Capturing the Moment: Join the Conversation

Toni: It feels like a very sort of romantic image, I don’t know how much I trust it.  I did sort of feel like the photographer was trying to force me to feel a certain way without letting me actually want to feel that way.

Hannah: It’s very convenient how her children are placed beside her, almost as if they’re props and not actual people.

Deborah: Yeah, I was going to ask, is it a studio portrait? I don’t know.

Elliott: This one, it actually belongs to a wider series, there are four other shots from this shoot, and she took the pictures as she was moving towards the mother. So they start quite far back and as you cycle through them she gets progressively closer and closer, and this is the closest shot. You see how the children are turning away? They’re not turned away in the other photos, so it makes me feel that something about it is mannered, or staged, or directed.

Marie: The fact the children are turned away, their body language is really visible. It’s why the artwork has its own frequency of discomfort which is then enunciated by Florence’s face as well. Although you can’t see the children’s face it’s very much represented in the body language which is quite unnerving I think, I can definitely hear a lot of tension in the image as well.

Sophie: I feel like the photographer has captured her in quite a vulnerable position with her children, so it’s quite sad to hear that vulnerability was then beautified and edited to produce the image that we see. Because she’s obviously showing such vulnerability, for that to then be misconstrued and told in a different way, I think is quite sad. So hearing the context of it, it’s quite a sad piece.

Alessia: It’s kind of interesting, because at first I didn’t know this backstory, so I thought this was an image of the struggle of tiredness or something. Now to me she just looks annoyed, or kind of like “okay, take this picture, I need to go.” After you hear the story you cannot unsee it anymore in the image, I feel. It now suddenly looks so staged, the more I look at it, the more its like... almost a parody, I don’t know.

Sophie: I find it quite confusing; I feel like it plays on a quite harrowing part of my brain. But then also, there’s something quite fantastical - and I don’t even know if it’s theatrical or comical – about it. So it very much splits my emotions I think, looking at it for the first time.

Melba: It’s very strong, emotionally it feels very strong, it’s like it’s passing something on. I said it feels like a horror story, but it does have very strong emotions in it.

Marie: If they could shout at us or talk at us in this space, would their voices echo?

Deborah: I mean the noise from it is very loud, I imagine a nursery or a playground with screaming and laughing and crying and all that family chaos really coming out.

Alessia: The fact that she decided to use a kind of imaginary narrative and imaginary characters to show her reasons and feelings about a subject, I think is what allows her... It’s like she’s putting her brain on the canvas in a way. If this was a staged picture it would feel very different, it would feel fake, but to me this feels very real because it’s a drawing.

Hannah: The perspective is really, really confusing for me, it’s adding to this whole sense of chaos. The central figure is absolutely ginormous compared to everything else, and so is that orange cat thing in the top right. The more I look at the individual figures the more disturbed I am by what they’re getting up to. Like the back left – I didn’t really know what that was but now I see it’s maybe the figure of a woman cradling a stork?

Deborah: And the dog and the insect? I mean that’s just so strange. A dog being attacked by a giant ant?

Melba: I feel like they’re dancing.

Marie: They’re dancing?

Melba: Yeah, the way everyone is placed, and moving with their feet, it’s like they’re actually doing a dance, that’s what it feels like.

Marie: So although they’re in the same frame, they’re quite close to each other, they don’t seem very conscious of each other's body. It’s almost like the other person that’s in this artwork is nature. Nature is the other subject that they’re all kind of in conflict or in conversation with. Either they’re looking at the sky or they’re feeling the wind. And because they’re having this conversation, or the wind is taking over, it’s affecting everyone’s perception of the space.

Sophie: When I first entered the room I definitely felt like it was very overwhelming, but the more I’m here, looking at the light, it feels like I’m in daytime, it feels like I’m outside. And I almost can’t imagine this photograph on paper without the light, because I feel like that’s part of the immersive experience. This does feel like being outside on a kind of lukewarm day.

Alessia: To me it feels very cinematic, like almost looking at TV or a movie. And in fact maybe to your question about how do we feel about the relationship with nature – this seems like the cinema version of what wind does, which suddenly takes your hat and makes it fly very high. That’s not how wind works it real life. At best it would just fall, in the water probably, in a very anticlimactic way.

Elliott: There’s all sorts of little people running around in the background, up to different things, that I hadn’t even noticed yet.

Marie: Ah yeah there’s another red hat. Is it the same person being reproduced maybe, do you think? And that hat looks really weird in the sky I just realised, It doesn’t look like a hat at all.

Sophie: It looks like a bird.

Marie: Like a bird?

Sophie: Yeah.

Hannah: He looks so happy that his hat is in the sky.

Sofia: It’s interesting how that’s the only face that you see, all of the other people’s faces are covered.

Sophie: It’s like the story is just about that one person, he’s just the centre of it all.

