Exercise – Discontinuities (P.24)

Make a selection of up to five photographs from your personal or family collection. They can be as recent or as old as you wish. The only requirement is that they depict events that are relevant to you on a personal level and couldn’t belong to anyone else. Using OCA forums such as the discssion forum on OCA Student, ask the learning communities to provide short captions or explanations for your photographs. Summarise your findings and make them public in the same forums that you used for your research. Make sure that you also add this to your learning log.

This exercise is based discontinuity which was an idea put forward by John Berger in his book poruced with the photographer Jean Mohr Another Way of Telling, first published in 1982. In it Berger argues that all photographs are ambiguous because they are taken out a continuity and so cannot represent the experience of the event depitcted (Berger & Mohr:1995).

I posted five images shown below on the OCA Student discuss forum.

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Unfortunately I only received two responses (in future I need to think more carefully how to title posts to generate more interest) which are shown below.

Lynda’s captions were:

1. Mom making a toast
2. Nostalgia – the days we could see people’s faces
3. Young freedom fighters – just missing the Che T-shirts.
4. Space to run
5. (Time) travel

And Gary’s were:

1. Listening
2. Traveling bored
3. Cuba Cubs
4. By the field
5. Social distancing

Even though I only had a couple of responses I think the replies do illustrate the point Berger was making about a photograph not being able to represent the experience.

The first image is of my mother from 2006 and it is the last photograph of her I could find that I thought captured who she was before her long battle with Alzheimer’s. A cropped version of this image was used on the order of service at her funeral in 2019. The comments from Linda and Gary are, understandably, a fairly literal interpretation of what they saw in the image, however, to me as the photographer, the image is part of a continuity, an important, although at the time unknown, milestone; the last family gathering where my mother was the person I knew before Alzheimer’s robbed her of her personality.

The second image is of my daughter, bottom left, on a New York subway train in 2008. I liked Lynda’s oblique reference to Covid-19 and Gary’s description of most underground journeys. I don’t remember where we were going to or from on this journey, however, I do remember spending ten days in New York with my wife and children. It was their first visit to the US and only a couple of months before Barak Obama was elected.

Linda picked up on the revolutionary elements on picture three and Gary the fact that it was taken in Cuba. The photograph was taken in 2007 and to me is part of a pair with the photographs taken in New York the following year. The contrast between the two countries was massive but the holidays were equally enjoyable.

Photograph four is a good example of Berger’s thoughts on discontinuitites. The captions from Linda and Gary pick up on what is happening in the image, however, the image gives no idea of time. The photograph was taken on Boxing Day and, like the earlier photograph of my mother, it is the last time she was well enough for my parents to be able to have family around at Christmas.

The final photograph was taken at a metro station in Bilbao. I think it is interesting the Gary’s caption was framed in response to the covid-19 crisis and Lynda’s was a more straight-forward observation about travel. I’m not sure if Lynda’s comment about time travel referred to travelling back or forward in time but for the record the image is from 2005.

Bibliography

Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (1995) Another way of telling. (1st Vintage International) New York: Vintage Books.