution in a sense. And the technisue is of course very interesting. Next to that it has to do with confronting myself with a deterioration process, the fact that he is growing older, getting weaker. There’s a certain fear. Since I was a teenager there has been a fear of him dying because he is older than most fathers are.

Where lies the limit of the image? As in that it's a very personal approach to a psychological problem. For me the image does not stop at the edges. The image continues in my relationship with my father. My father helps me a lot and I was confronted with the fact that his energy level is not the same as it used to be, that he cannot lift so much weight anymore and while playing with his grandson and he doesn’t have the same energy as that he had with us. I saw he is not the same man or in the same state as when I was younger. And I was confronted with that and it is something that is worrying me. It is as though I am capturing him before he dies.

Also he doesn’t take care of himself. There was a ball on his belly. It turned out that there was a breach in the wall of his stomach and some intestines were in betweenthe regular skin and the stomach wall. He didn’t go to the doctor when the ball appeared. Basically he waits too long to go to the doctor because often he doesn’t think it is necessary, he doesn’t take good care of himself. Recently there was also a threat of skin cancer. If you’re not taking care of yourself and if you don’t go to see a doctor and there is actually something wrong then dying becomes more apparent.

I believe that the beginning of the documentional proces gave a really good insight in how he is and what he thinks is important. In some of the pictures I took you can see that his house is very dirty which gives an insight in how he doesn’t think cleaning is important. Through this collation and discovery and asymilation and analysis I re-contextualize the footage, images etc I have gathered. The function of the documentation is to provide structure and meaning. In the gathering I sometimes accidently came across topics that are interesting. Once he gave me some film roles because I wanted to start again with analogue photography. There were some roles which had not been developed. When I recovered them it turned out that that some hadn’t been developed for up to 20 years. Usually the ideas of what I want to document or photograph derive from a hunch, an intuition. A lot of this documenting starts with an idea of what could be interesting to document and then I think of a way how I could portray this. Because I at acertain point realised that it was also about his detterioration his vukneribility I became interested in his physical state as well. So I photographed his body, parts of it. After that when I realised it was about his personal relationship in between me and him I wanted to place myself in the photograph as well. It has now developed into a photographic series in which I place myself with my father in a room. I first alter his personal space to stage something that I have in mind. They are interpretaive photographs with a hinch of an ethically evaluative photograph in them as well. I seek to explain how my relationship is but meanwhile I make a personal interpretation and maybe even give an ethical judgement. In this photographical series I focus on this childish longing and the strange relationship I have with him. In his house we create an kind off cinematographical setting in which we almost act and in which I am looking for the boundary of what is still possible. The real is transformed into representation. There is a confusion creted between the real and the imaginary in staging these dfferent settings. Disregarding distinction between real and imaginary. the threshhold to an imaginary and real space where. Enter imaginatively realms that uncanny but similar to our own. The historical real is neither text nor narrative. Documentary directs us toward the world of brute reality even as it also seeks to interpret it and the expectation that it will do so is ine powerfull differnece from fiction.

The communicational process through our bodies is a main subject in these photographs. When I wanted to emphasize his vulnerability in photographs I photographed parts of his nude body. Being undressed in these photographs is for me not only a sign of vulnerability but also a way to adress my subject matter more clearly. In my opinion clothes are distracting. Clothes are a certain layer we put on ourselves to make a certain representation of ourselves or they are loaded with representations or connotations which are put on certain clothes by our spectators. Clothes are a layer which blur our visions and interpretations. CS Pierce talks about how in the referencescheme: knowledge of the truth, reality. If there's in the perciever knowledge about who the character in the picture is: my father. They can make a certain connotation to the role that we are playing. The role of us as actors. The act of doing is very important in making the photographs. The act of cleaning out the space together with my parent and after searching for a pose...

is a process which makes me and my parent connect but also gives them some say in the communication in the picture. This makes it more genuine?

2 versions of the imaginary. What is the image? The limit where the image ceases, it speaks infinately about itself.