Sophie: I think it’s really interesting how they’re showing people looking at art how they naturally would. Because some people are looking down, which I think is really nice, because a lot of images of people looking at art are very staged, and everyone’s looking very intently at the piece. But actually that’s not how everyone interacts with art, people interact with art in very different ways. It’s showing more of the natural ways that people go about a gallery and the ways that people be in a gallery, which I think is really nice.

Deborah: Because the photograph is given this huge scale it gives it a certain grandeur. And the frame of the painting is inside the frame of the photograph so theres this perspective being created. It’s a kind of commentary on the frame, the frame through which we interpret or try to make sense of what we’re looking at or experiencing. And it makes me think a bit of Gogglebox, you know, that contemporary culture where we’re obsessed with observing the observations of the observation of the observation, ad infinitum.

Marie: Yeah, it’s like this cycle, this loop, this interest in human behaviour, especially in the institution. We’re in an institution looking at a painting in an institution.

Sofia: I feel the fact that they’re using photography makes it really immersive. You are in that situation but you’re also in the other situation, you’re in this art institution but you’re also in the other one. It’s like you’re part of the artwork but also experiencing it.

Jelena: I was going to say it feels like, instead of it being that all around the photograph is blurred, it feels like there’s a line of focus, and the more you move on that diagonal the blurrier it gets but the closer you get to the people the more in focus you are.

Sophie: I definitely see that immersion when you consider the fact that the focus of the photo is the people, and they’re the same height as you, they’re the same eye level. You’re not really looking up at it, which is what you typically do with a very grand painting, and it’s what they’re doing in the photo, looking up at this huge painting, this huge scale, but actually the focus of this photo is at eye level, and it does make you immersed into it. It feels like you’re with the people that are in the photo.

Marie: It feels very calm, I feel like we’ve been looking at works that have been quite intense, and quite busy, and this is a moment just to feel a bit more “ah”. I can breathe a bit, and there’s an element of openness. I don’t just mean because it’s the sea, the photographs just feel a bit more ambient, they have an ambient sound to them. The noise is quite calming to me.

Deborah: The definition of the sea is really striking. And interestingly it makes me feel that I can experience the movement of the sea.

Stary: There’s a saying in Chinese or Japanese culture when humans and the sky merge together. And I found a sense of that saying.

Marie: So they’re like in partnership?

Stary: Yeah, it seems like they’re inside it, part of nature.

Sophie: I find it really restful on the eye, because there’s not a lot to look at compared to other things we’ve seen in this exhibition where there’s loads of different elements. Here we’ve just got two stark colours with some sort of definition. I find it quite a soothing thing to look at after some of the more chaotic images in this exhibition.

Melba: To me, if I didn’t know this was a seascape, it feels like a foggy forest or a foggy place that you could get lost in. It just feels like a room which is never-ending.

Elliott: I think it’s really nice that we have the window in this room as well, because it’s a little exterior connection, you’ve got a little taste of the Thames. I think that’s what Sugimoto is saying, that these landscapes are universal across the entire world, and almost internal to us in a way, they’re kind of part of us because we experience them so often. You think about the countless people you’ve stood on the shore looking our on the horizon and wonder what they might have been thinking about.

Marie: I’m having these conflicting feelings, because it feels like a painting, but everything is too contemporary so it’s making me feel like it’s also a photograph. And that’s through the composition and the aesthetic of the girl, her haircut looks like it’s from the 1920s or 30s. So although it’s monochrome, black and white, it’s like a document, like a photograph, but it’s also historical because of the haircut and the composition.

Melba: If I look at the baby, I think it looks like a painting but If I look at the girl behind it looks like a photograph.

Hannah: I think the straight lines across give it that sense of continuity. It feels like it’s a historical picture but it’s speaking to our present, and it’s kind of collapsing that binary even between past and present.

Alessia: There is something odd about the baby in comparison to the other person. So I’m not sure whether Richter himself was biased when he painted his own face, and suddenly there’s too much detail – something around the eyes just doesn’t feel right. Whilst there is something so natural about the background figure, I don’t think you could pose like that.

Deborah: Now that we’re talking about it, she has a very innocent, naïve... there’s a lot of love I'm feeling from her, and the baby does feel like an older soul that is carrying some woes. She has a much lighter quality, a sort of beautiful and radiant aspect to her.

Sophie: It makes it seem like it’s his memory of her, as well as being... It confuses you as to whether it’s reality or it’s his memory.

Elliott: It makes you think about photographs of people who aren’t with us anymore, and how those photographs kind of stand in for memories or experiences you might have had with that person.

Jelena: That makes me think of a phrase I’ve learnt quite recently to do with holocaust memory in particular called ‘the presence of absence’. People who’ve had family members that they’ve never met but they know them or they’ve encountered them through photographs and through pictures and they become these ghostly figures, and that’s how this feels. Not in the case of Richter because he knew this women and met her, but nevertheless the fact that she would have died so young makes it feel like she’s this presence in his life that he knows about through this photograph, but wouldn’t have had the kind of connection that he’s perhaps painting and trying to think about here, as an adult.

