Photography: Martha Rosler - Part 1

As part of the “Key Practitioners in Art and Communication Design” series of lectures this term, we are going to be looking at singular works, or a singular artist and their accompanying body of work each lecture. We are going to be examining how things are made, the meaning of a piece and how it works. This involves analysing the practise behind a piece to understand how it has been put together. 

After attending the lecture I watched the interview with Martha Rosler that was suggested. This has fed further into my understanding of the topic and can be viewed at the end of this post.

The focus of today's lecture was Photographer Martha Rosler, whom started to become noticed in the 1970’s for her pieces around representation. Documentary photography was becoming more prolific at this point and in particular the subject was usually focused on the “other”, that being people whom are culturally different from the majority. By culturally I am talking about wealth, where they sit on the class system, gender and race while there was also a focus on the “strange” or unusual. Rosler wanted to not condone, but question the ethical and moral standing of this style of photography. She created photographs herself as a way to auto-critique the method and examine how it was and still is being used. Rosler wanted to capture a history of these people considered “other” in a way that would question the practises of the time. However Rosler didn’t want to infringe the rights to privacy she believes the homeless and unusual should have.

Martha Rosley - The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems - 1974/75Sourced from afterall.org

She achieved this by photographing Bowery in New York, which was considered a skid row, meaning a place where only those worse off would reside, so to speak. However by including their absence this removed the intrusive invasion of their space and allowed the photos form and setting to be the focus, therefore bringing attention to the style of photography. Rosler called the compilation “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems”. Two inadequate systems, as not only did it comprise of photographs but also the written word, that which describes the homeless, as they are perceived. Her choice of title at first strikes me as though she is referring to her own work as “inadequate”, though on consideration she may be indirectly referring to the documentary photographers’ who practised that which she questioned and those who wrote articles about the poverty as being inadequate in describing their experience.

Martha Rosler - Patio View - 1967-72
Sourced from moma.org

In Rosler’s series “Bringing The War Home” she created flyers out of collage and produced batches of these through photocopying as to spread awareness about the unspoken turmoil of the war. This was about the civilians living in those war-zones and the women whom were rarely considered in the news of war. The pieces are juxtapositions of American living expectations in contrast to the horrendous devastation brought on by the war. The scenes were centred on the home due to the traditional expectations of women to be the homemakers and therefore this brought across the realisation of its affects upon women and families.

Due to the considerable length of my understanding and analysis, I will continue this topic on a further post. Below is the video interview with Martha Rosler as mentioned.

Conversation between Martha Rosler and Stephanie Schwartz - Paris Photo Platform (EN) from Paris Photo on Vimeo.