Sample Literature Review: June 2019
Drawn and printmaking theme
A range of texts are providing the knowledge base for this theme, including The unfinished Print.2001 Parshall.P, Sell.S. Brodie.J. National Gallery of Washington; Water-based screenprinting Hoskins, Steve. 2001 London: A. & C. Black;Perspectives on contemporary printmaking. Pelzer-Montada. R.2018. Manchester University Press. These provide valuable insights into the technical, aesthetic and current understanding of the subject area. Pelzer–Montada describes through her selected essays current thinking. Hoskins delivers the technical parameters of the silk-screen medium and The unfinished print describes the history of this genre of printmaking. Each point to an area of investigation to be extended through research. Motada into digital influenced printmaking applications; Hoskins a technical update from 2001 to 2020 and unfinished prints through practice research into the concept of ‘non finito’; materiality of printmaking and the artist’s openness to chance. Taken together the research findings will provide a current argument for the drawn and printmaking theme with a liberation from likeness, towards whole contemporary portraits.
Portrait Artists and Photography theme:
I haveuncovered historic applications of photographic imagery by artists and printmakers since the introduction of the medium and created a lineage to contemporary smart phone photography. Ford.C. 2004. A Pre-Raphaelite partnership: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Robert Parsons. Burlington magazine. May 2004, No. 1214 – Vol 146; Keller, J., 1993. Walker Evans and many are called: Shooting blind. History of Photography. Building on this historic knowledge is research into the social and cultural implications of discreet smart phone photography; the ethical and legal issues of surreptitious image gathering: Phillips, S.S. ed., 2010. Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera. Tate Pub; McKay,C. 2013. Covert: The artist as voyeur.Surveillance and Society. These investigations are providing emergent photographic discourses that influence and inform each other and provoke new knowledge in the domain of digital portraiture.
Ethical, conceptual and philosophical foundations.
Post feminist and colonial philosophy posits thatgender, race, class, and other aspects of our identities are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities. Concepts of ‘positionality’ Linda M Alcoff,. 1991 The Problem of Speaking for Others.Cultural Critique No 20. University of Minnesota. Alongside positionality Alocoff aligns the concept of ‘location’, by which she means that the ‘social’ location of the author in relation to the other they are speaking about ‘has an epistemically significant impact on the speaker’s [artist’s] claims’. These concepts provide a contemporary lens with which to understand the ethics of discreet smart phone photography, drawn and printed portraiture. In addition the concepts of ‘lived experience’, through the Heuristic research model (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985, Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in PsychologyDe Monfort University, Leicester, UK and Institute of Psychology, Brno, CZ) and the phenomenological relationships and interactionsbetweenthe artist; sitter/participant and smart phone camera are contributing to the underpinning theoretical framework.
June 2019