Marie: The woman in the artwork is looking, not at us at all, she’s looking away, down at a corner somewhere, I’m trying to follow her gaze. I like the fact it’s not framed, the fact it’s not framed and that it’s very... you can see how the paper which is curving contrasts with everything else in the space which is framed and very securely attached to the wall.

Alessia: She looks very comfortable to me, and at first sight I thought that this was almost a photograph-like reproduction of her kitchen table or something, and then I started to notice all the elements of these images and ephemera and detail that seems to relate to her in a way, to the story of this person.

Deborah: It feels really relatable in that sense, the domestic, but I’m fascinated by the mixed media, the use of colour and the saturation differences that bring things forward or make them recede back. The table under the table really drew my eye, and it’s almost like a floating red carpet. I live in a tiny flat so I know what it’s like to have things under things, or packed away, and then you bring them out when you need them.

Sophie: It reminds me a lot of actual family photos, I feel like family photos always curve when you’ve got a bunch of them, and because they’ve been handled by so many people, they end up curving, especially when they’re very old. It gives me that sort of feeling, that sort of tactileness, like it’s a photo that people have held and sort of used and passed around.

Stary: Although she seems to be in a small room, there are some collages of the magazines, and it seems like the room is not enclosed with walls. It seems like an open space with no walls.

Hannah: Yeah, it’s like the room she’s in is very quiet, she’s contemplating, but then there’s the memories, they have a lot of noise, laughter and all this stuff going on. You feel like the space she’s in has probably had a lot of laughter and people sitting round the table. And you can kind of hear that, then it’s all taken away and she’s just in there alone.

Elliott: It’s like the static of memory or something.

Hannah: Definitely, but it looks very inviting, I feel like I'd like to hang out there.

Marie: Yeah, with her. Cup of tea?

Hannah: Cup of tea, yeah definitely.

Alessia: For me it’s action that really comes through in this painting. I cannot really understand exactly what’s happening, but I can see that there is a lot of complexity in the scene. There is a child with a flag, which I guess is a more peaceful protest, but then there is some more like direct action. Then there is a particular person in sorrow, and somewhere anonymous faces... It’s a quite complex scene.

Elliott: It does seem to change as you drag your gaze across from left to right, because up here in the left you have the wider crowd, the mass of people and the use of the horns, the vuvuzela, it feels quite celebratory in a way because they wouldn’t be out of place at a sports game or something like that. But then, over in the right, something very different is happening. You can tell that somewhere out of frame, there’s another force that is working upon them. And in the top right corner they’re almost transforming, into these skeletal figures.

Deborah: The left-hand side is very compressed, it feels like a lot of people and energy are contained, and then there’s a surge of movement to the right. The monkey’s expression is really in contrast. He’s really in the centre of the frame. I feel like he’s really looking at me, and asking a question, you know “what’s it all about?” That figure, that central figure, is very still.

Stary: I think this painting is so powerful, and the flag reminds me of Gaugin’s paintings.

Marie: I like the fact you picked up on the Gaugin reference. It feels like a very direct commentary from the artist about the colonial past and how Black people and people of colour have been represented through a White gaze, but not in a way which has any meaningful depiction of who they are as people. There’s lots of nice nuances as well, like the rat there being held next to that little boy. The horns, I keep looking at the horns, it’s kind of like a call to action.

Melba: My eyes are drawn to the top because the image is quite clear compared to the rest of the image to the bottom. And there’s a lot happening over there, there are people standing, there are cops. There’s something going on. It feels like that’s blood dripping down and it’s just flowing off because it seems like it’s a war zone, technically it feels like that.

Deborah: A first I thought it was a reflection, or like when you have film, so we’re looking at two pieces of film or that sense when a film sort of blurs, and you get different images in the same image. But then the ink dots make me think of bullets, or conflicts that we see now on television where you’re looking at a digital war in a way, there’s no people, it’s just drones and conflict. Things blow up but they’re so far removed from us. The top image... there’s people in that image and I can’t see any people in the other images, I can’t relate, other than seeing what I imagine is a warzone.

Sophie: I find it interesting where the circles are placed, it feels like there’s a symmetry with where the people are on the top and where the paint has been splattered on the bottom, and I feel that gives a very sombre feeling to the bottom part of the artwork.

Elliott: The past, or particular images of the past, has this quality of being fixed in time. When we relate this to our present moment, what the artist seems to be saying is that there isn’t any such similar fixed ground. Everything is shifting, and split.

Marie: It gets quite loud and then it gets quite quiet as it goes down. The fact that I can’t see anyone in the bottom section means it kind of feels like the silence distils. We have moments where we have uprisings, and certain issues are brought to the forefront, and then nothing changes, it goes quiet. It’s this horrible, repetitive, draining cycle. And I get that kind of draining with the movement of the ink as well, whether it’s been physically dragged down or organically dripping, it’s kind of exasperating. But it’s interesting at the top this looking. We’re looking at them, they’re looking the police, and we’re looking at them looking at each other as well. We’re looking at this passage of time.