29.09.11 Dear Photograph

I found this very cute website through LENSCRATCH who posted about it and I loved it as soon as I saw it! Dear Photograph is a site that invites readers to submit photos of photos positioned over reality. Or, as the site’s description puts it, “take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.” I love the nostalgia and think its a perfect way to link the past and the future together.

It's a remarkably simple but powerful idea, and it does indeed evoke emotional responses by the reader. For example, a photograph of a smiling child. Behind her is a stocky man in a baseball cap, with his arms resting on hers. "Dear Photograph," the caption reads, "Dad is gone… but the strength of his arms will always be around us." It's signed "Holly".

Not all of the photographs are about loss of a loved one. There's a picture of a young girl with a hula-hoop. "I wish I could still hula-hoop like I used to," says the caption.

Dear Photograph is a remarkable demonstration of the power of ordinary, humdrum photographs to evoke memories. Photographs freeze moments in time, reminding us of who we were – and, by implication, of who we have become.

Though, unfortunately, when I researched this site in the media the Guardian shed light on the darker side of the site. Firstly the upfront terms and agreements states you basically give away your rights to the photograph, effectively giving away your memories. 

They also talk of the sobering thought that the site, these photographs are only possible due to the past success of analogue photography, which give the aesthetic of ‘the past’ which is then re-photographed digitally and that this will hinder the site in say 30 years time. They go on to discuss the flaws in digital technology and its inability to create impermanent images which are stored as a digital file and will therefore take away from the idea of photography as having a physical outcome and the fact that photographs may not live on after there owners death.

Martin Parr concluded a piece on ‘how to take better holiday photographs’ with the dimple advice: print them! "We are in danger," he wrote, "of having a whole generation that has no family albums, because people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted."

12.09.2011 Corinne Day

The London Gallery will this month pay tribute to revolutionary photographer Corinne Day to mark the one year anniversary of her death on 27th August. Her use of candid style techniques to capture provocative and often biographical images came to define the 90's aesthetic that rejected the high-gloss images of mainstream magazines, which later became known as the fashion grunge scene.
In an interview by Dazed Digital, a colleague of Day, Alice Correia discussed the relevance of Corinne Day's photography in today’s society.
DD: How do you think the images speak to today’s society?
Alice Correia: Of course Corinne’s work will always draw a certain amount of attention because of who they depict, but beyond that, I think these images speak of a moment of teenage self-exploration; of a time when anything was possible because the whole world is at your fingertips.

Even 20-odd years later, Corinne’s photographs of Kate Moss, George Clements and Rosemary Ferguson still have a freshness; Corinne rejected the ‘Amazonian’ shoulder-padded look of the 1980s because it was fake; given the rise of fake tan, Botox and plastic surgery in today’s media culture, there is something to be celebrated in images of natural look teenagers, be they skipping down an empty highway, rolling a spliff, or slouching around at home.

I wanted to blog about this interview because, although I am not a huge fan of Corinne Day’s documentary work (though I like some of her more commercial fashion projects) I fell that with any controversial work, both sides of an argument must be heard before you can make up your mind about something. When researching the debate around the nature of Day’s work and its heroin chic content the majority of the views are negative, focusing on the adverse effects the scenes may depict, whereas when I came across Alice Correia’s comment on Corinne rejecting the falseness of the 1980’s culture and implying that we should celebrate images which show natural looking teenagers, being teenagers I had to conclude that in this case the photographs have both good and evils to them and in today’s culture which is driven by consumers and fake self-identity they can be viewed as equally helpful as they are damaging and therefore, like most things worth thinking about in life cannot have a definite answer and we should instead enjoy the aesthetic feel to Corinne Days work and remember her as a key photographer of the 90’s and her contribution to changing the attitudes of the fashion world.